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Comic Books!

M

madmatt

Apr 28, 2009
853
18
#1
Ok, since we are talking about Captain America, I want to know how many of you read comics or have read comics?
And I do not mean, "I read one once...", I mean was/is an avid reader.
And of course you have to tell us what you liked most.

For me, Batman is the ultimate character if done seriously. Kinda like Sherlock Holmes on steroids.
And also a lot of the stuff done in the '60's, like Green Lantern, Spiderman, Superman, Flash. Silver-age was so much better than current stuff, and actually you can get Silver-age stuff cheaper than current stuff if you ebay well.
Current stuff would have to include anything drawn by Amanda Conner because her characterizations are awesome. I am not up on the current scene tho, I fell off the bandwagon a few years ago.
I could go on and on...
 
#4
I used to be a big collector. I even sold them a bit in high school. I was in a boarding school with no comic book shop in town, so I'd get shipments from my hometown shop and resell them. Then there was the huge glut in the 90s, and then everything started getting lame and overpriced, and I just gradually got out of it. The new titles I thought were really cool would only last half a dozen issues while there was no limit to how many X-Men spinoffs they would crank out. I still pop into a comics shop now and then to see what's going on.
 
#6
The early comics - 50's, 60's etc. were great. I had TONS of Dell, Superman, Little Lulu, Krazy Kat, Archie, and the best - The Freak Brothers! I will still stop to read an old Disney comic, with a well crafted and drawn Uncle Scrooge story, whenever possible. I kept almost all of them which were later stolen from my sister's garage. The new generation of comics are unreadable to me.
 
#10
Was a big time collector, but between comics, guitars, and basses and my wife’s collecting habits we have no room left in our house. At least I stopped buying comics and guitars. ;) :D Regarding favorites, Vampirella (Warren), Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze), Wonder Woman (up through and including the “depowered” WW), and Iron Man get the nod as the ones I read the most.
 
#11
Big_Daddy said:
Invalid Link Removed
Click to expand...

I was reading some article the other day about why Superman-centric movies are usually boring, and poorly done (I think the first two Christopher Reeve-starring movies were decent). The author was arguing that Superman is too "good," and that you don't have the dark and/or brooding anti-hero of the more recent movie heros --- BRuce Wayne being a bit nuts and Batman having issues, Stark being a womanizer and boozer, etc etc etc.

I immediately thought, if you want to do Superman...look no further than the Superman: Red Son concept. I'm sure some people would be up in arms about taking an "American icon" and transplanting him to the USSR, but it could be SO FRESH.

Sorry to be off topic...yes, I was a avid reader and collector of comics until my entire collection was stolen. I'll flip through some nowadays...and I just bought Marvel's take on the Dark Tower stuff...
 
#12
I had hundreds of early 60's Archies, Marvel and DC comics. My mom threw them away one weekend because she thought they were junk, somewhere around 1971. I easily could've bought a car with the money from those, well before the comic book market collapsed.
I kept collecting and had thousands of comics at one point. Sold them all to help pay for the hospital bill when my daughter was born. (No insurance and c section =expensive!) Haven't read a comic in 25 years.
 
#17
echoSE7EN said:
I was reading some article the other day about why Superman-centric movies are usually boring, and poorly done (I think the first two Christopher Reeve-starring movies were decent). The author was arguing that Superman is too "good," and that you don't have the dark and/or brooding anti-hero of the more recent movie heros --- BRuce Wayne being a bit nuts and Batman having issues, Stark being a womanizer and boozer, etc etc etc.

I immediately thought, if you want to do Superman...look no further than the Superman: Red Son concept. I'm sure some people would be up in arms about taking an "American icon" and transplanting him to the USSR, but it could be SO FRESH.

Sorry to be off topic...yes, I was a avid reader and collector of comics until my entire collection was stolen. I'll flip through some nowadays...and I just bought Marvel's take on the Dark Tower stuff...
Click to expand...

better yet, ...

SupermanSpeedingBullets.jpg


instead of kansas farmers, superman's rocket lands in thomas and martha wayne's backyard.

superman's abilities, with batman's backstory.

freakin awesome. i'm waiting for this to make it to a movie. one of my favorite alternate-universe stories of any comic ever.
 
#19
echoSE7EN said:
I was reading some article the other day about why Superman-centric movies are usually boring, and poorly done (I think the first two Christopher Reeve-starring movies were decent). The author was arguing that Superman is too "good," and that you don't have the dark and/or brooding anti-hero of the more recent movie heros --- BRuce Wayne being a bit nuts and Batman having issues, Stark being a womanizer and boozer, etc etc etc.

I immediately thought, if you want to do Superman...look no further than the Superman: Red Son concept. I'm sure some people would be up in arms about taking an "American icon" and transplanting him to the USSR, but it could be SO FRESH.
Click to expand...

The article-writer was absolutely right, and it's also why a lot of the recent wave of superhero movies have also been mediocre. Most superheroes don't have a lot of inherent character depth. They don't wrestle with anything more than other guys with superpowers. Fun fifteen-minute reading but doesn't sustain a two hour movie-scale plot line.

It was a revelation to us who hit adolescence in the 80s to see what Frank Miller did in the Dark Knight Returns or Alan Moore in the Watchmen. Even Chris Claremont's X-Men was about a group of people struggling to find their place in the world, and that comic went straight down the toilet when they fired him.

I haven't read Red Son. The problem for movie producers is that if you mess with the icon, you lose audience, so it's not likely to get made. Even if they did, unless it introduces character complexity to Superman, rather than just playing him out as a boy scout under a hammer and sickle, it will still have the same problems. Actually, the first two Superman movies found what character depth there is in him, especially the second one; he had to ask whether he really wanted to be Superman, or to fit in like an ordinary person.
 
#20
To me, comics fell apart significantly when Image comics started. I tried to get into their titles, but they had way too much mediocre material. A lot of artists from DC and Marvel defected to them so it got to a point where Image had all the great artists, but the characters and material were second-rate knock-offs of already existing Marvel and DC characters - with a few rare exceptions. Of course, they made amends with The Walking Dead, but the mid 90's or so marked the end of my comic book collecting.
 

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