|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 17:27:25 GMT -5
Astro City dominates this category. Good call on remembering Astro City, but I would argue that it's a little different insofar as the replacement of certain heroes with newer, younger versions is necessitated by the fact that the series is set in real time. That's not the case for Marvel and DC comic characters, so it's not really a fair comparison. Also it's not fair because Astro City does it only for story reasons, not as a "temporary replacement hero" to goose crumpling sales.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 16:54:28 GMT -5
Astro City dominates this category. We’ve got the mother-daughter team of Hummingbird I and II. Then there’s Quarrel II, whose father was a criminal version. The second Jack-in-the-Box handed the suit over to a Shiloh Norman-esque street kid in order to focus on his family. Then there are the multiple Cleopatras and N-Forcers and Avatars of Music. But the definitive example is Altar Boy replacing the dying Confessor.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 13:00:09 GMT -5
You're all wrong. Music reached perfection in 1969 with The Beatles' Abbey Road. Cei-U! I summon Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam! Not that we should be having this contest at all, let alone on this thread...
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 11:29:32 GMT -5
Gale Allen and the Girl Squadron from Planet Comics #28 (January 1944, Fiction House). Art by Fran Hopper. Her expression looks more like "Come hither, boy" than "This is hopeless."
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 8:50:45 GMT -5
One of my collection projects is to show how comic books are made. To that end, I bought Patrick Gleason's pencils from page 2 of Batman and Robin #34 (2014)... ... as well as Mick Gray's ink version of the same page. Here is the final published version.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 8:43:16 GMT -5
Is it time to add Endgame to the list? Yes, and J.K. Rowling employs a very similar device (plot device, that is, though there's also a physical device called the Time Turner) in both Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The nerd pundits at Red Letter Media had speculated last summer that the film The Rise of Skywalker would also use time travel to revisit famous scenes from Star Wars films gone by, but that turned out not to be the case. Steven Moffat's brilliant 2011 Doctor Who episode "Let's Kill Hitler" tackles the famed eponymous thought exercise. Not only does the interference of the heroes accidentally save Hitler from an assassination, but they also discover in the process that someone else is employing the "go back in time and assassinate a helpless person" strategy on the Doctor himself.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 8:17:42 GMT -5
Issue #42 (June 2013)The Story: Bast resumes her role as Keris and begins broadcasting disinformation about what went down over the last few issues. Some sort of insurgency has chosen this moment to makes its presence known, and they attack everything in sight, including Keris’ balcony on which the medical shuttle is resting, with Kovar, Liana, and Serezha still inside. My Two Cents: Another 16 page issue. I’m starting to think that the other shoe may be dropping for Lady Bast. She seems to be the most powerful Ovanan left standing, with both shapechanging and psychic powers. Now that she’s in control of the ship’s communications network too, she’s starting to remind everyone about age-old grudges regarding her exterminated royal house. Minetti thinks Liana is too powerful to bring back to Earth. Picking up the joke from last issue, he calls her "the red button,” referring to her hair. But if she doesn’t return to Earth, would she be safe here in the care of powered Bast and unpowered Seren? Is it a coincidence that Kovar’s shuttle (containing Liana and Kovar) just came under fire? He’s one of the few people who could stand up to Bast if she made a power play. Speaking of Minetti, he’s exclusively called “Tony” in this issue, which confused me for a while; had I forgotten about a “Tony” in the mix? He and Brent are quite the potty mouths now, letting fly the “F word” multiple times. In her Editorial, Doran says that she’s taking sixty days off to do some other work before getting right back on the Distant Soil train. But as of January 2020, issue #43 has not seen publication.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2020 1:14:26 GMT -5
Mike Esposito has a sideline, perhaps now a main line, of recreating classic covers... Esposito died back in 2010. Duly noted. Had a sideline then. I've seen several recreations from him, some in color.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 22:58:33 GMT -5
Issue #41 (June 2013)The Story: The mindstorm ends as Liana and Jason collapse to the floor amidst the bodies of the slain Hierarchy. The scattered heroes begin to reunite. Serezha (the Russian author, remember him?) flies a shuttle to pick up our heroes from the coronation hall and take them back to Keris’ control room, where Dunstan is knee deep in Ovanan corpses. Minetti’s off-panel reunion with Corrine is apparently quite amorous, judging by the reactions of the other characters. That’s about all that happens in this short (17 page) issue. My Two Cents: A very chatty issue, with everybody talking about the implications of last issue’s massacre, and lots of cracking of jokes. One long joke in particular involves Ovanans using a red button for windshield wipers instead of nuclear missile launches. With Seren still incapacitated from Liana’s mental Death Blossom, Kovar takes charge, commanding the humans to secure the area with a careful search for any potential foes.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 22:49:23 GMT -5
Can I assume that the best introduction to the New Mutants would be the Epic Collection, which collects the Karma story from Marvel Team-Up, the Graphic Novel and the early issues of the series amongst others? Yes. The first year had some stinkers like the Team America team-up. The best issues were about #13-34, the late Buscema and Sienkiewicz era, plus the two big Art Adams issues (New Mutants Special Edition #1 and X-Men Annual #9). However, those don't make as much sense without having read the first twelve issues. So the Epic Collection is a reasonable place to start, but a terrible place to stop since it lacks the most memorable stories.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 22:43:38 GMT -5
In the Claremont documentary, Liefeld complains about late Claremont X-Men stories (before he was kicked off the first time) being too talking and lacking in action. At least he's consistent in thinking that the terrible 90s Marvel and Image comics were the sweet spot. Deluded, but consistent.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 16:14:16 GMT -5
Good god, that Kimmel clip. I'm just going to go kill myself now. Please don't! We need you around to offset these other people, who are probably the same ones who also cannot name any country on the map, even their own.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 14:06:01 GMT -5
Periodical sales are not coming back. Video is too ubiquitous and provides an experience which is both more comprehensive (image and words, AND motion and sound) and easier to consume. CNN has been killing Time and Newsweek and daily papers for thirty years. Cartoon Network has been killing comic books in the same way. Some people cannot name a single book. Let that sink in.
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 11:58:18 GMT -5
I'm not a fan of tpb or collected editions. I just throw them around and don't really value them. It feels like a glorified reprint. There I said it. which is ironic because periodicals are meant to be disposable, read and thrown away, while books are meant to be a more permanent format for works to endure in. It makes a sort of sense, inasmuch as the old periodicals are now rare because so many were disposed as intended, making the few remaining copies valuable to collectors. Thus we preserve our new periodicals in hopes that everyone else will throw theirs away and make ours valuable. Even though everyone now buying them engages in this protective behavior, and indeed you now get comic books bagged and boarded from the get-go, ensuring that they will all be protected and thus fail to become more valuable. Ironies mount!
|
|
|
Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 8:24:34 GMT -5
Rewatched Steven Spielberg's The Terminal last week. Fun little comedy about a plucky underdog (Tom Hanks) stuck in an airport by stupid laws. His nemesis, played by Stanley Tucci, was a needlessly sadistic Homeland Security supervisor who was stuck in the airport in a different sense. His love interest (Catherine Zeta-Jones) was written in a way that made me cheer when they didn't end up together, though I don't think that was the intent. Good John Williams music. A minor role was played by a young, scrawny Diego Luna, who went on to play a more heart-thobbing Cassian Andor in Star Wars: Rogue One more recently.
|
|