State of the Sequential, or "This Comic Sucks!!!"

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Having just gone on a major Archive Binge (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArchiveBinge) of Atop The Fourth Wall, one of my now favorite online shows, especially after meeting Linkara in person (I play D&D at the store he makes most of his comic purchases at) I got to thinking about just what kind of direction the comic book universes are taking. Series like Countdown to Final Crisis and Justice League: Cry for Justice show a lot of really odious ideas being thrown around.

The biggest thing that disturbs me is the unnecessary killing off of second stringers and supporting characters off-panel for cheap drama and shock value. This is one of Linkara's pet peeves with these kinds of series and I wholeheartedly agree. There's a lot of other ways drama can be created that doesn't involve essentially ending a character's story. While, yes, there's always the potential for a resurrection in a comic-book universe, a non-superpowered character isn't likely going to get that kind of treatment, and it just doesn't really make sense for so many people, who can be quite tough, to just be slaughtered to make the heroes feel bad. It might work if, say, a supervillain was specifically targeting them to get at a superhero, but these events are more along the lines of supervillains causing natural disasters on superhero hometowns.

Next there's the idea of heroes acting like a-holes. I don't doubt that there are some more anti-heroic figures out there, who don't have objections to torturing people for the alleged "greater good" (as a paladin, I believe torture is NEVER justified), but the majority of these superheroes we know and love have strong ethical codes that torture ranks pretty high as a violation of. Why do comic book company editors seem to think that sticking to your morals and taking a third option isn't dramatic or satisfying? A person forced to betray their morals can be done well, but as I've seen in the garbage being reviewed on AT4W, they don't even give a second thought to this sort of thing.

Finally, and this is my own opinion, there seems to be an obsession with crossovers and crisis events that do multiverse-shaking things every couple of weeks or so. Stuff like Countdown and Final Crisis and Blackest Night and whatnot, it always seems that these big events exist largely to facilitate the former two problems. Cry for Justice involved a response to the events of Final Crisis. One More Day was a result of the Civil War arc in Marvel. The current trend seems to be leaning away from the costumed crimefighters and more towards what basically amount to superhuman wars. I sincerely think the Marvel and DC Universes kind of need a break. Surely there can't be groups of supervillains bringing every superhero in the univers to their knees every week!

Now, I don't know very much about comics, it was Linkara's work that got me interested in them in the first place. Most of what I know about superheroes comes from the movies, which serve as a great introduction to the characters, but are different from their sequential art counterparts. But even a casual fan like me can see the disturbing patterns that a lot of comics seem to be taking. Sure, the 90's were a bad time for comics, but this new wave of stories seems to be even worse, basically ignoring the idea of superheroes as protectors of the people, and supervillains as people using their powers to benefit themselves, and instead making them two groups of powerful people with grudges against each other that occasionally flare up into wars with ordinary humans basically ignored as part of the collateral damage.

Am I right in what I'm seeing here? If not, then are things going to get better? Will someone allow these poor superheroes to at least have one moment to be happy?!

[Mystic Muse]

(I play D&D at the store he makes most of his comic purchases at)

.......I envy you.

On topic, if things are as bad as the comics Linkara is reviewing, then yeah, the authors are REALLY missing the point.



"At such times, all you can do is pray, with every fragment of your being, for just one chance. Where there is no third option, you create one. You find the way in the darkness. Where there is no hope, you bring hope, because you are a paladin, and giving up is incomprehensible. When the legions of hell are bearing down on you, it is your job to stand in their path, sword in hand, and say- "This far, and no further." And who knows, maybe your stand will inspire the world to stand beside you, and you'll carry the day. Or maybe it won't. But it won't matter, because you did what was right, what had to be done. You stood there in the face of the apocalypse, because no-one else would. When people say "someone should do something about this," that someone is you. And sometimes all you can do is apologize, that everything you had within you wasn't quite enough."

That's what I think of when somebody says "Superhero." not the kind of crap in "Cry for Justice"

EDIT: This isn't to say that characters can't be like that, more just to say you shouldn't turn Superman into an omnicidal maniac or something that should be totally out of line for their moral codes.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Am I right in what I'm seeing here? If not, then are things going to get better? Will someone allow these poor superheroes to at least have one moment to be happy?!

You're judging an entire industry off of, more or less, the bottom 10%. And also claiming yourself to be a Paladin, which is worrying but unrelated.

Anyway, of course things seem bad in comics if your only exposure to them is a web series about bad comics. Admittedly, things are pretty stagnant on the long-running superhero front, and there are some very, very bad artists and writers in prominent positions, but there's still some good, quality stuff out there. I can't really recommend any because I can't afford comics, but if you look at, say, Ultimate Spider-Man, that was pretty damn good for the whole period I was actually reading it, and had none of the issues you were complaining about. Well okay maybe Ultimate Marvel in general was crossover-happy but they were mostly cameos, not huge events.

I know that's only one counterexample, but seriously, you are very obviously coming at this "problem" from a negatively biased position. Go read some comics that aren't on Linkara's show (get him to recommend you some of the ones he actually reads for pleasure, maybe?) and form a more informed opinion.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

And also claiming yourself to be a Paladin, which is worrying but unrelated.
I don't mean seriously. It's a joke referencing my username and the fact that I generally tend towards playing Lawful Good type heroes, and such character types naturally are more appealing to me than grim, gritty anti-heroes! :smallannoyed:

[Zevox]

As Nerd-o-rama indicated, I think you're likely overreacting due to being exposed to comics solely form Linkara's show. As he's emphasized several times, he only reviews bad comics on his show, often the flat-out worst there is, both for the humor potential they present and for serious criticism of them. He's consistently refused to review good ones, in spite of apparently getting a lot of fan requests to do so, and only occasionally plugs good ones as recommendations to his viewers (and half the time when he does that it's either 52 or the run of The Titans that got him into comics). So yeah, if you watch his show but don't actually read comics, you probably get a much more negative view of them than would be accurate.

Heck, I only read a small handful of comics myself, always purchased as collected editions rather than single issues, but I can easily point you in the direction of much better books than Linkara reviews. Most of what I've read is Green Lantern related, which varies from excellent (the Sinestro Corps War) to only okay (Blackest Night - started good, got rather meh once Necron showed up). From what a friend of mine who reads individual issues (rather than just collected editions that I read - I'm way behind the current stories as a result) it's back to great again during the current story arc, "War of the Green Lanterns," though obviously I can't say for sure myself as yet since the compilation for that isn't due out until November (heck, I'm still waiting on the compilations for the period just before that story arc).

The few non-GL books I've read have been extremely good as well. Superman: Red Son is an old one at this point (and I think Linkara has mentioned it a few times), but I also just recently got ahold of The Flash volume 1: The Dastardly Death of the Rogues, which was much better than I was expecting and part of a still-ongoing Flash series. Aside from some head-scratching time travel stuff (which is nowhere near as bad as time travel stuff can get) that may be the best comic I've read since the Sinestro Corps War.

As a birthday gift I also just got (and read this morning) X-Men: Magneto Testament. It tells Magneto's origin story - or rather the story of his childhood. As you may know, he was a holocaust survivor from Nazi Germany. Yeah. It's as depressing and tough a read as you'd imagine any good story with that setting would be, but it definitely does the story, both of the holocaust and of Magneto, justice. I wish I were still in the college course on Nazi Germany I took a couple years ago so I could show it to the professor I had then - I'd love to get her reaction to it. It's something I could easily see being used as reading material in a course like that. Seriously, that's how historically accurate and grounded it is.

So, yeah, probably best not to make assumptions about the comic industry as a whole based just on the crap Linkara reviews. That's the worst of it, not the whole of it.

Zevox

[Archpaladin Zousha]

There ARE instances of the afformentioned "superhero war" concept that bugs me in good comics though. You mention the Green Lantern titles like Sinestro Corps War (I'm hesitant to get into them because I'm not sure how much backstory I need to understand it and where to begin). In his Superman: Distant Fires review, Linkara mentions a good miniseries involving a post-apocalyptic world and superheroes at war, Kingdom Come.

Like I said, the "superhero war" concept isn't something I'm parroting from Atop The Fourth Wall, but rather a trend that I'm observing in superhero comics both good and bad, and that's the tendency for superhero stories to no longer be about superheroes protecting their communities, but rather all the superheroes and supervillains in the world (and possibly even other worlds) forming clannish groups and brawling against each other over contrived reasons and grudges.

[Zevox]

You mention the Green Lantern titles like Sinestro Corps War (I'm hesitant to get into them because I'm not sure how much backstory I need to understand it and where to begin).
You don't, really. The only comic I read before Sinestro Corps War was Green Lantern: Rebirth, which tells the story of Hal Jordan's resurrection. While that probably helped a bit by introducing me to the four human Green Lanterns and to the villainous entity Parallax, I wouldn't say it would be required. It is a pretty good book in its own right though.


There ARE instances of the afformentioned "superhero war" concept that bugs me in good comics though. [...]

Like I said, the "superhero war" concept isn't something I'm parroting from Atop The Fourth Wall, but rather a trend that I'm observing in superhero comics both good and bad, and that's the tendency for superhero stories to no longer be about superheroes protecting their communities, but rather all the superheroes and supervillains in the world (and possibly even other worlds) forming clannish groups and brawling against each other over contrived reasons and grudges.
That's going to be a matter of taste then I suppose. For myself, one thing I really like about the Green Lantern books that I've read is that they largely take place off Earth and focus on the conflicts between the Green Lanterns and the other Lantern corps, often without involving civilian characters at all. I find that stuff very interesting, more so than just another superhero protecting civilians, which is a concept I find rather bland. Not that the latter can't be good too - the Flash story I mentioned falls more into that category - but it doesn't interest me as much.

Zevox

[SPoD]

Like I said, the "superhero war" concept isn't something I'm parroting from Atop The Fourth Wall, but rather a trend that I'm observing in superhero comics both good and bad, and that's the tendency for superhero stories to no longer be about superheroes protecting their communities, but rather all the superheroes and supervillains in the world (and possibly even other worlds) forming clannish groups and brawling against each other over contrived reasons and grudges.

Yeah, you're not going to like the GL stuff at all. I don't think he's fought a single traditional supervillain that was threatening the innocent in the entire current series.

I highly second the Ultimate Spider-Man recommendation, though. You'll like it, it's all about traditional superheroics and it's very well-written. Just make sure you start at the beginning of the red-and-blue spine books, not the recent white-spined reboot. The best part is, absolutely no backstory needed, the entire Ultimate universe began with issue #1 of that series.

EDIT: Also, if you're willing to stray from superheroes, read Y: The Last Man. Actually, read it if you like fiction of any sort whatsoever.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I've heard Y: The Last Man is really depressing though.

[Zevox]

Yeah, you're not going to like the GL stuff at all. I don't think he's fought a single traditional supervillain that was threatening the innocent in the entire current series.
There was an arc in Green Lantern Corps where some Sinestro Corps members were killing the families of new Green Lantern recruits in order to intimidate them and undermine the Lanterns' abilities to recruit new officers. Or another arc in the same book where Sodam Yat and Arisia had to liberate Sodam's xenophobic homeworld from the Sinestro Corps after Mongul conquered it. Or the way the Sinestro Corps War ended.

Otherwise, yeah, the conflicts have principally been between the different corps as most of them have one reason or another to attack the Green Lanterns (or each other), or have tensions with them that don't erupt into physical conflict (Star Sapphires mainly there).

Zevox

[Lord Raziere]

hmmm.....

maybe the superhero genre needs a second reconstruction?

deconstruct the clannish groups fighting over contrived reasons thing by showing that such kinds of fighting destroys all of society, making earth fall into total anarchy thus eventually the groups devolve into super-powered warlords fighting over territory, technology and supplies.

now have a bunch of outcasts of these super-power warlord groups who then see that the world has fallen from grace and set out to restore true justice and do truly heroic things by fighting against these petty superpowered warlords.

[Closet_Skeleton]

There ARE instances of the afformentioned "superhero war" concept that bugs me in good comics though. You mention the Green Lantern titles like Sinestro Corps War (I'm hesitant to get into them because I'm not sure how much backstory I need to understand it and where to begin). In his Superman: Distant Fires review, Linkara mentions a good miniseries involving a post-apocalyptic world and superheroes at war, Kingdom Come.

Like I said, the "superhero war" concept isn't something I'm parroting from Atop The Fourth Wall, but rather a trend that I'm observing in superhero comics both good and bad, and that's the tendency for superhero stories to no longer be about superheroes protecting their communities, but rather all the superheroes and supervillains in the world (and possibly even other worlds) forming clannish groups and brawling against each other over contrived reasons and grudges.

Kingdom Come is not a good comic. Not at all. It just isn't offensively bad. Its a middle of the road piece of dull with art that's too good for the rest of the execution.

Sinnestro Corps War isn't really a "super hero war" because the Green Lantern corps aren't superheroes. They're alien police with super powers. Individal Green Lanterns on earth have been super heroes but the corps isn't. Green Lantern Corps is space opera with superhero trappings, complaining it isn't what you think superhero comics would be is missing the point.

There are loads more genres in comics than the one that takes up most of the big two's publishing schedules and not every comic that appears to be in that genre actually is.

[Mina Kobold]

Like I said, the "superhero war" concept isn't something I'm parroting from Atop The Fourth Wall, but rather a trend that I'm observing in superhero comics both good and bad, and that's the tendency for superhero stories to no longer be about superheroes protecting their communities, but rather all the superheroes and supervillains in the world (and possibly even other worlds) forming clannish groups and brawling against each other over contrived reasons and grudges.

I'd recommend Runaways, Blue Beetle and the Teen Titans series starting with A Kid's Game then. Only the Teen Titans even get close to a superhero war and even when it does they still fight to protect humanity and their home city.

I admit, I haven't gotten my hand on too many comicbooks yet. But both Teen Titans and Blue Beetle are recommendations from Linkara's blog, so there must be something good out there. :smallsmile:

[KnightDisciple]

Kingdom Come is not a good comic. Not at all. It just isn't offensively bad. Its a middle of the road piece of dull with art that's too good for the rest of the execution.

Sinnestro Corps War isn't really a "super hero war" because the Green Lantern corps aren't superheroes. They're alien police with super powers. Individal Green Lanterns on earth have been super heroes but the corps isn't. Green Lantern Corps is space opera with superhero trappings, complaining it isn't what you think superhero comics would be is missing the point.

There are loads more genres in comics than the one that takes up most of the big two's publishing schedules and not every comic that appears to be in that genre actually is.I disagree with the bolded. It's not necessarily an excellent comic, but I think it's at least a good one. It tells its story well, has a couple of interesting twists, and hits the notes it meant to quite well.

The thing to remember is that it was put out in the late 90's; it's basically a reaction to the 90's trends of "superheros with guns and pouches who aren't afraid to kill! Extreme!" in comics. It proposed a world where that attitude made things really, really bad. But then it showed how just trying to set the clock back (metaphorically) wasn't necessarily the right move either.

Plus, it gave us some great character designs, like Old Not-Crippled-Yet-Dammit Batman. :smallcool:

To Zousha: Others are right; Linkara focuses on the worst of the worst in his reviews.

I personally don't mind a good mix of stories that focus on one hero, and stories that focus on the group. The thing to keep in mind is, no hero is in a vacuum. Superman still has the likes of Lois Lane, Supergirl, his parents, and so on on his side of things, plus all of his villains.

Saying comics should only ever be about just one hero at a time, and never about "clannish groups", is kind of silly. No man (or Superman) is an island. Everyone has some level of supporting cast and allies. Taking it to the "next level" of "what happens if Batman, Superman, and some other folks team up" is kind of a natural outgrowth. The key isn't in ratios of single titles to group titles; it's in how well-done these projects are. Which, honestly, can be a tall order sometimes.

[TheEmerged]

Keep in mind, of course, that the current War of the Green Lanterns just killed of a particularly promenient second-tier character. If you're an older fan of the series, he'd be a first-tier character.

Mogo will have to socialize in the great beyond -- which was foreshadowed, for the record

[Nerd-o-rama]

I've heard Y: The Last Man is really depressing though.

It's a story with conflict and people die in it, if that's what you mean (I don't think it's a spoiler to point out that three and a half billion people die in the first issue, if that's a problem for you). I'd rate a few pieces of it as tearjerkers, but the story overall ends on an uplifting note.

Also it is amazingly written barring some of the incidental bits and subplots, and is one of the most engaging stories in the sequential-art medium. I second the recommendation as emphatically as I can.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Saying comics should only ever be about just one hero at a time, and never about "clannish groups", is kind of silly. No man (or Superman) is an island. Everyone has some level of supporting cast and allies. Taking it to the "next level" of "what happens if Batman, Superman, and some other folks team up" is kind of a natural outgrowth. The key isn't in ratios of single titles to group titles; it's in how well-done these projects are. Which, honestly, can be a tall order sometimes.

Don't get me wrong, I think groups of superheroes are only natural. What I don't like is how this concept of heroes and villains forming teams is the natural conflict that grows out of this setup. The heroes form a group to coordinate their activities and to help one another in enforcing the law. As a reaction to this, the villains form a group to oppose the efforts of the superheroes. The supervillains as a group are capable of much more dangerous villainy than they'd be alone, resulting in the deaths of many innocents, or worse, those close to the heroes, which makes the heroes up their ante. And when the heroes up the ante, that makes the villains even more mad at them, and they do worse things. The whole thing just keeps escalating as the cycle of violence causes superheroes and villains to hate each other more and more.

"You killed my family!"

"You threw me in jail!"

"You destroyed my home city!"

"You tried to brainwash me into being good!"

"You and your friends are trying to subjugate the world!"

"You and your friends already have through your popularity!

"YEW BETRAYED TH' LAW!!"

"LLAW!!"

[Tiki Snakes]

I see what you are getting at. The classic villain team just doesn't fit the villainous MO, because it's a polarised Hero MO.

Villains shouldn't team up to oppose superheroes, they should team up to achieve their nefarious goals, (Be that Mutant Liberation/superiority, Vast Wealth, or whatever).

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Exactly! X-Men's mutant group led by Magneto is a PERFECT example of a supervillain group done right. They weren't created specifically to oppose the X-Men, but rather because Magneto disagreed with Xavier's views on peace between mutants and humans, and formed his own group to fight for mutants' rights. They fight each other because the X-Men feel Magneto's terroristic acts won't win over the normies, and so by stopping his crimes they earn some degree of respect (as much as can be expected, since even the nicest human seems to turn into a drooling racist when someone's revealed to be a mutant).

If anything, supervillains should form the teams FIRST, for whatever goal they're pursuing, forcing the superheroes to form their own group in response since no one superhero can take the group of villains down alone.

[Nerd-o-rama]

I think that sort of "villain team" is actually more common. You're just looking at what happens in Crossover Events because most Crossover Events suck, and therefore end up on AT4W.

The "evil" Lantern Corps, for example, are all philosophically-aligned groups based around Power Rings. The Greens and their allies just feel it's their duty to oppose the other colors when they start going out of control (along with any other number of interstellar threats, large and small).

The Sinister Six are a group of people who banded together because Spider-Man kept kicking their asses individually, and they wanted to overwhelm him.

Regular crossover teams like the Justice League or Avengers are, more often than not, banding together to take down single overwhelmingly powerful enemies (Thanos, Galactus, Darkseid and his entire army), and only occasionally end up with evil-opposite ripoff groups trying to take them down.

[Zevox]

The "evil" Lantern Corps, for example, are all philosophically-aligned groups based around Power Rings.
That's all of the Lantern Corps, actually, not just the "evil" ones.

Though actually it would be hard to call the Red Lanterns "philosophically-aligned," since other than their leader Atrocitus their rings exert so much control over them that they're basically mindless killing machines. Atrocitus uses them towards his goals of revenge on the Green Lanterns and Sinestro, but his corps are basically his barely-controlled attack dogs.

And since the orange light is wielded by just one being, Larfleeze, there's not multiple people to be "aligned" there - so really, that statement mainly applies to the Sinestro Corps and the "good" Lanterns.


The Greens and their allies just feel it's their duty to oppose the other colors when they start going out of control (along with any other number of interstellar threats, large and small).
Well, there's also the Guardians' belief in minimizing and controlling emotions in general, which causes much of their tensions with the Star Sapphires and some of their distrust of the Blue Lanterns.

Actually just about the only one of the Corps that is unambiguously "good" is the Blue Lanterns - the Guardians tend to steer the Greens more towards "law" than "good" with their distrust of emotions (though most individual GLs don't like that), the Star Sapphires have the whole brainwashing thing, and last I heard we still don't know much about the Indigo Tribe but they were last seen being rather creepy with Black Hand.

Zevox

[Nerd-o-rama]

And since the orange light is wielded by just one being, Larfleeze, there's not multiple people to be "aligned" there - so really, that statement mainly applies to the Sinestro Corps and the "good" Lanterns.

Coincidentally, the only Corps whom I actually know anything about except the general concept!