This is a thread to talk about a storytelling
The Storytelling Thread
- This topic has 998 replies, 24 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 4 months ago by
.
Author
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I don’t know what the timeline is exactly, but it felt to me as though they took a cue from the Batman Arkham video games. That was the first time I came across that particular version of Harley, although it might be that there’s a precursor in the comics that I’m not aware of.
-
-
Are you saying her original costume was not sexualized? more skin does not always mean more sexy.
Any excuse:
-
-
-
With Alfred killed and Superman outing himself, has DC written themselves into a corner?
Nah.
Things like that have occurred many times before and they have been undone. Nothing is truly permanent with the Big Two.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Nothing is truly permanent with the Big Two.
Remember when Peter and MJ were married, and then they weren’t? Or when Gwen Stacy was dead and then she wasn’t? Or when Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin and then he was dead and then he wasn’t and then he was the Iron Patriot and then he was the Red Goblin and then….
-
Nothing is truly permanent with the Big Two.
Remember when Peter and MJ were married, and then they weren’t? Or when Gwen Stacy was dead and then she wasn’t? Or when Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin and then he was dead and then he wasn’t and then he was the Iron Patriot and then he was the Red Goblin and then….
(Cough)X-Men(Cough)
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
plus, DC are probably due for a reboot any time now… that’s how they “fix” stuff =P
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
Afterbirth.
King’s next big event. It will come out. people will be outraged. A beloved character will be dead or supremely damaged. King will come out and say that editorial is responsible.
-
Afterbirth.
King’s next big event. It will come out. people will be outraged. A beloved character will be dead or supremely damaged. King will come out and say that editorial is responsible.
Well, maybe not Didio now…
-
-
I like the brief scenes that say a lot like the Deathstroke Wolverine scenes in the X-men/Teen Titans crossover back in the day, and some of the dialogue between Bats and Supes…
In DKR I liked Batman getting the street cred from that huge gang but then again he was down with a quasi skinhead group.
-
How would your storytelling approach be to a character like Superman, Batman, or whoever? Not exactly a reimagining per say… Personally, I would approach Batman with an emphasis on his childhood trauma. Miller did it in the original DKR but I wouldn’t devote pages on the murder flashback and Bruce waking up all the time…
Superman is interesting internally and externally. First, there is a pretty obvious conflict in that his experience and the experience of a normal person have nothing in common. So, the internal conflict is that Superman thinks he is a person. He thinks that his life as Clark Kent makes him human. However, he’s been infinitely more than human his entire life, so he’s simply blind to real human problems. He’d have to be confronted with that realization in the story. Often, whenever I see someone try to tackle Clark’s personality and vulnerabilities, it usually sounds like the sort of “weaknesses” or “mistakes” people will cite in job interviews. “Sometimes I care too much” sort of things. The truth is that a superman would not be able to understand the vast majority of human experience any more than a wild animal could.
Second, externally, I’d confront the character with the ultimate futility of his power. He can temporarily save the world from invaders and supervillains like Darkseid and so on, but he can’t really have any lasting effect on what he’s saving – humanity. Tied again into the fact that he is innately incapable of understanding the human experience. Like the “superman” Hugo Danner in Philip Wylie’s novel GLADIATOR said, “there is nothing I can do that many men working together with machines cannot do.” Superman can’t make the world a better place if people aren’t already willing to make it better without him.
So, initially, the first story arc would be Superman realizing the delusions of his life and of his personality. The second act would be Superman’s crisis point where he actively fights against that realization. He redoubles efforts to actually make a difference in the world – to leave a legacy for mankind – to be the Man of Tomorrow. However, again, his inability to understand the real human condition combined with the futility and ultimate danger of his power coming into confrontation with humanity’s incapacity for rapid “betterment” naturally leads to unexpected disasters and an even seriously more dangerous situation for the world. This leads Superman to double down on his efforts to succeed – bred out of the very inhuman fact that he never fails – until he’s betrayed every ideal, hurt everyone who he’s loved or who’s looked up to him and the worst that he’s feared has become a reality.
Then he leaves. He runs away.
So, there are two stories at this point. The world without Superman dealing with the fallout of his actions, and a fallen, broken Superman traveling the universe as a fugitive like Caine from Kung Fu. This is actually the most interesting section of the storyline and could last for a while, I think. One group of stories about a world where there was a Superman and where there still are super-people as well as super-technology that people are using (often against each other) dealing with the impact such a being would have left on it, and another story about Superman as something like an international man with no name – a wanted criminal to some and a divine savior to others – running away from a painful past but eventually learning to hope for and have faith in a better future that with all his power he cannot determine or control.
And, of course, that’s how he learns what it means to be human.
-
-
-
-
There are many kinds of character complexity. Skyfall had the most complete picture of Bond as a character, in its first half, before it sells out its themes to fucking nostalgia. Bond can be broken in all kinds of interesting ways. But he can’t be healthy, or able to love. That’s just not Bond, at least not for me.
As Schopenhauer pointed out, love is like a natural disaster or illness. Not something to pursue nor does it usually end in happiness. The average person has a litany of romantic disasters before settling into their final, usually resigned to, relationships.
I remember one critic did an analysis of the basic Bond story as following the alchemical Great Work pursuing the unification – or “bond” – of the divided masculine and feminine elements of the character. So, in the end, it could be about a man incapable of love learning to love himself.
That is what I think has been missing from Wolverine’s storyline as Al-X mentions above. Though his relationship with Jean Grey – more of a non-relationship, actually – has been present, it didn’t really go anywhere. I was sorry to see that his romance with Mariko from The Wolverine was more or less absent in LOGAN. However, with all the time changing shenanigans in between, it’s hard to say if The Wolverine ever happened in the new timeline.
Logan has generally been a “man with no name” sort of character following in the footsteps of the warriors Tashiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood made famous. The movie LOGAN was a sort of combination of UNFORGIVEN, LONE WOLF AND CUB and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES.
However, there are a couple of approaches for Wolverine that would work for the character. First, he is a samurai or knight in search of a good lord. Xavier was that for him for most of the storylines. He needs that to both restrain and give direction to the brutality he carries with him. That, in itself, though is not enough to really save him. He really needs to find a way to stop hating himself or to stop seeing himself as solely an engine of violence. A romantic interest would serve that purpose – someone who values him for his ability to not simply protect others, but to care for them. It would be especially dramatic if those two drives – the service to the lord and the love for the lady – come into conflict as his pursuit of the latter makes him less useful or devoted to the former.
-
-
I did have an idea for Wolverine a long time ago, but it is a little unworkable now since many stories, including the movies have done similar things.
Part 1
It would begin in the South Pacific during World War 2. The was a military doctor named Ishii who was something like the Japanese Doctor Mengele only far worse. He was interested in chemical weapons, but gas masks (and the wind) rendered them pretty much useless on the battlefield. So he developed an interest in diseases and weaponized Anthrax and Bubonic plague. He’d use Chinese civilians as test subjects for the diseases often killing entire villages with an outbreak. Later, he used American and British POW’s and this is where Logan would come in. As killing machine, he’s pretty impressive, but his superiors would send him on suicide missions and eventually he’s overwhelmed and captured. After his captors learn that he can survive anything without a scratch, he’s sent to Dr. Ishii’s camp to be the perfect immortal test subject.
Eventually, he escapes and kills everyone in the camp (including mercy killings of the other horribly suffering test subjects) except, knowing that the Japanese defeat is imminent, Dr. Ishii has already fled into hiding.
Part 2
A couple decades later in the late 60’s, Logan is basically muscle for hire and he’s paid by a shadowy ultra-right organization to take out a local group of leftist college kids who organize protests against the war and provide legal advice to civil rights activists. Logan ends up going berzerk on on one of the tougher kids, a hippie who looks like Jesus but fights like James J. Braddock. He jams his claws into the kid’s heart and figures he’s facing a murder rap, but the kid don’t die. Instead, he heals instantly, and juvenile bone claws emerge from his hands. From the kid’s reaction, Logan can tell this is the first time he’s had this happen and he realizes that this isn’t just a similar mutation. Under all that hair, the kid has his face. He’s some kind of copy.
Logan takes off, but he keeps an eye on the kid who he finds out is named Thomas Jones, is an orphan and a pacifist (even though he has a mean temper). Logan basically abducts Thomas and the kid’s girlfriend, Hannah, and they trace his background to find out who’s behind this. The search takes them on a trip across the country and down dead ends or half-leads to people like Mr. Sinister, a young version of the Spider-Man villain The Jackal and even The High Evolutionary. It also brings them into contact and sometimes conflict with Magneto and Professor X who both share somewhat anti-human opinions on the direction evolution should take.
Finally, the road ends with Dr. Ishii. Turns out the Doctor did not die or stay in hiding and instead has been working to create his ultimate weapon. He preserved samples of Wolverine’s tissue and has been experimenting on it to develop what he calls “human cancer cells.” Individuals who would be dispersed into the world to eventually destabilize it. Thomas was simply the baseline of the experiment. A functioning “cell” that could be slipped into society without notice. However, he was far from the only one. Thomas and Logan have to face an army of modified and monstrous clones and Thomas has to decide to fight and kill to save Hannah and his friend and father figure Logan.
As both men lay dying and wrecked by the effects of Ishii’s plague carrying monsters, the shadowy organization that originally hired Logan shows up. The organization reveals itself to be Weapon X.
Part 3
In the modern day, Logan is a member of the X-men still searching for answers about his past. He runs into an old woman who calls him “Thomas.” This is Hannah and she tells him the story. She also tells him that Logan died in Ishii’s lab years ago. She saw it. He’s not who he thinks he is.
So, the rest of the story would be Logan questioning whether he really was this unstoppable killing machine about whom over a century of stories have been told or if he’s really this sweet kid who wanted to make the world a better place, had a person he really loved in his life and would only fight to save people he cared about. And he has to ask the question if Charles has known this all along.
-
-
-
That is an interesting thing about Batman. If Bruce didn’t have the trauma driving him, it’s not like he would stop being Batman. Instead, he’d be Doc Savage.
The interesting viewpoint that the Gotham series took was that Batman is Bruce addressing his trauma. Instead of Batman leading to crazy costumed criminals, the mad crimelords led to Batman. He was the sane one and his “theatrics” were designed to counteract and intimidate the criminals who were running wild before he arrived. What seems patently insane in dressing up as a bat and fighting crime is actually a sane and carefully thought out approach.
What would be interesting is to see an arc where Gotham City actually cleans itself up and how Bruce would respond to a town that no longer needs Batman. How would he react to actually winning the war on crime?
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Bruce from Gotham would leave and go find a new city that needs help knowing that Gotham would be in the capable hands of Commissioner Gordon.
Or, like Doc Savage, he would stay based in Gotham but seek out cases around the world. It is interesting how Gotham is a part of Batman. Bruce has tight roots with the city – and for a while there was even a supernatural connection between the Waynes and Gotham City in the stories. I once theorized that a big part of Wayne Industries construction in the city was to basically create city structures that Batman would use to get around the city or spy on criminals.
It would be funny if some new engineer came to Gotham and was astonished at the building standards required for any construction.
“Jesus Christ, flagpoles on the sides of buildings have to be rated to hold six hundred pounds? And why does ever building have to have a three foot wide ledge every twenty feet?”
Seriously, though, considering Wayne’s dominance of the city’s economy and infrastructure, it would only make sense that Bruce would use that to build rooftop pathways, special tunnels, secret caches of supplies (or even a first aid station) and ambush blinds as well as use construction to insert cameras and mics in all the locations villains might gather. I’m surprised I haven’t see that in a story.
-
Seriously, though, considering Wayne’s dominance of the city’s economy and infrastructure, it would only make sense that Bruce would use that to build rooftop pathways, special tunnels, secret caches of supplies (or even a first aid station) and ambush blinds as well as use construction to insert cameras and mics in all the locations villains might gather. I’m surprised I haven’t see that in a story.
In Batman #666, the first Damien-as-future-Batman story, the defeat of the villain hinges on something similar, with Batman having essentially rigged the entire city.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
Obviously, assault, potentially kidnapping and abduction, terroristic threatening and most often, trespassing. Carrying concealed weapons, of course, and disturbing the peace. Probably speeding, too, since his car has a rocket engine. Also, has that car been inspected for emissions regulations (a big thing in California)? Likely in violation of all sorts of legally enforced vehicular standards there. Flying without a license too, unless he produces one and identifies himself, but you need FAA authorization and have to log flight paths and so on. Destruction of property as well even if he didn’t directly cause it but he was involved in it.
However, vigilantism itself is not a crime or legally defined. In California, there is penal code section 837 allowing citizen arrest: “a private person may arrest another: 1) for a public offense committed or attempted in his presence. 2) when the person arrested has committed a felony, although not in his presence. 3) when a felony has been in fact committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed it.”
Also, it is important to remember that in the U.S., at least, police officers actually don’t have any more rights or authority than citizens except when they abuse their position, it often is ignored or even encouraged by the city authorities. So, theoretically, a person could do anything a police officer could – except in the case of carrying weapons in certain places that otherwise prohibit it.
It is illegal to perform surgery without the patient’s permission unless ordered by the court, and most often this is because the patient’s life requires it. Such as treatment ordered for minor children of Christian Scientists. Ordering invasive brain surgery on an unwilling prisoner because he is a danger to others was done in the past, but I doubt it would get much traction today. Now, there is even the question whether anyone could be sure that the person they are holding is actually THE Joker or an imposter/patsy pretending to be the Joker. Even if they managed to fix the actual Joker, there could be someone out there even worse ready to take up the name and appearance.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
This does get into the legality of arrest in all the cases of many superheroes. I think an early Spider-Man story had the teen webslinger stopping a robber, but when the police showed up, the criminal claimed that he was attacked by this weird masked freak. It was just Spidey’s word against his and the cops weren’t too keen on listening to some weirdo in flashy tights.
Let’s say Batman brings in some masked criminal. Well, what’s the evidence? How do you even know the guy behind the mask is the wanted criminal? If Batman actually foils a crime, then what are the charges and how can a case be built from evidence the police did not gather? I think the reason Batman keeps running into the same foes is that the Gotham D.A. can never put together a case. However, I imagine Batman’s biggest fans are defense attorneys raking in a fortune getting guys like the Penguin, Joker and Catwoman out of jail against such flimsy cases.
-
-
-
This does get into the legality of arrest in all the cases of many superheroes. I think an early Spider-Man story had the teen webslinger stopping a robber, but when the police showed up, the criminal claimed that he was attacked by this weird masked freak. It was just Spidey’s word against his and the cops weren’t too keen on listening to some weirdo in flashy tights.
I used to love that stuff in the early Lee/Ditko Spider-Man comics. There was one where he breaks up a bunch of robbers outside a jewellery store who are about to break in, but they point out that they hadn’t actually done anything wrong at that point, so they call a cop over and complain about Spidey harassing them.
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
I personally argued jury nullification. They might argue that Batman felt a moral obligation since law enforcement had failed.
That would be a very good way for Batman to get off, but jury nullification is not a legitimate defense. It’s not recognized as an actual thing in legal terms. Also, it is very, very hard to get anyone to sit on a jury who would even consider jury nullification as lawyers have long prepared questions to weed those people out. “Have you ever been rescued by Batman or are you close with anyone who has been? Have you ever been threatened by one of Gotham’s many colorful crimelords? Have you ever purchased a Batman or Batman associated costume for your child on Halloween?” At the same time, it would be almost impossible to actually fill a jury with people from Gotham who have not been saved by the Batman since he’s saved the city multiple times.
The case the prosecution would have to make is that Batman actually only saved people his own actions had put in danger. That the vigilante’s entire modus operandi was to make himself look like a hero when he was actually a narcissistic and sadistic millionaire dressing up in fetish gear and getting sexual gratification beating up underprivileged, stigmatized and often mentally ill men and women in Gotham’s most poverty stricken areas. It would be a good case to make, too. The history of vigilantism in America is most associated with racist mobs attacking minority groups, lynching poor blacks, massacring Chinese and Mexicans and even persecuting the Mormons. Batman’s story is just a modern day retelling of The Clansman (aka Birth of a Nation).
It is actually against the law for an attorney to positively suggest that jury nullification is an option in court or during trial – they could be disbarred or even charged with a crime. Jury nullification exists only as a logical conclusion of the fact that a juror cannot be punished for their decision and a defendant cannot be tried for the exact same crime twice. However, the D.A. can anticipate this by being ready to charge Batman with other crimes in future trials, and honestly, a juror is more likely to not come to a decision than declare a person not guilty in spite of the fact they obviously broke the law.
Now, I still think arguing that Bruce Wayne is not Batman is a strong approach since it would be very hard to prove that he is. Even if the authorities discovered the Batcave under Wayne Manor, Bruce could argue he had no idea it was there and is very concerned that he was living over such a notorious vigilante’s hideout all this time. Now, Bruce would have needed to anticipate this and made sure that, first, he never seemed like he could be the Batman and, second, that he publicly expressed contempt and disdain for the hero whenever the topic came up. That way he’d have a record of being opposed to Batman and his war on crime.
Conversely, Bruce could reveal that even though he is not Batman, the Batman is actually the Batmen. His attorney could argue that police corruption was so widespread and actual police service so poor, he was forced to put into place an extensive private security service to protect his financial interests – interests that kept the city running – at his own expense. The Batmen were doing only what the police should have been doing, and if any laws were broken, it deserves nothing more serious than a large fine. On top of that, he could argue that the cases where this or that Batman seemed to spin out of control were due entirely to the absence of any confidence in police response. Where were the police during all this? Why didn’t they respond to an explosion in the warehouse district until an hour after Batman stopped Solomon Grundy? It’s not Bruce Wayne or Batman punishing the poor in Gotham but the neglect of the city itself that’s to blame.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
There are also issues with the chain of custody for evidence and evidence tampering.
Cop: “Well, Batman gave it to me.”
DA: “And where did ‘Batman’ get it? How do you know he didn’t just make it himself to frame someone? How do we even know this is the real ‘Batman’ and not some crook fucking with you?”
Cop: “Uhhh…”
It could all be ruled inadmissible by a judge and sink the DA’s case.
And there’s a shitload of issues trying to subpoena the superhero and should they actually show up, when they get on the stand.
It doesn’t take much scratching at the surface to see how completely and totally unrealistic superhero vigilantism is, superpowers aside. About 99% of all criminals captured by a superhero would (and should) actually go free.
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
I would put this in the Star Trek threads but it belongs here as well…
From the little I have seen of Star Trek Discovery and Picard, the writers this time have abandoned the
90’s format of all this posturing and humanist philosophy for more darker, daring adventure… Never quite
seen 7 of 9 like this…Then again Babylon 5 at the time was more daring in their storytelling and if Star Trek was like that we wouldn’t
have needed B5. Imagine what the Dominion War would have been like…Just saying…
Honestly, The Orville is more Star Trek than current Star Trek is. While it does have some running plot threads, each episode is pretty standalone.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
There is a question of “core” of the story. A creative team can come on to a series or book and change it entirely but in an essential way that is a completely different title. Like with the X-Men, you can tell a serious science fiction story with those characters, but the core of the story – like most Marvel comics – is about the experience of adolescence. Which is why Marvel comics totally captured the teenaged boy audience in the 70’s and 80’s.
However, if a writer or publisher wants to expand beyond that audience, then sometimes the core of the story actually has to change. Now, no one ever went broke exploiting teenage anxiety and angst – that’s the bread and butter of the YA fiction industry. However, you can’t treat a series like Power Pack exactly the same as X-men. The real world problem there is that when you’ve found success appealing to such a specific audience, it is hard to get writers to not write to that audience even when it’s not the best thing for the title.
There is some good advice for writers to write stories that they want to read or see. However, like most good advice and conventional wisdom, it’s usually either wrong outright or take wrong. It’s more true to say that writers do their best work when they write stories that they want to write which is so obvious that it is almost a stupid thing to say.
Obviously, 99% of the people behind comics, children’s books and YA novels are much older than their core audience. That has always been true. In many cases, like Winnie the Pooh, Alice In Wonderland and the Harry Potter series, the authors were writing the stories at first for an audience of children they knew. Still, that doesn’t mean you need to do the same thing. Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard wrote stories that they knew would be read and loved by mostly teen boys. They just knew their audience, and they had read those types of stories religiously when they were boys so they understood what they were making. The main difference, I think, is that they understood it from an adult perspective. That’s the main advantage I think adult writers have when writing for young audiences. They have gone through it and so they can take what is a very present and distressing situation – the powerlessness of youth – and give it a shape in fiction. It’s not too off base to say that the fandom for writers like JK Rowling or JRR Tolkein is close to a child-parent relationship. Even though these may not be the stories or novels that the writer actually reads for their own pleasure, they still certainly can be the sort of stories that the writer enjoys writing.
With shows like Discovery or Picard, the audience certainly has changed as has the landscape. The Next Generation was certainly square in the middle of the “family” show audience – mainly a show parents could watch with their kids of any age. Now, though, that isn’t as certain or true anymore. The impression I get is that the new Star Trek shows take an approach to the material in much the same way Zack Snyder approached DC. Certainly, that is a shift from the core of the previous stories. However, that was already shifting with Deep Space 9 and Voyager, anyway. They retained the visual style but diverged greatly from the regular shape of a Star Trek story. Picard and Discovery seem to also diverge from the visual style as well.
A slight note here, visual style is as important or even more important than story style even in comics. Image is often criticized because it seemed to emphasize visuals over story – but that was usually its strength, not a weakness. On top of that, going back and reading Cyber Force, Maxx, Pitt, Spawn or WildCATS even at the beginning, they really weren’t written any worse than any other comics on the stands at the time… or honestly most comics today. The division of great, good, mediocre and bad writing is fairly consistent in any medium. Even with the incredible expense of making a movie, you still get the same number of bad and mediocre whether they cost a billion dollars to make or a hundred thousand. Of course, the quality of the story hardly ever relates to the financial success anyway.
Nevertheless, a writer should really strive to be authentic and original since hack work never gets past the gatekeepers who can get a comic published, movie made or television show produced.
To go back to Power Pack, it still has a lot of potential as a concept for Marvel. Runaways and NYX were like a modern reimagining of that title, but it was also something like it’s own thing and the characters were a bit older than the Power Pack. There is an established world struggling to deal with people developing superpowers. The truth about the Marvel universe is that most people who develop superpowers don’t use them for good. The number of supervillains far outweighs heroes, and many of those heroes are in the employ of organizations whose interests are not necessarily altruistic. To take the perspective of elementary school kids in that world – rather than teenagers – is not something many people have done before or since. It wasn’t that novel a concept in the 80’s and 90’s though with little kids showing up a lot in horror movies, action films and sci-fi adventures. Everyone remembers Newt from Aliens and the big one, Eliot from ET. Power Pack was pretty popular and still gets a positive reaction from comic book fans. I never felt that it really took the perspective of the kids as much as it should, but I think it would be a better title to release today than another title like New Warriors.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Interesting. Mentioning the core of the story. To run with it: Star Trek was
Roddenberry vision but is it now?What makes for good Star Trek? Is it good if it adheres to Roddenberry’s wishes and
his storytelling?The audience and world has changed since the 60’s series as that was
50 years ago. To get back to the 90’s and ds9, even the fans at that time wanted the
franchise to take more chances and some even preferred (gasp!) B5 to ds9.
Abrams “revived” it in 2009 with the movies but was that really Trek or Fast and Furious in Space?
It is debatable.I have to say that stories, arcs, etc. have a beginning, middle, and end. To prolong
and stretch a certain style is really doing the story and audience a disservice. ie
Claremont’s X-Men imho, was best with Byrne and it came to its end, but I have to say
that it was stretched and milked dry. Morrison ended his run just right. But if you look
at how that title has changed from Stan Lee writing it…As for Star Trek, maybe they should rest the whole thing like they should also do with Star Wars
Hope I did not go all over the place… Cheers.
-
-
-
First season of TNG was probably the worst, but that could have been them just getting their bearings. Still, no excuse for this:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
To prolong and stretch a certain style is really doing the story and audience a disservice. ie Claremont’s X-Men imho, was best with Byrne and it came to its end, but I have to say that it was stretched and milked dry.
I strongly disagree. Claremont’s vision was of an ongoing story where characters changed considerably, where they could be written out entirely and replaced, everything continue to move on. It was entirely geared for the long form of many years and that’s what sold it. A majority of the adaptations of the work use concepts that came after that run, the evolution of Magneto, God Loves, Man Kills, Wolverine mini with Miller, #268 that reveals Wolverine’s longeivity and role in WW2.
Now subjectively it’s perfectly reasonable to think the Byrne issues were a creative highpoint but they weren’t the high point of X-Men’s popularity. During the Dark Phoenix Saga sales were around 170,000, this continued to increase and in the late 80s and early 90s averaged closer to 450,000 (I’m not going to include the speculator driven relaunch). That’s a sign that the ongoing soap opera was a major factor in driving those sales up, it is not replicated across the industry by other books.
Claremont left when the popularity hit a level where he was no longer allowed to either control the direction or make significant changes and that was the end of that but I believe the entire nature of it being a long running saga, with perceptible change missing in most comics, is what made it so popular and dominate the industry at the time.
4 users thanked author for this post.
-
I strongly disagree. Claremont’s vision was of an ongoing story where characters changed considerably, where they could be written out entirely and replaced, everything continue to move on.
That was an interesting point during the period of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Comics were about to go out of business several times so the fact that the X-Men and Teen Titans suddenly broke out as big sellers and brought a lot of interest back to the medium and superheroes pushed a lot of innovation… until it didn’t. X-men particularly changed the standards as it was about the situation changing as the book went on. Characters would drop out and new characters would come in.
It is interesting at DC, there was this 5G idea that would put young descendants of the heroes in the place of the current classic roster, but that’s really what should have happened with the first Crisis. Instead of Supergirl, Superman should have died and she should have become Superwoman, the most powerful hero on Earth, just like Kid Flash became the Flash. Bruce Wayne should have died or become incapacitated with Dick Grayson taking his place. Essentially, the Teen Titans should have become the Justice League.
Comics are in a similarly dire position now, it seems, so it makes sense they would start experimenting to see if they can make themselves relevant to young readers again.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
-
Well at least, unlike 9/11, this will be a world-wide narrative that everyone will have gone through…
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Needless to say I am a HUGE fan of the Byrne/Claremont issues and to a lesser extent the issues after Byrne. I have to say Claremont at his best was that time. Sure the title became popular afterwards but imho the quality of the storytelling was then.
Like I say, I am okay with that, it’s a perfectly valid opinion that those were the best issues.
That’s not quite the same as saying it was a case of staying on too long. For example this week I read two new X-Men books, the first was centred around the Brood from #155 (Byrne left in #143), the second around Scalphunter and events in the Mutant Massacre (#211). The Morrison run you mentioned began with a major part of the story centred around Genosha (#235). A central part of the Hickman Powers of X story is Nimrod (#191).
So that’s a rich vein of post-Byrne story ideas from Claremont still being mined. If he’d left with him I think it’s very valid to question whether the X-Men would have been at the industry leader it was or just been a ‘great run’ like Moench and Gulacy on Master of King Fu. The first X-Men film has Rogue as a very central character and the more complex version of Magneto as a Holocaust survivor. The sequel is a loose adaptation of God Loves: Man Kills. The Wolverine on his mini series with Miller. Logan features Caliban. All post-Byrne ideas.
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
Will this current pandemic do likewise?
It feels like we very much anticipated it, with the zombie craze of the recent years.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
It’s the end of comedy as we know it
-
…and I feel fine.
1 user thanked author for this post.
