Comic Book Resources

Hey, how about telling us what the final results were for each round.

Hey, how about telling us what the final results were for each round.

You mean like I did earlier today?

The competition is heating up. I went Death/Kyle/Starman/Dream, and don’t terribly regret any of them.

Here are my votes, same criteria (Character interest plus story engine) as before:

1. DEath: DEath is a very interesting character with an unlimited story engine. Tim is just another variation on the Batman’s sidekick trope.

2. DEadpool: DEadpool wins on the basis of uniqueness; his sheer insanity sets him apart from just about every other mainstream character (barring Ambush Bug). Kyle is just another GL variant.

3. Starman: Very tough call, as both Jack and Constantine are very well drawn and have fabulous story engines. Jack Knight slightly edges out Johnny C with his Golden Age backstory links.

4. Dream: Forget what I said earlier. This is the tough call. The tortured psyche of Rorschach vs. the endless (pun intended) story engine possibilities of Morpheus. So, character vs story engine….I am going with story engine, as comics are a serialized genre. Still, tough call.

1. Death: I can’t believe Tim Drake is #1 in the Modern Age bracket. Voted for Death because of this. He’s an idiot and I only wish there was a 1-900 number to crowbar him.

2. Deadpool: People hate him right now for being everywhere, and hate fuels me.

3. Starman: I really like Starman. It’s my favorite comic ever. That’s all.

4. Dream: Oh boo-hoo, flipping out over some little girl and a dog. Man up, Ginger.

This voting is making my brain do weird things. I have one trade of Starman as opposed to the dozens of dozens Hellblazers I’ve read, plus John’s beloved early Swamp Thing appearances.

And yet I found myself voting for Starman. I guess, as great as all those John Constantine stories are and for all his complexity, he’s still overall quite a prick. And it just took a few issues of Starman to realize that he’s a swell guy. So I decided to reward swellness.

Rorshach vs. Sandman was the hardest. I love both characters. But I loved Rorshach first and what the hell, that guy had a rough life (and while he did send many people to hell, at least the reason was never “because you dumped me”).

My votes, based entirely on how much I like or dislike the characters. No complex criteria here.

1 defeats 8. Tim Drake — I dunno. I don’t care about either of these characters so I voted for Tim. I’m not really sure why.

4 defeats 5. Deadpool — Ugh. Honestly, this is like a sign of the apocalypse. Kyle Rayner and Deadpool? Why not just cast a vote for Youngblood and be done with it? Deadpool is the lesser of two knobs. I guess.

6 defeats 3. Starman — Great character, great comic. Constantine is interesting too, but I’d much rather read about Jack Knight.

2 defeats 7. Rorschach — I dunno. For some reason, ever since I stopped cutting myself I seem to have lost interest in Morpheus. If this were the Wesley Dodds Sandman, this vote would be very different.

Please vote for Starman everyone. Otherwise, we’ll need some kind of Crisis on Infinite CSBG type event to wipe this monstrosity of a region out of existence.

constantine vs. jack knight was by far the hardest for me to decide, as they are two of my favorite six or seven characters. i finally went with constantine because knight, at his core, is just another version of the “trying to fill the shoes and learn the hero biz” character that dick grayson, wally west, tim drake, and kyle rayner all were before him. constantine, on the other hand, was a true original when moore created him back in the mid-80′s. i feel like batman, spider-man, and wolverine are all sure things for the final four from the golden, silver, and bronze age brackets, but who will come out of the modern age bracket? i like tim drake, but i think he’s a relatively weak #1 seed. could constantine come out of this bracket? jack knight certainly has a lot of fans too, so i could see him pulling it out.

Tim Drake was a tool, but he had his moments. Between that and the rub he got from Batman (why, hello, Dr. Wertham!), he got my vote.

I’m starting to burn out on Deadpool right now. And I actually liked Kyle when he first came out. The idea of an average guy getting the ring appealed to me. I went with GL.

The next two were really tough calls, but I went with Jack Knight (for the cool factor) and Rorschach (for the badass factor). Sorry, Vertigo.

Constantine/Starman is by far the hardest call so far in this whole thing. I threw in with Constantine simply for longevity, the Ennis run, and the fact that the guy basically gets by on his wits (and the occasional spell). No losers here, though, and unless Dream advances, it’s an easy call next round.

By the same token: Death and Dream should be easy advances. Nothing against Tim, but Death is a far more interesting character. IMHO, the seeds for Dream and Rorschach should be reversed…12 issues versus one of the greatest runs ever. No contest.

That leaves Kyle/DP. Kyle got the nod; Deadpool is a little too one note for me. Kyle, when handled well, has some depth and can stand on his own.

I’ve only ever read two of these people. This has been the weakest category by far. Maybe splitting them up into different ages was a bad idea.
I’ve been trying to think of who could’ve been in this category that would’ve been better. There aren’t a lot. Jubilee, Arana, somebody from the second New Mutants-New X-Men series– perhaps Sofia, maybe Dakota North if you’re being generous, Pixie, and since we probably should have a guy on this list, the original Night Thrasher. I’m sorry that I don’t know enough about any modern DC characters.
So why have the last twenty-five years been so bad for creating new characters? It isn’t simply because the older ones have had more time to develope, although that’s clearly helped in some cases. If you look back at the stories from the ’60s and ’70s (I don’t know enough about earlier time periods to judge them), you’ll see that Spider-Man was awesome from the very beginning, a lot of characters developed well within just a few years, and most of the good ones were good within a decade. What’s different about the modern age?
One obvious problem is that too many writers tried way too hard to make their characters hip and cool, and that almost always ends badly. (But not always. Luke Cage was a blatant attempt to be hip originally, but eventually became more like a real person and less like a stereotype.) I think maybe another reason is that in the last two decades there’s been less stability. Every time a new writer takes over a series, it seems he tries to make it all-new, all-different, or the editors force in a major crossover that changes everything around. Andthen somebody new comes in and tries to restore it all to what it had been before. And the characters get all screwed up from this. With the older characters, they have an established model, so it’s easy to restore them to what they used to be, with maybe a little bit of the new stuff remaining if it works well. But the new characters still don’t have any clear personalities; they keep changing from one storyline to the next, and there’s no long-term record to provide a guideline for how they should be.

Another reason for the lack of good new characters over the past two decades is that many creators are hesitant to use their best ideas for new characters when they are working for the big two as they could lose control of the characters and therefore the cash. See: Len Wein.

Other possible entries on this list could be… uh… Spawn? Witchblade? Invincible? Hell, I dunno. Pretty spare pickings.

Mary: I think the simple answer is the amount of characters versus the amount of quality writers to handle said characters plus time for new characters to develop a fan base.

For example, I’ll give someone who didn’t make this tourney (which is, in my book, a crime): Tommy Monaghan. A character created out of Bloodlines (an early 90′s DC Annual event that featured the creation of dozens of new characters), on the surface he was a simple character: a hitman for hire who gained some telepathic and x-ray abilities to make him, in theory, a more serious villain. Then Garth Ennis got him into his own series after several appearances in Batman and the Demon, and we got to see the character develop and become something great.

Bloodlines had tons of new characters, but Monaghan and, to a very limited extent, Argus, were the only ones who went anywhere after it was over. I largely look at the lack of writers and the inability to develop these characters over time (due to monetary considerations of doing so) as a reason why they flopped.

My picks:
- Death over Tim Drake
- Kyle over Deadpool
- Jack Knight over John Constantine
- Morpheus over Rorschah.

By, the modern age is certainly more creator-driven than the other brackets. Even a character like Tim Drake that was created almost by committee was largely defined by a long run by one writer (Chuck Dixon).

Jesus, Jack Knight against John Constantine? It’d be easier to answer which of my children I love more (well, if I HAD children, that is, lol). After much waffling and clicking back and forth, I went with my guy and picked Jack. Sorry Conjob, but shitty runs by Denise Mina and Andy Diggle really hurt you, lol.

A few random observations on the dearth of great new characters:

1. Low hanging fruit: Comics creators during the 1935-1970 had an easier time ot it, as they were able to draw on pre-existing concepts. For example, Siegel and Shuster drew upon John Carter of Mars (alien comes to a planet where, due to his unique physiology, he has superhuman strength) and Wylie’s Gladiator (compare the first few issues of Action Comics to the novel GLADIATOR; the phrase plagiarism comes to mind) when they created Superman. Similarly, Lee and Kirby could draw on previous SF novels that utilized the mutant theme (E.g., Kuttner’s MUTANT).Obviously, there is only so much low hanging fruit to pick.

2. Matthew Effect: The old-time creators were, by virture of coming first, able to seize the high ground and prevent their successors from succeeding. In other words, the rich get richer wjile the poor get poorer. E.g., Superman, by virtue of coming first, achieves a kind of preeminence that prevents other characters from overtaking him. Grant Morrison’s take on Superman can be seen as implicitly invoking this concept.

3. Creative decline: A painful notion, but we may simply be living through a period of relative cultural decadence. For details, read Charles Murray’s HUMAN ACCOMPLISHMENT: THE PERSUIT OF EXCELLENCE IN THE ARTS AND THE SCIENCES, 800 B.C TO 1950

By not leaving characters dead, DC is just ending up with a bunch of extraneous super heroes that no one knows what to do with. They might as well just deliberately create a super team called the Leftovers.

I don’t get Death and Dream as characters. As ideas and vehicles for telling stories about people, they work amazingly well, but I can’t for the life of me remember a character feature beyond the surface.

I can see Death losing on account of being more of a story engine than a character, but I don’t understand how you read 75 issues of Sandman without realizing Dream is DEEP. For reals, guys.

Rorschach is good too, but not good enough by half.

Snark comment: Considering that 1700 odd people voted in the first round, I’m really glad everyone doesn’t feel the need to give us an in-depth explanation of why they voted the way they did.

Generic internet fool comment: Deadpool FTW!

Seriously though, I am loving the possibility that Deadpool could potentially be the 4th most loved comic character, by this year’s tournament layout. (I’m taking Batman, Spidey and Wolverine as givens for the top 3)

“I’ll take ‘Anxieties’ for $800.”
Jack Knight vs. John Constantine
“What is ‘paralyzed by indecision’, Alex?”

EM