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- Jun 23, 2015
Crossed is dogshit and full on edge. The bad kind of edge.
Sperg about comic books here
- Thread starter Tragi-Chan
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- Jul 22, 2020
Superman's best villains are usually mirroring him thematically (Ultra-Humanite, Lex Luthor, Brainiac. All geniuses) or are foils to his virtue (Bizarro, Parasite, Zod, Metallo, any prominent Superman Rogues gallery powerhouse). The third category belongs to the Toymen and Pranksters who've just kinda been there forever. Mr. Mixy is probably the one notable sorta exception to the idea of being a thematic mirror or foil to virtue. Superman's rogues gallery is pretty concise in the really well known ones, but I think we still have room for more development for plenty of them.
Personally, I do think we've miled Luthor, Brainiac, and Zod quite a bit and could use a little break. I did like the Superman on Warworld run from a few years back. Mongul's always been one of my picks for big bad alien that Supes fights. Darkseid needs to be reserved for special events and none of the other big bad villain aliens carry that level of dangerous. Zod's matched with Kal, but has his own code. Kanjar-Ro is a Silver Age holdover. Sinestro's not part of this rogues gallery.
I guess that leaves. . .Despero. But he hasn't been used effectively since the JLA run right during Infinite Crisis. That JL Detroit story with him was bone-billing. The further JLI-JLE era tales with him were also pretty good.
I think we have some possible greatness left with Superman in the right hands. A run exploring Superman's presence and influence on the world around him in heartwarming ways would be nice. It's been done before, but I think a Superman run that explores the dawn of the "modern age" of heroes (I.E. Supes going public in metropolis) could be really fun. Have it be told through the lenses of retired heroes, villains, and adventurers of all kinds.
Another thing I also enjoy is that the idea of a Super-family isn't bad. It just needs to be handled decently
Letting Connor go back to Hawaii would be good. Let them all scatter around.
Stop focusing on weird gender/sex shit. Just give us heroes again. Wanna do a genderspecial bullshit story? Write it from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Have the lenses be the hero's. No shit people are gonna be weirded out with Jon and Tim and other characters just suddenly switching to being gay. 99% of the population isn't gay. The fucking '90s Northstar story about him coming out was far better executed because it told both sides, had an emotional core, and the reader was akin to being on the outside and looking in.
I hate how a lot of modern LGBT/idpol narratives put the reader in the mouthpiece's shoes because it doesn't work. The vast majority of the people on the planet can't identify with this, so don't alter and fuck up things to get your idpol wank on. Wanna tell me a story about how Captain America had a gay buddy from his youth in the '30s and '40s? Some dude in the 80s did a pretty good job with that, compared to what's out now. Wanna have an Ironheart that's likable? Don't make her into a fucking redditor. You can have your goofy idea work, but just do your homework and look at what made Kamala Khan likable. Like, fucking hell, it's not that hard. She's 100% a token character, but they handled her in a way that made her likable. Miles and Sam Alexander were also likable. It's not hard. Amadeus Cho, for all his bullshit and annoyances, is at least an understandable character that's been given time to grow into a deeply flawed hero. Ironheart's a jackass who didn't earn her spurs and spent her first impression being a little bitch.
Also wish we had big anthology books again that'd rotate featured stories. I want more Plastic Man and I've read literally everything with him.
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2023
Im not super autistically into every single age, I just have read the best comics of each age. I like Lex Luthor in so far as hes just the Cain to Supermans Abel, supreme manifestation of jealousy writ large. Zod is hateable cause hes egomaniacal and oppressive. Everybody else is just background noise, I dont know much of them apart from the Ape guy (Gorilla Grodd?) cause hes a big monke. Most heroes after Batman have had mid to bad villains cause theres no character depth or contrast to the hero like with Batman and the Rogues Gallery. Who even remembers Myxzsplik.
I really want to see, and Ive tried writing this myself multiple times, a Superman story but told in the way Marvels is, like through an external observer. Or a Superman story which dictates the entirety of the 20th Century through Supermans eyes cause he did land right around the Industrial Revolution, it would be a bit like Benjamin Button. Superman and his moral superiority being used as a lens to view historical events. Red Son did something like this which is why its really really good despite the commie apologia.
No point ranting about this, Im tired, I would give no shit if the American Comics industry dies cause its just full of slop and webcomic trash.
I want more first party capeshit Graphic Novels. I dont think theres ever been a Dark Knight Returns equivalent to Superman, something self contained and small. Same for Wolverine, you could do so many great self contained small pulp type stories with Wolverine but the closest we got was Old Man Logan and Logan the End.
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- Joined
- Jun 23, 2015
Talking about Crossed, I will have to give Ennis run credit for not being as godawful as the other shit.
Family Values is just dogshit and awful.
At least Ennis knew when to ease up on the shock vaule, unlike Family Vaules.
I like some edgy shit and shock vaule can be fun, but this is just nasty.
Family Values is just dogshit and awful.
At least Ennis knew when to ease up on the shock vaule, unlike Family Vaules.
I like some edgy shit and shock vaule can be fun, but this is just nasty.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
Mxy is a pretty major piece of Superman's mythos as he's a classic perennial trickster god that highlights Superman's wit and intelligence.
Ultra-Humanite was the original superman villain.
Character depth in villains wasn't a thing in DC for quite a while. You did have some level of contrast with the likes of the Flash rogue's gallery (temperatures, mirrors, mental powers>raw speed, the turtle, etc), Wondy's rogues (typically "evil" gods, monsters, evil women, and Dr. Psycho.). The Titans have always kinda contrasted with villains that required them to put aside their teenage hormones and unite. etc.
What I will say is that DC's a classic case of just having fucktons of forgotten villains. For every halfway decent villain like, Captain Cold or Two-Face, we've got a dozen idiotic ones.
There's probably a good way to do this but we'd probably need Alex Ross.
All-Star Superman.
Wolverine's an odd one but there's been oneshots and self-contained solo stories with him going into the corners of the world.
We're at the point where the good writers that helped with the late 90s-early 2000s reconstruction era are kinda old now. I can't think of many current era writers for comics that'd be capable of handling the sentimentality and massive world of DC, let alone the more self-contained and compressed world of Marvel.
Commander X
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- Joined
- Apr 6, 2018
Among other offbeat, obscure comics I've come across recently, some years ago I was intrigued by mention of an underground comic that was a sequel to a single-issue of a "weird menace" pulp, The Octopus, published in 1939. That had been an attempt by Popular Publishing at a "villain pulp", where the main star was a villain similar to how the "hero pulps" had main stars like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, Secret Agent X, etc. The Octopus being a mad scientist sort who wreaks havoc in the city. Their previous attempt at a villain pulp had been a short-lived magazine about a Yellow Peril character, Dr. Yen Sin. Popular also published what turned out to be another very short lived attempt at a villain pulp soon after The Octopus, The Scorpion where they just swapped out a new mad scientist/cult leader for the Octopus.
Now, in the 1970s there'd been something of a pulp fiction revival, what with the paperback reprints of hero pulp characters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc, small press reprints of "weird menace" pulps, detective pulp anthologies, Western pulp stories, etc. One editor, Robert Weinberg, had published reprints of The Octopus/Scorpion etc.
So from a underground publishing called Pulp Mania came a comic with typical weird underground psychedelic comic art that was a direct sequel to The Octopus, "The Skull Killer", where the masked vigilante who challenged the villain originally, the aforementioned Skull Killer has another go-round. I'd seen copies of it around, but only really looked into via a blog that posted pages.
Goin' Underground: The Skull Killer (Pulp Mania Inc., 1975)
It appears, despite promising a follow-up with a Nazi villain, there was only one issue because the people behind it, a writer named Brendan Faulkner and artist Gary Terry thought the copyright on the character had lapsed, but it hadn't at the time. Oops.
Artist Terry, who when I looked into him had a career that involved very little comics work but a lot of animation and storyboarding. Sometime after Skull Killer, he published what was supposed to be, again, the first issue of a digest-sized, black-and-white comic book, Atom Robot Adventurer, which featured a manga-inspired story featuring the titular character that came off like an adult riff on Astro Boy and a saucy, kinky attempt at revamping obscure WWII-era comic hero The Green Turtle, and ads promising more titles coming in 1976 that it looks like never came to fruition.
Atom Robot Adventurer
Now, in the 1970s there'd been something of a pulp fiction revival, what with the paperback reprints of hero pulp characters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc, small press reprints of "weird menace" pulps, detective pulp anthologies, Western pulp stories, etc. One editor, Robert Weinberg, had published reprints of The Octopus/Scorpion etc.
So from a underground publishing called Pulp Mania came a comic with typical weird underground psychedelic comic art that was a direct sequel to The Octopus, "The Skull Killer", where the masked vigilante who challenged the villain originally, the aforementioned Skull Killer has another go-round. I'd seen copies of it around, but only really looked into via a blog that posted pages.
Goin' Underground: The Skull Killer (Pulp Mania Inc., 1975)
It appears, despite promising a follow-up with a Nazi villain, there was only one issue because the people behind it, a writer named Brendan Faulkner and artist Gary Terry thought the copyright on the character had lapsed, but it hadn't at the time. Oops.
Artist Terry, who when I looked into him had a career that involved very little comics work but a lot of animation and storyboarding. Sometime after Skull Killer, he published what was supposed to be, again, the first issue of a digest-sized, black-and-white comic book, Atom Robot Adventurer, which featured a manga-inspired story featuring the titular character that came off like an adult riff on Astro Boy and a saucy, kinky attempt at revamping obscure WWII-era comic hero The Green Turtle, and ads promising more titles coming in 1976 that it looks like never came to fruition.
Atom Robot Adventurer
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2022
I thought it was written extremely lackluster and unoriginal, just cruising on the zombie craze of the times, it's TWD in more edgy and that comic already was levels of edgy that went from entertaining to plain silly. Still done a lot better than Crossed, be it artwork or storytelling, even if Kirkman turned out to be a hack. I know Garth can do better when he wants and isn't in forever-13-year-old-edgemaster mode.
I thought the storyline with the psychopath, while turning the edge to 11, was alright, at least compared to the other shit storylines in Crossed. Been forever ago that i read it, though. Had to look up the plot of Family Values, i only remember it very, very dimly and it's most likely as shit as the other stories, as you stated.
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2013
They were always intended to just be some vague untrustworthy Eastern Europeans since their entire origin was about being in the evil mutants and then betraying whoever's team they're on due to their own self interests. Until recently (and still to this day, really) the stereotypes for Eastern bloc peoples are:
1. Commie spy
2. Swarthy peasant with pierced ear
3. Gangster (This is more of a 90s thing)
It's just justification for the vaguely racist origins of the characters and the feeling among Westerners that all Eastern people are shady and duplicitous. People in the 60s until quite recently didn't give a fuck that the Roma are a distinct group of people, they just assumed that any Eastern European who didn't look like Dolph Lundgren was a Gypsy. Plenty of people still think that the Roma are Romanians, or that everyone from an Eastern bloc country is Russian (I have a Lithuanian coworker- customers still ask her if she's from Russia).
Maximoffs are originally from made up region Transia which was a sort of mix of Latvia and Romania vagualy in the region of the Black sea. I recall playing one of the old marvel ultimates games, and Quicksilver had a hilariously thick Russian accent.
The magneto thing got retconned out a few years ago, as did the fake country they're from. Iirc they were Latvian for a bit but I think they might be Serbs or some other kind of Balkan now, it changed a few times. The story now is that their parents were gypsies, but the twins were kidnapped and mutated by the High Evolutionary, so they're neither full humans nor classic mutants. Sometimes a writer will vaguely say something about them being Romani, but it's kind of half hearted and just shows how little anyone actually seriously give a fuck about correctly depicting Eastern people and Gypsies since half the time you get a panel of Quicksilver or Wanda lovingly watching a pack of fucking canary yellow caravans surrounded by people dressed like Esmerelda lol.
Are they Slav? Are they Balkan? Are they Serbian or Roma or Latvian? Who knows! These ethnicities and cultures are interchangeable as far as the writers care, they just settle on whatever will get them the most attention. It's at once really lazy and also absurdly offensive and ignorant.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
Yeah Transia was one of those places in Marvel that got visited semi-regularly in Maximoff related tales. I think Mt. Wundagore was there too but don't quote me on this.
Honestly it baffles me why pretend-nerds are trying to shit up the possibility of letting fictional countries/ethnicities be fictional. It's fictional, who are you to get in the way of the creative vision? All we know is that it's full of vaguely white eastern europeans. Let it be that way.
The Magneto thing being retconned was due to the Fox-Disney fight.
I am annoyed at modern Wanda's depictions. They keep going and trying to make her into a girlboss. I think it was more interesting to keep her a bit unstable and dangerous, but with some part of her always wanting to do good and be an Avenger.
She had potential as a major in-universe heroine that fell from grace and almost committed genocide. Krakoa tried to "redeem" her and whatnot.
Clyde Cash's Left Teste
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- Feb 22, 2024
I've had a BS theory for a year or so, that the real Peter and MJ got replaced by Skrulls sometime during the Clone Saga. The Skrull MJ gave birth and Norman took the baby where he relised that this isn't the real Spider-Man. He artificially ages the skrull infant to adulthood and implants Aunt May's memories into it so it thinks its the real Aunt May. Somehow the Skrull Parkers forget they are Skrulls.
This does a couple of things for the lore in the long run, OMD isn't about Peter and MJ selling their marriage to save elderly Aunt May. No, its about two parents trying to save who they know deep down is their daughter. The real Peter and MJ are out there frozen somewhere, waiting to be unfrozen.
On a more meta level, this makes the Clone Saga- a story which had two people trying to figure out which one is the real Spider-Man end with neither one being the main Spider-Man.
Superman needs more villains that are anti-America in some form or fashion.
He is getting a mini series though I doubt it will be good.
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2013
It was. Wundagore still exists in-universe but Idk where it is, I haven't been keeping track since the 4-part Uncanny Avengers miniseries years ago where they had the reveal about them being artificial mutants.
I'm glad that she's not just being bossed around by her brother anymore, but instead of making her interesting she's now boring. The recent scarlet witch and quicksilver series was honestly pretty bad and a huge dissapoinment; Wanda was being really dumb but aside from a quick 'my bad' at the end she never really made up for almost getting her brother killed. It's the rare occasion where I think the MCU iteration of a character is more interesting. I liked Wanda in House of M, the climactic scene where magneto kills Pietro and she revives him is so powerful imo.
It'd be cool to see her and her brother have some low stakes adventures together with some real character moments. Quicksilver was always one of my favourite characters especially in the 90s and early 00s when writers seemed more interested in unpacking his mental state and the reasons why he acts like such an asshole all the time, but these days he's been flanderised into a kind of snarky background character. They keep giving him love interests but then not going anywhere with them. He was cool in that one x-factor run from a few years ago but since then he's been very one-note.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
a few years back we had the avengers no surrender event that had a quicksilver miniseries afterwards
shame it never did much in it beyond confirm that he has untapped speed levels and wants to redeem himself
i think he should have just, like, had some adventures with Speed.
honestly the 2010s had so many new teen and diversity characters that it kinda killed the momentum of old ones that were getting worked on.
Clyde Cash's Left Teste
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- Feb 22, 2024
There are like what two generations of younger heroes after the Young Avengers?
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2024
Captain Atom is gonna be on Mark Waid’s JL team roster
Rare Waid W, especially after what Tom King has done to the poor Captain in the Jenny Sparks series.
Rare Waid W, especially after what Tom King has done to the poor Captain in the Jenny Sparks series.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
it was stupidly fucking fast.
we had the young avengers+america chavez+young allies of the 00s. then the early 2010s had ms marvel, miles morales, and whatnot. then we had kinda a second wave with viv vision, ironheart, and others.
it was just cramming them everywhere for little reason with no room to breathe. like, they had moon girl be a thing and killed off the monkey, moon boy, to do so. they had a batch of nu-inhumans that noone cared for. we had iron fists's adoptive daughter, war machine's niece, and a few other oddball additions.
the 2000s weren't a stranger because the civil war aftermath and the new x-men stuff brough a ton of characters. reptil, rockslide, pixie, all the avengers academy kids, runaways, etc.
the issue is that the 2000s introduced them in more structured formats that didn't make it feel aggravating. almost all of them were introduced via team books of some sort.
idk man mark waid can't be 100% trusted to give anything decent nowadays.
Clyde Cash's Left Teste
kiwifarms.net
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- Feb 22, 2024
That and Star Shappure on it along with Dan Mora on art are making me pull it.. Though I think Waid is going to end up blacklisted again from DC in a couple years
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- Feb 22, 2024
Same, Captain Atom has been awaiting a return since the “Fall and Rise” which set him up to be something…… and nobody did anything with it.
Waid is not to be trusted and World’s Finest has lost a lot of quality……. but him and Mora are the two holding up that company.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2020
Is that out yet?
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2024
Atom is probably gonna be behind 9/11 and September 11th is what revives Jenny.
That’s what I’ve guessed from the synopsis at least. Atom is the villian though, that’s for certain.
Imagine my shock that a glowie is writing things where a white blue-collar soldier who got fucked over by the military industrial complex becomes a murderous terrorist who is tied to an event that’s gotten more and more scrutiny…… really makes you think.
Clyde Cash's Left Teste
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- Feb 22, 2024
Tom King did 9/11
I still think World's Finest has been consistant though I do think the Doom-Mite arc. Though seeing Dan Mora draw minor DC magic people was a treat.