Sperg about comic books here

[Tor Lugosi]

I started reading Werewolf by Night recently and it's... surprisingly great. After the original Ghost Rider issues sucked I was wary of Marvel's '70s horror-related characters but so far I've been really enjoying WbN. Gerry Conway sets up a couple of good mysteries and conflicts from the start that propel the story forward and his scripting is pretty decent overall, although sometimes the narration boxes are a bit overwritten and he really likes to use silver to describe stuff (silver shards of glass, silver lakes, silver machines, silver moon, and a dozen more). Looks like the succession of writers for the book is good: Conway, Wolfman, and then Moench.

 

[Water-T]

You know, I've said it in this thread before and in various places, I'm really enjoying the X-Men Krakoa era overall, I disagree with most of the criticism it gets, I feel a lot of it comes from things taken out of context or made to seem worse than they are, I like that a lot of the things it does are typical X-Men concepts taken to the ultimate conclusion and blah blah blah that's not what I want to talk about now, but I had to say it for context.

So I'm liking it overall, but JESUS CHRIST are Excalibur and Knights of X fucking shit. Both by Tini Howard. Not even gonna front, I loved X of Swords in all of its fae bullshit glory, but all the work of setting it up and dealing with its repercussions in Excalibur and later KoX was excruciating.

My attitude about it up until recently was "yeah it's not great but what you gonna do", but recently I decided to re-read Remender's Uncanny X-Force, and damn, it's painful trying to reconcile that the Betsy in UXF is the same character as the Betsy in Howard's books.

That's what I wanted to say, fuck Tini Howard.

On the positive side, Knights of X lasted only 5 issues. Even the garbage that was Fallen Angels vol 2 managed to get 6 issues before it was canned. Why they even bothered to cancel Excalibur for KoX confounds me. The only difference was that Rogue and Jubilee were off the team and Mordred was tagging along.

 

[ChampFantana]

I recently finished Busiek's Arrowsmith stuff about a WWI in a fantastical version of our world. I liked it a lot, but one small thing bugs me. The main character is an airman/wizard, trained to fly using magic and the assistance of a dragonet (small dragon.). His main weapon is a sword, and a crossbow that fires energy bolts that are created by magic spells. If his superiors are willing to spend a bunch of time and money training him to use magic, wouldn't it be cheaper and much less resource intensive to simply give him a pistol and a couple of spare magazines alongside his rapier?

I'm currently making my way through the John Ostrander run of Grimjack from the 80s. Highly entertaining stuff, the characters are cool, the stories are damn good, and the art is pretty nice. I like it a lot.

 

[MirrorNoir]

At least with the Quiet Council there was a sense of drama: Mystique, Sinister, and Sebastian Shaw were up to no good and with Exodus he was a wild card as was the shoe to be dropped on whether or not Apocalypse was going to turn evil again or not.

But yeah there has been a great deal of "lets ignore past lore" shit outside Hellions (which famously had the Morlocks constantly trying to kill Scalphunter as a plot point for him getting made to be a Hellion). But even then there were NUMEROUS dropped balls, most notably the resurrection of the OG Hellions, who got jack shit screen time except for the implication that the entire team are virtual prisoners of Empath, who's been mind raping them to beat the shit out of each other for his personal amusement and making them worship him.

Also spoilers for Amazing Spider-Man #9 (the finale to the Hellfire Gala) and no, they didn't use the massive fucking delays to fix shit:

Spoiler: Spoilers

No one died as Scalphunter, Peter, and Wolverine saved MJ and Moira fled to make her appointment with the Eternals to help set up Judgement Day by telling them the names of the resurrection squad members.

Also, even though sales are collapsing mightily and Well's run is tanking fast, the ending of the issue is MORE shitting on MJ/Peter shippers by having MJ tell Peter to fuck off and still dragging their asses on the mystery box shit regarding why they broke up and why MJ is dead set on raising a stranger's kids. And worse still, we now have an upcoming Inferno III sequel which will have Evil Ben, Evil Maddie Pryor, AND a rumored heel turn soft retool for Venom too since the Ewing run has been a complete and total commercial and critical failure!

Also Judgement Day #4 spoilers

Spoiler

Starfox pulled a 2020 and rigged an emergency vote to get himself made King of the Eternals via adding mutantkind to the voting roll so he could win. And Magneto/Storm together defeated Uranos. Sadly Starfox tried to get the Zombie Celestial to back down and instead he states he's judged earth guilty and starts by murdering a bunch of humans protesting the X-Men treehouse over their hording immortality tech. Also, in exchange for helping him make him head Eternal, Starfox promises a tech sharing alliance with Krakoa and there is a rare "we fucked up" diss at Gillen's own Eternal book when he has Sersei claim that she failed her "judgement" because the Celestial preferred her pre-character derailment.

 

[Nick Obre]

Also spoilers for Amazing Spider-Man #9 (the finale to the Hellfire Gala) and no, they didn't use the massive fucking delays to fix shit:

Spoiler: Spoilers

Also, even though sales are collapsing mightily and Well's run is tanking fast, the ending of the issue is MORE shitting on MJ/Peter shippers by having MJ tell Peter to fuck off and still dragging their asses on the mystery box shit regarding why they broke up and why MJ is dead set on raising a stranger's kids. And worse still, we now have an upcoming Inferno III sequel which will have Evil Ben, Evil Maddie Pryor, AND a rumored heel turn soft retool for Venom too since the Ewing run has been a complete and total commercial and critical failure!

Well, they weren't gonna reveal the big mystery of the run in a tie-in issue.
Also, I haven't been exactly enthralled by this Venom run (Hitch is technically good but man, he puts me to sleep), but the latest issue was at least clever with the reveal and the recontextualization of an earlier scene.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

I feel like I say this monthly now but holy fuck am I glad I gave up on modern comics.

I'd bet they'll reveal MJ and Peter broke up because Peter cheated, since modern writers are fucking awful and can't conceive of someone being a good person, plus Marvel seems to fume over the idea that readers want Peter Parker instead of a replacement and worse yet want a married, adult Peter Parker.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Netflix recently announced that they're not moving forward with the Grendel series. Makes you wonder about the quality of it -- I can't imagine anything being so bad that even Netflix said "no, this is unfit for streaming", though maybe it just didn't have enough half-nude little kids in it or black trannies for Netflix's liking, or was just a budget issue. I was sorta looking forward to it, just to see how it turned out.

Them cancelling it also makes all that "the comics that inspired the Netflix show!" advertising for the TPBs Darkhorse did funny, ironic, and I guess technically false advertising now.

 

[trekkor]

(ASM#10)
what is this face meant to convey?

 

[Registration]

The power ranger 100 was alright. Kinda sad that jason will be gone since he was my favorite

 

[DaBigBopper]

View attachment 3701225
(ASM#10)
what is this face meant to convey?

> yfw When Gwen bites down and keeps sucking

You know what I really, really love about the X-Men bullshit? Every other week they'll have a flash forward sequence of some enemy kicking their shit in and then they'll effortlessly beat that enemy. There is no struggle in it. It's a splash page of them losing with really boring beam spam or certain characters being killed.

Days of Future Past had the X-Men struggling to evade Sentinels, it was not a direct fight. They had to use side streets and evade patrols. I do a read through with some friends and we usually read old comics and you really get the idea that Claremont and John Byrne really did want to tell a story of the X-Men being scrappy and raging against a rotten world.
The current stuff is listless. It's all Idpol and worse it's written by people who only have seen racism on TV or Movies.

The status quo of Krokoa is "Oh no! Some evil chuds might heckin' end our degenerate island" then "lol chuds owned". It's basically Monster of the Week with the looming threat being just another Monster of the Week.

 

[AMOOGUS]

> yfw When Gwen bites down and keeps sucking

Even funnier considering that harry went through all the trouble to fucking trick everybody instead of simply just forcing his dad to fuck gwen to cuck pete.
But seriously, why is x-men so cursed now? (along with a lot of comics these days.) freaking wolverine and cyclops and jean grey are freaking poly????
I know that comics aren't as profitable as they are in the past (i pirate them now and then) , but that doesn't mean that the plot doesn't have to be bad...

 

[Rupin]

I was reading Clairemont’s run on Excalibur. Good stuff! I loved how it showcased Nightcrawler as a leader and made him more of a main character instead of the X-Men‘s comic relief.

 

[MirrorNoir]

I was reading Clairemont’s run on Excalibur. Good stuff! I loved how it showcased Nightcrawler as a leader and made him more of a main character instead of the X-Men‘s comic relief.

Are you sure it was Claremont's Excalibur you read? Kurt doesn't become Excalibur's leader until well into the run (#68 to be exact) as Captain Britain was running the show until that point.

Also, Claremont's Excalibur run is pretty much dogshit even with Alan Davis's artwork. It's where EVERY bad trait of Claremont's writing took hold like a cancer and it's only redeeming trait being that it removed Shadowcat and put her in a proverbial time out room where she couldn't hog the limeline in Uncanny and other female characters (Dazzler, Psylockes, Rogue, Jubilee, and Maddie Pryor) got to shine and grow. Especially since we STILL have plotlines from his run there that have never been resolved (Sat-Yr-9 I'm looking at you).

Netflix recently announced that they're not moving forward with the Grendel series. Makes you wonder about the quality of it -- I can't imagine anything being so bad that even Netflix said "no, this is unfit for streaming", though maybe it just didn't have enough half-nude little kids in it or black trannies for Netflix's liking, or was just a budget issue. I was sorta looking forward to it, just to see how it turned out.

Them cancelling it also makes all that "the comics that inspired the Netflix show!" advertising for the TPBs Darkhorse did funny, ironic, and I guess technically false advertising now.

Grendel's a fucked up franchise in that it's only really decent incarnations are the Hunter Rose version and the Grendel Prime version; the former is an old shame of Matt Wagner (who had a huge amount of trolls remorse writing a villain protagonist that he ended up making a point, in every flashback story he wrote for Hunter, to make him more and more evil and unlikable). And the later is a literal faceless, personality-devoid cyborg gimp who's stories tend to be generic post-apocalyptic crap and was carried only by the character design.

Ironically you could probably get a decent show out of Hunter Rose if you only take the broad strokes and flesh out shit and expand it well beyond the ultra short timeframe Wanger has set the Hunter Rose stuff as happening within.

You could do an entire season of Hunter adopting his daughter and slowly taking over the criminal underworld while Argent slowly makes his own ways a vigilante hero. You don't even have to adapt the ending and go all sorts of directions and and make it last several seasons.

 

[Hummingbird]

I found a great deal on this omnibus of the '66 Batman comic series. Usually you have to pay $80 to 110, but I found a used one for $62 so I snatched it up. It's a good take on the series and gives some characters who never got to be on the show like Bane (whose an evil luchador) and Poison Ivy a chance.

 

[Rupin]

Are you sure it was Claremont's Excalibur you read? Kurt doesn't become Excalibur's leader until well into the run (#68 to be exact) as Captain Britain was running the show until that point.

Also, Claremont's Excalibur run is pretty much dogshit even with Alan Davis's artwork. It's where EVERY bad trait of Claremont's writing took hold like a cancer and it's only redeeming trait being that it removed Shadowcat and put her in a proverbial time out room where she couldn't hog the limeline in Uncanny and other female characters (Dazzler, Psylockes, Rogue, Jubilee, and Maddie Pryor) got to shine and grow. Especially since we STILL have plotlines from his run there that have never been resolved (Sat-Yr-9 I'm looking at you).

my apologies, I am just on issue 48 and Alan Davis is the writer. I still think it’s good stuff although that little side story with the N Men was goofy as fuck. I was thinking that Nightcrawler was the leader now cuz Captain Britain was off in some fantasy land fighting with King Aurtur and Merlin and he was too busy to lead the team until he came back in issue 47.

 

[Commander X]

Going over my first digital comics purchase in awhile, the digital version of the IDW collection of Doug Wildey's passion project Rio, about a former outlaw turned troubleshooter at large in the Wild West.

Wildey, who worked off and on in comics over the decades was also involved in animation and in one night, while reworking a concept for Hanna-Barbera, came up with "Johnny Quest".

However you get ahold of a hard copy version, be it the now pretty pricey IDW hardcover , or early prints from Comico or Dark Horse, it's worth it.

The Rio stories really were some beautiful comic book work. The IDW collection scanned the pages directly from Wildey's original art, so a lot of the pages in this release are in black and white. Some pages featured subdued colors over fantastic art and a great use of duo-shade paper.

 

[MirrorNoir]

Miracleman #0 was a huge bust and only damage controlled by the framing sequence that framed the stories in the #0 issue as published fiction in the Miracleman Universe (which includes a diss at Marvel writers by Gaiman claiming "the stories say less about the characters but the writers) and Ty Templeton's brief contributions: a pin-up page for a Batman The Animated Series version of Miracleman (that is inserted right in the middle of Ryan Stegman's story) and Ty's two pages of in-universe comic strips about Miracleman and the characters, including a "Life In Hell" parody with Kid Miracleman that is straight from the Groening strip in terms of tone.

Also, Gillen steps into the "let's pretend X-Factor never happened/Jean was Phoenix/Dark Phoenix" pool in AXE: X-Men, with the Celestial judging Jean a failure based off the whole blowing up a planet thing from the Dark Phoenix without any cavets most people put in (IE it was a cosmic horror impersonating her) when they reference Uncanny #135. And the ending has Jean going full cunt mode because, as Wolverine quips, Jean doesn't like it when she's told called out on her crap/told she's a horrible human being.

Also, picked up a bunch of Batman floppies. Including the issues of Detective Comics where Tim Drake's mom is killed/his dad crippled and the Black Mask story that happens before Knightfall. And one of my biggest grails: Batman Annual #14, aka "Eye of the Beholder", which is considered by many to be the definitive Two-Face story. And the Tomb of Dracula #1 Fascimile Edition.

 

[CowPox]

I'm reading the "Noir" version of Frank Millers "The Dark Knight Strikes Again" and maybe it's because of the lack of coloring or something but the art is just a horrid mess, at times its impossible to even tell what is going on, anyone else flip through this version? There's a scene where Brainiac who acts very out of character throughout the story destroys parts of Metropolis and i swear it just looks like a bunch of scribbles, i normally like Miller's style of art but this book just looks like a total mess, and the story itself seems like it was just a cash grab when compared to TDKR.

 

[MirrorNoir]

Haven't read the black and white version. DKSB is super hit or miss; there are some decent parts/ideas, mainly dystopian future JLA versus Luther/Brainiac and the stuff with Kandor is pretty chilling in terms of horror. Not to mention the stuff with Vic Sage; it makes me wish we could get Frank Miller writing/drawing Question full time, since he's kind of made for the character given Question's noir roots and the fact that, at the time, he actually drew Question looking like Question for the first time in ages and not like he had been under Denys Cowan (who after a couple of issues on the O'Neill run suddenly started drawing Vic as faceless Robert Plant cosplaying as Question) or the god-awful hack who drew "The Question Returns" who went rogue and drew Vic having visible eyes and instead of a blank face, just not having a mouth. Plus the cyberpunk bits.

But Batman is completely and utterly unlikable in the series, Superman continues to get shitted on, and the less said about the ending and "pay-off" to the Legion stuff the better.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

I’ve posted this in other threads, but I’m getting ready to read Bloom County for the first time. People have often compared this to Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side, while others have compared the art style to Doonesbury.

I was wondering what was this comic like for you when you read this for the first time. When I found out people compared this to Doonesbury, I was a little bit mixed on that since I always found the creator of that comic to let his personal politics get in the way of him trying to tell the story of the main character without getting too anti-Republican for anti-Republicans’ sake. I’m all for being satirical and making parodies when necessary, but in current day, when making jokes about the usual suspects and not once taking jabs at your own side (and I don’t mean light jabs or slaps on the wrists-level comedy), it can be tiresome since most of these people are missing the idea of telling jokes and actually having punchlines.

Either way, Bloom County looks like a good one, so let me know your thoughts on this one.