Marvel Comics blabbery

"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.

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.

Robert touched on this but it can't be reiterated enough that the hideous recolouring (and NOT recolouring for white paper!) makes basically every Marvel reprint from the '50s to the '80s read worse to current generations, or other people with eyes

except for Essentials I guess, which you must also be opposed to?

aw I really like my Thor Masterworks - I have a few original issues too but idk if I would say they look any better, faded as they are

I don't like Essentials, fuck b&w reprints of color material

reprints of 80s era stuff do look weird to me tho

Ditko and Gene Colan look superior in black and white. Way more atmospheric. I think Colan prefers his work not being coloured.

I think Eisner seen the Masterworks and DC Archives and made sure Spirit Archives didn't look like those. Respect.

Is there a better version of the Nick Fury/SHIELD material that's been reprinted other than the TPB? Never got confirmation the Masterworks one is any different, but the trade has the worst coloring ever

Well, at least bad enough that Steranko cringed for a while if someone showed it to him

Poor Steranko. When talking about the new colouring of Red Sonja, Frank Thorne said "They raped my Sonja".

Surely everyone agrees that Alex Toth and Mort Meskin look better in black and white?

I think 50s horror comics lose something when they're just black and white but I won't complain; I think Fantagraphics is doing a great job with their EC reprints. The recent EC Archives really blundered by changing the color to a more literal colouring. The originals had something similar to the impressionistic colourful lighting of Bava and Argento films.

Some people even get torrents of scans from the original comics to avoid bad recoloring jobs. You hear that, big comic companies? Your recolouring is so bad it's creating piracy.

I gave away that nick fury tpb. Just unreadable.

There's a new trade of all the Steranko SHIELD material that came out sometime last year. I haven't seen it so I can't speak for the coloring.

I'd be surprised if they changed their reproduction methods. Don't know why a lot of the bigger publishers are often reluctant to use the type of cleaned up scans everyone else sensibly uses.

I had no idea about artists reworking those TPB reprints - that is complete horseshit.
Actually I do feel the same way about the B&W reprint volumes. Yes, sometimes they look better, but it always bothers me that it looks completely different as it did on publication.

again, so do the colour ones

i don't disagree

also

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

i am indeed shocked that mainstream comics had *gasp* nipples! in them

The censored material first appeared in the black and white Tomb of Dracula magazine, which bypassed Comics Code Authority prohibitions against vampire nipples.

I agree that modern recolouring and 'restoring' of vintage material is on the whole very unsatisfactory - would much rather see reprints shot directly from clean copies of the original comics, as in The Smithsonian Book of Comic Books, or Spiegelman's children's comics anthology. Those huge original art repro books are very nice too, if you can afford them.

Part of the problem is that at the time, Marvel failed to keep decent film of the original artwork (which is of course now scattered far and wide, if it even still exists). DC, by contrast, have much better negatives of their old comics - the reproduction on their black and white reprint Showcase books is far superior to the repro in the Marvel Esssentials, by and large.

Robert touched on this but it can't be reiterated enough that the hideous recolouring (and NOT recolouring for white paper!) makes basically every Marvel reprint from the '50s to the '80s read worse to current generations, or other people with eyes

― oochie wally (clean version) (sic), Thursday, February 5, 2015 11:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except for Essentials I guess, which you must also be opposed to?

― oochie wally (clean version) (sic), Thursday, February 5, 2015 11:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be honest i thought we were discussing narrative and dialogue. i'm not so bothered about colouring, and while i'd much rather the Essentials volumes to be in colour, if I have to lose that to gain a phone-book's worth of comics at a small price I'm fine with that.

Anyone know if Marvel's Atlas era anthologies will ever go into public domain if they aren't already? Other publishers have reprinted bits of that work but is there some sort of limit on it?

Because Marvel are probably never going to do good reprints of them.
http://ditkocultist.com/2014/01/30/original-art-tales-to-astonish-13-marvel-1960/

Don't think there's much here that hasn't be said before - and the text seems to be very verbatim - but still some nuggets of interest in John Romita's deposition to the Marvel/Kirby Family lawsuit:

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/03/09/the-john-romita-deposition-for-the-kirby-family-v-marvel-lawsuit/

Thought this bit was particularly interesting:

Q: So what would Stan do with notes or the dialogue in the margins?

JOHN ROMITA: I used to write notes that I thought were clever. I’d say “maybe he should say ‘what’s up’,” you know, something like that.

They sounded clever to me while I was doing the drawing. 3 in the morning everything sounds clever. He invariably would not use them, and I asked him once “why wouldn’t you use — why wouldn’t you let him” — he said something similar. He said, “because I can’t speak in somebody else’s vernacular.” He says, “when I am writing my characters, I am writing in Peter Parker’s personality and Aunt May’s personality and I write the captions in my personality. If I start putting your personality in there, I am going to confuse the reader.” So he used to -he told me — he invariably did not use anything that was in the margins that was cleverly suggested by the artists, because he said he did not want to stray from his normal approach. He had a dialogue going with the reader. Saying “dear reader, this is your editor speaking right now.” He used to do that. It used to drive me crazy. I used to tell him “you are puncturing the illusion.” It’s like opening a door in the theater and letting the sunlight in and everybody realizes they are watching a movie now. I said “you are ruining” — he said, “it doesn’t matter. I am talking to my readers.”

I'd buy the Miller Daredevils as b&w Essentials if they existed, as the recolouring in the collected versions is atrocious.

agreed; i'm perfectly happy with the floppies

Something that often looks really brilliant: black and white with newly added grey tones.