Marvel Comics blabbery

It's a big tent!

I would've loved to be a fly on the wall during the discussions about whether or not to release that new Cage book. I don't think Tartakovsky's involvement on its own was enough to justify it even from a business standpoint, so I have no idea what they were thinking but it stands out pretty starkly in relation to the direction in which they've been heading.

i guess it's probably instructive that marvel seem to be working to build a more inclusive cast of high-profile characters while dc have worked to roll back new versions of established heroes in favour of reinstalling hal jordan, barry allen et al

I am curious as to whether there's more going on there than just the enormous batsignal you send up by making Geoff Jones the Chief Creative Officer.

I'm curious to see if DC gets any kind of shakeup if AT&T does ultimately wind up buying WB.

what's up with people who have the worst creative direction ideas having names that are atypical variations on "Jeff"

going to apply for a job in comics, my name is... Joephh

i don't think it's entirely a regime thing, though DiDio and his shitty ethos have been in place far far longer than I expected. The bedrock of modern DC is this this self-pitying neo-nietszschean humorless trip which is always gonna be ambrosia to a certain kind of asshole

assbrosia if u will

my name is jerf please let me direct tv show

BREAKING: DC NAMES NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/4/4c/JoffreyBaratheon-Profile.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20160626094917

My name is J'eehpf, English is sixth language and have traumatic head trauma impairing plot- and character-formation centers of brain, I would like to run your universe.

A few years back Chris Sims (and IIRC others with an even more strident tone?) made the case that part of the problem is DC's hangups about its "legacy heroes" - who, being created during and before WWII are almost all white. So the urge to reach back to classic versions, and the primary pantheon itself, end up kind of accidentally being all-white: http://comicsalliance.com/the-racial-politics-of-regressive-storytelling/

I would push that a lot further though - the urge to go back to a putative golden age of heroic clarity is reactionary on its face, and in America, the "good old days" narrative only makes sense for a certain reactionary slice of the white audience. I'm thinking of "Make America Great Again," but also that viral comic strip where people get excited about traveling back in time to different periods, and the one member of a racial minority ultimately has to point out to these bozos that none of the periods they want to go back to look particularly fun for him. So there's this sense with DC that there's a great enduring canonical past where Heroes Were Heroes, and all changes after a certain date are just disposable products of temporary Crises awaiting the next reboot to the 'classic' status quo, the "real" versions. It's a narrative that basically invokes an all-white, pre-liberal-meddling golden age even before you look up the character sheets and find out that indeed that is exactly what it is.

Marvel is definitely NOT without versions of this problem, and the new Cage comic stands as Exhibit A that there is something really fucked up in their editorial culture/practices, that that could seem normal and just slip on through. But I do think there's something important to Sims's point about the chronology of character creation - there are all these really popular characters with decades of established material whose "real" versions are minorities - there is no white Storm to reboot the character to. And that's even before you get into more recent variants of legacy characters (e.g. Miles Morales) that have managed to 'stick' so far, at least in some capacity.

I think even that gives DC too much of a free pass - the reason that there was a situation to revert to Barry/Wally/Ray Palmer is that DC has a history of passing on mantles (generally to other straight white dudes, granted). Marvel still had all of the original Avengers / FF / Spiderman, so it was more of a break to go "Fuck it, Thor is a girl now, suck it up", and still they did it.

doc casino otm, although it's kinda ironic / sad / disappointing that chris sims was himself responsible for fucking horrible online shit towards val d'orazio

the shit that was allowed to go down in the Superman office

ooh, what shit?

Google 'Eddie Berganza'.

Ahh fuckkkkk, I remember hearing about the D’Orazio thing but somehow didn't connect the dots or internalize that Sims was the perpetrator. Shit.

DC is so basically bad right now it would be funny if it weren't kinda depressing that they are still the biggest/second biggest fish in the pond.

DC comics could feature nothing more than Batman and the Flash discussing hummus recipes or passing a turd back and forth every month and it would still be one of the top two.

Didn't Neal Adams write that comic?

big fan of Batman: Odyssey over here

ditto; wish marvel would hire him to do a similar ongoing series with literally any character
imagine black bolt talking about his problems about talking

the entire comic would be Black Bolt's word balloons getting crowded out by increasingly-pulverized rubble

also an ice axe for some reason

His First X-Men thing or whatever it was called was shit.

re: Chris Sims, I hadn't heard about him, Val D'Orazio or the shit he did to her until now, so I can say that I hated X-Men '92 because it was terrible and not because his bad behavior tainted the comic for me.

I'm reading the old Doctor Stranges starting with the Strange Tales back-of-the-book appearances and I'm at a loss as to why Marvel doesn't even try to do this kind of anthology series anymore - test new characters, let things get weird, keep people interested in a title unto itself rather than just following Spider-Man.

I guess throwing 842 titles a month at the wall and seeing what sticks is effectively like publishing a really expensive anthology. Stuff like Squirrel Girl and Hellcat seem to be doing pretty well under that model, whereas they probably would've been quickly cancelled when Marvel was more conservative wrt the number of monthly books they put out.

Marvel kind of did that with the Spider-Man consolidation/biweekly publishing thing they tried after the One More Day garbage. A lot of the issues had shorter main stories followed by backup stories.

I believe the main reason they had these dual-story issues back in the day had more to do with artificial constraints on how many titles they were allowed to have on the newsstand at a time

sorry for the reddit link, it was the only one I quickly found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/30vuva/how_did_dc_limit_marvels_distribution_from/

the gist of it is that Marvel lost distribution in 1957 and until 1968 they were distributed by the company that owned DC, so they were limited to eight titles per month

xxp - pretty well is relative, the internal numbers I've see have Squirrel Girl/Hellcat-type of titles selling ~10% of Spider-Man, it's actually pretty shocking that they haven't been cancelled.

By anthology, though, I also mean trying different types of stories and target groups. I feel like the way Strange Tales started (Marvel's version of EC SuspenStories/horror) with the marketing push of Marvel AND the opportunity to do oddball stuff with the usual characters on occasion would sell.

Marvel Comics Presents was probably the series that fit the bill when I first started reading comics

i bought the shit outta MCP
Marvel does those infinite digital comix that are sort of fast and easy anthology type stories?

There were quite a few anthology titles put out during Secret Wars and CivWar 2, mostly tryouts for new artists and writers. Taking Sides and Street Dance Battle or something. I can't recall reading any really good ones, though :/

Isn't it the case that anthology formats have traditionally been unpopular with US comic buyers? That's one of the reasons that's usually given for why 2000AD never really caught on out there.

2000AD is popular to a general audience in mass-market locations in the UK. Archie is popular to a general audience in mass-market locations in the US. Heavy Metal is successful to a general audience in mass-market locations in the US. Best American seems to be successful with a bookstore audience in bookstores in the US. Marvel Comics Presents is probably the last time a superhero anthology at an economical price was offered to a general audience in the US?

I liked MCP but also remember it being pretty unpopular, one of those series always found in bargain bins

MCP started off as more of an a-list title with strong modern stuff alongside '70s luminaries revisiting famous haunts (Gerber on Man-Thing! Moench on Shang-Chi! McGregor on Black Panther!) but, with some exceptions, slowly became a regular 'who's that?' in terms of the talent involved.

Yeah, MCP as far as I could tell was always middling and died off around the time distribution focus shifted from newsstands to comic book shops.

The only issues I remember kids trading or looking for were those containing that Weapon X arc

Weapon X and early Sam Kieth work is pretty much the only mid-period MCP stuff that stands out in my memory but I never read it that consistently. Perhaps there are hidden gems I'm unaware of.

Oh, yeah, there was also Nocenti's Typhoid Mary batshittery (which was recently collected).

Got the 2 vols of tom king's vision on google play for $8 each, and they really were as good as everyone said

Yeah. It works really well as a miniseries, but would have been happy for it to carry on.

It is *highly* emo without being cloying or clever or meta, which I haven't seem comics do effectively very often. Maybe Love and Rockets?

I just read the Claremont/Miller Wolverine series for the first time and was impressed. Haven't read any Claremont besides Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past, but he came across quite menschy in the Sean Howe book, and this was fun and more well-written than I was expecting given Claremont's reputation. Is anything else of his worth checking, or is it just Miller making him look better than usual?

The classic X-Men run and New Mutants (especially the Sienkiewicz issues) are essential but nothing else has ever really grabbed me. His 00s X-Men stuff isn't horrible but is mostly forgettable -- all the character development isn't anything he hadn't done before, and the plot arcs are kind of lame.

He never lets go of the "Character, from the rolling hills of New Zealand, feels the primal forces of nature and her power of feeling primal forces weighs heavily on her conscience as she flies over the desert (not her native terrain by any stretch of the imagination) to help her friends, the mutants known as the X-Men!"

I think he's fluctuated but there are issues where it's 90% exposition boxes over the first half of the issue

Where does the "classic" run begin and end?

I actually kind of enjoyed the exposition, which was what surprised me. He's a pretty good sentence-writer, albeit within what I'm guessing is a limited bag of tricks. I don't want to overrate him - I was just surprised by its enjoyable competence and relative lack of purple-ness. No doubt diminished on repetition.

Claremont's X-Men/New Mutants/Excalibur stuff ca. '75-'91 is essential and highly recommended (some eras and storylines more than others, obvs).

imo you can drop off a ways before '91

I think you stick with each title until a little while after the next one starts publishing. You can see his interest shift. So drop the X-Men after the Asgardian Wars in '85, the New Mutants sometime after Excalibur gets going in '88, and leave Excalibur at the end of the Cross-Time Caper.

good theory