Rolling Comic Books 2020 Visions

ha, wow, did not realize he wrote that. that's gotta be the best thing he's associated with

the director apparently did a page-one rewrite on Happy Death Day, basically keeping Lobdell's premise

that sounds right. the premise is "groundhog day meets Friday the 13th" which any 14 year old could've come up with but the nuances and the lead actress are what make it worthwhile.

I kind of have to say that the way the last-year data on DC flaps around like a flag in a high wind renders the year-to-year comparisons kind of meaningless, like this May was worse than all the other Mays, but last October was better than all of them?

Guessing Rebirth was the cause of the massive sales jump from 2016-2017.
Also that list conspicuously leaves out 2011, the start of the New 52. Still interesting the sales reverted and decreasing within four years, though.

I agree that is bizarre the way sales will ebb and flow month to month in 2019. I would've expected stronger consistent sales during event periods.Heroes in Crisis wasn't good and Doomsday Clock was dribbling to the finish with the final four issues being a year late (started in Nov '17!). Year of the Villain was an incredibly loose thematic tie-in.

I would've thought Bendis-verse (Superman titles, Wonder Comics imprint, Event Leviathan) would've been a solid bump, and Black Label seemed to get a solid push from the my local stores. I'm guessing none of these did as well as they hoped.

Black Label has been pretty successful but the new leadership doesn't like the 'adult' direction, supposedly.

Watched the Cartoonist Kayfabe interview with Pat Mills. Space Warp is his attempt to do 2000AD again but with better creator rights and trying to get a teenage audience again (in addition to older comics fans). He made it fairly clear he likes to chase certain audiences and try to please them.
https://www.spacewarpcomic.com/

Space Warp looks interesting...

Batman's Grave #12 (the final issue) was in November's solicits published two days ago, so hopefully we'll still get the end of that without resorting to a future collection

I had never heard the story about a comic shop owner very loudly boycotting Mills' Marshall Law because a villain dropkicks a child so hard that it sends him for miles.

Bendis wrote some pretty good comics but I think whatever he had going he's kind of already mined out. It's not like the zombies were going to follow him to read Superman.

Bendis wrote some pretty good comics

citation needed

I really liked Age of Ultron, of all things. I don't think his "critically acclaimed" stuff like Daredevil and Alias holds up very well. But sometimes he hits the nail on the right amount of stupid, and he can be fun in small doses. Quite a few of his books have started well, but they always seem to go off the rails with unresolved subplots/bad writing within a year - his Iron Man and Superman runs are both pretty good/bad examples of that.

i like his extended run on the Avengers. Fanboys appear to have hated his run on Superman but I thought the elevation of Lois and Superman Jr was okay until the Leviathan thing got into full swing and that sucked.

The Superman Jr. stuff - I'm still waiting to see how it pans out; but I really liked Tomasi's work on the characters, especially with Super-Sons. The Action Comics / Invisible Mafia angle is also interesting but slow moving. Afraid you might be right that these plots will just go off the rails and forgotten, this happened a lot I feel towards the end of his otherwise-great Avengers run when he seemed to get bored of it.

I liked Leviathan in concept but was livid when Event: Leviathan ended with the villain reveal and then a note that there would be another Leviathan series next year to continue the story. Which of course, is now indefinitely delayed due to Covid.

the whole Leviathan thing had nothing at its core except a desire to be a big, universe spanning conspiracy because... well, because who watches the watchmen i guess? utterly pointless and i never gave a damn who the leader was. i think it's absolutely fated to be ignored by the next writer, so this was just so much filler.

I did like the idea that Leviathan was transformed from the Al Ghuls' crime cult to an opposing group of "good" revolutionaries who destroyed the world's spy networks to maintain a One World Order that would incorporate ideological superheroes, super-scientists, villains and intelligence agency survivors, and was interested in turning the population in their favor. But yeah... thrown away, it looks like.

They're basically QAnon but with lasers? Once I read it that way, it turned me off completely.

I thought QAnon was fighting the globalists? Eh, honestly i don't know

i read Q/leviathan as the evil SHIELD power-behind-the-throne but, again, I read his whole avengers/dark avengers run and this felt like that redux except not very good. a quick look around online supports my theory that this run doesn't benefit from close analysis.

I mean, I like a segment of the work he's done, but I think it's fair to say that applies across the board re: Bendis. It's not exactly deep.

i think he claremonts as well or (in his prime) better than almost anyone else and that's not nothing. Juggling character growth, group dynamics and long term impact for a team book can be fun to watch. obviously your ability to enjoy what he's offering hinges on your patience with his mamet for dummies dialogue.

I think that's a fair evaluation of his strengths.

In terms of his weaknesses (and an installment of 'things only Old Lunch cares about'): although the quality is variable and arguable, Marvel in the last decade or so has done an admirable job of sewing all of the components of their massive events into something resembling a cohesive whole, where all of the crossovers fit relatively well into the overall puzzle. EXCEPT that the weak link in every instance has been Bendis, who either just DGAF about being a team player or who worked under editors who were too dazzled by his star power to rein him in. But it drove me nuts every time. No, Brian, there's no way the thing you just wrote could've happened given the status of everything else going on atm, getcher head in the game.

(I do realize that his flippant attitude towards continuity is likely to earn him points among the contrarians up in this piece.)

i thought it was pretty good going through Secret Invasion/Dark Reign/Siege, but around The Heroic Age things petered out, but he kept doing Avengers/Guardians for several years after

Yeah, his ability to write team books at that point completely turfed out. His run on Guardians was pretty bad.

I don't think his "critically acclaimed" stuff like Daredevil and Alias holds up very well. But sometimes he hits the nail on the right amount of stupid, and he can be fun in small doses. Quite a few of his books have started well, but they always seem to go off the rails with unresolved subplots/bad writing within a year - his Iron Man and Superman runs are both pretty good/bad examples of that.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, August 20, 2020 1:08 AM (one hour ago)

i like his extended run on the Avengers. Fanboys appear to have hated his run on Superman but I thought the elevation of Lois and Superman Jr was okay until the Leviathan thing got into full swing and that sucked.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, August 20, 2020 1:24 AM (one hour ago)

I enjoy that the general internet discussion tone of "oh yes his earlier stuff is rubbish but he's really become quite the craftsman now!" is a solid 24 years old at the point :)

eis

Have people ever agreed on Bendis? Feel like he's been hated and liked in equal measure as long as he's been around

I kept trying his stuff to no avail when readers and pros alike on Usenet were saying "ignore his full-screen all-caps shouting abuse / crying emotional injury at people on here, he's really good," and the left-hand-navigation message board era was wild over his superhero timestretch material

obv there have always been dissenters (hello), but the positive attention to his current work vs rolling acknowledgment of his earlier stuff's empty calories is totally a thing ime

In the 00s DC and Marvel, there was so much wannabe hip dialogue I just can't stand (it's probably still like that); I can't remember if Bendis did this particular thing, but a lot of writers did this with villains and gangsters, starting a sinister lecture about how the world really works "y'see it's like this..."
It made me so angry I wanted to bite my own nipples off.

i will take Bendis' convoluted Gilmore Girls wannabe dialogue over Ennis' high-school-kid-describing-Faces-of-Death-style anyday.

hah! I enjoy both but that is pretty otm

so weird how ennis has been accepted by the Fanta critic crowd
http://www.tcj.com/back-in-ussr-garth-ennis-soviet-tales/

I think Rifle Brigade was quite funny at times but he's really not my taste.

Tucker has been a huge enjoyer of Ennis as a maker of masculine adventure comics, in the way that people with highbrow tastes in other areas may enjoy action movies, for a long time, and he is now the editor of the online arm of TCJ. I don't know that instances of him commissioning an Ennis fan to review Ennis speaks to anything about a previous Fanta critic crowd.

(Though Ennis had plenty of positive and equivocal reviews in the Journal in the '90s.)

Ennis's writing has long seemed to me like the only safe outlet of a mind which might otherwise be disposed towards acts of deep depravity. It's either write about a grungy psychopath who wears a jacket made of scrotums or become that grungy psychopath, if you will.

my recent hard drive crash took my digital files that i would clip to share but some of the punisher max stuff is just straight up racist

right, here's a good example of the kind of objectionable tin eared shit ennis was writing for marvel in '07
http://i.imgur.com/DNmlpS1.png

Stay classy, Garth.

There's definitely a massive "giggling schoolboy" aspect to getting Marvel to print the N-word and the F-word and the S-word and the W-word, but it's an undermining that's not without value. Showing racist characters being racist is more in line with classic 1960s Marvel values. Obviously there's a danger of dipshit readers sticking on Ennis' delight & celebration in writing bad people being bad*, and not go all the way to the "bad" part, but I'd suspect that this danger is much higher on his war comics.

(bias: Barracuda was dumb & required a conscious shift to accept its tone but I read it once, war comics skeeve me out)

*also a big part of standard Marvel villain-writing tbf

my recent hard drive crash took my digital files

oh no forks

the difference, which seems obvious on the face of it, is that this isn't racist characters being racist so much as it is Garth Ennis ventriloquizing a big dick slinging black guy with a gun and a STREET ATTITUDE. it's less the sin that he's encouraging people to be bad and more that he's very literally saying "here's what they sound like" to a crowd of dipshits that are totally happy to eat that shit up with a cracker.

ennis' particular brand of misogyny, homo/transphobia and racism is of a particularly pernicious variety imo where he engages in the worst sort of stereotyping and bias but then plays it off as irony or contrarianism or exceptionalism by occasionally playing characters against type. even if you get a giggle out of the house of stan lee publishing the word "cunt", it's still garbage no matter how you cut it

an everglades attitude iirc

i dunno what that means

Ennis is karaokeing (multimedia) blaxploitation dialogue for Barracuda, in the same way he's karaokeing gangster movie dialogue for the white drug-runners etc. We agree that this ironic play-acting has the potential to have a pernicious effect on dumb readers, I just hope that the vast majority of the readers take it as cartoony dress-ups.


Like, the Punisher is an extremely toxic icon, but I doubt many cops and CHUDs dressing up as him are reading comedy miniseries on the Marvel MAX label

(For an author whose teenage works were largely about the societal damage and trauma caused by racism and guns, one would like to think that Ennis isn't maliciously racist, but then I avoid nearly all his post-Hitman work due to its apparent tone or ugliness, so...)

xp: just a joke about the setting of that character, to placehold while I typed some actual thoughts

i like to think i'm sophisticated enough to be able to tell the difference between pastiching tropes in service of casting a fresh and tongue-in-cheek take on problematic material vs showing your ass and calling it a metaphor.

There's not much nuance or cleverness at play in Ennis' mid naughties work, which he was churning out in Bendis-level bulk. It's undeniably pulpy - and, frankly, readable in the way that Pringles are edible. I get where it's tempting to draw a line between Trashman and Punisher if you're feeling charitable, but I re-read a lot of this stuff recently out of curiosity and it's pretty vile... it would be easy to post another 50 pages of clips like the one above without effort.

and it's not just the trappings of prejudice that make it objectionable; it takes real glee in mixing sex and murder in a way that's exhausting and boring and childish and stupid. I literally just opened a random issue to see if I could find an example and this is what jumps out on page three of punisher v5 #24 from 2005.
http://i.imgur.com/NzHldpB.png
maybe it's a question of "if you were 15 when you saw this, it was the coolest comic ever" which is likely why i have a soft spot for the Heavy Metal crew, but this is nothing special.

a fresh and tongue-in-cheek take

I definitely don't think Ennis believed he was bringing a revisionist take to the sort of dialogue he was emulating

re that last spread: see above about finding the tone and ugliness of his recent decades' work offputting. Right there I think he was bringing a revisionist tone to the early MAX Punisher, in the way that revisionist Westerns exposed the hateful bloodiness and sadism that was polished as noble in earlier works - aiming to alarm and repulse the standard Punisher-reading chud by showing "realistic" violence and crimes, and the Punisher character as a proper psychopath. But I get the impression that he became happy with how well that impacted the audience, once he'd developed the skill*, and just continued to mine the furrow to no transformative end.

* in his 1992-2000ish work, he had a variety of tones of comedic violence in different texts, like For A Few Troubles More, Hitman, Preacher, the Punisher mini w/ Steve Dillon where he punches a bear -- so maybe he has many nuanced tones of horror violence in his 2005-20 work. But none of it looks interesting enough in tone, topic, or style to my glancing eye to find out. (I did read the Hitman reunion/sequel minis, or one of them, and he didn't have the comedy down anymore, either.)

Here’s some panels from Ennis’s The Pro:

https://i.imgur.com/iMv92PF.jpg

These are Bendis comics I liked.

Daredevil
Powers (pretty much ground to a halt once he got popular)

Secret War/House of M - not bad.

New Avengers (first few arcs - build up of Secret Invasion good, actual series underwelming...)
Dark Avengers

Some of the later ones seemed like he knocked him out in an afternoon...