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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 9, 2018 5:50:06 GMT -5
I loved 'Metamorphosis Odyssey' (although the title always seemed self-parodic on Starlin's part) and 'The Price,' but the Dreadstar book was just all right, and for some reason I never enjoyed Dreadstar's comic. I know it was well-regarded and I've never had a clear idea why, but the characters and plots completely failed to engage me. I haven't read the ongoing, but my reservation for doing so comes from the Dreadstar tryout, which just seemed so totally thematically different from what had come before. Too happy as the follow-up to a series that was about cosmic suicide from the very first panel. I wonder if the people who love the Dreadstar ongoing found that series first, and only discovered The Metamorphosis Odyssey in hindsight. Because it's hard to imagine starting with the MO and then moving on to Dreadstar. I read the whole thing chronologically. My main reservation with the comics is that while the graphic novels were just that, novels, with the intense character development and plot advancement typical of the format, the comics were very much like any other comic. The plots were less ambitious, the overall arcs predictable, the character interplay very soap opera-ish. I liked the comics, sure, but they were little different from Star Wars, Micronauts or Legion of super-heroes. Good guys with powers against bad guys, space adventures, etc. It got even more ordinary when Dreadstar lost his sword and gained superpowers. |
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,860
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Post by shaxper on May 9, 2018 9:18:25 GMT -5
It got even more ordinary when Dreadstar lost his sword and gained superpowers. Wow that doesn't sound promising. |
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2018 10:17:36 GMT -5
It got even more ordinary when Dreadstar lost his sword and gained superpowers. Wow that doesn't sound promising. That's the big one you can thank Jim Shooter for. Sword-weilding heroes don't sell, costumed heroes with super powers do, so make this about a costumed guy with powers not a sword-wielding protagonist. -M |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 9, 2018 10:55:34 GMT -5
Wow that doesn't sound promising. That's the big one you can thank Jim Shooter for. Sword-weilding heroes don't sell, costumed heroes with super powers do, so make this about a costumed guy with powers not a sword-wielding protagonist. -M Sword-wielding heroes don't sell. Conan had done pretty well (yes his best days were behind him, but still). Starslayer found an audience...it didn't sell gangbusters but it found an audience. So it's obvious that Dreadstar with a name creator and going through direct sales wouldn't sell. Shooter's myopia in many areas was legendary. |
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Post by mikelmidnight on May 9, 2018 11:43:07 GMT -5
I don't know if I could go to 50%; but, Shooter was definitely a better line editor than pretty much anyone else who took a stab at, after Stan. As an individual editor, a great many rank way above him; but, he did more to make Marvel's entire line successful, even if it did stifle the creativity that had been there. At the same time, I think a portion of that creativity had been spent and some of the guys who left had been spinning their wheels, even before they decided to jump ship. From a pragmatic point of view, I have to acknowledge Shooter as an unparalleled success, as Marvel's consistency and sales vastly increased during his tenure. From a personal point of view, the freewheeling creativity was what drew me to Marvel in the first place, and I pretty much stopped buying the entire line due to his policies. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 9, 2018 18:46:18 GMT -5
I don't know if I could go to 50%; but, Shooter was definitely a better line editor than pretty much anyone else who took a stab at, after Stan. As an individual editor, a great many rank way above him; but, he did more to make Marvel's entire line successful, even if it did stifle the creativity that had been there. At the same time, I think a portion of that creativity had been spent and some of the guys who left had been spinning their wheels, even before they decided to jump ship. From a pragmatic point of view, I have to acknowledge Shooter as an unparalleled success, as Marvel's consistency and sales vastly increased during his tenure. From a personal point of view, the freewheeling creativity was what drew me to Marvel in the first place, and I pretty much stopped buying the entire line due to his policies. I agree with your assessment... And it always puzzles me to see Shooter describe the comics that Marvel published just before he became EiC as “unreadable”. The mid 70s is probably my favourite Marvel era ever!!! |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 9, 2018 18:52:44 GMT -5
It got even more ordinary when Dreadstar lost his sword and gained superpowers. Wow that doesn't sound promising. There’s another big difference between a graphic novel (a genuine one) and a comic-book series. With the former, having to tell a big story in a limited number of pages, you cut to the chase and go straight to the point. There is also a certain distance from the characters that, to me, makes the tale more serious, more realistic, less of a staged play. I mean, in a comic, you have to suspend your disbelief far more often than in a novel, because not only do the heroes perform incredible feats, they do it every issue, for dozens of issues! With an ongoing series you also devote a lot of time to details, side stories, subplots that go on and on, and successions of personal dramas that can be interesting on their own but dilute the whole thing. Paradoxically, I was never as moved by, say, the events in Syzygy’s life in the ongoing comic as I was by a few crucial pages in The Price. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Jun 4, 2018 18:16:00 GMT -5
Wow that doesn't sound promising. That's the big one you can thank Jim Shooter for. Sword-weilding heroes don't sell, costumed heroes with super powers do, so make this about a costumed guy with powers not a sword-wielding protagonist. -M I read about the suggestion somewhere and sales went up after he gave Vanth a more superhero appearance. But hey, when he took the property to First comics, he could have changed him back. |
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Post by tonebone on May 20, 2021 12:33:18 GMT -5
From a pragmatic point of view, I have to acknowledge Shooter as an unparalleled success, as Marvel's consistency and sales vastly increased during his tenure. From a personal point of view, the freewheeling creativity was what drew me to Marvel in the first place, and I pretty much stopped buying the entire line due to his policies. I agree with tour assessment... And it always puzzles me to see Shooter describe the comics that Marvel published just before he became EiC as “unreadable”. The mid 70s is probably my favourite Marvel era ever!!! I agree they pre-shooter comics were definitely not "unreadable", but I also acknowledge that the Shooter era, either because of him or despite him, was my favorite era and I think the one that cemented Marvel Comics as powerhouse in comics history, lore, and licensing. I also know that as soon as he left, I found them to be literally unreadable. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 20, 2021 15:25:20 GMT -5
I agree with tour assessment... And it always puzzles me to see Shooter describe the comics that Marvel published just before he became EiC as “unreadable”. The mid 70s is probably my favourite Marvel era ever!!! I agree they pre-shooter comics were definitely not "unreadable", but I also acknowledge that the Shooter era, either because of him or despite him, was my favorite era and I think the one that cemented Marvel Comics as powerhouse in comics history, lore, and licensing. I also know that as soon as he left, I found them to be literally unreadable. That's interesting, and I suspect that a lot of our individual preference comes down to when we started reading Marvel comics. How does the saying go? "The golden age of comics is 12"? Still, I didn't dislike the Shooter-era comics, far from it, but really disliked the DeFalco tenure that followed. I stuck to a few titles out of habit, but mostly thought that it was an uninspired period of rehashing, retconning and rapid erosion of the willing suspension of disbelief. One thing I really enjoyed about the Shooter era was how events were supposed to have consequences. If a character died, you needed a bloody good explanation to bring them back (although that didn't prevent gun-happy writers to kill characters wholesale, leaving us with a much less varied Marvel Universe at the end). He took that attitude with him to Valiant, and I am still very impressed by what a tightly-knit shared universe that was; the history of the Valiant Universe was already written, and one just didn't play with the timeline willy-nilly. |
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Post by badwolf on May 20, 2021 19:55:27 GMT -5
Does anyone know exactly when the Shooter-DeFalco switchover occurred? I mean, what comics/events were going on at the time? I feel like I quit around that time but can't pinpoint it...
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 20, 2021 20:39:31 GMT -5
Wikipedia says Defalco took over in April of 1987.
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Post by codystarbuck on May 20, 2021 21:43:14 GMT -5
Which is about right. It took a little time for the wheels to come off the bus.
The real problem, for the DeFalco era, was the acquisition by the McAndrews Group, who used Marvel to play financial games with the stock market and junk bond market. DeFalco was in over his head; but, he also wasn't making a lot of decisions about the direction the company was headed, other than story content. That occurred in 1989. When they were owned by New World (which is the regime that fired Shooter), their biggest mistake was allowing all of their characters to be optioned, on the cheap, for movies. There were a lot of options out there, for quite a while, that went nowhere and led to all kinds of issues, with Spider-Man being the biggest example, though the FF were a close second.
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Post by Deleted on May 20, 2021 21:49:09 GMT -5
Was it under DeFalco that the line was divvied up into groups with group editors acting as de facto EIC for their part of Marvel and the EIC supposedly overlooking them all. I know Harras had the X-domain for a while as group editor before he ascended to EIC, and I thought that was during DeFalco's tenure.
-M
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Post by profh0011 on May 20, 2021 22:38:32 GMT -5
Jim "because I said so, dammit" Shooter? I think it's sad, in my view, he did his best work BEFORE he graduated high school. I heard at the time that Starlin went to First because Marvel became consistently LATE with his royalty checks. Awfully INCOMPETENT reason for a company to lose one of their BEST talents.
There was a rumor (or maye a joke-- or both) that the whole time Shooter was Marvel's EIC, he was really working for DC. So many of Marvel's best wound up leaving to go do better work at DC.
Starlin made a big point of having the last Epic issue end on a BIG cliffhanger-- as a way of rerally trying to make sure readers followed him to First. For many years, Jim Starlin was one of my favorite writers. But oddly enough, when he (and several others like him) decided to cut back to ONLY writing, with others doing the art for them, in every case, the finished work suffered terribly. |
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