Marvel Comics blabbery

Hey guys I read a recent Marvel comic! It was Tom King's Vision. Pretty good, not as good as Miracle Man, which both had better art and a layer of narrative ambiguity that I liked.

Also made me kinda bummed out that superhero comics are so murder-y now. Which is weird given that no one stays dead. Like, narratively we are still supposed to register murder as extreme, transgressive, dramatic, etc. even though its impact has been undermined by both overuse and its lack of lasting consequences.

art imitating life there

was unaware of people constantly rising from the dead irl but maybe I'm missing something

"narratively we are still supposed to register murder as extreme, transgressive, dramatic, etc. even though its impact has been undermined by both overuse and its lack of lasting consequences" = the past four days of news

oh I got the reference I just don't agree that that's analogous

death in the real world always has consequences

murder has been very common throughout human history (comics, not so much) and not really convinced this era is any more murderous than previous eras tbh

dunno if comparing modern age to bronze age either irl or in marvel eras is ever going to be partic fruitful.

why not? it seems to me like the levels of murder in mainstream superhero comics is fairly easy to track and it's gone from non-existent to super-rare to fairly common to omnipresent

rip comics code

Spoiler: mainstream (read: Marvel, those being the ones I read and am most familiar with) comics aren't actually all that murdery, at least inasmuch as murder is by no means omnipresent. The books with a high body count are enough of an outlier that they're fairly noteworthy.

So five (I think?) people getting murdered in this Vision book was an outlier?

my opinion is that everyone who wants to read marvel comics should be buying more issues of unbeatable squirrel girl

xxp well i wasn't looking to have a serious conversation about this, but i would suggest that graphic murder in mainstream comics was an every issue thing in the thirties and forties, waned considerably through the fifties, mostly disappeared in the era of the comics code and then came roaring back as a grim and gritty thing throughout the 90's and 00's. homicide as character development is currently undeniaby lodged in the goiterous throats of marvel and dcs glut of more mediocre titles; i think you could argue that's a side effect of the mid-90's death of superman/breaking of batman? anyway, i blame geoff johns.

And I can't recall a time when there were as many non-specialty titles (i.e. stuff that isn't based on a licensed property or released under a YA sub-imprint) specifically geared toward younger audiences.

Yes, Vision was an outlier with a darker tone than most (but certainly not all) of Marvel's other titles.

never forget, the second issue of action comics features superman straight up killing a guy but it's okay cause he deserved it
http://i.imgur.com/xVKJnZv.png

Blaming Geoff Johns is a good general policy in this and many other, wholly-unrelated instances.

also, here's batman shooting a "vampire"
https://i.imgur.com/TQkQjoW.png

maybe i should start a "when superheroes kill" thread

graphic murder in mainstream comics was an every issue thing in the thirties and forties, waned considerably through the fifties, mostly disappeared in the era of the comics code and then came roaring back as a grim and gritty thing throughout the 90's and 00's

yeah this sounds about right

that Superman page never fails to crack me up, Supes is so "now this is happening" about it

I can't recall a time when there were as many non-specialty titles (i.e. stuff that isn't based on a licensed property or released under a YA sub-imprint) specifically geared toward younger audiences.

totally agree with this, it's crazy the wealth of stuff that's available and perfectly suitable for my daughter that bears absolutely zero relation to the DC/Marvel/licensed characters axis

OL on the mark about the COMIX FOR KIDS onslaught, which is great! but there's still a fuckton of weirdly ultraviolent books out there where murder is the case that they give you. The Punisher's last four(?) or so volumes treat human life like kleenex.

batman versus dracula: a one panel thrill ride

http://i.imgur.com/PYQ3cgv.png

Batman Stops a Pogrom

on a slightly more modern marvel note
https://i.stack.imgur.com/ult59.jpg

bon voyage, baron blood!

Comic Panels of Superheroes Killing People

Yeah, scrolling through the books released in the year I'm just wrapping up (2017), the only stuff that stands out as particularly murdery are Punisher, the Bullseye mini (which was frankly fucking gruesome), and, well, anything with Rocket Raccoon (I neither understand nor care for this retcon of the character as utterly kill-crazy). Some Deadpool stuff, naturally, but during his time on the Avengers they tamped it down quite a bit.

allow me to introduce you to what DC did with "deathstroke"
http://i.imgur.com/9tZmy33.png

I'm trying not to.... oh hell

Remember when Jeph Loeb wrote a little story called Ultimatum and Marvel pretty much burned their Ultimate Comics line to the ground?

What else...Old Man Logan, Thanos, Carnage. I mean, you know what you're getting with most of these books that feature characters who've always been 'edgy'. You don't have to worry that you're gonna turn the page in most of the other other Marvel titles and suddenly find Marvin being graphically devoured by Wonder Dog (thanks again, Geoff).

you're right about Rocket, that's the movie to blame for that i think in that they needed a way for people to not read him as a cartoon. which i guess leads to his Bendis catchphrase:
http://i.imgur.com/M4lSKua.png

Deeply, deeply, deeply hate that catchphrase.

all the "old man" series are murderfests; here's a random panel i found in the first page of old man hawkeye i opened
http://i.imgur.com/HeG5k2L.png

The Nighthawk book was dark but kinda righteous, too (black vigilante unapologetically taking out racist white folks).

Important to recall that Millar kicked off that whole 'old man' future timeline.

yeah, he's responsible for a lot of this post-miller grim and gritty bullshit too. i'm not even gonna post the relevant JR JR Hit-Girl panels.

Marvel stuff coming out this week:

Probably some murders imo
ABSOLUTE CARNAGE #1
COSMIC GHOST RIDER DESTROYS MARVEL HISTORY #6
DEAD MAN LOGAN #10
IMMORTAL HULK #22 (in a horror comic style, though)
MAJOR X #0
OLD MAN QUILL #8
PUNISHER #14 (of course, I mean...)
STAR WARS #70 (someone's gonna get shot or lightsabered in a cantina)

probably not murdery?
AGENTS OF ATLAS #1
BLACK CAT #3
DAREDEVIL #9
HOUSE OF X #2
SAVAGE AVENGERS #4

no gratuitous deaths here, folks (hopefully, no guarantees)
CHAMPIONS #8
AERO #1
FUTURE FOUNDATION #1
INVISIBLE WOMAN #2

i will bet you a shiny nickel that house of x and savage avengers will have at least one murder

a random 2019 monthly body count of marvel vs dc vs usa would be an interesting if depressing project

I can't tell if you guys are arguing for or against my point anymore (ie whether or not Vision was an outlier - kinda doesn't look like it if there's a consensus that >50% of Marvel's monthly titles = murdery). But idk you guys read so much more of this crap than I do.

kings vision is not more murder-y than most of marvel's books but it takes murder a bit more seriously.

i think the unspoken mainstream superhero "comics code" wrt murder for the past two decades is that it's okay to show villains killing if it *furthers the plot* and it's okay for heroes to kill if the people they're killing REALLY deserve it. the murders in Vision are unwarranted and have grave repercussions as opposed to punisher just fucking killing people left and right.

That Cosmic Ghost Rider mini is basically a humorous gloss on What If afaict.

Shakes, Marvel puts out 457 titles a month, no way is that <50%.

cosmic ghost rider has been quite fun imo but, as far as this discussion goes, it takes killing people as seriously as deadpool does

>50% rather

the murders in Vision ... have grave repercussions

do they though? They appear to have grave repercussions *at first*, within the context of the story, but by the end he's escaped the consequences of actions by virtue of his wife's sacrifices... and he just starts building himself another wife. Also no one really cares that that Grim Reaper is dead cuz c'mon now. And the dead civilians fade into the background.

I was just going off the weekly list mh posted OL

xps

I'd need to reread but i recall the murders destroying vision's family, even though he's saved the universe 17 times yadda yadda yadda so they certainly proved impactful enough to dislodge a cyborg god's way of being

here's a fun recap of the house of ideas monthly hit ratio in 2017
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/2017-year-almost-everything-went-wrong-marvel-comics-1070616

i think marvel and DC put out about 50 to 60 single issue titles a month? maybe more? it's got to be an unprecedented glut at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_Marvel_Comics_publications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_DC_Comics_publications

I've been sorting comics lately and (as you might imagine) have quite a number of Marvel comics. I think I have roughly the same number of boxes for stuff from the past five years as I do for maybe a decade and a half that preceded it. It's kinda ridiculous.

Humblebrag here

if one were to purchase a hard copy of every new single issue marvel book solicited for release in october (excluding reprints, knick knacks, bound editions and whatnot), it would run you about $390 plus tax. add in variant covers and you're pushing $500 a month.

It's probably more 'admission of serious illness' than 'humblebrag' but potayto potahto I guess.