DC Comics Multimedia General - A crisis of infinite fuck ups

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The problem is that Superman is inherently lame and gay and needs to be made dark to be interesting. Snyder understood that. There's a reason Superman hasn't had a standard cartoon in nearly thirty years (not counting the LoSH cartoon since that's not the traditional Superman formula).

if you unironically derive even the slightest bit of joy from the shitty 60s Batman show, you're beyond pozzed and should kill yourself
Holy based
 
The entire movie has no reason to continue on after the first 15-30 minutes because if Lex's plan is to kill/capture Superman, did he have UltraMan leave him alive after beating him bad enough he needed healing at The Fortress of Solitude?
Because this Lex is too OP and he needs to be nerfed by making bad decisions.

There is nowhere in the movie where it's stated that making Ultraman was even hard, it's just that he's a retard because the formula isn't good enough... but it might be in the future.
And with the shit Lex can do, he can create a fucking universe just to test this shit in a safe environment, make a bunch of cyborgs like that Engineer bitch, have them endlessly experiment.
And even if you can only make retard remote controlled Supermen, 3 of those can take out Braniac.

If this shit is the base of the universe, Gunn will have to pull out the Anti-Monitor for an Avengers level team up movie.
 
My eldest (6yo) wants to read superman comic books :( picked up 1 issue of for all seasons for her.... Says 13+ :( wife ain't gonna be happy about that. If it gets her reading anything I'm all for it.

Any recommendations? As long as it ain't overly graphic or vulgar to the point I gotta explain stupid comic book shit.
id get some goofy old shit for her, there are plenty of Superman in the 50s/60s/70s collections, and miscellaneous compilations of old stuff like that besides the decade books. That said, DC just puts 13+ on everything that isn't explicitly for adults and 17+. for all seasons is the most mild milquetoast boring shit possible there is absolutely nothing in it that is heavy or inappropriate for a 6 year old, but I also dont think theyd like it much. It's sappy sentimental shit that'd probably bore a child.

besides the decade books, and the Adventures line (based on the cartoon and specifically for children), there is superman family adventures and super powers also targeted towards kids, the newer DC finest volumes for Superboy, Supergirl (not the peter david written one), and Superman Family are 1950s kids stories, the greatest stories ever told and celebration of years volumes are random stories that are mostly old stuff and the newer stuff in them is tame.

you cant really go wrong with the Adventures compendium which is like $40 or less online and a massive paperback with 800 pages or something, written for kids and could keep a 6 year old busy for 2 months.
 
you cant really go wrong with the Adventures compendium which is like $40 or less online and a massive paperback with 800 pages or something, written for kids and could keep a 6 year old busy for 2 months.
Seconding this, and including the Batman and JLA/DCAU Adventures series in whatever form they're collected in, and also the Batman Brave and the Bold series if it's collected. By the end of the BatB series it was essentially DCAU-tier levels of excellent storytelling with the BatB art style. I'll never forget how gripping the Catman team-up issue was,

I've always been amazed how those DCAU/animated tie-in comics.... end up being unironically good superhero comics, by any metric. BETTER than most mainstream ones, even: tight pacing, action-packed, one-and-done plots, and both superhero and villain well-defined in gimmicks, powers, and personalities. It's ironic since I'd imagine the one-and-done and "all ages" limitations would hurt them, but.... apparently the lack of editorial fuck-givings meant the writers could actually write great stuff without worries on endless continuity (so to speak), overly-large expanded universes, or bigwigs breathing down their neck.
 
And I'll second B:tBatB. Not Superman focused is the only problem for her request, but barring that it's got solid morality which is always a concern when you're exposing kids to it, bright and energetic stories and characters, very funny in places and on occasion serious in a way that kids can handle and get.

Of course the cartoon does have the infamous Birds of Prey song, but she'll be too young to pick up on Huntress singing of Flash "Too bad sometimes he's just too faaaaaaaast______!" 🎶

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Seconding this, and including the Batman and JLA/DCAU Adventures series in whatever form they're collected in, and also the Batman Brave and the Bold series if it's collected. By the end of the BatB series it was essentially DCAU-tier levels of excellent storytelling with the BatB art style. I'll never forget how gripping the Catman team-up issue was,

I've always been amazed how those DCAU/animated tie-in comics.... end up being unironically good superhero comics, by any metric. BETTER than most mainstream ones, even: tight pacing, action-packed, one-and-done plots, and both superhero and villain well-defined in gimmicks, powers, and personalities. It's ironic since I'd imagine the one-and-done and "all ages" limitations would hurt them, but.... apparently the lack of editorial fuck-givings meant the writers could actually write great stuff without worries on endless continuity (so to speak), overly-large expanded universes, or bigwigs breathing down their neck.
I had a legit subscription to the Justice League Unlimited comic during it's run and it was way better than JLA was at the time lol it amazes me too that until recently all of these tie in comics weren't getting collected well and were at risk to getting lost to time, just because they seem like easy fodder to sell to parents and school libraries even if the cartoon they're from isn't relavant anymore, a kid won't care or know the difference. It's just Batman or Superman or the JLA to them

this, for whatever reason has been a long standing tradition that the DC cartoon tie ins are very good. Believe it or not, the SuperFriends comic book from the 70s is better than the concurrent JLA too. It's not near the quality of the modern books we're talking about, but it's also better than it has any right to be, and in it's case is much better than 80% of that cartoon.

Hell, the Super Powers toyline comic from the 80s is written and drawn... by fucking Jack Kirby. Think about that, "yeah we got this shitty toy comic, who should we give it to? Oh I dont know, the most prolific comic creator of the mid 20th century, that guy who created Captain America and the Fantastic Four."

Idk what the Justice League was like around that period, was that the Detroit era? If it was, I know that era is beloved but id have rather been reading Jack Kirby's JLA toy comic with Superman, Batman and Darkseid than Vixen and Vibe lol
 
by fucking Jack Kirby.
I recall chatter that Kirby's work on Super Powers was in-part a "we can't legally give you royalties on the old shit but we want to make things good,, so here's some busywork so we can cut you a check"
 
I recall chatter that Kirby's work on Super Powers was in-part a "we can't legally give you royalties on the old shit but we want to make things good,, so here's some busywork so we can cut you a check"
that makes a lot more sense, I remember coming across issues of it in discount bins as a teenager and being so shocked by it's existence. they put the king on an action figure book??

In any case, it's so weird how with big franchise media, some of the best stuff comes out of the most left field places. It's probably a mixture of that type of ancillary material maybe having less eyes on it with less hands on editors or something and also creators working more so for the love of the game or with a mindset of how do I take this more mediocre job assignment and make it stand out or aim and shoot above the material.

In Super Powers' case specifically it's not really that good or a lost masterpiece or anything it's just crazy to see Kirby draw the JLA, and even crazier it's in such a low prestige random book like a toy tie-in.
 
In any case, it's so weird how with big franchise media, some of the best stuff comes out of the most left field places. It's probably a mixture of that type of ancillary material maybe having less eyes on it with less hands on editors or something and also creators working more so for the love of the game or with a mindset of how do I take this more mediocre job assignment and make it stand out or aim and shoot above the material.
An epiphany I had with these animated tie-in comics for DC and even surely their Marvel equivalents, or such tie-in comics in general... is part of why they do so well is.... hear me out at least, puzzle pieces or not....

....they recreate that original sense of picking up superhero comics as they were back in the Golden Age of '38-'55 for DC, and Silver Age of '58-'75 (give or take) for Marvel and eventual Earth-1 DC.

What do I mean? Well, we know who these characters are, of course. But hey, imagine being a kid picking these things up for the first time ever! Remember what I said in my above post on making everything short-but-sweet in well-defined heroes and villains in visuals and powers, the plot's tight pacing for a one-and-done, and keeping plenty of action as the point of such comics. And to these kids reading these series, tons of new characters or powers or plot elements coming every issue, but easily digestable in a six-to-twelve page story (give or take). And to keep them hooked, you have to make these stories work, be good. No meandering plots, no decompression, no ridiculous or esoteric stakes, no grimdark or edginess.... just good-ole' fashioned action-packed tales of derring-do.

When you think on it, isn't that how DC and Marvel, much less the very concept of superheroes, were like in their earliest days? Those kinds of tightly-made, entertaining, one-and-done stories with everything up-front and center? And they were just as fresh and exciting with plenty of cool, new stuff popping up every thirty days to show, just as presumably the "modern" tie-in series like the DCAU or Super Powers lines are doing for our hypothetical young reader, new to superheroes.

Well, that's my two cents on it, at least.
 
What do I mean? Well, we know who these characters are, of course. But hey, imagine being a kid picking these things up for the first time ever! Remember what I said in my above post on making everything short-but-sweet in well-defined heroes and villains in visuals and powers, the plot's tight pacing for a one-and-done, and keeping plenty of action as the point of such comics. And to these kids reading these series, tons of new characters or powers or plot elements coming every issue, but easily digestable in a six-to-twelve page story (give or take). And to keep them hooked, you have to make these stories work, be good. No meandering plots, no decompression, no ridiculous or esoteric stakes, no grimdark or edginess.... just good-ole' fashioned action-packed tales of derring-do.
Maybe controversial take, but I think the restrictions on children’s media made them better. Too many comics began relying on “adult-content” to be taken seriously, yet are written as though a 13 year old came up with the plot. Comics are hilariously bad in how much they think cussing, gore, sex and politics makes them high art.

The kids content forces all of that garbage out of a story. If you want it to be taken seriously, you really need some good writing chops and the ability to be subtle in the adult content. DC cartoons do this extremely well, going just far enough to leave an impact. This leads to a great base for the tie-ins to work off of.

In addition, the ability for the adaptation to be separate from mainline comics is also in its favor. Mainline comics are a jumbled mess of various writers with wildly different takes working on the same characters, alongside shitty big events that throw all stories off course. Adaptations take the good elements of comics and stream line them for normies, often leading to more definitive takes as they remove all the weird bullshit fans hate. A lot of adaptations also have an end, something severely lacking in comics that leads to the decay.
 
when I was a kid in the 80s my dad got me a lot of 70s and earlier capes from the dime bins, also we had a trade paperback, like "greatest superman stories ever" and a superman hardcover from... I think late 70s, was uncolored very snooty printing of old stuff
also the smithsonian had hardcovers compiling a mess of newspaper comics, and comic books comics, we had those too
 
Leak day…

Guess George Newbern and Phil LaMarr went ahead and told fans Injustice 3 is coming at a recent con.
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Alright, which Gunn slop character is getting in? My bets are Peace Maker and Mr. Terrific.
I'm legit shocked and happy to see them come back for another one. I thought after Kevin died they'd never get work again.



I'm late to the discussion but I liked the injustice comics quite a bit for having the balls to go crazy and stretch it out for 5 arcs. The brakes are off and there's no status quo, go nuts. It's literally a marvel "what if"story if it was given room to breath. Now there are flaws of course and I haven't actually sat down to read them all in a row but I really dig the brass balls of it.
The games I have a mixed bag on.

Really enjoyed the story for 1 because it feels like a playable episode of justice League. They really play up the mirror mirror theme and it works in a classic way. Especially when you finally get to play as Superman.

2 on the other hand suffered greatly because it didn't take risks. If you compare it to the comics it's very vanilla in the body count and the roster doesn't "feel" big. They tried to make it interesting but ironically the lack of multiverse shit made it feel boring. There were some good scenes and moments but it really didn't feel memorable to me.

I hope 3 at least tries to bridge the gap a little bit and make something interesting. As much as I would have loved a he-man follow up I knew as soon as they did it that any canon sequels would follow the good ending.
Saw Aquaman 2 again. That movie really needed less plot. It should have just been a grudge match between Aquaman and Black Manta. Instead it turns out Black Manta is being controlled by some very boring ancient evil CGI monster man who has no character other than being evil.
I was cool with it because it's a nice allegory for demonic possession and selling your soul for power. The movie for me was great popcorn fun.
 
superman hardcover from... I think late 70s, was uncolored very snooty printing of old stuff
I have that; there's two versions. Superman from the 1930s to the 1970s, and an updated one called to the 1980s. They both have different enough contents that having them both isn't a huge space waster. The original one is actually from the early 70s, its 73 or something.

It's kind of a fascinating artifact, I got both versions as a kid in the early 00s from a yard sale and a thrift store, but for like 20 years it was basically the only collected Superman book out there, until Byrne's Man of Steel and The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told in 87/88.

The reason it's fascinating to me, is it sort of presents itself and tries to justify itself as a "real" book, but the contents are mostly just goofy stupid shit after the first half of the 1940s stuff. Which, I love that goofy stuff, but it makes up the majority of a book supposed to cover the characters whole history, and the art is reproduced kind of poorly, beyond just being black and white.

But it being like the only Superman book around for 15 years or whatever, it just makes me laugh in it's presentation, and then you open it and it's mostly just crap. You'd go, no wonder there's not more of these, if this is a curated overview, reading Superman would make you retarded.

Those early collectors compilations of comics are all like that, there are hardly any and the ones that exist are trying too hard to seem like they actually belong on a bookshelf, to the point theyre unintentionally funny. My grandpa gifted me a leatherbound Marvel book from the 80s like that when I was a kid, it's trying to seem all sophisticated and you open it up, and it's Spider-Man punching Doctor Octopus lol. Although compared to the Superman Meets Al Capone or The Girl from Superman's Past in that other book, Stan Lee might as well have been William Shakespeare.
 
My grandpa gifted me a leatherbound Marvel book from the 80s like that when I was a kid, it's trying to seem all sophisticated and you open it up, and it's Spider-Man punching Doctor Octopus lol. Although compared to the Superman Meets Al Capone or The Girl from Superman's Past in that other book, Stan Lee might as well have been William Shakespeare.
Even writers doing work for either Marvel or DC have their moments where they're genuinely just as good as William Shakespeare to at times better than; in spite of and or due to the "silly" subject matter being written.
 
Ah hell, she's gonna be an aloof girl boss for sure.

Tag line: Truth, Justice, Whatever


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This is an unpopular opinion, but I actually don't like Batman: Year One movie, mostly from an adaptation standpoint. Every actor is directed to be monotone, but because they don't have transatlantic accents, they don't sound tense, but bored most of the time. Also, the movie seems like the color saturation is too high for a comic known for using black a lot, so I keep thinking they're using the same animation software as Young Justice when it needs to look more like season 1 TAS or rougher.

I do think it's better than Batman Begins though.
 
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