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El Gallinero Gros posted:Wasn't Spider-Girl basically the only decent book from MC2? No, because they also had one about a silver Juggernaut who tied a flannel shirt around his big Juggernaut waist and sported a grimy little goatee, which, for 1999, is such peak DeFalco that I can't believe he didn't blink out of existence, his service to the universe having been rendered in full.
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May 2, 2018 06:57
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I think The Champions floundered for a number of reasons and a few of them were explicitly about not playing to Mark Waid's strenghs. I think Waid has always been better at synthesizing disparate versions of a longstanding character into a cohesive whole than creating and defining new characters. I think I've compared him to Mark Gruenwald before, but I stick by it-- the older and weirder a character, he better he does with them. His real gift is taking someone with a whole host of baggage and weirdness and make what appears to be a mess into the compelling appearance of complexity. See his Flash run, where he did more than anyone to make the Flash corner of the DC Universe feel like an interesting, mysterious place. His Daredevil, too, reads like an attempt to make the lighthearted swashbuckler of the 60s gel with the gritty Daredevil of the last few decades, and it sings with the frisson of that challeng.That's what made his Archie such a treat-- nothing could be more Waid than taking four broadly sketched characters with decades of clutter behind them and making them speak relevently to a contemporay audience. He's a refurbisher, and a really great one. With The Champions, he was writing characters who had, up to that point, been the babies, for better or worse, of single writers with strong stylistic thumbprints. Kamala Khan is G. Willow Wilson's baby. Miles Morales is Brian Michael Bendis' baby. Amadeus Cho is Grek Pak's baby, Sam Alexander was pretty much a cipher until Gerry Duggan came along, Viv Vision worked in Tom King's Vision but was kind of broadly defined, and young Cyclops is just kind of nothing. There's no synthesizing and reconciling to be done so Waid is put in the position of just trying to respectfully follow in the footsep's of those writers. It comes off as politely not wanting to step on those writers' toes, and on paper it reads like spinning wheels and going very, very cautiously. This is not what makes thrilling superhero comics. Waid is also a great collaborator, who plays to the strengths of his partners and, in the best situations, has those artists tease notes of wit and subtlety out of what tends to be a pretty blunt scripting style. This is, again, on full display in Archie and Daredevil. This can even be true of his work with Humberto Ramos! Impulse, a young, brash, immature hero, is not really Waid's signature, but Ramos' kinetic and cartoony pencils made it a great comic. Champions is scripted and plotted so limply though that Ramos comes off as struggling to find the right tone. His exaggerated, rubbery style is just not the right fit for a comic which tends to be as deliberate and talky as Champions, and so you have scenes that call for a lot of nuanced acting dominated by crazy poses and hollaring faces. I think Waid and Ramos are both super talented creators, and I think a lot of the characters in Champions are very rich. But the brief for it was so limp and tired-- young heroes teaming up! proactively!-- that it tarnished everybody involved. The series was also so hamstrung by crossovers and compulsory continuity checks that it felt like the team never did anything but squabble and twiddle their thumbs. The villains were lackluster, as again, I don't think Waid is particularly strong, overall, at coming up with new characters-- that team of goofballs they kept fighting were so, so forgettable.
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May 13, 2018 23:09
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Elon Musk is, like Donald Trump, a Wharton boy. My partner used to work in academic administration and was briefly working at Wharton, the most agonizing job she ever had, just a boot camp for vampires as portrayed by Udo Kier.
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May 27, 2018 11:31
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