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My favorite thing about high evolutionary is that he evolved himself to a point where he was no longer a nuisance and just wanted to peacefully observe the universe to learn, but then figured the universe would end before he got to see it all so he de-evolved himself back into a meddlesome jerk so he could kill time in a less pointless way.
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May 1, 2018 20:55
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Rhyno posted:Same. Of course eventually Ben gets to go back to regular Thing and they dustbin her by writing her as if she wanted to become human again and got double-crossed by Doom to becoming worse because he's just a bad guy who loves doing that to people.
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May 1, 2018 22:57
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I remember really enjoying the annual that served as Englehart's first issue. The rest of it isn't fantastic. Conversely, I don't particularly dislike the DeFalco era FF (not least because it had some pretty cool-looking Paul Ryan art), Reed's safari jacket, Sue's 4-shaped boob window, Hyperstorm and all.
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May 1, 2018 23:22
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Rhyno posted:Same. Sharon Ventura in general is a stupid idea.
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May 1, 2018 23:47
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Wheat Loaf posted:I remember really enjoying the annual that served as Englehart's first issue. The rest of it isn't fantastic. Outside of a few exceptions (boob window being top of the list) the De Falco era FF is just bland. It's on the same level as the comics between FF102 and FF232 where the most significant thing that can be said is, "Oh, yeah, those issues exist, I guess." It's bad, but in a way that it's not worth working up the energy to complain about. I don't think I'd put De Falco in the bottom five of FF runs.
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May 1, 2018 23:53
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Englehart's run ends in such a petulant, bananas way that it's worth reading just as a curio of the genre being pushed to very weird, very personal places while still looking, walking, and quacking like a (not very good) Fantastic Four comic.
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May 2, 2018 00:06
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Random Stranger posted:Outside of a few exceptions (boob window being top of the list) the De Falco era FF is just bland. It's on the same level as the comics between FF102 and FF232 where the most significant thing that can be said is, "Oh, yeah, those issues exist, I guess." It's bad, but in a way that it's not worth working up the energy to complain about. I don't think I'd put De Falco in the bottom five of FF runs. Well, the thing is that De Falco is like Byrne in the sense that he wanted to do a "greatest hits" run, except he revisited a lot of Byrne's greatest hits, e.g. Sue becomes Malice again, Nathaniel Richards comes back, Reed mysteriously vanishes after a confrontation with Doom (though in retrospect the fact that he's gone for a good 30 issues or so is sort of cool, I guess). And some of Englehart's, come to think of it; I'm pretty sure he redoes Aron the Renegade Watcher. Of course it's nowhere near as good as Simonson or Waid but I'd rather go back to it than the mid-70s FF when their villains were the likes of Salem's Seven, who are probably my least favourite Marvel villains by a country mile, and Overmind and the Sphinx.
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May 2, 2018 00:21
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Wheat Loaf posted:Of course it's nowhere near as good as Simonson or Waid but I'd rather go back to it than the mid-70s FF when their villains were the likes of Salem's Seven, who are probably my least favourite Marvel villains by a country mile, and Overmind and the Sphinx. Yeah, that's why I wouldn't put De Falco in the bottom five. Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman basically spun the wheels on the comic for years and made a bunch of boring comics. At least De Falco tried to do something with the book. Conway was similar in that he tried to give the book a bigger direction but also just made some boring FF comics. FWIW, I think De Falco brought back Aron because as a writer he's kind of lesser Mark Gruenwald (which has a kind of irony to it). He likes the old continuity and one-off characters and trying to do something with them, basically making the titles he works on into his own isolated sandbox to play in because nobody else is going to touch what he's using. Basically, nobody wanted to see Aron again, but De Falco said, "Hey, I bet I can use that guy!" and gave us a prismatic cover for him. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 00:35 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 00:31
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Last night I read the first issue of Infinity War and discovered that's where the incredibly 90's character of Doppelganger comes from. I remember seeing this guy a lot as a kid, especially as a boss in Maximum Carnage on Sega Genesis, but then he gets loving impaled on a fence on the next page. Does he come back and play a big role somewhere or did people just think he looks cool from this brief appearance and jam him into stuff like trading cards and games and action figures?
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May 2, 2018 02:06
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Unmature posted:Last night I read the first issue of Infinity War and discovered that's where the incredibly 90's character of Doppelganger comes from. I remember seeing this guy a lot as a kid, especially as a boss in Maximum Carnage on Sega Genesis, but then he gets loving impaled on a fence on the next page. Does he come back and play a big role somewhere or did people just think he looks cool from this brief appearance and jam him into stuff like trading cards and games and action figures? He shows up again in the pages of Spider-man's comics, most famously joining Carnage's ragtag crew in Maximum Carnage. Basically he can't really die. I'm actually not sure if they ever gave a good reason as to why him of all the doppelgangers Magus created kept coming back, but eh.
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May 2, 2018 02:10
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Didn't Hob/Demogoblin empower him or something?
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May 2, 2018 02:24
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Demogoblin has this amazing ability to wipe out my memory of events involving him.
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May 2, 2018 02:28
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Rhyno posted:Didn't Hob/Demogoblin empower him or something? IIRC the reason he stuck around is that he got stuck in a freezer. No, I'm not going back to check. We'll just say Demogoblin is the one who did it and that's that.
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May 2, 2018 02:32
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I saw Demogoblin mentioned on his Wikipedia page, but you know how following a wiki summary of a comic event is. Is this ten years of a character or a one issue appearance and where did it happen? Why is this written like they're a real person? Tell me issue numbers.
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May 2, 2018 03:13
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Ghostlight posted:I actually liked Sharon's arc in that because I felt like it satisfactorily progressed from her internalised rape trauma, physicalised it, and then she became more comfortable as Thing than Ben ever was because he was always like "oh nobody will love me" when her whole position was "I don't want men to look at me, and this way they won't". She was already attracted to him even before she was a Thing because she didn't even view him as a man, which of course fed back into his own essential pathos - even when he was human the relationship was mostly written with a hint of role-reversal, because he was so weak she didn't feel threatened by him.
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May 2, 2018 04:08
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No, I just see that as part of her arc of coming to terms with her rape trauma. She still wanted to be wanted, despite the fear and rage she felt for men, so she went through a whole compressed Grimm-arc of coming to terms with monsterisation, but because it offered a sense of power and control over her body that she didn't have as a human she came to terms with both in the process.
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May 2, 2018 05:51
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Lurdiak posted:He shows up again in the pages of Spider-man's comics, most famously joining Carnage's ragtag crew in Maximum Carnage. Basically he can't really die. I'm actually not sure if they ever gave a good reason as to why him of all the doppelgangers Magus created kept coming back, but eh. Didn't he stay dead after Maximum Carnage until Carnage USA?
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May 2, 2018 07:28
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Unmature posted:I loving hate that Thing design My favourite part of the Pineapple Thing design was when Doom gets Joe Fixit Hulk to fight him. And the Thing thrashed him. Only Joe says nothing so The Thing doesn't k ow it's the real Hulk. Then Doom sends a Green Hulk robot at them to act as a distraction. And just as Joe gets away he tells the Thing that he's the real Hulk. And Ben just looses his poo poo because he missed his chance to best the Hulk in a fair fight.
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May 2, 2018 10:22
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The Question IRL posted:My favourite part of the Pineapple Thing design was when Doom gets Joe Fixit Hulk to fight him. And then in the rematch, Joe Fixit gets Thing underwater and Heimlichs him to beat him.
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May 2, 2018 10:29
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Squizzle posted:I won't disagree that Englehart liked Mantis way, way too much—but the way he shoved her into every book he wrote after creating her isn't quite the radical oddity that people sometimes imply. Dude could not let go of a dangling plot point, or a character for whom he wanted to finish an arc. It's Basic Englehart Practice to keep pulling her from book to book until he finished his Celestial Madonna garbage, or brought the character to some comparable closure. Anyone has a link or something to an article about this? I tried googling Englehart Mantis but I just got pieces about how he didn't like the character in Guardians Vol. II
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May 2, 2018 20:48
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Vincent posted:Anyone has a link or something to an article about this? I tried googling Englehart Mantis but I just got pieces about how he didn't like the character in Guardians Vol. II Steve Englehart talks about it a fair bit on his official website, but the short version is that Englehart takes over the Avengers and after a few issues introduces his new original character "Mantis" quote:Well, she is my first creation. Maybe not the absolute first but the first sort of major one and maybe the first for all I know. The first book I did was with the Beast and I’ve always had a soft spot for the Beast but I didn’t create him… With her, I mean the deal was I was writing The Avengers and I thought they needed to be shaken up and I had this idea of bringing in a sort of femme fatale character who would seduce all the male Avengers and cause dissension and so forth, and that was Mantis. Then he had a falling out with Marvel and jumped over to DC a few years later, where he tried to continue the story in Justice League by introducing Willow, who was essentially the exact same character "traveling dimensions" to fulfill her cosmic destiny. I think DC discouraged courting a lawsuit, and he had a falling out with DC soon afterwards and quit comics to move to Europe and become a novelist. Several years later he came back to work at Marvel because they were dipping their toe into creator owned work with Epic, and he launched a series called Coyote in which a character that looked and acted exactly like Mantis/Willow showed up and was called Lorelai. Coyote ceased publication soon afterwards, but Englehart had decided to go back to writing for the Marvel Universe, and in the third issue of the Silver Surfer title he launched he introduced the Surfer's new love interest, Mantis! His plan was to have Silver Surfer and Mantis fall in love only for her to tragically die, and then bring her and Thanos back in a big epic Mantis vs. Thanos event. Marvel nixed this (probably because they were talking to Starlin about coming back to do the whole Thanos Quest/Infinity Gauntlet storyline) and Starlin quit the book a few issues later. But no problem, he's still writing West Coast Avengers, so she can just come back from the dead in a storyline in that book! But wait, his editor tried to change some of his dialogue featuring Mantis, subject of (in his word) "the greatest Avengers epic ever", so he quit writing WCA Avengers too. No problem after all, Steve Englehart is still the writer of the NEW Fantastic Four, the book where even the characters in the book know they've got a great writer making the book more popular than ever. He can always bring Mantis into that book and continue the greatest story ever told. quote:...At this point, Marvel made its infamous decision that innovation should end. The initial impact was felt on WEST COAST AVENGERS, where my Mantis storyline was first eviscerated and then abolished. To try to salvage her, I took her untold storyline and moved it, with middling success, to the FF. To protest the end of what had been "the House of Ideas," I changed my byline to S. F. X. Englehart, using the standard abbreviation for simple Sound Effects. quote:Unique stuff for the Avengers... at a time when Marvel was consciously cutting back on "unique," a move that would drive out their big-name creators, lead the company to bankruptcy, and drag down the entire industry. He may be weirdly obsessed with Mantis, but at least he's humble about the whole thing.
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May 2, 2018 21:16
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I never understood why Mantis, the Celestial Madonna, would be the love interest of a Celestial Guy With No Dick. Maybe Englehart was planning an Immaculate Conception via Power Cosmic.
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May 2, 2018 21:25
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Edge & Christian posted:Steve Englehart talks about it a fair bit on his official website, but the short version is that Englehart takes over the Avengers and after a few issues introduces his new original character "Mantis" Kind of amazing that he thought more Mantis stories would have saved Marvel from bankruptcy.
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May 2, 2018 21:42
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Englehart eventually did get to write his Mantis vs. Thanos story in 2001 as Avengers: Celestial Quest. You will not be shocked to hear that it sucked. And then, of course, because Englehart doesn't have a monopoly on pettiness, Starlin wrote Infinity Abyss a year later and retconned it so that it was only a Thanos clone that Mantis and the Avengers had fought in Celestial Quest.
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May 2, 2018 23:05
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bessantj posted:How dare you, sir! If I remember correctly, Wolverine was part of an initiative to come up with characters that would help Marvel reprints sell better internationally, because that was an important secondary revenue stream in the days before everything was collected in trade paperbacks. The All-New, All-Different X-Men were supposed to be like the Blackhawks, which is why none of the initial new characters other than Thunderbird were American, but Len Wein kind of disregarded that mission after the initial inspiration. Marvel was licensing reprints in Germany, but not Kenya or the USSR. I think Roy Thomas's initial idea was something like having a British, Canadian, French, and German X-Man in the new team, who then could be cover featured according to whichever country the reprinter was selling their X-Men comic in. Captain Britain was a later attempt at that, and initially didn't come off so great because he was created and produced by Marvel staffers in New York who didn't know much about their British audience. (Chris Claremont prided himself on being an Anglophile, but he didn't have a lot of direct knowledge of the UK even though he was born there.) I just found this quote from an interview with Alan Davis about the redesign he did of Captain Britain's costume when he started drawing him in the Eighties: "The lion rampant was a real joke in the UK because, although it is a heraldic symbol, it was best known as a sign to denote the quality and freshness of eggs. There were all sorts of jokes about Captain Britain being a "good egg." Paul [Neary, Marvel UK editor at the time] wanted a total redesign so that, visually, Captain Britain would still be an American style super-hero, but with a British sensibility."
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May 3, 2018 02:58
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You know I never knew that's how Wolverine came into existence.
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Will the wiki for Future’s End fill me in enough to read Jurgens’ Batman Beyond? I just want more Tim/Terry stories without pretending to give a poo poo about Brother Eye.
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May 3, 2018 18:09
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30something years into the future, the DCU is taken over by Brother Eye, who's turned basically everyone into OMAC robo monsters. Future Batman sends Terry back in time to stop it's creation, but he lands years ahead of where he wanted to and into the near future of our DCU where BE is just starting it's scemes. ~47 issues later~ Terry dies and Tim Drake takes the BB mantle, saves the day (while somehow preventing his present from becoming the DCU's actual near future), wakes up 30 years later and oops, Brother Eye still took over and messed up the place, but not quite as much as at the start of the series, so there are still bands of survivors and heroes for him to fight with (including an older version of the girlfriend he had the series.) There. Saved you from a million unnecessary characters and side-stories 
Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 01:22 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 3, 2018 19:09
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Inkspot posted:Will the wiki for Future’s End fill me in enough to read Jurgens’ Batman Beyond? I just want more Tim/Terry stories without pretending to give a poo poo about Brother Eye. I would highly advise against reading it in general but hey to each their own. Adding to what Teenage Fansub said though, if you really wanna just read a Batman Beyond comic, Terry comes back and Tim Marty McFlys out of existence like 2 or 3 storyarcs in because time travel is confusing. But really it's not good TwoPair fucked around with this message at 01:01 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 00:58
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Just watch the 6 or so genuinely good episodes of the cartoon and Return of the Joker and imagine what other fun adventures Terry and Grumpy Old Bruce had. Or if you have to read a comic, try the one from 1999. 
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May 4, 2018 01:23
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Lurdiak posted:Just watch the 6 or so genuinely good episodes of the cartoon and Return of the Joker and imagine what other fun adventures Terry and Grumpy Old Bruce had. The only really bad episodes of Batman Beyond are the ones about the snake cult.
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May 4, 2018 06:51
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Yeah there are way more than a few great Batman Beyond episodes. If anything it's maybe more consistent in quality than BTAS. The Kobra arc is extremely bad though, yeah.
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May 4, 2018 11:13
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A recent rewatch is what set me on the comics. I’ve got a big soft spot for Shriek for some reason. The Royal Flush Gang are mostly solid. A lot of the Inque stuff is good. Could have done without the lame Kraven analogue and pretty much everything to do with Bane or sports. Spellbinder is kind of a mess. Curare is... fine. But yeah, that last handful of episodes after the future JL team-up are rough. Still not sure what to think about Epilogue. It wraps everything up too neatly and ends on a happy note that feels contradictory to who Batman is, but the way it’s all done makes total sense in universe.
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May 4, 2018 15:12
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You know the one with the Terrific Trio? Are they meant to be dead at the end? I don't remember if they ever came back. The big magma guy, sure, since I think he got turned into inanimate charcoal at the end, but I thought the other two just got trapped in the ventilation system.
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May 4, 2018 17:31
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Inkspot posted:A recent rewatch is what set me on the comics. I’ve got a big soft spot for Shriek for some reason. The Royal Flush Gang are mostly solid. A lot of the Inque stuff is good. Could have done without the lame Kraven analogue and pretty much everything to do with Bane or sports. Spellbinder is kind of a mess. Curare is... fine. But yeah, that last handful of episodes after the future JL team-up are rough. I hate Epilogue. At the end Waller tries to make it better by telling Terry "oh you'll be your own Batman and all your decisions are your own" but the fact still remains that it changes him from a punk with a heart of gold who stumbles into the Batcave by coincidence and learns to be a hero into Batman's son who was being groomed into a new Batman literally from conception. And it's heavily implied that Bruce knew this from episode 1, which is kinda hosed up. It serves no purpose other than explaining how two redheads birthed two black-haired boys and I guess providing a bookend to the DCAU because they didn't know they'd get another season of JLU.
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May 4, 2018 18:50
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TwoPair posted:I hate Epilogue. At the end Waller tries to make it better by telling Terry "oh you'll be your own Batman and all your decisions are your own" but the fact still remains that it changes him from a punk with a heart of gold who stumbles into the Batcave by coincidence and learns to be a hero into Batman's son who was being groomed into a new Batman literally from conception. And it's heavily implied that Bruce knew this from episode 1, which is kinda hosed up. It serves no purpose other than explaining how two redheads birthed two black-haired boys and I guess providing a bookend to the DCAU because they didn't know they'd get another season of JLU. I don't think that was implied at all. He may have discovered it at some point and didn't share the information but I don't think we are to believe he was aware of the Cadmus project at all till well into Terry's career. edit: According to Epilogue, if they added to that in the horrible comic follow-ups I wouldn't know. good day for a bris fucked around with this message at 19:37 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 19:35
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Wheat Loaf posted:You know the one with the Terrific Trio? Are they meant to be dead at the end? I don't remember if they ever came back. The big magma guy, sure, since I think he got turned into inanimate charcoal at the end, but I thought the other two just got trapped in the ventilation system. Batman killed them.
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May 4, 2018 19:45
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TwoPair posted:And it's heavily implied that Bruce knew this from episode 1, which is kinda hosed up. It serves no purpose other than explaining how two redheads birthed two black-haired boys and I guess providing a bookend to the DCAU because they didn't know they'd get another season of JLU. Nah. Bruce plays coy when Terry throws their histocompatibility in his face, but he would’ve paid Waller a conclusive visit in the night if he knew she’d been tampering with his DNA and hiring The Phantasm to murder people on his behalf. The odds that he and Terry are a match are improbable but not impossible. Wheat Loaf posted:You know the one with the Terrific Trio? Are they meant to be dead at the end? Pretty sure the 2D guy bit it. Freon apparently shows up in one of the newer volumes.
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May 5, 2018 03:04
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Just read the first issue of the Beauty and the Beast mini by Ann Nocenti from 1984 and it made me realize I've never read much about Dazzler. What are some good stories featuring her? It also made me think of the party animal Hank McCoy from back then and the stern weirdo he is now. When did that change happen? Did one writer do it all at once or was it gradual? And while we're at it, let me know your favorite Marvel mini-series. Especially if they're on Unlimited.
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May 6, 2018 02:47
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Unmature posted:Just read the first issue of the Beauty and the Beast mini by Ann Nocenti from 1984 and it made me realize I've never read much about Dazzler. What are some good stories featuring her? I'm trying to come up with something and while I can point out weird Dazzler stories, I can't point to any good ones. She started out with her own series which was terrible. Got bumped to comic book limbo because she's not an interesting character. Got added to the X-Men where she was the worst member of the team. And then nobody wanted to do anything with her because she's not an interesting character. But since you asked, here's the notable Dazzler appearances I can come up with. Dazzler #10-11 - She becomes herald of Galactus. Seriously. Dazzler: The Move - a graphic novel for some reason. New Mutants #29-31 is a follow up to Beauty and the Beast. Has Bill Sienkiewicz art so this one is actually worth reading. Secret Wars 2 #4 - Just read it because no description can do justice to this X-Men Annual #11 - Mainly because it's a good story with Alan Davis art while demonstrating what a lovely member of the X-Men she was. Her low point is in the Inferno crossover which is the last fun thing in Claremont's run on the Xbooks, but that's a lot to cover for basically seeing how demonically corrupted Dazzler isn't really significantly different from normal Dazzler. Unmature posted:It also made me think of the party animal Hank McCoy from back then and the stern weirdo he is now. When did that change happen? Did one writer do it all at once or was it gradual? Okay, this is kind of an interesting topic. So Hank McCoy debuted as a gruff, street tough kid as a member of the X-Men. If you listen to Stan Lee about this (and you often shouldn't), he realized that they had plenty of characters like that already so he changed Hank to be the smart, loquacious member of the team. And that's all he was until the book was canceled. Well, with these spare x-characters floating around people decided to do something with them and Beast got his own series of adventure stories where he drank a potion to become furry and hide his identity as he fought crime. Eventually the potion sticks and he joins Englehart's Avengers and that's where his persona changes again. Englehart decided that the Beast was the happy-go-lucky member of the team (and he heavily implied Hank was into "counterculture" if you know what I mean) and the Beast became one of the most popular members of the team. He sticks to the Avengers for several years and for a couple of decades that persona sticks. And then comes the X-Men X-Plosion where the writers forget the jovial aspects of his character. This particularly sticks because it's the version used in the cartoon. And so now we've got serious, studious Hank. Unmature posted:And while we're at it, let me know your favorite Marvel mini-series. Especially if they're on Unlimited. Spider-Man/Human Torch is a lot of fun, Dr. Strange: The Oath is great, MODOK's 11 is pretty cool...
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May 6, 2018 03:27
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Unmature posted:Just read the first issue of the Beauty and the Beast mini by Ann Nocenti from 1984 and it made me realize I've never read much about Dazzler. What are some good stories featuring her? The early issues of Dazzler's comic are kind of funny because they went crazy with guest appearances. Her second issue has her fighting alongside the Avengers, the X-Men, the FF, and Spider-Man. Plus she went up against the most ridiculous heavyweight villains -- Galactus has been mentioned but she also ran into the Enchantress, Doctor Doom, the Hulk (and the She-Hulk), the Absorbing Man ... As for good Marvel miniseries, off the top of my head I'd recommend 1602, the Steve Gerber-written Foolkiller (not MAX), and Elektra: Assassin.. Oh, and if you like Nocenti, be sure to check out the original Longshot miniseries.
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May 6, 2018 04:04
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