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Post by ThirdMan on Dec 31, 2017 16:27:09 GMT -8
That's, like, so meta.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 31, 2017 17:17:21 GMT -8
The series is one of the most meta I've ever seen. Pretty much every page has some kind of fourth-wall break, or a piece of self-referential commentary.
It's probably the craziest series the franchise has ever produced. And I say this as someone who has watched multiple episodes of Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 7, 2018 20:14:34 GMT -8
Whoa. Judging by the recent All-New X-Men series, we have a celebrity among us. Attachments:
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 2, 2018 17:26:29 GMT -8
Okay, I finally read a Sam Kieth comic book. No, it wasn't The Maxx or Zero Girl - it was Batman: Through the Looking Glass.
Lord, this man's artwork is insane. I can't tell if it's good or really, amateurishly bad - his constant use of distorted faces and figures, not to mention all the warped perspectives, suggest that copious amounts of methamphetamine were involved in the book's creation. But then again, there are plenty of nutty comic book artists who produce brilliant work (Dark Knight Returns is another ludicrously drawn version of Batman, but its visual peculiarities are all part of its appeal), so I suppose I shouldn't complain.
The story (by Bruce Jones) is less spectacular - it's a Batman/Alice in Wonderland crossover that owes a bit too much to BTAS' "Perchance to Dream." It would probably still stand out if Kieth weren't attached, but for very different reasons.
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 7, 2018 21:15:34 GMT -8
RIP Steve Ditko. He was most famous for co-creating Spider-Man (and never getting as much credit as Stan Lee), but he also had a hand in making memorable characters like Dr Strange (for Marvel) and the Question (DC). A remarkable talent - Spidey's "If This Be My Destiny!" arc is still one of the best comic stories ever written.
So odd that he basically faded into the ether after the 1960s. He had plenty of fans, but he hadn't gave interviews in the past 50 years, and he reportedly never received a penny in royalties for any of the Spider-Man films. Poor guy just never got the fame he deserved.
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 29, 2018 18:20:18 GMT -8
Over the weekend, I went back to the recent past (2012, to be exact) and looked at some Avengers (by Jonathan Hickman) and Justice League (by Geoff Johns).
Know what I discovered?
The Avengers comics were dark, moody, and pretentious. And the Justice League comics were bright, engaging, and fun.
The irony won't be washing out anytime soon.
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Post by Jay on Sept 24, 2018 10:30:44 GMT -8
This is an off-beat one, but has anyone read Michael Kupperman's All the Answers? It's a memoir about his father's time as a radio quiz kid and how the attention seemed to scar him for life. I don't have much time for leisurely reading these days, but I want to pick it up when I get a chance since Kupperman's main schtick is to be surreal and funny whereas this is an attempt by him to be serious.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 10, 2019 12:20:03 GMT -8
The Fall and Rise of Captain Atom is really good. It's a time-travel story that actually tries to make logical sense, and mostly succeeds. I was actually able to follow the entire thing very clearly, which is usually not the case with convoluted time-travel stories.
It's helped by the fact that the series is written by Cary Bates and Greg Weisman, who wrote the original Captain Atom series back in the '80s. Weisman, of course, has become quite famous for his TV work, as producer of Gargoyles, Spectacular Spider-Man, Young Justice, and so forth. But he's still got a knack for the paneled page. And Bates was first hired by DC Comics over fifty years ago, so the fact that he's still writing comics for them - and good ones, at that - is pretty incredible.
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Post by Jeremy on May 6, 2019 19:20:17 GMT -8
Okay, I suddenly realized that I needed to respond to a 2016 post from the old forum.
Back when the Killing Joke movie came out, we had a brief discussion about it on the forum, and I mentioned how graphic and disturbing I found the original comic book to be. To which Flamepillar responded:
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what that meant, since "A Death in the Family" (the 1988 Batman storyline where Jason Todd is killed) is not known for being particularly disturbing. But now it hit me - was Flame referring to the more recent "Death of the Family"?
Because yeah, that comic is as emotionally disturbing as it gets.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 5, 2020 7:59:23 GMT -8
Since Flame just crowned me king of superheroes (or something), it reminded me that I haven't done much writing about comics lately. So for the new year, I'm going to try to update this thread on a weekly basis. I won't talk about all the comics I read, but I'll try to highlight one thing I've been reading per week (until I get bored, obviously).
This week, we have:
Symbiote Spider-Man (2019)
Predictably, with the release of Far From Home, Mysterio has become the Spidey villain of the moment, and recent comics are reflecting that. In 2019 alone, he had an arc in Amazing Spider-Man, fought Wolverine in Dead Man Logan, and even clashed with MJ in Amazing Mary Jane. And because that's clearly not enough, we also get Fishbowl-Head in this "flashback" miniseries from Spidey's black suit days.
Taking place in the 1980s (both in comics and the real world), the series is a pretty run-of-the-mill story about Mysterio trying to steal Spidey's symbiotic costume. It features lots of references to Spider-Man comics of the day (Black Cat, Kingpin, the dude who eventually becomes the Spot), and also underscores the period setting of the era (Spidey has one battle atop the Twin Towers, another at Shea Stadium, and goes to see Cats). In short, the series feels made for people who remember Spidey comics from the '80s.
Even though I wasn't around then, I've read a lot of the old stuff, and was happy to see the references glittered about. Nostalgia sells, and there are few things as visually striking in Spider-Man lore as the inky black costume that turned out to be a murderous alien. Good times. Now let's see more non-Mysterio villains, please.
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Post by Jeremy on May 22, 2020 15:08:16 GMT -8
Okay, I'm finally back. No TV or movie talk this time, but here's a piece I wrote to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the politically charged Green Lantern/Green Arrow series - one of the most famous comic books ever. (Yes, I know the anniversary was last month. Sue me.)
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 3, 2021 13:14:05 GMT -8
Since there are a lot of Watchmen fans here, I'll share my thoughts on Doomsday Clock, which I just finished reading.
For the uninitiated, Doomsday Clock is DC's official sequel to Alan Moore's original graphic novel (with no connection to the HBO series... except for President Robert Redford). It's predicated on a very fanboyish question - what if the Watchmen met the Justice League? - but doesn't feel like cheap fanfic. (It began publishing a couple of years before the TV series, though both concluded around the same time.) The story (by Grant Morrison, one of the more inventive writers in modern comics) builds well over time, with several details that probably won't become fully developed on first reading (and is packed with DC references to stories dating back to the 1940s), and Gary Frank's art is excellent.
However, the most interesting thing about the new series is that it really wants to mimic the style of the 1985 series. Twelve issues, each 28 full pages, punctuated by in-universe newspaper clippings and articles for context, featuring three-by-three panel grids with inventive transitions. It apes the original Watchmen style and structure incredibly well, straight down to the villain reveal speech in the penultimate issue. But I understand if the decision to so directly work off the original model will irk some readers. Personally, I don't mind the attempt, since it works for the story and doesn't feel forced.
And no, I assume Alan Moore is not a fan of it, but it's not like he's been a fan of much of anything these last 30 years.
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Post by Jeremy on Apr 18, 2021 6:44:58 GMT -8
A few months ago, Guttersnipe and I were discussing some of the '90s X-Men comics that centered around the confusing and convoluted Psylocke/Kwannon story. Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of X-Men: A Skinning of Souls, which contains the full original story, hoping it would make more sense in the larger context of '90s X-Men (which I have been reading as of late, thanks to some of the "X-Men Milestones" paperbacks that Marvel has recently been publishing). All in all, it's still quite convoluted, especially since I've been reading a lot of these books out of sequence, and there were a ton of crossovers during the '90s between the various ongoing books, which included X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur, Cable, and Wolverine. Having already read through the "Phalanx Covenant" storyline, which takes place after the Psylocke reveal, the prior story which introduces Kwannon feels a bit anticlimactic. But I will accept some personal blame for that. I doubt the storyline could be published today, since the "white woman's brain in an Asian woman's body" (and vice versa) would be a heated point of contention. Though it's worth noting that the X-Men comics of the era drew a lot of Japanese inspiration (in part due to the rising popularity of manga in the US), notably in the case of Wolverine, whose past became so linked in samurai lore that they eventually managed to make a whole movie out of it. (Another reason this story wouldn't work today is that I kept reading the word "Kwannon" as... something else.)
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Post by guttersnipe on Apr 19, 2021 6:07:30 GMT -8
It feels like a whole lifetime since I followed any comic series studiously, but I'd quite like to revisit some of those stories via these milestones books (British jewel 2000 AD did a similar thing over the last few years). I remember finding the Phalanx thread genuinely scary at the time.
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Post by Jeremy on Apr 19, 2021 6:31:40 GMT -8
Yeah, there's some legitimately freakish artwork in some of these stories (at least as disturbing as the Marvel censors would allow at the time). The Phalanx Covenant story arc feels a little too similar to the Borg in Star Trek (hivemind alien race trying to assimilate humanity), but there's certainly some inventive storytelling there.
The Milestones books are a very good way to read the old comics - some of which have been out of print for decades - since they collect key issues from at least a half-dozen series in chronological order, for a full arc in each book. (Marvel's Epic Collections are also very good, though most of them collect issues from before your time.) I'm glad these stories remain in circulation; there have also been new reprints of the complete "Age of Apocalypse" saga, which I plan on getting to next.
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