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Maximum Carnage was a great event because that red cartridge lived in my SNES for about a decade.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:24
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I'll go on and say Maximum Carnage is actually not that bad. It's very 90's, but it's very much a statement about the idea of making heroes into grim and gritty take no prisoners badasses. Carnage is pretty much a poor man's Joker with Venom's move set, but he's made into a legitimate threat that Spidey nearly has to cross the line to deal with. I recently read the whole trade and it actually felt like a decent story, probably the best Carnage story. I think people look badly on it because it was loving LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG and felt like it was being stretched out way too thin by the end.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:28
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OldTennisCourt posted:I think people look badly on it because it was loving LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG and felt like it was being stretched out way too thin by the end. I tried reading the whole thing back in college and after a while it was Demogoblin and Doppelganger and Carnage wrecking poo poo while Spidey and Cap try to contain everything and it eventually becomes Team Batshit Evil against Team Underdog and oh god this must be our darkest hour Cloak and Dagger are dead And NY is in the grip of madness but the bad guys are taunting us and holy poo poo its 9:00 on a Friday why the gently caress am I still reading this?!
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Jul 8, 2014 04:32
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Isn't Carnage just a more 90's and extreme version of Venom (also red)?
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Jul 8, 2014 04:47
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FilthyImp posted: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. We're also overlooking that Countdown gave us Jimmy Olsen: Bugfucker and the concept of doing rails of cocaine from the mirror universe.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:03
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Chortles posted:As how Rogers could have ended up with similar moral inflexibility in such a war, or as an unwitting creation of Rogers'? How if Rogers had been in clusterfuck of what Vietnam was he could easily have been more like the Punisher.
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Jul 8, 2014 06:23
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The worst Spider-Man crossover by far was 'The Other', it was 12 very long issues of nothing that everyone has ignored since.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:56
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OldTennisCourt posted: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. Because Flash tried to recreate the accident that gave him his powers, but all he ended up with was covered in chemicals and being severely burned from being struck by lightning.
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Jul 8, 2014 08:00
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OldTennisCourt posted: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. It not only felt like all of those things, but it also kept hammering home how much of a poo poo Barry Allen was/is for completely loving everything up. Also nthing the posts as to how poo poo Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis are in cementing DC on a grim dark path that Grant Morrison tried to pull the whole line away from with Final Crisis. I'll also toss in Battle of the Atom as just a jumbled loving mess from start to finish that really had no reason to exist. Same goes for AVX holy loving poo poo what a phoenix dumpster fire. Not only did you have the unilateral Steve Rogers from Civil War but an equally dickish Cyclops. The whole thing was just brain meltingly bad that once again Tony Stark somehow makes poo poo a whole lot worse by trying to blow up a cosmic entity of death/rebirth. So many things wrong with AVX that really the only good point was a whale with crab legs. Also pretty much any Green Lantern event from Blackest Night to present has been poo poo and over done that not even liking Sinestro made up for it.
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Jul 8, 2014 08:37
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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 loving love the Countdown spinoffs because they make mistakes you would not even think possible. Like, here, I'll do it, I'll be That Guy who admits he read every single issue of Countdown at the time. Do you know how loving much Countdown there was, all together? 52 main issues + 40 issues of spinoffs (4 Arena, 8 Adventure, 8 Mystery, 6 Search for Ray Palmer, 6 Lord Havok and the Extremists, 8 Death of the New Gods which I'll admit wasn't technically Countdown-branded but was heavily cross-promoted...) + a bunch of poo poo that dove in and out of the pages of Countdown (Amazons Attack and Salvation Run both wove in and out of the book early on, an entire plotline was following off of a Legion of Super-Heroes arc I never could be arsed to read)... it was a sprawl. I think someone did the math and Civil War has it beat in terms of tie-ins, but keep in mind I'm also only counting things which had "Countdown Presents" on it, DONG aside. But hey, people have covered Countdown proper in a lot of places, and you asked about the tie-ins, so here, let me tell you how (almost) everything that touched this series hosed up in astounding ways. Disclaimer: I haven't re-read any of these since they came out. I'm probably horsing up finer plot details. I do not care. Countdown to Adventure was kind of the ultimate comparison point if you want to try beating that old "Countdown is 52 done right" quote to death some more. Remember how Buddy Baker, Adam Strange, and Starfire traveled across a lunatic cosmos in the wake of Infinite Crisis to get back home? Let's have them do that again except this time, we're going to throw in relationship drama between Buddy and his wife (please recall this man has JUST COME BACK FROM NEAR-DEATH for his wife in 52), a bizarre, not entirely consistent space plague that's also a mind control meme, and oh just for the hell of it, we're going to give you eight issues of what everyone wanted from a backup story: The Adventures of Forerunner. I think anyone reading this knows, but let me tell you about Forerunner. Forerunner is why  exists. (Yes, I saved that over 2 dead hard drives for 6 years.) She was basically a space-Goku working for the Monitors who they all secretly feared because h- you know what she's literally Goku, her entire race was wiped out by her new boss Meanwhile, the main story involved Cliff ogling Starfire every other page, Maxine nearly dying a lot, and Ellen ignoring her super-faithful husband's pleas that he didn't want to bang the space princess so there was 'drama'. I know Rann was involved somehow but I've totally forgotten how since Adam Strange just came to Earth near-instantly anyway to join up with the rest of the cast. Spoilers: the same villain they wiped out in 52 (Lady Styx) was also behind the whole drat thing again. I really wasn't kidding about this being like a crappy sequel to their 52 plot. Countdown to Mystery is the only one I'm not going to poo poo on. It was supposed to transition into a new Dr. Fate series from Steve Gerber, but his failing health meant that it wouldn't come to pass. He actually passed away in the middle of making these 8 issues, and the final one was various other writers offering their tribute to the man/interpretation of where the story might have finished. I remember it having some clunky bits, but nothing worth calling out. Say what you will about anything else that goes in this thread, I think this is the only one you can point at and go "Yeah an actual human's illness-turned-death derailed everything about the project". RIP, Steve. Countdown: Arena was "Remember when you all phoned in to kill Jason Todd? Let's do that on a larger scale", the comic. If you don't know what happened here, the gimmick was that The Monarch (no, not the Venture Bros. character, the guy mentioned earlier in this thread as being Captain Atom in planning, Hawk in execution) was finally Captain Atom, and he wanted to make his own Justice League out of the best, nastiest dudes in all the multiverse: the hardest-core Superman, and Batman, and... etc. So a website was made which put up 4 of each for voting by fans, to determine who was going to win the fights in the book. The huge problem with this is that Arena was basically one of the biggest sources of continuity making GBS threads the bed in Countdown - which universe was what number might change randomly from book to book, or contradict stuff laid down prior to the series, or- you get the gist. It also took the blank template 52 left (a multiverse with 51 other universes we could poke at later, left open intentionally for people to create new ideas and fill in those gaps over the years to come) and went "Nope, about 20 of them are now just old Elseworlds stories which are no longer in print/gimmick worlds." Did you know that one of the "old" 52 universes was straight up just "it's New Earth but genderswapped"? Because that happened. You also need to realize a lot of characters/universes debuted in this book and were instantly murdered. Because it was fan-decided, it meant that anyone new on the roster was basically going to get trashed so that Vampire Batman didn't die off since that was an existing character people had some nostalgia for, as opposed to a blank slate nobody was invested in. Sure, it sucks that we didn't get to find out what the deal was with the Green Lantern of the Batman Beyond universe, but that was literally all we knew about him: "Comes from the Batman Beyond universe. Is Green Lantern. Currently unnamed." Anyway, in the end, this series was moot on three levels. First off, because we kept checking in on the Monarch in Countdown itself, a lot of the fights were set in stone or written around because he was already siccing his goon squad on the multiverse/Monitors in the main book and it locked in some of the victors. Second, almost everyone escapes in the end anyway, so the winners of the fights are also nullified when it comes down to "only the folks who WANT to kill Monitors stick around, not necessarily the people voted on" (who were only voted on in a 'who would win if 1, 2, 3, and 4 fought' fashion anyway). Third: he didn't give a crap because his plan was actually "have all the Captain Atoms in the universe attack him, at which point he would absorb them all to become a Captain Atom with the power of 50 Captain Atoms". NO, REALLY. And then Superboy-Prime killed him anyway, ripping his suit a teeny bit and making all his Atom juice explode out, destroying an entire multiverse. Even in getting wiped out he was still trashing worlds so that other writers couldn't use them. (Fun fact: remember Nix Uotan from Final Crisis? His universe was the one that Monarch wiped out. From memory, they reused the number twice due to crappy editorial control, so his universe actually died TWICE in the pages of Countdown, once via Monarch exploding, once via I forget.)  No, really, that page right there destroyed an entire universe. Speaking of crapping all over Elseworlds stories, The Search for Ray Palmer was Kyle Rayner (who was also a key component in fighting the Sinestro Corps War at this exact moment - I don't think we ever got an explanation on how that worked), Donna Troy, and Jason Todd traveling the multiverse with a Monitor named "Bob". The entire plot for this crew was that they were looking for Ray Palmer, the Atom, who could supposedly prevent a Great Disaster, which was why he was on the run from ??? and had vanished a while back. He was leaving clues for whoever might want to find him in the form of giving Atom-logo tramp stamps to various people in the multiverse. The book had some of the worst art you'd see in the pages of Countdown by a large margin given that every issue was a different universe/artist trying to match the style of the original work being tampered with. This was from the Superman: Red Son universe. I swear to you, this art is not stretched poorly or crunched down, this is how it appeared on the page in the books.   This series ended with a wet fart in the form of visiting that gender-swapped universe I mentioned, wherein they arrive just as the events of Amazons Attack are playing out (and this time... the Amazons all have dicks). Spoiler alert: the ending still blows, but this time they meet with the she-Atom who goes "Oh, you're looking for Ray? Yeah, he was here, tattooed me, and I promised I wouldn't tell anyone this or where he went at all." So the cast go back to Countdown proper to look for Ray some more. That's right: the search for Ray Palmer doesn't make a single bit of progress or conclude at all in the series named after the guy. Okay, this one is my favorite for all the wrong reasons: Lord Havok and the Extremists is a story revolving around characters who were tertiary villains in old Justice League stories years ago, who now have their own universe in the multiverse, and oh, they had been dead for two months (our time) by the time this miniseries hit the stands. This book was solicited and ordered by shop owners months in advance, and then in Countdown proper they just loving died. All of them. So the miniseries began with "This takes place before Countdown #20-something" and ends with OOPS KYLE RAYNER AND HIS BUDDIES ARE HERE LORD HAVOK. Literally the most unnecessary tie-in in all of Countdown. Now onto the ones that make my head hurt. Death of the New Gods is a huge tire fire in and of itself, but it also covered stuff that was in Countdown and I want to say at least one other book going on at the same time? My brain tells me that we had no less than three seperate instances of Darkseid being killed within a month of each other, and none of them matched up. Anyway, the plot's pretty easy to guess: something's killing the New Gods. Now, in Countdown proper, Jimmy Olsen is banging a bug-woman and trying to solve this mystery himself, but in DONG, Superman and Scott "Mister Miracle" Free are working the case, with the latter occasionally using the Anti-Life Equation to bring people back from the dead and still not learning who did it in the process. That happens, by the way. Again: not making this up. It turns out in the end the Source did it. Remember the Source Wall? Well, once upon a time, the Source murdered all of the Old Gods (the Third World) and tried to get it right with attempt #4. But in the process, the Old Gods spat in its face with their dying breath, and made the Source Wall, to divide the two halves of the Source from one another. And one was white and 'good' and the other was black and 'evil', which we know because apparently one was made of Anti-Life and the other was Life. So those turn into that alien from the old Star Trek episode and begin fighting the final survivor of the New Gods, Darkseid.  Spoilers: that dude won. Kind of. I think Darkseid runs off in the end, and instead of finishing the drat job, they just go "Well, we got him to leave Apokolips, so that works", and merge New Genesis/Apokolips into one planet: the Fifth World. Then Superman goes home. Yeah, he was there for this entire thing too, just kinda going "Sorry, y'all, this is God Stuff, I've gotta sit this out." for the last half of the miniseries. I am only mentioning Salvation Run because the dude I quoted wondered about it: Salvation Run is more interesting for the nature of its creation than the actual book. I guess the original pitch for this miniseries was an Elseworld that George R. R. Martin tried to hit DC with years prior, where he went "Okay, so Arkham Asylum and Iron Heights and all those places never really work right as jails, do they? So what say the world's governments decide on a more permanent solution for the supervillain problem: you teleport them, one-way, to another planet, and then bam, that solves the whole thing." It was supposed to follow them arriving, trying to colonize the harsh world, settling down to their new lives, and eventually just sort of living out their lives, with some appreciating what they ended up with, others never stopping in finding a way to get "home", so on. I want to say the pitch mentioned multiple generations, too, so imagine Catwoman and Joker's kid or whatever as later leaders. The basic concept was used, sure, but the problem with not making it an Elseworld is... we all know that if you send actual villains (which they did) to the planet, they get home in the end. Lex Luthor, Vandal Savage, the Joker, Gorilla Grodd? You're not just getting rid of them forever! We all know it. In the vein of Amazons Attack and other "twists" over the course of Countdown Year, Desaad was partly responsible for the whole plan, making sure that the Earth governments sent them to an Apokoliptian training planet, so by about the midway point, Parademons keep screwing with everyone. Lex, Sivana, Grodd, and Vandal Savage end up making a portal device to get them all home, they all get home, and nobody ever mentions how Martian Manhunter got left on the planet but then came home to Earth in time to die in Final Crisis. And now I never want to dredge up details of this crap from my brain again.
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Jul 8, 2014 08:53
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Who the hell thought that a comic named "THE SEARCH FOR RAY PALMER" starring Donna Troy would interest a single human being on this planet?
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Jul 8, 2014 09:36
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What's the story where Carnage is in an asylum and escapes by travelling through the loving internet? I remember that was being billed as a big thing at the time.
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Jul 8, 2014 10:33
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I was only really aware of Carnage via the animated series; the first comic story I read which featured him was during Howard Mackie's run on Spider-Man, where Venom steals and eats his symbiote, then the big "Carnage is back!" story a few issues later was Cletus Kasady covering himself in red paint and running round New York in his underpants brandishing a knife. Speaking of the animated series, it had a couple of "events" as well right at the end of its run: the Secret Wars adaptation, then right after it the one where a bunch of alternate universe Spider-Man (including one guy who's just an actor who plays him on TV) team up to fight an evil version of Spider-Man who merged with Carnage during his version of the Clone Saga.
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Jul 8, 2014 11:29
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I love Travel Foreman. You just sold an issue of The Search for Ray Palmer. Around Batman RIP is when I hopped back on comics and went hard catching up on every DC event starting with COIE, and the absolute worst thing I read out of all of it was Zero Hour. I barely remember it now, but I assume I had a horrible time because I was reading it stand-alone with barely any understanding of the comics and characters of the time it was loving with, and it was more interested in fixing and shifting stuff than telling a story. It was absolute nonsense to me. Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 11:50
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Zero Hour was the vehicle that got me into DC comics full on so it has a soft place in my heart. It shouldn't have been to confusing since it was supposed to kill off all the confusing characters. But it made Hal Jordan a mass murderer =/
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Jul 8, 2014 13:15
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Hakkesshu posted:What's the story where Carnage is in an asylum and escapes by travelling through the loving internet? I remember that was being billed as a big thing at the time. That was Venom: Carnage Unleashed. It was just a four-issue Venom story and was in no way an event or a big deal. Though it did have a trade long before every single story would get a trade.
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Jul 8, 2014 14:53
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FilthyImp posted:Secret Invasion benefits from being part of a series of mega events that stretch out over a few damned years. Its got a promising hook and squandered potential, but the lead into a new status quo let's you gloss over it immediately. The new status quo was also really, really good. Dark Avengers, the List, the xmen stuff going on where they move to Utopia and have that awesome fight against the Dark Avengers, Asguardians in latveria briefly. Hawkbullseye fighting deadpool while deadpool wears a suit made of meat (This may have actually been part of the list but deserves being mentioned twice), Dark Reign FF, The Sinister spiderman mini. It wasn't an 'event' but it may have well been, Dark Reign was probably the best year of comics in my opinion.
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Jul 8, 2014 14:56
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Parlett316 posted:Zero Hour was the vehicle that got me into DC comics full on so it has a soft place in my heart. It shouldn't have been to confusing since it was supposed to kill off all the confusing characters. But it made Hal Jordan a mass murderer =/ I liked the books that spun out of it going forward (at least the ones that weren't Primal Force or Fate) and it did end up giving us my favorite version of the Legion of Superheroes in a strange roundabout way but the actual miniseries event
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Jul 8, 2014 19:17
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Syrg Sapphire posted:I am only mentioning Salvation Run because the dude I quoted wondered about it Huh. I was curious because I assumed, it being a Countdown spin-off, that it was ignored along with everything else when Final Crisis came out and Morrison said that Countdown was stupid and you shouldn't read it. But then I was reading Batgirl, and near the end Cluemaster mentions it. The Elseworlds plan sounds far more interesting. I tend to avoid events, mostly from preferring trades to floppies, so threads like this are great.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:04
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Jiro posted:It not only felt like all of those things, but it also kept hammering home how much of a poo poo Barry Allen was/is for completely loving everything up. Hey, the Avengers Academy Tie-In for AvX was also great. That series was great at producing great stuff out of the big events, between FI & AvX. So naturally, nobody bought it and half the cast was killed off, not even in one of the aforementioned event books, but in a crappy hunger games ripoff. Because Marvel hates joy, apparently. But that's a topic for another thread.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:44
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Yvonmukluk posted:Hey, the Avengers Academy Tie-In for AvX was also great. Oh god Avengers Arena is such hot garbage. "Hey, let's take a bunch of characters people like/have fond memories of and slaughter them! What's that? You like Juston, the kid with his own Sentinel from the really great and heartwarming comic/Iron Giant ripoff? gently caress you, now he's dead and his Sentinel is destroyed. Oh and Arcade is no longer an absurd, comic booky villain who plays by a set of rules, now he's a super smart badass villain who kills kids!"
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Jul 9, 2014 01:19
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Avengers Arena was designed specifically to punish everyone who loved Runaways. Even their brief arc in Daken's book was more enjoyable.
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Jul 9, 2014 02:53
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Since I've gotten back in, the worst I've seen has definitely been Shadowland. A street level Marvel event? Hell yeah sign me up I love me some Heroes for Hire and most of the other street level guys. And then it turns out its like the worst thing to have ever existed. The Hand build a huge pagoda in Hell's Kitchen that no hero in the whole Marvel universe thinks is a bad enough idea that it needs stopping. Daredevil's wearing knives on his hands and has no problems with the Hand straight up murdering people who break his laws. He brings Bullseye back from the loving dead because that's a great idea. It's like they wrote this whole event just to make Matt Murdock's life even more terrible than it had been for the quarter century prior. Odd thing is that what broke me personally was that it turned out that the Hand had a means to summon and command a powerful demon for the purposes of getting vengeance; Ghost Rider. They could control the goddamned Ghost Rider. And it wasn't like he was unaware of whatever, he knew and was angry but couldn't do poo poo about it. Also never mind the fact that Ghost Rider is a few weight classes above people like Misty Knight or Iron Fist and should have been able to wrap everything up inside of three minutes on his own, but whatever. He rides a bike down the street sometimes so street level he is!
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Jul 9, 2014 03:28
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Wasn't Shadowland just a story arc that grew out of control? If you read it as Kingpin building some big pagoda/temple/whatever in Hell's Kitchen, and the heroes stopping it over the course of a long weekend, it kind of works. Or I'm just trying to excuse Shadowland because an event that actually pays attention to that corner of the MU and isn't about how Iron Man ruins/fixes everything is incredibly rare.
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Jul 9, 2014 03:51
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Inkspot posted:Wasn't Shadowland just a story arc that grew out of control? If you read it as Kingpin building some big pagoda/temple/whatever in Hell's Kitchen, and the heroes stopping it over the course of a long weekend, it kind of works. It probably started out as an arc but it was definitely an event by the time it came out. You had the Daredevil book, five or so minis, and about that many one-shot tie-ins too. Had a logo and everything! And yeah, that it's one of those rare recent Marvel events that wasn't "X-Men or Avengers save everything" was part of why I bought it. Joke's on me though because Marvel got my money.
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Jul 9, 2014 04:22
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I'll just basically repost what I put in the X-Men thread about Battle of the Atom: Its worst crime is that it could have been good. I mean, the premise is solid; you've got the original X-Men in the present but they don't want to go back because they want to fix the present (and also Jean Grey has seen all the fun that awaits her in the original timeline). So do you respect their free wills or force them home because that's where the laws of time and reality and junk kinda say they should be? Here's the problems (while giving a quick rundown for anyone who hasn't read it). 1.) This story came way too late. I guess Bendis wanted to establish the characters of his version of the young X-Men so he wrote an arc or two of All New X-Men. At one point there is actually a scene where the kids have a debate themselves over whether they should go home. This is probably when BotA should start or people should start making a big deal out of this. Instead, we wait until months later, and because of that, something has to happen to restart this debate... 2.) The central conflict gets immediately invalidated (or it should): The actual story kicks off when the Original 5 are fighting some Sentinels and then Modern Cyclops and his crew show up to help. Anyway, at one point during the fight, Original Cyclops takes a laser to the chest and suddenly poo poo gets real. Modern Cyclops fades out of existence like Marty McFly, poo poo gets all shaky, it's very surreal. At this point, everybody should realize that there is no debate to be had, although the two that don't want to go are Jean Grey (understandable, her history is not a pleasant one to live) and Cyclops (why?). But hey, everybody's mostly in agreement until... 3.) Future X-Men appear to say that yes, the Originals shouldn't be in the present. This news makes everyone retarded. Jean and Scott run away and everyone else chases after them. Kitty Pryde and Rachel Grey, however, decide that apparently runaways shouldn't be chased after(?) and stop the team from catching them. Scott and Jean then run to try to find sanctuary with Modern Scott's team. Modern Scott decides that YES, he will harbor the version of himself who almost ended up erasing him from the timestream and that is a good idea. Magneto and Emma Frost side with the "send 'em home" camp. But then of course the future X-Men, along with Wolverine and most of the other present X-Men, show up and everything gets stupid again. Everybody gets in a big hero fight because of course they do, until Jean Grey figures out that the future is actually pretty lovely and agrees to go back. Original Cyclops acts like a total shithead about it though. BUT WAIT! You say, that sounds anticlimactic!, well then you've stumbled onto the end, where... 4.) The other side is suddenly totally justified. Magik time-travels and grabs another set of future X-Men who explain that the set that've been rolling with Wolverine are actually villains! *gasp* So everyone fights the villains and beats them but then Kitty Pryde and the Original X-Men gently caress off to join Modern Scott because hey, gently caress paradoxes, right? I mean, only villains believe in actually keeping time itself straight. All in all, it's supposed to be a story with an ethical conflict, but one side is immediately completely in the right, and then suddenly it's revealed that the bad guys were on that side, so everybody immediately decides to switch sides. Waffles Inc. posted:This isn't at all specific, since I didn't read it, but it was so bland and forgettable that even as a normal, weekly, pull-list-having comics reader I couldn't tell you a drat thing about it except that Tony had to be made an alcoholic again in order to wear some powerful armour to do a thing. Honestly, the part about that that's even stupider to me is that he really didn't even become alcoholic again. Like, he makes this big show outside of Asgard, but all he does is like, drink a little bit of whiskey until Odin shows up. I think he drinks some with a dwarf while he's making the Mighty weapons, but then he stops. It's never followed up in anything else (well, it came up in that awful Hammer Girls arc of Fraction's run, but still). I mean, say what you want about taking Babs out of the chair, but at least DC stuck with it. The Batgirl equivalent of Tony Stark drinking during Fear Itself would be if Babs managed to get her legs fixed, then was involved in some big crossover with the Batfamily as Batgirl, then immediately got shot and reparalyzed at the end of it. Giedroyc posted:The worst Spider-Man crossover by far was 'The Other', it was 12 very long issues of nothing that everyone has ignored since. Hey, Scarlet Spider got Other powers! TwoPair fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 09:23
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NorgLyle posted:(Hawkman's weirdness, the whole thing with the Team Titans(?) Also about Fear Itself & Iron Man: giving Odin his sobriety made him allowed the Justine Hammer to make her play against him, and it let Matt Fraction bring Tony's alcoholism organically into his run. Dr.Magnificent fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 13:45
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I thought Identity Crisis was great when it concentrated on the villains and the heroes on their downtime. Captain Boomerang and his son was pretty good too.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:04
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TwoPair posted:The Batgirl equivalent of Tony Stark drinking during Fear Itself would be if Babs managed to get her legs fixed, then was involved in some big crossover with the Batfamily as Batgirl, then immediately got shot and reparalyzed at the end of it. The good old Professor X Special. A classic.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:18
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Alhazred posted:Captain Boomerang and his son was pretty good too. Another strike against Blackest Night. The way Boomerang Jr. was written out like a weenie so they could bring his dad back was the dumbest poo poo.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:59
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NorgLyle posted:I've always had the opposite feelings on Zero Hour. It killed off my favorite members of the JSA (Hourman and Dr. Mid-Nite who were neat in a very pulp-inspired and in-universe believably pre-JLA way), had a bunch of dumb thrown in subplots that weren't resolved or even addressed in the actual event book (Hawkman's weirdness, the whole thing with the Team Titans(?), everything involving either version of the Legion that existed at that time) and was just a general meandering mess. Oh it also recreated the "famous" Captain Marvel pregnancy storyline with Power Girl for reasons passing understanding. Also those loving subplots are so bad. HAWKMAN gets every version of himself merged to "fix" his story. Waverider: At the very least, we may be witnessing THE BIRTH OF A NEW GOD. THIS MAY BE WHAT WE NEED TO TURN THE TIDE! Hawkman fucks off and has no importance on the story. Guy Gardner, you're actually half Vuldarian, an ancient WARRIOR and CHOSEN ONE. Also guns and poo poo come out of your body now. COngrats. PowerGirl is going into labor AT THIS VERY MOMENT. Wait whut?! Her child is creating a bubble of anti-time that shields her! WORLDS COLLIDE AND DIE, but life finds a way! (dramatic writing!) JSA you're old and busted. Make sure your next of kin or loved ones get your gear, so you can gently caress over their lives, too. And the resolution is basically Parallax restarted the universe but we killed him whoops how do we control this poo poo? Actually, it winds up feeling like that Futurama episode where Fry, Bender and the Professor wind up in the time machine that goes forwards only and see the Death/Birth of the universe a few times. As in "Oh waiiiiiiiiit! If I move GL half a centimeter...... NOW... ok guess Kryptonians and Daxamites are related now! Also (inscrutible changes to universe).
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Jul 9, 2014 21:49
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Gavok posted:Another strike against Blackest Night. The way Boomerang Jr. was written out like a weenie so they could bring his dad back was the dumbest poo poo. I remember them being fun in the Flash mini (I think?) with the son pushing people into a pit for his zombie dad to eat. e: Did even half of the characters resurrected at the end of Brightest Day get to do anything before the reboot? Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 21:55
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FilthyImp posted:JSA you're old and busted. Make sure your next of kin or loved ones get your gear, so you can gently caress over their lives, too.
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Jul 10, 2014 05:52
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Zero Hour made no sense to me as a guy who liked the multiverse. "We have to stop Hal Jordan or else we'll blink out of existence for a nanosecond and then reaper along with billions upon billions of people who will lives happy lives in alternate realities!"
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Jul 10, 2014 05:57
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Dr.Magnificent posted:Also about Fear Itself & Iron Man: giving Odin his sobriety made him allowed the Justine Hammer to make her play against him, and it let Matt Fraction bring Tony's alcoholism organically into his run. Well yes, but it was resolved so fast. Like, Hammer and that rear end in a top hat Army general got that regulator thingy put on Tony's repulsor, but then he figured out how to override it and got it off pretty soon. It had a nice scene where Tony went to an A.A. meeting with his new dwarf buddy (a shame that he's been cast off into character limbo apparently) but it never really showed him having any struggles like considering falling off the wagon. (Oh, one thing that really bothered me about that arc though: Hammer mentions that she found out about Tony's drinking via his suit's biometric data, but how the hell did she get access to that data?)
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Jul 10, 2014 06:57
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Inkspot posted:Wasn't Shadowland just a story arc that grew out of control? If you read it as Kingpin building some big pagoda/temple/whatever in Hell's Kitchen, and the heroes stopping it over the course of a long weekend, it kind of works. Nah. Shadowland was the complete opposite of an organic story arc going out of control and a I'd say my most hated run overall of a Marvel book in the last few years despite a lot of poo poo that's come out. Andy Diggle was handed the book after the stellar runs by both Bendis/Maleev and Brubaker/Lark (I still don't know why) and his entire run is based around the fact that he really just wanted Matt to kill Bullseye...just because he wanted it to happen. Despite the character's entire point being that in spite of all the poo poo that's been piled on him, including a nervous breakdown, he still won't kill. It's an event where someone for some reason decided to convince the editor that Batman killing the Joker is something everybody wants to see. And it all started with the terrible The List issue where Bullseye just blows up a building of people because you need justification for Matt wanting him dead apparently. Of course you couldn't straight up have Matt kill Bullseye so they brought in the Beast and had Matt being possessed and tried desperately to tarnish Elektra: Assassin, one of the best graphic novels Marvel has ever put out. Along the way the interesting supporting characters from the book are written out, killed or corrupted beyond recovery. And all of it just ends with Matt going "I was possessed but I killed so I'm moving out of New York for a week where I will conveniently meet up with a blind kid and remember what it's like to be a hero". Terrible storyline, terrible writing and terrible Billy Tan art too. I remember Marvel kept advertising the last page of issue #1 even before the book was out to try and hype interest.
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Jul 10, 2014 10:54
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Teenage Fansub posted:I remember them being fun in the Flash mini (I think?) with the son pushing people into a pit for his zombie dad to eat. Yeah, I hated that. Total character assassination out of nowhere. Boomerang Jr. was kind of a good guy who is suddenly tricking innocent people into a pit to be eaten by his father because Zombie Boomerang Sr. kept lying to him about how he'd become human again if he ate enough flesh. All so Jr. could be tossed into the pit and die while Sr. comes back at the end of the event because God forbid they both exist at the same time for more than ten minutes. Similarly, I also hated how the Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge tie-in depowered the more interesting and modern Zoom to take him off the table so they could just use Barry's Zoom and only Barry's Zoom. Going back to Countdown: Arena, one thing I forgot to mention was this weird choice of counterparts. So the basic idea is three-way fights of the same characters. Three Green Lanterns fighting each other (including the Bruce Wayne Green Lantern from Elseworlds: In Darkest Knight), three Wonder Women, three Blue Beetle's, etc. They decided to include Apollo from the Authority in there. You know, the guy created for the sake of being "gay Superman." He was part of the Ray triple threat fight. I get that Majestic is in his world and everything, but that was just a weird decision to me.
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Jul 10, 2014 13:07
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Blackest Night also had the charming scene where Zombie Dr. Light threatens to rape and murder female Dr. Light and then murder her children afterwards. The pages themselves are really loving bad with them being some of the worst of Post-IC Dr. Light writing.
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Jul 10, 2014 13:39
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OldTennisCourt posted:Blackest Night also had the charming scene where Zombie Dr. Light threatens to rape and murder female Dr. Light and then murder her children afterwards. The pages themselves are really loving bad with them being some of the worst of Post-IC Dr. Light writing. Didn't Zombie Ronnie Raymond turn Jason Rusch's girlfriend into salt or something while being super creepy about it? Man...Blackest Night was pretty hosed up.
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Jul 10, 2014 17:06
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nofaves posted:Didn't Zombie Ronnie Raymond turn Jason Rusch's girlfriend into salt or something while being super creepy about it? Man...Blackest Night was pretty hosed up. BN in general had some fun ideas and could have been a gory, stupid zombie romp but it kept trying way too hard to be hosed up which resulted in it just being really unpleasant. That scene in particular is really awful and depressing. Another huge issue was that all the Zombies had the same tone. Wouldn't it be more scary to have them act like they would have in life? Then when they lay down their sick zombie burns to piss off the heroes it has more weight. All of the zombies were written like they were Freddy Krueger with one liners while they killed people. OldTennisCourt fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 17:24
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