nick7913

July 14, 2011 6:09 pm Can his next project not be something summed up with "Like this well known property that I don't own but with a twist"?

June 29, 2011 11:13 am God, that Spider-Man cover just blows me away... 'Nough said...

June 29, 2011 11:06 am @JohnVFerrigno  @josh  I have to disagree with both you gentlemen. I don't think it's the nature of either the medium or the genre that is the problem. It's the particular approach taken by Marvel and DC. The problem lies in the brand recognition of particular heroes that is used for merchandising purposes outside of the stories. When the company tells you that you have to bring back that particular hero (no matter what long term plans you had for his replacement) because the movie is coming out this summer and you have to align the comic book version with the movie version, you have no choice but to do it.

That's probably the reason that I don't find most mainstream titles that appealing anymore. Sitting around waiting for the latest crossover to finish so we can get back to the story, or jettisoning future plans just for a marketing trick is something I don't find appealing and it seems to have crept into almost everything I used to love reading. That's probably what I enjoyed most about the Ultimate Universe: It was a small tightly knit universe where changes made mattered in the long run. It's a very weak argument that suits a coorporate executive mindset to state how difficult it is to keep stories fresh when you need to maintain the status quo. You don't!

We've fallen into the trap of thinking that this is the only way things can be done and lost sight of what stories should be about. It's difficult to judge because there are very few series outside of the big two that have lasted long enough to be comparable. I believe Cerebus lasted around 300 issues with a clear end, right? Judge Dredd is getting older and will probably eventually be replaced. Which is the answer to the problem really.

DC in particular had a very good plan for moving forward: Legacy characters. Almost all of their characters have some protege/sidekick who could eventually take their place, passing on the torch. Marvel good do the same by allowing older characters to pass on their roles to the newer ones, who may not be exact replicas, but who can do the job equally well. I don't see why Fantastic Four has to be stuck in that same place for almost half a century. It's a book about family, yet there's no reason why is has to be that same family. Reed and Sue had children, Johnny could get married and have his own, Ben can stay on the team or retire. The universe will not be lessened if those particular characters slowly fade away and are replaced by new ones. I can still be reading the same comic my father read 30 years ago but with a newer generation og characters. The same goes for X-Men, Avengers etc.

The problem with all these things is that by necessity they have to happen in the long run, something that has become impossible with the financial state the industry is in. Every solution is presented as the one that will fix everything easily NOW when the problem lies in the next 5-10 years. This is something Grant Morrison understood when he wrote the Death of the New Gods. Yes, Kirby was an amazing artist and his influence runs through many comics to this day. However it's time to introduce the Fifth Wave of Gods into DC. The same applies to everything else. Also look at the sheer magnitude of content and changes he introduced to New X-Men, while preserving most of the things that made it recognizable. He brought the X-Universe into the present. Marvel responded by wiping all the changes he made in an attempt to mantain the staus quo.
It's not that they have no alternatives, it's just that they don't want to take the risks associated with the alternatives. That's the problem you get when a creative company is run by businessmen instead of artists. Business men don't understand this particular product. They try to distill it and come up with a formula that is guaranteed to be successful. Only problem is that no such formula exists, nor will ever exist. It's the same reason that many big budget films lose that "something" that makes them special when going through Holywood bureaucracy. That's the problem, not any limitation in the nature of the medium/genre.

June 29, 2011 7:03 am @MisterJ  Last I checked, Mark Waid's character development for Johnny Storm was completely tossed after he left, the Thing has gotten over his appearance many times and then thrown back to his original state for some cheap drama. Spider-Man refuses the one chance to move past Uncle Ben's death by finally letting Aunt May to pass on and instead gets rebooted to an immature shadow of his former self, something that he'd never been even in the very first issues of his comic book. Bucky, one of the three deaths that were supposed to have been permanent, comes back in a cool way, gets great character development and Captain America dies, perhaps signaling the time for his legacy to be passed on. Then Captain America comes back and Bucky gets the shaft, because God forbid that somebody interesting should wear the Captain America armor and everything is back to the same status quo.
And to give a DC example Barry comes back and Wally gets relegated to the back seat of comic books, just so a fanboy writer can write a character that he grew up with but which the world has left behind. Couldn't Geoff Johns have created a new character instead of bringing in Barry? After all he's totally rebooting him just like he did with Hal (another unneeded returning character). In fact, DC is the company with the most legacy characters. They're the ones who could actually let their heroes age and eventually be replaced because newer readers do not care if Barry or Wally is the original. They care about the character you're writing now. 
I could bring a ton of examples of character development being scrapped. Any reader who's been arround for a while can but I don't see the point.
Make no mistake, Marvel and DC HATE change. Their heroes are coorporate icons and should therefore remain unchanged forever so they can sell T-shirts and baseball caps with them on. Any significant change will be ultimately undone in the long run. (ironically, the Ultimate Universe is the one place where so far this hasn't happened) The pieces keep getting shuffled around until everything is back in its original state. Then it starts all over again.

June 27, 2011 7:30 pm @Matrix  And then they come back and all that character development gets tossed. Not a very cool trope after all.

June 25, 2011 3:05 pm I'd also like to add that even though the Parthenon is in Athens, we're pretty much third-class citizens when it comes to comic books. We get them with at least a two week delay. To avoid spoilers on Ultimate Spider-man, I illegally download the latest issue even though I still buy it at the store (I'm a strong believer in supporting what you like). But even those scans take up to a week to hit the web sometimes. So it's not like it's just 24 hours without visiting comic book sites or going online at all. And all for a temporary band aid solution that causes more problems than it solves in the long run.

Have a look at the FF diagram on this page:
http://enterthestory.com/comic_sales.html
Does that look like a healthy business plan? That's what's destroyed the industry. 

June 25, 2011 1:44 pm Can everyone just cut it out with the "Knowing what happens doesn't detract from the story"? It's crystal clear if you've read it that it's supposed to be a surprise. At no point does it feel as if Peter isn't going to make it. He does his usual routine, tells his jokes and if I didn't know he was going to die I would have been sure that he'd get away somehow in the end. There is NO REASON to make apologies for the sad little coorporation that is going to rake in more money than any of us is likely to see in his lifetime.
What they did totally spoiled the story for me and for a lot of other people. If it was justified or not is besides the point for me, the reader. I don't believe they are justified but putting that aside, from the perspective of a guy who picks up a comic book to get a good story, I was denied part of it. And for what? It's not like they couldn't hype it without spoiling it. I thought "Everything changes" was their favorite line.
Anyway, a few years down the road when me and others like me who've gotten fed up with these cheap stunts have dropped all of their titles and bestelling things that used to sell 200,000 issues, that now only sell 100,000 have shrunk down to a fanbase of 30-40,000 you can point to things like this when analyzing what happened.

 Last year my pull list had 5 DC titles in it and 10-15 Marvel ones. Now there's just 2 from DC (just Vertigo) and 5 from Marvel. I'm done making excuses for those guys. Maybe you should too.

June 23, 2011 6:55 pm And STAY DOWN Green Goblin! Damn Conor, I've been up writing responses on that other comment section and I totally forgot about my finals tomorrow! I guess nerd rage beats exam jitters. Cu around. ;-)

June 23, 2011 6:40 pm @conor  I was just stating my opinion that this is the wrong way to go about expanding their readership. This approach has been tried so many times that even non-comic book readers are starting to catch on. Didn't Captain America die? Didn't Batman die? Didn't Torch die? The deaths are kind of starting to pile up. Say what you want about the gimmicky 90's but they only really had one major death (Superman) and Batman being crippled (plus a lot of stuff that was unpleasant but I digress). I don't see this having any long term benefit and I don't see either of the big two actually having a long term plan. Does anyone really think DC's 52 thing is going to work? How many of those titles will start below 20.000 orders and how many will fall to those numbers in 5-6 months?
The reason that Marvel dominated the industry over DC was that during the 60's they had a very tight line-up of books that one man could oversee and ensure quality across the board, with tight continuity where it mattered. As soon as they started expanding the stable of books and rebooting franchises to undo character development that had been made up to that point they started steadily losing readers. Ssee for example how they brought Sue and Reed back to FF after they had moved on around issues 300-350. Plus they undid the Thing's breakthrough where he had finally accepted himself for who he was. To preserve their franchise they made it stale and uninteresting by making it perpetually return to the status quo.
Marvel saw a resurgence during the 80's with the X-titles, because (Uncanny X-Men in particular) they had classic characters as well as new ones introduced all the time, they had people growing up, changing, evolving. Kitty Pryde came in a child and went out a Samurai tech-wizard. And yet as soon as they started the endless crossovers and reboots they lost all flavor.
It's not a surprise that Ultimate Spider-Man was as good as it was. Overseen by a single writer from beginning to end, it presented Peter's journey from boy to... Damn. I wan't to say man but it's just sad... But he became a man damnit. The world around him changed, his relationships changed, JJJ changed and it felt plausible and real. We went from point A to point B and it was a hell of a journey, instead of just going round and round. Now if they could only take the lessons learned from what is essentially a niche title as well as from their overall history and apply them to their mainstream titles, maybe they can find a better recipe than the one they have right now, which is basically a recipe for disaster. 

June 23, 2011 5:13 pm On the plus side, I have to respect ifanboy for having an actual spoiler tag on the article when the announcement was made. Comicvine was the first place I saw it and they put it right there in the title. Amateurs...