Marvel Comics blabbery

Disappointed at the lack of shiny vampires.

Zdarsky's career is so weirdly split between fun stuff and glum journeyman product. I like his Batman run right now, it's very silly but very readable. The first issue of Twilight was fine, but everyone's read a billion of these things by now and this one isn't anything special.

(FWIW the Cliff Chiang Catwoman miniseries from last year was a actually pretty fun, original take on "what if superheroes but dystopia and they're old so their back hurts")

since I enjoy reading random stuff on Marvel Unlimited, I started reading through the original Alpha Flight series from 1983. John Byrne might be a notorious shithead, but he could at least do a little X-Men style Canadian spinoff that had some interesting, if very dated by 2024 standards, moments

I guess it was subtle for the time since people weren’t looking for obvious tells, but any summary (see Wikipedia) that tries to say it took a while for the series to hint about Northstar’s sexuality is… wrong

I’ve been cracking up because every time he shows up there’s some obvious “hey did you know this guy is gay? he’s gay!” setup

I've always found Byrne to be vastly overrated. Most of his art is just so static, and there is a bland sameness that he brings to everything. I consider him the anti-Kirby.

I did enjoy the Doomsday +1 book he did for Charlton very early in his career.

yeah, I wouldn't say he's good per se compared to my favorites, but I think he's generally cohesive/consistent

with the whole Marvel Unlimited deal I've tackled a pretty broad swath of comics and tapped out more than a few times. so, I'm putting that caveat on my comments

When I was a kid in the 80s, I found Marvel Comics annoying because they had too many captions compared to DC.

That is probably... not true, but it's how it seemed at the time.

Anyway - I was reminded as I'm rereading Byrne's Superman run, for the first time since the UK reprints came out in the early 90s. They seem way more zippy and readable than his Marvel comics (although possibly more hacky - and his Superman is a real prude!)

I think the Marvel Method often leads to overwriting - scripters trying to fill every available space on the finished artwork. Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two. Once Byrne wrote full scripts for himself, he could let more of the artwork do the talking.

I do think it's a shame that the thought balloon has pretty much vanished from modern comics storytelling, tho - it's one of comics most distinctive literary devices!

Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two.

Orzechowski's lettering is so nice, it's probably hard to resist...

Claremont having a little catchphrase to describe the powers of each individual character, and the fact it was deployed about once per issue, makes you start to go a little insane after a while. I guess that in theory this would make it easier to start reading a comic at any point during the run, but it also makes a certain portion of each issue this background framework

Steve Gerber could go on at length like nobody's business.

I mean, all these Marvel writers are taking their cues from Stan the Man, who overwrote like crazy as a way of asserting himself on the product (and lol at the 'story' credit on this one):

https://www.comicsbookcase.com/features-archive/daredevil-comic-1966

https://i.imgur.com/LOYDFzn.jpg

How will you know that some real shit is going down if Betsy isn’t talking about the focused totality of her psychic powers?

LOL at Foggy already scheming about Karen.

xp lmao

Stan did have a flair for titles.

I may be alone in this but I think Claremont and Ann Nocenti are two of the better over-writers in comics. They can be purple and weird but they're very readable. Gerber, on the other hand...

Meanwhile I'm also rereading Milligan's Shade and some of those Vertigo titles are just as bad as Marvel.

... how would you be alone in liking Claremont in Nocenti, they're fairly beloved

I mean, it's a cliche that they're both a bit prolix. But I don't really see that - I think they're some of comics better sentence writers, i.e. wordy but easy to read. So often, reading comics feels like wading through sludge, and I don't get that with them.

I think it's relative. Compared to Alan Moore or some later writers, maybe they read as corny. But compared to the writing in most of the mainstream comics at the time they were on another level. Definitely soapy and wordy, but they helped bring more nuanced emotions into superhero books.

Well Nocenti is really a post-Claremont writer - she’s at the very tail end of the ‘overwriting’ era, a Shooter writer (whereas Claremont is very much a Roy Thomas writer).

Steve Gerber a million times better than either of them, of course.