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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 6:39:46 GMT -5
John Byrne was similar, as he progressed at Dark Horse. next Men was interesting, at the start; but, after a while, I started to question if he really had a destination in mind, as it never seemed to be moving towards an alluded conclusion. That was the best, though, apart from the sheer fun of The Torch of Liberty. Danger Unlimited was just the Fantastic Four in indie drag and Babe was neither funny nor subversive enough to rise to being a She Hulk copy. meanwhile, he is slagging off Image for doing pastiches of their Marvel work. Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle! I preferred Legend to Image; but, Mike Mignola was the creator who was using the opportunity to do something different and original (relatively speaking) while Art Adams was mostly having fun, when he could produce any work. Byrne was rehashing old work, in a lesser form and Miller was swiping from much better crime writers and turning into a reactionary. .... On the whole, I have pretty good instincts for things that I know will either fall flat with me or just p@#$ me off and I just avoid them. Byrne... I loved his 70s work up until his mid 80s stuff, really enjoying his art. The big impetus for change seemed to come in 1983... Marvel started paying bonuses based on sales, and if you did the writing, pencilling and inking you could make a pretty penny. Alpha Flight #1 apparently bagged him a $30,000 bonus, which is a lot now and was a hell of a lot back then. He worked hard to make the absolute most he could in that period, and his artwork started to decline, especially when inking himself on interiors. Most male faces started looking the same, as did most female faces. The same few expressions were used over and over. Background detail diminished. Inks weren't always carefully done. I still enjoyed his FF work, but the end of the run didn't look as good as the start. The only time I've been impressed by his art after FF was when he did the Superman re-launch a few months later. He tightened things up a lot for a little while. I think he lost the fire in his belly to do his best artistic work after this. I still enjoyed his stories for a few more years, and thought he still scripted well on X-Men titles and Hellboy, even though he wasn't plotting those. I bought a few of his 90s comics, like when his was on Spiderman near the end of the decade, but it had no wow factor any more, though it wasn't terrible. If a finisher was allowed to touch up the art and draw better faces, it would be much more palatable. I can't even name a comic he's written or drawn since 1999, which is sad. For his first decade he was one of the absolute brightest lights in comics, second only to Frank Miller, just edging out George Perez by a whisker. Even now I look back and am impressed by his covers! Sadly, like most from that era, his art doesn't look good with modern reprints, with the garish unsympathetic colouring. Looking back now at re-prints of Uncanny I wondered why I liked his art so much before- until I look at the originals again! I think as I've got older I've also generated a sense of what I might not like. I still wasn't prepared for the likes of Wanted being that damn bad. That comic was bad to the point that I'd doubt the validity of the opinions of people that actually did like it. 😂😂😂 Looking back at Byrne's work, it's hard to comprehend how fast he was working around 1980. At one point he was pencilling The Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four and Captain America SIMULTANEOUSLY and doing terrific work on all. He also co-plotted two of those and write FF. Baffling!! Such a pity that that version of John Byrne vanished. |
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 12, 2024 6:56:29 GMT -5
Trio was a Byrne project that I hated before finishing. I know not every comicbook project needs to be the literary equivalent of Citizen Kane, but there was nothing even remotely compelling about it, and it was just another in a long line of “photocopy” projects that he did. And I got bored with that.
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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 9:17:27 GMT -5
Trio was a Byrne project that I hated before finishing. I know not every comicbook project needs to be the literary equivalent of Citizen Kane, but there was nothing even remotely compelling about it, and it was just another in a long line of “photocopy” projects that he did. And I got bored with that. Never heard of that one before. Looked as expected. "Byrne mouth" on every character. I'm not sure anyone else has such instantly recognisable art. I could look at the mouth of almost any one character drawn after 1982, in any story, and know he was the artist. |
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 12, 2024 9:24:13 GMT -5
You are right. I mean, one could look at a drawling of, say, Reed Richards with an exasperated face, and then look at Superman with an exasperated face, and I believe it’s the same face. Or look at Namor’s face (1990 series) and you’ll see his eyes and bone structure and all that are not a million miles away from Man of Steel. rich, this was another one of his “photocopy universes” which you might be aware of:  |
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Post by rich on Sept 12, 2024 9:48:52 GMT -5
Ugh, it just looks like bad fan art paying a tribute to his prime years. 1984 onwards he's also been a fan of drawing as few backgrounds as possible, in addition to recycling poses and faces from his heyday.
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 12, 2024 10:06:01 GMT -5
Ugh, it just looks like bad fan art paying a tribute to his prime years. 1984 onwards he's also been a fan of drawing as few backgrounds as possible, in addition to recycling poses and faces from his heyday. I wasn’t inclined to check Triple Helix out even due to morbid curiosity. When I looked at Trio, I guess I was hoping for “one more hit” from him. Also, not sure if this counts as pertains to the original question, but I haven’t really had any desire to check out his Star Trek: TOS photonovels. |
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Post by tonebone on Sept 12, 2024 10:27:21 GMT -5
Ugh, it just looks like bad fan art paying a tribute to his prime years. 1984 onwards he's also been a fan of drawing as few backgrounds as possible, in addition to recycling poses and faces from his heyday. I wasn’t inclined to check Triple Helix out even due to morbid curiosity. When I looked at Trio, I guess I was hoping for “one more hit” from him. Also, not sure if this counts as pertains to the original question, but I haven’t really had any desire to check out his Star Trek: TOS photonovels. They're .... interesting. Imagine you take a stock ST TOS story, and mush it with a stock Byrne story... not bad, but not very memorable. I will say this... even though it's Photoshopped images from screen captures, you CAN TELL it's John Byrne. The layouts, character placement, panel arrangements... it's all JB! I think he pencils the book before gathering images, etc. If you are a fan of TOS, find 'em cheap and check 'em out. |
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Post by DubipR on Sept 12, 2024 13:51:55 GMT -5
Hate is the wrong word; disappointed would be the correct phrase. Sure there's books or concepts that I was excited for and just flat stopped because it just unreadable. That's the hype of the internet or early days of the internet where we'd read news of "Creator X takes over Title Z!" and we all go 'Holy S#!t I need to get that. Our collective hopes of wishing whatever book it is will be legendary but falls short.
First one that comes to my mind, is J Michael Straczynski's Superman run. Coming off his own creator own books (Midnight Nation, Rising Stars) to go to Marvel and work on Amazing Spider-Man and a really solid run of Thor, he moves over to DC to take on the big blue boy scout. What does he do? Does he fight Luthor? No? Take on the Negative Zone? No. Let's have Clark walk across America and solve everyday problems of America. Just felt like an exercise of a script idea he had and squeezed in Superman. Was simply unreadable.
Another JMS take during his Spider-Man run of the whole Gwen/Norm rape storyline and One More Day. Ooof.
Mentioned before of Byrne, Wonder Woman comes to mind. The announcement of Walt Simonson, Jerry Ordway and P Craig Russell working together on the book sounded promising. Its Simonson working with mythology with a great art duo. Just felt weak in its premise and execution. Dropped on the 3rd issue (out of a 5 issue arc). Just didn't land, at least to me.
Frank Miller, I'll add my two cents. He stopped being classic Frank Miller when That Yellow Bastard finished. Everything before that, completely worth reading in some facet. Once that weird Sin City story where two of the issues is him drawing his career in a dream sequence, I lost interest in his work.
Batman: Odyssey. Oh great, Neal Adams is drawing a new Batman story! Wait, he's writing? Neal was never a good writer, in my opinion, but this was garbage. First issue read and then didn't pick it up. I had to skim through to see the art but tried not to look at the word bubbles.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Sept 12, 2024 14:11:33 GMT -5
Most of the books people have mentioned, although certainly hateful in their own right, came after I stopped collecting mainstream DC & Marvel comics steadily, so I was no longer so invested in them. But the one title that most disgusted me from its inception was DC's The Wanderers.
I enjoyed the LSH title, but also found its decades of continuity daunting at times, so I was hyped to read a series based on a team in the same era which was relatively obscure. And then in the first couple pages of the first issue, they kill off the entire team, to replace them with edgy 90s clones. I literally threw the comic away and never picked up another one.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Sept 12, 2024 14:30:23 GMT -5
On the understanding that "hate" is too strong a term, I think the only thing I've read that really fits the OP's description was the Kurt Busiek and George Pérez Avengers/JLA crossover.
I picked up all four issues in one go from my local comic shop in 2005 or so, and really had high hopes for it, as I'm a big Busiek fan. But by the time I had reached the second issue I knew that it was a turkey. It's just eye-rollingly bad.
For one thing, I felt it lacked in the story department and some of the dialogue is excruciating -- definitely not Busiek's finest moment! I think part of the problem is that as a rule of thumb I find big superhero fights a bit boring, so I was probably hoping for a bit more intellectual meat to the narrative in order to hold my interest. Especially with this having been written by Busiek.
The thing that got on my nerves the most though was all the fawning over the respective heroes' abilities, with Busiek seemingly desperate to avoid favouring one character over another. Too much of it read like, "Honestly Superman...you're the best!"; "Oh no, Spider-Man...really, you're the best!"; "Well, thanks a lot, Superman, but we all know that you're just the greatest." etc etc. Urrrghhh...give me a break! You could sense Busiek not wanting to tread on any toes or upset DC and Marvel editorial by favouring one company's heroes over the other. Myself, I found it all deeply irritating.
Pérez's artwork was really nice to look at, but the writing came off as little more than a fanboy jerk-off session. I love Marvel superheroes a lot and I like a few DC ones too, but "never the twain shall meet" seems like a good rule to me.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Sept 12, 2024 14:35:46 GMT -5
Another JMS take during his Spider-Man run of the whole Gwen/Norm rape storyline and One More Day. Ooof. Just a point of correction (and it's an important point): it wasn't rape. Norman Osborn seduced Gwen Stacy, and she willingly had sex with him. Later, she bitterly regretted it, of course. I get that you might find it distasteful as a story development, but making a poor choice of who to jump into bed with is not the same thing as being raped. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Sept 12, 2024 15:09:35 GMT -5
Anything with a Rob Liefeld cover.
*runs from tomatoes hurled by icctrombone*
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Post by jtrw2024 on Sept 12, 2024 17:00:10 GMT -5
Another JMS take during his Spider-Man run of the whole Gwen/Norm rape storyline and One More Day. Ooof. Just a point of correction (and it's an important point): it wasn't rape. Norman Osborn seduced Gwen Stacy, and she willingly had sex with him. Later, she bitterly regretted it, of course. I get that you might find it distasteful as a story development, but making a poor choice of who to jump into bed with is not the same thing as being raped. Marvel made the smart move to retcon this story away a couple years back! |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Sept 12, 2024 18:45:31 GMT -5
Just a point of correction (and it's an important point): it wasn't rape. Norman Osborn seduced Gwen Stacy, and she willingly had sex with him. Later, she bitterly regretted it, of course. I get that you might find it distasteful as a story development, but making a poor choice of who to jump into bed with is not the same thing as being raped. Marvel made the smart move to retcon this story away a couple years back! Well, I really liked "Sins Past", so naturally I disagree. But it's a totally different timeline/continuity now than the one begun by Lee and Ditko in 1962 anyway. "One More Day", the deal with Mephisto and the resultant reboot saw to that. |
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Post by Doghouse Reilly on Sept 12, 2024 19:39:54 GMT -5
"Hate" is a fine description of my example.
Geoff Johns is a creator whose work I generally dislike, but it used to be that once in a while I'd give him another chance. I stopped doing that after his first issue of Shazam. Johns and DC promoted it as a return to fun and innocence for the character (I don't remember if they exactly said "innocence", but if not, that's still a fair paraphrase). Two or three pages in, there was a reference to child molestation. One could argue that it was oblique - Billy called the wizard "Chester", which in context could only have meant "Chester the molester" - but what kind of sicko thinks that even an oblique reference belongs in a book promoted as innocent? And it's not like the one or two pages preceding that were free of Johns' usual... Johns-yness, so I'm not concerned that I'm denying myself any quality comics.
This was even worse than the time Johns had Clark tell Jon that he won't let him meet Wonder Woman until he's 18. Yeah, it was obviously meant as a joke, but it's only funny if you hold some troglodyte view of relationships between the sexes.
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