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Post by berkley on Sept 21, 2021 3:17:42 GMT -5
I like to hear of a writer saying things like that. Too many writers see them as more or less blank slates on which they are free to write whatever comes into their heads - or whatever they need to fit the story they want to write, regardless of whether it makes any sense for the pre-existing characters involved. In this particular case, Captain Marvel ( Rambeau) was Sterns baby, there's no way he wanted to write her as incompetent or as cracking under pressure. I think that these characters are no longer scared cows, and that even Spider-man or Thor are subject to weird storylines. Marvel still operates under the theory of having the illusion of change. That's why whenever a writer leaves a book, they generally reset the status quo to the way they found it. Even after all the things that Bendis was vilified for, everything he did was undone when he left the Avengers.
It's too bad that it had to take a threat to the integrity of a personal creation or pet character in order for him to take that stand but I still respect the stand he took and him for taking it. I'd just like to ee that attitude taken with all characetrs, even the most obscure.
But yes, we always come back to to the inevitability of this sort of inconsistancy when dealing with serial characters written and rendered by so many different writers and artists over so many decades. And I recognise that many of these changes have been for the better: just compare the first couple of years of the Lee/Kirby Thor to what we think of as the "classic" version by the same two creators, from around #120 or a little before or after - and that's without even a change in the creative team!
I even approve of some of the more recent changes in Marvel and DC with regard to characters such as Loki, once a straightforward villain, now a more nuanced, ambivalent figure.
So while I may dislike or disagree with a writer's interpretation of certain characters, I don't question their "right" to their own vision. But in many cases I question whether they have any "vision" at all, i.e. whether they bothered thinking much about it or took the easy way out and just made up some random nonsense because they couldn't be bothered - or didn't have time: I imagine that the deadline pressures of serial comics are always a factor in these things.
So I dont mind the idea of a reset, if that's what they're doing these days. I think it's great - perhaps almost necessary - that the next writer has the freedom to drop whatever doesn't make sense to him or her from the last version and begin anew - as long as they have some sense of the core elements of the character or concept in question. And I acknowledge that there can be legitmate disagreements about what those core elements are, especially with these serial characters that have already gone through so many changes.
Anyway, this is getting away from the Avengers and into more the general question of the nature of continuing characters - which is so far-reaching that it probably requires a thread of its own.
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Post by SJNeal on Sept 24, 2021 18:16:10 GMT -5
There are people who LIKE Harras? wow.. that's a bit shocking to me too. Bomber jackets are unifying I guess, but not in a good way. So many people get hung up on the jackets, as if it were the eras defining trait. I'll have you know the X-Men also sported the same look and no one ever seems to give them flack over it...
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Post by brutalis on Sept 24, 2021 18:23:50 GMT -5
There are people who LIKE Harras? wow.. that's a bit shocking to me too. Bomber jackets are unifying I guess, but not in a good way. So many people get hung up on the jackets, as if it were the eras defining trait. I'll have you know the X-Men also sported the same look and no one ever seems to give them flack over it... True, but X-Men was more of a "school" so unifying jackets was more ok in a way. Also NONE of the mutants wear capes or are clad in armor or immortal. It just didn't feel or look proper in Avengers for the team to wear jackets. Just one cranky, grumpy old man's opinion which seems to be the same as many other readers.
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Post by commond on Sept 24, 2021 18:56:37 GMT -5
Jackets were cool at the time. Even the Fantastic Four wore them.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 24, 2021 19:18:19 GMT -5
They would have been fine if they were the gear, but they wore the bomber jackets OVER their regular costumes. That's really not the problem with those stories though, they're just not very good... too many X-Men ties at the time, and the love triangle went on WAY too long.
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Post by commond on Oct 12, 2021 10:36:37 GMT -5
I read the first Busiek/Perez storyline, and I wasn't hugely impressed. Does it get better? Perez' art was unrecognizable and Busiek's writing paled in comparison to some of his other super hero tributes.
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Post by badwolf on Oct 12, 2021 12:45:49 GMT -5
I read the first Busiek/Perez storyline, and I wasn't hugely impressed. Does it get better? Perez' art was unrecognizable and Busiek's writing paled in comparison to some of his other super hero tributes. Yes, I think the Morgan le Fey storyline is probably the weakest of the run.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2021 12:52:20 GMT -5
I read the first Busiek/Perez storyline, and I wasn't hugely impressed. Does it get better? Perez' art was unrecognizable and Busiek's writing paled in comparison to some of his other super hero tributes. Yes, I think the Morgan le Fey storyline is probably the weakest of the run. In hindsight, sure, but after The Crossing and the other shenanigans at the end of the first series, and then a year of Extreme Avengers, it was like manna from heaven. -M
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Post by brutalis on Oct 12, 2021 13:13:51 GMT -5
Yes, I think the Morgan le Fey storyline is probably the weakest of the run. In hindsight, sure, but after The Crossing and the other shenanigans at the end of the first series, and then a year of Extreme Avengers, it was like manna from heaven. -M And it gave Perez a freedom to design some interesting Medieval costuming for the team which I was doodling a lot of!
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Crimebuster
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Post by Crimebuster on Oct 12, 2021 15:11:05 GMT -5
Busiek's Avengers is not the same level overall as Astro City. But though I think his run overall is in the good to very good range, his high points as as high as anyone who has worked on the title. Avengers Forever, Ultron Unlimited, and especially Kang Dynasty are some of the best Avengers stories ever.
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Post by badwolf on Oct 12, 2021 15:28:57 GMT -5
Yes, I think the Morgan le Fey storyline is probably the weakest of the run. In hindsight, sure, but after The Crossing and the other shenanigans at the end of the first series, and then a year of Extreme Avengers, it was like manna from heaven. -M Well, sure. It was actually one of the things that brought me back to superhero comics after many years off. (I missed #1 and picked it up with #2.)
But the medieval transformation thing had been done before. Chris Claremont did it when the X-Men fought Kulan Gath, and there are probably other past examples. And having 100 Avengers in it meant it was very crowded.
It was also during this run that I started liking Perez's art a bit less. It seemed overly detailed while feeling less dynamic than his earlier work. I don't think the new coloring methods helped. I think I actually prefer Kieron Dwyer on the art later, even though I was disappointed at first. (And yes, the Kang storyline is fantastic.)
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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2021 15:48:30 GMT -5
In hindsight, sure, but after The Crossing and the other shenanigans at the end of the first series, and then a year of Extreme Avengers, it was like manna from heaven. -M Well, sure. It was actually one of the things that brought me back to superhero comics after many years off. (I missed #1 and picked it up with #2.) But the medieval transformation thing had been done before. Chris Claremont did it when the X-Men fought Kulan Gath, and there are probably other past examples. And having 100 Avengers in it meant it was very crowded. It was also during this run that I started liking Perez's art a bit less. It seemed overly detailed while feeling less dynamic than his earlier work. I don't think the new coloring methods helped. I think I actually prefer Kieron Dwyer on the art later, even though I was disappointed at first. (And yes, the Kang storyline is fantastic.)
If you are going to start dismissing super-hero comics because plot elements had been done before, you'll end up dismissing the bulk of the entire output of Marvel and DC. -M
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 12, 2021 16:03:35 GMT -5
I hear a lot of good things about Busiek's Avengers run, and I'm a big, big Astro City fan. But I'm reluctant to try it in case it's similar in feel to Busiek's Avengers/JLA 4-part crossover? I thought that was really bad.
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Post by badwolf on Oct 12, 2021 18:45:30 GMT -5
Well, sure. It was actually one of the things that brought me back to superhero comics after many years off. (I missed #1 and picked it up with #2.) But the medieval transformation thing had been done before. Chris Claremont did it when the X-Men fought Kulan Gath, and there are probably other past examples. And having 100 Avengers in it meant it was very crowded. It was also during this run that I started liking Perez's art a bit less. It seemed overly detailed while feeling less dynamic than his earlier work. I don't think the new coloring methods helped. I think I actually prefer Kieron Dwyer on the art later, even though I was disappointed at first. (And yes, the Kang storyline is fantastic.)
If you are going to start dismissing super-hero comics because plot elements had been done before, you'll end up dismissing the bulk of the entire output of Marvel and DC. -M I haven't though. I just didn't think this use was particularly novel.
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Post by berkley on Oct 12, 2021 23:17:48 GMT -5
I hear a lot of good things about Busiek's Avengers run, and I'm a big, big Astro City fan. But I'm reluctant to try it in case it's similar in feel to Busiek's Avengers/JLA 4-part crossover? I thought that was really bad.
I've read only the initial Morgan la Fay storyline, a few years afterwards in collected form. I actually didn't mind that one too much: sure, it was a very traditional, not to say predictable, Avengers story, but I imagine that was exactly what Busiek was going for at the time, kind of deliberately bringing back the classic 60s-70s-style Avengers after what I understand had been several years of erratic writing on the series (haven't read Marvel in general since the late 70s so I have only the haziest notion of what happened).
I had meant to try more of the Busiek/Perez Avengers but every time I've looked at something, even acclaimed storylines like Ultron, it hasn't appealed to me. Also most of the run seems to have a line-up that doesn't attract me : the new characters like Triathlon don't seem too interesting; hardly any of my favourites, e.g. the Black Panther, ever seem to be present (too bad, Perez drew a great Panther the few times I've seen him do it); and even with characters I do like, e.g. Thor, I'm not sure I'd like Busiek's take on them - I was really turned off by the way he wrote Thor in JLAvengers.
So for me, I think he actually got off to a pretty good start with the Morgan la Fay story, but it was all downhill from there. However, I acknowledge that it would be unfair of me to pass judgment on the entire run, not having read any of it apart from the first four plus maybe two or three isolated later issues.
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