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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 18, 2024 10:45:22 GMT -5
That was the beauty of the Astro City story, "Show 'Em," featuring the gimmick thief The Junkman. He was an engineer, who was pushed out at 65 and turned to crime to show he was still vital and creative, turning old discarded items into his weapons and devices. He pulls off the perfect crime and gets away with it; but, it eats at him that nobody knows it. So he pulls it again, with a built-in flaw, so that he is captured by Jack-in-the-Box and put on trial, where the details will be revealed to the world. The twist at the end is a device, you see hooked up in the overhead lighting fixture, that will allow him to escape the courtroom. I am reminded of Lex Luthor, who built a time time machine out of an orange, a light bulb, a coil spring and a flashlight
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 5, 2024 11:14:23 GMT -5
Back in the 1970's, I'd have loved to see Mayer's Superfolks adapted as a comic, preferably by Ralph Reese. However, by the mid-80s the influence had already permeated the comic field, and it would be redundant.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 5, 2024 11:10:12 GMT -5
I'm certain I'll be in a minority here ... but I thought every casting change the series made improved the show. I preferred Potter to Blake, BJ to Trapper John, and Winchester to Frank by a wide margin. I was also glad they got rid of Radar. If you are in a minority, at least it's not a minority of one. I also preferred Potter, BJ, and Charles over Henry, Trapper, and Frank. I liked Radar, though, and was sorry to see him go, but at least his departure made it possible for Klinger to become more than a one-joke character. One reason for the above was that Blake and Trapper John, as Cody says, were really just extensions of Hawkeye. Potter and BJ were more distinct characters. Likewise, Winchester was a worthy opponent, which Frank never was. In terms of Radar, I did like him, but I have a pet peeve about 'eternal ingenue' characters, and if they weren't going to move him out of that role, he needed to move on. I also was fine with Klinger in a dress, but after a while the joke got old, and it was a relief to see him doing something else.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 4, 2024 10:46:56 GMT -5
I can & will watch M*A*S*H up till Henry Blake's death. I never liked Potter, BJ was a poor sub for Trapper John while Winchester was the best replacement for Frank. However, for me, Henry made the show, his comedic reactions and facial expressions in regards to whatever the gang at the Swamp were doing was priceless. His death still hits me hard every time I watch the episode especially given how it happens. I'm certain I'll be in a minority here ... but I thought every casting change the series made improved the show. I preferred Potter to Blake, BJ to Trapper John, and Winchester to Frank by a wide margin. I was also glad they got rid of Radar.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 3, 2024 10:05:38 GMT -5
It's a funny phenomenon (well, at least for me) that sometimes something I didn't really get into back in the day suddenly seems cool when it gets referenced into something more modern. Like learning Ellis did a New Universe revival of sorts, I never knew that and feel compelled to check it out now. It will frustrate you for being unfinished, but it's a fantastic comic, one of the best things Ellis has ever done.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 3, 2024 10:03:38 GMT -5
Superfolks by Robert Mayer was a groundbreaking if flawed novel when it came out in 1977 ... now, so many better writers have learned from its use of tropes, that all that's left to it are dated references, bad prose, and unfunny attempts at humor.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 2, 2024 9:59:44 GMT -5
What I’d like to specifically discuss (although thread drift is fine!) is whether launching eight titles was too ambitious. Would launching fewer titles have worked, or not made any difference? At the risk of self promotion, Icctrombone and I did a whole podcast episode on how Valiant was Shooter's New Universe 2.0 in everything but name. In that instance, the company only allowed him to start with two titles featuring established heroes (Magnus and Solar) to test the waters for the first nine months, after which Shooter launched pretty close to one new title each month over the course of seven months and then imediately jumped into the first company-wide event. October 1991: Harbinger November 1991: X-O Manowar December 1991: Rai February 1991: Shadowman April 1991: Eternal Warrior, Archer & Armstrong, and The Unity crossover event I think opening with fewer titles may have helped in the short term, but made not much difference in the long term. The funding was the main issue: Shooter wanted to launch the NU with big-name fan-favorite creators, but wound up only using staffers ... with the consequence that none of the books looked or felt any different from mainstream MU books. Someone ought to mention newuniversal, which revived the NU characters into a single title, and which ended when he lost the files he was working on for the second arc. No fan of the original NU, this was one of my favorite Warren Ellis comics, and I still feel bereft. (I was disappointed that Valiant revived all these Gold Key superheroes but not the Owl / Owlman ... I can appreciate how they might not have wanted to step on DC's toes, but even as a supporting character in Solar it would have been good to see him.)
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 29, 2024 11:02:47 GMT -5
You'd think Jermaal would be like, "okay, cute for a simian I guess, but still four fewer boobs than it takes to get me going."
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 26, 2024 11:31:17 GMT -5
No, the best Bronze Age Superman story is this one: I don't know about that story specifically, but certainly Starlin's work on this series (most though not all of which included Mongul), is one of the peaks for the character in the era. I wish Starlin had done more, as Bronze Age Superman would have been well-suited to his sort of cosmic nonsense.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 26, 2024 11:28:36 GMT -5
Moreover, there were predecessors but they all were clearly dressed as monsters or circus performers. Lee Falk in the Phantom essentially created the superhero-style costume. Welllllll......that would be down to Ray Moore; but, he was adapting a medieval executioner's costume. Similar ones were also used for jailers in Flash Gordon. Flash did a lot to define superhero couture, too. I grant Alex Raymond's influence on the couture; however, his characters weren't strictly speaking superheroes.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:55:44 GMT -5
The Phantom's superhero-stye costume has always felt incongruous to the jungle adventure setting to me. I find the super-heroes who copied The Phantom's original suit to be incongruous in an urban setting. I'm kind of taking the piss. But the Phantom had the look a year before Superman. Moreover, there were predecessors but they all were clearly dressed as monsters or circus performers. Lee Falk in the Phantom essentially created the superhero-style costume.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:52:52 GMT -5
Moore doesn't invoke The Silver Age to mock it or point out what he regards as its stupidity as some writers like to do (with Whatever Happened To)- he does seem to have a genuine reverence for the era, but at the same time, I can't say that he's not tearing the period down either. I guess its the fact that he's running The Silver Age through a meat grinder but doing so with love which tends to throw me. That is how he made his name, for better or worse. This story wasn't a SA pastiche, but Supreme, 1963, and some of his ABC stories were.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:50:26 GMT -5
I think Byrne wanted to do the whole "man out of time" thing, but Cap was spoken for, and opted to bring back Jim Hammond to do the same thing. Why he didn't use The Black Marvel or The Thunderer, I don't know. I'd always assumed it was just Byrne doing his usual "I am writing this character now so nothing written about them in the past is true any more. Only what I write is canon". Like how he suddenly decreed that the Doom Patrol had ever existed before he started writing them. One observation I've made is that Byrne tends to try to return characters to (his view of) their original conception. That works wonderfully well for characters like Superman and the Fantastic Four, who are essentially static, but badly for characters like the Vision and Wonder Girl, whose popularity with readers was based on how they've evolved over time.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:36:59 GMT -5
I felt that while Moore did a good job of evoking the craziness of the Silver Age with Supreme, he never so much as hinted at the heartfelt sincerity that a lot of those stories contained. The corner of the Superman universe dealing with Red Kryptonite and wacky girlfriend shenanigans, sure, but the isolation of a selfless character in a world dependent upon his goodness just seemed too big a concept for Moore to be able to handle. As a result, Supreme just felt more like parody than pastiche to me with the silver age flashback sequences all too often serving to illustrate how ill-equipped the guy was at navigating the modern world. Of course, Supreme came ten years after the Superman reboot so who knows how much of what he did in 1996 would have even been in the back of his mind at the time of the reboot, but even in the 1980s, his Superman just seemed a little more naive than earnest in my opinion ( For the Man Who Has Everything, for instance, even ends with Superman telling Lois that he was a big-headed egotist who thought that the world couldn't get on without him). To put it another way - I don't think Moore could have written a Superman who could have delivered that "I never lie" line in the 1978 film the way Christopher Reeve had. I don't think folks are aware that Moore (and Steve Gerber, and I think Frank Miller) had actually submitted proposals to DC, for revivals of the post-Crisis Superman, and that DC chose Byrne? None of those proposals have ever seen the light of day, to my regret. I agree with you about Supreme, though. As much a Moore fan as I am, I don't think pastiching Silver Age superhero comics is a particular skill of his (as opposed to Morrison, who is brilliant at it), and I never cared for the series. I disagree with you that Moore couldn't write Superman, or thought him naïve. The story arc very much showcased Superman's competence and skill. And his closing words aren't disillusionment at all; they're an ironic commentary on someone's youth as he's passed into a comfortable middle age.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:26:34 GMT -5
I was fond of Byrne's Fantastic Four, but loathed everything about this story. It all seemed to spring from Byrne's belief that Scarlet Witch's marriage to the Vision was unnatural somehow (I think he compared it to someone marrying a toaster). It also undermined Englehart's take on Immortus, to no interesting affect.
And as much as I like Jim Hammond ... in the present day he's simply redundant, as we already have the Vision and Johnny Storm. He ought to have been left in a hole in the ground.
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