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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 November 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 11:24am | IP Logged | 1
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Brian HagueThomas' All-Star Squadron started off as a favorite title, but quickly went downhill in my estimation, as all of the characters essentially spoke with the same voice, concerned themselves with all the same petty details, and employed the same mode of phrasing, over and over and over...
Thomas tried too hard to make 20th-century characters, whichever decade they lived in, all sound like their dialogue had been written by Stan Lee in the early '60s. Then, anyone of what would later be called the 'baby boom' generation sounded like Rick Jones. While this 'snappy patter' had its own sort of rhythm and cadence which made it easy to pick out Thomas' dialogue, it didn't always fit the 1940s.
As far as Thomas's attempts at 'historical' dialogue, that always looked and sounded stilited, on the level of 'I know not this (thing) of which you speak.' The worst example that I recall reading was in RT's first assignment upon returning to Marvel in 1989; he wrote the first issue of the second 'volume' of WHAT IF..., which concerned the consequences of the Avengers 'losing' the Evolutionary War. Essentially, everyone gets a swelled head, like Hector Hammond(someone comments that a bystander's head is 'bigger and balder than a giant's cueball!')..and literally in the next panel, the evolution hits its 'next stage', and everyone utters such tortured prose as 'Truly they (referring to the 'evolved' heroes) are as far beyond us as we are to the men we were!" Uh..yea, verily, man, dig it!;-/
Edited by Brian O'Neill on 20 June 2014 at 11:32am
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Greg Kirkman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 May 2006
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Posts: 15775
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | 2
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* I am forced to use it for convenience of communication, but I cannot
tell you how much I loathe that term. The first time I heard it, I felt
someone drive a take thru my heart. Marvel stories and characters, as
established by Lee and Kirby very early in the FF's run, took place
HERE, in the same world we live in, not in some "parallel universe." I
don't recall when the term first appeared, but it was, for me, the death
knell of the REAL Marvel.
+++++++
I wonder...where did that term originate? I mean, I can understand its
usage as a way of distinguishing it from other fictional properties, but I
totally detest where it's gone, with the whole "Earth-616" nonsense.
DC's Earth-1 and Earth-2 is all good and fine, but I also cannot stand
the real STAR TREK now being referred to as the "Prime" universe.
All of these parallel universes really do detract from the verisimilitude of
the thing, don't they?
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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
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Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | 3
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Ed Love:I didn't mind [Roy Thomas] tying the Freedom Fighters to Earth-2. Seems he cannot win. He's held to task for being too slavish to continuity and then complained about because his use of the Quality heroes contradicted a few scenes from one story. Even so, there were a ton of Quality heroes we never got around to seeing.
Don't recall any legal issues regarding Captain Triumph. His appearance in the photo for the cover was simply a mistake because Captain Triumph's didn't debut until 1943 and America is already involved in the War in his origin story.
You're right, Captain Triumph turned up later. I'll have to go back and look through Thomas's letter columns in ALL-STAR SQUADRON to see what he said specifically, but I recall him mentioning 'rights issues as an explanation for why some Quality heroes could be used in the title, and others couldn't. Likewise, when someone, after the Captain Marvel 'family' had appeared, asked if Bulletman and other Fawcett heroes might show up, Thomas claimed that DC's rights to use the non-Shazam-powered characters had 'lapsed'. Since Captain Triumph was another one of DC's acquisitions from Quality, the rights to that character must have expired, as well. Not that RT ever wrote the characters out of the year 1942, anyway! (Ironically, in responding to questions about the first issue of ALL-STAR SQUADRON, Thomas said 'Captain Triumph didn't show up til 1943...and on Earth-X, at that! The Earth-2/Quality retcon came later.)
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133334
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | 4
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* I am forced to use it for convenience of communication, but I cannot tell you how much I loathe that term. The first time I heard it, I felt someone drive a take thru my heart. Marvel stories and characters, as established by Lee and Kirby very early in the FF's run, took place HERE, in the same world we live in, not in some "parallel universe." I don't recall when the term first appeared, but it was, for me, the death knell of the REAL Marvel.+++++++I wonder...where did that term originate? I mean, I can understand its usage as a way of distinguishing it from other fictional properties, but I totally detest where it's gone, with the whole "Earth-616" nonsense. DC's Earth-1 and Earth-2 is all good and fine, but I also cannot stand the real STAR TREK now being referred to as the "Prime" universe. All of these parallel universes really do detract from the verisimilitude of the thing, don't they? •• Plus, they are the ultimate in de-uniquing. In ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS, Larry Niven pondered the profound effect it would have on society if parallel universes were not only proven to exist, but we began freely communicating and trading with them. Basically, the suicide rate goes up. A lot. Cuz, what point is there to life, if every single choice you make is made differently by another version of you? Every success is a failure, every failure a success. NOTHING MATTERS. This is an argument I had several times with Mark Gruenwald, aka Captain Ominiverse. He never could set aside his mania for the multiverse to allow even the thought that it might not be a good idea. Not in fiction, anyway.
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Conrad Teves
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Joined: 28 January 2014
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | 5
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JB>>This is an argument I had several times with Mark Gruenwald, aka Captain Ominiverse. He never could set aside his mania for the multiverse to allow even the thought that it might not be a good idea. Not in fiction, anyway.<<
In fiction, I think the key is imposing explicit limitations on the idea. E.g., a warp drive that has speed limitations is more useful in a fiction context than one that allows instantaneous travel wherever. For instance, Niven and Pournelle had an instantaneous drive in The Mote In God's Eye series, but it could only be used from specific points. On the other hand, in Revenge of the Sith, Padme flew across the galaxy in the time it took Yoda to walk across the Senate. That felt odd. Even if such a thing were possible, it ran counter to intuition, which in fiction can break the suspension of disbelief bubble if you aren't careful. I was just talking with a friend this morning about the challenge of writing a Justice League story because you have devise a problem that cannot be trivially solved by a whole host of extremely strong, extremely diverse superpowers. The DC bunch seem a tad over-powered compared with their Marvel counterparts. In fiction, limitations are a good thing.
In real life, I don't think life has any point other than what you choose to give it. If I knew for a fact there were other "me's" out there who had succeeded where I failed, I would take it as inspiration to succeed--a choice. That sort of story like Niven's though is great to try and explore exactly what one means by "free will," as that can be philosophical jello when you start trying to pin it down.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | 6
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Just to mention -- that was supposed to say SUPERHERO fiction.
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Mike Norris
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | 7
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For me the Earth 2 solution would have been "Don't mention the war". For the first decade after their revival, the JSA fightng in WWII was never mentioned. It was implied by them being heroes roughly twenty years older than the JLA but never mentioned out right. It was Paul Levitz;s origin written in the 70s that first tied them to WWII and Thomas' work in the 80s that cemented it Thing is, the bulk of the JSA's adventures had no connection to the war and roughly half took place after the war had ended. So the JSA could have eternally been slightly older heroes from another Earth if Levitz and Thomas had continued to downplay/ignore the WII connection like previous writers.
Edited by Mike Norris on 20 June 2014 at 4:21pm
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John Byrne
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | 8
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During the War, superhero comics rarely did topical stories. The covers might have something related to the war effort, but there was no follow-thru on the inside.
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Stephen Robinson
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | 9
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I'm just not sure if a JSA from (eternally) 20 or so years ago would
make sense or would even work that well. SMALLVILLE did it this way,
setting the JSA in the 1970s, but that makes them very different
characters.
My preference is to keep the characters the same. The generation that
fought in WWII was unique. Make them Vietnam-era, and you have
something completely different. It's similar to Captain America. When
he was brought back in 1964, he was a just a generation "out of his
time." He could have known Reed Richards and Ben Grimm as young
men! That resulted in very distinct type of stories. Fortunately, Captain
America was kept in WWII so the character remained the same and
only the stories changed.
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Mike Norris
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | 10
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QUOTE:
I'm just not sure if a JSA from (eternally) 20 or so years ago would
make sense or would even work that well. SMALLVILLE did it this way,
setting the JSA in the 1970s, but that makes them very different
characters |
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Does it? As I said the characters weren't that active in the war and spent most of their time fighting crooks and evil scientists. They were no more defined by the war than Superman and Batman.
Edited by Mike Norris on 20 June 2014 at 4:51pm
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Brian O'Neill
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | 11
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ALL-STAR COMICS did back-to-back issues in which the JSA, most of whose members had enlisted in the service, regrouped as the 'Justice Batallion'(although that never replaced 'Society' in the official name); and followed that with a hypothetical story(nobody called the 'imaginary' then), in which the group managed to end the war(therefore allowing the writers to sidestep it from then on). Thomas explained that as an 'illusion'(in a chilling sequence with Alan Scott).
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Jason Czeskleba
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| Posted: 20 June 2014 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | 12
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IIRC there were just 4 or 5 stories in which the JSA was shown involved in the war, and after that they went back to fighting crooks. That's a relatively small portion of their Golden Age output. I suspect the writers of All-Star Comics realized pretty quickly that doing stories about the heroes being active in the war was a dead end, because you can't show the heroes winning the war or even making significant progress towards that goal, or else you've started to diverge too much from the real world setting that you want them to inhabit.
As Mike said, WWII was not a major part of their Golden Age history. I think it makes far more sense to have them perpetually 20 years older than the current heroes, and simply avoid mentioning the war. There's no reason their history needs to be tied to WWII, and the convolutions necessary to explain it far outweigh any benefit from maintaining that link.
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Topic Closed)
