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Post by tonebone on Nov 12, 2024 10:23:26 GMT -5
I quite like The Killing Joke. I thought it was a perfectly fine, if a little weird, "Elseworlds"-type story. I DO NOT like how it was incorporated into ongoing continuity. Ironically, I did like Barbara Gordon's ORACLE character... just not how she got there.
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 12, 2024 10:29:02 GMT -5
Well Ron Marz pissed off a whole lot of people in 1999. Why pick on just Alan Moore? Well, the title of the thread is asking for “a favorite writer.” |
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Nov 12, 2024 10:43:03 GMT -5
Well Ron Marz pissed off a whole lot of people in 1999. Why pick on just Alan Moore? Well, the title of the thread is asking for “a favorite writer.” Well Ron Marz is still my favorite Green Lantern writer and I really didn't find offense at his writing of Alexandra and Major Force. Dude was an absolute psychopathic sadist. What he did shouldn't be a surprise. But then I guess I take that better than I do sexual assault. |
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Post by chadwilliam on Nov 12, 2024 15:37:19 GMT -5
Byrne ticks me off with his nonsense opposition to the phrase, “I have always…” He is so literal. I have always wondered if his obsession with trivial minutiae such as this explains why he has always seemed so oblivious to matters of common sense. |
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Post by driver1980 on Nov 12, 2024 16:31:51 GMT -5
He doesn’t realise it puts people off interacting with him. “I have always liked cola…” or “I have always listened to rock music…” are phrases you might hear from countless people.
He also has an aversion to multiple-choice questions, taking no account of how 99% of normal people operate. For instance, when a friend visited my apartment once, he saw my bathroom and asked something like, “Did you paint and renovate this, or did your landlord sort it out?” It was me who had. Most normal people ask multiple-choice questions. I might ask a friend, “Are you going away to Ireland for Christmas this year, or are you staying home this time?” But when people ask him such things - and I suspect he’d be the same if a publisher interviewed him - he answers with a terse, “Yes.” He hates multiple-choice questions.
And he wonders why no publisher is likely to speak to him. Who has time to jump through hoops and police their own language (watch the hyperbole and normal conversational skills, folks!)? If I was a comic journalist or something, I would not seek to interview a pedant. Who’d want to meet him at a convention if he was gonna watch every word you said?
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Post by driver1980 on Nov 12, 2024 16:45:37 GMT -5
P.S. If any of this seems irrelevant, I have often been able to separate the art from the artist, but sometimes it feels impossible. Byrne dismissing the Batman ‘89 comic as being written by “fanboys” a while back had me thinking I do not care to support his work. Fact is, Byrne probably never even bothered to check that it was Sam Hamm who wrote the comic. So, yeah, in his bizzaro world, it’s a “fanboy” if the screenwriter of the 1989 Batman film continues the exploits of a much-loved incarnation, but somehow doing photo-novels based on Star Trek: TOS pics is not. Okay, got it…
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Post by Chris on Nov 12, 2024 18:21:16 GMT -5
Byrne ticks me off with his nonsense opposition to the phrase, “I have always…” He is so literal. I have always wondered if his obsession with trivial minutiae such as this explains why he has always seemed so oblivious to matters of common sense. I've thought for years that Byrne has some form of autism. Strictly my opinion of course, but it would explain why both his art and his writing seem somehow comparmentalized. |
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Post by chadwilliam on Nov 12, 2024 21:20:42 GMT -5
I have always wondered if his obsession with trivial minutiae such as this explains why he has always seemed so oblivious to matters of common sense. I've thought for years that Byrne has some form of autism. Strictly my opinion of course, but it would explain why both his art and his writing seem somehow comparmentalized. Sad if that's the case. While I'm not a big fan of his writing, I've always recognized that I'd probably hold him in higher regard if his style didn't go down such bizarre paths. I'm not even referring to the typical controversial decisions he's made, but writing an entire story just so he could establish that Superman's X-Ray vision doesn't make lead invisible to him as opposed to just mentioning it in a editor's note or something. I know that the responsibility for explaining away Superboy and The Legion of Super-Heroes after The Crisis was dumped in his lap without him having any control over the matter, but it sure feels like he took a much more convoluted path towards resolving the issue than he needed to. Same thing with Supergirl, same thing with Lois wondering if Superman was really Clark, same thing with Brainiac - very convoluted redesigns of characters and concepts which had previously been pretty straightforward. |
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Post by driver1980 on Nov 12, 2024 21:25:08 GMT -5
What do you think might have been a better path for the Superboy/LSH discrepancy? I agree he took a more convoluted path than he needed to. I don’t think I got to the stage in his run where Brainiac appeared, so I don’t know what he did there. Want to save me a trip to Wikipedia, please?  |
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Post by chadwilliam on Nov 12, 2024 21:52:13 GMT -5
What do you think might have been a better path for the Superboy/LSH discrepancy? I agree he took a more convoluted path than he needed to. I don’t think I got to the stage in his run where Brainiac appeared, so I don’t know what he did there. Want to save me a trip to Wikipedia, please? Instead of having them be inspired by Superboy, they could have been inspired by Superman. Any stories with Superboy in them could have been retconned so that he was never in the team. If another hero was needed to lead them, DC or Byrne could have substituted someone else. I'm not sure I can explain his Brainiac - alcoholic carnival stage magician who had some genuine psychic powers who had his mind taken over by an evil alien who had been disintegrated on his planet but came to Earth to seek refuge in Fine's body or something. Seemed that for a guy who complained about all the "barnacles" which he felt had attached themselves to Superman's history, Byrne was trying to create fresher barnacles for his guy in record time. |
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Post by supercat on Nov 12, 2024 23:37:35 GMT -5
The post Crisis Legion was a mess, but I did have this idea long ago that if they insisted on destroying the Superboy lore, but still had freedom with the Shazam family, switch it to Freddy and Mary as the inspirations.
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 12, 2024 23:50:12 GMT -5
As I've mentioned before, Byrne alienated me but good when he broke up Ben and Alicia and put Alicia with Johnny in Fantastic Four. It made me question his intelligence, his judgment, his taste, and his abilities as a storyteller.
Cei-U!
I summon the turning point!
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 13, 2024 1:08:45 GMT -5
They eventually made Mon-El the inspiration, as Valor, which made some sense and could work within past stories, until they retconned it all again. Or, just have it be Supergirl. Or Iron Munro.  |
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Post by driver1980 on Nov 13, 2024 5:52:35 GMT -5
What do you think might have been a better path for the Superboy/LSH discrepancy? I agree he took a more convoluted path than he needed to. I don’t think I got to the stage in his run where Brainiac appeared, so I don’t know what he did there. Want to save me a trip to Wikipedia, please? Instead of having them be inspired by Superboy, they could have been inspired by Superman. Any stories with Superboy in them could have been retconned so that he was never in the team. If another hero was needed to lead them, DC or Byrne could have substituted someone else. I'm not sure I can explain his Brainiac - alcoholic carnival stage magician who had some genuine psychic powers who had his mind taken over by an evil alien who had been disintegrated on his planet but came to Earth to seek refuge in Fine's body or something. Seemed that for a guy who complained about all the "barnacles" which he felt had attached themselves to Superman's history, Byrne was trying to create fresher barnacles for his guy in record time. That Brainiac version sounds awful. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Nov 13, 2024 6:04:21 GMT -5
They eventually made Mon-El the inspiration, as Valor, which made some sense and could work within past stories, until they retconned it all again. The Mon-El/Valor thing was a bit jarring at first (especially when they still featured Superboy in a few flashback scenes) but I thought they pull it off beautifully. The Annual in which it's explained how the lad became a legend gave us not only a rational reason for his being so important a historical figure despite not being in the Superboy/Superman league, but also a rational explanation for the existence of so many super-powered alien species who can breed with humans. A perfect example of a well handled retcon, in my opinion. |
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