@Arthur Morgan
Not just the characters, but the other books going on. Here's the thing, I liked his Batman run as it was coming out because it's one of the few legacy character arcs that actually worked. Dick and Damian were a great team, and he worked to give Dick his own new villains and his own identity as Batman. However he completely ignored the One Year Later set up and also what Paul Dini and other writers were doing at the time. Again, he works better in a vacuum because he just refuses to play with the others. Except for Fifty-Two, but then he was forced to co-write and share ideas on that one
Because Morrison doesn't read anyone else's work. He's barely conscious of what's going on elsewhere in whatever comic line he's working on. It's funny, because Joss Whedon would (rightfully) be criticized for effectively ignoring the continuity of the rest of the X-Books while he was off in la-la land writing his run on
Astonishing, which is why when reading that insufferable quip-a-thon mess in tandem with the other books of that era like
New X-Men: Academy X and
House of M, it feels like it takes place in its own pocket dimension.
Yet, Morrison does the exact same thing, and routinely gets praised for it. It's fucking baffling--and one of the reasons I don't and probably never will understand comic autists. The kind of bullshit they're willing to excuse in order to suck off a hack like Morrison is truly astounding.
Not that he needs any help--if you read his work, he's typically busy sucking himself off between every pseudo-intellectual monologue he pinches out of that talentless bald dome of his.
@jspit2.0
Frank Quitely is an amazing drafter with a keen sense of sequential art as a medium. There are tons of standout moments in the series, whether the scene with the admittedly eye rolling two dimensional Cassandra Nova using her powers to drive Beast to attack the bird mutant or #121, where Jean and Emma delve through the unconscious Xavier's mind
If only any of that draftmanship could enable him to draw a face that doesn't look like a moldering foot given sentience.
the Claremont X-men were well and truly dead. The 90s had made them unreadable. I note you mention Magneto and making him a villain. Well, how can a man using nukes to threaten world annihilation who ripped the adamantium from Wolvie's skeletons be anything but?
I believe we've had this exchange once before on this very thread, and my stance hasn't changed since then. Previous writers getting Magneto wrong doesn't magically give Morrison license or a free pass to get him even more wrong.
Especially when part of it was done to shame and degrade Magneto as a character, hence all the talk towards the latter part of the series of his own minions call him a "washed-up, outdated old man" and a "failed revolutionary", as Morrison tries to make a wider point about how characters like Magneto have no place in the hip, post-modern intellectual world he's supposedly making.
That's what makes his handling of the character worse than anything the 90's writers did. Let me be absolutely clear: I have zero love or nostalgia for the 90's Era of X-Men; despite what my avatar may imply, I found and continue to find that era an incomprehensible garbled mess, placed on a farcical pedestal of worship by comic fans who confuse their warm memories of the art and cartoon of that era with nonexistent quality in the storytelling. But what separates the reckless antics of the Lobdells and Lees of that era was that whatever regression was done to Magneto was done out of pure, impulsive pursuit of spectacle and pushing the "rule of cool" in every aspect of the comics, right down to the classic villains. It was dimwhitted fanboy action-figure mashing, done out of misplaced enthusiasm for the characters.
Morrison's Magneto was done out of spite. He wanted to degrade the character to make an intellectual point, which will forever make his antics infinitely more insulting, and Marvel's decision to retcon his stupid-ass comics all the more satisfying.
Morrison circa 80s was a Moore larper
That explains a lot. They both seem cut from the same cloth of puerile pseudo-intellectualism and self-indulgence.
@Hembruh
If anything though the BatFamily since the late 1990s is just too many motherfuckers and nobody knows what to do with them. Characters just disappear, and come back radically different, multiple characters with the same mantles, character development is reversed every other year, it sucks. I was always a fan of Nightwing & Tim, Cassandra Cain to some extent. but fuck it would suck ass to try and follow those characters today
I'm planning on getting around to a proper Batman read-through at some point (not anytime soon, as the pop culture landscape has left me with an involuntary gag reflex at all things Batman and Joker due to over-saturation in all forms of media), but when I ultimately do, I'm thinking about dropping off after the 90's for this precise reason.
From the way I hear it, the 90's was the last bastion of good Bat stories. I know Nightwing continued to have a good run into the 2000's (at least until Dan DiDio dropped a literal nuke on his city), but everything I've read past that point is a shitshow with too many sidekicks and Batman being his usual, insufferable unkillable Batgod self he's been for ages.
Patrician taste. I think the whole franco-belgian oeuvre is terminally underrated or almost unknown across the pond. I finally read Franquin's "Idèes Noires" two years ago and it's a true masterpiece, the artwork or rather the technique he used is insane, he must've spent ages on a single page. His "Gaston" still remains the most funny comic in existance. Last french book i read was "The Killer", nice artwork and panel setting but i dropped it after, i think, the third book, not even sure why. Others might like it.
A large part of Franc-Belgian albums being obscure is that a whole shit ton of it doesn't get localized, and there isn't a legion of dedicated autists to scanlate everything like manga does. So with no marketing or localization push, and little accessibility, you'd only know about the magic of Bandes-Desinees if you were actively seeking it out through obscure online resources. I've even taken up a hobby of translating some BD's that have languished in obscurity for myself, since there's no available translation for a disappointingly high number of the ones I want to read. (What helps is that scanlating a Bandes-Dessinees as opposed to a manga is INFINITELY easier than translating Far Eastern Moon Runes, and with modern translating software, you can knock out a BD in an afternoon if you know what you're doing).
I only recently got into BD's, and I'm still fucking astounded how much genre variety and stunning art quality there is to be found. As a frothing fantasy fan, when I found out the literal
thousands of comics dedicated to all manner of high, low, dark and heroic fantasy--with Soleil Comics literally having a
dedicated imprint to fantasy called "Soleil Celtic"--I couldn't fucking believe it. How in FUCK do we not have an equivalent in the states???
And that's before you crack into their entire swath of war-themed, historical, biographical, horror and Wild West works. Dedicated and sincere writers everywhere, unposessed by delusions of post-modern reinvention or fart-huffing pretentiousness, just cranking out one gorgeous album after another.
This is why I'm not on the whole "Western comics have lost the battle to Manga" Train. The "West" does not solely equal the pedesterian capeshit efforts of American comics....it also includes France. Which not only is superb, but has the added advantage over most long-running manga in that the authors
actually fucking finish the stories they start.
