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Infinity Abyss was pretty bad. Big head Thanos clone, besides him I can barely recall it. Edit: Oh, wiki is calling it a series and not an Event. I still don't know why Spider-Man was in it, probably had a movie out.
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Jul 7, 2014 01:36
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catlord posted:I would love to read about the Countdown spin-offs, because everybody knows how terrible Countdown itself is and why, but I hear very little about like, Arena and Salvation Run. I'm pretty sure everything attached to Countdown was loving awful as well. Wasn't Countdown one giant editorial mandate and constantly called '52 done right' by the editors at DC?
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Jul 7, 2014 01:56
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Tracula posted:I'm pretty sure everything attached to Countdown was loving awful as well. Wasn't Countdown one giant editorial mandate and constantly called '52 done right' by the editors at DC? Yeah, apparently the editors loving HATED 52 for some reason and decided they were going to fix all their issues with it and make the next series 'better' by being massively hands on with it at all times. What we got was Countdown. Countdown has the distinction of having the creator of the event it was leading up to straight up call it worthless and disregard almost everything it did, rending it completely pointless.
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Jul 7, 2014 01:58
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Fuligin posted:I think Ultimatum wins just for being both the most pointless and the most offensively awful. Loeb should have been fired out of a cannon for producing that piece of poo poo. Ultimate Power was a much worse "Event" than Ultimatum even if it didn't kill a bunch of people in increasingly dumb ways. I guess maybe people take more offense at the dumb deaths but as a story Ultimate Power was much worse.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:00
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I think with 52 the 'problem' for DC was that it was a self-contained event. I remember reading it and I got everything without having to go and see what The Question, Booster Gold, etc were doing in other comics. Countdown had so many crossovers and tie-ins it was insane and I think the whole idea was that Countdown was gonna sell more issues of other series as well so you could figure out what the gently caress was going on. Honestly this seems to be a trend with all sorts of lovely event comics, being forced to read other series so you can know what the hell is even happening.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:02
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Tracula posted:I think with 52 the 'problem' for DC was that it was a self-contained event. I remember reading it and I got everything without having to go and see what The Question, Booster Gold, etc were doing in other comics. Countdown had so many crossovers and tie-ins it was insane and I think the whole idea was that Countdown was gonna sell more issues of other series as well so you could figure out what the gently caress was going on. Honestly this seems to be a trend with all sorts of lovely event comics, being forced to read other series so you can know what the hell is even happening. Final Crisis was like that. I picked up the the main series I had no idea what the gently caress was going on.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:14
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I remember when Countdown was announced, the idea was that it was going to be the backbone or the hub of the entire DC universe; everything was meant to tie into it and it was meant to tie into everything. Problem was, if you've got a series that's called "Countdown" it kinda suggests it's counting down to something, and the guys writing it didn't really have much of an idea of what that actually was (because most of the information Morrison provided about Final Crisis was then still a work in progress), so what you ended up with was a year's worth of pointless build-up that ended up going nowhere. I believe it was Dan DiDio specifically who said it was "52 done right". I wonder if he's ever discussed the series and how it turned out since then.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:15
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Parlett316 posted:Final Crisis was like that. I picked up the the main series I had no idea what the gently caress was going on. Reading the tie-ins doesn't make Final Crisis any clearer.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:22
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Countdown had some neat ideas that I would've liked to have seen a decent writer tackle. Weird DC team-up of Jason Todd, Donna Troy (ugh), and Kyle Rayner travel the multiverse. Dude, that sounds awesome! Jimmy Olsen mysteriously starts developing random powers and has a Silver Age-esque Fourth World adventure. Neat! Two of Flash's Rogues fight for redemption while Mary Marvel has to choose between the goodness of the Marvel family or the grim and grittiness of the Black Marvels. Intriguing! Then it actually happened and it was garbage. Thanks Didio, Dini, and Amazons Attack. Arena should've been cool in a clash-your-action-figures type of way. It wasn't and dealt with Captain Atom who apparently became Monarch during some kind of Wildstorm crossover or something? Who cares. Vampire Batman turned Liberty Files Batman into a vampire I think but otherwise it blew. Salvation Run was kind of alright, but in the end pointless. Martian Manhunter infiltrates a bunch of villains who have been sent to another world as a prison planet. They fight. Then they leave. Martian Manhunter dies in Final Crisis and it's unconnected. Countdown to Mystery was the only legitimately good thing that came out of the whole event and it killed Steve Gerber. So blah. Cartridgeblowers fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 02:23
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Aphrodite posted:Reading the tie-ins doesn't make Final Crisis any clearer. Superman: Beyond was pretty much required reading, it's even included in the trade, since it's where the main villain is introduced. Still makes no sense though.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:24
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I believe I have dedicated more time and thought to Countdown (and all of its tie-ins) than any person currently or formerly employed by DC Comics. I would be happy to answer any questions about them. If the first question is "are any of them any good?" I would say yes! They reprinted some pretty cool stories in a series of COUNTDOWN one-shots with sweet Ryan Sook covers. Pick them up when you see them in the quarter bins. Otherwise, no.
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Jul 7, 2014 03:54
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OldTennisCourt posted:Superman: Beyond was pretty much required reading, it's even included in the trade, since it's where the main villain is introduced. Still makes no sense though. Also the Batman stuff. It got kind of recursive as far as I understood it and very very Morrisony. Batman shooting Darkseid creates a hole through which the real enemy emerges or something and then they all fall back in time and...
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Jul 7, 2014 04:20
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Nevvy Z posted:Also the Batman stuff. It got kind of recursive as far as I understood it and very very Morrisony. Batman shooting Darkseid creates a hole through which the real enemy emerges or something and then they all fall back in time and...
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Jul 7, 2014 04:23
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Secret Invasion isn't getting enough hate. It's a big event comic that Bendis claimed he'd been planning for years. Then the series starts, we get a ship full of "lost" characters, except it turns out they're skrulls! So we get six issues of pointless filler fight scenes with basically none of the cloak and dagger "who can you trust?" stuff that was supposed to be the appeal of the event, since, shockingly enough, the Skrulls get punked out once everyone figures out who's a Skrull. Then the finale is a poorly staged fight scene where Bendis kills off a character he hadn't done anything with in a completely throw-away fashion, all to lead-in to the incredibly idiotic idea that somehow the entirety of the Marvel Universe gets taken into believing that Norman Osborn should be made commander of everything, and that the media is so lazy they won't bother to check up on Norman's mental problems, or his years-long disappearance in Europe when he was presumed dead, or the persistent rumors that he's a sociopathic super-villain. Also, I know it's just personal taste, but good art goes a long way towards salvaging a crossover from "bad" to at least "decent." Fear Itself and Siege had sucky plots, but I at least liked the art. Yu can be a good artist for certain types of stories, but multi-character fight-scenes are not his strong suit. His layouts were dull and he did a really poor job of showing action in a series that was an 8 issue punch-up. Like Civil War, it could have worked. Battlestar was still on TV at the time doing basically the same premise- just have a twisty narrative where the reader's not sure who to trust, maybe with some kind of Black Widow/Spider-Woman spy vs. spy type stuff, where Spider-Woman is trying to convince the other Avengers that Black Widow and Fury's side are the real Skrulls could've been fun, instead of a three issue story stretched into 8 plodding issues.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:06
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Aphrodite posted:Uh, that scene explicitly ignores Batman's gun toting past. It's been a while since I've read Final Crisis and my copy is currently packed deeply away in storage, so, uh, how?
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Jul 7, 2014 05:18
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rotinaj posted:It would have been nice if a single one of the comics spinning out of Bloodlines aside from Hitman hadn't been garbage. The Robin Annual with the "Psyba-Rats" is dumb fun when you consider it has as much of a grasp on computers as Hackers. Even a laughably bad Tim Drake story by Chuck Dixon is still a Tim Drake story by Chuck Dixon. Deadpool posted:Ultimate Power was a much worse "Event" than Ultimatum even if it didn't kill a bunch of people in increasingly dumb ways. I guess maybe people take more offense at the dumb deaths but as a story Ultimate Power was much worse. "Do you like Ultimate Marvel?! Do you like Supreme Power?! Well, eat a big bag of dicks!!!"
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Jul 7, 2014 05:55
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Blind Sally posted:It's been a while since I've read Final Crisis and my copy is currently packed deeply away in storage, so, uh, how? Batman has a speech about guns and this being his once in a lifetime exception before he pulls the trigger.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:57
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Civil War was a goddamn mess. I read the full thing, all the tie ins (don't judge me) and none of it made sense. Hell in Cable/Deadpool, Cable says Registration turns America into a fascist nightmare. After seeing that how could you think the two sides were equal, Ironman, Reed Richards and Hank Pym (arguably the douchiest people in comics, maybe even more so than Superman) are accidentally building a fascist society. Than there was the story line about the two reporters and the Ultra-liberal Captain America supporter reporter gets arrested and with the help of a conservative senator realizes shes predictable. The X-Men staying neutral made no sense to me, since if Hero Registration goes through, the next drat thing would be mutant registration and aren't they suppose to be against that? And they loving ending, Cap looks around at a ruined Mid-Town and just gives up? He fought through the ruins of Europe in World War Two, he's seen while nations laid to waste in fights and he gets all guilty cause Mid-Town gets messed up a bit. Jesus I really am at a loss for the nerd obsession with Joss Whedon sometimes. The one positive thing I did like was the comparison of Captain America to The Punisher, where Spiderman pretty much said the two of them are the same, just they fought different wars and that's what molded them.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:59
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rotinaj posted:It would have been nice if a single one of the comics spinning out of Bloodlines aside from Hitman hadn't been garbage. "Gunfire" wasn't... excrement, but it wasn't good, either. The rest... Eh. (JLI had the advantage of top-drawer Mike Parobeck art, too.)
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Jul 7, 2014 05:59
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Oh, bummer. I must have missed/forgotten about that. S'too bad. I expected more from Morrison.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:59
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catlord posted:I would love to read about the Countdown spin-offs, because everybody knows how terrible Countdown itself is and why, but I hear very little about like, Arena and Salvation Run. I've read a good amount of Salvation Run, but I honestly can't say much about it. I mean, it was just there. The most I can say is that the Joker in it was incredibly tame and lame. If anything, the series was a huge disappointment because it was originally conceived as an Elseworlds. All the villains are sent off to live on another planet. The original idea would have shown them living together as a society for several generations, which was a pretty great idea. Unfortunately, mainstream comics don't allow much development outside of C-lister deaths all around. Arena I read out of morbid interest. It gave us the second-worst Countdown-related tagline. While Countdown was, "52 done right," Arena was, "Fanfiction at its best." The guy who wrote it tried his best with what he was given, but there wasn't much anyone could do to salvage it. There were some cool fights, but it was 70% about how Monarch was the biggest badass ever and that no matter what anyone tried, he'd shrug off their attacks. The way it worked, three versions of each character would fight it out until there was a winner. That guy would be in Monarch's army. Some of the fights were decided via fan vote. It didn't matter. The last page showed the final roster of the army and it was said that it would be continued in the pages of Countdown. In the pages of Countdown, they appeared for literally one or two panels before being killed in an explosion. Also, the trade's cover was the final page, thereby spoiling who won every fight.
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Jul 7, 2014 06:01
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KomradeX posted:The one positive thing I did like was the comparison of Captain America to The Punisher, where Spiderman pretty much said the two of them are the same, just they fought different wars and that's what molded them. Yeah, that was a clever point. It's too bad it's such a throwaway line that Cap just dismisses. 
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Jul 7, 2014 06:04
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laz0rbeak posted:Secret Invasion isn't getting enough hate. It's a big event comic that Bendis claimed he'd been planning for years. Then the series starts, we get a ship full of "lost" characters, except it turns out they're skrulls! So we get six issues of pointless filler fight scenes with basically none of the cloak and dagger "who can you trust?" stuff that was supposed to be the appeal of the event, since, shockingly enough, the Skrulls get punked out once everyone figures out who's a Skrull. Then the finale is a poorly staged fight scene where Bendis kills off a character he hadn't done anything with in a completely throw-away fashion, all to lead-in to the incredibly idiotic idea that somehow the entirety of the Marvel Universe gets taken into believing that Norman Osborn should be made commander of everything, and that the media is so lazy they won't bother to check up on Norman's mental problems, or his years-long disappearance in Europe when he was presumed dead, or the persistent rumors that he's a sociopathic super-villain. Secret Invasion also had that awful scene with hippie protestors, which, in the War on Terror context (very religious invaders attacking through sleeper cells, hmmm) makes the book extra ugly. And not-Spider-Woman parading in her skintight suit for the whole series for no reason. I loved the Avegers Initiative tie-in, where one skrull decides to defect and gets unceremoniously murdered by heroes in his moment of triumph.
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Jul 7, 2014 07:56
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Really, at the end of the day, most event comics/crossovers are terrible, particularly modern ones. Even if they have a good premise, they are usually fairly poorly executed, and the conclusions are rarely satisfactory.
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Jul 7, 2014 10:25
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For me the striking thing isn't the idea of them as the same guy in different wars, but the perhaps more unsettling to Cap idea that he has a causative relationship with the Punisher by his martial glory inspiring Castle and setting him down the path.
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Jul 7, 2014 10:26
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Inkspot posted:The Robin Annual with the "Psyba-Rats" is dumb fun when you consider it has as much of a grasp on computers as Hackers. Even a laughably bad Tim Drake story by Chuck Dixon is still a Tim Drake story by Chuck Dixon. redbackground posted:JLI's, Lobo's, and L.E.G.I.O.N.'s were fun! Are we talking the actual event books entitled Bloodlines, or comics written after the whole event was over and they were trying to do something with these umpty-dozen characters they had just created and promptly stopped doing stuff with? Because I liked quite a few of the actual Bloodlines Annual issues where people got introduced, and have read all of them. Even if they never got properly used again, that was one of the things I liked about DC continuity. All these people who were just around, and backround dressing now. Somewhere, Ballistic is working a lovely coffeeshop job, and Lionheart probably started pushing papers in a government job in England. That's one of the reasons I'm not into the Nu 52. So many of the things I liked from my childhood are dead and gone because of the reset. 
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Jul 7, 2014 12:46
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rotinaj posted:That's one of the reasons I'm not into the Nu 52. So many of the things I liked from my childhood are dead and gone because of the reset.
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Jul 7, 2014 12:50
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rotinaj posted:Are we talking the actual event books entitled Bloodlines, or comics written after the whole event was over and they were trying to do something with these umpty-dozen characters they had just created and promptly stopped doing stuff with? All four of those books were part of the main event. I wish that strategy were used today. People might hate events a lot less if they were a single mini-series and a random collection of Annuals instead of several issues interrupting the flow of titles they actually enjoy for something they probably won't in addition to three or four mini-series that all tell the same story but don't keep the facts straight and countless one-shots. I thought Trinity, the weekly where Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman never existed, was fun while it was happening. The idea that the world went straight to "metahuman" and bypassed "superhero" altogether was strong, but I tried reading it again and it is a chore to get through.
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Jul 7, 2014 13:42
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I'll go full on old man style and say I prefer my major events like Infinity Gauntlet, main series and the ongoing series are partially interrupted. They add to the story but they are not outright needed to figure what is going on.
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Jul 7, 2014 13:44
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I've heard the reason why Fear Itself fell flat was because it was initially supposed to be confined to Captain America and Thor books, only editorial decided to make it a linewide thing. hence its main focus on those two books with Bucky and Thor both 'dying'. But as others have said, there were still good tie-ins. My personal favourite was Journey Into Mystery. Little Mac posted:I will continue to defend how much better MUA2 was over MUA1 until the day I die. Civil War story and all. Yeah, it actually did it right with a new threat showing up midway through the conflict and both sides realising they've be acting like dicks and calling a truce to deal with the problem. I think I preferred What If? Civil War, though. If only because it illustrated how the whole thing could have been resolved if they'd been willing to talk it out like sensible people.
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Jul 7, 2014 14:10
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I think most events (Marvel events, anyway) are generally "opt-in" as far as tie-ins go. I remember Waid complained about "having" to do a Disassembled tie-in when he was writing Fantastic Four (he did the story arc where Sue and Johnny swap powers and he becomes Galactus's new herald), though in fairness that was about 10 years ago, and I'm not sure if writers at either of the Big Two have to do tie-ins as a matter of policy when events roll around.
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Jul 7, 2014 14:14
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The worst thing about Secret Invasion to me was how Bendis came up with this awesome plot based on the Skrulls saying, "Our problem is that we always fight the Earth heroes head-on and lose horribly. What if we just find a way to destroy them that DOESN'T involve fighting them head-on?" That's brilliant. I wanted to read that story. So what was the Skrulls' endgame? A big fight. That lasted three issues. Because that's all Bendis could think of. Another thing that hurt it was the whole Spider-Woman thing. The twist came so early on and came off so dull that it made people figure that there had to be more to it. Perhaps she wasn't going to fully go through with her plan? Maybe she'd have to fight her own kind in some way? Nope. What you see is what you get. Then they had that thing where Osborn had to steal the special directions of how to kill the Skrull Queen from Nick Fury/Deadpool. Why was this supposed to be such a hard thing? Not only was she a regular Skrull, but she was literally the weakest person on her side of the battle. All the other Skrulls had the powers of various heroes/villains while she was just Spider-Woman with some extra bells and whistles.
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Jul 7, 2014 14:16
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Gavok posted:Then they had that thing where Osborn had to steal the special directions of how to kill the Skrull Queen from Nick Fury/Deadpool. never actually read secret invasion proper
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Jul 7, 2014 14:19
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Inkspot posted:All four of those books were part of the main event.  Blood Pack immediately. Pax, the guy that LEGION saved from aliens' home pocket dimension had a pretty badass followup story in one of the Showcase '9X issues afterwards where he's telling a bunch of bar patrons about his quest to kill all the aliens still out there. He goes into what he's been through, how he tracks them, all that. Then we discover that everyone in the bar is in fact a bloodline alien (which Pax already knew) and he singlehandedly slaughters every last one of them. The story ends with him making his way to a starport where Things Again Are Not As They Seem. Pax was kind of cool, you guys.whoop, sorry bout the double post there 
redbackground fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 14:28
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In terms of good event comics I know I've already mentioned it in passing but I seriously cannot give enough praise to 52 in pretty much every respect. I went in knowing nothing about any of the B-cast of DC and I felt like it did an amazing job of getting me up to speed. Not having the big three around gave everyone a huge chance to shine and be awesome. Everyone got a chance to be a hero and a badass from Booster Gold to The Question and so on. I didn't read it when it first came out but didn't it actually manage to stay on time as well? One issue a week for a year and I recall the comic also happening in real time. If I re-read it I'm sure there's some flaws here and there but everything just seemed to click perfectly for me.
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Jul 7, 2014 16:52
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Blind Sally posted:Yeah, that was a clever point. It's too bad it's such a throwaway line that Cap just dismisses. Yeah it really was such a waste, but ever since that that has been how I look at The Punisher
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Jul 7, 2014 19:20
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As how Rogers could have ended up with similar moral inflexibility in such a war, or as an unwitting creation of Rogers'?
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Jul 7, 2014 20:39
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Tracula posted:If I re-read it I'm sure there's some flaws here and there but everything just seemed to click perfectly for me.
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Jul 7, 2014 20:53
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I'm honestly surprised Flashpoint hasn't been mentioned yet. Not only was it the spark that gave us the New 52, which is bad enough already, but it really felt like a weirdly low key and lackluster event to completely reboot the entire DCU with. At least Final Crisis was epic in it's scope despite it's total insanity.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:13
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laz0rbeak posted:Secret Invasion isn't getting enough hate.. Can't believe no one has given Maximum Carnage / The Clone Saga a nod yet. As for DC, DoNG was a complete waste (doesn't Mr. miracle master AntiLife and turn into some early 90s depiction of a computer virus?). And Countdown was meanderingly bad but gave us superboyman Prime being an angry cliche and Darkseid sitting on Mary Marvel's couch. Countdown was a narrative failure, but a so bad its good kind of crap shoot.
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