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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2017 10:47:46 GMT -5
SyFy Wire interviewed Tom King at NYCC and he talks Miracle, Darkseid, Batman and more...
Interesting, not sure how I feel about where he's coming from on some of this, but it's always fascinating to me to get behind the curtain with creators.
-M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2017 13:19:24 GMT -5
Very cool.
I'm personally loving anything King is currently doing and can't wait for his upcoming Swamp Thing story.
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Post by berkley on Oct 14, 2017 13:44:10 GMT -5
Not too encouraging, from my perspective: it confirms what seems to me his shallow conception of the New Gods. I doubt he's even read the original comics, since he needed someone to explain to him that Darkseid wasn't just a lame Thanos knock-off. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to have asked them to explain anything else about the New Gods. I suspect that to him they were just a bunch of characters lying around waiting for someone to make use of, not part of a well-constructed story concept where ideas, characters, plot-lines are all interwoven into a whole. Hence the shallowness, beneath the surface sophistication (as it appears to some readers), of his Mister Miracle.
I mean as a New Gods series, that is. Perhaps there's a decent story in there somewhere, but since he's chosen to use Kirby's characters to tell it, that's how I judge it - as a a story about those characters. From that POV, it looks to me like an artistic failure. Had he chosen to do this as an independent, creator-owned comic, with his own characters and background, it's possible I might see it differently.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2017 14:18:38 GMT -5
Not too encouraging, from my perspective: it confirms what seems to me his shallow conception of the New Gods. I doubt he's even read the original comics, since he needed someone to explain to him that Darkseid wasn't just a lame Thanos knock-off. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to have asked them to explain anything else about the New Gods. I suspect that to him they were just a bunch of characters lying around waiting for someone to make use of, not part of a well-constructed story concept where ideas, characters, plot-lines are all interwoven into a whole. Hence the shallowness, beneath the surface sophistication (as it appears to some readers), of his Mister Miracle. I mean as a New Gods series, that is. Perhaps there's a decent story in there somewhere, but since he's chosen to use Kirby's characters to tell it, that's how I judge it - as a a story about those characters. From that POV, it looks to me like an artistic failure. Had he chosen to do this as an independent, creator-owned comic, with his own characters and background, it's possible I might see it differently. If Kirby's characters are truly mythic and the Fourth World a modern mythological cycle, isn't there room for multiple interpretations of them? Myths are malleable. There is no one definitive take on Odysseus (even Homer is just one of many takes on him in Greek literature) and others have used Odysseus to great effect without it being exactly the same character and set up as The Odyssey. I keep hearing people throw around the idea of comics as modern mythology, yet they then put forward the idea there can be only one canonical interpretation of those characters. That's not the way mythology works. It's not the way storytelling worked either until well after the advent of the printing press. I mean should we dismiss Shakespeare because he didn't follow previous interpretations of characters he didn't create? that he took characters others created and were just laying around and used them to tell his own stories? I'm not trying to pick on Berkley here, but it's a recurring theme I see in fandom a lot, and it always baffles me that fans want to restrict these larger than life mythic characters to a single iteration because that's the way someone else did it when they first encountered them. I often see characters (especially mythic ones) grow, change and evolve once they enter into the mass consciousness. There are many iterations of Sherlock Holmes out there that work, not all of them follow exactly in Arthur Conan Doyle's footsteps. People look at Disney's iterations of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderalla as the "right" one or canonical because it's how they first encountered them and compare other versions to the Disney version, but the Disney version often strayed far from the source material. Should that discount the Disney version then? I adore Kirby's Fourth World, and I will freely admit that there have been some bad versions of them done post-Kirby, but now that the characters are out there in the mass culture, I would rather see people use them in their own way rather than simply try to ape what Kirby already did. Nobody can replicate Kirby because nobody is Kirby, but Kirby gave these characters to the mass culture as a gift of sorts, from his imagination to our world, to inspire others as he himself was inspired. Not everyone will feel the same and that's cool, and if we want to consider comics as having a single canon or interpretation based on their creator's original vision or intent, then we need to understand that this is not mythology and that everything done after the original creators is simply pastiche and not the real thing either. But that's a whole other can of worms. -M |
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Post by berkley on Oct 14, 2017 18:26:56 GMT -5
Sure there can be multiple interpretations of these characters. And naturally readers will make value judgements on those interpretations, thinking some are better than others. Whether I find any such interpretation of more or less value will depend on many different factors.
Since the New Gods aren't just a set of colourful characters but also part an interconnected whole, one factor will be how the writer comes to terms with that whole, how deeply he's looked into it. King doesn't seem to have done much looking, as far as I can tell.
It isn't a question of aping Kirby. Come on, that is about as flimsy a straw man as I've come across, yet it continues to be the main argument in defence of every single use of these characters that appears. Geoff Johns makes Highfather a power-mad war criminal? Hey that's his interpretation, man!
But reading the Kirby stories and noticing that the whole concept of Highfather is based on the story of how Izaya went through this struggle, passed this test, rejected the pursuit of victory at all costs and thus changed from plain Izaya to Highfather - noticing this fundamental aspect of the the character's nature would not be "aping Kirby", it would simply be making note of your starting point. You could then interpret the character in new circumstances or environments, or extrapolate beyond the end of the Kirby series, or whatever.
If OTOH you ignore such a basic fact about the character, what you're doing isn't an interpretation it's a complete re-invention. And yes sure, that too happens all the time, especially in comics. But that isn't what's being claimed for the Tom King MM.
As always, if people enjoy the series that's fine with me. But if it's really meant to be a new interpretation of the characters then it displays such a weak understanding of the entire concept they're based on that it cannot be characterised as a success, in my eyes.
if, OTOH, it's just making use of the names and the costumes without much regard for anything else, then Fine, if that's what you're into. As I say, I'd prefer he'd made a new story from scratch, especially since he apparently means this to be his answer to Gaiman's Sandman or Moore's Watchmen (yes, I know each of those made use of pre-existing characters. But not, I would contend, in the same way King is doing here).
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 14, 2017 21:50:07 GMT -5
Miller himself said something to the effect in this very panel that a character like Superman or Batman stays fresh by reinventing them occasionally.
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Post by berkley on Oct 14, 2017 23:04:19 GMT -5
Miller himself said something to the effect in this very panel that a character like Superman or Batman stays fresh by reinventing them occasionally. Well, like I say, I think dealing with the New Gods is more akin to dealing with something like Moore's Watchmen than Batman or Superman. But even from that POV, you'll notice that every re-invention or re-interpretation of characters like Batman or Superman is centred around certain core features that stay more or less constant. If they don't, i.e. if some of those core features are messed with, readers soon make their displeasure known. And even if now and then some more extreme version appears, they usually revert to something closer to the consensus eventually. It might take a while, but Captain America will eventually stop being a Nazi spy or Hydra member or whatever he is now, and go back to being Captain America, most likely. One problem with the New God s is that creators think they have more of a carte blanche because the large fan base isn't there and they don't get as much reaction from coming back at them (or, I imagine, as much direction from editors). Another problem is that, because of group think and the superhero-POV held by most creators, the new versions of these characters themselves become canon, and followed blindly by the next writer that comes along. We see that in King's MM and the Allreds' Forager: they follow the lead of Starlin's Cosmic Odyssey rather than the original. They're aping Starlin instead of aping Kirby. So I only wish someone would reinterpret the Kirby characters - because to do that, they'd have to go back, read the Kirby comics, think about what was going on there, and then interpret or reinterpret that. But that is not what usually happens, as far as I can see. They're reinterpreting some second or third or fourth-hand version that was of little value in the first place. There is no reversion back to the core aspects - because, it seems to me, they haven't bothered trying to figure out what those were. |
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 15, 2017 4:34:05 GMT -5
TBH, I don't think most creators "get" the Fourth World, and furthermore, to compound the issue, I think it was mostly more of a pocket world of Kirby's that crossed over with Superman cause he's sort of at that god level.
Having said that, since Levitz reintroduced Darkseid in LSH, the New Gods have gone from being their own thing, unsuccessfully, to being more integrated into the DCU. Sales-wise, the previous versions were not successful enough to keep them being published, unfortunately.
That's why the New Gods aren't as pure as you would prefer.
A few years back when DC was reintroducing the multiverse concept, there was an Earth-51, unofficially Kirby Earth. All his creations would share an earth there : Fourth World, O.M.A.C., the Demon, the Dingbats, Atlas, etc, true to their original Kirby iteration.
I'd buy it
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Post by Deleted on Oct 15, 2017 10:48:08 GMT -5
TBH, I don't think most creators "get" the Fourth World, and furthermore, to compound the issue, I think it was mostly more of a pocket world of Kirby's that crossed over with Superman cause he's sort of at that god level. Having said that, since Levitz reintroduced Darkseid in LSH, the New Gods have gone from being their own thing, unsuccessfully, to being more integrated into the DCU. Sales-wise, the previous versions were not successful enough to keep them being published, unfortunately. That's why the New Gods aren't as pure as you would prefer. A few years back when DC was reintroducing the multiverse concept, there was an Earth-51, unofficially Kirby Earth. All his creations would share an earth there : Fourth World, O.M.A.C., the Demon, the Dingbats, Atlas, etc, true to their original Kirby iteration. I'd buy it Darkseid was interacting with the rest of the DCU in Secret Society of Super-Villains long before Levitz used him in Legion.  The Darkseid Rising JLA/JSA x-over happened in JLA 2 years before the Great Darkness Saga started, so Levitz did not reintroduce Darkseid in LSH and the Fourth World had been integrated into the DCU long before that.  Kirby himself came back to do stories integrating the Fourth World with the rest of the DCU in the toy tie-in Super Powers series in 1984, around the same time he was doing the final new Fourth World stories included in the Baxter reprint New Gods series and the Hunger Dogs GN...  so I am not sure how much Jack objected to their use in the larger DCU, he was certainly willing to do that work for hire stuff using them that way. -M |
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 15, 2017 11:12:49 GMT -5
Of course you are correct.
I had forgotten about Darkseid's previous appearances.
Loved that JLA/New Gods story.
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Post by berkley on Oct 15, 2017 19:58:37 GMT -5
I think hondobrode is probably right though that it was the Great Darkness Saga that helped Darkseid begin to be seen as a major character by fans at large, more than his appearances in the JLA, which I don't recall making the same kind of impact. But I wasn't reading a lot of DC around then, so i could be wrong. I think I read somewhere that he liked Paul Levitz's use of the character in the Great Darkness story.
His original idea apparently had been to start the various Fourth World books off and then hand them over to other creators - I think he even had some specific people in mind for some of them, but I could be wrong about that.
OTOH, I think you can see from the internal evidence of the comics he was creating that at some point during the creative process they had become something personally important to him and think he would have liked to have the opportunity to carry on the story by himself, with complete creative freedom.
I suspect that by the time Super-Friends came around he had accepted that this was another creation that had been taken away from him, just like had happened at Marvel around ten years earlier. My guess would be that he had had already said good-bye to it, just as he had to characters like the Surfer and the Inhumans from his first years at Marvel. He'd let it go and at that late point in his career was happy just to get some income out of it.
At any rate, I'm not talking so much about what Kirby would or would not have approved of - it was very rare for him to criticise another professional, especially a fellow artist, so he may well have praised Abnett's and King's series to the skies, especially since, as I say, I think he had accepted that. I'm just talking about my own opinions.
The question of what constitutes a re-imagining of a character is an interesting one, and I wouldn't mind pursuing that discussion, if anyone's interested, whether here or elsewhere.
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