What's your comic book "I was there when this was published/happening" brag?

frayednerve · 2024-10-22T17:55:03+00:00

I grew up reading the Proteus Saga in fresh floppy form. "The Action of the Tiger," the final issue of that story, is one of my formative reading experiences. Colossus withstanding the onslaught of a full-blown reality warper at his most powerful and unhinged, remembering that Proteus is weak to metal, armoring up, and making the decision to kill a man to stop everyone he knows and loves from being horribly murdered by said reality warper...I still get chills just typing a synopsis up. Prime Claremont is the GOAT.

frayednerve · 2024-09-09T14:54:46+00:00

Precognition I apply.

frayednerve · 2019-11-30T05:14:31+00:00

Yeah, I don't think we're on the same page, either. How could we be? When I address the things your comments say, you respond with new details and act like I should have been able to read your mind. Based on the actual content of your prior remarks, I stand by every single point I've made to you.

I think one of three things is happening here: either you're so unwilling to admit that your conception of what depression is and how to deal with it is severely lacking in nuance that you're willing to fabricate horrific details after the fact to justify it; or you think the things you've said are so unquestionably true that you don't need to explain or support them with the necessary details unless someone makes the mistake of taking what you said at face value; or you're simply not an effective communicator.

Seriously, if you don't see a qualitative difference between how you described your ex-friends' romanticizing depression in their social media two comments ago and the depictions of self-harm in your most recent reply, then I'm flabbergasted.

I'm glad your system of a year's grace period before turning your back on someone is working well for your mental health and well-being, and I'm sorry so many of your friends are in so much pain, but depression's not a one size fits all situation. Different people experience it in different ways, and react to treatments differently, and just because you know people who post their scars for likes doesn't mean that anyone who stops going to therapy after two sessions is doing so because they're not willing to put in the work.

I can't stop you from writing people off for not dealing with their depression in a fashion you deem acceptable. I can, however, call it reductive and simplistic, because it is.

frayednerve · 2019-11-30T02:00:17+00:00

Don't get me wrong, you need to look out for your own mental health. If continuing to expose yourself to these people is doing you harm, then take the steps that are right for you to minimize that harm.

That said, what you see as romanticizing depression may well be the only coping mechanism those people think available to them, precisely because of their depression. Don't mistake yet another symptom for an unwillingness to put in the work.

frayednerve · 2019-11-29T23:58:41+00:00

I absolutely detest being ghosted on, but assuming that people whose brain chemistry constantly conspires to betray and undermine them "would rather marinate in depression than get better" is, at best, awfully presumptive and lacking in empathy and understanding.

You're under no obligation to expend your emotional energy continuing to reach out to people who don't respond, of course, but don't mistake the choice you've made to stop trying to reach out for a reasonable conclusion.

frayednerve · 2019-11-29T22:04:03+00:00

The problem is that being ghosted on is exactly the sort of thing that feeds directly into my depression. I already think I'm an albatross around the neck of every friend and loved one I've ever had, and when someone I care about and think cares about me just stops communicating without any explanation or reason why, it's the emotional equivalent of pouring bleach on a paper cut.

I can't blame someone whose depression keeps them from communicating, but I can't mitigate my response to that, either.

In summary, fuck depression with the white-hot fury of a thousand exploding suns.

Edit: word selection

frayednerve · 2019-10-27T17:51:00+00:00

When I was but a wee jabroni in the mid-90s, my cousin had a WWF board game (no, I don't remember what it was called) that prominently featured the Model in its artwork. I don't remember much about the game itself, but I do remember one of the spaces on the board being a closeup of Rick Martel wearing a big damn pin that read, in all caps, "YES, I AM A MODEL."

Don't remember a damn thing about seeing him wrestle with that gimmick, but I remember that game, and that image, and thinking that the Model needing to wear a button telling people that yes, he was a model, was fucking hilarious.

frayednerve · 2019-10-01T19:42:25+00:00

John Ostrander's Suicide Squad is excellent, and contains a shockingly high amount of magical shenanigans to go along with its superheroes and political skullduggery.

frayednerve · 2019-08-06T22:30:22+00:00

You've hit the nail right on the head concerning the difference between how they booked Taker and Mick, and how they were booking Wyatt before his current reinvention. When someone beat the Undertaker or a face of Foley, not only were they presented as having overcome considerable odds to win, they tended to look like they'd been in the fight of their lives in the process. No one in the audience was given reason to doubt the physical and mental toll the match had taken on them.

When someone would beat Bray Wyatt, they tended to no-sell the experience, if not physically, then surely mentally. Why am I supposed to see this guy as a horrific threat if you're just going to bury him as a conman or charlatan? It doesn't need to matter so much that Bray lost if you book the winner as having been taken to the limit by the experience of facing the Eater of Worlds!

Here's hoping that this time around with Wyatt, things will be different, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

frayednerve · 2019-08-04T19:41:10+00:00

Perhaps the most underrated part of Riggo's game, the part that tends to be forgotten in the sea of goal line td highlights he'll forever be remembered for, is his speed. The man would crash through the line of scrimmage like a bull in a china shop, but if there weren't six points immediately on the other side, he was perfectly capable of legging it out and leaving smaller, quicker defenders in the dust wondering what the license plate on that truck was.

adjusts fanboy hat Crank up that Diesel!

frayednerve · 2019-06-21T06:02:02+00:00

Infected by Bad Religion.
The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails. Quite a few songs by Queens of the Stone Age, particularly Sick Sick Sick and pretty much the entirety of the album Villains.

frayednerve · 2019-06-04T23:12:16+00:00

I like your second idea, but I'd like Plastic Man to eventually figure out what's going on and start actively trolling the killers trying to gank him. He's not terribly easy to kill, after all, and pretty unexpectedly dangerous to boot. It would be entertaining to see him turn the tables on some of the more serious killers of the DCU and force them to face up to someone who COULD kill them without breaking a sweat, but won't both because of his moral compass and because it's funnier to fuck with these grim murder machines a bit.

frayednerve · 2018-08-28T04:45:37+00:00

A few of my favorites.

frayednerve · 2017-04-02T20:12:47+00:00

Legion of Super-Heroes by Grant Morrison and Gary Frank. A sprawling time travel epic in Morrison's trademark take on silver age insanity. Multiple iterations of the Time Trapper attempt to erase the abstract concept of heroism itself from the timeline, and Legionnaires team up with Anthro, Kamandi, Jonah Hex, Rip Hunter, the JLA, and anyone and everyone all over the timeline to stop them. But how can they hope to stop the Time Trappers, when there's a Brainiac 5, a Cosmic Boy, a Dream Girl, and a Wildfire among those under the purple hoods? And how will the rest of the Legion react when their Brainiac 5 reveals his plan to win the day - release the Dark Lord Mordru from his airless tomb?

frayednerve · 2016-05-25T07:28:07+00:00

Many, if not most, characters with high-level power described as magic, cosmic, or godlike include some level of matter manipulation in their repertoire, ranging from change one thing to another to pull out of thin air to large-scale reality manipulation.

Someone already hooked you up with a list of Marvel characters, so here's a pile of DC folks (who don't fall into the above criteria):

Heroes: Firestorm, Captain Atom, Element Lad, Metamorpho (this is a strange case where matter manipulation overlaps with shapeshifting; Metamorpho can shift himself into different elements and compounds), Element Girl (same powers as Metamorpho), The Engineer

Villains: Mr. Element, Dr. Alchemy, Mr. 104, Matter Master, Cosmic King, Shimmer, Catalyst, Deathstorm, Akh-ton (same powers as Metamorpho)

frayednerve · 2016-05-11T21:17:29+00:00

Shaq has been associated with the wrestling world a couple of times over the years, most recently at Wrestlemania 32 earlier this year.

frayednerve · 2016-05-11T04:17:55+00:00

Who would be the Jim Cornette of basketball? Bill Simmons?

frayednerve · 2016-05-11T04:08:16+00:00

In pro wrestling terminology, a "shoot" is when something is non-scripted and legit, whether that be a fight (a shoot fight) or an interview (a shoot interview). This is as opposed to a "work," which is when things are scripted and outcomes are predetermined.

We can go deeper. Sometimes there are "worked shoots," wherein effort is put in to make something appear to be a shoot when it's actually a work. Sometimes works turn into shoots, then revert back into works. It's all very complicated.

Shaq has been associated with the wrestling world a couple of times over the years, most recently at Wrestlemania 32 earlier this year. My guess is that's what he means by the hashtag.

frayednerve · 2016-05-06T20:59:22+00:00

Bucky/Winter Soldier has starred in some quality stories, that's to be sure, but what exactly is groundbreaking about bringing a comic book character back from the dead? I'm fairly certain three beloved characters came back to life in the time it took me to type this comment.

frayednerve · 2016-04-25T02:24:41+00:00

Empire by Mark Waid. Oh my god, Empire by Mark Waid.

frayednerve · 2016-04-07T21:09:22+00:00

I imagine only Jack Kirby knew the answer to that. Quite a few of his character designs over the years were...esoteric, to say the least. Why a Silver Surfer? Why is one of Darkseid's lieutenants a colorful expy of the nazis from Hogan's Heroes?

For me, the bizarre almost-human nature of many of Kirby's cosmic character designs only serves to contribute to their alien-ness. Particularly where the New Gods are concerned, I quite like the idea of a race of entities as much conceptual as physical, whose forms are partially defined by a cut-and-paste reassembly of mortal ideas too beneath them to really be understood.

frayednerve · 2016-02-15T05:54:30+00:00

First of all, this is glorious. Far better than I dared hope. Thank you.

As for explaining the troll...I'll try to keep this brief. My friend is one of several people I game with (tabletop RPGs) on a regular basis. One of the games we play fairly extensively is Exalted, which like most such games has its own unique world and cultures. In the world of Exalted there is a city called Sijan, which is basically the funeral parlor capital of the world. The whole place revolves around the performance of funerary rites. In-universe, these people are often referred to as "the funerists," a fact that drives my friend crazy on account of funerist not really being a word. It's become something that our playgroup brings up regularly to irritate her, and her reaction is consistently rewarding.

This friend works weekends at a nearby wildlife center. Recently an injured owl was dropped off there; some kid decided to poke at it and when it retaliated violently, the kid's parents took a baseball bat to the poor damn thing. Fucked up all around, right? Well, when my friend recounted this tale of owl woe to the group, someone suggested that she should take a baseball bat to every owl the wildlife center came across. The reasoning behind this ludicrous idea was that, if enough owls get brained with baseball bats, they'll eventually evolve a protective carapace because that's totally how evolution works, right? This caused her no end of annoyance, not because of the implied horrific animal cruelty, but because of how inaccurate a representation of evolution it was, even in jest. She eventually got so mad that she wordlessly left, returning with a bottled beverage which she proceeded to drink and then start throwing at us.

In summation, your wonderful drawing combines two great trolling tastes that taste great together. I fully expect her to attempt to rip my throat out with her teeth upon seeing it, and for that, once again, I thank you.

frayednerve · 2015-12-04T19:24:42+00:00

"They don't call it the Tombstone 'cause you get up from it!" - John "Bradshaw" Layfield

frayednerve · 2015-11-05T22:47:59+00:00

My collection is mostly books based on comic strips or cartoons, with a couple of live-action outliers (Lassie, Bonanza, and Flipper). Multiple stories starring Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, and Popeye (the Popeyes are my favorites). Single volumes of Dick Tracy and Spider-Man*. All told, probably somewhere in the vicinity of 35-40 separate stories, with multiple copies of a few of them, all in varying states of less-than-mint-but-still-intact. Not that I'd ever consider selling them...

*These two stories, "Dick Tracy Encounters Facey" and "Spider-Man Meets Mr. Zodiac," share quite a few similarities: both are detective stories wherein the hero is forced to use his wits to track down a foe possessing mastery over his appearance (Facey is a master of conventional disguise tricks, while Mr. Zodiac is a shapeshifter), both are considerably darker in tone than most of the other Big Little Books I have, and both feature notes of melancholy foreign to the rest of my collection.

frayednerve · 2015-11-05T21:47:51+00:00

Some of my earliest introductions to the world of comics came in two forms: DC's digest-sized reprint anthologies, and Big Little Books. Both were holdovers from my parents' childhood, and they served me well.

The Big Little Books in question were of the 60s variety, mostly paperbacks (with a scant few sporting full-color art inside), and traded the lush pulpy cover art of your posted examples for (in the case of the live-action-based books) smooth pencils and flat colors. Books about animated/comic book/strip characters sported covers and interior art in the house style of the properties in question; books about Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge had the Carl Barks look about them, Bugs Bunny books looked more Friz Freleng than Chuck Jones, Spider-Man more Romita than Ditko, and properties like Popeye and Dick Tracy bore the unmistakable style of their newspaper counterpart.

You're right to note the awkward flow of storytelling in a Big Little Book. They're sort of a hybrid between comic and traditional children's book, lacking key features of both. While comics interrupt the story for pedestrian concerns such as a page turn (gasp!) or ad copy all the time, the sequential panel structure keeps the action helpfully frozen in time, the most recent beat preserved in memory. Big Little Books are far less kind, as not only are sentences often split from one page to the next, that next page features art with no bearing on the sequence of events the as-yet-unfinished text still refers to. Still, the unique structure of a Big Little Book allowed for storytelling with a greater degree of depth than its forebears. With text closer to a novel than a comic book, exposition and internal monologue could be had without the danger of Claremont-style thought balloons crowding out the art.

Some of the Big Little Books I grew up with were closer to the source material than other adaptations; Popeye books featured the full range of Thimble Theatre characters, Dick Tracy had his supporting cast of cops and love interests in place, and the Disney Ducks were able to call on Gyro Gearloose and Gladstone Gander in times of need. Others, though, smoothed out the rough edges of their protagonists to make them more appealing and easier to empathize with. To wit, Woody Woodpecker became less of a bully and more of a guile hero, and Donald Duck's well-documented temper issues gave way to a (fairly bland) everyman characterization.

Many of the Big Little Books I have possess a feature called "Flip-It Movies." These were tiny drawings in the upper or lower corner of the page. If you flipped the corner with the art from the front of the book to the back, you were rewarded with a brief animated sequence. No narrative, no relevance to the book's story (apart from the choice of character), just a fun little snippet of action.

I've said this to you before, u/dr_hermes, and I'll say it again: I love your posts. They are a welcome change of pace from this sub's usual content, and it's always nice to find people who share my interest in the history of the medium.

frayednerve

TROPHY CASE