Sperg about comic books here

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I do. In fact I'd go as far to say Knightsquest and Knightsend were better than kKnightfall.
Much like Reign of the Superman being the best of the Death of Superman trilogy, being one of the few trilogies where the third act is the strongest.

Death may be the iconic one, showing Superman’s fall, Reign shows him rise and it’s glorious.
 
Haven't read any Red Hood in years but you just know this book would have been fucking dumb.
a recurring thing in comics is that they want status quo, so you will have shit like nightwing etc fuckin everybody and it not mattering, but also can't stay with anyone, long term important characters like starfire barbara etc, but then they just randomly choose to forget status quo for the fuckin stupidest, lamest reasons, like having rapidfire ocs join the batfamily and having like step batchildren and honorary batmembers and shit like the nose ring dangerhair they gave Punchline to, and that's locked in retroactively in any reboots.

red hood is objectively his best ver in works like Under The Red Hood, or like Arkham Knight. if nightwing is young optimistic non lethal batman, red hood is young pessimistic lethal batman. i've not followed the continuous stupid lore but last i heard he recently ditched guns for anime swords and basically is in a redemption/dindunuffin arc, which is fucking stupid. he's dc's punisher basically and i guess they followed the same channels of not wanting a hero that would shoot criminals.

people keep talking about joker fatigue etc and yeah sure, but bigger problem is oh my god they need to remove anyone besides nightwing, red hood, barbara, tim drake, and i guess damian. red hood being more his own independent. having like literally something like 9 or so batmen is stupid af.

the endless character fuckery screws with everyone though, like since the teen titans show was successful, the original team was overwritten with them being like the show, so starfire is locked into a young ditzy retard forever, raven is locked into being a teen and has to always have romantic tendencies toward beast boy even though in the original if anything it was to nightwing in a triangle, nightwing's on a status quo seesaw of loving starfire, loving barbara, or manwhore who also has flaccid dick syndrome around only either of them depending on writer, harley quinn is just permanently a retarded lesbian because ivy shippers, ivy is permanently locked with her, etc. you can't do a harley quinn reboot without her being a lesbian wanting to fuck ivy and be a deadpool rip off, can't remove batfam bloat, and you have stuff like the countless teen titan vers just being progressively more literal whos until they bring back the "original" show based group when interest is minimal.

it leads to older stuff consistently being the only stories or character portrayals worth a damn. you CAN get some good stuff, like personally i really liked face-mask joker, or rather the idea of much more of a unhinged, serial killer ver of the character, the moments shown like even harley quinn going "that's not who i loved anymore", but then they very quickly revert it due to the Metal story shit. you'll have writers that have good ideas that either self sabotage, are sabotaged above, or have to share space with troontards, and in the end red hood is no longer red hood, he's a self insert of 6 different authors, placed under set limitations and rules from management that apparently does not fucking include rewriting characters that lasts through reboots.
 
it leads to older stuff consistently being the only stories or character portrayals worth a damn. you CAN get some good stuff, like personally i really liked face-mask joker, or rather the idea of much more of a unhinged, serial killer ver of the character, the moments shown like even harley quinn going "that's not who i loved anymore", but then they very quickly revert it due to the Metal story shit. you'll have writers that have good ideas that either self sabotage, are sabotaged above, or have to share space with troontards, and in the end red hood is no longer red hood, he's a self insert of 6 different authors, placed under set limitations and rules from management that apparently does not fucking include rewriting characters that lasts through reboots.

I think the focus on the extended mass-media interpretations of these characters has caused a weird form of literary/media "incest" and now we're just kinda forced to see the status quo get upheld in serialized fiction.

What would probably be good would be more "continuations" of those IPs in comic form. Haven't all the DCAU continuations in the comics in the 2010s-2020s done decently well?
 
“Red Hood: Max” is a dream series, broken Boy Wonder wandering Earth and bringing low-level justice to the worst would be a dream.

Like Jason pulling a Rambo and cutting the hearts out of cartel shitheads. Imagine that, Bruce getting reports of Robin symbols painted in blood on those storage units traffickers shove people into. Not even this “moving on and getting better” homo shit, just Jason, a “dead man” going full revenant and using all Bruce taught him to kill human garbage. Bruce knows his boy is out there, doing a darker version of the international travel he did in his youth and he’s simply in a unique denial where he’s pretending not to see it.
 
I'll look it up, thanks.

...................

@topic

So I started reading the Batman storyline "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?"

I'm reading from a version that divides it into two books: "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" and "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive." I'm most of the way thru the first book now.

So far it kind of annoys me.

One problem with a lot of Batman writers is they always want every story to be about how everyone is affected emotionally, so a lot of the story is characters chatterboxing about how sad they'd feel if Bruce actually did it, which is boring because as the reader we know damn well he didn't. It basically begins feeling like a glorified version of one of those cartoon episodes where the hero gets framed and everyone turns on them.

Me, my interest was I thought this was gonna be a murder mystery, but the book doesn't want to focus on that. In fact there's been little said about Vesper's murder.

This is one thing that bugs me: there's less evidence against Bruce Wayne than there was against OJ Simpson, and well... OJ walked. The initial sequence reads "obvious frame up," and yet everyone took retard pills in this story, even Oracle and Tim Drake are wondering "did he actually do it?" and the Gotham PD seem convinced. I think Bruce needs better attorneys.

Then the story hits a midpoint where Bruce Wayne escapes and... he decides he's going to be Batman full time, "there is no Bruce Wayne anymore."

Buh-scuse me? Don't you need Bruce Wayne to make sure funding keeps being channeled into your Batman efforts? The story is completely ignoring that so far, and again, none of his friends think to bring that up, instead preferring a "OMG you not being Bruce anymore is so troubling and sad!" angle.

It's kind of dumb so far.
This is the era in which I got into comics and Batman was my gateway. The problem with the late 90s/early to mid 00s was that there were all of these stories where Bruce had to learn to let the Bat family help him and that he couldn't do it alone... sometimes even under a year after he learned that lesson last time.

The idea that Batman would be forced to abandon Bruce Wayne as an identity wasn't a bad idea, you could do a thing where you show why superheroes need secret identities. The problem was that Dixon, Rucka, Brubaker and Grayson were either forced into this storyline and half-assed it until they could go back to their own plots, or thought they were so much smarter than they actually were. And, as you said, the emotional side was more important to them.

Admittedly, I have a lot of fondness for the storyline because this is when I started buying floppies after reading the No Man's Land trades, but there is a lot of "This happens because we need it to for the plot" bullshit going on.
 
Much like Reign of the Superman being the best of the Death of Superman trilogy, being one of the few trilogies where the third act is the strongest.

Death may be the iconic one, showing Superman’s fall, Reign shows him rise and it’s glorious.
Is the comic substantially different from the novelization? That's the version of the story I know best, and its one I have issues with.

Particularly how Superman's return is handled. Maybe I'm too movie/anime-brained, but there's two primary things that always bugged me:

ONE - That we actually get to see (or rather, read about) Superman's slow recovery, so its not as glorious as it could be when Superman actually comes back. Personally, I would have had him return during a climactic moment and deliver a beatdown on the bad guys, then save the explanations for afterward.

TWO - Another thing I personally would have done is have his return be for a rematch with Doomsday. It's just so weird that when he comes back, its to fight Mongul, some villain he's beaten before. This would be like if in Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth leaves the plot one-third of the way into the game, and then the final boss is Zeromus from Final Fantasy IV, someone who had never been relevant to the story before now.

It's just a standard example of a story being ruined by Comics autism. Can't have it be a rematch with Doomsday because they want to leave the door open for a "Doomsday Returns" story later, also gotta have Superman come back in some lame black costume for... some reason.... and gotta make sure the return is meticulously explained because we care more about making sure fans can't nitpick than we do about good drama....

It's sad because I ultimately do find it a good story, it just stops short of being a great story.
 
Where should I start with Marvel, specifically Deadpool, without wading through too much filler? I gave DC a shot back in the day, but it felt like a total snoozefest. Do I need to read X-Men to understand Deadpool, or can I skip that? And is Deadpool a good pick for a newcomer?
 
Where should I start with Marvel, specifically Deadpool, without wading through too much filler? I gave DC a shot back in the day, but it felt like a total snoozefest. Do I need to read X-Men to understand Deadpool, or can I skip that? And is Deadpool a good pick for a newcomer?
You can start with either the miniseries Deadpool: Circle Chase, then the '94 Deadpool miniseries, followed by #1 of the first ongoing, or just skip that first ongoing. Deadpool is tied to the X-Men, with a few X-Men characters popping up, but not to any great degree and Deadpool's usually divorced from the larger X-Men plots.
 
Where should I start with Marvel, specifically Deadpool, without wading through too much filler? I gave DC a shot back in the day, but it felt like a total snoozefest. Do I need to read X-Men to understand Deadpool, or can I skip that? And is Deadpool a good pick for a newcomer?
It's misery porn, but if you want the status quo on modern (ie: not movie Deadpool), you'd do best to pick up the 2012 run by Duggan and Posehn. It'll get you up to speed with Preston, his daughter, and and his current love/hate relationship with Wolverine. If you want just silly fun, you can go with Spider-Man/Deadpool from 2016. He was briefly married in both to a demon queen, so don't let that smack you in the face out of nowhere.
 
It's misery porn, but if you want the status quo on modern (ie: not movie Deadpool), you'd do best to pick up the 2012 run by Duggan and Posehn. It'll get you up to speed with Preston, his daughter, and and his current love/hate relationship with Wolverine. If you want just silly fun, you can go with Spider-Man/Deadpool from 2016. He was briefly married in both to a demon queen, so don't let that smack you in the face out of nowhere.
Deadpool: The Gauntlet or Dracula's Gauntlet (I forget which one is the collected version) is a pretty good story and will get you up to speed with Shiklah.

I've read the first two Spidey/Deadpool Epic Collections. The first one is crap, but I'd recommend the second one for sure.
 
It's misery porn, but if you want the status quo on modern (ie: not movie Deadpool), you'd do best to pick up the 2012 run by Duggan and Posehn. It'll get you up to speed with Preston, his daughter, and and his current love/hate relationship with Wolverine. If you want just silly fun, you can go with Spider-Man/Deadpool from 2016. He was briefly married in both to a demon queen, so don't let that smack you in the face out of nowhere.
Does it have the backstory of him?
 
Does it have the backstory of him?
If you're looking for a series that begins at the very start of his mercenary career, sorta like the way Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four began with the start of their respective hero careers, you're not going to find it. He was introduced in X-Force (well, technically New Mutants right before the re-branding as X-Force) as a fully formed character who was already a mercenary for years, a sort of Deathstroke ripoff who wasn't much more than another goon for the team to fight, but managed to catch on with readers, leading to getting his own mini-series (Circle Chase) and eventually an on-going years later. Every so often a writer does a flashback that fleshes out his origin but that's about it, as far as I know.
 
If you're looking for a series that begins at the very start of his mercenary career, sorta like the way Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four began with the start of their respective hero careers, you're not going to find it. He was introduced in X-Force (well, technically New Mutants right before the re-branding as X-Force) as a fully formed character who was already a mercenary for years, a sort of Deathstroke ripoff who wasn't much more than another goon for the team to fight, but managed to catch on with readers, leading to getting his own mini-series (Circle Chase) and eventually an on-going years later. Every so often a writer does a flashback that fleshes out his origin but that's about it, as far as I know.
Ok so what's the best character or group of characters to start with that does actually show a proper backstory before the whole plot starts?
 
The 1994 miniseries Sins of the Past first establishes Wade's time at Weapon X under the care of Dr. Killebrew. The first ongoing under writer Joe Kelly spends more time with various aspects of his past, especially in the -1 issue (because that was a thing Marvel spent a month doing) and the 1997/1998 annuals. Things get weird at the end of the run, though, as a big twist gets added that kinda makes him very nearly as complicated as Post-Crisis Hawkman got.
 
Ok so what's the best character or group of characters to start with that does actually show a proper backstory before the whole plot starts?
I'm a big fan of James Robinson's Starman, which introduces Jack Knight and follows his career as the new Starman from the start to the end, although it is connected to all the other characters who have used the Starman name, but I think the series does a good job of explaining it all and fleshing it all out.

a big twist gets added that kinda makes him very nearly as complicated as Post-Crisis Hawkman got.
The "that was all actually T-Ray's memories" crap? Didn't they eventually retcon it, basically going, "no, that's retarded, those were actually Wade's memories"?
 
The "that was all actually T-Ray's memories" crap? Didn't they eventually retcon it, basically going, "no, that's retarded, those were actually Wade's memories"?

I don't remember if it was specifically retconned or if everyone at Marvel realized nobody else would ever be interested in using T-Ray again, so it really didn't matter.

all the other characters who have used the Starman name

They did Will Payton dirty, revealing he actually died in the blast that gave him his powers, and he was really Prince Gavyn just using the body and memories.
 
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