Marvel All New, All Different - Ongoing Discussion (Spoilers)

Marvel is working with a company called Samuel French to create a series of one act plays focusing on Ms. Marvle, Thor and Loki, and Squirrel Girl. It sounds like they will be fairly simple productions that are meant to be performed by students.

 

Well, my epic Marvel catch-up has reached War of the Realms at last, and to be honest, it's er...not good.

On a brighter note, Hickman's brought all of the sci-fi sensibilities he evidenced in his runs on FF and the Avengers titles to House and Powers of X, and I'm (perhaps predictably) hooked...

 

I'm reading it with the tie-one in one go. It's rather underwhelming, and I don't really l appreciate the Asgardian stuff spilling over into the rest of the Marvel universe.

To be honest, there's very few of the big crossovers that really stand up. Imho anyway.

 

I've loved everything Hickman's done for Marvel. I hope to soon be in better financial straits so I can get in on his X-Men run on ground level. At the moment, $3.99 for these little floppy books with 20 pages of story just isn't a good use of my money.

 

Going back to his FF run, there's something about Hickman's writing that evokes literary sci-fi concepts and worldbuilding, beyond conventional comic storytelling.

It's just bigger and more...out there. The 'Of X' titles too.

 

As someone who has hated everything Hickman has ever done (his stuff is as convoluted as Grant Morrison's worst work without Morrison's background of being capable of good writing when he feels like it, and Hickman can be very lazy when it comes to actually knowing the modern status of characters), the X-Men stuff right now is...the least bad? I guess? I mean, fuck the "fake X-Men Future #2324434" stuff, but this isn't even a Hickman invention, some years it feels like we have multiple fake futures that will never be mentioned again just for the X-Men. That said,

DO NOT PUT LONG PAGES OF TEXT OR PLAIN DIAGRAMS IN A COMIC BOOK. I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE JOHN HICKMAN OR ALAN MOORE, YOU'RE NOT WRITING A DAMN NOVEL.

But, the idea of Krakoa being a mutant refuge is interesting (even if its inevitably going to blow up in their faces). Its unfortunate that the shitty evil reed Richards is almost certainly the villain, pretending to be Professor X for some reason (and people beleiving him...just because, I guess. Also, Hickman doesn't explain anything about how they got from the end of age of X-Man to this, and I just know that he has a few more shitty OCs coming up to make shit more confusing, like he usually does. Plus, the future stuff is absolute shit, and continues his MO of writing complicated, pointless bullshit presumably just to pad out the page count of his comics. The Moira character (who sure as fuck better not be Moira MacTaggert) is garbage and pointless, like all of Hickman's OC's (does anyone else remember the "brilliance" of Black Swan and Golden Horned guy?)

In the end, this is mildly interesting so far, and if the bullshit "future" stuff was removed I might even say it has potential, but it was not worth cancelling X-Men Red or especially Mr. & Mrs. X for this. I'm more interested in the X-Men books that return mutants to a normal status quo once Hickman is done fucking with them, but as it is this is still more coherent and interesting then the time he made Avengers literally unreadable for over a year.

 

Mr & Mrs. X were selling at sub-cancellation levels. They were going to be weeded out anyways.

 

It is Moira Kinross MacTaggart.

 

I really REALLY like those.

I think he approaches comics as if he was writing a novel to some extent. He's certainly not treating the characters like comics normally do, and as I said, his concepts, worldbuilding (where possible) and plotting is more reminiscent of literary SF than most comics.

I suspect that post 'Of X' things will settle back into territory a little more familiar, but doubt it'll be back to the conventional storytelling of the Red, Blue and Gold titles - at least I hope not.

As for getting 'here' from Age of X Man, I'm reasonably sure it'll be covered, but I'd just as soon forget Age of X Man entirely.

The X Men look like they're going to be something special for the first time in a very long time. I'm not convinced by the new runs on Avengers, Cap, Iron Man, FF and others and X Men could very well end up becoming Marvel's flagship title again.

 

As an aside, I see the DC Rebirth onwards thread is in constant use - I found this thread whilst considering starting a new and similar Marvel one.

I don't read DC and apart for Watchmen, Dark Knight and occasional stuff like Doomsday Clock, haven't for decades. Maybe when I'm up to date with Marvel (but maybe not).

It would, however, be nice to keep this thread fresh with Marvel talk and have somewhere to discuss the comics I do read.

All things Marvel seem to have gravitated wholly to the MCU end of things, and although I love the films, I love the comics too.

 

Marvel comics real talk: The Immortal Hulk is the best thing Marvel puts out these days. And the best the Hulk has been in a couple of decades.

 

I'm a bit behind (issue 14), but although I'm enjoying the new take on it, I'm somewhat dubious about how long they can keep it up before it becomes as repetitive and tedious as the old horror titles it's riffing off.

I could, however, be surprised.

 

Reedin iz hard.

Text pages were pretty common in comic books until the page counts dropped in the 60’s. IIRC, Stan Lee’s first writing credit was a text piece in Captain America Comics. Hal Foster used a combination of text and pictures in the Prince Valiant strip instead of the usual speech balloons and captions.

 

I'm pretty sure they've said that what Hickman does in House of X and Powers of X (for anyone not aware this is actually meant to be read as "Powers of 10", not Powers of (Ex)), will be the permanent status quo pretty much from now on, or at least for as long as the upcoming batch of comics lasts. This isn't the kind of thing that's just going to be undone once these series are over.

 

Starting with next month's #25 the Runaways will joining forces with another superhero, Doc Justice, and will become a new team known as Doc Justice and the J-Team.

 

Its not hard, its obnoxious. Its also completely pointless in Hickman's case. There is a reason comic books dropped text stories. At least Alan Moore was a good writer, so I'd put up with him putting random text pages into books. Hickman is just spouting more pointless bullshit.

Yeah, and at one point there were totally going to only be 208 mutants, period, forever. The only good thing about Marvel being reboot happy is that the X-Men only stay destroyed for a few years before inevitably changing.

Well fuck Hickman, then. I know a good writer will retcon this shit, Moria is not a fucking resurrecting mutant, but at this point Hickman is just turning supporting characters into OC's with the old character's names.

The X-Men were doing ok pre Age of X-Man. Now, they're being destroyed by the same man that ruined The Avengers and fantastic Four. I've always been a big X-Men fan in the comics, and this is the worst its been since I started regularly reading X-Men comics over a decade ago, and the X-Men have had some really bad runs in that time.

Also, hickman's writing is too incoherent to make the X-Men a "flagship" book. The better version of Hickman, Grant Morrison, has had maybe one "flagship" book in his career (the JLA), and that was back when he was still forced to write coherently by his editors.

 

I would love to hear aN update on this when it happens...my daughter is starting at San art high school...and they might be down for this

 

Having just completed a huge (many years) catch-up on Marvel, they really weren't.

Admittedly Hickman's stuff might lose some younger readers, but I'd bet it will bring on board a lot of other folks.