|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 8, 2014 5:25:38 GMT -5
To avoid duplicate content, I'm deleting my initial posts here.
|
|
|
|
Post by coke & comics on May 8, 2014 7:41:36 GMT -5
I'm intrigued. I'll have to look at in in more detail.
I would like to make one of my own. I have my own ranking data (on a 6 point scale) for some 500+ issues of Spider-Man, including Amazing up to 166.
I suspect you like O'Neil's run more than I do, but I am not yet there in my rankings and am on extended break from my Spider-Man ranking project. I could probably extract the ASM data from my list and try to make a similar picture to see how they line up. I have an excel spreadsheet and have made the occasional graph, though yours is much prettier than anything I have produced. Data visualization has always been a weakness of mine.
|
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 8, 2014 12:50:04 GMT -5
I'm intrigued. I'll have to look at in in more detail. I would like to make one of my own. I have my own ranking data (on a 6 point scale) for some 500+ issues of Spider-Man, including Amazing up to 166. I suspect you like O'Neil's run more than I do, but I am not yet there in my rankings and am on extended break from my Spider-Man ranking project. I could probably extract the ASM data from my list and try to make a similar picture to see how they line up. I have an excel spreadsheet and have made the occasional graph, though yours is much prettier than anything I have produced. Data visualization has always been a weakness of mine. I should clarify that these ratings are done on a 10 point scale. O'Neil, with Romita, was responsible for some of the best Spider-Man comics, up to that point in time. I'm aware that's not the common assessment, among spider-fans, but they stood out (from my POV) when I was 10, and the still hold strong 40 years later. |
|
|
|
Post by Ish Kabbible on May 8, 2014 13:08:24 GMT -5
I'm intrigued. I'll have to look at in in more detail. I would like to make one of my own. I have my own ranking data (on a 6 point scale) for some 500+ issues of Spider-Man, including Amazing up to 166. I suspect you like O'Neil's run more than I do, but I am not yet there in my rankings and am on extended break from my Spider-Man ranking project. I could probably extract the ASM data from my list and try to make a similar picture to see how they line up. I have an excel spreadsheet and have made the occasional graph, though yours is much prettier than anything I have produced. Data visualization has always been a weakness of mine. I should clarify that these ratings are done on a 10 point scale. O'Neil, with Romita, was responsible for some of the best Spider-Man comics, up to that point in time. I'm aware that's not the common assessment, among spider-fans, but they stood out (from my POV) when I was 10, and the still hold strong 40 years later. Well,anything we watched or read when young and impressionable will always be remebered fondly. But according to your grades,Spidey doesn't seem to be a favorite of yours with very few books braking above 5 out of 10 and nothing above 6 |
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on May 8, 2014 13:35:44 GMT -5
On a 10-point scale, nothing from the Ditko days ever got above a 5.5 from you.
We can all digest that critical nugget for a while before commenting.
|
|
|
|
Post by Slam_Bradley on May 8, 2014 13:54:35 GMT -5
On a 10-point scale, nothing from the Ditko days ever got above a 5.5 from you. We can all digest that critical nugget for a while before commenting. I just noticed that. Nothing over a 6 in the history of the book. This make me wonder why you would read that many issues of a book you were that ambivalent about . |
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 8, 2014 15:25:04 GMT -5
But according to your grades,Spidey doesn't seem to be a favorite of yours with very few books braking above 5 out of 10 and nothing above 6 Between O'Neil and DeFalco, Stern's run hovers around the 6.5 - 7 range. I skipped the names of this creative team, precisely because of a lack of space there. On a 10-point scale, nothing from the Ditko days ever got above a 5.5 from you. True, you can fault Stan "The Man" for that. His scripts penalize Ditko's work by about -0,5 This make me wonder why you would read that many issues of a book you were that ambivalent about . Because I enjoy those comics more than the ratings reflect. I find a distinction between what I like and what I believe to be good. I read those comic when I was either a kid or a teen, that, and the fact that Spider-Man is my favorite character, makes me inclined to read these. I don't usually read comics with low ratings, but I always wanted to read everything in order. Now that I'm up to date, I have all those comics labeled, most of them with a label that says, "never again". |
|
sacorn
Junior Member
Posts: 53 
|
Post by sacorn on May 8, 2014 16:34:04 GMT -5
Wow, you really aren't that keen on the early stuff, rating pretty close to 3.5/10 for the first 10 issues! That seems pretty Amazing (excuse the pun) to me, and almost makes the rating system pointless. Each to their own though  |
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 8, 2014 18:29:28 GMT -5
Wow, you really aren't that keen on the early stuff, rating pretty close to 3.5/10 for the first 10 issues! That seems pretty Amazing (excuse the pun) to me, and almost makes the rating system pointless. Each to their own though Saying that they started at the top with Amazing Fantasy #15 (like many people do) makes no much sense. There are some artists, whose opera prima represent the best they had in them, but apart from that, what usually happens is that there's a learning curve. Both Lee and Ditko were seasoned professionals by that time, but nonetheless, you can clearly see how they improve over the course of their first two years together. Bottom line, both the scripts and the art of those first issues was really weak. In any case, even if I were wrong, that wouldn't make the rating system itself, pointless, it would just reveal the data contained therein to be misplaced. |
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 9, 2014 2:55:51 GMT -5
Well the data is meaningless without context. What does a 1 mean? A 2? etc. Is it out of 10 or 7 since the chart only goes to 7? Without that kind of context, these are just colored lines on a graph the correspond to numbers without meaning. -M I already said it's out of 10, trimming charts when there's no data past a certain point, is common. I get the impression you're not very familiar with charts. |
|
|
|
Post by Ish Kabbible on May 9, 2014 11:19:43 GMT -5
I interpreted the chart as saying a 5 rating is half of being perfectly great or rather its exactly mediocre.
Now I'm looking at those Lee/Ditko ratings.When those comics came out , they were amongst the very best of what was currently on the newstands-if not the best.Even all these decades later to give them a mediocre or below rating
totaltly ignores the context when they appeared,the level of characterization they contained,the quality of the art,the introduction of one of the best rogues galleries in comics and the number of iconic sequences.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But the ratings on those issues stopped me cold
|
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 9, 2014 14:26:22 GMT -5
If by unfamiliar with charts you mean I taught math and statistics classes dealing with lots of charts and presenting of statistics and your chart would have gotten a failing grade because it does not properly present what the info on it means or provide relevancy for the data within it, and having prepared charts for articles that got published professionally, then sure I am unfamiliar with charts. Data is irrelevant without context in its presentation, and samples of the size you are preparing are generally statistically irrelevant (as my friend a statistician for the CDC always points out to me when I show his small sample sizes of data). A scale of 1-10 has no meaning unless you define what that means. It has no context. Even if its out of ten, what does a comic have to have to earn a 10? If it earns a 6.2, what does that mean? What is the baseline you are measuring it all against? What are the factors that go into getting it a grade? Not of that is presented here. All that is presented is a line on a chart representing a number. You give anyone reading the chart nothing to define what the number means, so it is essentially a meaningless chart until you do. If its a sales chart, and 6 represents tens of thousands of copies sold, then I know what the six means. Otherwise it;s just a six. If it's quality being measured, until you define what your standards of quality are and what a book has to have to earn a 6.2 as opposed to a 6.4 or a 7.3 or whatever, then they are just meaningless numbers on the side of a bar graph. By unfamiliar, I meant that you seemed to have problems understanding that, even though you don't have the 8, 9 and 10 markers on the y axis, if the accompanying text specifies that it goes up all the way to 10, the data has to be interpreted as varying from 0 to 10. And yes, I also deleted "0" for aesthetic purposes. Notice I said "seemed" at the beginning of the paragraph, now I just think you knew perfectly well what the graphic represents, but were being dishonest about it. |
|
|
|
Post by Ozymandias on May 9, 2014 17:02:43 GMT -5
I interpreted the chart as saying a 5 rating is half of being perfectly great or rather its exactly mediocre. Now I'm looking at those Lee/Ditko ratings.When those comics came out , they were amongst the very best of what was currently on the newstands-if not the best.Even all these decades later to give them a mediocre or below rating totaltly ignores the context when they appeared,the level of characterization they contained,the quality of the art,the introduction of one of the best rogues galleries in comics and the number of iconic sequences. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But the ratings on those issues stopped me cold I prefer to see a "5" as being ok, but you can also call it "mediocre", of course. While I agree on the Lee/Ditko team as being the best at the time (in the USA), I choose to ignore its historical relevance when rating these comics. I rate them, instead, from where I stand, and the stories feel dated. The amount of words is probably the most obvious, and even quantifiable, sign of age not being kind on the material. But you also have to contend with fake-ish dialogues, redundant and overelaborated captions, poorly motivated characters, ridiculous story-lines and a poor overall pace. I say "overall", because there's a few issues which weren't actually bad, a couple of them plotted by Ditko. |
|
