and Dead Tree Comics

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Thad
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Fri May 20, 2016 12:37 am

It also occurred to me that, holy shit, the character's name is literally MR A.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Sharkey » Fri May 20, 2016 3:00 pm

Rorschach was obviously drawn from The Question, but there's a buttload of Mr. A's DNA in there along with it.



I love that he has so much sympathy for Ditko while simultaneously condemning his moral ideas. He actually shows understanding of the circumstances that probably pushed the guy toward his worldview while pointing out that it's a pretty crappy one.



I guess I should never be surprised by anything Alan Moore does, but holy shit, this was actually a thing.

And yeah, still not shocked Ted Cruz named Rorschach as his favorite superhero.
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Thad
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Sat May 21, 2016 12:13 pm

Sharkey wrote:Rorschach was obviously drawn from The Question, but there's a buttload of Mr. A's DNA in there along with it.


Well, Mr. A is pretty much just a creator-owned adaptation of the Question.

Sharkey wrote:


In Search of Steve Ditko is fantastic and everybody should watch it. It's a great introduction for people who don't know much about Ditko, and for those of us who already know who he is, it's a well-assembled series of interviews.

Sharkey wrote:I love that he has so much sympathy for Ditko while simultaneously condemning his moral ideas. He actually shows understanding of the circumstances that probably pushed the guy toward his worldview while pointing out that it's a pretty crappy one.


Rorschach's not only the most interesting character in Watchmen, he's ultimately the most sympathetic -- not at first, but as you get inside his head a little more.

And there's something admirable about his stubbornness and his refusal to compromise. In the end, he's the only character who's willing to die for his principles -- and the principle he's willing to die for just so happens to be that people deserve to know the truth, no matter the consequences.

(Not for nothin', Dan Dreiberg is clearly visually based on Ditko. At least, 1960's Ditko, from back when people still knew what he looked like.)

That these views are a product of someone's circumstances is an important concept, I think. I took a (required) computer ethics class my last year of college, and the first two-week lecture was a professor inexplicably trying to push objectivism on us. The professor in question grew up in East Germany, and it occurred to me that if you've experienced a communist dictatorship, it's only natural to overcorrect in the opposite direction. Which is presumably how we got objectivism in the first place.

At any rate, I love Ditko. He's not just a fantastic artist who's still working in his nineties, he's a man of conviction and, for the past 25 or so years, he's done things his way and only his way, without interference or dillution from anybody else.

And, y'know, for all the stuff he says that I don't agree with, I sure think his stance on creators' rights and recognition is bang-on. And I also share his disdain for the direction of the superhero genre over the past couple of decades, and for the fandom that props up all the bad ideas and thinks it has a right to know creators' personal business.

Course, I also think those two poles are in direct tension with one another. Of course nobody knows who you are, Steve; you don't speak in public and your only interaction with the world is impenetrably-written small-press comic books and newsletters that, in the vast majority of cases, will only ever be read by people who are already sympathetic.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby des » Sun May 22, 2016 3:57 pm

Speaking of Alan Moore and Watchmen, and also being pissed. Someone leaked DC's Rebirth #1. The response from DC was definitely more aggressive than their sexual harassment policy. The original post on reddit had this as an apt summary:

Wally West is back. There are three Jokers. The Original JSA is back. Watchman are now part of the DCU and are responsible for the loss of time???


Which is to say, what the fuck? There's not a moment in my life lately where I'm not worried everyone at DC has lost their minds. Here's a full, spoiler-filled review.

I know Moore said he won't do interviews, but I have a sneaking suspicion/hope he won't be able to keep his mouth closed about this.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Sun May 22, 2016 4:01 pm

So THAT'S what happened to Wally at the end of Young Justice!

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Wheels » Sun May 22, 2016 8:22 pm

And let's not forget, this hand IS blue.

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Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Mon May 23, 2016 12:55 am

The funny thing is, I'd actually be pretty excited about that plot summary if the writer credit was Grant Morrison. It's just the sort of plot he'd kill with, uniting disparate periods of DC history, bringing back characters nobody wants to talk about, doing weird shit with characters everybody talks about, and then getting meta as fuck about the whole thing.

Plus, if it were Morrison, it wouldn't be the real Watchmen characters, it'd be the knockoffs-of-the-knockoffs versions from Multiversity: Pax Americana.

Under the circumstances, though? Well...I'm kinda surprised by how much I don't hate it, but pretty much everything about it sounds dumb. And it's exactly the kind of rollback that anyone who's sat through any of the previous continuity resets already knew was coming anyway.

The real question is how hard DC's going to take this "let's try and win back the fanboys" approach. Presumably the strategy to try and attract new readers had stopped working and that's why they're swinging back the other way, but...that's not a long-term solution; you can't just stop trying to bring in new readers.

I think the real question is, which of the new #1's are going to be new reader-friendly, and how friendly are they going to be?

I'm really only interested in two of them, Gotham Academy (currently the best book DC's putting out) and Deathstroke (I don't even like Deathstroke, but Christopher Priest is writing it). But I'm not a new reader.

swindle soiree wrote:I know Moore said he won't do interviews, but I have a sneaking suspicion/hope he won't be able to keep his mouth closed about this.


Moore may not do interviews specifically on the subject of Watchmen, but he's done plenty of general interviews where the subject's come up, and he's not exactly recalcitrant on the subject. (Hell, he's said before that the only reason he hasn't sued DC over his Watchmen contract is because he wants to be able to complain about Watchmen publicly.) The subject's bound to come up, especially if Jerusalem is finally coming out and he does interviews related to that.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 25, 2016 8:36 pm

So, uh, the latest out of Marvel is that the new Cap storyline is going to be that He's a Hydra agent - and has been one since he was a small child

You know I pretty much deride monthly cape comics as essentially soap operas for adolescents (same as wrestling) (used to be just young boys, but I guess they've been lurching away from that haphazardly for years - progress!), but this is easily among the dumbest fucking Days of Our Lives plot I've heard about in quite a while.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby des » Wed May 25, 2016 10:35 pm

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mothra » Thu May 26, 2016 12:56 am

Geo posted this one on Slack earlier today:

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby zaratustra » Thu May 26, 2016 4:28 am

So I read Rebirth #1. Yeah, despite no Watchmen characters appearing it's Watchmen crossover time, unless Geoff Johns is planning the shittiest - man it wouldn't be even the shittiest comics twist of the year now, would it.

I'm not sure how Dr. Manhattan can be made into a interesting villain of any sort. I mean he can literally do anything and his only weakness is his complete misunderstanding of how probabilities work.

Also Johns appears to be setting this up as some sort of "Watchmen made comics dark" and "Make comics great again" shit. You might remember this theme from critic-lauded INFINITE CRISIS. And it was just as much bullshit then because even if Alan Moore wrote a bunch of gritty comics 30 years ago, it was DC Comics that kept them on life support forever because they're incapable of creating anything new at the same level.

OH and the flagship titles will now be bi-monthly. Not sure if they're collapsing Detective Comics into Batman and the like, or if they're just gonna double down on the house-style and make all art computer generated now.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mothra » Thu May 26, 2016 1:37 pm


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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Rico » Thu May 26, 2016 1:48 pm

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Destynova » Thu May 26, 2016 10:11 pm

Isn't another one of Dr. Manhattan's problems is his weak-will/passiveness? He became a watchmaker because his father told him to. So perhaps someone convinced him that re-writing the DC universe was needed.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Büge » Thu May 26, 2016 10:18 pm

How meta!
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby zaratustra » Fri May 27, 2016 5:13 am

Destynova wrote:Isn't another one of Dr. Manhattan's problems is his weak-will/passiveness? He became a watchmaker because his father told him to. So perhaps someone convinced him that re-writing the DC universe was needed.


He's kind of a doormat until he goes to Mars, yeah. Then he does a couple things, but still has a tendency to go along with whoever's around. In fact, I think the only character that needs more than two panels to convince Doc to do something is Silk Spectre.

Also: oh god.

there's a character in Rebirth #1

his name is MR. OZ

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Fri May 27, 2016 10:14 am

zaratustra wrote:Also Johns appears to be setting this up as some sort of "Watchmen made comics dark" and "Make comics great again" shit. You might remember this theme from critic-lauded INFINITE CRISIS. And it was just as much bullshit then because even if Alan Moore wrote a bunch of gritty comics 30 years ago, it was DC Comics that kept them on life support forever because they're incapable of creating anything new at the same level.


Well, it wouldn't surprise me if the use of the Watchmen characters was forced on them by Warner, and he's pretty clearly using Dr. Manhattan as a thinly-veiled effigy of Dan Didio. (Which is a total missed opportunity; obviously the DC character you're supposed to use to bitch about your old editor is Funky Flashman.) But yeah, the very idea that Johns himself is blameless and just wants lightness and hope tends to overlook all the severed arms, stabs through the back, punched-off heads, characters with blood spewing from their mouths, and murdered parent retcons that he's written over the past decade plus. He may not be the guy who brought any of those things to the forefront of comics, but he's sure been an enthusiastic accomplice.

Milestone co-founder Michael Davis wrote a piece the other day called Why Are We Still Complaining About Dan DiDio?, where he takes fans to task for bitching about DiDio while they're the ones enabling all the things that are holding DC back.

He's not wrong; it's the fandom that keeps asking for something different and then flipping the fuck out when Batgirl gets a redesign to appeal to girls, who say they want done-in-one stories but don't buy them, who say they're sick of the events but keep shelling out for them, who won't buy any comic that doesn't have Batman in it.

Abhay Khosla responded with a rebuttal called The Case Against Dan Didio (as of right now that site is down, but there's a cached version you can read), where he argues that no, Dan DiDio really is exceptionally bad at his job.

Now, some of the things he lays at DiDio's feet are corporate's fault. (Yeah, Convergence flopped, but Convergence was a stopgap to cover a cross-country move of the entire company.) But for the most part? Yeah, it lays out a pretty lengthy series of decisions that make DiDio look like a really bad manager, that when they're stacked up together look like a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents.

About the best things I can say in DiDio's defense are (1) a lot of the shit that's gone down on his watch has been handed down by Warner and isn't his fault and (2) if they replaced him it's entirely possible his replacement would be worse.

Mothra wrote:

The outrage about this stuff is always just so weird. Like there's any way this is going to stick. Even if it's not a fakeout (and c'mon, guys, it's obviously a fakeout) it's all but certain that a future writer will undo it.

That doesn't mean it's not dumb. But the criticism should be "Oh great, another headline-grabbing twist that's going to be undone later." People shouldn't be acting like this is a permanent change.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Fri May 27, 2016 1:28 pm

Thad wrote:the criticism should be "Oh great, another headline-grabbing twist that's going to be undone later."


I can't speak for anyone else, but that pretty much is my exact complaint. It's garbage. It's Death of Superman.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Blossom » Fri May 27, 2016 5:20 pm

It's Death of Superman with a big ol' added dose of antisemitism. And wildly, massively out of character.

Superman dying doesn't mean he's not Superman, it just means he's dead (at least for now). It's more like ... imagine a story where we find out Clark Kent beats Lois Lane.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Fri May 27, 2016 8:55 pm

Well, I was referring specifically to the sense Thad was talking about, that this is an ill-conceived publicity stunt so blatantly impossible to permanently implement that the only question is how long before rollback.

But yes, it's notably even worse than Death of Superman for several additional reasons.
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