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I've heard that, towards the end, it was unclear if anyone was actually looking at the comics that were being submitted for CCA approval, and Archie Comics had just started slapping the 'Approved by the Comics Code Authority' seal on their covers without bothering having them reviewed.
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2019 10:40 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 19:49 |
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bessantj posted:That's a hell of a thing. What is in people's opinion the most convoluted storyline from the big two? (I'm sure Manga has had some legendary convoluted storylines.) Though I haven't read it Clone Saga always sounded convoluted. The story of Scarlet Witch's children probably should get at least an honorable mention for sheer number of confusing retcons and rewrites.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 05:26 |
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That was one of the big problems of the Clone Saga - stuff like the smokestack skeleton, where writers would throw in new twists just for the hell of it with no idea themselves as to what any of it would mean.
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# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 07:10 |
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Doc Samson tends to be written as primarily a highly skilled psychiatrist who happens to also have Hulk powers.
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# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 09:22 |
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Has Apocalypse ever really interacted with the non-mutant side of the Marvel universe? It seems like Magneto’s generally the only X-men foe who also gets to cross paths with the Avengers and the rest...
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# ¿ Sep 29, 2019 17:36 |
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Catman started off as being inspired by Catwoman.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2020 04:43 |
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Marvel’s 1980s Star Trek series was under the bizarre restriction that the only had the license for the first movie, and so couldn’t reference anything or follow up on any stories from the tv series. As a result, they ended up going in some... odd directions.
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 18:09 |
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Rhyno posted:Cardiac's dead I think. He showed up fairly recently in Valkyrie.
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# ¿ May 2, 2020 06:06 |
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Marvel's Transformers comics had "Circuit Breaker" as one of their few human antagonists; she even inexplicably cameoed in Secret Wars II so Marvel would keep ownership instead of Hasbro.
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# ¿ May 29, 2020 10:51 |
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Madkal posted:All that Red Skull stuff made me think: has there been an "iconic" villain who has either stayed dead, or passed on to a legacy who surpassed the original (or outright replaced the original). I was thinking Green Goblin but then remembered Norman Osborne came back. I can't think of any villain who has actually stayed dead (which makes sense if they are fan favourite). Baron Zemo?
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# ¿ Sep 9, 2020 05:58 |
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There was the bizarre Illuminati comic that 'revealed' that the Beyonder was actually just a mutant inhuman (?!), that made so little sense even on its own terms that I don't think anyone even bothered referencing it again to retcon it away.
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# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 13:15 |
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Daken seems to veer wildly between being a really fun character and being absolutely intolerable.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2020 17:24 |
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One of my favourite details in Mutant X is that Havok’s basically Quantum Leaped into the body of his counterpart from that universe. And this is never addressed! Everyone who figures out he’s not their Havok is basically “that’s cool, our Havok’s a dick” and the question of what actually happened to that universe’s native Havok never really comes up.
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# ¿ Oct 28, 2020 17:12 |
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In hindsight, Mutant X really should have been an Exiles-type series, with a different wacky alternate universe every issue. But instead they're all crammed into one, so it's just one crazy universe with every idea that caught Mackie's attention for a week thrown together.
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# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 04:03 |
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What was weird was that it felt like your typical "Popular guest star shows up in a new comic to boost sales" story... except it was Team America showing up in New Mutants, and it came out, like, six months after their own comic had been canceled. New Mutants had a rough start.
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 07:44 |
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Skwirl posted:It should be pointed out that it's called "Kamala's Law" because Kamala Khan was injured in her civilian disguise (like, in a coma for a week), so her running around as Ms Marvel is her violating a law named after her. This was about the same time that Covid screwed up comic distribution and Marvel basically put everything on hold, so it ended up feeling more meaningful than it would have normally - her comic ended up being delayed by months, so it actually felt like she was out of action for a long time, rather than just "Oh, she got beat up real bad but she'll be fine next issue".
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# ¿ May 18, 2021 10:00 |
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Along similar lines, there was a Ghost Rider comic where he was saved from demons by a mysterious bearded stranger who was clearly intended to be Jesus. Jim Shooter didn't approve, and had a later appearance by the character rewritten to reveal the character was actually a demonic trick.
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# ¿ Jun 6, 2021 11:09 |
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The New Mutants/Ilyanna half of Inferno is a lot better than the Madelyne half - if nothing else, because it feels like a logical conclusion to Ilyanna's story, rather than an abrupt swerve to eliminate a character rendered superfluous by Jean's return.
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# ¿ Sep 20, 2021 05:56 |
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At least the story's equal opportunity, with Havok getting a matching 'costume'.
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# ¿ Sep 20, 2021 14:05 |
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Random Stranger posted:Yeah, about that Ph.D... He got expelled from college. Kind of infamous for it. I mean, he probably has an honorary doctorate from a Latverian university by now.
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# ¿ Oct 18, 2021 04:14 |
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muscles like this! posted:Not mainline continuity but Earth-X has Celestials as the bad guys. Don't read any of the sequels. I mean, the Celestials tamper with everyone's genetics then wipe out planets that don't live up to their arbitrary standards. I think they're always the bad guys.
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# ¿ Oct 20, 2021 05:05 |
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bessantj posted:All this talk of "dark and gritty" comics. has there ever been a What If..? or an Elseworld which has shown a Utopian/perfect world? There were a couple of What If issues that did two stories in one issue on the same theme, one dystopian, one utopian: What If the Vision Conquered the World? and What If the Invisible Woman's Second Child Had Lived? The original Superman Red/Superman Blue 'imaginary story' was basically utopian - in that Silver Age style where the morality of using an 'anti-evil ray' to 'cure' all the world's criminals and, um, communists is never really addressed.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2021 15:05 |
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TwoPair posted:The Flash and the Speed Force are, to me, a problem of fans growing up (and to a lesser extent nowadays, the internet). There's a quote from Grant Morrison I love: "Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really loving dumb questions like ‘How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?’ It’s a loving made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!" Man, what an annoyingly dismissive attitude. You know why Spider-Man's a great character? Because he's all about questions like that, about "How does he get enough web-fluid?" and "How does he make money if he's superheroing all the time?" and "What does he do if he gets sick?" There's so many great stories in mixing the superpowers with mundane reality! (Not to mention "A Scientific Explanation for Superman's Strength" is on literally page one of Action Comics #1! It's psedoscientific nonsense, of course, but it doesn't just say "Duh, it's just a story, stop being a boring person and asking questions!")
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2021 10:21 |
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The whole Spider-Verse/Inheritors storyline just felt weirdly spiteful in the way it casually killed off so many alternate Spider-Men, including ones from existing What If stories. I mean, if you're writing a story called "Spider-Verse", surely it should be about how Spider-Man is awesome and kicks rear end, not about how Spider-Man dies over and over again? As far as treating alternate universes as disposable - I'm still made about how the Age of Apocalypse has been treated over the years. Full disclosure, as goofy and 90s-tastic as the original event was, it's still one of my favorites, and one of the things I liked about it was that although it was a dystopia, it wasn't completely negative. There were moments of hope, there were still heroes and small victories being won. And even though it was an alternate timeline that was inevitably going to be undone, it treated its characters as if they were just as important as the 'real' ones. And then in the 2010s we got a bunch of stories that just crapped all over it. Apocalypse is dead? Don't worry, Wolverine got infected with a Death Seed, became the new Apocalypse, resurrected all the dead villains, and undid any progress the heroes made in the original story. A bunch of heroes get killed, many of them off-panel. Everything is awful now forever. Then there's some nonsense involving the Celestials and some universe-destroying monsters, and in the end, the handful of AoA survivors sacrifice their entire reality to keep the monsters imprisoned. Nothing mattered and now everyone is dead.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2021 05:37 |
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Dawgstar posted:The last big crossover I recall that felt genuinely solid all around was World War Hulk, maybe? Depends what you mean by 'big' crossover - I thought Judgement Day was generally fairly strong.
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2023 06:34 |
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I’m still convinced those characters were going to be a bait and switch and would have been replaced with the ‘real’ team by the end of the issue. Nobody could have genuinely thought they were good concepts, right?
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# ¿ May 17, 2023 16:54 |
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Pym's never been an A-list character, and the abuse story is, unfortunately, one of his biggest arcs. He doesn't really have enough else going on to distract from it.
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# ¿ Sep 5, 2023 14:59 |
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ImpAtom posted:Don't worry, there's always the time they followed up The incredible the Immortal Hulk with... let me check my notes here... "Bruce Banner piloting the Hulk like a robot he called Spaceship Hulk." No, wait, that can't be right. I almost kind of respect that, it's as if the writer realized "Anything I write is going to look like garbage coming after Immortal Hulk, so I'm not even going to try and keep things at that level of quality."
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# ¿ Sep 6, 2023 06:47 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 19:49 |
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Looks like it was originally printed in Black Magic #32 in 1954. https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Magic_(Prize)_Vol_1_32
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# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 07:55 |