|
M....my Snagglepuss canon.... 
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 02:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 23:05 |
|
|
Christopher Priest is one of the most fascinating writers in the last 30 years of comics, and even his worst stuff (Deadpool) is a failure in interesting ways. Sean Howe's total neglect of his editorial tenure and writerly contributions is one of the most damning things about his book in my opinion.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2017 01:08
|
|
|
BrianWilly posted:She kisses him unexpectedly, using it as a distraction to get close in order to grab him by the balls and threatens to rip them off. It had good art and cool characters designs but yeah, it was regressive and distasteful in a lot of fundamental ways. I had high hopes starting it that the universe of bleak gender-horror that the book began on would be subverted and transcended but I don't know, I think I eventually realized Azzarello was shooting for something shallower and, in a way, even more depressing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 02:49
|
|
|
Roth posted:I don't think I've ever liked an Azzarello book 100 Bullets had nice enough art that it had me fooled for a pretty long time.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 02:54
|
|
|
Madkal posted:100 Bullets is legit great but if you are of the mind of "I don't like something written/drawn by a creator therefore all of his work retroactively sucks" ie the Frank Miller effect I suggest checking out Azz's Dr 13 Architecture and Morality to re evaluate your opinions on him. I forgot about Dr. 13, ok, I do like an Azzarello thing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 18:26
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:i would rather have sex with a robot than amanda waller not even a lois grade fully functional one maybe one of those second hand realdolls people advertise on craigslist if it was washed out with disinfectant first What the gently caress is this?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2017 04:47
|
|
|
Why not? Because it plays into a whole host of deeply harmful stereotypes about gay men and predation that have been old news for like-- 450+ years. And to be fair, like, in 2017 this kind of very low-key trudging about in second-hand homophobic tropes is far from the *most* offensive thing going down in mainstream superhero comics, but to say it's totally innocuous is goofy and ahistorical.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
Teenage Fansub posted:And those were the accusations leveled against the Batman and Robin relationship. Seduction of the Innocent. Though I'm sure I'm giving it too much credit in assuming at all that there's a deeper confrontational point to it, but I enjoy DC bluntly examining stuff like the kink in WW:Earth One and the yellow peril in New Super-Man. I guess, and in the abstract I do think there's merit on facing a franchise's checkered history head-on like that, although I'd want to draw a slight distinction between these three examples because a) New Super-Man is actually written by an Asian-American guy b) the kink elements in WW, when they show up, aren't so much critiqued so much as just revived-- that is, in Earth One for instance it strikes me as less a criticism of Wonder Woman as a kind of libidinal queer fantasy and more a criticism of how anodyne and tepid the character is when it isn't a libidinal queer fantasy. That being said I haven't read Earth One in a long time so I could be wrong. I'm not sure what a corresponding approach for Batman and Robin would be, especially after decades of DC assiduously stressing the father/child elements of Batman's mentor relationships (and tbh I think in an often successful way-- I think the reframing of the Batman family as an actual Batman Family throughout the 90s and 2000s produced a lot of emotionally effecting stories-- I love love love the idea of the Robins as really and truly being sons in Bruce Wayne's eyes and I wouldn't want to trash that dynamic for the sake of metacommentary). Having a queer Robin might be how I'd do it-- have an existing Robin come out (what great romances has Tim Drake had that would be lost?) or just pull that trigger with whoever the next Robin is. Who knows-- I also think the dynamics Wertham wrote about are also rooted in a reading of a much differently characterized Bruce Wayne since we've seen since then-- because frankly the effete smoking-jacket millionaire archetype has kind of wilted away in the interim. The dynamic he was responding to would be unrecognizable in the 21st century. My total pipedream would be a story-- an Elseworlds or whatever-- where both Batman and Robin are gay without representing them as lovers, because I think there are a billion rich stories to be told about superheroics and the dynamics of queer mentorship that haven't been told because Wertham left the whole industry squeamish. I think Paul Pope's Berlin Batman had the potential to develop in this direction before it became weird libertarian agitprop. I just don't think evil leatherdaddy Batman dragging a pack of lithe young Robins around on leashes is the way to resolve this logjam.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2017 20:58
|
|
|
Edge & Christian posted:Having lookread the pitch that Alan Moore wrotesaid for Twilight of the Superheroes I understandget the perception that he would have put out a good storytale with it despite being grimdark but it was very badbad almost as stupiddumb as the term "grimdark" itself and he probably dodged a bullet by having the whole thing scuttled by content labels or whatever. Warlock's back, baby! 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2017 06:26
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:i have greater faith in moore's ability to bring the story into flesh than you guys, obviously. if miracleman was described to me as a brief abstract it would've sounded juvenile, too; 'so, yeah, we'll have, like... reefs of baby-skulls and babies impaled on the same spike as their mother, vlad tepes style, in the middle of london. and the superhumans we make will no longer have our norms so they'll have a liberated sexuality, oh, and we have a big panel that shows a baby crowning in a photo-realistic style''. the billy batson thing as the general idea that he is failing at reconciling two aspects of his person works, the locked door mystery with martian manhunter being a shapeshifting hooker less so. To be fair though, if, say, Neonomicon was described to me as a brief abstract it would sound juvenile, and on paper, well, it's not only juvenile but tedious. I think Alan Moore's most facile points are about sexuality because he wants to imagine his way past repressive prudishness but he's also unable to get one foot out of the "sex is gross/scary" pit. Hence all the ways in which interesting later Moore stuff is irreparably damaged by his inability to not be glib about sexual violence. The thing about the Billy Batson in particular, like-- I have no doubt in my mind that he thought he was making one point, but that he'd wind up making two in total opposition to each other: Superheroes are beyond human sexual mores and show us the way beyond our cultural repressionand Superheroes are total pervs, luv. He can't have both-- but he keeps trying! And he's the most successful when this problem is muted or if the narrative makes space for this ambivalence-- like in Watchmen- but Twilight [...] sounds like it would have been a weird reductive mess more along the lines of later LoEG.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2017 22:53
|
|
|
So what, Batman just smuggled him in and left him there? Surely the next morning an orderly will come and see a stranger in a costume hanging out, realize there's no record of such a person ever being admitted, and like... let them out? I know I harp on a lot about representation and ableism in comics but god, has any Batman writer ever researched what mental hospitals are actually like? And even if we're willing to concede that Arkham Asylum is a heightened, gothic nightmare version of such a place, come on. Batman being able to just drop people in and have it stick-- especially in a story about nobody liking or trusting Batman-- is just silly.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2018 03:00
|
|
|
Michel Fiffe's Copra is a pastiche of Ostrander's Suicide Squad-- well, really, let's be candid, it's extremely loving and precise fan-fic with names just barely changed-- and it has a pretty compelling Deadshot analogue, I think largely because he's nudged somewhat out of the position of protagonist ergo he doesn't have to tick off some of the more tired "anti-hero" boxes. There's an arc where he's on a rampage going after the comic's Captain Boomerang analogue in which he's essentially a slasher-movie monster that's just a very tense, engaging long action sequence that does sell the narrative efficacy of a character who can be boiled down to "taciturn, shoots guns."
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2018 23:02
|
|
|
John Ostrander and Greg Rucka both wrote a pretty interesting Amanda Waller. She wasn't omniscient and she wasn't always who you were rooting for but she did stuff that made sense, elicited interesting dynamics from other characters, and felt like a character with consistent and complex motivations and beliefs.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2018 06:21
|
|
|
Edge & Christian posted:The two data points we have here aren't "teasing Superman is a Klan member" or whatever the hell Covok is talking about, it's "DRAMA IN A ROMANTIC COUPLE'S LIFE, WILL THEY HOLD IT TOGETHER" which is the sort of cheap controversy that has been courted by every sitcom and drama forever. Unless Bendis was writing the Office and Friends and Scrubs and Gray's Anatomy and the Honeymooners when they were making GBS threads out cheap controversial storylines to get people riled up. Which I guess is a take, but it's a take that seemingly disqualifies you from being able to enjoy serialized narratives. Hot scoop: Brian Michael Bendis has traveled back in time to whisper deranged fancies into Mort Weisinger's fragile ear at night so he'll wake up troubled with not-dreams and not-imaginary stories to talk to his analyst about.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2018 00:02
|
|
|
Madkal posted:Did it outsell Liefelds Bible book though? the Bible already has a Gideon variant 
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2018 02:15
|
|
|
I like Bojack but I strongly dislike the Snagglepuss comic. I guess I'm coming at it from the opposite direction of the way it's been framed here-- that is, if you take away the funny animals, is it a compelling, well written drama about the Lavander Scare? I just don't think it is-- it's broad, clumsily paced, and over-written. In fact I feel like if everyone in it were drawn as a normal-rear end human the flaws would stand out even more starkly, because the artificiality of the characters and the way they behave wouldn't be able to be hidden behind lion faces. Like-- I really, really want to be out there for new queer comics, but Snagglepuss just didn't do a thing for me, and I feel like it gets away with more than it should because it has a distancing gimmick that at once begs us not to take the whole thing too seriously and excuses itself from taking itself seriously as an artistic endeavor. Like-- Snagglepuss goes to some dark places. Huckleberry Hound is brutally beaten by his closeted horse boyfriend, and later he hangs himself. I don't think a cartoony style is necessarily incommensurable with sombre historic subject matter-- I recently read and more or less liked Ulli Lust's Voices in the Dark-- but Snagglepuss seems so unwilling to settle on the extent to which its winking and smirking that I felt vaguely insulted by its gestures towards real pathos. I felt the same way about the guy's Flintstone comics too, which never seemed to want to commit to whether or not its moments of ostensive emotion were punchlines or not. It just all feels a little glib-- well enough put together and slick, but sort of soulless.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2018 01:57
|
|
|
Dark_Tzitzimine posted:I assume you're talking about this? A bunch of these people have already been revealed as murderers. Phew, case closed! Let's all be proud of the hard sleuthing we did everybody.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2018 16:38
|
|
|
Onmi posted:No the biggest crime was bringing their corpses back in Blackest Night to murder the Hawks There have been a lot of bad DC events since 2004 but Blackest Night was surely the grossest and tackiest.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2018 16:30
|
|
|
I legit admire that D_T goes all in for Jason, I wish I had the jutzpah to be 100% for my favorite characters like that, especially in a space that's pretty antipathetic towards that character (and honestly Jason Todd does nothing for me and has usually been saddled with creative teams I don't like). I remember wanting to post something snitty about how poorly Taskmaster was written in this one Squirrel Girl issue a few years ago but talking myself out of it, but like, we're all comic book dweebs, who cares about decorum. So you know what, I'll say it loud and proud-- Ryan North doesn't get the extremely simple basic concept of Taskmaster and neither does Joe Kelley. (Also I think a red hoodie and a domino mask would be a fine, simple look for Todd, but the face in this new design is way too busy-- he's got the bandana and this kind of tacky looking cyber-mask,and the hoodie, it's just too much. If he's the black sheep of the Batman family, imo he should look like he's without Batman's resources and not have all these custom straps and high-tech eyepieces-- some of the sleek, street-fashion inspired designs from We Are Robin a few years ago might be where I'd start if I were, for whatever godforsaken reason, in charge of designing him.)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2018 22:40
|
|
|
If it was up to me Superman would mostly eat vegetarian food if he's cooking dinner for himself or grabbing lunch, but if somebody offers him their homemade meatloaf or whatever he'd accept it, and if somebody was coming over for dinner and loved piccata he'd make it just to put a smile on their face.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2018 23:13
|
|
|
Open Marriage Night posted:Brian Azzarello wrote a scene in Broken City where Bruce discusses cooking steaks with a detective. Maybe someone has that handy. From Batman #621:  and several pages later, Bruce Wayne mentally agrees with the detective before plating his dinner and discovering a twist:  There's a bunch more material in between but it's mostly exposition about the actual plot with occasional inserts of Bruce Wayne grinding pepper or whatever.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2018 11:21
|
|
|
It's double weird because it's not just like another Waid wrote Impulse, it's like another Ramos drew it. Impulse is visually such a fun, elastic, unbounded book, it reminds me of Jack Cole's Plastic Man in how it uses its character's powers to mess with how a story can be told and how it can look while still being super easy and accessible to follow, while everybody in Champions looks like a teenage Slim Jim.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2018 16:22
|
|
|
As somebody whose field of specialization is mid-20th century gay art circles I feel qualified in my opinion that his Snagglepuss comic was one of the most loathesomely stupid and lazy things I've ever read and it looks like he's settled on what his one trick is so great for him I guess.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
[s]Barry Convex posted:that’s a lot harsher than you were earlier but would love to hear more of your thoughts on what it gets wrong Yeah I had reservations from the beginning-- I thought the attempt to address homophobia in Cuba was heavy-handed and too glib-- but I really, really turned on it after Huckleberry Hound dies . Firstly because-- tonally, what the gently caress? It soared beyond bathos and just seemed profoundly tacky. As a story about cartoon animals it didn't interestingly subvert my pop-culture understanding of the character, and as a story about queer trauma and community in a turbulent historical moment, nothing was added by having half the people be dogs except for a sense of novelty that felt detached and embarrassed to commit itself to either pathos or irony. Because this really wasn't Maus, or even Bojack Horseman, both of which do interesting things with its animal characters and the logic of dehumanization. It was just animals because ha ha bet you've never seen Quickdraw McGraw do this before. As a drama it wasn't compellingly enough written to overcome the weird artistic disconnect, and as a comedy it was just profoundly unfunny if you weren't willing to buy into its premise as inherently funny (and if you were, the dreariness of the plotting did everything it could to disabuse you of that notion). That's all formal stuff though. As somebody working on that era and that milieu (albeit a ton more with the West Coast than New York City) what really struck me as off was the joylessness of it. In an era where the closet was the de facto place for gay men, even most educated and even bohemian gay men, there were a lot of reasons to stay in and relatively few to come out. One of those reasons was that, simply, being out was, in the right places, and with the right people, a lot more fun. Gay bars were riotous, loud, and funny, and queer artists spent more time goofing off and writing weird frothy injokes like John Ashbery and James Schuyler's A Nest of Ninnies than they did writing ponderous and self-flagellating mope-fests like we saw Snagglepuss and his friends staging. When the Berkeley Renaissance guys feuded they dressed up in dragon costumes and paraded outside of their enemies' plays on opening nights, and while the pain was there and very real and often very acute, they didn't live lives of nonstop depressive navel-gazing. The fight was always one they found, in the end, worth fighting, because it led to a happier, fuller, life, with better friends and better sex and the promise of a more optimistic tomorrow. In Snagglepuss there were very few scenes that suggested that any of these peoples lived lives worth fighting to maintaining-- it was also remarkably chaste, and I'm not saying I was clamoring for no-holds-barred furry porn on every page, but for a comic largely about the travails of gay men it was overwhelmingly straight in its squeamishness towards representing anything other than gentle smooches. I don't know Mark Russell's life story, so maybe I'm egregiously out of line, but it read like so many works of art by straight creators that want to plumb queer lives for drama and pathos in a way that ends up treating them like props. I guess "misery porn" is the term I see applied to Tom King, but I really felt it applied to Snagglepuss, which lacks even the light touch that King is capable of applying once inawhile. It ends up falling into the same pitfall as a lot of 80s and 90s stuff, which, in trying clumsily to address the AIDs crisis, wound up glossing queerness itself as a kind of condemnation, a life sentence to be miserable and grave 24/7, when that has really never ever been the case. Which is aggravating enough in a self-serious prestige drama, but this was supposed to be a loving comic about Snagglepuss the talking pink tiger-- if you can't make him funny you're not trying. The only conclusions I could ultimately come to were: A) that the comic was just a mess and a failure, that couldn't strike a consistent and compelling tone, and wasted its good intentions on clumsy piousness B) that the tonal disconnect was the joke, and that we were supposed to laugh at a bunch of gay guys getting their lives ruined because lmfao yabba dabba doo/war-crimes/etc.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2018 02:23
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Hey I wanted to say that I appreciated this and found it enlightening. Are there any accessible resources or books on queer history in this period you'd recommend? I can try. My focus is on poetry so it'll be a little biased. If you're interested in the East Coast milieu, my go-to texts are David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School, Jenni Quilter's coffee-table book New York School Painters and Poets: Neon in Daylight, and Maggie Nelson's Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. For a more focused look at important participants I really liked Karin Roffman's recent Ashbery biography, The Songs We Know Best, and while Brad Gooch's biography of Frank O'Hara, City Poet isn't perfect, it still gives a good snap-shot of the social scene and how vibrant and dynamic it was. Of course I think the best way to get at that is to just read the stuff-- O'Hara's Lunch Poems are a classic for a reason. Slightly younger than above but Joe Brainard is a delight and his serial memoir I Remember covers the late 50s and early 60s sporadically, I only mention him really because his series of Nancy paintings are probably of interest to any BSS posters who aren't familiar with them. Stephen R. Duncan's The Rebel Cafe is a broader study but definitely locates sexuality in the interesting stuff that nightclub culture was exploring during the Cold War. Ned Rorem's New York Diaries are also invaluable and cut off IIRC in 1961. Unfortunately to my knowledge there isn't a totally satisfying work on the Lavender Scare available-- David Johnson's The Lavender Scare from 2006 is a good start though. For the West Coast cliques I think the absolute best book to check out is Kevin Killian and Lew Ellingham's book on the San Francisco Renaissance, Poet Be Like God, which is also a bio of the fascinating weirdo Jack Spicer. Robin Blaser's The Astonishment Tapes covers similar ground, but its a transcription of a first person oral history so its a little looser and more free-ranging. That's mostly late 50s-mid 60s though. Slightly after that you have New Narrative people like Bruce Boone, Robert Gluck, Kathleen Frasier and Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, etc., who thankfully were maniacs for writing things down and putting out endless snippets of casual memoiring. There's a fantastic anthology that just came out a year or so ago, Writers Who Love Too Much that condenses that entire school of writing and which covers the late 70s to the late 90s but a lot of it deals with recollections of the 50s and 60s. For more general recommendations about pre-stonewall queer culture I think a super important book is Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin, George Chauncey's Gay New York, Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States, Vikki Eaklor's Queer America. Allan Berube's Coming Out Under Fire is about homosexuality during WWII and the immediate aftermath and is an interesting backdrop to the directions LGBTQ+ culture took in the 50s. Letters to ONE is a fascinating collection of reader correspondence to the major gay magazine ONE throughout the 50s and 60s and the same series put out. Lisa Jardine's The Ambassador From Venus is a thorough bio of Robert DUncan, who was also at the center of a lot of gay coteries mid-century, but I don't think he's very likeable in it. You might also check out James Merrill's memoir, A Different Life. Not entirely the right period but Samuel Delaney's TImes Square Red/Times Square Blue is an absolute classic and a rousing defense of a chaotic, rowdy part of New York culture that at the time of its writing was swiftly becoming sanitized for tourists. In general I think memoirs, letters, diaries, etc., are the best resources when available because so much 20th century queer history is by necessity oral history, and, tragically, so many people who could provide that history aren't around anymore. I'm sure I'm blanking on a lot of things and my advisors would be crossing their arms and shaking their heads but I hope that's a useful start. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Aug 31, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2018 00:01
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:This period I'm describing is pretty much the entire period of this current century, and could arguably be stretched back to the 80s depending on which aspects we're talking about What a strange sentiment. Do you mean just in comics, because I don't see why comics as a medium need to be any less "serious," than, like, novels or movies or plays? If you mean writers in general that's an even more weird thing to say. If you mean corporate, serial, super-hero comics I suppose I can see where you're coming from but I don't think "serious" vs.... what? Frivolous? is a very useful binary when gravitas and pathos and heightened emotions are historically at the very heart of the kinds of pop melodrama that cape comics descend from.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2018 00:40
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:Use this sign: leave Chris Kraus out of this!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2018 17:00
|
|
|
Ah yes, the famously raven-like Teen Titan, Arsenal.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2018 23:46
|
|
|
"No, not Raven raven, the other Teen Titan who's like a smart, resourceful, mischievious bird." "Oh, Jericho"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2018 00:20
|
|
|
Teen Lantern rules already.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2018 20:27
|
|
|
DC and Marvel both have a long and storied history of major characters becoming indistinguishable white men the second they take off their costumes. Whenever Captain and America and Hawkeye, god forbid Hank Pym, would be hanging out in street clothes you would be hard pressed to guess which is which. Having 2-3 grown-rear end ex-Robins running around, all of whom look functionally identical to Bruce Wayne, is baffling to me. Make a brown-haired one for goodness sake, or one with an eyepatch, or one with a big handlebar moustache, or one with freckles, or one with a parrot on his shoulder, because without speech balloons this could easily be, I don't know, two Punishers talking to each other . Giving them all slightly different 2008 haircuts isn't enough.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2018 06:11
|
|
|
Madkal posted:Dick Army is too great a name to ever do away with. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2018 21:16
|
|
|
So, walk me through this (Heroes in Crisis spoilers): So Harley lures Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman to her so she can tell them that she didn't kill everybody in Sanctuary. They think she's lying-- as in, they don't think she's telling the truth-- so a fight breaks out. In order to get an edge in this fight, she wraps Batman up in Wonder Woman's TRUTH TELLING LASSO in order to get him to reveal where he's keeping his secret krytonite, because she knows he's telling the truth if he's touching the lasso. That way she can make a bunch of super powerful people upset with her, rather than, like, just grabbing the lasso herself, holding it up, and saying she didn't kill anybody. Am I missing something? Is this as stupid a plothole as it seems to me?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2018 22:27
|
|
|
X-O posted:Wait what? I’m more concerned with the implication that Harley takes on Superman, Batman,and Wonder Woman and not only isn’t immediately dispatched but somehow gets the upper hand? Seriously? Oh, it's pretty stupid, and pretty bad. She steals WW's lasso and grabs Batman in a makeshift noose with it. Superman gets ready to go do, uh, something, but WW warns that Harley'd be able to break Bruce's neck before they'd be able to break the rope (because knocking her out isn't an option I guess?), so they meander around while she gets Batman to reveal where he keeps his emergency Kryptonite. She then blasts Superman and jumps out a window, while Batman and Wonder Woman just sort of stand there, because WW is I guess either weak to Kryptonite all of a sudden or just not that invested in solving the mystery. Immediately thereafter they're in contact with Barry Allen who I guess is also not that interested in catching her despite being in a frenzy of grief This is not a very good comic.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2018 23:06
|
|
|
TwoPair posted:I heard good things about the Omega Men and I really liked Vision but geez it sounds like either those were flukes and King is awful or he is just really making GBS threads the bed in a big way here A lot of promising writers turn out to be not very good at event books, and I think more broadly an unfortunate kind of funneling that happens in big two comics is that you can make your name on quirky, idiosyncratic books about B-listers, but as you get assigned more and more high-profile titles your ability to rock the boat is curtailed and you wind up reiterating the same big event-y tropes that readers first flocked to your writing to avoid. It's hard to remember but Brian Michael Bendis used to be a gritty indie darling, and the idea of him writing Avengers would have been laughable. Or something like Fear Itself which was nearly the opposite of the kind of writing that first attracted people to Matt Fraction's writing. Do you remember Death of X? I don't, because it was extraordinarily boring and aggressively inconsequential, despite Jeff Lemire and Charles Soule generally being excellent writers when they're allowed to tinker around in their own wheelhouses/ With Heroes in Crisis I don't think it's just that the story doesn't play to Tom King's strengths-- it's that it makes his strengths look asinine and magnifies his flaws. The story is on such a marquee scale that the intimate character moments that made people like Vision and Mister Miracle feel like maudlin Identity Crisis schlock (not that MM is totally free of sin there, and at points his Batman is pretty cringey too) and his general inability to plot an interesting fight scene has contributed a lot to the woefully uneven pace so far. I think part of this is just, that, with a few exceptions the event formula does not encourage or facilitate good writing. There are exceptions-- Mark Millar and Jonathan Hickman, neither of whom I like very much, are well-suited to the operatic spectacle of the form. Morrison and Waid aren't too shabby at it either, and neither is Ed Brubaker, because they're good at making a whole explosion of moving parts fit together elegantly. Even looking back on bad events by BMB, Fraction, Jason Aaron, etc., who saw their writerly strengths smothered under the weight of the form, King is just woefully unsuited for this kind of thing, sending it spiraling, so far, from the bloated nonsense that many event books are, to bloated nonsense that's also boring and bathetic.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 06:12
|
|
|
I don't think Mister Miracle was particularly good or subtle but I still read it, contra Omni, as a fairly hopeful (sort of) statement about depression. When you have clinical depression you don't get a choice about being stuck in a different perceived world than everyone else around you-- it isn't as simple as deciding, ok, time to break out of this fantasy. It almost never works like that, between this binary of deciding to stew in the mental waste of illness or making a heroic gesture and muscling back to the "real" world. In my own experience its about learning the logic of the world you've been given and finding out how to make compromises within it-- how to carve out a kind of happiness out from a perceptual framework designed to make you unhappy and exhausted. Mr. Miracle can never say in good faith "Darkseid ISN'T" but he doesn't have to let that statement be totalizing, he can exert agency and feel love and live a meaningful life within the walls he's been forced into. It's not rosy and I suppose it could be a somewhat dangerous message for some young people with mental illness and not a lot of other apparatuses to think about them within, but I would've rolled my eyes at an ending where he just shakes off the chains of illusion or whatever. For a cheesy example, my brother and I grew up in a home that was sometimes unstable and often unhappy, and that we both needed to find an escape from. He solved it by almost never being home, and he grew up and moved far away and is leading a very happy life. I solved it-- perhaps less healthily for a teenager-- by going inwards and just busying myself with different projects and stuff, and also grew up and moved away and began to lead a more or less very happy life. Escape doesn't have to mean one thing and insofar as I found the series frequently glib and oblique I appreciated that it modeled a vision of liberation from supervillain violence through means outside of the superhero genre. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Nov 19, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2018 18:41
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:Huh. I am sort of surprised. I like the art in Identity Crisis and it has some good individual scenes but it's just a comic I have a hard time imagining people defending passionately. IIRC Identity Crisis was the hottest stuff around for the first half at least, and the amount of people troubled by the rape stuff or not confident in the story's ability to resolve itself in a satisfying way were far outnumbered by people who were either all-in or just curious enough to see how it played out.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2018 15:27
|
|
|
I don't think I've liked a Lobdell comic since Generation X but I'd earnestly kind of annoyed if Bunker died. DC has way too few gay characters and not enough Latinx characters and even if Bunker isn't exactly setting the world on fire I'd rather have him in limbo for some future writer to pick up than in a grave.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2018 15:54
|
|
|
Covok posted:Alfred is the only person who has never betrayed Bruce. I don't want to have to think about the Outsider today but here we are.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2018 19:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 23:05 |
|
|
Roth posted:On the other hand, I don't think I needed to read a comic in which the Nazis sentence Jessie Owens to a work camp and nazi versions of Plastic Man execute three of the Freedom Fighters. What an atrocious comic that was, as spineless and tepid as Secret Empire but without even SE's game attempt to at least sort of have a plot. I get the instinct to have a stridently anti-fascist comic in 2018 but this wasn't it (first of all, we have that comic, and it's Uber, and it's excellent-- or TNC's Captain America, which is taking pains to thoughtfully tell the story Nick Spencer should have been telling). It didn't challenge anything. It didn't understand anything. PlaSStic Man is a tacky joke, and giving everybody Colonel Klink accents just trivialized what should have had at least a modicum of gravity to it. The modern day scenes literally have guys in monocles and jodhpurs strutting around. It's the most half-assed attempt to tell a speculative story about fascism in America that I've ever seen, and again, I've read Secret Empire. But the most craven thing about it is that it's willing to coyly play with the tropes of resistance but can't even bring itself to spell the word "nazi." Instead, the dumbshit neologism "ratzi" is parroted again and again. Ratzis didn't kill six million Jews. Ratzis didn't exploit and inflame the festering wound of bigotry and entitled rage of post-WWI Germany. Ratzis don't exist. Nazis did, and if we want to tell stories about confronting and resisting nazis, we can do our audiences the drat dignity of spelling out who the enemy was, and who the enemy is. gently caress this comic. It has nothing of value to say as long as it's content to treat fascism as nothing more than a campy fairytale. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Dec 20, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2018 03:27
|
|