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?

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

it's referred to in-house as the "illusion of change"

I remember reading the Son of M mini coming out of House of M - which is absolutely rubbish - where Spider-man goes to confront Quicksilver. It turns out that in the new world Quicksilver forced Scarlett Witch to create, that Gwen Stacy was alive and married to Peter Parker. So not only has Spider-man recently lost the love of his life for a second time, he had also had to admit to himself that since the new world was created on giving the superheroes what they desired the most, that he really loved Gwen more than Mary-Jane. I love that little situation, it's such a great little moment in the midst of these insane and weird stories. I wish there were more stories like that.

i remember that being a weird and trippy story - that's the one where Quicksilver meets the time-displaced duplicates of himself, isn't it?

Yeah, I wish David Hine had stuck around and done more stuff with Marvel (he also wrote District X, the Bishop police procedural set in Mutant Town). I guess he's at DC now? Who knows why.

I'm pretty bored with the marvel tentpoles, but the stuff on the edges - Black Widow, Superior Foes of Spider-Man, Loki - are doing interesting things.

x-post: I can't recall what else happens. It's right after M-day, and Quicksilver has lost his powers. There is something about mutants with disfiguring mutations going from being somewhat special to just being freaks. And then something with the Inhumans and their Terrigan mists, though that might have been from X-Factor?

Avengers just got interesting again, with the New Avengers story line crashing into the Avengers storyline in a big way and culminating with chunk of the team being vaulted forward in time at increasing intervals due to explosions from the Time Infinity Gem. I do like Hawkeye and Loki more, though.

marvel unlimited means that i'm basically reading everything Marvel releases digitally
50% is pretty much unreadable, 25% is dumb but readable, 15% is fun but dumb, about 10% is probably worth picking up in paper if i hadn't given up on floppies for space considerations many years ago

Just looking at all those Batman Odyssey panels, I had never even heard of that before today. Joe McCulloch was considering reviewing all the Adams/Continuity comics, because he said they are totally nuts.
Anyone remember Adams' theories about dinosaurs that he was sure was going to change the world?

One of the old Continuity artists left comics, started dressing like a Christian prophet and tried to fly a plane away from an airport when nobody was looking.

RAG, this is the pertinent thread... lots of laffs:
Can someone tell Batman why not?!?

Yeah, I was just looking. I was amazed.

don't miss the dramatic youtube readings!

Hadn't heard of this The First X-Men retcon series, sounds awful

i don't think that, these days, mainstream, corporately owned superhero comics are really the place to look for idiosyncratic, personally expressive work - there are plenty of other places where that's possible. rather modern superhero comics - when done well - represent the 'genius of system' - a collective storytelling effort

I think it works quite well when superhero stories are completely disconnected from the main timeline. Elseworlds and stuff like that tends make strong impressions from time to time. A lot of the celebrated Batman stories need no wider context.

Anyone read that gory Neal Adams thing for Dark Horse Presents? That seemed pretty crazy too. Wonder if there will be a collected version.

Aldo, what don't you like about Waid's Daredevil? I find it a lot of fun - not that Waid isn't inconsistent. But that title's been pretty great for the whole run.

otm

Oh no I'd agree with both of you, loved the first lot especially the Latveria arc - I just feel that Waid works best read as a Silver Age writer; enjoy the broad themes and the fun, don't get bogged down too much in the plotting. I loved the swinging about working out where the hospital was because he only remembered the NYC locations, didn't enjoy so much the stuff about being a mayor and the new kid in the apartment that might be from the future.

Just heard that The Watcher got killed and his eyes gouged out. Apparently comic shops are selling promotional eyeballs.

Yeah... And I have a feeling people will scratch their heads at what happened in chapter three of that series as well...

The obvious ljnks between that and Uuatu having one eye stolen make the rumours all too attractive for me I'm afraid.