We had almost a decade of Bendis, then we had Hickman's giant, aimless mess that was just setup for Secret War. That's up until 2015. After that we had the ANAD stuff where they tried to just cram the team with legacy heroes and then Jason Aaron came along with his power level wank. So yes, it really has been almost 25 years
It was the end of honest, non-jokey Avengers. Bendis made it (initially) a team of quippy Joss Whedon-esque random popular heroes engaged in boring repetitive Netflix adaption tier plots. Hickman made the team bloated with like 30 fricking characters, did actual character plots with maybe 5 of them tops, had a ton of characters that only Existed and ultimately his entire run is just setup for another book.
That kind of honest, classic superhero writing Busiek did has never come back to Avengers. Ewing could do it but they will never give him the keys to the kingdom when they can have him turn out stuff with characters and teams nobody else wants to touch forever.
What I want at this point is just something with the same tone as the EMH cartoon.
>What I want at this point is just something with the same tone as the EMH cartoon.
From the way you talk about it, I'm assuming the Busiek/Perez stuff is pretty close to EMH, which is a good sign for me tbh
1 month ago
Anonymous
"Ultron, We would have words with thee. " Was a line taking right out of Busiek. If you like EMH you'll love Busiek. That's the vibe.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>From the way you talk about it, I'm assuming the Busiek/Perez stuff is pretty close to EMH, which is a good sign for me tbh
EMH is based on several things but in terms of tone the show is definitely most akin to Busiek/perez which in turn is in the lineage of Lee/Kirby, Lee/Heck and Thomas/Buscema. Many of the plots and threats are adapted from comic book stories but they are all reworked into a different form, for example they do Secret Invasion but in a very different, much less convoluted way. If you enjoy the show then I think this comic will appeal to you.
[...]
These comics have life. There's always small moments like some of them having food or hanging out but it never becomes extended and bloated to the point where the actual super-stuff becomes a few pages of the issue. I understand the need for soap elements in superhero comics but you can do it and maintain an energy, and many current writers don't want or are unable to do that.
Yeah, that sounds very comfy
I'm probably gonna order it now. I've been hemming and hawing about getting the first omnibus ever since the reprint like a year and a half ago but I'm also now tempted to buy up the three remaining Silver Age Avengers omnis I haven't yet gotten alongside it, for completion
1 month ago
Anonymous
>From the way you talk about it, I'm assuming the Busiek/Perez stuff is pretty close to EMH, which is a good sign for me tbh
EMH is based on several things but in terms of tone the show is definitely most akin to Busiek/perez which in turn is in the lineage of Lee/Kirby, Lee/Heck and Thomas/Buscema. Many of the plots and threats are adapted from comic book stories but they are all reworked into a different form, for example they do Secret Invasion but in a very different, much less convoluted way. If you enjoy the show then I think this comic will appeal to you.
>Ewing could do it but they will never give him the keys to the kingdom
It has more to do with Cebulski and Brevoort & co being closet chuds. They'll never give him the keys because he'll try doing what he immediately did with Guardians and make it insanely homosexual.
Johns opened the door.
Slott just had her go on an 18 month bender after she wreck a whole town.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>johns did bad >slott then just had to worse >it was johns fault
1 month ago
Anonymous
& Rainbow is still running with John's mistakes.
1 month ago
Anonymous
NTA but the current run is fixing She-Hulk. All of Slott's mistakes and Johns. It is a breath of fresh air and great. Probably my favorite Marvel title being published now.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I don't believe you.
Plus all that shit is irreversible.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Dude, its even fixing Jack of Hearts of all fricking characters. I have no idea who Rowell is, but this run has been a delight.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The problem with a book that spends so much time trying to FIX shit is that it often runs out of time to do anything on it's own. Especially with how stories are written these days. We said the same thing when Spencer (I think it was Spencer) took over Spider-man after Slott and spent years and issue after issue fixing stuff resulting in a boring run before editorial smacked him down to get shit fricked again.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The book also make problems like how Jen groomed Jack into houseslave and sucking Mallory Book's hole.
Mallory Book shouldn't even exist but here we're are.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I loved Spencer's run. Sometimes a character needs a "fixing run". As long as She-Hulk doesn't get a Zeb Wells after it we'll be fine.
The book also make problems like how Jen groomed Jack into houseslave and sucking Mallory Book's hole.
Mallory Book shouldn't even exist but here we're are.
Oh, you're that homosexual that thinks that people can't change and move on from mistakes. KYS
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Oh, you're that homosexual that thinks that people can't change and move on from mistakes. KYS
Ironic
I'm sorry current Jen is still a loser.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>has a successful job >is in a loving relationship >has a bf that supports her
At this point I'm convinced you're Dan Slott, seething that all your bullshit is being fixed.
1 month ago
Anonymous
No storytimes.
1 month ago
Anonymous
NTA, but I storytime every new issue in my potpourri storytime. I'm behind because I'm doing a massive Marvel Event storytime right now.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>I'm doing a massive Marvel Event storytime right now.
That can't be good for your head.
Johns only does a handful stories and they're okay imo. He has not yet developed his DC foibles fully at this point.
Austen is garbage. Just pure garbage. Everyone slams Bendis but Austen is the first to start trying to make Avengers "mature" by including random sex scenes and swearing and more random violence. It's not as bad as his X-Men but apparently Austen was fired before he could write Disassembled and Bendis was given his script outline to work with.
Johns only does a handful stories and they're okay imo. He has not yet developed his DC foibles fully at this point.
Austen is garbage. Just pure garbage. Everyone slams Bendis but Austen is the first to start trying to make Avengers "mature" by including random sex scenes and swearing and more random violence. It's not as bad as his X-Men but apparently Austen was fired before he could write Disassembled and Bendis was given his script outline to work with.
Johns was fine. He was the one who wrote Janet and Hank boxing their clit and prostate.
Johns was fricking awful. The other year I storytimed every comic he ever wrote on Cinemaphile. It and Teen Titans were hands down his worst work.
It was the end of honest, non-jokey Avengers. Bendis made it (initially) a team of quippy Joss Whedon-esque random popular heroes engaged in boring repetitive Netflix adaption tier plots. Hickman made the team bloated with like 30 fricking characters, did actual character plots with maybe 5 of them tops, had a ton of characters that only Existed and ultimately his entire run is just setup for another book.
That kind of honest, classic superhero writing Busiek did has never come back to Avengers. Ewing could do it but they will never give him the keys to the kingdom when they can have him turn out stuff with characters and teams nobody else wants to touch forever.
What I want at this point is just something with the same tone as the EMH cartoon.
[...]
Agreed... except I'd go a step further and state that it is the "swan song" of the series.
If you haven't read ANY Avengers issues I might argue that it's not the place to start reading because it's impact will be severely diminished. It's essentially a love letter to the Avengers, an encapsulation of everything that made the series so great over the years. You can absolutely go in blind and enjoy it but it is even more rewarding for long time fans.
The material that immediately follows isn't terrible but it ends abruptly and insultingly at that. Bendis and all other runs were absolute shit, don't believe any of the praise you see for it.
If you want to start reading Avengers just start at the beginning... it's all good. The Kooky Quartet, Thomas' run, Englehart, Michelinie, Stern, etc.
i liked hickman secret illimuminati. beast was allowed to be relevant and for whatever flaws the ending hickman had, at least he put forth some fricking effort
But yes, the "true" Avengers haven't returned since Disassembled, basically. Much like Thanos won and killed the MCU, Wanda won and killed the Avengers, albeit without motive or reasonable explanation. At least she took away some of the x-wank, too.
We had almost a decade of Bendis, then we had Hickman's giant, aimless mess that was just setup for Secret War. That's up until 2015. After that we had the ANAD stuff where they tried to just cram the team with legacy heroes and then Jason Aaron came along with his power level wank. So yes, it really has been almost 25 years
Agreed... except I'd go a step further and state that it is the "swan song" of the series.
If you haven't read ANY Avengers issues I might argue that it's not the place to start reading because it's impact will be severely diminished. It's essentially a love letter to the Avengers, an encapsulation of everything that made the series so great over the years. You can absolutely go in blind and enjoy it but it is even more rewarding for long time fans.
The material that immediately follows isn't terrible but it ends abruptly and insultingly at that. Bendis and all other runs were absolute shit, don't believe any of the praise you see for it.
If you want to start reading Avengers just start at the beginning... it's all good. The Kooky Quartet, Thomas' run, Englehart, Michelinie, Stern, etc.
Same, it was a solid run, and he was giving us some Wanda/Vision, the one thing this run completely dropped the ball on. Possibly Brevoort's fault, considering the years that followed.
The post-Civil War New Avengers was my first Avengers comic. For a long time "Avengers" to me meant a group of street-level characters led by Luke Cage.
Frankly, This page is fine, Jennifer had the "luck" of being born with Narcissistic parents.
And those are the people who will ruin any kid's mentality and psyche for everything and go on to say WHY ARENT YOU LIKE X's SON, IF ONLY I HAD THEM AS CHILDREN
Like Bruce with His Father, Jen had both of her parents being buttholes because of sheer narcissism and ego forced into her.
"Decompressed Storytelling"
You gotta love it... so decompressed now that nothing fricking happens! You can read all of the dialog in a single issue in under a minute most times.
"Decompressed Storytelling"
You gotta love it... so decompressed now that nothing fricking happens! You can read all of the dialog in a single issue in under a minute most times.
Outside of things like Marvel Masterworks or the black and white Essentials, a story had to warrant getting reprinted as a trade, it had to be popular or important, or introduce a key character, or have early work by a star artist. Under Quesada and Jemas, Marvel just started reprinting EVERYTHING as trades a few months down the line, DC and the rest of the industry followed suit. IIRC it was Jemas, not Quesada who was to blame for telling writers to "plot for the trade" and specifically to write more like Bendis, at least in terms of plotting and pacing books.
Thanks to this we not only got decompressed storytelling where nothing happens for months, we also got readers "trade waiting", and lower-selling books getting cancelled a lot earlier than they otherwise might have been because of people not bothering to buy the single issues, and few titles having strong enough trade sales to make a difference. This played a part in the constant relaunches that have been killing long form storytelling in superhero comics.
I'm really of a split mind here. On the one hand I do think it's great that marvel and comics in general have made great strides to collect all their comics outside of the most famous stories. Really being able to collect a near complete run alone to say nothing of a series being printed in epic or omnibus format is like a dream at times. But at the same time we do have the problem were, like you said, new runs have to trade wait problem. And I don't think there's anything wrong with trade waiting in and of itself but the problem is actually there's no reason to want to collect the floppies with how the stories are written and with the overall increased cost of comics. Floppies have almost lost their value to a point where there's no reason NOT to trade wait. And I can't help but find that a bit sad as someone who's collected comics for years.
>I'm reading through it for the first time and I'm actually surprised at how dense the first issue feels even with it being double-sized
Busiek is a traditionalist in his writing. What Busiek does extremely well is let his artists carry the story without needing to have extended talking sequences or reaction shots inserted to drag it out. Look at these two panels from issue 4. Perez tells a story in just these pictures, regardless of what is actually being said. You don't even need to know that Black Knight had a romance with Crystal while she and Quicksilver were separated to understand that Dane still has it down bad for that Inhumanussy. And it's not dwelled on because it's not relevant to the actual story. But it's there, it enhances the later read-throughs and it gives the universe a feeling that things are going on everywhere, not just inside the room the current team is currently in.
I'm reading through it for the first time and I'm actually surprised at how dense the first issue feels even with it being double-sized
These comics have life. There's always small moments like some of them having food or hanging out but it never becomes extended and bloated to the point where the actual super-stuff becomes a few pages of the issue. I understand the need for soap elements in superhero comics but you can do it and maintain an energy, and many current writers don't want or are unable to do that.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say the run rewards longtime fans while still being incredibly accessible to new fans.
Busiek and Perez are a match made in heaven. Two pros at the top of their craft, and possessing a deep love for the material they're working with. They're not buying time before Hollywood comes calling, they're not slumming it, they genuinely love comic books and it shows.
[...]
[...]
Yeah, that sounds very comfy
I'm probably gonna order it now. I've been hemming and hawing about getting the first omnibus ever since the reprint like a year and a half ago but I'm also now tempted to buy up the three remaining Silver Age Avengers omnis I haven't yet gotten alongside it, for completion
If you're still not convinced then i'm going to say that Kang Dynasty, the massive arc that ends this run is one of the coolest Avengers epics of all time. It takes the team across the world, into space as they try to stop Kang from finally taking the world down in open combat. At the same time you get like four other long-running subplots culminating in one giant arc. It's just fantastic stuff with great character moments for everyone. And Busiek/Perez still has times to use non-regular characters, utilizing them in a great way for the plot. It's as the other anon said, this could be the final Avengers story if you never want to read another run.
[...]
[...]
Yeah, that sounds very comfy
I'm probably gonna order it now. I've been hemming and hawing about getting the first omnibus ever since the reprint like a year and a half ago but I'm also now tempted to buy up the three remaining Silver Age Avengers omnis I haven't yet gotten alongside it, for completion
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say the run rewards longtime fans while still being incredibly accessible to new fans.
Busiek and Perez are a match made in heaven. Two pros at the top of their craft, and possessing a deep love for the material they're working with. They're not buying time before Hollywood comes calling, they're not slumming it, they genuinely love comic books and it shows.
Just to take one tiny example, during Kang Dynasty Busiek and Perez successor Ivan Reis gives us this page of Firebird, a devout Christian superheroine giving Thor her views on his goodhood and attitude towards mortals. And it's just great, you know? Busiek knows the characters so well he can even bring something out of a character like Firebird that nobody else uses or even knows anything about. Yet in Kang Dynasty she is a guest-star and she fills several important roles in the arc. I just fricking love this attention to the world and the characters, that sense that this is a real world that we're just looking into through this comic.
I get the basic idea but as much as I love Busiek I feel like this is not the fricking character to have someone be saying this to, and given Marvel's canon having any kind of Abrahamic monotheist say this rings really, really fricking hollow given the canonical state of YHVH and the Abrahamic faiths.
1 month ago
Anonymous
It reads better in proper context. Pages like this are often taken out of context to make it seem worse than it is. There's been a few instances where Thor was on the opposite side of the conversation and it came off just as bad.
[...]
[...]
Just to take one tiny example, during Kang Dynasty Busiek and Perez successor Ivan Reis gives us this page of Firebird, a devout Christian superheroine giving Thor her views on his goodhood and attitude towards mortals. And it's just great, you know? Busiek knows the characters so well he can even bring something out of a character like Firebird that nobody else uses or even knows anything about. Yet in Kang Dynasty she is a guest-star and she fills several important roles in the arc. I just fricking love this attention to the world and the characters, that sense that this is a real world that we're just looking into through this comic.
Goddamnit, I'm convinced already
I'll order it now Then I just need to get the second volume when it comes out And then consider whether to get those three Silver Age Avengers omnis I need all at the same time just so I have them And then wait for Marvel to get around to start collecting the Roger Stern Avengers in omnibus form which will obviously take fricking forever because, my god, they're only just now putting Gruenwald's Cap in its first omnibus and that's fricking seminal
Don't forgot all the adjacent solo books. Waid Cap is in DIRE need of a reprint. You can get the epic collection and the returns trades for cheap still but I'm an omnibus prostitute.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Marvel's been getting more frequent with their reprints lately, so I'm sure it'll come along soon-ish. One of the upsides of the omnibus market exploding in popularity post-covid
Of course, one of the downsides is that it means they're putting out dozens every year which makes it that much more costly to grab the ones you want before they go out of stock/FOMO gets to you
1 month ago
Anonymous
I've been pretty good about restraining myself to stuff I don't want or need. It also helps that a lot of the stuff I wanted to collect is in epic format.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>I've been pretty good about restraining myself to stuff I don't want or need.
I've been good with that too recently. It helps that by now, I've got most all the extant omnibuses that I really want. But I'm also a big Silver Age gay, hence why I'm worried about currently being tempted to grab Avengers Vol 3-5 alongside this
Just realized how weird my Avengers collection is gonna look with all Epics and then the Busiek/Perez in Omnibus. Oh well
I'm not much of an Epic fan tbh.
Omnibuses are more expensive and often more unwieldy, but they collect more of a run in one go than just a standard Epic. I figure that's much more worth it.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Better to get the Silver Age omnibus editions now... I'm sure they'll announce the next volume sooner than later. One step closer to Stern's tenure.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Better to get the Silver Age omnibus editions now...
Get thee behind me FOMOSatan
Don't forgot all the adjacent solo books. Waid Cap is in DIRE need of a reprint. You can get the epic collection and the returns trades for cheap still but I'm an omnibus prostitute.
Dan Jurgens Thor is great too, if not an all-time classic. And Busiek/Stern Iron Man is also a banger, of course.
Also this era is what led to Carol Danvers ending up in the MCu because it was Busiek and Perez who dragged the character back to earth, kicking and screaming. She had been Binary and entirely irrelevant for well over 15 years and this point and considered an extremely minor character. Busiek/Perez made her an earth hero again, put her back in her iconic black and gold outfit and her role in this comic led to her Brian Reed solo and her being a "core" Avenger for years which eventually led to Captain Marvel after AvX. But it all starts here.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Also this era is what led to Carol Danvers ending up in the MCu
I thought people were shilling this run, not holding it to account for it's crimes.
Damn, an decent Avengersvthread and I missed it, how depressing.
The Stern run is collected in Epics, although idk how many are currently out of print.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah you really need to get those sooner rather than later. Epic is fast becoming my favorite format but man some of those after market prices get up there.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Word. And I must correct myself, the first part of Stern's run was collected in proto-Epic collections: The Trial of Yellowjacket and Absolute Vision Book 1 & 2. They're the same size as Epics and same retail price point but were printed earlier, '12-'14, and not branded as Epics.
Totally worth it though, Stern's run is the blueprint for Busiek. Avengers Forever, which they collaborated on, is my favorite comic.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I've been trying to fill in gaps with various other trades. I got a few of those black cover hardbacks. I forget if they have a line name but they made a lot of the,.
Yes, it did. Somehow Morrison making a decision to leave other Marvel heroes out of his X-Men stories got twisted by later writers and weaponized into something for the X-Men to resent the Avengers for. It's such an abuse of the shared universe that's been going on for so long that I don't know how to even stop it.
No, it happens after Kang Dynasty as there was a time skip of about one year after the Twelve/Ages of Apocalypse/Powerless and the start of Claremont's second run and then another vague timeskip after Claremont's second run ends/Lobdell's filler run and the start of the Casey/Morrison run.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Anon, the stories were being published at the same time. That's all that really matters. Nobody actually working on the books actually tried to figure out the specific details of the various X-Men time skips and define exactly where the heroes from other books were and what they were doing at any specific time. Morrison just made a choice not to have any other heroes show up in his run, rather than have a lot of guest stars, only for later writers to turn this into something to hold a grudge against the Avengers for. They're idiots writing stupid stories and nobody should be making excuses for them.
1 month ago
Anonymous
You know, this may be a bad idea, but what if Kang was the reason why Genosha gets obliterated during Kang Dynasty?
Absolutely! Nobody wanted JLA/Avengers to happen more than George Perez. Marvel and DC got cold feet on the idea over and over again but Perez got so excited that he basically drew the first issue decades before it happened. It was sheer glee over the prospect of drawing two properties that he had come up with, that enthusiasm was infectious. Every panel of that series was packed with Pérez just geeking out.
It takes a hell of an artist to get every member of both teams up to that point on a cover
1 month ago
Anonymous
Man he liked Firebird.
1 month ago
Anonymous
the redesign was kinda bad though
1 month ago
Anonymous
I will fight you with a brick
1 month ago
Anonymous
this is one is cool, i'm talking about the design of firestar during the george perez and busiek run
1 month ago
Anonymous
I was always partial to her second New Warriors outfit
1 month ago
Anonymous
the mask should've been red or black instead of yellow
1 month ago
Anonymous
That’s easily her best costume. The jacket with the flaming star on the back is a nice touch
Even if you dislike this Firestar costume, her modern one is far worse.
This one is fine too. The only costume of hers I don’t like is the original.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Love her shades
1 month ago
Anonymous
Even if you dislike this Firestar costume, her modern one is far worse.
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's really only the mask I have any issue with.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>the mask
is not even a mask i think at the time her face looked like that
1 month ago
Anonymous
i don't dislike it, but she has looked better, also it works with george perez style
1 month ago
Anonymous
Perez was cursed to design good costumes that no one else could draw well
1 month ago
Anonymous
scarlet witch didn't had panties or anything covering her up? interesting
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's one of those heroine costumes designed to tease readers with the idea that she's not wearing anything underneath, but it's like the way cosplayers made this costume, the panties are stitched into the front and back of the belt, there was at least one time they actually showed she was covered under the skirt, but it was in another book IIRC.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Isn't that the issue they teamed up with Spider-Man to save Juggernaut?
1 month ago
Anonymous
That would be an awesome poster. I'd get it framed.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Now that DC and Marvel are both owned by one of the 5 media megacorps, shit like this will never happen again
It's not fair
1 month ago
Anonymous
Doesn't help that frick up Joe Q had a hand in stopping DC/Marvel crossovers after JLA/Avengers.
The Busiek/Perez issues were my first taste of Avengers as a kid. I was growing tired of X-Men and thought I'd check out something new... hooked for life! Don't follow my path of addiction, save yourself.
I had actually checked out of comics at the time because of Onslaught and the whole Heroes Reborn thing. I do wish I stuck around because between Thunderbolts and the Heroes Return stuff marvel did a complete 180 in terms of quality and were just on fire for the next couple of years.
This was because they did the issue the weeks after 9/11 and were extremely raw because they all live and work in NYC. It's dumb but acceptable. There's so many worse examples
My collections are all a big mix of omnis, epics and some TPBs or older HCs in order to fill the gaps.
>I've been pretty good about restraining myself to stuff I don't want or need.
I've been good with that too recently. It helps that by now, I've got most all the extant omnibuses that I really want. But I'm also a big Silver Age gay, hence why I'm worried about currently being tempted to grab Avengers Vol 3-5 alongside this
[...]
I'm not much of an Epic fan tbh.
Omnibuses are more expensive and often more unwieldy, but they collect more of a run in one go than just a standard Epic. I figure that's much more worth it.
>Omnibuses are more expensive and often more unwieldy, but they collect more of a run in one go than just a standard Epic
Omnibuses are generally the same as getting two epics and you can often find those for way cheaper. I like the bigger art in an omni but in terms of comfortable reading epics are actually starting to become my preferred format.
Beast was always a ball of laughs with the Avengers... and a bitter pill with the X-Men. One of the best periods at Marvel was when the original team went their separate way. Beast found a home in the Avengers, Angel and Ice Man were fun in The Defenders. Always hated X-Factor dragging them back to the Mutant plantation.
I was always an x-kid growing up as a kid but when I got older and started reading Avengers it was just astounding how much better he was there. It's honestly actually amazing looking back how much mutants used to be spread out.
This page features one character who got ruined by literally every writer under the sun for the last 10 years and one woman who got dragged into Krakoa only to get dunked in shit and then called out for smelling bad. Never stop being classy, marvel
Beast was always a ball of laughs with the Avengers... and a bitter pill with the X-Men. One of the best periods at Marvel was when the original team went their separate way. Beast found a home in the Avengers, Angel and Ice Man were fun in The Defenders. Always hated X-Factor dragging them back to the Mutant plantation.
I didn’t enjoy it. It’s way too tect heavy-even by the standards of its time. The computer coloring and lettering commit every single offense of excess that was goin on at the time. Iron Man is a fricking eyesore.
It’s also really focused on fixing continuity. If that’s your thing, you’ll likely really enjoy it. >40 issues on the Triune story >Triathlete >Silver Claw
Lol, no.
I'm not sure if the inking is also part of the problem, but the coloring on this book and most other Marvel books of the time really hurt the artwork. It's been claimed that during the bankruptcy years Marvel were using the cheapest colorists they could get for most of their books during those years.
>The computer coloring and lettering commit every single offense of excess that was goin on at the time.
I don't really see this. Even going by the examples in this thread the coloring looks better than a lot of other comics since then that seem to have forgotten about coloring for readability
The fact that Mayday doesn't have a single one while Miles and Spider-Gwen have multiple legitimately makes me furious.
[...]
They’ve been printing her entire original run as a full collection, though I couldn’t tell you how far they are with that
Spider-Girl Vol 1 was #17 on the most wanted Marvel Omnibus poll recently, so that's something
https://www.youtube.com/live/RgUKGaDWxqI?feature=shared&t=6466
The people demand it! >The fact that Mayday doesn't have a single one while Miles and Spider-Gwen have multiple legitimately makes me furious.
The worst part is all the redditors who buy up those Miles and Gwen omnis like they're actually worth getting
>The worst part is all the redditors who buy up those Miles and Gwen omnis like they're actually worth getting
No they don't. The omnibus sub reddit is just a bunch of FOMO chasing shelfers. They don't like anything beyond mindless consumerism in an attempt to try and fit in. They keep asking for Krakoa.
So this has come up many times in the past, but do you really suppose a super hero team can be too big. On the one hand it can be advantageous to pull a JLU and have a nice solid pool roster but on the other I can see where it could give little room to have character moments and growth. Especially if they're just gonna strongly focus on a handful of favorites as the primary pov heroes anyways. I dunno. Maybe it's a works on TV better kind of thing.
For the purpose of actually telling stories about a superhero team, there shouldn't really be more than 6-7 members at most. Any more than that and there's just not room to give everyone something to do, and you run into the problem a lot of modern X-books have, where you have hundreds of superpowered people all in one place and a lot of characters are basically being reduced to NPCs who show up when their powers are required.
Teams like the Avengers and Justice League work best with a core roster of characters you can expect to be on the team almost all of the time, mixed with a few others who are probably just going to be around for that one run, but offer something new that shakes up the group dynamic. If they just duplicate a power set or personality archetype an existing member of the team already covers, there's not really much point in adding them to the group.
I've got the first Complete Collection, and like it.. Is it worth upgrading to the omnibuses, or should I just keep going with the Complete Collections?
There's only like two OOP epic collections I'm missing from year the 5 classic omnis leave off that I need and I can call my Avengers collection from the start to Busiek complete. Not counting the Crossing of course. Because seriously frick the Crossing. Whose bright idea was that mess.
>Whose bright idea was that mess.
Virtually everything that happened in the Avengers and FF books from mid 1995 onwards can be explained by Marvel editorial having learned that the company execs were in negotiations to outsource those books to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. Everything from FF suddenly bringing back Reed and Doom, to Marvel hiring Mark Waid, one of DC's star writers, to work on Captain America, to everything that happened in The Crossing, including a drastic revamp of Iron Man, were all desperate rolls of the dice in the hope something would take off and get enough sales and attention to convince the execs to call off the Heroes Reborn negotiations.
does any modern artist draw women with curly/wavy hair? whenever i think of wanda its always the curly hair variant, but noone draws her with curls anymore
Nobody else put in the time and effort Perez did into drawing heroines with curly hair, as soon as he was off Avengers the artists who followed started changing Wanda's hair.
Wanda is so beautiful. It's a genuine wonder that many of the other female Avengers didn't off themselves due to constantly being brutally mogged by her.
>It's a genuine wonder that many of the other female Avengers didn't off themselves due to constantly being brutally mogged by her. >Jan, Natasha and Carol spending a lot of time and money on their outfits, hair and beauty products >Wanda just literally wakes up looking perfect and doesn't even have to try >constant seething behind her back
Nobody else put in the time and effort Perez did into drawing heroines with curly hair, as soon as he was off Avengers the artists who followed started changing Wanda's hair.
So mad twitter people get mad at her skin color and not her straight hair. I actually don’t care but it’s funny
It's crazy right? Like they were doing crazy well in making up for the past half decade or so and then in the span of 3 years from 2000 on they completely shit over all that good will. The comic industry has never recovered from Bendis.
Quesada's a Boomer, and some around this time were also Boomers (Waid, Morrison, Gaiman, Loeb). Surprisingly Ron Zimmerman was a Boomer.
But IIRC most writers at this time were Gen X. Slott, Bendis, Kevin Smith, Millar, Ellis, Ennis, Simone, Tieri, Way, Brubaker, Fraction, Guggenheim, Aaron, Hickman, are all Gen X.
>Nobody mentions Avengers Forever
I know it's continuity heavy as frick but come on; it's the ultimate classic Avengers story, you can tell that the people doing the final battle in Endgame looked at Pacheco's art and said: "it has to look like this"
Somebody needs to write a book how Marvel lost their minds in the 00's.
Every other story was about rape or something god awful that shouldn't be in a children's book.
Speaking of, I often hear there's a lot of crazy shit going on behind the scenes when people talk about old creatives and editorial but I often wonder how this information ever came to light, are there books about the behind the scenes business?
I'm not saying Marvel was perfect, shit got thru the cracks (See Avenger #200) but for some reason, I think it's a lack respect for the characters, Everything went in overdrive with the scandals.
I think you're right. Back in the day there'd occasionally be a trainwreck story where nobody really knew how it even happened, and sometimes that autist with a weird hateboner for a character would be allowed to write that character, but generally the people working for Marvel and DC tended to be fans, and tended to have a basic level of respect for the characters, and intent to entertain the fans.
The people Quesada and Jemas were bringing into Marvel in the 2000s explicitly weren't fans, a lot of them barely keeping their contempt in check for the characters, the past stories, and the fans. It was just a job for them, and their idea of having fun with that job was pushing the envelope as far as they could. 90s Marvel had Ellis as the one guy who was like that, but suddenly the company was full of people with the same disdain for the books and characters they were working on.
The problem was it sold and that's a success and it made fans. But there was a cost.
[...]
Fan magazines, old interviews, stories from cons, official magazines, books about comics (The Great Comic Book Heroes, Sternako's History of Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story) I'm sure there are real sites with bibliographies and everything as well.
It does become harder to find stories and what not from stuff that's more recent just because more people are still around and stuff like that. And stuff that was on the internet that's just disappeared because it's old internet falling apart.
The further into this century we get, the less willing anyone in the industry is to reveal behind the scenes stories that might make anyone other than themselves look bad, or dish the dirt on what went down with controversial stories, events and firings. The industry and the talent pool have gotten so small and insular that nobody wants to risk saying something that could get them blacklisted, nobody's going to talk for years until their career is done and they don't care anymore.
>I think you're right. Back in the day there'd occasionally be a trainwreck story where nobody really knew how it even happened,
Another thing to remember is that during those days if there was a dud of an issue it would often just be one or two comics. No line is without it's flubs you can probably find some real stinkers even in the works of the greats. But classic comic book story telling meant we got to move on quickly to a new issue and a new adventure. Now a book will draw it's story out for nearly half a year. Which is honestly kind of a long time in comic books. It might not sound like it but it is and if you're not buying into the half year story it's gonna get easier and easier to buy out of comics entirely.
>The further into this century we get, the less willing anyone in the industry is to reveal behind the scenes stories that might make anyone other than themselves look bad, or dish the dirt on what went down with controversial stories, events and firings. The industry and the talent pool have gotten so small and insular that nobody wants to risk saying something that could get them blacklisted, nobody's going to talk for years until their career is done and they don't care anymore.
I think it's less that and more to do with Disney owning Marvel. That said I think if problems keep piling up internally inevitably someone will talk.
I don't think it is that, because it's happened industry-wide, not just with Marvel. Nobody's talking about what went on behind the scenes anymore, even with things that were absolute disasters, and there aren't even public feuds between creative talent who just don't like each other anymore, only when someone's getting cancelled for something they did 20 years ago and everyone gangs up on them.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I still think it's partly because of the Disney buyout (and WB taking more of an interest in DC) but maybe you're right, maybe there is some kind of clique trying to clamp down on things while also attacking their perceived threats so everyone stays quiet about it. That said I don't believe they have the same power as they used to years ago.
1 month ago
Anonymous
On the DC side, you can usually blame Didio for all the problems like Identity Crisis, Countdown, New 52, Heroes in Crisis, 5G/Future State, Bendis is Coming, etc until AT&T fired him and most of the Harras adajcent idiots at editorial.
1 month ago
Anonymous
There was recent revelations that Alex DeCampi was running a "whisper network" that was actively threatening talent in the comic industry to keep them silent about the bad shit the talentless woke Nazi shits were doing to blackball any writer not hyper woke and how said whisper network was actively protecting sexual predators who were woke.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Comicsgate gave up on the idea of trying to fix and reform the Big 2 very quickly and just degenerated into a way for people to shill their own new books, but way back when it started it was exposed that a lot of the writers and editors in the industry were networking through some secret forum or mailing list and internally policing themselves to keep out or remove anyone who was insufficiently woke, somehow it got memoryholed and nothing was done about it.
The problem was it sold and that's a success and it made fans. But there was a cost.
[...]
Fan magazines, old interviews, stories from cons, official magazines, books about comics (The Great Comic Book Heroes, Sternako's History of Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story) I'm sure there are real sites with bibliographies and everything as well.
It does become harder to find stories and what not from stuff that's more recent just because more people are still around and stuff like that. And stuff that was on the internet that's just disappeared because it's old internet falling apart.
said fanzines and creators coming forward at cons, letter pages, etc, etc etc.
Sometimes you just need to take a break. When you're an off/on fan it kind helps train your brain to recognize your era and be content with that. Though that said even with filling in the blanks I still don't know how we reached this point. It really does feel like night and day. Alternate realities feel like a more natural continuation than some of this shit.
The real downturn is when Shooter was forced out of Marvel, letting the inmates run the asylum essentially, that is the start of everything that ends up going wrong over the next decade, but just as the pull up finally started a whole bunch of frickers took control who came up through the post-Shooter era of comics who shot the industry dead right as it was about to maybe recover. British invasion and the rise of the "Rockstar Comic Writer" and a series of monkey see, monkey do copies of deconstructions, canon and continuity being abandoned for "Whatever the writer/new editors feel like they wanna do", slipping deadlines and reduced output because of line splintering, event culture and pumping the speculator market, all start there because it's largely all shit Shooter wouldn't let them do at Marvel and Marvel was the market leader at the time so when they started on it everyone else followed.
Then as mentioned here
I throw Quesada & Slott into there as well.
Hell you can say as soon as Gen-X got into power we were fricked.
It was Gen-X hubris.
They live on "This isn't your Daddy's Comics!"
Gen-X more or less grew up on that shit and they got enabled by the handful of salty as frick boomers like Byrne and so on in the industry who made Shooter and everything he ever touched out to be the Devil until they were the ones writing the books and calling the shots and that combined with the historical context ruined everything. We've reached the point where the "Dark Age" of the 90's is a golden paradise compared to the modern day.
The rock star comic writer is kind of a bizarre paradox. On the one hand writers and artists SHOULD be giving more credit and fame for their work. Especially ones who turn out banger runs. But at the same time a lot of these rock stars were drop in upstarts who did an arc or two and then bounced on a high note for their fame and not the resilient workhorses who put years into the brand and making it sustainable. Yeah Claremont got some mad cred for his run but it didn't always translate to the same kind of cash those Invasion guys were chasing. Deconstructions and character redefining is fine here and there but nobody seems to really be interested in making runs that actually build and hold up t he brand as a foundation anymore. There's no foundation. For as much as people say everything needs to change the status quo there needs to be an actual status quo to change which isn't something we feel like we've had in a while. And this is of course not getting into the general unprofessional surrounding the creatives. Like you said. Famous missed deadlines and the like. It's swell to ride the hype train but you need to actually put your damn books out.
The problem was it sold and that's a success and it made fans. But there was a cost.
Speaking of, I often hear there's a lot of crazy shit going on behind the scenes when people talk about old creatives and editorial but I often wonder how this information ever came to light, are there books about the behind the scenes business?
Fan magazines, old interviews, stories from cons, official magazines, books about comics (The Great Comic Book Heroes, Sternako's History of Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story) I'm sure there are real sites with bibliographies and everything as well.
It does become harder to find stories and what not from stuff that's more recent just because more people are still around and stuff like that. And stuff that was on the internet that's just disappeared because it's old internet falling apart.
I can never bring myself to hate characters I used to love. But I can't look at what's happening now and think it's even the same person. I just accept my era as my own universe and anything else might as well not exist as far as I still keep up.
Sometimes you just need to take a break. When you're an off/on fan it kind helps train your brain to recognize your era and be content with that. Though that said even with filling in the blanks I still don't know how we reached this point. It really does feel like night and day. Alternate realities feel like a more natural continuation than some of this shit.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I am truly baffled how people can invest in these characters anymore.
They must be Saints or have very short memories.
I think you're right. Back in the day there'd occasionally be a trainwreck story where nobody really knew how it even happened, and sometimes that autist with a weird hateboner for a character would be allowed to write that character, but generally the people working for Marvel and DC tended to be fans, and tended to have a basic level of respect for the characters, and intent to entertain the fans.
The people Quesada and Jemas were bringing into Marvel in the 2000s explicitly weren't fans, a lot of them barely keeping their contempt in check for the characters, the past stories, and the fans. It was just a job for them, and their idea of having fun with that job was pushing the envelope as far as they could. 90s Marvel had Ellis as the one guy who was like that, but suddenly the company was full of people with the same disdain for the books and characters they were working on.
[...]
The further into this century we get, the less willing anyone in the industry is to reveal behind the scenes stories that might make anyone other than themselves look bad, or dish the dirt on what went down with controversial stories, events and firings. The industry and the talent pool have gotten so small and insular that nobody wants to risk saying something that could get them blacklisted, nobody's going to talk for years until their career is done and they don't care anymore.
very funny that the day after this discussion that stuff about Fiege demanding the Ms Marvel death/turned into a mutant breaks
The whole fan outrage over the (temporary) death of Kamala that they were so afraid of turned out to be nothing because she's just not as popular as they want her to be. Most people didn't care about her death, and now they're learning with her what 80s Marvel learned with Cloak and Dagger and 90s Marvel learned with Namor; making a character a mutant, or putting the word "mutant" in a book's title does not mean it's going to sell like X-Men. Especially not in an age when the actual X-Men don't sell like they used to anymore.
But that interview reads like they're still afraid of fan backlash over the whole death story, and maybe some self-awareness that the story running in ASM sucked for Spider-Man readers who didn't care, so they're passing the buck and confessing that they were just following orders from Feige. Time will tell whether Feige approved them going public with that information, or if he cares that they did, but as the first notable inside story from within Marvel in years, it's not exactly an interesting reveal. We didn't learn anything we didn't already suspect, this was always obvious MCU synergy.
>Somebody needs to write a book how Marvel lost their minds in the 00's. >Every other story was about rape or something god awful that shouldn't be in a children's book.
You know, at least Marvel's never quite stooped as low as having the loveable wife of a loveable C-lister get raped by a goofy C-list supervillain as part of a side-story flashback in a storyline where said loveable wife gets murdered
I don't imagine he thinks he did anything wrong. I think he's gonna go to his grave thinking he's some kind of genius. Same for all of them. I really want to see what future scholars will take on this shit.
I mean they are but that's because Miller and Moore were shit, those homosexuals unironically laid the groundwork for everything that came after with endless shitty, edgy deconstructions that they sold on name power and novelty at the time.
I mean stuff like Spider-man's origin story is classic stuff I can see that speaking to people for ages. But whose gonna remember any of this new crap in years to come. Forget standing alongside big events like the Galactus trilogy or Dark Phoenix.
I mean stuff like Spider-man's origin story is classic stuff I can see that speaking to people for ages. But whose gonna remember any of this new crap in years to come. Forget standing alongside big events like the Galactus trilogy or Dark Phoenix.
In centuries to come, we will reach a point where the superheroes of our day have become like ancient mythology, the original stories, the adaptations and the fanfic will all get conflated together and nobody will even remember what the "correct" or "original" canon was.
>in the ass
I think you're confusing She-Hulk/Juggernaut and Jessica Jones/Luke Cage there. But a more recent She-Hulk run also referenced Juggernaut as one of her exes.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Jessica Jones
Why does she exist?
1 month ago
Anonymous
Bendis needed a self-insert to fantasize as getting fricked by Luke Cage.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I remembering suffering through the show & the only good thing was her huge heart shaped ass.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>her show
Normies think that an angsty b***h allowing (a very stupid and pathetic) villain to escape over and over in the dumbest ways and commit more preventable murders is dark and deep and not a comedic cavalcade of shitty plot armor and incompetent morons bumbling around.
>his stupid retcon then it got undone as soon as he left the book.
so she-hulk getting fricked in the ass by juggernaut is back to being canon? nice
He threw a hissy fit on his blog claiming she was one of those shield body double androids.
Makes no sense... Slott makes her the biggest bawd in fiction then gets mad as others do the same as he did.
This was harder to nail down than I thought it would be. I didn't want to overlord it with Originals but I gotta have Cap and I wanted Hank sso it would be weird to bench Janet. I also wanted to add some obscurer picks so I threw in Stingray and Firebird. The above image had a scene of her and Thor which made me thing that her and Herc on a team could lead to some fun. Or bullshit. Either way. And then I threw Songbird on their because why not. The original Tbolts earned it.
This was harder to nail down than I thought it would be. I didn't want to overlord it with Originals but I gotta have Cap and I wanted Hank sso it would be weird to bench Janet. I also wanted to add some obscurer picks so I threw in Stingray and Firebird. The above image had a scene of her and Thor which made me thing that her and Herc on a team could lead to some fun. Or bullshit. Either way. And then I threw Songbird on their because why not. The original Tbolts earned it.
I agree you've got to have Cap, Hank, and Jan in there. At the very least Hank and Jan, because it's not like they have anywhere else to go
80s Vigilante crap is stuff like The Punisher, Vigilante, Death Wish cash ins
Decompression is when you extend moments in comics for effect, Bendis is probably the one they're talking about because he was one of the big names doing it. There's a page in Invincible making fun of it when Mark's at a con someone may post for me
They were going to do it anyway, he just came up with the bullshit excuse for it.
Busiek had no real hand in resurrecting Jean. He didn't even suggest it himself directly, because it was before he actually broke into the industry.
IIRC he got to talking with Roger Stern at a convention in the mid 80s, as a fan, and brought up his fan theory of how he'd bring Jean back from the dead (the real Jean has been hibernating in Jamaica Bay since the crash in #100/1, which also has the added bonus of absolving her of Dark Phoenix's crimes). A few years later, Marvel editorial has demanded that Jean gets resurrected for X-Factor, and while brainstorming Stern remembers this one fan's theory and the others involved all approve. I think they might have checked in with Busiek that it was okay to use his idea, but that was really as far as his involvement there goes.
Avengers Forever was a pretty neat series. You had two Hank Pyms one crazy one sulky, Wasp being leadere, Circus freak Hawkeye, Super Strong but mope Captain America and Songbird from the slight future
That Songbird is still not an Avenger has turned into the joke from Futurama about Bender wanting to be a Harlem Globetrotter for me and I feel bad but it’s also very funny
Heh. Also I remember when the New Thunderbolts took on the New Avengers and the TBs, with Songbird leading them, did well for themselves. Cap even praising Melissa and by extention, Hawkeye since he taught her.
They joined in issue #4 after getting roped into the Morgan Conquest story when Rage got targeted by Morgana and basically invite themselves into the adventure.
Their run as Avengers BTW was widely WIDELY reviled due to the fact that Busiek and Brevoort DESPISED, widely DESPISED New Warriors and pretty much de-booted Vance and Angelica back to their "golly gee" pre-New Warriors personalities and made them incompetent rookies, with Angelica only being slightly more competent than Vance because George Perez was a huge Firestar fangirl and was the reason she got made a member.
Should also note that the only reason they acknowledged the issue of Firestar not having natural immunity to her powers (possibly inadvertedly sterilizing herself every time she used her powers) is that it was a huge elephant in the room that Busiek and Brevoort couldn't just handwave as not being canon anymore, hence why they miracle solved it via Hank just giving her a new costume that fixed it.
The two stuck around until #27, when they were written out during that issue's roster change but they show back up in the denouncement of the Triune Cult storyline that was part of Kang Dynasty.
You forgot to mention how Perez designed a new Firestar costume that showed some cleavage, Busiek and Brevoort made him change it because SHE WOULDN'T WEAR THAT. It was very mild compared with the costume Perez designed for Wanda, which was probably the lewdest heroine costume in the Big 2 at the time.
>I like the idea Wasp is the one who wants everyone at their sexiest and designs costumes that way
And everyone just goes with it and wears what she wants them to wear, no matter how lewd, except Firestar.
For some reason, I'm now thinking about the time Christopher Priest killed a character from Justice League Task Force just because he didn't trust anyone else to use them correctly.
1. Brevoort and Busiek being boomers who hated how Fabian made a bunch of forgotten boring young heroes grim and gritty ala the New Teen Titans
2. NW was originally pitched as "Young Avengers" but the Avengers office wanted nothing to do with the book but due to Fabian being a favorite of Bob Harris, he managed to get the book greenlit. So the book became a satellite Xbook, which helped it outsell the avengers books. And led to Fabian taking numerous pot shots against the Avengers in NW.
I have trouble believing this, because Brevoort was the New Warriors editor for some time (which is probably why they reached to that team when they wanted "newbie" heroes) and both of them worked closely with Nicieza for a while after that, like picking him to take over Thunderbolts.
I think the simplest explanation for why Justice regressed is that everyone, evenn continuity-conscious writers like Busiek, writes someone the way they remember them.
There's a moment in the run (the New Warriors issue, as it happens) where Busiek has to acknowledge that it doesn't make sense for Wanda to be so nervous about taking on a Deputy Leader position when she was already the leader of the West Coast Avengers and Force Works. She waves her Force Works '90s characterization away by saying she was a different person then, and that's all the explanation we get.
At least with Vance he could chalk up his regression to being nervous when he gets the job he always wanted, which oddly parallels Busiek being bumped up from smaller books to the big job he always dreamed of.
Yeah, the New Warriors themselves were always kind of, I don't want to sound dismissive, but it seems like they were 2nd stringers even though they did some pretty big stuff. A lot of them were very young so it's not weird that Vance might be nervous or a bit star struck.
1 month ago
Anonymous
New Warriors was a huge hit when the series first ran. They were Marvel's first non-mutant attempt at a big teen/young adult super hero group and were the closet Marvel's ever come to capturing the New Teen Titan fanbase (much to Brevoort's eternal butt-hurt, since Young Avengers, Young Allies, Avengers Academy trilogy, and Champions) all failed compared to New Warriors, with Runaways being the only series to come close to reaching New Warriors level popularity.
I have trouble believing this, because Brevoort was the New Warriors editor for some time (which is probably why they reached to that team when they wanted "newbie" heroes) and both of them worked closely with Nicieza for a while after that, like picking him to take over Thunderbolts.
I think the simplest explanation for why Justice regressed is that everyone, evenn continuity-conscious writers like Busiek, writes someone the way they remember them.
There's a moment in the run (the New Warriors issue, as it happens) where Busiek has to acknowledge that it doesn't make sense for Wanda to be so nervous about taking on a Deputy Leader position when she was already the leader of the West Coast Avengers and Force Works. She waves her Force Works '90s characterization away by saying she was a different person then, and that's all the explanation we get.
At least with Vance he could chalk up his regression to being nervous when he gets the job he always wanted, which oddly parallels Busiek being bumped up from smaller books to the big job he always dreamed of.
Niceiza was always close to Bob Harras and again, it was Harras who pulled strings to get New Warriors greenlit (minus the overt Avengers connection) and gleefully allowed Fabian to connect it to the X-Books at the time, along with showing up in Amazing Spider-Man for back to back guest spots when Bagley took over drawing ASM.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Niceiza was always close to Bob Harras and again, it was Harras who pulled strings to get New Warriors greenlit (minus the overt Avengers connection) and gleefully allowed Fabian to connect it to the X-Books at the time, along with showing up in Amazing Spider-Man for back to back guest spots when Bagley took over drawing ASM.
So many Annuals. But yeah New Warriors was good fun. I miss it. I am the only Turbo fan.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Was Runaways even popular? I never saw people reading it, the characters never appeared in other books, and even now they are basically forgotten and ignored. Not to mention the flop of a TV show.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The original series is very highly regarded. After that though I don't think it ever had the same energy. It probably should have stayed a max series and ended there. It was pretty clear they never knew what to do with them after the fact.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Rainbow Rowell series was awful.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Makes Nico gay when it was a very important plot point that she was not, in fact, gay.
But who needs characterization and solid writing when you can just pander to people.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Writers who do things like that seem to think they're "fixing a mistake".
1 month ago
Anonymous
She only writes for herself & has 0 self-awareness.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Volume 1 was very popular but for the opposite reasons you describe.
Basically it was a stand-alone series with no real overt ties to the rest of the Marvel Universe (at least in the first year), meaning you could read it and just it to get the full story. It had decent art and some decent likable characters, and unique for it's time story about kids going on the run because they found out that their parents were part of a rip-off of Millar's Fraternity of Evil from Wanted.
It was the sort of book that non-comic fans LOVE and the reason it crashed and burnt and is now pretty much forgotten, is due to the fact that the original writer left and was replaced by a variety of writers who tried to make the book more overtly tied to the Marvel Universe and this pissing off the fanbase who didn't want to read about the rest of the Marvel Universe. Which killed the series.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah there was some references and some heroes did show up but it was all from the perspective of the kids so you didn't need to know shit about Captain America or Spider-man beyond that they exist.
>There's a moment in the run (the New Warriors issue, as it happens) where Busiek has to acknowledge that it doesn't make sense for Wanda to be so nervous about taking on a Deputy Leader position when she was already the leader of the West Coast Avengers and Force Works.
These stories unintentionally setting the rule that the less Wanda wears, the more importance and authority she has.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Just like Black Cat's sense of morality.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Imagine if people who work for Marvel actually became aware of these things and started working them into stories.
1 month ago
Anonymous
So which Avenger git the rawest deal? >Tony >Wanda >Hank Pym >Other
1 month ago
Anonymous
Most of Tony's problems are instantly fixable the moment he gets a writer who doesn't inherently want to tear him down, who doesn't think a man like Tony Stark is everything he's been indoctrinated to hate and resent. It's possible, but it's unlikely right now a writer like that would even get work at Marvel. No specific storylines are really hurting him, even people still salty about Civil War are low in number.
Hank Pym's problems are just tied to both Marvel and fandom refusing to let go of one story from the early 80s. Again it's easily done, it's just nobody wants to, and writers who want to do anything else are few in number.
Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank, but one of those stories made the X-Men fanbase hate her, and that's a huge insane fanbase. The MCU considered those stories so important and character-defining that it adapted them, so she's probably got it worse than Hank, even before you add in Marvel being full of people who hate the Wanda/Vision pairing, or how even Marvel still can't see past "Magneto's mutant daughter" even ten years after it stopped being canon, or all the people on Twitter and Tumblr who don't actually read comics but are very vocally insisting on changing what she looks like and wanting to change her religion.
She-Hulk and Carol have also got it really bad in the way they're just not even the same characters anymore, they've been hollowed out and replaced by something new wearing their names.
There's also Vision, just for the lasting scale of what John Byrne did to him, completely dehumanizing him and training a generation of readers to dislike him and see his marriage to Wanda as something wrong, so effectively that a lot of them are still around and still triggered and disgusted by him.
1 month ago
Anonymous
To be honest every time I see She-Hulk I do get the ick.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank, but one of those stories made the X-Men fanbase hate her, and that's a huge insane fanbase. The MCU considered those stories so important and character-defining that it adapted them, so she's probably got it worse than Hank, even before you add in Marvel being full of people who hate the Wanda/Vision pairing, or how even Marvel still can't see past "Magneto's mutant daughter" even ten years after it stopped being canon, or all the people on Twitter and Tumblr who don't actually read comics but are very vocally insisting on changing what she looks like and wanting to change her religion.
There was a theory a while back that the people still blaming Wanda for destroying the X-Men are probably company shills trying to take the heat off Marvel. I'm starting to believe that some are, especially in light of Slott rumored to have at least one alt account on CBR and also posting on Cinemaphile. No way is he the only one who does that.
An actual X-Men fan would get that this is all on Quesada and Bendis (and possibly any higher-up either approving or ordering Quesada to go ahead with it)
Also anyone shitting on Wanda while praising Bendis' run on X-Men would definitely be a shill but I don't remember if there was anyone like that on here.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Most of OG got fricked beyond repair
At this point, might as well replace the core members of the group with a bunch of OCs and obscure characters.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Am I wrong for liking the 90s Avengers Jackets?
1 month ago
Anonymous
Eh. It's probably not the worst design at this point
1 month ago
Anonymous
>the moment he gets a writer who doesn't inherently want to tear him down
Funny thing is that everyone gets stuck on his arms days when he left that behind a long time ago. Everyone also seems pretty ignorant that Stark Industries is considered the best company to work for (whenever Tony owns it) and pays his people from the execs to the janitors very well with lots of perks.
>Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank
Wanda just seems to be a plot device now whenever they need some 'BIG' event they rotate between her, Phoenix and Franklin Richards.
>She-Hulk and Carol have also got it really bad
Seconded
>There's also Vision
I'm a passive Brynegay but what he did to Vision was the most petulant thing in his career, which is saying something. It's also a bit hypocritical since he also brought back Jim Hammond/OG Human Torch and had no problem with him having emotions and relationships.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Who would be a good writer for Carol?
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's not the same level of character assassination as those but it's always annoying to see Thor job to random Avengers villains when he often takes on more powerful enemies in his solo comics. The non-moronic writers know you can just say he's busy on Asgard and not use him
1 month ago
Anonymous
She-Hulk got kicked-out of the Avenger's Mansion for having a party every night & making it her own frickpad. >Inb4: What's wrong with that!?!
1 month ago
Anonymous
There's nothing wrong with that.
1 month ago
Anonymous
What's not wrong with it then?
It's diffidently wrong throwing a party at a place that isn't yours.
Plus it's all contrived setup so Slott can write his shitty Ally McBeal run.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Avengers Mansion isn't Playboy Mansion. Besides, Jen had own pad for that.
1 month ago
Anonymous
One of the most fricked-up things is that Slott got mad at the bed he made.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Tony is fine, he got ruined, killed off, and replaced by a teen version of himself and bounced back long before Civil War. He’s bulletproof.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Him sleeping with Jen while he was her boss was skeevy. Then again Jen was sleeping with all her co-workers.
Story goes that Brevoort originally demanded Julia gett her throat slit just like the original Madam Web in grim hunt and Arana would have given some mealy mouth bullshit speech about how killing Kraven, his psycho wife and psycho daughter (the later two who actually killed Mattie and Web and would have been the one to kill Julia too while Kraven fought Spidey) wouldn't bring them back and then steal Julia's costume from her corpse. But Joe Kelly intervened and saved Julia by making her the new Madam Web as well as demanding Kraven kill his psycho murderer wife, on the grounds that unlike Brevoort, Kelly felt she needed to die for all of the murders she committed in Brand New Day up to that point.
I really wish I got the second omnibus earlier. It's getting reprinted so whatever, I can wait but I had the chance to snag it for a decent price and passed it up in favor of not getting kicked out of my apartment.
>ordered the omnibus shortly after making this thread >gets dispatched in record time >meant to arrive today >the delivery was actually attempted at like 8:30 in the morning and Parcelforce only alerted me about it half an hour beforehand (but I was asleep anyways) >now have to walk a mile to the post office just to pick up the parcel and then lug the omnibus back
I hate the post sometimes
For the last couple years I've been doing a complete avengers readthrough with my buddy.
We currently just finished Avengers arena and are about to start Uncanny Avengers and the Hickman Avengers era.
Some thoughts:
For me, the best Avengers run is by far Roger Stern's run, I really loved mostly everything he did and it sucks hard how Marvel screwed him.
Busiek's run is definitely the second best run, and has what I think is the best Avengers story in it featuring their best villain: Ultron Unlimited.
I do think some of Busiek's plots weren't as interesting, like the Triune Understanding shit that went on way too long and had a very lame ending, but he was really good at the character interactions. (Some of the best avengers issues are always the roster deciding issues or issues where they're just hanging out in the mansion)
As far as the worst Avengers stuff, the start of Bendis' run and the ending are really terrible, as are some of obvious heroes reborn bullshit. But I was absolutely floored about how bad the Crossing was. What an absolutely abysmal story that just shits on everything.
And while it's not bad, I do think the original kree/skrull war is massively overrated. I had always heard it being a classic story and I was very disappointed with it, especially the ending with Rick Jones. I thought Operation Galactic Storm was a better cosmic level avengers story in pretty much every way, and I really liked how it had consequences and set up fractures in the team that basically paved the way to Civil War.
And as far as best Avengers members go, I think Vision is a standout as one of the most important members of the team, and I also think Hank is extremely important, especially with his involvement with Ultron. I really love Monica too, and think she should be on the team more often. Would've really loved to see what Stern did with her if he was on the book longer.
And as for worst Avenger, it's hands down Dr. Druid. What a dickhole.
>And while it's not bad, I do think the original kree/skrull war is massively overrated. I had always heard it being a classic story and I was very disappointed with it, especially the ending with Rick Jones.
IIRC the Kree-Skrull War was fricked over by Neal Adams not staying around for as long as he originally planned to
Agreed on Roger Stern's Avengers run being the highlight. It took the best stuff from Lee/Kirby, Thomas, etc and condensed it into concentrated form. No fluff, no fat, and sincere.
He did the same exact thing over on Amazong Spider-Man...and Marvel just fricked him over whenever they got the chance.
I also really appreciate what Stern did for Janet. For a long time she was this ditzy character that didn't really do much but after Stern did the incredible stuff with her and Hank in the wake of the slap, and then made her team leader, she grew so much as a character.
On the flipside, I was horrified to see what Bendis did with her. I never want that man writing her ever again
Don't remind me, modern hacks like Bendis write comics like trashy soap operas. No love for the material or what other writers had established, just trying to bamboozle the audience with "crash TV" style mayhem and crass humor.
You just gotta love when Marvel fricks over their best writers
There was something in the water at Marvel offices in the late 80's/early 90's. The destruction of deadlines and the neutering of editorial oversight in the name of creativity were the first dominos to fall. Catering to trendy artists over the writers was a dead end, and tossing out the "house style" just led to wild swings in talent.
Guys like Stern and Claremont were tossed aside. Other talents from Gerber to Byrne to Miller were lured away by indy comics. All over the course of a few years... then the artists all left for Image.
Nice
[...]
Isn't Druid considered the worst Avenger by EVERYONE?
>Loves Stern's run >Hates Dr. Druid
You can hate Druid for how he was written when Stern got kicked, but not before. Druid was actually a good utility character in that he could do mystic stuff that propelled the plot but was never a danger of being overpowered like Dr. Strange. Stern realized that being weaker than Strange made him more versatile on teams as evidenced by his short lived Marvel Universe series where he featured prominently.
I honestly think Druid is more shit on by other writers than Hank.
Fully agreed.
Yeah it makes sense, but it's such a lazy thing to do. It's not creative, it's not an idea with thought put into it, it's just "let's get the biggest most popular toys and put them in it to make more money"
It's cynical and lazy.
Busiek didn't put Firestar and Justice onto the avengers because they were popular, it's because he had a story he wanted to tell with them
I'm not even against putting spider-man or wolverine onto the avengers, but there should be good story reasons for it. Not just "it'll make us money and people love them"
And Bendis especially had a problem where it was like he was allergic to team ups for some reason. He made Storm join the New Avengers, and then she helped out for like 1 or 2 issues and I don't think she ever did anything again?
It's just really annoying
1 month ago
Anonymous
Just like not every character needs to be a headliner not every character needs to be an Avenger. Some characters just have a different vibe to them. Strange should always be around to add some extra magical insight but he should be largely focused on his own stuff. Same for people like Daredevil and Spider-man.
>He made Storm join the New Avengers, and then she helped out for like 1 or 2 issues and I don't think she ever did anything again?
Weirdly enough, Storm was an Avenger during the Marvel Adventures line and it was actually pretty great. Wolverine. And yeah Spidey was actually great here too despite what I just said but you know damn well 616 Avengers is bad for him. Marvel Adventures was just a whole different kind of beast.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Is that Janet as giant-woman?
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yep. She's great. That book was wonderful.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Bendis seemed to be inspired by Morrison's JLA where he put back the Big 7 together. But that works for the JLA, not the Avengers.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Bendis is like earth-3 version of Grant Morrison.
1 month ago
Anonymous
He was a good author for my teenage self. Lots of snark, catchy dialogue, drama. He was extremely good when writing teenagers, but that shit goes away with age.
1 month ago
Anonymous
No he wasn't. And all he knew was snark. And snark sucks. It's not the same thing as cleverness. He knew how to right ONE teenager and every character sounded like the same exact TV show.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Fully agreed.
Yeah it makes sense, but it's such a lazy thing to do. It's not creative, it's not an idea with thought put into it, it's just "let's get the biggest most popular toys and put them in it to make more money"
It's cynical and lazy.
Busiek didn't put Firestar and Justice onto the avengers because they were popular, it's because he had a story he wanted to tell with them
I'm not even against putting spider-man or wolverine onto the avengers, but there should be good story reasons for it. Not just "it'll make us money and people love them"
And Bendis especially had a problem where it was like he was allergic to team ups for some reason. He made Storm join the New Avengers, and then she helped out for like 1 or 2 issues and I don't think she ever did anything again?
It's just really annoying
It wasn't just Bendis, Millar was the one who at a meeting argued that the Avengers should be a-listers like the JLA. Bendis backed Millar on it, and Marvel gave Bendis got the job to take over Avengers to prove Millar's idea could work.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Busiek had no story for them. They got put on the team because Perez loved Firestar and wanted her on the team and Brevoort reluctantly let Justice tag along because they were a couple and both him and Busiek then realizing they could use them on the Avengers to shit on New Warriors and erase all of their character development in the series.
Also, Storm becoming an Avenger only lasted for a single arc because of Avengers Vs X-Men.
>Force Works
Good? No.
Entertaining? Possibly.
I consider it a perfect time capsule of the Marvel in the 90's and how they were trying to keep up with Image art style. It's an UGLY book and it's a miracle that Abnett & Lanning managed to prosper after it.
Force Works was neither good or entertaining. And it's only saving grace was that it didn't defile the WCA team, just took a huge steaming shit on them.
For the last couple years I've been doing a complete avengers readthrough with my buddy.
We currently just finished Avengers arena and are about to start Uncanny Avengers and the Hickman Avengers era.
Some thoughts:
For me, the best Avengers run is by far Roger Stern's run, I really loved mostly everything he did and it sucks hard how Marvel screwed him.
Busiek's run is definitely the second best run, and has what I think is the best Avengers story in it featuring their best villain: Ultron Unlimited.
I do think some of Busiek's plots weren't as interesting, like the Triune Understanding shit that went on way too long and had a very lame ending, but he was really good at the character interactions. (Some of the best avengers issues are always the roster deciding issues or issues where they're just hanging out in the mansion)
As far as the worst Avengers stuff, the start of Bendis' run and the ending are really terrible, as are some of obvious heroes reborn bullshit. But I was absolutely floored about how bad the Crossing was. What an absolutely abysmal story that just shits on everything.
And while it's not bad, I do think the original kree/skrull war is massively overrated. I had always heard it being a classic story and I was very disappointed with it, especially the ending with Rick Jones. I thought Operation Galactic Storm was a better cosmic level avengers story in pretty much every way, and I really liked how it had consequences and set up fractures in the team that basically paved the way to Civil War.
And as far as best Avengers members go, I think Vision is a standout as one of the most important members of the team, and I also think Hank is extremely important, especially with his involvement with Ultron. I really love Monica too, and think she should be on the team more often. Would've really loved to see what Stern did with her if he was on the book longer.
And as for worst Avenger, it's hands down Dr. Druid. What a dickhole.
Isn't Druid considered the worst Avenger by EVERYONE?
I mostly kept at it for Julia. Who is way better than Jessica and deserves to be an Avenger more.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Julia becoming Madam Web was and is so fricking shit
Frick Bendis
1 month ago
Anonymous
I refuse to believe anyone who says their favorite character is Jessica. Like okay Luke Cage I can sort of buy, he was cool with Iron Fist, but Jessica is just so vacuous.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Story goes that Brevoort originally demanded Julia gett her throat slit just like the original Madam Web in grim hunt and Arana would have given some mealy mouth bullshit speech about how killing Kraven, his psycho wife and psycho daughter (the later two who actually killed Mattie and Web and would have been the one to kill Julia too while Kraven fought Spidey) wouldn't bring them back and then steal Julia's costume from her corpse. But Joe Kelly intervened and saved Julia by making her the new Madam Web as well as demanding Kraven kill his psycho murderer wife, on the grounds that unlike Brevoort, Kelly felt she needed to die for all of the murders she committed in Brand New Day up to that point.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Christ
1 month ago
Anonymous
Spider-Man just keep getting the hits!!
1 month ago
Anonymous
Between that and the fact that it's public record that Slott outright REFUSED to write Grim Hunt because he was against Kraven being brought back, why the hell did they do it then? And were Wacker and Brevoort THAT fricking committed to the idea of Kraven's ex and his daughter being the new Joker in Spider-Man's life that they wanted her to kill Kaine, Julia, MW, Mattie, and Lizard's kid and then get away with it because "heroes don't fricking kill", even though they racked up a body count that would make Norman Osborn and Carnage recoil in horror and disgust?
1 month ago
Anonymous
Part of the reason for the Grim Hunt storyline was Spider-Man editorial having decided there were too many Spider- characters running around and that it was time to cull them so they had just Spider-Man, plus Arana as the new Spider-Girl and Julia as the new Madame Web. There was a similar move in the Hulk book not long afterwards to de-power most of the Hulks except Bruce and Jen for similar reasons. Nobody's talked about why they were so committed to bringing Kraven back, but shortly after they did, they chose Slott to be the main Spider-Man writer, and he stayed on the book almost ten years, refusing to use Kraven or even acknowledge his return, with Kraven fighting Flash and Kaine instead.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>too many Spider- characters running around
Boy does that really feel like a kick to the teeth now.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah, it's weird how they've completely flipped on that position so quickly and so hard. If only the Madame Web movie had done better, enough that they'd just bring her back so Julia could get back to normal.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah, it's weird how they've completely flipped on that position so quickly and so hard. If only the Madame Web movie had done better, enough that they'd just bring her back so Julia could get back to normal.
But remember, there's also just really no place for Ben Reilly in the Spider-Landscape any more, which is why they had to turn him into a nonsensical, comedically edgy "villain" with a bullshit motivation that'd be solved in two minutes if anyone actually wanted to.
GOTTA MAKE WAY FOR MILES AND SPIDER-GWEN!
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah, it's weird how they've completely flipped on that position so quickly and so hard. If only the Madame Web movie had done better, enough that they'd just bring her back so Julia could get back to normal.
That's always how it goes. >There's too many of blank up until the current blank is my pet.
1 month ago
Anonymous
This one?
1 month ago
Anonymous
Or this one?
1 month ago
Anonymous
This one?
Both look good
1 month ago
Anonymous
I like the boots on this one
[...]
Both look good
Long hair is preferable
1 month ago
Anonymous
>I like the boots on this one
Wanda's modern costume is basically a modernization of that look. It doesn't look as good, but at least they kept those boots.
>Long hair is preferable
Her hair was much shorter when she first started wearing that costume, in Force Works they were making an effort to improve things, but too late to stop the Iron Man cartoon using the shorter hair look.
I consider it a perfect time capsule of the Marvel in the 90's and how they were trying to keep up with Image art style. It's an UGLY book and it's a miracle that Abnett & Lanning managed to prosper after it.
1 month ago
Anonymous
U.S. Agent was trying to avoid a lawsuit for plagiarism with the new suit
1 month ago
Anonymous
It's crazy to see their name on that book. then there was the whole mess with the crossing and, yeah this book was doomed from the start.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Between this and Extreme Justice, you can tell they(Marvel & DC) were desperate for that Image audience.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I would still gladly read either over most of the shit being printed today
1 month ago
Anonymous
A lot of Marvel's classic 60s heroes just weren't selling so well in the 90s, in part due to them putting all the popular artists on other books. Desperate times led to them trying to update heroes for the 90s, and getting artists who had similar styles to the popular artists. By the time of The Crossing their backs were against the wall and they knew the suits were planning to give their books to Wildstorm and Extreme to reboot.
It was what it was, they made it through, most things went back to normal, and virtually everything from this era, good or bad, has been ignored and forgotten ever since, only brought back if some later writer was seething enough that he wanted to retcon or kill it. The lack of lasting impact of anything from this era makes it baffling that after all the years of Bendis and Hickman and everything since where the Avengers have been the Avengers in name only and the way a lot of the team have been mistreated over the last 20 years, so many fans are still seething more about 1994-1996 instead. Even most Spider-Man fans have reached the point where no matter how much they hated the Clone Saga, they can admit things have been much worse for much longer now.
Even when they failed at it, these years and Heroes Reborn were the last time Marvel made any effort at all at selling these comics to kids and teens. The move towards aiming at older readers is how we ended up with the insane edge of 2000s Marvel, and so many things that made the edge of 90s extreme look harmless, but no matter how bad things get, some people can't stop reeeing about the 90s.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>The lack of lasting impact of anything from this era makes it baffling that after all the years of Bendis and Hickman and everything since where the Avengers have been the Avengers in name only and the way a lot of the team have been mistreated over the last 20 years, so many fans are still seething more about 1994-1996 instead
I think it's because like Clone Saga, it's an easy target. Bendis on the other hand still had his own fans and 00s Marvel fanboys keep insisting the 00s were great so for a while everyone highly regarded his run. It also didn't help that Marvel insisted people stop caring about consistency
I will say that I'd rather take Liefeld's Avengers over Bendis' Avengers
1 month ago
Anonymous
>I think it's because like Clone Saga, it's an easy target.
That's sort of the thing with the 90s. The parts that made it bad were VERY easy to point too. The issues with 2000s era were more, how to put it, they were more subdued compared to the loudness of the 90s. You can easily point at Liefelds art, all the crazy new armors and costumes and holo foil covers but to get into what's wrong with what came later required a bit more of a deep dive and at the time it didn't seem so obvious just because the giant red flag of the 90s was still in recent memory.
1 month ago
Anonymous
what version of citizen v is that?
1 month ago
Anonymous
The Vth
1 month ago
Anonymous
That's USAgent. Hid look changed a few times over the years.
One thing I think was always sort of neat is that sometimes when the Avengers where doing major line up changes it became a sort of media spectacle. Kind of like a sporting team draft.
>could we consider Hawkeye, THE Avenger?
There was a Wizard Avengers Special in the late 1990s that ran the numbers on how many issues everyone had been in, and up to that time I think it was Captain America, Hank Pym, Wanda and Vision who'd been in the most issues of Avengers titles, and that was before Hawkeye had been in Thunderbolts for long.
The numbers would probably look very different today, a lot of the people who were core members of the team haven't been there much in the last 20 years.
>could we consider Hawkeye, THE Avenger?
There was a Wizard Avengers Special in the late 1990s that ran the numbers on how many issues everyone had been in, and up to that time I think it was Captain America, Hank Pym, Wanda and Vision who'd been in the most issues of Avengers titles, and that was before Hawkeye had been in Thunderbolts for long.
The numbers would probably look very different today, a lot of the people who were core members of the team haven't been there much in the last 20 years.
The rule I have made up and hold the books too is that you aren't a true Avengers book unless you have at least one out of Hank Pym, Jan, Clint, Wanda, or Vision on it. Cap, Iron Man, and Thor all get their own books so often is why they aren't included. It's based on an anon's offhand comment about how the JLA only feels complete if J'onn is on there
There was recent revelations that Alex DeCampi was running a "whisper network" that was actively threatening talent in the comic industry to keep them silent about the bad shit the talentless woke Nazi shits were doing to blackball any writer not hyper woke and how said whisper network was actively protecting sexual predators who were woke.
Comicsgate gave up on the idea of trying to fix and reform the Big 2 very quickly and just degenerated into a way for people to shill their own new books, but way back when it started it was exposed that a lot of the writers and editors in the industry were networking through some secret forum or mailing list and internally policing themselves to keep out or remove anyone who was insufficiently woke, somehow it got memoryholed and nothing was done about it.
Every industry is like this, people making friends and telling stories is just natural. also we need to not derail a good Avengers thread with it
A lot of Marvel's classic 60s heroes just weren't selling so well in the 90s, in part due to them putting all the popular artists on other books. Desperate times led to them trying to update heroes for the 90s, and getting artists who had similar styles to the popular artists. By the time of The Crossing their backs were against the wall and they knew the suits were planning to give their books to Wildstorm and Extreme to reboot.
It was what it was, they made it through, most things went back to normal, and virtually everything from this era, good or bad, has been ignored and forgotten ever since, only brought back if some later writer was seething enough that he wanted to retcon or kill it. The lack of lasting impact of anything from this era makes it baffling that after all the years of Bendis and Hickman and everything since where the Avengers have been the Avengers in name only and the way a lot of the team have been mistreated over the last 20 years, so many fans are still seething more about 1994-1996 instead. Even most Spider-Man fans have reached the point where no matter how much they hated the Clone Saga, they can admit things have been much worse for much longer now.
Even when they failed at it, these years and Heroes Reborn were the last time Marvel made any effort at all at selling these comics to kids and teens. The move towards aiming at older readers is how we ended up with the insane edge of 2000s Marvel, and so many things that made the edge of 90s extreme look harmless, but no matter how bad things get, some people can't stop reeeing about the 90s.
Which is what makes the success of the Busiek throwback style Avengers book very funny
>Which is what makes the success of the Busiek throwback style Avengers book very funny
The book having a star artist can't be underestimated there. Heroes Reborn was what made Avengers a hit book for the first time in years, it stayed a hit with the Heroes Return relaunch, and it's when Perez leaves that the book started gradually losing sales.
Books like Avengers and FF were getting overtaken earlier in the 90s because all the top talent were on other books. All it took to get them selling again was Marvel putting some star artists on them. It would've worked with or without the specific throwback style of this run.
A lot of the "heroes return" era feels like it was a made to get back to traditionalism after all that extreme 90s business wore down. Sadly it would be a short lived return and we were disassembled far too quickly. But man can you imagine if the Busiek style remained for another 5-10 years. Not specifically him on the book but people like him. That'd have been swell.
Eh... Busiek kicked Clint down to work with the Thunderbolts because he didn't want to write Clint as a competent leader figure given his time on the WCA team and Brevoort suggesting putting him with the Thunderbolts rather than regressing him like Busiek wanted to do so to him being a hot head foil for Cap.
Damn, an decent Avengersvthread and I missed it, how depressing.
The Stern run is collected in Epics, although idk how many are currently out of print.
Only the second half of the Stern run is in Epic trades.
To read the first half, you have to track down about four different OOP trades, Trial of Yellowjacket, Absolute Vision v1 and 2, and Legacy of Thanos. And Trial of Yellowjacket is a $200+ trade if you can find it and will continue to go up in value since they will most definitely end up splitting the story up in the Epic line like they did with the Masterworks line
You could get the single issues in that Trial of Yellowjacket trade for less than the book. Mycomicshop had the whole set for $90, and frankly you can probably get them for less by being a pragmatic bin diver. I think with some patience you can probably find the while things for $40. This is often true for out of print trades.
interested in checking out the avengers comics as Im not really familar with them but I hear they can be really good comics. should I just read from the beginning with those collection things, or like start at some other point.
There's no reason really not to start from t he start. You don't have to but you get a lot more context and it's interesting to watch how things develop. But also it's super hero comics so you can start from wherever really.
Roger Stern is probably one of my favorite writers, not just for Avengers but kind of in general. easily my favorite Spidey writer. I feel like he just sort of GETS IT when he does a super hero book and he's very much the kind of professional writer I talk about when I think writers need to focus more on being GOOD and consistently so then just dropping in to change the status quo or reinvent something that's not broken. Not that he didn't make changes and invent characters but he always did it in a way that felt earned gradually over time. He always felt like he was in it for the long term even in his shorter bursts.
I never realized until later that Stern did so much for the Spider-Man mythos. Like his work has always gotten used for adaptations, one way or another.
>Battered Fanbase Syndrome is a real thing.
With a team book, a lot of fans may be there just for that one character they like. If it's a character who isn't guaranteed to always be around, it makes the Battered Fanbase thing even worse, because you're so happy just to see them that you'll probably tolerate anything.
Low-Key, Dane kinda been through it. His Uncle was a supercrook, all the bullshit with the Ebony blade, getting stuck in the Ultraverse, trying to get that Inhuman pussy from Crystal and now he's damn near nuts?
I always ignored the Avengers because I thought it was just the big name heroes, and I was more interested in their solo stories. But a couple months ago I started to warm up to them when I realized that pretty early it became more of a home for characters who didn't have their own books. This has been a nice thread to get some reassurance that they're worth reading, pretty much straight up to the 90s.
Yeah, the movies didn't really help the image much but the avengers was a very eclectic book for most of its life. You'd get characters you'd almost never hear of outside.
Marvel teams USED to just be basically "one or two moderately popular characters and a shitload of characters who are failing so we're trying to make them work". The Sinister Six are a classic example, only two of them were considered decent villains at the time and the rest were one off fodder and attempt #48927 to find a way to make Kraven actually fricking work and find a place for him as a villain.
That's not really accurate. There's this weird misconception, usually from people who never read Avengers, that the book was some kind of dumping ground for characters who'd failed as solo heroes, when most of the characters' whose 'home' book was Avengers had never been solo characters, they were either created to be Avengers in the first place, or in early examples like Hawkeye, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, they were reformed ex-villains from other books, though most of them were never particularly villainous in the first place, which is why it worked so well.
Hank Pym and the Wasp are the only ones who had their own failed series, but they were already Avengers before it ended anyway.
As for the Sinister Six, they were originally a one-off team up in the first Spider-Man annual. It was just a threat escalation so the biggest Spider-Man story yet published in page count was also the biggest in scale. They didn't become a recurring group until the 1990s, when Kraven was already dead and replaced by the second Hobgoblin. All of the individual members were considered perfectly viable and kept getting stories as solo villains as well as Sinister Six stories.
Oh. That's a nice ending for her. Also, total tangent but WHY Hawkeye was in the Spider-Man Arcade Game? I love Clint but holy hell that was a random choice.
Namor didn't seem that weird to me because I remembered seeing the 80s Spider-Man cartoon episode with him in it, I just figured Kingpin polluted the water again
Hawkeye though at the time I didn't see him team up with Spider-Man in anything (this was before I read more comics)
Claremont made Brian Captain Britain again post-House of M for the New Excalibur series and rebranded Austen's CB "Lionheart". She's still around and can't be near her kids, and showed up in New Excalibur to b***h at Brian for coming back as a hero and not bothering to remove her powers so she could reunite with her family.
Those were utter dogshit, with the Hank Pym and Hawkeye character assassination, the bullshit new Captain Britain who was a retred of Nurse Annie the rapist, and the fact that the second and final Austen arc was a thinly disguised Invaders spin-off story where the Avengers spent most of the arc dealing with Austen focusing almost exclusively on character assassinating Hank and Clint even moreso.
I just can't believe it was really all that long ago. All the shitty new stuff feels like it should be new not old enough to vote. I really can't process the fact that things have been this bad for this long. People are gonna grow up with this as their normal. An entire generation will grow up not knowing what a half decent comic book looks like.
Yeah. Arguably it's one of the last times the Avengers felt like the Avengers
>the Avengers last felt like the Avengers a quarter of a century ago
Grim
We had almost a decade of Bendis, then we had Hickman's giant, aimless mess that was just setup for Secret War. That's up until 2015. After that we had the ANAD stuff where they tried to just cram the team with legacy heroes and then Jason Aaron came along with his power level wank. So yes, it really has been almost 25 years
When you put it like that, it looks even grimmer
It was the end of honest, non-jokey Avengers. Bendis made it (initially) a team of quippy Joss Whedon-esque random popular heroes engaged in boring repetitive Netflix adaption tier plots. Hickman made the team bloated with like 30 fricking characters, did actual character plots with maybe 5 of them tops, had a ton of characters that only Existed and ultimately his entire run is just setup for another book.
That kind of honest, classic superhero writing Busiek did has never come back to Avengers. Ewing could do it but they will never give him the keys to the kingdom when they can have him turn out stuff with characters and teams nobody else wants to touch forever.
What I want at this point is just something with the same tone as the EMH cartoon.
Yeah, if there's anything that's really missing from comics in the past few decades it's that honest comic book sincerity.
>sincerity
It has been MIA in most american media since the 2000s.
>What I want at this point is just something with the same tone as the EMH cartoon.
From the way you talk about it, I'm assuming the Busiek/Perez stuff is pretty close to EMH, which is a good sign for me tbh
"Ultron, We would have words with thee. " Was a line taking right out of Busiek. If you like EMH you'll love Busiek. That's the vibe.
Yeah, that sounds very comfy
I'm probably gonna order it now. I've been hemming and hawing about getting the first omnibus ever since the reprint like a year and a half ago
but I'm also now tempted to buy up the three remaining Silver Age Avengers omnis I haven't yet gotten alongside it, for completion
>From the way you talk about it, I'm assuming the Busiek/Perez stuff is pretty close to EMH, which is a good sign for me tbh
EMH is based on several things but in terms of tone the show is definitely most akin to Busiek/perez which in turn is in the lineage of Lee/Kirby, Lee/Heck and Thomas/Buscema. Many of the plots and threats are adapted from comic book stories but they are all reworked into a different form, for example they do Secret Invasion but in a very different, much less convoluted way. If you enjoy the show then I think this comic will appeal to you.
>Ewing could do it but they will never give him the keys to the kingdom
It has more to do with Cebulski and Brevoort & co being closet chuds. They'll never give him the keys because he'll try doing what he immediately did with Guardians and make it insanely homosexual.
>chuds
Go back
>Ewing could do it
I was with you until this. Ewing is every bit as bad as every other modern writer.
I can't believe Bendis' first New Avengers run was so good.
How were the Geoff Johns and Chuck Austin stuff that follow immediately after Busiek?
Johns was fine
>Johns was fine
He ruined She-Hulk.
Dan Slott did way more damage.
Johns opened the door.
Slott just had her go on an 18 month bender after she wreck a whole town.
>johns did bad
>slott then just had to worse
>it was johns fault
& Rainbow is still running with John's mistakes.
NTA but the current run is fixing She-Hulk. All of Slott's mistakes and Johns. It is a breath of fresh air and great. Probably my favorite Marvel title being published now.
I don't believe you.
Plus all that shit is irreversible.
Dude, its even fixing Jack of Hearts of all fricking characters. I have no idea who Rowell is, but this run has been a delight.
The problem with a book that spends so much time trying to FIX shit is that it often runs out of time to do anything on it's own. Especially with how stories are written these days. We said the same thing when Spencer (I think it was Spencer) took over Spider-man after Slott and spent years and issue after issue fixing stuff resulting in a boring run before editorial smacked him down to get shit fricked again.
The book also make problems like how Jen groomed Jack into houseslave and sucking Mallory Book's hole.
Mallory Book shouldn't even exist but here we're are.
I loved Spencer's run. Sometimes a character needs a "fixing run". As long as She-Hulk doesn't get a Zeb Wells after it we'll be fine.
Oh, you're that homosexual that thinks that people can't change and move on from mistakes. KYS
>Oh, you're that homosexual that thinks that people can't change and move on from mistakes. KYS
Ironic
I'm sorry current Jen is still a loser.
>has a successful job
>is in a loving relationship
>has a bf that supports her
At this point I'm convinced you're Dan Slott, seething that all your bullshit is being fixed.
No storytimes.
NTA, but I storytime every new issue in my potpourri storytime. I'm behind because I'm doing a massive Marvel Event storytime right now.
>I'm doing a massive Marvel Event storytime right now.
That can't be good for your head.
Johns only does a handful stories and they're okay imo. He has not yet developed his DC foibles fully at this point.
Austen is garbage. Just pure garbage. Everyone slams Bendis but Austen is the first to start trying to make Avengers "mature" by including random sex scenes and swearing and more random violence. It's not as bad as his X-Men but apparently Austen was fired before he could write Disassembled and Bendis was given his script outline to work with.
Johns was fine. He was the one who wrote Janet and Hank boxing their clit and prostate.
Johns was fricking awful. The other year I storytimed every comic he ever wrote on Cinemaphile. It and Teen Titans were hands down his worst work.
But Three Jokers and his filler arc on Superman a few years ago are his worst work
How’re you liking Mckays run currently?
i liked hickman secret illimuminati. beast was allowed to be relevant and for whatever flaws the ending hickman had, at least he put forth some fricking effort
bendis can fricking die though
New Avengers under Bendis was good.
But yes, the "true" Avengers haven't returned since Disassembled, basically. Much like Thanos won and killed the MCU, Wanda won and killed the Avengers, albeit without motive or reasonable explanation. At least she took away some of the x-wank, too.
>New Avengers under Bendis was good.
I liked it, at least the early run.
I hate it his dialogue.
It tries to ape "whendonspeak" but it fails all the time.
Agreed... except I'd go a step further and state that it is the "swan song" of the series.
If you haven't read ANY Avengers issues I might argue that it's not the place to start reading because it's impact will be severely diminished. It's essentially a love letter to the Avengers, an encapsulation of everything that made the series so great over the years. You can absolutely go in blind and enjoy it but it is even more rewarding for long time fans.
The material that immediately follows isn't terrible but it ends abruptly and insultingly at that. Bendis and all other runs were absolute shit, don't believe any of the praise you see for it.
If you want to start reading Avengers just start at the beginning... it's all good. The Kooky Quartet, Thomas' run, Englehart, Michelinie, Stern, etc.
Did Busiek ever make any bad comics? I thought the Autumnlands was wasted potential but aside from that?
Trinity and maybe some of his other DC work is seen as bad/mid
i also like the Geoff Johns run
Why?
All of Black Panther's dialogue is cringe as frick.
Same, it was a solid run, and he was giving us some Wanda/Vision, the one thing this run completely dropped the ball on. Possibly Brevoort's fault, considering the years that followed.
>arguably
Inarguably. Johns' run is just a continuation of that and after that it's Bendis and the ruination of the Avengers.
I give Johns credit for trying to flesh out Henry Gyrich, nobody ever tried to make him more than the "I hates capes and muties!" government guy.
No Surrender felt like the Avengers, but that only lasted four months.
The post-Civil War New Avengers was my first Avengers comic. For a long time "Avengers" to me meant a group of street-level characters led by Luke Cage.
I'm so sorry for your poor upbringing.
>Civil War
God that was dire
God, just look at that art
I still fricking miss Pérez bros
Absolutely. It was one of the top runs of the entire series.
>Johns was fine
Did you guys actually read this shit!?!
They took eachother's virginity didn't they?
Cousins don't do stuff like this together.
Frankly, This page is fine, Jennifer had the "luck" of being born with Narcissistic parents.
And those are the people who will ruin any kid's mentality and psyche for everything and go on to say WHY ARENT YOU LIKE X's SON, IF ONLY I HAD THEM AS CHILDREN
Like Bruce with His Father, Jen had both of her parents being buttholes because of sheer narcissism and ego forced into her.
No she didn't.
She had loving parents her dad was a cop.
Cite sources.
I miss Scott Kolins' 2000s style. That is a nice fricking She-Hulk I tell ya hwat.
>She-Hulk "fan" is just a schmoe.
Imagine my shock.
I'm reading through it for the first time and I'm actually surprised at how dense the first issue feels even with it being double-sized
Ah the days when comics used to have shit happen.
This, Quesada ruined everything with "Write it for the Trade".
"Decompressed Storytelling"
You gotta love it... so decompressed now that nothing fricking happens! You can read all of the dialog in a single issue in under a minute most times.
>12 issues of what could have been told in 5.
>The Characters are just eating & b***hing about their non-problems.
OUR HEROES!
>decompressed as hell for the trades
>only single issue sales matter
It's so schizophrenic
Outside of things like Marvel Masterworks or the black and white Essentials, a story had to warrant getting reprinted as a trade, it had to be popular or important, or introduce a key character, or have early work by a star artist. Under Quesada and Jemas, Marvel just started reprinting EVERYTHING as trades a few months down the line, DC and the rest of the industry followed suit. IIRC it was Jemas, not Quesada who was to blame for telling writers to "plot for the trade" and specifically to write more like Bendis, at least in terms of plotting and pacing books.
Thanks to this we not only got decompressed storytelling where nothing happens for months, we also got readers "trade waiting", and lower-selling books getting cancelled a lot earlier than they otherwise might have been because of people not bothering to buy the single issues, and few titles having strong enough trade sales to make a difference. This played a part in the constant relaunches that have been killing long form storytelling in superhero comics.
I'm really of a split mind here. On the one hand I do think it's great that marvel and comics in general have made great strides to collect all their comics outside of the most famous stories. Really being able to collect a near complete run alone to say nothing of a series being printed in epic or omnibus format is like a dream at times. But at the same time we do have the problem were, like you said, new runs have to trade wait problem. And I don't think there's anything wrong with trade waiting in and of itself but the problem is actually there's no reason to want to collect the floppies with how the stories are written and with the overall increased cost of comics. Floppies have almost lost their value to a point where there's no reason NOT to trade wait. And I can't help but find that a bit sad as someone who's collected comics for years.
>I'm reading through it for the first time and I'm actually surprised at how dense the first issue feels even with it being double-sized
Busiek is a traditionalist in his writing. What Busiek does extremely well is let his artists carry the story without needing to have extended talking sequences or reaction shots inserted to drag it out. Look at these two panels from issue 4. Perez tells a story in just these pictures, regardless of what is actually being said. You don't even need to know that Black Knight had a romance with Crystal while she and Quicksilver were separated to understand that Dane still has it down bad for that Inhumanussy. And it's not dwelled on because it's not relevant to the actual story. But it's there, it enhances the later read-throughs and it gives the universe a feeling that things are going on everywhere, not just inside the room the current team is currently in.
These comics have life. There's always small moments like some of them having food or hanging out but it never becomes extended and bloated to the point where the actual super-stuff becomes a few pages of the issue. I understand the need for soap elements in superhero comics but you can do it and maintain an energy, and many current writers don't want or are unable to do that.
There is no sense of adventure in modern comics it might as well just be Love & Rockets or Seinfeld.
Has Busiek made a breakdown/study on how the issues were made
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say the run rewards longtime fans while still being incredibly accessible to new fans.
Busiek and Perez are a match made in heaven. Two pros at the top of their craft, and possessing a deep love for the material they're working with. They're not buying time before Hollywood comes calling, they're not slumming it, they genuinely love comic books and it shows.
God yes. You can go into this book forever,
If you're still not convinced then i'm going to say that Kang Dynasty, the massive arc that ends this run is one of the coolest Avengers epics of all time. It takes the team across the world, into space as they try to stop Kang from finally taking the world down in open combat. At the same time you get like four other long-running subplots culminating in one giant arc. It's just fantastic stuff with great character moments for everyone. And Busiek/Perez still has times to use non-regular characters, utilizing them in a great way for the plot. It's as the other anon said, this could be the final Avengers story if you never want to read another run.
Just to take one tiny example, during Kang Dynasty Busiek and Perez successor Ivan Reis gives us this page of Firebird, a devout Christian superheroine giving Thor her views on his goodhood and attitude towards mortals. And it's just great, you know? Busiek knows the characters so well he can even bring something out of a character like Firebird that nobody else uses or even knows anything about. Yet in Kang Dynasty she is a guest-star and she fills several important roles in the arc. I just fricking love this attention to the world and the characters, that sense that this is a real world that we're just looking into through this comic.
I get the basic idea but as much as I love Busiek I feel like this is not the fricking character to have someone be saying this to, and given Marvel's canon having any kind of Abrahamic monotheist say this rings really, really fricking hollow given the canonical state of YHVH and the Abrahamic faiths.
It reads better in proper context. Pages like this are often taken out of context to make it seem worse than it is. There's been a few instances where Thor was on the opposite side of the conversation and it came off just as bad.
Goddamnit, I'm convinced already
I'll order it now
Then I just need to get the second volume when it comes out
And then consider whether to get those three Silver Age Avengers omnis I need all at the same time just so I have them
And then wait for Marvel to get around to start collecting the Roger Stern Avengers in omnibus form which will obviously take fricking forever because, my god, they're only just now putting Gruenwald's Cap in its first omnibus and that's fricking seminal
Don't forgot all the adjacent solo books. Waid Cap is in DIRE need of a reprint. You can get the epic collection and the returns trades for cheap still but I'm an omnibus prostitute.
Marvel's been getting more frequent with their reprints lately, so I'm sure it'll come along soon-ish. One of the upsides of the omnibus market exploding in popularity post-covid
Of course, one of the downsides is that it means they're putting out dozens every year which makes it that much more costly to grab the ones you want before they go out of stock/FOMO gets to you
I've been pretty good about restraining myself to stuff I don't want or need. It also helps that a lot of the stuff I wanted to collect is in epic format.
>I've been pretty good about restraining myself to stuff I don't want or need.
I've been good with that too recently. It helps that by now, I've got most all the extant omnibuses that I really want.
But I'm also a big Silver Age gay, hence why I'm worried about currently being tempted to grab Avengers Vol 3-5 alongside this
I'm not much of an Epic fan tbh.
Omnibuses are more expensive and often more unwieldy, but they collect more of a run in one go than just a standard Epic. I figure that's much more worth it.
Better to get the Silver Age omnibus editions now... I'm sure they'll announce the next volume sooner than later. One step closer to Stern's tenure.
>Better to get the Silver Age omnibus editions now...
Get thee behind me FOMOSatan
Blessed
Dan Jurgens Thor is great too, if not an all-time classic. And Busiek/Stern Iron Man is also a banger, of course.
Also this era is what led to Carol Danvers ending up in the MCu because it was Busiek and Perez who dragged the character back to earth, kicking and screaming. She had been Binary and entirely irrelevant for well over 15 years and this point and considered an extremely minor character. Busiek/Perez made her an earth hero again, put her back in her iconic black and gold outfit and her role in this comic led to her Brian Reed solo and her being a "core" Avenger for years which eventually led to Captain Marvel after AvX. But it all starts here.
>Also this era is what led to Carol Danvers ending up in the MCu
I thought people were shilling this run, not holding it to account for it's crimes.
Damn, an decent Avengersvthread and I missed it, how depressing.
The Stern run is collected in Epics, although idk how many are currently out of print.
Yeah you really need to get those sooner rather than later. Epic is fast becoming my favorite format but man some of those after market prices get up there.
Word. And I must correct myself, the first part of Stern's run was collected in proto-Epic collections: The Trial of Yellowjacket and Absolute Vision Book 1 & 2. They're the same size as Epics and same retail price point but were printed earlier, '12-'14, and not branded as Epics.
Totally worth it though, Stern's run is the blueprint for Busiek. Avengers Forever, which they collaborated on, is my favorite comic.
I've been trying to fill in gaps with various other trades. I got a few of those black cover hardbacks. I forget if they have a line name but they made a lot of the,.
Didn't Genosha's destruction happen at the same time as Kang dynasty? I known X-men fans continuously b***h about the Avengers not being there.
Yes, it did. Somehow Morrison making a decision to leave other Marvel heroes out of his X-Men stories got twisted by later writers and weaponized into something for the X-Men to resent the Avengers for. It's such an abuse of the shared universe that's been going on for so long that I don't know how to even stop it.
No, it happens after Kang Dynasty as there was a time skip of about one year after the Twelve/Ages of Apocalypse/Powerless and the start of Claremont's second run and then another vague timeskip after Claremont's second run ends/Lobdell's filler run and the start of the Casey/Morrison run.
Anon, the stories were being published at the same time. That's all that really matters. Nobody actually working on the books actually tried to figure out the specific details of the various X-Men time skips and define exactly where the heroes from other books were and what they were doing at any specific time. Morrison just made a choice not to have any other heroes show up in his run, rather than have a lot of guest stars, only for later writers to turn this into something to hold a grudge against the Avengers for. They're idiots writing stupid stories and nobody should be making excuses for them.
You know, this may be a bad idea, but what if Kang was the reason why Genosha gets obliterated during Kang Dynasty?
No wonder that JLA/Avengers felt so.....fun.
Absolutely! Nobody wanted JLA/Avengers to happen more than George Perez. Marvel and DC got cold feet on the idea over and over again but Perez got so excited that he basically drew the first issue decades before it happened. It was sheer glee over the prospect of drawing two properties that he had come up with, that enthusiasm was infectious. Every panel of that series was packed with Pérez just geeking out.
I loved how he had his Crossgen contract structured that he could go do JLA/Avengers if it ever happened.
It takes a hell of an artist to get every member of both teams up to that point on a cover
Man he liked Firebird.
the redesign was kinda bad though
I will fight you with a brick
this is one is cool, i'm talking about the design of firestar during the george perez and busiek run
I was always partial to her second New Warriors outfit
the mask should've been red or black instead of yellow
That’s easily her best costume. The jacket with the flaming star on the back is a nice touch
This one is fine too. The only costume of hers I don’t like is the original.
Love her shades
Even if you dislike this Firestar costume, her modern one is far worse.
It's really only the mask I have any issue with.
>the mask
is not even a mask i think at the time her face looked like that
i don't dislike it, but she has looked better, also it works with george perez style
Perez was cursed to design good costumes that no one else could draw well
scarlet witch didn't had panties or anything covering her up? interesting
It's one of those heroine costumes designed to tease readers with the idea that she's not wearing anything underneath, but it's like the way cosplayers made this costume, the panties are stitched into the front and back of the belt, there was at least one time they actually showed she was covered under the skirt, but it was in another book IIRC.
Isn't that the issue they teamed up with Spider-Man to save Juggernaut?
That would be an awesome poster. I'd get it framed.
>Now that DC and Marvel are both owned by one of the 5 media megacorps, shit like this will never happen again
It's not fair
Doesn't help that frick up Joe Q had a hand in stopping DC/Marvel crossovers after JLA/Avengers.
Don't do it OP!
The Busiek/Perez issues were my first taste of Avengers as a kid. I was growing tired of X-Men and thought I'd check out something new... hooked for life! Don't follow my path of addiction, save yourself.
I had actually checked out of comics at the time because of Onslaught and the whole Heroes Reborn thing. I do wish I stuck around because between Thunderbolts and the Heroes Return stuff marvel did a complete 180 in terms of quality and were just on fire for the next couple of years.
Thunderbolts is trash.
OG Thunderbolts fricking rules, it's when the revamp launch happened that they go to absolute shit.
remember that moronic Fightbolts business? That had no thunder. No bolts. and was about trailer trash metas in underground fight club? That sucked.
I love it how you can pinpoint when Marvel lost their fricking minds.
This was because they did the issue the weeks after 9/11 and were extremely raw because they all live and work in NYC. It's dumb but acceptable. There's so many worse examples
I still maintain Doom cried only because bin Ladden stole his idea to take down the Baxter Building.
thread stop tempting me into another failed attempt to storytime all the Avengers
>Lol I'm so glad I got my stuff out of my place of work I used as my own personal frickpad.
Just realized how weird my Avengers collection is gonna look with all Epics and then the Busiek/Perez in Omnibus. Oh well
My collections are all a big mix of omnis, epics and some TPBs or older HCs in order to fill the gaps.
>Omnibuses are more expensive and often more unwieldy, but they collect more of a run in one go than just a standard Epic
Omnibuses are generally the same as getting two epics and you can often find those for way cheaper. I like the bigger art in an omni but in terms of comfortable reading epics are actually starting to become my preferred format.
I believe in Henry Pym
>helps cure a young woman's cancer
why does Marvel hate this man so?
I dunno but Busiek treated Hank aces.
The 00's treated characters with decades of history into one note jokes.
>why does Marvel hate this man so?
Post 2006 Marvel lacks respect and dignity, unfortunately even to this day.
Marvel pre2006 wasn't good either.
The X office has been especially immature
I was always an x-kid growing up as a kid but when I got older and started reading Avengers it was just astounding how much better he was there. It's honestly actually amazing looking back how much mutants used to be spread out.
>The X office has been especially immature
There is no greater death sentence for an independent character than being dragged into X-Men garbage.
>The X office has been especially immature
What you don't like non-mutants showing up in their books just so they can act like Hitler?
By god, that has got to frighten some children
It got gay enough to frighten everyone.
This was also around the time everyone in mutant land was being super mopey about the legacy virus.
This page features one character who got ruined by literally every writer under the sun for the last 10 years and one woman who got dragged into Krakoa only to get dunked in shit and then called out for smelling bad. Never stop being classy, marvel
I can't even acknowledge modern comics these days. They're just.... spiteful.
Beast was always a ball of laughs with the Avengers... and a bitter pill with the X-Men. One of the best periods at Marvel was when the original team went their separate way. Beast found a home in the Avengers, Angel and Ice Man were fun in The Defenders. Always hated X-Factor dragging them back to the Mutant plantation.
I didn’t enjoy it. It’s way too tect heavy-even by the standards of its time. The computer coloring and lettering commit every single offense of excess that was goin on at the time. Iron Man is a fricking eyesore.
It’s also really focused on fixing continuity. If that’s your thing, you’ll likely really enjoy it.
>40 issues on the Triune story
>Triathlete
>Silver Claw
Lol, no.
>It’s way too tect heavy-even by the standards of its time.
There's nothing wrong with lotsa words in a comic book.
Frankly I wish comics were wordier. Wordy comics is why I learned how to love to read in the first place.
There’s lotsa words and then there are too many. I know I’m in the minority on this run, but I just don’t get the hype.
I'm not sure if the inking is also part of the problem, but the coloring on this book and most other Marvel books of the time really hurt the artwork. It's been claimed that during the bankruptcy years Marvel were using the cheapest colorists they could get for most of their books during those years.
Funny, I think the colouring is one of the best parts
>The computer coloring and lettering commit every single offense of excess that was goin on at the time.
I don't really see this. Even going by the examples in this thread the coloring looks better than a lot of other comics since then that seem to have forgotten about coloring for readability
>Your 100th issue.
>You're boiled down to just your breasts.
Ah Marvel.
>>Your 100th issue.
If it's not in one go it doesn't count.
Based and Maydaypilled
Spider-Girl omnibus WHEN???
The fact that Mayday doesn't have a single one while Miles and Spider-Gwen have multiple legitimately makes me furious.
She got her first Epic recently, at least.
It's something I guess
They’ve been printing her entire original run as a full collection, though I couldn’t tell you how far they are with that
Spider-Girl Vol 1 was #17 on the most wanted Marvel Omnibus poll recently, so that's something
https://www.youtube.com/live/RgUKGaDWxqI?feature=shared&t=6466
The people demand it!
>The fact that Mayday doesn't have a single one while Miles and Spider-Gwen have multiple legitimately makes me furious.
The worst part is all the redditors who buy up those Miles and Gwen omnis like they're actually worth getting
>The worst part is all the redditors who buy up those Miles and Gwen omnis like they're actually worth getting
No they don't. The omnibus sub reddit is just a bunch of FOMO chasing shelfers. They don't like anything beyond mindless consumerism in an attempt to try and fit in. They keep asking for Krakoa.
I hate every single iteration of Beast.
>That random hotdog vendor down the corner.
>He's an Avenger.
Does that guy smell or something
That's D-man. He's homeless and smells bed, yes.
So this has come up many times in the past, but do you really suppose a super hero team can be too big. On the one hand it can be advantageous to pull a JLU and have a nice solid pool roster but on the other I can see where it could give little room to have character moments and growth. Especially if they're just gonna strongly focus on a handful of favorites as the primary pov heroes anyways. I dunno. Maybe it's a works on TV better kind of thing.
For the purpose of actually telling stories about a superhero team, there shouldn't really be more than 6-7 members at most. Any more than that and there's just not room to give everyone something to do, and you run into the problem a lot of modern X-books have, where you have hundreds of superpowered people all in one place and a lot of characters are basically being reduced to NPCs who show up when their powers are required.
Teams like the Avengers and Justice League work best with a core roster of characters you can expect to be on the team almost all of the time, mixed with a few others who are probably just going to be around for that one run, but offer something new that shakes up the group dynamic. If they just duplicate a power set or personality archetype an existing member of the team already covers, there's not really much point in adding them to the group.
I've got the first Complete Collection, and like it.. Is it worth upgrading to the omnibuses, or should I just keep going with the Complete Collections?
Can you even get the complete collections cheaply these days? It might be surprisingly cheaper just to get the omnibus.
>THINGS ARE BEING FIXED!
>TRUST ME!
>NO!, I'M NOT EXPLAINING!
I really wish I was an Avengers kid. Looking back I missed out on a lot of great stuff.
You didn't miss-out on much.
All you really need is the arcade game as a childhood experience.
Oh well I played that. For years I had no idea what a vision was an why he kept showing up places. Good times.
There you're set.
Because once you start reading the books... Oh boy there comes the disappointment.
I have read the books since you know. And generally I found them very enjoyable. It was really only much later till things took a nose dive.
You can say they... Disassembled?
No. No I would not say that at all. That does not work in this context. Frick you.
There's only like two OOP epic collections I'm missing from year the 5 classic omnis leave off that I need and I can call my Avengers collection from the start to Busiek complete. Not counting the Crossing of course. Because seriously frick the Crossing. Whose bright idea was that mess.
Reminder that The Crossing got an omnibus before the Stern run
I think it's a bit weird that The Gathering got one first too. I own it and I like it well enough but it's weird all the same
>Whose bright idea was that mess.
Virtually everything that happened in the Avengers and FF books from mid 1995 onwards can be explained by Marvel editorial having learned that the company execs were in negotiations to outsource those books to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. Everything from FF suddenly bringing back Reed and Doom, to Marvel hiring Mark Waid, one of DC's star writers, to work on Captain America, to everything that happened in The Crossing, including a drastic revamp of Iron Man, were all desperate rolls of the dice in the hope something would take off and get enough sales and attention to convince the execs to call off the Heroes Reborn negotiations.
You know, some anon had a theory that the original Tony Stark died during the Crossing.
>Black folk in here legit think characters reputations can be "fixed."
Come say hi to my friend Mary Magdalene over here.
I never liked the art. Everyone looked so weird in the early 2000s books.
does any modern artist draw women with curly/wavy hair? whenever i think of wanda its always the curly hair variant, but noone draws her with curls anymore
Nobody else put in the time and effort Perez did into drawing heroines with curly hair, as soon as he was off Avengers the artists who followed started changing Wanda's hair.
Wanda is so beautiful. It's a genuine wonder that many of the other female Avengers didn't off themselves due to constantly being brutally mogged by her.
>Wanda is so beautiful.
The most beautiful.
>It's a genuine wonder that many of the other female Avengers didn't off themselves due to constantly being brutally mogged by her.
>Jan, Natasha and Carol spending a lot of time and money on their outfits, hair and beauty products
>Wanda just literally wakes up looking perfect and doesn't even have to try
>constant seething behind her back
How can one witch be so perfect?
It's a kind of magic.
>I...i dont see any panties on this costume
Did Busiek Wanda went commando?
It's maaaaaaaaaaaaagic
So mad twitter people get mad at her skin color and not her straight hair. I actually don’t care but it’s funny
>Fire all your inhouse artists.
>Hire a bunch of random Mexicans.
Last time Avengers was worth reading. As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it is effectively the "real" ending of the series.
I can name every single character in this picture.
I don't know if that's a good or bad thing
Not really, no.
>Is the Busiek/Perez Avengers run worth reading?
yes, is probably the best Avengers run even though the bar isn't that high
99/00 was so bright & hopeful, But then everybody had to turn into a degenerate butthole in the span of 5 years.
It's crazy right? Like they were doing crazy well in making up for the past half decade or so and then in the span of 3 years from 2000 on they completely shit over all that good will. The comic industry has never recovered from Bendis.
I throw Quesada & Slott into there as well.
Hell you can say as soon as Gen-X got into power we were fricked.
Quesada's a Boomer, and some around this time were also Boomers (Waid, Morrison, Gaiman, Loeb). Surprisingly Ron Zimmerman was a Boomer.
But IIRC most writers at this time were Gen X. Slott, Bendis, Kevin Smith, Millar, Ellis, Ennis, Simone, Tieri, Way, Brubaker, Fraction, Guggenheim, Aaron, Hickman, are all Gen X.
>Kevin Smith
9/11 fried their brains
Are you me?
>Nobody mentions Avengers Forever
I know it's continuity heavy as frick but come on; it's the ultimate classic Avengers story, you can tell that the people doing the final battle in Endgame looked at Pacheco's art and said: "it has to look like this"
Somebody needs to write a book how Marvel lost their minds in the 00's.
Every other story was about rape or something god awful that shouldn't be in a children's book.
It feels like the entire industry was taken over by people who hate the industry
It was Gen-X hubris.
They live on "This isn't your Daddy's Comics!"
Speaking of, I often hear there's a lot of crazy shit going on behind the scenes when people talk about old creatives and editorial but I often wonder how this information ever came to light, are there books about the behind the scenes business?
I'm not saying Marvel was perfect, shit got thru the cracks (See Avenger #200) but for some reason, I think it's a lack respect for the characters, Everything went in overdrive with the scandals.
I think you're right. Back in the day there'd occasionally be a trainwreck story where nobody really knew how it even happened, and sometimes that autist with a weird hateboner for a character would be allowed to write that character, but generally the people working for Marvel and DC tended to be fans, and tended to have a basic level of respect for the characters, and intent to entertain the fans.
The people Quesada and Jemas were bringing into Marvel in the 2000s explicitly weren't fans, a lot of them barely keeping their contempt in check for the characters, the past stories, and the fans. It was just a job for them, and their idea of having fun with that job was pushing the envelope as far as they could. 90s Marvel had Ellis as the one guy who was like that, but suddenly the company was full of people with the same disdain for the books and characters they were working on.
The further into this century we get, the less willing anyone in the industry is to reveal behind the scenes stories that might make anyone other than themselves look bad, or dish the dirt on what went down with controversial stories, events and firings. The industry and the talent pool have gotten so small and insular that nobody wants to risk saying something that could get them blacklisted, nobody's going to talk for years until their career is done and they don't care anymore.
>I think you're right. Back in the day there'd occasionally be a trainwreck story where nobody really knew how it even happened,
Another thing to remember is that during those days if there was a dud of an issue it would often just be one or two comics. No line is without it's flubs you can probably find some real stinkers even in the works of the greats. But classic comic book story telling meant we got to move on quickly to a new issue and a new adventure. Now a book will draw it's story out for nearly half a year. Which is honestly kind of a long time in comic books. It might not sound like it but it is and if you're not buying into the half year story it's gonna get easier and easier to buy out of comics entirely.
>The further into this century we get, the less willing anyone in the industry is to reveal behind the scenes stories that might make anyone other than themselves look bad, or dish the dirt on what went down with controversial stories, events and firings. The industry and the talent pool have gotten so small and insular that nobody wants to risk saying something that could get them blacklisted, nobody's going to talk for years until their career is done and they don't care anymore.
I think it's less that and more to do with Disney owning Marvel. That said I think if problems keep piling up internally inevitably someone will talk.
I don't think it is that, because it's happened industry-wide, not just with Marvel. Nobody's talking about what went on behind the scenes anymore, even with things that were absolute disasters, and there aren't even public feuds between creative talent who just don't like each other anymore, only when someone's getting cancelled for something they did 20 years ago and everyone gangs up on them.
I still think it's partly because of the Disney buyout (and WB taking more of an interest in DC) but maybe you're right, maybe there is some kind of clique trying to clamp down on things while also attacking their perceived threats so everyone stays quiet about it. That said I don't believe they have the same power as they used to years ago.
On the DC side, you can usually blame Didio for all the problems like Identity Crisis, Countdown, New 52, Heroes in Crisis, 5G/Future State, Bendis is Coming, etc until AT&T fired him and most of the Harras adajcent idiots at editorial.
There was recent revelations that Alex DeCampi was running a "whisper network" that was actively threatening talent in the comic industry to keep them silent about the bad shit the talentless woke Nazi shits were doing to blackball any writer not hyper woke and how said whisper network was actively protecting sexual predators who were woke.
Comicsgate gave up on the idea of trying to fix and reform the Big 2 very quickly and just degenerated into a way for people to shill their own new books, but way back when it started it was exposed that a lot of the writers and editors in the industry were networking through some secret forum or mailing list and internally policing themselves to keep out or remove anyone who was insufficiently woke, somehow it got memoryholed and nothing was done about it.
Like
said fanzines and creators coming forward at cons, letter pages, etc, etc etc.
The real downturn is when Shooter was forced out of Marvel, letting the inmates run the asylum essentially, that is the start of everything that ends up going wrong over the next decade, but just as the pull up finally started a whole bunch of frickers took control who came up through the post-Shooter era of comics who shot the industry dead right as it was about to maybe recover. British invasion and the rise of the "Rockstar Comic Writer" and a series of monkey see, monkey do copies of deconstructions, canon and continuity being abandoned for "Whatever the writer/new editors feel like they wanna do", slipping deadlines and reduced output because of line splintering, event culture and pumping the speculator market, all start there because it's largely all shit Shooter wouldn't let them do at Marvel and Marvel was the market leader at the time so when they started on it everyone else followed.
Then as mentioned here
Gen-X more or less grew up on that shit and they got enabled by the handful of salty as frick boomers like Byrne and so on in the industry who made Shooter and everything he ever touched out to be the Devil until they were the ones writing the books and calling the shots and that combined with the historical context ruined everything. We've reached the point where the "Dark Age" of the 90's is a golden paradise compared to the modern day.
The rock star comic writer is kind of a bizarre paradox. On the one hand writers and artists SHOULD be giving more credit and fame for their work. Especially ones who turn out banger runs. But at the same time a lot of these rock stars were drop in upstarts who did an arc or two and then bounced on a high note for their fame and not the resilient workhorses who put years into the brand and making it sustainable. Yeah Claremont got some mad cred for his run but it didn't always translate to the same kind of cash those Invasion guys were chasing. Deconstructions and character redefining is fine here and there but nobody seems to really be interested in making runs that actually build and hold up t he brand as a foundation anymore. There's no foundation. For as much as people say everything needs to change the status quo there needs to be an actual status quo to change which isn't something we feel like we've had in a while. And this is of course not getting into the general unprofessional surrounding the creatives. Like you said. Famous missed deadlines and the like. It's swell to ride the hype train but you need to actually put your damn books out.
The problem was it sold and that's a success and it made fans. But there was a cost.
Fan magazines, old interviews, stories from cons, official magazines, books about comics (The Great Comic Book Heroes, Sternako's History of Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story) I'm sure there are real sites with bibliographies and everything as well.
It does become harder to find stories and what not from stuff that's more recent just because more people are still around and stuff like that. And stuff that was on the internet that's just disappeared because it's old internet falling apart.
>But there was a cost.
My respect & Sanity.
I fricking Hate most Marvel characters now.
I wish nothing but the worst on Spider-Man & She-Hulk.
I can never bring myself to hate characters I used to love. But I can't look at what's happening now and think it's even the same person. I just accept my era as my own universe and anything else might as well not exist as far as I still keep up.
Thankfully you're more sane than I.
My autistic brain can't tell these are fictional people.
Sometimes you just need to take a break. When you're an off/on fan it kind helps train your brain to recognize your era and be content with that. Though that said even with filling in the blanks I still don't know how we reached this point. It really does feel like night and day. Alternate realities feel like a more natural continuation than some of this shit.
I am truly baffled how people can invest in these characters anymore.
They must be Saints or have very short memories.
I'll see if I can't find those. Honestly I never expected Marvel Age itself to have anything unflattering in it.
It's the same thing as when "Comics" became mainstream for the movies.
very funny that the day after this discussion that stuff about Fiege demanding the Ms Marvel death/turned into a mutant breaks
The whole fan outrage over the (temporary) death of Kamala that they were so afraid of turned out to be nothing because she's just not as popular as they want her to be. Most people didn't care about her death, and now they're learning with her what 80s Marvel learned with Cloak and Dagger and 90s Marvel learned with Namor; making a character a mutant, or putting the word "mutant" in a book's title does not mean it's going to sell like X-Men. Especially not in an age when the actual X-Men don't sell like they used to anymore.
But that interview reads like they're still afraid of fan backlash over the whole death story, and maybe some self-awareness that the story running in ASM sucked for Spider-Man readers who didn't care, so they're passing the buck and confessing that they were just following orders from Feige. Time will tell whether Feige approved them going public with that information, or if he cares that they did, but as the first notable inside story from within Marvel in years, it's not exactly an interesting reveal. We didn't learn anything we didn't already suspect, this was always obvious MCU synergy.
I definitely think someone needs to go over how damaging a lot of Marvel stuff from the 00s was
>Somebody needs to write a book how Marvel lost their minds in the 00's.
>Every other story was about rape or something god awful that shouldn't be in a children's book.
they were just trying to copy DC.
You know, at least Marvel's never quite stooped as low as having the loveable wife of a loveable C-lister get raped by a goofy C-list supervillain as part of a side-story flashback in a storyline where said loveable wife gets murdered
God, they did the Dibnys so dirty.
I have a comicbook club with my cousins and we have a hard cutoff at 1996.
We just can't with the 2000's comics.
You think Joe Quesada every ponders the damage he did?
Wholesale mythological deracination.
I don't imagine he thinks he did anything wrong. I think he's gonna go to his grave thinking he's some kind of genius. Same for all of them. I really want to see what future scholars will take on this shit.
I swear this shit took thousands of years for a hero to fall.
Not at Marvel.
When they took over in the early 00's they legit thought themselves as the new British Invasion.
On same level as Miller & Moore.
I mean they are but that's because Miller and Moore were shit, those homosexuals unironically laid the groundwork for everything that came after with endless shitty, edgy deconstructions that they sold on name power and novelty at the time.
I hate writers chasing trends
Short term fads have ruined long term sustainability
So are comics just one big lie?
Campfire tales told by the village idiot?
No, comics are like greek antic stories. Some will be remembered most forgotten because they are not worth to be remembered!
I mean stuff like Spider-man's origin story is classic stuff I can see that speaking to people for ages. But whose gonna remember any of this new crap in years to come. Forget standing alongside big events like the Galactus trilogy or Dark Phoenix.
In centuries to come, we will reach a point where the superheroes of our day have become like ancient mythology, the original stories, the adaptations and the fanfic will all get conflated together and nobody will even remember what the "correct" or "original" canon was.
the most dangerous avengers foe
I hate Bendis
Anyone else do too?
It ends on JLA Avengers anon, literally the best KINO ever made
>Oh Jen had it so hard!
Oh frick off.
>Dad: Loving, Caring, Supportive.
>Jen: YOU'RE SMOTHERING ME YOU HICK!
>Oh Jen had it so hard!
She sure did, anon. She sure did.
The recton of this is so bad and petty, It makes you to never want to invest in a comic ever again.
That's Dan Slott for you. It's at least funny that he put so much effort into his stupid retcon then it got undone as soon as he left the book.
>his stupid retcon then it got undone as soon as he left the book.
so she-hulk getting fricked in the ass by juggernaut is back to being canon? nice
>in the ass
I think you're confusing She-Hulk/Juggernaut and Jessica Jones/Luke Cage there. But a more recent She-Hulk run also referenced Juggernaut as one of her exes.
>Jessica Jones
Why does she exist?
Bendis needed a self-insert to fantasize as getting fricked by Luke Cage.
I remembering suffering through the show & the only good thing was her huge heart shaped ass.
>her show
Normies think that an angsty b***h allowing (a very stupid and pathetic) villain to escape over and over in the dumbest ways and commit more preventable murders is dark and deep and not a comedic cavalcade of shitty plot armor and incompetent morons bumbling around.
He threw a hissy fit on his blog claiming she was one of those shield body double androids.
Makes no sense... Slott makes her the biggest bawd in fiction then gets mad as others do the same as he did.
YEAH, IT'S THE JUGGERNAUT b***h!!
He fricked men before?
What would be your ideal Avengers roster, anons?
This was harder to nail down than I thought it would be. I didn't want to overlord it with Originals but I gotta have Cap and I wanted Hank sso it would be weird to bench Janet. I also wanted to add some obscurer picks so I threw in Stingray and Firebird. The above image had a scene of her and Thor which made me thing that her and Herc on a team could lead to some fun. Or bullshit. Either way. And then I threw Songbird on their because why not. The original Tbolts earned it.
I think this was a legit lineup they had in the late 80s, except for songbird
Back when they had the Avengers Island aqua base before it got attacked by lava men
I agree you've got to have Cap, Hank, and Jan in there. At the very least Hank and Jan, because it's not like they have anywhere else to go
West Coast Team
>Hawkeye
>War Machine
>Quasar
>Sersi
>Wasp
>Hank Pym
>Nightcrawler
>Scarlet Spider(Kaine)
East Coast Team
>Cap
>Songbird
>Thor
>Beast
>Wonder Man
>Stingray
>Crystal
>Synapse
-Captain America
-Iron Man
-Thor
-She-Hulk
-Ant-Man
-Wasp
-Hawkeye
I just want Hawkeye and Black Knight
>is capeshit worth reading?
No.
>he says, on the capeshit and kiddie toons board
Every blog post by these goons in the 00's was summed-up as "Frick you sweaty nerds & No we didn't ruin these characters".
He right, except it wasn't a fad (sadly)
>decompression in the aughts
>80's vigilante crap
What is he talking about?
80s Vigilante crap is stuff like The Punisher, Vigilante, Death Wish cash ins
Decompression is when you extend moments in comics for effect, Bendis is probably the one they're talking about because he was one of the big names doing it. There's a page in Invincible making fun of it when Mark's at a con someone may post for me
Sauce?
How are all these men combined still thinner than Dan Slott? Seeing him twirl or whatever in that con video is still so disturbing
I was seconds away from posting this.
I’m a Xfiles and Simpsons fan so this is honestly the perfect response to my question, thanks anon.
*jiggle jiggle* :DDDDDDDD
what a twee gait
God it’s even worse than I remember, he looks like Tweedledum.
And this is why no one makes jokes about Doc Ock been fat anymore.
>Doc Ock sees the true beauty of fat old dumpy women.
Busiek does have the sin of kicking off the revival of Jean Grey
They were going to do it anyway, he just came up with the bullshit excuse for it.
Busiek had no real hand in resurrecting Jean. He didn't even suggest it himself directly, because it was before he actually broke into the industry.
IIRC he got to talking with Roger Stern at a convention in the mid 80s, as a fan, and brought up his fan theory of how he'd bring Jean back from the dead (the real Jean has been hibernating in Jamaica Bay since the crash in #100/1, which also has the added bonus of absolving her of Dark Phoenix's crimes). A few years later, Marvel editorial has demanded that Jean gets resurrected for X-Factor, and while brainstorming Stern remembers this one fan's theory and the others involved all approve. I think they might have checked in with Busiek that it was okay to use his idea, but that was really as far as his involvement there goes.
Thanks for the info
Yeah, I also think Shooter even got Busiek a check for the idea
geoff johns runs is really good.
Avengers Forever was a pretty neat series. You had two Hank Pyms one crazy one sulky, Wasp being leadere, Circus freak Hawkeye, Super Strong but mope Captain America and Songbird from the slight future
That Songbird is still not an Avenger has turned into the joke from Futurama about Bender wanting to be a Harlem Globetrotter for me and I feel bad but it’s also very funny
Wasn't she on the U.S.Avengers or that doesn't count?
>With given time my avengers level could surely..
>ARE YOU!?
>....no.. *Walks away sadly singing "always we will fight as one...."
Heh. Also I remember when the New Thunderbolts took on the New Avengers and the TBs, with Songbird leading them, did well for themselves. Cap even praising Melissa and by extention, Hawkeye since he taught her.
Yeah, I think she'd be a fun fit. Good power set, neat look. Probably a lot of potential there with ties to masters o evil.
I really want her on a Avengers team, if not leading one.
Ask her about her feminist agenda.
Songbird and Mach 1 basically being forgotten is a fricking crime
>Mach 1
He did blackface that one time
>songbird
Her costume design is too cool to be in character limbo
>I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude
I’ve seen panels of Justice and Firestar joining the team during this run. How substantial is their appearance on the team and when do they join?
They were pretty prominent. Both join fairly early as reserve members but quickly get promoted to full time status for reasons
>How substantial is their appearance on the team and when do they join?
minimal, avengers wanted "young" blood in the team
I've noticed that both Justice & Quasar both fanboyed being on the team with Cap.
You team up with Captain America and see how you react.
Fair
They joined in issue #4 after getting roped into the Morgan Conquest story when Rage got targeted by Morgana and basically invite themselves into the adventure.
Their run as Avengers BTW was widely WIDELY reviled due to the fact that Busiek and Brevoort DESPISED, widely DESPISED New Warriors and pretty much de-booted Vance and Angelica back to their "golly gee" pre-New Warriors personalities and made them incompetent rookies, with Angelica only being slightly more competent than Vance because George Perez was a huge Firestar fangirl and was the reason she got made a member.
Should also note that the only reason they acknowledged the issue of Firestar not having natural immunity to her powers (possibly inadvertedly sterilizing herself every time she used her powers) is that it was a huge elephant in the room that Busiek and Brevoort couldn't just handwave as not being canon anymore, hence why they miracle solved it via Hank just giving her a new costume that fixed it.
The two stuck around until #27, when they were written out during that issue's roster change but they show back up in the denouncement of the Triune Cult storyline that was part of Kang Dynasty.
You forgot to mention how Perez designed a new Firestar costume that showed some cleavage, Busiek and Brevoort made him change it because SHE WOULDN'T WEAR THAT. It was very mild compared with the costume Perez designed for Wanda, which was probably the lewdest heroine costume in the Big 2 at the time.
I like the idea Wasp is the one who wants everyone at their sexiest and designs costumes that way
>I like the idea Wasp is the one who wants everyone at their sexiest and designs costumes that way
And everyone just goes with it and wears what she wants them to wear, no matter how lewd, except Firestar.
For some reason, I'm now thinking about the time Christopher Priest killed a character from Justice League Task Force just because he didn't trust anyone else to use them correctly.
Meh, I hadn't read all of New Warriors so didn't notice. I loved Vance so much as an Avenger.
I feel like he did the fanboy thing nicely without going too overboard unlike certain other modern attempts which shall remain nameless.
Yeah, he had a clear arc of overcoming jitters about moving from the semi-pro team to the big leagues. Perfectly understandable.
Have they ever said why they hate them? Or was it just because it was a DeFalco book?
Until proven otherwise, Anon is talking out their ass. I don't believe it.
A couple of reasons
1. Brevoort and Busiek being boomers who hated how Fabian made a bunch of forgotten boring young heroes grim and gritty ala the New Teen Titans
2. NW was originally pitched as "Young Avengers" but the Avengers office wanted nothing to do with the book but due to Fabian being a favorite of Bob Harris, he managed to get the book greenlit. So the book became a satellite Xbook, which helped it outsell the avengers books. And led to Fabian taking numerous pot shots against the Avengers in NW.
I have trouble believing this, because Brevoort was the New Warriors editor for some time (which is probably why they reached to that team when they wanted "newbie" heroes) and both of them worked closely with Nicieza for a while after that, like picking him to take over Thunderbolts.
I think the simplest explanation for why Justice regressed is that everyone, evenn continuity-conscious writers like Busiek, writes someone the way they remember them.
There's a moment in the run (the New Warriors issue, as it happens) where Busiek has to acknowledge that it doesn't make sense for Wanda to be so nervous about taking on a Deputy Leader position when she was already the leader of the West Coast Avengers and Force Works. She waves her Force Works '90s characterization away by saying she was a different person then, and that's all the explanation we get.
At least with Vance he could chalk up his regression to being nervous when he gets the job he always wanted, which oddly parallels Busiek being bumped up from smaller books to the big job he always dreamed of.
Yeah, the New Warriors themselves were always kind of, I don't want to sound dismissive, but it seems like they were 2nd stringers even though they did some pretty big stuff. A lot of them were very young so it's not weird that Vance might be nervous or a bit star struck.
New Warriors was a huge hit when the series first ran. They were Marvel's first non-mutant attempt at a big teen/young adult super hero group and were the closet Marvel's ever come to capturing the New Teen Titan fanbase (much to Brevoort's eternal butt-hurt, since Young Avengers, Young Allies, Avengers Academy trilogy, and Champions) all failed compared to New Warriors, with Runaways being the only series to come close to reaching New Warriors level popularity.
Niceiza was always close to Bob Harras and again, it was Harras who pulled strings to get New Warriors greenlit (minus the overt Avengers connection) and gleefully allowed Fabian to connect it to the X-Books at the time, along with showing up in Amazing Spider-Man for back to back guest spots when Bagley took over drawing ASM.
>Niceiza was always close to Bob Harras and again, it was Harras who pulled strings to get New Warriors greenlit (minus the overt Avengers connection) and gleefully allowed Fabian to connect it to the X-Books at the time, along with showing up in Amazing Spider-Man for back to back guest spots when Bagley took over drawing ASM.
So many Annuals. But yeah New Warriors was good fun. I miss it. I am the only Turbo fan.
Was Runaways even popular? I never saw people reading it, the characters never appeared in other books, and even now they are basically forgotten and ignored. Not to mention the flop of a TV show.
The original series is very highly regarded. After that though I don't think it ever had the same energy. It probably should have stayed a max series and ended there. It was pretty clear they never knew what to do with them after the fact.
Rainbow Rowell series was awful.
>Makes Nico gay when it was a very important plot point that she was not, in fact, gay.
But who needs characterization and solid writing when you can just pander to people.
Writers who do things like that seem to think they're "fixing a mistake".
She only writes for herself & has 0 self-awareness.
Volume 1 was very popular but for the opposite reasons you describe.
Basically it was a stand-alone series with no real overt ties to the rest of the Marvel Universe (at least in the first year), meaning you could read it and just it to get the full story. It had decent art and some decent likable characters, and unique for it's time story about kids going on the run because they found out that their parents were part of a rip-off of Millar's Fraternity of Evil from Wanted.
It was the sort of book that non-comic fans LOVE and the reason it crashed and burnt and is now pretty much forgotten, is due to the fact that the original writer left and was replaced by a variety of writers who tried to make the book more overtly tied to the Marvel Universe and this pissing off the fanbase who didn't want to read about the rest of the Marvel Universe. Which killed the series.
Yeah there was some references and some heroes did show up but it was all from the perspective of the kids so you didn't need to know shit about Captain America or Spider-man beyond that they exist.
>There's a moment in the run (the New Warriors issue, as it happens) where Busiek has to acknowledge that it doesn't make sense for Wanda to be so nervous about taking on a Deputy Leader position when she was already the leader of the West Coast Avengers and Force Works.
These stories unintentionally setting the rule that the less Wanda wears, the more importance and authority she has.
Just like Black Cat's sense of morality.
Imagine if people who work for Marvel actually became aware of these things and started working them into stories.
So which Avenger git the rawest deal?
>Tony
>Wanda
>Hank Pym
>Other
Most of Tony's problems are instantly fixable the moment he gets a writer who doesn't inherently want to tear him down, who doesn't think a man like Tony Stark is everything he's been indoctrinated to hate and resent. It's possible, but it's unlikely right now a writer like that would even get work at Marvel. No specific storylines are really hurting him, even people still salty about Civil War are low in number.
Hank Pym's problems are just tied to both Marvel and fandom refusing to let go of one story from the early 80s. Again it's easily done, it's just nobody wants to, and writers who want to do anything else are few in number.
Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank, but one of those stories made the X-Men fanbase hate her, and that's a huge insane fanbase. The MCU considered those stories so important and character-defining that it adapted them, so she's probably got it worse than Hank, even before you add in Marvel being full of people who hate the Wanda/Vision pairing, or how even Marvel still can't see past "Magneto's mutant daughter" even ten years after it stopped being canon, or all the people on Twitter and Tumblr who don't actually read comics but are very vocally insisting on changing what she looks like and wanting to change her religion.
She-Hulk and Carol have also got it really bad in the way they're just not even the same characters anymore, they've been hollowed out and replaced by something new wearing their names.
There's also Vision, just for the lasting scale of what John Byrne did to him, completely dehumanizing him and training a generation of readers to dislike him and see his marriage to Wanda as something wrong, so effectively that a lot of them are still around and still triggered and disgusted by him.
To be honest every time I see She-Hulk I do get the ick.
>Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank, but one of those stories made the X-Men fanbase hate her, and that's a huge insane fanbase. The MCU considered those stories so important and character-defining that it adapted them, so she's probably got it worse than Hank, even before you add in Marvel being full of people who hate the Wanda/Vision pairing, or how even Marvel still can't see past "Magneto's mutant daughter" even ten years after it stopped being canon, or all the people on Twitter and Tumblr who don't actually read comics but are very vocally insisting on changing what she looks like and wanting to change her religion.
There was a theory a while back that the people still blaming Wanda for destroying the X-Men are probably company shills trying to take the heat off Marvel. I'm starting to believe that some are, especially in light of Slott rumored to have at least one alt account on CBR and also posting on Cinemaphile. No way is he the only one who does that.
An actual X-Men fan would get that this is all on Quesada and Bendis (and possibly any higher-up either approving or ordering Quesada to go ahead with it)
Also anyone shitting on Wanda while praising Bendis' run on X-Men would definitely be a shill but I don't remember if there was anyone like that on here.
>Most of OG got fricked beyond repair
At this point, might as well replace the core members of the group with a bunch of OCs and obscure characters.
Am I wrong for liking the 90s Avengers Jackets?
Eh. It's probably not the worst design at this point
>the moment he gets a writer who doesn't inherently want to tear him down
Funny thing is that everyone gets stuck on his arms days when he left that behind a long time ago. Everyone also seems pretty ignorant that Stark Industries is considered the best company to work for (whenever Tony owns it) and pays his people from the execs to the janitors very well with lots of perks.
>Wanda has two stories from 2004-5 damaging her the same way as the slap does for Hank
Wanda just seems to be a plot device now whenever they need some 'BIG' event they rotate between her, Phoenix and Franklin Richards.
>She-Hulk and Carol have also got it really bad
Seconded
>There's also Vision
I'm a passive Brynegay but what he did to Vision was the most petulant thing in his career, which is saying something. It's also a bit hypocritical since he also brought back Jim Hammond/OG Human Torch and had no problem with him having emotions and relationships.
Who would be a good writer for Carol?
It's not the same level of character assassination as those but it's always annoying to see Thor job to random Avengers villains when he often takes on more powerful enemies in his solo comics. The non-moronic writers know you can just say he's busy on Asgard and not use him
She-Hulk got kicked-out of the Avenger's Mansion for having a party every night & making it her own frickpad.
>Inb4: What's wrong with that!?!
There's nothing wrong with that.
What's not wrong with it then?
It's diffidently wrong throwing a party at a place that isn't yours.
Plus it's all contrived setup so Slott can write his shitty Ally McBeal run.
Avengers Mansion isn't Playboy Mansion. Besides, Jen had own pad for that.
One of the most fricked-up things is that Slott got mad at the bed he made.
Tony is fine, he got ruined, killed off, and replaced by a teen version of himself and bounced back long before Civil War. He’s bulletproof.
Him sleeping with Jen while he was her boss was skeevy. Then again Jen was sleeping with all her co-workers.
>citation needed
I keep on forgetting she married a dogImeanJon!
Poor Jon, She treated him like absolute garbage.
That art is terrible. Just awful.
Well we're done hiring cartoonists with 15-25 years of experience.
We just hire random Mexicans out of art school for the lowest bitter.
So it's safe to say under Quesada's reign all the Marvel characters regressed to a lesser version of themselves?
I'd say marvel itself regressed to a ... I don't even know what to call it. But it feels so vacuous.
I'm at a point if these were real people I'd throw bricks at them.
Quesadilla is real
Killing one Gen-Xer isn't gonna solve this problem.
I really wish I got the second omnibus earlier. It's getting reprinted so whatever, I can wait but I had the chance to snag it for a decent price and passed it up in favor of not getting kicked out of my apartment.
>ordered the omnibus shortly after making this thread
>gets dispatched in record time
>meant to arrive today
>the delivery was actually attempted at like 8:30 in the morning and Parcelforce only alerted me about it half an hour beforehand (but I was asleep anyways)
>now have to walk a mile to the post office just to pick up the parcel and then lug the omnibus back
I hate the post sometimes
No. Team books are rarely good, and this is no exception.
For the last couple years I've been doing a complete avengers readthrough with my buddy.
We currently just finished Avengers arena and are about to start Uncanny Avengers and the Hickman Avengers era.
Some thoughts:
For me, the best Avengers run is by far Roger Stern's run, I really loved mostly everything he did and it sucks hard how Marvel screwed him.
Busiek's run is definitely the second best run, and has what I think is the best Avengers story in it featuring their best villain: Ultron Unlimited.
I do think some of Busiek's plots weren't as interesting, like the Triune Understanding shit that went on way too long and had a very lame ending, but he was really good at the character interactions. (Some of the best avengers issues are always the roster deciding issues or issues where they're just hanging out in the mansion)
As far as the worst Avengers stuff, the start of Bendis' run and the ending are really terrible, as are some of obvious heroes reborn bullshit. But I was absolutely floored about how bad the Crossing was. What an absolutely abysmal story that just shits on everything.
And while it's not bad, I do think the original kree/skrull war is massively overrated. I had always heard it being a classic story and I was very disappointed with it, especially the ending with Rick Jones. I thought Operation Galactic Storm was a better cosmic level avengers story in pretty much every way, and I really liked how it had consequences and set up fractures in the team that basically paved the way to Civil War.
And as far as best Avengers members go, I think Vision is a standout as one of the most important members of the team, and I also think Hank is extremely important, especially with his involvement with Ultron. I really love Monica too, and think she should be on the team more often. Would've really loved to see what Stern did with her if he was on the book longer.
And as for worst Avenger, it's hands down Dr. Druid. What a dickhole.
>And while it's not bad, I do think the original kree/skrull war is massively overrated. I had always heard it being a classic story and I was very disappointed with it, especially the ending with Rick Jones.
IIRC the Kree-Skrull War was fricked over by Neal Adams not staying around for as long as he originally planned to
Agreed on Roger Stern's Avengers run being the highlight. It took the best stuff from Lee/Kirby, Thomas, etc and condensed it into concentrated form. No fluff, no fat, and sincere.
He did the same exact thing over on Amazong Spider-Man...and Marvel just fricked him over whenever they got the chance.
I also really appreciate what Stern did for Janet. For a long time she was this ditzy character that didn't really do much but after Stern did the incredible stuff with her and Hank in the wake of the slap, and then made her team leader, she grew so much as a character.
On the flipside, I was horrified to see what Bendis did with her. I never want that man writing her ever again
Don't remind me, modern hacks like Bendis write comics like trashy soap operas. No love for the material or what other writers had established, just trying to bamboozle the audience with "crash TV" style mayhem and crass humor.
There was something in the water at Marvel offices in the late 80's/early 90's. The destruction of deadlines and the neutering of editorial oversight in the name of creativity were the first dominos to fall. Catering to trendy artists over the writers was a dead end, and tossing out the "house style" just led to wild swings in talent.
Guys like Stern and Claremont were tossed aside. Other talents from Gerber to Byrne to Miller were lured away by indy comics. All over the course of a few years... then the artists all left for Image.
You just gotta love when Marvel fricks over their best writers
>Loves Stern's run
>Hates Dr. Druid
You can hate Druid for how he was written when Stern got kicked, but not before. Druid was actually a good utility character in that he could do mystic stuff that propelled the plot but was never a danger of being overpowered like Dr. Strange. Stern realized that being weaker than Strange made him more versatile on teams as evidenced by his short lived Marvel Universe series where he featured prominently.
I honestly think Druid is more shit on by other writers than Hank.
Has Strange ever been an Avenger?
Strange was an Avenger during one of Bendis runs, yes. I think the New Avengers team?
I hate Bendis and his: "The popular characters should be avengers just cuz!" Agenda
Fully agreed.
Yeah it makes sense, but it's such a lazy thing to do. It's not creative, it's not an idea with thought put into it, it's just "let's get the biggest most popular toys and put them in it to make more money"
It's cynical and lazy.
Busiek didn't put Firestar and Justice onto the avengers because they were popular, it's because he had a story he wanted to tell with them
I'm not even against putting spider-man or wolverine onto the avengers, but there should be good story reasons for it. Not just "it'll make us money and people love them"
And Bendis especially had a problem where it was like he was allergic to team ups for some reason. He made Storm join the New Avengers, and then she helped out for like 1 or 2 issues and I don't think she ever did anything again?
It's just really annoying
Just like not every character needs to be a headliner not every character needs to be an Avenger. Some characters just have a different vibe to them. Strange should always be around to add some extra magical insight but he should be largely focused on his own stuff. Same for people like Daredevil and Spider-man.
>He made Storm join the New Avengers, and then she helped out for like 1 or 2 issues and I don't think she ever did anything again?
Weirdly enough, Storm was an Avenger during the Marvel Adventures line and it was actually pretty great. Wolverine. And yeah Spidey was actually great here too despite what I just said but you know damn well 616 Avengers is bad for him. Marvel Adventures was just a whole different kind of beast.
Is that Janet as giant-woman?
Yep. She's great. That book was wonderful.
Bendis seemed to be inspired by Morrison's JLA where he put back the Big 7 together. But that works for the JLA, not the Avengers.
Bendis is like earth-3 version of Grant Morrison.
He was a good author for my teenage self. Lots of snark, catchy dialogue, drama. He was extremely good when writing teenagers, but that shit goes away with age.
No he wasn't. And all he knew was snark. And snark sucks. It's not the same thing as cleverness. He knew how to right ONE teenager and every character sounded like the same exact TV show.
It wasn't just Bendis, Millar was the one who at a meeting argued that the Avengers should be a-listers like the JLA. Bendis backed Millar on it, and Marvel gave Bendis got the job to take over Avengers to prove Millar's idea could work.
Busiek had no story for them. They got put on the team because Perez loved Firestar and wanted her on the team and Brevoort reluctantly let Justice tag along because they were a couple and both him and Busiek then realizing they could use them on the Avengers to shit on New Warriors and erase all of their character development in the series.
Also, Storm becoming an Avenger only lasted for a single arc because of Avengers Vs X-Men.
Force Works was neither good or entertaining. And it's only saving grace was that it didn't defile the WCA team, just took a huge steaming shit on them.
>more shit on than hank
1) which hank
2) if you mean beast you're dead wrong
Only one person so far mentioned Avengwrs Forever - here’s 2 now. You have to read that if you like Busiek / Avengrers at all.
The thing I want most out of Avengers Forever is Songbird finally getting to be on a main Avengers team. She's earned it.
Sorry but I don't care about Genis
I like Genis
Check it, anons
Nice
Isn't Druid considered the worst Avenger by EVERYONE?
Idk I'll say the worst avenger is deathcry or Century
I read Forceworks as part of the complete Avengers readthrough and even I forgot about Century, lol
A lot of people forget about Force Works. For good reason. I only kind of remember Century because I had his action figure from the Iron Man cartoon.
I liked scarlet witch redesign in that comic
I mostly kept at it for Julia. Who is way better than Jessica and deserves to be an Avenger more.
Julia becoming Madam Web was and is so fricking shit
Frick Bendis
I refuse to believe anyone who says their favorite character is Jessica. Like okay Luke Cage I can sort of buy, he was cool with Iron Fist, but Jessica is just so vacuous.
Story goes that Brevoort originally demanded Julia gett her throat slit just like the original Madam Web in grim hunt and Arana would have given some mealy mouth bullshit speech about how killing Kraven, his psycho wife and psycho daughter (the later two who actually killed Mattie and Web and would have been the one to kill Julia too while Kraven fought Spidey) wouldn't bring them back and then steal Julia's costume from her corpse. But Joe Kelly intervened and saved Julia by making her the new Madam Web as well as demanding Kraven kill his psycho murderer wife, on the grounds that unlike Brevoort, Kelly felt she needed to die for all of the murders she committed in Brand New Day up to that point.
Christ
Spider-Man just keep getting the hits!!
Between that and the fact that it's public record that Slott outright REFUSED to write Grim Hunt because he was against Kraven being brought back, why the hell did they do it then? And were Wacker and Brevoort THAT fricking committed to the idea of Kraven's ex and his daughter being the new Joker in Spider-Man's life that they wanted her to kill Kaine, Julia, MW, Mattie, and Lizard's kid and then get away with it because "heroes don't fricking kill", even though they racked up a body count that would make Norman Osborn and Carnage recoil in horror and disgust?
Part of the reason for the Grim Hunt storyline was Spider-Man editorial having decided there were too many Spider- characters running around and that it was time to cull them so they had just Spider-Man, plus Arana as the new Spider-Girl and Julia as the new Madame Web. There was a similar move in the Hulk book not long afterwards to de-power most of the Hulks except Bruce and Jen for similar reasons. Nobody's talked about why they were so committed to bringing Kraven back, but shortly after they did, they chose Slott to be the main Spider-Man writer, and he stayed on the book almost ten years, refusing to use Kraven or even acknowledge his return, with Kraven fighting Flash and Kaine instead.
>too many Spider- characters running around
Boy does that really feel like a kick to the teeth now.
Yeah, it's weird how they've completely flipped on that position so quickly and so hard. If only the Madame Web movie had done better, enough that they'd just bring her back so Julia could get back to normal.
But remember, there's also just really no place for Ben Reilly in the Spider-Landscape any more, which is why they had to turn him into a nonsensical, comedically edgy "villain" with a bullshit motivation that'd be solved in two minutes if anyone actually wanted to.
GOTTA MAKE WAY FOR MILES AND SPIDER-GWEN!
That's always how it goes.
>There's too many of blank up until the current blank is my pet.
This one?
Or this one?
Both look good
I like the boots on this one
Long hair is preferable
>I like the boots on this one
Wanda's modern costume is basically a modernization of that look. It doesn't look as good, but at least they kept those boots.
>Long hair is preferable
Her hair was much shorter when she first started wearing that costume, in Force Works they were making an effort to improve things, but too late to stop the Iron Man cartoon using the shorter hair look.
Was Force Works any good?
NooooooOOOOOooooooo
>Force Works
Good? No.
Entertaining? Possibly.
I consider it a perfect time capsule of the Marvel in the 90's and how they were trying to keep up with Image art style. It's an UGLY book and it's a miracle that Abnett & Lanning managed to prosper after it.
U.S. Agent was trying to avoid a lawsuit for plagiarism with the new suit
It's crazy to see their name on that book. then there was the whole mess with the crossing and, yeah this book was doomed from the start.
Between this and Extreme Justice, you can tell they(Marvel & DC) were desperate for that Image audience.
I would still gladly read either over most of the shit being printed today
A lot of Marvel's classic 60s heroes just weren't selling so well in the 90s, in part due to them putting all the popular artists on other books. Desperate times led to them trying to update heroes for the 90s, and getting artists who had similar styles to the popular artists. By the time of The Crossing their backs were against the wall and they knew the suits were planning to give their books to Wildstorm and Extreme to reboot.
It was what it was, they made it through, most things went back to normal, and virtually everything from this era, good or bad, has been ignored and forgotten ever since, only brought back if some later writer was seething enough that he wanted to retcon or kill it. The lack of lasting impact of anything from this era makes it baffling that after all the years of Bendis and Hickman and everything since where the Avengers have been the Avengers in name only and the way a lot of the team have been mistreated over the last 20 years, so many fans are still seething more about 1994-1996 instead. Even most Spider-Man fans have reached the point where no matter how much they hated the Clone Saga, they can admit things have been much worse for much longer now.
Even when they failed at it, these years and Heroes Reborn were the last time Marvel made any effort at all at selling these comics to kids and teens. The move towards aiming at older readers is how we ended up with the insane edge of 2000s Marvel, and so many things that made the edge of 90s extreme look harmless, but no matter how bad things get, some people can't stop reeeing about the 90s.
>The lack of lasting impact of anything from this era makes it baffling that after all the years of Bendis and Hickman and everything since where the Avengers have been the Avengers in name only and the way a lot of the team have been mistreated over the last 20 years, so many fans are still seething more about 1994-1996 instead
I think it's because like Clone Saga, it's an easy target. Bendis on the other hand still had his own fans and 00s Marvel fanboys keep insisting the 00s were great so for a while everyone highly regarded his run. It also didn't help that Marvel insisted people stop caring about consistency
I will say that I'd rather take Liefeld's Avengers over Bendis' Avengers
>I think it's because like Clone Saga, it's an easy target.
That's sort of the thing with the 90s. The parts that made it bad were VERY easy to point too. The issues with 2000s era were more, how to put it, they were more subdued compared to the loudness of the 90s. You can easily point at Liefelds art, all the crazy new armors and costumes and holo foil covers but to get into what's wrong with what came later required a bit more of a deep dive and at the time it didn't seem so obvious just because the giant red flag of the 90s was still in recent memory.
what version of citizen v is that?
The Vth
That's USAgent. Hid look changed a few times over the years.
I hate the armor Tony had after Modular Suit.
Did anybody like Triathlon?
I did but obviously the rest of Marvel didn't.
He pretty good.
He was created to be hated that's the whole point of the character
One thing I think was always sort of neat is that sometimes when the Avengers where doing major line up changes it became a sort of media spectacle. Kind of like a sporting team draft.
Ah, Moondragon. I remember when she was kinda of a b***h.
I am not a fan of the composition and choice of lettering here lol
Kek, seething Clint. Busiek wrote Hawkeye so well.
I love smart mouth Clint I wonder, could we consider Hawkeye, THE Avenger? So much of his story is tied to the team and usually ends up back there.
>could we consider Hawkeye, THE Avenger?
There was a Wizard Avengers Special in the late 1990s that ran the numbers on how many issues everyone had been in, and up to that time I think it was Captain America, Hank Pym, Wanda and Vision who'd been in the most issues of Avengers titles, and that was before Hawkeye had been in Thunderbolts for long.
The numbers would probably look very different today, a lot of the people who were core members of the team haven't been there much in the last 20 years.
The rule I have made up and hold the books too is that you aren't a true Avengers book unless you have at least one out of Hank Pym, Jan, Clint, Wanda, or Vision on it. Cap, Iron Man, and Thor all get their own books so often is why they aren't included. It's based on an anon's offhand comment about how the JLA only feels complete if J'onn is on there
Every industry is like this, people making friends and telling stories is just natural. also we need to not derail a good Avengers thread with it
Which is what makes the success of the Busiek throwback style Avengers book very funny
>Which is what makes the success of the Busiek throwback style Avengers book very funny
The book having a star artist can't be underestimated there. Heroes Reborn was what made Avengers a hit book for the first time in years, it stayed a hit with the Heroes Return relaunch, and it's when Perez leaves that the book started gradually losing sales.
Books like Avengers and FF were getting overtaken earlier in the 90s because all the top talent were on other books. All it took to get them selling again was Marvel putting some star artists on them. It would've worked with or without the specific throwback style of this run.
A lot of the "heroes return" era feels like it was a made to get back to traditionalism after all that extreme 90s business wore down. Sadly it would be a short lived return and we were disassembled far too quickly. But man can you imagine if the Busiek style remained for another 5-10 years. Not specifically him on the book but people like him. That'd have been swell.
Eh... Busiek kicked Clint down to work with the Thunderbolts because he didn't want to write Clint as a competent leader figure given his time on the WCA team and Brevoort suggesting putting him with the Thunderbolts rather than regressing him like Busiek wanted to do so to him being a hot head foil for Cap.
Only the second half of the Stern run is in Epic trades.
To read the first half, you have to track down about four different OOP trades, Trial of Yellowjacket, Absolute Vision v1 and 2, and Legacy of Thanos. And Trial of Yellowjacket is a $200+ trade if you can find it and will continue to go up in value since they will most definitely end up splitting the story up in the Epic line like they did with the Masterworks line
You could get the single issues in that Trial of Yellowjacket trade for less than the book. Mycomicshop had the whole set for $90, and frankly you can probably get them for less by being a pragmatic bin diver. I think with some patience you can probably find the while things for $40. This is often true for out of print trades.
I imagine the Epic collection version will be announced sooner rather than later. It's currently one of the biggest gaps.
It's weird seeing them act like adults.
In the 00's they would have been screaming in eachothers faces like teenage girls.
interested in checking out the avengers comics as Im not really familar with them but I hear they can be really good comics. should I just read from the beginning with those collection things, or like start at some other point.
There's no reason really not to start from t he start. You don't have to but you get a lot more context and it's interesting to watch how things develop. But also it's super hero comics so you can start from wherever really.
Roger Stern is probably one of my favorite writers, not just for Avengers but kind of in general. easily my favorite Spidey writer. I feel like he just sort of GETS IT when he does a super hero book and he's very much the kind of professional writer I talk about when I think writers need to focus more on being GOOD and consistently so then just dropping in to change the status quo or reinvent something that's not broken. Not that he didn't make changes and invent characters but he always did it in a way that felt earned gradually over time. He always felt like he was in it for the long term even in his shorter bursts.
I never realized until later that Stern did so much for the Spider-Man mythos. Like his work has always gotten used for adaptations, one way or another.
It's insane to think that Vulture was barely even a character until Stern
>the last good Avengers long run
Busiek
>Last good Ironman long run
Busiek
Really made you think
He had a care for the characters
Busiek’s Iron Man was mid. He ran out of stuff to say. For me, the Knauf Iron Man run after Extremis was the last time the book was good.
I miss when Marvel was whoring themselves out to every corporation just to keep afloat.
I read it years ago and made me feel like modern marvel was lacking something.
Made me feel like reading some FF and classic X-men runs as well. Only run i've read before was original Lee/Ditko/Romite Spidey...
I feel so bad for the kids that had to grow-up on 00's Marvel & having no clue how vile it is.
Battered Fanbase Syndrome is a real thing.
Look at these 2 goobers, Both their fanbases live in constant sate of cognitive dissonance.
>Battered Fanbase Syndrome is a real thing.
With a team book, a lot of fans may be there just for that one character they like. If it's a character who isn't guaranteed to always be around, it makes the Battered Fanbase thing even worse, because you're so happy just to see them that you'll probably tolerate anything.
Me with Black Knight
What they do to Dane?
He's a borderline insane person and now he shares being the Black Knight with his mixed race, mutant, possibly lesbian, daughter
Low-Key, Dane kinda been through it. His Uncle was a supercrook, all the bullshit with the Ebony blade, getting stuck in the Ultraverse, trying to get that Inhuman pussy from Crystal and now he's damn near nuts?
5 gets ya 10 it's more Ebony Blade Frickery.
Me too Anon. Fricking Spurrier
I hate that british homosexual
He's a cigarette?
BTW...this has been a good thread Cinemaphilemrades
Avengers brings out the good in us. Unlike those shitty X-men threads. Fantastic Four threads are usually alright.
Fantastic Four threads are fine until someone starts b***hing that Franklin isn't a mutant
I didn't expect this thread to last so long when I made it tbqhwy
But it's nice to see so much Avengers love
I always ignored the Avengers because I thought it was just the big name heroes, and I was more interested in their solo stories. But a couple months ago I started to warm up to them when I realized that pretty early it became more of a home for characters who didn't have their own books. This has been a nice thread to get some reassurance that they're worth reading, pretty much straight up to the 90s.
Yeah, the movies didn't really help the image much but the avengers was a very eclectic book for most of its life. You'd get characters you'd almost never hear of outside.
Marvel teams USED to just be basically "one or two moderately popular characters and a shitload of characters who are failing so we're trying to make them work". The Sinister Six are a classic example, only two of them were considered decent villains at the time and the rest were one off fodder and attempt #48927 to find a way to make Kraven actually fricking work and find a place for him as a villain.
That's not really accurate. There's this weird misconception, usually from people who never read Avengers, that the book was some kind of dumping ground for characters who'd failed as solo heroes, when most of the characters' whose 'home' book was Avengers had never been solo characters, they were either created to be Avengers in the first place, or in early examples like Hawkeye, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, they were reformed ex-villains from other books, though most of them were never particularly villainous in the first place, which is why it worked so well.
Hank Pym and the Wasp are the only ones who had their own failed series, but they were already Avengers before it ended anyway.
As for the Sinister Six, they were originally a one-off team up in the first Spider-Man annual. It was just a threat escalation so the biggest Spider-Man story yet published in page count was also the biggest in scale. They didn't become a recurring group until the 1990s, when Kraven was already dead and replaced by the second Hobgoblin. All of the individual members were considered perfectly viable and kept getting stories as solo villains as well as Sinister Six stories.
>Sandman
how long did he last as a member
Longer than you'd think, less than I'd like.
Frick Bryne for changing him back to a badguy
He was a reserve for a hot minute in the 90s before working for Sable
I still don't know why they retconned Jen into a femcel that hates herself.
Now she's a boring gender flipped Peter Parker.
That arc with invaders before avenger dissambled was OK, same goes for that mom british lade jack of hearts saga.
Shit, I wonder what happened to Captain Britain II? Did she die?
Psylocke?
No, the British mother who defended Cap from the wrecking crew
No, she retired after a while to be with her family and hasn’t really been seen since
Oh. That's a nice ending for her. Also, total tangent but WHY Hawkeye was in the Spider-Man Arcade Game? I love Clint but holy hell that was a random choice.
I'd argue Namor is the weirder choice. But yeah it's strange that they didn't pick someone like Daredevil or Cap.
Oh yeah Namor was strange as hell too. Spider-Man, Black Cat, Daredevil & Cap would've fit well.
Namor didn't seem that weird to me because I remembered seeing the 80s Spider-Man cartoon episode with him in it, I just figured Kingpin polluted the water again
Hawkeye though at the time I didn't see him team up with Spider-Man in anything (this was before I read more comics)
Claremont made Brian Captain Britain again post-House of M for the New Excalibur series and rebranded Austen's CB "Lionheart". She's still around and can't be near her kids, and showed up in New Excalibur to b***h at Brian for coming back as a hero and not bothering to remove her powers so she could reunite with her family.
Did you read those arcs?
Those were utter dogshit, with the Hank Pym and Hawkeye character assassination, the bullshit new Captain Britain who was a retred of Nurse Annie the rapist, and the fact that the second and final Austen arc was a thinly disguised Invaders spin-off story where the Avengers spent most of the arc dealing with Austen focusing almost exclusively on character assassinating Hank and Clint even moreso.
I just can't believe it was really all that long ago. All the shitty new stuff feels like it should be new not old enough to vote. I really can't process the fact that things have been this bad for this long. People are gonna grow up with this as their normal. An entire generation will grow up not knowing what a half decent comic book looks like.
Scott is such a cancer
Reading Dan Slott comics made me antisemitic & never want to invest in female character ever again.