Marvel Comics blabbery

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.

this is billed as "legendary comic creator Lee's first prose novel", idk how much input he actually had into it compared to the guy credited as co-writer (I'm guessing not that much?)

https://www.amazon.com/Zodiac-Legacy-Convergence-Stan-Lee/dp/1484752538

Are you implying that Stan would just slap his name on someone else's work????

Certainly by the end of the 60s, Stan was much more of a frustrated - or failed - movie/tv screenwriter than he was literary novelist.

Maybe they left spaces where the dialogue should be and he just filled them in at the end?

For some reason last night I found myself looking at Spider-Man: Reign, pretty all of which I knew beforehand was it was the one with the radioactive spider-jizz.

Even going in knowing about that particular plot point, I hadn't anticipated just how bad it would actually be, a truly ham-handed attempted to give Spider-Man his own DKR. The sub-par sub-Miller art and dialogue is embarrassing enough, but then Andrews lampshades it by putting in a character called "Miller Janson"! No. No. Sorry, no.

It feels like an escapee from the nineties grim-n-gritty era that somehow managed to get published in 2006.

Wordiness is not just a problem with Lee, but with most American superhero comics (and most other genre comics) up until the '80s. It seems like there was a rule that you simply couldn't have "silent panels", i.e. panels without a text, and preferably each panel should explain what's happening either in dialogue or narration, as if the images weren't enough. For me, that's a big reason why many French and Japanese comics from the '50s/'60s/'70s read much better today than old superhero comics, they were often more confident in letting the images do the narrative work.

Sorry, by French I mean "Franco-Belgian".

preferably each panel should explain what's happening either in dialogue or narration

and in chris claremont's case, often the same unwieldy phrases over and over again, which is why the words 'the focused totality of my psychic powers!' sometimes pop up in my brain, unbidden and unwanted

is there a decent biography / analysis of chris claremont's work anywhere out there? it feels like he's up there with william moulton marston in terms of turning his throbbing sexual obsessions with bdsm and mind control into superhero fiction and i'd be really interested to find out more about it

Heh, when Claremont used to attend British comic conventions in the 80s, he always used to bring with him a sketchbook where he would get artists to draw him bondage pictures of Storm.

We have a thread of its own devoted to Claremont's stock phrases:

here is where we list CCCs (Chris Claremont Cliches)

that does not surprise me at all - he's probably got hundreds of them stashed under his bed xp

Did he get it from John Byrne or vice versa?

("focussed totality etc" is at least something that is difficult to infer from the images)

For me, that's a big reason why many French and Japanese comics from the '50s/'60s/'70s read much better today than old superhero comics

**cough** Edgar P Jacobs

(I do like those EPJ books though.)

Yes, I was going to mention Jacobs, and even some of the Tintin albums - especially Flight 714 - are quite 'wordy', too. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

I dimly recall reading that American comic books generally resisted wordless panels because they were worried readers would think the balloons had fallen off the page!
At Marvel in particular, the 'Marvel Method' always gave writer/editors the last word, literally: I think Stan often used to overwrite as a way of 'course correcting' Kirby et al (there are plenty of instances of dialogue and image being radically at odds in Marvel Comics) and just generally exerting his 'authority' over the printed page. What's especially excessive at Marvel is that you frequently got captions, dialogue AND thought balloons all in the same panel, which did make for a very cluttered reading experience.

I love this panel from an old Avengers comic where Steve Englehart takes the piss out of Don McGregor's incredibly prolix Black Panther comics:

https://materioptikon.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/a137_bp.jpg

Lol "nay"

can't wait to see chadwick boseman deliver that dialogue in avengers: infinity war

I SAY THEE NAY

That "nay" combined with Thor's expression just made me laugh harder than I have in a while.

"mauve shadows of regret"

Moebius/Jodorowsky stuff is super-wordy too, although obvs that's balanced out by other amazingness. But I do tend to fall back on skimming the words and looking at the pictures. (Also possibly bad translations.)

steve englehart otm

I think we've discussed Edgar P. Jacobs' extreme wordiness in some other thread, but yeah, he's an example that shows some Franco-Belgian writers could do that too. But my point was that walls of text were way common in American mainstream comics than Euro ones, not that Euro comics never had them.

I guess this is also because US mainstream comics normally have a separate writer and artist, whereas Euro ones don't? So the US writers didn't feel comfortable with just letting the artist do the heavy lifting? Wordless panels start to become more common in superhero comics in the 80s, and I feel the biggest single influence on that was Miller, who of course didn't have to worry about the aforementioned writer/artist division.

I have to admit the bottomless fan service of Web Warriors is kind of fun. Catching up on Marvel Unlimited and... Spider-Ham 2099 and Ducktor Doom 2099!

I'm reading Spider-Verse atm, which is much the same. Except probably less 'fun' (e.g. the Hostess Fruit Pie universe's Spider-Man just got eaten).

This was one of those things where I worry about the mental health of people who write comic books (and read them)

http://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/gen-discussion-1/rip-to-spider-man-and-his-amazing-friends-1608607/

Yeah, I didn't realize going in that Slott was going to be taking such Johns-ish glee in killing off the iterations of Spider-Man people are most likely to remember from childhood.