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Post by tarkintino on Mar 28, 2024 8:23:59 GMT -5
Indeed. I could name some choice writers (and artist/writers) in comic history who were guilty of that, but that would turn into 90 pages of what-about-isms. I guess that's why most writers move on. Even people like Alan Moore only seem to do about 3 years on a title. The stories get stale and you need a fresh perspective. Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. That, and creators such as Kirby's engaged in various rinse and repeat concepts (quest for meaning / ultimate...something / blonde-haired male heroes, etc.) were like watching the same 30 minutes of a re-run over and over again.
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Post by impulse on Mar 28, 2024 10:22:30 GMT -5
Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. Probably, not that what came after was much of an improvement. Though had he left earlier, that might have gone very differently.
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Post by Icctrombone on Mar 28, 2024 10:33:22 GMT -5
Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. Probably, not that what came after was much of an improvement. Though had he left earlier, that might have gone very differently. I have to disagree, I liked the whedon and the Morrison runs.
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Post by berkley on Mar 28, 2024 13:11:29 GMT -5
I guess that's why most writers move on. Even people like Alan Moore only seem to do about 3 years on a title. The stories get stale and you need a fresh perspective. Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. That, and creators such as Kirby's engaged in various rinse and repeat concepts (quest for meaning / ultimate...something / blonde-haired male heroes, etc.) were like watching the same 30 minutes of a re-run over and over again.
I don't mind a creator revisiting the same themes over and over - if those themes are what the creator seems to be genuinely concerned with and I happen to find them interesting myself. I rate Philip K. Dick as possibly the best science fiction writer of all time and he dealt with the same ideas in most of his books. Roger Zelazny would be another example. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs, at a lower conceptual level. These nmes come to mind because they're favourites of mine and I've enjoyed reading their books - in some ways precisely because they keep coming back to the same ideas - or in the case of ERB, the same formula.
But it's a mistake to assume that all these variations on a theme are exactly the same for any given writer. Looking at Kirby, one of the fundamental errors many readers and comics creators have made is assuming that, for example, the Eternals sereis was just a watered down, second edition of the New Gods, or that the Celestials were exactly like Galactus only bigger and multiplied. Lazy thinking of this kind puts the blinders on and leads to a misunderstanding of the work in question.
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Mar 28, 2024 13:31:48 GMT -5
Creators cycling through the same themes wasn't an issue when the audience for comics cycled out every 6-8 years as well, it's only when fans began to linger beyond that expected expiration date that it would be noticed andbecome an issue.
-M
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Post by commond on Mar 28, 2024 17:11:35 GMT -5
Indeed. I could name some choice writers (and artist/writers) in comic history who were guilty of that, but that would turn into 90 pages of what-about-isms. I guess that's why most writers move on. Even people like Alan Moore only seem to do about 3 years on a title. The stories get stale and you need a fresh perspective. Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. Says who? Nobody who was reading X-Men at the time wanted Claremont to leave.
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Post by Icctrombone on Mar 28, 2024 17:25:16 GMT -5
My understanding was that the fans were tired of his writing.
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Post by commond on Mar 28, 2024 17:38:07 GMT -5
My understanding was that the fans were tired of his writing. I don't believe that was the case. Bob Harras was tired of Claremont having so much control over the X-books, and the artists wanted to plot the stories, but I don't remember any fans wanting Claremont to quit. When he revealed the plots he had in mind, they were a hell of a lot more exciting than what Nicieza and Lobdell were doing.
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Post by rberman on Mar 28, 2024 17:38:23 GMT -5
My understanding was that the fans were tired of his writing. I have not heard that, but fans certainly were enamored of Jim Lee’s art. Forced to choose sides in the divorce, what would they have done? We’ll never know. One left, and then the other.
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Post by commond on Mar 28, 2024 17:39:32 GMT -5
My understanding was that the fans were tired of his writing. I have not heard that, but fans certainly were enamored of Jim Lee’s art. Forced to choose sides in the divorce, what would they have done? We’ll never know. One left, and then the other. This is very true, but the easy solution was to let Lee do the new book while Claremont continued to write Uncanny.
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Post by commond on Mar 28, 2024 17:50:32 GMT -5
Indeed. I could name some choice writers (and artist/writers) in comic history who were guilty of that, but that would turn into 90 pages of what-about-isms. I guess that's why most writers move on. Even people like Alan Moore only seem to do about 3 years on a title. The stories get stale and you need a fresh perspective. Look at Claremont, he stayed too late at the dance with X-men. On the other hand, Eiichiro Oda has been doing One Piece since 1997 and he's worth $200 million dollars.
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Post by Batflunkie on Mar 28, 2024 18:37:22 GMT -5
I've never really enjoyed how Claremont writes stuff (with the lone exception of Excalibur) and I wish I could put my finger on why
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Post by codystarbuck on Mar 28, 2024 20:25:21 GMT -5
I knew plenty of people who left X-Men all together. Claremont's writing was a factor, as was art; but, mostly, they were tired of the grandiose events, the lesser spin-offs, and just wanted something different. There was plenty of fan criticism, in certain quarters, about the endless Alien-influenced/swiped plots, for a start, extended subplots that either never got resolved or were underwhelming in their resolution.
Personally, I bailed after Paul Smith left, as I felt Claremont was rehashing storylines, trying to redo Dark Phoenix and he kept throwing monkey wrenches into relationship, which felt backwards,to me. I'm not big on endless soap opera; a bit of emotional drama, from time to time, is one thing, but every issue gets tiresome. It's a big reason why I never warmed to the regular Spidey books and why I found Claremont's non-X-Men writing to be diminishing returns. The Aliens vs Predator mini he did ended up being not as interesting as previous ones, since the only thing he seemed to bring to it was a focus on a female human, a female predator and an alien queen.
I liked his Star Trek graphic novel, up to a point; but, he turned it into another Alien riff, too, with Kirk and a bunch of old tv show characters teaming up with Klingons from the original series and a Romulan commander, to fight ....well, the Alien species, in a barely disguised form..
Now, X-Men chugged right along and others were fine and dandy with it; but, it is no more true to say that readers weren't tired of Claremont than to say everyone was hunky dory. There were detractors; but, they were probably a much smaller minority than the people who didn't care, as long as they got their X-Men fix or art they liked.
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Post by codystarbuck on Mar 28, 2024 20:35:02 GMT -5
I've never really enjoyed how Claremont writes stuff (with the lone exception of Excalibur) and I wish I could put my finger on why I'm not a big fan on how he writes romantic relationships; he always felt stuck in the soap opera tropes of endless suffering, for the heroes. Granted, that was Marvel, for a large segment of their material, which is why I kind of left the vast majority of their line behind, by the mid-80s. Claremont definitely liked his female characters to suffer and there seemed to be a lot of domination themes in that suffering, though I sometimes wonder who was bringing that, Claremont or his artists. I found that he was very much enraptured by the basic plot of Alien, with a character, usually female, on the run from a killing machine, before ultimately winning the day. He also kept coming back to parasitic aliens who implant their eggs into a host body, to gestate. The guy needed to go see a Steve Martin movie or something. I liked and still like a good portion of his X-Men run, before I bailed on the series and bits and pieces of his other Marvel work, like some of his Marvel Team-Up stories.. I do think he was done dirty in being removed from X-Men and I hope he stuck it to them, monetarily, when they came crawling back.
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Post by Batflunkie on Mar 28, 2024 20:49:02 GMT -5
I've never really enjoyed how Claremont writes stuff (with the lone exception of Excalibur) and I wish I could put my finger on why I'm not a big fan on how he writes romantic relationships; he always felt stuck in the soap opera tropes of endless suffering, for the heroes That makes sense, I think the "Claremont's X-Men" documentary went into his background saying that he studied theater. Maybe a bit of a fan of Hamlet?
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