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flaggthecat

Name: Gregory Green

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flaggthecat's Recent Comments
July 19, 2010 3:39 am

Excellent review. I'm glad someone else on this site has enough reading comprehension to recognize the sheer absurdity of the speeches Superman makes in this issue. Every single one is a real head-scratcher. I think my favorite is the last one. Being a hero is like being in a cage "whose bars are the principles and rules that define what you will and will not accept"? This is truly an amateurish metaphor. I can see bars being a metaphor for rules (cliché, but at least I see the similarity), but the metaphor falls apart when it's rulse that define what you will and will not accept. Those are not restrictive rules and principles, like the obvious "I will not kill anyone, no matter what". Those are rules for what he will tolerate from other people, and indeed it's kind of torturing language to even call those rules. It's as though JMS started the sentence, folded the page over so the words were covered, and had someone else finish it.

That said, I have a very low opinion of almost all comic book writers' ability to use words. At the very least, JMS is legitimately taking the book in an unpredicable and (as far as I know) original direction. So I'd say the words JMS wrote were often bad, and the execution of the story was often poor, but the story idea itself is a mark in his favor.

Is it just me, or does it seem like it just shouldn't be hard to produce higher-quality scripts? I mean, they have a month, for god's sake. What does the editor even do?

July 23, 2009 1:21 am I just got around to reading this issue--excellent review, flapjaxx. Matt Fraction continues to fall short of impressing. He comes up with only semi-coherent ideas for his comics, and makes his characters sound like "hip" people in commercials. He's still an improvement on Bendis, though.
July 22, 2009 2:06 pm I second that. This was a real surprise for me, because I had never heard of the writer, Chris Ryall (although it turns out he's the publisher of IDW, so I guess he's not low-profile). I just got it for the Templesmith art, which has been typically excellent.
October 3, 2008 6:45 pm @Kory: G-Mo doesn't talk about not wanting to dumb down his books, but rather about wanting to write with less choreographing, less telling the reader what she's seeing and how to feel about it (as is still routinely done in most other comics, through things like dialogue and dramatic camera angles). I think this G-Mo interview at IGN sums up the issues brilliantly: http://uk.comics.ign.com/articles/902/902992p1.html.
October 3, 2008 4:14 pm

"I think it's been established that comic book readers are smart enough to follow a plot and the emotions behind it without having their hands held the entire way." This doesn't track very well with comments on G-Mo's Batman. Wait, I take that back--people aren't complaining that Morrison doesn't hold their hand the _entire_ way, they're maybe complaining that he doesn't hold their hand enough or even at all.

 I think this is an interesting issue, and I personally can't stand how much hand-holding Tomasi does, in Nightwing and in Green Lantern Corps. (This maybe isn't the right place to say, but I thought the recent Black Mercy arc was, I don't know, over-choreographed.)

October 3, 2008 4:03 pm

@Titanesque: I think it's grossly unfair to accuse Grant Morrison of not understanding narrative. This story has had a sequence of events which unfold over a defined period of time (that is, moving forward chonoligically, as is most common in storytelling). There's a particular group of people who are the actors, with some of them well known, others more mysterious. The action has occured in determinable places: Mart's confusion about Wayne Manor/Arkham Asylum aside, it's possible to establish where things happened by means of evidence in the comic. Have those three things in some form, and you have a narrative.

The confusion people feel is so clearly intentioned by Morrison that I don't think anyone's claimed otherwise. There seems to be more ground for argument about whether or not the cause and effect of things were understood by the author and gradually made known to the reader, if it will all "make sense in the end" or not--but I think it's also reasonably clear that Morrison knows what he's doing as a writer. Elements of the story have been revealed at the times Morrison intended, even if people had to work to interpret the clues, and in the end, I don't think there will be much doubt as to what happened in the arc. The storytelling may be complex (and people have a right not to like it), but the story itself really isn't.

September 22, 2008 4:28 pm

Excellent review, Mart, as always it seems.

Judd Winick on his own is one of the stupidest writers in comics, with basically no understanding of character or story, and about the dumbest brand of sexist I've ever seen.  Bill Willingham is more competent, kind of a journeyman hack, and he has a slightly less overt but just as offensive brand of sexism.  Together, it seems, they pioneer new ways to fail. 

September 9, 2008 6:59 pm

All of this talk about Michael Chabon is well and good, but the best novel ever is undisputably not written by an American in this century . . . unless Philip Roth has been saving his best work for the last years of his life.  I guess I am a Philip Roth geek.

September 8, 2008 1:33 pm

I hope this comment isn't another one that would put you in the ground, but your review of Ruins made me interested in seeing it.  Was it not at all ironic?  Is it like The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe only it's Warren Ellis killing the Marvel Universe?  I know it wasn't packaged that way, but why did it exist? 

August 19, 2008 11:33 am Guggenheim went way, way down in my estimation with this title, the latest Spiderman arc, and almost all of Resurrection so far.  I saw a lot of positive comments about Guggenheim's writing abilities.  What are they based on?