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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 6:24am | IP Logged | 1  

Looking at these latter day Robins, I am reminded of a point which seems to completely elude current artists: superheroes are supposed to be "quick change artists". They are supposed to be able to shed their civilian identity in a matter of seconds and race into action. I look at some of these guys (like the Damian Wayne version) and think of how long it took to lace up my skates for hockey in school! And that was just the skates!

Isn't this a slippery slope though? I mean, isn't thinking about super-heroes and comic books too "realistically" the point at which one should consider finding another hobby?

••

Back in the day, even as recently as my earliest years at Marvel, there used to be a short "list" of "Early Warning Signs" that you were getting too old to be reading superhero comics. A few items on that "list" were…

• When you started to think the heroes were "crazy" to do what they do

• When you started to want real world physics applied to the way the powers work

• When you asked questions like "How can Spider-Man cling to walls when he has gloves and boots on?"

• When you started to notice the characters were not aging

• When you started to wonder about their sex lives (as distinct from love lives)

Roger Stern used to say that asking any of those questions was a sign you should stop reading -- or turn Pro!

Of course, when Rog said that, the Old Guard was still mostly running the show, and they were there to make us newbie pros understand that ASKING the question wasn't the same as needing to ANSWER it!

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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 6:39am | IP Logged | 2  

That "Damian Wayne" drawing points up another way modern comics have gone off the rails. Compare to the Garcia Lopez drawing of Robin from the old DC Style Guide…

Look at all the superfluous lines on the costume on the left. Even the breast emblem which is tricky enough in its original form, has grown an extra circle around it, and little ticks in the shape of the "R". How long does it take to draw that new costume? And to draw it seventy times per issue.

And this is not unique to "Robin". For a few decades now artists have been piling on the line work -- ESPECIALLY artists called upon to redesign the characters but NOT to draw them issue after issue!

No wonder books get delayed!

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James Woodcock
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 7:28am | IP Logged | 3  

You know, looking at that Robin costume - EVERYTHING is doubled up.

Two capes, laces on the boots, knee pads on the legs, canisters on the belt, inner lines on the tunic, an inner circle on the buckle, a line around the R symbol, extras on the gloves and a crazy hair cut.

As JB says, why would you do that to yourself?

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Flavio Sapha
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 7:52am | IP Logged | 4  

Teen Titans was definitely one of those titles that should've quit at some point. #50, perhaps?

••

Or perhaps readers of TEEN TITANS should have left before they started complaining that the characters were not aging "as they should"?
++++

JB, I was around ten or twelve when I read this stuff, so aging characters was not really what I was looking for.

But Robin was written in this title as having an "arc" which culminated on his becoming Nightwing. The same could be said of Wonder Girl, who had some sort of identity search and got married in #50.

Perhaps the writer had written himself into a corner, by doing these arcs? The whole Nightwing thing seems to me akin to DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, which, as you have commented, works best as the LAST DD STORY.

A few issues after these "landmarks" George Pérez left the book and it was never the same...not even with Garcia Lopez doing the art for a while.

So, this is kind of what I meant about NTT quitting. Perhaps I was thinking of how a few years later, Neil Gaiman got into an agreement with DC to end his SANDMAN book on #75.    

I understand that commercially it´s much healthier to have a comic book with a flavor that can be reproduced indefinitely, like Wayne Boring´s Superman or the Disney Ducks (both of which I love, no dis intended to these great comics). But a bunch of creators in the 80s (yourself included) came up with more singular kinds of lightning, which are really hard to bottle.

So, in this sense, I sometimes wish that the American comic book could accomodate the idea of the finite series (like, say, Japan). Think how much better it would have been for the X-Men, for instance!
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Andy Mokler
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 9:26am | IP Logged | 5  

Of course, when Rog said that, the Old Guard was still mostly running the show, and they were there to make us newbie pros understand that ASKING the question wasn't the same as needing to ANSWER it!

Ah, an important distinction that had eluded me.
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 10:15am | IP Logged | 6  

There's an even more important question that seems so often to elude the people producing current comics.

Stories almost always begin with someone asking some variant of "Wouldn't it be cool if. . . . " But the important, and seemingly unasked question is "Sure, but THEN what??"

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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 07 March 2013 at 11:06am | IP Logged | 7  

i think the answer, JB, has been: we'll just reboot it in a few months anyway.
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