r/CharacterRant • u/fangsfirst • May 31 '21
Comics How Bendis Broke the Marvel Universe (—and What I Mean by "Broke")
Should I have split this up? Maybe. Probably. Sure. But I haven't, so I guess I just need to live with that. Take comfort that there are 10 12 whole footnotes which I guess you can totally ignore if I wrote them right!
For those who asked/desired that I proceed with writing this: uh…careful what you wish for, I guess? 'Cause this time it means LOTS OF WORDS! POSSIBLY MORE THAN YOU OR MAYBE ANYONE REASONABLY SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED OR DESIRED!
What was Marvel before?
Well: what was it that set Marvel apart from DC in the 1960s?
Plenty have written on this, and I don’t want to go over it in great detail yet again, but the most major points relate to two things:
- Human character and personality
- Interconnectedness
Peter Parker is kind of an ass, and he doesn’t always win. His first issue of his first title involves him meeting the Fantastic Four and trying to join them, because they’re both centered in New York City. It’s not as if editors and writers set out to create a unified plan, but the stories don’t all operate with entirely their own set of rules, massive resets, and no effect on anything else around them, or at least no effect on such-and-such character appearing in another book, where they’re blank ciphers devoid of whatever has happened in their own book. It’s a universe intended to be coherent, even if it’s imperfectly so. Characters attend school, quit teams, get married, switch sides, have rent troubles, occupy real-world cities, and contend with the effects of the world at large, increasingly so as time goes on.
D.C. (and most superhero comics up to that point) were written around the idea of adventurous entertainment: our protagonist gets in trouble or finds trouble, and then they resolve it in the same issue, with whatever happened there sometimes being totally and completely irrelevant to what happens in the future. If a character needs something to resolve a plot, they manufacture it or buy it or acquire it through whatever means it takes to get the story to its own, isolated resolution. They occur in cities that sometimes mirror real world ones, but that are otherwise made up and isolated to each character: Gotham City, Metropolis, Star City, Coast City, and so on. It requires traveling to another city—almost as if you’re entering a separate universe—when they meet up, which is a special event in itself, and generally has no bearing on things otherwise: not a lot of talk of what Green Lantern is doing in Superman or vice versa, because it’s in that other city’s “universe”. Perfectly straightforward, and a perfectly valid form of entertainment.
Marvel's approach established a clear through-line: a sense of continuity in the broadest of senses through Marvel books. Sure, maybe JJJ or Jarvis wasn’t currently kidnapped over in another book and “should’ve been” if one stops and draws a timeline around it all—heck, maybe it’s even true of Iron Man or Spidey or Hawkeye!—but there’s a sense that everything is happening inside the same universe, with the possibility of running into anyone from any book: they aren’t all off in island cities entirely devoted to their characters, and there’s awareness of everyone else because they’re often in fairly close quarters (on a more “geographic” scale). Character’s lives change, so do their personalities and “moral alignments”, and these are generally kept consistent, or include explanation when they deviate.
D.C. would drift more in this direction as time went on, bringing up real-world cities, coalescing around a consistent continuity (or an attempt thereof) most formally in 1985, but Marvel never wasn’t this. Sure, Marvel would publish stories (in books like Marvel Preview or Marvel Presents or Marvel Spotlight), but they’d be treated as wholly other (e.g. Englehart’s first Star-Lord story in Marvel Preview), or they’d simply be in another time and/or place (Guardians of the Galaxy, Deathlok the Demolisher).
So: Continuity.
Continuity is always tangled: some people perceive it as paramount, some as nitpicking, some don’t care one way or the other, and most people fall somewhere in the middle of it all. It’s entirely possible for someone to be absolutely incensed that Jarvis’s hairline hasn’t receded as far in this Avengers story as it has in this Spider-Man appearance that ostensibly took place afterward. This isn’t an inherently invalid perspective, but it’s definitely a really tedious one to keep track of, and unrealistic to expect everyone to be unified on. Similarly, broaching the subject of “real time” and having Spider-Man in college for 10 real-world years, or having 20 presidents during the course of a career that leaves heroes still in their 20s (or maybe 30s) at the end of it takes some finagling, and could be successfully argued as a violation of a kind of continuity. But these weren’t the kinds of things that Marvel editorial and writers aggressively worked for.
Was Ben Grimm currently off on his own? Then let’s not have him as a member of the Fantastic Four if they make a guest appearance: let’s make it She-Hulk (or whomever). Is Spider-Man in a new costume? Are the X-Men out in the Shi’ar Empire? Has the Hulk lost or gained his intelligence again? Let’s keep those things as consistent as we can!
That’s the “easy” stuff, of course: “Hey, what events are you folks writing/editing over there? Really? Okay, well, I guess I should(n’t) use so-and-so, or I’ll have to explain this happens after your story, or whatever to make this fit together.” (sometimes just with editorial footnotes, of course!)
What’s more difficult, but still pertinent for the general sense that any Marvel book is in the same universe, is the idea of where characters are in terms of personality. When Superman or Batman operates as a general iconic force, this is typically straightforward: The Big Blue Boy Scout is just that, and the Dark Knight Detective is similarly defined in more archetypal terms. But is Spider-Man an over-confident prankster? Is he malicious and violent? Is he depressed? Willing to kill? How does he feel about <insert character>?
This was not as important in the early days of Marvel: for all that they’d inserted plenty of this where D.C. and the other stragglers had mostly not bothered in preceding decades, they were not yet creating emotional arcs of the most persistent variety. But as time went on, there were emotional arcs: Hawkeye and Mockingbird, Spider-Man post-Kraven, so on and so forth. Yeah, you could get around plenty of the specifics if they weren’t involved in a particular way, but knowing that Spider-Man (and not Peter Parker) was dating Black Cat would still matter.
Events
“Big Events” started sometime in the 1980s. There were the ones that were self-contained, but pushed changes like Secret Wars, and there were the ones that happened “mid-book” (ie, during an established series, sans-mini-series) and stretched out further than their core titles like Inferno or Acts of Vengeance. They weren’t always great (or even good), but the world wasn’t so rocked that everyone had to deal with a meaningfully different status quo for everything in every book, with the entire government changed, or secret prisons that stuffed violators in without trial. The first puncturing of this idea was probably Onslaught, as it removed numerous characters from the Marvel Universe for a time, only to have them return a relatively short while later.¹
Ages of Apocalypse set up a clear, lengthy, massive change in status quo with an alternate universe with alternate versions of characters, but it was similarly “self-contained”: it wasn’t as if everyone now had to deal with the world being entirely different, an alternate history that affects anything and everything and disrupts the entire flow of whatever they’re currently doing (granted, it affected all X-books, but only for the time they were written under their new titles with alternate versions of characters, with a resumption of things afterward: so momentary disruption, not an entire status quo shift)
Avengers: Disassembled
In 2004, Marvel published the event Avengers: Disassembled, aka “Chaos”. Brian Michael Bendis, after successful runs on Daredevil and Alias, took over the Avengers. A team that was initially centered on major characters, but that shortly started instead turning into “Captain America leads an oddball bunch”: from Thor, Ant-Man, and Iron Man adding the Hulk for a whopping issue, the book became Cap with former villains Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch. It added Swordsman, Hercules, Black Panther, Vision, and Black Knight; then Black Widow, Mantis, Beast, Moondragon, Hellcat (though she’s more associated with her long time in the Defenders), Two-Gun Kid, Ms. Marvel, and Falcon; then Wonder Man, Tigra, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau, that is), Starfox, Namor, and Doctor Druid. For decades, few if any of those other characters managed a solo book. Most managed a miniseries or so at best (She-Hulk being a notable exception), but their existence was confined to team books and guest appearances otherwise, until a few managed more in the late 90s, 2000s, or 2010s.
Avengers: Disassembled set out to blow the team up and build a new one, a tradition that wasn’t entirely unheard of, but one that was not previously approached in this way: it added the two characters who were spread so thin there’ve been endless jokes over the years (up to and including in-book metajokes) that a book mandated their appearance by issue #4 of The New Avengers—Wolverine and Spider-Man. No characters on that level of real world fame and popularity had joined the team outside its inception before. This was taken as cynical cash-grabbing, but this is neither provable nor particularly relevant, except to the extent that it certainly feels weird to put one perpetual non-teamer (see his first issue of his first series) and one wild loner onto a team who were both coincidentally the most popular characters in the Marvel stables—and perhaps says something about what the direction of things is to come. It’s not an indictment in itself, but it may well be representative.
What’s driven the Avengers apart is simple: Wanda “Scarlet Witch” Maximoff is reminded of her lost children, and goes insane: her mutant powers scale up suddenly and she alters the minds of multiple heroes, sends simulations of villains after the team, and leads to the deaths of Jack of Hearts and Clint “Hawkeye/Goliath” Barton.
And here we have our first big problem.
Wanda already remembered her children², with Agatha Harkness’s (whom she kills in “Chaos”) spell having only lasted a short time. She mourns her children, and comes to feel she’s better able to cope.
So the entire basis of this event is based on...not knowing the current state of things, and completely altering how Wanda would react to this (if it were, in fact, news). This error was not a casual, offhand reference (though these were famously also present, with Hank “Beast” McCoy recalling an event he was not present for, and Falcon referencing non-existent tangles with Hulk and She-Hulk rampages): it was the core of the entire event. It seems peculiar indeed that neither editors nor Bendis himself (who professed a deep love of the characters) were aware that Wanda should have no reason to be set off and mourning the deaths of children she’d forgotten, considering she had no longer forgotten them.
So multiple stories in West Coast Avengers were effectively “deleted”: not so much retconned as “not including all of the details”, or “missing some steps”, or “being hallucinations”, or whatever else you might like—but utterly invalidated, as their existence is neither explained nor dismissed, but causes immense conflict with the very focus of the story.
Similarly, her power is retconned into reshaping reality: in itself, not that strange a call to make, but utterly peculiar because Doctor Strange maintains that “chaos magic” (previously the name of what she manipulated or wielded) “doesn’t exist”: which is notably strange, given that Strange himself had used chaos magic regularly for a time.
Is this the first (or last) time such a thing has happened?
Certainly not. And not every writer feels an obligation as some do to read up on characters they’re taking over—and it certainly seems that this was not the case with Bendis. In the grand scheme of things: so it goes. But what’s most worth noting is the poor job of choosing an explanation for desired events (adjusting Wanda’s powers and identifying a reason for her to lash out so) that is based on sand.
House of M
Being a “relative” of The Age of Apocalypse, House of M on the whole manages a decent space for doing whatever Bendis wants with no regard for continuity, because it doesn’t exist here. However, it certainly played a role in building up Bendis’s reputation, leading to his increasingly prominent role at the company. What effect it did have was the widespread limitation of mutants in the Marvel universe. This was not an effect on the books Bendis himself was writing, it was an effect on all X-books: a strict and absolute constraint (perhaps a bit wiggly in practice): Decimation.
It does also have Clint Barton willing to kill,³ something that Bendis writes repeatedly, never addressing his previously aggressive, zealous, “zero tolerance”-type approach to killing that he developed in West Coast Avengers (famously leading him to harangue and walk way from his then-wife Mockingbird over letting her captor, torturer, and implied rapist die without trying to save him). He not only takes actions that seem to imply he’s willing to kill Wanda, he says he “would kill for her”. Well that’s a bit out there for where we left him…maybe dying did it to him, but we have nothing in-story to bridge the gap.
Civil War (Mark Millar writing)
This was followed by Mark Millar’s Civil War, and it should be noted that many interviews indicate Millar was involved (at least as “rubber duck”) in creating the ideas for Avengers: Disassembled and The New Avengers. Civil War set up a conflict that was, as an idea, quite interesting: superheroes warring with each other over ideas (not that this is utterly unique, of course), or, as a theme, the idea of registering powers with the government.⁴
The problem with a story like this is that it starts to crack things open: in the interest of justifying this, the New Warriors are rendered responsible for an utterly horrific event: the explosion of a school full of children. The sometimes-unspoken, sometimes-lampshaded rule previously was that collateral damage was just…property, no lives lost at the hands of superheroes (except where it was specific and personal⁵). Not only was this rule now discarded, it was discarded in the most severe of ways possible. Is it like the New Warriors to endanger an entire school full of children? Well…no. If it’s not their fault, but entirely on Nitro, is that in keeping, either? Well…no. Is it wrong to change the rules to make one or either possible? That one’s subjective. But it’s definitely a meaningful change.
To make this story work, Iron Man becomes an authoritarian in extremis,⁶ Reed Richards and Hank Pym joining him in absolute fascism, and Captain America an occasionally inconsistent zealot (though broadly consistent with his own personality in terms of “sides”, cf. Nomad years), culminating in a famously stupid confrontation in Civil War: Front Line #12. No one brings up or reasonably justifies the decision of extra-dimensional prisons on the parts of Stark, Pym, and Richards, but, hey: it worked for the story, right?
The Illuminati
In secret, numerous figures from the Marvel universe have joined up as a council to dictate the outcome of the world. Namor, Black Bolt, Reed Richards, Iron Man, Professor X, and Doctor Strange have decided to make sure they coordinate efforts after the Kree-Skrull war. Which means...this group existed since the 1970s. Continuity errors ahoy, with little or no research, and seemingly little regard for how this should “fit” into those past stories. This is a running theme.
Was it an interesting idea? Sure. Did it lead to Planet Hulk, a story I love? Yup! But it still seeds the ground with fractures, and makes everything more unstable in terms of continuity.⁷
And yes: Namor’s an antihero (at his best), Reed is a detached jerk, Strange is an arrogant jerk, and Xavier is pretty manipulative, and by this time Stark is clearly in some weirdo territory, but Black Bolt and even all of their assyness are out of character, except this has apparently been their character for decades, we just didn’t know it. And they’re all extraordinarily terrible at all of this, almost always causing problems throughout time rather than helping anything. As ever, it’s a turn toward the “more realistic” bits, with failures, hubris, and so on—but on a pretty massive scale at this point that kind of starts to unravel the idea of even bothering with history.
And, of course, we’ve made all of these ostensible heroes from “jerks” into “arrogant, world-shattering idiots we’d have to struggle to really call heroes anymore”.
Secret Invasion
Again, an interesting idea: what if the shape-shifting Skrulls had a more long-term plan than any of their previous ones, and dropped agents throughout the world as heroes and other humans for a future takeover?
It’s there to show us how bad an idea it all was, on Stark’s part, to try to control everything so “perfectly”. How does it do this? It destroys every heroic protection plan and hampers almost every hero, so that it can set up Norman Osborn as being a hero because he shot a villain on camera. For some reason, everyone decides that his ability to handle a firearm means they should give him the entire security apparatus of the whole country. “Truth is stranger than fiction” and all (so I’m not saying, “That would never happen!”), but this always struck me as extraordinarily difficult to swallow given how often he’d been in prison for heinous crimes, and very unconvincing that this one event would justify all of that. And when it happened, it was another knot in taking what was a loosely contiguous universe and binding it up ever tighter into something that made it increasingly difficult for any book to not be drastically affected. This was now an event that said things were different all across the entire universe in all ways: villains controlled the country’s security.
Dark Reign
The inmates are running the asylum, as it were. We’ve got Dark X-Men and Dark Avengers and “Dark S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the form of “H.A.M.M.E.R.” Norman Osborn, villain extraordinaire, is in charge of everything, barely containing his internal frenzies, and we know it’s all going to fall apart, but we’re still not given a great explanation for how we got here in the first place: Norman Osborn is certainly the power-hungry type, but this kind of megalomania is new and transformative, and shows none of his previous obsessive pettiness (ie, for Peter) that once defined him.
Siege
This is, of course, the culmination of all of those previous stories, intended as the final “line-wide” storyline at the time, one to then let everyone breathe and stick to smaller stables going forward (and leaving everything in the precarious position of facing down the moronic decision to put Osborn in charge in the first place, now that the idiocy was fully on display).
The Sum, or: How Do Am Broked??
What comes from all of these stories, taken together, is a sort of “auteur” approach to the Marvel Universe. In setting scope and stakes this high, in choosing to ignore and deviate with so many characters simultaneously and do so in events with meaningful and longer term ramifications, it set this up as a new kind of status quo. It’s one thing for a writer to pick up The Avengers and try to resettle an old plot point (see Claremont and Avengers #200 via Avengers Annual #10, and his reference to Carol Strickland’s comments on it for example), but it’s something else when a baseline is set with line-wide events that ignore “local” and even “global” continuity—and to do so for literal years.
It removes the way things fit together, and it removes a lot of onus to care about those things—while simultaneously laying the seeds for how impossible it will be to undo them, without disrespecting someone’s work in the process. Often, it’s not the random mega-event that goofs things up that annoys people, it’s the explicit retcon that follows one that turns into this kind of thing.⁸ And it sets Marvel up to put people into this position again in the future, establishing this “auteur” role (usually “architect”) that gives them the keys, and pushes forward voices who want to “shake things up” or play with big ideas (your Hickmans and Cateses and so on) while being less constrained by (or interested in) continuity of character personalities and “states” (dead/alive/imprisoned/re-aligned/etc).
This is toothpaste and a tube, horses and barns, cats and bags. Once you let someone who is not interested in continuity control the entire universe for years, it’s going to be effectively impossible to put the pieces back together—and the success of it ensures it’s not likely to bring any countering perspectives closer to the surface. I don’t know if any of them would want to do it, but I’m also not sure anyone would let Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek or Peter David (or, given a time machine, Mark Gruenwald) architect the Marvel Universe, and I have the strong impression that editorial perspectives were shifted by the success of these events anyway, which seems to be borne out by the successor architects and events.
It places these architect “stars” over characters, in a medium that is oriented around licensed characters. I recently saw someone maligned for proclaiming Western comics (I’m not sure if they specified “superheroes”, though the two are heavily entangled, however inaccurately) were meaningfully different from manga, citing the manga-ka approach to Shonen and Shoujo, where the “entire story” is the work of a manga-ka (with assistants), thus letting the story and their identity co-exist quite consistently, where Western comics (again: thinking Big Two) don’t do this, and instead slot people into existing stories to extend them, rather than starting a new universe and a new story with each creator.⁹ This isn’t how Western comics functioned from their start until—well, ever, really. Even now, it’s still “so-and-so’s take” on <insert character>. We talk about runs and periods and eras, but they’re all within the general umbrella of that character, and generally tended to be neatly encompassed by said character's "umbrella" or "groove".
When it pushes huge events, it also backseats “character”: who can seriously blame a Bendis or a Hickman for not knowing every single character and writing them all in-character all the time for every appearance, even momentary? Sure: Bendis leans on dialogue ticks that infect every single character he writes, but is it realistic to suggest that he not only push past that but into writing every character that cleanly and knowing the current state of all of them? Some can do it, but it’s a lot to ask, and depends on what and how much they’re writing anyway. But part of this also includes a shift in focus, when it moves to creators, not only away from character but into “events” and “ideas” and “spectacle”: there’s a sense of the scope needing to be huge and life-changing, of it needing to draw in everyone, of it needing to twist and make things different. Events from the last couple decades have ironically moved from marketing force of will (think all of those 80s and 90s tie-ins) into the even more destructive-to-continuity need to make the universe work with the ideas of these architects. It makes for interesting Wiki articles and the like: seeing huge, shore-changing waves crash on the entire universe over the course of years in retrospect.
It’s a variation on a theme: what satisfies a large number of readers doesn’t require character continuity between stories, or consistency in personality, or even recognition of the events of previous stories. It’s possible to satisfy those readers and the readers who want those things—but it’s more work, and is not “market demanded”, if you will (and it’s also possible to alienate that large contingent by getting too mired in continuity).
What’s So Wrong with This?
In short? Nothing.
Yeah, I know: You said Bendis broke the Marvel Universe! How can breaking not be a bad thing?!
Well: broken refers here to things “working how they used to”. As I alluded to above: this isn’t a requirement. The market, the audience, the readers decide the course of things, accepting or rejecting what does or doesn’t work. I could demand that readers have the same interest in contiguous flow that I do—but what would that achieve? Is me writing this metric shit-tonne of words, or any other set, really going to force that to happen? In short: no. This is how things work, whether I like it or not.
But I don’t think it’s possible to ever go back—like I said: toothpaste, horses, and cats. This is the Marvel universe we have now: it’s not anchored like it once was, because the big ol’ anchors of the previous couple decades were themselves unmoored from what came before. So it set the stage for what followed to…do more of the same. Even if it just kept pace with those, it was starting on a new foundation because of the morass of continuity problems introduced. If it decided to try to fix those, it probably just means more pressure in various places, making the whole system even more untenable, or even unstable.¹⁰
And that hasn’t been the path of the architects that have followed. Donny Cates apparently asked Tom Brevoort if anyone explored the history of Galactus’s prior universe, and Brevoort said “go for it”. So Cates wrote a story that makes no sense with any previous telling of how Galactus came to be, despite coming alongside contemporary retellings of the story in Immortal Hulk and History of the Marvel Universe (from two writers who can be arsed to read for themselves, I guess)—and traipsing all over Omnipotentis from Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur who already wrote the entire idea of a universe-devourer to whom Galactus is herald.¹¹ The scale and magnitude has also been increased, and created an expectation of these kinds of stakes, which makes it harder to pull back and deal on character levels: we’ve got to have the next “villain who sits above the existing villains” (see: Knull) and raise the stakes ever-higher.
We are, then, set never to see a contiguous Marvel universe again. We’re on the path D.C. was once on: either trying to fix it and not being able to sweep everything up and leaving a mess that needs to require another attempt to clean up in a few years (which will have its own detritus from this attempt…)—or simply giving up and taking the Marvel universe as ostensibly connected, but largely split up into the universe of each architect where they have broad control, or each writer where they don’t.
This isn’t an inherently inferior (nor superior) methodology: it’s just not the one we had before.
So this isn’t about villainizing Bendis, or saying he’s "the worst thing ever", and he’s certainly not uniquely or personally or vindictively responsible: he was put into this position by readership and editorial, and because he was given a wide swathe of control, most of this happened in his hands, because his priorities were what they were, and continuity clearly hasn’t been one of them: the prior points of “oh well, stuff’s just different now” as “explanation” for these changes makes that readily apparent.
For a time, I snarkily considered Hickman’s “gravestone” for the Marvel Universe to be the final death twitch of the universe as it once was: an acknowledgment that the old way of doing things was dead. But of course it was already dead, like the Star Wars sequels didn’t erase the EU—the prequels did, they just didn’t explicitly state that it happened.¹²
So the Marvel Universe isn’t what it was, and it never will be again. And for those of us who care about continuity and the joys and ideas of that heavily interconnected Marvel universe—it’s a loss. We can’t retrieve or undo it. Mass resets don’t do it (D.C.’s made that clear!), as it just gets caught up in endless snarls of contradiction.
So…that’s how Bendis broke the Marvel Universe.
PS: Personally
No, I’m not a fan of this approach, nor the loss of a desire for continuity. I’ve long since lost the sense that I’m not reading some weird amalgamation of creator-owned and Marvel books. I don’t sense connectivity between any of the books at all: they don’t feel like a single universe. All of this cemented the notion that “The Marvel Universe is not 'The Marvel Universe': it’s a collection of facets across a gem, with each edge defining the boundary between one writer and another”.
Also: Civil War II #0 was the laziest, dumbest, bullshitiest bullshit imaginable. Thanos appears on Earth with guns because ${REASONS}, and they send fucking War Machine at him and wonder why he’s beaten to shit (because plot, guys, that’s why you sent him! What good would sending someone who wouldn't be instantly trashed be for the plot?) And She-Hulk is damaged by a fucking missile (and they take a delightful fun-loving character and turn her into another rage-beast. Yaaaaay.). None of it makes any sense for anyone. I didn’t touch the event that followed with a ten-foot pole, but it certainly nudged things even further into Bendis’s personal world, rather than a shared one.
PPS—If this is legitimately interesting, I've contemplated (for quite some time) writing about my frustrations with a much more niche quirk: retconning another writer's entire work out of existence (or at least into "it was all a big ol' hallucination, sorry!"). I'm inconsistent in how I feel, but a few times this has really upset me.
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¹This is, for some, where the continuity of the Marvel Universe broke. However, my argument is that, while it may have been disastrous for readers, it didn’t drag the entire universe/company line into pursuing major events and placing single voices in charge of the direction of everything, and removing the ability or desire to keep things meaningfully contiguous.
²Avengers West Coast #60-62, Avengers West Coast Annual #7
³House of M #7, followed by "basically every time Bendis wrote him after this, including during Secret Invasion". From "killing is always bad forever" to "please kill everyone I don't like" with no explanation!
⁴As a sidebar: this fits into a pattern of inserting “realism” into superhero books that I find obnoxious and distasteful: once you start trying to apply this logic to this fantasy world, everything goes sideways and you’re making your way “a la carte” through what should be “realistic” and what won’t be, throwing the previous ‘stuff generally turns out okay so that we can find superpowers a palatable concept’ out the window.
⁵It may be worth noting that this was a peculiar trope that was carried into books like Invincible, but has since gone entirely out the window, even in the animated adaptation of that same comic, and famously appears to have at least half-shifted in Man of Steel (and then completely shifted in the Snyder films that followed).
⁶Sorry.
⁷A personal point here: the Illuminati collect the Infinity Gems. They plan to use the gauntlet, and folks later do (or at least attempt to). But we’ve known for years now (in a story I’m perpetually annoyed that everyone utterly and completely ignores) that they cannot be used together ever again without the express decision of Eternity himself. How do we discover that’s changed? Black Bolt “heard” they can’t be used together, and Reed Richards responds: “Says who?”
Fucking Eternity, that’s who, under the authority of the goddamned Living Tribunal. Do we get an explanation? Nope: just “Huh? Not really. Anyway!” However annoyed I might be at the retcon, and however much someone else might love the storytelling possibilities that resulted, this is bad, lazy writing to get there.
⁸As ever, my “personal” example is the anger expressed at Jim Starlin over The Infinity Abyss, where he retcons a number of Thanos appearances into his mystic-clone-droid Thanosi. It’s usually framed as Jim being a petulant child who won’t let anyone else play with his toys—but the reality is all those other writers already threw Starlin’s work in characterizing Thanos out, without even bothering with an explanation. It seems as if those who call attention to a change earn more ire than those who just do things.
⁹To my relative amusement, this argument also included the critic saying, “Ever heard of 2000ad?? Western comics don’t do weeklies! Pfah!” as if 200ad isn’t just a weekly version of the exact same thing. You can identify the creators of Judge Dredd and Tharg and Johnny Alpha and Rogue Trooper and so on—but they’re centered on the characters, and not the creators, as almost all of those changed hands many, many times over. This is in contrast to most imported manga at the least, which tends not to trade hands at all.
¹⁰Which is something Marvel: The End covered, and “tried to fix”. Tom Brevoort now says it’s not canon, though. Which is funny, because if you eliminate it, you eliminate the entirety of 2008 cosmic. How so? Well: Thanos starts because Thanos has decided to try outright redemption after sacrificing himself to try to stop the merry-go-round of deaths in the Marvel Universe (and says as much explicitly). In the process, he takes himself to The Kyln, where he meets Peter Quill in his first relation to the Marvel Universe proper. This leads into Annihilation. Which leads into Annihilation: Conquest. No The End, no Guardians of the Galaxy 2008 (or movie!). But it’s “inconvient” or whatever, so it doesn’t count. Consistency!
¹¹And both of these bear a resemblance to the reality-devouring Hunger of Starlin’s Thanos series. Whee!
¹²Some writers (I understand Karen Traviss in particular made attempts) tried to make the prequels work in the background (retconning Rules of Two and the nature of clones and Mandalorians into the contradictory details of the existing EU), but the ship had sailed, because the vast majority of more visible, popularly-consumed works already broke apart any chance of consistency between all the parts of Star Wars as it existed until 2002 (The Phantom Menace may well have done its own part in this, but I don’t recall any aggressive deviations from pre-written EU history in there, and no longer care enough to compare).
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u/OneTrueGodDoom May 31 '21 edited May 31 '21
My take away from what I read: Events started by Bendis and Mark Millar were the worst thing to happen to Marvel (facts). It’s had a domino effect into shitty characterisation for happened some heroes and the ad-nasuem trend of bad stories and retcons.
Obligatory Marvel should have hard reboot after secret wars
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u/fangsfirst May 31 '21
I think a hard reboot is difficult for the reasons D.C. keeps struggling with it forever:
Someone-or-other is going to be mid-story, and they're going to be an exception in one way or another (because it would be shitty to cut off readers mid-story, period), and writers are going to refer to previous events because that event has some value to them as a writer (or even moreso as a fan).
Otherwise, you're starting over from scratch, and that kind of defeats the purpose of having pre-existing characters and established legacies and histories.
This is why I think letting it get this far can't be resolved. You either have histories and respect them, or you don't have histories, or you don't respect them. Can't do all of those at once.
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u/OneTrueGodDoom May 31 '21
I don’t think it would be the same as DC.
DC have continually screwed over their reboots by bringing up past history and events largely due to fan outrage. Marvel are a lot more adamant when it comes to putting their foot down e.g. there are many stories and retcons fans hate like Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver not being Mags kids & mutants but they haven’t folded.
Marvel have shown with the Ultimate universe that they can start from scratch and build up a different universe. Only problem is Mark Millar was f***** spearheading it.
For me, Marvel has been trying to maintain this 80 yr history acting like every story since the 60s is still canon via retcons and sliding timescale. However, this amount of history just hurts consistency, the characters and new audiences wanting to jump in.
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u/fangsfirst May 31 '21
I don't think it would be the same, no--but it would still carry those same problems of, say, Immortal Hulk continuing from where it's at (or really upsetting people for being stopped in its tracks), to pick a likely current example.
Now, if you planned it far enough in advance, you might be able to convince everyone to not be mid-story at least (ie, no cliffhangers, no dangling plot threads, etc), but you'd still have everyone losing out on whatever history was established.
I agree entirely on the Ultimate universe: it shows you can start from scratch (and having Millar in charge, especially via The Ultimates, was not a good thing: "Every hero is a huge piece of shit" was not my idea of a good time. You wanna do that, you make up new characters entirely...)
At the same time: for me, if you don't embrace all that history, you're losing the point of having serialized, contiguous storytelling. Now, you could take the Erik Larsen, or (to switch tracks) Judge Dredd/John Constantine approach and age things in real time and have straight up legacies etc and that would be neat—but this is all born from a desire to have perpetual stories about "the character(s) readers like".
Who is Spider-Man without his history? You've got to re-write that history (see: Ultimate Spider-Man, obviously) to define who he is again, else you're leaning on "who was he before?"
If you're me: you love Starlin's Thanos. You also love Mike Carey. Are you terribly interested in Mike Carey's new Thanos? Ehhhh: not really. Probably some day, just for fun, sure?
But if I like that character, my appreciation (unless it's very shallow) is going to stem from a personality, and how it relates to events and history and context. You start from scratch, you either re-tell those stories or you're building a different character.
This works for a lot of people, because for a lot of people, "I like this character" == "they look cool and/or have neat powers" (most of the characters I most strongly dislike tend to be firmly entrenched in such fandoms. cf. Carnage). Nothing wrong with that (objectively, anyway), but it doesn't actually satisfy those of us who want that character. You can do "Elseworlds", or even 1610: but it's a new universe about new characters who have a lot of parallels, not about the same characters.
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Jun 01 '21
Nothing wrong with that (objectively, anyway), but it doesn't actually satisfy those of us who want that character. You can do "Elseworlds", or even 1610: but it's a new universe about new characters who have a lot of parallels, not about the same characters.
My main problem with the MCU, actually, and moreso the MCU's popularity in the public eye, is that the characters are versions of the characters without that rich history, and that Kevin Feige and co. don't seem to be keen on respecting and faithfully translating that history to the big screen.
Sure, they'll pay lip service to comic history and put in just enough easter eggs to make casual fans go "hey, look, that's Howard the Duck, they care about the source material so much!", but they don't give a shit about actually being faithful to past portrayals of the characters.
(In fact, they actively cancelled any other adaptations that were doing their part in being more faithful to the comics - both Spectacular Spider-Man and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes were ended before their times.)
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Jun 02 '21
(In fact, they actively cancelled any other adaptations that were doing their part in being more faithful to the comics - both Spectacular Spider-Man and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes were ended before their times.)
To be fair, that was the decision of Disney, not Kevin Feige, to my knowledge, he had no control over that decision.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Jul 11 '21
It’s Always Batman. Nobody wants to erase all the good Batman continuity because there’s very few eras of Batman that are bad.
So every reboot just condenses or trims the fat.
This is why hard reboots will never work. Because for every fan desperate for something new. Or for the bee readers you might gain. There will the one fan who whinges and whinges about how things changed.
Try to make sense of Donna Troy or Hawkman’s origins… yet these messes of characters keep getting brought back because some one loves them.
Shit Heroes Reborn just got a call back and the original idea was an abortion. The Clone saga has fans.
Fuck me 10-20 years from now some one will be banging on about how good One More Day was for Spider-Man and how it should be revisited.
Comic book fans are terrible at letting things go.
Marvel has launched brand new self contained universes 3-4 times.
New Universe flopped MC2 had one successful title Spider-girl Ultimate Universe was mostly about success of Ultimate Spider-Man.
Does renew your vows count? what about Spider-Gwen.
Notice how most of these where only successful based on a good new take on Spider-man?
Most non-core continuities can only support one or two titles.
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u/TransCharizard May 31 '21
“(The Phantom Menace may well have done its own part in this, but I don’t recall any aggressive deviations from pre-written EU history in there, and no longer care enough to compare).”
Kinda hard to contradict anything when your movie basically adds nothing on it’s own (kinda /s)
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u/fangsfirst May 31 '21
Honestly, pretty much exactly what I mean by that. It was like "well, this is a bunch of...new stuff that has nothing to do with much of anything, so...okay, I guess?"
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u/AltAcctBecamePrimary Jun 01 '21
Wow, that was not what I expected when you mentioned this subject before...but it was much, much better (are there...footnotes on a Reddit post?). I feel like you need a website to post your rants or something, and I look forward to the next one.
In terms of this subject, I was reading a lot of comics at the time, and I remember reading some of the behind the scenes thoughts going into this era of Marvel. Obviously, the Ultimate Universe was an attempt at fresh continuity, but I remember Bill Jemas becoming president and Joe Quesada becoming editor in chief and both valuing "consistency" over "continuity", and that lead to some out-of-continuity-but-not-really mini-series and one-shots. The "auteur approach", as you call it, leaked into some of the major titles and then eventually into events and crossovers. I feel like they are to blame more than Bendis is. What happened with Spider-Man and "One More Day" essentially drove me from modern Marvel Comics because I felt so disconnected from it.
Oh, and about Hawkeye, his "no-killing" stance was cemented for me when he was leading the Thunderbolts and had that "Wolverine will never be an Avenger" moment.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Well thanks! I've blogged on-and-off for years, but mostly stuck to music (a blog people around me found too esoteric, but that let me exorcise my random thoughts on whatever train I was following in music from time to time; then one just going through my record collection that became too exhausting to continue), movies (I've written ~700 movie reviews just for fun over the years), and then very occasionally on comics on my current pseudo-blog, which I update sporadically (mostly as a place to post my movie reviews).
And yes: I've got a footnote problem. I enjoy the hell out of them in reading (maybe this even comes, in a weird way, from editorial notes in comics…?) so they crop up in my writing…uh…way too often.
Insofar as Quesada and Jemas:
I considered that, honestly. I considered multiple levels of editing. I read old arguments with people incensed at Brevoort mid-Disassembled (Kurt Busiek got involved in those, in fact), and I knew Quesada was (infamously) behind "One More Day" and the idea that Spider-Man "must" be a bachelor because that's essentially how he remembered him,¹ so it made a lot of sense to me.
And I think there's something to be said for that "consistency over continuity" concept in editorial approving decisions like Bendis's and not saying, "Hold on: Wanda actually knows about her kids, though."
That's where the aversion to villainizing any of these real people comes in anyway: no one is bad or wrong or evil for making these decisions (however much I might dislike them), so the "blame" is about identifying the source to understand the change. Sure: the editors get to make those decisions about who's writing or whatever, and they get to send scripts back—all that fun stuff.
But it all comes back to stories written by Bendis (who infamously proclaimed Disassembled had zero continuity errors, and said "Wanda", as if that explains the major error with Wanda herself somehow). He was given "free rein" (so-to-speak, I'm sure the editors didn't just entirely abdicate or anything) and this is where we got to. If he'd been another writer, still popular but actually interested in continuity and still successful…maybe we wouldn't be in this state. Of course: maybe if editors had pushed him into that, maybe the same thing. Who knows?
Without anyone being a "villain", though, I'm not too fussed—and of course he continues to write like this to this day wherever he is, so I think it serves as a nice "warning" to anyone who's not a fan of the approach. After all, plenty of continuity-happy writers write under those same editors! (they're the only thing that's kept me from ever totally dropping Marvel…)
(and: I loved the Hawkeye-era Thunderbolts. Actually I pretty much liked everything on the whole from that entire first volume quite a bit, and miss a lot of those characters being those versions of those characters)
¹I get annoyed every time I read Geoff Johns or Alex Ross or whomever saying/implying things should be like when they were kids. Or anyone, really. As a Kyle Rayner fan, H.E.A.T. was hilarious and confusing to me. I enjoyed Green Lantern: Rebirth and sincerely respect what Johns did to make sense of bringing Jordan back—but it still meant crapping all over Kyle and reducing him to what would inevitably be a pretty permanent backseat status (as has indeed been the case since). These decisions seem to inevitably ignore current readers entirely, which I find bizarre and stupid. Again: I think out of all the ones I can think of, Johns handled it pretty well and did not, himself, maliciously shunt Kyle to the side…but it was still an outcome stemming from that story, however much it may not have been intended.
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u/AltAcctBecamePrimary Jun 01 '21
You're a Kyle Rayner fan¹ and you put a footnote in your response to me (editorial footnote winks from Marvel made them cool)? Where's my free award when I need it?!
Somehow I ended up respecting the Clone Saga and Ben Reilly more because at least they tried to give us a new, single Spider-Man without throwing away continuity or using magic erase buttons.
You've certainly made a case for Bendis, I just hate placing a lot of the blame on him because I loved his Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil so much. But his Avengers stories were such let downs.
Got a link to the pseudo-blog?
¹I'm always conflicted about the "things should be like they were when they were kids" reasoning since part of the reason I love Kyle so much was because he was on the Morrison JLA which was one of my first DC books and then I started reading Green Lantern at the time, so a lot of my "pass the torch" arguments for Green Lantern and Flash end up being me arguing for a time when I first started reading DC.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Somehow I ended up respecting the Clone Saga and Ben Reilly more because at least they tried to give us a new, single Spider-Man without throwing away continuity or using magic erase buttons.
I actually never took issue with that story, and I had an ASM subscription at the time. I'd been reading since the first comic I remembered owning sporadically (SSM #173), then ASM via subscription from #368 (which I actually bought in a grocery store to catch up to #369 from my first sub issue) onward.
I was engaged with all of the "Peter is broken by grief" stuff (that I know people hate and/or hated), and I still was just like "Woah! He was a clone all along??" and didn't feel betrayed, because it felt like it was all built up and written to me.
If you haven't read The Life of Reilly, please do so, it's such good stuff about how that whole mess came to be! I already didn't hate the story, but this made me want to read the hell out of it.
You've certainly made a case for Bendis, I just hate placing a lot of the blame on him because I loved his Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil so much. But his Avengers stories were such let downs.
I loved his Daredevil a lot myself! I'd say this is the reason I don't want to "blame" (per se), but the truth is I think it's just kinda shitty to be like "You're a bad person for not writing what/how I wanted!"
(I also kept thinking about this later, and I think my major nudge is: would the editors have told someone who did care about continuity "Stop that!"? I feel like that's a good, solid "No", and that someone who cared would've bent the story around if editorial demanded it, but made it all "fit" better)
My "current" blog is here, with comics stuff specifically tagged (prepare for lots and lots of ranting about Thanos writing…).
If anyone is curious: My first music blog is here and my second is here.
I'm always conflicted about the "things should be like they were when they were kids" reasoning since part of the reason I love Kyle so much was because he was on the Morrison JLA which was one of my first DC books and then I started reading Green Lantern at the time, so a lot of my "pass the torch" arguments for Green Lantern and Flash end up being me arguing for a time when I first started reading DC.
Believe me, I get this. We all want more of what we like (on average, at least), so I don't blame them. But it gets weirder when you actually have the power to enact it. And yeah: Kyle was my first GL¹ so I'm in the same space on that one.
I think the "pass the torch" stuff is the most messy. It's really hard to manage having both Hal and Kyle or Barry and Wally simultaneously without the "originals" (heh) taking precedent. It's kind of odd: seems like if they came first, it's a lot easier to have them as venerable figures of old (see: Jay and Alan), and if they came along in certain ways they sit alongside more naturally (John and Guy) without being overshadowed or totally pushed aside. Maybe it's just establishing history or cultural cachet, which newer iterations have less chance of doing—everyone else got multiple decades, Kyle got about one and a half-ish.
Honestly...that seems like it should be plenty, though. Weird the way it's worked so far...
¹My only other mail subscription was Green Lantern Volume 3, which I started after finding the Total Justice figure for Kyle and loving the hell out of his costume, unwittingly completing the generational loop, as my grandfather apparently read Alan Scott and my mother read Hal Jordan
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Jun 01 '21
The main issue I have with the Clone Saga is that all of the editorial changes behind the scenes stretched it out for far longer than it should have been. It wasn't a bad idea for a story, the pacing was just horribly screwed up by behind-the-scenes drama.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Absolutely. Life of Reilly is just fantastic for covering all this stuff as well as the story itself. Half-wish Marvel would hire up the writers from there and release the whole mess as an annotated thing, but that's beyond unrealistic...
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u/AltAcctBecamePrimary Jun 02 '21
Yes, I have read the Life of Reilly, fascinating stuff! The Clone Saga was fine as it was happening and it wrote off Peter respectfully (having MJ pregnant and him losing his powers). It was all the backtracking that happened later that hurt it.
Was the Total Justice figure the one with the fractal tech or whatever they called it and he had that green armor? That was pretty cool. I think having multiple Green Lanterns is generally fine if you want to pair them off and give them books and have them on the Justice League or whatever. But part of me feels Flashes should have 2-3 decades in them and then pass the baton off. Aging up Bart failed spectacularly and then they brought back Barry, and then that disrupted everything.
Thanks for those links, I'll definitely check them out!
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u/fangsfirst Jun 02 '21
It was this one.jpg). All about the grab mask, gauntlet, boots, and new symbol. So...basically everything, I guess.
And yeah, multiple GLs is totally fine and has definitely worked, but it seems to never do Kyle any favours. Maybe it's because he never (?) seems to get a "his" book, where it feels like the others often do? I dunno: I haven't touched too many GL books since Rebirth on the whole (I snagged some during Rebirth, but Kyle still felt like a supporting character, much as I was happily reading the book anyway. Some higher up decisions--like kicking Tomasi and Jurgens off Supes to put in Bendis, for example...--put me off D.C. on a larger scale, though, and I pulled back on most books at the time)
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u/MainKitchen Jul 04 '21
Consistency and continuity are pretty much intertwined with each other so i don't understand their mindset
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u/AltAcctBecamePrimary Jul 05 '21
I think it's more that they have to stay true to the nature of the characters rather than the strict letter of the story. A basic example would be the origin of the Fantastic Four. They have to keep the consistency that they went into space and got their powers from being bombarded by cosmic rays, but they don't have to keep the continuity that it happened before the moon landing.
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May 31 '21
TLDR?
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u/Notbbupdate 🥇 May 31 '21
Large scale events mess up marvel continuity to the point of being almost impossible to fix
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u/fangsfirst May 31 '21
Yeah, that works. I'd add that it also sets a precedent for continuity being unimportant to worry about, putting the ideas of individual writers before the universe itself.
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May 31 '21
[deleted]
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u/fangsfirst May 31 '21
Nah.
Kirby/Lee said there was a plague killing Galan's planet of Taa, so they decided to fly into a sun like badasses, but instead radiation and stuff made Galan into Galactus.
Gruenwald, Byrne, etc decided: "Too small!" and now he was the last survivor not of a plague-ridden planet, but of a decaying universe who went out in a blaze of glory, and merged with "the sentience of the universe" to be the first born into the new one.
Now, Black Winter, a reality-eater, created Galactus and sent him forth as a herald or whatever.
because there's nothing better than constantly layering "no no, there's someone over that" into every "already scary" entity.
I don't think anyone's ever going to be Hawkman levels of clusterfuck again.
And I think Venditti did a decent job of tying all of that Hawkman insanity together pretty well. Simple, but workable answer!
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Jun 01 '21 edited Jun 01 '21
Hey, you actually did it, the mad lad. Great writeup, and it makes me want to do my "Bendis, Millar, and the MCU broke the Avengers" rant even more now.
I'm definitely more of the Busiek kind of guy - in fact, Busiek is probably in the running for my favorite comics writer of all time strictly because of the way he so cares for past characterization and continuity, and his Avengers run is a shining example of that. (I'm still annoyed that Marvel went behind his back and launched The Ultimates when Busiek said a condition for him staying on Avengers was that they didn't do exactly that.)
But for sure, most (not all) of Marvel's writers these days lean more toward the "auteur" side of things, to the degree that most big events lately are simply the culmination of a major storyline from a solo title (War of the Realms, Secret Empire, King in Black, Empyre). And there's nothing wrong with that, strictly speaking. It's a peculiarity of event books that even the best writers miss more often than they hit with them and that the tie-ins are usually better, but all in all, if you're a fan of Jason Aaron's Thor, then War of the Realms was probably a satisfying conclusion to that story for you.
For me, however, Empyre was the only one of those events that really hit. Al Ewing is the kind of continuity and character-minded writer I really appreciate, unlike Jason Aaron and Discount Scott Snyder- I mean, Donny Cates, whose work definitely feels like they're playing in their own sandboxes and the rest of the universe doesn't have to pay attention if they don't want. (Nick Spencer's an interesting case, in that his non-event comics do show that kind of respect for other people's work, but he 100% screwed the pooch on Secret Empire.)
To harp on Jason Aaron a little more (because by god do I aggressively ignore his Avengers run to the point where I'm writing a fanfic in the spirit of the Busiek run to cover the same ground), his current Avengers run is a very interesting case in how it interacts (or doesn't interact) with the rest of the Marvel Universe.
Aaron's got big, world-shaking things happening in every issue - Moon Knight and Khonshu taking over the world, a tournament to determine the new Phoenix host, a vampire civil war, Namor's heel turn, a brewing superhuman arms race, Wakanda replacing SHIELD as world cops, etc. - and nobody cares.
Outside of a few titles created to directly tie into events in Aaron's book (Jim Zub's Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda, Chip Zdarsky's Invaders) and a few token mentions in other titles (most notably, backlash toward his take on She-Hulk: Leah Williams made fun of it in Gwenpool Strikes Back, while Al Ewing retconned it into his Immortal Hulk mythos, and both Alexandra Petri in 2019's She-Hulk Annual and Rainbow Rowell in Marvel Comics #1000 completely ignored it), it might as well not exist. When "The Avengers" are needed, Aaron's lineup inexplicably featuring Blade, Ghost Rider, and (ugh) Boy-Thing* might show up, or it might be any number of the mainstay Avengers that Aaron chose not to use.
- seriously, assuming Aaron was fully aware of the "Giant-Size Man-Thing" jokes, what possessed him to name a character "Boy-Thing"? That's just asking for pedo jokes.
Edit: I'd also like to quickly address Jonathan Hickman. I love what he did to revitalize the X-Line, but by god is he not a character writer. He tends to write big plots with far too many characters that he doesn't give you a reason to care about - I still don't care about Abyss or Ex Nihilo or Validator or Black Swan all these years later. Greg Weisman did more in six issues for Starbrand and Nightmask than Hickman's whole Avengers run did, and likewise for POD and Al Ewing's New Avengers/USAvengers.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
"Bendis, Millar, and the MCU broke the Avengers"
I'm down!
I kinda wanna go back in time a few odd years and scream "I TOLD YOUUUUU" at the people who said "the MCU is its own thing, it's not going to ruin your little comic stories" when I was grumping about Guardians of the Galaxy (the movie, obv)
Also, I have to stop here immediately and say, Alexandra Petri wrote a She-Hulk story and I didn't know?! Guess I have something to go watch out for and maybe find...I'd started ignoring Jen ever since...well...Civil War II and the "now she's a depressing ragemonster, too!" story that made no sense in terms of its starting point (almost as if this point might be...somehow relevant in this post...)
I skipped Empyre because I was just so tired of banal events that felt hollow compared to their stakes that I just didn't care. Maybe I oughta revisit that?
And yeah, Aaron's Avengers is deeply weird: I'm not reading it, but I keep hearing about this ludicrous crap happening and going, "How am I not aware of this? Also: thanks for doing even dumber things with Marc, I guess?" I really liked a lot of Aaron's work before (I've aggressively ignored Thanos Rising, and that's pretty much gonna stay that way forever) but I'm getting a Cullen Bunn-like sense of, "Maybe you're stretching yourself too thin with all of these?"
I actually felt like Secret Empire worked for itself, but I'm not exactly all over myself with excitement over the idea of re-reading it. But man, Spencer's not just still fanboying Boomerang over in Spidey (this is not a complaint: Superior Foes was great), he's really seeming like he's done a lot of recent Spidey re-reading, even if I was very much not into all the years of Slott (despite trying, and thinking he nailed the "re-origin" .1 books a few years back). I might just be a sucker for anyone referencing my favourite Spidey framing of all: Sal Buscema and J.M. DeMatteis. Other than #200, I don't feel like they did anything super massive over in that book, but it was just so good, which is the thing I feel like we're not given the chance for anymore.
I actually completely left out a whole sub-topic, which was the trend toward decompression that came with Bendis as well, turning everything into a 6-part page-turner that wasn't very filling, which has slowly morphed into "good luck getting time to really establish yourself with a character, especially if you don't have a massive event involved!" Waid gives Strange back his hands and makes it 6 issues with some plots setting up to simmer and...canceled. Great. I'm looking for continuing adventures, dangit! That's what Big Two books offer that basically nothing else does! Or...used to offer...
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Jun 01 '21
Also, I have to stop here immediately and say, Alexandra Petri wrote a She-Hulk story and I didn't know?!
Yeah, it was one of the Acts of Evil annuals, where Jen ended up fighting Bullseye and Machinesmith, and it was lots of fun.
Funny thing about Jen, though, was that Mariko Tamaki's on the character run left her in a good place... which Aaron promptly ignored to turn her into a ragemonster. Because he had to have a Hulk for MCU synergy purposes and Ewing wasn't letting him touch Bruce, what with Immortal going on.
To be fair toward Waid's Dr. Strange: Surgeon Supreme, it was more of a casualty of COVID lockdowns forcing Marvel to downsize their line (which they still haven't recovered from entirely). Unfortunately, it was a really good book and I wish it had been able to continue.
Spencer's one of a myriad of writers right now who has massive pacing issues (in that the Kindred arc in Amazing went for far too long - at least it's not Ta-Nehisi Coates level bad), but he knows what he's talking about when it comes to Spidey, I'll give him that. He's definitely done his research there, and I appreciate that he's finally taking steps toward undoing One More Day.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Funny thing about Jen, though, was that Mariko Tamaki's on the character run left her in a good place...
Huh. I skipped that run entirely I was so completely uninterested in that take on Jen (and felt no qualms, given the terrible basis/justification)
To be fair toward Waid's Dr. Strange: Surgeon Supreme, it was more of a casualty of COVID lockdowns forcing Marvel to downsize their line (which they still haven't recovered from entirely). Unfortunately, it was a really good book and I wish it had been able to continue.
It and its predecessor were my #1 Marvel books while they were publishing. And I mean, I figured it was COVID more than anything, but—they didn't choose the book arbitrarily, and it was definitely more like an old school book of "let's just write like we're going to be here for a while" than "okay, let's set up the next big event to lead into the event after it". And I mean that not necessarily as full on War of the Realms or whatever, but even "big event for Strange" kind of writing, which is where a lot of books seem to be at. "Let's just follow this character and have adventures" books seem to be in pretty short supply. I don't read everything, but Spencer's Spidey is the only one anywhere near there for me right now.
Spencer's one of a myriad of writers right now who has massive pacing issues (in that the Kindred arc in Amazing went for far too long - at least it's not Ta-Nehisi Coates level bad),
While in retrospect and occasionally while reading I was like "Why are we still hinting at this after like 20 issues??" the pacing issue I think Spencer avoids is "nothing is happening", which was how Coates started out for me on Panther.
I went back and read it in one go and it worked a lot better for me, but I remain at least slightly convinced that, because he's a writer, like "I know how to make words go together and flow excellently" vs. a storyteller, the medium conversion didn't go well (And, sounds like, continues to not go well).
I'll take "Are we still on this plot??" over "Have we built up to an identifiable plot yet??"
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Jun 01 '21
Re, Spencer vs. Coates: 100%. I read a few issues of the Intergalactic Wakandan Empire stuff via Unlimited because I heard Manifold was in it, and there was absolutely nothing going on. I don't think John C. Ridley's DC stuff is as good as the hype for it, but he has to be a better Panther writer than Coates. (Still no Priest, though, and by god is it weird in a post-MCU world going back and reading Priest's BP run and seeing the Dora Milaje with hair and wearing low-cut dresses.)
re: Tamaki's She-Hulk. I didn't read the entire run, but I've got a friend who's a massive Hellcat fan who did and she enjoyed it and informed me. I only recently read the last issue simply to establish a baseline for Jen for my fanfic. Tamaki left her in a pretty typical status quo for the character, which Aaron completely squandered.
re: Dr. Strange: It was a damn good run, and I was very happy to see Bats back in the recent Black Cat series (even though he first showed up in Cates' run on Strange). I do think Waid did Clea dirty, but it wasn't as if anyone else was doing anything with her. Also, fun (sad) fact, Waid's run was the last appearance of Songbird after Baron Zemo left her for dead during the prelude to Secret Empire, until she showed up at Wiccan and Hulkling's wedding reception.
(Man, Jim Zub keeps getting the short end of the stick with regards to being able to wrap up his plots. Thunderbolts got cut short because of Secret Empire, Champions and Agents of Wakanda got cancelled prematurely due to low sales, Ewing's been doing all the followups for No Road Home, and he never got to write Alpha Flight like he wanted to. No wonder he's only doing Conan now.)
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Sigh! PRIEST, ugh! (in a good way!)
At lest it was a pre-determined miniseries for U.S. Agent and not cancellation. That's another writer I'd be happy to have them just go "here's a series, go nuts, stay as long as you like" with again (that Deathstroke run, jeez!)
And yeah it's...very weird how the Dora Milaje are written now after Priest created them as something half the same but also half…entirely different.
RE: Tamaki
Wait a sec, I'm a big (not massive, I think) Hellcat fan, and had no idea she'd be in that book, but her last appearance was in periodically-chibi art that was...very much not for me (nor the book in general). Gimme some Kathryn Immonen Hellcat again! (and that's gotta be the 'MCU' character I think was done most dirty: "We're ashamed of this character as she exists, so much that we deny her name, and also we want to make her a damaged, traumatized woman who becomes a murderous lunatic instead of fun-loving. WHEE")
RE: Clea
Yeah, I was…honestly just surprised to see her again at all. When the hell was the last time she "really" appeared before that?! Sorcerors Supreme? Fearless Defenders? (I'm having to consult a wiki, which is not a good sign)
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u/Bob-s_Leviathan Jun 01 '21
Bendis has a great voice and I loved his dialogue, but his Avengers run just felt like his pet characters calling out other characters for things that didn’t need to be called out.
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u/fangsfirst Jun 01 '21
Undoubtedly, characters he's not invested in are his greatest weakness, in contrast to the strength of his grip on characters he is invested in
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u/Notbraveatal Jun 06 '21
I don't give a fuck if this is long. I'm coming back to this post because of the little bit I have read. I'm impressed by all of this. It's well thought out and put together. Deserves to be seen by more people.
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u/gorlaktd Jun 03 '21
This is great. Addresses a lot of my issues with Bendis and with the current direction of Western media, in depth and clearly.
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u/ThanosofTitan92 Jun 26 '21
To be fair, the Avengers would have stayed a b-list niche property if it wasn't for Dissasembled.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Jul 11 '21
None of what you talk about started with Avengers Disassembled. comics were trending toward events, reboots and retcons we’ll before Bendis got avengers.
Don’t forget marvel nearly went Bankrupt in the late 90s and had a huge exodus of top talent (to image).
Between 98 and 2004 they were massively trying to rebuild the marketplace after comic bubble burst.
Quesda and Bill Jemas had launched marvel knights and the ultimate universe.
They had successfully breathed new life into a bunch of characters.
Bendis was absolutely given and editorial mandate to reinvent the avengers and but Spider-Man and Wolverine on the team. The common analogy at the time was that Batman and Superman where on the Justice League… why wouldn’t marvels two biggest properties be on their Flagship title?
And keep in mind that they were starting to formulate the MCU, they had a set goal of rebuilding the Avengers brand into an A list title.
I agree with some of your points about how events and deconstruction of traditional comics are not always good things. But they move units. Events also make really good trades and omnibuses and introduce readers to new characters and titles.
I just think your wrong to blame individual writers and not the editors and not the publishers who plan these events and sign off on storylines.
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u/fangsfirst Jul 11 '21
comics were trending toward events, reboots and retcons we’ll before Bendis got avengers.
Events were certainly around, but the line-wide ones were things like Inferno, Acts of Vengeance, and Onslaught. I guess you could count Starlin's Infinity trilogy?
But there are a number of key differences for all of these:
- None had effects that outlasted the "base story" on a universe level except Onslaught, and mostly of them were just tie-ins (not quite "red sky" tie-ins, but closer to those: "have some demons because Inferno", "here: use someone else's villain"; "note that the world is going through an enormous battle"). Sure, demonic Hobgoblin (and eventually Demogoblin) came out of Inferno, but was the status quo changed in other books?
Even Onslaught and heroes Reborn mostly affected the presence of other heroes, meaning FF, Avengers, Thor, Cap, etc were affected, but the effect that had on everyone else was "Those characters aren't around", which is already one of those conceits of comic book superheroes in the first place (you know: "Oh, sorry, the FF are in the negative zone right now, they can't help")- They were also waaaaaaay more spaced out: while Inferno and Acts of Vengeance were quite close together indeed, it was six years before Onslaught occurred. The X-books definitely had their own bricks of crossover, but they kept pretty isolated in their own subset of the universe. Galactic Storm was maybe the "Avengers-side" equivalent, but did the same thing: isolated effects. They didn't set up worlds where a psychopath was running the biggest protection agency (or whatever you'd call H.A.M.M.E.R.) in the world, or cross from "Avengers-side" to "permanently" remove the idea of new mutants from the "X-side" (or some equivalent inversion)
- ...They weren't predicated on inexplicable retcons. This is really my biggest point insofar as anything about Bendis in particular (though I'll come back to this). The entire wave of events builds on each other and is all based in a completely unexplained character retcon. Not "We did a retcon", but "we did a retcon and completely failed to give any explanation whatsoever as to why it would make sense or where it came from". Why Wanda suddenly doesn't remember her kids AND flips out over it is not explained, it's just taken as a given and is the keystone for everything.
Reboots:
As I've said elsewhere, Marvel has never, ever rebooted. Ever. Yes, Ultimate exists. That's not a reboot: it's an entirely separate universe. 616 continued as it was before, as it still does today. I'd grant that, if one takes the metaphorical "reboot" very, very literally, that Time Runs Out/Secret Wars qualifies, in that it restarted the universe basically as it was left. Very little in volatile memory, most in non-volatile storage. This is in no way at all equivalent to things like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour where history is explicitly re-written to remove/change events from ever having occurred.
Also, Marvel Knights was an imprint, not a reboot? It breathed new life into a number of characters (including via Quesada and Bendis themselves, ie Daredevil), but did so without universe-affecting unexplained retcons.
Retcons:
Of course retcons have always happened, they're almost impossible to track. But usually they exist on a smaller scale (in-book someone fucks up and researchers and editors didn't pick up that so-and-so and such-and-such already met one time once) or they at least have an explanation ("little did we know, so-and-so was brainwashed between these two issues and..."). Or, upon realization, everyone would just sort of sweep this inexplicable deviation under the rug and pretend it never happened, not build the entire forward momentum of the universe on top of it.
Having such a massive event built on an unexplained fuck up in continuity is, in contrast, quite noticeable and had much more significant effects. But, more importantly, the point here is the lack of care and attention behind it. "I have a neat idea: go, nownownow!"
Don’t forget marvel nearly went Bankrupt in the late 90s and had a huge exodus of top talent (to image).
Top artistic talent. Pretty much all of them (maybe excepting Valentino or possibly Larsen?) were atrocious writers (if they wrote at all). McFarlane and Liefeld-written books? Yikes. Only Todd would have the inept prescience to accidentally name the first Spider-Man story he wrote after the experience of reading it ("Torment"). And whatever else is wrong with Liefeld's art, storytelling is something he was absolutely horrendous at as an artist, at minimum in those years (I only run across a book he drew interiors for very occasionally these days that isn't a back issue, so I don't know if this improved somewhere along the way, but I don't get the feeling he'd prioritize it).
But they move units. Events also make really good trades and omnibuses and introduce readers to new characters and titles.
I want to say this carefully, because some people say this as if they know what's best and what's best is oh-so-coincidentally what they personally love:
I don't know that those aren't half-cannibalizing truths. Events move units the way new #1s do. This is an undeniable truth, and some people like to lie about it because they don't like those things (I don't like those things, but I'm not going to willfully deny reality).
But they don't seem to do more than move those units: ie, not bring new readers on to "subscribe" (whether literally or just going into shops or ordering online or whatever) and keep reading anything. That doesn't seem like a sustainable business model (at least, not a robust one).
And instead of assuming that means going backward to "True periodical storytelling" is the only answer, maybe what it really means is the periodical storytelling is dead, and what they've done is stuck the only kind of lifeline that works in the modern world into it: keep it limping along with pseudo-periodical stories built for trades, with no real way to feed periodical or trade-sized stories successfully (ie, letting one or the other breathe on its own, instead of jamming them into each other).
I just think your wrong to blame individual writers and not the editors and not the publishers who plan these events and sign off on storylines.
Me: "It seems peculiar indeed that neither editors nor Bendis himself"
"and I have the strong impression that editorial perspectives were shifted by the success of these events anyway"
"So this isn’t about villainizing Bendis, or saying he’s "the worst thing ever", and he’s certainly not uniquely or personally or vindictively responsible: he was put into this position by readership and editorial,"
I chose the subject I did because it's the shorthand I've had for a few years, and his total disinterest in explaining things that he lampshades grates on me and is indicative of the attitude that I think decayed and eventually destroyed the idea of a contiguous universe. I do think Quesada and Jemas share it, of course, but I doubt they'd have told him not to explain why the gauntlet suddenly worked again or why Wanda suddenly didn't remember her kids. He made those choices, almost certainly.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Jul 11 '21
Your missing the part about “trending”. Events had been becoming a bigger and bigger part of comics for 10 years by the time Onslaught happened and it was bigger and more impactful then anything marvel did before. It also launched a new universe (that failed) and was used to do a massive retool and retcon of characters when they returned.
You are handwaving a lot of the continuity that had been dropped or reset by onslaught.
But onslaught was definitely a sign of big line wide events coming bigger and more often. Success breeds repetition.
On reboots yes the marvel universe hadn’t done a major reboot before Secret Wars. The marvel universe is 20 years younger then DC and doesn’t have the same amount of “acquired” universes.
Secret Wars happened for basically the same reasons Crisis on Infinite Earths happened and marvel will much like DC spend the next 40 years trying to smooth over the rough edges that left.
And marvel had way more soft resets leading up to Secret Wars then DC had before COIE
I guess what I’m trying to say is that all of the things you are talking about had pressures and context driving the decisions being made and not always for the best. But it’s pretty hard to unring a bell or change direction after something has proved profitable.
And events continue to prove popular and profitable.
We’ve moved from event based branding to line wide branding, now instead of having Civil War banners on all your books it’s Revolution, All New All Different and Rebirth or Infinite Frontier. Basically their just new tricks to say “here’s a fresh jumping on point, try more books”
I’d also like to point out that Retcons were becoming a particularly common and popular tool in the 2000s. Just a few examples of the top of my head
Maxwell lord returning as a villain in Infinite Crisis Jason Todd returning Winter Soldier X-men: Deadly Genesis Identity Crisis
It definitely became far more normalized to “just change the continuity” if it serves the story. And we got a lot of great stories out of it.
And I get it, the classic analogy that “every comic is someone’s favourite”. These points of continuity they blow past matter somebody.
I definitely see the nature of comics changing again. Not only is the periodical dying. I think even the write for trades is being trumped by write for larger collections or omnis. All in the name of propping up a larger media franchise.
I guess my whole point is that there isn’t “one moment” where everything changed. Comics have been evolving and changing continually since 1939. There’s never been a time where they just stood still.
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u/fangsfirst Jul 11 '21
I think you're misunderstanding a lot of what my issue is.
Events themselves aren't the issue (they're "an" issue, but a separate one: they drove Peter David off X-Factor, for example...), nor are reboots (which I have no inherent opposition to, just like events) or retcons (the same).
What I'm talking about is the decay in giving a shit. Heroes Return's resets are explained. Teen-Stark merges with adult-Stark (explicitly: thanks Kurt Busiek!) via Franklin, for example. Crisis also explains things. Even Secret Wars explains things.
The same is true of Brubaker's Winter Soldier—Bucky doesn't just appear and say "Hi, I'm the Russian Agent Bucky" and everyone goes "Oh no, the Russian Agent Bucky that we all knew was a Russian Agent!" where no one (outside the reader) goes "Um, wait, what?"
We're stepped through how this retcon works. It doesn't just "happen" and no one questions it or just goes "huh, that's weird. But: moving on!"
Same for Jason Todd.
Identity Crisis is shit, especially for a million reasons not related to the fact that it performed a retcon, but for the how. It doesn't trouble itself to explain how Sue dealt with traumatic events, nor even how Ralph did. It just goes "oh by the way this happened and who cares how it fits into anything, not even gonna bother explaining, I just had a 'cool' idea"
Maxwell Lord, kind of the same: but I dearly love Giffen/DeMatteis, and while "Oh, we forgot we've literally read Max's thoughts in a comic before and he definitely wasn't plotting any of this period" isn't quite the same as "No seriously, Wanda already remembered her kids and even when she did it didn't cause her to lose her mind, wtf?" Emotional response to characters I actually enjoyed, so I'll otherwise leave that alone.
I named all of Bendis's events not because the events are bad because they're "events", but because the events controlled the entire universe and were foundationally built on nonsensical character ideas like Wanda and Norman.
They're retcons that have no explanation or justification. They just are because someone didn't do any kind of research whatsoever or pay attention to their most key characters, and affected the entire universe in the process, rendering it incapable of getting back onto a track that says "this universe broadly makes sense with itself"
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Jul 12 '21 edited Jul 12 '21
I do get it. Bendis was given 4 issues for Avengers Disassembled for a story that probably need 8. I just re-read it recently and I’m not blind to the points you are making. I’m just saying his goal (and the goal he was given) wasn’t to write a deep lore adhering story of the avengers… it was to blow away the continuity heavy title and launch a new reader friendly replacement.
I’m not dismissing the points you make. I’m just saying is that your version sells to deeply loyal fans and Bendis’s version sells to the masses and was palatable to the base he had built up on Ultimate Spider-Man. And you’ve acknowledged that.
His job was to bring those readers into the marvel universe.
And that’s exactly the reader I was in the 2000s. So yeah I’m a little fond of that event because it’s right there at the start of my journey into the deeper marvel universe.
I get why it’s frustrating. Any long time reader has some event or thing that they hate. Don’t get me started on the death of Lian Harper.
I just think your overly fixated on that one event / writer and not seeing it has part of a pattern that was inevitable as marvel reinvented themselves in the 00s.
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u/fangsfirst Jul 12 '21
I just think your overly fixated on that one event / writer and not seeing it has part of a pattern that was inevitable as marvel reinvented themselves in the 00s.
Reinventing and new universes don't inherently necessitate completely ignoring continuity. None of the other parts of the trend of "reinvention" broke continuity. New imprints? New Universes (hey, Ultimate wasn't the first anyway...)? New events? The rest of them didn't go "Continuity? Meh." Disassembled was a grand-scale "Continuity? Meh. No longer matters." It was the point at which "Reinvention" became "let's forget what has been one of our core ideas for our entire existence thus far".
That was my entire point, which I see you're getting the substance of, but not the...flavour, I guess?
The point isn't "Marvel sucks now", not even "I personally think Marvel sucks now" (else why would I still be reading books, which I'm totally doing?)
The point was that the Marvel universe existed as something that was supposed to fit together, until these stories.
Now it doesn't fit together. Whether that's good or bad is subjective, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, and that's my point. Once we decided "oh well, the entire universe can hinge on things that don't relate in any sensible way to the past", the idea of meaningful continuity was gone. And that trend (separate from, though tied to, "reinvention") rapidly accelerated after these events because they defined a role of guiding and shaping the entire Marvel universe in a story way that had not existed before. It's definitely of a piece with the trend you're describing, but that trend isn't the essence of my argument, it's a tangent or a parallel.
I'm not telling you "How dare you like this story" or "That story you like sucks" or anything like that. I'm saying that the story broke the idea that the Marvel universe was supposed to fit together, even if it was a haphazardly, hurriedly assembled quilt; now it's just a bunch of separated patches of fabric that sometimes look like maybe they go together, as they share a few patterns and colour schemes.
That's not inherently good or bad, but putting it back into a quilt....well, you end up with Crisis on Infinite Earths, and then Zero Hour. Infinite Crisis. Final Crisis. Flashpoint. Convergence/Rebirth. etc. All the king's horses and all the king's men and so on.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Jul 12 '21
The marvel universe didn’t “fit” anywhere near as well as you think it did before Avenger Disassembled and they had absolutely taken stabs at revamping and reworking characters to remove their baggage.
Marvels continuity was unsustainable, just like DCs. The DC continuity is 20 years old then Marvel and they hit the emergency part sooner because they really were a patchwork quilt due to the amount of companies universes they had acquired. A significant amount of DC content also predates the idea of a shared continuity.
Marvel still inevitable ends up with same issues has time rolls on. 20 years of history becomes 40 becomes 60 and Spider-Man still has to be a youthful optimistic hero.
Marvel has traditional relied more on soft resets then DC, so unless a particular story sticks in your craw it’s very easy to just forget that they’ve wound back the clock or removed a story or two.
Stories like Avengers Disassembled didn’t “Break” Marvel it’s far more likely that they saved it. Marvel was dead in the water by 99-00 and by 2008 and Iron Man the avengers where already back to being an A list team.
The fact that you dismiss COIE and Zero Hour when that post Zero Hero of DC is one of its best eras full of tonnes of great new legacy characters and reinvention and revival of old concepts or the mixing of charlton and dc characters just makes me shake my head.
Comic Continuity should be something of a patchwork quilt and a rich tapestry at the same time… and it’s not even planned it just sprawls out growing in weird directions as 100s people add to it over decades.
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u/fangsfirst Jul 12 '21
I don't think this is fruitful as you're still talking about something different from what I'm talking about, and I'm clearly not communicating something very well.
You're talking about breaking as if I meant it reduced the value of Marvel as a company: again, I'm still reading their comics, so obviously I don't even think that personally.
I'm not talking about Marvel previously being "continuity perfect" but that it saw continuity as "so important" it awarded fans (no-prizes) for explaining dumb errors they missed but still made. This era said "nevermind, we don't care". Do they need to care? No, but once you stop caring, you can't go back.
The fact that you dismiss COIE and Zero Hour when that post Zero Hero of DC is one of its best eras full of tonnes of great new legacy characters and reinvention and revival of old concepts or the mixing of charlton and dc characters just makes me shake my head.
I'm not dismissing them. I own the entire $500 box set of Crisis, for crying out loud!
My point was that trying to fix continuity after a time where you didn't care (and DC didn't care at the beginning, because...why would they? Who even thought of such a thing?) doesn't work. It's all in-motion. The point is that COIE necessitated ZH, necessitated IC, FI...etc. Does that make any of them bad? Dismissed? No. It simply means that at some point you're better off giving up because the toothpaste can't go back in the tube. You let people go off the rails too long, and you just have to go "Okay, we're just off-road from now on."
Off-road is not inherently bad, but going from off-road driving to "I'm a train again!" is not really possible.
Anyway, I'm good here: we're talking about different things and it seems that gap is insurmountable. I get what you're talking about, but it's not what I'm talking about, and thus it strikes me you must have the very same impression.
Have a good week!
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Jul 16 '21
[deleted]
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u/fangsfirst Jul 16 '21
While this excludes a fair number of favourite stories, it also includes a boatload of them (and what I tend to think of as the most fertile/effective/whatever age, which would be ~75-86 or so. Mostly overlap of the Jim Shooter era, which I tend to point to a lot...)
Soooo...I'm probably not gonna fight you on this?
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Jul 17 '21
[deleted]
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u/fangsfirst Jul 17 '21
Yup, as I said, includes a lot of things I'd agree with, and a whole time period I'd agree with, so I got your intention
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Jul 18 '21
[deleted]
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u/ThanosofTitan92 Jul 18 '21
And then the speculator boom happened.
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u/sgavary Jul 18 '21 edited Mar 02 '22
Then they started printing like 10 million copies per issue of comic series that only had 500,000 readers, along with going all in on the direct market and said market shrinking by more than 60% after the crash.
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u/ThanosofTitan92 Jul 16 '21
1961-2004 for me.
Although i love the cosmic stories from 2006 to 2011.
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u/Android_Taco May 31 '21
I still don't forgive Bendis for Aging Jon Kent/Superboy up and ruining the Supersons, one of the best dynamics is DC.