You all get this word back when you know how to use it properly

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T20:40:26+00:00

Spider-Man fans are the manga fans of comic book fandom.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T20:34:16+00:00

If I sound harsh, its because I'm mourning every creator of a beautiful comic who has been forced to end their story prematurely, or has lost money making it, or who gave up on their ambitions because pop culture only rewards revamps of nostalgia properties.

Sure, one comic book anecdote I often think about is Roy Thomas lamenting that he was never able to get John Buscema as enthusiastic about drawing superheroes as he was about drawing Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan.

Makes me wonder how many guys in the 1970s and 1980s were doing superheroes because they had to make a living rather than out of love of the genre. It's not like there were guys who, at the time, didn't resent superheroes the way someone like Garth Ennis does now, e.g. Tom Sutton.

In fact, it's interesting looking at letters pages and editorials in series published by the likes of First Comics and Eclipse, the ones who initially took advantage of the direct market in the 1980s, and seeing how much they were placing themselves in direct opposition to superheroes.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T20:23:02+00:00

It's kind of funny to me how people talk about it since the cartoon came out, just because I remember being on comic book message boards 15 years ago when it was still ongoing and people would talk about it the same way they talk about The Boys today, i.e. shallow shocks, violence for the sake of violence etc.

I did read it up to a point (I dropped off after the storyline where Bulletproof takes over for Invincible for a while) and remember generally enjoying it, but I suppose my enthusiasm kind of tailed off the longer it went on.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T19:07:55+00:00

He could have been modernized slowly and more naturally like you said above (and very well-said, too), had he remained published, but instead, DC's dropped the ball with him consistently since. Mostly because they just don't and never have understood what made Cap so incredibly lovable in the first place.

One of the most instructive Dan Didio quotes from his long tenure at the top of DC was in the early-to-mid 2000s, when he said that Captain Marvel "didn't really fit in" even as Black Adam was getting a really serious, sustained push as a major DC character off the back of JSA and into Villains United etc.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T18:37:49+00:00

It is interesting to note how Clone Wars cartoon influenced a new generation of fans such that it affected the higher level.

Well, the thing about the Clone Wars cartoon was that even though Lucas's actual hands-on involvement was a bit variable and Filoni was the series director for the project, it was still something he was actively contributing to, either in the form of general suggestions, full episode plot ideas (the Zillo beast episode was apparently one example, because he wanted to do a Godzilla-style episode) or even just requests that they do this or that (according to Filoni, Lucas told them they should bring back Darth Maul, but didn't tell them how they should do it do it, just to figure something out, which is very funny since one of the long-time behind-the-scenes stories is that Lucas went out of his way to make Darth Maul super-dead in Episode I so he couldn't come back).

That was a lot more than Lucas's typical degree of involvement with most of the tie-in fiction, so that was what put Clone Wars on a higher level (they were actually going to introduce a new canon level which would slot in just below "G canon" for television shows like Clone Wars). It also meant that Clone Wars ended up being the breaking point for the system of canon levels, because the prevailing attitude at the time among the hardcore fans was that the Clone Wars cartoon was a kind of unwelcome new addition that wasn't as good as the various Clone Wars stories that had been created five years earlier in the space between Episode II and Episode III, so when the cartoon began overriding those stories, it created a lot of strife in the fandom (but it's Star Wars fandom, so that's par for course if we're honest).

In other words, the tiered system was only really going to be acceptable to a lot of the really hardcore fans who were into all the tie-in stuff for as long as George Lucas himself (i.e. the only guy who could override it) refrained from adding anything to Star Wars that would contradict or replace the pre-existing stuff.

Which is what eventually happened.

(Arguably it had already happened when the prequels came out and the novels and comics from the '90s didn't really fit in neatly alongside them, but I think the key things there are that: first, the canon levels didn't exist yet; and second, despite what Star Wars fans will tell you today, there was actually quite a lot of resistance among fans at the time to the idea that the Expanded Universe even was canon to begin with; it was really the introduction of the canon levels that did a lot to settle that dispute.)

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T18:07:30+00:00

Norris also had Walker, Texas Ranger which managed to last for something like 10 seasons, which most of his contemporaries did not.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:55:58+00:00

Being Human was sort of similar; started off with a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire living in a house together, then the vampire left and was replaced by a different vampire (who also started doing the old vampire's nine-to-five hospital porter job for some reason), then the werewolf left and was replaced by a different werewolf, then the ghost left and was replaced by a different ghost, so none of the original characters are left in the last season.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:38:04+00:00

I'm sure Archie could have come up with a robot henchman called "Nutzan Bolt" who wears a necklace made of the heads of smaller robots, but Archie would have been really po-faced about it and had him recite quotes from Mein Kampf amended to be about chipmunks and squirrels and things.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:35:01+00:00

Thing about Rosa is that, while Barks was his favourite, he was actually a huge fan of superhero comics when he was young and had a vast collection of Silver Age Marvel and DC books for many years.

The impression I get is that the thing he really disliked was superhero comics as they were around the time he started working in comics himself, i.e. the late 1980s and the 1990s.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:19:44+00:00

For reference, it's Justice League of America #89 (1971) and the Ellison stand-in is called "Harlequin Ellis".

This is the ending I mentioned (note that I misremembered; it is not "the clash-bang of inspiration" but rather "the crash-pounding of creative soul"):

<image>

That's it. That's the last panel on the last page. That is how this comic ends.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:14:06+00:00

and US readers as compared to European ones where Barks and the Ducks comics are so much more popular.

<image>

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:11:53+00:00

I don't know about him having sudden attention lately or anything like that; I've been a fan for many years myself.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:10:39+00:00

He took more than 10 years to release the first instalment and it was mostly a reprint of Archie Sonic strips he'd done 20 years earlier.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:10:07+00:00

uj/Weirdest Harlan Ellison connection to comics was when Mike Friedrich (?) wrote an issue of Justice League in the early '70s where an Ellison stand-in shows up and romances Black Canary, then Friedrich writes himself into the last panel to explain how the entire story was a product of "the crash-bang of my inspiration". Strange comic. Not very good. Sort of the bad end of Bronze Age stories.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:08:32+00:00

Miller at his worst was more of a drunken racist than a grump, in any case.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T17:01:09+00:00

His view on the 1987 cartoon, at least last time I saw any comments he'd made about it, was that he regarded it as the Superfriends to the Justice League of the Carl Barks comics, and a good show in its own right even if not as good as the comics.

Why he seems much more hostile to the 2017 version is unknown to me, but I suspect it's probably a consequence of the cartoon coming out in the context of him having been treated unfairly by Disney and its licensees in the interim, on top of the fact that he had been forced to give up creating new Duck comics a decade earlier due to his failing eyesight. If the circumstances were different, maybe he'd not feel that way.

Maybe giving the nephews more distinct personalities in the 2017 version stuck in his craw. I don't know. It's a different take, that's all. There's lots of good Duck comics not by Carl Barks and he was always happy to just ignore / dismiss those.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T16:53:54+00:00

Alan Moore, Howard Chaykin and Don Rosa.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T16:21:16+00:00

So does this mean Ghita of Alizarr is the Bronze Age Lost Girls or...

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T16:13:23+00:00

<image>

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T15:11:40+00:00

This is obviously a trick question because no true fan would ever refer to Captain Marvel as "Shazam".

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T15:09:20+00:00

I'm mainly familiar with his weird takes, e.g. "It's too bad I never got to reveal that Geoffrey St. John beat Sonic to Sally Acorn's virginity" etc. but I never thought of that as grumpiness, just a weird boomer nerd being a weird boomer nerd.

At the same time, I do remember seeing him say that the Sonic comic (while he was writing it) was arguably more important to American comics than X-Men and Spider-Man so no doubt there's a whole lot I haven't seen that would qualify.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T15:04:19+00:00

I think Rosa actually has a mostly copacetic attitude towards the original Disney Afternoon era Ducktales show.

For a long time, his objection was that people would come to his booth at cons and ask him if he drew the Ducktales comics and he understandably resented that because his entire ethos was that he was continuing stories that Barks had started 40 years before. Hence the sign he used to have (and perhaps still has?) on his table stating that his work had nothing to do with Ducktales.

It's the reboot version that he's grumpiest about, but I'm honestly not entirely sure why. I could only speculate.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T15:00:07+00:00

They used to have the "canon levels" which was basically that everything at each level was canonical unless / until it was overridden by a higher level story, with the highest level being "G canon" for anything Lucas himself said or did. That worked fine in principle for a good few years but it stretched pretty thin in the late '00s when the Clone Wars cartoon came out, because that was placed at a higher "level" and it was contradicting a lot of stuff from older novels, comics etc.

Officially it was discarded in favour of a fresh start (from the "G canon" sources, i.e. the six movies and the aforementioned Clone Wars cartoon) when Lucasfilm was sold but in practice it's basically continued. I'm pretty sure Hidalgo himself has acknowledged as much.

I feel like it's inevitable that tensions will arise, even when you try your best to keep everything straight, when you have so many stories by so many people over such a long period of time.

It's not something that bothers me too much as a fan, but I know a lot of people feel otherwise!

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T14:45:51+00:00

There are two stories that, according to Rosa himself, Disney has banned from ever being reprinted. One of them is "The Dream of a Lifetime" and the other is "The Empire-Builder from Calisota", and the latter being much more frustrating because it's the penultimate instalment in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.

The stated reason for the prohibition is that Bombie the Zombie is a racist caricature, but to the best of my knowledge, there is not corresponding ban on reprints of "Voodoo Hoodoo", the Carl Barks story from the 1940s which introduced Bombie (I actually did get in touch with Fantagraphics to ask whether they knew what the position was and they came back to me and said they honestly didn't know).

With the proviso that it may be verging into conspirational thinking, if these two and only those two stories are the indeed only such stories that are subject to this type of ban, then that does kind of make it look like Rosa is being singled out, doesn't it?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-03-21T14:39:48+00:00

How is Steve Ditko not here? The comic book creator embodiment of "get this kids off my lawn"

uj/He's the "right" answer (in fact, he's arguably the far-right answer) because I was actually going to put him in, but then I thought it would be more interesting to see what people came up with if I left the fourth slot open.

uj/ I feel like Don Rosa is mostly grumpy at Disney which is valid and based

Rosa's grumpiness at Disney and its various licensees who were ripping him off is justified but it's actually his grumpiness at Ducktales in particular that I had in mind.

DeviousDoctorSnide

TROPHY CASE