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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 8, 2017 20:27:43 GMT -5
This is more about dialog, but I was always amused by Stan's most redundant stock villain line, "I'll destroy him forever!"
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 8, 2017 7:21:53 GMT -5
Incredible Hulk #200-467 is by far my longest unbroken run on a title.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 8, 2017 7:16:46 GMT -5
I hate changing continuity. I feel like the stories I read as a kid are totally invalidated now. Don't feel this way. Frank Miller once commented that fans have every right to have their own personal continuity separate from whatever the publishers are doing at the time. Let's face it, it can be argued that the original Marvel Universe ended around 1991 (after Claremont was ousted and Image was founded, things were never the same again). Certainly modern Marvel has little grasp on any kind of coherent continuity. I like to think that 1994-1997 didn't happen, at least at Marvel, picks up again during the Heroes Return era (1998-2001) and ends once Quesada takes the reigns. The final nail for the Marvel Universe as an actual shared universe that used continuity as a beneficial tool was the end of the Busiek run on Avengers.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 8, 2017 7:07:46 GMT -5
Face Front! is another Lee contribution to the lexicon.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 8, 2017 7:06:23 GMT -5
Since I'm reading The Marvel Age of Comics chronologically, I get a kick out seeing the Marvel language develop over time. I think the funniest aspect to me is when we get to the point where the credits always say something hyperbolic and grandiose about the talents of Lee and Kirby, but playfully mock the contributions of poor old Artie Simek. Some humor challenged readers took this literally and started sending in letters to Marvel demanding that they stop insulting Artie.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 7, 2017 17:18:34 GMT -5
I don't want to get to personal here (particularly since I'm a Byrne fan...at least Byrne circa 1975-1990) but the subject of Byrne's "mean-spirit" got me thinking about his work and my interactions with him over the years. I was at one time a member of the Byrne forum (actually, I was a member of the older forum that predated this) dating from its inception in 2004. For the most part I felt Byrne was usually on point with his opinions when it came to comics, but his increasingly bizarre and contrarian views on creators rights and politics gradually lead to me voicing my disagreement and getting banned. The final straw was his strange irritation at the fact that Kirby's family and Marvel had finally come to an amicable financial agreement. By taking a hard-line "it was work for hire" stance, Byrne seemed to think that he deserved some sort of praise for being objective and pragmatic in the face of overwhelming sentiment, even taking into account the decades long injustice of the Kirby/Marvel situation. The fact that he benefited from a royalty deal that found its roots in the examples of the mistreatment of Siegel/Shuster and Kirby seemed either lost on him or beside the point. I made a comment that it was almost as if Byrne (and a few others on that forum) where suffering from a collective Stockholm Syndrome when it came to the business side of Marvel and DC. Sure, they despised the creative direction of the Quesada era (a sentiment I generally agree with) but that's where it began and ended for them. That "older forum" wouldn't happen to be the Unofficial John Byrne Fan Site, would it? It was run by some Swedish guy. I think his first name was Magnus. Or maybe his last name was Magnusson. Anyway, I was a member of that forum, too. It was the first message board about comics (and maybe even the first message board on any topic) that I regularly frequented. At first, the posters were just fans and it was lot of fun. Then Byrne showed up, and ironically a lot of the fun got drained out. I didn't know about Byrne's reputation for being a difficult person at that point. He seemed to be look to pick fights all over the place. To be fair, a certain portion of the members seemed to be trolls. I get the feeling that some were people who had met him at conventions or elsewhere and now bore a grudge against him. But Byrne couldn't stop himself from taking the bait. Also, Byrne's fire was directed at anyone who disagreed with him on anything. In a thread, I once made the mistake of saying that I preferred Byrne's art on Uncanny X-Men to his art on X-Men: The Hidden Years (which was being published at that time). Byrne joined the thread to tell me that I didn't know how to read comics and his art on Hidden Years obviously reflected improvement. Over time, there were different camps. Some members felt it was okay to voice various opinions. Others became sycophantic regarding their idol. They delivered North Korean style praise of Byrne and apologized profusely about anything Byrne disliked or disagreed with. In spite of that, I still like a lot of Byrne's work. I feel like sometimes distaste for Byrne the person bleeds over into evaluation in Byrne's work as an artist/writer. But it was tiring reading his posts, because he seemed to have a constant desire to get into fights. Yep, that's the one. I remember his touchiness when people dared say that they preferred his art during his original X-Men run. In no way was his figure work and detail an improvement, so I think you were spot on. I do think that he's improved a bit in terms of layout, but it boggles my mind that he can look at his art during, say, that original Savage Land arc and think that it's inferior to his Hidden Years stuff.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 6, 2017 10:09:32 GMT -5
While it's not a superhero comic, the "weird western" The Sixth Gun by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurt was an excellent series. I love that series. I still need to get the spin-off minis collections, but I devoured all of the main series trying to find out what would happen next. I find Bunn's big 2 stuff hit or miss, but this and some of his other creator-owned stuff (Hellheim in particular) is tops. -M I have all the spin-offs but haven't read them yet. I love that setting and hope Bunn returns to it someday soon. I'm far more interested in this than anything he's been doing for Marvel or DC, that's for sure.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 6, 2017 10:01:41 GMT -5
Just like with animation you have the ability to create any shot you want. You also don't have to be held back budget constraints like films and TV shows are. If you can imagine it, then you can put it on a panel for a story.No one will tell you that's too expensive to draw for the production lol Agreed. It amuses me a bit when people claim that movies and TV have finally caught up to comics. Well...yes and no. They can do just about anything given the budget, but their will always be constraints and it STILL costs millions and millions of dollars to recreate one classic Kirby splash page, much less an entire epic!
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 6, 2017 9:56:56 GMT -5
I don't want to get to personal here (particularly since I'm a Byrne fan...at least Byrne circa 1975-1990) but the subject of Byrne's "mean-spirit" got me thinking about his work and my interactions with him over the years. I was at one time a member of the Byrne forum (actually, I was a member of the older forum that predated this) dating from its inception in 2004. For the most part I felt Byrne was usually on point with his opinions when it came to comics, but his increasingly bizarre and contrarian views on creators rights and politics gradually lead to me voicing my disagreement and getting banned. The final straw was his strange irritation at the fact that Kirby's family and Marvel had finally come to an amicable financial agreement.
By taking a hard-line "it was work for hire" stance, Byrne seemed to think that he deserved some sort of praise for being objective and pragmatic in the face of overwhelming sentiment, even taking into account the decades long injustice of the Kirby/Marvel situation. The fact that he benefited from a royalty deal that found its roots in the examples of the mistreatment of Siegel/Shuster and Kirby seemed either lost on him or beside the point. I made a comment that it was almost as if Byrne (and a few others on that forum) where suffering from a collective Stockholm Syndrome when it came to the business side of Marvel and DC. Sure, they despised the creative direction of the Quesada era (a sentiment I generally agree with) but that's where it began and ended for them.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 6, 2017 9:34:24 GMT -5
Legend has it that the Barda Superman issue was Byrne taking a shot at Kirby, rather personally, seeing as how Jack modeled Barda in part after his wife. My theory is that Byrne did this as retaliation for the Destroyer Duck parody that Jack was involved in. Say what you will about Byrne, but he's always been a huge Kirby fan, so I could easily see how such a personal attack by one of his heroes would injure his fanboy pride.
I remember liking Byrne's Superman the first time I read it, but this was long before I grew to appreciate, and even prefer, most aspects of the Pre-Crisis DC Universe.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 4, 2017 17:05:44 GMT -5
I think this was a pretty good adaptation of The Tower of the Elephant with the exception of the depiction of Yara. Smith draws him has a generic looking wizard, bald with gray hair, in a dull green robe. I always envisioned Yara looking more Asian in appearance, sorta of akin to the Mandarin from Marvel Comics. One of the comics I'd love to own one day! This story was adapted three times, up to now: once in CtB, once in SSoC (with art by Buscema and Alcala) and once in DarkHorse's Conan, script by Busiek and art by Nord. I feel that this, the first adaptation, remains the superior one... even if it counts the fewer pages. It's the one that had the most exotic and weird atmosphere, the one that blended action and mysticism the best. Yara did look a little generic as wizards go... But this was CtB #4. He was setting the trend! I liked the way he looked a bit old, too. Oh I still enjoyed it. It's fascinating how raw Smith was at this point, particularly looking at what he'd become as an artist. I think trying to ape Kirby held him back. I've seen some of his last Conan issues and he was already looking like classic BWS toward the end of his run. That said, the cover is kind of hilarious. At least they resisted the urge to include a damsel in distress in the actual story.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 4, 2017 16:59:46 GMT -5
I flat out hated Knightfall. Too much of it required Batman and others to be complete morons. Batman getting hit from all sides by a directed chaos is one thing; Batman never calling for help or others intervening without invitation made no sense. The novelization fixed one of my pet peeves, with Gordon, when tells Robin that he knows that Azrael is the new Batman, not the original. In the comic, he's clueless. So Gordon doesn't recognize a different voice? Some detective! Any story that requires intelligent characters to become dumber than Homer Simpson should be torn up, in my opinion. Identity Crisis fits into that. I hate that story with a burning passion of a thousand suns. One, it sacrifices a darn good character to set off a violent and unsatisfying story. As a mystery, it's pretty weak. It also has characters acting so far out of the norm as to be insulting and cherry picking moments, taken out of context, to justify things was even more insulting. Civil War was the same way. The murder of Sue Dibny just to act as a spark to the story was pointless; the retro-rape of the character was reprehensible. It caused me to sever ties with DC and most modern comics from DC and Marvel. Both companies went out of their way to destroy happy couples, because they didn't think readers responded to them. If the romance was popular enough to bring the characters together, why would marriage destroy that? Just more cynical bad writing from mediocre writers and editors who never created anything of their own; just picked over the carcass of Kirby and others. Getting down to it, what I truly hate is the dumbing down of and transformation of heroes into more violent and amoral psychopaths. It's like writers were afraid of a virtuous hero, because they exposed the writer's own moral shortcomings. You can present a moral person who has problems (Spider-Man and the better Superman tales). Not everyone needs to be the Punisher and Batman shouldn't read like a script for a Death Wish movie. I've never read all of Knightfall, but the main problem I had with it is that it was basically a direct response to the success of the Death of Superman story-line. "Hey kids, if you loved when we killed Superman, you'll really love when we maim the Bat!" So cynical and pandering. I realize that their job was to sell comics, but the early 90's really were shameless. I agree with your points about creators and their cynical bad writing from the 90's till now. It's kind of amusing when you see these modern creators and they all seem to be your typical affable, sedentary, friendly geek-nerd types (like most of us I'd wager) yet the guys who actually had to fight in WWII, had to start working at the age of 10, etc, (like Kirby, Ditko, Lee and so on) seemed to always have a more idealistic take on heroes. I guess when you've experienced real horror and hardship you want to go in the opposite direction thematically.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 4, 2017 3:00:03 GMT -5
I've always loved the history and world-building aspects of what became the Marvel Universe. Warts and all. It's fascinating watching a shared universe develop with no real plan and later creators trying to make it all fit together in things like The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 3, 2017 9:15:39 GMT -5
How about some more hate? 1. Bob Kane's treatment and dismissal of Bill Finger. 2. The Seduction of the Innocent's baseless attack on comics. 3. Jack Kirby's lack of business acumen (that man deserved to have died a millionaire). 4. The legacy of Secret Wars I & II as well as Crisis. I actually like Crisis, think Secret Wars I was mindless fun, hated Secret Wars II, but those ushered in the event era in comics.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Sept 2, 2017 16:53:13 GMT -5
This is an easy one, but I can't stand Deadpool in the comics or any of his mind-numbingly annoying spin-off series. Gwenpool might be the most annoying to me. It still chaps my behind that I liked the Deadpool movie as much as I did. Ugh!
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