|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 20, 2014 12:07:09 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 20, 2014 10:26:52 GMT -5
All he needs is a red and green striped sweater and a glove with razor blades welded to the fingers.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 19, 2014 0:02:10 GMT -5
I checked out my local Wal-Mart tonight on the way home from the gym, and found the trades in the book section, which looked like a war zone. No copies of the Avengers, 1 copy of Captain America, and a handful each of GotG and Spidey. I'd say about half the of remaining copies had visible creases in the covers, wear marks, or tiny rips in the edges. I managed to find relatively clean copies of Cap and Spidey. Still, not bad picking up two pretty good trades for only $10.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 18, 2014 23:58:18 GMT -5
I tried Marvel Unlimited using the 99c promotion they ran for July/August, and was a bit disappointed. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that I own a Kindle Fire HD. There isn't a Marvel Unlimited app available on the Kindle store, and when I tried to sideload the Android version it failed to run. I tried tracking down an older version that did run, but I was less than impressed by the reading experience. It was disappointing too, because I was considering ditching all of my Marvel books for a MU subscription, figuring that I could keep up with most current comics with a roughly six-month lag. If there was an arc or run that I particularly enjoyed, I could buy the collected edition and it would still be cheaper than if I had bought all those books as floppies.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 18, 2014 23:50:42 GMT -5
I'm actually pretty flexible when it comes to artists. As long as the story is good and the art is functional (i.e., doesn't hinder the storytelling or make things confusing), I can stand art by just about anyone. I'm pretty forgiving of stylistic idiosyncrasies, and I'm willing to give most artists a chance to let them grow on me. In fact, I will almost never say an artist sucks or is terrible, just that their style isn't really to my liking. Now that being said, I mentioned John Romita Jr as my "lukewarm" pick mostly based on not really getting the appeal. Most artists, even the ones whose style is not to my liking, I at least get the appeal. But I do not get the appeal of JR Jr. I've even tried to like him, but it just doesn't click for me.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 14, 2014 9:17:43 GMT -5
Anyone catch this week's The Walking Dead? Fascinating development with the zombies. I had a feeling they might be doing something like this to shake things up. Course, it could be a red herring too... still, I'm interested to see where they take this.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 13, 2014 11:02:18 GMT -5
My vote would be for John Romita Jr. He has a very distinctive style, and a lot of people seem to like him, but I just can't get into his art. Something about the way he draws faces makes them look really odd to me, among other quirks. I second this. I liked his early work at Marvel on Iron Man and Amazing Spider-Man, but the stuff he's put out in the past decade definitely is not my cup of tea. My first thought when I saw this topic was Chris Bachalo. There are a lot of people who love him, but from the first moment I saw his work on Generation X, I could not get into it. It works with certain characters or types of books (I think he would do a great Dr. Strange book, and his style would work on a book like Fables), but to put him on more mainstream properties like Uncanny X-Men just makes me scratch my head. Bachalo's work in Generation X actually went through a lot of changes, from what I can remember, and none of it looked like the stuff he does nowadays. I think in Gen. X he was just starting to transition into more of a manga/anime look, which he doesn't even employ anymore. I enjoyed Generation X, but there were some things about the art work and page design that wasn't my cup of tea -- like all the computer-generated X symbols that they would use to fill in all the white space between panels. Funny thing about Bachalo, I initially didn't like his current style when I came across it in Wolverine and the X-Men. But after a while, I got used to it and started to appreciate it. Sure, it's quirky, but it was a good fit for the tone of that book. I think that's they key thing for me -- I'm willing to give most artists a chance if they can do work on a book that fits their quirks. Right now, Javier Pulido's work on She-Hulk seems to be pretty polarizing, but I think it fits the book perfectly.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 12, 2014 21:24:46 GMT -5
My vote would be for John Romita Jr. He has a very distinctive style, and a lot of people seem to like him, but I just can't get into his art. Something about the way he draws faces makes them look really odd to me, among other quirks.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 12, 2014 19:07:27 GMT -5
You could have just stopped watching. I did. I stopped with season 7. I finished the show on DVD after they ended it. As dragged out as it was, I still wanted to see how they handled Clark embracing the Superman identity.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 12, 2014 16:47:42 GMT -5
in essentially giving us Superman in season 8-10, it showed that the showrunners no longer believed in their original premise -- that the formative years of Clark Kent could make for good storiesThat's a bit unfair. The original premise of the show aged out. Clark was 15 when the show started and 25 when it ended. And the actor was several years older than that. Would you have had Clark stay in high school the whole time? M*A*S*H* (mostly) pulled it off, but that was the exception. I would have ended it sooner. Like I said, 5-6 seasons maybe. I think it would have made for a more interesting story to show his story with some distance from the Superman years.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 12, 2014 10:12:12 GMT -5
Gotham doesn't need to be a great Bat-verse show or even a good one to be a television success. I think we're really making two different points. From a television executive's perspective, you are absolutely right -- so long as people tune in and they have enough ratings to go for a few seasons, make some DVD and other merchandising sales, they are happy. By this measure, Smallville was absolutely a smashing success. I speak more from the perspective of what I as a fan would personally like to see from such shows. Now don't get me wrong -- even with its flaws I enjoyed Smallville. But when all was said and done, looking at the whole of the experience, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed in some ways. I would have liked to see it end sooner -- maybe 5 seasons. I would have preferred it if the showrunners had not dragged out the process of Clark embracing his destiny. We all knew he had to get there at some point, but by season 6 when Clark is still conflicted about his father and his destiny, it just started to get old and made the network look like they are trying to milk their cash cow for all they could. Also, in essentially giving us Superman in season 8-10, it showed that the showrunners no longer believed in their original premise -- that the formative years of Clark Kent could make for good stories. My fear is that Gotham will suffer from that behavior as well. Maybe they will get a few good seasons out of it, and then realize that child Bruce Wayne and his rogues before they became his rogues are running out of steam. At that point, they should just end it. But knowing TV execs, they will probably try to keep the thing going by giving us Batman without Batman, if you get my drift.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 12, 2014 0:08:17 GMT -5
I heard about some advance reviews of Gotham, and they were pretty disappointing. Now that Smallville has run its course, I have a lot of reservations about prequel shows. Let's be honest -- origin stories, as essential as they are, are only interesting because of the eventual payoff of seeing the main character become the hero. If they are going to be told, they need to hit the main points while being brief enough to get on with what the audience really wants to see. I think this was the fatal flaw of Smallville. There's only so many seasons where you can show Clark stumbling over his powers and figuring out his destiny. After a while, the audience gets restless and they want to see him do his thing as Superman. By the later seasons, the producers seem to have resigned themselves to that fact, and gave us a show that was pretty much Superman in everything but name only -- Clark had a costume, a secret identity, worked at the Daily Planet, was dating Lois Lane, and fighting full-on Superman villains like Zod, Doomsday, and Darkseid. And yet Smallville managed to run 10 seasons, a success by any network standard let alone a network like the CW that changes it's line-up as often as I seem to change socks except for Smallville and Supernatural. If Gotham ran half that long, it's network would be ecstatic because that means it had hit the magic syndication number and generates extra revenue beyond advertising and DVD sales. -M Smallville managed to last that long because there was some built-in fanbase due to being a Superman adaptation, and it was on the CW network during an era where it had few, if any, reliable ratings generators. They also strung fans along for a number of seasons with indications that they were actually moving Clark along towards his superhero destiny. By seasons 5-7, many longtime viewers figured out that the network was just spinning its wheels, which coincided with the lowest ratings of the show. This was also the era when the original showrunners left the show, as well as a good chunk of the original cast. Seasons 8-10 moved the show to Metropolis and the Superman-in-everything-but-name-only era. The ratings experiences an uptick, enough to convince the CW to keep milking the cow for another couple of seasons. I think by this time they knew they couldn't keep up the pretense of it being a prequel, and figured that the only way they could justify keeping the show on the air was by basically giving them proto-Superman.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 11, 2014 23:18:36 GMT -5
I heard about some advance reviews of Gotham, and they were pretty disappointing. Now that Smallville has run its course, I have a lot of reservations about prequel shows. Let's be honest -- origin stories, as essential as they are, are only interesting because of the eventual payoff of seeing the main character become the hero. If they are going to be told, they need to hit the main points while being brief enough to get on with what the audience really wants to see.
I think this was the fatal flaw of Smallville. There's only so many seasons where you can show Clark stumbling over his powers and figuring out his destiny. After a while, the audience gets restless and they want to see him do his thing as Superman. By the later seasons, the producers seem to have resigned themselves to that fact, and gave us a show that was pretty much Superman in everything but name only -- Clark had a costume, a secret identity, worked at the Daily Planet, was dating Lois Lane, and fighting full-on Superman villains like Zod, Doomsday, and Darkseid.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 11, 2014 23:07:12 GMT -5
The Big Two seem to have settled on a pattern of exploiting spikes in sales to make their money -- reboots, new #1s, character deaths, events, etc. And every time sales go back to what they were, sometimes worse. To me that just seems like a recipe for long-term failure. They are acclimating their buyers to only pay attention when something sensationalized happens. After a certain point in time, the same tricks just aren't going to work anymore as readers become more jaded. They will be forced to come up with something more sensational to grab the audience. They must be taking their cues from drug dealers.
|
|
|
Post by Randle-El on Aug 11, 2014 23:00:45 GMT -5
I have a couple of issues of Uncanny X-Men that were signed by John Romita Jr. and Jim Lee. No convention story here. I was buying back issues to fill in my run, and these came in a few lots that I purchased. I didn't even know they were signed -- the seller didn't mention anything and I didn't know until I started leafing through the books and discovered the signatures. I got them cheap too... I think less than a dollar per issue. Since I didn't witness the signatures first-hand, there's no way to know if they are the genuine thing. But the JR Jr looks like his signature, and I got Eddy Choi (Jim Lee's assistant) to take a look at a scan of the books and he said that they looked real to him.
|
|