Tough question for you guys: is Mr. A Storytime of Pain-worthy?
I love Ditko, by the way.
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Tough question for you guys: is Mr. A Storytime of Pain-worthy? I love Ditko, by the way.
Depends on how into Ayn Rand you are
Oh yeah. It's fricking painful.
And being into her is like announcing to the world that you stopped maturing in middle school.
>And being into her is like announcing to the world that you stopped maturing in middle school.
Okay wishy washy libertarian.
Libertarians worship Ayn Rand.
Most modern libertarians go out of their way to disassociate from her and objectivists for a few reasons, mainly being that she herself openly disliked libertarians, but also because of specific issues like her support of nuclear weapons use and the creation of Israel. I'd say it's a shame, because her moral philosophy is the only one that's really compatible with libertarian legal theory, but most "libertarians" don't even read libertarian literature beyond MAYBE Anatomy of the State because it's short.
Commiegays continue to seethe eternally at the writing of based Ayn kek
>Stopped maturing at middle school
That’s Socialism. Ayn Rand is like Freshman college
>Ayn Rand is like Freshman college
When Ayn was a young girl, she had a number of toys. Enough to clutter the house. So her mother told her to pick some toys to be stored away for a while, to be swapped out later with the toys she chose to keep then. Anticipating the deferred gratification of that arrangement, Ayn gave her mother her favorite toys. Later, when the time came, Ayn learned that her mother gotten rid of the toys Ayn gave her instead of putting them in storage. And so Ayn had a formative experience.
It's about the lack of good storytelling, not the politics.
Why are you guys so fricking superficial? Goddamn.
Look, I can dunk on randians and see that it puts less work into storytelling and more into preaching than a chick tract.
Because they don't respond to certain stimuli rationally.
You wouldn't know what rational was if it was printed on your food stamps
Wishy washy libertarian is just saying libertarian with extra words. It's selfishness with a hat.
If you're this easily triggered I must be talking about you.
Go rub your sore fragile ego.
You don't know what you're talking about, so who cares what you have to say?
Seethe about what? Grown men living in basements and garages convinced that the mindset of a toddler is the peak of philosophy? Unless you hold up the line at the grocery store trying to get out of paying sales tax, or frick a kid, I find you amusing
>It's about the lack of good storytelling, not the politics.
Because Mr. A genuinely has amazing visual storytelling while also having as many words as a typical leftist meme. Mr. A is no Unfunnies, you know that, but you're doing your Cinemaphilemblr Two Minutes Hate so the actual quality of the product is not as important to you as political grandstanding. Go pull this shit on scans_daily, CBR or whatever other SJW hellhole your type crawls out of.
It has amazing visuals. It's very poor writing. Dikto's ego was a little too much at times, he couldn't write for shit.
Yeah. He has great compositional skills and artistic storytelling, but he is not good at the actual "putting dialogue on a page" part, which is why his highest commercial success was with Stan Lee. What I hate are the Cinemaphilemblr types like
who have to tear down anything that disagrees with their ideology, and bring everyone into the Denounce Heresy circle.
There are good qualities to Mr. A. There are bad qualities. For understanding comics as a craft or Ditko as an artist, they are highly valuable. They are not here for that. They are here to virtue signal.
All this says is that you have a clear bias in favor of the comic because you share its ideology, but don't want to admit it. You're hiding behind this supposed understanding you have of the art form, but you have to resort to making unfounded accusations to prove your point.
Weasels.
Nta, but you're literally doing the same thing you're accusing those anons of doing by asserting Mr.A is Sop worthy because of Ditko's politics.
>genuinely has amazing visual storytelling
No it doesn't. It may contain a few nuggets here and there, but overall it's a slog to read.
>you're doing your Cinemaphilemblr Two Minutes Hate so the actual quality of the product is not as important to you as political grandstanding
Did you even read what the frick you replied to, you stupid c**t?
Ni. Shut the frick up.
Mr. A has NOTHING to do with Ayn Rand.
>Mr. A has NOTHING to do with Ayn Rand.
In wish more people would get that.
Only for Cinemaphilemblr.
MR A
>Mystery
Genius
No, that would be Mr. E.
No, that's how people say "He-Man" while they try to do a french accent.
ghetto mystery maybe, like mysteray
Mr. A didn't go after anybody who didn't deserve it. He'd go at rapists, thugs, thieves, scammers and murderers on the basis that morally gray is in truth, facetious, and the consequences of your actions EXIST.
He also let victims get victimized
Those victims (and btw not all of them) were specifically ones that placed themselves in a situation that would have consequences. His response was hey you buttered your bread.
But he also gave people a chance to make the right choice, as hard of a choice as it was, the right choice. Some would take it, some simply would not.
Ditko did the same thing with the original Question. You, crook, ran from me, tripped and fell off the rooftop ledge, and now you're hanging from a post and those hands are slipping, hmmm... who's fault is that? Not mine. It's yours. Deal with it.
But the Question being there in the first place lead to those events, he's directly responsible for that guy hanging off a roof by escalating events with his threats of violence.
>with his threats of violence.
What threats of violence? See, that's input you added in.
You see a guy in a mask on a roof, the threat is apparent, and he chased after him. just as the Question sees a guy on a roof and sees a criminal with no evidence, it's logical to apply the reverse to himself. If he wasn't up to no good he wouldn't need a mask.
Threat ran because threat knows what he is in truth and someone else found out.
It's like when a burglar doesn't realize the janitor's still working a night shift until it's too late, runs trips and falls hightailing it.
That's not the same situation. The Question has actively chosen to confront the victim (let's not other the deceased, his actions are irrelevant to the Question crimes of assaults and manslaughter) when the victim decided to get away from the Question, the Question dressed in a mask like a pervert btw, chased after knowing they're on a roof with little room to maneuver, did the Question back away, no, his intent was the batter poor victim for no reason The Question could prove without resulting to torture, if the victim committed a crime at all. The Question menaced a poor man off a roof top because he could, it's black letter, he's responsible and he's guilty.
He didn't do jackshit except preach
Quit lying.
It's true. b***h never do something. He is just there talking about right and wrong.
>nyrrrr doo nuttin!
Are you so blind? In Mr. A's stories A doesn't have to do anything that the antagonist hasn't gotten himself into already, and if the antagonist fights then he gets punched for fricking around and finding out.
Go back to reading your herpy derpy Hulk books and quit griping.
So he does nothing
There was an issue where he saves an ex con that was tempted to commit crimes again by an old partner but decided against it, beyond that I think he was more of a narrative device than a character
Frank Castle is what happens when this trope can be taken too far.
Punisher's world is also a particularly chaotic one in which he is the only guy around stopping the shittiest people in the streets from continuing their pathos while other superheroes are out battling baddies in the Negative Zone or somewhere.
Not to say Punisher HASN'T taken things too far, but the way his stories work the people he hunts generally deserve the ending they get.
Help me out here as someone who has never actually read Ayn Rand. So, Mr. A is considered an objectivist manifesto, right? And its big thesis statement is "Good and evil are absolute and evil needs to be punished."
But wasn't Ayn Rand's whole thing that practically everything is justified in the pursuit of self interest and morals don't factor into it?
>But wasn't Ayn Rand's whole thing that practically everything is justified in the pursuit of self interest and morals don't factor into it?
Evil to Ayn Rand was simply taking action without judgment. Evil is knowing that something IS, but you ape out and commit actions to claim it's not.
Ditko only plugged into Rand and Objectivism because it was close to his most true beliefs-those of Aristotle. He was less directly influenced by Rand and more broadly into Aristotle by the end of his life.
I read a bunch a while ago and he doesn't do much that we haven't seen the regular super heroes do. I expected crazier shit.
That said, while I do agree with the ideas, the story telling is indeed bad.
>morally gray is in truth, facetious
How come he never went after corrupt politicians? I recall that he worked for an amoral company and did something about it, but if you want to be a vigilante you could probably get better results going after men in suits than thugs in jeans. And what about the consequences of Mr. A's actions? He's breaching the sanctity of due process, a given right to American citizens. It's one thing to target a criminal who bypassed the justice system through whatever means, but to kill a man before his day in court is questionable. Though, Mr. A probably argues that most criminals go unpunished, and the justice system is broken in many regards.
Corrupt politicians don't often hang out alone near dangerous situations that they can be spooked into by a guy standing nearby menacingly.
It wasn't a Mr. A story, but Ditko did a comic about a doctor who refused to operate on a dictator.
He's a gary stu with warped ideals but the stories aren't that bad. Just dumb and boring.
It's just an explanation of objectivism told through a simple storyline. It's no different from those "Cartoon Guide to X" books.
I posted all of Ditko's self-published comics for SoP Weekend back in 2020: ignore the butthurt libertarians (or as I like to call them, "libertarians") Mr. A is pretty garbage. The art is inventive, but the stories are basically the same Babby's First Philosophy shit over and over again.
The worst part is that it's not even the worst of his self-published work - that would be a three-way tie between "Ditko's World Featuring...Static" which was just walls of text with a superhero story occasionally happening, "Avenging World" which was basically those shitty editorial comics you get in right-wing papers with all the subtlety stamped out, or those weird-ass pamphlets he published towards the end of his life that were literally fragmented sentences attached to barely-coherent scribbles. God, those were depressing to read.
tl;dr, you bet your sweet bippy they are!
Ditko himself has said Mr. A was a test run of a series of ideas he was planning to use later. The Question was one the results of that test.
>Ditko's Question run was mostly good art with boring preachy writing
Yeah, that checks out
>A lot of shitty comics are labeled "SoP", but I pretend they're good because I fell for the most infantile "philosophy"
ftfy
Just curious what would you do if you encountered the antagonists The Question dealt with? Hub City was next to Gotham the most violent and corrupt city in New Earth. I guess Vic Sage should keep his mouth shut about it? Yes? No?
You're referring to Denny O'Neill's run on The Question aka the good run. I appreciate that pretending to be a tough guy is the only way you can get through the day, but I can't indulge in your bullshit so... I dunno, frick off back to plebbit or whatever cesspool you crawled out of.
Truth. People have given Stan Lee a lot of shit, most of it deserved, but he was a good writer. Not a GREAT writer, but still good.
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I'm not pretending to be any tough guy you shit for brains. Take your meds today.
O'Neil's run is not that good.
O'Neil wanted to make him a mystic martial arts fighter on the basis that he'd never be able to survive in the post-Crisis DC earth unless he could accomplish feats considerably past the average olympic athlete.
So he has him get beat up by Lady Shiva and then he goes to fricking Tibet or something and learns the fictional kung fu stuff and be one with some Buddhist magical energy mumbo-jumbo, and has to face Shiva again and then when he stalemates her, now he's in the top 10 MAs of the DC universe.
In some defense, O'Neil does tries to slightly keep the original gist of Vic within his character, but it wanes and becomes obvious later that he really wanted an Iron Fist type character and used Vic for it.
Richard Dragon is literally DC's Iron Fist like character.
Richard Dragon doesn't wear a mask though.
>O'neil's run on the question aka the good one
And opinion discarded. Legitimately the most overrated comic run of all time
Wasn’t it the opposite? He did Mr.A after the Question and continued to do so up until the last decade of his life
Mr. A was crafted first as the original idea of The Question. But The Question was a version, the first time he put the idea of Mr. A on a publishing company.
He had a general concept for the character all the way back to Spider-Man. Think of his origin story: Peter fails to do good simply for goodness' sake, and is therefore punished cosmically for it. Combine that with the character design: Spider-Man wears a full face-mask, but constant attention is drawn to Peter (with face) and Spider-Man (no face) in an exact composition he reuses for The Question.
In Mr. A, Ditko basically addresses the audience directly and says the reason why he does faceless heroes (Mr. A has a mask that does not emote much) is to remove the subjectivity: the good see good in objectivity (children and innocents are not frightened by the mask for long) while the grey see grey (saves mother but not her criminal son despite her protest) and the bad see bad (aforementioned criminal son left to die as a result of his own actions). Stan Lee, famously, Marvel Method-ed Ditko's Spider-Man, and turned him into the Peter Parker we know and love rather than proto-Mr. A.
After the fallout, Ditko decided he'd do his vision without interference. The Question and the "actual"/published Mr. A are equal products of this resentment. The Question was a corpo version for kids (and if you read early Ditko Question and Mr. A side by side, you can tell) while Mr. A was his full vision.
So it depends on where you start counting. Does Un-Stan-Lee'd Ditko Spider-Man "count" as a Proto-Mr. A, or is Mr. A a product of Ditko's frustration with Spider-Man?
I did not know it was already SoP'd.
The art is the only reason I was able to stomach as much as I did.
But he kept writing and drawing Mr. A comics through the 2010s.
Frank Castle has had good, even great, comics.
Such as?
A lot of good and interesting comics are labeled "SoP"
Even mediocre or normal bad comics are called SoP tier. The truly painful stuff gets passed over. It's like a buzzword that lost most of its meaning because it's applied to everything.
>The truly painful stuff
Such as?
The 9/11 schizo one, see
Also this new captcha is cancer, if you get it wrong you lose the post you were typing.
Haven't read that one.
>if you get it wrong you lose the post you were typing.
That doesn't happen to me.
Hurr durr reader doesn't like philosophical comics.
Hurr durr reader still likes the dark setting.
Hurr durr reader wants death and explosions.
Hurr durr reader is in luck, he can go read some Alan Moore.
>reader doesn't like philosophical comics
>he can go read some Alan Moore
Doesn't compute.
Then fix your circuits ya heap of junk.
You know, porn comics are philosophical since they represent the thinking of Diogenes.
There's no real kind of musing in porn comics.
>guy that goes "hurr durr" telling me to fix myself
That didn't compute either did it, roboderp?
Sorry, I don't speak spastic.
>great visual storytelling but it's about a moronic philosophical stance so it belong in the SoP
brainrotten capeshit Cinemaphilemblrgays never cease to amaze me
Mr. A does incredibly basic things right that so many comics fail completely at. Does it have a batshit insane philosophy? Yeah. But then it actually portrays that philosophy visually.
Here is a good example. Look at the way Mr. A's suit and pose is drawn, compared to the criminal. Not just some random scruffs that say "this character is unkempt", but things like his tie flying out of control. Look at the pose: he's stepping towards the "Good" side as though , but all of his body is on the "Bad" side and he is actually already twisting towards falling onto it.
This is such a simple thing that is often completely absent from modern comics.
Adult:
>Ah, comics are a visual medium! Characters don't just have to state things in a neutral pose or from a cieling view of a group in a room, an artist can actually portray their message visually.
>All that, in a comic full of people stating directly what they mean in exposition! Man, this comic sure is crazy, and the dialogue is no good, but Ditko sure was an artist.
/co/mblr
>Ditko says mean things in this comic I disagree with, therefore, it's a bad comic
>I love Ditko though, don't gatekeep me!
I view you with the same contempt I'd view some /misc/tard crying about Kirby being israeli when trying to discuss his art. Virtue signal with some other term, Storyline of Pain is for actual terrible comics like Brazilian Mega Man, not for your political squabbles.
Forgot to attach, duplicate file. Yes, this is such a simple panel, but it does what comics are supposed to do: portray what is going on thematically using visuals. You just don't like what's happening thematically.
And do not accuse me of being you. You are the one who judges things on a simple "Agrees with me" or "disagrees with me" as a barometer for quality.
Your single-minded reading of the art and your constant false accusations make me believe you are an insane person.
I'll make it plain for you: I really like Ditko's art, and at some points, the storytelling is very good, including facial expressions and some of the story endings, which are strong, but overall each Mr. A comic is bogged down by its manner of presentation, not just the dialogue, to the point that it's an incredible chore to read. I don't have a problem with Ditko's philosophy, though I recognize it is extreme at times. I don't even completely disagree with some of the points made, but they are not made well.
Not at all. I'm saying there that the butthurt responses to my comments specifically come from an ideological place. Why else would they accuse me of being a lefty so incessantly?
All I wanted to entertain was if it's SoP-worthy considering all of its non-ideologue aspects, which I should have stated in the first place.
Mr.A is all about a subjective viewing on good and evil, when it isn't the case in real life. Mr.A would be seen as a villain to most, and a Hero to some. He is the most logically grey area character for being so black and white.
Why you all hate libertarians?
Old internet punching bag, minfig is old as shit so he still posts like he’s trying to appeal to other 2000’s era internet posters like they’re still 21 and not well into their 40’s.
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There is a genuinely absurd amount of craft and talent visible on every page of Mr. A. I would almost argue that the general inability to look past the politics and understand the actual dynamics of the storytelling is an indictment of media literacy in the twitter era.
>There is a genuinely absurd amount of craft and talent visible on every page of Mr. A
I disagree. Parts of it are pretty great, but most of it isn't A-game Ditko (pun not intended).
>I would almost argue that the general inability to look past the politics and understand the actual dynamics of the storytelling
I'm gathering that this is the consensus among Mr. A fans, which I think is not entirely unfounded, but very unfair to someone like me, who can look past the politics as well as my own appreciation of Ditko.
I always preferred The Question as a character but Mr. A certainly has some striking art to it.
Ditko's Question had a cool bit when he was in a maze of a warehouse with a bunch of thugs and kept switching between The Question and Vic Sage to make them think two guys were picking them off.
Moore and Gaiman are Ditko fans despite disagreeing with his politics. Moore even wrote a song about Mr. A written to the tune of Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground.
There was one issue I really liked, but on the whole it’s just a mess with nice visuals but bland dialogue and terrible one note stories. But I think the art is to good to consider it a straight up “storytime of pain” tier dump
I do have a soft spot for one of the comics.
The early stuff is interesting, the later stuff starts to read like Chick Tracts and loses most of its graphic flair.
Here’s a philosophical theory, Evil isn’t the opposition of Good or a different way of doing things than the standard. Evil is a lack of Good’s presence; Evil only happens because of a lack of Goodness within a man or a lack of Good men around it.
There's no such thing as evil or good. Morality is a man made construct of socially accepted norms.
YWNBAW
And you'll never go to heaven
I know
What more important question is what's Mr. A adjective here exactly?
*free shrugs* dunno. My favorite thing to come out of Mr.A is Rorschach, who overshadowed Alan Moore's communist intentions with the righteous justice everyone preferred.
Runner-up prize goes to The Question, who's a fun character, would make a great comic series / cartoon /tv show / movie if a competent team handled it, and's the main character in one of Justice League's best episodes.
Objectavism's kinda cringe as, Ayn Rand's hypocritical on account of her being a israeliteess. This's why Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers stopped following her, as he noticed the, "best" people promoted in her organization were never gentiles. Similar to Jung being the token gentile in Freud's cult whose work far surpassed Freud's when he left.
When Ken Levine made Bioshock: Infinite, he blamed the failures of communism on white men, despite the movement being israeli.
Sidenote: The X-force run focusing on Multiple Man had the girl who knows things reading Atlas Shrugged to show how smart she's.
You mean X-Factor
>who overshadowed Alan Moore's communist intentions
His intention first and foremost was a good character that drove the story. He succeeded in that respect.
Schizoposting so early?
>rabbi felated my newborn penis
I'm not israeli so I don't have any genes for mental illness.
>His intention first and foremost was a good character that drove the story. He succeeded in that respect.
>a good character
Bullshit. Rorschach was meant to be a strawman of what Alan Moore dislikes. He failed entirely in his role as a strawman because even a flawed caricature of Alan Moore's enemies is more likeable than communism.
The guy we are supposed to relate to the most is Nite Owl: the fat israelite who can't get an erection. Again, Alan Moore failed because no one reads Watchmen and says
>I really connected with Nite Owl!
>Rorschach was meant to be a strawman of what Alan Moore dislikes.
Now that's bullshit. It's because he wasn't written as a strawman that he was a well-liked character. Moore made a nuanced character that qualities he admired and qualities he didn't. He based him partly on Ditko, whom he loved.
You weren't SUPPOSED to relate to any of the characters.
>You weren't SUPPOSED to relate to any of the characters.
Why, then, do almost all hardcore Watchmen fans relate to Rorschach, despite Moore clearly trying to portray him as someone who goes too far in his quest for justice.
You can be a huge fan of something without fully understanding it. Happens all the time. Most of those fans like the movie anyway.
You do sound like a moron
>muh israelites
no israelites in my country
This shit still. Alan Moore understands the appeal of Rorschach. Watchmen though was also about exploring the psychology of what it would take to build such a hero. The problem is people always take one aspect of the character while ignoring the negative. And then quote people always mention on this too is specifically Moore insulting a certain type of fan who approach him irl and not really attacking people for finding Rorschach heroic. It's the same thing as weirdos who love Punisher or Judge Dress in a narrow autistic way. You can like Dredd killing criminals and being over the top, that can be fun, but if you're a sperg who takes it seriously and rejects any notion of the satire and parody of it, then you're a pleb and a weirdo.
>When Ken Levine made Bioshock: Infinite, he blamed the failures of communism on white men
Don't you mean Bioshock 2?
>Runner-up prize goes to The Question, who's a fun character, would make a great comic series / cartoon /tv show / movie if a competent team handled it, and's the main character in one of Justice League's best episodes.
Fun Fact: The Question's real name (not Vic Sage) is taken from the name of a israeli psychiatrist.
His real name was Vic Sage.
Not really, at its worst it just has mediocre writing, it's still worth a read for any fan of Ditko's art.
>Tough question for you guys: is Mr. A Storytime of Pain-worthy?
No, because it's good.
It's not good at all, but also not SoP worthy.
No, but then again, I don't care for that Storytime of Pain nonsense. If it's bad, I just won't read it.
He should join a team with the Fixer, Isom, and Kamen America
Obligatory
I don't think it's painful, just interesting and potentially angering depending on where you lie on how much sympathy "bad people" deserve.
It's more of a pain to read than it is interesting.
>depending on where you lie on how much sympathy "bad people" deserve
That's not even a factor for me.
YES POST IT!!!
It has pages with denser text than Cerebus and a certain Jay Naylor NTR comic, so yep.
More like Mr. gAy.
No, it expands your mind.
Clearly not the case.