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Endless Mike posted:I mean, I can see what she is talking about, but Gillen is pretty clear that everyone in WicDiv is terrible in their own way. The thing with Woden is that he's unilaterally the most repugnant person in the series and his god-like powers aren't even his, all his ploys and plots are just vanity, and he's eventually torn literally limb from limb, Maenad style, by the women he exploited. There are occasional moments where Gillen lets the character explain where he's coming from, and it's strong writing, but it's strong writing of a morally bankrupt worldview, and other characters invariably call it out as such. He's a gross character, and Gillen has been clear in interviews that writing him makes his skin crawl too. Everything he appears to accomplish is the work of someone else. He's absolutely not supposed to be "right" and I'm legit curious where this person is getting that impression. And if showing a male character being the victim of physical and emotional domestic abuse is MRA poo poo then I don't know-- I guess I just strongly, strongly disagree? I think Wic Div is great, and earns its representations of ethically questionable behavior by framing it explicitly as the actions of people who have convinced themselves that they're above other people. Urdr is also hands down one of my favorite portrayals of a trans woman in contemporary comics, and I feel like Gillen has been super sharp and respectful with her character, so that earns a pretty fair amount of good will from me. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Mar 4, 2019 |
# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 18:27 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 10:19 |
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Lurdiak posted:Much like male victims of rape, male victims of spousal abuse get trotted out constantly as an MRA talking point to prove that "both genders do it" or, even more disingenuously, to try and pretend men are more abused in these ways than women are so any woman trying to frame rape or spousal abuse as a feminist issue is actually supporting abuse. That doesn't mean they're not things that really happen, that the victims are invalid or that they shouldn't be discussed, but in certain contexts I can see it being interpreted as a red flag. Right, and MRA's also like to hijack the issue of sexual assault in prison, but that doesn't make carceral abolition or reform an MRA issue, and yielding that issue to the far-right would be a grace disservice to men as well as women and NB people in the prison system. Similarly, detached from the alt-right propaganda machine, I think domestic abuse can and should be discussed as something that men can be the victim of without detracting from the fact that women are hugely disproportionately the victims of it. If someone read WicDiv and got a "not all men" vibe from that subplot, I would say that's an extremely dramatic misreading. It's a plot line about codependency and if it has a major fault, it's in tiptoeing close to the line of blaming the victim.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 21:36 |
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CharlestheHammer posted:I feel like everyone is actually terrible is becoming more and more the lazy go to crutch for stories. That's also not at all the reading I get from WicDiv or really any of Gillen's books, except arguably Die which seems so far to be about walking back from that presumption? I don't think he has any interest in making a cynical statement about human nature, but he is fascinated, I think, with issues of complicity, and of how people reconcile themselves to unjust conditions rather than fighting against them. This is huge in WicDiv in particular but overall I'd say his ouevre bends way more towards rehabilitative than retributive models of justice, and models of how people interact and live together in general. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Mar 4, 2019 |
# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 22:40 |
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Does Seven Soldiers count as an event comic? Annihilation also largely holds up.
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 08:41 |
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Gripweed posted:Are there any American comics about physical fitness? How wide a net are you casting? There's a young adult series from Boom! about highschool fencing that I haven't read.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 23:41 |
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Is Curt like, re-decent again? I seem to recall him devouring his son I actually think it's a pretty forgettable run, definitely not worth $80. I guess if you can get it used it's pleasant enough but it's definitely Waid in his "innocuous wheel-spinning" mode for better or worse, imo.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 23:54 |
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Yeah, this is one of those days where I'm sort of dreading going into work because I know students are going to feel a need to come together and talk about it and I'm happy to facilitate that but facing the collective rage and grief of a generation that's inheriting all of this is never easy. I'm still young (or young-looking) enough that students disclose a lot of generational anxiety to me, but old enough that there's also an element of "and how could your generation let it come to this??" and like, I have no idea how we did.
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# ¿ Mar 15, 2019 14:24 |
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Edge & Christian posted:At the point that you covered a comic literally titled The Osborn Journal I was kind of hoping you'd finally remember how Nouraieouman Ousuybourney spells his name but hey Maybe it was Robert Osborne's journal and all his hard work cloning Peter Parker was just a roundabout way of bringing Joan Crawford back.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 18:26 |
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If I were the writer of X-Men I'd 100% introduce a mutant called Rouge with, I don't know, the power of apparently having great cheekbones always looking fresh-faced.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 19:20 |
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I hate to live up to my avatar but these seem like a lot of more or less arbitrary dunks on a lot of stories that are good if often pretty flawed? I suppose a lot of bro-y guys like Grant Morrison, and Grant Morrison's work has had some dubious blunders in representation, but this all seems like a pretty wayward path towards a full-throated critique. I guess the obvious counter is that it's a joke, but I don't know, not many of these seemed spot-on enough for me to laugh. There wasn't really any shock of recognition, probably because so many of these seem to interpellate the reader as a straight guy?
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# ¿ Mar 25, 2019 05:18 |
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Roth posted:I think I'm really disconnected from the average comics fans, because all the Grant Morrison fans I know are artsy trans women that love Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, and All-Star Superman. Yeah me too. In high-school and college he was the mainstream comics writer most likely to come up in conversation in queer spaces (well, in high-school maybe it was Neil Gaiman, but I never got into him and would sort of zone out during those conversations), I suppose he probably has his fair share of snide guy followers but I've generally apparently been able to avoid them. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Mar 25, 2019 |
# ¿ Mar 25, 2019 20:05 |
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E&C has a point, Byrne has produced enough appalling posts and blurbs and stuff that one can very easily prove that he's a tedious, self-absorbed racist without making stuff up. And really the hyperbolic stuff is never as bad as his actual textual footprint so why bother? That being said I think litigating precisely which type of racist John Byrne is is not that compelling a hill to die on. At best, on the basis of his own words, he's racially tone-deaf and too narcissistic to care to an extent that I'd still feel comfortable calling Pretty Racist. He clearly does, to stick to the specific thing at hand, want to use racial slurs or at least feels entitled to use them, because he uses them twice in the quoted posts. Even if it isn't born out of a raging, vociferous loathing of minorities, it still comes from feeling detached from any ethical stakes in language, and a refusal to engage with empathy.
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# ¿ Apr 13, 2019 02:00 |
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site posted:You know it's "strange" how I can't report mods for misgendering me while making snide comments That sucks, sorry.
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# ¿ Apr 20, 2019 02:58 |
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They sound like marvelous fellows!
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# ¿ May 13, 2019 04:43 |
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If you want to talk about Unfunnies could you do it in the thread you specifically made about it, because I don't want to hear about it and I don't think it's bad in an interesting enough way to really be worth hearing about.
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# ¿ May 14, 2019 08:02 |
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site posted:one of the things that really hooked me when i first got back into comics was a 2 page spread in bendis' torso that's like, a spiral panelling thing that you had to turn the book vertical for. it was really cool Torso really fascinates me in that so much of what we think of when we think of Bendis in 2019 is already there, from the really idiosyncratic way he thinks about tempo and I almost want to say "meter" in how he tackles panels, to the fact that the ending is a huge disappointment. But yeah, the spread you're talking about is great and sort of blew my mind too when I first encountered it.
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# ¿ May 15, 2019 18:29 |
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Several months ago, I mentioned that I had written a scholarly article about what lessons Daredevil comics can teach about legal ethics and the legal system in general, especially to an audience of non-lawyers. It was finally published online today, in the Capital University Law Review. I'm a tenure-track law librarian, and getting scholarly articles written and published is one of the necessary requirements for tenure, which means you either get more job security and stability, or you get fired. This is awesome, congratulations!
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# ¿ May 17, 2019 08:27 |
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Meme or not, thank you for sharing the panels, I otherwise would not have ever seen them. I don't have any nostalgia for the Transformers and no real interest in digging into the comics but that seems like a nicely handled plot beat.
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# ¿ Jun 3, 2019 02:51 |
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Giant Days is excellent and unless you're totally allergic to fairly grounded sitcom-y stuff you should all check it out.
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# ¿ Jul 21, 2019 22:06 |
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This is really apropos of nothing but the details of it are pedantic enough that I feel like I'd be better off posting it here than anywhere else. A friend of mine died early this week, really suddenly. He was a disability studies scholar who'd dealt with chronic illness his whole life, but this seemed to have come out of nowhere. He was two weeks shy of his 51st birthday, and had been a hardcore comics guy since childhood. We'd get lunch on campus and talk about stuff like Peter Gillis' career just because we knew nobody else was, and it was fun to turn over neglected stumps in comics history and see what was wriggling around underneath. He was the one committed Garth Ennis apologist I'd willingly break bread with, and for his part he patiently humored me whenever I felt like haranguing him about the queer genius of late-period Claremont. In an infamously contentious and paranoid department, he was beloved by everyone-- students, faculty, staff, everyone. I barely see the point of taking the elevator down from my office anymore, knowing it'll never again open up on him singing Brecht to nobody in particular. In an era in academia when "eccentric" is too often a dog whistle for "abusive and unreliable but tenured" he was a true, classic, old-school eccentric-- someone whose passion for learning overflowed constantly into weird, joyful exuberance, someone whose curiosity and wit didn't obey doctrinal lines or the narrow lanes of professionalization. Anyway, last night my wife and I went over to his home to keep his widow company, cook dinner, and do whatever she needed. We wound up sorting through the massive piles of paper in his office for most of the night remembering what a weird, charming guy he was, separating out all the relics decade-old pull lists mingled in with old student papers, abandoned drafts of letters to his family, receipts for kombucha, print-outs of old listserv arguments, a magnificently cranky mid-80s argument with Sondheim, etc.. But I kept glancing up at this Alan Davis Excalibur poster hanging up in his office, nicely framed with all the odd-ball 90s Excalibur characters on it-- Cerise, Kylun, Widget, Micromax, just a weird snapshot of the time. It made me feel weirdly peaceful to think of him sitting at his desk, writing about crip theory and crime fiction and glancing up at Nightcrawler and co. once in awhile. If anybody has any information about this particular poster, I'd love to be able to track it down further. The one site I found listing it (but not selling it) said it was included in Excalibur #124, which doesn't make sense because I think that was the very end of the Ben Raab run. I feel like leveraging my grief into a nerdy hunt for decades-old minutia is something he would have appreciated. Here are Davis' pencils for it. If nothing else, I think it's a beautiful showcase of his talents.
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# ¿ Jul 27, 2019 21:09 |
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Rhyno posted:I found the color version, it has the mid run logo on it. Still looking for details. Edge & Christian posted:The #124 there means that "Excalibur" (that poster) was #124 in the series of Marvel Press posters that started in the mid 1980s. These posters were solicited and sold separately from any comics. Marvel numbered the posters for the same psychotic collector's psychology that led them to number the first 30-ish "Marvel Graphic Novels" despite consecutive issues having absolutely nothing to do with each other. "If you liked MGN #32 (The Death of Groo), surely you'll want to see Jim Shooter and Paul Ryan's Thor story! Thanks both, I found "Marvel Press (#124)" on a checklist of Davis' work under posters, and the details check out. I also found a four-year-old CBR forums thread attempting to piece together a comprehensive list of these posters but it seemed pretty patchwork which, as E&C points out, is weird and a shame because the ones I've stumbled on today are frequently dope. Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Archyduchess, I'm so sorry for your loss. That was beautifully-written, as usual. Will do, I'm going to catch up on two weeks of neglected work e-mails tomorrow (I'd just gotten back from Vermont when all this happened) and I'll drop you a line then.
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# ¿ Jul 29, 2019 00:00 |
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I'd actually be curious to see someone with the time and resources figure out if mainstream US comic books geared towards a "general" audience disproportionately featured sexual violence vs. tv shows/movies/etc. with a similarly broad target demographic. The subtext of this conversation so far also had me thinking, if one takes hentai and stuff out of the equation and narrows manga down to stuff someone might reasonably pick up for their kid or read on the subway, is there really, statistically, more sexual violence than Western comics? I truly couldn't even hazard a guess, honestly, because I feel like online reception of manga culture has latched onto stuff that's perhaps culturally marginal in Japan.
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# ¿ Jul 29, 2019 02:46 |
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Madkal posted:That Storm poster is as punk as gently caress! Let's say she's deliberately dragging it on the ground to ruin it.
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# ¿ Jul 29, 2019 16:57 |
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Gripweed posted:I know I'm way late on this, but I finally got around to Captain Marvel. I didn't follow any of the ~discourse~ around it at the time, but I was aware that there was a small but very vocal group of people online who were extremely mad about it. And now, having seen it, I think I know why they were mad and I'm 100% with them This isn't why most of the people "mad about" Captain Marvel were mad, and I think you truly would have had to have buried your head in the sand or been trapped in a cave for years to not glean that the issue was mostly sexism, or rather, that the issue was mostly sexists. There are legitimate issues with the movie (I don't like how cheery it is about the military) but overwhelmingly the driving force behind the online backlash was the organized tantrums of misogynists. I don't know if this post is a bit or what, but come on.
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# ¿ Aug 16, 2019 19:22 |
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Soonmot posted:i'm two days sober and apparently a bit testy unironic congrats, that's a hard decision but speaking from my own experience often a really good one
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# ¿ Aug 17, 2019 00:27 |
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Nocenti's Daredevil is so weird and so beautiful, it really meanders and gets lost but it isn't really like anything else, and I think for whatever with JRjr her super lurid and lyrical scripting style lands a lot better and feels a lot more bespoke than with roughly contemporaneous stuff like the incomprehensible Longshot mini.
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# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 06:39 |
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I don't think Nocenti is a nihilist, there are numerous good to not-so-good stories throughout her career that demonstrate that she has from the start been uncommonly committed to using superhero comics as a vehicle for social and political agitation. I think part of what's so compelling to me though is the well-known bit about how when she broke into Marvel she was basically totally unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the genre-- she came to the medium through Dick Tracy and Pogo and, later, underground comix. She's approaching these narratives with an outsider's perspective, and from that perspective, sure, a very intuitive direction to take the reins of a character at that point still heavily determined by Frank Miller's neo-noir is even further into existential angst, albeit a stripe of angst that's less stoic and almost primly reactionary than Miller even at his best, more informed by her countercultural background and a floridness that I'd call lush, or, again, lyrical. If Miller's Daredevil inhabits a cosmos that's dirty in the same way that Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson's worlds are dirty, than the griminess and depravity of Nocenti's DD is more like the fever-dreams of Rimbaud or Baudelaire, which imo meshes with the political and social theory she was reading at the time as she worked on her Master's degree. To pick up on Random Stranger's point, I think she's reacting with a somewhat justified bafflement at precisely that moralistic stasis that underlies a lot of superhero comics-- if Gotham is going to stay grimy and cruel and evil, what does that say about the people who live there, how do they interface with a world that's locked into this agonistic back-and-forth completely beyond their ability to do anything about it? How does altruism and courage look in that kind of world, how does it behave? I think it's less that there's no hope of redemption for humanity, it's that given the narrative architecture Matt Murdock traverses there's no hope of redemption for him because he travels among people who have also foreclosed that possibility for themselves, and she spends much of the run digging into why they've resigned themselves to that. I'm thinking of one of the highlights of the run, the ridiculous but very fun and ultimately satisfying fight against Ultron. It's a gorgeous brawl where she really lets JRjr cut loose, with great splash pages of the Inhuman flying around and beating rear end, but it's also about someone trying to outgrow his worst instincts and getting beaten and destroyed for it. At the same time, this Ultron, who is willing and desperate to grow, is also still a crazed murderer. Everybody's in the wrong, and everybody is wrong within closely held frameworks of absolute moral certainty. Ditto the whole arc with Number Nine the perfect woman, or the stuff with Mephisto and Blackheart. Even the aforementioned Typhoid Mary. I think Nocenti is more than willing to imagine a trajectory of real growth and improvement for people-- I think a sadness and rage about this pervades a lot of her 80s/90s stuff-- but I think a huge part of her DD run in particular (as well as Longshot I think but god who knows with Longshot) is about how that trajectory or I guess the escape velocity required to attain towards that trajectory is impossible when one takes the structures they find themselves hazarded into as inevitable and immutable. Her DD is someone trapped in the grammar of DD comics, and her Longshot, as absurd as he is, is a beautiful anomaly in an ugly world precisely because he's intruding from outside of that grammar. It's telling imo that the last two big arcs in her run are about Bullseye trying to slip himself into that narrative and being extremely hosed up by it, and a half-coherent but weirdly compelling thing where DD and all his friends go to hell, are psychologically tormented for awhile, then saved by the Silver Surfer before one of them literally ascends to heaven. It's as far from the gritty neo-noir that the genre as a whole took as Miller's big thing as possible, and in being plucked from the cod-naturalism of that kind of narrative and into the more operatic and allegorical narrative of Mephisto and Hell, they finally can get their poo poo together and, in the case of Brandy Ash, actually for real evaporate out of superhero comics and into heaven, like some bizarre metatextual trick of aufhebung. I realize I'm being vague and probably extraordinarily broad here-- to be honest, I haven't read through the run in ages, but I want to revisit it now. But yeah, it is both a very good chunk of Daredevil comics and a difficult, disagreeable, and frequently somewhat repugnant one. I think it's an extremely provocative response to Miller and I think the medium is richer for having it. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Aug 26, 2019 |
# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 05:23 |
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That issue is ugly in such an interesting way, I used to be fascinated and horrified by it as a kid. That would be a rad thing to have up on your wall.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 01:49 |
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Quitely is one of those cases in which I love him but I absolutely understand why someone else might not, just like Gabriel Ba and Chris Bachalo. I took forever to come around on Moebius and I still respect Dave Cockrum's art more than I like it (and I hated Alan Davis as a kid, mostly due to being exposed to very badly inked work of his), so I think partially there's just some aesthetic black box deep inside each of us that overrides everything that Scotland spent a generation trying to teach the world about the cultivation of taste and discernment. I can definitely see why the extreme fleshiness, almost pulpiness of Quitely's forms could be really viscerally not great to look at for people.
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# ¿ Sep 23, 2019 07:13 |
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Gripweed posted:How exactly are they defining "Essential" here? Are there really that many "essential" Wolverine comics? Wolverine's been in a ton of good solo comics, and for a long stretch of time I'd honestly say he was mostly in decent-to-great solo comics. The first Claremont/Miller mini-series is a classic, and the first ongoing is remarkably consistent in how fun it is. Claremont/Buscema open it up with a very loving riff on Terry and the Pirates-style adventure comics, which PAD and Archie Goodwin both run with for a bit before a short, not bad handful of Mary Jo Duffy. Then you get right into Larry Hama, which goes (with, IIRC, less than a half-dozen fill-ins!) from #35 or so to #118. It's not a perfect run, it's long and rambling and meandering, but they're also extraordinarily fun and capture the kinetic energy of the 90s with a lot more verve and charm than many of the more famous or infamous books of the period. Edit: So, so "Kitty Pryde & Wolverine" is not stellar, but month-to-month, the solo series is strong from 1988 to at least 1997-- I largely dropped off of it once Hama left, but I know post-Hama there was stuff by Warren Ellis that was regarded and a Steve Skroce arc that looked good at least. Surely, between that, the Claremont/Miller mini, and little OGNs and maybe MCP arcs, one could fruitfully stuff a few Essentials without much filler. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Oct 13, 2019 |
# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 22:52 |
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There's also Keith Giffen's short-lived The Heckler, whose main character was, weirdly, also precisely the same as your description. Much less well-known than the Creeper though.
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# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 07:13 |
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Rhyno posted:The Heckler had the laughing powers? I thought he did, but I was misremembering the "HA"s on his suit. I guess he was just a nonpowered leaping guy? I do have a soft spot for Giffen's oddball short-lived 90s series (Vext too in particular) but honestly it's been awhile since I've read them.
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# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 16:44 |
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Gripweed posted:I'm hoping you guys can help me with something. My local comic shop is doing a big sale this weekend. I went intending just to get manga, as you do, but the manga section wasn't great. And it turned out they had a massive clearance section, with tons of American comics for 1-3 bucks each. NGL, I kinda wilded out. I'm not really familiar with any of the stuff I got. Is literally any of this worth reading? Sort of a mixed bag! Thunderbolts is a classic and Stormwatch is not bad at all, albeit very of its time. If S.W.O.R.D. is the Kieron Gillen book it is a fun read. I think Justice Leage 3001 and Empowered have their fans although the latter is definitely not for everyone. I don't care for it but I know a number of posters here could offer a pretty enthusiastic endorsement of it.
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# ¿ Nov 3, 2019 23:16 |
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Tom Spurgeon has passed away. I can't say too much about him personally but certainly when I was a little kid really trying to broaden my horizons in this medium, TCJ under his editorship did most of the heavy lifting for me.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 04:42 |
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quote:Tank Vixens is a short mini-series adult comic penned by writer Paul Kidd, themed around The 101st Tank Crushing Brigade, fighting in a war against a megalomaniacal female vole general, Udda Von Schteppenschlammer and her assigned army of soldier mice aboard The Vainglorious Pratwaddle. Unlike normal wars however, the methods of combat used are based on the power of fashion instead of military might, a totally unorthodox style that generally involves the vixens (female foxes) running around topless or even totally naked during battle and the mouse general being defeated due to her "inadequacies" in most cases as a result. The idea for Tank Vixens came from Phil Morrissey's and Tom Verré's project titled Lesbian Foxes In Hovertanks where lesbian foxes rode around in futuristic hovertanks. Oh ok.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2019 07:14 |
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Alaois posted:Now you're telling me Thunderbird couldn't fly???? I thought the whole thing with his death is that he flew up to stop the evil general escaping on the plane I sort of like the John Francis Moore run-- I read it in chunks in real-time, but with enough gaps that whatever was going on always felt excitingly baffling. And the art was a lot of fun in a very 90s way.
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# ¿ Nov 24, 2019 05:39 |
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Gripweed posted:I finished Counter X. What? You should look into the X-Force revamp that rose from Counter-X's ashes-- the Milligan/Allred run. It hasn't aged as gracefully as I once would have thought but it really is something special and a really fascinating snapshot of where Marvel was at in 2001. The X-titles were definitely adrift around that time and Counter-X was one of several efforts to nail down a direction that felt more fresh and contemporary-- and I think you'll agree that a lot of the later 2001 retoolings were much more successful in that regard (also G. Mo's New X-Men and to a much lesser extent Joe Casey's Uncanny). I want to say Cable's Soldier X rebranding and the trajectory up to it-- which was an interest spin, especially when Darko Macan took over writing-- was also part of this push? But I'm not 100% sure the dates line up. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Nov 25, 2019 |
# ¿ Nov 25, 2019 15:52 |
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I really enjoyed Michael Fiffe's article about Tom Tenney in TCJ last month. It's not my taste but the article pointed out some aspects of it that I do think are worth appreciating and Fiffe highlights some really lovely panels. I guess Force Works was the last thing he did for Marvel, then some Image stuff, and then he bounced out of comics for good. Honestly I think his pencils only really work for me at all with Reynaldo Garcia inking.
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# ¿ Nov 26, 2019 23:49 |
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I think it's a little crummy especially if it happened right away. Even if they gave the series a shot and didn't like it-- I've definitely been gifted books I wound up disliking, or just not having room for, but I usually try to pass them along to somebody who I think would get more use out of it, or donate them, I'd feel really weird trying to make money off of the whole thing.
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# ¿ Nov 27, 2019 08:25 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 10:19 |
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I think Princeless is supposed to be generally well-regarded by people looking for comics to pass on to young kids and Jeremy Whitley has done some good stuff but other than I've never seen or heard of anything at all compelling coming out of Action Lab.
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# ¿ Dec 1, 2019 02:50 |