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Post by goldenfist on Sept 19, 2010 21:27:36 GMT -5
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Post by spiderwasp on Sept 19, 2010 22:23:03 GMT -5
I agree that I like big events BUT big events do not have to be sweeping events like Civil War and Secret Invasion. Children's Crusade, for example, is a pretty big event to me and it only involves one title. Look through history. Weren't "The Coming of Galactus", "The Kree/Skrull War", "The Korvac Saga", "The Dark Phoenix Saga", "Secret Wars", and many more big events? There's a large amount of flexibility between having books where nothing happens and storylines that crossover to 50 titles. Although, oddly enough, Bendis is a master of doing both these things at the same time.
I will also say that there should be run for simpler stories out there too. We can still anticipate big events while reading a few smaller stories and have all of this happen within one or two titles.
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Post by Shiryu on Sept 20, 2010 18:11:03 GMT -5
As a general point, I agree, but they have to be reasonable with the tie-ins. There were amazing events like Kang's Dynasty which didn't have any tie-in and it was a real pity IMHO. And others like Civil War or Evolutionary Wars that had way too many, some of which totally pointless.
I was actually rather happy with Siege. Short main story, not too many tie-ins, I think it's been Marvel's best recent event.
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Post by humanbelly on Sept 22, 2010 17:01:08 GMT -5
Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a "non-big event", as far as I can tell. EVERY EVENT in EVERY ISSUE has the entirety of existence hanging in the balance, it seems, even without the canvas of a multi-title, continuity-wide story arc to work with. That's the case, at least, with the three Avengers team-oriented books (New Av, Avengers & Secret Av). For those not reading the new books:
New Avengers: Our entire dimension is going to collapse/fragment/be taken over at any moment. The process has begun in Central Park, I believe. This is HUGE, BABY! Mystical Armageddon! Multi-issue arc!
Avengers: ALL OF THE TIME STREAM IS COLLAPSING! Taking New York City (and presumably the world) with it. Has something to do with the machinations of Kid Avengers from the future & the Maestro. The team is huge! The story's huge! This is HUGE, BABY! Kang AND Apocalypse AND Killraven AND Maestro! Multi-issue arc!
Secret Avengers: Something about the Serpent Crown and this secret Shield base on Mars (or Shadow Empire, or someone), and mind control, and . . . and. . . I can't even remotely follow this one, BUT--- it was specifically stated that the fate of the earth (or the universe, or all of reality. . .) was in dire jeopardy! It all comes down to Steve Rogers' indomitable will-power! A story so huge that there wasn't any room left for characterization! Just huge-ness! This is HUGE, BABY! Plus the commemorative one-gazillionth Nick Fury plot twist! Multi-issue arc! (Well, four anyhow).
You may think I'm kidding-- but the status quo is clearly that there's no such thing as non-dire circumstances. If the final moments of all creation aren't ticking away while our heroes are in late throes of extremis, then there's apparently no reason on earth to write a story for them. That other stuff is clearly just a waste of time.
Sheesh.
(Hmm- not usually prone to this kind of ranting. These things just tend to build up. . . )
HB
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Post by spiderwasp on Sept 22, 2010 22:04:28 GMT -5
Agreed HB, and when every event is a big event, none are.
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Post by humanbelly on Sept 23, 2010 16:35:52 GMT -5
Agreed HB, and when every event is a big event, none are. Exactly. The hipper comic execs shouldn't be too big to embrace one of the fundamental themes of THE INCREDIBLES. HB |
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Post by Shiryu on Sept 23, 2010 17:06:23 GMT -5
Exactly. The hipper comic execs shouldn't be too big to embrace one of the fundamental themes of THE INCREDIBLES. (I love that movie, great fun) That's true, but in fairness that's always been the case at Marvel. How many times has the world been saved in the space of one month? Avengers, FF, X-Men, Thor, Hulk and occasionally Spider-Man, Thing, and even more street-level heroes like Daredevil have saved the world many times over. I've never checked to see if the world was ever saved more than once during the same month across different titles, but it certainly wouldn't be a surprise. At Fantastic Four and Avengers it was almost a daily event given the magnitude of their adventures. |
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Post by humanbelly on Sept 24, 2010 7:35:18 GMT -5
Exactly. The hipper comic execs shouldn't be too big to embrace one of the fundamental themes of THE INCREDIBLES. (I love that movie, great fun) That's true, but in fairness that's always been the case at Marvel. How many times has the world been saved in the space of one month? Avengers, FF, X-Men, Thor, Hulk and occasionally Spider-Man, Thing, and even more street-level heroes like Daredevil have saved the world many times over. I've never checked to see if the world was ever saved more than once during the same month across different titles, but it certainly wouldn't be a surprise. At Fantastic Four and Avengers it was almost a daily event given the magnitude of their adventures. Your point has some validity, Shir, but I do think that the magnitude of this practice has increased, geeze, tenfold or more in the last 10 years. Mind you, I'm old-ish, so my personal golden age is going to be the late 60's, 70's, and well into the 80's-- and that becomes my basis for comparison. And, really, the most dire threats to the world/galaxy/universe/dimension/reality/all of creation weren't as tightly packed together then as you might think. Or the crises didn't proceed as deeply into the very final seconds of the 11th hour as they seem to do now. Kree/Skrull War-- sure. Michael Saga-- yep. Crosstime Kang Council-- uh-huh. But those can be countered with much smaller-scale, tighter arcs like the Mansion Siege, Assault on Olympus, and even the long Gatherers storyline. And even though the FF might've been saving the universe at the same time as the Avengers in a given month, there were a HECK of a lot less books featuring the same characters where this conflict become noticeable (Spidey was pretty much the only guy with multiple books-- and his universe-saving opportunities arose only occasionally), and it was a given that one of the events took place before or after the other. Oddly enough, this current "All Crisis All the Time Channel!" that constitutes the Avengers team books makes the entire world too. . . small. It's far too easily put into extreme jeopardy, and- like a chronically ailing, fussy, demanding, hypochondriac relative- runs a serious risk of alienating those whom it would appeal to. "Omigod, you're being overrun by Mephisto again?? But we just got Aron the Rogue Watcher out of the basement last night!! Do you really, really need us to come over? AGAIN??" No, I think in the (*gulp*) decades-long view, this trend has ballooned considerably. ;)Doesn't mean I'm right, though--!  HB |
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Post by spiderwasp on Sept 24, 2010 17:13:11 GMT -5
My frame of reference is similar to yours HB and as a result, I think you are 100% on target. There doesn't seem to be room in most Marvel books today's such as Absorbing Man taking over a ship in a NY harbor, Deathbird breaking into a lab, The Zodiac trying to kill all the Geminis, the search for the origin of Mantis, or the Grim Reaper trying to replace his brother. A story where Hank and Jan get trapped with Ants while Whirlwind waits to kill the Avengers would be viewed as "So what?" It seems like many of today's readers can only be drawn in if all creation is at stake or there is a promise of a change in the status quo. Villains like the Wrecking Crew or Electro can only be used if it is contained in a panel or two just to let us see that the heroes are out there and busy. What can I say? I'll take the Circus of Crime over another chance of all reality collapsing in a hearbeat but that's just me.
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Post by Shiryu on Sept 24, 2010 17:32:02 GMT -5
Hmm, in a way I do see what you mean, it's been a long time since we've had something like that in most books, although there have been exceptions. For the most part of Brand New Day Spider-Man has been dealing more or less with that type of menaces, from the Juggernaut to various Goblins, Sandman and Shocker. But I've also noticed that in Avengers, X-Men or FF old-time big villains like Terminus are now defeated in the odd panel recounting recent adventures without actually showing them.
But I also think that this is a consequence of a certain... stagnation, if you like, of characters over the last 50 years. A huge percentage of villains is still made of characters created by Stan back in the Silver Age. These are characters that have been defeated time and time and time again by pretty much everyone. In the 60s, 70s and occasionally 80s the hero would often say "he is stronger, more deadly than ever" or something similar to justify why he didn't win in a few pages, but now can we really expect to see Captain America defeated by, say, Batroc? or Spidey by the Vulture? in a world were we have seen Aragorn battle the armies of Sauron for the sake of Middle Earth, or Harry Potter risk his life against Voldemort for wizardkind, or all sorts of Armageddon-like movies and series, I can see why having two people fight over a robbed bank seems almost petty and readers may find it uninteresting (although I don't necessarily agree with it). So I think the upsurgence of cosmic event is more or less a consequence of that need to do something more amazing every time.
But I also believe there still are plenty of expections. Hey, Machinesmith has just come back this month and he was the first Cap villain I've ever read ^^
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Post by owene on Sept 25, 2010 4:00:30 GMT -5
Hmm, in a way I do see what you mean, it's been a long time since we've had something like that in most books, although there have been exceptions. For the most part of Brand New Day Spider-Man has been dealing more or less with that type of menaces, from the Juggernaut to various Goblins, Sandman and Shocker. But I've also noticed that in Avengers, X-Men or FF old-time big villains like Terminus are now defeated in the odd panel recounting recent adventures without actually showing them. I've really noticed this, it always reminds me of Kurt Busiek's Astro City, he'd show a brief glimpse of his world's analogues of classic villains as the window dressing for the latest character driven story. They served as short hand for the reader to get their bearings in a story that riffs on comics concepts but wasn't actually a shared universe with thousands of comics worth of history. The narrator would mention how they had encountered Jack In the box while he was hunting for The Brass Monkey or whoever but there was no need for the villain to actually be anything other than a flashback showing the heroes day to day. Similarly Alan Moore in Top 10/Tom Strong etc, Mark Waid in Irredeemable and Warren Ellis in Planetary. They all seed their stories with half glimpsed battles with naggingly familiar new villains It actually works very well as a technique in books where the comic is to a large extent writing about comics not actually telling you the story of a character or when you need newly created characters to have some of the resonance of old ones. You see the snippet of a classic super hero battle, your mind fills in the blanks and you can tell the new story. (You get it a lot in Elseworlds/what if's as well for the same reason and in Morrison's work even in actual shared universes) There is absolutely no need to do it in the MU where the characters actually have the real history and the reader can be expected to know it already. Where the wrecker isn't just a guideline to show you that a hero can fight massively strong brawlers but is supposedly an antagonist of a similar power level than the hero. But because the deconstructionist books mentioned above got loads of plaudits and are probably the ones the writers actually enjoy to read themselves they borrow the structure without seemingly understanding why Busiek had to make up PYRAMID for his heroes to defeat on page 2 before he did his character studies. The writer of avengers isn't writing a deconstruction of a super hero story or a character study showing what being a kid growing up in a super hero family is like. They are actually writing Avengers, the conflict with the villain is actually what they are signed up for. |
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Post by humanbelly on Oct 2, 2010 6:02:23 GMT -5
Hmm, in a way I do see what you mean, it's been a long time since we've had something like that in most books, although there have been exceptions. For the most part of Brand New Day Spider-Man has been dealing more or less with that type of menaces, from the Juggernaut to various Goblins, Sandman and Shocker. But I've also noticed that in Avengers, X-Men or FF old-time big villains like Terminus are now defeated in the odd panel recounting recent adventures without actually showing them. I've really noticed this, it always reminds me of Kurt Busiek's Astro City, he'd show a brief glimpse of his world's analogues of classic villains as the window dressing for the latest character driven story. They served as short hand for the reader to get their bearings in a story that riffs on comics concepts but wasn't actually a shared universe with thousands of comics worth of history. The narrator would mention how they had encountered Jack In the box while he was hunting for The Brass Monkey or whoever but there was no need for the villain to actually be anything other than a flashback showing the heroes day to day. Similarly Alan Moore in Top 10/Tom Strong etc, Mark Waid in Irredeemable and Warren Ellis in Planetary. They all seed their stories with half glimpsed battles with naggingly familiar new villains It actually works very well as a technique in books where the comic is to a large extent writing about comics not actually telling you the story of a character or when you need newly created characters to have some of the resonance of old ones. You see the snippet of a classic super hero battle, your mind fills in the blanks and you can tell the new story. (You get it a lot in Elseworlds/what if's as well for the same reason and in Morrison's work even in actual shared universes) There is absolutely no need to do it in the MU where the characters actually have the real history and the reader can be expected to know it already. Where the wrecker isn't just a guideline to show you that a hero can fight massively strong brawlers but is supposedly an antagonist of a similar power level than the hero. But because the deconstructionist books mentioned above got loads of plaudits and are probably the ones the writers actually enjoy to read themselves they borrow the structure without seemingly understanding why Busiek had to make up PYRAMID for his heroes to defeat on page 2 before he did his character studies. The writer of avengers isn't writing a deconstruction of a super hero story or a character study showing what being a kid growing up in a super hero family is like. They are actually writing Avengers, the conflict with the villain is actually what they are signed up for. This is a very, very well-considered piece of analysis, Owen. You've explained and quantified some story/structure devices that I hadn't even taken as being conscious writer choices (oh, how naive is the HB). And then I'm all "Of COURSE-- how OBVIOUS!!". It's nice to feel just a touch smarter after reading a post. . . I might toss in that Invincible over at Image used this Create-a-Universe shorthand technique at times-- also successfully, in my opinion, and for the same reasons you outlined. It works when you, the reader, are able to become involved in the present moment because you feel you have enough sense of the past. It doesn't work when you feel like too much has rushed by you, and there's not any proper context for what's happening right now--- Middle-of-the-Movie Syndrome, I guess you could call it. But thanks-- enjoying your posts! (Man, post more. It's quiet lately. . . ) HB |
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