Once again, the venerable
Seebelow Gets It Right with their assessment of
10 years of the Ultimate Universe. Here's a sweet tasty morsel from it:
"There's also the flaw that all of these fresh starts seemed to represent a chance to slough off the conceits and prejudices of the 1960s, and yet it all ended up almost worse. In the rush to find Ultimate versions of everyone, senseless "Ultimate Vision" and "Ultimate Red Guardian" have shown up, amounting to far less than the sum of the parts of the predeccesors, while attempting to even the playing field between certain female "housewife" superheroes and their male counterparts, all the writers could think to do was make the formerly underappreciated female sidekicks into scientists, just like their heroic hubbies. The watered-down 'me-too'ism of the Ultimate Wasp and Ultimate Invisible Woman is not an improvement over having been an accessory, frankly.
So, ten years into the Ultimate Universe, and all I really know about it is that the writers got to do whatever they wanted, they got to swear more, they're killing the whole thing off under the man who is kryptonite to decent writing, Jeph Loeb, and in the end it all feels like a terrifically long issue of What If where the premise was What If All Superheroes Acted Like Assholes Most Of The Time?"
It seems to be contagious, this consideration of the Ultimate line. Witness Steven Grant's
latest column: "Bringing us to Marvel's current attempt to resuscitate its Ultimate universe with ULTIMATUM, arguably this year's most ignored "Big Event." The Ultimate Universe was ostensibly created as an alternative to the messy morass of Marvel continuity and an entry point for new readers. (The rumor at the time speculated a long term goal of slowly replacing failing Marvel titles with new Ultimate titles until the old universe was a memory and the new the company's new torch carrier. Regardless of truth – I couldn't say – it's not the first time such an idea surfaced in connection with Marvel; at the time, the grapevine had it that Marvel's New Universe of the mid-'80s was also intended to phase out the old Marvel Universe.) Certainly 9 years ago ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN was the very definition of market heat, and the line held it for some time, so what went wrong?
Basically, what always goes wrong. Not long ago I read in interview with the late Charles Biro, writer-illustrator-editor at Lev Gleason Comics in the '40s-'50s, architect of their line and creator of the incredibly successful CRIME DOES NOT PAY. In the mid-40s, Gleason Comics were burning up the newsstands and routinely outselling DC, Timely (Marvel), Fawcett etc. on the strength of four comics: DAREDEVIL (recently reincarnated as Death-Defying Devil in Dynamite's new superhero line), BOY COMICS, CRIME DOES NOT PAY and its sister publication, CRIME & PUNISHMENT. They made plenty of money and it was all the work Biro could handle, but Gleason looked at the accounts receivable and figured that if four books made that much money, eight books would bring in twice as much.
Not surprisingly, Gleason was dead wrong, though it's a conclusion most people in his position, especially in comics, tend to jump to."
I gotta be honest, both make quite the strong case.
79 comments:
When the imprint first started, I remember thinking Marvel had a great opportunity to look back on its past, take the best concepts and most successful stories, and go from there while avoiding the pitfalls. They were basically creating a new Marvel Universe with the benefit of hindsight.
And for a while that seemed to be the case, because you got a lot of familiar tropes being done once, properly, and resolved - we've talked about Ultimate Hank and Janet Pym, but in "Ultimate Spider-Man" Peter tells MJ his secret after the first arc, and they get together almost immediately afterwards; Wolverine gets together with Jean Grey, she dumps him and then she hooks up with Cyclops; Ultimate Proteus combined David Haller and Kevin McTaggart (which, IMO, should've been the case with the original, as their backstories are perfectly compatible) and so on.
Grant is correct when he says that mindless expansion played a big part in the line's collapse, but I'd say the initial rot set in even earlier, right around the time Bendis started cannibalizing his own stories with things like Ultimate Ronin. Then you started having lesser writers like Kirkman and Loeb mucking up the works, and ultimately (pun intended) the imprint ended up doing a 10-year compressed version of Marvel's 40-year slide towards creative bankruptcy.
Well, there was a certain logic to it (the same logic behind Heroes Rebrn) that a clean start could attract readers who felt hopelessly snowed under by mountains of continuity, right? Problem is, I'd say there's every chance that if it catches on, ten years down the line you'll have the same problem intially.
I think the Ultimate line's problem is, is that once the formula for a successful Ultimate character was established (i.e. when Ultimates was a big seller) every Ultimate book was going to be done in that exact same style, and there would be as many books as the market would tolerate (and beyond) and it was never going to deviate much from that formula.So things were bound to get boring with that amount of homogeneity.
On the other hand "Ultimate Ronin" is pretty much a perfect two-word epitaph for the Ultimate line, really. Because who gives a shit about Ronin? Did anyone ever?
I'm not sure that's the default outcome, though. I mean, if we're in agreement that Ultimate Ronin was the beginning of the end, doesn't that imply that the Ultimate line only started going downhill when idiots like Bendis and Kirkman began cannibalizing the main MU for story ideas, thus negating any difference between the two? Vaughan had the right idea during his Ultimate X-Men run: trick the readers by relying on their expectations, and then subvert them. If Longshot turns up, you'll think he's the hero of the story, but he's not. And if Sinister's shown to have a master, you'll guess it's Apocalypse, and then it turns out Apocalypse is just a figment of Sinister's imagination. (At least until Kirkman retconned him into existence.)
So perhaps the problem is that the Ultimate writers lost sight of their mission statement: to tell different stories, and different kinds of stories.
And no, I don't think anyone cared about Ronin. Ever. They still don't. :)
I think it was a combination of factors, but mostly that moment (whenever it was--I didn't read many Ultimate books, to be honest) when they just stopped trying and not just in the sense of recycling old characters and plot points . . .just when they looked at the accumulated history of the MU they had to draw from and didn't ask "OK, do we need to re-do this as is? Is there another angle we can do on this, maybe? Or is the idea worthwhile, but maybe we can filter it through and get it to play in a different context?" That was the beginning of the end.
I have no idea what the big deal is with him, save he's named after a rogue samurai but dresses like a ninja and also he sucks like a demonic vacuum cleaner.
Not to scapegoat the man unjustly, but Kirkman's arrival seemed to represent the collective throwing-up of hands in resignation - that was right about the time Bendis did Ultimate Ronin, Ultimate Moon Knight and Ultimate Carnage, none of whom were all that different from their counterparts.
Ronin is only slightly entertaining as an example of Bendis' fall from grace; the twit started going on about how no one would ever guess Ronin's identity, except everyone figured out it was Daredevil (seriously, like, even John Byrne probably knew), leading to the revelation that Ronin was Echo. A woman. Who apparently flattened her breasts to two dimensions every time she turned up on the page. It was such an obvious cop-out that the name became synonymous with Monumental Suck, and that's how it's stayed.
To this day, I am completely lost as to why Robert Kirkman is someone I should pay attention to. I've given all the big stuff a try and . . .nope, I just don't get it.
I remember that! Man, that was hellaciously annoying (and, as history's taught us "Mystery member" stuff in team books always ends up either being prematurely spoiled or a massive anti-climax) and the whole Echo thing was . . .yeah. It was such a non-sequitur choice as to be completely anti-climactic, really.
That makes two of us. It can't just be that he can string a few sentences together without sounding like a complete idiot - granted, that's still a step above most people working in comics today, but that doesn't make his own work any better...
That's just the kind of petulant sore loser Bendis is - perfectly emblematic behavior of the whole Frat House of Bad Ideas at the moment. I'd say we get the writers we deserve, but I happen to think we deserve better. :)
Well, not even that, really. I just don't find his stories that engaging, and I find his tendency to wallow in ultra-violence for very little story purpose to be a bit repellent, really.
It's the Shocking Swerve in a nutshell, really. Wrestling writers love to pop Shocking Swerves in the name of tricking the fans on the Internet. Never mind that you're tweaking a very small percentage of the fanbase in the name of a ridiculous and utterly pointless pissing contest.
I don't mind gratuitous violence if it's balanced out elsewhere, but really, Kirkman's never created a scenario or a character that could hold my attention for longer than two minutes.
As far as I know, though, wrestling can be much more dynamic in terms of how it responds to audience feedback - if a storyline takes a wrong step and there's negative backlash, it's probably much easier to fix things on the fly than in comics. (Unless the wrestler in question has gone on a homicidal/suicidal rampage. That'd probably be a bit more challenging to undo.)
It's gotten so abused as a tactic this decade I could do with having it sit on the shelf for a bit. It's lost all power to engage for me, it seems.
Unless the wrestler in question has gone on a homicidal/suicidal rampage. That'd probably be a bit more challenging to undo.
In those cases, the standard operating procedure is to passively mind-wipe everyone and hope they forget. No, really--that's about what they did when Chris Benoit lost his fucking mind.
Well, it's much more tied to fan reaction--getting "over" with the crowd is the engine that drives a character's advancement in wrestling(ideally--there are other factors that screw things up sometimes) The problem is, it matters most who's over with the crowd (they pay the most for the seats at the arena and buy merchandise while they're there, ideally) to a lesser but still great extent (they pay for PPV, ideally and follow it on TV, thus driving ratigs, etc.) Wayyyyyyyy on the ass end of that spectrum are the smart fans on the Internet, who are so infinitesimal in the larger scheme of things, that they're the ones who get swerved, even though there's no percentage in it and they're the least susceptible to being swerved. And yet . . .it happens all the damn time.
Fortunately, it's the staple of a very specific group of writers and I'm pretty sure we already know to avoid them anyway. :)
I remember hearing about that... on the one hand, it's not exactly a common situation so the flailing and panicking is understandable, but on the other hand, those who fail History will just have to take the class again, etc.
Now, see, that sounds like Joe Quesada's modus operandi: so much effort is invested in Internet marketing and misdirection and interviews and whatnot, but the company line is still that the percentage of readers who are also active online is negligible at best, nonexistent at worst. So then why go through all the trouble in the first place?
Yeah. They're not going to drag me back, really. :)
It's not . . .but then, it was endemic of a whole host of problems in that industry which would blow this way past the character limit, and may have just been the leading edge of it, but that's something else entirely. That said, the lack of learning from history has never heart comics before.
Yeah, Joe Quesada is to comics what Vince Russo is/was to wrestling--SO focused on working the Internet to the exclusion of everyone, allegedly to the justification that in doing so they put the Internet in their place as a noisy, rowdy motley horde of Goths or whatever. But if they are, then what the hell is the point?
Good for you. Who needs the blood pressure? :)
Diminishing sales may disagree with you on that point...
It does make me wonder about the facts of the situation, though: how much influence does the Internet-based readership hold in the direct market? Given that the average comic book reader is probably nearing thirty, it's hard for me to believe there's a significant portion of the fanbase who aren't represented online...
Not me. Ask anyone who knows me--I'm enough of a ball of stress as it is.
True, mind you, that was awfully garbled, and I think what I meant to say is that the comic industry never seemed to heed history, and also I should never try to write these at 2 AM. :)
I would imagine it's more than the comic companies want to admit, and yet less than comic fans think, if that equivocation made any sense. I can't imagine that if they were as insignificant as comics creators say, that Legion of 3 Worlds would have finished up as it did.
Well... I think it's more that the comics industry only uses history as a referent rather than a cautionary tale: it's all well and good to bring back Barry Allen but no one seems to recall the very valid reason DC killed him off in the first place.
Makes sense to me. Not sure where to place that, though: on the one hand, we're probably lucky the K-Box/Jesse Baker types don't wield the kind of power they'd clearly like to wield over the Big Two, but if someone like Al Kennedy had that degree of influence... well, Jeph Loeb would probably be shipped off to some dark corner of the Image universe, for starters.
Oh that never happened--Barry was beloved by all and we were apparently just too stupid to realise just how special he was, which is why we have to have it explained to us by Geoff Johns.
That's a world I'd like to live in. I wonder sometimes if the K-Box/Baker types do run comics, they're just a different type of nutter and they don't spend as much time on the Internet as the other kind.
But what the hell do I know? I liked the Claremont/Jim Lee issues of Uncanny X-Men, but also thought Morrison's New X-Men was brilliant. Obviously my judgment is suspect or something. :)
Hmph. Let's hope that backwards-looking mentality gets tossed out once the DC restructuring is complete. As with Marvel, I can't conceive of a situation where the Corporate Overlords could possibly make the situation worse, and since Levitz has apparently had an active hand in the way the DCU's been going lately, I don't feel quite as bad about his demotion...
There's something to that theory: certainly people like Bendis and Johns are as stuck in the past as those two, and they can be just as virulent when it comes to characters/storylines they just don't like... but on the other hand, for all their faults, I can't see them ever going as far as K-Box and Baker do.
That's different, though. I mean, I'll admit a sentimental attachment to X-Cutioner's Song as one of the first X-Men books I ever read, and I'll defend it up to a point... but Morrison's run worked for me on a completely different level.
Given the corporate mentality, there may be some of that around--given the plan seems to be to make the two companies into trademark farms, there is a high likelihood that the most enduring characters may be locked into their most potentially profitable iterations, left alone, and played safe with. Maybe. Whether that means less rape and zombies or what, no one knows and I hate to speculate and be wrong more than I am already.
It's probably different manifestations of the same problem. I was watching a documentary about when the original Doctor Who series was canceled and brought back (it's a long story) and one of the reasons they stated for it was the notion of "fan ownership of the show." Alan Moore said as much recently that when fans started writing comics by and for fans, it pretty much sounded the death knell.
Fun fact: I still have a full set of X-Cutioner's Song cards. Partly because I have fond memories of it too (and Nicieza's hilarious purple prose on the backs of the cards is a hoot) As for Morrison, lord I re-read the trades the other day and it's amazing just how full of energy they are, y'know? As kind as I tend to look at the 90's were, this was the first time since the Jim Lee/Claremont run where I felt personally engaged with the book again.
I'm ambivalent about that possibility. On the one hand, playing it safe drastically reduces the chance that something like NEW X-MEN could happen again; then again, every bad decision Marvel and DC have made over the past five years was motivated by a desire to "shake things up", so... less rape and zombies, yes. And that would be a very good thing.
Not sure I agree with that point as a generalization - Morrison was, after all, a fan of the early Claremont years in X-Men. The problem isn't fandom per se so much as it is that sub-species of fan that's stuck in the past and wants everything Back The Way It Was. I imagine they're fairly easy to spot: anyone who starts a story pitch with the phrase "Let's bring (insert old-school character name here) back from (insert traditional method for disposal of useless relics here)!" should be fired immediately.
Oh, I remember those! They ended up printing the whole thing in an apocryphal comic, which was basically Xavier reading Stryfe's LJ Poetry about how much he hated everybody because they didn't understand his pain. Very ahead-of-its-time!
Morrison single-handedly brought me back to comics after almost ten years of not even thinking about them. No small feat. :)
Leaving aside that New X-Men may be for all time a non-recurrent phenomena (been reading through it again in preparation for a whole big review) it may well be that the lesson here is that rape and zombies have been so overused that the next great innovation that really blows people away and sets the tone for the new decade will have to be something else. What, I can't say. If I were that prescient I would have hit the bloody powerball by now.
Strongly agree. One of the things I find curious about New X-Men in retrospect is that Morrison was borrowing stuff from every era of Claremont (one could see the recurring themes of the U-men and the Third Species as his spin on the Neo. But, y'know, good.) It works well, but its interesting you can get things like this from the same point of departure. I'm fine with that, of course--so long as it's pushing things into new areas.
YES. And that is why I love X-Cutioner's Song to this day--You collect all the cards and you have the side story of Stryfe being all emo and shit and it's great. I like to think Devin Grayson saw one, snapped her fingers and went, "Like that. Yes."
It's awesome to re-read them now--they really do hold up rather well. Not even Silvestri's Christ-awful scratchings in the last arc hurt it all that much. Never mind, read in one sitting, it's easier to take the larger plots and themes as a single body of work. :)
I like to think the circumstances that led to the creation of New X-Men could be replicated - not in the immediate future, because Quesada and the rest of the Kappa Lotta Krappa Fraternity have got to go. And then all you need is a writer willing to think outside the box. In fact, I think Carey could do the job admirably, given the opportunity.
Of course, given the current level of brain power at the Big Two, it's quite likely the next big innovation will be zombie rapists.
I think the key difference between them, insofar as the X-Men specifically are concerned, is that Claremont never thought his high concepts through - the Neo arc is an excellent example, because as a launching point the idea of a post-mutant species is excellent... it's just that Claremont didn't know what to do with that once he got the ball rolling. Morrison, on the other hand, knew exactly where he was going and it shows.
I just had to look up some of those entries. "White king against black king. Yet here, nothing but grey reigns supreme. Shades of grey, of uncertainty, insecurity, confusion, anger, love and hate. Shades of me. Shades of you. Shades of them. ... I did it for only two reasons. I did it because I hate you all. And I did it, ultimately, because I hate myself." WOW. That's, like, so deep. ;)
Although even then, it took Dino Pollard's annotations for me to realize that the Sublime connection went all the way back to Cassandra Nova and the Nanosentinels...
It could, I suppose--anything, ultimately, is possible, but a lot of stars would have to align, I think. And I don't know if Carey would do something exactly like that (and probably he shouldn't--you can never innovate the same twice, right?)but he luckily doesn't do too bad with the hand he's got now, eh?
Sad, but true, I'm afraid. As much as I like Claremont, I have to say, I'm racking my brain trying to think of an idea that he didn't appropriate from somewhere else, and the few I can remember. . . aren't great. Bless him, that's not his line. Fortunately, Big Ideas you can walk around in and marvel at was Morrison's stock in trade and it worked grandly. I know people hate "Weapon Plus" but the concept of The World was just so cool . . .
I wish I'd had those annotations, sadly. Would have made writing the WDT for New X-Men a LOT easier I reckon. :) That said, it is kind of clever how the Sentinels are implacable villains for the X-Men, eh? :)
Oh, and . . .if I didn't fear getting sued by Marvel? I would totally build a fake LJ account under the name "chaosbringerstryfe92" and just transcribe all those cards. Because that would be one of those cases where technology had just been waiting for its moment.
Admittedly, he was more innovative at the start of his run - his new uses for Rogue, the Children of the Vault, Pandemic, the Hecatomb and so on. The Legacy reboot has been more about revisiting the past (though, for some reason, it's so much better when Carey does it than, say, Bendis).
I imagine most people are opposed to the Weapon Plus arc because of Bachalo's horrid artwork. Which I can certainly understand. But retconning every secret government project from Captain America to Nuke as Weapons One through Nine? Genius!
To say nothing of the fact that, somewhat like the X-Men themselves, the Sentinels are constantly evolving into new and different forms. :)
That was a great time, although I have to admit, probably Carey's finest hour with regards to revisiting the past was referencing Hazard, of all people. That he managed to weave that into anything like a coherent narrative, especially given it was ignored for about 15 years, was frankly amazing.
That wasn't Bachalo's finest hour, was it? I always wondered why Ultimaton had like, three thumbs. I just liked the whole "superheated time" concept, myself--there was something about the way the thing didn't make logical sense but felt right, somehow that I liked.
Yes indeed! My dream X-Men project/stupid fan idea basically boils down to an evolutionary/arms race between humans, mutants and Sentinels. It wasn't going to build to a Days of Future Past rehash or anything like that as much as a kind of three-way contest for the future, if that makes any sense.
Of course, the crowning moment was that he actually killed Hazard, thereby ensuring that no one will ever, ever revisit that toxic wasteland of a character again. :)
To be fair, has Bachalo ever had an hour that could be defined as "fine"? :)
Of course it does: separating the Sentinels from humanity and spinning them off into their own "faction" would give the X-Men a different kind of threat to face - in the past, the Sentinels were always manifestations for human bigotry, but if you take humanity out of the picture you're left with a relentless enemy that adapts and evolves with time, creating an analogy between mutants and technology; perhaps that would finally trigger the construction of a new metaphor for mutants, as the usual underdog bit has gotten a bit out of hand after M-Day.
That was such an odd roll-out for a character, one of those weird moments where they're obviously marking time and yet still trying to do something of consequence. However, it doesn't work, because the X-Men can easily defeat someone firing jumper cables at them.
. . .uhm, the first Death mini-series? I thought it wasn't bad.
That was basically my idea--the Sentinels start out as a deterrent against mutants (my idea had mutancy as much of a social movement as a evolutionary watershed--it's a very long and bizarre thing) and then later on Magneto explains that in trying to meet the ever-evolving threat of mutantkind, the Sentinels are becoming a species all their own, except whereas mutants are the result of a natural process, he Sentinel species is an opportunistic paradigm--by experimenting on humans and mutants, the Sentinels would be constantly "upgrading" themselves, and eventually the story becomes mutants at one extreme, the Sentinels at the other, and humanity in the middle.
This was my idea, anyways. Bit daft, I know :)
I'd always thought of Hazard as belonging to the same "school" of characters as, say, Siena Blaze - representing a point where the writers had blown through every conceivable set of powers twice, and having run out of ideas, just started making up absolutely crazy (and utterly useless) power sets just to introduce new characters.
Well, Gaiman's like champagne, he makes anything better. :)
Oh, it's utterly daft - precisely the kind of ideas the line should be pursuing: big, bold, exciting stuff. And, of course, you can then complicate matters by having Sentinels evolve to the point of achieving self-awareness, if only because that would force the X-Men to basically commit murder when destroying them, where they could've cheerfully torn apart an entire army of them before...
Like, as I mentioned on your blog, Reignfire. He rained fire, and that was pretty much all. The best part of this was his power, scrubby though it was, was enough to allow him to lead the MLF, no slouch when it comes to lame-ass power sets.
And also like champagne, less erotic being poured down someone's back than you'd think. Wait, I think that came out wrong . . .
Exactly. Even moreso, since the Sentinels would start "upgrading" mutants (integrating a unpredictable mutation into the Sentinel paradigm in the process), possibly having to kill their own as well. If you want to add some immediacy to the X-Men's mission, and excitement back to the books, raising the stakes in a way that puts the X-Men in a interesting position in relation to the story, and putting them in a conflict wherein the future is up for grabs in many different aspects is the kind of X-Men book I think I'd like to read.
Of course, the most baffling thing about Reignfire was that awful, awful hairstyle. He looked like a time-displaced roadie for Van Halen.
I doubt it. :)
As would I - the X-books have been running the "civil rights" metaphor for almost thirty years now; it's certainly better than Stan Lee's original paradigm, but I wouldn't object at all to another redefinition of the franchise...
The great thing about that was that five years after the reign of El DeBarge both he and Bishop were sporting Jheri curls despite being from the future. What did they know that we didn't? ;)
*ahem* I will look innocent now and decline to incriminate myself further. For once.
I liked Morrison's rather succint definition myself--"The X-Men is about The New vs The Old." So when I spitball ideas about writing X-Men, that's usually what's in my mind. While I think you still can do stories about The X-men as a civil rights metaphor, it's been done so much in my life that maybe it's time to give it a rest. The part of X-Men most people have claimed to identify with--the outcast against an uncaring and hostile society--is something that I remembered responding to very strongly when I was younger.
I defer to the late great Robin Harris on this matter: "Jheri curls saved the motor in my car. We were driving to San Diego and the oil light came on..."
Mmm-hmm. ;)
And rightfully so: despite the franchise's many missteps over the years, they've managed to hold onto the power of that message surprisingly well. As for the "New vs. Old" dichotomy, the only problem I can see with that paradigm in the long term is that the storytelling focus would be on "The New" (meaning the X-Men), which means you couldn't ever do a post-mutant development because it'd shift mutants to "The Old" and that'd be the end of them.
Of course, now that I think about it, transitioning the concept of the X-Men from mutants to post-mutants might've been a very interesting change to the franchise...
I guess when they remake The Road Warrior, I know what hairstyle everyone will have. ;)
I wish I had a "blush" emoticon right now, for some reason. :)
Oh I don't know--there's a story to tell there as well: What do you do when you won the revolution? It's easy to rebel against the status quo, but what happens when you become the status quo? How does your thinking and your tactics change? What sort of world have you created?
My idea--and this is a terrible historical analogy, and I'm apologizing in advance--is that the human/mutant/old/new conflict is framed a bit like Weimar Germany--There's a lot of passion and energy for change, a lot of danger and hardship, and a lot of people wanting to steer things in one direction or another, and the result could be something wonderful or (as history taught us in Weimar's case) something more horrible than we could possibly imagine. The mood of it should be that things are going forward rapidly, but you're never sure which direction they're going in, and whether the whole "rushing towards tomorrow with no way of turning back" is a good idea. Then it's a story about the push and pull between old and new and the changes that come along the way--"Where are we going and what sort of world will we find we've made when we get there?"
And, of course, instead of dealing in methane, the post-apocalyptic landscape will be full of Jheri curl juice deposits. :)
It would probably involve asterisks somewhere. ;)
But that's still a finite story, isn't it? In fact, I think that's something the X-Men franchise has struggled with for decades - the story clearly demands a move forward but the conventions of the medium won't allow it, so instead of seeing "the" future we've been getting more and more "alternate" futures - starting from "Days of Futures Past" through Bishop's timeline, Cable's timeline, "Here Comes Tomorrow", and now Hope's dual future. Each one took the concept to its natural conclusion - either the mutants inherit the earth or they're obliterated by humanity - but each one became invalidated in turn because God forbid the next stage in evolution would actually represent evolution on any level.
That sounds about right. And, of course, the dramatic appeal for readers is that you don't necessarily know which way the wind's blowing until events are already in motion: it's the uncertainty that'd keep people reading.
And it seemed like such an innocuous substance when they advertised it at the end of every episode of "Soul Train" in my youth. Although its flammable properties do explain Reignfire's powers . . .he did not in fact rain fire as much as he was shedding out a combustible weave.
I have a sudden urge to hide behind an asterisk right now. :)
There is some poetntial to extend it, buuut . . .things start getting more ephemeral. If you were to look at the rise of mutantcy as analogous to, say, the women's lib movement in the US, that's certainly a struggle that's been going on for pretty much all of my lifetime and more besides. The central dynamic of the movement has changed as new adversaries--from within and without--have come forward, but you could, theoretically extend it to a certain point. Mind, you'd still need a payoff at some point, so it's not an "infinite" story so much as "able to be prolonged for a long while, but not indefinitely"
Exactly, and looking at my "social movement" metaphor from above--there's going to be push-backs from within and without, as every reversal or victory brings with it changes and alterations to the dynamic. Kind of like how after "Jedi" the Rebels had to get their shit together and actually govern, as they'd pushed the Empire out and now had to make their own stab at governance.
It gets better: according to his backstory, Reignfire began his life as prehistoric goo. Are you pondering what I'm pondering? :)
I've recently started watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender", and aside from being a surprisingly deep and fascinating story in its own right, it's also a great example of how you can/should set a definitive end-point for your story to make it that much better. You could tell the story of the X-Men as a movement from genetic underdog to the status quo, and whatever lies beyond that, but you'd have to be willing to let your reader get to the last page and close the book at some point.
Perhaps not the best example, given that that particular franchise spent its entire projected future telling the exact same story over and over again, without even a hint of cyclical irony. Doesn't exactly make for a thrilling saga. :)
I think so, Brain, but if they called them "sad meals," would children really buy them?
I have yet to see Avatar--it's been on TV bunches over here and I've heard good things about it, but I haven't quite mustered the time to invest in it. Having seen the other Avatar, maybe I'll give it a look. As to the endings thing--well, very true. While it works as a paradigm, it's asking rather a lot, I imagine, for people to sit still for years and years documenting the history of a sociological movement. :)
Well, they've tried every way possible to break the deadlock. If they'd left the EU stuff at the treaty with the Empire, I have a feeling everything would be cool--it was a natural stopping point and felt like an adequate culminatory moment. Unfortunately, they went on from there and everything they tried (new adversaries, rehashing stuff) well . . .it hasn't worked, has it?
Yes, always! :)
I can't recommend it enough - it's an epic story in a fascinating world, and as a bonus (for me, anyway) it takes a shockingly progressive stance regarding gender; we've talked before about how SF and fantasy can be less-than-fair when it comes to competent female characters, and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" just about demolishes that convention. To cite one minor example: mixed-gender Mooks. The bad guy's Stormtrooper-esque armies have an almost equal amount of men and women. Also, the second season premiere introduces a character I believe to be the greatest female villain in the history of Western animation.
Be warned, though: I started out watching two episodes at a time, then four, then six, then eight. Blew through the third (last) season in two days. It's quite compelling. :)
Ideally, though, the sociological aspect would be the backdrop - you could still do "good" mutants vs. "evil" mutants, with everything that entails.
Not as far as I can tell - apparently the new adversaries were Villain Sues, and the Empire broke the peace treaty, and Jacen Solo turned evil. *shrug*
God I miss cartoons like this. The Animaniacs/Pinky & The Brain/Freakazoid thing was a troika of awesomeness.
OK, you sold me. I'm pushing buttons on my TiVo even as I type this. In a wholly unrelated matter--my life has too many buttons in it.
Well, yeah, but the problem with that is trying to make it sound like it's all part of the forward progression and we're not just bogged down in the standard hero-on-villain stuff.
Yeah. I give them all points for trying, but when your Big Moment is bringing in Daala it really speaks for itself, doesn't it?
And, I think, very much a product of the '90s; they certainly don't seem to have contemporary successors...
As long as you avoid this one I'm sure you'll be fine. :)
In fairness, I do think that's one specific area where the X-Men tend to do better than most superheroes, in that their villains (Magneto, Mystique, Sublime, the various _____ of Humanity groups, etc.) tend to be tied into the political/ideological conflict, and the ones that aren't are usually personal nemeses (ie: Cassandra Nova, Dark Phoenix, Stryfe).
Indeed. I wonder if the simplicity of the original trilogy ended up sabotaging the franchise's future: the Rebels are good and the Empire is evil, and the second you put a writer in charge who isn't Timothy Zahn and doesn't have that kind of vision, it's just going to revert to the same binary approach.
Well, in America, an enforced mandate requiring a certain amount of educational content finally killed their chances to be creative, and so finally killed off Saturday Morning at exactly the time that it was starting to have a bit of a renaissance.
I've seen a couple episodes and . . .yeah. It's really interesting and I like how complete the interior mythology feels . . .I'm watching a few more.
Well, some of them, like Magneto and Cassandra Nova pull double-duty as both personal threats and ideological personifications of the central conflict, but yeah, I see what you mean. :)
Well, maybe it's an idea that could only really have run a little while after the six movies said all there really was to say on the subject? I think "Vision of the Future" really draws a line under it. Much as I like "Legacy," apart from a few wrinkles, it's Jedi vs. Sith yet again, innit?
I'd always thought the "edutainment" mandate was more of an '80s thing - if I recall correctly, that's when you had all those series like "GI Joe" or "Thundercats" ending with characters breaking the fourth wall and talking about the power of friendship and honesty, or whatnot. If anything, the '90s seemed to subvert that: you had "Ren and Stimpy", "Darkwing Duck", "Rocko's Modern Life" and, of course, "The Simpsons" (though I suppose that particular one's a breed apart), and none of them seemed explicitly didactic...
So if you disappear for a few days, I'll know where you've gone. :D
Of course, the X-Men aren't exactly an ideologically united front themselves - if anything, Cyclops seems to be leaning more towards Cable's original militant stance, while someone like Beast is more inclined towards Xavier's pseudo-pacifism.
Pretty much. I mean, yes, they obviously tried to complicate the formula by separating the Sith and the Empire, but that's been done too, hasn't it?
That was the camel's nose in the tent. The "knowing is half the battle" BS was a sop thrown to the folks at ACT in the name of convincing them that there was some demonstrable educational value, with the hopes that they'd go off and be busybodies somewhere else. About the mid-90's a federal mandate came through that mandated a set time for educational/instructional programming, and it was ironclad enough that they had to comply and that pretty much killed off the last of the afternoon cartoon blocks and replaced them with infomercials and educational pap, because heaven forbid we make entertaining educational programs anymore.
If I'm not moving house, which is a possibility . . .
Not that any of that is set in stone, as Cyclops lately just seems to twitch in whatever direction the plot needs it to go, because trying to work out the inherent race politics in a story where they live on an island made by fish people is the kind of thing that makes one's head cave in.
More or less. It kinda works, to some extent, but . . .I dunno. Ultimately the whole purpose of the EU stuff is supposed to make money rather than organically grow the franchise and, well, the thing speaks for itself.
I suppose it's a bit of a mixed blessing, in that it had the (probably unwanted) side-effect of disentangling cartoons from the necessity to pander to the safest, most "child-proof" demographic; the very idea of Superwoman threatening to rape Batman while casually breaking his ribs would've turned the Powers That Be into Coronary Central back then.
Where to?
As settings go, that one ranks below Australia and just above Deep Space.
Which is a pity: you'd think that if just one franchise could afford to make choices based on creative rather than financial merits, it'd be "Star Wars"...
True. Of course, some of that was they finally saw the means to economically produce original work for an older audience without having to sink a ton of money into it, thus necessitating an appeal to the broadest possible audience. That said, yeah is a pretty heavy scene, isn't it? I was kind of amazed they got away with some of that.
Right off the beach. It sounds OK until you realise I have no great love for the beach and believe, like Bill Hicks, that it's just where dirt meets water.
Well, there's something to be made of it--the problem is no one has bothered to make anything of it.
Very true. Of course, there may have been a narrow window of that when the EU first began and that was the only way you could get new Star Wars stuff. Once they figure that a set amount of people would buy anything with the Star Wars logo on it . . .
Certainly much heavier than I expected - for comparison's sake, that was right up there with the Tim Drake flashback in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker". Also, credit where it's due: I never thought I'd see Superman punching a woman in the face, but I was ecstatic when she punched him right back. :)
To be fair, there are worse places - you could've ended up on a time-traveling island occupied by smoke monsters and polar bears. :) In all seriousness, though, watch out for corrosion: salt water's absolute hell on just about everything.
How can they? They're too busy setting up the move to... hell, I don't even know anymore. Idaho? Hawaii? Johannesburg? It's the same problem, really: they barely spend enough time scratching the surface of one setting before moving to the next. I actually liked the idea of San Francisco as a haven for mutants, but that were over before the dust even settled.
Makes you wonder whether the EU would have fared better if they'd just let Zahn run things after the Thrawn trilogy - I somehow get the feeling that "mysterious enemy from Beyond" he was setting up would've been a tad more interesting than what we actually got with these guys, who look like rejected designs for Penance...
That was pretty awesome--that Superwoman was actually allowed to mix it up with the good guys and her and Wonder Woman were allowed to have a pretty credible fight, which is also pretty damn rare when you get down to it.
Yeah, that would just . . .suck out loud, really. :) Well, thankfully I'm on the freshwater side of the island, so hopefully the salt water problem won't be quite as big of a problem as if I were on the ocean side of the shore. I hope, anyways. ;)
And that's eventually going to do them in, because eventually people are going to just get worn out of this--it may be happening already, given Siege's weak numbers--that you can't keep saying "nothing will ever be the same again . . .if there hasn't been a consistent "same" before then.
Well, it probably would have been something of a letdown no matter what they had ended up being, but being a group of aliens from Babylon 5 who'd popped in from the universe next door probably didn't help matters. I don't know if giving it exclusively to Zahn would have fixed the main problem--that of the perception that the novels are just product and it matters little ultimately whether they are any good or not.
That and Zahn would have burned out early on and then it woulda been all Mara all the time. :)
I seem to recall Wonder Woman having quite a few excellent throwdowns during the pre-JLU seasons - if it hadn't been for that bloody awful costume, I probably would appreciate her much more than I do. :)
I'll be sure to keep my fingers crossed and sacrifice a Jeph Loeb book to the Real Estate Gods. ;)
I honestly doubt I'm the only one looking at this whole "Heroic Age" thing as being the very last straw: if this one goes south, or some new status quo pops up six months later, I'll go from having one foot out the door to being down the block and not looking back.
You know what would've been nice? Instead of inventing some Jem'Hadar knockoffs, just have the pre-established alien races join together against humanity, for whatever reason. That way the conflict becomes internal and personal, and you don't have to spend too much time inventing Villain Sues.
Ooh, good point. I was tired of her halfway through the first Hand of Thrawn book and that was only his fourth novel...
It perplexes me that no one can seem to fix Wonder Woman's costume, which is, yes, pretty awful. Except for all the others. I mean . . .bike shorts and a leather jacket. Mike Deodato, whatever did we do to you?
Aw c'mon. They'll just toss him back. :)
I'm kinda thinking it isn't going to work. Once again, we got a bunch of boilerplate about how they're going to cool it with the big events and . . .two months after Siege, there's like five. There's three going on right bloody now and the signal to noise ratio is keeping me away like someone is blasting Lady Gaga through my window.
That's an idea--you would imagine after decades of human-led oppression that the put-upon aliens who'd spent most of the time under the heel of one or the other would try to assert themselves while they were divided, but no one really thought to explore that.
I have to admit, initially I thought she was pretty awesome, but she soon wore out her welcome.
Well, the Dodsons came closest during the aborted Heinberg run, but as that Wonder Woman was Donna Troy, I suppose it doesn't count...
Well, I wouldn't give them anyone good... too few of those in comics today as it is. :)
The biggest strike against the whole "Heroic Age" movement on both sides of the fence is that it's still the same extremely limited talent pool calling the shots: Geoff Johns for DC, Bendis for Marvel, and neither of them has convinced me they're even capable of making that kind of paradigm shift, let alone sustaining it for any significant period of time.
That's probably a consequence of what we talked about once regarding the differences between "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" - unlike Roddenberry, Lucas doesn't seem to consider aliens as races per se, because you typically only have one or two characters representing an entire species. Aside from humans, there were never any significant alien communities... well, except the Vong, but I try not to think about them unless I absolutely have to.
As an adversary to the Skywalker clan, sure - I loved the fact that she was mostly unapologetic about working with the Empire, even after she realized the Emperor had manipulated her. But Zahn had to go and turn her into Luke's soulmate, and thus her transition to Mara Sue was complete.
It should--I remember it and it was a pretty tidy bit of design actually. I saw a bit of it in WW's counterpart from Crisis on Two Earths so it's not been completely forgotten . . .
They get rarer and rarer every day, neh?
Yeah. Frankly that's kinda hobbled any excitement I could generate myself--although in all honesty, Johns can actually hit on the odd good idea every now and again so he can't be dismissed out of hand, but a New Era of Bendis at the helm of the Marvel Universe is exactly the kind of thing I know I don't want to read.
Well, the Vong just popped in from Babylon 5 (or from Voyager, where they essayed the role of Species 8472) so a slight amount of mission creep is no surprise there. But yeah, I give Trek credit for at least eventually thinking of aliens as Funny Mask #12.
I wonder if that was his idea, or it was mandated by people above him? Although I was slightly heartened by the fact that even in her Mara Sue days she was still occasionally allowed to puncture the whole Jedi self-importance thing from time to time, which was damn near invaluable for surviving some of those books . . .
Sure, but only in a Mirror Universe can Wonder Woman dress appropriately. That's... rather discouraging. :)
I'm just glad the Hollywood trend's been dying down over the past few years - aside from Reginald Hudlin and the Assistant to the Secretary to the Agent of Stephen King, we seem to have weeded out that influx of "mainstream" hacks who couldn't put out 22 pages in 22 months...
I believe it was William James who said that a difference that makes no difference is no difference. Whatever the covers tell you, I'm sure Heroic Age Bendis is going to be more of the same, and nothing else.
It's always tricky with aliens - you want them to be familiar enough so the readers can understand them, but not familiar enough that they're just poorly-disguised ethnic stereotypes. And if you go too far in the other direction you get BSG God: beyond human understanding, and therefore creating a fundamentally broken narrative.
I doubt it was mandated, if only because there hadn't really been any post-ROTJ material outside the novels at the time - don't those kinds of mandates turn up when editors want to push cross-media stories in the same universe closer together?
Yeah. I wonder are they saying that "sensibly dressed" is a sign of evil if you're a woman? That's scary.
Thankfully their numbers are dwindling, but then of course you have those numbskulls like Jeph Loeb and The Mark who you can't dislodge with a crowbar so it's kind of a push at the moment.
I think the major difference The Heroic Age will bring in is a new banner above the title, and that's probably all. My faith in anyone at Marvel making a genuine push to go in a new direction is pretty well spent.
It's tricky for sure, and the standard way to do it generally to filter aliens through a human frame of reference and extrapolate them out into a monoculture, which can work, if you disguise it or keep it interesting enough so it's not obvious. If you're lucas, you just walk into the SFX department and say "I want people with pig heads!" and that's as far as it goes.
I don't know. They didn't really get together until the Hand of Thrawn books, which were a little bit later and they'd probably consolidated the EU books by that time. So by then they could have mandated it since Mara was pretty popular and they wanted to keep her around. *shrugs* hard to tell. As the prequels can tell you, Lucas is not so good on planning . . .
You have to wonder how Earth-2 Lady Gaga dresses. Burqa?
I suppose the only comfort there is that they're reasonably contained - avoiding Mark Millar is simply a matter of dodging Icon and the Ultimate imprint, and thankfully it's been a good long while since that's been a real dilemma. :)
I wish we could attribute the Heroic Age to the Disney Overlords, but the fact that they haven't kicked Quesada to the curb isn't very conducive to a fresh start...
I think the key to depicting a monocultural alien race is to embrace the theory that any sentient species would need a measure of unity to make it into space - otherwise they'd self-destruct before getting that far. Of course, then you have to wonder how all those "warrior cultures" kept from eating themselves into oblivion...
Nor the original trilogy, if we're being brutally honest: aside from The Reveal in "Empire Strikes Back", were there very many genuinely surprising moments in terms of plot direction?
All I know is, on Earth-3, she's actually a woman. Beyond that, I fear to speculate.
It's getting about as easy as avoiding the bits of dog mess in my front yard when I go to get the post, which is to say, pretty easy. I also want to thank him for starting a magazine just as magazines are dwindling to nothing. Let me wish him the following--"Hope you flame out like the Hindenburg!"
Well, nothing says "new direction" like "the same people who've been running things doing more or less the same stuff with a new masthead over the title." The sad thing is, I'm not even sure that's sarcasm anymore.
I hedged a bit with mine--there are a lot of subordinate races under the rule of the monoculture, which helps the realism of it and creates some tension. As to the warrior race staving off implosion, well--you war against other races to to divert the internal tension, don'cha? Bread and circuses and all that?
Not that many, really, and even the Big Reveal isn't played out to it's full potential when you get down to it . . .
Ah, Earth-3, where Britney Spears caused a scandal by revealing her ankle. :)
Maybe he tried to get back in with 2000AD and they laughed him out the door, so now by God he's going to start his own magazine!
Given the current state of affairs, I'm inclined to agree. "The Sword" ended this week, which leaves me with "Fables", "X-Factor", "X-Men: Legacy" and "Irredeemable", and if "Second Coming" irritates me too much I'll just toss the entire franchise in the bin and call it a day. I'm quite literally at the end of my patience.
Sure, but a certain level of technological development is needed to get to a point where you can even make contact with other races; how do they last that long without tearing each other apart?
Well, Mark Hamill was too busy screaming his head off like Janet Leigh in the shower to make the most of the situation. :)
Wild times on that Earth-3, eh?
With blackjack! And hookers! ;)
Yeah, I'm not really sure what Second Coming is supposed to be accomplishing--so far it seems WAY too small to be the hoped-for undoing of M-Day and seems more like "let's do an utterly grim crossover and kill off Nightcrawler because . . .uhm . . .he's the only one we've never killed off!"
Well, if they're fascists, they've probably compartmentalized their weaker subordinates in such a way as to keep their machinery running, but not to give them any power to resist. That's one way to go, anyways. :)
You cut off the guy's hand and say you're his daddy he cries like a bitch about it. What a crybaby. ;)
Earth-3, home of the recent film "Platonic Friendship and the City 2", about four male virgins who go to Abu Dhabi to discuss the latest in Bible interpretations. :)
Blackjack, hookers and black hookers named Jack. Genius! :)
I'll admit I'm fond of those stories where the X-Men are methodically picked apart by their enemies, and on that level, it's working well enough. Practically speaking, though, they'll probably just pull a Phoenix ex machina at the very end and have Hope fix things as quickly as possible.
Makes sense... it's just not something we get to see very often in standard SF.
And then he starts dressing like Johnny Cash on Xanax. Way to parent, Darth. :)
My God, I think we've hit upon the comics version of the "Soviet Russia" joke. Wonder if Yakov would sue?
And jacked hookers named black! The serpent is eating his own tail now! :)
I like stories like that, but only if we get the third act where the X-Men turn the tide. Everyone forgets that that iconic X-Men pic with Wolverine in the sewer happens just after the X-Men got totally trashed by the Hellfire Club. The trick is to make their defeat satisfying enough to make you feel like they're at their Darkest Hour and then when they come back you're punching the air because they've come back from the brink and undisputedly won. Been ages since the X-Men have actually done that.
Well, there are a lot of Permanent Underclasses in SF (The Inhumans even have one) but rare is they time you get a really in-depth look at the sociology of the whole bit.
Given that this was the 80's we're lucky he didn't go all androgyne and become Boy Luke.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure Yakov Smirnoff would take one look at my bank account and laugh all the way to his next gig. :)
Tastes like chicken, I'm sure. :)
I think that's going to be the litmus test for this whole event, because the only justification for the non-victories in "Blinded by the Light" and "Messiah Complex" is by saying that, from the moment the Acolytes and the Marauders teamed up (before Hope was even born), it's all been leading to that final battle on Utopia. But if they're going to do that, they need to give the X-Men a decisive win, no caveats, no "To be continued...?" They really need to draw a line under everything that's been going on since M-Day and just move the hell on already.
Not completely impossible, though - Zahn did a good job of creating a distinctively alien culture and society in his "Conquerors" trilogy, to the extent that the second novel completely omitted any human POV.
Now that would've justified Vader's Big No. :)
Both our bank accounts combined, I'd imagine. :)
Not touching that one. . . ;)
Absolutely. One of the nice things that the House To Astonish guys said about Siege was that it unequivocally said "The good guys won." That desperately needs to happen for this whole new direction or whatever to really work. It can't just be yet another permutation of the Same Old Shit.
I'll have to check that out. I hadn't known that many people were doing that.
And mine too! :)
Indeed. :)
It's too early to tell, but looking across the pond to what DC perceives as a "Brightest Day", I seriously doubt Marvel can pull off a genuine heroic revival, not with Joe Quesada and the Silver Age-Revival-through-a-Funhouse-Mirror party are calling the shots.
The first two novels are rather good - haven't started the third yet, but I'll let you know if he maintains that level of quality through to the end. No point getting invested in something that'll go downhill at the last minute...
Apparently DC perceives "Brightest Day" meaning "Aquaman controls dead fish and Black Manta kills the hell out of people," which is, funnily enough, the polar opposite of how I or any sane people would define it. How 'bout that?
I figure you're in the clear provided Mara Jade or a reasonable simulacrum doesn't show up in book 3. ;)
Well, we called it, didn't we? Slapping a coat of white paint on a Yugo doesn't make it any less of a Yugo. :)
Or if he must have a Mara Jade there, let's hope it's the Thrawn Trilogy version and not Mara Almighty...
You know, I reread "The Last Command" a few days ago, and I had this completely insane theory that Zahn was trying to set Jade up as the next primary protagonist of the Star Wars franchise - that's why she's the one to kill C'baoth, because it's going to be her story from that point on. Might've been interesting to see that play out...
Nothing says "commitment to a positive attitude" like killing off your minority characters and making one of the most powerful forces in the universe literally "white power." :)
Assuming we can, in fact, ever go home again.
I'd have loved to see it, because lord knows, a fresher direction than "ultimately the same mistakes get made again with only a change of understudy" tends to burn one out after awhile . . .
White Power Rings: free pointy hoods with each purchase!
Oh, let's be optimistic just this once. :)
It certainly killed any lingering interest I had in the EU at that point - thematic repetition is one thing, telling the exact same story again is quite another.
I look forward to the new crossover BIRTH OF A NATION. :)
Like riding a bicycle, I've nearly forgotten how.
I think, in the warm light of reflection, we'd all have been better off had Vision of the Future been the last word.
I don't know what's more unfortunate: the fact that I can so easily believe they'd do something called BIRTH OF A DC NATION, or that they've fallen into so many traps in so short a time that it's entirely plausible in the first place.
I think we're both long overdue for something to go right and properly for once. :)
To be brutally honest, I would've stopped with "The Last Command", as I can't think of a single book after Thrawn that really worked in the post-RotJ timeline. Which isn't to say the entire novel line was a waste: "Shadows of the Empire" was a rather good interquel, and some of the anthologies such as "Tales from the Empire" and "Death Star" did a very good job humanizing the Empire under Palpatine - I never realized just how comfortably faceless and anonymous they were in the original trilogy, and how easy the story became as a result.
It has literally gotten to the point where I absolutely dread the DC solicits. I continue to be astonished that so many people can get things so collectively wrong. And no, the DC Universe game trailer only makes me despair even more.
Yes in deedy. :)
I dunno--apart from the Luke/Mara stuff the 2 Hand of Thrawn books were actually pretty good, as is LEGACY . . .oh, wait.
And I've just now realized that I don't even read them anymore, just jump ahead to the Vertigo section and that's it. Wow.
I'm more interested in "Arkham City" myself. :)
Yes, we must draw the line somewhere. :) There were quite a few good parts in the "Hand of Thrawn" books, I just felt that at the end of the day the books got dragged down with foreshadowing (ie: there's something Out There and it's Coming Soon and that's why the Empire and the New Republic have to join up - and they ended up retconning Them into the sodding Yuuzhan-Vong, who couldn't have been less interesting).
And how small is Vertigo getting lately? Seems like a lot of their books are dropping like flies all of a sudden.
I . . .wow, this will probably cost me some respect in your eyes, but I really found Arkham Asylum to be cumbersome and really not all that fun. If you promise me Batman beating the hell out of criminals, I don't want to wait ten minutes for it after I press Start. It's a deal-breaker for me. :)
Yeah, it would have been better for everyone concerned had the whole thing been crushed down into one book and some of the Mysterious They been soft-pedaled in light of the disappointment to come. But it still works well as a good stopping point before the bottom drops out, dunnit?
I think they've shifted most of their attention to crime/noir GNs. I've read a few, but other than "The Bronx Kill" none of them really worked for me.
You mean the walk down the hall before the first fight? I thought it was worth it just to hear Mark Hamill do the Joker again. :)
Depends on whether you use it and the Thrawn Trilogy as bookends, in which case it fits perfectly; Zahn scattered a lot of little callbacks and follow-ups throughout the two books, which leads me to believe he saw them as jumping-off points too. (And he mercifully stopped short of actually having Luke and Mara get married, so I suppose that's something...)
Well, I suppose they have to follow the tastes of the day, but it seems pretty odd when you consider at the start of the last decade they were fairly eclectic, weren't they?
It was nice, but . . .man, I so wanted to press start and skip all that so I could get to the fights. It was good to see him still doing it so well, but I'd have liked the option to just get down to it. And Detective Mode was annoying when it was "PKE Meter" mode in Ghostbusters. ;)
Yeah, they frankly felt like a summation of things up to that point, and since they didn't end up with Daala running anything, it was as happy an ending as you can hope for, really. His later books don't have the same energy to them.
Even looking at just the flagship books, they went from Swamp Thing and Hellblazer to Preacher and Sandman to Y and Fables - aside from the fact that they each had a touch (or more) of the fantastic, they were all long-running character studies. And now we're getting done-in-one, highly compressed stories that repeat themselves far too often (because, honestly, how much can one do with or subvert the urban noir sub-genre?) and aren't memorable in the least.
Maybe so, but I must admit, when he drops down from the ceiling with his cape all spread out, I could practically hear the Danny Elfman theme from the animated series. :)
From what I've heard, he was rather dismayed at the direction the EU took starting with the arrival of the Vong. I can certainly understand his frustration - it's one thing to trim down an oversized secondary cast, it's quite another to kill off two of the three Solo kids in rapid succession and saddling the third with more baggage than was absolutely necessary. A bit more discretion probably would've gone a long way there.
Then again, maybe he was just bitter because they killed off Mara Jade. :)
Yeah, there's really not been a really aggressive off-concept thing at Vertigo for awhile, has there? How long ago was the Grant Morrison "id run amuck" books like The Filth and the Invisibles, anyway?
Well, there is that. :)
Yeah, I stopped reading them regularly after the Hand of Thrawn books. I just couldn't get excited about the direction things were going on, and the current trend towards every book having some variation on the Jedi vs. Sith thing isn't something I'm interested in in the wake of Legacy ending either. I mean, zombie Stormtroopers? We're that bankrupt for ideas now?
Not sure I'd go quite that far, as I've never been able to understand - let alone enjoy - Morrison's weirder stories... but yes, it's been quite a while since they've done anything that could really be considered "experimental". Probably because the current market couldn't sustain it. Which doesn't excuse their not even trying...
I wouldn't mind the endless repetition of Jedi vs. Sith if they at least made an effort to evolve either group beyond what's already been done. Let's see some altruistic Sith who believe in using the Dark Side to create utopia, or Jedi who enforce "order" to the point of becoming Blood Knight Templars... something beyond the same old morally simplistic formula again and again.
Even the ones I have pretty much no connection to, I usually find interesting in terms of their demented ambition. I would imagine a down market is the ideal time to experiment, lord knows that's what brought Marvel back from the brink at the turn of the century . . .
Instead . . .we get . . .zombie Jedi. Hell's bells.
Looking back, it's amazing how far they were willing to go. It's equally amazing how far they've regressed since then.
Zombie Jedi. I don't even want to know. Now I'm imagining Liam Neeson stumbling about wearing even less of an expression than he had the first time around and moaning "MIDICHLORRRRRRIAAAAANS..."
Well, inevitably following a successful revolution, the first thing the new people in power do is compromise their ideals in ways large or small so really . . .no shock there, eh?
If everyone in Phantom Menace had been a zombie they would have been 10 times more lively than they are alive. :)
Post a Comment