Marvel Comics blabbery

also lol DJP

In modern comics I rarely find that sort of density that old comics are plagued with or The need they had to tell you everything a few times. That's one great thing about Japan, even their old comics breeze along by comparison.

I mean, what sort of problems do the better comics have today? Some of the colouring is really bad but I can't think of much else.

wait. i'm sorry, i totally misread you, i thought you were saying the opposite thing

Ward- Do you consider the 60s Marvel artists even better than early 50s EC?

I don't know about 'better'. As a comic strip artist (rather than illustrator) Kirby could do things Al Williamson couldn't (ie tell a dynamic and personally invested story), but it would be difficult to argue against the sheer craft of so many of the EC artists in their prime, and Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC (it also seems really obvious that the way that Marvel addressed its readership through letter columns and so on owed a great deal to the way that Gaines/Feldstein spoke to, and engaged with, 'EC Fan-Addicts'). In both Marvel and EC's case, it makes much more sense to read their comics on an installment basis, rather than in huge chunks, when the limitations of formula and genre start to become very apparent.

no substandard guys

Never been much of a Jack Kamen fan; the Harrison/Wood collaborations are horrible; Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths; Feldstein's stiffly ugly artwork is the v definition of an acquired taste. There's plenty of dross in every major EC title if you dig deep enough, tho' by about '53 all of their major artists are absolutely ON FIRE.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

Agree w/ this. It seems like a real fool's errand - or a recipe for perpetual disappointment - to expect a constant stream of 'masterpieces' from such a labour intensive and economically marginalised cultural form as the monthly American colour comic book. The dross illuminates the good stuff, if only by negative example.

the technology advances in production and printing alone have made comics a more consistently high quality product

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes, so I don't necessarily think technological improvement equates to a 'quality' product (actual 60s Marvel comics, printed from the original artwork, usually seem far more beautiful and elegant than the whizzbang stuff of today, imho). Obviously modern, streamlined storytelling techniques are a response to the fact that these days, comic book readers have so many other distractions and pleasures to choose from, so there simply isn't time for the huge amount of (over)writing that ppl like Stan and Roy Thomas could indulge in. Again, I don't think this means that the caption-less, thought balloon-less, read-it-in-five-minutes comic book is automatically superior, or inferior.

great post, ward!

Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths

but it's so cuuuurious! such a weird blend of their two styles - not complementary, not an improvement, but a really interesting combination. like P Craig Russell on Mignola.

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes

I find 92% of '60s Marvel str8 unreadable but it's SO much easier on the eye to flip through, or look at images from, than 98% of modern assembly-line comics

Ward otm

I like Kamen a lot, some of his rendering ability is stunning. His work for the picto fiction line is really impressive.
Remember all those jokes about Kamen being "too nice?", get a load of this
http://www.comics.org/issue/353075/cover/4/

I love Feldstein. His work always looks very alive and awake to me.

It really doesn't help that there's so much hype and worship around EC and silver age Marvel. The way reprints are often priced and presented reinforces that. There are still lots of seemingly otherwise sane adults who will freak out in denial if you say to them that these comics are badly written (I think Feldstein writes fine but there's just too way way way much of it). As a teenager reading all those TwoMorrows magazines, I felt like a blasphemer when I was admitting the flaws of the classics.

I really like the idea of reading Kirby era Fantastic Four but I just can't and that's pretty damming that lots of people feel this way. But I should say there are lots of golden and silver age comics that read just great and have very economical writing. Even some Stan Lee comics from the 50s are relatively restrained. I think Eisner's Spirit reads well. Kids comics should read like that.
It's just incredibly unfortunate that two of the best sets of old American comics are written the way they are.

In the Masterworks reprints I remember Mike Allred going along with all the hype, so when Steve Bissette written his alarmingly frank introduction for Amazing Fantasy Omnibus, I was amazed Marvel printed it.

As much as I think it's true that people underestimated these comics, I think it's very important to see that the snobby public was half right that these comics are trash.

Heinlein's Law applies but i don't see why you can't also apply Oscar's Law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxgWHzMvXOY

Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC

This is interesting because a lot of people consider EC too rigid with their overall form but they certainly allowed everyone their own drawing style. Krigstein had to fight to get his way with the panel arrangements at EC but he went nuts with his work for other publishers.

Forks, can you tell me the title of that video because my kindle doesn't show embedded videos.

Oscar the Grouch's "I Love Trash"

To be honest, I love a lot of the overwritten Stan Lee stuff. That's what I come for. To want to erase that or edit it out seems like a fool's errand along the lines of colourising old movies or, you know, the Star Wars special editions. These comics are what they are, they're a point in the evolution of the form, and trying to change them so they read better to current generations seems crazy wrong to me. If you don't like them then read modern comics that are more to your tastes (and which, in forty years, will doubtless seem as dated and unreadable as you feel Silver Age marvels are). You're not wrong or right to have issues with this era of comics, but they are what they are.

I would never want them edited or changed by anyone.
Feldstein at least seemed to understand he'd overdone it and made them less readable.
Finding Stan Lee's cheer and goofiness charming is understandable but having blocks of text repeatedly explaining the same thing is something I don't know how anyone can defend. A lot of comics from that time never did this.

Wishing they were more economically written (like Eisner's Spirit or Joe Gill's Gorgo & Konga, Tezuka and lots of other old comics) is not remotely the same as colouring black and white movies or adding things to Star Wars.
But Marvel actually does something along those lines. Not only are they horribly recolored in a way that ruins the art (ruining the best reason to buy these comics), some are even redrawn.
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/original-art-stories-marvel-masterworks.html
They are fucking with their own comics in a way I think is vile.

Some earlier reprints removed the dotted eyes from Spiderman when he sees Uncle Ben's killer because apparently it looked too goofy for such an important moment.
Some Tomb Of Dracula reprints (such as the Essential collections) covered up female nipples that were in the originals.
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/censored-essentials.html?zx=b452862fc142c0fb

Re: experimentation in Marvel, Gene Colan faced resistance for his work.

And to be totally clear, in this context overwritten doesn't mean purple prose (I love HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. I actually prefer this style to most styles), it means writing the same information again and again and again as if you're trying to beat the information into a child.

Re: dotted Spiderman eyes.
http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/2008/08/humble-beginnings-spider-manaka-mr-peepers.html

as if you're trying to beat the information into a child

uh this is what they were trying to do

I'm sure most children understood the first time. And if they didn't they'd go back and read it again. Like they'd do with any other well written comic for kids.

Chris Claremont is almost painful for me to read sometimes due to his style being that, forever. Every issue forever telling you that Storm is mistress of the elements, claustrophobic, and strong

Len Wein's Swamp Thing. "Shambling muck encrusted monstosity", I'm sure lines like that were repeated loads of times.

i caught the spider irises for the first time on this recent readthru and they are AMAZING

i think another thing to remember is that these comics weren't written to be masterpieces, or given the budget or timetables to become masterpieces - that they were written fast, and suffer for that low budget, hurried production process. i'm not saying that voids your issues with these comics, but they weren't being written for us to appreciate decades later - they were written to make money, and quickly.

Given that situation, it was even less sense the way they were written. Stan Lee always praised his artists by saying they barely needed dialogue to be understood. So my theory is that he was trying to justify his presence with such an abundance of writing. Maybe he felt competitive.
Most people facing Stan Lee's schedule would have been incredibly restrained.

I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was Spider-Man I wonder what they would say if they knew I was SpidaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Every issue forever telling you that Storm is mistress of the elements, claustrophobic, and strong

haha yeah I can't take this w Claremont either

"Given that situation, it was even less sense the way they were written"
Should have written "it makes even less sense"

the admittedly painful repetition of themes and key dialogue is easier to take if you break up the reading process and don't try to read the sheaf of pamphlets as if they were a novel.

One of my favorite lines to come out of this '60s Marvel readthrough: someone is confused by something ridiculous that happens in an issue of Tales To Astonish and Hank Pym's response is, "Explanations are too boring!"

Ron Goulart is the first person I ever seen comment on this. He said it drove him nuts because it was like someone narrating a film while you watched it, describing everything on screen.
I think he was told to write more words per panel and he took too much pride in his work to go along with that nonsense.

I think EC comics were possibly worse for this "tell it 3 times" phenomenon. Told in the caption, told in the image and then told in the dialogue balloon.

Example: a panel of two men, one looks angry and threatening, the other looks afraid and is starting to back away. Caption says "The stranger looked angry and Bobby was feeling threatened and he started to back away, fearing what the stranger might do". Dialogue has Bobby saying "hey fella, simmer down, you're scaring me. What are you gonna do?".

A lot of these comics had pages filled with that. Whether you're a kid buying them as they came out or an adult fan reading them decades later who wants to read large amounts of them eventually, it's difficult to space them out so it isn't too grating.

This isn't totally relevant but some of my favourite comics dialogue is this by Basil Wolverton. I memorized it without much trouble and I read it ten years ago. It's a couple afraid of two hairy ape men, the man says to his girlfriend "Let's tear, Claire! I don't care for that nightmare pair with the rare hair!"

I was reading through the first collection of Remender's Uncanny Avengers (I give it a 4/10) and boy there a lot of fucking panels in it. I can't tell whether it's pastiche or deliberate. Either way the comic is not very good.

I think even the trashiest, hackiest of '60s Marvel comics have beautiful single panels or pages in them, even when the whole story together is garbage.

Marvel overwriting is weird - actually I find Claremont okay! His sentences are pretty clear and clipped even if they're bombastic/repetitive. It's the 70s era (Thomas/Wein/Gerber/Englehart/etc) I find quite hard work, except for maybe Jim Starlin.

Also I grew up with Edgar P Jacobs' comics and those are fucking dull and wordy as shit, so maybe I'm not the average. (Beautiful art though.)

And obvs Kieron Gillen does some magnficent panel-overwordiness in Journey into Mystery.

I never have to deal with this stuff because there are virtually no Marvel/DC superhero comics I want to read but this nicely sums up bad habits of the writing in the new stuffhttp://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2009/11/blackest-night-midpoint.html
The middle bit with The Flash talking.

If I was to point out some problems of modern comics I liked. I think some of Alan Moore's work has text captions too visually descriptive to be put in with comic art. Particularly that Swamp Thing issue of psychedelic sex. I liked some of the writing in that but it's awkward reading a comics page and trying to visualise all these amazing things he talks about.

The new Sandman Overture looks like it has way too much blocks of text in with so much complex imagery. If they made it an illustrated prose book, I think I might have read it.

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2009/11/blackest-night-midpoint.html

Corrected link

Well, TBF, the existence of Blackest Night nicely sums up bad modern-era mainstream comics.

Immediately after spending hundreds of dollars on that mess was roughly the point I jumped off the DC bus.

geoff johns is SO BAD, history is not gonna be kind to him

Definitely a good touchstone there. He also links to the reintroduction of Black Hand in Green Lantern, which had some great artwork and storytelling, but at the same time was just so gratuitously grim. The pinnacle being that full-pager of him blowing his brains out with the laser - it's an incredibly arresting image, but just too much.

To be more positive, my favourite Marvel thing is mostly Dr Strange. I like lots of their anthology comics and it's easy to forget they published stuff like Powerhouse Pepper but the most I ever enjoyed a Marvel comic is when Baron Mordo chases Dr Strange across the world. I love that part where he divides into multiple identical versions of himself to mislead and confuse his enemies.

Gene Golan's Dr Strange work is amazing to flip through because it always looks like amazing and important things are happening.

http://comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=14639

I still like a lot of things about Ditko's Spiderman, for me the fashions and settings are important so it's hard for a modernized version to be as compelling. Some of Everett's Sub-Mariner looks really great.
I think Marvel's big supernatural and cosmic space/multi-dimensional stuff has always been more compellingly visualized than DC. Thanks to a relative few artists for inventing that more operatic and psychedelic approach.

For a very modern superhero approach I think Claudio Castellini's Silver Surfer is pretty impressive.

Gay, I'm 're-using too many words.

Sorry, WHAT THE FUCK is kindle doing, all these mistakes then making me sound like a homophobe.

Some have defended G Johns because apparently he takes his job very seriously as a way to impart his lessons about life. They say he really thinks of ways to make his readers lead better lives.

Maybe somebody hacked my kindle and put in all these ridiculous corrections that make no sense.

Geoff Johns thinks of ways to make me lead a better life by not giving me any reasons to read his funnybooks

but it's so cuuuurious! such a weird blend of their two styles - not complementary, not an improvement, but a really interesting combination. like P Craig Russell on Mignola.

Nicely put! But I'm not sure the world needs as much of the Sev/Eld stuff as we ended up with. The issues of Rom pencilled by Ditko and inked by PCR are also a tasty treat.

Re: experimentation in Marvel, Gene Colan faced resistance for his work.

Wasn't this only really toward the end of Colan's tenure at Marvel, when he fell foul of some Jim Shooter bullshit about 'proper' comics storytelling?

The wordiness on 60s/70s Marvel Comics is obv a by-product of the 'Marvel Method', where the pages are drawn first and then dialogued/captioned after (sorry if explaining that is like explaining Storm's powers every issue - there are always new readers!) And yeah RAG, the writer/editor types like Lee, Thomas, Wein, Wolfman etc def looked upon it as their chance to wrest some of the storytelling control back from the artists - if the lazy/bloody-minded/more talented penciller hadn't drawn what had been plotted/expected, then that could be 'corrected' by a mass of words.

Excessive writing - in tone and quantity - was also a gesture towards the literary. Lee and Kirby had experienced first hand the 1950s anti-comics moral panic, so Lee's garrulousness could be presented as an attempt to broaden the vocabularies of his young readers, and position the superhero comics closer to the respectable literary novel. Again, the typeset (Kurtzman's war comics were hand-lettered) ECs strips written/edited by Gaines/Feldman were very 'aspirational' in terms of cultural reach, and that very much included their own mad idea of what constituted fine writing, expressed in pulp purple plastered all over the page.

And writing lots of words was seen as a benevolent gesture to the reader - it made the comic book a denser object, a 'bigger' read. These days, I don't think we're obliged to read every last 'face front true believers'.

It could have been just Shooter against Gene Colan but I've heard people like John Romita Sr say that Stan Lee gave a lot of artists a hard time. Stan didn't like Gil Kane's art and many artists were pressured to look more like Kirby and Romita. Ditko was left alone obviously, I think Stan understood his work.

doubt Stan understood much of anything, Ditko likely less malleable than the others

http://dialbforblog.com/archives/296/one_or_the_other.gif

http://charm-of-charlton.de/
Elsewhere I talked about Gaines stealing horror concepts from someone else but I don't think I ever remembered the link but here it is. Sheldon Moldoff makes a pretty convincing case that he was done wrong but I don't think anyone can claim to have invented horror comic anthologies that late.
The first horror comic anthology was a few years earlier and there were others before EC started.
http://www.comics.org/issue/215631/cover/4/

Also I grew up with Edgar P Jacobs' comics and those are fucking dull and wordy as shit, so maybe I'm not the average. (Beautiful art though.)

I was gonna mention Jacobs' Blake & Mortimer as one of the worst example of the "words telling you the exact same thing as pictures" phemomenon Robert mentioned. Like, you could literally remove all the third-person narration boxes (which appear in abundance) from those comics, and the plot would still be as easy to follow. I find this particularly weird given that, before Blake & Mortimer, Jacobs worked for a long time as Herge's assistant in Tintin, which a complete opposite to B&M: Herge (correctly) trusted that the visual storytelling was enough, so Tintin comics have pretty much no narration boxes at all.