Comic Book Talk

cmoney said:
I sort of hate that the new Captain America comic explicitly states that he came out of the ice post-9/11. I don't like having the mainstream comics that tied to real world events. I even dislike when they have specific presidents in the present.
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How did you feel when Dr. Doom cried as Magneto removed the 9/11 wreckage?
 
Chooch555 said:
I dunno man, the conceit of Marvel has always been that it's our world.
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There's a lot of the conceits that just don't work with my carefully constructed autistic logic.

Why is being bombarded by cosmic rays and radiation cool, but if you're born with it, you deserve to be rounded up and murdered by robots and put in camps?

Oh wait! I just looked at the current world.
 
This couldn't be less surprising after the success of Marvel's Ultimate reboot and DC's Absolute books.

I don't hate it, but it doesn't excite me.
 
November 8th is quite a day in comic book history for two reasons. First, Filipino comics artist and illustrator Tony DeZungia was born on this day in 1932. Tony will probably best be remembered as the co-creator of Jonah Hex and Black Orchid for DC Comics.

DeZuniga was the first Filipino comic book artist whose work was accepted by American publishers, paving the way for many other Filipino artists to enter the international comic book industry, including Alfredo Alcala, Alex Niño, Nestor Redondo and Gary Talaoc.

Tony died from complications due to a stroke on May 11th, 2012, but he left behind an incredible body of work that will live on.

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Also on this day back in 1939 ...

Whiz Comics number 2, the first appearance of the Golden Age Captain Marvel, premiered on newsstands all over North America.

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The Big Red Cheese is now 86 years old.

Happy Birthday to Tony DeZungia and SHAZAM! Thanks for all the great memories.
 
Finally caught up on Chip Zdarsky's Cap.

I am now in favor of a clean slate restart at Marvel. Story itself is great, but the sliding time line is wearing thin. Maybe full on generational reboots are the way.
 
SDcomics said:
But if this is indeed what Marvel's doing, they need to learn from DC's mistakes. If you're going to reboot, then you need to REBOOT. Start over completely from scratch. Don't reboot and then keep some stuff. That just causes massive amounts of confusion.
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When I read New 52 I shook my head and groaned when I saw that all of Batman's continuity was kept intact but the rest of the DCU, including his satellite characters, were all rebooted. With the exception of Green Lantern who was riding a wave of popularity at the time with Blackest Night just wrapping up. They didn't have the guts to mess with their most popular characters. This just turns everything into a cluster-f. Even I, a relatively seasoned comic reader, didn't have the resolve to try to work all this crap out in my head. New readers? Forget about it. (I love how companies keep alluding to the mythical "new readers" but there never seem to actually be any. Go to a comic book store every Wednesday for a month and survey the number of kids to the number of 40+ year olds you see stocking up on new books. You honestly expect today's youth with zero attention span to sort through 15 Spider-Man #1s all with 10 different covers?)

Yeah, I might be down for a complete at total Marvel reboot but they'd have to reboot it ALL, not a half-assed reboot like above. I guess I'm more open to a total Marvel reboot more so than DC just for the fact that they have fewer legacy characters that I'd miss. DC has Nightwing, Tim Drake, Kyle Rayner, Wally West and a few others that would be gone if DC did a TRUE reboot. Marvel just doesn't seem to have the deep legacy bench that DC does.
 
Reboots are what Absolute and Ultimate are for. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
I think the biggest mistake Marvel ever made was ditching the format of the comics actually happening in real time. In the early Marvel days, up through the 80's, the stories actually occurred in the years they were set, and the characters grew and evolved. Peter Parker started as a High School student, but eventually went to college, got a full-time job, got married, etc. At some point they decided to adopt the "sliding time scale" and it was fine for a bit, but when you're going DECADES with these characters and they're permanently stuck in their thirties, it just gets convoluted. If they'd stuck to the original format, they could have introduced new characters as time went on, with Legacy heroes becoming the norm. You could have Peter Parker growing older, no longer active as Spider-Man, but mentoring the new hero to wear the mantle.

I know some readers wouldn't like this, as "their" Spider-Man or Captain America would always be the original, but I also think it would give new generations a chance to have their own characters to attach to. There are plenty of people who grew up with Wally West and Kyle Rayner being "their" Flash and GL, and if Barry and Hal had still been in the books guiding those new heroes I think there would have been a greater acceptance of the new guys by older readers.

Now it seems that both of the Big Two have to either do a "soft" reboot or a full on "Crisis" style revamp every few years because the continuity gets so bloated and confusing. One writer chooses to bring some element in from the previous continuity that another writer ignored, and the whole cycle starts anew.
 
TheGillMan said:
I know some readers wouldn't like this, as “their” Spider-Man or Captain America would always be the original,
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Yep, that’s me.
I’m honestly not interested in time “passing” like that in comics. I’d prefer occasional hard/soft reboots to “aging out” key characters (and I guess it depends on what one considers “key characters”). There are other forms of storytelling where I’d welcome that sort of “real time” evolution, but the whole reason I come back to comics is to be with my favorite characters. It’s what is specifically special about comics to me: Peter Parker will always be there.
 
AceofKnaves said:
Yep, that’s me.
I’m honestly not interested in time “passing” like that in comics. I’d prefer occasional hard/soft reboots to “aging out” key characters (and I guess it depends on what one considers “key characters”). There are other forms of storytelling where I’d welcome that sort of “real time” evolution, but the whole reason I come back to comics is to be with my favorite characters. It’s what is specifically special about comics to me: Peter Parker will always be there.
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Same. I'm comfortable with handwaving specific things away (Magneto's not 100 years old, after all) and having things "mostly" fit, but I don't want histories and associations erased and I love when stories suddenly pull out some obscure old character or bit of lore that hasn't been used in ages to shine it up.
 
Not that point of your post, but Magneto being 100 actually makes sense to me. He's an omega-level mutant who controls magnetism. Who knows how that'd affect his aging?

I saw this on Bluesky this morning:

https://bsky.app/profile/willardfoxton.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3m5dsuxmdzk2e

I honestly couldn't believe the writer was challenged. 1) Who cares? 2) Reboot it. The Craig films themselves were a soft reboot. 3) Stick it in another part of Bond's life.

The responses were largely in favor of Bond continuing. Sometimes I feel like an oddball for obsessing over these legacy characters, but there's definitely a spot for them in storytelling.

I'm not as stressed by questions like "What year was Peter Parker born?" As I said in another thread, the less superheroes deal with the real world, the better. The logistical questions give DC a huge edge, too. You don't have to worry about how Batman feels about 9/11 because he lives in a made-up city.

I don't worry about continuity. I treat each run like an anthology series. If every author is writing an Elseworlds story, you don't need to think about canon or character voice.
 
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