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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Oct 22, 2014 14:02:19 GMT -5
Well if Starlin isn't writing much anymore, and Abnett & Lanning are separated, Marvel's cosmic characters are f___d in the hands of anyone else. (Not that either aren't possibly good on their own, as I read Embedded by Abnett and I enjoyed it as a great science fiction novel.) Abnett's excellent on his own, and sci-fi is his specialty. His Durham Red stories from 2000AD took a semi-cheesecake character and gave her an epic space opera filled with wild concepts. Some of 2000AD's best stuff.
And, as I mentioned before, Abnett is writing Guardians 3000 for Marvel at the moment. The first issue was great.
I also enjoyed Death's Head II from back in the day. He wrote one of my favorite LOTDK series, The Magician (?), I think it was called. So yeah he's good on his own for sure, but I also they're both great together. And I'll look into Guardians 3000. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 22, 2014 14:18:57 GMT -5
Really disliked it. Changed the direction of the Marvel Universe. I did not like the new direction. Dropped a lot of Marvel titles at that time.
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Post by pinkfloydsound17 on Oct 22, 2014 16:45:34 GMT -5
I do enjoy the Captain America stories that followed Civil....a lot. I have seen some real strong arguments here. The reason I asked was because the shop in town had a set of the issues and I debated grabbing it a month ago but decided against it. The set was gone when I went to look today. I think I will just stick to the classics but if I stumble on them for cheap (unlikely now that the movies will probably inflate prices unecessarily), then I may give them a try.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 22, 2014 16:54:07 GMT -5
Well if Starlin isn't writing much anymore, and Abnett & Lanning are separated, Marvel's cosmic characters are f___d in the hands of anyone else. Is it just me that think Starlin just retreads the same one story over and over and over and over and over again? |
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Post by crazyoldhermit on Oct 22, 2014 19:34:40 GMT -5
Civil War is a strange beast.
It craps all over long established characters, injects a level of politics into the story that is inconsistent with the universe and can leave a very bad taste in the mouth of fans.
On the other hand, when you get past personal biases and the relative absurdity of it it's quite interesting and reading the entire crossover (100+ issues) is a feat that is very rewarding, as you get to experience a single conflict from a countless number of different perspectives. Like a real war the story contains lots and lots of smaller ones and reading them all gives a real feel for the events that are happening.
IMO the best Civil War tie-in is the explicit NON-tie-in, Planet Hulk.
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Post by coke & comics on Oct 22, 2014 22:04:59 GMT -5
I read Marvel comics pretty religiously starting in 1989. By 1999 or so I was reading pretty much every Marvel comic. When that became infeasible financially, I was still reading all the major ones, though I had given up on the X-Universe by 2003 or so. I definitely still had a completist mentality. I thought that if I started a series, I should finish it.
Civil War taught me better. I realized I didn't need to read the final issue because I had read the first 6. And as I looked about all the Marvel comics that turd of a story was touching, I realized I was better off just walking away. I dropped my entire pull list and am better off for it.
For 7 years now I have only bought comics in trade, and focused on buying the comics I expect to be good. I wasn't away from Marvel long. Once I got the taste of Civil War out of my mouth, I happily went back to following Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Agents of Atlas and Nova in trade.
Civil War changed the way I read comics, and I am better for it. And much happier with my reading. And much less tolerant of crap like Civil War.
Thus I consider Civil War one of the foundational comics in my comics reading and I will always be grateful to Mark Millar for being such a terrible hack of a writer.
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Post by Action Ace on Oct 22, 2014 22:12:18 GMT -5
I don't always read Mark Millar comics. But when I do, I like them much more often than not.
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Post by coke & comics on Oct 22, 2014 22:16:26 GMT -5
Mark Millar is a poor man's wannabe Warren Ellis.
And I find Ellis not always to my tastes.
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Post by Randle-El on Oct 22, 2014 23:17:02 GMT -5
As a rule, I don't really follow Marvel events, nor do I particularly care about the line-wide status quo. And in general, I don't pay attention to the Fantastic Four or the Avengers (historically my Marvel reading has been primarily X-Men, Daredevil, and Spidey). I picked up Civil War as a trade paperback from a 50% off bin during a sale my LCS was having. Since this event was mostly Avengers and Fantastic Four, I can't really say that I had any complaints about the characterizations since I'm not heavily invested in any of the featured characters (with the exception of Spidey perhaps), other than that it was plainly obvious who you were supposed to be cheering for, undermining the notion of "hero vs hero". So with all that being said, I found Civil War to be an entertaining enough to be worth the few bucks that I paid for it. Like someone else wrote, consider it basically an elseworlds tale that explores some interesting ideas and leave it at that.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Oct 23, 2014 3:06:24 GMT -5
I do enjoy the Captain America stories that followed Civil....a lot. I have seen some real strong arguments here. The reason I asked was because the shop in town had a set of the issues and I debated grabbing it a month ago but decided against it. The set was gone when I went to look today. I think I will just stick to the classics but if I stumble on them for cheap (unlikely now that the movies will probably inflate prices unecessarily), then I may give them a try. I enjoyed Brubaker's run, but I think that he was going to kill Cap and replace him with Bucky anyway and Civil War only benefited from being tied into it. If anything, Civil War interfered with what is otherwise a solid run. Is it any wonder that Marvel's current best series are all more or less event-free? (Daredevil, Hawkeye, etc.) |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,197 
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Post by Confessor on Oct 23, 2014 7:48:57 GMT -5
How much sense will the Civil War branded issues of Ms Marvel make if I don't read the rest of Civil War? I know that publishers can be pretty lenient with their labeling of books as tie-ins, but the end of #5 made it seem like she plays a significant role. It's been a long time since I read them, and I've never read them in isolation -- always as a part of the larger Civil War event -- but my recollection is that they are relatively self-contained. That is, Ms. Marvel is certainly quite heavily involved in the events of the war, but the issues of her series that bear the Civil War banner are reasonably self-contained, I believe. You should be OK. |
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Post by Nowhere Man on Oct 23, 2014 8:07:57 GMT -5
What amuses me is how low-concept Marvel's Quesada-Era events have been: the heroes fight (extrapolation of all those old "misunderstanding" issues) the Skrulls hide among us and attack, Thanos attacks, Ultron attacks, etc. At least Secret Wars, Contest of Champions, Infinity Gauntlet, Acts of Vengeance were relatively new and creative ideas.
Sorry for the bitchiness. I just really dislike Civil War. *blushes*
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Post by fanboystranger on Oct 23, 2014 10:58:31 GMT -5
Well if Starlin isn't writing much anymore, and Abnett & Lanning are separated, Marvel's cosmic characters are f___d in the hands of anyone else. Is it just me that think Starlin just retreads the same one story over and over and over and over and over again? No, I'm with you. It's been pretty much the same story with some cosmetic changes for most of the past twenty years. That said, I have not read the recent Thanos OGN yet, so that may be different. |
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Post by Ozymandias on Oct 23, 2014 11:57:49 GMT -5
It wasn't an Elseworlds story, it was a What if everyone in the MU tried to act, like they were in a theatrical performance of Watcmen? Something that could never work (artistically or financially), but which was a much better try, than what the industry did in the "grim and gritty" days. Better luck next time.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Oct 23, 2014 14:02:43 GMT -5
Secret Wars, Contest of Champions, Infinity Gauntlet, Those certainly were new and creative ideas when Roy Thomas wrote the first Grandmaster storyline in 1968(??ish) , and when Starlin did it the first time in 1975. (Acts of Vengeance was actually pretty cool.) Civil War, if nothing else, was unprecedented in scope and (at the time) unique in structure, and it really did revolutionize mainstream comics storytelling. And it did offer the most actual lasting change in the structure of a universe since Crisis on the Infinite Earths, while being slightly better written* - although, much, much, much, much, much worse on the art side. PFS: I'd definitely recommend it if you can find it for cheap. It it, as everyone says, mightygodking.com/2014/10/20/nerrrrrd-raaaaaaaaage/ and the artist doesn't quite seem to understand this "sequential" part of the art and the colorist makes everything all strange and shiny but it's hugely influential and actually really important in the history of superhero comics. * I'll defend this to the death. Civil War had main characters with actual motivation and a plot that progressed in a comprehensible manner, even if neither those motivations and progressions didn't make any sense. Crisis was just a bunch of random things happening to a bunch of characters who weren't humanized or defined in the slightest. It's the difference between a D Minus and an E to be sure, but Civil War had at least had at least the rudiments of a functional story in their somewhere. Plus Civil War didn't get rid of all the cool conceptual science fiction underpinnings of it's company's multiverse in order to get the characters closer together so they could talk about their feeeeeeeelings like they do over in X-men. |
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