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I've never really been able to get into Donny Cates's "Look at what I'm doing isn't it hilarious and audacious  " books so far, and while Death of the Inhumans takes the sort of "Lockjaw... in Iron Man's armor... in dinosaur times... fighting.... ZOMBIES!" part out of his writing, it's actually worse.I kind of assume it's all going to get magically reversed, but it's not just Lockjaw. I guess the idea is that the Kree want the Inhumans to serve them, so the first thing they do to get the Inhumans to join them is to murder 11,038 (the number is specified) of them and carve JOIN OR DIE into their chests and put them in orbit around the moon. Then they murder the four other tribes of Inhumans from Hickman's run. Then they set a bomb to kill Black Bolt's crew (but only kill Triton but Medusa is also mortally wounded). Then they invade New Arctilan and appear to be killing everyone in sight, including Naja and Flagman, then they kill Maximus and Lockjaw. All in the first issue. This feels like a What If. Covok posted:The difference being no one likes Inhumans so no one's going to be mad.
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Jul 6, 2018 13:53
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site posted:I think marvel committing genocide on two different ethnicities on the same day so casually is actually a good distillation of how they view marginalzed groups at the company John Byrne in 1982 posted:There are half a dozen of us at Marvel right now who have sat down and said boy, the last fifteen years (makes raspberry sound with his tongue), we really messed up. And we're trying to correct all the dumb stuff from the past 15, sometimes 20 years. a) FRAMER'S INTENT John Byrne talking about fixing things the Old Masters did b) Byrne' point for where Marvel went wrong is somewhere between 1962 and 1967
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Jul 6, 2018 16:50
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The Eternals I at least assume are part of some sort of revival/revamp plan, partially because I have more faith in Aaron to be a good/constructive writer than I do with Cates, but also because they straight up mentioned the Uni-Mind which is a Get Out of Jail Free sort of thing to bring back Eternals. This isn't even the first time the Avengers have had to deal with a bunch of Eternals corpses.  The Death of the Inhumans seems more wonton and mean spirited.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:11
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Joe Sinnott is still alive at 91. He inked a lot of early Marvel, including FF #5 and then almost all of the back half of the Lee/Kirby run and the lion's share of later issues into the early 1980s. Stan's brother Larry Lieber is 86, and scripted most of the early Iron Man and Thor stories and a bunch of other stuff of the era. Sal Buscema is 82 but he didn't break in at Marvel until 1968.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:28
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Rochallor posted:He's not original original but John Romita Sr. is still kicking too.
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Jul 7, 2018 04:25
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Honestly, Marvel has done a pretty great job with all of their renumbering and rebooting of making it hard to identify top selling books. It's happened awhile ago, and the first book they really 'killed' was Wolverine. It was a consistent Top 10/20 seller for years through Civil War tie-ins and the Loeb/Bianchi runs and random fill-in arcs and was up in the top 10 with Old Man Logan, and then when Old Man Logan got delayed they went ahead and launched the "new, main" Wolverine book that was supposed to be Jason Aaron's first big "prestige" title, Wolverine: Weapon X. Within six issues it was selling significantly less than either Dark Wolverine (the Daken book that took the 'old' Wolverine numbering) or Wolverine Origins (the supposed b-book) and after just sixteen issues they felt the need to relaunch it as just "Wolverine" with a new #1 even though it was still part of Jason Aaron's Weapon X run. That book launched big but had also drifted out of the top 20 within six issues, so barely a year later after issue 20 (Marvel was big into doubleshipping books back then, which also seemed to hurt sales) the "A" Wolverine book wasn't in the top 50. So they renumbered the 21st issue as "Wolverine #300" and it bounced back to #14, before immediately dropping back to #43 with the next issue. By the last issue of the renumbered run (#317) the book fell all the way to #62, so they relaunched AGAIN with the 2013 version of Wolverine #1, which yet again had a #1 in the top 5 and a sixth issue wallowing down around #50. After thirteen issues, they relaunched Wolverine yet again in early 2014, the first Wolverine relaunch to not crack 100,000 copies of the first issue, though it was in the top 10. It was another case of it pretty clearly just being the 14th issue of Paul Cornell's run so it was really unclear why it needed to be a #1, and people seemed to realize that. Same story, six months later the book is down in the 50s and has shed 75% of the first issue sales. That last Wolverine series, the sixth in a little under six years, ended with issue #12 and was replaced by the Death of Wolverine mini-series. A less extreme version of that seems to have happened to drat near ever single book at Marvel. And honestly with most books at DC that don't have Batman in the title. Taking aside first issues or "milestone issues", the only books that are consistently in the Top 20 comics right now are Slott's Amazing Spider-Man (and even that is dependent on "event" storylines), Batman, Walking Dead, Star Wars, and Jason Aaron's Thor once in awhile. I think the real takeaway is that direct market fans have been trained to think there's only one [character/team] book that 'matters', so something like Snyder/King Batman is positioned as THE Batman book, and it sells consistently well and blows every other Batbook out of the water. Slott's long run on Spider-Man was "THE" Spider-Man book, and so it outsold everything else by a large margin. Even when Ewing was doing cool Avengers stuff, it was also in the secondary book where Hickman, Waid, etc. were doing the "important" Avengers book. Things get messy when you can't steer everyone to THE book for a franchise, this has been what has happened with the X-Books pretty consistently for about a decade. Can anyone tell me what was the Flagship X-Men book at any point after Joss Whedon/John Cassaday left Astonishing X-Men? I can't, and there also hasn't been a consistently top-selling X-Men team title since then.
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Jul 9, 2018 16:41
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Dawgstar posted:How did All-New Wolverine do, out of curiosity? 11/15 AN Wolverine #1 - 119,786 11/15 AN Wolverine #2 - 55,634 (-53.6%) 12/15 AN Wolverine #3 - 50,990 (- 8.3%) 01/16 AN Wolverine #4 - 49,978 (- 2.0%) 02/16 AN Wolverine #5 - 43,149 (-13.7%) 03/16 AN Wolverine #6 - 44,668 (+ 3.5%) 04/16 AN Wolverine #7 - 38,168 (-14.6%) 05/16 AN Wolverine #8 - 38,242 (+ 0.2%) 06/16 AN Wolverine #9 - 43,545 (+13.9%) (CV2) 07/16 AN Wolverine #10- 38,579 (-11.4%) (CV2) 08/16 AN Wolverine #11- 40,312 (+ 4.5%) (CV2) 09/16 AN Wolverine #12- 35,481 (-12.0%) (CV2) 10/16 AN Wolverine #13- 38,297 (+ 7.9%) 11/16 AN Wolverine #14- 35,437 (- 7.5%) 12/16 AN Wolverine #15- 31,796 (-10.2%) 01/17 AN Wolverine #16- 35,128 (+10.5%) 02/17 AN Wolverine #17- 29,255 (-16.7%) 03/17 AN Wolverine #18- 46,731 (+59.7%) 04/17 AN Wolverine #19- 57,526 (+23.1%) 05/17 AN Wolverine #20- 36,573 (-36.4%) 06/17 AN Wolverine #21- 38,500 (+ 5.2%) 07/17 AN Wolverine #22- 34,610 (-10.1%) 08/17 AN Wolverine #23- 27,867 (-19.5%) 09/17 AN Wolverine #24- 33,140 (+18.9%) 10/17 AN Wolverine #25- 62,286 (+87.9%) 10/17 AN Wolverine #26- 28,499 (- 54.2%)
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Jul 9, 2018 16:52
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Skwirl posted:What happened in issue 18 where it jumped from 29 thousand to 46 thousand? and again almost doubled its sales at issue 25 only to lose half of them the next issue? Issue #25 was part of "Legacy" and had the lenticular cover and all of the books got an artificial boost/bust with the first/second Legacy issues.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:28
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site posted:Was this issue the first time it was mentioned kamala had ended up marrying Bruno? And yeah, I think Ahmed is still adjusting a bit to writing comics (and team comics are always trickier than solo books like Black Bolt), but I wish Javier Rodriguez would get as much high profile work as he wants.
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Jul 13, 2018 18:07
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Rhyno posted:Edit: wait, how is his visor glowing if it's not on his face? https://twitter.com/kennybloggins/status/1017891076303196161
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Jul 15, 2018 02:39
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As someone who actually did care about the Vision prior to that mini-series it didn't feel like it was actually about the existing character of the Vision, which is just how comics work I guess. Lots of different ways to "rehabilitate" a character.
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Jul 22, 2018 16:55
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I am no great fan (or any fan at all) of Jeph Loeb's writing but both of these sounds like poorly thought out/poorly received jokes that revolve around the idea of "hey look at this uncool old dude trying to be cool and With It and failing miserably for comedic effect" more than any intended disrespect or belittling of fans. Maybe I'm out of touch but I've lived through convention panels where Dan Didio poo poo all over a fan for wearing a sports coat because THIS IS COMICON IT'S NOT YOUR BAIL HEARING YA NERD or Ian Sattler repeatedly insisting that the JLA is very diverse because Superman and Martian Manhunter aren't even human and ONE OF THEM IS GREEN, he's not a white guy! or the time that Bill Willingham self-hijacked most of a Fables panel to crack on the Venture Bros fans camping in the hall by pointing out that they probably wouldn't like his comic because it has words and they are fans of a cartoon which probably means they're illiterate because cartoons are for children who don't know how to read yet and there are literary references in Fables so even if you know how to read I know you're too dumb to have read any real books so maybe stick to your baby cartoons you stupid fans... given the historical trends of big con panels while if I were a Loeb confidant I would have desperately advised for him to skip both of these dad jokes, I don't know if it ranks in the top 10/20 bad con panel decisions I can think of in recent memory. EDIT: Chris Claremont shoehorned Warwolves into his short-lived Fantastic Four run! 
Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 06:04
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Dawgstar posted:Warwolves, sure, but how about the Technet?  Wheat Loaf posted:The Technet were an Alan Moore creation, weren't they? and not quote:Devour: Bodybag can devour up to 3 living beings and store them inside her stomach-sacs. Sizes of victims have varied, as she has shown to be able to eat Benjamin Grimm (Earth-616) Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 13:39
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I assume he was trying to play off jokes like these where the whole point is that it's a weird poorly signified nonsense binary, but for a whole variety of reasons that's a bad idea. I think it's less meant to be edgy and transgressive and more silly.
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Jul 23, 2018 16:46
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I know that this is the grand tradition of the past 10-20 years of comics but considering they just made a big deal about how they're finally bringing back the Classic Eddie Brock/Venom pairing fans have been clamoring for, to almost immediately pivot into goofy Roy Thomas On Crank style "actually the symbiotes were made out of the shadow of a dark god and forged into mythic weapons in the skull of a Celestial and Grendel was actually a symbiote and Thor is Beowulf and there are symbiote dragons buried in the Earth used by the US military to fight in Vietnam" seems kind of at cross-purposes. I know a lot of people love this poo poo but maybe Venom could be a flawed human bonded with a weird alien thing trying to find justice in a world that doesn't understand him? I know comics are a medium of endless possibility and etc. etc. etc. and Big Ideas are cool but also mmmmmmaybe those big ideas don't have to be Venom But Thor or Batman But the Joker or Spider-Man But They're 400 Of Them or [character] But Old and so on and so forth? Also a few things I want to acknowledge: 1) I realize that a large part of this is how the modern American comics landscape works, that creators have little to no incentive to add a genuinely new idea into the ecosystems of either Big Two Universe if it's not inextricably tied to an existing property because they can just save that idea for an Image/Dark Horse/etc. book where they actually own the characters and get to control them and reap the rewards of creating a Hellboy or Invincible or whomever. 2) This is also NOT the same thing as complaining about "Wolverine But a Girl" or "Iron Man But Black" since those are stories about human beings and exploring how the symbolism of the characters mean and their roles in the world change with a new person holding a mantle in a way that when done well is still a human story with human stakes and drama and development in a way that 'actually there have been Hawkeyes throughout all history check out this one alternate universe Evil Cyborg Vampire Gambit But Hawkeye eight pager and then this double page spread of Spider-Ham Hawkeye and Old Man Matt Murdock Hawkeye and Cosmic Hawkeye getting eaten by Eagle-Eye, the eldtrich beast that eats the eyes of Hawks to get vision so good it can destroy the multiverse!' does not. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 16:31
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It's less a problem and more of a story I don't have any interest in? Which in this particular case of Venom is a non-unique disadvantage because I've never cared that much about Venom outside of a few stories/runs, but catching up on Venom this week in the face of releases and solicitations and announcements about Spider-Geddon, Infinity Warps, Old Man/Lady _____________, Three Jokers, Dank Multiverses, Extermination, Avengers 1,000,000 BC, Batman Who Laughs, even more What Ifs, etc. etc. etc. has me exhausted. It's true that this doesn't change the core concept of Venom any more than my Hawkeyes vs. Eagleeyes thing doesn't change the core concept of Hawkeye being a guy with a bow and arrow, but it really gilds the lily and signals that for the foreseeable future we're going to get a bunch of stories about Symbiote Dragons and Creepy Mind Controlled Toxin and Operation Desert Venom and Symbiote Thor and Symbiote Miles Morales (which to be fair they've been leaning on for years, yes) and that does not excite me at all.
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Jul 26, 2018 17:55
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X-O posted:Comics are a cycle of trying new things and falling back when they fizzle or don't work out. That's just what they'll always be. I like that cycle personally because I can read a year of two of interesting stories with characters I didn't care for much before while they're doing something different with them. And sometime soon the fans of the classic versions will get their version back for a while. This particular type of revamp always seems more interested in WORLDBUILDING (Vietnam Venom! Beowulf! Dead Celestials! A STORY SPANNING MILLENIA!) as opposed to, you know, anything particularly interesting for the characters. This seems kind of like Donny Cates's MO, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
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Jul 26, 2018 21:09
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Archyduke posted:I'm mostly shocked by the implication that Marvel didn't already have a Beowulf. They did! Not to mention the previous implications that immortal characters like Gilgamesh and Ulysses Bloodstone were the source of the Beowulf myth and I feel like some sort of alien from the 1990s (maybe in Clan Destine?) was supposed to be Really Beowulf. Also DC full on had a Beowulf comic during the DC Explosion/Implosion.
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Jul 26, 2018 22:30
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Wrong thread, but I liked Jessica Jones quite a bit.
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Jul 31, 2018 03:31
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DeFalco/Ryan Fantastic Four is just historically bad, I cannot imagine anyone defending it if they've actually looked at it in this century.
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Aug 8, 2018 19:41
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The original Kraven (Sergei Kravenoff) who died in Kraven's Last Hunt was resurrected towards the end of the Brand New Day run of Spider-Man in some sort of weird Spider Blood ritual I don't really remember. He was upset at being resurrected and thought his family weren't True Hunters and ended up killing most of them, then trying to find a Spider good enough to kill him again. None of the various Spiders/Venoms were willing to kill him in battle so he tried to get Hulk to kill him, or maybe a resurrected Kaine would let him die a warrior's death, etc. Basically every comic he's been in for the past 10 (or 30+, really) years have portrayed him as kind of a weird murderous dude who had weird ideas about wanting a noble death and so either wants to kill or be killed by everyone he sees. I'm not saying it's a terribly compelling character to me in most of these stories, but it's a consistent character that doesn't really work with the USG version. Which doesn't make USG a bad comic, but some of the NUH UH NUH UH THIS IS ALL IN CONTINUITY, IF YOU LOOK UP THIS OLD COMIC THANOS SOMETIMES FARTS SO HARD THE GAUNTLET FALLS OFF AND HE POOPS HIMSELF THAT'S WHY I HATE THANOS BEING TREATED AS A THREAT IN STUPID rear end HICKMAN'S BULLSHIT level of wanting everything (that i like} in continuity is weird to me.
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Aug 9, 2018 20:53
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Alaois posted:e hasn't been writing for the Daily Show for the past like 3 years, I don't remember if he left when Jon Stewart did or before that but it's been a while.
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Aug 23, 2018 21:34
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On some level (though it's hard to maintain that sort of status quo) both the initial introductions of Amadeus Cho and Lunella Lafayette involved them being young genius people of color without much/any socioeconomic privilege. I think Amadeus had a solid middle/upper middle class upbringing but also had his parents killed and went on the run when he was in his teens, and Lunella/Moon Girl's initial arcs are literally about how she's stuck in a struggling public school. Of course years down the line they're both friends with billionaires and have unlimited funding for whatever gadgets they're building, which is kind of the struggle of open ended shared universe storytelling. It was even baked into Riri Williams's origin for all of about three issues before she got invited to Harvard and inherited Tony Stark's patents or whatever. EDIT: I realize the initial question was about "trailer park white trash", not other underserved communities. I think that concept would suffer from the same sort of creep into "he's got a redneck voice but he's working for MODOK" within a few appearances. That said, if Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys just showed up one day as part of the Intelligencia with absolutely no explanation I wouldn't complain. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Oct 16, 2018 |
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Oct 16, 2018 20:38
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I feel like this even happens on the bigger/richer characters, I've lost track of how many times that Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Lex Luthor, or Bruce Wayne have lost their fortune and had to operate leaner and smarter and oh wait someone got bored with this status quo, they're a multi-billionaire again. Speaking of which, did anyone read the last issue of Slott's Tony Stark: Iron Man comic? The entire comic was built around the idea that some shadowy company launched Tinder, except the way this Tinder worked was that a human would fill out a profile and (unbeknownst to them) the Tinder company would build an incredibly lifelike AI robot/life model decoy that was their perfect mate and then I guess they'd just seed the world with hundreds/thousands/millions(?) of these perfect AI soulmates until one of them got security clearance to a big company like Stark Industries and then they'd immediately transform into Hivemind Thief Robots and try to steal all the technology they can to profit!!! Think of all of the technological advancements they could steal, all for the mere cost of seeding the world with countless perfect human duplicates that could initially fool even the world's greatest technologist! That can't cost that much money, right?
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Oct 16, 2018 21:03
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I feel like being able to build note-perfect independent AIs who will be your soulmate and appear human to any sort of test or scan (even within the Marvel Universe) is a good enough feat that you could probably do okay in the market without the secret "transform into robbery-bots and steal other technology for money!"
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Oct 16, 2018 21:13
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site posted:Oh i totally misread what was going on then, i thought it was a bunch of already existing robots who tried a catfishing op and just decided to send everyone they had once literally every stark employee revealed themselves to be single IUG posted:He had some Secret Wars comic "Where Monsters Dwell". I read most of the what seemed like 50 mini-series that came out from that event. Where Monsters Dwell was easily the worst. Extremely toxic masculinity dripped from it, and I don't remember it being tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic. Just a bunch of drat WOMEN telling a MAN how he should LIVE. I've since avoided him.
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Oct 16, 2018 22:42
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That's a slight updating of the time Stan Lee hung out with KISS and the members of KISS put their blood into a comic Marvel published starring them.    A proud Marvel tradition!
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Oct 18, 2018 00:47
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Oct 25, 2018 19:32
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Teenage Fansub posted:♪♫♬One of these things is not quite the modern equivalent of the other♪♫♬ Before I say anything dumb, is this mostly a "Jimmy Kimmel isn't funny" thing, or does he have some war/sex crimes in his past? Letterman (or Leno, who teamed up with Spider-Man more than once) seem to have more skeletons in their closets than Kimmel.
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Oct 25, 2018 20:01
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They're the West Coast Avengers which limits their options in 2018. Colbert and Meyers have already appeared (and Meyers wrote a Spider-Man one-shot), and in any sane world Fallon is underneath Kimmel in any ranking, so... Desus & Mero & Power Man & Iron Fist would be better, don't get me wrong.
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Oct 25, 2018 20:26
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Teenage Fansub posted:... don't do a lame cameo at all.
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Oct 25, 2018 20:36
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In general Infinity Wars is almost like a reverse Fear Itself (and a couple of other small-in-scope-stories-that-turned-into-Events) in terms of storytelling, it's very much a continuation of what Duggan was doing in Guardians of the Galaxy with a sprinkling of Al Ewing concepts that turned into a Big Event except... it isn't even that? It's a monthly mini-series with a handful of short mini-series thrown in. It was being positioned as a much bigger deal, but at some point during the changeover from Alonso to Yoshida, Plans Changed in a major way. The biggest illustration of this is that the original promotional material/set-up (going back to Marvel Legacy) had two of the New Infinity Watch members being Wolverine and Carol Danvers. They were front and center for all of the announcements, and Marvel Legacy one-shot has as one of its big cliffhangers Wolverine holding an Infinity Stone. There are a couple of early promo images with the Thing's hand holding a stone/Thing reaching for a stone and later Super-Skrull shows up in the story but no Thing, though I don't know if that was a planned swerve or an adjustment). Then when the Infinity Countdown mini-series (which was originally solicited as issues of Duggan/Kuder's GOTG run) starts up, Wolverine literally drops the Infinity Stone off in a toilet tank in a safehouse only he and Black Widow know about with a note that lampshades the whole thing "Hey Nat, I had a plan for this stone but I got other stuff to deal with, can't explain sorry later bye!" and Black Widow just kind of picks up where I guess Wolverine was going to be in the narrative? There was also the whole thing after Legacy where they did "after credits sequences" with Wolverine, back from the dead with an Infinity Stone, is teleporting around just missing all of his old friends who he wants to share a secret with. But this was all completely dropped and in the actual Return of Wolverine series he's back from the dead, amnesiac (he doesn't know his own name or who Daken or Sabretooth or anyone else is), working for some evil corporation with claws that get hot. Which means the whole "hey bub I'm back and I need to seek out my old friends for a secret mission!" doesn't align at all with where the new management decided to go with Wolverine's return. Carol also gets shunted off pretty quickly, but not as hilariously.
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Nov 9, 2018 18:46
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Aphrodite posted:How do all the merged characters fit into this? The whole merged universe thing really feels like (as I said earlier) that this was a Guardians of the Galaxy storyline that they got hyped for at one Alonso-led creative summit, and the mash-em-ups were pitched as a way to extend this out into a big linewide crossover. Then when they pulled back from that, the concept was still there and Duggan/Ewing/et al thought it was a fun idea, but it no longer serves a huge purpose besides being a fun idea.
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Nov 9, 2018 19:52
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Skwirl posted:Between this and the Thanos/Cosmic Ghost Rider stuff, Donny Cates really likes writing Frank Castle but writes him completely different from anyone else ever has.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:12
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I think I'm in the vast minority but Greg Pak's whole Weapon X/Weapon H/Weapon X-Force run has really threaded the needle of clever-stupid in an enjoyable way. Weapon H as a character is ridiculous on the face of it but is done with just enough of a straight face, and the book itself draws in a bunch of stuff I enjoy (Dario Agger trying to profit from the natural resources of Weirdworld and hiring Weapon H, Korg, Titania, etc. as private contractors, weird Hulk/Brood/Wendigo/etc. hybrids, etc.) I assume that Pak is wrapping this all up with this final mini-series, and not unlike Sabretooth leading his Weapon X-Force of every C-list 1990s X-Villain (Omega Red! The Nasty Boys! The Original Next Wave ft. The Original Agent X!) into Hell by getting killed by a bored and louche Azazel is a fitting ending to that series, a big dumb Hulk & Wolverine vs. Hulkverine should be a fun wrap-up.
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Nov 14, 2018 20:02
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Kikkoman posted:I love Pak's Planet Hulk and Red Hulk stories but have fallen off the Marvel train these last few years... If I want to check out that stuff, do I need to start with Weapon X? I just looked it up on Comixology and noticed it's got Greg Land's name attached to it. The Totally Awesome Hulk - Amadeus Cho becomes the Hulk. There are four volumes of Totally Awesome Hulk, and Weapon X launches awhile later. The first trade of that is pretty much where all of the Greg Land art is. You could honestly skip this if you don't mind coming in kinda-sorta mid-story, since a lot of poo poo is restated immediately after the first trade when the two books crossover for WEAPONS OF MUTANT DESTRUCTION, which is the introduction of Weapon H. Then the second volume of Weapon X partially continues the Weapon H storyline, at which point he gets his own book. Weapon X continues on for what is probably going to end up being 3 additional trades. Totally Awesome Hulk also got retitled/renumbered as just The Incredible Hulk after the WMD crossover, for Return to Planet Hulk and World War Hulk II arcs that I don't think have been collected into trades yet but are on Comixology as single issues.
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Nov 15, 2018 05:28
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Speaking of Dan Slott (who I do not reflexively hate but has written a lot more bad than good in my opinion, even outside of his endless Spider-Man run) is anyone reading his Iron Man run? The big overarching "futurist mission" in the book is Tony wanting to create The eScape which kept getting talked about as the most advanced and incredible and world-changing piece of technology the world has ever seen, something Tony Stark could finally be proud of, his mark in history, his legacy. It debuts in this week's issue and it's.... an Iron Man faceplate that links you into a VR simulation where you can be a superhero or a Pokemon? There's a whole lot of old man writing with people camping out for days to get eScape accounts... or... uh... masks? But the masks are only "merch"? And it's an online MMO but a group of robbers are trying to steal a tractor trailer truck of copies of "Tony's video game". Which is actually the one thing I'm kind of willing to say confidently "Dan Slott doesn't know what the gently caress he is talking about" "The eScape", whatever form the retail version may take, is allegedly so popular that people are camped out to buy it despite it being on the market for weeks, and going for "twelve times the retail price" on eBay. This makes Tony's game "worth more than gold or platinum". Which is technically true, gold is worth about $40 a gram, so a $50 Cracker Barrel Gift Card is "worth more than gold" on some level. This is why for people who aren't Dan Slott the term is that something is "worth its weight in gold", which if that Cracker Barrel Gift Card is virtual means it is worth infinitely more than gold by weight. Later on Tony says he's proud of making something "worth more than diamonds", which again... it's good that Tony is finally taking some pride and thinking his work is important. But also he's livestreaming the truck heist to the game, and millions of people worldwide are "playing along" and it's overloading his armor circuits or something, because that's how server lag works! Anyway a lot of the other stuff can be waved away as fart machine comics science and by the end of the issue a supervillain has hacked into the admin functions and given all admin powers to banned trolls and IF U DIE IN THE GAME, U DIE IN REAL LIFE!~~~~!! so it's not like he's actually going to explore any of this poo poo. But the "people are camping out for days to purchase access to an online game that launched weeks ago and buying copies for (conservatively) $3000 which is more than gold!" stuff seemed like the biggest slap in the face to the concept of Dan Slott, Adult Who Lives In The World to me for some reason.
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Nov 24, 2018 15:31
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Yeah, like Happy Noodle Boy said, there's a layer of forgiveness with Cosmic/Magic Comic Book Stuff where you can think that Spiderverse or something like that is dumb, but since I have no real world experience with The Web of Life or how a group of Victorian Cosplayers whose whole gimmick is eating Spider-Mans can be super allergic to radiation except when they're not, so long as a fantasy story plays by its fantasy rules (and doesn't keep reversing/complicating them, Geoff Johns) I can play along. Slott's Iron Man, in addition to having the handicap of being by Dan Slott, is trying to do Real World Business and Technology Stuff, which unfortunately for him is a thing that people actually have Real World Experience in. Unlike The Emotional Spectrum or the Infinity Stones or whatever, these stories are rooted in how real people/masses of people/businesses run. It's almost not worth picking on it for this outside of this issue's brutally dumb "video games worth more than diamonds!" stuff, but this is a problem with doing BUSINESS in superhero comics in general, and one much better writers than Slott bang up against. The storyline isn't finished yet but the current Weapon H thing about Roxxon colonizing/pillaging/exploiting the natural resources of Weirdworld sort of hinges on the idea of "they're torturing Morgan Le Fay and the politics of Weirdworld are in chaos because the former dictator queen is trapped in a generator siphoning her infinite power" as a metaphor for I dunno, all of the Oil Adventuring in the Middle East done by western powers for the past hundred years or so. Except Morgan Le Fay really is a genocidal monster the likes of which the real world doesn't have any comparison, an eternal being who's killed millions and tried to kill or mind control billions. She's not from Weirdworld so it's not like she's a natural resource, and having such a power source in the control of an even-more-evil-than-normal corporation is a real issue, but society/the universe is unquestionably benefitting from converting her murderous impulses into electric lights or whatever in a way that i don't think any real world comparison can convey. It would be good to fight to turn her into a public utility, but I'm not convinced it's good to fight to free her. A more direct comparison I think is Joe Casey's WIldcats 3.0 which I know a lot of people love but the entire thing read to me like: "We will release this game-changing product into the market. It will blow away the competition. It's expensive to make but we have infinite resources so i'm not worried about making a profit." GAME CHANGING! YOU'RE A DISRUPTED, SPARTAN! "People are trying to compete with our product. We'll just give it away for free." ART OF THE DEAL! WARREN BUFFETT AIN'T GOT poo poo ON YOU! "A corporation stands in our way of doing this. We will buy them, with our infinite money." YOU ARE A NEGOTIATOR AND PLANNER THE LIKES THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN If it was supposed to turn into like a critique of capitalism or this was just setting the stage for an exploration of a post-scarcity economy with superheroes or whatever fair enough, but it took up so much of the book and felt like someone wanted to write high stakes Sorkin-y Business Process stuff with God Mode on or something. The ascent of a corporation with infinite resources in a finite world is just something that you can pass by fiat.
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Nov 24, 2018 18:56
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The Question IRL posted:That sounds dumb, but in a way that is just "your understanding of how entertainment and digital media works is 15 years out of date." Like there would be a time when newly released games would have sold out and been super valuable. That's just not nowadays. Is the idea that Tony Stark (who has shown no limitations re: capital or production capacity of... whatever the thing people are buying is) is throttling production so that people will wait in line for days and sell them for "more than diamonds or gold'? And then bragging about it? If it turns out this is supposed to be a villainous prideful act Stark must atone for then okay, but otherwise it's really dumb. It's like the Tinder story where [mysterious villain] creates an app that will determine your ideal mate and then create an artificial human being with those exact traits that no one will realize is an artificial intelligence/body in order to.... steal Stark's intellectual property and profit from it? Because creating soulmates doesn't require a lot of resources and isn't marketable in and of itself? Slott keeps comparing his run to Black Mirror, and I haven't seen all of Black Mirror but all of the ones I have seem to benefit from having someone around to go "well if X, then how does Y work?" and also the smaller scope that Slott doesn't have doing a long-ish run in a shared universe. Mostly the former though. I'm not saying any of this eScape stuff was a good idea, but there are all sorts of interesting unintended consequences/subcultures that crop up in online communities you could extrapolate out into a comic book. I am here for whatever version of TF2 Hat Economy that Crimson Dynamo tries to set up in eScape, but we're not getting that, we're getting IF U DIE IN THE GAME U DIE IN REAL LIFE Harsh Realm nonsense.
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Nov 24, 2018 19:20
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El Gallinero Gros posted:When did Ellis write it? Is it good? Excalibur: His first act was to add a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, caustic Essex man named Thor: Much of the story centers around a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, caustic Englishman named The twist in Hellstorm is that the lead character wasn't British, he was just a hard-drinking/chain-smoking rear end in a top hat who thought superheroes were dumb and stupid and childish and had a really hot industrial/goth girlfriend. In Ultraforce, the twist was that it was an older hardcore cool dude who all of the chicks loved, like Jarvis except more badass. In Doom 2099 the twist was that basically all of the characters that weren't Doom were this.
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Dec 5, 2018 15:02
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