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Post by Hoosier X on Jul 25, 2014 16:33:53 GMT -5
Well, it's not as if Supergods is the only thing that Morrison wrote that wasn't very good.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,202 
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Post by Confessor on Jul 25, 2014 17:04:42 GMT -5
Oh, lordy!  OK, as the board's resident defender of Sins Past, I'll bite... Why is it so God F---- Awful ? Lets sit down and examine this horrible arc. The letter itself took 5 years to deliver in the US Postal service from Europe folks. Maybe back in the grand ole days when mail delivery was slow this happens. But not in the current era of mail delivery and the fact this storyline was supposedly 5 years ago. No, this stuff still happens today. This is a news story I found with one quick Google from this year... news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/23/canada-post-takes-45-years-to-deliver-letter-to-calgary-woman-living-just-215-kilometres-away-from-sender/It's far fetched, sure, but this is a superhero comic, so I don't think a major suspension of disbelief is needed to swallow this set up. Then we have Mary-Jane's role as the supportive wife in this. MJ would keep this an odd secret for years, knowing in the back of her mind the sainted image of Gwen Stacy in Peter's mind was a lie. So for years she kept this piss poor secret from Peter and tortured him in a way by never revealing this. Mary Jane was sworn to secrecy by Gwen, who was a close friend at the time, despite an earlier rivalry between the two girls. She kept that secret for a good long while, but then the unexpected happened and she married Peter. Now, here was a new dilemma for MJ: Peter was her husband, but MJ also knew how sacred the memory of Gwen was to Peter, so she decided not to come clean. MJ decided (rightly in my opinion), that honesty is not always the best policy -- compassion is the best policy. And there are some words to live by, people. Telling Peter the truth would've served no useful purpose and would've only caused Peter additional pain. Gwen told MJ that the fling with Norman Osborn was just a one-off mistake and that it meant nothing to her. MJ believed her and decided not to taint Peter's memories of his first true love. I see MJ's keeping of the secret as a very noble gesture on her part. She was in a difficult situation, torn between a promise she had made to a dear departed friend and being honest to her husband. She ultimately decided to spare her husband the pain of knowing the truth, because ultimately, what earthly good could it have served, if we're being honest? Again, MJ's compassion is the key here. Gwen Stacy's death was a key moment in comics. One that beside Uncle Ben is considered a key early building block In Spider-Man's life. That her innocent loss at the hands of Norman Osborn showed him the price he could pay as a hero and to those he loved. In this piss poor series Gwen's death was the reaction of an angry spurned lover. Which makes the innocent tragic death that fans love today into a joke. It still does show Peter "the price he could pay as a hero and to those he loved." Remember, Sins Past didn't take away Osborn's original motive, which was to hit Spider-Man where it hurt, it just added an additional layer to it. Gwen was still an innocent. Having a sexual indiscretion with Norman Osborn does not make her guilty or deserving of her death or somesuch. With all due respect SuperE, this point in your post is a real head-scratcher for me. I'm having trouble understanding your logic here. Gwen's death was still a tragic slaying of an innocent girl by a mad super-villain. Nothing in Sins Past changes that. The children themselves was originally supposed to be Peter Parker's . That was JMS idea but the editors felt it would age Peter too much and decided again , it should be a plot for Norman Osborn. Who had been so over used that decade that editors didn't seem to mind him again taking part in a story arc that not many wanted to see. The children were drawn comically to look like Gwen Stacy (Sarah) and Peter Parker (Gabriel) Well, this comment of yours is more a critique of editorial decisions within Marvel. That's absolutely fine, as far as it goes, but it has no real bearing on whether it made for a good story or not. I think making the kids Norman's and Gwen's was actually the right decision. The important thing from a storytelling point of view was that the reader was in the dark about the twin's biological lineage and that made the first two or three issues of Sins Past really gripping. Likewise, the fact that the kids looked a lot like Gwen and Peter was some great misdirection, when considered within the context of the story and how it all panned out, even though it wasn't originally planned like that. To me, the finished story justifies that meddling with J. Michael Strazynski's original plot that took place. I guess your mileage may vary. At the end of this the sad fact is these characters were so darn scorned no one wanted to read them. So in Marvel's infinite wisdom , they continued to push and promote the characters. At last seen , fans have continued to send the message they don't care for this. This is a pretty subjective take on the situation. You didn't care for Sins Past and that's fair enough, but when have Marvel pushed and promoted Sarah and Gabriel? I know Gabriel appeared again in the American Son mini-series a few years back, but the twins have hardly been around enough for fans to (as you say) need to send the message to Marvel that they don't care for them as characters. JMS to his credit hated what was published and told online he wanted to make changes. He wanted Peter to be the father originally but was stopped. I can definitely understand JMS's ire. No creative person wants their work meddled with. I'm a published songwriter and there are examples of times when producers have changing bits in the middle of one of my songs or something similar and those instances still rankle today. Who knows though, maybe those producers were right. Maybe they improved my song. The question is, did Marvel's editorial meddling make for a better story in the end? Yes, I believe it did. But I'd never expect JMS to admit that or even believe that. EDIT: I hope this lengthy reply of mine doesn't derail the thread too much. Maybe the mods might want to spin mine and SuperE's posts off into a dedicated "Sins Past" thread or something? Just an idea. Sins Past was published exactly 10 years ago, so it fits the "classic" criterea. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 25, 2014 17:32:19 GMT -5
May I nominate "Avengers: The Crossing"? Yes. It might be THE worst Piece of junk ever written. Worse than ID crisis, Sins past and Emerald Twilight combined. There are some that really hate what Bendis did to the Avengers, to those people I'd like to give them Teen Tony and Thor walking around topless talking like a longshoreman. |
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Post by Phil Maurice on Jul 25, 2014 17:56:49 GMT -5
Regrets? I've had a few. . .
Rise of the Midnight Sons - This dreck is unreadable, and not just because it comes poly-bagged. In hindsight, the bags were a safety feature.
Dem Clones - Take your pick. Whether it's the Clone Saga, Maximum Clonage, or I Was a Teen-Age Clone, the message is clear: Geneticists with class tissue samples shouldn't grow clones (I'm gonna stop saying "clone" now).
The Super Sex-Tape - For somebody who professes to love the Man of Steel and Jack Kirby's Fourth World, John Byrne has a strange way of showing it. |
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Post by superecwfan1 on Jul 25, 2014 17:59:08 GMT -5
Oh, lordy! OK, as the board's resident defender of Sins Past, I'll bite... Why is it so God F---- Awful ? Lets sit down and examine this horrible arc. The letter itself took 5 years to deliver in the US Postal service from Europe folks. Maybe back in the grand ole days when mail delivery was slow this happens. But not in the current era of mail delivery and the fact this storyline was supposedly 5 years ago. No, this stuff still happens today. This is a news story I found with one quick Google from this year... news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/23/canada-post-takes-45-years-to-deliver-letter-to-calgary-woman-living-just-215-kilometres-away-from-sender/It's far fetched, sure, but this is a superhero comic, so I don't think a major suspension of disbelief is needed to swallow this set up. Then we have Mary-Jane's role as the supportive wife in this. MJ would keep this an odd secret for years, knowing in the back of her mind the sainted image of Gwen Stacy in Peter's mind was a lie. So for years she kept this piss poor secret from Peter and tortured him in a way by never revealing this. Mary Jane was sworn to secrecy by Gwen, who was a close friend at the time, despite an earlier rivalry between the two girls. She kept that secret for a good long while, but then the unexpected happened and she married Peter. Now, here was a new dilemma for MJ: Peter was her husband, but MJ also knew how sacred the memory of Gwen was to Peter, so she decided not to come clean. MJ decided (rightly in my opinion), that honesty is not always the best policy -- compassion is the best policy. And there are some words to live by, people. Telling Peter the truth would've served no useful purpose and would've only caused Peter additional pain. Gwen told MJ that the fling with Norman Osborn was just a one-off mistake and that it meant nothing to her. MJ believed her and decided not to taint Peter's memories of his first true love. I see MJ's keeping of the secret as a very noble gesture on her part. She was in a difficult situation, torn between a promise she had made to a dear departed friend and being honest to her husband. She ultimately decided to spare her husband the pain of knowing the truth, because ultimately, what earthly good could it have served, if we're being honest? Again, MJ's compassion is the key here. Gwen Stacy's death was a key moment in comics. One that beside Uncle Ben is considered a key early building block In Spider-Man's life. That her innocent loss at the hands of Norman Osborn showed him the price he could pay as a hero and to those he loved. In this piss poor series Gwen's death was the reaction of an angry spurned lover. Which makes the innocent tragic death that fans love today into a joke. It still does show Peter "the price he could pay as a hero and to those he loved." Remember, Sins Past didn't take away Osborn's original motive, which was to hit Spider-Man where it hurt, it just added an additional layer to it. Gwen was still an innocent. Having a sexual indiscretion with Norman Osborn does not make her guilty or deserving of her death or somesuch. With all due respect SuperE, this point in your post is a real head-scratcher for me. I'm having trouble understanding your logic here. Gwen's death was still a tragic slaying of an innocent girl by a mad super-villain. Nothing in Sins Past changes that. The children themselves was originally supposed to be Peter Parker's . That was JMS idea but the editors felt it would age Peter too much and decided again , it should be a plot for Norman Osborn. Who had been so over used that decade that editors didn't seem to mind him again taking part in a story arc that not many wanted to see. The children were drawn comically to look like Gwen Stacy (Sarah) and Peter Parker (Gabriel) Well, this comment of yours is more a critique of editorial decisions within Marvel. That's absolutely fine, as far as it goes, but it has no real bearing on whether it made for a good story or not. I think making the kids Norman's and Gwen's was actually the right decision. The important thing from a storytelling point of view was that the reader was in the dark about the twin's biological lineage and that made the first two or three issues of Sins Past really gripping. Likewise, the fact that the kids looked a lot like Gwen and Peter was some great misdirection, when considered within the context of the story and how it all panned out, even though it wasn't originally planned like that. To me, the finished story justifies that meddling with J. Michael Strazynski's original plot that took place. I guess your mileage may vary. At the end of this the sad fact is these characters were so darn scorned no one wanted to read them. So in Marvel's infinite wisdom , they continued to push and promote the characters. At last seen , fans have continued to send the message they don't care for this. This is a pretty subjective take on the situation. You didn't care for Sins Past and that's fair enough, but when have Marvel pushed and promoted Sarah and Gabriel? I know Gabriel appeared again in the American Son mini-series a few years back, but the twins have hardly been around enough for fans to (as you say) need to send the message to Marvel that they don't care for them as characters. JMS to his credit hated what was published and told online he wanted to make changes. He wanted Peter to be the father originally but was stopped. I can definitely understand JMS's ire. No creative person wants their work meddled with. I'm a published songwriter and there are examples of times when producers have changing bits in the middle of one of my songs or something similar and those instances still rankle today. Who knows though, maybe those producers were right. Maybe they improved my song. The question is, did Marvel's editorial meddling make for a better story in the end? Yes, I believe it did. But I'd never expect JMS to admit that or even believe that. EDIT: I hope this lengthy reply of mine doesn't derail the thread too much. Maybe the mods might want to spin mine and SuperE's posts off into a dedicated "Sins Past" thread or something? Just an idea. Sins Past was published exactly 10 years ago, so it fits the "classic" criterea. No it should stay here and calling Sins Past a classic is like saying Miley Cyrus is doing classic music now. In all honesty I won't go into a massive debate with it. Yes I blasted Marvel editorial for their blunders with this. But a big reason is the comical aspect that they had a character on the page look like Peter Parker nearly and instead was proclaimed to be Norman Osborn's love child. It was one of those....LOL situations . |
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Post by fanboystranger on Jul 25, 2014 18:13:45 GMT -5
The only thing Loeb has going for him is that Tim Sale and Art Adams like to work with him. He's a mediocre writer who is elevated by the work of his artists. He's a spectacularly good visual writer who figures out writes to the strengths of his artists better than damn near anyone else in the industry. Did you see those painted flashback pages in Hush? Who ELSE woulda figured that Jim Lee could do that, and do that very well? Anybody who read 100 Bullets 50, where Lee first used that painted technique? |
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Post by fanboystranger on Jul 25, 2014 18:27:57 GMT -5
I have a bit more patience for Final Crisis than you, but I think it was ultimately a failure of craft. I'm not just referring to the multiple artists (which definitely hampered the series) or some of the unexplained references, but Morrison's pacing, in particular, creates an intentionally jarring narrative mess. The first few issues are almost glacially slow, then as time collapses to a singularity, you are blasted with scene after scene that demand further explanation. Morrison likens it to "channel surfing", but I think in his theoretical zeal to experiment with a new method of comics storytelling, he missed out on the central truth that the story needs to be paramount. It's not that events didn't make sense as some detractors would have it, but that they weren't explored enough to form a coherent and satisfying narrative. In one sense, I admire the ambition to try something different on such a high profile project, but I also think it was almost a rejection of comics storytelling for something that is ostensibly a rejection of another medium altogether, as "channel surfing" is in some sense a rejection of the directed narrative forms of the tv medium by people who can't bear to turn the tv off. It's almost a comic for readers who hate the medium but can't look away for whatever reason, which is why event comics, regardless of quality, sell like gangbusters.
I love the end, though. Superman singing away the sickness that has plagued the universe is a beautiful moment.
I believe that Final Crisis was an example of a writer who becomes convinced of his own brilliance, especially as compared to the rabble that he's doing the favor of writing for, and is allowed free reign on a major project without any editors reining him in. His "channel surfing" technique in any other project or medium would be termed "bad writing" as he flung what should have been major events (like shrinking the entire world's population and freezing them in ice cube trays) at the audience like they were being shot out of a machine gun, only to be immediately forgotten. I don't disagree with what you're saying. Obviously, there was a certain level of hubris on Morrison's part when he decided that "channel surfing" would be a effective storytelling technique. Morrison's theoretical design-- the idea that time was speeding up as it lead to one point-- was simply not condusive towards telling the story. Final Crisis was about twenty issues of content packed into ten issues (because Superman Beyond is absolutely necessary to the story, and Submit is probably more like what the rest of the series should have been as far as pacing.) I don't think that rapid fire technique worked well at all.
On the other hand, I've been reading comics for so long that I'd rather read an interesting failure that attempts something different than something mediocre that just goes through the motions, which is what most event comics are. Unlike a lot of the other books that have been mentioned here, I can see why some people are drawn to Final Crisis-- it's something different, and it's packed full of moments and references that are left to the reader to interpret. As a community has developed to unlock and interpret those bits, it's also interactive with the reader. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it interesting, in my opinion.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jul 25, 2014 18:41:38 GMT -5
He's a spectacularly good visual writer who figures out writes to the strengths of his artists better than damn near anyone else in the industry. Did you see those painted flashback pages in Hush? Who ELSE woulda figured that Jim Lee could do that, and do that very well? Anybody who read 100 Bullets 50, where Lee first used that painted technique? I didn't remember that. It was cool! It occurs to me that Jeff Loeb's other great strength is a kind of social networking - Artists seem to really like working with him, because he's so good at writing to what they can do, and he can parlay that into getting really good guys to work with him. It's not exactly related to creative talent, (and it's not something that most writers would even THINK about, let alone comics fans) but there's always a social element to the creation of art and I think that it's as valid a skill as anything. It's strange to me how focused comics fans are on story-completely-removed-from-visual-execution, but I guess that schools teach English and they generally don't teach drawing? And since comics criticism is all textual you're going to get purely textual thinkers? Anyway, it seems what Jeff Loeb's doing is fairly obvious and his strengths as a comics writer are REALLY obvious, so it puzzles me why so many comics fans just don't get it - While at the same time having no problem with (say) Grant Morrison, who's stuff is a lot more challenging. |
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Post by berkley on Jul 25, 2014 19:02:01 GMT -5
I haven't read much of Loeb's stuff - the only thing I can think of is a She-Hulk comic that I was interested mainly for - you guys already called it - the artwork, which in this case was by Art Adams and Frank Cho (two separate stories collected in the same book). It's hard to judge his writing by this one story, especially since I dislike the main character, but my impression was that it was very in-tune with what seems to be popular in current superhero comics: American sitcom style writing, with a lot of one-liners and obvious set-ups for obvious punch-lines. By those standards, I thought it was pretty well-written, i.e. if you liked that kind of thing - and a lot of people obviously do, because they keep doing it - then you'd probably like this.
When I try to think of the very worst storylines, I realise that everything that springs to mind is something I've heard or read about online rather than something I've actually read. Anything I've managed to read from start to finish has had something going for it, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it. So while a series like Final Crisis wasn't exactly my cup of tea, I think it's far from being one of the worst storylines ever in comics.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 25, 2014 19:52:31 GMT -5
I believe that Final Crisis was an example of a writer who becomes convinced of his own brilliance, especially as compared to the rabble that he's doing the favor of writing for, and is allowed free reign on a major project without any editors reining him in. As far as I'm concerned, that's been Morrison's modus operandi for basically ever. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jul 25, 2014 20:01:04 GMT -5
I believe that Final Crisis was an example of a writer who becomes convinced of his own brilliance, especially as compared to the rabble that he's doing the favor of writing for, and is allowed free reign on a major project without any editors reining him in. As far as I'm concerned, that's been Morrison's modus operandi for basically ever. I feel like I'm swimming against the tide, I really enjoyed Morrisons JLA, X-men, and All Star Superman. There aren't many writers that hit all the time. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jul 25, 2014 20:28:08 GMT -5
May I nominate "Avengers: The Crossing"? Yes you may! I've posted about this multiple times on CBR... thank goodness for Kurt Busiek and the Space Phantoms! |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jul 25, 2014 20:32:20 GMT -5
May I nominate "Avengers: The Crossing"? Yes. It might be THE worst Piece of junk ever written. Worse than ID crisis, Sins past and Emerald Twilight combined. There are some that really hate what Bendis did to the Avengers, to those people I'd like to give them Teen Tony and Thor walking around topless talking like a longshoreman. Don't forget Mutant Wasp! I've not read any of Final Crisis, but I didn't think Identity Crisis was that bad... it wasn't good, but it wasn't 'worst ever'.. just overly dark and gritty for the sake of it, IMO. |
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Post by DubipR on Jul 26, 2014 16:33:07 GMT -5
Whichever crisis it was in which Dr. Light raped Sue Dibny and Jean Loring was the villainess. Unbearable and unreadable. Zero Hour. (Was that the name?) In which Hank Hall was the evil guy, because Darkseid and Thanos were away for the weekend, but it was supposed to be Phoenix, er, Green Lantern, but they changed that. Unreadable also. Just reread Roy Thomas's four-issue mini-series about Batman accusing the JSA of being Nazi sympathizers. Came out in '84 or '85. Better you should try to read a bad 18th century novel. Roy always means well, but his OCD about making every little thing in DC continuity from Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholoson's birth to Arak's visit to the Incas fit together is bad enough, but when that is coupled with with his incessant need to inform you that he did, neediness overwhelms plot, characterization and storytelling. I will never reread this mini-series. Thus, unreadable from here on in. Identity Crisis is what you're thinking of; everyone else replied. I loved Meltzer's reply to what its about... "It's a love letter to the 70s with a modern twist." Really? I don't remember seeing rape shown or implied in DC Silver Age. Hank Hall was the baddie in Armageddon 2001, because everyone figured out it was supposed to be Captain Atom as the bad guy so the powers that be in editorial switched it to Hank Hall. Still, it was an amazing pile of drek. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2014 17:10:48 GMT -5
Rape is the twist!
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