Sperg about comic books here

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Czargon the Red said:
deadpool's famous but rob's just kind of the guy who went in far over his head.
Click to expand...
Rob's story is kind of classic. He got handed too much success at way too young an age when he had no idea how to handle it, and then about the last 80 percent of his career has just been a long slow slide because he never learned how to build that success into something sustainable. The analog I always like to bring up is Michael Schenker: played lead guitar on the first Scorpions record when he was 16, was a full-fledged touring rock star at 17, broke down at 22, and has been various temperatures of flaming wreck for the rest of his life.

If you look at the timeline, Rob was 23 years old when New Mutants #87 dropped. He went from literally who to superstar in the space of less than a year after that. Youngblood #1 was a history-making smash hit (first ever creator-owned book to top the sales charts, remember) and made him an instant millionaire when he was 25. And then he was crashing and burning -- his Heroes Reborn books flopped, he got turfed out of Image, he had his giant pathetic legal slapfight with Todd -- just in time for his 30th birthday.
 
Czargon the Red said:
I'm still salty that DC killed the Original Atom before the reconstruction era.

Like we have a lot of stories with Jay and the other flashes, Alan and the other GLs, and we can even find some with Carter and Katar.

But the OG Atom and the others? Nope.
Click to expand...
Yeah it's weird we have like Atom Smasher, and Damage, and yet their wasn't a story with all three of them.

Zero Hour was weird.
 
Fromtheblackdepths said:
Yeah it's weird we have like Atom Smasher, and Damage, and yet their wasn't a story with all three of them.

Zero Hour was weird.
Click to expand...
not to mention the Reconstruction era and 2000s just didn't really have Al Pratt's Legacies interact much. I think the most memorable one was fucking Blackest Night and uh
Putting this in a spoiler because Blackest Night is a pretty fun read. Also other spoilers but yeah. The whole "Atom" legacy has suffered.
Ray Palmer has a brief moment where he tells Damage that he's worthy of the legacy of Al Pratt.

then Black Lantern Jean Loring rips his heart out.


I get why they'd pick on Damage but I think they still had plenty of story potential with him. Atom Smasher may have had some more recognizability due to the DCAU JLU stuff. I think Damage could have potentially had a great redemption arc and become a higher-end character and potentially on the high end of the B list ones.

Oh and just to add insult to injury, DC killed Ryan Choi within a year or so of this. God they just don't know what the fuck to do with the legacy.

COme to think of it, the only consistently living members of the whole Atom legacy/supporting cast are Ray Palmer and Atom Smasher/Nuklon. Jean Loring's dead. Those small aliens from Sword of the Atom are dead. (You remember those. They showed up in Black Night too.), Adam Cray the Suicide Squad Atom died in the late 80s. Etc.

his friendship with Hawkman got seriously fucked up in blackest night too jesus.

I also seem to remember the whole Silver-Age "Time Pool"" thing Atom had with some old professor. Feels bad that DC doesn't know what they want to do with the Atom, but then the issue is that unlike Marvel's Hank Pym, Ray Palmer didn't wind up creating any major villain like Ultron or any big moment of controversy like the bitch slap. (Unless you count ID Crisis and evil Jean Loring.)

I think the other thing is that once you start looking at how The Atom belt works, it basically lets him not only grow and shrink, but become super strong, durable, and dense. It's a little too strong, but it's balanced by Ray Palmer's focus on his work and exploration. He's always depicted as a scientist and merely an average fighter in the JLA.
 
Czargon the Red said:
not to mention the Reconstruction era and 2000s just didn't really have Al Pratt's Legacies interact much. I think the most memorable one was fucking Blackest Night and uh
Click to expand...
Smasher interacts with Al in a great moment in Johns JSA. I'm far saltier about OG Mr. Terrific and Roulette being left ambiguous.
Czargon the Red said:
Putting this in a spoiler because Blackest Night is a pretty fun read. Also other spoilers but yeah. The whole "Atom" legacy has suffered.
Click to expand...

Since you are a JSA man, I'd like to talk about the mixed feelings I have on the Thomas era JSA.

Given what we know now, that McCarthy was essentially right about deep penetration by communists, I don't know that the excuse for the OG JSA breaking up being the result of McCarthy holds up well. Then you have the pandering in Thomas' All-Star run, which got pretty cringe at times. Don't get me wrong, Thomas did some great stuff. But would I rather not have Roy Thomas lecture me about racism or whatever every three or four issues of my superhero book? Yeah.

Still great comics and if I'm ranking JSA runs it's probably third or fifth on my list.

kaien said:
Rob's story is kind of classic. He got handed too much success at way too young an age when he had no idea how to handle it, and then about the last 80 percent of his career has just been a long slow slide because he never learned how to build that success into something sustainable. The analog I always like to bring up is Michael Schenker: played lead guitar on the first Scorpions record when he was 16, was a full-fledged touring rock star at 17, broke down at 22, and has been various temperatures of flaming wreck for the rest of his life.

If you look at the timeline, Rob was 23 years old when New Mutants #87 dropped. He went from literally who to superstar in the space of less than a year after that. Youngblood #1 was a history-making smash hit (first ever creator-owned book to top the sales charts, remember) and made him an instant millionaire when he was 25. And then he was crashing and burning -- his Heroes Reborn books flopped, he got turfed out of Image, he had his giant pathetic legal slapfight with Todd -- just in time for his 30th birthday.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. But I don't thinks it's just age. McFarlane was older and so was Silvestri. Yet you have this whole Image generation and what is their contribution?

Todd McFarlane had one memorable two issue arc on Spidey that was the culmination of Tom Defalco and others Symbiote suit stuff. He had a decent run and Hulk, and some okay stuff at DC. But that's it, outside of a couple of years of Spawn, which most people agree is pretty but kindof junk.

Compare that to prior generations. Frank Miller and Walt Simonson (Daredevil and Thor), John Byrne and George Perez, (NTT and Uncanny X-Men), Neal Adams and Jim Steranko, (Nick Fury and Batman), or Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Thousands of issues with hundreds of characters still beloved and used. Todd? Venom, a take on the Symbiote suit. Rob? Deadpool and maybe Cable. Marc? Witchblade, a character he never drew an issue for. It's not just them. Guys like Joe Quesada and second generation figures are in the same boat.

The speculator boom encouraged a whole generation to produce less.
 
jspit2.0 said:
Absolutely. But I don't thinks it's just age. McFarlane was older and so was Silvestri. Yet you have this whole Image generation and what is their contribution?
Click to expand...
Creator ownership was a double-edged sword in a weird way, yeah. Lee and Silvestri and McFarlane were able to keep their businesses on a more or less even keel in a way that Rob couldn't, and I do chalk that up to their modest edge in maturity, but they basically just became successful dreck merchants. They made fortunes without the aid of quality control for long enough that they never figured out how to do it well even when the post-crash market forced them to try.

Wildstorm and Top Cow eventually produced some good stuff from time to time. Would I put it up there with the best of Shooter-era Marvel? Shit no.

Building on your point, you could see how some of those '80s greats went into decline when they got bigger than the game. Frank Miller, you can argue about exactly when Sin City went downhill, but it certainly did. The Simonsons went to Top Cow and became totally unreadable. John Byrne, holy God. (Although Byrne might have lost his mind either way.)
 
Anyone here read The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Like most people, I didn’t know prior to posting this that the movie was based on a comic strip series:

6BD00C69-88EE-4A2F-890B-7E2CBFF3AAE1.jpeg 1DC82B54-DD72-4D4F-92EC-CE14532A9684.jpeg

It’s insanse how much Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill have been a part of my life somehow.

Also why does this image remind me of the huge roundtable scene with the army generals and scientists in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

4F00B0A4-E3CE-43F7-B242-B2D0CFBF8944.jpeg
 
Last edited:
albert chan said:
Anyone here read The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Like most people, I didn’t know prior to posting this that the movie was based on a comic strip series:

View attachment 1886384View attachment 1886385

It’s insanse how much Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill have been a part of my life somehow.

Also why does this image remind me of the huge roundtable scene with the army generals and scientists and in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

View attachment 1886389
Click to expand...
Oh my god. I love this series. What you wanna talk about?
 
albert chan said:
Anyone here read The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Like most people, I didn’t know prior to posting this that the movie was based on a comic strip series:

View attachment 1886384View attachment 1886385

It’s insanse how much Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill have been a part of my life somehow.

Also why does this image remind me of the huge roundtable scene with the army generals and scientists and in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

View attachment 1886389
Click to expand...
Alan's ABC (Americas Best Comics) universe is easily my favourite body of work of he did. Genuinely creative and different. The difference between something like Tom Strong and Neonomicon is night and day.
 
The first couple League stories are pretty great adventure yarns. After that it gets weird...and weirder...and weirder. I forget exactly where I got off the train but it was at a point where I think it only made sense to Moore's extremely unusual brain.

In re: Neonomicon, I wanna say he's on record that he wrote it to pay off his tax bill that year.
 
albert chan said:
Anyone here read The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Like most people, I didn’t know prior to posting this that the movie was based on a comic strip series:

View attachment 1886384View attachment 1886385

It’s insanse how much Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill have been a part of my life somehow.

Also why does this image remind me of the huge roundtable scene with the army generals and scientists and in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

View attachment 1886389
Click to expand...
I have along with all his ABC content and I rank it at the bottom with Promethea.

sKr0n said:
Alan's ABC (Americas Best Comics) universe is easily my favourite body of work of he did. Genuinely creative and different. The difference between something like Tom Strong and Neonomicon is night and day.
Click to expand...

Awesome was, in my opinion, better. Both were derivative.

kaien said:
The first couple League stories are pretty great adventure yarns.
Click to expand...
It's War of the Worlds mixed with Stand Lee/Roy Thomas' Avengers, as I remember.
kaien said:
After that it gets weird...and weirder...and weirder. I forget exactly where I got off the train but it was at a point where I think it only made sense to Moore's extremely unusual brain.
Click to expand...
Black Dossier or 19whatever volume 1 for me. It was indulgent, bloated, lacking story cohesion, and generally tedious.
kaien said:
In re: Neonomicon, I wanna say he's on record that he wrote it to pay off his tax bill that year.
Click to expand...
Plenty of people hack. But even when they hack they can produce great stuff. Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman to name two have been hacking for over thirty years and produced some genuinely decent stuff.
 
jspit2.0 said:
Plenty of people hack. But even when they hack they can produce great stuff. Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman to name two have been hacking for over thirty years and produced some genuinely decent stuff.
Click to expand...
Miller's a loon and his art has gradually degenerated but he's always got his moments. I can still think back to stuff like the hamster wheel in Dark Knight 2 and just crack the fuck up.

Dovetailing with the Rob Liefeld discussion, the Judgment Day story that Moore wrote to blow up and reboot Rob's superhero universe is one I enjoyed a lot. It's hilarious on a meta level, because the message is essentially that all the stuff Rob did in the '90s and the larger industry trends that his comics represented were terrible mistakes.
 
kaien said:
Miller's a loon and his art has gradually degenerated but he's rarely boring. I can still think back to stuff like the hamster wheel in Dark Knight 2 and just crack the fuck up.

Dovetailing with the Rob Liefeld discussion, the Judgment Day story that Moore wrote to blow up and reboot Rob's superhero universe is one I enjoyed a lot. It's hilarious on a meta level, because the message is essentially that all the stuff Rob did in the '90s and the larger industry trends that his comics represented were terrible mistakes.
Click to expand...
I'm surprised Miller and Liefeld never worked on anything together or did they?
 
Nope. Miller didn't do much collaborating in the '90s. He did the Martha Washington books with Dave Gibbons, he wrote that one issue of Spawn, but I think that was about it. He was always adamant that Sin City was something he'd only do himself.
 
kaien said:
Nope. Miller didn't do much collaborating in the '90s. He did the Martha Washington books with Dave Gibbons, he wrote that one issue of Spawn, but I think that was about it. He was always adamant that Sin City was something he'd only do himself.
Click to expand...
I think Sin City can't work without the insanity of Frank Miller. I just love the super-noir theme of it.
 
jspit2.0 said:
Smasher interacts with Al in a great moment in Johns JSA. I'm far saltier about OG Mr. Terrific and Roulette being left ambiguous.


Since you are a JSA man, I'd like to talk about the mixed feelings I have on the Thomas era JSA.

Given what we know now, that McCarthy was essentially right about deep penetration by communists, I don't know that the excuse for the OG JSA breaking up being the result of McCarthy holds up well. Then you have the pandering in Thomas' All-Star run, which got pretty cringe at times. Don't get me wrong, Thomas did some great stuff. But would I rather not have Roy Thomas lecture me about racism or whatever every three or four issues of my superhero book? Yeah.

Still great comics and if I'm ranking JSA runs it's probably third or fifth on my list.



Absolutely. But I don't thinks it's just age. McFarlane was older and so was Silvestri. Yet you have this whole Image generation and what is their contribution?

Todd McFarlane had one memorable two issue arc on Spidey that was the culmination of Tom Defalco and others Symbiote suit stuff. He had a decent run and Hulk, and some okay stuff at DC. But that's it, outside of a couple of years of Spawn, which most people agree is pretty but kindof junk.

Compare that to prior generations. Frank Miller and Walt Simonson (Daredevil and Thor), John Byrne and George Perez, (NTT and Uncanny X-Men), Neal Adams and Jim Steranko, (Nick Fury and Batman), or Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Thousands of issues with hundreds of characters still beloved and used. Todd? Venom, a take on the Symbiote suit. Rob? Deadpool and maybe Cable. Marc? Witchblade, a character he never drew an issue for. It's not just them. Guys like Joe Quesada and second generation figures are in the same boat.

The speculator boom encouraged a whole generation to produce less.
Click to expand...
Roy Thomas was explicitly trying to kinda tie in story reasons for IRL things like why the JSA stopped appearing after '51 or why Hourman had an appearance gap in the 40s. Or why Al Pratt gained super strength. Etc.

It's not a bad approach, even if some of it was hit and miss. Amazing Man isn't a bad concept, far from it. He's pretty much peacefully assimilated into the larger DCU. The Flying Fox, Tsunami, and other "non-white" heroes he created still sort of worked out alright. (I think we see Tsunami and Neptune Perkins married and active until Infinite Crisis where Perkins dies.) Flying Fox never really did anything else but hey, he's there if a writer ever needed a Native American hero or legacy that didn't have a fucking stupid name.

I think the thing is that the McCartyism causing superheroes to go into decline doesn't make a lot of sense pre-crisis since you literally had Superman and Wonder Woman as active icons.

However, I think that good old Senator McCarthy would probably have taken what the literal agent of divine will had to say. (Spectre).

That whole story could have been handled better, but as it is, I don't think it's too bad. Part of me wishes James Robinson's Golden Age was canon so we could have gotten some sort of plausible mistrust of superheroes beyond "Red Scare" stuff. Remember, this right right after the war and according to Roy Thomas and other writers, the golden age superheroes were not only all on film and radio, but they were all officially backed by FDR and Churchill themselves. The news of Mystery-Men like TNT dying in fights with Nazi Superhumans did make it to publication. It sort of weirdly doesn't make a ton of sense since these superheroes would have been seen with as much public fervor as the big name allied generals were seen as public heroes post-war.

Hence, I think James Robinson's Golden Age should have been canonized. It makes a ton of sense, and they really didn't use Robotman/Mr. America/Dan the Dyno-mite in any capacity outside of Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron.
 
Czargon the Red said:
Roy Thomas was explicitly trying to kinda tie in story reasons for IRL things like why the JSA stopped appearing after '51 or why Hourman had an appearance gap in the 40s. Or why Al Pratt gained super strength. Etc.

It's not a bad approach, even if some of it was hit and miss. Amazing Man isn't a bad concept, far from it. He's pretty much peacefully assimilated into the larger DCU. The Flying Fox, Tsunami, and other "non-white" heroes he created still sort of worked out alright. (I think we see Tsunami and Neptune Perkins married and active until Infinite Crisis where Perkins dies.) Flying Fox never really did anything else but hey, he's there if a writer ever needed a Native American hero or legacy that didn't have a fucking stupid name.

I think the thing is that the McCartyism causing superheroes to go into decline doesn't make a lot of sense pre-crisis since you literally had Superman and Wonder Woman as active icons.

However, I think that good old Senator McCarthy would probably have taken what the literal agent of divine will had to say. (Spectre).

That whole story could have been handled better, but as it is, I don't think it's too bad. Part of me wishes James Robinson's Golden Age was canon so we could have gotten some sort of plausible mistrust of superheroes beyond "Red Scare" stuff. Remember, this right right after the war and according to Roy Thomas and other writers, the golden age superheroes were not only all on film and radio, but they were all officially backed by FDR and Churchill themselves. The news of Mystery-Men like TNT dying in fights with Nazi Superhumans did make it to publication. It sort of weirdly doesn't make a ton of sense since these superheroes would have been seen with as much public fervor as the big name allied generals were seen as public heroes post-war.

Hence, I think James Robinson's Golden Age should have been canonized. It makes a ton of sense, and they really didn't use Robotman/Mr. America/Dan the Dyno-mite in any capacity outside of Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron.
Click to expand...
The Golden Age wasn't canon when it came out in 1993, but it gradually became canon after Zero Hour.

DC themselves say as much: How JSA: THE GOLDEN AGE Changed the Justice Society Forever
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom