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Post by Action Ace on Jan 13, 2016 23:40:13 GMT -5
I wouldn't say prominent, but perhaps more prominent than they are in Millennium. Giffen plots the crossover and there are developments for several JLI members and this will be the point the team splits into American and European branches.
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Post by dupersuper on Jan 13, 2016 23:46:07 GMT -5
Just so we get it out of the way now...Shaxper do you have Invasion!? Ugh. They're prominent in that one too??? If you're reviewing Millennium, then there's no reason at all to "ugh" over Invasion. It's only 3 issues and they're very good. You may need it for your Superman thread as well, actually... |
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Post by realjla on Jan 13, 2016 23:54:11 GMT -5
Was "Invasion" supposed to be a 12-issue series? If it really was planned as 3 issues of '80 pages with no ads', that seemed unusual for that era.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 14, 2016 0:02:26 GMT -5
Was "Invasion" supposed to be a 12-issue series? If it really was planned as 3 issues of '80 pages with no ads', that seemed unusual for that era. So was the weekly format for Millennium (unusual for American comics). DC was doing a lot of experimenting with format, price, etc, for comics in that period. The Baxter books, Prestige Format, the New Format, the bi-weekly release of Man of Steel, the weekly Millennium event followed by the Action Comics Weekly experiment, the min-series within a series approach of Year One (the forerunner of the story arc that now dominates monthly comics), etc. so the three 80 page giants of original material (hearkening back to the old DC 80 page giant format but with all new material this time) doesn't seem that out of place when they were throwing things against the wall to see what stuck. One of the big criticisms for big events at the time was the time it took them to conclude and how long they might interfere with monthly books or hold up stories waiting for the outcome, so the weekly release of the Millennium event and the 80 page issue format for the Invasion event I think were both experiments to address that and see how they worked. DC was a lot less conservative as a publisher then than they are now, and under Kahn, Giordano and LEvits there was a lot more willingness to try new things in terms of both content and format. -M |
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Post by realjla on Jan 14, 2016 1:04:26 GMT -5
Was "Invasion" supposed to be a 12-issue series? If it really was planned as 3 issues of '80 pages with no ads', that seemed unusual for that era. So was the weekly format for Millennium (unusual for American comics). DC was doing a lot of experimenting with format, price, etc, for comics in that period. The Baxter books, Prestige Format, the New Format, the bi-weekly release of Man of Steel, the weekly Millennium event followed by the Action Comics Weekly experiment, the min-series within a series approach of Year One (the forerunner of the story arc that now dominates monthly comics), etc. so the three 80 page giants of original material (hearkening back to the old DC 80 page giant format but with all new material this time) doesn't seem that out of place when they were throwing things against the wall to see what stuck. One of the big criticisms for big events at the time was the time it took them to conclude and how long they might interfere with monthly books or hold up stories waiting for the outcome, so the weekly release of the Millennium event and the 80 page issue format for the Invasion event I think were both experiments to address that and see how they worked. DC was a lot less conservative as a publisher then than they are now, and under Kahn, Giordano and LEvits there was a lot more willingness to try new things in terms of both content and format. -M Although 'Invasion' had plenty of crossovers, it could actually be read more easily as a stand-alone title, compared to the previous three 'event series'. Of course, by 1988, Batman and Justice League were the only DC books I was still following. 'Crisis' crossovers tended to insert something in mid-story pointing towards the main series, and the crossovers for 'Legends' and Millennium' seemed incomprehensible if you weren't keeping up. The Batman 'Invasion' crossover had him fighting Thanagarians in Havana, but it wasn't impossible to keep up with events. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 14, 2016 1:36:34 GMT -5
realjla said:
Again, a lot of that was in response to feedback DC got to the previous events, this really was a time when they were trying a lot of new things, of course, as events got entrenched, more and more got tied into them (unlike Invasion) and entropy set in as DC got more calcified moving forward-things like Eclipso: The Darkness Within, Final Night, Genesis, 1 Million etc. did not follow the example of Invasion, but became more entwined going forward (though the Justice League was still front and center for a lot of them-sorry Shax!
Again this was a period where DC still saw a lo of possibilities to evolve the format and content of comics, Marvel had become even more calcified under Shooter's regime, and the DC Renaissance made them the darlings in a lot of fan's (and retailers') eyes, so they had the goodwill to experiment and not alienate fans or retailers and did so, but the goodwill did evaporate and the progressive experimentation, which culminated with the birth of Vertigo, soon evaporated altogether by the mid-late 90s.
To bring it back to point, you see this progression in microcosm in the JL(I) books, there's a lot of experimentation in the issues Shax is currently reviewing, but once a "winning formula" was found, the books soon became very formulaic and then carbon copied out to build a Justice League franchise of books until it stopped working because it lost the freshness which defined the early part of the series and made it so popular.
-M
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Post by tingramretro on Jan 14, 2016 2:43:30 GMT -5
Not "inevitably". Both Wally west's father and the Outsiders' Dr. Jace turned out to be Manhunter agents, and neither were robots. It was actually Dr. Jace's betrayal that kicked off the chain of events that led to the Outsiders disbanding after Millennium. Other Manhunter agents included Obsidian's girlfriend Marcie Cooper in Infinity Inc., Booster Gold's agent Dirk Davis, Mr. Smith from Ferris Aircraft, Karin Grace of the Suicide Squad, Blue Devil's sister Mary, the Pittsburgh Chief of Police in Firestorm and Harry Hadley from the Captain Atom Project. I think the only ones who turned out to be robots were Laurel Kent, Lana Lang and Thor the Thunder Dog. Lana Lang wasn't a robot. The Smallville town doctor was a robot and he hypnotized/brainwashed her and several other Smallville kids her age. Also, the first Justice League Rocket Red was a robot. I was kind of trying to avoid mentioning Rocket Red 7... |
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Post by tingramretro on Jan 14, 2016 2:58:36 GMT -5
Slight pause in the reviews as I wait for my Millennium #1-8 to arrive by mail. They should be here by Monday. Noooooooo! Legends was bad enough! This is ten times worse! My favourite part of Millennium was the Infinity Inc. crossover, where Golden Age Manhunter Dan Richards finds himself fighting his dog Thor, who is actually an android sleeper agent. Richards was supposed to be a police officer in his civilian i.d, and so presumably not totally clueless, but it had apparently never occurred to him to wonder if 47 wasn't possibly a rather unlikely age for a Spaniel to reach, and have him checked out by a vet... |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 14, 2016 12:16:04 GMT -5
I vaguely remember liking Invasion!, I concur with the others that my memory is that the JLI is more important to it than it is to Millenium.
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Post by MDG on Jan 14, 2016 12:18:13 GMT -5
Wow, you're actually going to read and review Millenium? My condolences.. I'm a big Englehart fan--even liked his WCA/Vision/Scarlet Witch books--but getting through Millennium and New Guardians, and later the Mantis-heavy Silver Surfer, was a tough period. |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Jan 14, 2016 14:35:22 GMT -5
Wow, you're actually going to read and review Millenium? My condolences.. I'm a big Englehart fan--even liked his WCA/Vision/Scarlet Witch books--but getting through Millennium and New Guardians, and later the Mantis-heavy Silver Surfer, was a tough period. I like Mr. Englehart's work, especially the Celestial Madonna saga and his Captain America run, and I even liked Mantis during the Celestial Madonna run. But after that she became like an antibiotics-resistant infection that he just couldn't rid of and that he spread everywhere he went (even renaming her "Willow" in his JLA run at DC). |
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Post by realjla on Jan 14, 2016 17:11:59 GMT -5
"This one...This one...This one"...GUH!!!!
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 14, 2016 18:17:30 GMT -5
This one is offended to hear you talk this way. This one thinks Mantis is awesome.
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Post by realjla on Jan 14, 2016 22:10:47 GMT -5
This one is offended to hear you talk this way. This one thinks Mantis is awesome. |
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Post by realjla on Jan 14, 2016 22:12:06 GMT -5
This one concedes other one's point. But this one still thinks that one's dialogue is the fault of one who wrote stories.
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