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Post by Hoosier X on Feb 18, 2024 20:55:32 GMT -5
I purchased Detective Comics #240 and I’m hoping it shows up in the mail pretty soon. I’ll probably be reviewing it on one of the Batman threads. I would be very interested in reading your thoughts on that story is you have the time or the inclination to take another look at it and write a short review. The Batman story is “The Outlaw Batman.” I was thinking that I might have read it at some point, but I looked online and it appears that it had never been re-printed until it appeared in the omnibus that you’re speaking of. So this will be the very first time I’ve ever read it Sure. Do you want me to post it in your Batman review thread or in this one? Do you want me to wait until your copy arrives so it'll be a Siskel & Ebert thing, or should I just post my review whenever? It would be great if you would post it in the “Batsplaining” thread! And I think it would be better if the two reviews were posted within a few days of each other, and not separated by my “New Look” comments. I’ll let you know when I get my copy of Detective Comics #240. Unless I get really busy, I’ll be posting that review pretty quick.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 19, 2024 9:42:22 GMT -5
I -re-read All-New X-Men #1-6 yesterday (the Brian Bendis - Stuart Immonen series in which the teenage original X-Men are brought to the future).
Has the series aged well? Art wise, absolutely; Immonen's work is beautiful to look at. The two major X-titles at the times had great artwork (Chris Bachalo was handling the other).
The story itself I found frustrating more than anything else, despite some very good moments. I loved the cultural clashes, as when young Cyclops can't get a road map at a gas station because they've been made obsolete by cell phones, or him wondering if something's happened to the water supply after seeing people drinking bottled water. Where the script fails is when it relies on plot-mandated nonsense, when it simply walks over continuity, or when it ignores characterization.
The overall concept of the series is that Hank McCoy fetches the young X-Men from the past so that they can show the current Scott Summers what a bad man he has become. All right, we needed some kind of reason to bring the young mutants to the present... but this makes no sense. First, adult Scott has not become a monster like Beast and the other X-Men say, and he's definitely not starting a mutant genocide; he's basically written like a mutant Malcolm X, unwilling to let mutants get beaten up by cops for no reason. Second, if someone did become evil, I seriously doubt that a meeting with their young self would change their attitude; if anything, they'd justify themselves and explain how their road led to where they are now. Third, since Beast has a time machine and doesn't mind changing the timeline, why not use it and go prevent a few recent bad things from happening? (I mean, this is comics... go back in time, replace a few characters with LMDs, let these be killed instead of major characters, and you can have your mutant cake and eat it too). Hints are given that Beast isn't operating on all cylinders and might be suffering from major depression, which would have been a cool sub-plot; but nothing ever came of it.
We get several continuity glitches as well, glitches that an editor should have caught. Kitty Pryde states that she was trained by Jean Grey and that she was a hard teacher, but the two were never at Xavier's school at the same time; Jean was dead when Kitty joined, Kitty left before Jean came back, and Kitty came back again after Jean died the second time. (Or third? Or fourth? Hard to keep count). Beast is revealed to have had a crush on Jean from day one, something no one mentioned in 50 years or so. Back in the past, Scott, in his civilian clothes, introduces himself as "leader of the X-Men" to a complete stranger, thus blowing Xavier's School's cover for no reason whatsoever. Those aren't big things, but they were easily avoidable.
This is the second time Stuart Immonen draws a series in which an adult and disabused super-hero team meets its younger version (the first time was in Legion of Super-heroes, in the early '90s). The pay-off is more satisfying here, as the young 'uns aren't simply given their own independent mag without any further interaction with their older selves.
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Post by Calidore on Feb 19, 2024 10:22:20 GMT -5
Second, if someone did become evil, I seriously doubt that a meeting with their young self would change their attitude; if anything, they'd justify themselves and explain how their road led to where they are now. I like this one. Older evil version instead successfully gaslights younger version into becoming older evil version, and thus the attempt to change a future ends up bringing it about, in proper timey-wimey story tradition.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 19, 2024 10:32:25 GMT -5
Second, if someone did become evil, I seriously doubt that a meeting with their young self would change their attitude; if anything, they'd justify themselves and explain how their road led to where they are now. I like this one. Older evil version instead successfully gaslights younger version into becoming older evil version, and thus the attempt to change a future ends up bringing it about, in proper timey-wimey story tradition. "Oh great! Now there's two of them being evil! What can we do?" "Just one chance... get a third, even younger version from the past, and convince these two to change their way!"
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 19, 2024 21:33:14 GMT -5
I didn't mind the concept, but the delivery was terrible... between Beast saying he ALSO had a crush on Jean to the whole Iceman has been gay this whole time thing was just silly... if you want to change core characters, just make new ones.
Speaking of Bendis, I read the first trade of Alias , which I had tried to read on Hoopla at least once before and it just didn't grab me. I have to be in the right mood for Bendis, I think. It was pretty decent, though definitely not great.. she's a better retcon-based character than Sentry and Triumph, but not as good as Blue Marvel. The things I liked the best were kinda random.. like the bit where she tries to get an appointment to see the Fantastic Four with fake Rick Jones (I would totally read that autobiography if someone actually wrote it) and at the beginning when she threw one of her clients through the window.. classic.
I might read the 2nd one at some point since Hoopla has it.
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Post by james on Feb 23, 2024 17:25:52 GMT -5
Being laid up with a bum lef and back issues😬. I decided to pull out two of my favoritism runs. CAP 247-255 ( the classic. Stern /Byrne run) and Abengers 158-166. These 2 plus Byrne’s. FF and Wolfman/Perez TEEN TITANS run as the comfort food of comics
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Post by spoon on Feb 24, 2024 22:14:46 GMT -5
I read The Strange Deaths of Batman TPB reprinting stories from Detective Comics #347, World's Finest Comics #184, Brave and the Bold #115, Batman #291-294, World's Finest Comics #269, Batman Chronicles #8, and excerpt from a story in Nightwing #52. It has various stories of Batman dying whether they be hoaxes, "imaginary stories," being revived from the verge of death, etc.
Some of them are really creepy stories. It's amazing to see the emotion that can be evoked. My favorite is the Brave and the Bold story guest-starring the Atom. It's a little bit like Weekend at Bernie's (a decade before the movie) in a way that's really messed-up, but it's fascinating and Jim Aparo's art is so beautiful. Raves here about the four-parter "Where Were You the Night Batman Died?" was the reason I sought out the TPB, but I really wasn't feeling the story until part four. One funky inclusion is the pages from Nightwing #52, which is just an excerpt of a dream sequence, not a full story. Doing a little research I found out it was part of an event across the Bat titles the death of Batman as a theme.
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Post by Hoosier X on Feb 24, 2024 22:43:25 GMT -5
Bob Haney was on a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con in the late 1990s, and somebody asked him what his favorite story from Brave and the Bold was. He mentioned two or three stories, but the one he talked about the most was the one in #115 with the Atom.
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Post by Hoosier X on Feb 25, 2024 13:25:59 GMT -5
I didn’t buy any old comics for several weeks, and I didn’t get many new comics for two or three weeks. (There was even a week where none of my regular comics came in.)
But I got Detective Comics #240 recently. And last week, I got the following new comics: Catwoman #62, Spider-Woman #4 and Wonder Woman #6.
I read them all within a day or two.
AND, I finally started the Thor Epic Collection volume To Wake the Mangog! I only read the first two stories. I’ll be reading this for a couple of weeks.
Comics I haven’t read yet:
To Wake the Mangog
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Feb 25, 2024 21:18:58 GMT -5
I finished reading the Monster Masterworks TPB I picked up recently. It gathers together eighteen of those old, weird Marvel monster tales from the late '50s and early '60s.
The majority of the stories were produced by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, though there are a few Steve Ditko drawn stories too. A couple of these tales were vaguely familiar to me from having read them in the pages of Star Wars Weekly, where they were used as backup strips, way back in the early '80s.
Mostly, the plots are ridiculously simplistic or just plain ridiculous, with plot holes that you could drive an 18-wheeler through. But the Kirby and Ditko art is always nice to look at and the stories do have a certain period charm, despite their other shortcomings.
I have to be honest and say that this was almost one of those collections that I jokingly call my "I hate my money purchases". But it isn't actually quite bad enough to truly qualify as one of those. I will keep this book in my collection, because it's a decent compilation of pre-FF #1 comics, but I'm unlikely to re-read any of its contents again.
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Post by MDG on Feb 26, 2024 12:31:21 GMT -5
... I have to be honest and say that this was almost one of those collections that I jokingly call my "I hate my money purchases". But it isn't actually quite bad enough to truly qualify as one of those. I will keep this book in my collection, because it's a decent compilation of pre-FF #1 comics, but I'm unlikely to re-read any of its contents again. Yeah--I prefer books like this and, for example, the TPB that has the "Origin of Zatanna" stories, than complete collections/long runs of a title. Gives a smattering of what was going on, but doesn't feel like a chore to read.
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Crimebuster
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Making comics!
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Post by Crimebuster on Feb 26, 2024 13:54:17 GMT -5
Where the script fails is when it relies on plot-mandated nonsense, when it simply walks over continuity, or when it ignores characterization. You just described everything Bendis has ever written.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 26, 2024 14:25:32 GMT -5
Where the script fails is when it relies on plot-mandated nonsense, when it simply walks over continuity, or when it ignores characterization. You just described everything Bendis has ever written. Hey, Alias was all right! Daredevil was also really good.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Feb 26, 2024 16:05:03 GMT -5
You just described everything Bendis has ever written. Hey, Alias was all right! Alias was fantastic.
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Post by Batflunkie on Feb 26, 2024 20:12:42 GMT -5
I have to be honest and say that this was almost one of those collections that I jokingly call my "I hate my money purchases". But it isn't actually quite bad enough to truly qualify as one of those. I will keep this book in my collection, because it's a decent compilation of pre-FF #1 comics, but I'm unlikely to re-read any of its contents again. I was kind of like the with the two Moon Knight Epic Collections I bought. I intentionally didn't read any of Moench's Moon Knight previously so I wouldn't just buy it just to have on my shelf like a good hunk of my TPB collections. (Some I read enough to where I enjoyed them that I wanted to outright buy it like Killraven and Man-Thing). From what I've read, the series is decent, I kind of wish Moench was able to get away with more like he was in the Hulk Magazine and Marvel Preview outings. It's very very old school pulpy and while I like pulp like the kind McGregor was dishing in War Of The Worlds (and even Moench's own Deathlok), it just wasn't for me IDK, maybe I just need to let it grow on me. Heck, I didn't like DeMatties' Cap run the first time I read it and it took a re-read with the Epic Collections for me to enjoy it fully I think my biggest grievance with Monech's tenure on the series (from what I've read in the first two Epic Collections of his) is that the series has an inherently mystical element to it with Mark being reincarnated as an avatar for Khonshu and almost nothing is done with it
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