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Arthur Morgan said:
Which is funny because it was written by Gail "Women in Refrigerators" Simone.
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I'm not sure if that was an agency thing or a violence against women thing. Either way, it was a pretty stupid complaint. And it's funny that she wrote something people would contribute to chuds: a strong all female warrior race/society getting broken into sex slaves to be sold at auction
 
a comic can have good art and still be horrible. i feel like there's plenty of examples in the last decade of DC/Marvel picking artists that don't stylistically work with the genre at times.

or it can have shit art and great writing. i can't think of examples off the top of my head right now.


Tom King and Tom Taylor both kinda piss me off as writers. King seems capable, but keeps trying to be the guy to make things darker in the stories without it having any real weight in the long run because it's serialized fiction. I honestly don't remember much about his lauded vision run and people seem to love it.
 
I think the biggest crime of Tom Taylor is that he has an uncanny knack for making superheroes unbelievably boring.

He's been on Nightwing for ages now, and I can't remember a time this comic was this milquetoast, bog-standard, lifeless and generic. At least his run on Superman had the benefit of being bad to the point of being hilarious.
 
Mississippi Motorboater said:
I mean, when it comes to creators handling pre-established characters, I guess I'll echo some of what @Arthur Morgan is saying and say that a bad comic is when a creator puts his/her own creative impulses before the integrity of the characters. I.e., when they put whatever hacky or headline-grabbing premise ahead the traditional traits of the characters, or how they're normally supposed to interact.

Tom King is quite possibly the most apt embodiment of this phenomenon. It doesn't matter what he's writing...be it Batman, Supergirl, or Wonder Woman as he's doing currently...he will happily snap character history, internal consistency and traditional in-universe continuity clean in half to accommodate whatever pretentious, edgy, post-modernist point he's trying to make, no matter how much of a poor fit it is with the character he's shamelessly wiping his balls with.

He's like Zack Snyder if he huffed comic paint instead of his own farts.
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I'd argue Tom is malicious where Zack is a pretentious faggot, but yeah, tom King is the ultimate example of writing. Good pick.

Alexander Thaut said:
a comic can have good art and still be horrible. i feel like there's plenty of examples in the last decade of DC/Marvel picking artists that don't stylistically work with the genre at times.

or it can have shit art and great writing. i can't think of examples off the top of my head right now.


Tom King and Tom Taylor both kinda piss me off as writers. King seems capable, but keeps trying to be the guy to make things darker in the stories without it having any real weight in the long run because it's serialized fiction. I honestly don't remember much about his lauded vision run and people seem to love it.
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Hot take, Taylor pisses me off more. Tom Taylor can write. He has solid C tier comics with basically solid dialogue and story structure. He is maliciously awful because he's so cancerously woke.

Tom King is a nepotism baby glowie. His mom was a studio exec and he leveraged his privileged upbringing and CIA 'vet' status to enter comics. Where he was promptly given the BEndis treatment. Elevated after a bunch of poor to mediocre selling bland indy garbage with terrible dialogue, story structure. All because he held the correct politics and background. They wanted him to be a thing and he did.

But forget his politics. Tom King...can't write. He apes, poorly, Alan Moore. He apes, poorly, baby's first English lit curriculum. His dialogue? Purple, overly verbose speech that mistakes stuttering, stunted prose for coherent, organic dialogue that is woven into a broader story structure. We will always, in the West, have a Tom King. A person wholly unqualified and unworthy elevated due to connections. But someone who can write and does poorly because of agenda? Far more reprehensible to me.
 
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I'll tell you something which makes for a bad comic. Cross-overs! You're merrily reading along and suddenly bam - your story arc is gone, the characters are sometimes even wildly changed into some other version of themselves and you don't know what is going on. It's especially destructive if you're reading much later on in some collected work which I typically am.

But on the other end of things, I'll tell you what makes a comic good. The Brown Bomber! Today I learned this is a DC character and had to share.
brown bomber.jpg

That's Vixen in the panel with him, btw. So it turns out The Brown Bomber is a call back to a character called The Black Bomber, who was proposed and rejected by DC editorial. The Black Bomber, I kid you not, was a KKK member who would get turned into a Black superhero and have to do "Black things" in order to be turned White again. He never came to be but lived on in the form of the character above.

(Admittedly very short lived).
 
Overly Serious said:
I'll tell you something which makes for a bad comic. Cross-overs! You're merrily reading along and suddenly bam - your story arc is gone, the characters are sometimes even wildly changed into some other version of themselves and you don't know what is going on. It's especially destructive if you're reading much later on in some collected work which I typically am.
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I understand it when a Marvel or DC comic has another character cameo to help fix XYZ or something to show the connected world. I don't like it when they just have an A-lister for the sake of getting sales up.
Overly Serious said:
But on the other end of things, I'll tell you what makes a comic good. The Brown Bomber! Today I learned this is a DC character and had to share.
View attachment 5929940

That's Vixen in the panel with him, btw. So it turns out The Brown Bomber is a call back to a character called The Black Bomber, who was proposed and rejected by DC editorial. The Black Bomber, I kid you not, was a KKK member who would get turned into a Black superhero and have to do "Black things" in order to be turned White again. He never came to be but lived on in the form of the character above.

(Admittedly very short lived).
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anti SJW said:
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This is the new version of Sentry from Marvel. I wonder if the wheelchair flies when she does.
Link to tweet.
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Sure, why not. Sentry's never been quite handled right and the idea of this is super funny. . . and fits in with the idea that Sentry's power doesn't fix the brain.
 
Overly Serious said:
I'll tell you something which makes for a bad comic. Cross-overs! You're merrily reading along and suddenly bam - your story arc is gone, the characters are sometimes even wildly changed into some other version of themselves and you don't know what is going on. It's especially destructive if you're reading much later on in some collected work which I typically am.

But on the other end of things, I'll tell you what makes a comic good. The Brown Bomber! Today I learned this is a DC character and had to share.
View attachment 5929940

That's Vixen in the panel with him, btw. So it turns out The Brown Bomber is a call back to a character called The Black Bomber, who was proposed and rejected by DC editorial. The Black Bomber, I kid you not, was a KKK member who would get turned into a Black superhero and have to do "Black things" in order to be turned White again. He never came to be but lived on in the form of the character above.

(Admittedly very short lived).
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Bendis the character.


anti SJW said:
View attachment 5930833
View attachment 5930832


This is the new version of Sentry from Marvel. I wonder if the wheelchair flies when she does.
Link to tweet.
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Jesus fucking christ, it feels like a parody of the 90s PC culture
 
Alexander Thaut said:
Anyways, is it just me or does american comics seem to have the issue with the fucking dialogue being too heavy or awkward more often than the european/japanese comics? I remember lengthy expositions being a thing throughout the ages, but this bullshit seems to have been popularized with Claremont's soap opera X-Men and then ramped up into goyslop with Bendis and Whedon.
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They do. American writers are very inefficient with their writing on average when compared to Japanese or Europeans. This got especially bad after the 80s, and even more so in late 90s and early 2000s when decompressed storytelling became all the rage. There is a whole group of writers who think that their primary job is filling up word balloons, and things like plotting and characterization are secondary.

Registration said:
This talk about bad comics... What makes a comic bad for you? There is one example that I would like to use that is Trouble by millar, I think the book is alright and the art is good, but then people say it is bad only because it deals with a specific cast of characters in their youth.

I Believe that for something to be truly bad, it must be in their own strucure rather than the characterization, shit like shit illustration, bad coloring, wrong fonts and text not centralized and so on.

there is one famously bad comic that I love qnd that is Marville, it is so entertaining, I cant hate it and love it. It is so unpredictable in each issue that makes it a wild ride.
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Bad writing (plotting, dialogue, characterization), bad art, bad sequential storytelling. One of these is enough to ruin a comic.

Overly Serious said:
I'll tell you something which makes for a bad comic. Cross-overs! You're merrily reading along and suddenly bam - your story arc is gone, the characters are sometimes even wildly changed into some other version of themselves and you don't know what is going on. It's especially destructive if you're reading much later on in some collected work which I typically am.

But on the other end of things, I'll tell you what makes a comic good. The Brown Bomber! Today I learned this is a DC character and had to share.
View attachment 5929940

That's Vixen in the panel with him, btw. So it turns out The Brown Bomber is a call back to a character called The Black Bomber, who was proposed and rejected by DC editorial. The Black Bomber, I kid you not, was a KKK member who would get turned into a Black superhero and have to do "Black things" in order to be turned White again. He never came to be but lived on in the form of the character above.

(Admittedly very short lived).
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What makes it better is that his white likeness looks a lot like Bendis. I would not be surprised if that was intentional especially with the last three panels that have reused art - one of Bendis' hallmarks.
 
Reading the 1992-93 xmen crossover
x cutioner's Song...never let someone say comics have only recently started to push an agenda. The only thing that separates 1992 from 2020+ is instead of taking up the whole story, the relentless preaching is one page so scott lobdell can say " there I wrote on a message on accepting the weirdos now can I show Nathan summer's snipe Charles Xavier with a giant over-sized gun?"
 
Looking over some of my Universe by.... stuff it strikes me just how much John Byrne crap is collected.

Honest question is there anyone here that wants a Universe by X collection?

Me personally. I'd like George Perez for either of the Big Two, Mignola got the DC treatment but it's a horrible collection omitting large pieces. Maybe Walt Simonson?

Alexander Thaut said:
I understand it when a Marvel or DC comic has another character cameo to help fix XYZ or something to show the connected world. I don't like it when they just have an A-lister for the sake of getting sales up.



Sure, why not. Sentry's never been quite handled right and the idea of this is super funny. . . and fits in with the idea that Sentry's power doesn't fix the brain.
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I miss Jae Lee's old style pre Marvel knights. That original miniseries is good and self-contained. It would have been better for Bob Reynolds to never have returned.
 
jspit2.0 said:
Looking over some of my Universe by.... stuff it strikes me just how much John Byrne crap is collected.

Honest question is there anyone here that wants a Universe by X collection?

Me personally. I'd like George Perez for either of the Big Two, Mignola got the DC treatment but it's a horrible collection omitting large pieces. Maybe Walt Simonson?



I miss Jae Lee's old style pre Marvel knights. That original miniseries is good and self-contained. It would have been better for Bob Reynolds to never have returned.
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I forget what Universe by X is.

Byrne is. . . I get why he's collected. Same with any of the big writers/artists from the '80s. Claremont, Simonsons, etc.

Sentry as a concept in the standard marvel U shoulda had a few more years of being in stories for characterization before civil war. or slide civil war down. Bendis just sucks because he kinda fucked it up repeatedly.

Like, there's an attempt at giving us some weight to the sentry's existing. I get that much. The problem comes when we just don't get the quiet moments or better character moments beyond "he's mentally ill" in 50 flavors.
 
An interesting link I came across at the site Crimereads
A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORLD OF ALTERNATIVE COMICS IN 1970S NEW YORK CITY
author Michael Gonzalez recalls how in his early teens, after buying his very first issue of Heavy Metal magazine in 1977, and reading alternative and independent titles like Mike Freidrich's anthology magazine Star*Reach he was inspired to try and publish his own sci-fi comic magazine. Gonzalez relates how he managed to touch base with many of the comic world's luminaries on this journey, it's a short and intriguing reminiscence of an important era in American comics and graphic art.
 
I recently read the original Longshot mini-series, by Ann Nocenti and Arthur Adams.

Some of the character work is decent. Longshot himself is an interesting character and his whole earnest, naïve, hopeful personality is refreshing, which seems to have been Nocenti's intent given her foreword in the TPB. I also never knew that Longshot's luck power requires his motives to be pure in order to work, which is an interesting mechanic for a super power. Spiral and Mojo were also an interesting pair, with their bickering and bantering being amusing. Unfortunately, that's all the praise I have for the six-issue series.

The structure, pacing, and general plotting are god awful, with Longshot typically just randomly stumbling from plot point to plot point with no rhyme or reason. It's so nonsensical that I was completely sure there'd be a twist wherein the story would reveal that the whole thing was a movie that Mojo was making. But, no, it was just a poorly thought-out and shoddily told story. I didn't even find the art particularly impressive, though I think it was the inker and colorist letting down Art Adams' art because the covers are pretty great.

Lastly, I have no idea how the Ricochet Rita = Spiral theory took root. Outside of the two both having some hint of romantic feelings for Longshot there's nothing that ties them together. Nocenti apparently never intended for it to be the case yet it eventually became canon.
 
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Foltest said:
You forgot the villian Black Manthra, who had autism.
oh wait I forgot, Aquaman cured him!
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They retconned that as Black Manta trolling Aquaman.

Also, it's canon that pre-Zero Hour, that Black Manta was evil because he was kidnapped by a pedophile ring as a kid and spent most of his childhood as a rape toy for sailors and him having a huge hate boner for Aquaman because a young Aquaman once swam past the boat and didn't hear Manta scream for help. Leading to his hatred for Aquaman.

Foltest said:
I have not read ID crisis but isn’t a major fault with the story, that as a murder mystery story, it is basically impossible to forsee who did the deed?
That there is basically no hints whatsoever?
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There are some hints. But they all hinge on you remembering Jean Loring is a cheating whore and someone who, like Sue, was a slightly less active hanger on with the JLA in the early years.
Commander X said:
Seeing a mention of "Cry for Justice", one of the worst storylines ever. What was a real kicker for me was that I had finally gotten around to finishing up back issues and such of Robinson's Starman run just before I checked out CfJ and all I could think was that it was a real difference. Robinson's run on Starman had its weak points but holy balls CfJ was just awful. Stilted dialogue, ("But I still have to ask -- are you here now as a hero... or a villain?"), panels that often felt out of sequence, dialogue that seems to float in out of nowhere, and characters that often felt like they were barely there. All of the blustering about crying for justice or seeking justice or whatever reminded me of the Totally Nineties DC title "Extreme Justice" I'd encountered in bargain bins, but much, much weaker.
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Cry For Justice only happened because Dwayne "Rot In Hell Racist Shitstain" McDuffie pissed off JLA and Hal Jordan fans to such a degree, that DC had to rush into production a new JLA book led by Hal to quiet the backlash McDuffie's anti-white hate boner for all things white (and Hal in particular) had incited. Made worse by the fact that Robinson INSISTED on a super super slow artist in exchange for taking on such an assignment on such short notice, which backfired and forced DC to force McDuffie against his will to restore Hal to the JLA book because CFJ was moving way too fucking slow artwise and wouldn't have issues ready to ship until after Final Crisis wrapped. At which point, McDuffie's general hate mongering rightfully got him fired from the book, which meant Hal could be restored to the JLA and Cry For Justice got turned into a mini-series, and Robinson moved onto the main JLA book.

A Grey Cat said:
Reading the 1992-93 xmen crossover
x cutioner's Song...never let someone say comics have only recently started to push an agenda. The only thing that separates 1992 from 2020+ is instead of taking up the whole story, the relentless preaching is one page so scott lobdell can say " there I wrote on a message on accepting the weirdos now can I show Nathan summer's snipe Charles Xavier with a giant over-sized gun?"
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Should note that the opening chapter of Xcutioner's Song got shitted on and got a TON of hate mail, because Chuck's speech wasn't inclusive enough (IIRC in particular, because he didn't say anything about the gays).

Ironically, in the super detailed synopsis that spoiled pretty much the entire story save the ending, that ran in Marvel Age to promote the storyline, originally it was going to be at a scientific conference on mutants that Xavier was supposed to be shot. But they changed it to a Lila Cheney concert for the published storyline.
 
Reading the original Secret Wars and I'm regretting not reading much Avengers comics when I was younger. Wasp is weirdly adorable with her fashionista shtick in the middle of an all out war and her trying to flirt with Magneto to learn what he's planning. I like the goofier shit in comics like this and wish there were more writers in modern comics willing to have silliness in their stories. Earnest cheesiness is underrated
 
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