flaggthecat

July 17, 2008 10:44 am @Conor and Race: I think I meant that Marvel had lost my heart.  How emo.

July 16, 2008 7:59 pm

@scott: I would imagine the quality of the storytelling has most to do with whether people like the origin story of a villain.  Godfather II is fantastically acted and directed, and so its young Vito enriches the already-seen old Vito.  On the other hand, the Star Wars prequels are poorly acted and have atrocious directing, and as a result, people were disappointed.

Also, it's possible that Nolan didn't feel the need to show Joker's origin story because it was done in Tim Burton's Batman, and he wanted something fresh.  At any rate, none of us have seen the movie, so it's at least possible that it would in fact be improved by an origin story.

In general, I disagree with your statement that monsters are better unexplained; of course, you actually said that it's "almost better" that way, but I wonder why you said "almost".  I'd say that the random appearance of an evil entity isn't necessarily boring, but it's automatically more interesting if there's a well-told origin story.  It allows for complex emotion within the story, and the audience's relationship with the monster can be much deeper  if the monster is put in context, if we know how such a monster can come to be.  People are probably most scared of monsters that they fear are possible within themselves. 

July 16, 2008 6:25 pm @JumpingJupiter: That's a great post you linked to, but the Trinity logo doesn't have a drop shadow!  Interestingly, I found an interview with the guy who designed it, and he also did the cover for Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  Huh.  http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=156907

July 16, 2008 6:05 pm Ah, it was s1lentslayer who got White but not the main title!  Mystery solved!  No one else cares, but maybe you can share my excitement!

July 16, 2008 6:03 pm @RobAbsten: Huh.  Now I'm confused, myself.  The best I can tell is that I was bored at work and waiting impatiently for new comics to come up, and when it did I started clicking to see the pull lists of commenters here; maybe there was an error in yours that showed you getting White.  It sure isn't there now.  Anyway, had you been getting White but not the main series, I would have been interested to hear why, because . . . I don't know, because someone who does that must have a perspective very different from mine.  I probably wanted to start a conversation.  Worked anyway, heh wott wott?

July 16, 2008 4:45 pm Hmm.  One more thing, if anyone's still interested.  In their summer events this year DC just has more character to their characters than Marvel.  The way that they interract is more interesting to me, and they seem more like real people.  The Iron Man movie certainly did a lot to interest me in the character, but in the Bendis books his conflict with the New Avengers seems circumstantial and, frankly, boring.  Really, the characters in MA, New A and SI all seem less interesting for having been written by Bendis.  I still want to give the guy a chance, and I can see that the story he weaved into the last five years of Marvel was well planned and an interesting concept all on its own, but the execution is very lacking, at least for me as a new reader.  I was excited to follow the thread back at first, but I don't see the events drawing on characters very much, and the whole thing started to seem like a poorly written history book.  FC, by contrast, got me wondering about the previous crises enough to actually start to read them, and although I still haven't read Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis, I have read Identity Crisis, which made wonderful use of characters, and Batman's role in OMAC Project led out of that very well.  DC's recent history reads more like a heroic saga than a history book.

July 16, 2008 4:23 pm

@RaceMcCloud: I'm pretty much a new reader; I started reading mainstream comics in April (for the first time in my life, at the age of 25, although I was familiar with a lot of the characters from other media), and SI got me excited about reading Marvel.  I spurned DC at first, I think because I knew fewer of their characters.  I remember wondering if there were a series of diferently colored lanterns, and if Blue Beetle had anything to do with them, and how strange that everything was color-coded . . .

 My initial interest was only in finding out what the X-Men comics were like; I guess you could say Marvel saw a payoff from the early nineties cartoon, about fifteen years after it ended.  When I did a little reading online, I was pretty surprised to find that the X-Men weren't too popular anymore, and that the Avengers were the big thing now.  Surprised and displeased, honestly.  When I first looked at new books on my LCS' shelves, I didn't know that the Avengers were different from the British TV show until I examined the covers.  I don't remember ever having heard of the comics.  So I looked at some X-Men comics, saw that they were really weird, and put them back.  A few weeks later, with more information, I bought the newly released hardcover of Messiah Complex.

But the first time I looked at mainstream comics, SI got me interested in the greater Marvel Universe, before I had even read a Marvel comic.  I guess I read about what was going on and found that New and Mighty were the seeds of the event, and so first I went back and bought the last eight or so New Avengers books.  I started with 33, a big fight with the Hood's gang, narrated by I don't remember what small-time villain.  I had heard that Bendis had a reputation for being a good writer, and I read with an eye for that at first.  It took two reads to figure out what the hell was going on, which I assumed was because I hadn't read back issues.  Anyway, I read up to whatever was current, I guess 38 or so, and then got and read SI.  I guess I'd say it didn't feel difficult to follow, but in retrospect it was.  I could tell what the main event was, but I didn't really know the significance of (or care about) things like why the Skrulls were invading, who the Illuminati was, what all the backstory from events back to Avengers Dissasembled was, etc.  It all felt a bit campy, and not worth the time, effort and money of figuring out.

 I liked SI #1 well enough, and got 2, which I also thought was okay . . . but I wasn't really hooked.  At this point I was reading a whole slew of Marvel titles, but none of the good ones (Captain America, Immortal Iron Fist, Jason Aaron's Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Spider Man) had anything to do with the event, and they also didn't seem to have much fall-out from Civil War and on back (I know Cap died in a CW tie-in, but it didn't seem to actually come out of that event). 

 Then in June I started looking at DC, with Final Crisis (again weeks after it actually came out).  It was as confusing as anything I'd ever written, and I relied heavily on an annotation website to figure out anything at all, but nevertheless it seemed much more compelling.  The New Gods themselves seemed sort of campy, but it was clear that Grant Morrison understood them as symbolic.  I didn't know almost any of the characters, and they looked like they had silly origins but were nevertheless being treated seriously.  And so I started getting a whole slew of DC titles, as well.

 Now, to me at least, Marvel has lost.  I still pick up a lot of Marvel titles, but I've stopped getting SI; Bendis, honestly, seems like he has idiosyncratic appeal at most, and I just don't think he's very smart; and I'm looking at everythign Grant Morrison has written (Invisibles, whew boo!) and very committed to Action and Superman, Batman and all of the Bat titles (I like all of them, much to my surprise at first, and I'm even looking at getting years of back issues of Batman, Robin, Detective, and whatever else comes up as important to the story line), Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Manhunter . . . sheesh, just about everything.  Whereas with the Marvel books, I'm interested in the writers but not so much the characters: mainly Brubaker, Fraction, Aaron, Straczynski.  I'm looking at Powers to give Bendis a second chance, but currently his name woudl actually serve as a deterrent for me.

July 15, 2008 5:32 pm @Kory and Kimbo: That's in line with what I've heard before.  What I wonder is what that could have to do with the creative team.  I like Tom Peyer's writing, and he had nothing to do with introducing the children (as far as I know).  He's only been on the series since the beginning of this year, and the issues he's written (just the last, what, five?) were very fun.  The art, meanwhile, is maybe too cartooney but does good storytelling.  Whatver problems the comic has, then, aren't with the creative team.

July 15, 2008 1:58 pm @conor: well sure it makes sense why I don't know where long-term Flash readers are coming from.  I'm planning on getting some of the last several years of Flash soon, particularly the run by Johns.  But I don't see how it could change my perception that this is a perfectly good comic right now.  Do people hate it because it's not what they wanted, or because they think it's bad?

July 14, 2008 7:17 pm It's really not that bad; I don't understand where a lot of the comments here are coming from.  I haven't read much Flash from before this team, because I just started reading comics in March, but I've seriously enjoyed the last four issues.