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Post by tonebone on Dec 25, 2021 18:19:37 GMT -5
Ultimates 3, by Jeph Loeb and Joe Mads... It jumped an entire aquarium full of sharks.
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Post by SJNeal on Dec 25, 2021 18:33:44 GMT -5
Man, if you think G.I. Joe jumped the shark after #55, you should be glad you didn't stick around for the other 55 issues after 100. I was actually still buying G.I. Joe off the stands while Mark Bright was the penciler. You wouldn't believe how bad the art got towards the end. I've always liked Bright's work, but he was a bad fit for G.I. Joe. The bulk of my issues were actually much later in the original run, when Andrew Wildman was penciller. I don't think that guy ever drew a single mouth closed... As bad as they were, I wish I'd held onto those issues, because they go for crazy prices online now!
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Post by SJNeal on Dec 25, 2021 18:41:58 GMT -5
I wasn't a huge Catwoman fan at the time, but I loved her purple "Knightfall" era redesign, and picked up the first issue of her solo title since it kinda spun out of those events. It was a great series! While no one will point to it as a classic, it was never boring and boasted a who's who of good writers - Duffy, Dixon, Moench, Ostrander... even the polarizing Devin Grayson did great work during "No Man's Land" with this book. Then came Bronwyn (who?) Carlton. They turned the title into an incomprehensible mess that could not be recovered until Ed Brubaker and the late, great Darwyn Cooke showed up to save it.
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Post by berkley2 on Dec 25, 2021 19:58:28 GMT -5
I'd like to say that the FF and Thor jumped the shark after Kirby left but it wasn't quite so simple or abrupt because both series managed to carry on for the first coup!e of years or so with a pretty good imitation of the Kirby-era style in the writing aided by some not really Kirby-like but still solid artwork. Kind of like how Genesis produced an excellent imitation of the Gabriel-era of the bands sound in their first two albums after he left.
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Post by jason on Dec 25, 2021 20:07:09 GMT -5
I think GI Joe was a fine comic throughout the 80s. Even CC's "death" and replacement by a Crimson Guardsman (who was the one who shot the original CC, not Raptor) added some extra drama, and of course, it gave us the Cobra civil war. Personally, I'd say GI Joe went downhill in the early 90s when they had to shoehorn in stuff like Ninja Force (which just made the comic even more ninja-centric) and the Eco-Warriors.
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Post by badwolf on Dec 25, 2021 20:24:07 GMT -5
Ouch! Like Rags said, one person's "jump the shark" comic can be another's "jump on point", and in my case Uncanny X-Men 188-193 were the first bunch of issues that got me into collecting the Merry Mutants' adventures, with Rachel Summers being particularly close to my heart But I can see why that period with Paul Smith ending his short tenure and JRJR picking up could have been off-putting to long time readers. Claremont introduces some very peculiar dialogue tics (like pasting two words together into a new one, or rendering characters' distress as long run on sentences without spaces) and the stories get more dependent on having read tie-in issues from other on-going series or mini-series. That being said, I will always adore stories like 'Madness', 'Rogue: Public Enemy', 'Lifedeath 1 & 2', 'The Trial of Magneto', and 'Duel'. I like how the X-Men and the New Mutants are living together in the mansion in these years and there is a sense that, amid all the angst and dread, both teams find the time to unwind and have fun every once in a while. Now for me personally, while originally collecting the back issues, where X-Men lost me was after Mutant Massacre-- Cyclops, Rachel, Kitty, Kurt, and Colossus (briefly) depart and the new recruits like Longshot or Dazzler just wouldn't grow on me at first. The team got more 'proactive', got less and less squeamish about using lethal force against villains if they felt it was unavoidable, and the book just seemed way more action-heavy and a lot less character-driven. The new setting post-Fall Of The Mutants, in the Outback, felt colder and lonelier to me than the Xavier Institute. Later I came to appreciate the Fall Of the Mutants-Inferno era a lot more, but they're still not my favourite stretch of X-Men stories. The art wasn't the main reason I left the book, but it was a reason. I actually quit while Silvestri was doing it, and while he was a little better than JRJR, it was still too rough and scratchy for me.
The main reason I quit was that the book had become so damn depressing. Mutants being massacred, the persistent focus on Rachel's terrible future.. and it seemed like it was never going to end.
Even the coloring had become very drab.
And yeah, the replacement of the "classic" new X-Men with Dazzler and Longshot (who I never felt belonged) also caused me to lose interest.
So it was a few things, but mainly that it just wasn't fun any more. For perspective, I had been reading since the Dark Phoenix saga.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 25, 2021 20:29:52 GMT -5
The Crossing was the biggest one, IMO... Evil Tony, then Teen Tony.. mutant Wasp was at that same time too.
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 25, 2021 20:49:07 GMT -5
Ultimates 3, by Jeph Loeb and Joe Mads... It jumped an entire aquarium full of sharks. I kind of felt that series swam in a piranha tank, from the beginning.
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Post by beyonder1984 on Dec 26, 2021 8:47:36 GMT -5
Regarding the responses to my apparently controversial GIJOE #55 comment.
Yes, Yearbook #3 came out later but since it was an annual, it was the last hurrah/endnote to the original Joe storyarcs.
Yes, I wound up reading everything after #55 until cancellation because I was a completist. And, yes, it had horrible wanna-be Image artwork. Even worse, it became a Snake-Eyes book and no longer felt like it was a large team anymore.
Regarding how great Fred being the imposter Cobra Commander was and that there were still good issues after #55: I agree. However, if you started at #1 (or binge them), you can clearly see that the "realism" drops with #55 and Larry Hama is forced to add new waves of characters and the iconic ones lose all of their presence. When the storylines focus on a small team, the main team takes a back seat.
IDW had the benefit of using the entire completed Joe roster and easily could plan arcs.
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Post by beyonder1984 on Dec 26, 2021 9:02:52 GMT -5
As other have mentioned with X-Men, I, too, never even got up to Uncanny X-Men #300. I found Scott Lobdell's work to be inferior to previous writers.
I found "things were never the same" leading into Avengers #300, and after Walt Simonson left Fantastic Four (#354 was his last and then #355 was a fill-in).
Incredible Hulk was never the same after Gary Frank got phased out (around #425) and then we had guys like Liam Sharp, Mike Deodato Jr., Jeff Rebner, and Adam Kubert.
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Post by Cei-U! on Dec 26, 2021 9:04:53 GMT -5
As far as I'm concerned, the entire Marvel Universe jumped the shark when they resurrected Jean Grey and created X-Factor. That was the point where I stopped buying Marvel comics (the Elektra: Assassin mini-series excepted) and didn't do so again until the Busiek-Perez Avengerss. Some four decades later, I'm still comfortable with my decision.
Cei-U! I summon the straw that broke this camel's back!
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 26, 2021 13:05:39 GMT -5
As far as I'm concerned, the entire Marvel Universe jumped the shark when they resurrected Jean Grey and created X-Factor. That was the point where I stopped buying Marvel comics (the Elektra: Assassin mini-series excepted) and didn't do so again until the Busiek-Perez Avengerss. Some four decades later, I'm still comfortable with my decision. Cei-U! I summon the straw that broke this camel's back! I was done in that timeframe; but, it was more a reflection of the editorial regime in control. Their books just underwhelmed me, in story and art, with a few exceptions. Simonson's Thor was nice, but I was never a big fan of Thor. Marvel was spinning wheels and the generic look to a large segment of their comics bored me. At the same time, DC was undergoing a massive transition, which started in the late 70s and really started ramping up by the time I was going off to college. I had also discovered alternatives, like many of the books at First Comics and, soon, Eclipse and others. For the next decade I barely touched a Marvel book (with a few exceptions); and, mostly only read minis and one-shots after. I tried a couple of series, but didn't remain long, like Guardians of the Galaxy and that was more due to characters than creators. The Busiek/Perez Avengers was probably the only series I stayed on for at least a year.
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Post by earl on Dec 27, 2021 23:32:58 GMT -5
Lots of the talent moved over to the Distinguished Competition and pretty much started making Marvel comics with DC characters in that same period of time. Pretty much the 25th anniversary is a pretty good place to stop for the most part.
My 'no-prize' idea for explaining why the Marvel universe got so screwed up in the mid late 80s and into the 90s is that the series of universal/existence stories un-moored the 'reality' of the Marvel Universe.
Grandmaster's meddling led to Korvac which cracked reality and led to The Beyonder and the Secret Wars (which rippled out and created the changes which brought upon Apocalypse) which then led to Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet, which totally shattered everything leading to everything else including the movie worlds.
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 28, 2021 0:43:15 GMT -5
First Comics kind of jumped the shark when Mike Gold left, as the editorial director. Sure, some of the books were doing well enough, but many of the creators followed him out the door. By the time they did the Classics Illustrated stuff, they had jumped the shark and dragged the skier back into the cage area and left him for dead. Really, really bad idea that cost them a ton of cash.
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Post by berkley2 on Dec 28, 2021 9:19:12 GMT -5
Lots of the talent moved over to the Distinguished Competition and pretty much started making Marvel comics with DC characters in that same period of time. Pretty much the 25th anniversary is a pretty good place to stop for the most part. My 'no-prize' idea for explaining why the Marvel universe got so screwed up in the mid late 80s and into the 90s is that the series of universal/existence stories un-moored the 'reality' of the Marvel Universe. Grandmaster's meddling led to Korvac which cracked reality and led to The Beyonder and the Secret Wars (which rippled out and created the changes which brought upon Apocalypse) which then led to Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet, which totally shattered everything leading to everything else including the movie worlds. What year did the 25th anniversary fall on, 1976? I'd put thecollapse a few years later, though not many. Somwhere in the 1979 to 1981 range, maybe. It was kind of a gradual thing at first but accelerated later.
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