Avengers: Infinity War

i said it

If that's a tacit thumbs-up for his early crime comics, I must vehemently disagree witchoo.

nah, I didn't mind an eight-pager that he drew and Warren Ellis wrote in Negative Burn, before Ellis had collapsed into a hyper-dense black hole of his own regular tics and tropes

Ellis is capable of reverting to straightforward storytelling and he's actually honed that part of his craft. It's just under a layer of all those tics too often, sadly

I'm sure he crammed plenty of the tics into those 8 pages, I just hadn't read anything else other than Lazarus Churchyard at the time (he'd barely written anything else other than Hellstrom and Doom 2099)

His run on Excalibur was from around then and was relatively understated, as I recall. I enjoyed it at the time and was kinda less than thrilled when his subsequent work ramped up into full-bore ticdom.

(I say that and then immediately recall Pete Wisdom being among the first gruff n' gritty Ellis analogues.)

At least Pete Wisdom was funny.

(I like his tics)

nice to see you, Dan!

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xxpost Yeah, and still understated relative to what came not long after (think there was probably only a year or two between his first Marvel work and Transmetropolitan).

hey everybody

funny how actually liking your job leaves less time for here

Hi, Dan. I hope to discover that for myself one day.

The tics are definitely irritating (I swore off him long ago) but I feel like Ellis is even worse when he's got his po-faced sci-fi hat on

hi DJP!!

last thing I remember liking from him is Nextwave. At least it was taking the piss

Ellis has done good work despite his tics. But almost always despite his tics. The lesser stuff is all tic (was particularly miffed when he picked up Ennis's unfortunate 'John Constantine = me with my baddass meter cranked to 11' baton).

for some reason DC is letting Warren Ellis reimagine the Wildstorm universe, maybe because he did an ok job the first time. it's ok?

his Secret Avengers issues were good one-shot stories in a landscape where very few comics do one-shot stories anymore

And welcome to the Warren Ellis discussion thread.

DJP!

Powers sucked and led to my no longer reading Bendis (when I was reading comics), but I do remember loving his Daredevil run.

I thought Powers had like twelve issues and I'm going to be wildly confused if I investigate, right?

Yyyyyyup. I don't know if it's currently being published (I'm guessing not, since Bendis moved to DC) but it was still being published up until fairly recently.

Haha just a bit.

Vol 1 Powers had 37 issues
Vol 2 Powers had 30 issues
Vol 3 Powers had 11 issues
Powers Bureau had 12 issues
Vol 4 Powers has had 4(?) issues so far

I browsed the wiki entry a little and it sounds like I had read further than I thought, but I definitely jumped ship before volume 2 when the concept seemed to run out of steam and interesting ideas

Which is kind of the problem with how Bendis's Marvel work went, to me: he'd have a half-decent idea or at least pitch for a plot, sometimes not go overboard with his "we're all talking at once" dialogue, and kick out a decent plot arc. Then he'd inexplicably keep writing the title for several years. By the end, he was just doing the same plot arcs he'd already done, but on different books.

I was home sick over the holidays and idly watched this cuz it was free on Netflix and who wants to guess what I thought of it

Amazing effects supervision?

you cried at the end when they all crumbled away ;_;

is this a teaser trailer for your upcoming post

lol DJI respect knuckles

something something meter data

i wanna hear it!

https://bschlog.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/killjoy-was-here.png

i bet shakey loved it and has watched it two (2) more times since

it was bad! really bad. mostly all I could think while watching it was what a huge waste of resources, money and effort went into it, esp packing every single goddamn frame with a bunch of super finely-detailed CGI in a vain attempt to convey some kind of realism or awesome sense of scale or ... something. The plot (such as it was) was predictable both in its telegraphed beats and its utter reliance on familiarity with every other conceivable entry in the MCU. If I wasn't familiar with the comics and just happened to be watching this movie and went into it cold it would be completely incomprehensible. who are all these people and why are there so fucking many of them? why should I care about any of them? oh here's a fight scene where a bunch of super-highly-detailed CGI things get smashed and someone makes a smartass remark. on to the next one! a bunch of these protagonists don't seem to like each other for some reason. evil space guy wants to achieve a cosmic balance by murdering half of all life in the universe? uh ok, that makes no sense, there is *way* more empty space/non-living matter in the universe than living matter already...? I would've preferred Thanos' original motive, NIHILISM why because he's in love with DEATH, or Darkseid's anti-life equation, which at least have some semblance of internal consistency/logic. Just fucking stupid, loud, overblown and exhausting. Infinity Gems never made sense to me anyway - he has a REALITY GEM that controls REALITY? uh, doesn't that make him omniscient? why would you need any other gems at all? I fast-forwarded through most of the last big fight scene at Wakanda waiting for Thor to show up and then when he does and "kills" Thanos oh SNAP! REALITY GEM to the rescue btw a bunch of ppl are dead. ok. I wish they were all dead tbh, Thanos didn't go far enough tbrr.

omniscient

meant omnipotent

i just started watching mcu movies after never having seen any and they've all been ok, this looks dumb as hell tho

If I wasn't familiar with the comics and just happened to be watching this movie and went into it cold it would be completely incomprehensible. who are all these people and why are there so fucking many of them? why should I care about any of them?

this is a redundant criticism

the whole point is that the audience has seen all the other movies

i just started watching mcu movies after never having seen any and they've all been ok, this looks dumb as hell tho

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, January 2, 2019 3:48 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually ill go as far as to say that i actually liked guardians of the galaxy and spiderman: homecoming

that's a terrible way to make a movie imo, it can't stand on its own as a piece of work

xp

nn otm on that point

shakey otm about everything else

did u go into Superman 3 wondering why there was a d00d flying around in a red cape

it’s a pretty bad way to make a lot of comics, but here we are

they really should just number the main ones past a certain point because despite movies being “tangential” a bunch are essential. it’s a serial story across a franchise

some of the mcu ensemble movies work brilliantly tbh

some are a fuckin mess

they all suffer from presumed gravitas when really theyve the emotional depth of a medium-warm fart.

lots of the stand-alone ones are good tho. and the casting and quipping are fun

plots, as a rule, totally embarrassing

black panther, gotg2 and dr strange real low points, latest spiderman and thor/hulk prob best

the hyper-finely defined backgrounds and settings just made it incredibly ugly to look at imo, like they were trying to make up for a lack of storytelling ability, characterization, coherence, emotion or anything that makes movies interesting by cramming every single pixel of every frame with some bright and shiny doodad. It reminded me of 90s comics artists who seemed to think the pinnacle of comics art was using as many tiny lines as possible, or those guitar magazine metal guitarists that think every song should be non-stop shredding finger-tapping and whammy bar pulloffs. just stop it.

xp

really they could just start putting “an avengers story” as a subtitle, awkwardly

it's clearly not a terrible way to make this particular movie. The resonance it has for fans is built on the many hours they've spent watching these characters prior to this. It's fine that it doesn't work for you, and your other criticisms are perfectly valid matters of taste, but to argue that the non-standalone nature of this movie is a failure is to fundamentally misunderstand what Marvel were attempting to achieve with it

I liked the last Thor movie a lot! It had a self-contained story, characters with identifiable motives and relationships, a lot of character-driven humor, good art design underpinning it etc

xp

the avengers throughline is a big challenge. it clunks now.

better when it can be referenced without the universe-threatening, dire consequences and contracted minimum screentime for each of seventy stars

cpt america movies probably achieve a good balance here?

avengers 1 was really good tho

they coulda spent 45 minutes recapping everything and then had a pop quiz afterwards before moving the story forward

I feel like the movies have become too true to the Avengers, which is the most boring team comic Marvel has ever done. That’s my challop