Marvel Comics blabbery

That's a nicely written piece though, by comics bloggin standards

see, to me that cage sample reflects less tartakovsky and much more destefano: the rubbery limbs, contorted faces, bigfoot-style cartooning all 'round
i love destefano's work in general but Marvel putting him on something as culturally loaded as a blaxploitation take of power man running concurrent with the netflix relaunch of Cage as "unapologetically black" is tone deaf to the point of ugliness.
i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bigfoot Luke Cage story, but why not give it to Milton Knight or (DeStefano's Instant Piano cohort) Kyle Baker? Shit, I would buy those books in a heartbeat! Even Sanford Greene's work would be more appropriate and i don't even dig that guy's style.
anyway pulliam-moore otm

I'll personally wait on dropping the otm-bombs until we have more than one dialogue- and context-free page of art upon which to judge.

(sitting stunned by how much I would love a Kyle Baker Luke Cage)

The elephant in the room here is surely that the reason he's a big deal these days is almost entirely due to a white guy.

no offense OL but unless the placement of that page of art is "thing that luke cage reads in a grocery store tabloid and then shakes his head walking away" there is no particular context in which it's gonna play well.

the reason he's a big deal these days is almost entirely due to a white guy.

Yeah, I thought he was a big deal because he released some acclaimed graphic novels in the '90s, I have no idea who this "white guy" is?

I assume that he's saying Luke Cage is a big deal because of a white guy (or, really, a long succession of white guys) but I'm not sure why that's an elephant.

TBF, I'd predict that Luke Cage is on track to become a bigger deal than ever almost entirely due to the performance of a black guy.

the white guy Andrew Farrell is referring to is Bendis, right?

That's who I thought he meant.

I thought he was talking about Iron Fist.

xxp I'm willing to hear a counterfactual, but as far as I know Luke Cage's profile has received an enormous boost over the last decade because Brian Michael Bendis featured him as a prominent character in a lot of his Marvel work - supporting character and love interest in Alias & The Pulse, and himself and Jessica Jones have been in various Bendis-written Avengers books since - they provide the "new family - how can we have children in a world/life like this?" role to varying degrees of eye-rolling depending on who's writing them.

I could certainly have been clearer that I meant Cage and not Kyle Baker, true.

I too would love a Kyle Baker Luke Cage

If this is your kind of thing, the collected Steranko SHIELD is on sale for £3 on the Marvel app. It's about 500 pages.

I've been reading late '00s Spider-Man, likely because I have a deep-seated self-loathing I'm trying to work through and reading questionable comics is how it's playing out.

I started out right before "One More Day." It's really as bad as everyone said it was! The partial retcon definitely helped, although it's still very clumsy in execution. It divided the two events that the plot encapsulated into more-digestible bits, at least.

The multiple issues per month deal was sloppy in that it kept the number of plots and variability of quality that you'd get across multiple Spider-Man series, but all under the banner of Amazing Spider-Man. You still end up feeling like there's a main title and some interesting side stories, but they end up being neatly divided between "written by Dan Slott" and "some other stuff."

The integration between Spider-Man and the two (!) teams he's on is decent, but still a little sloppy. You no longer end up asking "if the Sinister Six (or however many villains there are this week) are so powerful and they're in New York, then how come the Avengers don't help out?". It also gives Slott the chance to do a couple FF stories during Hickman's run, and you end up with some fun stories that are less about the plots-within-plots and more about Spidey playing off of the Richards family.

I really liked Superior Spider-Man! I'm sure the new status quo is starting to show some wear, but having Doc Ock take over was the world's longest shortcut to pushing Peter into being a more developed human being. Him being a scientist only because he had to sell out to Tony Stark via the Civil War shenanigans just never felt right, and now he has an actual job instead of decades of bouncing between photography and teaching gigs. He's turned into a little too much of an Iron Man-lite version now, though.

I remember some decent Waid/Marcos Martn stories in that period.

Feel like he's much more interesting as a photographer than a scientist.

agreed, those were some of the better stories!

imo having him do science stuff is good, him being really successful is probably bad

there's also the weird anachronism of him showing up to the office with the classic "check out these pictures!" and "can we make the evening edition" style banter that continues on way too far into this century when absolutely no news room operates like that and I have no idea why he isn't uploading his pictures and while editions are important, newspapers upload shit all the time

Slott himself seems only half-sold on the Parker Industries thing at first. there's at least one "spider-mobile!" joke per issue for six months

I've recently started catching up slowly on some of the Marvel books from the last few years. Are they publishing anything else these days as focused and idiosyncratic as Tom King's Vision?

Karnak had a shot, but artist issues and disastrously blown deadlines kind of derailed that.

Karnak is nearly far enough behind that Marvel Unlimited will have all the released issues by the time the next is out

it's only up to issue three right? first two were real good.

I think I'm cautiously optimistic about Mariko Tamaki's take on Jennifer Walters; I don't know how well Tamaki's strengths will carry over to superhero comics, or how much of a free hand editorial will give her, but she's always been deft at character studies.

Karnak's up to #4 (came out in mid-May). Theoretically #5 is out this week.

Mariko Tamaki's doing She-Hulk?! This is excellent news!

I'll rep for the current Moon Knight series. Half a dozen issues in and I genuinely don't know whether the lead character has just had a breakdown and is imagining it all.

Got to say that Luke Cage trailer looks cool on Netflix.

Re: my previous post about Genddy Tartakofsky's Cage!...

I'll personally wait on dropping the otm-bombs until we have more than one dialogue- and context-free page of art upon which to judge.

After reading the first issue, I'm comfortable proclaiming that this is an indefensible piece of shit on pretty much every level. Even more racist than the previous dialogue- and context-free page of art would suggest, a pathetic 'story' that barely hangs together, shitty dialogue, no characterization. I thought at least the art/design would offset any other subpar elements but even that's no great shakes. I'm surprised Marvel actually put this out, and especially surprised that they timed its release so poorly as to coincide with a much better show that'll probably send people to the comic shop in search of further Cage material. Avoid!

Also, it's completely incidental that this is a Luke Cage book or that it's set in the Marvel U at all. This could've been any random-ass character.

it's shitty, yes.

And there's ample evidence on this board to suggest that I'm as big a Marvel apologist as it gets. Like, I can't think of anything Marvel that I've read from the past, I dunno, 5-10 years that I personally would call outright shitty. But this was outright shitty.

I mean, I do understand "don't judge a book by its cover" but we were actually given some severely offensive contents to peruse, I don't know how much benefit of the doubt was actually necessary here.

Agreed. If I was a fan of the show and saw this, it might put me off comics entirely.

I hadn't heard about the writer of Mockingbird being chased off of Twitter because of an MRA-baiting feminist joke on the cover of the series finale but this just more intensely fuels my belief that every Marvel comic should be an overt celebration of everything scared little man-babies wet their regressive widdle drawers over. The Scarlet Witch proclaimed 'no more hetero white dudes' and, lo, many neckbeards were drenched with tears on that day.

otm

I enjoyed the Mockingbird run quite a bit and read a few articles about the writer, with whom I wasn't familiar, before all this harassment bullshit. I might check it out now, so... hey

Vision was the best series since Superior Foes of Spider-Man. Almost makes up for how much utter crap they've been publishing since Secret War.

Ack! I know. I'm putting off the last issue as I don't want it to be over.

i'm starting to wonder what it might say about me that comic books and videogames, two of my favourite things, attract fans who are regularly so fucking vile

brb gonna get into classic literature, crochet and gardening

vision ends well btw

Any medium/genre that appeals to a multitude of age groups is going to unfortunately attract some people with arrested development. But a whimpering fanboy who wishes that dumb girls understood they're not welcome in his cloistered superhero clubhouse are ultimately no different than the dude with Truck Nutz on his pickup who longs for the halcyon days of the '50s when those gays didn't use their mental powers to make unsuspecting hetero folks think of ding dongs rubbing together all the time. The world moves on, some people have difficulty with that, and the worst among them lash out in confusion and fear. It maybe just seems more pronounced in a smaller community. But, yeah, there's a reason why 99% of my comics discussion and celebration has been relegated to very particular online haunts.

Feel like the whole bro/neckbeard culture never made it to the UK, but I could be deluding myself. It's not like we don't have a very conservative culture (obviously), they just aren't very interested in comics or computer games, except from the "ban this sick filth" angle.

Actually, I know next-to-nothing about computer games, so have no idea on that front. And Milo is British, isn't he? So never mind.

xxp true, and clearly the ability to organise like-minded people via social media has made it easier for hateful bags of shit to find each other and conduct harassment campaigns.

i guess maybe (although i fucking hope not) the same witch-hunts against 'sjws' are happening in the online classic literature / crochet / gardening communities too but i'm much more likely to be aware of campaigns by comic book and videogame fans because i pay them more attention.

and yeah, thank god for the relative sanity of ilx when it comes to talking about this stuff because there are so many shitty, horrible forums out there that are unfathomably popular

xxpost To be fair, I had pretty much zero offline exposure to those types in the US but, to be even fairer, my offline exposure to other comics fans is just a few ticks north of zero.

chuck, bro culture might be less of a thing here in the uk but, assuming by 'neckbeard' you mean the redpill/mra mindset, that's definitely and unfortunately an international phenomenon. thanks internet :(

Ah - oh well. I keep thinking everyone else is like ILX and Camden Mega City.

Gonna buy my protest Mockingbird anyway - was actually waiting for the collection. First ish was surprisingly good but felt like it'd read better together.

This is a treacherous thought to entertain but -- I feel like the DC milieu is just a wee bit more nourishing a Petri dish to your mra gamergate swarmer than the marvel milieu. There's something baked right into the characters of superman and (modern) batman that feeds it...

My gf was aware of the furor because she reads, like, actual books or whatever, and Chelsea Cain is apparently another one of those legitimate book writin' people who've taken a stab at comics of late. Sadly, she's probably learned her lesson on that front.

Jon, I don't think that's an unfair assertion at all. Although they admittedly still have work to do, Marvel has made serious strides at diversifying both their creative staff and their character pool in recent years. DC wouldn't let Batgirl get married, and generally still seems to be putting out a lot of regressive stuff (to say nothing of the behind the scenes culture, like the shit that was allowed to go down in the Superman office).

yeah, it feels correct to me, jon - marvel are at least making an effort, miles morales has definitely become a beloved character in spite of the questionable objections people raised at the time of his debut, but they're also publishing the fairly indefensible tartakovsky luke cage book...

It's a big tent!