Unpopular Opinions You Hold About Comic Books

[Avaitor]

I agree with you. The comic industry is incredibly hard to get into, which is why the mainstream hasn't cared about the major company's work since the 90's. And there is a hell of a lot to try to play catch-up with.

The good thing about the Essential books is that they add in exactly what the books offer- the Essential stories. You get all of the mainline comics and annuals, as well as the crossovers that mattered. If you want to get into Spider-Man, you've got about 10 or 11 Essentials to read so far for Amazing, a handful of Spectaculars, and I believe they're also starting Web of now too. Again, easier stuff.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, I'm really greatful for the Essential collection. If it weren't for that, I'd pretty much be missing out on a history of great work.

After I finish reading all of the volumes that my friend has (which is the first 5), I'll see if I can order the rest online, myself.

Also, I'm considering hitting up either Essential Thor or Essential Captain America. While I have a lot of interest in the Captain America, I may go for Thor since he's getting a movie next year. I've already read Extremis, so that covers my main reading in preparation for the next Iron Man movie.

[Avaitor]

The first Essential Captain America and Thor boks contain a LOT of stories, since they started out in anthology books as 10-12 page stories before evolving into their own series. So yeah, you get a big bang for your buck.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I knew that about Captain America, but didn't realize that about Thor. That's interesting.

BTW, I just felt like mentioning this, but I've always loved that infamous cover of the first issue of Captain America, where it features him directly punching out Hitler in front of a group of Nazis. That's one of the most bad-ass covers I've seen for such an old-school comic.

[Dr. Insomniac]

The graphic novel format is the optimum format of comic book reading. Single issues are a dying art, which almost every major comic publisher is too blind to notice.

Superman is an interesting character with a layered personality that happens to be misunderstood by the majority of fandom.

J Michael Straczynski has become a hack.

Neither Alan Moore nor DC are right when it comes to the Before Watchmen debacle. DC is obviously trying to milk a story as much as they can out of its monetary potentital, while Moore is a hypocrite who sees fit to judge others for things he himself has committed.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just a self-congratulatory romp about how Victorian literature is awesome and how modern entertainment is pure shite. What could've been a fascinating reconstruction of public domain fiction becomes ruined by telling instead of showing, obscure references up its own ass, and snide remarks on recent culture that serve to be nothing other than an old man ranting about what he can't comprehend.

The Marvel universe is just as unrealistic, if not more so, than the DCU.

I don't think any of this stuff involving Comixology will save comics from obscurity. The only thing that will is to release comics as free material in the same way webcomics do, but try telling that to an executive.

I'm pretty neutral to the New 52. It's gotten some good titles like Batman, Swamp Thing, and Animal Man, as well as some shit like Suicide Squad and Red Hood. Really, it's no different from what we had two years ago.

The comics industry is probably one of the most conservative entertainment corporations in recent memory. Even in this day and age, it treats having gay characters or women of color in prominent roles as a massive surprise.

The Ultimate Universe was a superb idea destroyed by bad writers.

Planetary has been the best fucking thing to come out of comics in over ten years. All other books absolutely pale in comparison.

Image has been consistently better at delivering great stories than either Marvel and DC in recent time.

It frankly sucks how superheroes and comics have become united in the eyes of the public. It's the equivalent of TV being nothing but cop shows.

Stan Lee was a hack who claimed Kirby and Ditko's ideas for his own. In fact, it was only recently that creator rights have managed to move a step forward in terms of honoring and properly paying the writers and artists instead of turning it into a petty work-for-hire job.

In fact, if Jack Kirby's reincarnated, he's probably out there drawing webcomics instead of bothering with this hopeless monopoly.

The comics of yesteryear are no better than the ones now.

Garth Ennis is probably right about superheroes, all things considered.

[gunswordfist]

Two-Face>Joker.

Agreed.

[gunswordfist]

I'm not sure if this is really an unpopular opinion, but I have to say that I really can't stand the structure of mainstream superhero comics. What I mean is that they make it so damn hard for most of them to be accessible to newcomers. For instance, over the 60+ years that Marvel has been producing comics, they have come out with so many different iterations of most of their superheroes, and any one single popular superhero that you pick out seems to have at least a few completely different canons to go by. I mean, thankfully the classic stuff is easy enough to get into with Essential collections and whatnot, but other than that there's just so much stuff to wade through to really get into the Marvel Universe as a whole (and there are multiple Marvel Universe's, as well). I'm not singling out Marvel in general, but just using that as an example.

I suppose I've just been spoiled by reading manga for all these years. Say what you want about manga, but if manga in general has anything going for it, I feel that its really easily accessible. Most series have continuous story-lines that go in a completely chronological order by a chapter structure. Also, while cross-overs can be a fun thing, I feel like there are so many cross-overs in comic books that it can be hard to keep track of things. That is to say, even if you are reading Spider-Man in chronological order of issues, you'll still miss things if they happened as a cross-over as part of another superhero series in the same Universe featuring Spider-Man. With manga, since there are no cross-overs to begin with (except those non-canon specials that they run in WSJ on rare occasions, like the Dragon Ball and One Piece crossover), you are pretty much guaranteed a coherent story from beginning to end.

Don't mistake my post, though. I'm not putting down the quality of good mainstream superhero comics. I'm just saying that the structure of their releases and general serialization leaves much to be desired for those not already in the loop about them, IMO.

I agree. Crossovers make things messy. I always go by recommended collections but sometimes they are missing parts due to crossover. Hush Returns had no freaking ending in the  book due to that. Sounds like manga does something right.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I don't know if we're allowed to include manga in this thread, but since I read that, I have to say this unpopular opinion of mine:

A majority of modern shonen manga just plane sucks. It has become popular to say that the modern stuff is good and people like me can't see that the classics weren't anything special and are just blinded by nostalgia. The thing is, I'm not blinded. I can tell when I think writing is plane good or plane bad. Even taking Bleach out of the equation, stuff like Naruto, Fairy Tail, Beelzebub, and God knows what else is considered popular these days just sucks, and those series are handled by obviously inexperienced and untalented authors. There, I said it.

Dragon Ball is a terrific series. Contrary to popular belief by people who have only seen the anime and think that they automatically know everything that there is to know about Toriyama, Dragon Ball was never the cliche smash-fest that everyone seems to think it is. It always had a sense of humor and anyone who has actually bothered to read it can see how Toriyama downright mocked a ton of the shitty cliches that plagued manga story-telling long before DB was ever written into existence. That, and it does a terrific job of being funny when its a comedy, and it does a fine job of being entertaining when its meant to be a bit more serious. It was meant to just be a fun series and that's what it is. It never gets bogged down by Toriyama thinking that he has developed his characters into something deep and unique (which is what Kishimoto has been doing with Naruto), and he always sticks to writing what he knows that he's actually capable of writing.

Something like Yu Yu Hakusho is good because despite being a standard shonen on the outset, it has characters that are actually likable and Togashi is one of the few shonen mangaka who actually knows how to write interesting villains.

Modern battle shonen suck simply because most of their writers just plane suck. Sorry, but that's just the way it is in my eyes.

Oh, also, I'm just going to contradict what I just said and say that while Togashi is definitely the best mangaka that I have read in all of shonen, he's really overrated and I despise at least 90% of his fan-base (which is mostly made up of HXH fans, in particular, so its really that fan-base that I despise). Togashi writes interesting stuff for that series, but its far from flawless, but if you so much as point out any problem with HXH from its plots to its needless cruelty towards characters, some dumb-ass will find some fucking stupid way to say that Togashi's an eccentric writer and that if you don't like some aspect of HXH you just can't take non-mainstream style story-telling.

Personally, I say bad writing is bad writing, and when Togashi writes some part of his story badly, I'm going to call it out. I do still like HXH as a whole, but I'm also willing to admit that it has a huge stretch of problems, and the people who aren't willing to accept any of those problems are just blind fanboys who shouldn't be taken serious.

There, I have finished my nonsensical ramblings for the evening. My appreciation to anyone who wasted their time reading all of that junk I just wrote out.

[gunswordfist]

Planetary has been the best fucking thing to come out of comics in over ten years. All other books absolutely pale in comparison.

Image has been consistently better at delivering great stories than either Marvel and DC in recent time.

Love Planetary. Thanks again for the recommendation. I'll add in my unpopular opinion and say 100 Bullets is the best comic book series ever.

That's probably true about Image. Of course The Walking Dead is my favorite ongoing series, Invincible is good and I loved what I read from Dynamo 5. There's probably more too. Also, did Marvel really kill off it's cosmicverse like I heard. Annihilation is the greatest modern anything they've ever done. There was no pettiness or sillyness that plagues Marvel's Earth comics.

And EK, please tell me you are on a cell phone..or a plane because there's no way anyone can make that typo so many times in a row.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

This is coming from the dumb-fuck who can't spell for his life?

[Rynnec]

-post-

I think a large part of the mediocrity found in most modern shounen can be blamed on how...pandering it is to certain audiences. Think about it, aside from a handful of works like Fairy Tail and Negima, a great amount of shounen these days have casts full of bishounen characters and yaoi overtones to pander to the Fujoshi audience, while at the same time giving them cool, "badass" powers to appeal to the proper demographic. (KHR is a big offender of this). While this isn't bad in and of itself, the problem is that said characters tend to be incredibly bland and generic, but that's okay because of ""OMG SO HAWT" "TEH YAOIZ!!" or "zOMG SO BADAZZ!". While I can't be entirely opposed to the idea without being very hypocritical (because honestly, if there were more shounen with casts full of kickass pretty girls and yuri overtones, I know I wouldn't complain about them at all), I can see why others would be.

Ironically, this trend got its start with Yu Yu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin. Two of the most well regarded Battle Shounen.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I don't mind so much that they go for those sort of character designs. I've grown used to it, if anything. But its like you said, they make the characters so damn bland. There's nothing interesting about them, and if they aren't already following every cliche in the book, the author is too busy using the character to pander to some idiotic fan fetish to actually bother giving them some decent and serious characterization. I think the most frustrating thing is that people in Japan are obviously aware of this but nobody seems to care that much. Having read the manga Bakuman, the authors of that actively pointed out what made a good shonen series, and its funny because it really rings a lot of truth to it, especially when you consider how lacking most modern shonen series are in the elements pointed out by Bakuman.

Its frustrating for me because I grew up with quite a lot of shonen manga and anime. If I had grown up with more superhero shows and comics then I wouldn't be so pissed at the state of modern shonen because I wouldn't care about it so much, but as someone who actually does like a good shonen series, I suppose it just annoys me that the genre is severely suffering from what I consider to be a general lack of effort. Of course that's just my opinion, and I'm sure that there are exceptions to the rule (which I haven't read because I haven't found any, yet, unfortunately), but I'd really love for some new blood to come in as far as mangaka go, and I want to see some really exciting new shonen series.

[gunswordfist]

This is coming from the dumb-fuck who can't spell for his life?

I just plane don't get you.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I just plane don't get you.

I wouldn't expect you to. You're peanut-sized, mindless-action-loving brain can't comprehend any intelligent form of communication.

[gunswordfist]

Oh good, I kept my post plane and simple enough to the point where even a sub-human like you can understand me.