Best thing I’ve read I’ll week.

It took me until “Advantageous” to get it – and I just read these issues for the first time last year.

I kept thinking – ‘maybe, I underestimated his Spider-Man run.’

Bravo.

Like, 100% got me! That was amazing. I literally read the review, and then immediately thought “Oh my god! I can’t believe I passed up multiple opporuntities to purchase Spider-Man #1.” I even went to eBay to see if I could get it for less than $1000 today.

Well, done. \\commences slow clap// Well done.

Sure, like everyone else here, I thought the “advantageous” sounded odd, but since I’ve been reading nothing but the gospel of Greg Burgas today (I’ve been going through, reading “Comics You Should Own”, and noting down what comics I should hunt down) I merely chalked it up to one more moment of brilliance that I needed to experience myself.

Oh, the dangers of coming across April Fool’s jokes months late. I finally realised it was a joke when I remembered how cheap those “Torment” backissues were.

Wow. That is pretty clueless. Kind of like the linguistic equivalent of a Rob Liefeldt drawing.

I have to admit, for a few paragraphs, I truly was drawn in by Greg’s argument- I mean, those high, thin panels as NY Skyscrapers? And here I was starting to believe I was a troglodyte merely for thinking that was some amazingly obtuse visual storytelling that gave you virtually no information nor compelling art alongside some downright tuuurrible prose that went nowhere, failed to elevate the material like he intended, and sucked the ever-loving fun out of the entire exercise. And then I came to “His Weblines Advantageous” and bingo, I remembered the date. Still, that’s about the smartest Fools Gag thrown my way this year and well worth remembering.

Fair’s fair though, I did start to see some clear improvement in MacFarlane’s writing skills as his run progressed (I think this was after all the guest writers on Spawn, so something rubbed off)- the Wendigo storyline was his best narrative and overall idea- he threw out all the damn meta-expositional junk and gave us a decent whodunit- my only complaint being a Wendigo that was now an albino bigfoot susceptible to bullets rather than a terrible, inexorable cursed thing roaming the land- but for the needs of the story it worked, and Pete got off some of his best one-liners that MacF ever gave him.

And he got Wolvie back in his yellow outfit for the first time in ages, though I did prefer the brown and tan. But at the time it was a nice little gimmick.

I am getting pretty tired of the “great ____, or greatest ____” line, though.

I dunno, I liked Michelinie’s Iron Man. His Spider-Man truly was mostly crap. Actually Spider-Man was mostly crap the entire 1990s.

I only read Michilinie’s Spider-Man and his 90s Iron man run where Tony Stark had a Jheri Curl, so I don’t know if he was better elsewhere. I always hear his original Iron Man run from the 80s was pretty good, but I never tried it for myself.

I think the worst offender in the overexplanation thing must be Tom deFalco, though. I remember one story in his horrible Fantastic Four run, where Reed said something like “Look out, an antigravity platform is shooting some sort of concentrated laser beam at us!” And the panel clearly showed a high-tech platform shooting a laser at them…

Haha, that’s too funny. DeFalco is a write who can do good work at times, but MAN did his FF run bring out the worst in him!

I dunno, I liked Michelinie’s Iron Man. His Spider-Man truly was mostly crap. Actually Spider-Man was mostly crap the entire 1990s.

I think the worst offender in the overexplanation thing must be Tom deFalco, though. I remember one story in his horrible Fantastic Four run, where Reed said something like “Look out, an antigravity platform is shooting some sort of concentrated laser beam at us!” And the panel clearly showed a high-tech platform shooting a laser at them…

Really, anyone who complains of that is actually complaining of an entire generation of writers. Right or wrong, they more or less all wrote like that from the 60s to the 80s.

Yeah, but Michilinie singlehandedly had every annoying stylistic tic of the era concentrated in one writer. JM DeMatteis used to do that thing of saving the last word of a sentence for the next panel and Chris Claremont used to overexplain in exposition what was already made clear in the art, but Michilinie took every bad stylistic tic of the era would combine them all into one Frankenstein monster of bad old school writers, except minus any of their redeeming qualities. And he also had his own unique annoying stylistic tics all his own, like the Shaggy-like scared stuttering inside thought bubbles every time Spider-Man had to fight someone (who stutters IN THEIR HEAD?). Dumb villains like Chance, Humbug, Jonathan Caesar, Styx and Stone, etc.

Not saying McFarlane was good, just that Michilinie was no better. Maybe working under him so long contributed to his bad writing even, because the longer McFarlane’s run went on, the stories actually improved some.

And indeed, Mary Jane proves to be a lifeline most advantageous!

Just horrible, horrible stuff. Every single panel had a stupid thought bubble explaining what was clearly being depicted already by the art,

Really, anyone who complains of that is actually complaining of an entire generation of writers. Right or wrong, they more or less all wrote like that from the 60s to the 80s.

And in Michelinie’s defense, it’s also the case that Venom was going to be a woman that lost her child during one of the Spider-Man’s battles, but some dumb editor thought a woman wouldn’t be a fearsome opponent for Spider-Man, so… we have Eddie Brock with his silly-ass motivation.

Still, I agree that Michelinie’s writing in Spidey was mostly crap, though. It’s only that McFarlane was far crappier…

I liked MacFarlane’s work on Amazing–and he does some nice stuff here, but this series was weak story wise–and it didn’t take long to drop it. I’m not sure why I bought it as long as I did. Maybe it was because the art on the other Spidey series was so weak at this time–especially MacFarlane’s replacement–Erik Larsen–who seemed to be a MacFarlane wanna be–even though he’d been in the business longer. Larsen was the reason I stopped buying the re-introduction of the Doom Patrol.

Now, the ACTUAL storytelling, on the other hand…