Marvel Comics blabbery

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.

Seems like the trend of killing off characters you deem not cool enough. Or killing more kid friendly characters to be more shocking.

TBF, the whole storyline is about a group of people who kill Spider-Men across dimensions and many other Spider-Men are killed or at least threatened with death. But, yes, it's telling that he made those particular decisions (although the newspaper strip Spider-Man was very specifically spared when he clearly should've been the first to go).

it's been a while since i read through spider-verse but i didn't think there was any malice in slott's portrayal of the alternate spider-people's deaths, it was more of a way to a) sell the threat of the villains by showing how easily they were able to murder their way through the multiverse and b) celebrate the weirdness of the many different interpretations of spider-man and throw some more into the mix for future creators to play with if they'd like.

and, most importantly, kinda bring spider-ham into marvel universe continuity because everyone loves spider-man

er, everyone loves spider-ham, i mean

Doesn't sound like a promising story either way.

i really enjoyed it fwiw! the way it's presented in that comicvine link is the worst kind of 'boohoo dan slott is destroying my childhood!' fanboy bullshit that isn't supported at all by the story itself

The greatest moment I've encountered so far was the Anarchic Spider-Man short which, as far as I can tell, was astoundingly published before Trump announced his candidacy but features President Osborn leading a paramilitary squad and literally bloviating about 'making America great again' before Anarchy Spidey smashes his head open with a guitar.

i dunno if i've said this anywhere else on ilx but at the risk of repeating myself i think slott's spider-man run is one of the best in the character's history - one of the best recent examples of doing fun new things in the marvel sandbox, and so full of affection and understanding for the character of spider-man and his supporting cast

(admittedly i'm not up to speed with much past spider-verse so if it all goes to shit afterwards i reserve the right to claim that dan slott has destroyed my childhood)

I've enjoyed the Slott Spider-Mans I've read too - he always seems to make an effort, and the Superior Spider-Man spin-off was especially enjoyable - but the most recent collection I sampled, where Peter Parker has become a kind of Tony Stark-alike tech entrepreneur, seemed like a really duff new direction.

i actually liked that direction quite a bit - i thought it was pretty clever to have one of the outcomes of the superior spider-man saga become that doc ock ends up pushing peter into a position where he actually has to do something constructive with his genius

Ha, I didn't read the copy on that ComicVine thing, but not a fan of the "female character dies gorily but chest still perky" cliche

And there does seem something witlessly mean-spirited about those two examples (although, like you say, out of context).

Always find Slott's comics look fun (he seems to have a lot of luck with artists) but kind of a chore to read. I liked that She-Hulk series, ten years ago?

XPOST

They got a comic for the winners in the world
I want a comic when they lose

I'm with bg, Slott gets that even when Spider-Man was in the depths of Ditko-style stories of learning about individual responsibility that he was still *fun* which is something a lot of Spider-Man comics forgot. When I was a kid there seemed like there was an A storyline where Spider-Man had the better creative team but was still becoming increasingly grimdark post-Venom, and the B stories (Spectacular and Web of Spider-Man) where it was just him beating up the Kingpin's goons or family and punching hired thugs with guns

They'll winnow out some of these characters eventually, but now they have:
- Peter, who is an actual adult who can succeed as an intelligent scientist dude. He can build things in his life without perpetually working a myriad of jobs and never getting ahead in a relationship/career after the Doc Ock being a better Parker loophole
- Miles, who is still a kid and has to balance family and school
- Cindy (Silk) who is Peter's age but has no real world experience so she's stringing along jobs and always on the verge of being fired Parker-style

Then there's Spider-Gwen and all the alternate universe shenanigans of Web Warriors

Ward, Cindy and Miles are your losers :)

I guess, TBF once again, I can't really remember any other sadistic moments in Slott's near-decade of writing Spider-Man so it's probably unfair to treat a single panel featuring dead Amazing Friends as a sign of the same mental illness that Geoff Johns demonstrates on the regular.

the best gimmick was visiting the newspaper strip's universe, where nobody could get anything done because they kept halfway resetting and summarizing dialogue from the previous three panels