Comic Book Resources

Thanks for the mention, Bill, but..."James K."?

I must be missing something.

Well, as a Shifty Canadian, you have no sense of American history, but I was riffing on James K. Polk, 11th President of the United States, and now the joke's totally not funny anymore.

AH!!

I'm an idiot!

The man they called The Stump.

That too!

This quote turns out to be a much more evocative way of saying precisely what we were talking about here:

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/12/12/wolverine-trailer-hoopla/

i clicked every link in that post, and it's like this deep vast creepy ocean that i hate without knowing.

Borges could have totally made that "a novel with nothing in it but the dedication" idea work. And it would have been the best novel ever.

Sadly, so true...

One of my New Year resolutions is to go through my Pull List and be utterly, brutally honest.

Do I look forward to reading this comic every month? Yes or No? If it's not a resounding "YES!" then bye bye...

I don't think he's completely off, but it's not like this sort of complaint is only applicable to comic books.

You could say the same thing about movies/tv being nothing more than more trailer/commercial, albums just being more single, etc.

And in all those genres you wouldn't have been looking hard enough for the good stuff. There's a modern pretension that we're surrounded by more crap than we used to, but that's just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. Just because you only remember the good stuff from the past doesn't mean the overwhelming majority of what was written wasn't god awful. And while the nature of the problem wasn't the same (overblown splash-page contentless bashfests vs. overblown text-full brainlessly weird pulpiness) they were both pervasive.

Preface: I'm looking at this quote solely in the context in which it's placed on CSBG (or actually, the no-context in which it's placed). So sorry Mr. Plok if I'm way off what you meant here. Now...

The quote is a very novel way of phrasing a very generic and pointless complaint. In the history of all entertainment media, there has never been a time when the bulk of stuff being produced in that media has been considered intellectually satisfying and good. We call good things good because there are so many things of their kind which are not that. If Grant Morrison comics, Scorcese films, and James Joyce novels were the only ones of their kind, we'd label many things we now consider brilliant as vapid or derivative cuz we'd have much higher standards. So yeah, its not surprising that you think most of the comics on the racks are superficial trash. Most comics have always been superficial trash and will always be superficial trash until comics cease to be published. At least comics on the whole are better now when compared to comics of previous eras (e.g. paper quality, art, fact research, continuity, logicality of plot, character development, showing not telling, etc)

i do think he's completely off. there is a mind-numbingly wide variety of stories every week in the new comics that hit the racks, even if the majority of them come in the form of superhero comics. if you're not finding anything you like, you're probably not looking hard enough.

Well, somebody's heart shrunk three sizes recently.

Speaking for myself, I don't like having to look to hard. I'd rather have something catch my eye. Less and less catches my eye these days. There are worthy super-hero comics out there, but they tend to get lost in the waves of dross. I'm glad we have the internet and blogs out there to recommend good comics; I doubt I would have bought Iron Fist, Agents of Atlas, Blue Beetle, or Captain Britain unless I read the good reviews. The covers of most super-hero comics, and the implied content, haven't made me pick them up.

On the other hand, I just got into Fables, and love it. I'm eager to read the next trades of Scalped, Northlanders, Criminal, and Walking Dead. I know I'll enjoy the most recent Love & Rockets book. There are a few super-hero books that appeal to me- e.g. Captain America, Daredevil, the Superman books (!)- but I'm happy getting other stuff. When a super-hero book looks good, I'm sure I'll get it. I'm just not looking to hard these days.

Blackjack said - "One of my New Year resolutions is to go through my Pull List and be utterly, brutally honest.

Do I look forward to reading this comic every month? Yes or No? If it’s not a resounding “YES!” then bye bye…"

i just switched where i order comics from starting with my March order and did this exact same thing. My regular order (not counting TPBs and odds and ends) dropped from $80 to $60 a month. I cut some mainstay books too - JLA, Flash, Astonishing X-men - but I did much the same way you did. Some of that cut back was because of cancellations (Blue Beetle - boooo!!!) or hiatus titles (Batman) but I did not replace them. So that is 7 books that I no longer get. And if some don't get good soon I've got a few other things on the chopping block too.

Cass and Nick Marino, you might be right about the increase in quality in recent super-hero comics, especially in regards to the production aspects. Hell, some books look stellar; the Spider-Man/ X-Men mini, for example, is gorgeous.

I still don't think any current artists can match or exceed Kirby, Ditko, Barry Windsor-Smith, Gene Colan, Walt Simonson, Bernie Wrightson, etc. in anything but surface detail. I don't think any current writer (except Morrison & Brubaker) working in super-hero comics has matched what Ostrander did with Suicide Squad & Spectre, what Priest did with Black Panther, what Simonson did with Thor, or what Gerber did period.

Ultimately, though, it all comes down to personal taste, and I'm glad others are finding more enjoyment than me in current super-hero comics.

FYI - I'm responding to Bill's quote of Plok, and not to Plok's comment in its original context. But I don't see any reference to "super-hero" in that quote. Just to comics.

I believe that comics should be good, and there are plenty current ones that are. They just don't usually take place in either the Marvel Universe or DC Universe.

So, here some of the floppies I look forward: Fables, Jack of Fables, Northlanders, Scalped, The Sword. The only current super-hero books I get are Dynamo 5 and Invincible. I understand all the complaints about the awful comics out there, but there's an easy solution: don't buy them. If you're buying it just because it features your childhood hero, you're part of the problem - you are funding the continued existence of bad comics.

When people complain about how all comics are bad, it doesn't make them sound cool or discerning - it just makes them sound like they need to look around a little more.

Most comics have always been superficial trash and will always be superficial trash until comics cease to be published. At least comics on the whole are better now when compared to comics of previous eras (e.g. paper quality, art, fact research, continuity, logicality of plot, character development, showing not telling, etc)

This is what I've been trying to sum up for a long time; I live in a college town where a lot of people are hip enough to like graphic novels but not hip enough to know or respect their inspirations; most of them don't realize that superhero comics are in any way different from the 1960s 'Lex Luthor has turned Batman and Superman into . . . CHESS PIECES' era.

I believe that comics should be good, and there are plenty current ones that are. They just don’t usually take place in either the Marvel Universe or DC Universe.

There are also a number of good comics that take place in the Marvel and DC Universe featuring well-known characters. They just are the sort of minority that takes a bit of reading and discernment to discover; then you just go to the store on Wednesday and get a new chapter of a good book every week.

"I still don’t think any current artists can match or exceed Kirby, Ditko, Barry Windsor-Smith, Gene Colan, Walt Simonson, Bernie Wrightson, etc. in anything but surface detail. I don’t think any current writer (except Morrison & Brubaker) working in super-hero comics has matched what Ostrander did with Suicide Squad & Spectre, what Priest did with Black Panther, what Simonson did with Thor, or what Gerber did period. "

Well, then you're judging the at-the-moment-output against the greatest hits of everything up to just recently. (I would personally not view Priest Panther as something OLD, for example, I see it as an artifact of the current paradigm. And I thought the recent Knauf Iron Man run was pretty close to it in tone, scope and quality).

I'll have to check out the Knauf Iron Man issues, as Priest's Panther is among my favorite comics.

In responding to the idea that today's comics are better, I started cherry-picking favorites, without realizing it, in order to say that I don't agree. Instead, I'll note that I think today's art and storytelling doesn't match up against '60s Marvel & DC (especially Kubert, Cardy, Infantino, and Neal Adams), a time when artists innovated rather than just drew well. Late-'80s Marvel & DC was a wonderful period marked by energetic and daring comics. Both companies hit a lot of highs from the late '90s to about 2003.

I view 1998 (start of Marvel Knights) to the end of Jemas' reign at Marvel as vastly different from current Marvel. New X-Men, X-Force/ X-Statix, Jenkins' Spider-Man (before it lost its way), Busiek & Co. Avengers, the early Ultimate books, the early Bruce Jones Hulks, the early JMS Spider-Man, Peter David's Captain Marvel... I think I was reading and enjoying half the line. There was the sense that the creative talent was trying new things (even if some of them failed), and Marvel was exciting again. For me, that sense has been lost in the last 3 years.

Again, if you think today's comics are the best, more power to you, and enjoy. I don't get that sense of excitement, but I'm happy other people do.

I buy over 50 new comics every month. I live for the weekly visit to my LCS. And I am constantly on the watch for new titles to replace the ones that end or drop in quality so much that I can't stand them. I used to wait until the end of the year to make changes, but it is so much easier to stop at the end of a story arc or a particular writer's last issue on a book.

The fact that someone periodically restates a variant of Sturgeon's Law devalues neither the law nor the restatement.

I'm glad Omar mentioned Sturgeon's Law here. Everybody remembers the quote "Ninety percent of everything is crud", but the context is particularly applicable here. A literary critic had read a couple of SF books, then wrote a review arguing that all SF was terrible. Sturgeon pointed out that books being reviewed were not very good, and stated his famous law.

Same thing applies here - ninety percent of floppy comics are crap, agreed. But that means that ten percent of them aren't. So, if you're unhappy with the mainstream, go find the good stuff.