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Space Fish posted:
Maybe I was just young at the wrong time but this line gave me a small heart attack, killed all the plants in my house, and turned my dogs evil: quote:Fans similarly seemed overly-excited that Gerard Way was formerly in some ska band.
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Jan 3, 2019 18:55
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Mr Hootington posted:The imperialist oppressors are bad, but so are the oppressed. Say, maybe he did work for the CIA after all!
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Jan 4, 2019 22:32
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howe_sam posted:Yes, he found nothing. The original 616 Miles was a former lieutenant of Kingpin and scrubbed himself from the Internet when he retired. It was dumb. That miniseries was like the best and worst of Bendis because that particular bit of backtracking was stupid but I thought the overall character arc of 616 Miles was satisfying and wrapped up in a surprising effective and sweet way. It's funny, I went back and read Torso a month or two ago and most of the strengths and weaknesses of his writing to this day are evident: there were moments of character being revealed through dialogue that were breathtakingly well done, and for large stretches its very very good at setting up a particular mood, but then the plot just wraps itself up in the fastest and most lackadaisical way in the last 10-15 pages.
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Jan 13, 2019 16:00
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Mark Russell does absolutely nothing for me. The earlier stuff of his left me completely unimpressed-- it had the kind of cynicism that ventriloquizes "wokeness" just through jaundiced irony but is so disaffected and cynical that it winds up advocating for nothing. Snagglepuss was one of the worst comics I read in 2018, totally lazy and insulting to me as a queer person and as a scholar of the period he was writing about. I've written about it before and I don't want to reiterate every single point again, but it was so blisteringly, scathingly sluggish and unfunny that the only conclusion I could come to was that "hey, remember the jokes about Snagglepuss being gay? They're true--- and he's got depression!" was the entirety of the joke. And that loving sucks.
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Jan 24, 2019 17:07
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Android Blues posted:"Heroes with PTSD undergoing therapy" could have been a great series. "Convoluted, slow-moving murder mystery that takes place after all the therapy already happened" is not. Yeah, that's a really weird and sort of disturbing undercurrent to this, that the world at large has a revulsion to therapy. Maybe that was true 25-30 years ago but now? What a bizarre supposition. It's really, I don't know... macho? It speaks to what feels like a real suspicion and skepticism of vulnerability-- or at least a belief that people's baseline reaction to vulnerability is suspicion and skepticism-- that is not flattering to King. Like-- I'd be more shocked and appalled to learn that superheoes didn't have therapists (and like, Doc Samson has been a concept-- and quite regularly presented as healthy and good-- for how long?). Superman's big stupid speech is only coherent in a world that's playing by an incoherent ruleset. It's a huge flaw in an already flaw-riddled story, but instead of being just dumb clunky plotting it misreads basic human empathy. It's a bad, bad look. I could extrapolate further based on his incoherent take on Arkham Asylum but I don't know, Arkham Asylum has always been a sloppy and deeply vexed concept imo. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 01:00
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Darth Nat posted:I mean, given that, judging by previous posts, Tom King thinks that the height of insight into superhero trauma is "character that did PSAs against drugs... WAS SECRETLY DOING ALL THE DRUGS!", I doubt his version of the former would be very good either. To be fair I sort of liked the bit with... Lagoon Lad or Lagunatic or whoever near the beginning of the series.
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Jan 31, 2019 01:48
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I don't love Watchmen but if you read it six years ago and remember it having any sort of mercy or sympathy or admiration for the Comedian of all people, whatsoever, you should read it again. This isn't meant to be an attempt at a burn or anything-- it's something I unwittingly do all the time, where I drastically misremember something I read ages ago because some small flaw lodged itself in my head and got magnified over time.
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Feb 9, 2019 22:16
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I'm sure this is not King's intended message, but there's an unfortunate "if you go to therapy you'll get worse and it won't be able to protect you from anything" vibe to Heroes in Crisis as it goes along. Again-- I am sure that's not what King thinks he's writing, but this is what happens when you write a story badly, you end up making arguments against your own will. It's eerily similar to how Identity Crisis ended up as a cautionary tale about having loved ones or being loved. All the pieces of a good story are here, and the individual scenes of patient interviews are often pretty nicely written, but what a mess, structurally.
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Mar 27, 2019 14:37
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Is there any actual evidence that Tom King committed war-crimes (I mean aside from the general project of being part of the US military apparatus) because that seems like a pretty hefty thing to lob at somebody for writing a lovely comic. Edit: And to be clear it is a deeply lovely comic. If Wally could just run back in time and kill himself and move his body hither and yon why didn't he just go back in time a little further and not go on a killing spree? How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Apr 24, 2019 |
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Apr 24, 2019 14:47
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Edge & Christian posted:I could be incredibly wrong and unfair, but that's what this feels like? No, it feels disingenuous to me too, and of a part with the somewhat tacky or sleazy way imo that violence or the hint of violence swirls around the Tom King "myth," up to and including, I guess, the fallout from the Twist Street thing.
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Apr 25, 2019 01:26
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I think a few people really were not impressed with it. I certainly thought it was kind of a weird, reductive, and not very compelling representation of a super fascinating moment in queer history, but I also 100% expected it to get an Eisner nomination.
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Apr 29, 2019 04:45
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This tangentially reminds me, and sorry if this is off-topic, but: I remember when the last iteration of this thread was first talking about Exit Stage Left and I brought up my objections to the way it made queer history feel so joyless, someone asked me for some recommendations on texts that more accurately or fully conveyed the vibrancy of mid-century queer culture. I suggested a few things, but there's a book that just came out that I think does a really, really splendid job of communicating the liveliness, diversity, and joy of New York's gay communities (and its show-biz communities especially) from the mid-19th century through the early 1960s, and which covers a lot of the same historical ground that ESL does: When Brooklyn Was Queer, by Hugh Ryan, who's also the curator of the splendid Pop-Up Museum of Queer History.
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Apr 29, 2019 22:26
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Edge & Christian posted:The Bat Well I'm all for it.  Edit: Is imgur not working for anyone else lately? The last two times I've thrown something on there and then tried to link it here I've gotten nothing, just in the last week or so. Well anyway, it was Phat. From the X-Statix. It was Phat.
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Jun 12, 2019 16:27
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"Hey hon, how about a beach getaway this weekend? I just remembered I'm from a planet with oceans, and I'm so sick of joining the armed forces."
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Jun 18, 2019 00:42
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Vince MechMahon posted:No it isn't. The reason is simple. He didn't join the military because he's a good person. What on earth are you talking about? I think Superman being in the military is an appalling notion, but it factually was a going concern within the books, notably during WWII. Here is the most often cited example, from 1943's Superman #25.  The prior reference is to the February 16-18, 1942 installments of the Superman newspaper strip. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it never happened. This took 30 seconds to look up. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 01:50
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Vince MechMahon posted:It's not 1943. It's 2019. Superman would not have been alive during the draft currently. There is absolutely no reason to address this in 2019 unless you are writing a period piece. And even then you don't actually need to because the answer is "it's a comic book." What the gently caress are you even talking about? Superman is a fictional character who has been around for over 80 years, and the old stories don't stop being of artistic, cultural, and historical interest just because the diegetic Clark Kent has "aged" out of them. I don't throw Anna Karenina out the window because it has out-of-date information about trains in it. As I said-- I think Superman being in the military is a dumb idea, and in the context of this particular comic probably a loathsome one. But despite it being 2019, as you've helpfully noted, the thematic proximity of Superman and the US military is not novel and is in fact present from very early on. If it isn't to be celebrated necessarily it's still there to be grappled with and understood, just as Morrison, for example, chose instead to grapple with and elevate the character's very foundational roots as a working class socialist hero. This is how dealing with texts works. "It's [just?] a comic book" is a pretty lackluster way of engaging with the medium.
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Jun 18, 2019 03:45
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I don't think anyone is claiming that it's a good idea, let alone that this particular Miller/Romita comic sounds at all good or anything other than insanely ill-advised. In fact in this thread I've specifically called it dumb, "probably loathsome," and appalling. My point I guess is that saying, quite rightly, "blending superheroes with military institutions is disturbing and sort of horrifying" doesn't negate that superheroes have often been blended with military institutions and deeply troubling insinuations of nationalism. I think it's a long-term issue that haunts the genre, and not acknowledging it doesn't make it go away.
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Jun 18, 2019 03:52
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catlord posted:Superman did join a foreign government's army in his second story ever, but that was to torment a weapons manufacturer, who he also forced to join, into not being a piece of poo poo. Yeah, Morrison's stuff might scratch that itch. Otherwise I'm not really sure-- I think it's difficult to capture that mercureal, improvisational energy of really, really early Golden Age comics, when the rules of the genre were being figured out on the fly. There's that incredible early Batman story where he goes to Europe and blunders onto a bunch of flowers with anguished human faces, like something out of a Gothic novel or an Artaud play, that is so out of place for a conventional superhero story but perfectly in keeping with the series as it was at the time, still trying on different flavors of weirdness and atmosphere to see what stuck.
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Jun 18, 2019 04:24
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Also/formerly known as Earth-31. Ok, yeah, this would be a really really good story, so I'll concede that the idea has potential. Edit: It sort of makes me think of the subplot in the early issues of Chip Zdarsky's Spider-Man: Life Story, where Peter has to grapple with other heroes going to Vietnam vs. his own ambivalence about the war. It makes very literal and upfront a lot of subtext about violence and power that are there in the original comics.
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Jun 18, 2019 21:21
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nofather posted:I haven't heard much about it, either. A lot to like in it! I loved the last two pages. And Damian stealing tech. Batman realizing the fight was wrong. Gotham flirted with the idea of Riddler/Penguin and really, Cory Michael Smith and Robin Lord Taylor had fantastic chemistry.
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Aug 16, 2019 09:39
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Open Marriage Night posted:How many good super hero costumes use brown? Trench coats don’t count. That one fantastic Wolverine outfit, for one, and the Rocketeer. The Marvel versions of Ares and Hercules also use a lot of brown contrast and I think both of them look pretty cool.
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Aug 17, 2019 02:14
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The Riddler issue is the first Russell comic in a long while that I've liked, and I think in a large part because it gets back to an element of pre-reboot Riddler that I liked-- that he's really too smart to just keep losing fistfights, and should eventually find something better to do with his time. Fingers crossed somebody at DC also has fond memories of his stint as an insufferable but generally benign private investigator.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:52
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Parallax posted:I remember enjoying the No Man's Land novelization as a kid. If I remember correctly, it was written by Greg Rucka. I also remember reading a Knightfall novelization a bunch of times I had the Knightfall novel too-- it gave me the very false impression that Abattoir and Cornelius Stirk were big deals, as well as Bane's crew of awful nobodies who I can probably still list off the top of my head thanks to that book (um, let's see-- Trogg, Zombie, and Bird or Byrd or Byrde, and you know what, all these years later I finally get the joke).
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Sep 25, 2019 07:39
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site posted:superman smashes the klan is definitely worth a read It was just fantastic, and Gurihiru are perfect for it.
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Oct 16, 2019 20:53
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chefscientist posted:Hey Goons, help me out. I picked up Batman: White Knight from the library and I'm two chapters in and this is... bad? This is bad, right? Yeah it's extremely stupid. Sean Murphy does gorgeous work but I wish he was doing it somewhere else.
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Dec 9, 2019 10:08
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Xelkelvos posted:New character. He's a ghost that haunts a theater in Gotham and is connected to every brick of it. Thus, the brick tied to Frankie's arm. That's a pretty cool schtick-- what's his name and where could I read about him?
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Dec 11, 2019 22:01
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Superman Smashes the Klan continues to be immensely charming and beautifully illustrated. If you've got a kid in your life in any way do everybody a favor and grab them the first two volumes for the holidays.
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Dec 18, 2019 18:57
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Oh wow, I had no idea that was a Rafael Grampa thing. That's a gorgeous page.
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Dec 27, 2019 15:55
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It was pretty dull but I also am totally turned off by Tony S. Daniels so your mileage may vary.
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Jan 8, 2020 20:12
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I liked the little moment where Bruce phones in a task for Alfred and has to be reminded that Alfred isn't there any longer. I think Tynion is a lot better at character beats and the soapy stuff than long-game arcs and subplots, so I'm hoping he finds a nice balance here on the flagship title. Again, I think with a different artist-- one who was better at "acting" as it were-- a lot more of it would have landed with me.
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Jan 8, 2020 20:20
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Hell yeah! It's Mr. Mind and who I can only presume is nude Condiment King!
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Jan 23, 2020 06:25
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We'll always have Punch and Jewelee.
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Feb 9, 2020 08:48
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Two Tone Shoes posted:When was the last time the character described like that was anything but a misguided bad guy? Franklin Richards I guess, sometimes the Molecule Man. I sort of forget the mechanics of how Secret Wars' resolution shook out but the narrative generally treated the recreated universe as positive.
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Feb 9, 2020 19:02
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I feel like that's a good story narrative hook and I enjoy seeing it executed well. I am super not a JMS fan but I thought Peter Parker going public was a great little period for the Spidey books.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:18
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I feel like Didio is going to be one of those people where critical and historical consensus on him in 10 or 15 years is going to be a lot different than what it is now or what it was a decade ago. For sure a complicated figure with a far reach.
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Feb 22, 2020 15:35
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Fine, fine! I'll do it. First order of business: All Star Cheeks the Toy Wonder.
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Feb 23, 2020 08:23
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My Joker, My Joker, and Me (the Joker)
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Feb 26, 2020 20:37
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I like it when superheroes have a healthy relationship with their parents to bounce off of and I think it opens up more storytelling opportunities than the orphan thing.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:37
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X-O posted:Batman is seething as he reads this comment. I'll probate that little piece of poo poo, what's he going to do about it?
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Feb 28, 2020 18:05
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X-O posted:Batman is totally the type that will write you a three page PM about a sixer. Then I'll oppose him with every tool at my disposal. 
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Feb 28, 2020 18:26
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