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King is good in general, he's just awful on Heroes in Crisis. Also, his style being so sparse and decompressed works better for some projects than others.
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Jan 4, 2019 10:00
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"Heroes with PTSD undergoing therapy" could have been a great series. "Convoluted, slow-moving murder mystery that takes place after all the therapy already happened" is not. Like, the whole "therapy retreat for superheroes" concept is nearly irrelevant to the end result, at least so far. It could have been Titans Tower or the Hall of Justice getting turned into a spree killing scene and most of the plot would flow exactly the same, with the exception of this weird false conflict of, "oh no, now the public will know that superheroes go to therapy". I feel like this being a PR crisis at all presumes a world of people who would be like, scandalised if they heard about a soldier or a cop in therapy, rather than shrugging and going, "yeah, that makes sense, seems like a stressful job".
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Jan 31, 2019 00:52
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Sleez is an atrocious character and everything involving him should go swiftly down the memory hole, but yeah, technically it's canon that he was so nasty and gross even Apokolips didn't want him. So he and went and lived in a sewer on Earth, as you do.
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Feb 19, 2019 08:49
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I actually thought this was the first really good issue of HiC. No Identity Crisis-style superhero murder mystery, just superheroes in therapy. Loved the Gnarrk segments, and this is the first time Harley has seemed human rather than being a manic caricature. The page with Harley and Ivy talking as they hold hands was really good.
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Feb 28, 2019 11:18
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Doomsday Clock #9 is terrible, definitely a series low point. It's a bunch of superheroes punching Dr. Manhattan for no clear reason, while he tussles with them, again for no clear reason. Meanwhile, he travels in time to prove a point to Firestorm, something which Dr. Manhattan canonically cannot do. Professor Stein referring to "grooming" Ronnie Raymond feels in extremely poor taste, into the bargain.
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Mar 6, 2019 16:51
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Darth Nat posted:I do really enjoy the juxtaposition of a Geoff Johns comic with fuckin' James Joyce quotes at the end. John Byrne did this in his atrocious Next Men, too. Several issues open and/or close with quotes from Ulysses. It seems to be the province of comic book writers writing very bad, "thinky" stories to stick quotes from very good writers in as bookends in an attempt to legitimise their work. Barry Convex posted:I believe someone here coined the phrase "Cargo Cult Watchmen" to describe it, and it continues to be accurate. if anything, it's even more blatant this issue, and it certainly doesn't help that it looks to be increasingly irrelevant to broader DCU continuity Hi! That was me. I honestly can't think of any apter way to describe the book. Edge & Christian posted:I don't know if I was the first person to use it, but I have said (and maintain) that a huge amount of Doomsday Clock is exactly that, from the borderline meaningless 'back matter' to having some dumbass Nathaniel Dusk movie be a parallel story to all of the textual/visual 'It's amazing how Marionette and I finish each other's---" 'Sandwiches! I'm Rorschach Jr. and I fuckin' love sandwiches!" page transitions. Yes, totally. All the signifiers, none of the substance, bundled in with the shallowest, tackiest storytelling habits of mainstream superhero comics.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:48
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Like, the whole Rorschach II plotline is completely irrelevant to everything in the story. He doesn't make sense as an individual, he isn't important to the plot, he's tied to the original story by the thinnest possible thread - his entire existence, and his shaky backstory, are just a prolonged justification for having someone who acts and looks like Rorschach in the book, because everyone knows you need Rorschach for it to be Watchmen. Same deal with Jon arbitrarily resurrecting the Comedian. I'm still not entirely sure why he did that in plot terms, but in actual terms it was so that the story could have the Comedian in it. Remember him? From Watchmen!
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Sep 5, 2019 08:53
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Xelkelvos posted:The Riddler YotV special was interesting if only because it's an attempt to refocus Riddler after King used him up. Obviously it doesn't quite mesh with City of Bane and the tone is very different than any of the current Batman lines (which makes sense since Russel is also currently on Wonder Twins and there's a lot of the same energy there). King's take on Riddler is garbage. Just another murder-man who says, "what is the difference between an x and a y?" before he shoots someone. If Russell is writing something different (and lighter/smarter/more interesting!) I'll definitely check it out.
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Sep 12, 2019 09:54
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Gaunab posted:Tom King has really run the Bat/Cat thing into the ground, especially "it was a boat" "no, it was a street" thing. I'd probably enjoy it more if every issue with them didn't feel like they had the same dialogue. Like you could take those issues and switch them around and it wouldn't effect the story that much. Agreed. There's nothing to their relationship but the beats of those impactful initial issues played over and over again. Plus, King's ultra-decompressed dialogue is starting to come off as a guy padding pages to meet the weekly quota. This issue was a total dud, and while I get that "Batman and Catwoman are back together!" is ostensibly a big story beat in the plot he's writing, the actual substance of the plot here could have been put across in a single page.
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Sep 12, 2019 23:16
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TwoPair posted:I thought it was stupid but I figured he was just a one-off villain for Snyder's little event and I can handle stupid in small doses because I expect that from events. But now it looks like he's just gonna stick around and my eyes just can't stop rolling. I think he's sticking around as a direct response to how cool a lot of fans found him. Which is...pretty predictable, I guess.
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Oct 6, 2019 12:26
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Batman's dialogue in this issue was reminiscent of ASBAR, honestly. Also, the characterisation of the Superman/Batman tussle was fully insane. They just...are fully aware they're being manipulated, but fight each other anyway, and Batman is monomaniacally obsessed with punching Superman, then Wonder Woman shows up and is like, "you idiots, we need to form a Justice League"? It felt like someone recounting a dream.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:37
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I think borrowing great poetry to illuminate parallels in your work can be a really good literary technique, but if it's undercooked the whole thing comes off as callow. King has great taste in poetry, but he usually fails to make his use of it feel integral or necessary to the stories he's using it for.
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Nov 21, 2019 15:55
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Tynion's Detective Comics was good. Only comic I've ever read that managed to make me like Azrael.
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Dec 22, 2019 17:56
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Dawgstar posted:I really dug the Bat-Team stuff. He also did really well with Cass. Yeah. Cass and Clayface were really good. It was a great treatment of Tim Drake, too, and even Anarky's whole deal was compelling. A lot of writers have tried to do "Batman, but a team book", but Tynion's Tec is the only run at that concept that's ever really clicked for me.
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Dec 22, 2019 19:39
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Punchline is a terrible name. Instead Joker should have a boyfriend called Straight Man.
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Feb 9, 2020 22:56
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One of the Wonder Twins villains being a take on Permit Patty who imprisons people in the Phantom Zone with her supertech cellphone, but it's always black people due to her deep-seated prejudice is a writing move that shouldn't work, but actually comes off as a deft, sad metaphor and works totally. I've always liked Russell's work though. I loved Snagglepuss.
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Mar 16, 2020 00:00
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I'm enjoying Tynion's Batman more than I enjoyed the back half of King's, with its interminable dream sequences and double-backs. I think the fact that the current storyline contrasts the relatively wholesome "retro" rogues with their completely gonzo modern selves is a nice way to textually acknowledge the shift in tone those characters have been subject to over the course of decades.
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May 25, 2020 23:29
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Nessus posted:Moving the topic in here from Funny Panels, the idea of the Riddler going after people who don't deserve their money makes sense, although you do get a question of "where does Batman get involved, except as a gimlet-eyed agent of the status quo?" I think this vibe would work best for Riddler (and keep him more villain than anti-hero) if he wasn't targeting people who had achieved greatness in an immoral fashion, but rather people who'd achieved success without "deserving" it by his elitist personal metric. So like, tech CEO who made their bones by stealing patents from better inventors? Yeah, sure, this Riddler would go after that person. But also like "sports manager who pulls down a million dollars a year, but constantly misuses words in interviews and boasts about not reading books" would infuriate Riddler, because he's that sort of dweeb. The guy who hated George W. Bush not because of his policy decisions, but because he mispronounces nuclear in press junkets. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 16:19
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I also agree with How Wonderful! that the Riddler shouldn't be murderous, so much as just indifferent to incidental harm caused by his schemes. He cares about forms, ideas, and intellectual diversions more than people, and that's really harmful, but he's never been interesting as a vicious murderer.
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Jun 16, 2020 16:21
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(Part of why I hated The War of Jokes and Riddles - there are almost no jokes and almost no riddles, just two gang lords who occasionally make a coy reference to their respective gimmicks while engaging in acts of gratuitous violence.)
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Jun 16, 2020 16:23
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I think it was poorly timed in that that issue came out around when the Women in Refrigerators discourse was really picking up steam, and it was increasingly widely agreed that Kyle Rayner's girlfriend in a fridge was the nadir of sexist comics writing. I personally think Blackest Night sucks all over, though. It's like a tawdry splatter sexploitation film, but with an ending where the zombies are defeated by a new Power Rangers toy.
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Jul 19, 2020 09:49
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The worst replies to that tweet are the ones that are like, "proof that the SJWs have ruined comics, here's what REAL comics look like!" and then it's a picture of a Tarot-tier titty lady called something like White Dove: The Sexblade Chronicle.
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Aug 9, 2020 17:04
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The silliest part of the Batman Who Laughs is that he still doesn't have superpowers, but he also never does cool martial arts stuff or uses gadgets. He just ambiguously Wins and throws poisoned batarangs at people.
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Aug 28, 2020 10:39
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I'm catching up on Tynion's Batman, and really loving it so far. The vision of an ideal future Bruce has, where he's turned Gotham into a utopia and his villains are now Flash-style goofballs, is really fun and compelling even if it's brief. I love the idea that Batman would prefer to be like Flash or Superman, to embody hope, if he wasn't continually getting dealt such an awful hand by the nightmare he lives in.
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Sep 16, 2020 08:04
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How Wonderful! posted:I liked that scene too and I wish Tynion had wanted to/been allowed to write that series instead of what becomes a pretty boring, to me, Joker event. I'm not normally one to enjoy "the Joker is attacking the city and the stakes have never been higher!" but this is really singing for me. Despite how dubious she looked, I'm enjoying Harley vs. Punchline and the specific use of Punchline to skewer the idea that the Joker is reflecting a twisted society, an agent of a nihilistic philosophy, etc. Tynion doesn't position the Joker as cool or alluring, but as a banal, nightmarish monomaniac whose sole proficiency is in crafting plots to ruin Batman's life. It feels like a take on a story like (for instance) Death of the Family, but without being enamoured with the antagonist and his point of view. This Joker isn't Batman's worthiest adversary, or his dark mirror, or a representative of any ideology: he's just mundane petty cruelty, a murderous bully. Harley outright says that she thinks the Joker's not a smart guy, and the narrative seems to be on her side with that. Alfred points out that the reason the Joker is able to kill so many people is not because of some unique proficiency he has, but because he doesn't care about people, and it's Batman's job to care. I loved, "Batman is a naive, optimistic child's dream - and you must hold onto it", as well. I feel like there's a core of humanist optimism in this (often very dark) story that hasn't been present in a lot of its contemporaries. But I've always enjoyed Tynion's Batman work, so I might just be the target audience.
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Sep 17, 2020 14:17
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radlum posted:Alfred is alive again? Nah, Bruce gets poisoned with hallucinogens and has a vision of Alfred telling him what's up after he doses with an (equally hallucinogenic) remedy made by Poison Ivy. I really enjoyed that segment in particular. It's poignant, but very hopeful, and it's clear-headed about good and evil when Batman writers often prefer to be hard-boiled and ambiguous.
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Sep 18, 2020 04:30
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Small as it is, "Batman chooses not to save the Joker's life" was a progression in their ancient dynamic and I liked the issue generally. I think if all the stuff in this event about rebuilding Gotham and moving towards a better future goes somewhere in the run's next few arcs, it'll look pretty good in hindsight.
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Oct 7, 2020 05:55
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OnimaruXLR posted:I kind of like Punchline, not profoundly but I enjoy how she IS pretty direct reference to all the people who think the Joker "has a point." Harley said it herself in the story arc, she thought the Joker had a heart whereas Punchline thinks he has a brain, and they're both wrong. Yeah, I thought this was a good use of her character. The previews made it look like she was edgier, more x-treme Harley, but she's actually a different vibe and her existence is an interesting commentary on the Joker's essentially vacuous nature. She thinks he's some great satirist exposing the flaws of a cruel society, when actually he's just a sadistic bully. It reads like a refutation of "that kind of fan" but not in an overly metatextual way.
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Oct 7, 2020 07:15
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I feel like, yeah, the only way to kill the Joker in mainline continuity is to set up his big ticket return a month to a year later. But even in doing that, they also kill the story element of, "people are mad at Batman because he won't kill the Joker", which has in itself become a source of drama. Like, if Joker dies and then goes to Hell and comes back as Devil Instinct Joker, you can no longer have plots where people tell Batman he should kill the Joker and Batman wrestles with this conflict.
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Oct 7, 2020 14:01
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I would definitely like to see a de-emphasis on the Joker as scary murder man who does insanely twisted chemical attacks in favour of making him do some actual "joke" crimes where the punchline isn't people gruesomely dying. I mean, he can go back to the murder later, but like, at least one run of crimes where he's just doing preposterous stuff would be a nice change.
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Oct 7, 2020 16:38
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I hated King's treatment of Riddler, where he was a brutal gang lord who would roll off an irrelevant riddle while shooting at people with guns. If Joker's been over-egged, at least the Riddler is usually still a reliable source of goofy criminal gambits, even in modern Batman.
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Oct 7, 2020 18:33
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Like, the prelude to Joker War features him turning Gotham into a giant crossword puzzle, that's good stuff.
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Oct 7, 2020 18:33
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Jupiter Jazz posted:Wanted to try New Teen Titans so I read the first ish and....I didn't like it. New Teen Titans, especially early on, feels like someone trying to ape Claremont's Uncanny X-Men in a DC milieu and really not finding the right energy.
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Dec 7, 2020 11:03
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I definitely think Heroes in Crisis took Tom King's reputation from, "a trail-blazing voice turning tired characters into blisteringly relevant dramatic powerhouses! Mr. Miracle/Vision is revolutionary work!" to "oh, he wrote an overhyped event where the Flash killed a bunch of B-listers with machine guns, he's actually just a comics writer like any other". It seems to have stolen the fire right out from under his burgeoning fanbase. I don't even necessarily think he's a bad writer, it was just proof that he could write a truly wretched story, and for some people that was enough to rob Prometheus.
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Jun 28, 2021 20:32
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What I disliked about that arc was not so much the Booster characterisation (it's off but okay, if your inciting incident needs him to be an idiot and you feel like you can tell an interesting story out of that, sure) but then that the alternate timeline is such bog-standard "what if no Batman?" AU fare. Gotham is paralyzed by criminals and supervillains, there's an amoral Batman replacement who lives on the edge and shoots people with guns, and the rest of the DC universe is rendered powerless to help. I feel like by the time the comic rolls out Dick Grayson as The Gun Batman you're already yawning.
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Jun 30, 2021 13:03
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Tynion on Batman I enjoyed (I liked Joker War on the whole but yeah, it was old ground and sometimes over-grim), but I really loved his Detective Comics run from a while back where he turned it into a team book about the Batfamily. He can definitely write great Batman stories when he wants to.
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Aug 10, 2021 08:49
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Mr Hootington posted:Wasn't superboy 10 during this period? I disapprove of the picture. A ten year old kissing their crush on the cheek? Doesn't seem super controversial to me. I don't know if you went to school but this happens quite frequently!
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Jan 26, 2022 09:39
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Xelkelvos posted:Mark Russel is the writer for One-Star Squadron so if you've read the recent Snagglepuss, The Flintstones, or Wonder Twins book, then you'll have an idea of what they're doing as they tread the line between comedy and drama and the handling of real issues. That Power Girl is in the role she is in is probably intentional. Yeah, one of the villains in Wonder Twins is a take on Permit Patty - a woman who has a cellphone that allows her to trap people in the Negative Zone, but for some reason she only uses it on innocent black bystanders because they're scary to her. I haven't read One-star Squadron, but the Karen thing is almost certainly intentional.
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Jan 29, 2022 10:51
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It feels like something that was alluded to as a story hook in the Krakoa launch stories and then almost never touched again. Which is a bummer!
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Nov 25, 2022 20:30
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