SHIPlifters Of The World - Unite And Take Over (12/04/08)

"The never-that-convenient-but-what-are-you-gonna-do" Midtown list.

That thread title probably deserves an exclamation mark, but I'm not feeling it right now...

God, what am I getting?

BATMAN #682 - The furrowed brow continues anon!
HELLBOY: THE WILD HUNT #1 - Yay violent abstraction.

And maybe something else.

Those two, plus Army@Love

BATMAN #682: I can has resolution?
SWORD #13
CABLE #09
NEW AVENGERS #47: Is this crossover Skrull thingie still going on?
SECRET INVASION #08: I guess it is!
WEAPON X FIRST CLASS #01: Because one Wolverine First Class title is never enough.
BOYS #25

Batman already? wow.

It's up over at Diamond: http://www.diamondcomics.com/shipping/newreleases.txt

Don't forget: comics on Thursday rather than Wednesday this week!

For me:

BATMAN #682--I was in the camp that LOVED 681. A small camp, but we mean it.
SANDMAN: THE DREAM HUNTERS #2--I thought #1 was pretty good, and hey, P. Craig Russell art!
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #579--ah, it's coming out _this_ week
NEW AVENGERS #47--now do we get to find out what comes next?

If MARVELS: EYE OF THE CAMERA is extra-long to make up for being extra-expensive, then maybe. Otherwise, I'll pass.

How could you not love the last Batman? Resolutions are overrated anyway.

Batman and Spidey for me. Someone needs to gave Waid and Marcos Martin their own title, somewhere...

Yeah, I was really surprised how good that last issue of Spider-Man was. Does anyone else feel like Marvel is subtly retconning about 10 years off of JJJ's age since "Brand New Day" started?

Batman, JSA, Amazing Spider-Man, New Avengers, Secret fucking Invasion.

SOLOMON KANE #3 (OF 5) - This is the hump issue of the miniseries, but I have really liked this one. It has a weird dreamy vibe to the artwork and coloring and hopefully the payoff will come on the story.
KULL #2 (OF 6) - The first issue was pretty good. Kull is pretty much a more angsty version of Conan, which for some people is about the worse thing they could imagine, but I grew up reading this kind of stuff, especially the Roy Thomas Conan stuff. I've gotten hooked on Dark Horse's Conan books and the quality on all of the Robert E. Howard books is really strong.

BATMAN #682 - I'm curious to see how Morrison paints his way out of a corner. It will probably be by going out the window, but it should be interesting. I liked how the RIP ended and the stuff with The Joker in the last issue was gold. I'm all about the vague ending, as really this is only the end of this arc.

That is pretty much it for new stuff.

I think I am more into reading runs of back issues and trades anyway.

Just Batman for me, so I guess I'll have to wait until Saturday... I really enjoyed last issue too!
Am sorta interested in where A WORLD WITHOUT A BATMAN will go...but not enough to actually follow Battle for the Cowl. The latest issue of Robin reveals at long last who the new Red Robin is, and, um, it ain't the Devil. I don't know who it is, and I've been reading Robin for like 2 yrs! WELL PLAYED, DC!

Once the Batman sendoffs and Final Crisis wrap...I think that's it for me. :(

Are DC running three or four monster crossovers simultanaeously? i.e. Batman RIP, Final Crisis, the Superman one about Kaldor, etc.?

They're not entirely monster crossovers, just three or four titles, and crucially no central title for two of them. I'm sure Marvel did worse in the eighties - oh hang on, that's a terrible yardstick.

Mm, the new Batman issue is great. And also includes an excellent joke about curtains.

What?? I thought comics were a day late this week?

Sorry, Canada.

I thought that John Byrne invented Canada in Alpha Flight. You mean it's a real place?

Canada is fictitious, but Sasquatch is real.

SOBs. If we have to suffer, you should have to suffer.

Once the Batman sendoffs and Final Crisis wrap...I think that's it for me. :(

I can't wait for FC & SI to end -- that shit's taking up NINE SLOTS on my pull list (which is, um, hueg).

Fun fact: I still have GMo / JLee WildCATS on my pull list. :D

Once the Batman sendoffs and Final Crisis wrap...I think that's it for me. :(

yeah me too. I might buy all my remaining Swamp Thing trades but I'm done with Comics.

Fuckin' grown-ups.

Got on then, we don't need you!

Yeah, that "curtains" joke is first-rate. Annotations up now at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2008/12/batman-682.html .

Incidentally, anyone find it odd (and a potentially bad sign for his future at DC) that G-Mo hasn't given any interviews in the past few weeks, even to the Brit tabloids?

I think the Batman is really really good this week, actually.

can't believe ppl are giving up on comics when we're living through a GOLDEN AGE of new and archival releases - the best and most exciting time to be a fanboy i've ever known (and i've been collecting/reading comics, off and on, for more than thirty years...ohboy)

longbox vs bassinet

"the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art"

Whatevs. In, like, 4 yrs, my kid will have a pull list longer than David R.

They have medication for that now.

I really hate this Norman-Osborn-cons-the-world crap. It was implausible malarkey when Lex Luthor did it too, and as a motivating conflict for about a quarter of the MU going forward, it's weak-ass bullshit.

If you're talking about the final issue of SI, & not the highly enjoyable 1st issue of Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts, I will assault you w/ plastic cutlery.

No, I'm talking about Thunderbolts, but there's enough talk in the news sites to see that that's where they're going with all this. Is the next big x-over event going to be the good heroes vs. the con-job bad "heroes"? Aaagh.

can't believe ppl are giving up on comics

OTM, “The 900th Everything Changes Forever crossover from DC this year hasn’t really changed everything, so I’m setting fire to all my Segar and Xaime and Justin Green! THANKS FOR NOTHING, ‘COMICS’.”

Hey, I just said I'll be happy when these crossovers are done -- I'm still buying 95 X titles!

I'm excited that Morisson might be free to get to the non-DC ideas that have been boiling in his head for the last few years! I mean, I'm not unhappy with Final Crisis and Batman, and let's not forget his impeccable ASS, but more new stuff is more new stuff!

Yeah, that does it. I am finished with Bendis. I will buy the thing next week with Alex Maleev's art, but after that, the dude is pretty much dead to me.

That said, it is going to be hilarious watching Marvel do an entire year or two of EVIL GOVERNMENT comics in the first year of Obama. Way to tap a zeitgeist, you deeply unimaginative douchebags...

I'm not going to go so far as saying I'm ACTUALLY interested, but the villain thing does seem slightly more interesting than the Skrull thing. Because skrulls are, you know, silly.

But this whole VILLAINS UNITE! thing does seem a very DC trope. And, you know, about five years too late.

I liked the Skrull thing, in theory. It kind of fizzled out at the end, and mainly in Bendis' own books.

Bendis is totally out of gas. In a perfect world he would back off of everything but Ultimate Spidey and Powers and otherwise take a year to recharge batteries.

He's like Tarantino I guess. A good-to-great idea man, fantastic ear for dialogue, but something just doesn't click in the final analysis. Longform pacing maybe.

"Fantastic ear" for dialogue. Yeah, uh, okaaay...

Bendis doesn't have stamina. He has great ideas for 12-18 issues, then starts to drift off of the rails.

I like his dialogue! Well, sometimes I don't.

I mean, when I was growing up and a big Marvel Zombie, most of the books were written by ROY THOMAS and GARY FRIEDRICH. So, uh, there.

Well, I think he did great on Daredevil, which was right in his zone and he was pretty focused. I think the issue with Bendis comes down to this:

1) His stylistic quirks have metastized, and he's slowly transforming into something akin to late period Chris Claremont.

2) He is just not good at writing big superhero stories. He doesn't fully understand the genre, and he can only impose his cynical world view and general aesthetic on them so much before his huge flaws as a superhero writer become apparent.

3) He's not anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is, or his fans believe him to be. I'm of a mind that it's fairly easy to get people to think you're smart for doing crime/noir type stuff, because you're selling a sort of knowing, maybe halfway ironic seriousness that people associate with intelligence. I think what you have with Bendis is a guy who is smart and maybe even has some decent taste, but has no curiosity or imagination. This is probably why he appeals so much to the macho-geek segment of the comics buying audience -- he may dig superheroes and ninjas and whatever, but he's not going to do anything these dolts would call "gay." Which is, more or less, anything that is good in this world.

4) He has lost all of his discipline, and the editors aren't editing him because he brings in so much money he can get away with anything. The climax of Secret Invasion is a great example -- he seems to have forgotten that he works in a visual medium, and had big events take place in FLASHBACK NARRATION. Maybe he thinks that is clever or subversive, but it's really just terrible storytelling. I mean, the very fact that this is a man who wrote something like 40-50 consecutive comics vamping on the same narrow theme and had no real conclusion but to set up another similar story speaks to a terrible laziness that is either a) outright hackishness b) creative bankruptcy c) full-on contempt for his audience. I'm of a mind to say it's all three.

I would argue against C, not seeing any point to ascribe motives to a guy I don't know, but A & B are bad enough. I always find the "contempt for his audience" argument way uglier than it needs to be, when simply criticizing the work is appropriate.

I don't mind the hackishness, or the stupid structure, or the overblown-everything-ness -- I mean, it's superhero comics! -- but his stuff's never that fun. I'd accept a lot, if not all, of his flaws, if his stuff wasn't so plodding. It's like a weird mixture of balls-to-the-wall and totally plodding.

ad hominem (adj.)

1) Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason

2) Points 3 & 4 in Mr. Perpetua's last post

& fwiw I'm just as wearied by everying BMB's done of late outside of Ultimate Spider-Man

I'm wondering why my personal considerations aren't valid when explaining why I'm giving up on this guy, and why I can't really tolerate his writing anymore. I mean, I know I'm not being fair and nice, but I don't see why I have to be fair and nice about this.

You don't HAVE to do shit (this being the internets instead of real life), but it demeans your arguments when you hate on the writer instead of (or as well as) the work. How the hell do you know whether he has contempt for his audience? If you do, start a comics gossip thread, I'd like to hear it.

Well, I did leave room for the option that he DIDN'T have outright contempt for the audience...

magnanimous (adj): noble and generous in spirit; generous and understanding and tolerant

I am willing to state, for the record, that I do not consider Matthew's views or potential views of Brian Michael Bendis's character to be definitive. I am not sure how this misunderstanding arose, but I am willing to do my bit to help straighten it out. Anyone else?

I do not consider Matthew's views or potential views of Brian Michael Bendis's character to be definitive.

CHALLOPS! BANTER!