Tag: Comics

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You Can’t Go Back to Battleworld Again: Graeme Revisits The First Secret Wars | Wait, What?

You Can’t Go Back to Battleworld Again: Graeme Revisits The First Secret Wars | Wait, What?

waitwhatpod:

I can still remember how excited I was to read Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars for the first time, when I was a kid.

Literally just posted! Proof that nostalgia will only break your heart!

Looking for images for this post, I found a whole host of covers to the British reprint series. Guess what I’m going to be sharing on the Wait What Tumblr for awhile.

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One thing that struck as extra-odd was the idea that there’s hell to pay in terms of people holding grudges. I haven’t found this to be true over the life of what I shudder to call a career in comics. People get grumpy and pissy about stuff, but actually holding a lingering resentment? It doesn’t seem to happen because of critical discourse. The publishers of this site once conspired to label Adrian Tomine a moron and a piker; here’s him holding a grudge. I think I’ve interviewed all of the comics pros that went after me hard during that same era. Two of the comics professionals I like most currently are people with whom I’ve had massive differences of opinion in the critical realm. Many of the other people of whom I’m most fond in comics are very critical of my own work. I worked for King Features seven months after writing really negative articles about King Features.

Reading this, I had two immediate responses. The first was a cynical, “Clearly, Tom hasn’t criticized enough Big Two comic books/comic book creators*” and the second, a more wistful “Why can’t I be like Tom?”

I agree that there’s not “hell to pay” about people holding grudges, although I’ve certainly had experiences where people holding grudges against me have had problematic impacts on my life and my job in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated. But for the most part, what can you do about people holding grudges, especially if you’ve apologized and tried to rebuild bridges you didn’t even know existed before apparently burning them down? Some people are just resentful and petty and angry, and you have to just let them be like that, I guess.

(* That sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not; I genuinely think creators and staff working for those companies trend towards paranoia and grudges more easily than independent cartoonists for reasons that essentially come down to the corporate culture in which they have to operate and the Internet culture which has built itself up around those companies, but that might be my own personal experience forming an entirely unrealistic bias.)

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So much of this series is tied up in hoping that I, as a reader, cares about the Watcher being killed, about whatever new retcons the writers have thought up, and about Nick Fury as the man on the wall. As stories, all of those can be great, but as concepts, they’re just ideas on the page that excite me as much as any random creator interview, which is not a lot. Watching as the characters run around over the paper-thin surface of this ‘story,’ they become increasingly less motivated by anything internal and just seem like cogs.

Chad Nevett on Marvel’s last event series, Original Sin. Well worth a read.
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For starters, there’s no real explanation of what an Onslaught is. Is the Red Skull actually dead or transformed? Is Red Onslaught a separate entity and the dead Red Skull’s voice is still somehow around? Is the Red Skull in control of Onslaught? I have no idea. I guess if I’d read the Onslaught X-Men comics back in the mid-90s, I might know, but I dropped those like a brick before the lead-in to outsourcing the core books to Image happened. That wasn’t really covered here except a line about Onslaught being a construct of pure hate, which didn’t exactly enlighten me. Still, the character (characters?) has multiple voices which seem to be dominant at different times and it wasn’t exactly clear storytelling. The story reads like everyone is supposed to know what an Onslaught is. If the characters were confused, I might not feel like I’m missing out on something.

This made me feel very glad I decided not to try out Axis today after all. I’m burned out on Marvel events and the whole massive continuity clusterfuck of them all.
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And it’d have to be black-and-white. Black-and-white is part of the grammar of large rambling graphic novels, in my head – FROM HELL, CEREBUS, THE LAST KINGDOM, add your own here. Also, it’s the grammar of literary graphic novels — MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, etc etc. So I could fool myself, as all pulp writers who finally give up on plot and just drop their bowels in public do, that I am being all literary and clever. Black-and-white always had the mad things in. Now that I reflect on it, I think most of my fondest memories of comics come from b/w books: 2000AD, WARRIOR, LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, ESCAPE, the undergrounds, the independents, the early Anglophone graphic novels…

From the most recent installment of Warren Ellis’ email newsletter. There really is something about black and white comics, isn’t there? For me, it’s stuff like 2000AD, early Deadline, Alec… It’s all very deeply embedded in some way. For all the memories and nostalgia I have surrounding early American comics and their exoticness, it was the British comics that were mostly black and white – or black, white and a third color, normally red or blue – that were big, important jumps forward in my comic reading.