and...
to Steven R.Stahl,
PLEASE
notapotatoe@gmail.com,
for conspirating.

Posted by notapotatoe on 2007-07-13 05:52:45
Why bother?
Tom, is it really worth spending a blog on this type of stuff? There are a lot of people in the world who subscribe to the philosophy of, "I'm right and everyone else is wrong." Even if you make one see reason (which is probably impossible no matter what you do), there will be plenty more.

I love the blogs that deal with the actual job of being an editor. I hate to see them interrupted to spend time on some jerk, no matter how well spoken that jerk may be.

Posted by CodeGuy on 2007-07-13 16:21:13
Agreed
I agree with CodeGuy's thoughts on the matter. I know Tom can't really take the "it's only one guy" approach, because all those "one guys" add up in the long run, so he feels obligated to respond rather than ignore. It really is too bad that, in this era of open exchange between creators and consumers, most of the vocal consumers are the unpleasant ones with a sense of entitlement. I never read the postings in question so I'm not commenting personally on this poster, but rather in general from my time spent reading the threads on the various other comic news sites too (Newsarama, etc, etc).

Tom mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago that he's not sure how long he'll keep doing this blog. I, for one, absolutely love it, and it will be a shame to see him finally get fed up with getting hassled and decide it just isn't worth the trouble anymore. I personally look forward to this blog and to "New Joe Fridays" and will be sad when/if either of them end!

Posted by spiderseppy on 2007-07-13 17:40:08
Curious
Exactly what grammatical errors?

Also, exactly how is Bendis' characterization out-of-sync and inappropriate?

I'm not coming down on either side. Without more actual, detailed examples its very hard to judge.

PS: Nice to see you responding to a polite critic, Tom. Too many people would either ignore him or act like the criticism is totally invalid, even when its coming from a large segment of fandom (ie Joey Q. and the Heroes for Hire tentacle rape cover).

You know, a very cool weekly or monthly blog feature might be inviting a wellspoken net fan/blog runner/message board poster to provide in-depth criticism against a current Marvel book or policy or trend and have a response from a high up editor such as yourself. Editors and creators enjoy brushing off the rabid, berating fandom that stereotypes us comic lovers, but there are actually a lot of reasonable, intelligent, relaxed people with a plethora cogent arguments that address serious issues and complaints concerning Marvel policies, characters, storylines, etc.

Posted by Akelexre on 2007-07-13 17:52:18
With all due respect, Tom - the word "fan" derives specifically from "fanaticism". So when we're addressed as "fans" (as the most recent cover of Marvel Previews indeed does), you can hardly deny that you expect this kind of behaviour.

Posted by Fetsur on 2007-07-13 18:13:41
Justifying a Situation--Or Not
Mr. Brevoort, the arguments you’re making by invoking absolutism and emotional reactions to the stories are ones a porn publisher would make. There are no literary or esthetic standards a porn story has to comply with, no need for a coherent plot or, really, any plot at all, and no need for multifaceted characters. All the writer has to do is get the readers to react emotionally to the sexual content. By insisting that I simply “don’t like” Bendis’s “Avengers” stories, you’re disregarding the actual content of my comments, and implying that you lack the capacity to react intellectually to the content . If that’s the case, it would be a terrible failing for an editor.

You’re also trying to evade issues by not dealing with the actual continuity errors and grammatical errors that I (and others have) complained about. The grammatical/word usage errors in NEW AVENGERS #28 didn’t occur years ago, and shouldn’t have occurred at all, but unless people have been reading the comments on prior blog posts completely, they won’t know about them. The text page-dialogue contradictions in NEW AVENGERS #16-#18 regarding the time elapsed since HOUSE OF M didn’t occur years ago and shouldn’t have occurred--an editor and a writer having contradictory timelines for a set of issues is bizarre--but unless people reading prior comments already knew about the contradictions or found them, they wouldn’t have known about them.

The problems with “Avengers Disassembled” and HOUSE OF M are still relevant because they were the basis for current issues and situations. One could compare the situation to a set of stories, with the first story having an invalid premise. If the basic premise for the stories is invalid, it doesn’t matter how well-written, in some respects, subsequent stories are. They’ll all be invalid, unless the problem with the premise is corrected.

By touting sales as the justification for Bendis’s assignment to the “Avengers” titles, you are, again, reacting as a porn publisher would. He can’t point to literary quality or esthetic satisfaction for his products; all he can do is point to sales and claim that he’s providing what the market wants. You should be able to take pride in what Marvel publishes, regardless of how well a given issue sells.

By failing to deal with the specifics of my complaints and relying on sales as the justification for shoddy products, you’ve reduced yourself to being a seller of junk. Congratulations.

SRS


Posted by Steven R. Stahl on 2007-07-13 22:15:20
See what I mean?
There is only one rule that is an absolute: go with what works. If you don't understand that rule, then you don't *really* understand all the others.

Posted by CodeGuy on 2007-07-13 23:43:35
hey tom if you read HITLER'S ''my kampf'' you will see that it's ''articulate and well-written'' but that doesn't mean that the things written there are ''facts''.
I think this poster Stahl is a dogmatic person, as you say an absolutist.
And his response to your post just demonstrated that, no matter how well he can express himself, hi is just an internet-troll, a hater.

HEY STAHL JUST STOP READING THE ''JUNK'' YOU DON'T LIKE EVERY MONTH. you are all a contradiction yourself.

you hate the 'JUNK' that MARVEL sells, but you read it every month, and worst, you write 5 000 words every week, commenting it.
RIDICULOUS!!

Guido Cuadros F.A.

Posted by Los Shapis on 2007-07-13 23:47:22
Huh?
Mr. Stahl,
It would have been helpful to at least give one concrete example for those of us who don't follow the blog comments every day. As it is, I still have no idea what you are talking about and I read NA regularly.

Posted by beta-ray on 2007-07-14 05:18:24
You know what?
Tom, you've very eloquently stated what my mantra has been for comic books as long as I have had my own money to spend on them -- If you don't like it, don't read it!

I liked "New Avengers," for a while, but when it no longer interested me, I stopped reading it. Pretty simple! Thanks for the great blog, and keep the cool art previews coming!

Posted by ljacone on 2007-07-14 09:46:18
Details
I have read NA since the beginning as well, along with House of M, and would be interested in some more details on the problems being touted so I could flip through my back issues and look for them.

Posted by spiderseppy on 2007-07-14 09:48:06
Errors
One problem is the NEW AVENGERS/HOUSE OF M (HOM) discontinuity. NA and HOM were out of sync, in that the Sentry was in HOM, although he hadn’t joined the team yet in NA. The Sentry’s Watchtower appeared on top of Stark Tower in NA #10, before he was a member, although HOM #1 opened without the Watchtower present and heroes entering the tower by foot because the NA hadn’t announced themselves to the public yet. So there’s a discontinuity that prevents HOM and NA from meshing, although Bendis wrote both titles.

In HOM #8, Dr. Strange told Spider-Man that he couldn’t erase his unwanted memories of the HOM reality, although he’d erased memories before, using the Eye of Agamotto.

In HOM #8, Pym cited Newton’s Third Law of Motion re displaced mutant energies, when he should have been referring to conservation of energy.

There were several continuity errors in AVENGERS #503, concerning the existence of chaos magic, Wanda’s memories of the children, the claim that Wanda used her power to conceive the children (wrong; she channeled magical energy), etc., all of which rendered the plot developments therein invalid.

There are other, lesser, errors, such as forgetting, in NA #8 that Cage’s body broke a wing of the quinjet in NA #7, contradictory statements regarding control of the Raft prisoners in NA #1, misuse of technical terms concerning genetics (NA #14), etc.

The existence of the Illuminati circa the Kree-Skrull War is incompatible with the Avengers/Defenders War.

The errors matter because they turn the plot content and characterization into incoherent junk, when compared with plots and characterization in prose stories. There’s nothing preventing stories about Marvel’s heroes from being the artistic equivalent of prose stories; it’s simply a matter of paying attention to details and taking the characters seriously.

SRS

Posted by Steven R. Stahl on 2007-07-14 10:39:47
So, there we are.
We asked for specific examples, we were given them. [Mostly. There are still a few remaining questions though: misuse of technical terms concerning genetics?? Like, what terms, and how were they misused? Consider getting as detailed as possible, SRS: I'm talking quotes, page citations, dictionary definitions vs usage in the comic, etc. basically treat it like you would if making an argument for an academic paper. Make it so that they CAN'T brush your arguments off as unreasoned and emotional. Still, a good start.]

So: is he right people? Is he wrong? I'm not a big Avengers fan and haven't read those books in a good minute (and can't say I was big into them when I was reading them), but if he's right those are some pretty bad screw-ups.

Posted by Akelexre on 2007-07-14 12:57:36
A little of both
A few of the examples are highly debatable. Things like differences in the HoM world and the real world are problematic because the HoM world was created by magic, and it was supposed to be a world where almost everyone got their fondest wish. Sentry being on the team at that point is fine, it could just be an example of his own wish fulfilment. It was basically an alternate universe, so yes, there were differences between it and the real universe, that's how it was supposed to be.

He's right in some of the science errors, but wrong in that these things are so much worse than what editors allowed in the past. I've never seen an era of comic in which there weren't science errors. Stan Lee has admitted many times that he didn't know anything about science and often made things up as he went along. These errors aren't good, but saying that editors of the past would never have allowed them is simply incorrect.

Most of the rest is that he doesn't like retcons, not even minor ones ("minor ones" meaning details of past experiences as opposed to Crisis on Infinite Earths rewriting everything). That's not so much a "right or wrong" issue as it is personal taste. There are pros and cons for retcons. If he'd actually listed these things from the start instead of making blanket statements, we could have had a much more productive conversation. However, retcons are a comic technique, and debatable as they may be, they are valid. Their purpose is to help the author succeed in telling interesting stories, so they are very much something that can be judged by the enjoyment of the readers. Sometimes people will dislike the loss of their learned history, other times people will accept it because it allows for a good story. With so many people reading New Avengers, this really is a case where the book just isn't to Stahl's personal taste.

Posted by CodeGuy on 2007-07-14 15:02:37
Stahl...you lost me
Stahl,
I was somewhat impressed with your eye for detail, but then your two posts on this entry completely lost me. The details you are bugging out over are simply not worth the fight. And your "congrats" statement is completely off the mark. If you think you can do a better job, go through the hard work to be a published fiction writer, get the job and do it yourself. This entry isn't 7 paragraphs long, so I know you might think it is a little weak, but please, let it go. It's old now.

Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2007-07-14 16:57:49
My tastes tend to run similarly to Stahl's. I've made no secret of my dislike of Bendis' version of the Avengers, and his treatment of characters that aren't his personal favorites (such as Luke Cage and Spider-Woman 1, who went two decades without being used in any large way, but were left in limbo, not killed off off-panel or turning into pysychotic murderers, leaving them available for him to come in and play with today).

I also tend to agree with Stahl on retcons. But regardless of that, there is a difference between retcons and errors in continuity.

Wanda KNEW about her children. The point can't be argued, because we've seen her discuss them in comics after her memory was wiped briefly while the Avengers West were fighting Immortus. She was seen to have known about them later in that issue (when fighting the Big One and in issue 75, where Jack asks her about them while Franklin Richards and Rachel Carpenter are playing). For longtime Avengers fans like me, we're frustrated that Bendis was simply wrong on the basis he used to (IMO) wreck Wanda forever* and have the Avengers all up and quit.

* I know Tom doesn't agree that that can happen to a character, but I look at reactions to Hank Pym 25 YEARS after the Shooter assassination of the character.

I can't really talk about NA errors since I finally gave up even looking at my co-workers copies because they irritated me too much.

Posted by motteditor on 2007-07-15 17:35:40
Show of support
I'm not a regular poster here, but I would like to quickly throw in in support of Mr. Brevoort. Since it apparently matters to some, I have an advanced degree in English literature with a background in philosophy, and the question of aesthetic absolutism vs. relativism has been around for a very long time. Like all the great philosophical questions, no real consensus has been reached. In my experience, however, the absolutists are typically the ones seeking to justify why their perceptions are just a little bit better than everyone else's. In academia, these people are typically the ones seeking to explain why their degree in one of the soft arts really does make them an authority on beauty or what is "good". Imagine, if you will, a world where a handful of academics control all art and everything that doesn't meet their requirements is equated with pornography. To me, that is chilling, Orwellian version of the future designed to destroy any chance the mere "average" man has of enjoying or creating anything. If these people had their way, art would be an increasingly sterile, repetitive, and riskless endeavor. Indeed, it is becoming so in many areas. Also, three quick points:

1.) Despite the push towards absolutism, the "rules" for good art are hotly debated, even in the most academic of contexts.

2.) Even the most widely agreed upon rules are routinely broken by our greatest literary artists. Dickens. Faulkner. Shakespeare. In our greatest literary works, exception to the rule IS the rule, a fact which, to my mind, illustrates the general uselessness of "rules" to begin with.

3.) Even if one narrows the rules for literature down to a handful of generally agreed upon standards, virtually every comic book fails. EVERY comic book. It's a different medium with a wildy different form from the printed novel. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who loves comics.

Finally, even if we agree on the rules, ultimately, the interpretation of said rules ends up being relative anyway. In short, on things like "characterization," there is no objective way to apply the standard. Different people will see different things as good characterization. As a number of people have pointed out, Mr. Stahl makes constant references to Bendis writing characters inproperly, while others see these facets as logical directions given the characters' histories.

So in short, well done, Mr. Brevoort.

Posted by Muldrate on 2007-07-16 02:49:30
More Errors
In order to back up Stahl's comments I, too, have found some factual errors in some of Marvel's biggest comics. Most notably, the biggest scientific error in regards to the World War Hulk storyline seems to be a VERY early, and basic, ignorance of the basic rules of physics. I even looked it up, it turns out that if you sustain an explosion from a gamma bomb, it doesn't actually give you super strength, it just incinerates you. What's more, this Spider-Man character? Apparently in real life he would just get sick and possibly die if bitten by a radioactive spider.

Yeah...absolutism.

It's great, until you step into the world of fiction. Things get changed and facts have to be smudged as it IS a fiction.

As for personality/characterization: There is no absolute when it comes to human psychology. People act differently, all the time, for no reason. And one person's opinion of another's motives is going to be totally different, and no one can say that one action or choice HAS to be made by a particular person.

That's life.

Posted by PseudoSherlock on 2007-07-16 10:58:21
Stahl
This is a made-up guy, right? A broadly drawn example of the worst the internet comic book community has to offer? Well, to whomever made him up: your satire could use some subtlety!
DDD

Posted by dum dum dugan on 2007-07-16 23:18:17
Brevity and stuff
Hi, Mr. Stahl.

I don't mean to be mean or anything, but you might try to remember that old chestnut, "brevity is the soul of wit / and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes."

You're obviously passionate about the pre-Bendis Avengers. I think you'd make further headway with your critiques, and gain credibility, if you wrote in a succinct and straightforward manner.

I also think you'd gain credibility if you used fewer insults or, barring that, if you did not attempt to gussy them up and hold them at arms length, as you did here:

"By insisting that I simply “don’t like” Bendis’s “Avengers” stories, you’re disregarding the actual content of my comments, and implying that you lack the capacity to react intellectually to the content . If that’s the case, it would be a terrible failing for an editor."

Of course, Mr. Brevoort's decision to engage with one element of your argument and not another does not imply a lack of intellectual capacity on his part. You know that, so why bother with the insult? With whom do you hope to score points? People who already agree with you and dislike Bendis' Avengers run? What is gained by that?

(Your comparisons to pornography, and your likening Mr. Brevoort to a porn publisher, are similarly obvious in their intent. They read as a smearing tactic, a baiting tactic, or both.)

On the issue of absolutism in criticism, I poked around and noticed that in a response to an earlier entry, you stated that literary criticism is a science. I'm sorry, but as someone schooled in both, I have to say I believe you're mistaken. Criticism can draw upon something like (to use your earlier example) cognitive studies of how the brain works, sure, but where are the falsifiable claims? Where's the repeatability? You're not posing scientific questions when you're engaging in criticism, literary, comics or otherwise. Sorry, man.

In that same post, you write: "I’m accustomed to subconsciously assessing the quality of text as I read it, and I know much more about comics than the average fan does."

I believe this attitude is at the core to the objections to your posts. It's the basic "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees must be in some way deficient, or less skilled than I am" kind of thing. It's a rarely justified worldview, in my experience. It's also an appeal to authority (self-authority, in this case), and while it serves a rhetorical function, it is no guarantee of the absolute accuracy or "rightness" of your assessments. And it's really uncharitable.

Seriously, dude, take your knowledge and your paraprofessional comics experience and your passion and get out there and write some good comics or something. You obviously have some intelligence, so why not put it to actual use?

(Apologies for the length. Obviously, I'm less of a wit and more of a nitwit ;)

Oh, and to Mr. Brevoort, I only pop over here occasionally (checking out the Civil War thing right now), but nice blog. Thanks for taking the time.

Posted by SF89 on 2007-07-17 00:07:27
Remember "No-Prizes"?
You know when readers would come up with answers for the mistakes instead of just insiating they knew better? I miss that.

Posted by IanZL on 2007-07-17 17:18:15
Cicil War
I see that , for the most part, the original outline that Mark wrote was kept with a few alterations. It was well planned out from the start which is always a good thing. I'm glad Tom made the Planet Hulk story sepearet from the Civil War story. You wouldn't want too many things happening at once. The idea might please us fan boys but the reality is that, for seven issues, you are telling two stories instead of one and that most of the elements that made these stories successful in the first place have been left out.

Posted by s05bf0d4 on 2007-07-17 17:36:21
SRS
Stahl.

Sounds a bit like Skrull.

I am the weaver.

Posted by jonesy76 on 2007-07-18 14:38:35
Chandler
When Raymond Chandler was asked who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep, he was forced to admit he didn't know. This is a far bigger continuity blunder than anything Bendis has ever done - so is Raymond Chandler consequently a bad writer? Plainly not.

Also, what are these grammatical errors? Mixing up scientific terminology is not a grammatical error.

Posted by nedmartyr on 2007-07-19 08:18:50
Mr. Stahl here is a perfect example of one of the most frustrating, annoying, and shocking things about comics: the fact that certain portions of the readership either cannot suspend disbelief for only certain portions of a story, or that self-same suspension of disbelief is dependent on whether or not the reader likes what he's reading.

Seriously. It's a comic book. I guarantee that if you were at ground zero of a gamma bomb explosion, you would be incinerated. Mutations in human genetic coding don't give you the ability to shoot laser beams from your eyeballs, they give you an extra arm growing out of your head. If you can't suspend your sense of disbelief for the amount of time it takes to read a comic book(and we're talking maybe ten minutes, max), then stop reading and go pick up some non-fiction.

Now, Mr. Stahl may be inclined to say "I'm not complaining about that, I'm complaining about the continuity". Well, that's all well and good-but face facts: every writer has made some sort of factual error in his/her writing. The Da Vinci Code is infamous for its errors. If your argument was worth the effort, I would go through old comic books from the Golden and Silver Ages and show where even the greats screwed up. Nobody's perfect.

Oh, and I went to New Avengers #28 to find what "grammatical errors" you spoke of. There weren't any. Let me make this clear: THERE WERE NO ERRORS. I can only assume you meant the usage of the word "snooty", in which case, while the word was used a bit unusually, the usage was not wrong, and certainly not a glaring mistake.

Posted by blue5213 on 2007-07-19 11:27:46
Support
Let's face it, after reading this, we're ALL the worse that comics fandom has to offer. Especially those of you who are prepared to tear down Mr. Stahl simply because he has made a well written and researched comment about the lack of quality of New Avengers. Let's face it, Bendis is building a lot of his writing on the backs of old continuity and his lack (and his Editor's) of effort in getting a lot of the details correct is making for books that are bad. Popular art is not good art. Is Titianic the best movie ever made simply because it made the most money? Are Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life awful movies because they were theatrical flops? No. Mr. Brevoort, while I usually enjoy your candor, your lack of providing any argument other than, "well people are buying it and if you don't like it, leave." is shameful. This is someone who obviously loves the characters you are there to shepard and the fact that you will not speak to any of his factual arguments says to me you don't have the answers. Perhaps you should spend more time wondering why the pitch for Civil War was so much better than what you published, than tearing down bloggers who pay your salary.

This is why I don't buy or read your books anymore, because they are awful.

Posted by jason1749 on 2007-07-23 15:19:53
Too Long a Response (Skip if bored)
To jason1749:

Well, personally, I'd had more of an issue with the self-aggrandizing tone, the unsubtle insults (believing you're right shouldn't give you license to be a jerk), and (to me) his mistaken ideas about literary criticism being anything like a science.

I actually think a few of his charges are either incorrect (e.g. Wonder Man doesn't say the public doesn't know about the New Avengers yet, just that the public doesnn't know they're operating out of Stark's new skyscraper yet - seriously, look it up), or minor enough that they won't wreck a good work.

I noticed some of them myself while reading House of M, etc., but still found the stories enjoyable. If Mr. Stahl would want to charge that this indicates my own sense of what's good in literature, comics, art, etc. is less developed than his, well, whatever. I don't know him, he don't know me, he's welcome to think what he likes. (Yes, that was an intentional grammatical error. And for the record, I dug House of M, and the current Avengers books, but thought Civil War went a bit off the rails after issue 4 and didn't care for Frontline. So, not a Marvel Zombie.)

Also, given Stahl's education and his knowledge of both literature and comics, if he really wants to tear down Bendis' Avengers work and reveal it as the trash he thinks it is, why spend so much time on minutiae? Can't he muster up some more fundamental criticisms to make his case, rather than pointing out continuity errors and goofy comic book science? That didn't make sense to me. I'd think he'd also spur a more substantial debate, if not from Brevoort, then from the other posters.

On the other hand, if there was a major retcon involving Wanda's past and that is, for Stahl, the core issue, again, whatever. Retcons, both major and minor, occur all the time, especially when a new writer comes on board. So long as they produce good stories, or enjoyable stories, great, more power to 'em. On the other hand, if Mr. Stahl wishes to remove the retcon from the writer's toolbox, hey, Spidey shouldn't be around sixty right now? And what about Mr. Fantastic and the Thing? How many WWII veterans do you see galavanting about Manhattan? (I guess Nick Fury could share the Infinity Formula, but hey, that'd be a retcon too.)

If that doesn't mollify him (or you), let me put it another way. This will be a little long, (and goes against my earlier advice to Stahl, so pot kettle etc.), but what the hey.

I grew up reading Claremont's X-men, starting with #202, when JRJR was pencilling. Worked my way backwards, got ahold of the Paul Smith issues as well. (A bit harder to do back in those days.) For me, that was the X-men, the gold standard: the Claremont-Smith and Claremont-JRJR runs. And along with the sense of camraderie amongst the X-men and the supporting cast, and the pain and celebration of being different, one of the greatest elements of that period was the development of Magneto, the re-awakening of his conscience, that reached a point where, as a much more sympathetic character, he actually joined the X-men, tutored the New Mutants, even held back from fighting the Avengers at one point, because he'd committed himself to a higher path.

This was new for the character back then, and really got to the core of at least part of what the X-men, as a team and as a book, was about - operating in that grey area, where your fiercest enemy was, at the end of the day, not so different from you, where differences could be overcome, being different could be overcome. (The best expression of all of this, only indirectly involving Magneto, was actually over in New Mutants, in issue # 45, worth checking out, if you've never read it). All of this, for a fourteen year old, was great, meaningful stuff (expositional dialogue and Claremontisms notwithstanding). It really had an impact on me, back in the day.

Now, flash forward to the 21st century. I'd stopped reading comics 8 or so years earlier, a bit after Sandman had ended, but now I started picking comics up again. I'd heard that Grant Morrison had done a run on one of the X-men titles. Being a huge fan of his from back in the Doom Patrol days, I borrow the hardcovers from a friend, and read them straight through. Some parts were good, some great, some only so-so, but Morrison clearly had a passion for and knowledge of these characters, and was working with some of their core themes.

Then I hit the bits where Magneto, takes over NYC, and starts herding people into ovens. I was appalled. I could take him being a bad guy again, I'd seen that before. The loss of the nobility built up during the Smith and JRJR years, that was worse. Didn't he read the stuff leading up to and building upon Uncanny #200, I thought? (I'd later read Morrsion had deliberately planted his flag in the Claremont-Byrne years, so this seemed at least intentional, if still a bad idea, IMHO.) But the idea of a Holocaust survivor putting people in ovens... Terrible, terrible stuff, as far as I was concerned. Sure, it made him a real baddie, counteracted the image Ian McKellan had built in the movies, etc., but jeez. How could anyone imagine Magneto would do this, etc. How could Marvel let him do this, etc. Nearly gave up reading Marvel comics, etc.

But hey, the wheel comes around. Morrison's moved his very talented self over to DC and is doing cool stuff on All-Star Superman. At Marvel, the noble, rueful, regretfully self-aware Magneto is back, post House of M, and I'm happy with where the character stands. Somewhere down the line, I'm sure that'll change again. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that a lot of people, however much I might disagree with them, really dig everything about Morrison's run, all the way through. I can't quite see where they're coming from, but it doesn't mean I'm going to disparage them, or Morrison's writing abilities, or that I'm going to conclude my reading/critical skills are better than theirs. I'm just not going to buy or read Morrison's run anytime soon. (While I'll still read and re-read my copies of Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, etc.) Seems simple enough.

Wow, that was longer than intended. Still, hopefully, you get my point.

Finally (almost finally) I actually meant the comment I made about Stahl spending less time on this kind of thing and more time writing good comics, though I can see where that might have read as an insult. (Poor wording on my part.) The guy seems (to me, at least) to be hung up on things it's not worth getting this hung up on, but he's clearly intelligent, has spent some time studying writing, feels confident about himself, so why not wed his passion to his abilities? Find a sympathetic artist, put a solid superhero webcomic together. Do something other than insult people from a self-assumed high ground. Or if he doesn't have the time or inclination for that, then why not set up a site, become a contributor to a site where he can write about comics (ala The Savage Critics or Sequart)?

Just a thought (or three) offered in sincerity with no offense meant to Mr. Stahl (or to you :)

And finally finally, if anyone's interested, here's a smart little essay, by writer Paul Cornell, on dealing with continuity for a property about as old and as tangled as the Marvel Universe:

http://paulcornell.blogspot.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who.html

Thanks for your time if you've read this all the way through. All the best. Happy reading.

Now, off to do something useful.

Posted by SF89 on 2007-07-24 01:02:32