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Superheroes took over the medium specifically because back when the comics code was introduced, more "realistic" comics were disallowed. It seems bizarre to go back and start complaining about how unrealistic they are.
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Jul 29, 2016 16:48
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My favorite superhero stories are often the ones where they don't restrict themselves to standard superhero scenarios. You can still have fun with people punching endless waves of people because they're bad guys, but it's more interesting when the whole thing becomes more of a character drama. Although in some respects, the main reason the less superheroic stories even happen with superheroes is just because superheroes have a stranglehold on the comic industry as a whole. Writers have ended up stretching superheroes far beyond what they have ever been meant for.
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Aug 2, 2016 03:14
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The way I heard it, sidekicks back in the day were there to make the hero into more of a father figure to provide a kind of fatherly influence to young readers in an era with a lot of paternal abandonment. It is interesting when you look at the superheroes who were conceived decades later like most of Marvel's catalog were and they barely have sidekicks at all, compared to all the kid compatriots in the golden age. In those days, everyone was trying to court teenagers, and the only "real" sidekick I can think of from then was Rick Jones.
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Oct 10, 2016 04:48
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There were so many bad decisions with Young Justice. Really forced running gags, a massive timeskip that just destroys any chance of following character development or the long running plotlines, trying to make a tie-in videogame that covers the missed plot, introducing too many new characters at once, expecting and planning for a 7 season run and losing track of the short term, and greatest of all, constantly shopping around a dead and buried project to various networks in a vein attempt to get somebody to produce your misunderstood magnum opus. I don't know what Weisman's going to do after he's finished with the return of Young Justice, but he's going to be insufferable from now on.
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Dec 12, 2016 00:36
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You might be thinking of that Hydro-man clone.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:16
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For some reason, DC is still stuck in the same mentality as if it was a decade ago when superhero movies were untested and unrespectable, and you have to make a big deal of being adult and serious and grown-up to be taken seriously in this day and age.
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Jan 12, 2017 05:14
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I remember BTAS being mostly episodic, but it's pretty amazing how much continuity they did with things towards the beginning. Harvey shows up for a while before falling into a vat of chemicals, and Thorne reoccurs constantly. That pretty much stopped later on, but they did do a bunch of really iconic standalone episodes. On the other hand, I don't think it ever fully made sense why Robin would pop into and out of existence. STAS didn't have the same sort of worldbuilding, but they did have that mob boss who eventually led to Darkseid, along with more 2-parters in general. Also they put more setup into some of the reoccurring villains because they had to work out an explanation each time for how they came back from whatever oblivion they were sent to after their last defeat. Joker can just pop up again a couple weeks later after being beaten up by Batman, but after Metallo gets lost at the bottom of the sea or Brainiac gets entirely obliterated, they needed to explain how they came back.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:09
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It's sad to see Bruce alone and trying to fight street thugs as an old man, but so long as he's trying to change the world just by personally punch every criminal in the face, he's never going to get ahead of the curve, especially with supervillains in the mix. The only stories I've seen where Bruce Wayne actually attempts to improve the community, it's only really a token effort. No writer wants to tell a story about Bruce Wayne doing social work.
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Apr 26, 2017 01:13
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The obsession with having to start with the origin seems like a more recent thing. For some reason at the same time that comic superheroes became more prominent in pop culture, everybody became really self conscious about being some weird nerd thing that normal people might not be aware of. I don't think they started with the origin even when Batman started out in the comics.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:02
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Jordan7hm posted:My son really wanted to watch something X-Men so he started the animated series tonight. It's basically the same as what they did with Thunderbird in the comics when they rebooted the series back in 1975. That cartoon ran on melodrama, and part of that was raising the stakes. There's death, neo-nazis, flashbacks to childhood trauma (particularly intense in Magneto's case), attempted assassination, slave labor, and alien soul-drinkers. It can seem cheesy at times what with all the screaming, but it's still good, just it's something different from Batman.
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Apr 28, 2017 00:53
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There's also Firestar, from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends back in the 80s. Originally they planned to use the Human Torch, but couldn't for reasons, so they made a new character and eventually brought her into the comic continuity. They gave her a much darker backstory, because that was what comics were like at the time. I don't think any writers really liked to use her though, so she alternates between being a joke and being part of the background. Herbie from the Fantastic Four cartoon also got picked up by the comics.
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Apr 29, 2017 18:49
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I always thought it was weird in the animated series that Gotham doesn't have capital punishment, but Metropolis definitely does. The politics and morality of the whole thing gets thorny, but the last minute realization that Clark Kent was Superman was neat.
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May 1, 2017 02:05
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It makes sense when you're trying to tell the story of Spider-Man with the benefit of knowing who his iconic archenemies are ahead of time. If you tie everything together you can provide some neat foreshadowing. MTV Spiderman will always be the worst Spiderman cartoon to me.
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Jun 29, 2017 05:22
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TTG's only failing is that a lot of people go in expecting the old Teen Titans or something wholesome or some dramatic superhero thing. If it's not your type of comedy, fine, but it's a lot of other people's.
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Jul 2, 2017 20:43
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So let me get this straight, there are going to be multiple spider-people running around, AND they're leading with the Jackal, so there's even going to be even multiple Peter Parkers running around. What next? Are they going to barrel right into Venom and Carnage just to make things the most confusing they can be? The style looks neat, but it feels like the background is really empty, which might be because they're using a bunch of weird angles.
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Jul 15, 2017 04:54
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I feel like there must've been some third celebrity they wanted but couldn't get. Three seems like a better number. I didn't know Fallout Boy was a full band and not one dude's stage name.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:55
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I thought that was more just the fact that Batman in the DCAU turned out to be so serious, so he kind of didn't fit in as much, especially on the wacky space adventures. And then when he does show up, a lot of his aspects got really exaggerated, either to keep him relevant among all the superpowered heroes or to fit in better as part of an ensemble cast.
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Sep 11, 2017 05:20
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muscles like this! posted:Makes sense that he would think about following in his father's footsteps. So wait, how do you both run a huge privately owned corporation and be a practicing doctor?
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Sep 20, 2017 02:10
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Monaghan posted:A lot of the "classic "kid shows, especially from the eighties don't really hold up. GI Joe, transformers turtles, aren't that great. My main memory of Beast Wars is the fact that it was in one of those garbage timeslots earlier in the morning than I could normally wake up for, so I barely ever got to see it. Great toys though. I do have very fond memories of Reboot though, and I think it mostly still holds together. I'm not sure if the CGI is even fine by contemporary standards, considering how Mainframe was working with TV-budget equipment, but they really made it work stylistically.
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Sep 29, 2017 22:21
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At some point characters are close enough to infinite power that trying to compare infinities against each other loses all meaning. It's particularly dumb when people treat power levels in Dragon Ball Z as if they actually mean anything, since the whole point of power levels was that it would be a running gag that the scouters never worked and power levels could just fluctuate wildly anyways. Personally I like to leave it as Hulk strongest one there is, because as Hulk testifies, "Hulk strongest one there is." And personal testimony is about as valid as any other fictional evidence.
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Oct 29, 2017 19:09
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Through a lot of legal finagling, the rights to the characters and storylines of comic books wound up being owned by the publisher instead of the artist or writer, and so as time went and companies grew, and artists and writers drifted to an from employers, the publishers would put different people on the titles. That setup also led to the DC shared universe, because a lot of DC's heavy hitters were originally developed by separate companies that all eventually wound up under the same roof after a series of companies swallowing other companies.
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Oct 30, 2017 03:15
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Archie is the only company that really made the effort to stay in popular spaces. I picked up a lot of Archie and Sonic at grocery stores as a kid. I don't know why other comics don't try to get a wider distribution other than the fact that they dug themselves into this hole back in the 90s and they'd rather stay there than try something new (or old?). I've heard that there's a big dumb distributor monopoly, but I don't really know much about that.
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Oct 30, 2017 06:15
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There are a few titles that get the chance to tell relatively lengthy stories for maybe a couple years. There's never going to be decade-spanning epics like some of the more popular manga go though, and even the most isolated titles on the fringes of the continuity will eventually get pulled away into an event at some point or another, especially if there's any amount of success with the title. You liked Miles Morales? He're's a big huge event to bring him over from his parallel universe into the main Marvel one! And now he's got separate titles where he goes off and joins superhero teams or shows up in other heroes' books, AND he'll be thrust into the center of more crossover events. So long as the reader is left feeling that they missed something, that's more sales to exploit. But of course, that's just Marvel and DC (IDW may be slowly slipping down the slope towards letting events run things with some of their titles as well). Writers and readers who want more long form stories that aren't always getting yanked around by editorial mandate can go to things being published by other companies, or even independently created works online. We're a long way past the 50s when the comics code killed off everything other than superheroes and child-friendly things.
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Oct 30, 2017 18:11
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There is something to be said about stories that end in their own due time instead of being artificially extended long past the point when the creator is sick of it, or works that keep on coming up with some new twist so that they can extend their plot indefinitely while technically the overarching plot moves at a glacial pace. Marvel and DC have a lot more flexibility.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:45
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Does it count as being the "breakout character" if she was the most well-known character that anybody cared about going into the movie?
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Nov 21, 2017 04:54
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I feel like without the hat, it's not even really a costume, she's just somebody who didn't put clothes on over her underwear. All that's really left is a vague playing card theme.
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Nov 21, 2017 18:04
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Come to think of it, Brave and the Bold and maybe Suicide Squad are the only takes on Harley Quinn that give her a costume that goes beyond just riffing on the original B:TAS design and trying to sex it up. I guess DC characters don't generally change their costumes much, but you'd think there'd be more directions to take.
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Nov 22, 2017 18:26
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I think in his first appearance, he was trying to steal missiles from an army base, and he's had a lot of similar run-ins since. At the very least he's always making some kind of trouble like a rogue state. There are some fun stories in the 80s where he's trying to stop racism but in ways that are somehow immoral, like his anti-racism mind control helmet, or this gem in Secret wars after he spent like 2 issues making out with wasp and lays out his plan to take the Beyonder up on his challenge and use a victory to create a world of harmony.  The most evil scum since Hitler.
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Jan 18, 2018 06:16
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The issue should be the standard "superheroes don't kill" rule, since the people Mags is talking about killing are already trying to kill the heroes for their ultimate goal, but they really quickly dismiss Magneto as being some kind of powermad maniac. For comparison, back in 2012 marvel rounded up a bunch of the extraneous teenage characters and did a hunger games, leaving almost half of them dead for reals at the end of it all. Times sure have changed.
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Jan 18, 2018 07:25
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It evens out a little when it turns out that his wife was some kind of horrible goblin clone all along, but yeah, there was a lot of fuckery involved in making X-Factor. He went back to see his family after a little while, but by then they had all mysteriously vanished. His wife and kid he eventually found (before they turned into a goblin clone and old man cyborg respectively), but his grandparents are probably super dead. The role that Cyclops has settled into is the guy who leads because nobody else wants the responsibility, and everybody already hates him because he's kind of a jerk, so they're all ready to blame him for anything that goes wrong, and his life has otherwise been a long series of tragedies. He is the guy whose job it is to tell everybody else to stop having fun while at the same time not being allowed to have any fun himself. Everybody hates him for pretty understandable reasons, and yet he was always my favorite character as a kid who I sympathized the most with.
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Jan 18, 2018 17:10
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It would've worked out well if it weren't for the giant genocide robot out of nowhere.
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Jan 20, 2018 07:21
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business hammocks posted:What will comics do about Magneto as World War II passes out of living memory? Has he appeared progressively younger in holocaust flashbacks as time passes (ie in the 80s he was a teenager but in the 00s he’s like five or six)? Technically Magneto should be able to get away with having been any age back during the holocaust, because at around 1975 he was turned into a baby, and then transformed back into an adult via Shi'ar technology. That was even brought up as part of his crimes against humanity trial in the 80s, as part of the justification for ruling him not guilty. Comics these days get really anxious and self-conscious about their old wackiness though. Halloween Jack posted:I've said this before: if they have a backbone they'll make him Palestinian. That would definitely be interesting, but probably too interesting for any business execs to be willing to risk anything on it.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:06
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It was the last big direct conflict between large nations, and more importantly, the first time that the international community acknowledged and prosecuted crimes against humanity after they all awkwardly looked the other way with regard to the Armenian genocide. And it was conveniently the key part of the sequence of events that put America on top of the world, at least for a brief period.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:40
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The new April's fine, although the whole new style and new designs for the turtles doesn't make me very hopeful. No knowing how it's gonna be until it's out though.purple death ray posted:It sucks that every time they make a Ninja Turtles cartoon they burn all proof of the older cartoons and execute anybody who admits to having seen them but wygd Yeah, the yellow jumpsuit industry never recovered from back in 2003 when they rounded up and slaughtered all the fans of the old April.
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Feb 2, 2018 01:34
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TMNT has always had a really muddled heritage too, it started out as a half-joke half super serious comic, but the version that most people are familiar with was the licensed cartoon made to sell toys that totally reinvented everything. Then the 2003 cartoon leaned more heavily towards the original comic, but also fused it with the 80s cartoon, and then the CGI cartoon, which was mostly its own thing, but still pretty good. And that's before taking into account the Archie Comics, the anime, the movies, the other movies, and the dumb concert tour.
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Feb 2, 2018 05:50
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The 2003 show I enjoyed most, probably because it was what I watched as a kid. I watched a few episodes of the old show back in the older days of youtube when you could just find old TV shows unedited, and it was about what you'd expect from an 80s kids' show. Then I watched an episode from one of the later seasons and it was crazy, they were all in some kind of resistance movement in an alien-occupied futuristic New York? Not particularly any better, but it filled me with wonder as to what the hell happened in the earlier seasons to get to that. The Archie comic was technically my first exposure to TMNT, although I only had a few issues. There was even more confusion as to what anything was. There was one where one of the turtles was having troubles getting accepted by his fox girlfriend's family and maybe fought somebody to death? There was one where the turtles were skulking around on an alien spaceship with an alien turtle from either another planet or dimension talking about how his savage people all destroyed themselves, and there was one with the turtles as kids, before they differentiated themselves with colors. Kinda wild shift in tone there. The CGI cartoon was probably much more well-thought-out, and higher quality, with long running storylines planned from the start and evolving relationships (aside from whatever the hell was going on with Donny) and character arcs, and I liked it a good bit, although I'm still left nostalgic for the first show I saw, like Baxter Stockman steadily losing bodyparts after each failure or the turtles finding an underground society of monster people under their sewer lair. Krang-speak also gets old after a while, and for some reason I totally lost interest in the show towards the end. I think in general cartoons have been getting better over time, although you still get a few stinkers.
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Feb 2, 2018 19:34
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Amazon posted:Product description Come to think of it, a lot of these old shows are like 60% merchandising. You're probably missing out on a lot without the context of the toys the cartoon is selling. Edit: Oh wow, it really was in the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyjpmeSEm2Y SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Feb 3, 2018 |
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Feb 3, 2018 02:31
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Essentially what's happened is that after cable companies have grown bloated and disgusting and complacent with their captive market who couldn't escape whatever price or lovely service their company set, consumers finally found another option. Streaming has its pros, but the main thing it has over cable is the fact that cable service is tied to lovely cable companies who everybody hates, but can't switch away from without expensive installation costs. So streaming showed up, using the fact that any company can transmit its data through the internet regardless of who owns the lines and acts as the IP (like what phonelines became after Ma Bell got broken apart) to finally compete and provide service people like more. But of course, now that streaming is becoming the main venue for content distribution, all the old forces involved in making cable service what it was have come back. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried to do some weird bundling scheme. So basically streaming is just the latest installment in a decades-long saga of corporate intrigue. The newest development may be the fact that primarily content-creating media companies are both big enough, and the costs involved in setting up an independent streaming system are low enough, that they can more directly pull out and do their own thing. These are the hazards of oligopolies and cartels.
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Feb 5, 2018 01:40
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I watched Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold. It's a bit rough, they try to stick a bit too many things in at once, and the Scooby gang never really fits in with all these superheroes or supervillains, but there's a bunch of everything that made The Brave and the Bold great. I think it's also the first appearance of Detective Bullock within the Brave and the Bold universe.
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Feb 7, 2018 17:25
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I can respect the idea of acting without consideration for Disney's unstoppable tide of acquisition because gently caress them, they don't own you yet.
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Mar 25, 2018 19:29
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