Marvel Comics blabbery

Geoff Johns is supposedly doing a Green Lantern book again. We need aldo to check out all the Rebirth books again. That thread was one of the best on this board.

It's interesting how things have reversed between DC and Marvel... DC used to be the company with great writers who attracted readers outside the regular fanbase too (Morrison, Moore, Ostrander, Milligan, Robinson, Gaiman, Ennis, etc) whereas Marvel was more about devoted fans reading anything with their favourite characters (the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises being prime examples). But now it's pretty much the other way around.

Obviously Marvel had great writers before the 00s too, but they were more in the category of "fan favourites": continuity-heavy plotters like Claremont or Busiek or Stern who were loved by those already into superhero comics, but didn't have the cross-audience appeal of Moore or Gaiman or Morrison.

It's mostly hit and miss? Marvel's cultivated writers more since 2000, which is the same point where Axel Alonso jumped ship from editing Vertigo titles to work there. I think editorial gets short shrift when it comes to attributing success, but in terms of which writers/artists are cultivated it's more painfully obvious when they're less competent.

DC went through years of Karen Berger transitioning out of her role as part of Vertigo and it seems like their line has become weaker every year.

This shift hugely attributable to editorial IMO

I honestly have no idea who is holding the reins at DC editorial but every title I've enjoyed seems to have succeeded despite the greater editorial direction, not because of it

Marvel's MO after the independent spinout of the early 90s (Image etc) seemed to be to pull in even tighter and have editorial dictate really mediocre story ideas while leaning on people who were willing to be their workhorses

x-men titles kind of had this soap opera-lite feel that was indebted to claremont (although with less expository dialogue) that had only occasional entertaining moments but a lot of issues

xxpost Last I knew, Bob Harras was running things (into the ground) at DC. Which, if you remember his stewardship of Marvel in the mid-'90s, lends some pretty heavy credence to your comments re: editorial.

good ol' Bob

oh is THAT how Lobdell got a DC gig?

what, you didn't notice the magic of Harras/Lobdell/Nicieza being at DC?

lol at wikipedia's list of "key people" at DC

Dan DiDio (Co-Publisher)
Jim Lee (Co-Publisher)
Bob Harras (Editor In Chief)
Geoff Johns (Chief Creative Officer)

same list also appears on wikipedia as an example of the peter principle

didio is garbage

marvel banished jeph loeb to marvel studios, but i am unsure which bad decisions there are his

i've always assumed loeb is behind any bad decisions marvel studios make

Thankfully, I don't think his is a creative role currently. Long may he remain exactly where he's at.

Not going to hugely disagree with the hits and misses people have mentioned above. I had really high hopes for Moon Girl but it's kind of meandering. I quite like the Parker Spidey book in Cuba/Latin America but I might be alone. ChoHulk is better than it deserves to be and the Patsy Walker book is at least as good as Squirrel Girl. Bizarrely, both the Venom and Carnage books are 100x as good as you'd expect. Illuminati is a frustrating read but is actually quite entertaining and Angela is imo superior in an awful lot of ways to LadyThor. Also Hercules not as much fun as when it was Hulk iykwim but worth a look. Oh, and Al's Contest of Champions thing is a throwaway delight.

Pleasant Hill is not actively bad. The Jim Starling cosmic thing is a giant pile of crap. And it's hard to work out which is the worst X-Men book but perhaps Greg Land saves Uncanny from that fate. Now THAT'S damning with faint praise.

Anyway, so Steve Rogers. Who didn't see that coming?

PS I could be tempted to do a Rebirth thread.

i'm always gonna be six months back with Marvel Unlimited... so the best things going six months back are the star wars books.

Aldo, please do a Rebirth thread.

ulysses is not far off the mark, the Star Wars books (Vader especially) are some of the better things Marvel has published recently.

Yeah the two main Star Wars books are really aceing it since the big crossover.

Also - a great Spidey comic from Tumblr (!)
http://hannahblumenreich.tumblr.com/post/141936003298/that-take-out-is-going-to-be-freezing-by-the-time

Aldo, please do rebirth!!!!!!!!!!

My god, do you want to actually kill the man?

Worth it

kudos to Al for this American Kaiju plot, I'm laughing

Coates's Black Panther selling huge number in some parts of the country (like 300 copies in a shop that normally sells 75 Amazing Spider-Mans per issue)l, I did okay but I'm not exactly shocked that TNC didn't generate a rush in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

it's... readable? Little flowery on the prose. It's a single issue, hardly fair to judge anyone based on that.

$5 for 23pp, Black Panther is for the people

It¨s good. It's not earthshaking or twist filled, or unusual like something like The Vision. But it's thoughtful, well plotted, and some of the artwork is pretty awesome. The scene with the two lovers in silhouette was beautiful.

Little flowery on the prose

Don McGregor tribute?

you tell me
http://i.imgur.com/jVUruU1.png

btw, on thread recommendation I read the first six issues of Tom King's The Vision... it's great!

lol "beautiful"

why can't the internet tell me if the Tom King in comics from 2016 is the Tom King in comics from the 90s

Why is that lol?

I mean, I doubt it, but I'd like to think DC finally caught on to the talent behind Snookums, That Loveable Transvestite

lol because the panel as posted by forks was unremarkable bigtwo drawing with block computer colouring (and clunky typing over the top, not that that's on Stelfreeze &/or whoever else, but it's still part of the panel)

It's not the most original drawing, no, and nothing in the scene is. But I still think it's beautiful. And it's not normally how the bigtwo draws black skin, I don't think, not to speak of how scenes with two half nude lesbians tend to be drawn.

Marvel probably should lead with the 'two half nude lesbians' in those parts of the country where TNC isn't a hook.

They've been discussed quite a bit in the pre-release interviews... Though mostly it was TNC talking with himself about his discomfort with the 'virgin warrior' concept of the dora milaje, how to deal with male gaze and that most of the creative team is male. Probably not the best strategy.

I'd be hella psyched if The Vision tom king was pal-yat-chee tom king

different guy: https://www.facebook.com/tomkingauthor

that doesn't say he is, he could have gone bald in the 23+* years since Snookums

*wasn't it originally a Daily Texan strip, like Chris Ware and Robert Rodriguez, before Pal-Yat-Chee?

he's an ex CIA operative. I think he's been busy with other things.

Explains why he took a couple of decades off comics.

The world needs to laugh!

I think daily Texan tom King is a storyboarder now

I finally switched from subscribing to single issues to subscribing to Marvel’s 5-issue paperbacks. Still reading: Doctor Strange, Howard the Duck, Ms. Marvel, and Squirrel Girl.

It occurred to me today: does every Marvel superhero team now have someone who can teleport or at least some sort of teleportation device?