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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 2, 2024 9:59:44 GMT -5
What I’d like to specifically discuss (although thread drift is fine!) is whether launching eight titles was too ambitious. Would launching fewer titles have worked, or not made any difference? At the risk of self promotion, Icctrombone and I did a whole podcast episode on how Valiant was Shooter's New Universe 2.0 in everything but name. In that instance, the company only allowed him to start with two titles featuring established heroes (Magnus and Solar) to test the waters for the first nine months, after which Shooter launched pretty close to one new title each month over the course of seven months and then imediately jumped into the first company-wide event. October 1991: Harbinger November 1991: X-O Manowar December 1991: Rai February 1991: Shadowman April 1991: Eternal Warrior, Archer & Armstrong, and The Unity crossover event I think opening with fewer titles may have helped in the short term, but made not much difference in the long term. The funding was the main issue: Shooter wanted to launch the NU with big-name fan-favorite creators, but wound up only using staffers ... with the consequence that none of the books looked or felt any different from mainstream MU books. Someone ought to mention newuniversal, which revived the NU characters into a single title, and which ended when he lost the files he was working on for the second arc. No fan of the original NU, this was one of my favorite Warren Ellis comics, and I still feel bereft. (I was disappointed that Valiant revived all these Gold Key superheroes but not the Owl / Owlman ... I can appreciate how they might not have wanted to step on DC's toes, but even as a supporting character in Solar it would have been good to see him.)
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 29, 2024 11:02:47 GMT -5
You'd think Jermaal would be like, "okay, cute for a simian I guess, but still four fewer boobs than it takes to get me going."
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 26, 2024 11:31:17 GMT -5
No, the best Bronze Age Superman story is this one: I don't know about that story specifically, but certainly Starlin's work on this series (most though not all of which included Mongul), is one of the peaks for the character in the era. I wish Starlin had done more, as Bronze Age Superman would have been well-suited to his sort of cosmic nonsense.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 26, 2024 11:28:36 GMT -5
Moreover, there were predecessors but they all were clearly dressed as monsters or circus performers. Lee Falk in the Phantom essentially created the superhero-style costume. Welllllll......that would be down to Ray Moore; but, he was adapting a medieval executioner's costume. Similar ones were also used for jailers in Flash Gordon. Flash did a lot to define superhero couture, too. I grant Alex Raymond's influence on the couture; however, his characters weren't strictly speaking superheroes.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:55:44 GMT -5
The Phantom's superhero-stye costume has always felt incongruous to the jungle adventure setting to me. I find the super-heroes who copied The Phantom's original suit to be incongruous in an urban setting. I'm kind of taking the piss. But the Phantom had the look a year before Superman. Moreover, there were predecessors but they all were clearly dressed as monsters or circus performers. Lee Falk in the Phantom essentially created the superhero-style costume.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:52:52 GMT -5
Moore doesn't invoke The Silver Age to mock it or point out what he regards as its stupidity as some writers like to do (with Whatever Happened To)- he does seem to have a genuine reverence for the era, but at the same time, I can't say that he's not tearing the period down either. I guess its the fact that he's running The Silver Age through a meat grinder but doing so with love which tends to throw me. That is how he made his name, for better or worse. This story wasn't a SA pastiche, but Supreme, 1963, and some of his ABC stories were.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2024 10:50:26 GMT -5
I think Byrne wanted to do the whole "man out of time" thing, but Cap was spoken for, and opted to bring back Jim Hammond to do the same thing. Why he didn't use The Black Marvel or The Thunderer, I don't know. I'd always assumed it was just Byrne doing his usual "I am writing this character now so nothing written about them in the past is true any more. Only what I write is canon". Like how he suddenly decreed that the Doom Patrol had ever existed before he started writing them. One observation I've made is that Byrne tends to try to return characters to (his view of) their original conception. That works wonderfully well for characters like Superman and the Fantastic Four, who are essentially static, but badly for characters like the Vision and Wonder Girl, whose popularity with readers was based on how they've evolved over time.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:36:59 GMT -5
I felt that while Moore did a good job of evoking the craziness of the Silver Age with Supreme, he never so much as hinted at the heartfelt sincerity that a lot of those stories contained. The corner of the Superman universe dealing with Red Kryptonite and wacky girlfriend shenanigans, sure, but the isolation of a selfless character in a world dependent upon his goodness just seemed too big a concept for Moore to be able to handle. As a result, Supreme just felt more like parody than pastiche to me with the silver age flashback sequences all too often serving to illustrate how ill-equipped the guy was at navigating the modern world. Of course, Supreme came ten years after the Superman reboot so who knows how much of what he did in 1996 would have even been in the back of his mind at the time of the reboot, but even in the 1980s, his Superman just seemed a little more naive than earnest in my opinion ( For the Man Who Has Everything, for instance, even ends with Superman telling Lois that he was a big-headed egotist who thought that the world couldn't get on without him). To put it another way - I don't think Moore could have written a Superman who could have delivered that "I never lie" line in the 1978 film the way Christopher Reeve had. I don't think folks are aware that Moore (and Steve Gerber, and I think Frank Miller) had actually submitted proposals to DC, for revivals of the post-Crisis Superman, and that DC chose Byrne? None of those proposals have ever seen the light of day, to my regret. I agree with you about Supreme, though. As much a Moore fan as I am, I don't think pastiching Silver Age superhero comics is a particular skill of his (as opposed to Morrison, who is brilliant at it), and I never cared for the series. I disagree with you that Moore couldn't write Superman, or thought him naïve. The story arc very much showcased Superman's competence and skill. And his closing words aren't disillusionment at all; they're an ironic commentary on someone's youth as he's passed into a comfortable middle age.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:26:34 GMT -5
I was fond of Byrne's Fantastic Four, but loathed everything about this story. It all seemed to spring from Byrne's belief that Scarlet Witch's marriage to the Vision was unnatural somehow (I think he compared it to someone marrying a toaster). It also undermined Englehart's take on Immortus, to no interesting affect.
And as much as I like Jim Hammond ... in the present day he's simply redundant, as we already have the Vision and Johnny Storm. He ought to have been left in a hole in the ground.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 23, 2024 12:00:40 GMT -5
I'm surprised, especially after the death of Christopher with the estate being handled by younger generations that no comics set in Middle Earth have been made. There was the one adaptation of the Hobbit by Dixon and Wentzel in the 90s by Eclipse that has essentially been kept in print as a trade since the LOTR movies were released, and the one attempt at a photocomic using stills from the Bakshi animated movie done by Warren, but no proper adaptations of Frodo, Aragorn and such, and no tales told form other ages of Middle Earth. There was a comic adaptation of the Bakshi cartoon, published in Europe but never translated into English. LotR ComicAnother that I am surprised we haven't seen more of is Kim Newman. His Anno Dracula got a comic tie-in, from Titan; but, his Diogenes Club stories are perfect for a comic book series, not to mention the Drearcliff Grange stories or his in-world fictional character, Dr Shade...or his Derek Leech character.....or The Angels of Musick......or his Moriarty and Col Sebastian Moran consulting criminal stories (mirror pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, using his enemies)...or...you get the idea. He is an old friend of Neil Gaiman, which makes it all the more surprising, as he references comics, as well as movies, tv and literature (high and low) in his works. Would have been perfect for Vertigo. I've for years wanted to see a Dr Shade comic. Not only is he Newman's most prominent superhero-type character (there are many others who are alluded to or receive cameos), but there are several different versions and even generations of characters who have borne the name; you could practically craft an anthology series, with different eras and versions all being done in different styles.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:24:37 GMT -5
(...) I'd love to see Marlowe, Sam Spade and The Continental Op if they were well done. I kid you not, as soon as I saw the heading for this thread, Hammett's Continental Op was one of the first that came to mind. A few years ago when I was reading Selina's Big Score, it occurred to me that it would have been so cool if Darwyn Cooke had done adaptations of the Continental Op stories. I've thought the Op was a natural. He's not a very typical action hero, but the name is catchy, and one short story (at least) per issue would last for quite a while, and of course two novels when it's time for continued narratives. And although I didn't really like either the Jirel of Joiry or Northwest Smith stories - I found them excessively dark and bleak - I'm also a bit surprised that they were never adapted to comics, esp. by Warren for Creepy or Eerie, with someone like Esteban Maroto or Gonzalo Mayo doing the art.
I'm pleased that Jirel of Joiry is finally going to be a comic!
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:18:53 GMT -5
It feltlike I was the sole audience for this; certainly in my locale, though I have seen signs of a few other fans of it.
It was right up my alley as well. It has been annotated in depth online by various folks.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:15:21 GMT -5
On the Scorpion, Chaykin was always a interesting stylist, both in how he drew and how he told a story. I always felt that the Scorpion was one of the Atlas titles that could've found a loyal audience if the company hung on since, while derivative of the Shadow, it didn't feel as copycat as a lot of the other books.
One final note: at one point Alex Toth was slated to take over the comic, and apparently the publishers (or Chaykin) disapproved of his approach, instead turning him into a blandly generic contemporary costumed superhero. The Toth story was reworked as The Vanguard. This is one of my all-time favorite Toth stories and I wish he'd done more.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:08:46 GMT -5
Millennium sucked, by most standards you can imagine and the Manhunter spin-off comic was at its best for the first 4 issues, then started a slow downhill trajectory. I liked it, for the most part; but, I always had the feeling that the subsequent stories weren't as good as that initial battle, with Dumas, and Ostrander never really got it back to that level. Once Doug Rice departed, the art was less interesting, which was the main reason I was hanging on. Ostrander resorted to reviving Dumas, for the finale, then Shaw became cannon fodder for Eclipso; but, like most of the others, got better.
I rather liked Mark Shaw as the Privateer (despite the nonsensical eyepatch). I was not a fan of this era of Englehart's writing unfortunately. The only Millennium crossover I liked at all was the All-Star Squadron, since who the Manhunters were, was fairly obvious, and I had no problem tying together the two heroes to bear the name.
Also, as documented by Bob Beerbohm, retailers were actually hoarding Kirby's and Neal Adams' books, so DC thought they were selling less than they actually were. We can only imagine how comics history might have been different without this fraud.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 10, 2024 19:02:34 GMT -5
Sapiens Imperium by Sam Timel,Jorge Miguel Nicely done large-size translation of a French series, the first volume in an ongoing sci-fi epic. While the characterisation isn't the deepest, the creators play adeptly with the standard tropes. A very readable book and the ongoing series ought to be entertaining.
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