JBF Forum ?
Tom,

Maybe it would be worth your consideration to become a member at the JBF? One would think that with your history with comics (both personal & professional), that you'd have some interesting things to share with that forum !

Monday Morning Lunatic !

Posted by Mon Morn Lunatic on 2008-01-15 20:07:44
Before I read comics
It was actually before I read comics. I started reading comics when I was 15, but when I was eleven or so, I was watching Sailor Moon. There was something about the art style -- which was radically different than animation I'd seen before -- that tweaked in my mind and made me realize that someone had drawn it. I'd known that for a while, but I'd never really thought about it. It's what made me want to learn to draw.

Then there was the Clone Saga. Right around when Ben Reilly became Spider-Man, the lettercols were insisting that he was the real Spider-Man, and it was so exciting to be working with a young single Spider-Man, and they had all kinds of plans for the future, etc. A year later he was dead and the book was headed in a totally different direction. Clearly something was up behind the scenes.

I had another wake-up moment when I posted a review on the internet years later... not a bad one, exactly, but the praise was a bit too faint. The writer actually responded to it, not too happy, and I freaked out and ran away from that message board forever. I stopped writing intentional review-reviews at that point. I'm not really qualified to discuss literary merit anyway, or at least I wasn't at 18, and enjoyment is subjective.

I've never shied away from complaining, though, if I didn't enjoy something, or if some point of continuity seemed wrong. I'll say, "I hate this story," or "I hate this art," but I won't say I hate the writer or artist. There are so many variables between brainstorming and printing that from the outside, it's practically impossible to pin anything on one person anyway. Even if you do, from their perspective, they probably didn't do anything wrong. So I'll just try to point out what I think is wrong -- really for my own benefit or for lulz, not to try and impel change -- without making it personal.

Anyway, back to the question, one of the nice and fascinating things about comics is that the process is -- not entirely, but somewhat -- transparent. Between the number of interviews, the hype, the letter pages, and blogs like this, there's enough of a flow of information that you know that stories are growing and changing behind the scenes. While you can get lost in the story, it's easy to keep the fact that it's just a story in perspective. For most.

The ugly side of that is that the anger when something goes "wrong" gets heaped on people who don't necessarily deserve it.

Posted by aurata on 2008-01-15 20:08:30
Spidey 2099
My revelation came in college. I was collecting every issue of Spider-Man 2099, something I hadn't done with any title. Before that I just bought the occasional comic and read what was at the library.

Then one day, Spidey 2099 had a fill-in issue. It was terrible. That's when I figured out that the characters were not as important as the people making the comic. Without Peter David and Rick Leonardi, it might be Spider-Man 2099 but it wasn't the same comic.

College is probably a little late to figure out that the creators are more important than the characters, but I'd just never thought about it before then. It took a terrible issue with a character I liked to make me think about it.

Posted by CodeGuy on 2008-01-15 22:04:36
When Roy Thomas Left Conan
Conan the Barbarian was the most consistantly great series at Marvel back in the day. I took it for granted that Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Ernie Chan were Conan. That's just how it was. It was reality, with no need to think about anything else.

When Roy left with issue 115, and Chan left 3 issues later, reality came crashing down that I couldn't take the characters for granted, because a bad run could be right around the corner by a different writer. That noticeable shift in quality was what made me start paying attention heavily to the creative team.

Posted by Dusty. on 2008-01-15 22:48:32
Grant Morrison
I never paid attention to the creative team when I was a kid, and throughout the 1990s I had cut back to buying What If and nothing else.

But sometime in 2000 my roommate at the time handed me a stack of Grant Morrison's JLA and it changed the way I looked at comics. Not only did I start reading them again, but I began to notice who was writing and seek out other books by the same talent.

Posted by tech knight on 2008-01-15 22:58:34
When it changed
dfdsf

Posted by Gentleman Jack on 2008-01-16 01:45:51
When It Changed
(apologies for the above garbled post. Technical error on my end.)

In the summer of 2002, at the age of 24, I attended my first Comic Con. An avid collector since age 7, and an avowed Chris Claremont fan since I was old enough to know his name---- I was thrilled. Claremont himself was gonna be there. We drove from Charleston, SC to San Diego, and the whole way I was thinking about how great it would be to meet the man whose work essentially taught me how to read, and so much more.

When we got there---- inevitable disappointment. I caught Claremont between panels, midway through the weekend that by definition I"m sure was exhausting. And he was a d***.

It broke my heart. I was a freaked-out, FanMan (tm) that had crossed the country to meet him and now--- at the height of the Morrison NEW X-MEN phenonenon --- he really didn't want to be bothered with a fan, much less a fanatic.

I had thought that here was a guy, just like me, who wrote stories about superheroes and had these ideas he was trying to express--- and maybe we could be friends. (I was really, REALLY naive about all this.) At a minimum, I wanted to buy him a drink somewhere and thank him for "LifeDeath". But I freaked him out. I followed him out of an X-Men panel trying to talk to him and by the time he'd made the escalators twenty feet away, it was really clear he wanted to be somewhere else NOT being talked to about Dani Moonstar.

And that was it for me. I realized that this guy, who was not famous anywhere else at any other time of the year, was a celebrity at the Con and that it drove him nuts. He didn't want to talk to me, he didn't want to hear what I thought and (in the days before X-TREME X-MEN and then EXCALIBUR and then NEW EXCALIBUR were canceled), he couldn't care less about me buying his books.

Like I said, it broke my heart--- but that was my first REAL glimpse "Behind the Curtain". He was a guy, a guy who was annoyed by me. And I still feel crappy about that. But more to the point, it brought home to me that--- like any other business--- it's just a bunch of guys doing what they do. They aren't in this to make friends, or to meet people who think like they think. They're in this to cash a check and pay their light bills. It is what it is, and that's when I found out ... and the tender age of 22.....

You'd think I'd have learned long before, huh?


Posted by Gentleman Jack on 2008-01-16 01:57:50
The Stan behind the curtain
As a British comicbook reader, I started out with British made comicbooks like the Beano, which has NO creator credits on it at all (or at least, it didn't back in 1982, which was when I last read a copy).

When I read my first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, which was also the first American comic I'd ever read) back in early 1982, my six-year-old self was fascinated to see his first ever credits listing in a comicbook. Who the heck were Roger Stern and John Romita, Jr? A different person does the colouring and the lettering? That's just WEIRD! When I drew a picture, I did EVERYTHING myself! Breaking it down like the Marvel guys did just seemed like a bit of a cop-out! And why on Earth would you need such things as pencillers and inkers? Couldn't you just draw it in ink to start with?

Ah, what fools these six-year-olds be.

Needless to say, despite my initial confusion over the credits box, I was instantly hooked on Spidey and started to actively seek out other Marvel titles. As the months turned into years I began to understand and appreciate the creative process and eventually became a professional artist (not working in comics, mind you, but a professional artist all the same) as a direct result of that first issue of Spider-Man being delivered to my house BY ACCIDENT! If I could find that confused paperboy, I'd love to shake him by the hand, all these years later, for unwittingly determining the course of my life. Or possibly order a hit on him. One or the other.

Posted by Paulymorph on 2008-01-16 05:45:12
I think I've always known comic book heroes were fictional. Being the youngest of three, my life was quickly demystified. I've never believed in Santa Claus or any of those common 'mystical' beings. (only my belief in God remained intact until I was 13).

Despite this fact... I think I made some of those characters 'living entities' I could sympathize with. They became my role models to help me make decisions between wrong and right.

As I live in Belgium (Europe) I only got to know the characters of two publishing companies: Spidey, the Avengers, The X-Men and the Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics and Batman and Superman of DC Comics. These are the titles I still buy today. I have added some Marvel titles related to the ones mentioned above but only because I felt that they might give further background.

I've TRIED reading other comics after the Clone Saga (i felt so disgusted with the story in combination with extremely fast rising prices for comics in Belgium in that period that I stopped reading Marvel and DC) occasionally, but none of those characters would seem to attract my interest.

My point? Writers ARE important. I will enjoy a good story better than a bad one. But in the end, I think I care about the character the most I guess. I don't care if the charcacter gets hurt, sick, weakened etc.... as long as the stories seem to build up..

'Continuity' seems to have gotten an extremely negative connation perhaps, and I will not call it that... But there is also something called character consistency. I don't care e.g. if Spidey can one day lift a car and the next he can lift a building... But I DO care if Spidey would suddenly claim his uncle Ben never mattered...

Stories come first.... True... But a good story is a logical sequence that makes sense.

Posted by Zigy on 2008-01-16 06:17:38
OMD influenced answer
I now realize my answer was again tainted by OMD and my feelings about that. I'm going to stop posting untill I've cleared up all my negative feelings about it.

Sorry guys!

Posted by Zigy on 2008-01-16 06:18:41
Behind The Curtain
The first time I peered behind the curtain was interestingly enough the first series I bought at a comic shop. I have been an avid fan of super-heroes pretty much my entire life; I bought all the trading cards and watched all the shows and cartoons, but it wasn't until the first X-Men movie came out in 2000 that I started reading any of the comics.

There was something odd about knowing all the back stories to the characters I saw up on the silver screen without having observed them in their natural environment, so to speak. Luckily there was a Half Priced Bookstore in town so I could go pick up a metric ton of comics after the movie let out, and that remained my main source for the medium for two years. Then Marvel announced a title too sweet to pass up -- The Ultimates.

I was familiar with the Marvel Ultimate line-up through the plentiful array of Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men presented as dot-comics. In short, the prospect of a similar treatment of the Avengers was looking really good, and my brother and I decided to make our first expedition into the then alien culture contained within the local comic book store. This experience of course turned out to be an entirely satisfying in the long run, though there were some pretty infamous bumps along the way.

To this day I'm not sure I've ever read a stronger opening sequence than the allied forces storming that Nazi/Alien base with Cap leading the charge. It never fails to suck me in when I'm reading it, and I attribute this mostly to the fact that the story would be just as clear if the dialog had not appeared in the issue. It was a little later in the story line that I first learned the price of attempting to stuff that caliber of art into a monthly title. The delays made me realize that not every book could or should look like The Ultimates, and that a creative team can still hurt a book despite an unwavering fidelity to the product.

Looking back, however, the story never ran out of steam and neither did the readers. Sure I and others had to re-read a few back issues to get a running start at whatever issue was coming out that season, but hey, lesson learned right, and now I can read both volumes with complete satisfaction.

Posted by welleshadow on 2008-01-16 08:10:49
behind
frankly it's not being miser that telling that comic-books have taken an important place in my life,
'gosh it had been written- and draw-just for me, I don't know how to say it another way:
the 'Born Again ' story-arc was a huge revelation, I was depressed at this time and before, and believed that it happened to me and nobody excepted me, with no help from the outside, and then there was something talking to me.People telling me that I wasn't alone and also that there were clues.
the 'Life and death' story-arcs, 'The falls of mutants' and 'Inferno', with the first appearance of Apocalypse and the Four Riders in between and first X-Men's story in Genosha right after that, the Nocenti /Romita Jr run on 'Daredevil',all were connected with important moments of my life - so thanks again a lot to Ms Nocenti,Mr Miller, Claremont,Romita Jr and Silvestri ,and to Mr and Ms Simonson, it was all I dreamt to find in a comic-book at this time, I tought there was a secret message in it, something that pulled me to forge ahead ,to discover more other books: I'm about to read 'Slaughterhouse 5' by Kurt Vonnegut and I can't help thinking that comic-books make you do this kind of things.

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-01-16 08:29:16
Last to Know
Frankly, I'm not sure I really took any time to think about who was writing the comics until a year or two ago when I started strongly working toward writing for comics myself. Which would have been in my 25th year.

I was always aware that there were people writing, most likely from Stan Lee's bullpen bits and such. However, I couldn't have named an actual comic writer (besides Stan) until a couple years ago. Granted I knew that Stan wrote comics, but it was never really important to me how they got on the page, only that they did.

I even had friends who were into the actual artists, but I never really cared about that. My focus has always been on the fictional characters, not on whomever was pulling their strings. And honestly, it seems to me that I was probably better off in my cocoon of ignorance. Before I could start blaming this or that writer I was quite content to simply assume that the FF were having an off day and might be better next month.

Mind you, I'm not particularly naive when it comes to fantasy in general. I denied the existence of a Santa when I was 5 or 6, and my belief in God dwindled before I can really remember, I just have always loved fictional characters and worlds and it really doesn't matter to me who is creating them. I'd rather be lost in the world than whining because it isn't being crafted as I might do it. At best, I start fantasizing on how I would do it if I was given the chance. And while they're essence is mutable, I tend to think of all fictional characters as objectively existing somewhere, which I think helps to write them more realistically.

So, really, before I started wanting to be a writer and studying the process to emulate it, I was quite happily unaware of the men behind the curtain.

Stupid career-building reality.

Posted by PseudoSherlock on 2008-01-16 08:38:28
Not me
I never liked looking behind the cutain, I'd rather get lost in the story than the production. I never cared about behind the scenes stuff.

Posted by Seru1 on 2008-01-16 08:47:15
still haven't read onemorebrandnewday but tha
yes still haven't...
despite I find some criticism about the use of the Spiderman character that were absolutely interesting, at the same time - my life is wonderful, be sure of that-I accidentally found a Spidey against Venom cover by SIMON BISLEY, and in the middle of all the polemical situation, it makes me remember what I 'd like to see, to read...
Yes Spidey is a really strong character, very misunderestimate these times that made me think it had been planned this way to make him do the lethal helljump, some kind of lreaction from the Marvel writers- and editors - to telling us ' not good enough ? then take a look, it could be far far worse' ( yeah like I'm telling you ) .
And I want you to take a moment all you posters to think about really about super-heroes ;as one of the character in 'The Golem' by Gustave Meyrink said about the Devil :
'IS this not strong enough-as a concept, do you need a far worse symbol ?'
Let's take another example, in the 'Zodiac' movie, by David Fincher, when the cartoonist is in the cave of the old man and begin worrying and run away.THIS IT.
If sometimes what super-heroes do is not enough then take a look at what happen when they DON'T DO something.I think that this is the message that all the creative teams are trying to tell us.So Spidey is not an example any more, c'mon it's nothing in regards of what is waiting for us, what could emerge from a meeting ( circumstances ) with Ghost Rider ('mmmh...Spidey...you're kind of...bend no ?),and if other heroes began to discover it too and judging him, he could blast them ( I didn't ask you what YOU would have done ) and then maybe Spidey will become the most dangerous super-vilain of the MU- which is certainly something that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko didn't planned but that's not a reason- and then people will really know who he is.
This said, I still won't read it until it is written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Sean Philipps, and don't let me talk to you about Ted Mc Keever and Ann Nocenti because after that, you won't dare anymore to say' creative team' in front of me )

Thank you,

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-01-16 08:55:44
still haven't read onemorebrandnewday but that's O.K

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-01-16 08:56:32
I don't know that there ever was a time that I didn't know these things were written and drawn by people. I definitely remember knowing which artists and writers I liked at age nine. I've always been able to keep my feelings about writers and artists separate from my feelings of their work.

Posted by Fetsur on 2008-01-16 13:10:01
Although saying that, as much as I like to see behind that curtain, I can't help but feel we get too much of these days, that the boundaries are so broken between the content and the users that it's hard for someone to read or watch something without knowing "someone made this". I think that's why you see the furore over One More Day - people refusing to suspend their disbelief because they know a person came up with that idea.

Posted by Fetsur on 2008-01-16 13:12:49
Premises, Etc.
I began reading comics as series with AVENGERS #114, at the age of 15, and I’d already read dozens of adult novels by then. I reacted to stories critically then, too, if with a smaller knowledge base to use. What kept me interested were the similarities of the stories’ content to the novels I’d read. A story’s art generally functioned as the equivalent of descriptive text. That’s not the case now, with all-dialogue scripting. While people might complain about “compressed” plot development vs. “decompressed” plot development, if one looks at a typical prose story, he won’t see solid blocks of dialogue broken up by narration. He’ll see dialogue mixed with descriptions, a character’s thoughts, and authorial observations. No amount of dialogue, however skillfully written, can compensate for the missing thoughts and narration in terms of story content. Emulating a cinematographer in laying out panels is lost on me. If I wanted cinematic effects, I’d watch a movie.

As for negative reactions to stories, I’ve found that when I’m greatly disappointed with a storyline, the problem can generally be traced back to the storyline’s premise. If one looks back at several controversial Marvel storylines, (OMD, “Avengers Disassembled,” “Civil War”) and storylines in which the problems with the premise were somewhat less apparent (YOUNG AVENGERS, DEADLY GENESIS), he’ll see fundamental problems with the premises.

In the case of YOUNG AVENGERS, Heinberg had Kang try to do the impossible (change his own past), even though Kang had to know that was impossible, and used an artificial means of assembling the group. If he’d started with an existing group of Avengers fans and dealt with the problem of getting them powers, the storyline would have evolved more naturally and continuing the series after Heinberg’s departure would have been easier. Finding opponents for the YA would be problematic in any case.

In the case of DEADLY GENESIS, Darwin was an animated deus ex machina throughout and the resolution relied on an impossibility: Darwin sustaining Vulcan’s life without losing his own.

In the case of OMD, the use of Mephisto was too obviously taken from stories and films featuring pacts with Satan. Aside from moral and ethical issues, apparently no one mentioned that the M.U. already had a Satan, and that readers would inevitably see problems with continuity that the creators didn’t see. While a story featuring a genie never deals with the mechanics of having wishes fulfilled, the point of the story is generally that a person can’t wish problems away or be happy without achieving the state on his own. That point was missing from OMD.

Marvel might avoided problems by critiquing storyline premises thoroughly. Spending time breaking plots for individual issues is wasted if, when the time comes for the resolution, the writer and editor realize that the planned resolution can’t work. That problem is less likely to arise with character-based plots; it’s more likely that plot developments will seem forced.

I doubt that much time is spent breaking retcons, but if an editor asked, “Is the plot element being retconned ambiguous, or is the writer just having this happen instead of that?”, there would probably be far fewer retcons in print.

SRS


Posted by Steven R. Stahl on 2008-01-16 13:54:37
The Curtain Lifted Literally for me
It was the Marvel Team-Up between Spider-Man and Saturday Night Live "Not Ready For Prime Time Playas", circa 1978. I quite clearly remember seeing Belushi's samurai drawn in the issue, and a taken aback Peter Parker's face on a monitor above the SNL audience flashed with "Superhero in his spare time". I was a fan of Spidey of course and at least as big a fan of SNL so the collision between a real sketch comedy and a sketched comedic hero blew some circuits that I'm still missing. Sniff. Imperius Rex!

Posted by N.Mackenzie on 2008-01-16 17:44:40
Sure, there have always been the names in the credit boxes and I pretty much always had favorite writers and artists. But I think it was Mike Parobeck's tragic death when I realized these were real people like you and me, living and dying on the same planet.

Posted by Michael Heide on 2008-01-16 18:58:59
wolviebeserker
wolviebeserker
just wanted to say that, i understand there are those out there like yourself that might enjoy this. i respect your opinion, after all this is still america, i'm a desert shield/storm veteran, so i respect your disagreement. i do want to ask why the argument of spider-man making a deal w/ the devil is weak argument?? i don't know how long you have been reading asm but don't you think that this is way out of character for spiderman??? i'm just saying this has seemingly turned into an alternate universe for asm. for a lot of us, that doesn't seem interesting, but i understand there are others who may like it. i wasn't particularly crazy about the pete/mj marriage myself, i wouldv'e preferred he hitched with the black cat myself, but my complaint is the direction they went in dissolving the marriage/deal w/ mephisto thing. i'm not close minded, i just like for my comic character's to be consistent with what i've read previously. i think jms made great strides in developing sm, such as aunt may finally learning pete was sm, and having some of spidey's allies, the avengers and ff know his identity, i wasn't crazy about the whole world finding out in civil war but i guess without too much ranting, what i'm trying to say is: change in moderation is fine, but radical change for the sake of change is a cop-out. there have been way too many "radical" changes for major characters in the marvel u lately that have absolutely no substance, rhyme, or reason other than to generate higher sales for a hollow product. hope i wasn't insulting in my rebuttal. hope you enjoy bnd!!

Posted by y2jr on 2008-01-14 16:10:41


Posted by y2jr on 2008-01-17 10:55:51
bnd: the younger generation
bnd: the younger generation
it's sad, but from what i have read on-line and various related articles(newsweek) the EIC, joe q, has stated in no uncertain terms that they are trying to get ASM to relate to younger readers. us "older" readers no longer matter to marvel. as i stated in my first post in TB's section, i am married with 4 children, and i do not
want my children believing that deal making with a devil is morally sound. obviously, marvel has lost the foundation of morals on which stan lee built it. i'm not a religious fanatic but i don't care what the circumstances were, spider-man/peter parker would not make this deal. i don't know why the "loki favor" was forgotten or omitted in all of this but this is just beyond ridiculous, even for a comic book. parker's persona was very similar to steve roger's in that there mantra was always "there's got to be a better way to do things". what it boils down to is "joe q" did not care about the integrity of the character or the continuity, or the legions of ASM fans who have spent untold amounts of money buying this product from marvel, it didn't matter as long as he accomplished the objective of dissolving the marriage because it doesn't relate to younger fans. as far as the loyal long time fans, so what? who cares? joe q will still get his hefty salary and the heck with us older fans. in other words, if you are over the age of 30(i'm 37 and have been a loyal marvel fan since 1976) marvel doesn't care about us or our opinions. why am i writing this then? as a long-time fan, i just wanted to speak up, because i know there are a few of you out there my age and i hope like me you will take offense to marvel's lack of customer service to those of us that have heavily invested our time and money to these books and quit buying them. marvel thinks we are too old to be reading them, i guess. they have no respect or compassion for us, whatsoever. they have proven that in both, their words, and their actions. i have tried to be respectful in my complaint, so i hope this doesn't get spiked. i have nothing against the younger generation, but why isn't ultimate spider-man enough for the younger guys. it has been a high quality book that i myself have even enjoyed. anyway, for whoever reads and responds to this, thanks, in advance for your time. i have enjoyed the adventures of ASM, but i will no longer be buying because of marvel's attitude toward me as a consumer and their lack of disregard for morals. don't we have enough of that in our world today??? it's sad that you have to fantasize about a universe where morals still matter.

Posted by y2jr on 2008-01-11 16:18:15


Posted by y2jr on 2008-01-17 11:05:02
the walls fell
I guess the wall really fell for me when I read uncanny 235 or so. It was when the x-men went through the siege perilous and came out undetectable living in Australia, doing global crisis control ala JLA. Up until then, I just kind of presumed that the x-men did x-men things and that naturally, the stories just flowed from their exploits. At that point, I lost touch with the x-men and I didn't like where the story was going. and I just kind of drifted.

Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2008-01-17 11:11:06
Mine was when the X-Men went from a team that I thought was more of a family than superheroes (Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty, and Nightcrawler) to a group of outlaws after the Mutant Massacre. After X-Men #1 it seemed to get worse when they had to introduce two teams and continues today where it seems like writers play "Fantasy X-Men" just to fill out team rosters.

Posted by Smakk9 on 2008-01-18 06:47:33
I am really thrilled to hear there's some Cary Bates goodness coming - he was always solid at DC, then broke out with Captain Atom. Then left for TV or somewhere - drat.

Posted by Volthoom on 2008-01-18 07:30:16
Crisis Without Change
One reason why I’ve never had illusions about how comics were created was that I’d read adult SF years before reading comics, so comparing comics to SF in terms of story possibilities came naturally. Any given comics story that includes fantastic events can be structured as tightly as a prose SF or fantasy story; it’s just a matter of the writer placing importance on structure. One way to avoid “changing” a character while still making the story meaningful is to provide a basis for the character to have existential problems, if not a full-blown existential crisis.

Suppose that a villain discovers that a Cosmic Cube can be used to take control of a newly-arisen universe and speed up and shape its evolution. The result is a universe with an Earth shaped to its master’s whims, including duplicates of the heroes firmly under the control of the villain and his many associates in that universe. If the heroes discover that the situation exists, what, if anything, can they do about it? Taking away the Cube wouldn’t solve the problem.

The deities Dr. Strange invokes have the power to create life within their universes. Since the heroes are readily available as references, the deities can create duplicates of the heroes as they wish, if they have reasons to do so. The competition between the gods that was interrupted by the Avengers (see the “Eighth Day“ storyline) gave them those reasons. Now, instead of competing within the Marvel Universe, the deities use duplicates of the Avengers and other heroes to compete in tournaments staged within a “pocket” universe. Those duplicates are as real as the heroes themselves, and their deaths are just as real. If the heroes discover that their duplicates exist, what can they do about it, if anything?

The storylines I’ve been most impressed by in recent years have been by novelists (Irvine’s Hellstrom miniseries and Card’s Ultimate Iron Man miniseries). The differences in how the stories were structured, compared to those by other writers, were noticeable. I view the “illusion of change” policy as severely limiting, but there are ways to work around the policy if one considers intellectual problems important.

SRS


Posted by Steven R. Stahl on 2008-01-18 10:29:32
When I noticed creator names?
I didn't notice them for a long while. Maybe 12 years old? I had been reading since I was like 8. I met other (older) fans who would say "Byrne & Claremont are great on Uncanny X-Men". My response was...I didn't know those characters. I remember this guy asking me how much I liked Simonson art on Thor. My response was...who? I caught on after that.

Re: Jim Shooter & Hank Pym. Shooter is a genius. Pure and simple. Marvel has really messed that up though. Only Marvel writer who has handled the aftermath properly is Engleheart. Everyone else tried to "fix" it which only makes things worse. See OMD.

Posted by thorionthei on 2008-01-18 14:32:12
Looking behind the curtain
Thanks to Stan Lee's Bullpen bulletins it was clear from the first time I picked up a Marvel comic way back in 1967 that there were men and women behind the scenes. And because of Stan's poor memory and creation of the No Prize it was very clear they were human and fallible.

However, it wasn't until the death of Captain Stacy that I began to realize that I wouldn't always agree with the directions stories went in or what was done with the characters.

And as I've gotten older it seems like I disagree more and more with the directions certain writers and editors want to take the characters. The ones I disagreed with most strongly that actually caused me to drop titles were the Clone Saga and Heroes Reborn.
And One More Day of course.

Posted by izzatrix on 2008-01-18 14:59:54
Mine is a bit more of a positive story.

I started collecting in 86 but by the end of 95 I was out of college and without a job. I had to drastically cut my pull list to bare essentials and to help with the withdrawl I began re-reading my collection. I noticed certain stories held up and some didn't. I began to pay attention to the credits and found that stories by Roger Stern held up. I also noticed that an artist named John Byrne really appealed to my younger self. So much so that I bought some random Superman issues because he drew it.



Posted by Jamie Coville on 2008-01-19 22:22:13
For me it was a Belgian comic called Suske en Wiske, I know there's an english version, but I'm not sure what it's called.

Anyway, the series was about a selection of characters, Suske and Wiske, two perpetual teenagers and the heroes of the book, Aunt Sidonia, a tall, very thin waiflike figure with a really big nose, Lambik, a very arrogant, character who saw himself as the hero, Professor Barrabas the resident genius that caused most of the adventures and Jermommeke, probably the only 'superhero' in the group

The issue in question that got me to stop reading the series for about ten years afterwards, was called 'de briesende bruid' which translates I think to 'the really anxious bride', though I'm probably wrong on that, couldn't find the right translation, sorry.

Anyway, for decades Sidonia had been after Lambik to get him to marry her, and in this issue, she finally gave up on that quest, fell in love with another man and got married only... in a move equal to Quesada, the writer then intervened right on the scene, and had the artist draw a hand erasing the scene.

We even got a note in the issue, I think at the end where the writer, who was new on the series, if I well remember, made it clear that part of the arrangement they had with the original writer and creator of the characters, was that the characters were never allowed to change, and that Sidonia was never allowed to marry.

And I remember thinking, then why the hell am I reading this book? I threw that thing down in disgust, left it to my brother to mess it up, (he still liked drawing in my strips at the time) and stopped reading the series.

Because even then, at age 12 or so, could be wrong, it's been a while, I just didn't want to read about characters that are never allowed to change, about characters stuck in their youth, because for some reason their creators are incapable of seeing beyond that one aspect of the character.

I realized since than that the book had more flaws than that, but that was the moment I just saw through it all and lost interest. It's also about around the time that I moved over to American comics like Spider-Man, because unlike Suske and Wiske, Peter Parker was allowed to grow and change, because he wasn't stuck in perpetual youth and because he was married.

Posted by liliaeth on 2008-01-22 14:28:26