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Your Comic book related (book, series, movie) opinions you dare not say out loud.

I already said before that I don't like Reed Richards so lets skip on past that. I also don't like Franklin Richards. "I can warp reality and create universes. I will live beyond all known time and space. Celestials and Galactus fear my powe....zzz...zzz...zzz...zzz..."

The Bat Family is to large and bloated. There needs to be a culling both to get away from the silliness but also to reinvigorate the joy of we felt in the Death in the Family when Jason Todd was beat to death.

Red Hulk is a dumb character. I may have less dislike for him if they didn't have the stupidest reveal possible with it being Thunderbot Ross.

DC and Marvel

Whilst I cannot deny that I like a good action hero film and I grew up on the old Batman and Robin and the slew of amazing 90s cartoons for Xmen, Spiderman and others.

I still dislike DC and Marvel comics.


For most part for 3 reasons (it used to be mostly just one)

1) Because they retell the same story with the same characters over and over and over and over again. Yes each retelling can bring its own quirks; its own style and so on; but honestly it creates a sense that they also don't actually know how to create new characters; or that the company machine is afraid too.

2) To me part 1 really shows itself when they take a character and gender/race flip them. I've always generally disliked this approach toward diversity in storytelling because it feels like the most lazy way to do it and honestly a little insulting in many ways. Instead of creating a strong character with their own identity; they take one that sells well; flip the aspects they want to flip and sell that character all over again.

3) Interlocking mess. Ok so over the years hwilst they reboot a LOT they also interlock stories a lot and this, to me, is a nightmare. I like reading stories start to finish so the sense that both companies have worlds and characters that run into thousands of comics which interlock randomly here and there (often making no easy sense unless you were subscribed to them at the time). It's just a huge backlog I can never see myself ever approaching trying to read

4) Esp in films but in more recent times both firms have latched onto this whole idea of a single universe for all their IP/Characters. This to me is just icing on the cake of lazy and messy and just "company wants high sales".

I've no problem with "christmas mashup Alien VS Superman" type comics and stories. As one off/short run non-canon bits of fun they are cool.
But today we've got the whole thing being done intentionally as canon. We've the likes of Conan - a hero famed for hating magic in a low to high fantasy ancient setting; now running around in space with superman and stuff.

To me it just destroys the original characters and the desire to make every single one they own a "comic book superhero" is again a lazy marketing push.




The worst thing is that it WORKS; it works so well the likes of Dynamite have made Red Sonja a superhero; it works so well it smushes the competition and many other comic makers (many of whome can do outstanding artwork) often feel like they are crushed in the corner under the slew of new Batman releases.




So there - DC and Marvel - I don't hate everything they do; in isolation I enjoy a lot of it; but stepping back at the bulk and body; at the direction they are heading in and all - lots to grumble about

Gonna have a grump about two tales in the current 2000Ad.

Silver

I’ll be brutally honest? I hate the artwork. It’s all washed out yellows and blues. And we’ve spent three Progs seeing the main vampire thing character get the snot kicked out of it. And I’ve no idea who anyone is, or what’s going on. This is a Volume 2 though, so I am missing some context. But, man that artwork is just awful. To my eyes at least.

Ghosted

Art work is very anime inspired, which isn’t my bag at all. Plot wise though I’ll wait until it’s wrapped up, then go back and read the lot from the top.

But sometimes? That’s just 2000AD for you. It’s an anthology. Not every tale is going to be to your tastes. What matters is the Comic Continues, and in doing so continues to be the best way for British writers and artists to break into the industry. What starts with a single Future Shock* could end up with highly acclaimed work for DC and/or Marvel down the line.

*Future Shocks are one shots, maybe three or four pages long. Pretty much open submission, and used to fill gaps when the comic requires. Could be an artist or writer has been ill or otherwise missed a deadline. Could be “that serial is done, let’s throw in some Future Shocks, see what the readers make of them”. Essentially the experimental heart of 2000AD.

The funny thing about comics is its all a matter of how things are written. Things I used to hate have become the best thing about a character in the hands of a better writer.

Case in point, the original Red Hulk run is dire. Understandably so as Jeff Loeb was dealing with the loss of his son. It's still not my favorite character but he's definitely had solid uses and I actually quite liked the arc in Brave New World.

The Bat Family varies WILDLY from author to author. There's plenty of times it doesn't work but there are absolutely authors who see how badly Bruce needs to move past the grumpy loner and take pride in what he's built. The insistence on removing them is exactly why we get this constant wave of terrible reboots.

Personally my main gripe is when characters get stuck. I used to love Spider-Man but One More Day cemented him as a character whose best stories are behind him. Some of the alt universe stuff is strong but mainline has been out of things to say for decades. His best recent run was as a completely different character.

I don't think there's a real answer to be honest. It's also kind of irrelevant. A good creative team can make a great story out of anything. It really doesn't do good to dwell on the continuity. Just focus on great individual runs and try something new when they wrap up.

Deathstroke. Have no idea why that nonce keeps showing up.

 LunarSol wrote:
Understandably so as Jeff Loeb was dealing with the loss of his son. It's still not my favorite character but he's definitely had solid uses and I actually quite liked the arc in Brave New World.

Nope. Still a dumb character that shouldn't exist.

 LunarSol wrote:
The Bat Family varies WILDLY from author to author. There's plenty of times it doesn't work but there are absolutely authors who see how badly Bruce needs to move past the grumpy loner and take pride in what he's built. The insistence on removing them is exactly why we get this constant wave of terrible reboots.

Incorrect. Kill 50% of them and leave them dead.

Overread has already mentioned them but giant reality shattering cross overs involving multiple different series/heroes are just such a frustrating experience

If you're trying to read them 'live' you struggle to get hold of all of the relevant issues, and are forced to buy in to stuff you really have no interest in (and may well not be able to follow properly due to other running plots/background in series you don't follow)

They often end up making major changes that the IP then spends the next few years rolling back as they find the 'new normal' doesn't appeal to the long term fans they want to sell the comics too

and even if you want to pick up a trade paperback after the fact you end up with a messy volume due to differences in art style/artists between the comics that make it up, and not infrequetly the odd bit of the story goes missing because of space issues in the trade paperback or because the story crossed into a book where one of the rights holders decides they don't want to cooperate any more

just stop it

I just don't like comics as a medium, I don't know why, and it's weird because I pretty much love anything based on them.

And it's not just limited to superhero comics. I like a good bit of anime, but I can't get into manga at all (The only one I can tolerate is One Piece, and I just read that so I'm not constantly inundated with spoilers, I think the anime version is much better despite it's many flaws).

Like New Who and its near constant “sod it, we’ll just reset the universe”, comics don’t half rely on such tropes.

I don’t mind alternate realities. At least when done well. I don’t mind new characters picking up a mantle. At least when done well.

But constantly resetting just feels super lazy.

Which is a reason I love Judge Dredd. Nearly 50 years of a single, continuous timeline with very few retcons/tweaks. And it’s changed Dredd’s outlook. Oh, he’ll still enforce the law to the letter, but also fights for change, if not outright reform.

But I guess he’s a fairly easy character to adapt to the real world as it changes, as you just satirise real world events and concerns as they shift. Provided you keep Dredd and Justice Department’s heavy handed nature, it all works.

I don't like how comics are instantly equaled to USAmerican superhero stories by so many people. It's such an incredibly narrow view of the medium.

The foreign comic books I grew up with were mostly French and Belgian stuff (countries still considered comic book world superpowers) and the fact that so many people have never read Thorgal or Metabarons or Yans or hundreds of other mindblowingly good classics and still think they are comic book afficionados ...just sad.

Cyel wrote:
I don't like how comics are instantly equaled to USAmerican superhero stories by so many people. It's such an incredibly narrow view of the medium.

The foreign comic books I grew up with were mostly French and Belgian stuff (countries still considered comic book world superpowers) and the fact that so many people have never read Thorgal or Metabarons or Yans or hundreds of other mindblowingly good classics and still think they are comic book afficionados ...just sad.

100% agreed - the other sad thing is a lot of those series can die so easily too. Uber was doing great and then just upped and died as a series; Requiem has been very slow to bring out new books.
Meanwhile some exist only in digital form in some translations or in such limited physical stock that they basically are only digital. DC and Marvel dominate the market so heavily no one else can easily get their head up - you get the odd few like Monstress and Saga but otherwise many are totally unknown.

Eg I suspect almost no one here has read Yiu despite it being perfect for any 40K Warhammer fan into the art and styles.



It doesn't help that when Amazon took over Comixology they then went around and utterly gutted it by building it into their system which resulted in just a mess where loads of comics just vanished from the system or got buried and lost. Heck even just browsing your way to where you can read the ones you've bought is a pain the neck.

What I don't like is how modern media takes long-running stories and try to speed-run them. The Phoenix Saga is supposed to be a SAGA, that plays out over an extended period. Not a 'one movie and done' thing.

Especially since there are so many great sub-plots within the overarching story that would make perfectly good movies (and yes, I admit, some rather bad ones that would not make good movies) in their own right while building things up.

Behold! And gaze upon the Terrible Horror from the new(ish) DC Connect pre-order magazine, if you dare!




Seriously. WTF?

To be honest, I only really like DC stuff based on the Bruce Timm animated serieses (Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, The New Batman/Superman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, etc.) . I used to read the heck out of the comics based on them too.



Probably because they were self contained and I didn't need to hunt down issues of comics I disliked to finish a storyarc.

I thought A-Force was a painfully subpar comic. It was tonally confused. Characters came back to life for no reason. The attempts at "serious drama" flopped. Apparently its strength was supposed to be with interactions but I didn't think any of them were memorable.

I'm honestly surprised the anti woke outrage mongers didn't talk about it, seeing as how it was an all female team, with Carol Danvers.

 Overread wrote:

100% agreed - the other sad thing is a lot of those series can die so easily too.

...

It doesn't help that when Amazon took over Comixology they then went around and utterly gutted it by building it into their system which resulted in just a mess where loads of comics just vanished from the system or got buried and lost. Heck even just browsing your way to where you can read the ones you've bought is a pain the neck.

TBH sometimes it's better when series end without being milked beyond any need and often without the original authors having a say (Asterix? Thorgal?). But yes, the market giants decide what is sold based on what is bought and at some point you can't buy some things easily anymore as the market has fully homogenised itself. I wonder how easy it is to buy the best comic I have ever read - The Szninkiel - in the US for example.


But yeah, if somebody only associates comic books with superheroes, it's like discussing TV series with somebody who has only seen Alf and A-Team and doesn't even know Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Chernobyl or Sopranos exist.

Oh true but many of the "not DC/Marvel" series rarely get a chance to even finish their primary story arc. They never even approach the state where they get stretched out way beyond their original creators.

I really hate what Grant Morrison did to Batman. Can't stand anything with Damian Wayne in it. (the rest of my post is disconnected from this point, but I feel I need to say it given the chance!)

Graphic Novels are not the same thing as comics, and writing a good graphic novel is easier than writing a good comic. In a graphic novel you get to tell a full story with a beginning, middle and end, and you get to change the status quo and have the character change.

But a comic book is a serial medium. You've got the wheel for this week, this month, maybe this year. But you've got to hand the character off to someone else eventually, and when you do, you've got to leave the status quo intact. The character has to remain recognisable for new people and a kid who picks up the comic should be able to slot in and understand what's going on.

That takes real skill, and is often totally under rated. The ability to write a villain of the week six issue run which leaves us back where we started after a fun and interesting ride is HARD, and it's the bread and butter of comic book writing. The workhorse writers who can do that are the backbone of the industry. Anyone can write a story that shakes up the status quo and makes big changes, and it's a cheap way to get people to pay attention.

But it inevitably leads to the dreaded retcon, and the poor sod tasked with writing the retcon gets all the crap over it, but really it's the fault of whoever broke the status quo to the point that a retcon was needed.

On that note, Judge Dredd is a masterclass in this sort of comic book writing, with only a few "big status quo changes" in it's incredibly long run, but lots and lots of interesting stories despite an intentionally one dimensional protagonist who only changes incredibly slowly and subtly throughout the years and years of stories.

I hate the term graphic novels.

To quote Alan Moore (the man who was fethed by DC almost as hard as Stan Lee fethed Jack Kirby):

"By calling them graphic novels, which was a term that I hated, because they're not particularly graphic, and they're certainly not novels, usually they're 12 issues of She-Hulk stapled together. That is not a novel. What I think happened was that a lot of people, who were just interested in the adventures of Green Lantern, even though they were 35 or 40. Having Watchmen gave them away saying, oh, I'm not emotionally slowed, I am reading… this is a graphic novel that is for adults, no, it's not. It's the same comics that you've been reading for ages. I would feel happier about it if graphic novel actually meant something more than it does at the moment, which is big expensive comic and that's pretty much all it means."

 Da Boss wrote:
On that note, Judge Dredd is a masterclass in this sort of comic book writing, with only a few "big status quo changes" in it's incredibly long run, but lots and lots of interesting stories despite an intentionally one dimensional protagonist who only changes incredibly slowly and subtly throughout the years and years of stories.

Yes it really stands out when you have an author who doesn't understand they have to leave a setting/character ready for the next person (witness Star Wars with its insta gib hyperdrive, or the lens flare star trek films leaving a wreckage of a franchise and implausible rationales explaining why the galaxy changing tech can't be used anymore).

For Dredd? The setting is the main character.

Mega City One, the Cursed Earth, Luna-1 and so on may have been explored one after the other, but it’s still a cohesive whole.

Take Chaos Day, the latest epic. MC-1 suffered massively. Not just loss of life, but influence and wealth. That knocked on to other settings in the same universe, such as Justice Department’s space fleet being curtailed, allowing for greater dissent in the colonies.

The events of the Judda all but entirely prevented cloning being a solution to dwindling Judge numbers. Yet, the Mechanismo programme was reworked and updated with much greater success.

All these different elements create narrative nooks and crannies to be explored, keeping the setting really quite fresh. And there’s always something in the real world to be satirised.

No, not parodied. Satirised. Satire needn’t be funny.

In many ways I think its an "americanism" esp by producers/managers/business suits to push for "big bad evils" that are always "even more powerful than the last one"

Which in films gets accelerated to an insane degree; but even in comics for superheroes you also see the same issue. DC and Marvel honestly leaned on reboots so much because of that - once you've told a story cycle where they've saved all creation you can't really top that very easily and you can't really go back to fighting bank robbers and muggers either.

I do honestly wonder what their end-game plan is for the multiverse but I suspect its something horrifically messy story wise or just "we'll reboot the multiverse"

Dredd also benefits from the anthology nature.

Sure, I don’t think he’s ever been absent from a Prog since his debut in Prog 2. But because 2000ad, as I mentioned in my earlier post, will give new writers and artists a shot? Those that land well with the readers, or show potential that can be nurtured. And eventually, they might even be trusted with a Dredd strip.

Needn’t be a Mega Epic. The latest serial has been very small scale, set as a conversation between two Judges, one of whom had Dredd for an assessment. Bit of flashback, a novel crime, but in the grand scheme of things? Pretty inconsequential to the history of Dredd and MC-1. But it still fits, and it still get the imagination going. And there are plenty such tales in the Dreddiverss.

Which is also an interesting narrative tool. Necropolis in particular really leaned into it, with the main event starting off innocuously, and later tying into a Curse Earth tale where it turned out the protagonist was Dredd all along. And so world shaking events can just sort of slowly be built up.

I've seen the conversation popping up a lot lately and a current popular point of hate is writers having characters have radically different personalities in crossover comics. Not the sole purview of X-Men comics it is a very common occurrence within them.

Common example is Captain America outside of X-Men being about protecting everyone and inside one is written like a human centrist bigot. They've even had Spider-man be a jerk to the mutants in the X-Men comics.

Yeah, that's really annoying and generally comes when the writer is doing a heavy handed allegory based on something historical or political. Especially if you bought the crossover as say, a captain america fan, and you find out the writer is just using them as a plot device.

I felt that way during the Civil War comic, the way that they made a bunch of the pro-Treaty side cackling villains was really over the top. It was honestly handled better in the film.