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Andrew Bitner
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 01 June 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 7526
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 8:55am | IP Logged | 1
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Andrew, I *do* read the comics. I know what I'm talking about because I'm actually reading this stuff, which is how I know it is less and less fulfilling. When I say that I miss the days of Spider-Man doing his daily routine and then fighting a random bad guy, or Superman *nearly* missing a deadline because he's saving the planet, it's not random blather from a guy who read comics 35 years ago and is pissed off about comic books he isn't reading. "Writing for the trade" is an evolutionary development that, to me, has created massive problems with storytelling generally. Coupling that with crossover fever and mega-event bombshells, well, like I said, it'd be nice to have more stories that don't involve THE END OF EVERYTHING, CONTINUED IN ___________ ad nauseum.
Edited by Andrew Bitner on 21 January 2015 at 8:57am
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Andrew Bitner
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 01 June 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 7526
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 8:58am | IP Logged | 2
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Maybe we'll see things change after CONVERGENCE and SECRET WAR but I'm not holding my breath. As noted above, a perfect "jumping on" point is also a perfect "jumping off" point.
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Jason Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2473
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 10:54am | IP Logged | 3
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I made the right decision to stop reading superhero comics in 2010. What a mess.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | 4
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I was a bit too grumpy in my last post, sorry about that. But I stand by my point about Superior Spider-Man. The story lasted about a year, was well-paced, and was confined to a single title (plus the Spider-Man Team-Up book). Compare that to the year-plus-long stretches in the nineties where characters like Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman were replaced by clones/sidekicks/etc., which ran across four different books that pretty much meant you couldn't just buy Action Comics or Web of Spider-Man every month and get more than a quarter of a story.
Superior Spider-Man was an interesting concept, we knew it would be temporary, and if readers didn't like it and wanted to take a year off of reading the main Spider-Man book, easy enough. Sales were great, so there was no incentive for Marvel to wrap it all up in a four-issue story arc, and Peter Parker's back in the driver's seat in a book called Amazing Spider-Man already. For my money, the story moved at a good clip, there was an issue's worth of content every month (well, twice a month, but you know what I mean), and it wasn't all that different than waiting out an Avengers roster change or a new costume or creative team.
Sometimes you'll get a really prolific, long-lasting writer like Peter David on Hulk or Dan Slott on Spider-Man or Brian Michael Bendis on any number of books, and if you don't like that guy's writing, you're out of luck if you're a big fan of the character that he's writing. And maybe some characters will never be as entertaining to you as when you first discovered them, or maybe you've read as many new Aquaman stories as you'll ever want to read in your lifetime. It's not like there's any shortage of other books out there.
Getting back to the original post, though, yes, there does seem to be danger in raising the stakes for each superhero comic exponentially to the point that you can't have Iron Man stop a bank robber or get into a scrap with the Melter or the Unicorn anymore. When it feels like every issue has to be the Avengers encountering some threat that's potentially going to destroy the entire universe, it's harder to feel invested when they're just trying to stop some villain team that wants to rob Fort Knox. Which is probably why I'm not reading any team books these days.
Sales seem to indicate that most people are perfectly fine with buying into every single crossover that hits, and that the "small" books are never going to be giant sellers that the rest of the industry will try to emulate, but keep voting with your wallets and we'll hope that we all keep getting the kinds of books that we want to read.
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Jason Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2473
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | 5
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Titles like Superior Spider-Man are based upon ignoring the idea that every issue of a comic is conceivably someone's first issue. And this has been the norm in mainstream superhero comics for over 20 years now.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | 6
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Titles like Superior Spider-Man are based upon ignoring the idea that every issue of a comic is conceivably someone's first issue. And this has been the norm in mainstream superhero comics for over 20 years now.
The book was very new-reader friendly. "One of Spider-Man's greatest villains is in control of Spider-Man's body." Even if you don't know who Spider-Man is yet, that's easy enough to grasp.
The Avengers tends to be a whole different story, and I ended up dropping those since I realized I could read every single issue and still not be quite sure what was going on or who was on the team. I've dropped pretty much every team book over the years when too much seemed to be happening to the characters in other books (and that wasn't explained well in the team book), or when no explanation seemed to be given about any given character's status quo (plenty of individual X-Men have changed a lot since the nineties).
Most books about individual characters are as accessible as they've been in decades, even if you're picking up part three of a six-part story.
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Dave Phelps
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4184
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | 7
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The temporary substitution idea is hardly a new one. See James Rhodes as Iron Man for 30 issues in the 80s, John Walker as Captain America for 18 issues a few years after that, or even Medusa filling in for Sue Richards in the Fantastic Four for a few years back in the 70s.
Using an intentionally temporary status quo as fodder for new stories is a perfectly reasonable way to shake stuff up for a bit before re-establishing the standard premise. "New reader friendly" just means giving people the information they need to understand what's going on. It doesn't mean "avoid temporary status quos at all costs just in case."
To me, the problem arises when it feels like you go from "wild new direction" to "wild new direction" without any room to breathe. Or worse, do the same shake-ups over and over again. (Oh, look, an Avengers story where Captain America faces off against Iron Man. How novel!)
I don't particularly care for Dan Slott's work on Spider-Man, but he's generally been pretty good about mixing the smaller stories with the bigger ones (at least up until the return of AMAZING - seems like it went from epic to epic this time but I haven't been paying much attention).
Edited by Dave Phelps on 21 January 2015 at 6:14pm
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
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Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | 8
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Superior Spider-Man had a lot of standalone issues and two-parters, building up to some multi-part storyline in the final issues. Like you said, though, Amazing Spider-Man hasn't quite found its groove yet. It ran a few issues, had an Original Sin crossover, then it dove right into the big Spider-Verse story after that. But that's selling like gangbusters, and at least every series involved in the story contains a complete story. I'm just buying Amazing Spider-Man for the duration, and everything's right there; if you just wanted to buy Spider-Man 2099 or Spider-Woman, you'd still get your regular story with the lead character you wanted to read about.
Hoping that Slott gets back into his normal routine of mostly one- and two-part stories after this wraps up.
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Tim O Neill
Byrne Robotics Security
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 10937
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | 9
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I see where you are coming from Andrew and actually agree that Slott is an exceptional writer - before the "Superior" story kicked in, he was on fire and I was enjoying his work on the book a lot. He had a knack for Peter's voice that we haven't seen in a long time. Maybe that is what bothered me -- it's always hard to see a favorite writer or artist take a wrong turn. I have no doubt that he was able to mine something to keep people interested in the book, but he lost me big time.
I think the story crossed the line for me because it not only took Peter Parker out of the mix, it put a villain in the driver's seat. Making the villain the protagonist is not something I want to see beyond a few issues - it is self indulgent and takes the book away from an all ages book into a place that is for a niche audience tired of what they perceive to be a formulaic title. And this was at a time when the Andrew Garfield movie was afoot, which did a great job of showing how to portray the character. I recognize the title was successful, but its success speaks to a readership that is narrow.
Point taken about the other titles available at the time, but as a casual reader of new comics, I always go for the main title. I think the main title should be the default all ages title, and the secondary titles should experiment with these kinds of stories.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | 10
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Using an intentionally temporary status quo as fodder for new stories is a perfectly reasonable way to shake stuff up for a bit before re-establishing the standard premise. "New reader friendly" just means giving people the information they need to understand what's going on. It doesn't mean "avoid temporary status quos at all costs just in case."••• Be honest with yourself for a moment. Dig down deep and find the kid -- presumably -- who first started reading comics. Find his emotions, his expectations, his excitement for the new issues. Think about your favorite characters and titles. Now, imagine you'd started reading four or five issues into a thirty issue "epic" in which the main character doesn't even appear! Would having that explained to you every issue REALLY have made you come back for more? Think really hard about this, now. And don't fall into the trap of thinking "Well, I've seen all this before, and I know it ways gets back to normal." Try to remember a time when you didn't know what "normal" was!
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Stephen Robinson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 5835
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| Posted: 21 January 2015 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | 11
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Even before I bought an issue of the Hulk, I was a big fan of the
character (mostly from the 1980s cartoon ). I recall picking up my first
issue with great excitement, which diminished quicky when I realized if
was an issue where, as part of a larger story arc, the Hulk didn't speak
and Banner didn't even appear. It was nothing like what I'd expected.
I like upsets to the status quo but it should still feel like the larger book.
Maybe the Daily Planet or even Metropolis doesn't appear in an issue
of SUPERMAN but we still see Clark Kent, Superman, and Lois Lane.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
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| Posted: 22 January 2015 at 12:01am | IP Logged | 12
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One of the first issues of Amazing Spider-Man I read was #293, which had Spider-Man dead and buried with Kraven the Hunter running around impersonating him. That got me hooked and I could barely wait for each next installment to hit my local newsstand that summer.
Come to think of it, I started reading Captain America when John Walker was the replacement Cap, I started reading Avengers during a stretch when their Big Three weren't around and it was just a random bunch of heroes I'd never seen before (right before Walt Simonson came in and blew up the whole team), and my first issue of the Fantastic Four was during a prolonged stretch without Reed and Sue in the book. I'm sure that any number of my first exposures to long-running characters in the eighties was during some weird status quo period.
Are kids going to give the current Captain America run with The Falcon as the new Cap a look? I'd guess they're just as likely to check it out as they would be with any random, not-available-on-newsstands issue of the past 15 years. Kids are probably most likely to see these as trade paperbacks at their local or school libraries now, so the real hooks are cool art, cool story, and characters they recognize from other media. The Falcon-Cap costume looks enough like The Falcon that kids saw in the Winter Soldier movie, plus there probably aren't any shortage of Steve Rogers as Cap trades at any library that carries recent Marvel books. |
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Topic Closed)
