Huge massacre of all the new characters introduced in a storyline. I liked Nightmask and Ex Nihilo. Wasn't a huge fan of Starbrand but still. Plus all the other Gardeners.
I can only hope we'll see them and Thor and Hyperion again in Battleworld somehow, maybe snatched from Oblivion by whoever or whatever creates it (Doom? Someone else?)
If I like a character, I don't like to see them killed, because it spoils any future potential they may have had. If I don't like a character that much, killing them just feels gratutious - I'd rather see something interesting done with them than just have them be killed for shock value.
We're also clearing away the Black Priests and Mapmakers, two big players that I thought for sure would have a role in Battleworld. So much for that, it seems. All the concepts and characters that were introduced with the Multiverse collapse appear to be falling away one by one as we march towards Battleworld. The culmination of all of this is shaping up to not have any of the elements that made me interested in the first place.
I don't know, ever since the revelation of the Ivory Kings as the Beyonders and the ones behind the Multiverse collapse, each issue has left me a little cold.
This is a problem I have with Hickman's storytelling sometimes.
He's minimal to a point where it almost feels like he's experimenting. Since issue 1 of Avengers, I've wondered what the actual point of the Gardners was, and then later the New Universe Characters, what the Builders are if they aren't really building the universes, etc.
Basically I understand what is happening in the story, but I don't understand who any of these characters really are because he hasn't told us at all. And I'm sure he probably has notebooks and extended and unused scripts that detail all that stuff, but for time and to try for a really fast moving, compressed story, he's cutting all that detail fat in order to show us only what's happening to the characters we've known forever.
And it's definitely affected the plain Avengers teams a lot more than the New Avengers, whose experiences and encounters with other worlds and enemies have been way more detailed and developed.
And I'm sure part of this is done because the time-table was likely increased a tiny bit making it necessary to drop some arcs, and I'm also sure some of it is being done to make Secret Wars as new-reader-friendly as possible.
I really like it. In general terms, a story tends to be much better off if nothing intrudes on it, e.g. other comic storylines. That also works in reverse though- you need to be very structured in order to have a good grip on an expansive story, and editorial will let you do much more if at the end of everything, the shared universe is still recognizable. This means putting most of the toys back in the box, but that doesn't mean nothing changes, or that the toys can't be brought back at a later date. And anyway, why do people want the new things to stick around anyway? People like them because Hickman made them cool. Well, other writers can come up with their own stuff. In the end, the best stories are so recognizably tied to an author that their interpretation of character(s) becomes distinct from all others. When that author leaves, it's the same as those characters having been put away anyway.
I think we just feel cheated that we never learned the history behind most of these things, or what their actual real significance and origins were to the old system of the multiverse.
We've spent two years seeing all this crazy stuff: universal builders, multiversal builders, the multiversal skeletal stations thingy, the old system of the gardners for creating and evolving worlds, the new system of the New Universe for protecting worlds, etc.
And I basically just described all that we know, and likely all we'll ever get to know, about each of those concepts. But I don't understand why they're really important though, or who established them if they're not originally the creators of the multiverse. Shit is all confusing.
Maybe we actually will get this, though, in secret wars. There's only one issue of New Avengers left, and two of Avengers, and Secret Wars starts during the final incursion. Will there be time to explain the beyonders more? Maybe they've set up all of these systems?
I'm not sure what other information we need about the old and new builder systems
We know the Builders were the first race to evolve on various universes, who in turn created the old systems to populate the universe and the new systems to protect it. I guess we don't know what caused them to lose thier way and become assholes, or where the Abyssi went; but I'm not sure that's germane to the story.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
Huge massacre of all the new characters introduced in a storyline. I liked Nightmask and Ex Nihilo. Wasn't a huge fan of Starbrand but still. Plus all the other Gardeners.
I can only hope we'll see them and Thor and Hyperion again in Battleworld somehow, maybe snatched from Oblivion by whoever or whatever creates it (Doom? Someone else?)
If I like a character, I don't like to see them killed, because it spoils any future potential they may have had. If I don't like a character that much, killing them just feels gratutious - I'd rather see something interesting done with them than just have them be killed for shock value.
We're also clearing away the Black Priests and Mapmakers, two big players that I thought for sure would have a role in Battleworld. So much for that, it seems. All the concepts and characters that were introduced with the Multiverse collapse appear to be falling away one by one as we march towards Battleworld. The culmination of all of this is shaping up to not have any of the elements that made me interested in the first place.
I don't know, ever since the revelation of the Ivory Kings as the Beyonders and the ones behind the Multiverse collapse, each issue has left me a little cold.
This is a problem I have with Hickman's storytelling sometimes.
He's minimal to a point where it almost feels like he's experimenting. Since issue 1 of Avengers, I've wondered what the actual point of the Gardners was, and then later the New Universe Characters, what the Builders are if they aren't really building the universes, etc.
Basically I understand what is happening in the story, but I don't understand who any of these characters really are because he hasn't told us at all. And I'm sure he probably has notebooks and extended and unused scripts that detail all that stuff, but for time and to try for a really fast moving, compressed story, he's cutting all that detail fat in order to show us only what's happening to the characters we've known forever.
And it's definitely affected the plain Avengers teams a lot more than the New Avengers, whose experiences and encounters with other worlds and enemies have been way more detailed and developed.
And I'm sure part of this is done because the time-table was likely increased a tiny bit making it necessary to drop some arcs, and I'm also sure some of it is being done to make Secret Wars as new-reader-friendly as possible.
I like Hickman's long-form writing as he still usually manages to make a good dense single issue and doesn't usually get as decompressed as Bendis' writing. I don't really mind if he starts to clear the table at the end of his run, he's pretty lucky to be able to write Secret Wars as an endcap. I wasn't a huge fan of Infinity, but SW is a way different concept and seems to be more of Hickman's thing than just Thanos invading earth
The end is shaping up. It looks like all of the tools the Illuminati and AIM built to defend Earth from incursions are going to get used up fighting off the intergalactic armada.
Already a hotwired Builder planet killer and a orbiting satellite relay powered by geothermal vents got toasted, and now it seems like they're going to pull a hail mary with some manner of combination of Sol's Hammer and the Rogue Planet. (Possibly using the planet as a shield for Earth while Tony nukes the solar system with Sol's Hammer)
I imagine after the dust settles, Earth won't have very many fancy toys left to stop the last incurusion, and with th Cabal working with Ultimate Reed Richards, most of the heroes will be neutralized as well. The subsequent standstill will likely be what prevents either side from destroying the other.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Tony is awesome. Tony will save the day.
Reed (and to an extent the Illuminati) is sipping a little bit on that haterade Steve has been glugging since attacking mutants. Let's just kind of chill out on the idea Tony has always been morally ambivalent and a loose cannon when he's been pretty solid until recently, as in the past four or five months.
Steve is a good man who is acting like an arsehole because he's sick of the arseholes being right
Reed is a good lad, and bless Sue's cotton socks for sticking with him and flipping the V at the Steve Rogers and Carol Danvers secret police appreciation society
T'Challa is a sore loser
Namor is the hero we need, not the hero we deserve
Solar on
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Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
Steve is a good man who is acting like an arsehole because he's sick of the arseholes being right
Reed is a good lad, and bless Sue's cotton socks for sticking with him and flipping the V at the Steve Rogers and Carol Danvers secret police appreciation society
T'Challa is a sore loser
Namor is the hero we need, not the hero we deserve
I'm just basically tired of Marvel's heroes acting so...unheroic. It'll be good to get to Secret War.
Conversely, I love it. Doing the right thing isn't always about doing the heroic thing. However, I also think that the fact that Marvel's Illuminati are faced with the types of decisions they've had to make lately, make the decisions that need to be made, and then still struggle internally about whether or not it was the right thing to do makes them seem pretty damn heroic.
It would be pretty easy for guys like Reed, Tony, et al to make the tough decisions that need to be made because they know what's best; but it's not easy for them, because at the end of the day they want to do the right thing as much as they want to do the best thing. It's been pretty compelling storytelling, and I'll be a little sad when it's over.
And we can agree to disagree. I'm not saying it's a bad storyline (well, I could make the argument, but I won't). It just feels extremely forced to me. I loved the initial Illuminati concept, and I'm usually the one yelling "choo choo!" when we board the nostalgia train, but this is whole storyline just leaves me a bit cold...and, to be honest, bored. I thought the mostly off-panel wipe-out of the cosmic entities in particular was gratuitously ridiculous, and the general inability of the heroes to think out of the box has been commented on to death...it's just sad to me that we've got these heroic people, supposedly the best, brightest, and most courageous in the world, and they still get stuck having to make really harebrained decisions just to fit Hickman's re-hash of a joke-plot from the 1980s. It kills me, because I think it could have been handled much more maturely and better, if Marvel had the guts to do it and a writer with the vision to plot it out. Instead, we're stuck in a world where no matter what, it seems Reed Richards is still useless.
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
I think Marvel in general are more interested in 'flawed' heroes and sort of using that lens on old concepts. Hickman invented some new stuff, though he seems to be sweeping that stuff up now at the end of his long run. I definitely prefer Hickman's Imagework over his Marvel work though
I've been reading through this storyline on Unlimited the past couple of weeks per the lisiting in the OP, just finished up the first 2 issues of the Time Runs Out arc. Is there somewhere that explains the jump between Avengers 34 and 35?
The last panel of 34 is Cap gathering the Avengers to go after the Illuminati and then 35 starts with the Avengers under shield control and attacking Amadeus Cho who is a member of the Illuminati. Except he's never brought in the New Avengers sibling arc. That one ends with the Illuminati hiding from the incursion and then the rise of the Cabal stopping it.
Just feels like there's a couple books that i'm missing unless the jump is intentional and the missing pieces are filled in through flashbacks. I apologize if the information is listed in the more in depth paragraphs of the OP, been trying to avoid those due to spoilers and whatnot.
time jump is intentional. The important stuff gets flash backed and some stuff gets explained in Avengers World when they start their "before time runs out" arc
"Ride or Die?" asked Goku
"Ride or Die" confirmed Dominic Toretto, as they took off to find the Dragon Balls in hopes of reviving their friend Sonic
I'm just basically tired of Marvel's heroes acting so...unheroic. It'll be good to get to Secret War.
Conversely, I love it. Doing the right thing isn't always about doing the heroic thing. However, I also think that the fact that Marvel's Illuminati are faced with the types of decisions they've had to make lately, make the decisions that need to be made, and then still struggle internally about whether or not it was the right thing to do makes them seem pretty damn heroic.
It would be pretty easy for guys like Reed, Tony, et al to make the tough decisions that need to be made because they know what's best; but it's not easy for them, because at the end of the day they want to do the right thing as much as they want to do the best thing. It's been pretty compelling storytelling, and I'll be a little sad when it's over.
I mean, we know it's going to end up with them being completely wrong when it all washes out. Hickman's already done that with FF. The point is when they walk away from those heroic ideals, they think they're doing right, but it'll fail.
I've been reading through this storyline on Unlimited the past couple of weeks per the lisiting in the OP, just finished up the first 2 issues of the Time Runs Out arc. Is there somewhere that explains the jump between Avengers 34 and 35?
The last panel of 34 is Cap gathering the Avengers to go after the Illuminati and then 35 starts with the Avengers under shield control and attacking Amadeus Cho who is a member of the Illuminati. Except he's never brought in the New Avengers sibling arc. That one ends with the Illuminati hiding from the incursion and then the rise of the Cabal stopping it.
Just feels like there's a couple books that i'm missing unless the jump is intentional and the missing pieces are filled in through flashbacks. I apologize if the information is listed in the more in depth paragraphs of the OP, been trying to avoid those due to spoilers and whatnot.
Yeah, did you catch the "Eight Months Later" title page in #35? The time jump is entirely intentional.
time jump is intentional. The important stuff gets flash backed and some stuff gets explained in Avengers World when they start their "before time runs out" arc
I've been reading through this storyline on Unlimited the past couple of weeks per the lisiting in the OP, just finished up the first 2 issues of the Time Runs Out arc. Is there somewhere that explains the jump between Avengers 34 and 35?
The last panel of 34 is Cap gathering the Avengers to go after the Illuminati and then 35 starts with the Avengers under shield control and attacking Amadeus Cho who is a member of the Illuminati. Except he's never brought in the New Avengers sibling arc. That one ends with the Illuminati hiding from the incursion and then the rise of the Cabal stopping it.
Just feels like there's a couple books that i'm missing unless the jump is intentional and the missing pieces are filled in through flashbacks. I apologize if the information is listed in the more in depth paragraphs of the OP, been trying to avoid those due to spoilers and whatnot.
Yeah, did you catch the "Eight Months Later" title page in #35? The time jump is entirely intentional.
No, I completely missed that one. Had to go back and double check that one, must have tapped through a little quick getting through the title pages. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
Doom's role as SPOILER and the fact that he's working to stop the Incursions in his own way is interesting because it feels like when you write Doom he's more interested in saving the world instead of conquering it. Is it fair to say that you write Doom as more of an anti-hero than a villain?
Yeah, I've never thought he was a straight villain. Sure, he's incredibly flawed and such a pragmatist that we would often look at what he does as villainy, but I think there's a lot of nobility in him. Much like Magneto in the mutant world, it's very easy to understand where Doom is coming from. So if you can easily understand the perspective of the villain, it becomes very easy to write them from that position. And depending on the kind of story you're telling, perhaps they're not wrong at all. It's that their methods that are. So, you're not wrong. As we get into "Secret Wars" proper this will get even more interesting.
Doom is one of Marvel's great characters because like Magneto, Namor, and Loki, his motivations and loyalties are complicated and interesting - to the point that when they just play Doom up as a punchclock megalomaniac or tinpot despot - hell, any time they try to paint him as purely evil, it usually comes off as terribad. It's much more interesting that Doom can play the hero and the villain, depending on circumstances...which is just something that Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Scott Summers, et al. are really bad at. You can't really picture Harry Osborne ever convincingly playing the hero, and every time Tony Stark tries to play Doctor Doom he just comes across as an asshole.
Doom is one of Marvel's great characters because like Magneto, Namor, and Loki, his motivations and loyalties are complicated and interesting - to the point that when they just play Doom up as a punchclock megalomaniac or tinpot despot - hell, any time they try to paint him as purely evil, it usually comes off as terribad. It's much more interesting that Doom can play the hero and the villain, depending on circumstances...which is just something that Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Scott Summers, et al. are really bad at. You can't really picture Harry Osborne ever convincingly playing the hero, and every time Tony Stark tries to play Doctor Doom he just comes across as an asshole.
Agreed, though you can say that Doom's a pretty simple character when you boil his motivations down to his big 3:
Conquer the world for its own good
Save his mother's soul from hell
Utterly defeat Reed Richards
Technically, you can say he's already accomplished all three (he appears to have canonically freed his mother in Triumph and Torment, he's conquered the world in a few stories most notably in Emperor Doom, and he'll always hold saving Valeria's life over Reed's head). Still, he's largely defined by those three motivations as they clearly emphasize his ruthless arrogance, his tragedy, and his pettiness, respectively. It's a careful balancing act that, if you don't get it right, rings false.
Too much focus on the tragedy and his underlying humanity and you get the ridiculousness of Doom crying during 9/11. Too much on his pettiness, and you get Waid's misfire of Unthinkable. You're generally pretty safe going all-in on the "I rule you for your own good" aspect of the character - as seen in DoomWar and the first Secret Wars. I'm eager to see what Hickman's final take on him will be.
Agreed, though you can say that Doom's a pretty simple character when you boil his motivations down to his big 3:
Conquer the world for its own good
Save his mother's soul from hell
Utterly defeat Reed Richards
Which is, I think, a mistake. Those are his motivations if you view Doom as a serial supervillain. When I see Doom, I see these three motivations:
Doom will never break his word.
Doom knows what's best.
Doom will do anything to protect what is his.
And when you take Doom out of his stereotypical milieu - like Doom 2099 - that is exactly what you see. The whole obsession with Reed Richards is, I think, a cheesy one-note that writers tend to over-emphasize. It undermines the inherent flawed nobility of the character by making them a ranting monomaniac that pushes all of his neuroses off Mister Fantastic...and then fail to think through the consequences of that.
Too much focus on the tragedy and his underlying humanity and you get the ridiculousness of Doom crying during 9/11. Too much on his pettiness, and you get Waid's misfire of Unthinkable. You're generally pretty safe going all-in on the "I rule you for your own good" aspect of the character - as seen in DoomWar and the first Secret Wars. I'm eager to see what Hickman's final take on him will be.
I'm actually not looking forwards to it, just because...well, I don't trust Hickman. The whole run-up for Hickman as far as Doom is trying to make Doom out to be the Doom in the original Secret Wars. If Doom ends up stealing a Beyonder's powers and building Doomworld or something, I wouldn't even blink. A lot of the characterization for Doom since...oh, since he came back from whatever limbo he was in after the Unthinkable debacle has been bizarrely off. Doom and the Masters of Evil was a bit of a comedic misstep, Doomwar was just stupid, the whole Future Foundation thing is blah for me, and I'm still not sure what's supposed to be up with Doom and X-Factor...I did like the time-traveling Dr. Doom as a candidate for Sorcerer Supreme, but that's about the limit.
I find it weird that that it seems like (to me anyways) that Hickman's Doom fits perfectly into your "ideal doom", yet you still harp on it being bad. Did you by chance read all of Hickman's F4 run? 611 was probably one of the best Doom issues ever.
Oh well, Hickman Doom is best Doom.
"Ride or Die?" asked Goku
"Ride or Die" confirmed Dominic Toretto, as they took off to find the Dragon Balls in hopes of reviving their friend Sonic
I admit, I'm biased against Hickman. I hate his plotting. With a vengeance. And don't particularly care for most of his writing. His characterization isn't always completely shit, but even then I reserve judgment since he's basically the Geoff Johns of Marvel.
Oh god. Comparing Hickman to Johns just seems like trolling to me (I know you aren't). John's is about as subtle as a jackhammer whereas Hickman writes some of the most complex and nuanced stuff I've seen in mainstream comics.
I also don't agree with your comment on characterization. Hickman is basically the only writer in years who was able to give actual characterization to Cannonball, Sunspot, Smasher, Black Panther, etc. He also writes Reed better than anybody in history.
I think the guy is far and away the absolute best writer in the business at the moment.
And I agree he's a good writer - I just don't like what he writes. Hickman to me is a guy that comes up with some interesting concepts and then fumbles the ball when it comes on the actual plotting. The concept for Secret Avengers and Secret Warriors is right up my alley; the idea of the Future Foundation is something that in principle should be awesome - but the execution always leaves me cold. To you, his stuff may be complex and nuanced - and some of it is! I liked his S.H.I.E.L.D. series. But a lot of it is just painfully, boringly obvious rehashes and small elaborations on shit from thirty years ago - which is why I compared Hickman to Johns.
When I compare Hickman to Johns, I'm not talking about the quality of the writing, I'm talking about the quality and the plotting. I've been trying to be better about bitching about it lately, but the entire multiversal collapse storyline is shit to me. It's endemic of Hickman's style of setting up an elaborately absurd situation which hammers characters into uncharacteristic actions, devoting the most time and attention to characters that had been relegated to the sidelines for the better part of a decade and that is exactly what Johns does. They're both nostalgia-fueled fanboys running the asylum - and sometimes that is awesome, and sometimes that is incredibly weak.
I'll come out and say it: this is the best version of Luke Cage there has ever been. This is the best version of Black Panther there's ever been. I don't particularly like Sunspot, but I respect that Hickman is at least treating him as something more than another X-Man minority tank character like Colossus or Warpath, and trying to do a corporate takeover of AIM is at least nominally interesting. But against that, I gotta say... I don't like his overall plotting. I think the Future Foundation was a great concept that was immediately handicapped by the problem that Reed Richards is still useless (and when I say that, I'm not referring to just Reed Richards specifically, but the tvtrope version of it where super-geniuses in comics in general never manage to get their act together to address any actual issues that face real people - Reed Richards can't cure cancer with Science! any more than Doctor Strange can cure cancer with Magic!)
And to put this in context...I gotta go back to Warren Ellis' Planetary. Because whether you like Ellis or not, all the crap that Hickman has tried to do or plot and stretch out over umpteen issues, Ellis has already done and arguably better. Multiversal collapse? Justice League expy? Secret super-spy illuminati behind-the-scenes stuff? The heroes actually using the things they discover to make a better world? Yeah, that's all been done before.
Don't get me wrong: I know I'm in the minority. I fully acknowledge lots of people enjoy his comics, and more power to them. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade. But it pains me because...I think at this point, I really do want more from comics than the status quo ante. I want more than smart people making stupid decisions like trying to figure out how to kill another Earth before it smacks into their Earth. I want heroes that can make a difference beyond beating people up, and I don't want large sections of continuity swept under the rug in a couple of panels (sorry, the whole scene where the Beyonders take out the sum total of cosmic deities is still lingering with me); I want mythic characters that can be redefined by actions and events, but I don't want to rehash the comic storylines that I read from the 80s and 90s (and that's not just Hickman, that's in general).
And I agree he's a good writer - I just don't like what he writes. Hickman to me is a guy that comes up with some interesting concepts and then fumbles the ball when it comes on the actual plotting. The concept for Secret Avengers and Secret Warriors is right up my alley; the idea of the Future Foundation is something that in principle should be awesome - but the execution always leaves me cold. To you, his stuff may be complex and nuanced - and some of it is! I liked his S.H.I.E.L.D. series. But a lot of it is just painfully, boringly obvious rehashes and small elaborations on shit from thirty years ago - which is why I compared Hickman to Johns.
When I compare Hickman to Johns, I'm not talking about the quality of the writing, I'm talking about the quality and the plotting. I've been trying to be better about bitching about it lately, but the entire multiversal collapse storyline is shit to me. It's endemic of Hickman's style of setting up an elaborately absurd situation which hammers characters into uncharacteristic actions, devoting the most time and attention to characters that had been relegated to the sidelines for the better part of a decade and that is exactly what Johns does. They're both nostalgia-fueled fanboys running the asylum - and sometimes that is awesome, and sometimes that is incredibly weak.
I'll come out and say it: this is the best version of Luke Cage there has ever been. This is the best version of Black Panther there's ever been. I don't particularly like Sunspot, but I respect that Hickman is at least treating him as something more than another X-Man minority tank character like Colossus or Warpath, and trying to do a corporate takeover of AIM is at least nominally interesting. But against that, I gotta say... I don't like his overall plotting. I think the Future Foundation was a great concept that was immediately handicapped by the problem that Reed Richards is still useless (and when I say that, I'm not referring to just Reed Richards specifically, but the tvtrope version of it where super-geniuses in comics in general never manage to get their act together to address any actual issues that face real people - Reed Richards can't cure cancer with Science! any more than Doctor Strange can cure cancer with Magic!)
And to put this in context...I gotta go back to Warren Ellis' Planetary. Because whether you like Ellis or not, all the crap that Hickman has tried to do or plot and stretch out over umpteen issues, Ellis has already done and arguably better. Multiversal collapse? Justice League expy? Secret super-spy illuminati behind-the-scenes stuff? The heroes actually using the things they discover to make a better world? Yeah, that's all been done before.
Don't get me wrong: I know I'm in the minority. I fully acknowledge lots of people enjoy his comics, and more power to them. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade. But it pains me because...I think at this point, I really do want more from comics than the status quo ante. I want more than smart people making stupid decisions like trying to figure out how to kill another Earth before it smacks into their Earth. I want heroes that can make a difference beyond beating people up, and I don't want large sections of continuity swept under the rug in a couple of panels (sorry, the whole scene where the Beyonders take out the sum total of cosmic deities is still lingering with me); I want mythic characters that can be redefined by actions and events, but I don't want to rehash the comic storylines that I read from the 80s and 90s (and that's not just Hickman, that's in general).
I agree that Hickman likes putting his characters into sometimes ridiculously impossible situations.
But the key difference between Hickman and someone like Johns is that he has a deep, fundamental understanding of every single character he uses.
I seriously cannot think of one instance in any of his runs where a character of his, acted OUT of character due to where Hickman wants to take the plot. He'll do it in other ways, sure, but not to the characters in his stories.
I'll put it this way.
If Geoff Johns is a kid bashing action figures together, Johnathan Hickman is playing some bizarre meld of the Sims and Civilization.
I'd also argue that putting characters in insane situations that causes them to do uncharacteristic things sounds like plain ole awesome comic book writing.
For better or for worse, I'm a product of a comic book reading generation where continuity is one of the things that gets me going. Hickman seems to be one of the only writers today who has this ability to treat continuity almost like a character - and I fucking love it. Outside of the retcon around The Beyonder being an Inhuman I'm not really aware of any areas where he's bent continuity to his whim. He just seems to have a deep understanding for both character and continuity and isn't afraid to retread old ground in order to plant seeds of greater interest.
Personally, that sounds like some sort of comic book writing wizard to me.
My only problem with Hickman is plotting on Avengers has been full of jumps. We are here, then we're here, then over here! Infinity being the worst bit of the bunch.
I don't think his writing was as disjointed on FF and it's definitely not on Manhattan Projects.
But the weird timing of that Inversion event seriously hampers the flow of Hickman's run a bit.
I mean, it wasn't a bad event, but outside the Hickman bubble Axis would have been pretty great, and you wouldn't have had to worry about weird time-skips and personality shifts affecting Hickman's run.
I'm guessing Hickman ran with it because he's ballsy as fuck, but still.
It would have been better for both idea's if they were seperate events.
Eh, the only major effect it had in Hickmans run is with making Tony Stark ostracized from the Illuminati, and really he didn't need to be inverted to have written that.
And I agree he's a good writer - I just don't like what he writes. Hickman to me is a guy that comes up with some interesting concepts and then fumbles the ball when it comes on the actual plotting. The concept for Secret Avengers and Secret Warriors is right up my alley; the idea of the Future Foundation is something that in principle should be awesome - but the execution always leaves me cold.
Hickman has never been a writer on Secret Avengers.
I also don't think Planetary is a good comparative piece to Hickman's run other than by bullet points of basic concepts, but that's just me.
Eh, the only major effect it had in Hickmans run is with making Tony Stark ostracized from the Illuminati, and really he didn't need to be inverted to have written that.
Yeah, Hickman has done a good job at side-stepping other events, which is sort of cool because it will make his run hold up really well in the future, but it's also sort of a dick move to other writers in the line because he barely acknowledges their work.
Everyone in Original Sin aside from Cap remembers their stuff almost immediately, while Cap remembers his time in the Illuminati some time later in a dream. Tony is wearing the white armor and we know he's inverted, but Hickman has shied away from directly acknowledging that to my memory, and the reader could easily see Tony just having gone too far at some point in the 8 months without needing any more additional context. The references to the events are made in the recap pages written by the editor, while Hickman is leaving open gaps for future readers to fill in those spaces with their own understandings of the characters and without having to read Original Sin or Axis.
My only problem with Hickman is plotting on Avengers has been full of jumps. We are here, then we're here, then over here! Infinity being the worst bit of the bunch.
I don't think his writing was as disjointed on FF and it's definitely not on Manhattan Projects.
I totally agree with this. I know his run has always been planned for a 3-ish year span, but it feels like he's maybe lost an arc here or there and reshuffled some stuff a few times. Basically it kind of feels like he's rushed the story a little bit to get to the finish line. It's also been a much bigger problem in Avengers than it has in New Avengers. The Avengers book has been really choppy, and until Time Runs Out it largely felt like it was mostly there for foreshadowing and introducing concepts that would pay out later in New Avengers.
What? Caps arc was the best Original Sins tie in, way better than the x-men one that took literally months to finally finish with a wet fart, or bendis rewriting continuity to do basically nothing but recap covered ground in gotg
What? Caps arc was the best Original Sins tie in, way better than the x-men one that took literally months to finally finish with a wet fart, or bendis rewriting continuity to do basically nothing but recap covered ground in gotg
Yes, but it has 0% to do with the main original sin mini. It totally sidesteps the giant eyeball of secrets and the immediate recall of forgotten truths (although Bendis's OS tie ins ignored that stuff as well).
Basically when Hickman has to tie-in to other linewide events, he does so in a way that is very loose and thematic and ignores the actual happenings in the event minis as much as possible.
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I really like it. In general terms, a story tends to be much better off if nothing intrudes on it, e.g. other comic storylines. That also works in reverse though- you need to be very structured in order to have a good grip on an expansive story, and editorial will let you do much more if at the end of everything, the shared universe is still recognizable. This means putting most of the toys back in the box, but that doesn't mean nothing changes, or that the toys can't be brought back at a later date. And anyway, why do people want the new things to stick around anyway? People like them because Hickman made them cool. Well, other writers can come up with their own stuff. In the end, the best stories are so recognizably tied to an author that their interpretation of character(s) becomes distinct from all others. When that author leaves, it's the same as those characters having been put away anyway.
And I basically just described all that we know, and likely all we'll ever get to know, about each of those concepts. But I don't understand why they're really important though, or who established them if they're not originally the creators of the multiverse. Shit is all confusing.
Maybe we actually will get this, though, in secret wars. There's only one issue of New Avengers left, and two of Avengers, and Secret Wars starts during the final incursion. Will there be time to explain the beyonders more? Maybe they've set up all of these systems?
I like Hickman's long-form writing as he still usually manages to make a good dense single issue and doesn't usually get as decompressed as Bendis' writing. I don't really mind if he starts to clear the table at the end of his run, he's pretty lucky to be able to write Secret Wars as an endcap. I wasn't a huge fan of Infinity, but SW is a way different concept and seems to be more of Hickman's thing than just Thanos invading earth
http://www.newsarama.com/23933-first-look-secret-wars-1-a-force-1-more.html
"Ride or Die" confirmed Dominic Toretto, as they took off to find the Dragon Balls in hopes of reviving their friend Sonic
Already a hotwired Builder planet killer and a orbiting satellite relay powered by geothermal vents got toasted, and now it seems like they're going to pull a hail mary with some manner of combination of Sol's Hammer and the Rogue Planet. (Possibly using the planet as a shield for Earth while Tony nukes the solar system with Sol's Hammer)
I imagine after the dust settles, Earth won't have very many fancy toys left to stop the last incurusion, and with th Cabal working with Ultimate Reed Richards, most of the heroes will be neutralized as well. The subsequent standstill will likely be what prevents either side from destroying the other.
Reed (and to an extent the Illuminati) is sipping a little bit on that haterade Steve has been glugging since attacking mutants. Let's just kind of chill out on the idea Tony has always been morally ambivalent and a loose cannon when he's been pretty solid until recently, as in the past four or five months.
Steve is a good man who is acting like an arsehole because he's sick of the arseholes being right
Reed is a good lad, and bless Sue's cotton socks for sticking with him and flipping the V at the Steve Rogers and Carol Danvers secret police appreciation society
T'Challa is a sore loser
Namor is the hero we need, not the hero we deserve
But all hope lies with DOOM!
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
Conversely, I love it. Doing the right thing isn't always about doing the heroic thing. However, I also think that the fact that Marvel's Illuminati are faced with the types of decisions they've had to make lately, make the decisions that need to be made, and then still struggle internally about whether or not it was the right thing to do makes them seem pretty damn heroic.
It would be pretty easy for guys like Reed, Tony, et al to make the tough decisions that need to be made because they know what's best; but it's not easy for them, because at the end of the day they want to do the right thing as much as they want to do the best thing. It's been pretty compelling storytelling, and I'll be a little sad when it's over.
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
"Ride or Die" confirmed Dominic Toretto, as they took off to find the Dragon Balls in hopes of reviving their friend Sonic
I'd be pretty surprised if Hickman doesn't have something big in store for Reed before this is all over.
I mean, we know it's going to end up with them being completely wrong when it all washes out. Hickman's already done that with FF. The point is when they walk away from those heroic ideals, they think they're doing right, but it'll fail.
I'd be surprised if Hickman swerves from that.
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I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
Yeah, did you catch the "Eight Months Later" title page in #35? The time jump is entirely intentional.
Awesome, Thank you.
No, I completely missed that one. Had to go back and double check that one, must have tapped through a little quick getting through the title pages. Thanks for pointing it out.
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
Agreed, though you can say that Doom's a pretty simple character when you boil his motivations down to his big 3:
Conquer the world for its own good
Save his mother's soul from hell
Utterly defeat Reed Richards
Technically, you can say he's already accomplished all three (he appears to have canonically freed his mother in Triumph and Torment, he's conquered the world in a few stories most notably in Emperor Doom, and he'll always hold saving Valeria's life over Reed's head). Still, he's largely defined by those three motivations as they clearly emphasize his ruthless arrogance, his tragedy, and his pettiness, respectively. It's a careful balancing act that, if you don't get it right, rings false.
Too much focus on the tragedy and his underlying humanity and you get the ridiculousness of Doom crying during 9/11. Too much on his pettiness, and you get Waid's misfire of Unthinkable. You're generally pretty safe going all-in on the "I rule you for your own good" aspect of the character - as seen in DoomWar and the first Secret Wars. I'm eager to see what Hickman's final take on him will be.
Doom will never break his word.
Doom knows what's best.
Doom will do anything to protect what is his.
And when you take Doom out of his stereotypical milieu - like Doom 2099 - that is exactly what you see. The whole obsession with Reed Richards is, I think, a cheesy one-note that writers tend to over-emphasize. It undermines the inherent flawed nobility of the character by making them a ranting monomaniac that pushes all of his neuroses off Mister Fantastic...and then fail to think through the consequences of that.
I'm actually not looking forwards to it, just because...well, I don't trust Hickman. The whole run-up for Hickman as far as Doom is trying to make Doom out to be the Doom in the original Secret Wars. If Doom ends up stealing a Beyonder's powers and building Doomworld or something, I wouldn't even blink. A lot of the characterization for Doom since...oh, since he came back from whatever limbo he was in after the Unthinkable debacle has been bizarrely off. Doom and the Masters of Evil was a bit of a comedic misstep, Doomwar was just stupid, the whole Future Foundation thing is blah for me, and I'm still not sure what's supposed to be up with Doom and X-Factor...I did like the time-traveling Dr. Doom as a candidate for Sorcerer Supreme, but that's about the limit.
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
Oh well, Hickman Doom is best Doom.
"Ride or Die" confirmed Dominic Toretto, as they took off to find the Dragon Balls in hopes of reviving their friend Sonic
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
I also don't agree with your comment on characterization. Hickman is basically the only writer in years who was able to give actual characterization to Cannonball, Sunspot, Smasher, Black Panther, etc. He also writes Reed better than anybody in history.
I think the guy is far and away the absolute best writer in the business at the moment.
When I compare Hickman to Johns, I'm not talking about the quality of the writing, I'm talking about the quality and the plotting. I've been trying to be better about bitching about it lately, but the entire multiversal collapse storyline is shit to me. It's endemic of Hickman's style of setting up an elaborately absurd situation which hammers characters into uncharacteristic actions, devoting the most time and attention to characters that had been relegated to the sidelines for the better part of a decade and that is exactly what Johns does. They're both nostalgia-fueled fanboys running the asylum - and sometimes that is awesome, and sometimes that is incredibly weak.
I'll come out and say it: this is the best version of Luke Cage there has ever been. This is the best version of Black Panther there's ever been. I don't particularly like Sunspot, but I respect that Hickman is at least treating him as something more than another X-Man minority tank character like Colossus or Warpath, and trying to do a corporate takeover of AIM is at least nominally interesting. But against that, I gotta say... I don't like his overall plotting. I think the Future Foundation was a great concept that was immediately handicapped by the problem that Reed Richards is still useless (and when I say that, I'm not referring to just Reed Richards specifically, but the tvtrope version of it where super-geniuses in comics in general never manage to get their act together to address any actual issues that face real people - Reed Richards can't cure cancer with Science! any more than Doctor Strange can cure cancer with Magic!)
And to put this in context...I gotta go back to Warren Ellis' Planetary. Because whether you like Ellis or not, all the crap that Hickman has tried to do or plot and stretch out over umpteen issues, Ellis has already done and arguably better. Multiversal collapse? Justice League expy? Secret super-spy illuminati behind-the-scenes stuff? The heroes actually using the things they discover to make a better world? Yeah, that's all been done before.
Don't get me wrong: I know I'm in the minority. I fully acknowledge lots of people enjoy his comics, and more power to them. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade. But it pains me because...I think at this point, I really do want more from comics than the status quo ante. I want more than smart people making stupid decisions like trying to figure out how to kill another Earth before it smacks into their Earth. I want heroes that can make a difference beyond beating people up, and I don't want large sections of continuity swept under the rug in a couple of panels (sorry, the whole scene where the Beyonders take out the sum total of cosmic deities is still lingering with me); I want mythic characters that can be redefined by actions and events, but I don't want to rehash the comic storylines that I read from the 80s and 90s (and that's not just Hickman, that's in general).
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
I agree that Hickman likes putting his characters into sometimes ridiculously impossible situations.
But the key difference between Hickman and someone like Johns is that he has a deep, fundamental understanding of every single character he uses.
I seriously cannot think of one instance in any of his runs where a character of his, acted OUT of character due to where Hickman wants to take the plot. He'll do it in other ways, sure, but not to the characters in his stories.
I'll put it this way.
If Geoff Johns is a kid bashing action figures together, Johnathan Hickman is playing some bizarre meld of the Sims and Civilization.
For better or for worse, I'm a product of a comic book reading generation where continuity is one of the things that gets me going. Hickman seems to be one of the only writers today who has this ability to treat continuity almost like a character - and I fucking love it. Outside of the retcon around The Beyonder being an Inhuman I'm not really aware of any areas where he's bent continuity to his whim. He just seems to have a deep understanding for both character and continuity and isn't afraid to retread old ground in order to plant seeds of greater interest.
Personally, that sounds like some sort of comic book writing wizard to me.
I don't think his writing was as disjointed on FF and it's definitely not on Manhattan Projects.
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I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
But the weird timing of that Inversion event seriously hampers the flow of Hickman's run a bit.
I mean, it wasn't a bad event, but outside the Hickman bubble Axis would have been pretty great, and you wouldn't have had to worry about weird time-skips and personality shifts affecting Hickman's run.
I'm guessing Hickman ran with it because he's ballsy as fuck, but still.
It would have been better for both idea's if they were seperate events.
Hickman has never been a writer on Secret Avengers.
I also don't think Planetary is a good comparative piece to Hickman's run other than by bullet points of basic concepts, but that's just me.
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
Yeah, Hickman has done a good job at side-stepping other events, which is sort of cool because it will make his run hold up really well in the future, but it's also sort of a dick move to other writers in the line because he barely acknowledges their work.
Everyone in Original Sin aside from Cap remembers their stuff almost immediately, while Cap remembers his time in the Illuminati some time later in a dream. Tony is wearing the white armor and we know he's inverted, but Hickman has shied away from directly acknowledging that to my memory, and the reader could easily see Tony just having gone too far at some point in the 8 months without needing any more additional context. The references to the events are made in the recap pages written by the editor, while Hickman is leaving open gaps for future readers to fill in those spaces with their own understandings of the characters and without having to read Original Sin or Axis.
I totally agree with this. I know his run has always been planned for a 3-ish year span, but it feels like he's maybe lost an arc here or there and reshuffled some stuff a few times. Basically it kind of feels like he's rushed the story a little bit to get to the finish line. It's also been a much bigger problem in Avengers than it has in New Avengers. The Avengers book has been really choppy, and until Time Runs Out it largely felt like it was mostly there for foreshadowing and introducing concepts that would pay out later in New Avengers.
Yes, but it has 0% to do with the main original sin mini. It totally sidesteps the giant eyeball of secrets and the immediate recall of forgotten truths (although Bendis's OS tie ins ignored that stuff as well).
Basically when Hickman has to tie-in to other linewide events, he does so in a way that is very loose and thematic and ignores the actual happenings in the event minis as much as possible.