Mark Millar's Ubermensch

The main impression I get from that is that Mark Millar does a lot of cocaine.

And clearly, he learned everything he knows about women from Sarah Jessica Parker.

IOW he sounds like a comic book creator?

His Swamp Thing arc is probably my favorite of his work, but it has no connection to any of the previous work on the title except Moore's run in the vaguest sense -- which would be like landing the Captain America job and ignoring everything since Englehart -- and it's taken every Swamp Thing appearance since then just to make the character writeable again. It's no big deal to end a character's mythos with a bang -- Christ, I could make Speedball into an epic hero if I didn't have to worry about people wanting to use him after I was done.

I think that's the beauty of the JLA, in concept. That it's just big adventure and doesn't need to adhere to whatever's going on in the characters' individual nor, necessarily, what's happened previously in JLA. It should be a book that you can pick up at random and always see superheroes save the universe.
Like, when I was a young kid, before I was seriously reading comics, if I only had enough money for one comic one week or whatever interval, I would always go with JLA, because it was guaranteed big superhero action. Green Lantern that month might be about some Guardian mindfuck-ripoff of Conan, and Action might have an 8-page Superman story surrounded by 13 pages of Lois Lane teaching Jimmy Olson how to drive standard, followed by a Supergirl story where she dreams she married Beppo. But JLA would have The World's Greatest Superheroes holding off an invasion of starfish!

Not at all, no. But we got through sixty years of comics without needing every issue to be part of a Big Event or to redo the character (except we didn't, quite, because Millar isn't new in his attempts to do those) without needing Millar to save us from ourselves. Gleefully going on about how much Superman will suck until you get a chance to change him isn't an investment in character advancement.

The alternative to "don't thrash around in the mythos like a bitch" isn't "hit the reset button on your way out."

And again, if everyone took that attitude, the whole notion of serial comics would be tossed out the window, because writers would pick and choose which previous runs they wanted to pay attention to.

Different characters have different "demands," I guess, but ultimately it doesn't matter very much: a series of drastic changes made to any character, with no time off from them, is nearly always bad fiction, and likely to be much worse as serial fiction, in which enormous amounts of story are told. It's not that you can't change things -- but if you can only tell stories in which major changes are the focus, you shouldn't be writing comic books with other peoples' characters.

Counterexample: the X-universe

And again, if everyone took that attitude, the whole notion of serial comics would be tossed out the window, because writers would pick and choose which previous runs they wanted to pay attention to.

(shrug) The good stuff would stick.

a series of drastic changes made to any character, with no time off from them, is nearly always bad fiction,

Turn this around: if it's bad fiction, why should the next writer have to waste an issue or two fixing it?

I agree completely about comics which are made with big changes as a goal in and of itself: I really think this Superman is going to blow.

As regards the sales, I don't give a shit as long as the comic is entertaining. Considering what the relaunch was like, if Mark Millar's run meant that they couldn't release the title again for three years, my only regret is that it wasn't six.

The problem with "the good stuff would stick" is that it assumes everyone agrees what the good stuff is, and they don't. There were people who loved Clark Kent as a TV news anchor who could push the Earth out of orbit if he felt like it -- but on the whole, DC felt the concept had become unmarketable. That was "fixed" along with everything else by Crisis, and starting somewhat from scratch, but you can't usually do that with just one book -- (although it does seem to be Millar's intent this time around).

But when you've got a continuous line, and you have people picking and choosing, you could end up with me writing Swamp Thing, let's say, and ignoring Millar -- and then you writing it after me and ignoring everything but Millar and the parts he depended on. They may as well be two separate titles.

He chose to write a company-owned character, after all, with a significant history -- the job is a collaborative one whether you have an active collaborator or not, and writers who don't like it shouldn't pursue it.

I think people were deriding John Byrne because he was John Byrne, and also because his attitude was "This book had gone way wrong, and I'm the man to fix it (stand up, pants fall down, trombone)"

Except (I'd assume) that they would both have as a base Moore's issues. Which is a problem with my vision, admittedly: it assumes that reasonable people can agree on what really defines a character (as opposed to what's just a good story).

Also it requires that John Byrne be formally recognised as a crazy man.

A lot of this is why I kind of wish we did have a Crisis -- if not the event, at least the reboot -- every 20 years or so. That lengthy continuity and accumulated back story is a weakness in comics -- I just don't think ignoring it works in practice, and I think writers who make things more difficult for their successors -- since it's a job where you know you're only there for a brief period of time, you're just a seatwarmer -- should be docked some of their pay.

Byrne catches flak because he rolled back *all previous* incarnations of the Doom Patrol. His is effectively the premiere appearance of these characters in the DCU now. Don't ask me how he got that one past editorial.

As for continuity, it's largely made to be broken and then remade, it appears. I'm far more interested with people keeping the essential spirit of the characters (or having a good reason for bending 'em), not keeping every single continuity nugget in place or worrying about what comes after. The status quo can always be remade. Swamp Thing has been effectively rebooted to the Wein/Wrightson days (though more thinglike than human in a suitlike), even after Millar made the character unworkable. You can always get superheroes back to their origin points somehow.

I liked his Swamp Thing, I liked his Authority, I really like the Ultimates. But the nastiness and crudeness I've started to see in his work (especially in the last few issues of the Ultimates and all of Wanted) really bother me...from reading his own site and his pieces here and there it all seems like publicity-seeking stuff, which just makes it seems worse, somehow.
And, whether it was meant to be funny or ironic or not, the "You think this "A" on my head stands for France?" bit from Cap in Ultimates seemed cheap and childish.

God, even writing this makes me feel old...

Your moment of zen...

Millar's Ultimate X-Men is just odd. Some great bits, some bits where everything drags on, some bits where stuff just happens seemingly because it's convenient to get it out of the way. Also, it bites A LOT from the movie (the way Gus Van Sant "bit" Psycho).

Also, conveniently enough - the 1st issue of the new Ultimates series is out today. I loved the first Ultimates arc, vaguely adored the 2nd arc (that A = France thing notwithstanding), & am hoping for a return to the good stuff w/ the 2nd season.

Plus, if Morrison did Crisis and a Superman reboot, they could logically be connected -- which makes sense if you want to preserve Superman's status as the preeminent DC superhero despite his post-Golden Age lack of seniority.

Also: you googlepoofed GOOGLE! Of all the people to google themselves, they ... well, just might.

As politically insensitive as the A thing is, I did think it was very funny. And acceptable in someone who's been frozen since 1940.

As for FQ on a monthly - if they give him a head start, and have a fill-in art issue every so often (by, oh, I dunno, Philip Bond), then it could be sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

I think his Superman thing deifies Elliott S! Maggin just a little too much. The guy had an awful lot of good ideas but I think his total negation of Clark Kent wasn't one of them. All this "Yeah yeah he's jesus but he's an alien jesus" thing feels really cold and dispassionate. Not quite as dispassionate as Byrne's cold, joyless sexing-up tactics, but still, not somebody who'd actually interest me on any human level.

You can certainly formulate an argument for a new version of Superman who's more attracted to dogs than to Lois (or Cat Grant or Lana or Wonder Woman) because of the biology of Kryptonian physical attraction and the coincidental similarity of canine pheromones. You can come up with perfectly good science for it, and you can write a couple issues that will be funny and make people talk about it on the internet. That doesn't make it a good idea.

I'm not saying the status quo can never change at all, or temporarily, but you need other things going on in between the shake-ups, and if you don't want constant traffic of readers coming and going, you need to use the shake-ups conservatively or have some reason for them. (One of the reasons the X-books work, I think, is because the cast is so large -- if all that stuff happened to the FF, you'd really be pushing it.)

Even in the terms you've just described them, they're limited-use stories -- you can't constantly smash series taboos without taking the time to establish those taboos in between.

It's like Tivo -- there was a long article on Tivo the other day about how a lot of the appeal of it is to bypass commercials, but broadcast television is paid for by commercials, so if everyone had Tivo, there wouldn't be anything to watch with it. Guys like Millar only have stories to write when the industry keeps them in the minority.

I'd think that's an obvious point. It's also something that Millar does, from what I've read ("The Authority", "Ultimate X-Men"); Millar more than Ellis was the one who planted the seeds of The Authority as liberal fascists in that book and shortly after deviating from the mainstream X-template he set relatively firm parameters on the types of stories he was going to do in UnlXM.

Luthor, meanwhile, is utterly pro-human and for that reason is determined to destroy this freaky alien who's skewing human development with his very presence. He should have been a hero of humanity, only Superman turned up and now he's determined to wipe out this evolution-retarding anomaly by any means necessary, including robbing banks/killing people/assassinating the President.

I AM THE NEW MARK MILLAR.

Superman'll talk about how Luthor keeps trying to sic giant robots on him, and the Justice League gets all awkward and looks away and is like, "Well look, Kal, thing is, he bought us this geosynchronous defense satellite, and we didn't even ask for it, Lex seems pretty cool ... maybe you guys should just talk or something..?"

And then at the end, Luthor thanks Superman, and Superman says "My pleasure, but do try to be good!" It's two people who have no option but to try to defeat each other, but have respect for each other anyway. (Actually, Supes sounds like a smug git, but he always does due to his Superness.)

Maggin's finest hour by a long way.

http://superman.ws/tales3/president/?page=17

Unfortunately this sequence is spoiled somewhat by him using his Kent power to tear down a nuclear plant and replace it with the environmentally-friendly alternative of... a coal-burning plant. Yay Superman.

ihttp://www.buzzscope.com/reviews/4919/4919_1.jpg

http://www.buzzscope.com/reviews.php?id=4919

anybody got a cbr?

At some point between this thread and 2008 I decided Millar was an objectively terrible writer but I’m not sure when I made that decision. I’m very surprised to see myself arguing in favor of the existence of Ultimate X-Men, which aged at the time like an armpit full of sour cream and that I actively hated after like 3 issues.

Yeah, sometime after Ultimates 2 (which I remmeber as being excellent but have no wish to revisit) he got bad and stayed bad IMO.