[Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

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[Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by Ancient History »

The Big Two have lost me lately - not overnight, but over a period of years, and it's just been months since I bought anything from either of them. With the demise of Hellblazer and the advent of the New 52, I've essentially lost interest in DC. Even the remaining Vertigo titles are meh - Fables should have been cut off at the knees ages ago, and as much as I love Mike Carey I got fucking bored with The Unwritten after the Harry Potter bit wore thin. Marvel isn't much better - Marvel Now does nothing for me, and while there are still characters and storylines that genuinely interest and excite me, for the most part the larger plots just leave me cold or genuinely disappoint me - M-Day, Dark Reign, Silent Invasion, Fear Itself, Age of Ultron have all been pretty meh for me. The craptacular takes on Spider-Man have been really painful compared to some of the really excellent writing expended on Secret Warriors, Secret Avengers, &c.

The thing is, I don't get why that should be. In recent years both companies have done the unimaginable and really reinvigorated some previously derelict properties - Green Lantern, Moonknight, Iron Fist, Batman (Batwoman & Batman, Inc. in particular), Thor, Captain America/Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Swamp Thing & Animal Man in New 52 - but I don't feel they've really capitalized on those successes, or maybe just the really sucky way they've handled them, particularly with devastatingly bad crossovers.

So I find myself mainly following indie series these days - including select titles from Image and Dark Horse to pick out the Minor Two. I buy issues of Conan, Prophet, and Usagi Yojimbo as they come out and pick up the trades for Hellboy and its spinoffs, Eric Powell's The Goon, etc. I like self-contained miniseries like Hawken and Sergio Argones' Funnies, and anthology titles like Dark Horse Presents and 2000 AD. I buy everything that Howard Chaykin writes and illustrates, and at least take a look at whatever Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, and Steve Niles are doing.

In other words, I like a lot of variety outside the superhero market, I prefer quality, quirky titles rather than endless series, and there's a distinct trend to liking the more mature (but not necessarily pornographic) side of things. Marvel & DC as they are now just aren't made for me - 99% hero comics, a lot of interplay between titles but no real continuity after the 52/Now shift, and zero consistency on writing and art quality. There's not a lot of vision and the smaller titles in both companies tend to get less promotion, sinking out of sight quickly when they don't sell.

Which is really kind of unfortunate, because there is some great stuff out there. Planet Hulk was as brilliant as World War Hulk was ridiculous, but even WWH had its moments. I still remember how much I enjoyed Dr. Strange and Brother Voodoo in the pages of New Avengers, and wished that Marvel could re-invest in an ongoing magical title that didn't suck - the last time they ever tried anything like that was when they gave Warren Ellis free reign on the character. I might not care for all aspects of New 52, but I was definitely pinked when Swamp Thing and Animal Man got their own series again.

And the thing is, I understand I'm not their main market anymore. I've seen the sales charts over at The Beat, I know Hellblazer has been on a slow, terminal decline for the last decade. Most of the titles I enjoy rarely break 10,000 sales for a given issue, and the big Justice League and Avengers books often sell more than ten times that. But I refuse to believe my dollars aren't worth having, or that more thought and planning to improve the quality of their line towards my market segment would be to the detriment of all. So what did they do right, and what did they do wrong, and what can they do to make it better?

I think Marvel & DC comics are at their best when there is a fairly clear line between the mature and non-mature comics. I know efforts like MarvelMAX with explicit content never really flew off the shelves, but I think you do need some delineation between kid/young adult and more grown-up fare. Marvel's "street" level properties like the Punisher, Moonknight, and Iron Fist; and old Vertigo properties like Hellblazer, Animal Man, and Swamp Thing, really benefit from a more mature take on things. It's good to contrast the New Avengers with the Secret Avengers, Justice League vs. Justice League Dark. That doesn't mean every issue should feature graphic rape, abortion, nudity, &c, but the creators should be free to include those and other themes in more mature books. It's hard to picture Superman talking with a white magician that might be Jesus, it's not hard to see John Constantine asking him if he's got a light.

I don't think superhero books are passe, but I do think as the bread and butter of Marvel & DC they dominate the market too much - series like Fantastic Four that are vast, aging dinosaurs that seem to reset to status quo ante after every creative team finishes their run, and are subject to some really terrible transformations in the meantime. So I think experiments in miniseries, either on the edge of the superhero genre or in different genres, should be encouraged. Dark Horse and Image seem to have really hit a stride with series-of-miniseries, collecting plot arcs and maintaining continuity without running into monster-of-the-week issues that plague titles like Superman and Fantastic Four.

Certain creators needs to step back and stop taking turns on established series. I'm just going to name some names: Dan Slott. J. Michael Straczynski. Joe Quesada. Geoff Johns. I know that might strike some of you as unfair, particularly given the love Staczynski somehow has, but seriously - look at his seriously. He has the reverse Midas touch. Every established property he graces with his presence goes down the crapper. I don't care if Joe Quesada was responsible for the direction of One New Day, JMS needs to stop being given money. Geoff Johns just is not as smart as he thinks he is. Multicolored lanterns? Brilliant! Darkest Night? Cool. Brightest Day? Terribad. There's literally no excuse to employ these people when there are so many more talented people in the industry. Get John Ostrander and Tim Truman to do a Spiderman storyline, and the world will read that! I'd love to see Kieron Gellen's take on Superman or Wonder Woman. Marvel should never use Joe Quesada when John Paul Leon or J. H. Williams III exists in this universe. I don't care if they're busy. Wait. It's worth it.

I think Marvel in particular has learned a lesson about letting new, established authors the ability to come in and really invigorate old, semi-retired properties. Dan Abnett turned around Marvel's cosmic line. Warren Ellis made the Ultimates interesting. Gail Simone is probably the one writer that could really do some fascinating things with Red Sonja. I'd like to see more of that, and I guess I'd like to see more of the lesson it teaches: it's okay to try new things, and to give creator's their own lead on their projects.

What this boils down to is, I think, Marvel and DC should each come out with an anthology book along the lines of Dark Horse Presents, but skewed to their properties. Call them What If? and Elseworlds, just to take two established properties. The thing about these properties is that they're going to be small, innovative, mostly self-contained stories by both crazy new artists and writers and brilliant established writers and artists. They can use as much of the established characters and continuity as they want without being bound by it, and free of the content restrictions of the established books. So maybe Howard Chaykin writes a Superman story where in an effort to overcome kryptonite, he starts injecting himself with liquid K and slowly realizes he's become addicted to it even as it's killing him - and that's a story about Supes having to get clean, and how even for him it's hard and a neverending battle. That would be brilliant. Or maybe we just get a one-shot Hellblazer story from Warren Ellis about the first time he really teamed up with Aquaman, and that's brilliant too. Or maybe Gail Simone writes a stand-along Lois Lane story. Brilliant again. And yeah, maybe Marvel and DC do the Dark Horse idea and use their What If/Elseworlds books as a platform to test out how fans like a new series concept before they actually launch the series. That has to be worth something, doesn't it? Instead of tossing out a series with no support and little promotion and hoping it swims?
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Post by Stahlseele »

*nods*
we need more things like Superman: Red Son for example.

otherwise:
where are things like DC's Lobo?
where is marvels deadpool now?
why is Logan nor Headmaster anymore?
where did the fun and adventure with crazy hijinks go?
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Koumei »

A friend of mine who puts more effort into being a feminist than I do* has really gotten into Marvel lately, to the point of spending way too much money on it via the instant-ipad-ebook-purchase options and the "Oh hey, you read X, would you also like Y and Z? By the way, a new issue of X is out!" Oh, and the fact that the "fuck Australia" markup is literally 100% with ebooks, which can't even use shipping as dodgy justification.

Her favourites are:
[*]Thor: because "it's totally written for women, as he's actually decent to women and respects them without being patronising and Chivalrous, and also he's the kind of pretty guy we like, still muscular without being a freak"
[*]Siff: because she's from the Thor 'verse but is a kick-ass hero in her own right.
[*]Loki/Kid Loki: because Thor-verse and lulz
[*]Dr. Strange: not sure why, I don't know enough about that one to guess
[*]The newest X-Men: it's an all-girl team, but they didn't call it "X-Women" or "X-Girls" or whatever. It's still the X-Men. And even the covers have them in poses that male characters would be in, and apparently Psilocke now looks like a ninja, not a stripper-ninja.

I just can't bring myself to really give a shit about anything by DC or Marvel, I got burned out long ago, returned briefly to see if anything had changed, and in their main IPs, basically "Nope! We just did a universe reset a few times so that we could tell the same stories over rather than having characters develop and retire!"

When various other companies (Dark Horse being most famous) started doing their own stuff, it was such a breath of fresh air, to be honest. Just a shame that DC and Marvel didn't really catch on.

*I should be a bit disappointed by blatant fan service anime, Relic Knights and such, but at the end of the day I go "Oh awesome, boobs!" is the basic problem.
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Post by Maxus »

I've always preferred Marvel to DC for a universe, but DC as a company does better graphic novels and indie series.

I just can't bring myself to care about DC's main series though--I love the hell out of the Batman Arkham games, but I don't bother with reading Batman. The only Superman thing I really like is Death of Superman. Characters are so wildly inconsistent. I understand this is unavoidable when you've got a character fifty years old, but seriously. Superman's power level wobbles from year to year. One year, he can get stunned by a gas station exploding, the next he can take a missile to the chest and ignore it.

I had to piss off a buddy because he kept trying to 'hook' me on Injustice by telling me about what characters are doing in response to Superman deciding he was going to take over the world.

I'm sorry, dude, I just don't care about DC. This is not doing anything to help the situation.

Anyway. Yeah. I think comics would benefit if the writers took a page from manga and a writer of a series would be THE writer for the series for ten years or so--this would give them a bigger feeling of investment in the work, and help with the consistency issues.
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Post by Username17 »

I've always liked DC more than Marvel. Marvel has its two main continuities (the New York that the X-Men are in, and the New York that Spiderman is in), and I've never been able to really get myself to care about either one. DC has their different fake cities that operate as semi-contained universes, and I've always liked the Gotham stuff. Even the Gotham-compatible material like Star City is something that I tune into from time to time, as it crosses over well. Moving up a power level to the stuff in San Francisco (Teen Titans) or El Paso (Blue Beetle), is also in the ballpark I care about and is sometimes fun.

It also really helps that while Marvel has of late had much better movies, DC has consistently dominated in the TV show competition for literally two decades. There has never been a Marvel TV show that is as good as the third best DC TV show. Heck, I don't think Marvel has ever come up with a TV show as good as the sixth best DC TV show (which is probably Young Justice or Smallville).

Now I have a fundamental problem with comics in general in that I live in Eastern Europe ten months out of the year. So when I buy comics, I need to pick them up as trade paperbacks during the summer. So I fully admit that what I do is pirate like a boss during the school year and then buy trade paperbacks of things I liked that are available in that form when I arrive state side.

But very lately I haven't even been doing that. DC kind of lost me with Rotworld (an event so "big and weird" that it was obviously going to go away and not count for anything), The Boys lost me by firing their artist and looking like poop, and I just don't have any comics I follow at the moment. DC's New 52 was hugely hit and miss, with a lot of hits and a lot of misses. But then they thrashed around and made sweeping changes that I think turned a lot of their hits into misses.

I genuinely like their new Huntress/Powergirl teamup, where they are an alternate universe Robin and Supergirl. But they keep falling into the same problem "World's Finest" has always had: Gotham and Metropolis are two different settings with massively different power levels and it's really hard to come up with things for the Gotham partner to do. If you present the Metropolis partner near the high end of her potential powers and make her a scientist and rich industrialist, the Gotham partner is frozen out of even most "skill challenges". Each comic's adventures were disappointing, even though I liked the characters presented. Someone needs to have a long discussion with these people about story structure.

That was more rambling than it should have been, I'm sorry.

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Post by virgil »

I only have Cynic's word on how they've been handling Constantine since they ended Hellblazer, which makes me sad. I would love it if they made a comic line focusing on Martian Manhunter, which would require a certain caliber of writer because of the all too common complaint I hear about him being too powerful to write for.
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Post by Ancient History »

Marvel, having hit the reset button slightly less often and gotten its various lines together a bit more integrated, has a slightly more coherent mythology than DC, but DC has a much more established set of iconic characters. I think Frank and I talked once about how Marvel never really got a Wonder Woman equivalent, though ghost knows they've stuffed Carol Danvers' bra and tried to stuff her into the role.
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Post by Stahlseele »

I think Marvels Attempt at Wonder Woman was Spider-Woman personally.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by sabs »

DC does have more Iconic charactrers. But.. they're boring.
Superman, Wonderwoman are stupidly powerful and uninteresting 90% of the time. Lois Lane needs to jump off a skyscrapper when Superman is on another planet so we can finally move on. Batman is cool, although.. "my parents were murdered 30 years ago" gets old. Flash has the witty banter of spiderman, but doesn't really manage to pull it off.

Green Lantern Corps stuff is kinda cool, although there was the time when a yellow bat would kick his ass.. and that was lame. These days, it's better, but it's grandiose out in the wide galaxies.

Green Arrow is a at least a character who faces real challenges. Robin, and the Teen Titans are better.
What DC has is some of the best Villains. Lex Luthor, Joker, Poison Ivy.. and most of the cool bad guys are from the Batman franchise.

Marvel on the other hand, has
X-Men which is fun, even with the blue shift alternate universe Scott's his own Grandpa crazy.
Fantastic Four
Avengers
Spiderman
Hulk

Most of those guys are flawed, they're regular people with extraordinary gifts/curses/abilities who have try to use them for the betterment of mankind, sometimes to disastrous and hilarious effects.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by Parthenon »

Ancient History wrote:I buy issues of Conan, Prophet, and Usagi Yojimbo as they come out and pick up the trades for Hellboy and its spinoffs, Eric Powell's The Goon, etc.
Usagi Yojimbo is still going?

Most of my comics reading has been borrowing collections from the library- I don't think I've ever actually bought any comics... no, wait, I bought two collections of Batman second-hand of just after he got his back broken where Azreal took over and went insane while wearing power armour and then Bruce became Batman again.

But for some reason my library had books 3-6 of Usagi Yojimbo. Which was a complete bitch since I really wanted to read the first two collections and everything after that. Just like they had 4-12 of Lone Wolf and Cub, and things like that.

Why would you do that? Or have books 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7. Dicks.

Oh, wait, comics.

I'm not sure why, but at one point I realised I was getting several comics out of the library and then not bothering to read them before taking them back and getting more comics I wouldn't read. Most of the Marvel/DC I just didn't give a shit about, even highly acclaimed stories like Hush.

I started reading more random comics like The Walking Dead (until collection 5 or so where it was just too bleak for me) or very different things like Global Frequency (damn I wish there was more of that) or Crossed. I'm not quite sure what it says about me when I found some parts of Crossed hilarious ("Look what you did! Look what you fucking did!").

Although sometimes even things I was recommended and the library had like Locke and Key I only read part of then got bored.

I think it was partly because with the big names I didn't want to start partway into a storyline or get partway in and then never see what happens next. Theres a whole lot of Hellblazer I didn't read because I had no idea which storylines came first and with possible renumbering who knows what the order is. And there are a whole lot of first collections (e.g. comics 1-6 of a new series) with no second collection which is irritating when it is way too late to buy the comics and theres no way to see what happens next without the comic version of wikipedia.

Which is probably why I prefer self-enclosed stories like Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer or 100 Bullets. Why aren't there more comics like that around?

Okay, I'm rambling. Better stop and sleep.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by Whatever »

Parthenon wrote:Which is probably why I prefer self-enclosed stories like Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer or 100 Bullets. Why aren't there more comics like that around?
There are, actually. But they're not serialized in print. You pretty much have to go high quality webcomic -> trade paperback for those kinds of things unless you're a well established creator already.

See, for example,

http://diggercomic.com/

http://www.freakangels.com/

http://fribergthorelli.com/wbk/

All of which are either completed or close to wrapping up.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by Ancient History »

Parthenon wrote:
Ancient History wrote:I buy issues of Conan, Prophet, and Usagi Yojimbo as they come out and pick up the trades for Hellboy and its spinoffs, Eric Powell's The Goon, etc.
Usagi Yojimbo is still going?
Yeah. Dark Horse has also been pushing back issues and collections online through their digital comics store.
Which is probably why I prefer self-enclosed stories like Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer or 100 Bullets. Why aren't there more comics like that around?
The short story is that those are acclaimed comics by acclaimed creators, and come along rarely. The slightly longer story is that those kind of comics do still exist, but they're really hard to make something consistently awesome - I loved The Boys, and Scalped, but I was a bit sick of both long before they ended. Chew, The Unwritten, Fables, and Invincible are still running, but have entirely dropped off my radar because...fuck, I got bored with them. (I mean hell, Savage Dragon is somehow sitll running!) Long life has killed more comics than it's ever made.

What you really want to be reading right now are Prophet, Saga, and Atomic Robo, I reckon.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by Parthenon »

Whatever wrote: See, for example,

http://diggercomic.com/

http://www.freakangels.com/

http://fribergthorelli.com/wbk/

All of which are either completed or close to wrapping up.
I've already read Digger and Freakangels. I'll have to look at the last one. And thanks for the suggestions, Ancient.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I've never really cared for the whole "So and so is too powerful to write for" complaint given that you can rest assured that thanks to his sheer popularity Peter Parker will always and forever punch waaaaaaaay above his weight class.
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Post by Stahlseele »

same with wolverine. and batman. and deadpool. hell, most of the big names really . .
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Cynic »

I'm actually quite impressed with Scott Snyder's run on Batman. He did some decent work before the whole New-52 idiocy but even within New 52, his Batman work is pretty good.

I can bitch all day about Justice League dark and their treatment of Constantine and Shade the Changing man as heroes but I won't because it's not worth my time anymore.

But I was going through a Batman comic recently and saw Constantine talk about his "Bromance" with Swamp Thing. This was in a sneak preview of the JL:dark series but I was just surprised with this atypical snark of Constantine. Don't get me wrong, Constantine snarks and bitches all the time but usually he's more acerbic. I"m not using this incident as to discourage people from JL dark or DC's Constantine but more as an example of the confused treatment characters get within an universe so giant and encompassing as the DC world.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by tussock »

Ancient History wrote:Long life has killed more comics than it's ever made.
Yep, a little more respect for the passing of years and increasing age of their character stock would do wonders for them. Batman is over 100 years old now. Superman too. Even Spider-Man and the X-Men are over 70.

It's not Robin's turn, it's the turn of ... hmm, about 16 years difference, take that as the norm, you get another four handovers of the Gotham's greatest detective role. The Dark Knight could've just been the new guy, literally called the Dark Knight.

Lois and Clark's great-grandchildren should be having kids now, while playing the roles of the new Superman and Supergirl and Superwhatever. The Superman dies story could just have been another Superman dying, because he was fighting godlings at 62 like an idiot.

Then because your characters get old and die eventually, you can totally threaten them. Lex's grandson's plan to steal superman3's power could have worked, permanently, because a young black superman4 was ready to go anyway, with the powers clocked back to something a little easier to write for.


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Post by Maj »

That would certainly allow for variations in a character's use of their legacy.
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Re: [Comics Wank]What It Would Take To Get Me To Buy Marvel/DC

Post by fbmf »

tussock wrote:
Lois and Clark's great-grandchildren should be having kids now, while playing the roles of the new Superman and Supergirl and Superwhatever. The Superman dies story could just have been another Superman dying, because he was fighting godlings at 62 like an idiot.

Then because your characters get old and die eventually, you can totally threaten them. Lex's grandson's plan to steal superman3's power could have worked, permanently, because a young black superman4 was ready to go anyway, with the powers clocked back to something a little easier to write for.
This is why I loved The Dark Knight Returns*, and, to a lesser extent, Kingdom Come.

It was cool to see Batman have to keep up now that he's in his mid-50s. It was even cooler to see that he ultimately couldn't.

Game On,
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*-TDKSA , especially the art, was horrible, except for Batman beating down Superman. Again.
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Post by Username17 »

sabs wrote:DC does have more Iconic charactrers. But.. they're boring.
I just watched all of Arrow, and I have to say that you're totally wrong here. It isn't just that Superman and Wonderwoman are iconically powerful, it's that the characters themselves are iconic. When they introduce Floyd Lawton, Slade Wilson, or Roy Harper that means something in a show based on DC comic characters that you really couldn't find an equivalent of in a Marvel-based show.

Green Arrow is frankly a fairly minor character in DC continuity land, and his enemies, allies, and sidekicks even more so. And yet, to find characters who are as readily identifiable in abilities and personalities as fucking Arsenal on the Marvel side you have to go straight to the top of the main character list. Other than Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Bruce Banner, is there anyone in Marvel continuity who is as strongly characterized as... Roy Harper?

Basically, Marvel suffers from this:
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Tussock wrote:Yep, a little more respect for the passing of years and increasing age of their character stock would do wonders for them. Batman is over 100 years old now. Superman too. Even Spider-Man and the X-Men are over 70.
Why should they get any older? They are folk heroes. Robin Hood doesn't get any older. King Arthur doesn't get any older. Snow White doesn't get any older. And Batman doesn't get any older either. Because every generation of bards can put together a new Robin Hood movie, and it probably won't be as good as the Errol Flynn version, but they can do it. And every generation of bards can make a new set of Batman comics, and it probably won't be as good as Dark Knight Returns, but on the other hand it might be Batman Incorporated and be totally awesome.

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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele »

what do you mean with characterization exactly?
one of the characters with the most backstory in the Marvel Universe is Wolverine/Logan
Two characters that are CHARACTERS . . Wade Wilson/Deadpool and Jennifer Walthers/She-Hulk.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Bit characters. If Sam Wilson or Bill Foster are introduced onto a Marvel property, people aren't going to have the same reaction as if Roy Harper walks in on an episode of Arrow.
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:what do you mean with characterization exactly?
one of the characters with the most backstory in the Marvel Universe is Wolverine/Logan
Two characters that are CHARACTERS . . Wade Wilson/Deadpool and Jennifer Walthers/She-Hulk.
Wolverine has more backstory than any character in anything. But it does not make sense. If you asked three Wolverine fans to tell you the story of Wolverine, you'd get one story about a Canadian military experiment gone wrong, one story about an amnesiac samurai, and another story about living with the Blackfoot tribe of First Nations people. There is a not-inconsiderable chance that one of the people will tell you that he is literally a hyperevolved wolverine.

Compare to Spiderman: bit by an enhanced spider, gains super powers, his uncle gets shot because he ignored some bad stuff going on, he decides that his great powers imply great responsibility, starts fighting crime. Or compare to Batman: parents killed in an alley while leaving a performance with him, Bruce Wayne swears vengeance, Bruce Wayne wanders around the world training and developing gadgets, decides that criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot and puts on a bat cowl. These stories have been told over a dozen times each and differ in all kinds of minor details, but the legend is fairly consistent. You could sit around the camp fire and tell your children the story of Superman or the story of Iron Man and no one would go "What the fuck? That's not how it goes!" But for Wolverine, that is totally what would happen.

And DC is simply much better about crafting legends for their characters. Even their minor characters. Even their villains. Now part of this is that they have Bruce Timm on staff, and he is a genius. But I think a lot of it is simply a different approach to editing and storycraft. Mr. Freeze probably wasn't interesting until the Batman Animated Series made him interesting. But he's interesting now, and pretty much anyone can tell you the tragic story of Victor Fries. In a way that people pretty much can't tell you the story of The Rhino or Sabertooth.

Marvel certainly has villains who have a legend about them. Hell, there are even some in the generally rudderless X-Continuity. Magneto springs immediately to mind. But the fact is that when you're comparing characters with comparable legendary gravitas in Marvel and DC, you're comparing main villains and headline heroes at Marvel to third stringers at DC and coming up about even. Doctor Doom is about as iconic as say Scarecrow or Deathstroke. But he's no Lex Luthor or Joker.

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Post by Stahlseele »

I had to google these <.<
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Unfortunately, I think they retconned Freeze to be less sympathetic. As in, Nora is no longer his wife, just the first subject of full-body cryo-suspension that he had a creepy stalker fixation on, and they never actually met because she was frozen before he was born.

I really hope that doesn't stick.
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