Comic Book Resources

Heh The world sex on the cover? Left corner on the water, nice . Good read as always.

Cheers

"Mike Carey, on X-Men, has picked up the reins with nary a blip on the “hey, has something changed?” radar."

Um... he changed almost the entire cast in his first storyline.

Which makes the fact it wasn't jarring in the least all the more impressive.

Aquaman's Atlantis is so much cooler. It's got all the work PAD put into it between his Aquaman run and the Atlantis Chronicles.

Cover homages: I'm aware of six. Probably the earliest one was What If (first series) #12
http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=32876&zoom=4

Incredible Hulk #393 had a homage to that cover.

I think Grant Morrison's transition onto Doom Patrol was pretty impressive. He picked up some hanging threads and by the end of his first arc had both completely revitalized and revolutionized the concept of the book.

there is more than one on the Ninjak cover

Another Hulk cover homage is Marvel Zombies #1, 4th printing

Incredible Hulk #324, the return of grey Hulk is another homage, as well as Savage She-Hulk #1.

I wasn't going to buy Animal Man after Morrison left, but I loved the title so much, I gave Milligan a chance. Sure, he only wrote a six-issue arc, and yeah, it didn't make much sense right away — but somehow it was bizarre and playful and, after everything Buddy had been through under Morrison, you needed to keep reading to find out why his world was still so askew when it was supposed to be put back to right. It was a really marvelous arc that kept me happy and finally, at its conclusion, gave us the reunion between Buddy and his family that we'd been waiting for.

(It's too bad Milligan's reputation isn't greater and that he's not doing more comics. We need more Milligan!)

Not necassarily the same title but Whedon picking up after Morrison was a good transition.

What If General Ross Had Become the Hulk?.

Planetes is an awesome book, and one I try to recommend to all my comic reading friends who don't normally read manga. I think it has a great crossover appeal, much the same as books like Lone Wolf & Cub, Akira, and Blade Of The Immortal.

For seamless/good writer transitions, I'd mention:

- Geoff Johns taking over for James Robinson early on in JSA's run. Johns also managed to make an easy transition from Mark Waid on Flash.

- Just about ANY of the writers on Hellblazer, as all have done a pretty good job of building on what Alan Moore & Jamie Delano started with the character of John Constantine. There's a reason why it's DC's 5th longest running current title...

- Speaking of Swamp Thing, I think Rick Vietch very seemlessly picked up where Alan Moore left off.

I'm very anxious to see if the passing of the baton from Vaughan to Whedon on Runaways will be as seemless...

I can't resist mentioning my favourite example from outside comics.

After "Doctor Who" was cancelled in the UK in 1989, we all waited with baited breath for the much-hoped-for movie - which finally arrived in the late 90s, starring Paul McGann and Eric Roberts. And you may recall how good that was. Oh yes. It was abysmal. It completely reinterpreted canonical elements such as the Eye Of Rassilon and the powers of the Master. It was just awful.

I can imagine the scene, weeks later. The British Government calls an emergency meeting. Tony Blair addresses the Cabinet. "Gentlemen. Britain has been made the laughing-stock of the world. Our national idol, Doctor Who, has been reduced to a generic - nay, a sub-par - Hollywood action hero. At this time the people of the nation need redemption. They need to be raised up from the mire into which they have been cast by this appalling addition to the canon. We need the help of a man. A special man. A unique individual. We need him to save us. We have no alternative. Get me Terrance Dicks!"

Now Terrance Dicks was script editor on the Doctor Who TV series for some years, writing some of the greatest stories of the 70s, including "Genesis Of The Daleks", and he also novelised the lion's share of the series. If (before the recent relaunch) you asked a Doctor Who fan for the name of a Doctor Who writer, you'd most likely hear the name of Terrance Dicks. Looks like a gnome, writes like a god.

So Terrance Dicks took it upon himself to redeem the Doctor Who continuity, by writing a novel called "The Eight Doctors", set immediately after the movie. And he succeeded spectacularly. In the course of the first two pages, he dismissed the movie's biggest continuity errors with genius sentences such as (I'm paraphrasing here): "Of course, it wasn't *really* the Eye Of Rassilon. Not *really*. That was back on Gallifrey. Where it had always been. Yes. Of course. No, what the Master had been talking about in the TARDIS was just a small local copy of the Eye Of Rassilon. Yes." And a bit later, the Doctor is musing: "What was with the Master and those weird shapechanging powers? He'd never done that before. Must have been some weird kind of nightmare I was having."

The rest of the novel somehow manages to explain away the whole of the movie, while also telling an interesting story in its own right. Read in the context of the movie, it's the funniest thing I've ever read to do with Doctor Who. "Of course, it wasn't *really*..." has become a catchphrase in our house.

Back to comics, though...

Grant Morrison and Alan Moore are always reliable when it comes to looking as though they respect whatever happened before they came onto the book, while simultaneously moving it off into a nice little box on the sidelines so they can do what they want. But I think it's deeper than that. I think that those two in particular take careful note of everything that happened, and of the undertone of those happenings - e.g. creator chaos, lack of a plan, change in publisher style, and what-have-you - and then they incorporate that metatext into their plans. They don't just architect a big impressive plot - they have an underlying symbolic approach to the specific comic at hand which means that you just don't forget their runs. I think they're professionally incapable of disrespecting what's happened before so much as to completely ignore it. But they generally find a way to comment on it.

It's more than just coming up with a story explanation for previous continuity - I admire Geoff Johns for coming up with the whole Parallax thing, but I just don't think it's in the same league.

I would put James Robinson's Starman in the same league, mind you.

~ Gil

for the cover homage, the second issue of Bullet Points.

Or to write it as everyone else has:

Bullet Points #2

Um… he changed almost the entire cast in his first storyline.

Basically what Matt D mentioned, that it seemed so seemless even though the cast was different.

But beyond that, by the time Milligan was off the book, the cast of the book basically was only Rogue, Havok and Iceman - and Havok was written off nicely, I think.

Meanwhile, Carey managed to bring in Mystique from Milligan's earlier storyline and also work in plotlines from Claremont (Karima) and Casey (Lady Mastermind) very nicely.

"Not necassarily the same title but Whedon picking up after Morrison was a good transition."

I'm pretty sure that's not even possibly the same title, actually.

You do realize that the Ninjak cover is homaging an old Romita Amazing Spider-Man cover, right?

I remember Morrison saying in his pitch for the X-men which was reprinted in the first trade

"Yeah. Screw everything that happened before. I don't wanna deal with it right away. If there's stuff that needs to be cleard up, I'll do it sometime in the future."

So, probably not a good transition. Not that I was reading the X-books before Morrison came along because suck, but there you go.

Which is a perfectly fine way to approach stuff, IMO. Don't care writers half-heartedly dealing with continuity they don't care about. But if they can think of something cool to do with a previous writer's status quo, that's cool too.

You do realize that the Ninjak cover is homaging an old Romita Amazing Spider-Man cover, right?

Not the sex part, though, right?

MarkAndrew I think you're typing a bit too fast - you seem to have randomly chosen words missing from your sentences.

I thought the Grant Morrison to Mark Waid transition on JLA was very good. It's a shame it all went to shit after Waid left.

I agree with the Waid to Johns transition on The Flash, too. I guess the transition from Robinson + Goyer to Johns and Goyer on JSA was smooth, but looking back it is the exact point at which I started losing interest in JSA.

I second the Morrison to Milligan on Animal Man transition too.

Another great Flash transition was Mike Baron to William Messner-Loebs at #15. Loebs took over the dangling plot thread (Velocity 9, Wally losing his fortune) and carried on without missing a beat. He did so well that a lot of people seem to think there was no change in writer until Waid took over. I've read a lot of things online where Chunk's creation is misattributed to Messner-Loebs and similar things.

Peter David's entry onto Hulk...most people think he created/brought back the Grey Hulk.

Re: Planetes.

Avoid the anime version. None of the drama and humanity, more diaper jokes, misogyny and infantilization of women. They introduce a new main character - a whiny new female officer who seems utterly incompetent and criminally unprofessional/untrained while being all perky, wide-eyed and innocent. Hachimaki stays around as a generic anime arsehole, and all the rest are relegated to background status.
Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Here's one more homage to Hulk #1: Incredible Hulk #474
http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=100654&zoom=4

There's at least one more, if you stretch the rules.

"Re: Planetes.

Avoid the anime version. None of the drama and humanity, more diaper jokes, misogyny and infantilization of women. They introduce a new main character - a whiny new female officer who seems utterly incompetent and criminally unprofessional/untrained while being all perky, wide-eyed and innocent. Hachimaki stays around as a generic anime arsehole, and all the rest are relegated to background status.
Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. "

Wow, I totally disagree with that. The Planetes anime is just as good as the manga, IMO. It differs in a few places, and fleshes out parts of the story with new characters and events, but I found it extremely interesting, and more importantly, compelling. It did a fantastic job of capturing a realistic sense of life in space, space travel, and the toll both take on the lives of those traveling and those left behind on Earth.
To address a couple of your comments directly, the "new female lead" is not new, she's one of the MAIN CHARACTERS IN THE MANGA! You did read it right? She's given a larger role than in the manga, but she is not new and her personality is kept pretty intact. And Hachimaki is a jerk in the manga too, but it's probably more noticeable in the anime because the manga story is shorter and gets to his eventual turnaround/rebirth faster. And I'm not sure where any of the misogyny references come from. The female characters are all portrayed as intelligent, capable, flawed,

I hate when I freaking hit the submit button in the middle of a sentence...

Waht I was going to finish my thought with was:

The female characters are all portrayed as intelligent, capable, flawed, quirky, human individuals, just like everybody else in the cast.