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COMICS!!! |OT| February 2021 | Big Gleb!
- Thread starter Messi
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I think it's less that Alan Moore "only wrote two good comics" and more "what has he done for us lately?" Alan Moore only ever seems to be brought up nowadays when a clickbait site wants him to talk about how superheroes are dumb and for babies and caused right wing fascism and a cultural sense of arrested development.
I haven't thought about Morrison in a while (I think their last thing was Hal Jordan?) but I mostly like what I've read. However, if they suddenly just dropped off the face of the Earth then the context of their discussion would change from what's coming next to discussing their body of work as a whole, and I think that's where Alan Moore is now. He wrote Miracleman and Watchmen and V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing and Promethea and Supreme and more that I can't think of and all of it was loved in its day and will continue to be loved by those in the know, but those are all comics that came out in the previous century, and now we're examining his total work.
And so far that examination consists of a lot of "jeez there's a lot of weird sex shit in here."
I haven't thought about Morrison in a while (I think their last thing was Hal Jordan?) but I mostly like what I've read. However, if they suddenly just dropped off the face of the Earth then the context of their discussion would change from what's coming next to discussing their body of work as a whole, and I think that's where Alan Moore is now. He wrote Miracleman and Watchmen and V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing and Promethea and Supreme and more that I can't think of and all of it was loved in its day and will continue to be loved by those in the know, but those are all comics that came out in the previous century, and now we're examining his total work.
And so far that examination consists of a lot of "jeez there's a lot of weird sex shit in here."
it's just... incredibly rare for any comic writer to remain excellent for long periods of time. they either only find success in a specific window where cultural trends meet their ability and then they fail to change, or they change in ways that make them incompatible with cultural trends. the frank miller and alan moore paradigms.
grant morrison is a rarity, a progressive perspective that got to watch comics catch up with them. in the war of wills, they won. but even they're not perfect.
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Don't expect someone in their mid 60's to do anything other than sit on their butt and spout questionable opinions. That'll be you one day too.
Morrison is non-binary.
The Green Lantern Writer Grant Morrison Comes Out as Non-Binary
Celebrated DC writer Grant Morrison came out as non-binary while discussing Peacock's Brave New World while praising recent social changes.
www.cbr.com
DC Comics To Rename Black Adam As... SHAZADAM! Not Joking
As part of a series of Infinite Frontier-related scoops that, as of March, the character of Black Adam will be changing his name to Shazadam.
bleedingcool.com
cheers. i've been fucking up my pronouns all week.Morrison is non-binary.
The Green Lantern Writer Grant Morrison Comes Out as Non-Binary
Celebrated DC writer Grant Morrison came out as non-binary while discussing Peacock's Brave New World while praising recent social changes.
I know it's bait from Ramon but personally for me, there are 4+ that I would put in a good-to-great category.
Top 10
Watchmen
Ballad of Halo Jones
V for Vendetta
Still have to read all of Swamp Thing but what I have read of v1 was great.
Another four I've liked somewhat in the early stages but eventually dropped - League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Promethea, Miracleman.
Man, I love Control. I can't believe so many people haven't played it until now. I just got the artbook in the mail the other day, it's lovely.
Is anyone actually reading all these Firefly comics? lmaoAnother new DLX revealed. Out in November.
I've known that it existed because I check the releases on CMX every week, but it's not something I ever actually had an interest in. I read the novel, and that was enough.
I gotta get back into that show. It was getting fucking wild.
Least shocking thing I've heard today.Morrison is non-binary.
The Green Lantern Writer Grant Morrison Comes Out as Non-Binary
Celebrated DC writer Grant Morrison came out as non-binary while discussing Peacock's Brave New World while praising recent social changes.
Good lord, if this is the direction DC is headed.... Did an AT&T executive come up with this?Watch this be one character making a joke by naming heroic Adam that.DC Comics To Rename Black Adam As... SHAZADAM! Not Joking
As part of a series of Infinite Frontier-related scoops that, as of March, the character of Black Adam will be changing his name to Shazadam.bleedingcool.com
As for Moore, you're right. Moore wrote a huge swath of amazing comics and you could convincingly argue none of them are bad, not even in that Frank Miller way where we used to be in love with him and then one day a webcomic writer makes a joke about the amount of prostitutes in his comics and subsequently torpedoes his entire reputation. The worst thing you can say about Moore is that he was too liberal in depicting sexual violence because that was just A Thing To Do for male writers in the 80s.
No, Moore's issue right now isn't that we've outgrown him or even that he's outdated (except for that one LoEG story where Harry Potter is the villain and Moore is exactly one step away from just turning the entire thing into a diatribe about kids these days), the problem is that Moore left the niche where he built his popularity, and nowadays nobody wants to go near him unless they want him to talk about how superheroes are shit in a day and age where they're the most popular thing in the world. It's not that Moore has quietly scaled back it's that all we have to go off of these days is his public persona of Grumpy Snake Man.
Let's take the case of Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the guys who more or less defined the X-Men for all time. Neither of them do much anymore, Claremont is flat out paid by Marvel not to write and his last big work for Marvel was the Nightcrawler series (which was really good go buy it). They both made legendary contributions to the X-Men mythos but there's a reason Chris Claremont is remembered as the X-Men's cool dad even though most of his work since leaving in 1991 has been of questionable quality: Chris Claremont hasn't pissed anyone off yet. He just comes back every once in a while to give him something to do and we umm and err over whether or not he's still got it, but we treat it as a fun visit to the retirement home as our old man tells us a story about the good ol' days. The worst thing you'll hear about Chris Claremont is that he's wordy and gets kinda hot and bothered when writing his female characters, but everyone in the X-Men fandom mutually agrees that whether or not he's passed his prime he's still a revered figure. We wouldn't have the X-Men without Claremont.
John Byrne, meanwhile. John Byrne drew the most important X-Men story of all time. John Byrne included Puck into Alpha Flight because he thought it was fucky how we treat people who have dwarfism. John Byrne wrote the rulebook on Post-Crisis Superman. John Byrne made Sue Storm into the Invisible Woman. This guy was involved in some of the best comics ever made and then proceeded to permanently stain his reputation with all but the absolute worst people by being a horrible transphobic shithead. Nobody wants to talk about John Byrne anymore, we all kind of suck in air through our teeth whenever we see his names in the credits of something even though in an ideal world we'd be happy to have such a big deal in cape comics back in action. John Byrne is the kind of bad that retroactively taints all your good memories.
Alan Moore is not in the position of John Byrne for flagrantly obvious reasons, rather he's now in that place old writers go when the fond memories of their past work and the excitement of what's coming next get overpowered. If clickbait sites would ask him about literally anything other than superhero comics then we would be spared Ramon Villabos' hot takes, but those hot takes get made in the first place because the only thing Alan Moore is giving us in the modern day is that he's very cross about superheroes.
Top 10 is such a great comic. Its kinda fallen through the cracks but few writers could create such a detailed world and keep the story tight at the same time. Gene Ha's art was top shelf too.
Well you can't have mine. Unless you wanna pay me like 3x retail. 😂
That's the friends and family discount. Have you seen how much that book is listing for on ebay? lmao
If you broke it up into several smaller posts people might read it. Text walls are too scary.
Haha you fell into the double bait
Because you probably heard it a month ago when it was news (or maybe not because you don't read the thread)
Moore ended up being right about Harry Potter and JK Rowling though. He's always ahead of the times.
I'm not sure this is ENTIRELY true, because Moore does still put out work - he wrote a novel a few years ago, and even still does comic work, though he's said he's now 100% retired. League of Extraordinary Gentleman ran in various forms until 2019, and those books came out pretty regularly. Cinema Purgatorio ran for a few years. Single issues here and there. I'd argue that it's not that he's not working, it's that he's not working on A) on anything mainstream or B) anything particularly novel.
Like, is his current work worse than 20+ years ago? Not really - I haven't read much of it, but it stands up fine in my experience. It's just that it's nothing, arguably outside of more extreme content, he couldn't have written back in the day.
I'd argue that he's in a pretty similar position to Morrison over the past decade. Like, Morrison is on Green Lantern - is that any worse than their runs on other DC characters 20+ years ago. Nope, most people reading it agree that it's quality stuff. It's Morrison does Green Lantern. It's just, well, we kind of know what that looks like; we've seen enough "Morrison does X" to make an educated guess. Unless it's something relevant to the Big Two structurally, like Multiversity, it's not sticking in anyone's memory. They put something out, people enjoy it, they move on.
The only thing that's keeping Morrison more relevant than Moore is that they hasn't divorced from the superhero sphere, still goes guest issues, still takes on advisory roles. If their output was just, you know, Happy and Klaus and independent work on that level, would they be in the conversation at all? I doubt it.
Ultimately the comics sphere has a few "conversation" pieces: what Marvel and DC are doing, what's new from breakthrough creators in the indie sphere, and hype for the occasional major IP adaptation or "name brand." If you're not in one of those categories, your work is pretty disposable.
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I'm not much of a writer, but it does hurt when I put effort into a photoshop for a gag and check back all day to nobody giving me a single lol.
lol
This is all 100% accurate. I'm tired of talking about Alan Moore's superhero takes, but that's all anyone wants to ever talk to him about. It doesn't help that he's very much a hypocrite. After ABC, he decided the best thing he could do involved ripping from pulp heroes. And if superheroes are basically one big white supremacist KKK reference, I'm not sure what pulp characters are what with all their white saviors and orientalism and people of color being savages or mystics that can't speak English properly. Not saying Moore's doing those things, but that's the stuff he's pulling from. Even though Tom Strong is one of the best comics ever written.
Hey, I just posted those and yeah, they are taking advantage of the DC exclusives clause getting nuked by ATT
Aaron being the lead on Heroes Reborn is really taking the wind out of the sails of something that could be pretty fun lol. I might check one or two out.
What do you mean? These guys are TV writing whos of the same sort DC is shacking up with.
Freelancing? I guess they are prepping up the writers pool again, needs less white guys though.
I think those Shooter memos are fine. Nobody should have been taking them seriously.
Marc Bernardin's black.
Marc Bernardin's black.
lmao this is amazing. Surely it was that simple all along.
What does it say underneath? "We're working for a ______?"
That kinda says a lot about the medium, or at least, it's predominant voices.
This is literally every medium, fam. I'll use wrestling as an example: incredible matches happen in every promotion every year, but in the end the only ones people are going to mention are WWE, AEW, and New Japan. There's some five star classics being had in Stardom that no one will remember except people who really love women's wrestling.
Video games too. There's room for the AAA games, and a break out indie game, maybe one game that flew under the radar.
It's not about quality, it's about visibility. When you have both that's when you're memorable.
There's no money in journalism for mediums that have massive reach, comics have no chance. I have thought about subbing to SKTCHD because when they do put up a free piece I'm like "Hey, this is pretty good!" but I haven't taken the plunge yet.
I feel like I personally would enjoy a middle ground between CBR listicles and Serious Art Critique, but I have no idea what that would look like, and what sort of market, if any, would exist for it.
I'd love for CBR to transition to a place that lets me write about obscure comic books and anime. But as you say, is the market there for it?
Xavier Files became a general comics site recently, and it's pretty nice, if it can grow into something bigger without losing its quality, I think it has potential.
He definitely goes back into the bathroom to smell his own shit
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