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Post by kirby101 on Apr 2, 2024 18:33:27 GMT -5
It might not be at the level of Maus. But Will Eisner's The Plot is a very important graphic novel that should be in every library.
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Post by tartanphantom on Apr 2, 2024 19:27:29 GMT -5
It might not be at the level of Maus. But Will Eisner's The Plot is a very important graphic novel that should be in every library.
I totally agree. I've got my copy!
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 2, 2024 20:59:21 GMT -5
It might not be at the level of Maus. But Will Eisner's The Plot is a very important graphic novel that should be in every library. Where it would most likely be subject to challenge after challenge, in certain areas.
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Post by kirby101 on Apr 2, 2024 21:16:29 GMT -5
It might not be at the level of Maus. But Will Eisner's The Plot is a very important graphic novel that should be in every library. Where it would most likely be subject to challenge after challenge, in certain areas. It would have good company.
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Post by impulse on Apr 3, 2024 8:37:05 GMT -5
I've been reading X-Men since 1983. With that being said, you know how you have comfort food? Well to me, Claremont is comfort reading. His style, narration, prose, characterization, action, themes, etc, love all of it. He's had a plethora of amazing artists over the decades to illustrate that prose. By focusing on the characters, their motives, their emotions, he's endeared them all to readers. Yes, X-Men is a soap opera and I love(d) every page of it. However upon his later return though, I think a major problem was that his style of writing had gotten passe with then-current readers. Captions, thought balloons and such, readers weren't accustomed to that very much at that time. Combined with his typical emotional in vocative writing style and perhaps readers thought he was mired down in plot(s). The (reading) times had changed and seemingly Claremont may have been passed by as a result. If so, it still doesn't diminish my overall enjoyment of the man's work and the legacy he built within the X-mythos. Well said. I will add that in addition to his style having been passed by in time upon his return, he also had seemed to have not been as strong at it as he once had. His tics and cliches seemed to get worse, and he wasn't as good at the stories as he used to be. No one had the grasp on the primary characters he had worked with for years, but I also really disliked how he handled some of the established characters he inherited then, too. He was great with the characters he had defined, but he handled some others very poorly IMO. Though ignoring prior characterization is hardly exclusive to Claremont. Anyway, I think it's both his style was no longer in fashion and he already used up the A material. His original run still deserves all the credit it gets, though IMO.
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Post by driver1980 on Apr 3, 2024 8:45:41 GMT -5
I've been reading X-Men since 1983. With that being said, you know how you have comfort food? Well to me, Claremont is comfort reading. His style, narration, prose, characterization, action, themes, etc, love all of it. He's had a plethora of amazing artists over the decades to illustrate that prose. By focusing on the characters, their motives, their emotions, he's endeared them all to readers. Yes, X-Men is a soap opera and I love(d) every page of it. However upon his later return though, I think a major problem was that his style of writing had gotten passe with then-current readers. Captions, thought balloons and such, readers weren't accustomed to that very much at that time. Combined with his typical emotional in vocative writing style and perhaps readers thought he was mired down in plot(s). The (reading) times had changed and seemingly Claremont may have been passed by as a result. If so, it still doesn't diminish my overall enjoyment of the man's work and the legacy he built within the X-mythos. While everyone’s mileage varies, I feel at least a comic like that takes a while to read, and is value for money. I can read some current Marvel comics in less than ten minutes. But with some older comics, due to thought bubbles, captions and so much else, reading time, if not rushing, might be 20 or more minutes! I’m not, of course, advocating for captions and thought bubbles for the sake of it, but I do prefer them. Seems we’re not in the characters’ heads as much now.
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Post by kirby101 on Apr 3, 2024 9:02:58 GMT -5
I've been reading X-Men since 1983. With that being said, you know how you have comfort food? Well to me, Claremont is comfort reading. His style, narration, prose, characterization, action, themes, etc, love all of it. He's had a plethora of amazing artists over the decades to illustrate that prose. By focusing on the characters, their motives, their emotions, he's endeared them all to readers. Yes, X-Men is a soap opera and I love(d) every page of it. However upon his later return though, I think a major problem was that his style of writing had gotten passe with then-current readers. Captions, thought balloons and such, readers weren't accustomed to that very much at that time. Combined with his typical emotional in vocative writing style and perhaps readers thought he was mired down in plot(s). The (reading) times had changed and seemingly Claremont may have been passed by as a result. If so, it still doesn't diminish my overall enjoyment of the man's work and the legacy he built within the X-mythos. While everyone’s mileage varies, I feel at least a comic like that takes a while to read, and is value for money. I can read some current Marvel comics in less than ten minutes. But with some older comics, due to thought bubbles, captions and so much else, reading time, if not rushing, might be 20 or more minutes! I’m not, of course, advocating for captions and thought bubbles for the sake of it, but I do prefer them. Seems we’re not in the characters’ heads as much now. While I agree with you for the most part, sometimes it goes to far. I have been re-reading some of the Tomb of Dracula issues. While the art looks just as good as it ever did (of course, it's Colan), but Marv Wolfman never wrote one word balloon or caption when he couldn't do 3. Sometimes there is over writing as well.
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Post by impulse on Apr 3, 2024 9:49:21 GMT -5
Agreed, reading comics was work when I was a kid. 20-30 minutes to read an issue. When you had a stack, it was downright exhausting. It makes sense as Claremont at least was a frustrated novelist IIRC who ended up in comics.
On the other hand, I was pretty miffed dropping $4 on a comic in the 00s and 10s and being done with it in 4 minutes.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 3, 2024 11:14:19 GMT -5
kirby101Your comments re Wolfman are spot-on. As I was reading that Dracula page, I couldn't help red-pencilling it mentally. A few choices jumped out quickly... "Yeshiva school"? A yeshiva is a school. Redundant. Unless spoken by someone unaware of its meaning. Which the young man in the yarmulke (which I first thought was a beanie) who attends the yeshiva certainly wouldn't be. Is the woman's name "Shiela" or "Sheila"? Sloppy. Those balloons in the first panel... what's up with them? Why is the man speaking the woman's lines as well as his own? According to Jim Shooter, "Traditionally, for comics done Marvel style (pencils from a plot, before dialogue and captions were written), writers indicated balloon placements with blue pencil on the penciled art boards or on photocopies of same." So should the panel have been reversed? Maybe Wolfman was trying to jam too much info into the panel and expanded the size of the balloons? In any event, when I have to reread a panel to make sense of what's going on, that's not a good thing. I'm guessing the fault wasn't Colan's. And that second panel? Unclear to whom Dracula is speaking. Granted, maybe it would be clearer in context, but still. And I love hoiw Dracula switches form early modern English -- "for the nonce" -- to a cliche in the vernacular: "Dracula has other places to be." I wonder how often writers read their work aloud, especially the dialogue. Do people actually say "Surely your father had mentioned, blah, blah, blah..."? People talk in bursts, not in pronouncements. Another thing that always ticks me off in comics and movies is the apparent suspension of any dialogue between panels or scenes. By the time that the two people had found a cafe, ordered coffee and begun to drink ot, wouldn't they have kept talking, meaning that that David would already have said, "I want to know more about this."? "Er" is always a giveaway that what's going to be said probably isn't exactly true. And then they apparently drink their coffees, leave money for the bill and walk away without saying a word, because David's next line sounds like an immediate follow-up to what "Shiela" just said. I also love how the Big boss explains all kinds of stuff to the operative on the phone. "We will discuss it at length?" Really? Is the Big Boss boiling the tea and taking the biscuits out of the oven? And leave us not completely destroy Marv, but really... "ebony-tressed skies"? Um, how about "dark"? Or since the colorist surely will show that it's night in that panel (and has to be, because Dracula),let Colan handle the heavy lifting. Writing's about showing, not telling. Now, although the passing overhead of the shadow of the bat makes each being feel what his own death will be like (an effect that's not just "chilling," but "somber"... huh?) could have been illustrated, for whatever reason it wasn't. Wolfman should have saved his idea for somewhere else in his Dracula saga. "kill your darlings," Marv, remember? Yeah, I guess I'm being snarky, but where was the editor on any of this to bail out his writer? Oh, wait, it was Roy Thomas, who thought Bulwer-Lytton kicked Hemingway's ass. Hey, I know I'm in the cheap seats, but I still get to have an opinion.
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 3, 2024 11:23:34 GMT -5
Agreed, reading comics was work when I was a kid. 20-30 minutes to read an issue. When you had a stack, it was downright exhausting. It makes sense as Claremont at least was a frustrated novelist IIRC who ended up in comics. On the other hand, I was pretty miffed dropping $4 on a comic in the 00s and 10s and being done with it in 4 minutes. He wrote a novel or two......he was better at comics. Not a bad prose writer; just not really his strength. Like I said before, I bailed on X-Men when Paul Smith left. I have re-read material, from time to time and still enjoy it. Same with Claremont's work on MTU and some other things. Never said he was a bad writer; but, he was stuck in a rut, then, that he never escaped, in my estimation and I was moving on. His stuff was demonstrably better than what followed, on X-Men; but, it still didn't interest me. I liked his Star Trek: Debt of Honor quite a bit, except that he dragged out the Alien schtick for it. The story still worked, quite well, and had some humorous moments, capturing the spirit of the original series quite well, plus some of the movie elements. Still, as soon as I saw the alien nasties, I just kind of sighed, shook my head, and continued. His Alien vs Predator starts out well, then kind of gets lost in the middle. I tried Sovereign Seven and it really felt generic, to me. He did a story for the Wild Cards series, edited by George RR Martin, which I thought was a no-brainer until it underwhelmed me. I read his novel, First Flight. It was fine, but nothing that was particularly memorable or groundbreaking. Just kind of average sci-fi, borrowing a lot of things from past writers. I just feel his best days were the mid-to-late 70s and then he just plateaued, like a lot of writers. Their material settles down into a comfortable body that will engage you, but it doesn't excite you, like it once did.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 3, 2024 11:44:13 GMT -5
I tend to prefer getting more bang for my buck, both from the time it takes to read an issue and from the amount of story actually in the issue. The decompressed storytelling only works if it's used to put in more detail and character like the original Ultimate Spiderman. When all it does is stretch a 20-page story into a 60-page story, even in the trades it reads like a paper-thin mess.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 3, 2024 11:56:11 GMT -5
Here's an interesting parallel. In 2015, as Bendis's time on the X-Men comics was ending, he wrote an issue featuring a teamup between Magik and Kitty Pryde as best friends reunited saving a mutant child. In 2024, as the Krakoa era is ending, Gerry Duggan also wrote a 'best friends reunite to save mutant children' issue for Magik and Kitty. But the difference in quality is night and day.
In the Bendis issue, there's real emotion between the lead characters. The child they save is endearing. Bendis is able to back so much meaning into 3 words when Magik asks the child "how many sleeps" she was left alone on an island for. It's a great character-driven issue.
In Duggan's issue, there's no emotion, just mindless bloodshed and exposition. The kids they save get a panel and no lines, making it easy to miss the very fact that any kids were saved at all. The characters go around slaughtering their enemies, and when the plotline of nanites taking away Magik's powers is resolved there's no payoff to her getting her powers back. It's a checklist of plot points without any meat, intelligence, fun, or any of the qualities of an average comic, let alone a good one.
Uncanny X-Men #33 from Bendis is one of my favorite issues of all time. Duggan's X-Men #32 from last month is one of the worst comics I've ever read. What a drop in quality in the same kind of issue over 9 years.
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Post by impulse on Apr 3, 2024 13:22:30 GMT -5
He wrote a novel or two......he was better at comics. Not a bad prose writer; just not really his strength. I meant more that I thought I read somewhere his ambition were in writing novels, but he ended up in comics. Had he had his choice, he would have been a novelist. I agree he fell into familiar trappings. As one who started in the 80s and 90s, I felt it more in the 00s return work, but that's because I started with the 80s and 90s stuff and hadn't read the earlier yet. Generally, I enjoy both decompressed and dense stories. It comes down to quality, really. I agree that Bendis is great when he's on. Unfortunately he is off a lot. Alias was great though.
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Post by codystarbuck on Apr 3, 2024 15:05:59 GMT -5
He wrote a novel or two......he was better at comics. Not a bad prose writer; just not really his strength. I meant more that I thought I read somewhere his ambition were in writing novels, but he ended up in comics. Had he had his choice, he would have been a novelist. I agree he fell into familiar trappings. As one who started in the 80s and 90s, I felt it more in the 00s return work, but that's because I started with the 80s and 90s stuff and hadn't read the earlier yet. Generally, I enjoy both decompressed and dense stories. It comes down to quality, really. I agree that Bendis is great when he's on. Unfortunately he is off a lot. Alias was great though. I think most comic book writers of his generation aspired to writing beyond comics; but, it was a good entry gig (well, by the later 70s) and paid well enough. I think part of the problem is that they developed specific habits to please certain editors, which didn't exactly help them move outside of comics. Also, before royalties, you had to write a lot to make decent money and you quite easily fall into formulas with that kind of output. Claremont was definitely better at emotional stuff than many of his contemporaries and wrote better female characters, though more relative to his peers than in necessarily writing well-rounded female characters. There are still some chauvinistic tendencies in there and a reliance on old tropes, though not nearly as badly as some.
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Post by Chintzy Beatnik on Apr 3, 2024 18:10:03 GMT -5
It might not be at the level of Maus. But Will Eisner's The Plot is a very important graphic novel that should be in every library. Been wanting to track down a copy since Nicholas Meyer name dropped Eisner and The Plot on a podcast where he was talking about one his Sherlock novels that was about the same subject.
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