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Underground > Comic Books >

Ellis on JLA:C

Jake, Colossus of Clout

21:28 / 13.08.05

Has anyone else read this?

Having been enjoying Ellis' Iron Man run, I decided to pick this up. What a terrible mistake. Absolutely everyone in this book talks in patented Ellis smart-ass dialogue. This is particularly jarring when it's coming out of Superman, Wonder Woman or Perry White, who seems to have become Mitchell Royce.

Perhaps I'm being old-fashioned, but in my opinion Superman shouldn't joke about incinerating Daily Planet interns. Wonder Woman shouldn't say things like "it's going to be horribly boring and will make you question your sanity in coming," in relation to a Themysciran greeting ceremony, while in her role as ambassador.

This isn't just bad writing, it's incredibly lazy. This is Ellis on autopilot, similar to Milligan on X-Men.

Another sinilarity to Milligan's X-Men is the atrocious art, courtesy of Butch Guice, who I had not been introduced to before yesterday. His sloppy linework, catscratch inking and total lack of storytelling ability made a bad story so much worse. There's one sequence of Batman going stealth on some poor fucking security guards that is so horribly done that it's almost impossible to figure out what exactly is going on. Also... Worst. Batmobile. Ever. I think LaRocca's bad art on X-Men is better than this clown.
So. Do not, under any circumstances, buy this piece of shit. Consider this a friendly warning. Don't waste the $2.99. Buy a beer at your local drinking establishment. Have your car washed. Purchase something by Chris Claremont. Anything but this.

22:23 / 13.08.05

The Perry White was awful wasn't it? And Clark and Lois writen as some sexy, sassy, smart couple was wrong. The only time it worked was the reporters and the policeman dynamic. I don't get Ellis - Planetary is so fantastically smart, Desolution Jones is fun but so much other stuff comes out and seems like something caught between a semi-formed idea and a half read article.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

22:33 / 13.08.05

I haven't liked Guice since he discovered that he could draw from photos...half the time, his figures are direct steals from photos of celebrities, and they are so stiffly inserted into the panels that it's like photoshopping a kid would do.

I SO wanted to like this, too, since I agree with something Ellis said when his was writing about this story: We need the "transformative moments" with super-heroes. It's important to the story to have Clark Kent take off his shirt to show the costume underneath for the character to have the mythic quality he used to. They stripped most of it away over the years (starting with Byrne making him a bodybuilder and successful author instead of ordinary schlub that the reader could identify with), and now his switching into Superman, if it happens at all, happens bwteen panels or when the reader is "seeing" other things in the story.

Too bad the characterizations just don't fit the characters he is using.

23:33 / 13.08.05

hmm, what a shame. but will try flipping throught it, at least. jackson 'butch' guice used to be great.

not that his work has aged badly. maybe he's slugging for the page rate, much like a lot of ellis did on his recent superhero work.

don't know if this jla arc suffers from the dared decompression plague [haven't read it yet], but it unfortunately wouldn't come off as a surprise...

this is already an old discussion in itself, but as much as I love the manga-style narrative, most of western authors haven't quite nailed it.

in the end it turns out to be just overly stretched-out concepts. sometimes the monthly grind of the work can lead to this. there's only so much cinematic atmosphere you can create in comics.

not the same as counting plot points per issue [as ellis has mentioned while responding to this kind of argument]; i'm only saying that some authors seem to be afraid of running out of ideas lately.

Jake, Colossus of Clout

23:43 / 13.08.05

Well, it isn't later-Transmet-ten-lines-of-dialogue-per-issue decompression. Things do happen. The plot may turn into something interesting, but the characterization and dialogue is so awful that I don't care.

I am so steamed about Perry White. I always saw him as a kind of gruff, but loving, uncle-figure to Lois and Clark. The man in this comic is not the Perry White that I grew up reading in Superman comics.

I bought this and the new Iron Man at the same time, and the difference is night and day. Ellis' IM is really clever, thoughtful and fresh, IMHO. Not a single line of throwaway smart-ass dialogue in the issue. Good characterization. His Tony Stark is the best version I've ever seen. And this JLA is just thoughtless crap. It seems like two different writers. I don't want to start rotting, so I'll go sing Iron Man's praises in his own thread. Read that. Not this.

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

01:46 / 14.08.05

Well, for what it's worth: New Maps of Hell was written a loong time ago and has been on the shelf for a while. Might account for the good Ellis/bad Ellis.

02:00 / 14.08.05

I think the series was written in 2003, so it's not as if it was written prior to Ellis' impressive run of stories/series since the advent of Planetary and his run on Authority.

16:20 / 14.08.05

there's already a thread on this somewhere here, I think, but no biggie.