Anyone who wants to argue the quality of Silvestri’s work only needs to zoom in on the face of any of his characters in a group-shot panel. They look like chicken-scratch.

Tony Isabella

Carl — Loki’s female guise was due to him taking over Sif’s body while her essence was trapped elsewhere. I don’t know how that relates to his other abilities, but it’s all part of his scheme.

about point #3. Well said!

As the run up to it has been dragged out more and more I’m becoming less and less enthusiastic. It turned out that “anything” has been pretty dull. The run up to Sinestro Corps was like an avalanche building; with Blackest Night feels more like people milling about waiting for something to happen. All of the stories have been so contained and confined: here’s the leader of a new corps and he does something then it’s off to meet another one and there’s no ongoing tension or conflict. And a line wide crossover makes me less interested than one confined to its own books. And DC zombies. (Really? DC Zombies? That’s what they come up with for the black lanterns?)

So my point is this: you may “still not care about Blackest Night” but DC seems to have been actively working to lose my interest.

2. Just because one title sells more than another doesn’t make it a better title. Final Crisis did great numbers, but that doesn’t mean it was the best title DC put out those months. So it’s unfair to say that 52 is the best of the weekly series so far (I think Trinity will hold up much better after a few years of distance).

3. Good art will elevate mediocre writing, and good writing will elevate mediocre art (to an extent), but really bad art and writing will contaminate anything they touch.

ChrisCross’ absence seems to be due to a health scare he had in May:

I woke up to the reality of the world of hypertension. I had spent a great deal of my life trying to do the right thing to take care of my body and then i got caught in some circumstances of life where pressure was all around me. And instead of asking for help and taking care of myself, I was awakened with intense vertigo and vomiting. Nothing says, “what the hell are you doing to me?” like going to the hospital to see that your blood pressure’s through the roof and that through sheer God miracle, I didn’t have a stroke or heart attack or didn’t damage anything internally. I’m better now, and I voluntarily took myself to a great nutritionist who owns a wellness clinic in Manhattan, but I wanted to make a point that even though this isn’t something that I wished on myself or planned to put myself through.

From his in-depth interview about Dance at The Pulse.

Until 512 it wasn’t doing the rest of us any favours. And then it was the some of the best bits of Iron Fist with the serial numbers filed off !

I mean, sold out in the States just means any issues that were shipped over here inevitably vanish just as quickly here, because the hype has built up for two more days sometimes!

Also, I’ll echo Bill in saying that taking Fraction off of Uncanny and moving him to Thor would probably be in the best interest of both titles, as I’ve heard great stuff about Fraction’s Thor work with Zircher, whereas his run on Uncanny has been pretty dismal thus far.

Bad art on the other hand will keep you away from the comic altogether unless you are really into the writer or story already. In that case, you have to spend a lot of effort ignoring the art, unless you want to be bored, confused, irritated, or insulted.

Also, casting artist to writer is important. I’m one ot those people who read Morrison’s JLA run, and was confused by the noisy chaotic images. However, when Waid took over, I had no problem with reading Howard Porter’s art.

The comic industry seems to cycle between saying either writing or art is more important in comics. Either viewpoint misses the point in comics. Comics are stories told through pictures. Sometimes artists forget to tell a story and focus on each page being a wonderful collectible on E-bay (Jim Lee) . Sometimes writers forget that and fill pages with the talking heads spewing witty dialogue (Brian Micheal Bendis).

If story is all that you need, then there is a world of prose fiction out there. If art is all you want, may I suggest Deviant Art?

If both float your boat (though not necessarily in equal measures) may I suggest the web comic Opey the Warhead?

I actually disagree. Bad art can be visually unappealing — a few issues of Alan Moore’s Supreme would’ve been much better without the Liefeld studio — but when I see beautiful art matched with a terribly written story I get frustrated that the artist wasted his/her talent illustrating a script that never should passed the editor. Since the scripts are done first (even if done old-fashioned “Marvel style”), I wonder why bad scripts aren’t dealt with before an artist is even assigned to a crappy story, aside from deadlines.

Like, if Quitely drew a book with a horrid story, it would annoy me because there has to be a half-dozen or so other projects offered to him that probably were much better. Of course, someone like Quitely can pick and choose his own projects, so maybe he should be blamed for wanting to illustrate the cruddy story in the first place!