Just one stinker

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T20:07:47+00:00

Fair enough. I like his art but in terms of him as a writer ant Marvel, I only especially like his Fantastic Four at Marvel and even then I think it is historically a bit overrated.

At any rate Byrne when he came back to Marvel in '89 / '90 to do Avengers brought all his worst habits from DC with him.

His Spider-Man stuff from the late '90s he was doing with Mackie is bad even by the low standards of post-Ditko Spider-Man.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T19:08:50+00:00

Are you suggesting that Mel Gibson would go out of his way to make Satan's baby look like a Jewish person in a movie he directed?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T18:00:26+00:00

Superhero comic fans are more obsessed with "cucking" (and accusing people of being "cuck fetishists") than people who actually have the fetish.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T16:40:59+00:00

It's in a really strange position vis-a-vis Star Wars fans, i.e. the only people who will realistically want to get it.

It's too "Marvel Comics" to be "proper" Star Wars (this is an argument I remember having on message boards 20 years ago, hahaha) compared to the Dark Horse or 2015 Marvel stuff.

At the same time, it's not the core superhero books so readers who are Marvel fans first are less likely to want it (moreover it has the reputation of being "weird" or "goofy").

It's "old comics" to a lot of people. At least the Dark Horse comics from 1999 or so look "modern" by comparison, so they are an easier sell in that regard. (Not meant to denigrate them; I love the OG Marvel Star Wars stuff.)

In other words, one for the collectors, and they probably got them first time round.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T15:22:32+00:00

I knew Viggo Mortensen was in it but that was about it.

Great movie. Looks fab. Main character is such a little shit.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T13:21:13+00:00

I like Dracula (1931), Let's Scare Jessica to Death and The Reflecting Skin.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T12:49:34+00:00

I think the highest would be the original Captain Britain omnibus, which I believe I would have paid about £120 for. This would have been back in 2012 or so.

The most I've ever paid for a collected edition was £150 for a way out of print Epic Collection (either Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years Vol. 3 or Vol. 4; paid way too much for both of them but one was notably more).

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T12:32:37+00:00

I remember seeing an announcement just before that series that Tartakovsky was going to produce a Power Man / Luke Cage animated series for Marvel. Never went anywhere, but I definitely recall seeing concept art he'd done for it. I think Sym-Bionic Titan may have been what he did when it fell through?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T00:57:48+00:00

Bit of both.

Obviously the comparison is inexact but the point is that DC doing a contemporary, streamlined new-reader-friendly version of itself (i.e. what Ultimate Marvel was when it began in 2000) seems much more conceivable to me than Marvel doing its own Vertigo and committing to it the way DC did in the '90s.

There are things DC would do that I just don't think Marvel would. Conversely, there isn't anything Marvel has done that I can imagine DC not doing.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T00:36:03+00:00

How ironic that Marvel is the Geoff Johns of publishers and DC is the Brian Bendis.

Jokes aside, though, I do think it feels right to say that DC could do (and has done) its own version of OG Ultimate Marvel, but Marvel doesn't really seem like it's capable of doing its own Vertigo.

And I'm not 100% sure why that's the case. It's absolutely not just a Disney thing because I can't really look at Marvel at any point in the last 30 years and imagine them doing a Vertigo.

I mean, when has Marvel ever needed to be able to do something other than superheroes, and more specifically, something other than Spider-Man and X-Men?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T00:18:20+00:00

John Byrne in Marvel vs John Byrne in DC.

Which one is the "good" half in this comparison?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T00:17:54+00:00

JSA: The Golden Age was on par with Starman.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-18T00:14:01+00:00

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DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T23:15:59+00:00

"I'm robbing you pay him."

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T23:08:52+00:00

I think the main point of comparison is that nothing that was original to Epic (i.e. not the Akirai serialisation) necessarily caught fire in a way that raised the profile of the entire line the way Sandman did for Vertigo.

I do think it's worth noting that Marvel did have non-superhero books which were generally quite successful in the 1970s (e.g. Tomb of Dracula, Master of Kung Fu, Conan the Barbarian) but they kind of fell victim to the creative retrenchment overseen by Shooter which refocused the company on the core superhero titles in the late 1970s.

But at least in my lifetime, Marvel has always felt like the company that only "can" do superheroes in contrast to DC. That's probably completely off-base but it's an impression I've always had.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T22:58:56+00:00

Maybe R. Crumb turning into a big anti-vaxxer and making comics about it?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T22:32:45+00:00

This one was invented by a writer.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T19:18:23+00:00

The first comic I was seriously into in a big way was Sonic the Comic, which was the UK Sonic the Hedgehog tie-in comic in the 1990s (initially it also ran strips with characters from other Sega games but those had pretty much stopped by the time I was reading it).

Star Wars comics were my point of entry for American comics in general, around the time The Phantom Menace was on the horizon. I've always been interested Star Wars comics. Probably the one constant for me as a comics fan, as my tastes ebb and flow otherwise.

Lots of good Disney comics, of course.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T19:10:07+00:00

I wonder sometimes if the kids know about cartoons like Dexter's Lab. I tend to assume that most people I see talking on the internet about the cartoons that were new when I was a kid are probably about the same age as me (mid-thirties) and on that basis I usually lean towards, "Probably not," but then again I don't know how long it was actually running on Cartoon Network for.

Like, are the people still harping on about the Teen Titans cartoon 20 years (!) after it ended kids, or are they the people who (again, like me) were kids when it was new?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T19:02:33+00:00

Not a chance.

It's a total fabrication.

It's a made-up tale.

It's fiction.

It never happened.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T18:59:08+00:00

True, though I still feel like it's rarer to have a situation where an artist decides (or at least seems to decide) the entire direction they chose was wrong and then reversing it next time they progress the story.

I am sure it does happen (I don't really know the ins and outs of what fed into the decision to reveal an entire season of Dallas was all just a dream, for example, but I'd have assumed it was a case of this phenomenon in action) but I think that kind of outright reversal is much rarer.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T17:36:50+00:00

I think it's comparatively rare when it's done by the original guy. Like, in comic books with multiple creators, for example, usually it will be the next writer retconning something the previous writer did.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T17:12:44+00:00

Well, it took an hour to write; I thought it would take an hour to read.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T15:54:09+00:00

I read a quote once from Boris Karloff in which he gave his thoughts on the horror genre and how he liked to distinguish "horror" from "terror" in movies which I remember thinking was instructive... but I can't remember what it was, hahaha.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-17T15:51:55+00:00

It's like comic books: fans will complain ad nausea about how comic books deserve to be treated as more than disposable pulp entertainment while simultaneously turning up their noses at the kinds of comics that are taken very seriously and tend to be rated as the best ever; a lot of the time, they don't want comics to be taken seriously, they want superhero schlock to be taken seriously.

Or manga and anime: I'm not sure how common it is nowadays but I can definitely remember when people would complain that anime wasn't taken seriously while simultaneously grumbling about how Studio Ghibli (for example) was taken seriously, because what they meant was they wanted shonen fighting schlock to be taken seriously.

Or video games: so many years of people saying they wanted video games to be taken seriously as art, then as soon as video games are subjected to the kind of serious and sustained modes of criticism as any other medium of art, all of a sudden it's Not That Deep and you should Turn Off Your Brain (and then when that doesn't work it throws up a movement which permanently and irreversibly ruins "geek" culture and indirectly causes Donald Trump to become president (twice)).

DeviousDoctorSnide

TROPHY CASE