http://www.marvel.com/blogs/tom%20brevoort

Well, one is now forced to either reconsider and learn something, or… one can simply find new ways to criticize other people in order to make us feel better while at the same time not changing a damn thing about the world. Being a cynic of human nature, I’m opting that the latter is more likely.

As a humor comic? Ah, I gleefully recall being flamed as I pointed out entire stretches of gags and characterization points Ellis was really just lifting from popular sitcoms. There’s even Family Guy manatee jokes in it, people!

How many copies did you buy?

Anyone else think they should market Godland as ‘From the guy who wrote X-men and Superman high on coke’?

I might have to get the 2nd trade of Godland. The first didn’t excite me too much, except for the drug hungry floatiing head, but I re-read Automatic Kafka on the weekend, and it left me hungry for more Casey.

A good idea does not a good story make, however. I was going to refer to Morrison’s work as “purple prose”, but Omar beat me to it. Even as an attempt to emulate pulp, it comes off more as fan fic. Of a story Dini & Timm told better a decade ago, accompanied by screen shots of a bad video game.

I want to go back and read all of “Batman & Son” in one sitting before rendering a final decision on dropping it, but so far this run feels like Morrison at his most mediocre – cool concepts/ideas wrapped in a middling story featuring archetypes instead of characters.

The major difficulty here is that the plot is really coasting on some rather overelaborated symbolism: it’s as if Arkham Asylum: A Serious House… had been published as a script book rather than a comic, or perhaps as a proposal.
And what makes it worse is the degree to which Morrison’s chosen visual symbolism, which simply underlines the stretch his prose style has to try in order to try and work as a comic. The writing is so over the top in tone as a result that there’s no sense of suspense or build; it’s all climax, with the result that the actual climax isn’t one.

Nor is the plot all that brilliant: for all the expectations heaped on Morrison in his stated desire to “make the Joker scary again,” having him kill people isn’t innovative, and it’s hardly some sort of wild new take on a character who’s spent far too many storylines simply killing people for his murders to have much impact on the reader.

It’s the format that was the experiment here; and that format, detailed above, doesn’t really work as a prose story or as a comic. I does, however, do a ggood job of demonstrating the vast gap between prose and comics as media, mainly by way of plummeting into that gap.

Though it does seem like Morrison’s Batman stuff is kind of an afterthought. It seems like Superman is getting more love and attention.

To be fair, though, #81′s pretty good. I’m not buying that Xavier’s actually dead and it’s silly that Kirkman is trying to convince us he is, but it’s a good catching up/funeral issue, with some great cameos and at least one generally unexpected appearance. There’s also a very nice bait-and-switch with Ultimate Shadow King, but I won’t give it away for anybody.

http://www.benzilla.com/?p=616

And yeah, I stupidly picked up the damn issue of Casanova, thinking it was going to be the start of a new arc (who plots seven-issue arcs? WHO?), and missed out on the Godland issue, because I missed the cover price, and didn’t notice that it was a recap issue.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures… I mean, me.

Hmm.

First, I think your reasoning is fallacious when you say, “Oh, this is what comics fans say they want, but they really want what they’re getting.” Comics fans say they want non-stop action, snarky humor, and goofy villains, but I’ve rarely heard them say they want Machine Man, Boom-Boom, and Photon together in one book, and I’ve certainly rarely seen them say, “Hey, I’d like a book that doesn’t pay much, if any attention to the established personalities of these characters and writes them like generic Warren Ellis characters!” Warren Ellis picked very obscure characters who can’t carry a book to carry his book, and lo and behold, they didn’t sell. No mystery there.

And to be honest, after reading Nextwave, I’m not sure it deserved to survive. I mean it was entertaining, yes, in a junk food junkie sort of way, but there was this constant underpinning of contempt for its audience. It was tremendously lazy, as though Ellis was saying, “I’ll just put in some fight scenes, some one-liners, a skeletal plot, and some jokes involving perverse sexual practices. That should be enough for you slope-browed wankers, right?” And yes, for the half-hour it took me to read it, it probably was, but I wasn’t unaware that Ellis thought that was as much as he needed to do.

(And the best news all day was that they’re coming out with Marvel Adventures: Iron Man…the Marvel Adventures line continues to be consistently better than its mainstream Marvel counterpart on a title-by-title, issue-by-issue basis. Which is, of course, not relevant to Nextwave at all, but you mentioned Marvel Adventures: Avengers in there too, so it gave me an excuse.)

I don’t know how DC and Marvel can improve promotion, but we need to hear more than “okay, this is shipping next week.” They maybe need to emphasize tone so that we know what kind of book to expect- “the insanity continues in the next ALL-NEW ATOM!” or somesuch.

What is the “Karl well?”

Damn, that first part reminds me. Why isn’t Karl Kesel writing a monthly book anyway?