Marvel Comics blabbery

... how?

neo nazi guy: "aw, did that trigger you?"
me: "Oh I am way 'triggered'!" *pulls triggers on my half dozen giant guns turning him into red goo*

i guess this and Jeremy Lin is what it takes for more Asian Americans to show up lol

http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html

idk if this is something everyone here is already familiar with, but I've just gone down the rabbit-hole of this incredibly detailed website that makes the argument that the first 30 years of Fantastic Four comics are The Great American Novel. it includes graphs:

https://static.minichan.org/img/1475125041967855.gif

it all seems sort of reminiscent of that movie where ppl have intricate theories about The Shining

"Zaps Franklin" was some seriously heavy shit, for real.

that kind of nuclear-grade nerd shit is like catnip to me tbh

when was the Waid run? that's the last one i actually read

Jeez...it started maybe fifteen years ago? I'm surprised to suddenly realize I've read everything from that point on. Only run that I'd highly recommend since then is Hickman's.

i've been reading bits of that site over the last couple of days and it actually seems to put forward a pretty coherent argument! at the very least it does a great job of charting the genuine evolution of the characters over decades, the scale of which i don't think i'd every appreciated before.

either way i've started reading stan and jack's ff again and it really is one of the towering achievements of not just superhero comics but comics as a form. so much wild creativity packed into every issue - i can't imagine how impossibly exciting it must have been to read them month-to-month as they were published.

Having somewhat recently read silver age Marvel in its entirety, I can confirm at least that Lee & Kirby FF is one of a small handful of silver age Marvel things worth reading in its entirety.

i could happily live without the egregious sexism, that's for sure. from what i remember from reading the first 125 issues or so of amazing spider-man in the essential collections a decade or so ago, they mostly read pretty well too.

what were the standouts from your insane journey into mystery the silver age, by the way? once i've worked my way through the ff i might do some more marvel unlimited reading furtehr down the line...

I'll have to go back and review. One surprising highlight for me was Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, which was much grittier and far less perfunctory than I would've imagined. The unquestionable lowlight was Ant-Man, which I honestly don't know if I even finished because it was completely perfunctory and awful. It was like something they whipped together on the train while riding to work but didn't have time to finish so they got like the janitor to put the finishing touches on it before it went to press.

Lee/Kirby original run of Thor is incredible

sure there's a lot of big dumb fight scenes and "I SAY THEE NAY!" but so much fun, and so many crazy ideas

Yeah, I mean, most of the generally-accepted highlights held true. Lee & Kirby FF and Thor (and I'd put their Captain America and Nick Fury stuff pretty high up there, too), for sure. The 'Tales of Asgard' backups in Thor might be my favorite of all. Steranko's Nick Fury, of course. Ditko's Spider-Man and Doctor Strange are both good but kinda overrated imo (at least inasmuch as they're often held in regard as paragons of the form). A lot of the other stuff is kind of a haphazard mess. Romita on Amazing and Colan on Daredevil get top marks in the art department. I left off around 1970, when they just seemed to be getting a handle on how to tell longer stories, so I think I'm likely to find the bronze age to be more rewarding once I get back around to it.

Steranko's Nick Fury art is a great extension of Kirby but omg did I get sick of all the exposition

when I re-read that run recently I was struck by just the sheer volume of words I was carelessly skipping over

lolling at the thought of old lunch ploughing through old issues of ant-man out of some misguided sense of duty and also coming to the grim realisation that it's exactly the kind of pointless waste of time i'll probably end up doing sometime too

i've been meaning to read the lee/kirby thor for a while - am i right in thinking it ends with a bit of a whimper due to stan and jack falling out?

yeah the very end of the run is weird because you can tell the plotting/writing was fucked with. From existing original artwork it looks like Kirby wanted to run with this Galactus+Thor teamup angle and then Lee clumsily reconfigured it into something else. Plus the artwork scale was changed (much to Kirby's displeasure) and that hampers things as well. The last issue is a standalone thing that feels more like one of Kirby's Fourth World stories (a bizarre super-rich dude with a mind-swapping machine!)

You have no idea how much art and entertainment I've consumed out of a misguided sense of duty, bizarro. It's sick.

the pre-Marvel Universe issues of Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense are on Marvel Unlimited, there's lots of good stuff there - great art by Kirby, Ditko and others, some hilariously hokey "twist" endings

I like that FF great american novel thing, some of his arguments seem a bit of a stretch but there is some genuinely insightful stuff there as well imo. particularly enjoyed his argument that Kirby was actually an excellent writer of dialogue for comics (which I agree with 100%)

Stan Lee is a terrible terrible scripter imo

yes

I've always thought that Kirby dialogue was a wonderful complement to his art, inasmuch as both underscore the extent to which the dude existed in a whooooole different kinda headspace.

definitely - literal universes breathed into life in a cloud of kirby's cigar smoke. no wonder alan moore had him show up as god in supreme

heh, I'd forgotten this dialogue - 'cognitive zone'!

http://www.littlestuffedbull.com/images/comics/24hrswkirby/supremereturn6b.jpg

(Total aside, I don't know how I overlooked your new display name, bizarro. Probably my favorite Sonic Youth album.)

enh, i wish there were more lee ranaldo tracks on it

The later issues of the Kirby Thor run are p messy - by about 1968, there's a definite sense that Jack is disengaging from Marvel and holding back on giving them any more juicy new characters - but many of these issues are inked by Bill Everett rather than the wretched Vince Colletta (who erased backgrounds etc from Kirby's pencils) and the difference is astounding, even at the smaller art size.

I would also say that the Human Torch solo stories in Strange Tales are even worse than Ant-Man.

And The Avengers is pretty consistently great for its first 200 issues or so - the Roy Thomas-scripted issues drawn by John Buscema and Gene Colan that were inked by either George Klein or Tom Palmer are just sublime superhero art.

Totally agree

the pre-Spidrman Amazing (Adult) Fantasy has some of Ditko's best art imo (along with some pretty terrible scripts)

http://www.marvelmasterworks.com/marvel/mm/amfan/images/panel_amfan009b_omni.jpg

^Unpleasant modern recolouring on that

I generally prefer Ditko's 50s Charlton work - things like Tales of the Mysterious Traveler - to his pre-superhero Atlas/Marvel stuff, though again, the scripts are nothing to write home about

The lack of full stop after "I am death", presumably a mistake, is actually kind of chilling

Yes the omission of periods has a real and sometimes powerful stylistic effect IMO

Was the Bixby Hulk TV series a big splash in the UK, as well? I'd been curious as to why, when they first started producing original content, Marvel UK didn't really do much with existing characters beyond the Hulk, but I just realized that this happened around the same time as the show.

Yeah, it was pretty popular. The original Hulk material appeared during Dez Skinn's tenure as Marvel UK's Editor-in-Chief, and he did manage to commission some other new strips, most notably Night Raven drawn by David Lloyd, in some ways a trial run for V for Vendetta.

Complete Night Raven collection coming soon in the US! I'm glad they've gotten around to dredging up more obscure and hard to find material lately (I have the recent collection of UK Hulk stuff somewhere).

The Hulk show was huge in the UK. I was only 4-5 when it was aired, watched the Banner scenes and would run out for the room whenever he turned into Hulk. A Les Dawson sketch where he turns into the Hulk gave me nightmares for a while.

from what i remember from reading the first 125 issues or so of amazing spider-man in the essential collections a decade or so ago, they mostly read pretty well too.

― hunk of poo, big fart, girlfriend, and Dove soap (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 10 January 2017 16:05

I dunno, I read all that and after Ditko leaves the goods are few and far between, but ably drawn by Romita and Kane. Good Romita/Kane era stuff you get is Spiderman growing six arms, Rhino, Shocker, Morbius and Prowler but a lot of the other new bad guys are just crappy gangsters (including Kingpin). You barely get to know Gwen and her dad so when they die it doesn't carry much impact, which was surprising because I'd heard so much hype for her being a great character (although I understand kids at the time would have been attached to her). Romita said his Terry And The Pirates tribute issues are his favourite thing he ever did but I found them pretty bland. The 105-107 Spider Slayer story is the first time I felt the creators truly didn't care. The rematches with Dr Octopus are boring and I think he's an overrated villain to begin with. Mary Jane's "ginchy" haircut is not good.

Surprises in the Ditko era is just how much time Frederick Foswell gets. The Enforcers are the shittest thing in the Ditko era.

After Hulk's decent initial miniseries I found the first Essential Hulk volume pretty awful. The Ditko Hulk stuff from Tales To Astonish is pretty joyless and often badly inked by another artist.

I love a lot of the Dr Strange stuff, Ditko's era is pure classic even when the stories aren't. I'm a Bill Everett fan but his 60s superhero work looks boring and like he was struggling to be modern. Marie Severin's art is quite interesting and Adkins is a pretty solid hand but the stories are a complete chore. I love Gene Colan's stuff but by that time I gave up reading the text.

I don't know, I think the scene where Mary Jane turns up to console Peter after Gwen's death is pretty much the apex of Marvel, and perhaps of comics themselves

It's not the story itself so much as we barely knew Gwen.

xp that particular set of panels is one of my all-time favorites, so strong

I think Lee's scripting has buckets of charm, in small doses, when he's "on".

And possibly, if his comics had had 50% less words, he might even have been considered a great writer. It's not that what's there is dreck, there's just too much of it.

Unfortunately that's the case for a lot of old comics.

And possibly, if his comics had had 50% less words, he might even have been considered a great writer. It's not that what's there is dreck, there's just too much of it.

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, January 14, 2017 1:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If I remember my Marvel history, Lee had always intended to eventually get out of the comics biz and become a "serious" writer, but could never make the transition. You definitely get that "frustrated novelist" vibe from a lot his stuff.

I bought quite a few Marvel Essentials before I realised that Lee's shtick gets very tiring when read in large amounts. The early years of Spidey are a bit of a golden patch though, but I was surprised how boring it got once Ditko quit.

You have no idea how much art and entertainment I've consumed out of a misguided sense of duty, bizarro. It's sick.

― Gorvernment Stoodge (Old Lunch), Tuesday, January 10, 2017 5:06 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I tend to do this too, but only because I'm a horrible completist. That's what led to me reading the entirety of Bronze Age Wonder Woman.

I can't imagine Stan writing a novel tbh.