Superhero comics: What insane story/character developments do avid followers take for granted but would blow the minds of anyone only peripherally aware of them?

OK, there are references to DD's previous SF residency in the last series' last issue and the new series' 1st issue.

Mea culpa, I was only skimming the DD stuff because Waid.

Yeah, Supergirl is the whole blood vomiting deal. The cat is away with Atrocitus, who got sold out by GG and died but came back through the ring of a giant ox and is now alive again.

Hex is great, you should all obtain All-Star Western and read it.

The DC-verse was attacked by an evil Superman who drew power from kryptonite and was weakened by sunlight. Therefore, he put the moon in front of the sun, and since apparantly none of the heroes in the US realize that the world is round, he could defeat them all. Only after a long battle did someone realize they could just move the moon away again, and the evil Superman was easily defeated.

I tried to type out the insanity that has been the X-men since schism, but I can't be bothered to check on it. Are the young X-men still around, and is it true that young Cyclops will get his own ongoing where he is in space?

yes and yes.

Cyclops #2 comes out tomorrow.

Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May

Aw jeez. My kid's been reading that title. How bad is it?

Parker goes EEEW and ICK much like your kid would at the thought of old people kissing before it goes anywhere tbh.

Thanks. I used to monitor his comics after reading about this one upthread

Superhero comics: What insane story/character developments do avid followers take for granted but would blow the minds of anyone only peripherally aware of them?

but let my guard down after a while.

Ha, I remember the Torch dying but didn't keep up with it after that, the return sounds just like a total mess:

It is later revealed that the Human Torch was revived by a species of insect-like creatures that were implanted in his body by Annihilus in an attempt to force Storm to help open the Negative Zone portal. However, although Storm refused, Annihilus gained a means of access when an alternate dimension Reed Richards opened the portal for him, forcing Storm to escape and lead a resistance against Annihilus with the aid of his fellow prisoners.

i mean that CANNOT be what they had in mind right? Like at least the Superman thing turned out to have been a pretty well-planned out two-year story arc and was totally awesome. I was a kid, sure, but at the same time was the wretched death and return of Mister Fantastic, which even then I knew was lame by comparison.

Daredevil now lives in San Fransisco (for the first time, conveniently erasing the two years in the 70s he lived there shagging Black Widow)

I've only read as far as the most recent trade (which ends with DD moving out of NYC), but in it the explicit reason why he moves to San Fransisco is his previous history there.

Oops, sorry, I see that WilliamC addressed that already.

Wow, I REALLY skimmed it.

Doctor Octopus had a blistering affair with Aunt May
Doctor Octopus displaced Spider-Man from Spider-Man's brain but not before he had made him feel what it was like to shag Aunt May

Didn't the Octopus/May romance happen, like, decades ago? I remember reading about it as a kid. Or are you saying he romanced and had sex with May while inside Peter's body? Because if it's the latter, wtf?!

No, it's all flashing back to 74 (?) but it's not a supervillain scam like it was in the original book (apparently, not read) but a proper marriage.

So they've retconned it so that he really was in love with May? IIRC it definitely was presented as some sort of a scam in the original story.

Dude, I read something like 35 hero books a week. Give me a break here.

35?! Why?

Because he doesn't have time for a 36th!

ps Aldo are we talking physical copies or do you digi comic too?

Just digi, buy very little in physical.

Marvel and DC, on an average week, put out something like 15-18 books each. Add a couple of indies and BAM.

As to why, search for my "reads so you don't have to threads". Just because i stopped writing doesn't mean i stopped reading (I even say as much on the DC thread).

Johnny Storm's return was pretty awesome, and very intricately plotted. The mechanics of his revival and escape also played a major role in the next phase of the story. I highly doubt it wasn't planned out well in advance.

It was written by Hickman, who seems to specialize in complex extended plots. (Sometimes to the books' detriment when floppies are rolling out in 2- to 4-week intervals. Infinity didn't make much sense to me at the time -- it might read better in a chunk.)

Yup, his plots are insane, and elements back from Secret Warriors will occasionally still get drawn into his new stuff. But at times he loses his handling of it, I think everyone at marvel has admitted that Infinity spun out of control. I liked it, though, but that's compared to crossovers where nothing happens for six out of seven installments, and then half of the final installment is spent setting up new stories.

New insane development: Thanos has an Inhuman son, who is even more powerful than him.

As to why, search for my "reads so you don't have to threads". Just because i stopped writing doesn't mean i stopped reading (I even say as much on the DC thread).

this doesn't actually explain why!

Yeah, your implication is that you were torturing yourself reading all this stuff just to post about it!

OK, by way of explanation...

I stopped writing the DC one pretty much because I found the writing was sucking what pleasure I was getting out of the actual good books away, probably because I was spending all my time trying to think of new and inventive ways to say "this books sucks" about landfill titles like Grifter. I always had time for the good and equally for the awful cf The Liefeldening.

Because I am an Aspie shut-in rube creature of habit, having got myself into a routine of obtaining the comics on a weekly basis I pretty simply never got back out of it. It's helped me in a lot of ways get back to an almost child-like appreciation for them - the good ones are good, the bad ones are bad, and some of them are just FUN. Now I'm moved completely away from my LCS and only get floppies no more frequently than monthly I get a re-read when they turn up of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that I like enough to buy. I also re-read chunks in 'trade' in digi, the whole Doc Ock/Spidey brain stuff was beginning to look like a candidate for that but real life has got in the way over the past couple of months and I only get the weekend to read at the moment so keeping pace is all I can do.

I suppose I'd convince myself I just love comics. You could less charitably say I'm stuck in a rut, and I certainly have a weakness in quality filtering for Marvel.

I was a big fan of this stuff for a decade and I regret that phase of my life. I still love Ditko, Kirby, Everett, Gene Colan and a few others contributions to the mythology but not a whole lot more. Would it be fair to say that only a relative tiny minority of people did anything worthwhile?

I keep seeing smart people with good taste reading this stuff but as I've said in another thread, they seem to treat it like a dirty habit and hold super low expectations for the comics. Like its only morbid curiosity that keeps you coming back (cue an animated gif where someone peers into a dark place and backs away in a horrified manner). It's always "let's talk about how decadent and stupid this stuff is".

I knew a guy who said "I just read the illegal scans to keep up with the story, I'd never pay for this trash", but when there is so much excellent legally free stuff on the internet, how do you justify the precious time and electricity?

So many comic creators and fans know exactly how bad things are but just put up with it out of habit? There certainly is progress but it has been so ssssssssssssssssssssssssssslllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww that many creators will never see the benefits of the progress.

It's worth repeating that even many of the biggest comic fans don't really respect the medium as much as they think. People who get ragingly indignant about bad things in music, sloppy prose writing and slightly ill advised character development in Mad Men are just fine and dandy about utterly foul comics.
This seems to have spread into films because so many people who think the superhero films are mostly mediocre are quite happy to talk about them for a long time.

In a world overflowing with great stuff (including thousands of tragically neglected stuff) you can spend time and money on, what in the last 20 years of superhero comics has made it all worthwhile?

For me...

- Gene Colan, Kelley Jones, Sam Kieth, Sienkiewicz and Phil Winslade

- Savage Dragon. I stopped reading this two years ago because I didn't like the art and characters enough but it was often exciting and very funny. It was too confusing and messy a lot of the time but it made a serious effort at continuity and consequences. It was so many of the things that Marvel tries but fails to do with their long running sagas.

Speaking for myself here, I dabble into buying comics once or twice a year, and still love the medium. The whole floppy month-to-month thing is too much to keep up with, hence internet discussion and sites, which admittedly I love connecting to because of nostalgia and fond attachment to characters I read and loved in my childhood. And also I still have a degree of love for the format and expansive universe storytelling, though I haven't really kept up with the bigs in about 5 years or so.

The only current comic I'm reading right now is Saga in trade, and sometimes I'll hear good things about new series and current writers like Matt Fraction and it'll motivate me to take some out from the library and pick up a book here and there. It's harder especially to sort out what the good indie and creator-owned stuff is, it all gets lost in the shuffle.

(frankly I find the common disparagement of webcomics to be far more depressing than laughing at a Masters of the Universe revival)

I really, really, really have enjoyed recent work by Matt Fraction, Al Ewing, Robert Hickman, Dennis Hopeless, Kelly Sue Deconnick and G Willow Wilson. I wouldn't be purchasing their books if I didn't actually like them.

I just love the idea of a superhero-universe. The idea of a thousand small stories building up this massive universe, with a shared past and interlocking stories. It's such a good idea, and I love the stories set on the fringes, like Secret Warriors, S.H.I.E.L.D., Hawkeye or Abnett and Lannings cosmic saga. But in the mainstream, it's all shocking move following shocking move, always going in circles. It just seems so promising, but is so shitty, most of the time.

Which is why I keep on reading, and keep on laughing.

I'm a few years behind, but I'm a big fan of a lot of what Marvel's been putting out for the past decade or so, especially the extent to which they've steered hard towards making theirs a truly cohesive universe. It's hard on the wallet, but it's one of the things I love about mainstream comics. And the writing has by and large gotten much better than what was standard in the past century. Yes, it's often ludicrous, but that's just another thing I love about mainstream comics.

DC nowadays, on the other hand, can suck a fuck. But even they were doing a lot of solid stuff before they decided to chuck everything (including the goodwill of their readership) into the shredder.

I can forgive DC for its trespasses just for giving Grant Morrison the keys to Batman for a few years and letting him go wild

Yeah, Morrison's BatOpus is seriously one of my all-time favorite runs on any comic. I will give DC kudos on allowing him to wrap it up on his own terms rather than forcing him to conform to their insane new parameters.

I like a lot of Morrison's stuff but I've had absolutely zero interest in his Batman stuff, largely because Batman is a character I'm much more content to watch in TV shows and movies rather than read about (unless of course you are talking about Batman: Odyssey, which should be required reading in schools); ditto Superman

I've just been buying the trades of GMoz's Batman Inc. run - is it done?

I wish Adam's First X-Men had equalled the insanity of Batman Odyssey.

I don't generally have much interest in reading Bat-stuff, either, so I was surprised that I loved that run as much as I did. It helps that it's more about time travel and creating back-up personalities and Bat-Mite hauntings than it is about flitting about in the dark and scaring muggers.

And, yeah, Batman Inc. (and presumably Morrison's extended Bat-arc) is done.

actually now that I think about it, I am much more interested in watching the marquee DC superheroes than I am in reading about them, which is kind of interesting to me anyway

that is kind of weird given how terrible the DC movies have been/are going to continue to be

I like the first couple NolanMan movies but otherwise...

Suggestion for Nolan:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0oefiB5rY8Q/UY0TT40ogWI/AAAAAAAAAKI/N3TF-lwFod4/s1600/tumblr_mkbsneYaDK1s2k64ro2_500.png

http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-S5Mbj9LNYQQ/TYmHVpFNunI/AAAAAAAAJVw/ImZ4KoICebg/s1600/Batman_Odyssey_23.jpg

More suggestions:

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/files/2011/03/odyssey-banana.jpg

Even more suggestions:

http://wolkin.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/odyssey3.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0EiujcV3Tg

when will the jacking stop

Nhex says "It's harder especially to sort out what the good indie and creator-owned stuff is, it all gets lost in the shuffle."

I'd say the opposite.
It's harder to find out if a superhero comic has been stupidly hyped or if it can stand alone as a story with no further context needed or if it has the bad colouring that plagues mainstream comics. I don't think there are a whole lot of good artists now either.

At worst creator owned stuff is harder to track down but in general it's easy to follow.

Yes, the whole connected universe thing is an exciting idea but it so rarely works. It's so haphazard that any attempt to make it look serious and important looks ridiculous because some people are doing their best to make sense of hundreds of bad story choices by hundreds of creators. They play to the very worst weakness of the whole thing by playing up the importance of what is currently going on in relation to previous continuity, which will probably be retconned anyway.

I mostly followed Spiderman up to 2005 and I read all the major storylines except some 70s and 80s stuff (I missed Kraven's Last Hunt, Jean DeWolf, Juggernaut fight, the early Jackal/clone stuff and Hobgoblin stories) and I honestly don't think anything truly worthwhile happened after the end of Ditko's run! If I was being generous I'd say Mary Jane, Rhino, Shocker, Black Cat, The Spot, Tombstone, Venom, Morbius and some elements of the clone saga were good. But generally Spiderman's story went in pointless circles.

That newish Dr Octopus story sounds horrific.

I've been trying recently to isolate what I think were genuine contributions to imaginative fiction in DC and Marvel. I think the whole cosmic side of Dr Strange, Silver Surfer, Eternals is really great, but again I think only a relative minority of creators did this well. I wish it had all happened in creator owned stuff.
I think it's sad that Gene Colan's never collaborated on a truly great book. But I've never read Night Force, Detectives Inc, Stewart The Rat, Nathaniel Dusk or Ragamuffins so I can't really say that. I think his greatest work is his commission output at the end of his life.

"pointless circles" should be Marvel/DC's motto