Comic Books Comic Book • Page 407

Ok, here’s my comics EOTY 2020 list:


- The Magic Fish (Trung Le Nguyen)
- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Cartoonist (Adrian Tomine)
- Insider Art: A Compendium of Comics, Crafts & Cats (various)
- Constantly (gg)
- Magnificent Ms Marvel (Saladin Ahmed, Minkyu Jung)
- X-Men: Marvels Snapshots (Jay Edidin, Tom Reilly)
- 920London (Remy Boydell)
- Maids (Katie Skelly)
- Empyre: Savage Avengers (Gerry Dugan, Greg Smallwood)
- A Map to the Sun (Sloane Leong)
- Venom: Venom Island (Donny Cates, Mark Bagley)
- Octobriana 1976 (Jim Rugg)
- The Audra Show (Audra Stang)


Funny that the only mainstream direct market comics I ended up including were one ongoing series, one story arc from an ongoing, & a couple one-shots, all from Marvel. Well, & one Image graphic novel, but I don’t really categorize Remy Boydell in my head with the bigger Image creators.

If I’d gotten to ‘em, I’m sure Pulp & Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen would’ve been on here, but being selective in what monthlies I’ll pull & prioritizing creators outside of the Marvel/DC/Image scene when buying graphic novels made a big difference.

Almost forgot about that Empyre: Savage Avengers one-shot, since I don’t give a shit about either Empyre or Savage Avengers, but that really was a great Marvel comic. Greg Smallwood drawing Conan the Barbarian slay aliens with some help from Venom? Yes, please.

 

@Deanna, this isn’t directly comics related, but I like that you’ve had Vita Ayala on your podcast(s), what, 3 times in the past couple months?

(Also, if you haven’t given it away yet, I think 2021 is the year I’ll finally talk ASM2 with you? lol.)

 

Yeah! They’ve been on 3 episodes of Chat Sematary recently (one is a Patreon ep) and we talked about The Wilds a while back on WTG. Very fun getting to talk to Vita and I’m hoping to get more new guests on this year.

I think I still have you down for it! Just let me know when you’d like to do that and I’ll rewatch both.

 

Love that Icon comic behind her. Reminds me that I gotta get back into my Milestone Media reading.

 

Steve Orlando doing a spin on “The Death of Superman” at AfterShock that’s basically “what if Superman was piloted like a Gundam?”

 

Boy DC fucking loves making Wally West kill people

 

I do not understand why they do this, especially when between the 90's/2000's comics and the Justice League Timmverse cartoon, a deeeeecent chunk of fans see Wally West as *the* Flash.

 

So Death Metal and everything that led up to it was fun, I guess? That's really all I can say about it.

 

Yeah, great quote. I saved a video of McFarlane I really like - great advice for artists. The guy has an impressive work ethic.

 

Vastly preferred regular Metal. Death Metal was just constant nonsense and not even really in a fun way, even though it tried REALLY hard to be lol.


And now we have future state which Idfk what it even is or why it’s happening, even after reading Flash and Batman. Probably dropping DC till it’s over.

 

I do feel like, if you’re gonna read one of the DC ongoing titles in March with the same writer as a Future State miniseries for the same character, it probably makes sense to also read that corresponding Future State mini. Seems to be built so you don’t have to, but still seems worth it imo.

 

Whole thing just seems like an absolute mess and I just wish they'd return to the pre-Flashpoint world like they keep half-assedly doing anyway lol

My biggest gripe with Death Metal was the same complaint I had with his Justice League run, evvvvveeryone has the exact same "voice" - Batman sounds like Superman sounds like Wonder Woman sounds like Luthor sounds like Starman sounds like Martian Manhunter sounds like Jarro and on and on and on, it just has the tone of fanfic :/

 

A return to the pre-flashpoint DCU would make me verrrrrry happy.

 

As someone that has only been into comics since exactly Flashpoint and N52, I have no idea what was even better about it at that point.

I've seen that argument a ton but don't really understand why it's a thing. It all seemed so convoluted and had a massive barrier to entry imo.

 

I don’t even need pre-Flashpoint. Rebirth was close enough to make me happy.

 

The best thing they could do is just stop talking about continuity altogether, forget about Flashpoint & Rebirth & Doomsday Clock & Death Metal & whatever else... and, just make comics. Have a healthy sense of continuity with whatever is happening in the same family of titles & whatever came immediately before (so as to not have obnoxious whiplash), plus whatever bits of history from various versions that work for what’s being done, but don’t overthink it.

We don’t need any more events about what is or isn’t real in a fucking superhero comic book world, lol, unless that question is actually more about opening a neat story idea than it is about cleaning up or setting up whatever. You don’t need to “fix” anything. It’s comics. You just have to make ‘em & release ‘em.

 

It was basically what we have now only there was like... history there instead of weird convoluted crap like "what exactly *is* Tim Drake's history...?" but it doesn't matter cause there's no putting the genie back in the bottle now, soooooo

 

I mean personally I think that a company like DC, with literally almost 100 years of published history, should like... have a continuity and stick to it a bit, but I'm a total nerd for DC's history and legacy so I'm not an unbiased opinion.

We all know I'm a Tom Taylor fanboy, I feel like he gets it - you don't have to be a *slave* to the continuity, it can and should be fluid to gel with the times - but you shouldn't just discard that "past" for a clean slate when that past can form a direction for the character to take as opposed to what I see as the aimlessness of lots of characters post-Flashpoint.

Sorry, just stoned and griping lol

 

Ok, but like, isn’t messiness built into DC’s history? You’re a much bigger DC fan than I am, but I know enough to know that they’ve never really had the (more or less) continuous continuity that Marvel has.

They shifted earths in the Silver Age, blew things up in Crisis on Infinite Earths, blew things up again with Flashpoint, & then whatever Rebirth was happened. And, that doesn’t include the other weird canon massaging/breaking that’s happened here & there. (How many times has Superman’s history changed? lol.)

To compare this to a franchise I care a lot more about than DC, I hate all the weird Nick Spencer Spider-Man stuff going on right now that’s kinda touching on One More Day without really doing anything with it. It’s all “oh he doesn’t remember what happened,” & it’s like... ok, whatever, I don’t care. I wish the MJ marriage were restored, but I’d rather they just stop talking about it & write comics with Pete & MJ together, instead of doing Marvel’s version of the Doctor Manhattan/Wally West teases.

Also, I think it’s funny that Death Metal’s whole big thing is saying that “everything happened, everything matters” in an attempt at the Grant Morrison approach, & that’s what revived this “why did DC erase their history?” conversation. It’s done! It’s fixed! Any writer can use more or less whatever from history they want! Trying to “fix” things again is what makes it aimless, lol.

 

I mean, I guess for me the problem with everything post-Flashpoint is that everything pre-Flashpoint has been deleted except for the stuff that hasn't been deleted so everything in DC comics now has become this lukewarm retread of stories they've already told, because they need to re-establish everyone to the same status quo they were at before, all the while clarifying which stuff pre-Flashpoint is still canon, until we got to where we are now, where *most* pre-Flashpoint stuff has been acknowledged to have happened but then, like I said, characters like Tim Drake get this hollowed out history where like... I don't know, it's hard to explain. It only got worse post-Rebirth, cause now even more stuff that happened before maybe happened this time around except for the stuff that didn't.

I think the difference with DC's massaging of their continuity before was that they didn't so much outright delete history as massage it. The comics during the 30's-40's took place on one Earth, when they started printing comics again in the 60's it took place on a new Earth, but all those stories from the 30's-40's still happened... just on Earth-2. Then with the Crisis, everything was merged but for the most part the history/canon remained.

I mean, it's entirely just my personal taste since there are people who very much love DC post-Flashpoint, even in this thread, but I feel like since then, DC's characters have just lost their voice and direction. Snyder's characters in Death Metal all sounding the same/acting interchangeably is something that I've felt for a while with DC now. They're just... meandering IMO.

Maybe it'll get better post-Future State, but I read through the issues released yesterday last night and woooooooooooof.

 

I would argue that they don’t actually have to do think & have just tricked themselves into believing that they do. Maybe, in the most egregious situations, they could do a one-shot or miniseries to get things where they need ‘em, but for the most part, that’s just not necessary.

Thinking this whole thing needs explaining would make the meandering worse, since that’s been the biggest hurdle post-Rebirth.

 

My biggest issue with post new-52 DC is it alway felt like they wanted to ignore the legacy of their characters which becomes a problem when their legacies are tied so deeply to who they are. The JSA and Wally West are the biggest examples of this. Wally West was such a good character because he was the quessential sidekick becoming main hero and he had to grapple with all the baggage that came with that and had to learn to become his own person. Once barry was back they know what to do with him cause the core of his character had just been erased.

I always get the sense DC think these characters legacies/histories are roadblocks to readers that make them inaccessible, when really its the fundemental core of their world.

 

My hot take is Ive read a TON of Barry Allen Flash stories post new 52 and enjoyed a lot of them, but i still dont think a single story has justified his return lol.

 

What do you mean his return? Was he not around pre-Flashpoint?

 

He returned right before flashpoint basically, but Barry Allen was dead/not the flash for like... 20+ years up and till that point? He was always the example of a character that died and stayed dead which was so rare for superhero comics