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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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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:00:40 GMT -5
I'm surprised, especially after the death of Christopher with the estate being handled by younger generations that no comics set in Middle Earth have been made. There was the one adaptation of the Hobbit by Dixon and Wentzel in the 90s by Eclipse that has essentially been kept in print as a trade since the LOTR movies were released, and the one attempt at a photocomic using stills from the Bakshi animated movie done by Warren, but no proper adaptations of Frodo, Aragorn and such, and no tales told form other ages of Middle Earth. There was a comic adaptation of the Bakshi cartoon, published in Europe but never translated into English. LotR ComicAnother that I am surprised we haven't seen more of is Kim Newman. His Anno Dracula got a comic tie-in, from Titan; but, his Diogenes Club stories are perfect for a comic book series, not to mention the Drearcliff Grange stories or his in-world fictional character, Dr Shade...or his Derek Leech character.....or The Angels of Musick......or his Moriarty and Col Sebastian Moran consulting criminal stories (mirror pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, using his enemies)...or...you get the idea. He is an old friend of Neil Gaiman, which makes it all the more surprising, as he references comics, as well as movies, tv and literature (high and low) in his works. Would have been perfect for Vertigo. I've for years wanted to see a Dr Shade comic. Not only is he Newman's most prominent superhero-type character (there are many others who are alluded to or receive cameos), but there are several different versions and even generations of characters who have borne the name; you could practically craft an anthology series, with different eras and versions all being done in different styles.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:24:37 GMT -5
(...) I'd love to see Marlowe, Sam Spade and The Continental Op if they were well done. I kid you not, as soon as I saw the heading for this thread, Hammett's Continental Op was one of the first that came to mind. A few years ago when I was reading Selina's Big Score, it occurred to me that it would have been so cool if Darwyn Cooke had done adaptations of the Continental Op stories. I've thought the Op was a natural. He's not a very typical action hero, but the name is catchy, and one short story (at least) per issue would last for quite a while, and of course two novels when it's time for continued narratives. And although I didn't really like either the Jirel of Joiry or Northwest Smith stories - I found them excessively dark and bleak - I'm also a bit surprised that they were never adapted to comics, esp. by Warren for Creepy or Eerie, with someone like Esteban Maroto or Gonzalo Mayo doing the art.
I'm pleased that Jirel of Joiry is finally going to be a comic!
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:18:53 GMT -5
It feltlike I was the sole audience for this; certainly in my locale, though I have seen signs of a few other fans of it.
It was right up my alley as well. It has been annotated in depth online by various folks.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:15:21 GMT -5
On the Scorpion, Chaykin was always a interesting stylist, both in how he drew and how he told a story. I always felt that the Scorpion was one of the Atlas titles that could've found a loyal audience if the company hung on since, while derivative of the Shadow, it didn't feel as copycat as a lot of the other books.
One final note: at one point Alex Toth was slated to take over the comic, and apparently the publishers (or Chaykin) disapproved of his approach, instead turning him into a blandly generic contemporary costumed superhero. The Toth story was reworked as The Vanguard. This is one of my all-time favorite Toth stories and I wish he'd done more.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:08:46 GMT -5
Millennium sucked, by most standards you can imagine and the Manhunter spin-off comic was at its best for the first 4 issues, then started a slow downhill trajectory. I liked it, for the most part; but, I always had the feeling that the subsequent stories weren't as good as that initial battle, with Dumas, and Ostrander never really got it back to that level. Once Doug Rice departed, the art was less interesting, which was the main reason I was hanging on. Ostrander resorted to reviving Dumas, for the finale, then Shaw became cannon fodder for Eclipso; but, like most of the others, got better.
I rather liked Mark Shaw as the Privateer (despite the nonsensical eyepatch). I was not a fan of this era of Englehart's writing unfortunately. The only Millennium crossover I liked at all was the All-Star Squadron, since who the Manhunters were, was fairly obvious, and I had no problem tying together the two heroes to bear the name.
Also, as documented by Bob Beerbohm, retailers were actually hoarding Kirby's and Neal Adams' books, so DC thought they were selling less than they actually were. We can only imagine how comics history might have been different without this fraud.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:02:34 GMT -5
Sapiens Imperium by Sam Timel,Jorge Miguel Nicely done large-size translation of a French series, the first volume in an ongoing sci-fi epic. While the characterisation isn't the deepest, the creators play adeptly with the standard tropes. A very readable book and the ongoing series ought to be entertaining.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 6, 2024 11:50:13 GMT -5
One of my favorite books and I consider it a failure of American fandom that it is not continually in print:
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 5, 2024 10:09:23 GMT -5
The color Fortunes, in Rampaging Hulk/Hulk Magazine play up their relationship well, especially after she learns his real name is Davey Fortunoff. I remain incensed that Marvel has refused to reprint this material, even in the collection of of the Dominic Fortune miniseries, giving us pages of non-Chaykin dross instead.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 5, 2024 10:07:24 GMT -5
I also didn't care for Curt Swan in the 60s and 70s. I started appreciating him later and enjoyed his return in the 90s to Superman. But I realized it wasn't Swan I thought boring, it was the Superman books from then. And I still find them boring. The Superman comics of the era had their issues, certainly. A lot of the problem with Swan was that he needed an inker who would be sensitive enough to preserve his anatomy and character work, but lend a gloss to make the whole package more dynamic. He looked so gorgeous under Murphy Anderson, John Byrne, and George Perez.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 4, 2024 12:53:36 GMT -5
Kingdom Come. Batman Beyond. Christian Bale's Batman. O'Neil and Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow run. I'm with you on Kingdom Come. I love it for reasons external to the comic...but I find it almost unreadable. I like the art and the design work, and don't mind the story, but overall it's just a barely above-average 'event' comic. (also, I know it was supposedly stolen from Moore's proposal, but always considered the plot comparison overrated ... as opposed to Armageddon 2001 which was hands-down the same plot.) I've never gotten the love for Morrison's JLA. It isn't bad; but it feels like cookie cutter superhero plots, to me. Same for his All-Star Superman; I like it well enough, mostly because it reads like recycled Elliot Maggin. All-Star Superman has its moments, but also a lot of moments that fall completely flat for me. Still, I appreciate the scope and grandeur of the story and it would be a candidate for a 'one Superman comic' to give someone (I did in fact buy it for my brother-in-law). I pulled out my DVD Batman 66 set and watched a few episodes. Man, It was hard to sit through. I loved the series as a child, and having rewatched it as an adult ... it didn't bother me but I think the humor has dated badly. I will give the series props for one thing though: Batman is more comics-accurate than any other cinematic version. He's solemn but not humorless, and he actually is a brilliant detective (he just lives in a very silly universe). I'd agree about the X-Men to an extent: I enjoyed the Claremont/Cockrum and Claremont/Byrne runs but never rated them in the top rank of Marvel comics back then: MoKF, the Englehart Dr. Strange, most of Gerber's stuff, ToD, Killraven, and others were much higher quality series to me at the time and I probably feel even more strongly about it now. They were entertaining but at the same time fairly standard Marvel superhero stories. I doubt I would have read X-Men at all if I hadn't liked the artwork so much, and did in fact bail after Cockrum's second stint on the book ended, just as I gave up on the Avengers after Perez left (but then forgot to come back when he returned for a short time a couple years later). The Morrison JLA passed me by when it was new but I did try to go back and look at it a few years later, after I had gotten to know and like Morrison's independent work. I found it pretty much unreadable: the regular JLA characters were written as god-like heroes (deliberately so, to give Morrison his due), while the only two characters I was really interested in, Orion and Barda, were mostly used as fall-guys to show how much more heroic and morally superior the mortal superheroes were to the New Genesis immortals. I suspect Morrison wrote this before he had read Kirby's New Gods material closely or given it much thought, because in later years he showed a pretty good appreciation of it in interviews (though not in any of his own comics featuring those characters, sadly). So yeah, I'd agree about the Morrison JLA too. I collected X-Men from the first Cockrum through the end of the Paul Smith run. It's rather hard to rate. I agree with you that at the time, I was far more interested in the more experimental titles. On the other hand, Cockrum's importation of soap opera tropes and female-focused storytelling made it one of the better mainstream, non-experimental titles out there, and I thoroughly enjoyed it at the time. It's not aged so well, but partially because so many other writers have learned from it. I was a fan of Morrison from their early days (literally, Gideon Stargrave in Near Myths), but I hated their run on JLA. I found it completely tedious. I also think it was bad for their writing, and almost everything they produced after that had the 'big screen,' less humanistic, style that didn't appeal (sometimes I'd catch glimpses of the more humanistic style in 7 Soldiers or other projects, but fewer and farther between).
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 4, 2024 12:27:53 GMT -5
What I find amusing about both stories, is that Ruby does more intelligent research and detective work than Moro, but Moro turns out to be right purely by accident.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 4, 2024 12:24:20 GMT -5
I’m not surprised at the roster of talent. They were paying much more than the big two. It also appears that the major companies didn’t hold much of a grudge afterwards, the artists were given work. Why not? Whether or not the big two purposefully squelched Atlas, it seemed to prove that--at the time anyway--readers bought the characters, not the creators. Most of the Atlas titles were mediocre, and the 'name' creators only did brief appearances. They had other problems as well ... they overextended, and Marvel (more than DC) started blitzing the newsstands with reprint titles, partially to crowd out Atlas. At one point I owned 80-90% of their titles (for some reason I never came across their b&w magazines), I think all I've kept are the Chaykin issues of Scorpion and a couple with short Toth strips.
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