flapjaxx

May 14, 2013 8:44 am Sad news. I read the Dial H trade a few weeks ago and really liked it. I guess they'll still bother putting out Vol. 2 to close out the series? It'd have to collect 9 issues, though, one of which will be double-sized...

May 13, 2013 12:55 pm Well... Yeah. I've been saying this all along. I think the series is generally "good" overall, and Snyder has flashes of brilliance, but more often than not the series has screamed "pseudo-intellectual / shock-value" to me. It goes all the way back to issue #1. We find a guy who was killed days ago but for some reason left a message saying that Bruce Wayne will die within 24 hours... as if he knows when his body would be found, and as if he would even care about protecting Bruce Wayne for some reason, AND be enough of a genius to leave a clue in some sort of "invisible paint" or whatever. Seriously. Read the whole arc and try to make logical sense of this big moment in the first issue. It makes no sense and it's ALL done for "Se7en"-style shock-value. Then in issue #5 Batman drinks some water just after surmising, in one of Snyder's laborious monologues, that it probably has poison/drugs in it anyway. Stupid. Bruce has only been gone a DAY but he's totally ragged and desperate enough to drink water he knows is poisoned. And he's only been gone a DAY, keep in mind, but Damian's on the verge of tears about it, even though Bruce has been MIA on missions that lasted much, much longer than that in recent memory, and Damian wasn't nearly so quickly effected then. Stupid pointless maudlin stuff. Bruce is overwhelmed by one Talon at the end of issue #5... but in issue #6 he recovers miraculously for NO reason, like Hulk Hogan coming back at the end of a match. (And Bruce will go on to fend off a whole platoon of Talons in issue #8, before he even gets to his armor suit... but ONE of them totally overwhelmed him before.) Capullo's art is magnificent in #6, but there's no reason for what's transpiring here. And Bruce is apparently so smart that he figured out how to blast a big escape hole with just a bit of camera-flash power that he was sneaky enough to steal... but this was right after he was stupid enough to drink poisoned water that he knew was poisoned. It makes no logical sense. Bruce's power levels and intelligence vary widely from issue to issue, but Snyder either doesn't expect his readers to notice, or else he's so blinded by his own shock-value and so enraptured by his own long-winded monologues... that as a writer he doesn't even notice himself now unintentionally inane many aspects of his "sophisticated" plots are. Then in issue #7, when Bruce returns, we see that the Wayne defense perimeter is actually just ALFRED WITH A SHOTGUN, and Alfred doesn't even recognize Bruce at first. Think about that. It's stupid on every level, especially since Snyder has gone out of his way to ramble on about how great Wayne security technology is. Also,d Alfred has been worried sick about Bruce, waiting for him to return... but at first he doesn't even recognize Bruce or be expecting him to return to one of his bases? That's only the first arc. It's not even worth continuing trying to explain how stupid a LOT of Snyder's plot-points continue to be after that. If people can't pick up on it by now and are still dazzled by long-winded monologues (since when is Bruce Wayne obsessed with talking to himself about architecture for pages at a time?), then I don't know what to tell you. Still... decent series overall! I liked most of what I read so far (I just dropped it after the most recent issue) and I thought the comics were worth the money I paid for them. But they have all the (pseudo-)sophistication of mid-'90s Spawn comics, for real. McFarlane's writing is basically on the same moderate level as Snyder's, as far as I'm concerned. Both of them can write better comics than I could! So, I don't really hate them, you know? Nervous Alfred with a shotgun is a cool visual, though.

May 12, 2013 9:13 pm ^Yeah, I liked B&R more than the guys did too. The pages with the Red Hood weren't super great, but everything else was. Thor was a great POTW, by the way. I'm not even a Thor fan, but what Aaron and Ribic are doing here is so undeniable that the title is basically becoming my favorite comic. Good stuff, guys.

May 7, 2013 3:06 pm It's not "racism". They're just ignorant or tonedeaf or something in this one instance. There isn't any judgmental hate in play, so I really don't see how this could be a vitriolic offense. I'm part Greek. If someone in Asia got Greeks mixed up with Italians and said, "Oh, Greece, that's where pizza comes from, right? I love pizza! You guys are awesome!" I wouldn't feel that was racist at all. I'd feel the person was obviously ignorant in a shocking way in this one instance, but he wouldn't be implying that Greeks, Italians, or pizza were bad. It's sort of the same deal here. Marvel are trying to do an homage of something that they clearly think is cool, but people just got mixed up as to which of two Asian countries the imagery actually came from. It's stupid of them and their editorial (blowhard Tom "I'm never wrong about anything!" Breevort especially), but calling something like this "racist" just diminishes what that term actually means.

May 7, 2013 3:00 pm "But in most other medium’s sales are reflective of quality generally." Just... no.

May 7, 2013 2:49 pm Even when it was coming out I thought it was pretty decent, and it definitely helped to read issues 2 & 3 back to back, and then reread 3 right before 4 came out. Taken as standalone installments, I could see how people would have felt that things were weird and/or lacking. But when you step back and see what Remender was setting up and how his writing style has changed to accommodate and introduce the scope that this series has -- it all make a lot more sense. I like these last few issues more, but the writing style actually hasn't changed that much at all -- it was pretty good in the first four issues. I think the constant spectre of a subpar Cassaday was (understandably) putting readers in a bad mood going in.

May 6, 2013 8:35 pm Yeah, I'll probably need to reread the last few issues before tackling this one. It's a dense read even when shipping on a normal schedule. I just love it, though. It's constantly near the top of my list of favorite comics in any given month/quarter.

May 6, 2013 3:19 pm Funny stuff, and insightful too. Like many people, I automatically check out mentally whenever "con fever" starts to get into full swing. I go to websites, see a litany of articles prefaced with "C2E2" or "ComiCon" and they all basically become invisible under an "I don't care about this meaningless trivia" filter. Even the few announcements that I might care about--I really can't be bothered to be concerned about them on an active up-to-the-minute basis. So it goes without saying that I wouldn't want to stand in lines for hours to attend these panels in person. If I was paid to do so, I guess I would, though? So I don't begrudge any reporters from websites for having to talk about it. Any news (important or otherwise) will totally flood the internet anyway, so I'm not sure what the point of the sweating it out to attend panels would be, not for the average fan at least. The ideas Jim presented here are great, though. One way these panels could become useful is if questioners tried to turn them into investigations of craft and storytelling/behind-the-scenes creativity. I'd actually be interested in hearing or reading about that from the creators/editors. Much more useful than predictable questions that can't be answered for fear of spoiling upcoming storylines, or off-the-wall questions that no one on stage has any idea about.

May 6, 2013 3:11 pm I'm beside myself that there's an entire article about this, introduced with something about "comics’ greatest characters and stories". Just... wow. Not something I'd expect to see on the internet in 2013.

May 6, 2013 3:09 pm Yeah, I thought THIS return of Claremont was pretty good, overall. The issues with Davis on art were solid; you had great characterizations and stuff with X23 and Sage that was actually interesting. Then there were all of the issues with Rachel Grey drawn by Bachalo. It was great stuff. I won't say there weren't some clunker issues, but as is usual the case with Claremont these days... I think people forget the good stuff.