Marvel Comics blabbery

Is that mcgregor Gerber englehart or thomas

Len Wein

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/scans/PM17_AceOfSpades.JPG

It gets even better than that, right before coming up with Power Man he was considering "The Ace of Spades", but thought it was "too ethnic"!

:-o

This one breaks it down into storyline sections, I think, but seems to be missing some parts (no 52 issues).

https://kat.cr/complete-grant-morrison-batman-comic-run-pre-new-52-t7100920.html

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 9:35 AM (1 month ago)

Not only is it missing parts of Morrison, it appears to have more non-Morrison bullshit than Morrison, and not put all the Morrison in the right order

― glandular lansbury (sic), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 11:35 AM (1 month ago)

otm

As soon as I saw the word "Hush" I was thinking, wtf is this shit

― μpright mammal (mh), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 11:39 AM (1 month ago)

just looked at this on a computer for the first time, so I could actually count: out of the first 90 comics in this "complete Morrison Batman" torrent, FIFTY-THREE are by other people

the 11 reprints from 1951-64 are at least more relevant to his run than all the contemporaneous stuff. (and the last 42 issues are uninterrupted Morrison.)

What a travesty for Kick Ass Torrents!

ha ha

I was thinking more for milo trying to read the whole thing

After putting it off for years I finally did finish reading the Morrison run. well almost - the weird thing is towards the end, after New 52 started the Batman universe is really weird being half-rebooted and half-not, but the Morrison run does slightly intersect with the other Bat-titles (Synder Batman/Detective Comics/Batman & Robin/Nightwing etc.) so while I've read Batman Inc - Leviathan I still have to read Death of the Family...

I've read the 13 issues that came after Leviathan and I have no idea what Death Of The Family is

It's a Snyder thing, you wouldn't understand.

To steer this back towards the topic at hand, I've been catching up on the secondary and tertiary All-New X-titles, and I've been pleasantly surprised to see the extent to which Morrison's New X-Men run has been referenced in recent years, especially after the embarrassed, 'shove it under the rug and forget it' treatment it received for so long. I guess we just had to wait for a new, Morrison-inspired generation of writers to come 'round.

Spurrier's X-Men Legacy (not exactly the book I was referencing but clearly a beneficiary of that legacy) is good stuff, btw.

as much as I hated their "resurrect Grant Morrison's toys he created then killed" approach, I guess I'll let them have Xorn now

Good grief Civil War II must be one of the most relentlessly un-fun comics I've read since Countdown or Identity Crisis.

wtf is going on re: Civil War II

I kinda dig it for reflecting the zeitgeist but Chuck is OTM, it ain't fun.

i know basically nothing about CWII, what's the deal?

minority report divided by world war hulk with bendis dialogue

guy sees future
people ask if it's a series of self-fulfilling prophecies
hawkeye kills banner because ?!?

Welp, there's that spoiler I'd been assiduously avoiding.

Apparently the deal is "Bendis murders old characters to make space for new ones"

it hardly feels like a major plot beat, more "then this thing happened"

ah, it'll retrofit in a year anyway
killing major characters is as serious and stable as a jenga set

Seriously. To the extent that I kinda wish they'd just stop doing it for like a decade or so.

lol as if Banner is really gonna give anyone a way to kill Hulk

It's like a bigger ontological problem at this point. Why does death even mean anything to characters in the Marvel U? Why is that a universe where death would've ever even been considered more than a minor annoyance in the first place? Because all of the people who've died seventeen times on average look at Uncle Ben's as-yet-undisturbed grave and say, that could be us?

I will lol if they murdered Banner in order to prevent Hulk from killing all the heroes and Amadeus Cho freaks out and kills everyone in order to keep himself sage

even if death isn't permanent i'm sure dying is still uncomfortable (especially dying violently), and being out of the scene for anywhere from 6 months to years is also a sad thing. maybe not any more sad than someone going on a long vacation but still. and the chance that you don't ever get resurrected makes it a bit russian roulettish. maybe knowing death is rarely permanent might make you more willing to take risky heroic chances that put yr life into jeopardy but they are already doing that on a regular basis so either it's bc they know and so that kind of heroism is a logical result of knowing you can't die permanently or bc they're just big heroes and thank god there's a safety net to catch them if they ever fall off the tightrope of the living.

(waves at friend's mangled corpse) Have a nice trip!

One of the best recent-ish stories I've read along these lines revolved around Siryn refusing to grieve Banshee's death because he was an X-Man and therefore due to be resurrected any day now.

I was thinking of that exact story, too. This big secret re: death is being referenced in-universe more and more frequently.

pretty sure he came back during the x-force thing where the dead remained half-dead, but allied with selene xp

tbf the reaction from almost every character running into a "reanimated" character in that plot was "aw, hell no"

xpost Yeah, he did. Don't recall what ultimately became of those resurrected Horsemen.

I wish it were at least treated in some manner similar to Buffy's death and resurrection. Like, there are at least consequences or things lost from being brought back from the dead.

I guess they kinda went there with Nightcrawler's resurrection, but it doesn't really have as much gravity as a one-off thing.

iirc peter david did something interesting back in the pantheon-era hulk days, where rick jones' gf marlo was brought back from the dead but was basically in a vegetative state for a while xp

Yeah, for like maybe a year at most, iirc. Nothing like that ever lasts.

Did they fix Nightcrawler's problem of not having a soul yet? :(

Why does Bendis still have the keys to the Marvel Universe, I thought everyone was bored of him already? At least Hickman did something cool and imaginative with those keys. Bendis' previous big story (Age of Ultron) was one of the most tired, needless crossovers I've ever read, can't imagine this one being any better?

Oh this one is much much worse. Ultron was at least dumb fun, and had two really great Vic F crossovers.

On the other hand this one has taken Al's Ultimates team (i.e. the optimistic, hopeful ones) and turned them into The Bad Guys.

I wonder if time will out whose idea Civil War II was. My guess is that it wasn't a writer. Could be that Bendis took the job cuz no one else wanted it.

I was a Bendis fan back in his earlier Marvel days but kinda feel these days like he needs to focus on maybe like the Miles Morales book and otherwise just relax and enjoy the big money he surely has at this point. Pass that baton, bruh.

https://twitter.com/JHickman/status/752939781684797440

I'm not even caught up to the point where he left but I miss Hickman already.

It feels like Bendis has been churning out plot long enough that everything is kind of bland. I'd rather see some whimsical or really weird ideas fall flat than another by-the-book plot trickle through.

When I was thinking about "Road to road to Civil War 2.5" or whatever is going on had its "shocking" character death, and how as readers we're primed to disbelieve it's permanent, it reminded me of what Hickman did with the Human Torch. He's lost, presumably dead, in the Negative Zone for a reasonable amount of time but never shown to die on panel. I don't think, as a reader, I was ever supposed to believe he was dead, but his absence meant something to the plot.

...and his return meant even more! The reveal that he was killed _many times_ and rebuilt for these drudging fights (which is, at its root, what comic superheroes are put through, although not as literally) was commentary on superhero death, and when he finally reappears, it's one of the main events that turns the tide in a much larger battle! The Negative Zone portal popping open, and Johnny Storm standing there with Annihilus on a leash, was.. fun? Comics can be fun!

Yeah, good call. Too bad that, again, his grueling time in the Negative Zone didn't seem to affect his personality for long.

I guess that's my main complaint about Bendis, nothing seems fun or novel, just a slog through ideas that could be interesting but come off like checkmarks on a list of plot progression waypoints.

I picked up a few of Al's new Ultimates issues in a comic shop and the cashier hadn't been reading them and the cover with the golden Galactus on it kind of gave him pause, because he actually wanted to read it to figure out what was going on. I'm not sure "oh, I guess Doom is Iron Man now" gives the same sort of sense of curiosity.

But...it's a different suit of armor! The possibilities!

for sure, this one has green eyes

feels like Bendis has been churning out plot long enough that everything is kind of bland

Bendis comics have been bland since 1994

where'd I post that anecdote about overhearing dudes talking about Bendis? still funny

I definitely went through a period of wading back into comics and picked up the collected crime fiction works and gave them away not long after

Contrarian take: I like Bendis! Sure, not 100% of his stuff is good (agreed on the pointlessness of Age of Ultron) but the quality of his good stuff outweighs the bad easily imo

I'm with you. The pre-Marvel stuff, though...not recommended. A large part of the reason it took me a while to get around to his Marvel stuff.