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The Bitching About Bad Comics Thread
The Geebs That Is A Pony
Super Moderator, Moderator mod
Super Moderator, Moderator mod
Hey, do you hate when comics are bad? Disappointed by something? Want to talk about it? Do it here. Keep it out of the other threads. This is where you can vent, and warn others about what you don't like.
This is where you can be angry and make bad jokes and whatever. If I see bad jokes and anger and stupid nonsense in other threads, I'll probably infract you. If you want to discuss problems you have with the subject of a thread in that thread, you can, but I'm going to expect you to be civil about it.
This is especially true for the moment of the week thread. Those threads are for highlights. If you want to bitch about something in there, well, I'm not going to have much tolerance for it.
Oh and side note, the phrase "moment of the weak" is stupid and you should feel stupid for using it.
This is where you can be angry and make bad jokes and whatever. If I see bad jokes and anger and stupid nonsense in other threads, I'll probably infract you. If you want to discuss problems you have with the subject of a thread in that thread, you can, but I'm going to expect you to be civil about it.
This is especially true for the moment of the week thread. Those threads are for highlights. If you want to bitch about something in there, well, I'm not going to have much tolerance for it.
Oh and side note, the phrase "moment of the weak" is stupid and you should feel stupid for using it.
The Geebs That Is A Pony on
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I'm pretty sure they are waiting for the end of Dark Reign and until then they're not willing or able to make any kind of significant impact on him.
This is it exactly. ASM has some weird bi-polar disorder these days. You never know which Spidey you're going to wake up next to when you buy an issue.
Howard Chaykin is the sole reason I quit reading Punisher War Journal.
Personally i think it's intentional, we've had the painfully obvious build up to Hal Jordan Rainbow Lantern/White Lantern across the series, but thats really a red herring what will happen is that all the emotions with cancel out and Hal Jordan will end up becoming the Beige Lantern, the only man dull enough to mute and nulify the light of the entire emotional spectrum.
thank god Geebs created this thread, or I would be so freaking jailed right now.
enough with the no smoking but wolverine can gut people
x-men wearing veils and shit simply to seem diverse (the illusion of being topical in today's world)
and dc needs to stop hiring comic book writers whose sole experience is writing male power fantasy shit
also: my biggest problem is people like you
yeah, you
stop giving kirkman money
stop buying shit out of a sense of nostalgia or completionism
read an actual fucking book to get perspective on shit outside of comics
comic book creators and the people who own that intellectual property suck too
kill aunt may
let spider-man stop being a sheltered character
kill somebody and have them fucking die
except black adam
bring him back
and make him kill everyone
MICHELLESTARTER MK 3 https://www.wepay.com/donations/michellestarter-mk-iii-analogy-or-pun-comparable-to-iron-man
stop giving loeb money
stop giving loeb money
don't buy independent comics when they suck
don't buy digital comics until they come up with better distribution and images
MICHELLESTARTER MK 3 https://www.wepay.com/donations/michellestarter-mk-iii-analogy-or-pun-comparable-to-iron-man
like, they having a single file line or something
MICHELLESTARTER MK 3 https://www.wepay.com/donations/michellestarter-mk-iii-analogy-or-pun-comparable-to-iron-man
MICHELLESTARTER MK 3 https://www.wepay.com/donations/michellestarter-mk-iii-analogy-or-pun-comparable-to-iron-man
I think I love you.
Rant number two: Flash Rebirth is not a good comic. It's all the rave on the 'Net, but I've yet to meet a single real life person that hasn't dropped it after issue #2 (admittedly only seven to ten people, but still). The story is beyond blase and the art is atrocious, even by EVS standards (seriously, this hack is merely a step above Liefeld quality).
also, fuck Jim Lee.
he's added to my list.
that said, those are all little nitpicks on my part are largely because i don't think people should be getting paid to be so damn regressive
MICHELLESTARTER MK 3 https://www.wepay.com/donations/michellestarter-mk-iii-analogy-or-pun-comparable-to-iron-man
And another thing I don't like are creators getting every comic form the publisher they work for for free. How about this, to see how it feels to us schmucks who have to pay $4 an issue; the only free book you get is the one you worked on (editors don't get any free books). You can't really say "I get it" when people are upset about the price hikes when you get your stuff for free, some of which is decompressed with bad stories.
And Steve Wacker, quit trying to be so funny and quirky in interviews and just make ASM actually coherent from writer to writer. Or what, are you gonna leave Marvel halfway through your job like you did at DC (what, what, I said it, what)?
We can complain about things a decade old, right?
Marvel employees actually don't get comp copies anymore. I'm not sure about DC though.
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Anjin, I respect you and I agree with most of what you said. But fuck Jim Lee.
Also, fuck Joss Whedon. He's so fucking overrated it hurts to read anyone praising him anymore.
Pretty sure it's not finished yet. That or I missed an issue (or I forgot about it).
Another thing I hate is the handling of hero's no-killing policies. Choosing not to kill is a valid moral choice, bu I think that they should be forced to confront the consequences of their choices once in a while. As things are now, whether or not to kill is treated as a personal choice rather than a decision that affects the very communities heroes defend, and I just don't think that's consistent with the fact that they fight crime primarily for the public's good rather than for personal reasons.
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Reed and Sue's relationship isn't much better with the way it has only one setting, that being perpetual emotional neglect with brief respites at the end of arcs.
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Yeah, I mean look at the impact their marriage had on the Hawks.
I see what you did there.
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Glad to see people share my disdain for Howard Chaykin. Look, I liked American Flagg... but he absolutely killed Blade and Punisher: War Journal for me. Not to mention his women look atrocious.
Steve Dillon, stay away from Wolverine. He's another artist who draws everyone with a square jaw, and his backgrounds in the first few issues of Wolverine: Origins were completely uninspired (but at least it wasn't copy and pasted like bloody Leifeld does). You don't have to draw all your women in the Image way, but at least make them look feminine.
Can Byrne, Claremont, and Loeb please just retire? Pretty please?
Can DC have a coherent universe at ANY point? I mean, I thought any time there was a 'crisis' things were all supposed to line up afterwards. But like it's been mentioned... why is it Bart Allen is running around in Flash Rebirth, but the Teen Titans have failed to address this, AND Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds has yet to finish?
Fuck Jim Lee for not even putting out a second issue of WildCATS or actually finishing All-Star Batman & Robin. What were you doing, the convention circuit? Getting paid a bajillion dollars just to do covers? Fuck you Jim Lee, fuck you sooo hard.
" No, I'm eccentric... only poor people are called crazy."
But there comes a point where repeatedly capturing the Joker becomes an irrational decision. Every time the Joker is not killed, Batman is basically signing the death sentence for a hundred innocent people (or more). I find it really hard to believe that Batman can keep a clear conscience and allow the Joker to live.
On a different subject. . .
Pretty sure the All-Star Batman and Robin delays are the fault of Frank Miller as much as it is Jim Lee's fault. Frank Miller seems to be more concerned with his hollywood movie making career these days instead of his comic career. Of course, there's a lot more money to be had in the film industry so its not really surprising.
And Jim Lee is the head of art direction for DCUO. All the character concepts, the look and feel of the game, and everything else artistic in this game is either made by Jim Lee or approved by Jim Lee. Making an MMO is a huge undertaking, and I'm sure he's got his work cut out for him with this project.
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Example: Battle For the Cowl. Why the fuck did they waste my time with a 3 issue side arc when they could have just put these issues into the regular Batman and Detective Comics numbering system.
Example 2: Captain America: Reborn. First they change the numbering system and have a celebratory issue #600 in which absolutely nothing happens. And now they're stuffing the regular Captain America issues with filler story, while the primary story arc is taking place in a side arc. I say fuck the filler story and just make Captain America: Reborn a part of the regular numbering system. It should be issues 601-606.
The art in Runaways, starting with the rock zombie arc (or whatever it was called, and dont get me started on that idiotic storyline). Barf. I guess they're trying to go for a younger demographic, but I had to stop buying it. Yuck.
There are other ways of releasing comics besides floppies. Shonen Jump's anthology format comes to mind.
100% agree. Everytime Joker goes on a rampage and kills a few dozen people, Batman needs to acknowledge that they're dead because he chose not to put down the human equivalent of a rabid animal. If he still accepts his choice, then I can accept that, but to ignore such simple cause-and-effect is completely out of his character.
EDIT: Just saw that Lucascraft made this same exact point a few posts back. Instead, I'll have to contribute my 2 cents by expanding the example to include Superman/Lex Luthor, Spider-man/Norman Osborn (Peter could have prevented the entirety of Dark Reign), etc.
The problem, as I see it, is purely one of storytelling. While there's the whole moral 'purity' of it, there's also the conflicting needs to have a long-running villain and victorious hero. I was reading an explanation of the Punisher awhile back, which stated that he has few, if any, iconic villains, largely because nobody survives long enough to become iconic. He kills his enemies, and that's that. It forces the comic to step outside of traditional storytelling norms, and you know that must terrify a lot of writers.
The only way that a villain can stick around and a hero can win is by having the hero choose not to kill the villain. To get around either of these tired and shallow conventions, comic storytelling has to evolve. Sometimes, the heroes have to not win, and that needs to be explored with more imagination, creativity, and care than went into Dark Reign and Final Crisis, which just don't work on a number of different levels.
Ultimately, if a villain's going to stick around pretty much forever, it needs to stop being because the hero chooses not to kill him and start being because the hero can't kill him. Either that or the hero's going to have to make an informed and complete moral choice to accept the innocent lives that will be lost as a result.
Wednesday Comics:
I think it depends on what type of comics you grew up with. The only time I read 'modern' comics as a kid was after getting a massive box containing most of the Death of Superman, Knightfall, and Emerald Twilight/Emerald Dawn stuff for Chrismas when I was 6 or 7. Beyond that, my parents only got me comics from the antiques shops they loved to go to so much, which meant I read a lot of Marvel stuff from the late-70s early-80s. Beyond that, most of my other early exposure was from old promotional reprints and the actual Sunday comics. So Wednesday Comics is a huge matter of nostalgia to me (even the smell of the ink and the pages does something), but beyond that it's also a return to a type of comic I love that doesn't neccessarily work anymore in today's world. Beyond that, there are also almost no ads in the book (I think only one). And beyond Wonder Woman (which was a bit better in Issue 2) and Superman, there isn't a single other strip that I dislike.
Flash: Rebirth:
Yeah, I felt the exact same way about the first two issues. Issue 3 was actually much better, and the start of something bigger for sure. It was a total turn-around for the series.
I don't care for the shonen jump/anthology approach, but I'm also equally against floppies. I don't like the serial format, the high cost, the difficulty in storage, the saddlestitch binding method, the quantity-over-quality approach, etc.
I understand that some people need their monthly soap opera fix (dammit sonny, my stories is on!), but I prefer buying full, coherent stories -and I'm sure if the development was targeted specifically toward that, then the quality would jump drastically.
And I absolutely hate it when I buy a trade and every 20 pages they tell me in-story what's been happening for the last 20-80 pages. Fucking Trials of Shazam did that shit.
BUT
This shit's being going on before he was named the director for DCUO. Case in point, the WildCATS relaunch. 1 issue, in 2 years, when it was supposed to be bi-monthly. That's Kevin Smith territory right there (I'm not even going to get into Kevin Smith, that's an essay).
And I whole-heartedly agree with your sentiment with the 'sub-arcs' thing. BFTC was a waste of everyone's time, especially considering:
A - We all knew Dick was becoming Batman.
B - The backlash from having Jason Todd be Batman would kill any of the major bat titles.
C - There was no real point to having the story outside of the regular confines of Detective & Batman except in an attempt to sell extra issues.
D - We all knew Dick was becoming Batman.
E - They have no problem with telling a story from multiple points of view within the same book. See: 52, Countdown etc...
You can also apply this to Ultimate War, Amazons Attack (although I'd rather fail to acknowledge it's existence), and World War III. Albeit, I don't mind a 1-shot to begin the arc, as was the case with Utopia.
" No, I'm eccentric... only poor people are called crazy."