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Generally, most things don't live up to their hype well they are that well acclaimed but for me The Watchmen did. I think it's one of the best comics ever.

Has anyone read the the new TMNT books or Infestation from IDW?

No. I saw Spock shooting some Zombies. Is that infestation?

Yes. Yes it it. It is also the one where Spock meets G.I. Joe, the Transformers and the Ghostbusters.

Anung Un Rama wrote:Yes. Yes it it. It is also the one where Spock meets G.I. Joe, the Transformers and the Ghostbusters.

Whoaa......Suck on that Alan Moore.

Speaking of the Watchmen prequels, does anybody have anything good to say about Brian Azarello, or is he every bit a terrible a writer as his time on Hellblazer suggests to me?

He's known for 100 bullets which is well reviewed though I haven't read them myself.

Clearly 'to each his own' and all that, but I got real bored with 100 Bullets real quick...

I really enjoyed his "Lex Luthor: Man of Steel" but then he also wrote "For Tomorrow."

Alpharius wrote:Clearly 'to each his own' and all that, but I got real bored with 100 Bullets real quick...

Really? What bored you? At what point did you get bored?

I love this series. It's one of my favorite. I mean, I don't read
95% of what gets posted about here, but I love 100 Bullets.

After Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men I was looking for another X-Men TPB at my local comic store and got Xenogenesis by Warren Ellis which continues the team from AXM. And I really enjoyed it.
The X-Men travel to Africa on a lead about new Mutant babies being born. The character moments aren't quite on the same level as with Whedon writing, but there are some great action scenes and a lot of wonderful splash pages.

I was looking through some other TBPs as well. Would you guys recommend House of M?

Ya it's good but pretty weird. House of M is like an elseworlds tale but one that did really happen. It was the indirect cause of Civil War.

Anung Un Rama wrote:After Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men I was looking for another X-Men TPB at my local comic store and got Xenogenesis by Warren Ellis which continues the team from AXM. And I really enjoyed it.
The X-Men travel to Africa on a lead about new Mutant babies being born. The character moments aren't quite on the same level as with Whedon writing, but there are some great action scenes and a lot of wonderful splash pages.

I was looking through some other TBPs as well. Would you guys recommend House of M?

I'm actually a Warren Ellis fanboy. I pick up anything he does just
because he likes to research weird stuff and put them into his
comic books.

Yes, but I actually found xenogenesis to be a little too real world. At least the first issue. I appluad his efforts to bring light to the many issue Africa faces but this is supposed to be the Marvel U not real life.
I'd much rather see Wakanda become a world superpower on par with the US. This is supposed to be escapism after all.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:Yes, but I actually found xenogenesis to be a little too real world. At least the first issue. I appluad his efforts to bring light to the many issue Africa faces but this is supposed to be the Marvel U not real life.
I'd much rather see Wakanda become a world superpower on par with the US. This is supposed to be escapism after all.

That's my problem with comic books. They're ships in a
bottle, unaffected by anything real.

malfred wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:Yes, but I actually found xenogenesis to be a little too real world. At least the first issue. I appluad his efforts to bring light to the many issue Africa faces but this is supposed to be the Marvel U not real life.
I'd much rather see Wakanda become a world superpower on par with the US. This is supposed to be escapism after all.

That's my problem with comic books. They're ships in a
bottle, unaffected by anything real.

But they do. 9/11 really hit New York in Marvel but I don't feel it should have.

Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result
of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or
DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

malfred wrote:Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result
of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or
DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

No, but it shouldn't. In real life 9/11 is one of the worst things to ever happen to New York but in the Marvel U it would be like the 118th worst thing in NYC history. So why make a big deal of it or even have it in there? The Marvel U has diverged so far from our own since the 60s that real life references are pointless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Actually, the 30s. I think we can say the Marvel U officially went its own way when Captain America punched Hitler in the face.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:

malfred wrote:Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result
of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or
DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

No, but it shouldn't. In real life 9/11 is one of the worst things to ever happen to New York but in the Marvel U it would be like the 118th worst thing in NYC history. So why make a big deal of it or even have it in there? The Marvel U has diverged so far from our own since the 60s that real life references are pointless.

Which is why we have different preferences for our comics.

It's not that I necessarily want everything here to happen there, but creating
a mutant African warlord makes more sense than having a tribal hereditary
ruler of Wakanda. What I want out of comics is for the stories to matter, and
when everything is locked in status quo (I don't care how many mutations
you give mutants or have the white queen switch sides, the lineup for the
X-men is relatively unchanged) then there's little to no chance for change to
touch characters.

malfred wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:

malfred wrote:Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result
of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or
DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

No, but it shouldn't. In real life 9/11 is one of the worst things to ever happen to New York but in the Marvel U it would be like the 118th worst thing in NYC history. So why make a big deal of it or even have it in there? The Marvel U has diverged so far from our own since the 60s that real life references are pointless.

Which is why we have different preferences for our comics.
U
It's not that I necessarily want everything here to happen there, but creating
a mutant African warlord makes more sense than having a tribal hereditary
ruler of Wakanda. What I want out of comics is for the stories to matter, and
when everything is locked in status quo (I don't care how many mutations
you give mutants or have the white queen switch sides, the lineup for the
X-men is relatively unchanged) then there's little to no chance for change to
touch characters.

Actually we agree. Had this debate with Manchu already. I'm big on things mattering. Characters who die staying dead for once. I just don't want real life events suddenly interjecting themselves into this fictional narrative whether it's Islamic Terrorism or Jersey Shore.

I don't want it to be sudden, either, but I think it has to happen.

For instance, I didn't think Xenogenesis had an odd real life
occurrence at all. Even Hitman had to deal with warlords with
super powered bodyguards, after all.

I haven't read Xenogenesis past the first issue to clarify, that's why I used an example from one I was more familiar with: the 9/11 spider-man.
It just seemed odd to me hearing cyclops literally listing off Africa's problems. Like I said good to raise awareness of real life issues but bad for world building.
DC avoids the whole thing by using fictional cities like Gotham and Metropolis. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:Ya it's good but pretty weird. House of M is like an elseworlds tale but one that did really happen. It was the indirect cause of Civil War.

I thought Skrulls caused the Civil War.

malfred wrote:Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result
of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or
DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

Well, there was the Spider-Man 9/11 special and I think Captain America had some stories related to it, but that's pretty much all there is.

It's not a bad idea to use these events in a comic, but some of these things just pale in comparison. 9/11, from a comic-perspektive, wasn't nearly as bad as that explosion that got Civil War started or what happened in Ultimatum. And wasn't there a Mutant genocide or two as well?

KamikazeCanuck wrote:I haven't read Xenogenesis past the first issue to clarify, that's why I used an example from one I was more familiar with: the 9/11 spider-man.
It just seemed odd to me hearing cyclops literally listing off Africa's problems. Like I said good to raise awareness of real life issues but bad for world building.
DC avoids the whole thing by using fictional cities like Gotham and Metropolis. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

But Gotham got hit by a few terrible disasters on a similar scale. Think of No Man's Land or Firefly setting random people on fire and have them burn alive from within.

malfred wrote:Did it have the same impact? Did comics change as a result of 9/11? I don't know because I don't normally read Marvel or DC. My guess is that it doesn't.

Yeah, of course comics changed because of 9/11, to the extent that the people who write them and the culture they live in changed. That's my hypothesis.

What's the proof? I'm curious.

That would require a thesis. The first question to ask is in your court: what do you mean by "impact"? As far as, "has this particular event been literally alluded to from time to time in DC Comics?" ... no, I can't say I've seen any references to it of late. But, if the question is "has 9/11 changed our culture and that change has been expressed in art" then, as I said, my hypothesis is "yes, and that includes comics." So back to impact: before we start looking for examples of this in comics, we should establish what it is. What are the ways in which 9/11 has affected our wider culture? Aside from very specific things, like increased security in airports, what are some elements that we take for granted today that would have been alien to us in 2000?

Someone once told me that Civil War is the post 911 storyline
to read, but I haven't gotten around to it.

That's one difference between Marvel and DC that doesn't get talked about much. In the DCU events happen in fictional places like Gotham, Metropolis and Central City. Whereas, Marvel all happens in NYC. 9/11 happened in Marvel and gets referred to every now and then. The 9/11 special was touching in some ways but also dumb in many others. You have guys like Spider-Man and Thor picking up the wreckage alongside firefighters at ground zero. What is the point of that? That really was a time for the real life heroes. Their time on the pile was an unique mourning process that I feel we should leave to them. The Asgardian God of Rolling Thunder is out of place there. There's also a panel where Dr. Doom looks sad. Someone in the next issue pointed out that that was also stupid because Dr. Doom would be happy this happened. He's probably right on that. I think I'd like to avoid the whole conversation of what Dr. Doom's thoughts on 9/11 where.

In my opinion the destruction of Gotham in No Man's Land was much more interesting anyway. That's the great thing about a fictional city. You can do whatever you want to it. You're not at the mercy of real life events. Not sure if the quake was mentioned in comics after that series but hopefully it was because it was a pretty monumental event in that fictional universe. Y'know, until the reboot...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

malfred wrote:Someone once told me that Civil War is the post 911 storyline
to read, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Ya, it's good despite what reds8n will tell you. Problem with those mega-events is that the main title doesn't really cover the whole thing. And of course it suffers from mainstream-comic-book-syndrome where the things that happened in it slowly get undone...

I pretty well agree with KC regarding the appropriateness of something like 9/11 existing explicitly in comic book worlds. To me, the uncomfortable question is "why didn't Superman save us?" But if Superman does prevent the attacks ... well, that's kind of tasteless against real life, too. Same thing with the Holocaust. If Superman was fighting Nazis in the 40s then why didn't he do anything about the Camps? It's a great "what we knew" sort of American guilt trip hypothetical but a story about Supes handily preventing the Holocaust is hardly appropriate to the scope of the real tragedy.

Again, I think the real question is: how did our culture change and how have those changes been reflected in comics?

Manchu wrote:I pretty well agree with KC regarding the appropriateness of something like 9/11 existing explicitly in comic book worlds. To me, the uncomfortable question is "why didn't Superman save us?" But if Superman does prevent the attacks ... well, that's kind of tasteless against real life, too. Same thing with the Holocaust. If Superman was fighting Nazis in the 40s then why didn't he do anything about the Camps? It's a great "what we knew" sort of American guilt trip hypothetical but a story about Supes handily preventing the Holocaust is hardly appropriate to the scope of the real tragedy.

Again, I think the real question is: how did our culture change and how have those changes been reflected in comics?

Yes, exactly. These world are too fantastical for real life events. That doesn't mean comics can't tackle very serious subject matter, they should just deal with it it a more allegorical way.