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You're doing the Lord's work. When you finish you should do Wildstorm. They were almost as messy for the first two years and then Alan Moore popped in. Speaking of, are you going to keep on going through Maximum and Awesome?
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Jan 25, 2020 18:41
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Rhyno posted:You're doing the Lord's work. My plan was to stop around the time Extreme stops since I feel like this would have worn out its welcome at that point (he said, sending one nice and slow over the center of the plate). Since Maximum Press is a pretty big part of what cause Liefeld to be forced out of Image, I'm going to have to talk about it...
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Jan 25, 2020 19:02
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Random Stranger posted:My plan was to stop around the time Extreme stops since I feel like this would have worn out its welcome at that point (he said, sending one nice and slow over the center of the plate). Since Maximum Press is a pretty big part of what cause Liefeld to be forced out of Image, I'm going to have to talk about it... I'd just love to see you react to the actual, good comics that made up Awesome.
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Jan 25, 2020 19:09
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Gail Simone trolling Brits over their cuisine is one of my favorite parts of Twitter. https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1221111088227373056?s=19 https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1221128572745576448?s=19
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Jan 25, 2020 19:14
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Random Stranger posted:My plan was to stop around the time Extreme stops since I feel like this would have worn out its welcome at that point (he said, sending one nice and slow over the center of the plate). Since Maximum Press is a pretty big part of what cause Liefeld to be forced out of Image, I'm going to have to talk about it... Please don't stop, I'm really enjoying your write ups. They give detail about an ethos and artist who too often we just use as shorthand for the 90s. Knowing the actual content that was being published really fills in the cracks.
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Jan 25, 2020 21:53
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Yeah, this is really interesting and useful, a nice overview of an era which it's so easy to look at through the lens of shorthand and dismissal. I'm glad you're reading it so I don't have to, because good lord I don't want to.
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Jan 25, 2020 21:55
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well since im not really getting any bites in the slack, im just gonna start posting my astro city thoughts here while i read through - lmao the story about the comic publisher who pisses off some cosmic entity so bad they literally erase the entire building with him in it - the perfect distillation of the absurdity of life in a multi-book comic line   - im fascinated by this history element about the old soldier taking sides against america in the vietnam war - The story about the living Barbie doll was much better than i expected from the premise - a small thing i appreciate about astro city is that all the newspaper clippings actually have text you can read and provide lore for the story site fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 22:11
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I'd also be interested in your Astro City thoughts, site. I only have the first 5 trades but enjoyed them and would keep collecting but they got kind of pricey. Would really love if they got the Omnibus treatment.
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Jan 25, 2020 22:20
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showing life in the superhero world from alternative perspectives in just incredibly refreshing to me right now. like the dark age books mayyybe went on a bit too long, but watching the history of the city through the eyes of someone who wasnt superman but whose lives just happened to intersect with major moments was great. it kind of makes you step back and see how you can appreciate the severity of some things without needing like a 6 issue arc to explain how the justice league got to the climatic battle. and the silver centurions time travel was aneat hook, that tbh i thought was mildly less interesting when busiek went back a few issues later to explain it. i didnt want it explained, and it didnt need to be to work
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Jan 25, 2020 22:34
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I never finished Astro City but it's a really wonderful series. Your thoughts on it are definitely welcome here.
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Jan 25, 2020 22:45
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I thought this post would wrap up Extreme Studios comics from April 1994 and maybe even do all of May. But there's another event in May. Not even a single issue separates Extreme Prejudice from Images of Tomorrow. And somehow they were blindsided by readers getting fed up and abandoning these things in droves. New Men #1 - 2 - Might as well start with the series spun out of Extreme Prejudice. And since they weren't worth talking about in Extreme Prejudice I need to say who they are. We have Kodiak the bear-man, Dash the In the first issue the All-New, All-Different New Men play basketball and then face a guy who controls rocks and soil as he attacks a university. Issue two has them face... oh come on! They're fighting the unmovable "Girth". At a carnival. Because it's literally X-Men #3. Though Girth is a bounty hunter after a guy at the fair rather than just a fat guy on display. Girth doesn't care much about casualties so the New Men have to save a bunch of people. For what is literally X-Men fan fiction devoid of creativity, this book isn't horrible. The New Men have personalities, though they are shallow, cliched ones. The action is a lot more than just "character runs up and punches bad guy before getting knocked away". There are things happening in these books. I wouldn't read these voluntarily, but I like seeing some of these Extreme Studios books actually do something. Supereme #12 - Supreme's powers have been drained by Quantum but he's carrying around Mjollnir (the extra 'L' means Marvel can't sue) after beating up Thor so he decides to use that for the time being. He's also hunting Grizlock, his Lex Luthor, who escaped from prison where he's been rotting for nearly fifty years. So naturally Supreme goes after henchperson who looks like he's about twenty years old. We get a long flashback to their origin in which Supreme saved him from a hostage situation but blew up his factory; none of this sequence has any dialog and is instead told in captions written in the most passive voice possible. There's yet more timeline problems. Supreme appears in 1938. In the wake of that hostage crisis, evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Grizlock turns up and he spends fifteen years in prison. Once he gets out, he kills all of Supreme's friends and this is in 1946. Also, he and Supreme could never have had any further interaction than those two minutes so there were no opportunities for him to try to kill Supreme repeatedly as has been stated in these comics. And the issue ends with Grizlock attacking Washington DC in a robot designed to kill Supreme "hours" after Supreme was beaten by Quantum, so right when Quantum was attacking Washington DC and burning it to the ground. That must have been a busy day. Prophet #5 - So, this comic goes some places. Prophet has cut a deal with Damien Omen who wants to use him to make more super powered killing machines. Prophet is put into a virtual reality machine where he experiences a World War 2 scenario where he butchers a platoon of Nazis in gruesome fashion. Then the scenario changes and the man who was asleep from 1942 to 1992 is put into Vietnam where he spouts every piece of bullshit about the war that your rear end in a top hat uncle uses ("Would have won if they had more men like me!!"). Then he goes full war atrocity on the Vietnamese in page after page of ultraviolence. The turd icing on this shitcake is that he caps it off by identifying a woman as pregnant and then killing her because this is some painful writing. Rob Liefeld is the only credited writer on this book, so he gets all the blame for the dishonesty about the Vietnam war, the lovely attempts to present the horrors of war while simultaneously glorifying it, and then using the laziest trope out there to tell readers how bad this is. I honestly wasn't expecting a book this bad. Phantom Force #2 - Jack Kirby joined the source in February 1994, about two months after Phantom Force #1 was released. So this issue was published posthumously and includes over 40 pages of Kirby art which was the end of the art that Extreme Studios had. The remaining ten pages of this oversized issue were penciled by Michael Thibodeaux. Thibodeaux has almost no comics career himself, working mainly as a graphic artist. His only significant comics work is with Jack Kirby and Last of the Viking Heroes which I remember someone back in the 80's kind of liking but haven't really read it myself. This comic was inked by a huge number of people, though obviously not for the typical timing reasons. While the Image founders got their chance to ink Kirby last issue, this issue let everyone at Extreme Studios get a chance to ink Kirby along with a few additional people like Steve Rude. In this issue Gin Sing (still unhappy about that name), goes to get the plague antidote. Turns out it wasn't an antidote, it was a formula to give alien warlords super power. Then there's a fight involving a girl who changes places with a super strong alien scientist, a guy who has a cosmic power sword, star slavers who are a bunch of weird monsters, the final piece of Kirbytech ever drawn, and a kung fu dual who someone who is essentially Darkseid. A giant fight scene? Yep. But it's one where a lot of things are happening and the art is dynamic while telling its story. I said this was basically 70's Kirby all over again and that continued here. I don't know if it would be remembered as a great book if Kirby had been able to keep going with it, but I think it would be better thought of than Captain Victory at least. I was wrong previously that issue 3 was released from another publisher before issue 2. It seems like it was solicited for release before this but there were delays. The later issues still have Kirby covers for some of them with Image founders doing the inking on them, but it's Michael Thibodeaux's work for the rest. Deathmate: Red - Well, I guess it's time to talk about this train wreck. To reiterate, Deathmate was an intercompany crossover between Image and Valiant. The "story" (and in fairness, it didn't need a deep story) was in the future Solar, the Valiant character with total control over all forms of energy and guy who has accidentally destroyed the Earth multiple times, stepped beyond the boundaries of his universe and bumped into the WildC.A.T.s character Void who also stepped beyond the boundaries of her universe. The two immediately gently caress and that causes their universes to merge. This is breaking time which is being destroyed backward (don't think about it). Behind the scenes, this crossover was a train wreck, Valiant having been founded by the most tyrannical editor-in-chief in comics history had a culture of "You get the books done and out no matter what." Image being founded by artists who wanted to do their own thing and not get bossed around had a more lackadaisical attitude, to put it mildly. Valiant was a company of professionals. Image was a company of kids. This came to a head because Valiant would produce half the series and Image would produce the other half which would be a prologue, epilogue, and four double sized issues that were intended to be read in any order (they can't be, but there's no order that makes sense). Valiant's came out bang on time. Image's did not. It was so bad that Bob Layton went to Rob Liefeld's house and refused to leave until Liefeld drew his required pages. The merged universe finds Youngblood working for a villainous corporation from the Valiant universe and Bloodshot, soon to be in his own movie, was on the team. They're going after people who have taken over a nuclear reactor because of pollution (I know). Bloodshot not only doesn't get a line in this first half of the comic, he doesn't do anything. Prophet is watching and he gets captured by Knightstrike which is a team of anti-evil-company people. Knightstrike consists of a not-Spawned Al Simmons, Chapel, Kirby, and Valiant's Eternal Warrior. Knightstrike attacks a parade where Youngblood is and in true What If fashion everybody kills everybody. This issue is an embarrassment. Intercompany crossovers are usually tightly managed to make sure that both sets of characters are well represented. They want people who like one or the other to check out both plus let fans see these characters interact. This was basically What If Youngblood and a Couple of Valiant Guys Are Hanging Out. It's like Liefeld's ego demanded that his creations be the center of attention and no one else could even approach the spotlight. Bloodstrike #25 - Nope, I didn't skip over fourteen issues, this was part of the "Images of Tomorrow" event where a few books skipped straight to their issue 25. The promotion was that this would be exactly where the book was in just over a year's time. Only four Image books took part in this event, and three of them were from Extreme Studios. Turns out, two of those books don't even reach issue 24 so they never even ran into the problem of trying to get their books to match. Bloodstrike 25 is about a commando named Bloodstrike who is irreverent toward his handlers, not the team Bloodstrike. He attacks an alien facility where they are cloning "Carnage" but spelled in a 90's style. Bloodstrike has Cable's body with Deadpools head stuck on it, just in case you thought they might start getting creative now. That's really all there is to this issue. He doesn't even fight Kha'rnyg (I didn't bother looking up how they spell it but that's just as stupid). Bloodstrike and his handler are the only characters in this comic and there's nothing to them. Supreme #25 - This issue opens with an alternate earth Supreme apparently being replaced/taken over/copied by someone called Simple Simon and attacking the US military. This is another issue long fight scene between a still depowered Supreme using Mjollnir and the copy. Then one of his children from the future breaks a machine and the villain just leaves. Well, their mind just leaves but it's another case of the fight resolving by just stopping. The weird thing for me is that this could have been issue 14 of Supreme. Despite being a year off, there's apparently nothing that happens to these characters between now and then. It emphasizes the lack of development that occurs in Extreme Studios books. Bloodstrike 25 has the same problem. Brigade #25 - Something I haven't been mentioning is there's been a subplot of two former Brigade members doing something in Japan. This plot actually disappeared after a while so I was thinking it was just dropped. But apparently it comes back in issue 25 where Kayo fighting meets Battlestone again. And then Battlestone kills him because he's joined Youngblood (including mystery alien Combat who hasn't appeared in Youngblood since issue 1 with no mention of where he got to) and Youngblood is killing off all the members of Brigade. And then they do it with only Not Namor and Seahawk escaping. Other things we learn: Brigade went to space for issues 18 to 20. In issue 14 the government tried to kill Brigade again. Issues 12 and 13 will be about Boone being a spy for the government. Battlestone leaves the team apparently dead in issue 14 and then has his own miniseries. And this means that Brigade is the one book to lean into the skip ahead concept and actually lay down a plan for what they're going to do over their next 15 issues. I skipped Team Youngblood for the moment because it's a three part story that crosses over with another book and frankly all the oversized issues I wasn't expecting were exhausting. Rhyno posted:I'd just love to see you react to the actual, good comics that made up Awesome. Good comics? Such things exist? How Wonderful! posted:Yeah, this is really interesting and useful, a nice overview of an era which it's so easy to look at through the lens of shorthand and dismissal. I'm glad you're reading it so I don't have to, because good lord I don't want to. That's kind of what got me to pick this as a reading project. I was already off the Rob Liefeld train by the time he went to Image, so despite these books selling enormous numbers of copies, I've barely read any of them. My usual reading projects are all about filling in those blind spots for me and this is a pretty big one because why would you want to go back and read these comics. And it's interesting when I find a bright spot in these books. Those moments when I can say, "Hey, this is neat!" And despite that, they're still more readable than a good portion of what DC and Marvel were putting out in 1994. As the big two chased Image, they made piles of terrible comics that were even more unreadable. site posted:well since im not really getting any bites in the slack, im just gonna start posting my astro city thoughts here while i read through Yay! Someone is reading something awesome (but not Awesome  )!site posted:showing life in the superhero world from alternative perspectives in just incredibly refreshing to me right now. like the dark age books mayyybe went on a bit too long, but watching the history of the city through the eyes of someone who wasnt superman but whose lives just happened to intersect with major moments was great. It's something that the superhero genre is sorely lacking since it is something built on escapism. Yeah, a lot of readers aren't interested in what's happening with that guy who's stuck behind the Batmobile in traffic, but there's a lot of human drama that has to occur around superheroes that we just never see because it's time to move on to the next issue with the next big fight. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 22:57
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site posted:
When Busiek wrote "Marvels" there's a bunch of newspaper clippings that he never thought anyone would read so he wrote dumb in jokes and and poo poo. And then people dug out microscopes and figured out what they said.
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Jan 25, 2020 23:08
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Skwirl posted:When Busiek wrote "Marvels" there's a bunch of newspaper clippings that he never thought anyone would read so he wrote dumb in jokes and and poo poo. And then people dug out microscopes and figured out what they said. being digital where you can zoom in on small text helps. but this reminds me of the second issues punchline: "how a justice league epic battle story becomes 'shark on train tracks' headline" lol Random Stranger posted:It's something that the superhero genre is sorely lacking since it is something built on escapism. Yeah, a lot of readers aren't interested in what's happening with that guy who's stuck behind the Batmobile in traffic, but there's a lot of human drama that has to occur around superheroes that we just never see because it's time to move on to the next issue with the next big fight. seriously, i would love an ongoing like this in the marvel u but itd probably get cancelled faster than future foundation
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Jan 25, 2020 23:11
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Not an ongoing or anything but there's an issue of (I think) Tangled Web of Spider-Man, where Spidey drops off a crook at the police station all webbed up with evidence and a note saying "Courtesy of your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" in the first page and the rest of the issue is cops trying to get a confession from him because they know even a public defender can get the case easily dismissed with "a masked stranger beat up and kidnapped my client then planted evidence on him."
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Jan 25, 2020 23:25
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Have you gotten to where the Image guys traded books for a month yet?
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Jan 26, 2020 06:50
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Honestly I'm kinda amazed in retrospect that Valiant didn't sue Image over the whole Deathmate debacle, you'd think delays of that degree for an intercompany event like that would construe a breach of contract or something? there was a several year period as a teen where after I had found out about Deathmate when looking up Valiant Comics on Wikipedia, it made me so mad I wished I had a time machine so I could eviscerate everyone at Image for it, it's one of those things about teen me I'm embarrassed about, though at the same time I don't blame him, cause Valiant was cool while Image barely made anything back in the 90's or early 2000's that was even remotely worth the effort taken to make it, and the industry would honestly probably have been better off if Image had never existed
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Jan 26, 2020 08:06
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Rhyno posted:Have you gotten to where the Image guys traded books for a month yet? That's three or four more posts down the line and, yes, I will read both sides of the exchange. Though I know even less about the book Liefeld takes over. But you know what Extreme Studios needed in June 1994? A new number 1. Youngblood Battlezone #1 - I'm not actually reading this, but I thought it was worth it to mention it. Battlezone is basically The Official Handbook to the Youngblood Universe. Because "Battlezone" makes sense as a title for that. It also turns out that the source I had been using for tracking which month things came out in had the wrong year for this book and it wasn't in Extreme Studios own checklists. It's actually a May 1993 book instead of a May 1994 book. And yet the second issue isn't out until July 1994. Oddly enough, there's no profiles for people in this comic. It's all about things like the headquarters and the armor someone wears and what the guns they carry are. This would would have come out when there were still less than a dozen issues of Extreme Studios books so it was especially bad as a cash-in. Team Youngblood #9 - The last time Rob Liefeld was actually doing anything with Youngblood was July 1993. He penciled the four page Troll "story" in which he beat up training robots and we were told that Troll was joining Youngblood, but I wouldn't count that. But he's back! Liefeld pencils over half this issue of Team Youngblood which is the first part of a crossover with actual Youngblood. That's right, after 11 months Youngblood #6 is coming. This issue is mainly catching up with the characters since most of them haven't been seen since Liefeld stopped doing Youngblood. Shaft and Badrock train in the danger room, Vogue and Diehard are a couple and are being sent out on a mission to get Cybernet (who I used as an ISP for a while back in the early 90's). Sentinel's in a failing marriage because he prioritizes work over family. Troll is mad that he's still not on the team. The alien Photon is still trying to learn English from cassette learning rather than immersion before getting hauled off to a reception by Cougar where they get to beat up some people with guns who burst in. The women get it especially bad in this issue. Vogue is upset about getting breast implants; also, she runs a cosmetics company in her spare time somehow. The women from Team Youngblood are doing yoga in leotards with what is definitely the X-Men logo missing one leg of the X. They're chatting about Riptide's upcoming Playbook shoot. Photon "comically" accidentally punches out a waitress at the reception. This issue informs me that Badrock is sixteen years old. Which means he was 11 when he was recruited by Youngblood, just in case it wasn't bad enough already. His origin is that he chugged a formula his father was making for the government which turned him into a stone guy. There's a page where Sentinel is looking over pictures of all the supervillains the team has faced: there's ten of them and most of those only appeared for a panel or two. It was a nice reminder of how little has happened despite Youngblood being in their third year at this point. If you ever wanted to demonstrate to someone why Rob Liefeld is a bad artist, you could hand him this issue. There's characters standing in mid-air, body proportions that don't make sense and change from panel to panel, characters that are slight variations on other popular characters, and plenty of things that are definitely not feet. Youngblood #6 - The very first page of this issue has Cable. I'm not going to say he's Not Cable because he absolutely is Cable. Glowing cyborg left eye, cybernetic left arm, bare chested with giant blue shoulder pads, bandoleer of bullets around the right arm, red headband. It 100% is Cable exactly as Rob Liefeld draws him. He's also riding Kaneda's motorcycle, but that's kind of minor compared to just how blatant "Lt. Col. Bravo" is. Cable also has some headgear that appears and disappears between pages because Rob Liefeld. Die Hard breaks down the team that he thinks is on a suicide mission after Cybernet: "an alien criminal [Combat], a beautiful Russian gymnast [Vogue], a former member of the very organization that we've been sent to confront [Dutch], and the bipedal equivalent of a rechargeable battery [Die Hard]". That's the most information I've ever been given on three of those four characters. Also, I guess this means Vogue is just Not Black Widow. Also, is that where Liefeld took the name Die Hard from? Youngblood truly is the land of non-stop trademark infringement. The sixteen year old Badrock has a chain of restaurants, a music video, and a clothing line. Don't know why people would want to wear clothing designed for a giant rock person. He punches out a crazed stalker who attacks him while he's on Letterman. Shaft has to deal with new Youngblood members Knight Sabre (Australian guy with weapons, not Japanese woman in a robot suit), the diminutive and immortal Troll, and another Die Hard at the White House which is then attacked by the Brotherhood of Man. The new Youngblood members then jump out of the red brick building that the White House has changed into between pages to go fight them. The White House has some amazing properties because it then immediately changes to a concrete brutalist structure in between panels and then back again. And just for maximum comedy, the dialog explicitly says it's the White House as Shaft is standing on the red brick face of the building. And it turns out that the Brotherhood of Man was manipulated into attacking the White(?) House to give the new Youngblood members positive media coverage, and that coverage makes Troll the most popular member of the team. Knight Sabre besides having the worst Australian eye-dialect, has the power to absorb aggression and release it as vague energy blasts. So at least I know what he does besides look vaguely like Gambit. Oh, hey, the rebuilt the Washington Monument in the couple of weeks since Quantum destroyed it. So this is an overstuffed issue with a lot of sloppiness. It's the first full book that Liefeld has penciled in a year. I will say that he's better at layouts than the people around him, I think that's because he spend three or four years working for Marvel and DC which forced him to learn something about structuring a comic page. I also don't see how this is a three part story like it was touted as in Team Youngblood. There's only one plot line that's being carried from issue to issue (some team members going off to fight Cybernet) and nothing has happened in that story yet. Last issue it was get read to go, this issue they're going. Team Youngblood #10 - The team finally gets to the Sabretooth is there with a new villain group consisting of "Blackrock" (Badrock but black; I do not know if he was African-American before becoming stone but it's Liefeld), "Maddock" (another former Cybernet guy which seems to mean something but I have no idea what since I thought they just had some soldiers in armor and some robots), "Argus 2", and "Argus 14" (two guys in armor with generic names so I guess they're doomed). They just leave after a few minutes despite winning and then the base explodes; Die Hard, Dutch, and Vogue are badly wounded in the escape and Combat is abducted by the aliens he's a fugitive from (remember them? They haven't shown up in a year...). In a back up story, Sentinel builds his robot suit and works too hard. That ends the arc that brought Rob Liefeld back to Youngblood. The fight scene in this one isn't that bad since the heroes are getting overwhelmed and the villains are doing something. I still haven't been given a reason to care and it doesn't help that every single person involved in the fight can only punch. It's still better than most of the action in these books. Supreme #13-14 - Supreme actually had two issues ship in June 1994. The Supreme Madness storyline runes for six issues and the series goes bimonthly for the duration. As far as gimmicks go, that's a good one. It's something Marvel had done with a few of their series in the early 90's, typically by having a fill-in artist get a good head start on the run. Issue 13 picks up with Grizlock's attack on the White House, though you wouldn't know it was the White House since it isn't drawn in this issue and the fight with the giant robot takes place in a featureless city. Although Grizlock brought kryptonite to the fight, Supreme doesn't have powers anyways and beats the robot with Mjollnir. Supreme is about to kill the man who murdered Not Lois and Not Jimmy, but Grizlock figures out that Supreme is powerless and offers to restore his powers and Supreme for some reason takes him up on the offer. I actually could see Supreme doing this since he's depicted as an insane power obsessed loony, but not with the guy who he's out for revenge on for killing everyone he knew. Anyway, it's a trick and for some reason Grizlock actually does some things with Mjollnir to make it look like he's going to help Supreme and instead shoots him with death rays rather than, say, regular bullets. But oh no! Making Thor's hammer shoot death rays at Supreme drives him insane... more insane and Supreme's rampage destroys Grizlock's lab killing the Not Luthor in the process. The lab was located below Washington DC because I guess that's the only city where things happen and Union, a Wildstorm superhero, was visiting the Smithsonian at that moment. They fight until Union just quits and Supreme fliest away and the hero just lets the Superman on a murderous rampage go. About half of issue fourteen is printed sideways. The sideways double page spread is a favorite gimmick of Liefeld, and it's kind of annoying when it's one pair of pages. This issue keeps switching back and forth and giving me a headache. (This is a good time to mention Liefeld's obsession with sideways comics. His first job for one of the big two was on Hawk and Dove at DC and in one issue he submitted his artwork for one scene sideways without checking with anyone first. So they had to cut up his sideways art to make it fit standard pages.) Brigade #10 - So a few issues after abandoning the Malibu beach house headquarters and moving to a private Caribbean island, Brigade is abandoning the private Caribbean island and moving to the Malibu beach house. Crucible is a new team member picked up in the Extreme Prejudice crossover who I don't even remember and she has the power to affect probability. She's attacked by shape changing aliens who have just been hanging around the beach house. Meanwhile, Coldsnap is continuing to be super angsty over being an ice monster, there's a gay panic joke, and a villain who carries three katanas is going after the team members who are in Japan.. I seriously don't remember Crucible at all. To the point that I thought she was a different character and couldn't figure out what was going for a while. They don't even give her a name or context for her being there until after her big scene is over with. I even went back and looked to see if I could spot her in crossover and I couldn't (and I wonder why it takes me so long to read these nothing comics). Bloodstrike #11 - The previous issue's tag bragged about a new creative team for this issue and the book is now being written and drawn by Karl Altstaetter. Altstaetter, of course, is yet another person whose initial comics work is with Extreme and then doesn't seem to have done a whole lot more after Liefeld's studios collapse. So there's been a subplot going for a while that a secret organization wants to expose Bloodstrike but just going to the press with the massive piles of documentation that they have isn't good enough. Instead, Bloodstrike's handler has been working for them and is setting up something to do something where people will notice dead characters coming back; it really doesn't make any sense. This issue opens with a guy dropping through the skylight and going, "You haven't heard of me before but I'm here to end this subplot." And then he does. Then the story cuts to a commando named Bloodstrike that was in the flash-forward issue last month who is on a hostage rescue mission. So that's how they're handling the transition: just giving up on the old premise immediately and rebooting. He shoots too many bullets so we know he's bad rear end, then shoots the hostages when he gets there under orders from the government. There's a Savage Dragon cameo in this issue, but all he does is show up at the Bloodstrike base to discover that there's nothing there now. The end. This is probably the most absurdly audacious change in direction I've encountered. We've gone from zombie superhero government assassin team to commando with no transition. They were Bloodstrike, now he's Bloodstrike because someone in the government likes reusing names I guess. There were subplots about someone coming across the people abducted to be used as spare parts for the team and the guy who caught sexually transmitted zombie-ism, and I guess those are just gone. This is basically walking the book back to square one and giving me even less reason to care about what happens in it. New Men #3 - Nothing can move the Girth! The fight from last issue continues and the New Men do pretty good until Girth eats a power pellet and amps himself up. But the person he was after has the power to manipulate time and they rewind him to before that point. They beat the villain, but then teleport him away someplace instead of letting the cops or a government superteam pick him up. Meanwhile, someone invents Not Sentinels. There isn't a whole lot to this issue because it really is just one fight but New Men continues to be decently produced. There's good use of contrasting panels in the art including a few clever bits of layout. The characters actually interact during the fight so it's not just a series of people running into get their hit. I still don't care for the book, but it's not a complete mess. I guess that's a good prompt, since there's nothing to that New Men issue, for how I'd rate the individual series at this point two years into Extreme. At the absolute bottom is Brigade who is a team that I don't know why they stick together and why they do anything. Then come the Youngblood books whose massive casts of uninteresting people make the books drag on. Above them was Bloodstrike who were goofy but thanks to Giffen giving them a direction by leaning into the insanity, they had things going on. I suspect that this new direction is going to make me re-evaluate. Supreme had a chunk of issues early on where it seemed to be finding a direction, then writer changes have made the book tread water. Maybe this new story line will inject some life back into the series. New Men is at the top for the moment and maybe its because they're still too new to have fallen into a rut. We'll see how I feel when issue 7 is just the Dark Phoenix Saga (I don't know if it is, but I wouldn't be surprised). drrockso20 posted:there was a several year period as a teen where after I had found out about Deathmate when looking up Valiant Comics on Wikipedia, it made me so mad I wished I had a time machine so I could eviscerate everyone at Image for it, it's one of those things about teen me I'm embarrassed about, though at the same time I don't blame him, cause Valiant was cool while Image barely made anything back in the 90's or early 2000's that was even remotely worth the effort taken to make it, and the industry would honestly probably have been better off if Image had never existed I don't think it's the case that we'd be better off without Image. Image even during the era I'm talking about did something special by giving creators an outlet for their creator owned works and a high profile platform for them. They didn't do a great job of this in the early 90's, their total focus on art over storytelling and inability to break the superhero mold was a major problem with the company. But when you consider how difficult it has always been in this industry to first publish a creator owned work and then get it any attention at all, Image provided an important service. And from bad old Image arose a company that has been a more generally positive force in comic books. Once they outgrew those initial problems, they still had many of the same advantages and were applying them to much better books. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jan 27, 2020 |
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Jan 27, 2020 03:45
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Also basically everything from old Image Liefeld didn't have his hands in was on a spectrum from okay to actually really good. Savage Dragon owns, Spawn is fine, Stormwatch owns. 
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Jan 27, 2020 19:44
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I think saying we'd be better off without Image is very myopic. Yeah, their early output may not have been great (but some of it was!), but just being an advocate for creators' rights is huge for the industry as a whole. Granted, some of those early creators didn't practice what they preached, but giving a large platform for independent creators to try new things truly changed the industry in a positive way. Someone else might have gotten there eventually, but it might not have had the impact that a company started by the era's superstar artists did.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:00
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Saga, Chew, Powers, Sex Criminals, the Walking Dead, Invincible, ABC Comics, All that Hickman stuff. And the 80's cartoon resurgence started at Image.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:04
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Why was Liefeld considered a great art superstar at all, given his name is now a byword for the opposite of a good artist? Was his Big 2 stuff qualitatively different from his Extreme output?
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Jan 27, 2020 20:23
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A Strange Aeon posted:Why was Liefeld considered a great art superstar at all, given his name is now a byword for the opposite of a good artist? Was his Big 2 stuff qualitatively different from his Extreme output? The fandom ate it up man. His poo poo SOLD.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:25
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Liefeld actually drew one of my favorite one and done X-Men stories. From when they were in Australia and the boys have a boys night out that gets interrupted by an alien invasion. Helps that he was drawing from a Claremont script near his peak.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:30
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Yeah, Image has done a ton of good for the comics industry, especially as they moved away from the model of "superhero comics but not Marvel or DC." These early Extreme titles sound like a loving mess, and Spawn/Savage Dragon et al have never been my scene, but creating a space and a distribution vector for creator-owned comics in a slightly more mainstream position that say D+Q or Fantagraphics or whatever was absolutely something the industry needed.A Strange Aeon posted:Why was Liefeld considered a great art superstar at all, given his name is now a byword for the opposite of a good artist? Was his Big 2 stuff qualitatively different from his Extreme output? Because it was new and dynamic and had a sense of energy and verve that a lot of more polished stuff lacked. It also had superficial stylistic similarities to other very popular artists of the period like McFarlane or Erik Larsen or Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, etc.. I would also say his Big 2 stuff pre-X-Force is noticeably different, largely because he was working off tighter scripts and hewed closer to tried and true page layouts and stuff like that. Liefeld was and is a guy who benefits tremendously from a short editorial leash.
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Jan 27, 2020 20:39
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Yea all those Marvel artists basically broke away from the "house style" to be more dynamic, while still maintaining a a superhero ideal. For me Jim Lee is probably the most platonic ideal of a comic book artists. His men are muscular and strong, his women are beautiful but look like they could still knock you out. Liefeld's artwork is wonky as poo poo, but comparing it to what came before it felt more compelling. It's kind of like comparing a Michael Bay movie to an 80's action movie. Sure the Bay stuff might not be your cup of tea, but it is loud and explosion packed and gets the job done. Also it always blows my mind in the way that freaking Image overtook Vertigo in the to go to place for creator owned weird non-superhero stuff.
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Jan 27, 2020 22:12
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Madkal posted:Also it always blows my mind in the way that freaking Image overtook Vertigo in the to go to place for creator owned weird non-superhero stuff. Interestingly, James Viscardi of ComicBook dot com had some thoughts about Image from retailers: https://twitter.com/JimViscardi/status/1218630381920047104?s=20 https://twitter.com/JimViscardi/status/1218641383914983425?s=20 https://twitter.com/JimViscardi/status/1218643820306485248?s=20
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Jan 27, 2020 22:52
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IDW is also going to be publishing titles using Marvel IPs, I bet having a Spider-Man and an Avengers book helps your numbers.
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Jan 27, 2020 23:14
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Image is #3 on the back of a handful of high selling creator owned series though, not on the collective sales of a bunch of mid tier books, and a huge part of why they get and keep those series relates to the compensation model at Image. If I’m a name creator and I have a banger of a project I want to work on, why would I take it to boom, dynamite, idw, etc? If I’m working on a surprise hit of a series that I do own, why wouldn’t I eventually migrate over to image once I have a built in audience, so I can get a bigger piece of the pie? That’s kind of the entire raison d’être of image at this point.
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Jan 27, 2020 23:32
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Skwirl posted:Liefeld actually drew one of my favorite one and done X-Men stories. From when they were in Australia and the boys have a boys night out that gets interrupted by an alien invasion. Not just an invasion. An Invasion.
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Jan 28, 2020 00:06
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Well, I'm going to have to split up July 1994 Extreme Comics stuff because there's too much. There are ten books Extreme Studios put out that month, including two more #1's. I'm skipping Battlezone since it's just character write ups but that's still a lot. Doom's IV #1 - I'm going to kick this off with the number one that became yet another series. This issue had two different covers that you had to buy to get the whole picture, so the gimmicks are still flowing. Rob Liefeld is listed as "Creator" and "Story", though he doesn't seem to have done anything else with this comic. I have no idea what Doom's IV is about going in, so let's be surprised. It opens with a sideways double-page splash of the superstrong stone-covered hero Brick is lifting a giant machine for his workout and I go, "Oh poo poo. I know what this series is now." It's going to be Fantastic Four, isn't it. Other team members are Burn who "furnaces up" (oh god, that's a double reference isn't it), Slyde who phases into things, and warrior from the future Grimm. The three who have powers got them on a space mission. The fabulous four's secret base are attacked by Doom corp who apparently gave them their powers and now wants to kill them. After defeating the robots, they have to move their headquarters. Burn's got fiance who hates that she's now a "superhero", though apparently all they do is hide from people who want to kill them so it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with that. Brick has his children living with them and isn't happen about having to move them around either. Slyde and Grimm are just 90's extreme people and so don't have anything going on. This is fine as an introductory comic to the team, but I'm not really feeling this one. It's another book where I'm supposed to be interested because it's just like another already familiar source. If it was the story of Brick and his kids, it would have been a way better book. Prophet #6, 0 - I keep forgetting that this series exists which doesn't speak much for it. That's probably because I put it off to the end when I want to just get it gone. But I'll do two issues up front. Issue six kicks off with the aftermath of Prophet butchering an entire military base and fleeing into the mountains. His sidekick Kirby is hunting them down with the assistance of the cyborg killing machines the base was making. They catch up with Prophet who destroys one of the cyborgs and then reveals previously unseen cybernetic cables in his head which are used to reprogram the killbot. Kirby is back to being an alien from another dimension in this issue. Even though he was a lab assistant to the guy who made Prophet back in the 40's and the Disciples who were from that other dimension are in this issue as being created by the US government. Issue 0 has Prophet's version of Brother Eye being attacked and he and Kirby go to space to save it. Once there they find a villain who calls Prophet his brother and "to be continued". But I guess not in Prophet #1 and Prophet #6 had it's own cliffhanger so I have no idea where it's continued. So Kirby who recently arrived through either a time or dimensional portal depending on which issue you're reading has a long history with Shaft and took two bullets him during a war? I'm starting to get the distinct impression that nobody is thinking through the continuity of these books. New Men #4 - I think I know why New Men is working for me better than most of these books: it's Jeff Matsuda's art. He gives the characters in New Men a lot of personality rather than having them be shouty people who grit their teeth. There's a lot of little touches in his art like people casually using their powers for convenience and people reacting to previous panels as the story is continuing. In this issue, an alien who absorbs people named Ikonn (not the Dr. Strange guy) is attacking and Ripclaw from Cyberforce shows up to fight him. The New Men arriving on the scene do the usual mistake the guest star for the villain thing and they fight, but Ikonn has caught two of the New Men. It's occurred to me that we've seen nothing of the New Men's mentor. He sent them off in issue one to a fight, the story in issue two and three they stumbled onto while at a carnival, and then in this issue they stumble onto the alien on their own. He just doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do in a book that's supposed to be about him teaching them. Bloodstrike #12 - The women in this comic have giant anime eyes. It's weird to have the men in the standard Extreme Studios house style while the women are all anime. Bloodstrike (the assassin, not the team) is being proposed as a replacement for Youngblood, because one covert guy is definitely a good replacement for a team with a PR machine behind it. AFter the idea is rejected, Bloodstrike goes after Cybernet and shoots up some robots. Unfortunately his handlers get captured and the Bloodstrike is swept away by a flood in the tunnels they're fighting in. This is such a regression to the earliest days of Extreme Studios. One long fight scene that doesn't have anything going on in it. This is definitely going down my rankings list.
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Jan 28, 2020 03:00
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Donny Cates is writing a Namor series or an X Book involving Namor or he's a giant rear end in a top hat. https://twitter.com/Doncates/status/1222361319296458752?s=19
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Jan 29, 2020 05:29
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https://twitter.com/TheBurnham/status/1222354712869179393 (click "play") 
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Jan 29, 2020 07:18
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Art Adams playing the long game.
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Jan 29, 2020 07:20
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https://twitter.com/TomKingTK/status/1222525364423012352?s=20
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Jan 29, 2020 15:26
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If you like artists reusing the same stock pose over and over again, then have I got the comic book company for you! Still in July 1994, I'm probably not going to get to August in this post due to time constraints. Supreme #15-16 - This is parts three and four of the Supreme Madness storyline and issue three made me realize what this story is. It should have been titled "Supreme Beats Up Everyone from Non-Liefeld Image Books". Last time we had Mark Texiara's Union. This time we've got the big time as Supreme beats up Spawn. Well, that's what I thought it would be from the cover, but instead Supreme swoops down to the alley where Spawn sleeps to scare the homeless people there and then he and Spawn have a pity party. Then after they recount their origins to each other, Supreme flies off. I guess McFarlane wouldn't let his guy be shown as weak. The art in issue 15 is provided by Pedi, whose weird balloon style characters I commented on before. It still makes a mess of Supreme, but it kind of works for the McFarlane characters who are always distorted. Issue 16 has Supreme fighting Stormwatch. And they actually fight. I'm totally unfamiliar with Stormwatch and this issue is not selling me on them as they come across as yet another completely generic superhero team. Having a Japanese character named "Fuji" who says things along the lines of, "Fuji would like a word with Supreme-san," is making me raise an eyebrow. Supreme knocks over an apartment building as a distraction and it's handled with all the weight of someone off-panel shouting, "Hey, that's my building!" In the end, Stormwatch just leaves because their boss is mad at them despite being in the middle of a fight with a maniac who is killing people. Then Supreme crashed into Pitt's lair to prepare for the next issue. Youngblood #7 - Well, I guess I have to get back to Youngblood eventually. This is now two months in a row where Rob Liefeld has penciled a full issue. He won't quite maintain a monthly schedule but when you consider that he penciled a grand total of 30 pages between July of 1993 and April of 1994, this is an enormous improvement. This issue opens with Shaft having a "terrifying" nightmare of his overeating and become fat. So, you can guess how that goes. Then Badrock is skiing and I have no idea of how an eight foot tall concrete person manages that (that's not even my words, the book mentions it without considering that it would make skiing impossible). Badrock is attacked by Spawn's enemy Overtkill who just keeps repeating "Kill Badrock" over and over. Meanwhile, Chapel is getting ready to go after Spawn. This leads directly into... Team Youngblood #11 - The cyborg Overtkill is a tough foe for Badrock so he has to use his head to come up with a clever plan. And that clever plan is throw a rock at him and then punch him a lot. With Overtkill dealt with, the team goes after the people who blew up a bunch of Youngblood members last month where they find the guy who never did anything on the team and quit it back in the first issue or two of the series. Gasp, what a betrayal by a character it took me thirty seconds to remember that they existed! The back up story wraps up Sentinel's origin which is that he built an Iron Man suit and then demonstrated it for the military. The most interesting thing in this comic was that the villains used a sonic weapon to take out Youngblood while they couldn't figure out what was happening. In a better comic, this might have been an effective sequence as some of the characters could hear the attack and the characters succumb one by one. But it's almost perfunctory here, handled in a two page spread. Troll II #1 - I swear I'm not going to go for the easy joke here. No matter how easy it is. This is a double-sized one-shot where Troll fights some Nazis in WWII with Not Union Jack, then teams up with Badrock and the New Not Union Jack to take down the same Nazis in the present day. The Nazis are replacing scientists with robot duplicates including Badrock's father. Their goal, besides the fourth reich, is to make a mind transfer machine so the head Nazi can put his brain in a robot body. This is a badly paced comic. The confrontation with the villain starts on page 43 of 48, but 18 of the previous pages were one fight scene against some nameless and faceless cyber-nazi-thugs. It feels like Karl Alstaetter just started penciling without plot laid out and realized "Oh crap, I've got to wrap this up in a few pages." Also, Not Union Jack doesn't have a nose. He also gains a face mask in between pages, but the lack of nose is really bothering me.
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Jan 30, 2020 04:46
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Moving on to August 1994 as I do some baking for a party tomorrow. Let's see how many of these I can get through. Brigade #11 - This issue's cover promises a fight with WildC.A.T.s and oddly enough the two teams don't come to blows. Yet. Probably next issue because that's the way these things work. Brigade has gotten a message that Kayo is in trouble in Japan and fly off to rescue him with half the team objecting to Battlestone's decision. The WildC.A.T.s find out that an orb (is that a thing for them? Do they hunt orbs?) is in Japan and they go after it. Kayo is rescued from yakuza torturers by a former Brigade member and they sneak out as everyone else arrives. Somehow Brigade decides that arriving on site is sufficient to prove that Battlestone was right about it not being a trap. Then as everyone is sneaking through the castle sewers, a giant monster attacks and the teams finally run into each other. I have read the original WildC.A.T.s miniseries and I really don't know anything about the team since they were yet another team of generic superheroes that Image cranked out at the time. I thought maybe they fought shapeshifting aliens and Dan Quayle. Supreme #17-18 - The biweekly Supreme Madness storyline continues. Last issue ended with Supreme being knocked into the Central Park carousel which Pitt apparently made his home. Pitt immediately decides that it's his turn to fight Supreme. They punch each other for the whole of issue 17 until Pitt steals Mjollnir from Supreme who is now powerless without it. In issue 18, Pitt suddenly recognizes Supreme because Supreme saved his planet. That lets Supreme get the hammer back and start the fight again. Suddenly it's day time despite the fight taking place at night before. Supreme knocks himself out with a blast and when he wakes up he's no longer insane. But then he's attacked by Not Green Goblin, or maybe Not Hobgoblin since he stole his equipment. Supreme beats him up with a small assist by Pitt and then Supreme is back to his usual sociopathic rear end in a top hat self. I wish I could say I was surprised that this six part storyline wound up being a big wet fart, but that's par for the course now. Every conflict is "resolved" by running out of pages and one side just leaving. None of the characters from other Image books brought anything to the storyline except maybe Spawn who competed with Supreme for "most whiny". Complaining a lot isn't much of a personality, but it's more than anyone else brought to the table. Pitt is a creation of Dale Keown who took his Hulk, gave him a ponytail and claws, and called it a day. His book suffered from delays even more than Rob Liefeld's with the comic being on issue three when this was published despite issue one coming out eighteen months before. Team Youngblood #12 - quote:THE TIME: NOW It's so adorably sincere. The first page has a panel with what might be the worst perspective I've ever seen in comics. Some of the characters and the background are drawn from an overhead perspective, some of the characters are drawn from a three-quarters perspective, and a couple of them are drawn from a rear perspective. It's genuinely impressive to draw all those characters and have none of them fit together. This is an issue long fight between Team Youngblood and some villains that happen to include a former Youngblood member who never really did anything in his previous appearances. Also, word has gotten out that Riptide is going to pose nude for Not Playboy. Youngblood is defeated and they're taken before the master of the base, the Never Man. The Never Man is just the outline of a person, thus making him the best drawn character in this issue. Troll: Once a Hero #1 - Wait, didn't we just have a Troll one-shot? Yes, we did. But Extreme Studios was cashing in on Troll mania that swept the country in the summer of 1994. This issue recaps some of Troll's adventures like the time he coached an all women's baseball team during World War II with Tom Hanks. He takes them to the championship game, but then FDR calls him up and demands that he take care of Europe. Troll flies to Germany and kills the Nazi scientist in charge of their a-bomb project, then it's off to South Dakota. There he finds that he's been carved into Mount Rushmore as a thank you, but an assassin blasts his face off the mountain. So this is a comic that's never as amusing as it thinks it is. There's no wit here, just "zany" situations. In the "League of the Own" pages, for example, it's just women playing baseball while Troll tells them what to do. Presumably it's supposed to be funny because they don't understand baseball but we never see that so it just makes Troll look like an rear end in a top hat. The best/worst part of this comic was after it was over as I flipped to an ad for Youngblood Year One by Kurt Busiek. "Holy poo poo!" I thought, "I might get to read a great comic!" So then I looked it up to find out how long I had before I reached Busiek's story and it turns out they never made the comic. And then it turns into a Rob Liefeld story. See, Busiek still wrote the plots for those books, it's just Liefeld never bothered to draw them. Ten years later, Liefeld's trying to make Youngblood a thing again and he puts out a four issue series called Youngblood Genesis which uses, with Busiek's blessing, those plot outlines. Issue one comes out July 2003. Issue two comes out April 2004, and Liefeld's been promoting it by saying it was "written" by Busiek when Busiek's contribution was minimal. This leads to Busiek making public statements that he has nothing to do with the book and the last two issues are never published.
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Jan 31, 2020 04:41
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It's a small thing but I like that in astro city time is like a real thing and people age out of heroism and move on with their lives
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Jan 31, 2020 09:20
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That sort of happens in Savage Dragon but usually they die rather than retire.
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Jan 31, 2020 10:44
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site posted:It's a small thing but I like that in astro city time is like a real thing and people age out of heroism and move on with their lives Yeah, I gotta dig out my trades and floppies and do a reread.
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Jan 31, 2020 19:54
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I read a couple things today / yesterday. The first was Prisoner X. The entire 5 issue run was 2.50 in a bargain bin, and I had heard it was one of the better minis from the Age of X books. It did nothing for me. It didn’t really feel like anything happened until right at the end, and I really didn’t like the art. Then I read James Bond: Permission to Die. It’s a 3 issue premium series put out by Eclipse in 1989, written and drawn by Mike Grell. Pretty by the numbers Bond story - first he goes to a cool foreign local, where he sleeps with a local girl, then he rescues his target, who he sleeps with, and finally he goes to the bad guy’s lair (where he sleeps with the bad guy’s bodyguard). There’s some story about nukes but honestly who cares. Fun dumb pulp action with some good looking very scratchy Grell art. There started to be artists assists towards the end and the art seemed to slip, and the production also seemed to have some challenges (the art felt a bit blurry in book 3), but another decent bargain bin find. And finally, Renato Jones the One %. Ellis says punisher meets occupy wall street, and yep that sounds about right. I bought it because Kaare Kyle Andrews did the cartoonist thing on this one: he wrote, drew and coloured the book, only leaving off the lettering and some design work to a partner. It’s a very violent book, but the art and the design sense is fantastic and carries the story. In issue 5 there’s this great scene with an explosion, and then the book does the gimmick where the next two pages are just an empty white double page spread, and it takes 8 pages for the story to come back (slowly, first with dialogue boxes that become darker, then with an image). There’s also a bunch of ads throughout the issues that I found pretty fun. I’ll post them when I have a chance to get in front of my computer. Biggest complaint with this one is that the story starts strong and then kind of meanders. The issues are pretty dense (unless the storytelling demands it, as in the issue 5 example I gave) so it’s not like Prisoner X where you feel like they just wanted to pad sales, but it feels like it loses the thread pretty quickly after issue 1. Anyway there is a second season, but I only have 3 of the issues, so that’ll have to wait until I find the others in a cheap bin or something. I do recommend picking this one up if for nothing else than the great art. And as noted above, I’ll post some examples of the stuff I really liked.
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Feb 2, 2020 05:38
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