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Post by Cei-U! on Oct 10, 2020 23:15:38 GMT -5
So far as I'm concerned, the story of the Spider-Man who debuted in Amazing Fantasy #15 ended with his graduation from college in Amazing #185. I like some of what came after, but I strongly disliked the Wolfman and Mantlo versions (my loathing of the Black Cat is well known round these parts) and I really didn't care for the black costume/symbiote stuff (though I loved the costume design). I haven't read a Spidey comic since early '86 (except for the Kraven's Last Hunt TPB) so I have no firsthand knowledge of what came later. From what others have said, I'm pretty sure I'd hate the Clone Saga, One More Day, and Sins Past. Cei-U! I summon the web-slinging wonder! When I read the 11 volumes of Essential Spider-Man years back, Wolfman's run was the first consistently disappointing period for me. Sure, there are subpar issues along the way, but at a minimum Amazing is solid for the first years. I know from another thread that other people like the Korvac Saga, but has a similar place in Avengers for me. I think Avengers ranges from solid to great pretty much throughout until Perez departs during the Korvac storyline, which disappointed me. I'm with you. The Korvac storyline is the nadir of the 1970s Avengers, markedly inferior to what came before and after. In hindsight, Korvac seems like a test run for the (yechh!) Beyonder.
Cei-U! I summon Shooter's unhealthy fascination with "misunderstood" omnipotent villains!
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Post by berkley on Oct 10, 2020 23:21:56 GMT -5
I wish they would retcon away everything done with the Eternals since Kirby's series and that any new series would take just that run as its basis and work from there. I should qualify that statement by adding, not because those later MU storylines are necessarily terrible in themselves, as MU stories (though personally I don't think any of them apart from the Thor/Celestials saga are any great shakes), but because they have had the effect of effacing the Kirby series as an independent work with its own unique approach, structure, and underlying themes and concerns.
In a way - actually in two ways, come to think of it - it's an inverse example to the thread subject: 1) the later stories have not been ret-conned even though, as Eternals stories, they are IMO about as terrible as you can get; and 2) the original Kirby story has been ret-conned - and ret-conned to the extreme, ret-conned pretty much out of existence - but not because it was terrible, but rather because it was and continues to be misunderstood and unappreciated.
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Post by berkley on Oct 10, 2020 23:30:52 GMT -5
When I was reading Mrvel back in the 70s I rated Wolfman up there or perhaps just below other favourites like Englehart and Gerber, but looking back, that feeling was derived entirely from Tomb of Dracula. In hindsight, none of his other work, with the partial exception of Night Force at DC (which hardly lasted long enough to tell what its promising start would have developed into) reached anywhere near the same level of excellence as did ToD. The best of it - some of his DD stuff, maybe Teen Titans - was just entertaining superhero stories. I'm pretty sure I read a good part of his Spider-Man and FF runs but nothing about them stands out to me in mempry, good or bad.
But I'll always pay him tribute for Tomb of Dracula, that was a really special series that can hold its head up with the best of its time.
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Post by tarkintino on Oct 11, 2020 4:44:30 GMT -5
let's not go into how Ditko never wanted the Green Goblin to be Harry's father That's a myth passed on by Marvel's editor and his cronies, designed to somehow make Ditko look bad. Lee had his faults, but his account of the Green Goblin matter is not one of them. Ditko was not the guy who took the dive into the more dramatic, soap-opera kind of character development--not on the level of what Norman Osborn would be--that was Lee, as evidenced by his work on the title post-Ditko, and on other Marvel titles of the period. There's a creative consistency in Lee's work--which included Spider-Man. So much of what Spider-Man would become as an ever-developing icon of the medium was not on the "plate" so to speak, while Ditko was there. It is highly doubtful (also based on what Ditko would do post-Marvel) that he did not have as deep a connection to powerful emotional content as Lee, Romita, Thomas, Conway, et al. Its just not there. That appearance does not prove Ditko wanted Osborn to be the Goblin at all, as it is just an unnamed person who could have been anyone with one of Ditko's hair-design leanings. There is no hard evidence in favor of Ditko on this matter at all, and its not as though former Marvel employees have bitten their collective tongues for 50-plus years about this--or any of the other inner-workings--good and bad--at the company. Just the opposite. In other words, I've heard dirt (some of it firsthand) about Lee, et al., that calls some long-lived stories into question, but the Green Goblin matter has been rather consistent. Hugo Weaving's Red Skull from Captain America: The First Avenger was closer to the source (with more Silver Age Skull influences), as far as Marvel adaptations go. Amnesia as a plot device for character's behavior is very, very old. I seriously doubt anyone at Marvel was taking creative inspiration from that ridiculous Batman TV series. Satirizing it--yes (as seen in Not Brand Ecch), but not inspired by it. Even DC's writers started to run away from any of its influences while it was still first run on ABC (mirroring some of the period reader letters I've posted on this board which echo the resentment they had over the TV series and any of its tropes appearing in the comics). Who? Unless an individual admits he has a problem, willingly submits to treatment (and there's no real treatment for what Osborn did to himself) or is discovered to be the Goblin, arrested and placed in court-ordered treatment, he is going to continue to be a menace.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
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Post by Confessor on Oct 11, 2020 16:46:17 GMT -5
I'm primarily a Lee/Romita man when it comes to '60s Spider-Man, but I really love the Lee/Ditko era too. I also don't really see them as two distinctive variations on the character: I think Romita's run followed on very comfortably and naturally from the Ditko era. Peter's transition from gangly, awkward guy, with a bitter streak (as a result of bullying) in his early teens into a more assured, more handsome and more confident young man in his late teens and early 20s mirrors a lot of people's lives during those years. It certainly mirrors mine. Therefore, it tends to ring "true" for me.
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Post by zaku on Oct 11, 2020 17:01:39 GMT -5
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Post by berkley on Oct 11, 2020 17:20:58 GMT -5
When I read the 11 volumes of Essential Spider-Man years back, Wolfman's run was the first consistently disappointing period for me. Sure, there are subpar issues along the way, but at a minimum Amazing is solid for the first years. I know from another thread that other people like the Korvac Saga, but has a similar place in Avengers for me. I think Avengers ranges from solid to great pretty much throughout until Perez departs during the Korvac storyline, which disappointed me. I'm with you. The Korvac storyline is the nadir of the 1970s Avengers, markedly inferior to what came before and after. In hindsight, Korvac seems like a test run for the (yechh!) Beyonder.
Cei-U! I summon Shooter's unhealthy fascination with "misunderstood" omnipotent villains!
Much the same experience here. I was into the multi-issue Korvac story until Perez stopped doing the art, upon which it became immeditaely apparent that it was the artwork all along that I had been enjoying. I did keep reading to the end, but that was it for the Avengers with me. I stopped following the series and never have picked it up again on a regular basis, though I have gone back and tried a few back-issues here and there of things I've seen or heard about online.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 11, 2020 17:58:53 GMT -5
Your mentioning this abomination made me recall the story of Black Zero... who works for some outlaw cosmic empire, whose mission is to destroy any planet about to begin traveling in space. Supes finds out that Black Zero was the one really responsible for the death of Krypton, and so, logically, naturally, and rationally, he frees Jax-Ur to save Earth from Black Zero. Could have been a perfectly wonderful story IF IT HADN"T BEEN TOLD BETTER FOR 30 YEARS ALREADY!!!! Did Weisinger and writer Otto Binder not get the memo that this was what Imaginary Novels were invented to do?
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Post by tarkintino on Oct 11, 2020 18:32:45 GMT -5
Your mentioning this abomination made me recall the story of Black Zero... who works for some outlaw cosmic empire, whose mission is to destroy any planet about to begin traveling in space. Supes finds out that Black Zero was the one really responsible for the death of Krypton, and so, logically, naturally, and rationally, he frees Jax-Ur to save Earth from Black Zero. Could have been a perfectly wonderful story IF IT HADN"T BEEN TOLD BETTER FOR 30 YEARS ALREADY!!!! Did Weisinger and writer Otto Binder not get the memo that this was what Imaginary Novels were invented to do? At least readers got a nice Adams cover out of it!
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Post by zaku on Oct 12, 2020 6:46:15 GMT -5
Your mentioning this abomination made me recall the story of Black Zero... who works for some outlaw cosmic empire, whose mission is to destroy any planet about to begin traveling in space. Supes finds out that Black Zero was the one really responsible for the death of Krypton, and so, logically, naturally, and rationally, he frees Jax-Ur to save Earth from Black Zero. Could have been a perfectly wonderful story IF IT HADN"T BEEN TOLD BETTER FOR 30 YEARS ALREADY!!!! Did Weisinger and writer Otto Binder not get the memo that this was what Imaginary Novels were invented to do? There is a post-Crisis version of him too. From Wikipedia:
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Post by mikelmidnight on Oct 12, 2020 11:36:47 GMT -5
Jameson, meanwhile, went from a neurotic nutcase to completely INSANE under Romita. I preferred him in the '67 cartoons, where, at least, he was the "comic releief". Under Romtia, he wasn't funny. And at times, he was outright dangerous. Like the time he hired Electro to attack Spider-Man while he was making an appearance on THE TONIGHT SHOW in a studio filled with innocent bystanders in the audience. There's no way Jameson shouldn't have been charged with all sorts of crimes connected with that single incident.
Yeah, I never hated Jameson as a character foil, but when he was employing super villains and putting civilians in danger, he passed into super-villain category himself, and ought to have gone to jail.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Oct 12, 2020 11:37:28 GMT -5
You can totally geek out as reality has been such a big part of so many books and comics over the past few decades. I do kind of like the idea in theory that say Cynoshure from GrimJack might be connected to the Bleed which might be connected to the Dark Tower or the Eternal Champion multiverse or Riverworld or the Negative Zone.
Matt Howarth's Bugtown is the seedy underbelly of the same city.
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Confessor
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Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Oct 12, 2020 13:54:10 GMT -5
Jameson, meanwhile, went from a neurotic nutcase to completely INSANE under Romita. I preferred him in the '67 cartoons, where, at least, he was the "comic releief". Under Romtia, he wasn't funny. And at times, he was outright dangerous. Like the time he hired Electro to attack Spider-Man while he was making an appearance on THE TONIGHT SHOW in a studio filled with innocent bystanders in the audience. There's no way Jameson shouldn't have been charged with all sorts of crimes connected with that single incident.
Yeah, I never hated Jameson as a character foil, but when he was employing super villains and putting civilians in danger, he passed into super-villain category himself, and ought to have gone to jail.
Well, he is Spider-Man's arch-enemy, after all.
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Post by chadwilliam on Oct 13, 2020 10:08:34 GMT -5
Interestingly, I don't think this was ever retconned. Nor Black Zero, Nor the fact that the rocket which brought Superman to Earth as a baby first stopped over at another planet where the man of steel - whose very presence caused this world to advance from a society of cavepeople to super-scientists - grew to live to be 100 until his son (yes, Superman has a son) de-aged him to infancy, put him back in his rocket, and sent him on his way to Earth where only a couple of hours had passed ( Action Comics #370)Nor the time Superman encountered a race of aliens who eradicated crime, war, and natural disasters but, thinking that they had some nefarious scheme in mind, destroys them only to learn too late that, no, their intentions were good the whole time ( Action Comics #368-369 - man, just one issue before the above). As a result, the world is once again plagued by crime, war, and disaster. Nor our learning that the reason people can't recognize the physical similarities between Clark Kent and Superman is due to a subconscious hypnotic suggestion filtered through the Kryptonian lenses of Kent's glasses which cause viewers to see Clark as older, frailer, and balder ( Superman #330). Perhaps never mentioned again, but never retconned.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 13, 2020 10:29:17 GMT -5
Interestingly, I don't think this was ever retconned. Nor Black Zero, Nor the fact that the rocket which brought Superman to Earth as a baby first stopped over at another planet where the man of steel - whose very presence caused this world to advance from a society of cavepeople to super-scientists - grew to live to be 100 until his son (yes, Superman has a son) de-aged him to infancy, put him back in his rocket, and sent him on his way to Earth where only a couple of hours had passed ( Action Comics #370)Nor the time Superman encountered a race of aliens who eradicated crime, war, and natural disasters but, thinking that they had some nefarious scheme in mind, destroys them only to learn too late that, no, their intentions were good the whole time ( Action Comics #368-369 - man, just one issue before the above). As a result, the world is once again plagued by crime, war, and disaster. Nor our learning that the reason people can't recognize the physical similarities between Clark Kent and Superman is due to a subconscious hypnotic suggestion filtered through the Kryptonian lenses of Kent's glasses which cause viewers to see Clark as older, frailer, and balder ( Superman #330). Perhaps never mentioned again, but never retconned. Y'know, after I posted, I realized that it was the Black Zero story that was the retcon. Then, as I remembered a couple of others that might qualify, like when the Silver Age Hawkman was outed as an alien, I realized that both were examples of ignored retcons. I was too ashamed to admit it. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court and the OP. Though it may be argued that ignoring that kind of story is simply a passive retcon.
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