Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities I am over super-heroes

Blame Geoff Johns.

https://www.comicsbeat.com/doomsday-clock-12-review/

But I'll always have the old stuff to look back on sentimentally.

Old records never die. Neither do old comic books.

Bye-bye, DC -- you were always second-best to me anyway.

Bye-bye, Marvel -- you broke my heart one too many times.

Oh honey.

Thank you, Sarky.

Understandable. I took a break for years from picking up new books outside of a couple titles (Nightwing, mostly).

I've come back to the X-Universe for the changes there, but already I'm thinning out the herd there. It was an interesting overall frame, and I appreciate that.

I tend to agree about keeping to the stories that we loved. I'm actually really happy with the trade industry and how aggressively many of my favorite storylines are being collected. It's nice to have them in one binding.

Thanks, Andy.

Yeah, the trades do have their pluses. I have to admit that I wish there had been some economically feasible way of keeping the Marvel Essentials/DC Showcase black-and-white "thickies." It was a great way for completists to fill in the iffier runs on decades-old titles.

As for the "HiXMan" Universe, I'm not feeling it, but then I've been a detractor of Hickman's going all the way back to Fantastic Four a decade ago.

On the other hand, the "HixManverse" has inspired me to do a fan fiction counterpoint, so that's good. It's a story I've been nurturing since Alan Davis left "Excalibur" back in...wow, 1993. I call it "Age of Merlyn."

Hopefully I'll actually finish it!

Sounds like you are not so much over super-heroes as over the way they are currently written. As you say you still look fondly on the collected stories you have.

Fair enough. I felt much the same in the 90s when the anti-hero reigned supreme but have come to enjoy at least some of what is offered to day (BTW Doomsday Clock is not among those I have enjoyed).

Hopefully the wheel will turn and you will discover some new stories that appeal to you again in the future. At least with TPBs and libraries you can occasionally sample without spending the cash and regretting it.

Not today of course but hopefully some day in the future.

In the meantime writing your own sounds like a great idea.

My nieces and nephew are all between 13 and 15 years old. I recently visited Australia after a long time away and I decided to bring them all a bunch of TPBs to somewhat make up for all of the Birthdays and Christmases I missed while I was gone.

I very intentionally did not put a single DC (or Marvel) book in that pile. I could not in good conscience recommend anyone get into the burning mental hospital that is that company. Reading the solicits for their books every month is a lesson in creative bankruptcy.

These are the books I did buy them (all volume 1s):

Amulet
Atomic Robo
Lumberjanes
Maus
Monstress
Planetary
The Sixth Gun
(and one more I’m forgetting)

You may want to give books like them a go (if you haven’t already).

Thanks, guys.

Stile, the irony is that the Age of the Anti-Hero was when my interest in superheroes reached supernova intensity. LOL I guess what I'm tired of is what came in the wake of the anti-heroes, all those Kingdom Comes and JLA relaunches and Avengers softboots and so on. I mean, I understand better now than I did at the time about the cyclical nature of the genre, but I feel that the Big Two, especially Marvel, really crapped out. Most of what I still find readable from the late 90s and early 2000s is what Peter David was writing for DC -- Young Justice and Supergirl. It wasn't cynically middle-of-the-road, and at the same time, it wasn't trying to be edgier than its natural self. And some of what Marvel gave us during that same time did manage to be both genuinely edgy without being cheap or tasteless -- in the current Kill This Thread game, I recently mentioned Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy mini-series. That one cut so deep that Disney now refuses to make it available online or in trade.

Blacula, I consider Maus one of the greatest graphic novels ever published, and Art Spiegelman is one of my heroes, climbing higher every year in my Personal Pantheon of Creators. Thanks for mentioning Monstress, that's one that keeps "bubbling under" in the lower reaches of my To Read List -- I really need to finally get around to it. Lumberjanes and Atomic Robo aren't really my thing, and Planetary is definitely not my thing (although in the unlikely event I ever decide to give it another chance, my local library system carries the omnibus.) The other two are unknown to me, so I will definitely investigate. Thanks again.

I don't know if I am over super-heroes...but my DC Universe subscription has gone mostly untouched for the past couple of months. I guess the novelty wore off. I also quickly got bored with the X-Men relaunch because I feel whoever comes after Hickman will go back to the status quo.

There are so many excellent comics and GNs that don't involve super-heroes, I can't keep up with them. It must be getting hard to tell a new super-hero story at this point without getting more and more extreme. I hear Dial H has some interesting twists with homages to other comics (waiting the for TPB) and Rucka's Lois Lane might be worth checking out.

I second Blacula's recommendations, Sixth Gun is a wonderful supernatural western and Monstress has amazing artwork, which makes up for the story being a bit slow in my opinion. There's also Paper Girls, Rumble (if you like weird monsters and ancient gods), the new Strangers in Paradise, just about anything by Jeff Lemire (even his superheroes!), Isola (fantasy), Shadow Roads (another supernatural western), Invisible Kingdom (sci fi), Brink (sci-fi detective), Excellence (magic) and on and on. Most of these I've been able to get out of the library.

Happy hunting!

Emily, Gods bless you for seeing the light much sooner than I did.

Cramey, thanks for the votes of confidence in Blacula's recommendations and the extra ones of your own. I already put in library system requests for a couple of them. Which did I choose? Stay tuned.

If you guys need a reason to better understand why it's more plausible to remain skeptical of DC wanting to "Do right" with their fifth generation characters

http://www.comicosity.com/a-holiday-special-edition-the-rise-and-fall-of-titans-lian-harper/

Very informative and in-depth look at Lian, Sarky. I wasn't reading any of the books she was in and didn't appreciate the build-up and potential that was accorded her as a DC character. Bad enough to kill a kid, but that's the sort of extremes they seem to reach for to keep the superhero properties "interesting".

Sometimes indy and web comics provide really quirky and/or challenging takes on superheroes. mr_cleome is really into Kristen Gudsnuk's Henchgirl right now. Can't say I'm as wild about it as he is, but I do give her points for such a personalized, small-press-flavored take on the genre.

Thanks, Cleome.

At one time I wanted to do something along the same lines as what you described, something to actually publish, but these days I'm more into celebrating kitsch than reinvigorating genre.

If I have time later, I'll reread and write a one-off review. It can be really invigorating being privy to all this youthful energy, even if that sometimes means thousands of ideas being thrown against a wall and then shoved aside to cram in the next important thing.

That'd be great, but only if you're able find the time. Gods know, we're all busy bees in these...interesting...times we live in.

What I had in mind was kind of like the more down-to-earth issues of the New Mutants, circa 1985-86.

I feel so sorry for Mary Wilshire, having to replace Bill Sienkiewicz, and the resultant damage it did to her career. She didn't deserve the hostile response she received. Her artwork was no better and no worse than the pre-Sienkiewicz NM issues drawn by Bob McLeod and Sal Buscema, and Claremont's scripts had gotten much better by that time.

Also, Mary did a superb job drawing the Firestar mini-series. That's an unsung gem from the era when Marvel's Mutants were in their prime.

Lol. I didn't even know that Wilshire had worked on that book. Some fans are impossible to please. Wouldn't surprise me if the same people who disliked Sienkiewicz moving further and further into abstraction as his issues progressed also complained because Wilshire was too "normal."

It wasn't really any particular artist who made me stop reading the book. In general, I was getting to the end of my rope with endless crossovers and big events by the middle of the Sienkiewicz period. Also, the promise that *N.M.* would be keep its distinct, more youthful feel wasn't kept for all that long, was it?

McLeod never got enough credit for his work. I appreciated his no-frills approach to composition, and that he was the rare artist who really drew adolescents that looked like adolescents.

Ann if you want non-superhero comic suggestions, I propose the following:

Heavy Vinyl by Carly Usdin and Nina Vakueva, set in a record store during 1998 and focusing on an underground teen girl detective club
Avant Guards by Usdin and Noah Hayes, about a newly formed basketball team at an art school
Sparrowhawk by Delilah S. Dawson and Matias Basla, where a young woman is thrown into the world of Faerie by its evil queen and must gain enough power to escape and reclaim her human identity
Star Pig by Dawson and Francesco Gaston, about a girl on her way to space camp being the only survivor when her ship is destroyed, and gets rescued by an amnesiac tardigarde
Lucy Dreaming by Max Bemis and Michael Dialynas, where an avid reader discovers she has the power to enter the storyscape and step into the role of various female heroines while she dreams

All of them are limited series, though Heavy Vinyl's getting a graphic novel continuation this March

Thank you, Sarky. They all sound wonderful.

It's bad enough to have multiple versions of some series.... but to do stories just to "explain" how one series' continuity and history has been altered to become another continuity... IS TOTAL F***ING B***S***.

I'll say it.

"CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS" should never, ever have been done.

DC has been riffing off of it ever since... and it only gets worse and more meaningless every single time.

DC's navel gazing in place of plotting has been very painful since Zero Hour at least.

Equally painful has been their creative inability to do anything other than inferior, muddled versions of it under the annual guise of Event comics.

I try not to blame Crisis for DC's desperation to grab hold of a decreasing fraction of its sales by churning out rubbish.

Crisis has plenty of plot holes of its own. But I enjoyed it very much at the time. I enjoy it now. More than just the series, I did get the feeling of a refreshed DC at the time. It's just a shame it didn't last, and that they had very few original ideas to keep it fresh.

Looking back, I've read plenty of excellent comics across DC's multiverse before Crisis, or even the multiverse, came about.

Was it necessary? Marvel weren't bouncing around their multiverse much at the time. DC, looking to sell themselves, wanted to replicate that. Since that didn't come off, the answer would be "no". Would it have been such a success or launched other books as a Elseworlds type story? That's probably another "no"

So, I'm glad it exists as a story. It's just a shame DC have never had much of a clue creatively, or as a business, to avoid the path they've taken.

I do recall reading some letters from fans at the time, expressing their disquiet at the end of their superheroes. Having read quite a few books form their era, I sympathise with their point of view.

Sarky's post above looks much more interesting than anything DC are putting out.

I am happy to hear from posters here and other places on how some non-superhero comics are doing well. I hope sooner or later Hollywood could take notice of it, as it would open doors for a wider variety of movies to be made. It seems of late that almost anything that is not super-hero or sci-fi is destined for a short run (movies such as "Crazy Rich Asians" being notable exceptions).