Books 3-4

[subplotkudzu]

 3)  Secret War: A 108 degree turn on Brian Michael Bendis' work from _Fortune and Glory_, this one epitomizes everything I really don't like about modern Marvel comics. I have no real issue with Bendis' telling a Nick Fury story constructed on the realization that bank robberies and other conventional crimes would ever produce enough cash to support tech themed super-villains - it's a great concept for an elseworld's style story. But Secret War is right there front and center with regular continuity, and in so doing messes up dozens of existing villains, the half dozen other major heroes in the book, Nick Fury, SHIELD and, most damningly, the logical structure of the Marvel Universe. To my mind there is no point in looking at an existing supers world and pointing out what wouldn't work. Why, none of it would work, thank you, so breaking it down on a particular point is like yelling out how the magic tricks are done from the audience. The harder job is making us believe that it _does_ work. This ranks up there with the "no the Justice League has consistently mind wiped all the villains they capture in order to maintain their secret identities" Identity Crisis nightmare that DC published a while back. Dreck, all of it, I don't care how well it sells. 

4) Thieves World Graphics vol 2 & 5: Got these for Christmas, just as good as I'd hoped last year. Need to get the rest of them. The inter-linking of the stories in the graphic format makes them better in my mind than the originals, which were always choppy due to their short story nature. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Secret War was entertaining at first, but it seemed as if the writer kind of lost interest in the story and changed the subject.

JLC

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

That was part of it, but not hardly all. Aside from the technical issues (such as Dell'Otto's painted artwork being utterly incapable of capturing explicable battle scenes, and the lack of coherence between the present day and flashback parts of the story) the book was marred by a use of pernicious logic - my aforementioned compaint about rendering the techno-villains semi-obsolete which will now be adhered to until it is discarded and forgotten, plus the crippling of Luke Cage by saying that the doctor's can't resolve his internal injuries because they can't penetrate his skin. Sure, you could say that these are "Logical", but only when one has already ridden the comic book illogic train long enough to accept super-heroes and villains in the first place.

This sort of thing is why I love Bendis' _Powers_, where he's playing in his own sandbox and can freely extrapolate this stuff, but loathe his work at Marvel (to be fair, I have not read Ultimate Spider Man, but there again he has more or less autonomy for these sorts of things). Plus, the pendulum swing of "logic" in these cases is always towards an utterly immoral authoritarian government crushing the heroes. It's dull and trite and boring.

Again, stop telling me how it won't work. Dazzle me with your depiction of how it _will_.

[thismustbetheplace-rjs.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Wow. Thieves World. Mine are in a box... somewhere (the text versions, not GN). I should dig them out one of these days. Sounds like the new year's reading is off to a decent start.