Sperg about comic books here

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okay, I'll admit that the name just came to mind.

John Byrne and Art Adams are probably closer to "good".

Or anyone that's well-rounded enough to handle art overall without looking like garbage. Ivan Reis? I guess?
That is the point... Most famous comic book artists are just doing poses instead of illustrating the action itself. Your examples are usually seen in multi characters battles without focusing on the action itself, each movement and so on.

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But since comic book heroes focus lots more on team of heroes instead of individual fighting and focusing on the combat itself rather than powers happening at the same time. And the sticked with it for decades, there is barely evolution in how to show this. I've seen good battles in Iron fist/Shang Chi comics from the 70's/80's but it was a single character focused fighting others. You just cant do multiple battles right that would look good on panelling rather than these splash pages more fit to illustrations.

There is a somewhat recent comic that does everything right: deadpool vs the punisher, every action in the fight is illustrated, the flow of the action, the Pages composition, everything is excelent and it is fucking rare to see on capeshit. Even the most well talked focus on sea of characters in crisis like comics instead of focusing on solo fights.

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The limitation of pages and how to use them in capeshit comics really caps it. Good action exists in comics like Luther strode or that western very focused action that I forgot the name.

These types of pages will never be interesting tl me, it is just posed characters without focusing on action,
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I really struggle to think about iconic capeshit battles where the action shines, something that manga for example got hold of it quite easily and in a memorable way.
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And all of this is just battle scenes, if we go to composition of pages and other aspects, capeshit goes even further down.

I think this action aspect of big battles is ao strong that even the avengers films breaks it down in little scenes in those avengers assemble scene of avengers 3 or 4 film.
 
That is the point... Most famous comic book artists are just doing poses instead of illustrating the action itself. Your examples are usually seen in multi characters battles without focusing on the action itself, each movement and so on.
Well I think a lot of this kinda has to deal with the evolution of it all.

I do wish american comics artists were allowed to get better with paneling. I'm a fucker who likes the stuff, but I'll admit American stuff's very word heavy.
 
@jspit2.0

Come on fella, dont be foolish, the only reason americans are ignorants about other world production is because they are monolingual unlike most of the population outside and they cant handle subtitles even for easy shit like films.

"Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams"

If they were so great why do they fell off so hard later on their careers?

Don't confuse influential with great or excelent, if you take sports for example a regular player of today would destroy people from the past, they have better technology, training, knowledge and so on. The same goes for art.

Lets use Neal Adams for example, a work he himself wrote and illustrated some time ago:

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Did you read it? It is bad, really fucking bad, it almost insulting how bad it is.

"You know, most American's don't read foreign stuff/enjoy foreign stuff because the BEST entertainment for almost a century was made in their country. "

Just like your sports? Americans play american football, basketball and not lot of other countries do practice, your teams win national championships and you claim that you guys are winners of the world? Meanwhile when other countries get involved like Japan in baseball, you get BTFO on it.

You can't lose if you dont compete with them, and we see clearly with comics that the moment we see competition, you guys start to lose like having your own domestic market being dominated by manga and young people read more and more than they will ever pick a batman.

This pride is why lots of people (me included) see americans as fucking weirdo people, they want to be the best without going around and doing it. And in the end it is always the weirdo there standing off, it happens in so many different mediums like sports, video games, culture and even comics.

This is a single page from a Extremely comercial artist, the father of japanese capeshit as we know it (super sentai and kamen rider), (so it isn't even a matter of someone from outside the industry) this manga was published in 1967 and it blows the fuck of anything american produced in scope/themes/artistry.

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And all around the world in any media there are works like this, and the american here would tell me that he sees no reason to go outside his country to see what is going on around the world? That he has no curiosity? Zero desire to know more? Come on dude, curiosity is one of the Foundation of knowledge, the desire to know more and more, to broad the horizon, to see what lies behind the mountain. Anyone who truly loves art want more and more, no one would be satisfied with just a single slice of pie, knowing there are thousand of different pies out there to experience it.
 
I read Brat Pack by Rich Veitch on a whim and loved it. Other than Archie comics when I was a kid, I'm not well read on comics. I don't even know where to start in my search, anything you can suggest?
 
It's most definitely a good story, especially for what it intends to be, but for all of the banality and empty-calorie bull of capeshit comics... the really cynical bleak stuff like Brat Pack leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
That is what I like about it haha, but yours is a totally fair take and I think it's just a matter of taste.
 
Picked back up my X-Men chronological read through. I stopped a couple of months ago at Uncanny X-Men Annual #8, which is one of those stories where a character tells a fairy tale story and that's the entire story of the issue. I find them really boring and that one was no different; it was a real chore to get through. Stuff that's happening in this period:

- Dire Wraith war in ROM the Space Knight. Only really involves the newly introduced Forge due to him inventing a neutralizer that can kill wraiths but his also zaps the superpowers out of any superpowered being, with the government having used it in a fight with the X-Men which robbed Storm of her powers, leading Forge to refuse to make more of them. I mostly skimmed through the ROM issues as they're not heavily connected to the X-Men's plots and I'm not that interested in Forge. Speaking of Forge, he's sold as this genius but it's kinda hard to be impressed with his intelligence when his mutant power is the ability to invent whatever he wants without understanding it.

- X-Men & Alpha Flight mini - 'Those Who Sit Above in Shadow' (basically the gods of the gods) tell Loki if he can prove himself worthy by helping humanity that they'll grant him a wish. He creates a city in the arctic circle that has this weird magical well that when entered grants anybody special abilities and transforms them into their ideal self. Unfortunately, it also robs them of their creativity and imagination. The two books' casts are used pretty well and it's plotted decently, with a decent pace, but the art is kinda weak. I liked it overall.

- Nightcrawler mini - Written and drawn by Dave Cockrum. Nightcrawler goes on an adventure through a few different weird dimensions. It's an entertaining enough four issue mini-series but nothing really happens in it. No real exploration of Kurt's character or anything like that. Almost feels like Cockrum had an idea for an original mini-series but couldn't get Marvel interested in it until he made the main character an X-Man. It's easily skippable and I doubt I'll ever re-read it.

- Kitty Pryde & Wolverine - Read this before I took a break but I liked it enough that I wanted to bring it up. It's maybe an issue or two too long but Claremont tells a compelling story using Kitty and Logan and explores each character well. I'm also a big fan of Al Milgrom's art (and I even liked the comics he wrote, like his small stint on Spectacular Spider-Man).

- Legion - The first Legion story in New Mutants. Most of the story takes place inside of David's fractured mind, which I feel Claremont does well with and Sienkiewicz' art really sells the idea that the characters are in a twisted mindscape. I think a lot of writers would have went with the tired id/ego/super ego tropes you often see in stories involving a person's mind but Claremont largely avoids those pitfalls. In general, I actually like Bill Sienkiewicz's art a lot, especially the way he draws Warlock. The weirdly fluid way he draws the character makes him look properly alien rather than just some sort of robot like a lot of other artists do.

- Other stuff:
-- The rosters are weird. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what characters get used in a story beyond whatever whim Claremont has for it. Magma, for example, pretty consistently shows up for an arc and then disappears for a few issues. I also can't recall when Doug Ramsey actually officially joined the New Mutants. For a while he was just friends with the cast, hanging out with them (and Kitty) socially on occasion but now he's suddenly a full member.
-- I like Rachel's character but Claremont clearly has no idea how to use her. She's constantly falling into a catatonic state due to remembering some past memory, allowing Claremont to write her out of the story.
-- I've been liking New Mutants a lot. The cast is pretty good, all of them getting decent character arcs, with Cannonball and Dani (the native American chick) being my favorites. Magneto's also been slowly becoming a better person, with him becoming the New Mutants' teacher a bit into the future.
-- The Uncanny X-Men, on the other hand, I feel has been stuck in a rut and is just spinning its wheels right now. I can't remember the last story arc I that really drew me in. Nimrod has been being built up in the background for a little while now; hopefully his story ends up being worthwhile.

Speaking of Magneto joining the New Mutants, there's something that's been driving me crazy. I swear that in the last 20ish years there was a mini-series or a one-shot that was a sort of 'lost adventure' type story for the New Mutants that takes place when Magneto is their teacher. I remember it was meant to bridge the gap between Magneto being a better person and a caring leader vs the "sike, i was just pretending to be good!" bullshit later on. However, for the life of me, I cannot find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Did it maybe just get brought up in an interview and cancelled? Am I just crazy?
 
Don't know if this is the right spot to post but this comic was just brought into my place of work and holy shit it feels like satire. Jesus no wonder the comic book industry is in shambles if this is what gets published nowadays lmao.

Hilarious

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I mean nigger babies are monstrosities who should be chased out of town by a mop of pitchfork wielding peasants.
 
Don't know if this is the right spot to post but this comic was just brought into my place of work and holy shit it feels like satire. Jesus no wonder the comic book industry is in shambles if this is what gets published nowadays lmao.

Hilarious

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don't recognize the creators and I'm guessing it is or was related to the Heavy Metal magazine?

I swear, some shit only gets pushed because of ESG.
 
-- I've been liking New Mutants a lot. The cast is pretty good, all of them getting decent character arcs, with Cannonball and Dani (the native American chick) being my favorites. Magneto's also been slowly becoming a better person, with him becoming the New Mutants' teacher a bit into the future.
I love New Mutants. I usually hate teenage storytelling (high-school manga settings have really shortened my patience or benefit of the doubt for storytelling in that age group), but the way that it's done here in that 1980s style is very quaint and charming, and the character writing is very endearing. It's funny, because Wolfsbane was my favorite of the group (Dani being a close second), and weirdly enough, everyone I talk to seems to hate that character. I always thought she was cute; the scene where the kids are walking out of E.T. and Rahne is crying because the film seemed real to her, was unbelievably sweet. Moments like that really remind you how much someone like her prizes the sentimentality everyone around her takes for granted, and how it's a glimpse at her difficult home life.

Also, I know that there's a lot of division over Simonson's tenure on the book, and yeah, it's very uneven compared to Claremont's run on the book, but I liked her weaving in the X-Terminators (assuming that counts, since those characters fold into the cast around the time of X-Force in the 90s), largely because of the way she writes Boom-Boom.

And while I'm at it, New Mutants Vol. 2 by Weir and DePhillipis is also great, hugely underrated, and not even remotely deserving of the flak it received at the time.

Speaking of Magneto joining the New Mutants, there's something that's been driving me crazy. I swear that in the last 20ish years there was a mini-series or a one-shot that was a sort of 'lost adventure' type story for the New Mutants that takes place when Magneto is their teacher. I remember it was meant to bridge the gap between Magneto being a better person and a caring leader vs the "sike, i was just pretending to be good!" bullshit later on. However, for the life of me, I cannot find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Did it maybe just get brought up in an interview and cancelled? Am I just crazy?
Are you talking about this? Because that's the only recent example I could dig up.
 
Don't know if this is the right spot to post but this comic was just brought into my place of work and holy shit it feels like satire. Jesus no wonder the comic book industry is in shambles if this is what gets published nowadays lmao.

Hilarious

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i want to write a parody of that spiderverse spiderwoman where she gets a crowbar in the stomach and a red homonculus shits out
 
I read Brat Pack by Rich Veitch on a whim and loved it. Other than Archie comics when I was a kid, I'm not well read on comics. I don't even know where to start in my search, anything you can suggest?
Rich Veitch also did some comics for Eastman and Laird's original TMNT run. I would highly recommend the Mirage TMNT, at least for the first 50 or so issues. I would also recommend Sin City by Frank Miller, since these things are a perfect middleground between cynical and capeshit
 
Call me crazy but I loved the late 80s team of Storm, Rogue, Havok, Colossus, Psylocke, Dazzler, and Longshot. The only drawback is that they're extremely painfully 80s styled.
 
Don't know if this is the right spot to post but this comic was just brought into my place of work and holy shit it feels like satire. Jesus no wonder the comic book industry is in shambles if this is what gets published nowadays lmao.

Hilarious

View attachment 5872593
Yep, you're in the right spot. Just looked it up and it's from 2021, so that sounds about right.
don't recognize the creators and I'm guessing it is or was related to the Heavy Metal magazine?

I swear, some shit only gets pushed because of ESG.
Paul Cornell has written some stuff for Doctor Who and DC. If I remember correctly he did that Demon Knights series that was a launch title from the New 52 and some mini-series that tied into Grant Morrison's Batman run. Which was more than a decade ago so I don't blame you for not remembering him because he never did anything that stood out.
 
Neal Adams is a good artist but as a writer? Hell yeah, his shit is pretty damn awful and hilarious.
Batman Odessy is crap, but in a fun way. It is one man vision.
A vision that is full on autistic.
 
Yep, you're in the right spot. Just looked it up and it's from 2021, so that sounds about right.

Paul Cornell has written some stuff for Doctor Who and DC. If I remember correctly he did that Demon Knights series that was a launch title from the New 52 and some mini-series that tied into Grant Morrison's Batman run. Which was more than a decade ago so I don't blame you for not remembering him because he never did anything that stood out.
Demon Knights was fine. I wish DC would just pump out Anthologies based on different groups or time periods.

Just cram all the superfluous stuff into one big bat-book. All the non Batman/Robin/Nightwing stuff. Save time and money. If the feedback for something in that book is high enough, greenlight a limited series or sth.

That's how Showcase worked, right? I'm tired of having an entire team-book's worth of heroes crammed into every major DC book. The Flash, pre n52, already had a barely workable 3-5 (Jay, Barry, Wally, Wally's Twins. Jesse Quick and Bart Allen were on teams seperately). Giving me a Flash book with like a dozen named superheroes just doesn't work. Give me either a Barry or a Wally focused book.

Hell, just because we haven't seen it, gimme a story where Etrigan and Jason Blood have an adventure in the '40s with the characters there.

@Foltest
Neal Adams is a good artist but as a writer? Hell yeah, his shit is pretty damn awful and hilarious.
Batman Odessy is crap, but in a fun way. It is one man vision.
A vision that is full on autistic.

Neal Adams feels like someone who has a good starting premise or concept, but requires other writers to really make those premises and concepts work well.

He created John Stewart, Man-Bat, and Ra's Al Ghul. The framework was there. Other people eventually elevated them. It's a thing I've noticed with some other well known comics artists.

Good art, lots of creative energy, good concepts, and they need a fucking writer/editor to work with.

Jack Kirby was good with concepts and creativity. He just needed a writer to work with. Unfortunately a lot of these guys didn't understand this.
 
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