This dude kicked the crap out of us and stole the Phoenix shard!
Then when we tracked him down, we found that he had beaten the fuck out of a bunch of Kree and killed the Supreme Intelligence, let us take the shard back, and was clearly really repentant and miserable about the whole thing, to the point where he refused to even fight back.
And nobody goes "wait a minute, we should maybe see what happened here?"
Not even Vision, who was originally a villain and has been used as a weapon against the Avengers before?
Not even Ms Marvel, who was an alcoholic fuck up for years?
Not even Beast, who secretly works for a black ops Avengers team that has killed lots of people in their time, and yet gave X-Force all the shit in the world for the same thing?
None of them say "this guy seems legit sorry, maybe we shouldn't just kick him out, and actually ask him what happened? It's not like half the fucking Avengers haven't been mind-controlled a dozen times or are ex-villains or whatever."
I'm sorry, that doesn't feel right to me at all. That feels pretty contrived.
you are acting like they have time to actually sit down and talk shit out
their whole mission was to try and stop the Phoenix Force from coming to Earth
they failed
and now they have no idea if Earth is even still there and they need to get back and help the Avengers and god dammit this terrorist ex-villain kid who has been an Avenger for 2 minutes just kicked the shit out of us and betrayed the team and we are done with this shit
you are thinking about it as a reader, not as how they would act in the middle of a world-threatening crisis after they fucked up their mission to hopefully save the world
Even so, they'd give the benefit of the doubt to literally any other member of their team. Sudden, short-lived betrayals just come with the territory, and it's happened a dozens of times before with any number of characters.
So, the fact that they ditch Noh just like that makes him seem utterly dispensable and renders everything he did on behalf of the team null.
Personally, I think it'd have been better if Noh had ditched them out of shame and regret. You'd have the same result, but it would feel less poorly contrived.
Carol stands around for a couple of panels staring at him
have you ever tried to punch someone who you think has done something awful but they refuse to fight back in real life?
Because it is really hard not to stop at any point and think "why the fuck are you not trying to defend yourself."
Seriously, Thor goes to smack Noh and he just sits there. At that point only a moron would not think "Huh. Without him we would never have even got the shard, he's not fighting, he only punched us around a little bit and nobody got seriously hurt back on the ship, he's letting us take it, he's talking about this huge mistake he made..."
And then Beast is the one that chews him out? Beast? Beast doesn't know shit about Noh or what he has been or who he was or whatever
Carol went from "hey, fellow person who knows about the Kree and Avenger" to "FUCK YOU FOREVER"
It really, really doesn't follow for me. At all. Especially given the people who are there.
Well every other member of the team has been an Avenger or a hero for years and has earned their trust
Noh-Varr has been an Avenger for, what, a year in-universe? If that.
And before that he was on the Dark Avengers and before that he carved FUCK YOU into the middle of Manhattan with a laser
doesn't exactly give them much reason to side with him
doubly so when the only dudes who really looked into his past and thought he was worth bringing into the team were Captain America and Wolverine, neither of which were present.
I don't think it is a perfect story and yeah some of the teams reactions were a bit extreme, mostly Beast and Carol
but I don't think it is totally crazy for the team to just go FUCK OFF and leave Noh-Varr after he betrayed them. None of them know him personally, and he has more history as a terrorist and a villain than he does as a hero and they are in an extreme rush to get back to Earth ASAP.
So why not just clap him in irons and take him with them?
After all, he is the only reason they managed to get part of the Phoenix anyway, and clearly has some kind of crazy powerful alien science brain
without him they would have almost certainly failed
and had he not had a change of heart, then the Kree would have got the shard and the Avengers would have been a bit fucked
It basically seems like the story ends with Noh Var flying away, so they had to contrive a situation where the Avengers acted in really irrational, out of character ways in order to make that work
I guess I am just gonna have to say I am feeling this is a Peter David's "Out of Character Paradox" dilemma
you say they are out of character
I say they are in an extremely stressful situation, even for superheroes, and are acting like normal people would. Which is, not exactly level headed.
We aren't gonna agree on this.
As for your point with them not taking him with them, they address that in the book. Captain Britain, I think, says he should face trial on Earth and they decide they have better things to do then worry about him breaking out and escaping on the trip back.
and they do not act in normal people ways all the time
Thor hardly ever does. He acts like a super-powerful God of Storm, a paragon of moral and physical strength. Because that is what he is. If Thor dropped his hammer and ran away from an exploding gas main because that is what normal people do, man, then people would be all "this is bullshit" and rightly so.
I just think that it was a really shitty way to get rid of one of the only character in the book that I actually really liked, while making everyone else seem really unlikeable and ignorant.
Nobody is going to look back and think "hey, remember that time when Noh Var betrayed the team, realised he had made a huge mistake, then they told him to fuck off forever and he did, leaving his girlfriend behind on Earth with no knowledge of whether he was dead or whether he had left her or anything? That was awesome dude."
"A lot of these creator owned indy books are little more than story boards for a movie pitch IMO."
The Internet is largely fueled by anonymous opinion, very typically of the uninformed variety, but despite the fact I take issue with the validity of this particular statement, I'm going to leave that alone for now. Instead, I first want to address the pejorative nature of the comment, because the point being made here is that creator-owned books are somehow less worthy of attention because they're just pitches for movies.
So, let's play along and assume that actually is the case. Let's pretend for a moment that virtually everyone writing and drawing creator-owned comics is only doing so because they want to shop their ideas around to Hollywood, so they can be turned into television shows and movies. Or both. Let's say these creative people are so driven by ambition that selling comic books simply isn't enough. They don't just want their stories to reach comic book readers – they want them to reach the world. They want as many people as possible to read their stories, to look at their artwork, to experience their creativity.
Is that so wrong?
You need to read the whole thing, but he seems to be, as the publisher of a company that's largely responsible for this phenomenon, coming from an extremely defensive position. He lauds the noble independent creator as someone not afraid to, "--filter their creativity through someone else's characters and ideas," while taking lazy shots at Marvel and DC. He paints readers who are against Movie Pitch Comics™ as being threatened by creators who would venture away from the Big Two, to create their own stories.
And that's some straight up tilting at windmills, fighting imaginary giants, bullshit.
When readers complain about Movie Pitch Comics™, we all know what they're talking about. It's not Who Is Jake Ellis?, a smart espionage book, that would also make a smart espionage film. It's not Morning Glories, a clever teen drama that would also translate to television. It's certainly not Chew, a weird, paranatural crime procedural, filled with gross-out humor and a huge cast of three-dimensional characters.
It's Jennifer Love Hewitt's supernatural thriller, The Music Box, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, star of supernatural TV thriller, Medium.
It's Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem, starring Tyrese Gibson. A comic published by Image, that marketing director Percy Carey/MF Grimm publicly stepped away from, saying that the creators used, "-snake oil selling marketing tactics which I found to be unnecessary and insensitive to comic book retailers.“ That's the same Percy Carey who wrote the Eisner-nominated Seconds, by the way.
It's Platinum Studios and Radical Studios (Hint: "Studio" is always code for "Can we sell this as a movie, later?"), slinging soulless crap at the wall, hoping for just one thing to get turned into a movie, so they can recoup their massive losses. Radical's co-founder Barry Levine said as much, stating, "--each title is built with the assumption the comic book will eventually land on the big screen."
It's Virgin Comics publishing comics endorsed by celebrities like Jenna Jameson, John Woo, Dave Stewart, Ed Burns, and motherfucking Duran Duran.
It's Nick Simmons being given a platform to tell a story through the wonderful medium of comics, and then tracing Bleach.
It stupid, empty, pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator garbage, that exists in a medium I love, solely to be translated to another.
And it galls me to see Stephenson ask, "Where is the harm?" I suppose it depends on how you quantify harm, but I think there's some harm in Tyrese Gibson selling a pile of shit to retailers under false promises, that they then can't return. Or in Thomas Jane co-writing a comic that sees years pass between issues, sticking readers and retailers with scattered fractions of the story they thought they were buying. Or Virgin comics abruptly shuttering its doors, leaving series unfinished.
I think things like that do considerable harm, to retailer and reader confidence, if nothing else. How many times do they watch a story get delayed or end half-finished because the creators were never really committed to it in the first place, before they decide to stop trying new things?
Don't get me wrong. Movie Pitch Comics™ aren't the worst thing in the world. Fred Van Lente wrote at least three series for Platinum Studios, two of which were actually pretty alright. Radical and Virgin threw money at talented guys like Rick Remender and Garth Ennis, which I can appreciate, in an industry where a steady paycheck is never a certainty.
But, it feels grossly hypocritical to malign Marvel and DC for their mercenary practices, and then applaud the guy who shits out some words and pictures, because he wants to spin it into a pile of cash. I think Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley's EZ Street, actually did a really good job of putting the crosshairs over Movie Pitch Comics™, and if you're a creative type, I can't recommend it enough.
Everybody in this business, regardless how much we all love comics, is here because we want to make money. From the most noble amongst us to the most craven, we all want to make money telling and selling stories, and the writers and artists doing work for hire at Marvel and DC are no different from the writers and artists creating their own characters – they want to make a living doing comics. No matter how you cut it, comics is a job, and whether it's measured by comic book sales or ticket sales, everyone is aiming for appreciation and success.
This touches on something I wanted to type about---the idea that it can be dangerous to have to make all of your money off of the art form that you love. I think there should be a responsibility to comics as a culture and creators should really actively try not to make bad comics just for a pay check.
The thing is, with the skills that it takes to make a comic you can make more money
pretty much anywhere else. I spent a day and a half this week doing loose pencil storyboards that paid as much as two weeks' work on King City.
So jobs on the side that keep your real work pure are fantastic.
Everybody in this business, regardless how much we all love comics, is here because we want to make money.
Who is in comics because they want to make money? Who in god's green earth is dumb enough to get into comics because they want to make money? Like ok, yeah I'm not saying don't make money, and don't not try to make money at comics. Because yeah that'd be awesome. But I can't believe anyone got into comics because they wanted to make money.
And Graham is absolutely right. I mean I'm on a totally different scale than him for sure, but I've mostly been able to make a living doing art of some kind or another*. But I've only ever been able to break even in comics for the most part. But commissions, logos, animation, band posters and book covers? Yeah a fraction of the work for like 100 more percent of the money. If anyone does comics for anything other than passion, well you're doing it wrong.
*That might not be the case for much longer. Moving from my super-cheap existence in a cabin in the woods 40 minutes from anywhere to a town with expenses and blah. But keeping the fingers crossed on still making it on drawing alone.
That's funny. I was just thinking the other night about my rather crude bitching about JLH's comic. Poor choice of words, but I still maintain that sentiment. Also, to be fair or contrarian some of Virgin's foreign-language adaptations like Snake Woman were pretty good. It is a shame they up and closed.
I know there are some people like that, and they exist in every creative field, and I don't understand how they are successful at it while people who do it with love first get marginalized or ignored.
I do have to ask, though, what about Mark Millar? He is the first person who comes to mind when I think of Movie Pitch Comic because he's actually optioned comic book properties before issue #1 has hit the stands.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
It's the same thing across the board, when it comes to creative endeavors.
Who starts a band because they want to make money?
Who decides to become a standup comic because they want to make money?
Who gets art supplies to become an artist because they want to make money?
You become a creator of stuff because you love that stuff. You do it to make stuff.
Want to make money? Whooole lotta other ways to do that that are gonna get you paid a hell of a lot quicker and more regularly.
Do the thing you love. You can figure the rest out after that.
I do have to ask, though, what about Mark Millar? He is the first person who comes to mind when I think of Movie Pitch Comic because he's actually optioned comic book properties before issue #1 has hit the stands.
He's exactly who I was thinking of, too. Sure, those semi-celebrity comics are clearly movie bait, but they tend to not get made or read by anyone so they rarely count. Even a lot of the smaller comics 'studios' rarely get much into theaters.
But Millar? He's selling things left and right now matter what. And in some ways, I think that's great for him but if you're not even going to wait until you at least START the story in the comics, why bother?
I also disagree that this is a comic-only phenomena. Books have this same problem. Tons of books are written just to option off in the same way, with little care for the medium they're created within.
Of course the problem is that movies don't get made unless it stars maybe one of a half dozen men like Will Smith or is based on an established property—be it a book, comic book, or board game. So, yes, there are people gaming the system. That makes them disingenous at best, and exactly the kind of people I mentioned. I know it sounds weird, but there are people who see the arts as a moneymaking scheme.
Crimsondude on
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
Well, in spite of my last post about why someone should ever attempt to create anything, there is a hell-ton of cash out there in the arts.
Good luck ever thinking you can just go out and find it, though. These things tend to work the other way.
I do have to ask, though, what about Mark Millar? He is the first person who comes to mind when I think of Movie Pitch Comic because he's actually optioned comic book properties before issue #1 has hit the stands.
I left Mark Millar off, for the same reason I left Robert Kirkman's Thief of Thieves off; I'm not really sure what to think about them. In Millar's case, he's clearly just aiming for high-concept pitches ("What is Batman was a total cunt?" -Mark Millar, on Nemesis) that are easy to package as movies. And it's resulting in weak stories, which is a bad thing.
At the same time, I'm not sure it's all that different from what he's always done. This is the guy who wrote Trouble, an American Pie-esque sex comedy, starring Aunt May and Uncle Ben. He did a big, dumb, loud version of the Avengers, which I think was just as casually stupid and hateful as Kick-Ass. According to Grant Morrison, most of the stuff people remember from when Mark Millar was good (Aztek, Swamp Thing, Superman Adventures), Morrison was coaching him on.
So, I'm not sure that the comics he's making now, are really all that different from what he'd be doing anyway, had Wanted and Kick-Ass not been optioned as films. I think the only thing that changed, is that he realized he could do his own Captain Marvel pastiche, or his own Evil Batman story, owning them outright, and profiting off them to a much greater degree. Otherwise, I think he'd just be mailing DC pitches for a Captain Marvel reboot, or a story about the CSA's Owlman.
I do think the constant delays in Millar's independent projects are a bit ridiculous, but any reader or retailer ordering them, should really expect it, by now.
Then there's stuff like Thief of Thieves, where Robert Kirkman is plotting a series, and then handing it off to another writer every arc, to do the heavy lifting. Coupled with the essay about comics sharing sensibilities with film and television, which appeared in issue #1, it's pretty clear that the book only exists so that Kirkman could exploit his relationship with AMC, to sell them another TV show, with minimal work on his behalf. And it's already been optioned, so he's succeeded.
And while I think it's kind of gross to see Kirkman go from a comics cheerleader to a guy chasing Hollywood money, I'm not sure it's really hurting anybody. The Walking Dead comic has exploded in popularity since the TV show debuted, exposing a ton of people to the comics medium, that otherwise may not have been. If Thief of Thieves can do the same thing, while also getting people interested in the works of Kirkman's lesser-known collaborators, I don't think that's a bad thing.
It really all just comes down to taste, I guess. Mark Millar's comics make a small blip on my bullshit detector, because he's a guy who's been making dumb comics for a long time, and will probably continue to do so for a while longer. But, a celebrity endorsement, or a huge company deciding to enter the comics marketplace, causes my bullshit detector to explode, and scatter shrapnel in a mile-wide radius.
I just came across an actual printed book typeset in Comic Sans MS. What the fuck?
My father sends emails in over-sized bright blue Comic Sans. We had to explain to him that was not an appropriate font. Doubly so when sending business related e-mails.
I just came across an actual printed book typeset in Comic Sans MS. What the fuck?
My father sends emails in over-sized bright blue Comic Sans. We had to explain to him that was not an appropriate font. Doubly so when sending business related e-mails.
The place I'm working now, we get a lot of emails in ridiculous forms like oversized comic sans. I think we just block it out by this point.
And you haven't seen course handouts till you see the years of graphic design handouts I have. It's interesting because we started to marry font choices with their personalities
Vision and Beast being unforgiving pricks to Wanda was the climax of AvX #0 (I think), but Carol was standing with Wanda.
However, the Supreme Intelligence and being mind control are not things that would make her think straight.
I wasn't paying attention to Marvel when Wanda pulled her "No More Mutants" whammy, so my question is: What stops her from undoing her voodoo?
edit: Imagine I am asking that question in a really bitchy tone.
Well the idea for awhile was that she was amnesiac/went undercover/was a Doombot/got imprisoned by Doom. Children's Crusade was supposed to sort that out and put her back on the table, but, y'know, Children's Crusade.
Now I think her powers are a little burnt out after Disassembled/House of M still. (Read: editorial/narrative fiat.)
Vision and Beast being unforgiving pricks to Wanda was the climax of AvX #0 (I think), but Carol was standing with Wanda.
However, the Supreme Intelligence and being mind control are not things that would make her think straight.
I wasn't paying attention to Marvel when Wanda pulled her "No More Mutants" whammy, so my question is: What stops her from undoing her voodoo?
edit: Imagine I am asking that question in a really bitchy tone.
Well the idea for awhile was that she was amnesiac/went undercover/was a Doombot/got imprisoned by Doom. Children's Crusade was supposed to sort that out and put her back on the table, but, y'know, Children's Crusade.
Now I think her powers are a little burnt out after Disassembled/House of M still. (Read: editorial/narrative fiat.)
I know nothing Children's Crusade, and it sounds like I should keep it that way(?).
Glad to know I'm not missing anything obvious, muchas gracias.
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sportzboytjwsqueeeeeezzeeeesome more tax breaks outRegistered Userregular
Vision and Beast being unforgiving pricks to Wanda was the climax of AvX #0 (I think), but Carol was standing with Wanda.
However, the Supreme Intelligence and being mind control are not things that would make her think straight.
I wasn't paying attention to Marvel when Wanda pulled her "No More Mutants" whammy, so my question is: What stops her from undoing her voodoo?
edit: Imagine I am asking that question in a really bitchy tone.
Well the idea for awhile was that she was amnesiac/went undercover/was a Doombot/got imprisoned by Doom. Children's Crusade was supposed to sort that out and put her back on the table, but, y'know, Children's Crusade.
Now I think her powers are a little burnt out after Disassembled/House of M still. (Read: editorial/narrative fiat.)
I know nothing Children's Crusade, and it sounds like I should keep it that way(?).
Glad to know I'm not missing anything obvious, muchas gracias.
Good Call, Children's Crusade would not only not answer a single question you have, but would also raise many more. ( And none of them good questions)
sportzboytjwsqueeeeeezzeeeesome more tax breaks outRegistered Userregular
I just read the Children's Crusade wiki, and while I didn't see the scripting/dialogue, the overall plot seems like something that would result from me writing comics, so what a disaster. Who okays these things?
Walkerdog on MTGO
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
I just read the Children's Crusade wiki, and while I didn't see the scripting/dialogue, the overall plot seems like something that would result from me writing comics, so what a disaster. Who okays these things?
I just read the Children's Crusade wiki, and while I didn't see the scripting/dialogue, the overall plot seems like something that would result from me writing comics, so what a disaster. Who okays these things?
Well, they waiting a long time for the dude to come back and write that. They weren't going to do any standalone type Young Avengers comics without him. And I guess they over did that commitment a bit.
Posts
This dude kicked the crap out of us and stole the Phoenix shard!
Then when we tracked him down, we found that he had beaten the fuck out of a bunch of Kree and killed the Supreme Intelligence, let us take the shard back, and was clearly really repentant and miserable about the whole thing, to the point where he refused to even fight back.
And nobody goes "wait a minute, we should maybe see what happened here?"
Not even Vision, who was originally a villain and has been used as a weapon against the Avengers before?
Not even Ms Marvel, who was an alcoholic fuck up for years?
Not even Beast, who secretly works for a black ops Avengers team that has killed lots of people in their time, and yet gave X-Force all the shit in the world for the same thing?
None of them say "this guy seems legit sorry, maybe we shouldn't just kick him out, and actually ask him what happened? It's not like half the fucking Avengers haven't been mind-controlled a dozen times or are ex-villains or whatever."
I'm sorry, that doesn't feel right to me at all. That feels pretty contrived.
you are acting like they have time to actually sit down and talk shit out
their whole mission was to try and stop the Phoenix Force from coming to Earth
they failed
and now they have no idea if Earth is even still there and they need to get back and help the Avengers and god dammit this terrorist ex-villain kid who has been an Avenger for 2 minutes just kicked the shit out of us and betrayed the team and we are done with this shit
you are thinking about it as a reader, not as how they would act in the middle of a world-threatening crisis after they fucked up their mission to hopefully save the world
So, the fact that they ditch Noh just like that makes him seem utterly dispensable and renders everything he did on behalf of the team null.
Personally, I think it'd have been better if Noh had ditched them out of shame and regret. You'd have the same result, but it would feel less poorly contrived.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
have you ever tried to punch someone who you think has done something awful but they refuse to fight back in real life?
Because it is really hard not to stop at any point and think "why the fuck are you not trying to defend yourself."
Seriously, Thor goes to smack Noh and he just sits there. At that point only a moron would not think "Huh. Without him we would never have even got the shard, he's not fighting, he only punched us around a little bit and nobody got seriously hurt back on the ship, he's letting us take it, he's talking about this huge mistake he made..."
And then Beast is the one that chews him out? Beast? Beast doesn't know shit about Noh or what he has been or who he was or whatever
Carol went from "hey, fellow person who knows about the Kree and Avenger" to "FUCK YOU FOREVER"
It really, really doesn't follow for me. At all. Especially given the people who are there.
Noh-Varr has been an Avenger for, what, a year in-universe? If that.
And before that he was on the Dark Avengers and before that he carved FUCK YOU into the middle of Manhattan with a laser
doesn't exactly give them much reason to side with him
doubly so when the only dudes who really looked into his past and thought he was worth bringing into the team were Captain America and Wolverine, neither of which were present.
and I told you why I think it is bad
do not tell me that you would not go back and change it to make it at least work properly, even if the result was the same
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
but I don't think it is totally crazy for the team to just go FUCK OFF and leave Noh-Varr after he betrayed them. None of them know him personally, and he has more history as a terrorist and a villain than he does as a hero and they are in an extreme rush to get back to Earth ASAP.
After all, he is the only reason they managed to get part of the Phoenix anyway, and clearly has some kind of crazy powerful alien science brain
without him they would have almost certainly failed
and had he not had a change of heart, then the Kree would have got the shard and the Avengers would have been a bit fucked
It basically seems like the story ends with Noh Var flying away, so they had to contrive a situation where the Avengers acted in really irrational, out of character ways in order to make that work
you say they are out of character
I say they are in an extremely stressful situation, even for superheroes, and are acting like normal people would. Which is, not exactly level headed.
We aren't gonna agree on this.
As for your point with them not taking him with them, they address that in the book. Captain Britain, I think, says he should face trial on Earth and they decide they have better things to do then worry about him breaking out and escaping on the trip back.
and they do not act in normal people ways all the time
Thor hardly ever does. He acts like a super-powerful God of Storm, a paragon of moral and physical strength. Because that is what he is. If Thor dropped his hammer and ran away from an exploding gas main because that is what normal people do, man, then people would be all "this is bullshit" and rightly so.
I just think that it was a really shitty way to get rid of one of the only character in the book that I actually really liked, while making everyone else seem really unlikeable and ignorant.
Nobody is going to look back and think "hey, remember that time when Noh Var betrayed the team, realised he had made a huge mistake, then they told him to fuck off forever and he did, leaving his girlfriend behind on Earth with no knowledge of whether he was dead or whether he had left her or anything? That was awesome dude."
because it isn't
it fucking sucks
You need to read the whole thing, but he seems to be, as the publisher of a company that's largely responsible for this phenomenon, coming from an extremely defensive position. He lauds the noble independent creator as someone not afraid to, "--filter their creativity through someone else's characters and ideas," while taking lazy shots at Marvel and DC. He paints readers who are against Movie Pitch Comics™ as being threatened by creators who would venture away from the Big Two, to create their own stories.
And that's some straight up tilting at windmills, fighting imaginary giants, bullshit.
When readers complain about Movie Pitch Comics™, we all know what they're talking about. It's not Who Is Jake Ellis?, a smart espionage book, that would also make a smart espionage film. It's not Morning Glories, a clever teen drama that would also translate to television. It's certainly not Chew, a weird, paranatural crime procedural, filled with gross-out humor and a huge cast of three-dimensional characters.
It's Jennifer Love Hewitt's supernatural thriller, The Music Box, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, star of supernatural TV thriller, Medium.
It's Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem, starring Tyrese Gibson. A comic published by Image, that marketing director Percy Carey/MF Grimm publicly stepped away from, saying that the creators used, "-snake oil selling marketing tactics which I found to be unnecessary and insensitive to comic book retailers.“ That's the same Percy Carey who wrote the Eisner-nominated Seconds, by the way.
It's Platinum Studios and Radical Studios (Hint: "Studio" is always code for "Can we sell this as a movie, later?"), slinging soulless crap at the wall, hoping for just one thing to get turned into a movie, so they can recoup their massive losses. Radical's co-founder Barry Levine said as much, stating, "--each title is built with the assumption the comic book will eventually land on the big screen."
It's Virgin Comics publishing comics endorsed by celebrities like Jenna Jameson, John Woo, Dave Stewart, Ed Burns, and motherfucking Duran Duran.
It's Nick Simmons being given a platform to tell a story through the wonderful medium of comics, and then tracing Bleach.
It stupid, empty, pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator garbage, that exists in a medium I love, solely to be translated to another.
And it galls me to see Stephenson ask, "Where is the harm?" I suppose it depends on how you quantify harm, but I think there's some harm in Tyrese Gibson selling a pile of shit to retailers under false promises, that they then can't return. Or in Thomas Jane co-writing a comic that sees years pass between issues, sticking readers and retailers with scattered fractions of the story they thought they were buying. Or Virgin comics abruptly shuttering its doors, leaving series unfinished.
I think things like that do considerable harm, to retailer and reader confidence, if nothing else. How many times do they watch a story get delayed or end half-finished because the creators were never really committed to it in the first place, before they decide to stop trying new things?
Don't get me wrong. Movie Pitch Comics™ aren't the worst thing in the world. Fred Van Lente wrote at least three series for Platinum Studios, two of which were actually pretty alright. Radical and Virgin threw money at talented guys like Rick Remender and Garth Ennis, which I can appreciate, in an industry where a steady paycheck is never a certainty.
But, it feels grossly hypocritical to malign Marvel and DC for their mercenary practices, and then applaud the guy who shits out some words and pictures, because he wants to spin it into a pile of cash. I think Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley's EZ Street, actually did a really good job of putting the crosshairs over Movie Pitch Comics™, and if you're a creative type, I can't recommend it enough.
Oh, one more thing.
Eisner-nominated Brandon Graham, your rebuttal?
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However, the Supreme Intelligence and being mind control are not things that would make her think straight.
Who is in comics because they want to make money? Who in god's green earth is dumb enough to get into comics because they want to make money? Like ok, yeah I'm not saying don't make money, and don't not try to make money at comics. Because yeah that'd be awesome. But I can't believe anyone got into comics because they wanted to make money.
And Graham is absolutely right. I mean I'm on a totally different scale than him for sure, but I've mostly been able to make a living doing art of some kind or another*. But I've only ever been able to break even in comics for the most part. But commissions, logos, animation, band posters and book covers? Yeah a fraction of the work for like 100 more percent of the money. If anyone does comics for anything other than passion, well you're doing it wrong.
*That might not be the case for much longer. Moving from my super-cheap existence in a cabin in the woods 40 minutes from anywhere to a town with expenses and blah. But keeping the fingers crossed on still making it on drawing alone.
I know there are some people like that, and they exist in every creative field, and I don't understand how they are successful at it while people who do it with love first get marginalized or ignored.
I do have to ask, though, what about Mark Millar? He is the first person who comes to mind when I think of Movie Pitch Comic because he's actually optioned comic book properties before issue #1 has hit the stands.
Who starts a band because they want to make money?
Who decides to become a standup comic because they want to make money?
Who gets art supplies to become an artist because they want to make money?
You become a creator of stuff because you love that stuff. You do it to make stuff.
Want to make money? Whooole lotta other ways to do that that are gonna get you paid a hell of a lot quicker and more regularly.
Do the thing you love. You can figure the rest out after that.
He's exactly who I was thinking of, too. Sure, those semi-celebrity comics are clearly movie bait, but they tend to not get made or read by anyone so they rarely count. Even a lot of the smaller comics 'studios' rarely get much into theaters.
But Millar? He's selling things left and right now matter what. And in some ways, I think that's great for him but if you're not even going to wait until you at least START the story in the comics, why bother?
I also disagree that this is a comic-only phenomena. Books have this same problem. Tons of books are written just to option off in the same way, with little care for the medium they're created within.
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Good luck ever thinking you can just go out and find it, though. These things tend to work the other way.
I left Mark Millar off, for the same reason I left Robert Kirkman's Thief of Thieves off; I'm not really sure what to think about them. In Millar's case, he's clearly just aiming for high-concept pitches ("What is Batman was a total cunt?" -Mark Millar, on Nemesis) that are easy to package as movies. And it's resulting in weak stories, which is a bad thing.
At the same time, I'm not sure it's all that different from what he's always done. This is the guy who wrote Trouble, an American Pie-esque sex comedy, starring Aunt May and Uncle Ben. He did a big, dumb, loud version of the Avengers, which I think was just as casually stupid and hateful as Kick-Ass. According to Grant Morrison, most of the stuff people remember from when Mark Millar was good (Aztek, Swamp Thing, Superman Adventures), Morrison was coaching him on.
So, I'm not sure that the comics he's making now, are really all that different from what he'd be doing anyway, had Wanted and Kick-Ass not been optioned as films. I think the only thing that changed, is that he realized he could do his own Captain Marvel pastiche, or his own Evil Batman story, owning them outright, and profiting off them to a much greater degree. Otherwise, I think he'd just be mailing DC pitches for a Captain Marvel reboot, or a story about the CSA's Owlman.
I do think the constant delays in Millar's independent projects are a bit ridiculous, but any reader or retailer ordering them, should really expect it, by now.
Then there's stuff like Thief of Thieves, where Robert Kirkman is plotting a series, and then handing it off to another writer every arc, to do the heavy lifting. Coupled with the essay about comics sharing sensibilities with film and television, which appeared in issue #1, it's pretty clear that the book only exists so that Kirkman could exploit his relationship with AMC, to sell them another TV show, with minimal work on his behalf. And it's already been optioned, so he's succeeded.
And while I think it's kind of gross to see Kirkman go from a comics cheerleader to a guy chasing Hollywood money, I'm not sure it's really hurting anybody. The Walking Dead comic has exploded in popularity since the TV show debuted, exposing a ton of people to the comics medium, that otherwise may not have been. If Thief of Thieves can do the same thing, while also getting people interested in the works of Kirkman's lesser-known collaborators, I don't think that's a bad thing.
It really all just comes down to taste, I guess. Mark Millar's comics make a small blip on my bullshit detector, because he's a guy who's been making dumb comics for a long time, and will probably continue to do so for a while longer. But, a celebrity endorsement, or a huge company deciding to enter the comics marketplace, causes my bullshit detector to explode, and scatter shrapnel in a mile-wide radius.
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KILL IT
I wasn't paying attention to Marvel when Wanda pulled her "No More Mutants" whammy, so my question is: What stops her from undoing her voodoo?
edit: Imagine I am asking that question in a really bitchy tone.
My father sends emails in over-sized bright blue Comic Sans. We had to explain to him that was not an appropriate font. Doubly so when sending business related e-mails.
The place I'm working now, we get a lot of emails in ridiculous forms like oversized comic sans. I think we just block it out by this point.
And you haven't seen course handouts till you see the years of graphic design handouts I have. It's interesting because we started to marry font choices with their personalities
Well the idea for awhile was that she was amnesiac/went undercover/was a Doombot/got imprisoned by Doom. Children's Crusade was supposed to sort that out and put her back on the table, but, y'know, Children's Crusade.
Now I think her powers are a little burnt out after Disassembled/House of M still. (Read: editorial/narrative fiat.)
I know nothing Children's Crusade, and it sounds like I should keep it that way(?).
Glad to know I'm not missing anything obvious, muchas gracias.
That makes me want to do everything in life in comic sans just to troll everyone who hates it.
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Good Call, Children's Crusade would not only not answer a single question you have, but would also raise many more. ( And none of them good questions)
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Well...at least the art was fantastic.
They should sell some with blank text bubbles!