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Post by zaku on Apr 6, 2024 11:32:08 GMT -5
Translation: if you’re going to be sexist, “do it right”! Well, it was the 40s. Seeing the same thing in the 90s, and done wrong, it was a little jarring.
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Post by zaku on Apr 6, 2024 9:40:57 GMT -5
And comic book readers even complained when they were stereotypically portrayed as sexually repressed nerds! Yeah, but bondage "good girl art" from say the 40's somehow becomes respectable Pretty sure Phantom Lady was "creatively inspired" similarly. Were, at least they were a little more anatomically correct!!!
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Post by zaku on Apr 6, 2024 7:19:22 GMT -5
You know What didn’t hold up? A good chunk of the Superhero comics of the 90s, both in terms of art and content. I swear, there isn't a decade in this genre, either before or since, that I consider quite as unreadable as this one. I think that readers at that time were gripped by a fit of collective madness, because I can't find any other plausible explanation. If you are just talking superheroes, then I would tend to agree, with certain caveats. Anything from James Robinson was gold, in that period, Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek did some good stuff, and there are some really good one-shots and mini-series. beyond mainstream superheroes, though, there is a ton of fantastic material, in all kinds of genres. Yep, absolutely, superhero comics. Let's everything that can be stereotypically defined as "90s Image style", both in terms of art and contents.
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Post by zaku on Apr 6, 2024 7:07:40 GMT -5
You know What didn’t hold up? A good chunk of the Superhero comics of the 90s, both in terms of art and content. I swear, there isn't a decade in this genre, either before or since, that I consider quite as unreadable as this one. I think that readers at that time were gripped by a fit of collective madness, because I can't find any other plausible explanation. And these were the typical superheroines of the 90s And comic book readers even complained when they were stereotypically portrayed as sexually repressed nerds!
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Post by zaku on Apr 6, 2024 2:33:05 GMT -5
I imagine that the best choice narratively would have been for Robin to simply retire from superhero life, so Batman would have remained a "loner", as in the case of the death of the Boy Wonder. Having been there when this happened, a major concern we all had was whether or not it would "stick". If Jason simply retired, someone was eventually going to bring him back. To repeatedly whack him with a crowbard and then blow him up? That MIGHT stick. ...and it ultimately didn't. Well, they live in a world with Lazarus pits and cloning technologies. It actually doesn't make much sense for someone to remain disabled (or dead) for long. I remember it was one of the criticisms of Oracle's character.
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Post by zaku on Apr 5, 2024 10:41:29 GMT -5
I imagine that the best choice narratively would have been for Robin to simply retire from superhero life, so Batman would have remained a "loner", as in the case of the death of the Boy Wonder.
And by the way, he got beat up with a crowbar. In real life if he doesn't die he will probably remain in a wheelchair.
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Post by zaku on Apr 4, 2024 4:02:41 GMT -5
It is very strange, especially with DC putting out a Deluxe Edition of Starlin’s Batman: The Cult at about the time this mini is slated to end. But then again, there is not a current Batman group editor at the moment, so there could be several factors. 35 years is a very long time...
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Post by zaku on Apr 3, 2024 11:51:24 GMT -5
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Post by zaku on Apr 3, 2024 8:13:36 GMT -5
Ugh. I missed the start of Eclipso: The Darnness Within in July. Looks like the intersecting Superman annuals were not written by the regular teams. Is it worth pausing the regular reviews to go back and cover this crossover? Nope. (IMHO)
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 16:22:04 GMT -5
I've never read the series, but I remember they tried to retcon it with the protagonist being delusional or something. After how many issues? They did exactly that, but I had stopped reading by then. I think it happened shortly before Starbrand blew up Pittsburgh. Of course I had to google it, and it happened in the issue #15, with the new creative team of Peter David and Lee Weeks.
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 9:12:43 GMT -5
I have seen people praise the 80s Transformer movie as if it was Lawrence of Arabia. I tried to watch it recently. It's a silly, bad cartoon. It's okay if you loved it when you were 9, but acknowledge that it is not a masterpiece. It's just as valid it's a masterpiece for me as it's a bad cartoon for you. There are no truly objective arguments that suggest otherwise. Obviously art is subjective. But there is still critical consensus. This is why Citizen Kane is considered, I don't know, better than Jaws: The Revenge, even though I'm sure there are people who consider the first to be rubbish and the second to be a masterpiece. But you can't always reduce everything to "it's subjective".
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 8:46:02 GMT -5
How many titles did the Malibu universe start with?
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 6:02:10 GMT -5
Marvel didn't offer sufficient financial incentive to bring in top talent (the big names that showed up mostly did it out of friendship or were gone almost immediately) and while there was indeed a general guideline to the new line ("superheroes living in the world we have outside our windows"), titles like Justice broke that rule immediately by starring a guy from a fantasy world in a parallel dimension. I've never read the series, but I remember they tried to retcon it with the protagonist being delusional or something. After how many issues?
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 5:33:13 GMT -5
It was intended to be a more "realistic" superhero universe. The big problem is that for me, fundamentally, "realism" and "superheroes" are two antithetical concepts. You can make great superhero comics. You can also write some that will be studied in universities. But they will never be "realistic". There's a reason why cities aren't populated by Batmen and Daredevils (if we want to limit ourselves to superheroes without superpowers) busy fighting crime with batrangs and backward somersaults. The suspension of disbelief in superhero comics is very high. They weren't the only ones who wanted to create a "universe like ours but where suddenly people with superpowers appear!". The problem is that then we end up in the same tropes as superhero comics (rightly so, otherwise it would be another genre). Intersting. I agree that the superhero genre is inherently unrealistic - obviously! - and that thus one of the reasons Watchmen and Dark Knight caught on with fans in the 1980s is that aging fans like me were ready for the sort of re-imagining they offered. But I think it's worth looking at the difference between those two, where they pointed.
In later years the only interesting superhero series I can think of are Planetary - which I only heard about after it was almost finished - and Ennis's The Boys.
Regarding Watchmen and Dark Knight (and the infinity of more or less successful successors), I think that the big difference was that they broke the boundaries that the genre had imposed on itself up to that point. But analyzing them, the tropes of the genre are there. Batman beats up criminals by dressing as a bat. But obviously the complexity of the writing and the characterization is at a level infinitely higher than that of a monthly magazine.
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Post by zaku on Apr 2, 2024 5:27:29 GMT -5
You make some fair points, Zaku. I don’t think all of the realism that was tried was unworthy, though. Ken Connell trying to get his bearings and utilise some navigation was at least different from a comicbook world where someone living in Mobile, Alabama gets powers - and then flies to New York City without any problem. Not that I need every Superman comic to show him working out latitude and longitude, but a little thing like Connell getting his bearings can work while giving us the superhero stuff as well. I just wanted to start a thread about this: How many elements of "realism" can you put into a superhero comic before it stops being, well, a superhero comic? Watchmen has always been held up as an example of "realism," but we find some tropes of the genre in it downright unrealistic. For example, in one issue we find a slightly overweight man and a woman in stiletto heels who single-handedly rout a gang of criminals. Ask any martial arts or street fighting expert: it simply can't happen.
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