Jim Lemoine
Jun 7, 2004, 04:25 pm
<img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/logos/dittol_logo.gif" align=left border=0 alt="Did I Think That Out Loud?!? logo">By Jim Lemoine, jimlemoine@comixfan.cjb.net
Six Degrees of Marvel Comics
When you write a Marvel Comics column and you're up to your thirty-eighth installment, it can get a bit hard to figure out what to write about next. When you usually focus on characters, and you've already written about a lot of the characters that interest you most, finding a sufficiently-mainstream-yet-still-interesting character to analyze can be a struggle.
For instance, I'd love to write another column on a member of the Fantastic Four... but through the 1-2-3-4-5 columns, I've already written about all the core players. I suppose maybe I could write a "Six" column about the first-ever replacement member of the Fantastic Four, Crystal the Inhuman Elemental. I always liked Crystal: cool powers, fun family, weird hair-thing, and a personality that's changed over time... but never so much as to be unbelievable. Crystal is the original wild woman of the Marvel Universe, a passionate lover and a faithless wife. In her first appearance, she was sitting alone in one of the seedier sections of town in a skimpy outfit - then when she encountered a strange man, she acted surprised and led him right back to her family's supposedly top-secret headquarters. Later, she'd date the hotshot star of the MU (the Human Torch), get bored with him, marry Quicksilver (a move her family just had to approve of, knowing the Inhumans' love of superior genetics and Pietro's status as homo superior), cheat on Quicksilver once or twice, and get in a dream catfight with the Invisible Woman. She's sexy, she's loose, she has a sparkling personality, she's related to Black Bolt, and she pulls hair. How can you not love that?
You'd think everyone would be as interested in Crystal as I am; she's got connections to all three major branches of the Marvel Universe. She's always been a part of the Fantastic Four story, she's served her time as an Avenger, and she's connected to the X-mythos as the wife of former X-Factorite Quicksilver and the mother of Magneto's completely human grandchild. As a member of the FF, she spent most of her time flirting with Johnny Storm (even when they both were married), and as a member of the Avengers, she spent most of her time flirting with the Black Knight (even though Sersi needed his love to live or something; I was kind of confused by that story). She's a character who has exhibited both weakness and strength, but most especially raw humanity. She's a devoted Princess and a rebellious child, a mother and a call-girl. It's a real shame she's barely been seen since she left the Avengers back in the mid-nineties, just in time not to get caught up in that Onslaught/Franklin mess.
Heh. Franklin. It's good to see the kid finally growing up a bit in the pages of Fantastic Four. Anybody else here remember Fantastic Force? Nah, I didn't think so. Long story short: a long-established Marvel Universe couple's adult child comes back from the far future, all decked out in high-tech metal armor and amazing, unstoppable psychic powers. He then goes on to form a team composed of himself, his mysterious-and-just-introduced-kind-of-a-girlfriend-but-kind-of-not, and a few relative unknowns, all springing from the pages of a current team book. Does that setup sound familiar to you?
Well, sure, yes, it was X-Force, but it was Fantastic Force, too. Coincidence?
But only one of those titles is making a comeback this year, and Vibraxas (who had the power to shake the earth and make a lot of women very happy) isn't a member of the comeback team. Why is X-Force returning in its most classic form after all this time? Well, retro's in, apparently... at least judging by the vast majority of Marvel's current titles. Rob Liefeld's art remains a source of fascination to many, and I'll admit it if nobody else will - those early X-Force stories by Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza weren't really all that bad. Sure, they weren't exactly Shakespeare, either, but they could have been much, much worse. I cheerfully admit that I'll give the first issue of X-Force a try, just for curiosity's sake. I'll be interesting to see how far it deviates from the original X-Force #1 (which nobody actually read, since it came polybagged with a trading card, and nobody would ever want to spoil its Mint value), and it'll be pretty neat to see forgotten characters like Shatterstar back in action - as a long-time Marvel fan, I'm always happy when forgotten characters get a chance in the spotlight.
Which I think is the biggest reason that I've always been so disappointed at the lack of staying power of Defenders. Called "The Worst Comic Ever Made" by Comics International, the most recent relaunch of the Defenders concept was helmed by Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen, two names that have rarely been in the same sentence with the words "Worst" and "Comic." Their Defenders was... well... different. It focused on the Big Four (Doc Strange, Hulk, Namor, and the Silver Surfer), went with a more Kirby-esque style of art, and certainly didn't take itself very seriously. Contrary to what fans expected, it didn't read or feel much like Busiek's Avengers - it was a definite light-hearted throwback to the original Defenders stories. It was cancelled pretty quickly, but those initial eleven issues of the relaunch are highly recommended for anyone who wants to read a fun and very funny comic. The Hulk moments alone were priceless.
Maybe that's the reason Secret Defenders didn't last so long - because it didn't have the Incredible Hulk. Then again, maybe the reason Secret Defenders bombed so quickly was because it was a really, really bad book. I've always been surprised that a mere lack of quality could cause a book to bomb in the dreck-rich nineties - especially a book with so marketable a premise. In each issue of Secret Defenders, Doctor Strange would gather a revolving team to combat some mysterious ethereal menace, choosing from the ranks of folks like Wolverine, Spider-Man, the Punisher, Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, Darkhawk, Sleepwalker... okay, I assure you, back then those last four were really popular. With a line-up like that, how bad did this book have to be to get cancelled while so many other terrible books lasted into the big comic book bust? The first issue even had a foil cover – how could that fail???
That reminds me... this could come back to haunt me later, but does anybody else miss that second Ghost Rider? Not the Johnny Blaze-Zarathos GR, but the Daniel Ketch not-an-evil-demon Ghost Rider? Sure, that Rider gets a lot of flak as yet another dark, gritty nineties creation gone terribly, terribly wrong. Yes, his mysterious origin and violent nature made him virtually identical to any other ultra-marketable nineties comic creation, most of which were, in hindsight, pretty terrible. But I submit that at least originally, the Daniel Ketch Ghost Rider was the exception that proved the rule. The first twenty-five issues of the third volume of Ghost Rider were that oh-so-rare dark, violent, and mysterious character done absolutely right. After just a couple of issues, you actually cared about Ghost Rider, and though he didn't say much, Danny Ketch and his alter-ego already had a heck of a lot more depth than characters like the Punisher or Wolverine had back then.
With the book's twenty-fifth issue, things sort of went to Hell... literally and figuratively. The book's way-hot artist, Mark Texeira, left to pursue other projects. Series writer Howard Mackie (who'd been doing so well up until then) spoiled the character's origin and introduced a very convoluted continuity of the worst type. And the title, which had been so good as a surprisingly realistic inner city story, became a tale of mystics, magic, and demons. Pretty soon GR was teaming up with Wolverine and the X-Men, and it was all downhill from there.
That Ghost Rider series was started as part of a launch of new titles - all dubbed "Heroes for the Nineties" (even though one of the titles didn't even chronologically occur in the 1990's). Just like Marvel's recent Tsunami wave of new series, this mass launch included a bit of the old, a bit of the new, and a bit of the unexpected: the titles were Robocop (which didn't take place in the Marvel Universe at all - thus, sadly and logically, no Marvel readers bought it), Namor (a new look at an old character by John Byrne, who provided some of the best Marvel work of his career), the aforementioned Ghost Rider, Guardians of the Galaxy (if you like retro... hell, if you just like good stories and awesome cliffhangers, you should really seek out this title's first twenty-five issues), Spider-Man (written and drawn by that guy with the balls), and the Nicieza/Bagley ahead-of-its-time masterpiece, The New Warriors.
Y'know, it's amazing how much good material came out of such a demonized period of comics history.
It's not rare to see a teen superhero comic come out from a major publisher. What is rare is to see the teenagers in that comic actually acting like teenagers. More often than not, they're just slightly smaller and more inexperienced versions of their older counterparts, which is a shame since there's so many great stories that can only be told with realistic young characters. Compare Claremont's New Mutants to Faerber's deservedly-shortlived relaunch of New Warriors, and you'll see a world of difference. Claremont's characters were immature, uncertain, arrogant, and desperate to prove themselves... just like all teenagers. Faerber's characters were... well... superheroes.
Fabian Nicieza is a guy who knows how to write realistic young characters, who can make even painfully-dorky characters like Speedball cool, and who can weave current events and real-world problems into his stories seamlessly. Nicieza's run on New Warriors included Middle East power struggles, environmental quandaries, parent-on-child violence, gangs, guns, homosexuality, and patricide. And through it all, we watched our heroes grow up the hard way. This book was great for the same reason that Claremont's first run on Uncanny X-Men was great: there was no status quo. People changed, our heroes grew up, and they started to look at the world in different ways. Watching characters change over time is one of the most pleasing experiences in comics reading - it's the art Stan Lee perfected, that made all those Silver Age Marvel titles so darn popular.
I recently reread another old Marvel book with realistic young heroes... Generation X. Where the middle of the series dragged and sagged under its own weight, the beginning and the end were fantastic. And while X-Fans may wax poetic about the beauty of the original Lobdell/Bachalo creative teaming, it's Brian Wood, Steve Pugh, and Ron Lim who really deserve props for realizing the potential that Generation X always had. A lot of those X-Fans hate this team for killing Synch, closing the Massachusetts Academy, and consigning Penance, Artie, and Leech to limbo. But the later Wood/Pugh/Lim issues, especially the series-ending Four Days storyline, was the best the title had ever been. Four Days wasn't about mutant superheroes who just happened to be teenagers; it was about teenagers who just happened to be mutants. There's a big difference there, best exemplified in this storyline that will remind you why characters like Chamber and Jubilee (yes, Jubilee) have so much potential.
Y'know, I didn't really care that Skin had died until I went back and read Wood's Generation X. I was mystified by the death of Angelo Espinosa when I first read it in Uncanny X-Men; it seemed that the writer either (a) assumed that everybody else hated Skin as much as he did, so it wouldn't be a big deal, or (b) assumed that a brief one-panel announcement would be enough to leave a lasting impact on the reader, one that would temporarily revert to the back of our minds while we read about Skin's best friends talking sex upon visiting his gravesite. I just didn't get it.
The fact is, Skin was a major Marvel mutant character for years, and Marvel had the opportunity to do something incredibly meaningful with his death (as Brian Wood did with Synch, or as Frank Tieri did with Maggot). Instead, Skin's demise was almost an afterthought, a brief and relatively unimportant aside, which can only leave the reader wondering why. Why bother even killing this character, if the death means nothing to anyone? Why kill a character who was taken very seriously, in a way that doesn't take him seriously at all? When a character's been around that long, there is a garden of opportunity in death for new stories and creative new directions for his friends and comrades - why kill a character, then ignore all of that?
Of course, now I've done what I absolutely didn't want to do - I've virtually guaranteed that many readers will completely forget everything in the column prior to the last two paragraphs, suddenly believing that the entire column is about Chuck Austen. There will be e-mails and message board postings all about the merits and/or faults of Chuck Austen by people who don't seem to have the slightest idea what the rest of this column was about. We'll hear about Chuck Austen's varied career - from his great War Machine to his abyssmal Draco. We'll hear that he's the greatest and most underrated writer in comics today, and we'll hear that he's the worst writer in the history of creation. We'll hear from supporters calling his detractors closed-minded and hateful, and we'll hear from his defenders calling his supporters shallow and faithful to a fault. But most of us... most of us just won't care.
So many comics fans feel very strongly about very particular things, and they automatically assume not only that everyone else cares to discuss those opinions in detail, but also that they agree. Often, no evidence or rational discussion is needed - it's enough to make a statement and wait for an immediate Chorus of Amens. (Of course, I write a column, so I'll happily admit that this is the pot calling the kettle black. But I do try to back up what I say, at least.) But is anyone else annoyed at how certain fanboys can completely commandeer a conversation, both in real-life and the internet? Here's an example - read the following paragraph:
"I really enjoyed the latest story by Grant Morrison, the slightly quirky Seaguy. It was much better than The Filth, a surprisingly poor Vertigo title in an era of otherwise high quality. But it had nothing on his most brilliant story - his work on Doom Patrol."
Example continued: I guarantee you that the vast majority of responses I receive to that paragraph will have nothing to do with the quality of any of the mentioned works, nor will anyone take issue with my compliments of Vertigo's recent material. I won't hear a thing about the current Doom Patrol team's revival, or my characterization of Seaguy as "quirky." Instead, I shall receive a plethora of replies along the likes of, "I'm glad you mentioned Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. I thought it was the best," or, "Man, how can you even talk about Morrison? His New X-Men sucked."
Of course, for the paragraph preceding this one, I will receive many replies from people asking, "You don't really think New X-Men 'was the best', do you? I thought you were smarter than that," and, "You don't really think New X-Men 'sucked', do you? Man, you're stupid."
And so on.
Lots of writers seem to have polarizing work these days. Take J. Michael Stracynski for example. Everybody either seems to love his Amazing Spider-Man or hate it. It's not necessarily that JMS writes a bad Spider-Man - in fact, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that that's the problem. Fans on both sides seem to agree that JMS writes a generally good, mostly light-hearted, adequately tragic Peter Parker. Instead, the problem seems to lie in the direction of the title - mystical mysteries with Ezekiel and Dr. Strange, versus the more classic confrontations with the likes of the Green Goblin and the Vulture. It's very interesting to me that the direction of a book, as opposed to the characterization of its protagonist, can have such an impact on a comic fan's desire to purchase a title.
Of course, then we could... no... no, wait. I've got it!
The Spider-Man movie starred Tobey Maguire. Tobey Maguire was in Seabiscuit with William H. Macy.
And William H. Macy was in Murder In The First with... Kevin Bacon.
Whew. That took long enough.
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Jim Lemoine is really sick of hearing about Chuck Austen and Grant Morrison, to be honest... but 49-cent tacos make it all better.
<center><hr width=75%></center>
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and are not reflective of ComiX-Fan or its other staff in general.
Six Degrees of Marvel Comics
When you write a Marvel Comics column and you're up to your thirty-eighth installment, it can get a bit hard to figure out what to write about next. When you usually focus on characters, and you've already written about a lot of the characters that interest you most, finding a sufficiently-mainstream-yet-still-interesting character to analyze can be a struggle.
For instance, I'd love to write another column on a member of the Fantastic Four... but through the 1-2-3-4-5 columns, I've already written about all the core players. I suppose maybe I could write a "Six" column about the first-ever replacement member of the Fantastic Four, Crystal the Inhuman Elemental. I always liked Crystal: cool powers, fun family, weird hair-thing, and a personality that's changed over time... but never so much as to be unbelievable. Crystal is the original wild woman of the Marvel Universe, a passionate lover and a faithless wife. In her first appearance, she was sitting alone in one of the seedier sections of town in a skimpy outfit - then when she encountered a strange man, she acted surprised and led him right back to her family's supposedly top-secret headquarters. Later, she'd date the hotshot star of the MU (the Human Torch), get bored with him, marry Quicksilver (a move her family just had to approve of, knowing the Inhumans' love of superior genetics and Pietro's status as homo superior), cheat on Quicksilver once or twice, and get in a dream catfight with the Invisible Woman. She's sexy, she's loose, she has a sparkling personality, she's related to Black Bolt, and she pulls hair. How can you not love that?
You'd think everyone would be as interested in Crystal as I am; she's got connections to all three major branches of the Marvel Universe. She's always been a part of the Fantastic Four story, she's served her time as an Avenger, and she's connected to the X-mythos as the wife of former X-Factorite Quicksilver and the mother of Magneto's completely human grandchild. As a member of the FF, she spent most of her time flirting with Johnny Storm (even when they both were married), and as a member of the Avengers, she spent most of her time flirting with the Black Knight (even though Sersi needed his love to live or something; I was kind of confused by that story). She's a character who has exhibited both weakness and strength, but most especially raw humanity. She's a devoted Princess and a rebellious child, a mother and a call-girl. It's a real shame she's barely been seen since she left the Avengers back in the mid-nineties, just in time not to get caught up in that Onslaught/Franklin mess.
Heh. Franklin. It's good to see the kid finally growing up a bit in the pages of Fantastic Four. Anybody else here remember Fantastic Force? Nah, I didn't think so. Long story short: a long-established Marvel Universe couple's adult child comes back from the far future, all decked out in high-tech metal armor and amazing, unstoppable psychic powers. He then goes on to form a team composed of himself, his mysterious-and-just-introduced-kind-of-a-girlfriend-but-kind-of-not, and a few relative unknowns, all springing from the pages of a current team book. Does that setup sound familiar to you?
Well, sure, yes, it was X-Force, but it was Fantastic Force, too. Coincidence?
But only one of those titles is making a comeback this year, and Vibraxas (who had the power to shake the earth and make a lot of women very happy) isn't a member of the comeback team. Why is X-Force returning in its most classic form after all this time? Well, retro's in, apparently... at least judging by the vast majority of Marvel's current titles. Rob Liefeld's art remains a source of fascination to many, and I'll admit it if nobody else will - those early X-Force stories by Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza weren't really all that bad. Sure, they weren't exactly Shakespeare, either, but they could have been much, much worse. I cheerfully admit that I'll give the first issue of X-Force a try, just for curiosity's sake. I'll be interesting to see how far it deviates from the original X-Force #1 (which nobody actually read, since it came polybagged with a trading card, and nobody would ever want to spoil its Mint value), and it'll be pretty neat to see forgotten characters like Shatterstar back in action - as a long-time Marvel fan, I'm always happy when forgotten characters get a chance in the spotlight.
Which I think is the biggest reason that I've always been so disappointed at the lack of staying power of Defenders. Called "The Worst Comic Ever Made" by Comics International, the most recent relaunch of the Defenders concept was helmed by Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen, two names that have rarely been in the same sentence with the words "Worst" and "Comic." Their Defenders was... well... different. It focused on the Big Four (Doc Strange, Hulk, Namor, and the Silver Surfer), went with a more Kirby-esque style of art, and certainly didn't take itself very seriously. Contrary to what fans expected, it didn't read or feel much like Busiek's Avengers - it was a definite light-hearted throwback to the original Defenders stories. It was cancelled pretty quickly, but those initial eleven issues of the relaunch are highly recommended for anyone who wants to read a fun and very funny comic. The Hulk moments alone were priceless.
Maybe that's the reason Secret Defenders didn't last so long - because it didn't have the Incredible Hulk. Then again, maybe the reason Secret Defenders bombed so quickly was because it was a really, really bad book. I've always been surprised that a mere lack of quality could cause a book to bomb in the dreck-rich nineties - especially a book with so marketable a premise. In each issue of Secret Defenders, Doctor Strange would gather a revolving team to combat some mysterious ethereal menace, choosing from the ranks of folks like Wolverine, Spider-Man, the Punisher, Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, Darkhawk, Sleepwalker... okay, I assure you, back then those last four were really popular. With a line-up like that, how bad did this book have to be to get cancelled while so many other terrible books lasted into the big comic book bust? The first issue even had a foil cover – how could that fail???
That reminds me... this could come back to haunt me later, but does anybody else miss that second Ghost Rider? Not the Johnny Blaze-Zarathos GR, but the Daniel Ketch not-an-evil-demon Ghost Rider? Sure, that Rider gets a lot of flak as yet another dark, gritty nineties creation gone terribly, terribly wrong. Yes, his mysterious origin and violent nature made him virtually identical to any other ultra-marketable nineties comic creation, most of which were, in hindsight, pretty terrible. But I submit that at least originally, the Daniel Ketch Ghost Rider was the exception that proved the rule. The first twenty-five issues of the third volume of Ghost Rider were that oh-so-rare dark, violent, and mysterious character done absolutely right. After just a couple of issues, you actually cared about Ghost Rider, and though he didn't say much, Danny Ketch and his alter-ego already had a heck of a lot more depth than characters like the Punisher or Wolverine had back then.
With the book's twenty-fifth issue, things sort of went to Hell... literally and figuratively. The book's way-hot artist, Mark Texeira, left to pursue other projects. Series writer Howard Mackie (who'd been doing so well up until then) spoiled the character's origin and introduced a very convoluted continuity of the worst type. And the title, which had been so good as a surprisingly realistic inner city story, became a tale of mystics, magic, and demons. Pretty soon GR was teaming up with Wolverine and the X-Men, and it was all downhill from there.
That Ghost Rider series was started as part of a launch of new titles - all dubbed "Heroes for the Nineties" (even though one of the titles didn't even chronologically occur in the 1990's). Just like Marvel's recent Tsunami wave of new series, this mass launch included a bit of the old, a bit of the new, and a bit of the unexpected: the titles were Robocop (which didn't take place in the Marvel Universe at all - thus, sadly and logically, no Marvel readers bought it), Namor (a new look at an old character by John Byrne, who provided some of the best Marvel work of his career), the aforementioned Ghost Rider, Guardians of the Galaxy (if you like retro... hell, if you just like good stories and awesome cliffhangers, you should really seek out this title's first twenty-five issues), Spider-Man (written and drawn by that guy with the balls), and the Nicieza/Bagley ahead-of-its-time masterpiece, The New Warriors.
Y'know, it's amazing how much good material came out of such a demonized period of comics history.
It's not rare to see a teen superhero comic come out from a major publisher. What is rare is to see the teenagers in that comic actually acting like teenagers. More often than not, they're just slightly smaller and more inexperienced versions of their older counterparts, which is a shame since there's so many great stories that can only be told with realistic young characters. Compare Claremont's New Mutants to Faerber's deservedly-shortlived relaunch of New Warriors, and you'll see a world of difference. Claremont's characters were immature, uncertain, arrogant, and desperate to prove themselves... just like all teenagers. Faerber's characters were... well... superheroes.
Fabian Nicieza is a guy who knows how to write realistic young characters, who can make even painfully-dorky characters like Speedball cool, and who can weave current events and real-world problems into his stories seamlessly. Nicieza's run on New Warriors included Middle East power struggles, environmental quandaries, parent-on-child violence, gangs, guns, homosexuality, and patricide. And through it all, we watched our heroes grow up the hard way. This book was great for the same reason that Claremont's first run on Uncanny X-Men was great: there was no status quo. People changed, our heroes grew up, and they started to look at the world in different ways. Watching characters change over time is one of the most pleasing experiences in comics reading - it's the art Stan Lee perfected, that made all those Silver Age Marvel titles so darn popular.
I recently reread another old Marvel book with realistic young heroes... Generation X. Where the middle of the series dragged and sagged under its own weight, the beginning and the end were fantastic. And while X-Fans may wax poetic about the beauty of the original Lobdell/Bachalo creative teaming, it's Brian Wood, Steve Pugh, and Ron Lim who really deserve props for realizing the potential that Generation X always had. A lot of those X-Fans hate this team for killing Synch, closing the Massachusetts Academy, and consigning Penance, Artie, and Leech to limbo. But the later Wood/Pugh/Lim issues, especially the series-ending Four Days storyline, was the best the title had ever been. Four Days wasn't about mutant superheroes who just happened to be teenagers; it was about teenagers who just happened to be mutants. There's a big difference there, best exemplified in this storyline that will remind you why characters like Chamber and Jubilee (yes, Jubilee) have so much potential.
Y'know, I didn't really care that Skin had died until I went back and read Wood's Generation X. I was mystified by the death of Angelo Espinosa when I first read it in Uncanny X-Men; it seemed that the writer either (a) assumed that everybody else hated Skin as much as he did, so it wouldn't be a big deal, or (b) assumed that a brief one-panel announcement would be enough to leave a lasting impact on the reader, one that would temporarily revert to the back of our minds while we read about Skin's best friends talking sex upon visiting his gravesite. I just didn't get it.
The fact is, Skin was a major Marvel mutant character for years, and Marvel had the opportunity to do something incredibly meaningful with his death (as Brian Wood did with Synch, or as Frank Tieri did with Maggot). Instead, Skin's demise was almost an afterthought, a brief and relatively unimportant aside, which can only leave the reader wondering why. Why bother even killing this character, if the death means nothing to anyone? Why kill a character who was taken very seriously, in a way that doesn't take him seriously at all? When a character's been around that long, there is a garden of opportunity in death for new stories and creative new directions for his friends and comrades - why kill a character, then ignore all of that?
Of course, now I've done what I absolutely didn't want to do - I've virtually guaranteed that many readers will completely forget everything in the column prior to the last two paragraphs, suddenly believing that the entire column is about Chuck Austen. There will be e-mails and message board postings all about the merits and/or faults of Chuck Austen by people who don't seem to have the slightest idea what the rest of this column was about. We'll hear about Chuck Austen's varied career - from his great War Machine to his abyssmal Draco. We'll hear that he's the greatest and most underrated writer in comics today, and we'll hear that he's the worst writer in the history of creation. We'll hear from supporters calling his detractors closed-minded and hateful, and we'll hear from his defenders calling his supporters shallow and faithful to a fault. But most of us... most of us just won't care.
So many comics fans feel very strongly about very particular things, and they automatically assume not only that everyone else cares to discuss those opinions in detail, but also that they agree. Often, no evidence or rational discussion is needed - it's enough to make a statement and wait for an immediate Chorus of Amens. (Of course, I write a column, so I'll happily admit that this is the pot calling the kettle black. But I do try to back up what I say, at least.) But is anyone else annoyed at how certain fanboys can completely commandeer a conversation, both in real-life and the internet? Here's an example - read the following paragraph:
"I really enjoyed the latest story by Grant Morrison, the slightly quirky Seaguy. It was much better than The Filth, a surprisingly poor Vertigo title in an era of otherwise high quality. But it had nothing on his most brilliant story - his work on Doom Patrol."
Example continued: I guarantee you that the vast majority of responses I receive to that paragraph will have nothing to do with the quality of any of the mentioned works, nor will anyone take issue with my compliments of Vertigo's recent material. I won't hear a thing about the current Doom Patrol team's revival, or my characterization of Seaguy as "quirky." Instead, I shall receive a plethora of replies along the likes of, "I'm glad you mentioned Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. I thought it was the best," or, "Man, how can you even talk about Morrison? His New X-Men sucked."
Of course, for the paragraph preceding this one, I will receive many replies from people asking, "You don't really think New X-Men 'was the best', do you? I thought you were smarter than that," and, "You don't really think New X-Men 'sucked', do you? Man, you're stupid."
And so on.
Lots of writers seem to have polarizing work these days. Take J. Michael Stracynski for example. Everybody either seems to love his Amazing Spider-Man or hate it. It's not necessarily that JMS writes a bad Spider-Man - in fact, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that that's the problem. Fans on both sides seem to agree that JMS writes a generally good, mostly light-hearted, adequately tragic Peter Parker. Instead, the problem seems to lie in the direction of the title - mystical mysteries with Ezekiel and Dr. Strange, versus the more classic confrontations with the likes of the Green Goblin and the Vulture. It's very interesting to me that the direction of a book, as opposed to the characterization of its protagonist, can have such an impact on a comic fan's desire to purchase a title.
Of course, then we could... no... no, wait. I've got it!
The Spider-Man movie starred Tobey Maguire. Tobey Maguire was in Seabiscuit with William H. Macy.
And William H. Macy was in Murder In The First with... Kevin Bacon.
Whew. That took long enough.
<center><hr width=75%></center>
Jim Lemoine is really sick of hearing about Chuck Austen and Grant Morrison, to be honest... but 49-cent tacos make it all better.
<center><hr width=75%></center>
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and are not reflective of ComiX-Fan or its other staff in general.