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Cosmic comics?

  
  

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deviant
12:31 / 17.12.06
hello do you have any interest in cosmic comics.yes or no what do you think of the genre,its limitations,weaknesses and what can we get from them?
 
 
Mario
12:44 / 17.12.06
If you mean Silver Surfer and that ilk... I think they work best in small doses. The longer a character like that is used, the bigger the risk that one of three things will happen:

1) The character's foes will become so overpowered, it's ridiculous.

2) The character will be depowered to make it easier to come up with threats.

3) The character will become overly familiar, and lose any real attraction. This is especially true of villains, like Darkseid & Galactus. If they are used more than a handful of times, you reach a point of diminishing returns.

Furthermore, few writers really stretch their muscles when writing cosmic stories. More often than not, it devolves to two energy manipulators blasting away at each other while the narration breathlessly describes the universe shaking. Great art, but not exactly riveting storytelling.

Personally, I wish that the Big Two would do fewer "cosmic" titles, and more "science fiction" titles. The power level may not be as exciting, but the potential for great stories is greater, I think.

(In the purposes of full disclosure, I must confess that I was always a fan of Thor. Not as an uber-powerful deus ex mallea, however, but as the hero who stands up to any evil and cries "I say thee NAY!")
 
 
sleazenation
13:24 / 17.12.06
For me the ultimate 'cosmic' comic (if we are using that to refer to the uber powerful, frequently space based comics such as Silver Surfer, Quasar and some of the Green Lantern stuff) was Jim Stalin's run on the Silver Surfer in the late 80s and early 90s, mainly because at the heart of his writing was a philosophical question of what to do about overpopulation. True, this was largely overshadowed and ignored by the excesses of subesquent stories The Infinity Gauntlet-War, but still...
 
 
Jack Fear
15:11 / 17.12.06
Jim Stalin

Best. Typo. Ever
 
 
sleazenation
16:13 / 17.12.06
Well, he did kill half the population of the Marvel universe in a purge at one point...
 
 
Spaniel
17:13 / 17.12.06
Well, I wouldn't call a comic that was at heart about over population the ultimate cosmic comic, mainly because over population isn't really cosmic subject matter. Mind you, that raises the question: just what is cosmic subject matter?
 
 
gridley
01:59 / 18.12.06
just what is cosmic subject matter?

Now I want to write a comic book about a sixteen year old girl (and her pet monkey) who flies around the universe in a rocket-cycle (with a little sidecar for the monkey) using her gravity wand to stop galaxies from colliding and black holes from getting too large.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
02:38 / 18.12.06
Hello?

ADAM FUCKING WARLOCK, anyone?

Back when he was good, obviously. The Star Eater, Captain Autolycus, the crucifixion on Counter-Earth...
 
 
Char Aina
02:55 / 18.12.06
yeah.

i always felt like the best bits of the silver surfer were the bits where he had to deal with the cosmic grief, or the cosmic guilt.

'cosmic' wouldnt feel 'cosmic' to me if there wasnt misery.

weighty decisions with galaxy-sized repercussions were the surfer's daily bread, and occasionally he had to make choices that doomed even larger chunks of space, iirc.
he was choosing between lives all the time, and he was doing it because he had to.

that was the stuff that made him meaningful to me, and that defined his character.

if you have cosmic stories without the pain and the wrenching decisions you dont really have much more than space opera.

starjammers, or some shit.
 
 
Triplets
03:29 / 18.12.06
1) The character's foes will become so overpowered, it's ridiculous.

Didn't George put in a Lovecraftian reality nuke in his final JLA arc? An old weapon that used the cosmic death urge as it's payload. Hard to get more overpowered than that. But it worked.
 
 
Spaniel
07:42 / 18.12.06
It's not misery I want, it's the presence of small albeit immensely powerful individuals against vast, vast backdrops and against incomprehensibly powerful forces.

Obviously misery and/or existentialist/philosophical/religious questions will inevitably follow in the wake of that stuff.
 
 
Mario
09:52 / 18.12.06
I was actually thinking more about things like the Infinity Gauntlet/Crusade/War. DC doesn't actually do "cosmic" all that much, except during anniversary crossovers.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
13:37 / 18.12.06
This seems like as good a place as any to post this; anyone else reading the new Omega Men mini? It's one of those drastically under-promoted books that prolly slipped under everyone's radar, but it's really pretty nifty.
Firstly it's got henry Flint artwork - a 2000ad stalwart producing some enjoyably bizarro artwork here. It's part Bisley, part Ezquerra, but with a wonky 'comix' vibe and great psychadelic colouring. It really stands out in the current dullsville photo-realist style.
Secondly it's a great rag-tag cosmic romp with the few remaining Omega men battling the tide of Lady Styx's army across the Galaxy. It's got the Spider Guild, the Darkstars, Guardians, Vril Dox and all those other DC cosmic weirdies. It's self assured and fresh, and the team themselves are a pretty loveable bunch of second-stringers. Love the Doc, with his weird bio-mechanical body, and the ill-tempered ball of blue energy Elu.
It's just the kind of thing I want to read at the moment; a refreshing antidote to the boring 'real world' stories of Mark Millar et al. Third ish is out this week, so you can get up to speed easily, which I recommend.

Here endeth the lesson.
 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
14:32 / 18.12.06
Actually, Isn't this why we never saw volume 2 of Marvel Boy.

Didn't the editors say "It's too cosmic."

My concept of cosmic is a bit different. The cosmic of the overpowered Dragon Ball Z characters is boring, dull, and dumb. But the cosmic that is like a good acid trip (thinking early Dr. Strange) is more my cup of tea.
 
 
Just Add Water
14:54 / 18.12.06
ADAM FUCKING WARLOCK, anyone?


Seconded.

I was such a Starlin fan in the mid eighties, when Marvel reprinted his seventies adventures on good quality paper (Warlock Special Edition 1-6, according to Wikipedia. Reportedly also available as a TP). This was the storyline where Warlock fought The Magus, his evil future self (but of course!). Oh, and also Thanos. Wikipedia article.

I also collected Dreadstar and that whole Metamorphosis Odyssey (it has "Odyssey" in the title! You know it must be cosmic!) at the time, but that kind of petered out, as I recall. At least I don't remember how it ended, if it ever did.

I recall also enjoying Enhlehart and Rogers' Silver Surfer.

I haven't read those comics in ages, and I don't know how I'd feel about them today, being finished with puberty and all, but this thread has made me want to pick them up again. Some existential angst on a grand scale every now and again can only be good for you, I think.
 
 
Spaniel
14:58 / 18.12.06
Marvel Boy will return in the pages of the Illuminati, apparently.

I'm sure it will be amazing
 
 
Just Add Water
14:58 / 18.12.06
Oh, and I forgot this:

(It was during the Strange Tales run that a wag in the production department altered the Comics Code seal to read "Approved by the Cosmic Code Authority".)

What rebels, eh?


Link
 
 
Mario
16:40 / 18.12.06
Marvel Boy already re-appeared in Runaways/Young Avengers (or was it YA/R?).
 
 
Spaniel
17:10 / 18.12.06
(Read it. Was good)
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
17:27 / 18.12.06
No idea who wrote it, but there was an issue of Silver Surfer where Galactus finally removed whatever mental whammy he'd put on the Surfer to inhibit his guilt over causing the deaths of entire galaxies, and ol' Norrin went totally mental.

That was cool.
 
 
Char Aina
17:29 / 18.12.06
he did that a couple of times, i think.
i got the impression he'd 'remind' him and then wipe his memory again as necessary, manipulating the herald as the situation required.
 
 
matsya
20:46 / 18.12.06
One problem I have with the 'in space' comics is the old trope of the homogenous alien planet population, a la Star Trek. And just to be perverse, I also have a problem with the 'every weirdie alien thingo the artist can think of drawn into the background crowd' trope, too, a la Star Wars.

I've just always found it a bit under-done. Surely there's got to be a happy medium between the two?

I'm enjoying G0DLAND at the moment, which is a bit of the old cosmic doodah, and also Kirby's original Eternals, with the loverly Celestials before they were made crappy by inexpert over-use.

Never really got into the Warlock stuff that much, or Silver Surfer. Though both characters intrigue me, nothing I've read has been particularly great.

On a total tangent, has anyone read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics? A short surreal novella full of bizarre little myths about the cosmology of the universe.

There's a good synopsis here:

Each chapter of Cosmicomics begins with a blurb which sounds like the dry, tasteless extract of a physics, astronomy or geology textbook, describing how solar systems formed from nebula, the universe started from a point smaller than an atom, the orbit of the moon changed long ago, dinosaurs became extinct, space is curved, expands, etc. On each of these topics, our narrator, Qfyfq, immediately launches. His idiosyncratic voice, omniscient, blithering, self-centered, unerring, ridiculous, is recognizable, exactly consistent, no matter if he is talking about his life as a mollusk, a dinosaur, a moon-being before color, or life before there was form, when the whole family lived on a nebula, or in the point before space.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
21:28 / 18.12.06
Cosmicomics is my second favourite Calvino book - after Invisible Cities. The protagonist is a lot like Mxyztplk, actually, and was influential in Morrison's revamp of Aquaman's impish Qwisp.

Would we consider the Green Lanterns to be "cosmic" charaters, or are they a straighter form of sci-fi?
 
 
The Falcon
21:42 / 18.12.06
Cosmicomics also contains the Qfwfq, ah, entity which directly inspired the infant universe of Qwewq in that series that time. It's the only Calvino I've read, actually. And I've only read it because of that fact. What a topsy-turvy world I live in.
 
 
The Falcon
21:46 / 18.12.06
Read posts firsts, Falke.

No 'i' in Qwsp though, Papers, but in Quisp. I wasn't aware that was also the case but certainly I could see it's science-rendering properties informing the trip to the fifth dimension there; not really 'cosmic' that so much as mindbending & extradimensional. I'd definitely say the GL Corps qualify as cosmic - because they are aliens.
 
 
Mario
22:02 / 18.12.06
The thing about the GL Corps is that, while they may LOOK alien, for the most part they are basically funny-looking people. Kilowog is a bruiser, Salaak is a by-the-book officer, and so forth.

(The exceptions, for the most part, were written by Alan Moore )

The solo GL book isn't particularly cosmic. It's more "superhero stories in space". The present Corps ongoing is even more generic: "Cops in space".
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
00:25 / 19.12.06
The concluding part of the "A Murder of Crows" story arc of Moore's Swamp Thing is probably the best cosmic comic story i've ever seen (and if you want to use the other definition of "cosmic", as in "crazy out-there stuff in space", as opposed to "mystical revelations of the nature of the universe", then the later "Earth To Earth" from the same series is also pretty good)...
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
01:05 / 19.12.06
So what is it that differentiates cosmic stories from, say, mystical ones then - is it just the lack of a fixed planetary locale?
 
 
matsya
01:31 / 19.12.06
hey nataraj, how's about a synopsis of these moore stories?
 
 
Haus of Mystery
09:05 / 19.12.06
Godland is indeed cosmic goodness. It starts off slightly unsure of itself, but the second volume ('Another Sunny Delight') is far more enjoyable. Treating Kirby as a genre is a nice idea, and for once Casey seems to have found his own voice. Great colourful artwork as well.

Observe treats:



and



and



Bring it on.
 
 
Horatio Hellpop
09:16 / 19.12.06
Steve Englehart & Gene Colan on Dr. Strange, especially the Eternity storyline (issues 10-13) where Eternity destroys Earth, then is later convinced by Strange not to undo it but to reconstitute it (so that Earth continues to have really been destroyed) but to the Doctor everyone is now a facsimile. I'm not sure what the important philosophical distinction is, but Stephen gets a little freaked out.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
09:31 / 19.12.06
Understandably.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
11:56 / 19.12.06
So what is it that differentiates cosmic stories from, say, mystical ones then - is it just the lack of a fixed planetary locale?

Actually, i dunno. Definitions may vary, i guess. That Swamp Thing arc is "cosmic" (as well as "mystical") to me because it involves characters, realms and concepts that explain and personify the huge-level aspects of the DC universe - "cosmic" in the sense that, say, Lovecraft's cosmology is "cosmic" - mind-bendingly huuuuuge, beyond-all-earthly-experience themes. A "mystical" story can (doesn't have to) operate on a much smaller scale and within the confines of a location on Earth, i think...

hey nataraj, how's about a synopsis of these moore stories?

i'm tempted to just say "go read them", as they're very easily available (the entire run is conveniently collected into 6 very nice looking TPBs), and IMVHO if you buy just one full author's run on a comic title in your lifetime, then Moore's Swamp Thing has to be it... but, cos i'm a spoiler-lover myself, i'll attempt a (very) brief synopsis anyway:

basically, "A Murder Of Crows" is the conclusion to the "American Gothic" storyline (which is most of the 2 preceding TPBs), in which John Constantine takes the Swamp Thing on a tour of America, dealing with various supernatural/horror occurrences and revealing to Swampy his full powers/nature as a Plant Elemental (which is a retcon from pre-Moore Swamp Thing books, in which he's just a freak accident of human/plant fusion - this is explained in the first Moore ST TPB), while Moore deconstructs various Hollywoody horror archetypes (vampires, zombies, werewolves, radioactive mutants, etc) and uses them to critique America sociopolitically (in terms of race, gender, environment, etc). All these things, according to Constantine, are signs of something very major coming that will threaten the whole universe...

This thing basically turns out to be a witch-cult called the Brujeria, who have planned a ritual to awaken the "Great Beast from the Outer Darkness" (basically, the Gnostic principle of Order as opposed to God as Chaos - so, God (The Presence)'s equal and opposite Anti-God). All the magical, mystical and elemental characters in the DCU, including the forces of both Heaven and Hell, have to attempt to stop it, but it's so mind-bogglingly immense that even the Spectre, who has the power of God Hirself, is negligible in comparison. Swamp Thing... well, doesn't exactly "defeat" It, but gives It the answers it needed to make it not destrpy all creation, and, well, basically it ends with a reordering and/or re-revelation of the DCU cosmology from a loosely-Christian to a loosely-Taoist one.

(IIRC, all this happened roughly simultaneously in DCU chronology with the Crisis, and could be regarded as an aspect of the Crisis, but i know next to nothing about how the Crisis happened, so this might not be true...)

"Earth To Earth" happens after Swamp Thing has got back from all this cosmic/mystical/epic stuff, and finds his girlfriend on trial at the machinations of Luthor (i think), which story arc ends in Luthor hitting him with a tech weapon which prevents him from accessing the "Green" (Earth's elemental plant-consciousness-thing), and forces him to "jump" through space and end up travelling through the "greens" of other planets - one where there is no other sentient life and he tries to multiply himself to create a fantasy world with copies of his girlfriend etc, one where the sentient race are plants and he ends up "animating" them (he can recreate himself by animating any plant matter), causing all kinds of consciousness-screwing craziness (I believe this story features the plant Green Lantern), a Geigeresque space-floating plant-alien which uses him to fertilise itself, an appearance in the Rann-Thanagar war, etc. Towards the end he encounters Metron* and Darkseid and Kirbyesque cosmic stuff happens. This story arc is possibly Moore's tribute to "classic" sci-fi comics writers. I think he finds a way back to Earth at the end.

Ok, that was rather less brief than i thought it would be. But, if you like mind-bending, mystical, creepy, moving, political, cosmic and/or philosophical comics at all, go buy all of Moore's Swamp Thing...

* I originally mis-typed this as "Matron". The mind boggles at that imagery...
 
 
buttergun
12:36 / 19.12.06
The Starlin Warlock/Magus saga of the mid-70s is not available as a trade, that's just a Web myth. Why it's never been reprinted in such form is anyone's guess. The best place to find it is either in the above-mentioned 6-issue reprint from '83, or a another 6-issue miniseries, simply titled "Warlock," which was published in '92.

But yes, it's the best of cosmic Marvel, and the Magus is a great character. In fact I use an image of him from that storyline as my avatar on several forums:



Love the Crowley-like sentiments...
 
 
buttergun
12:37 / 19.12.06
...AND the killer Afro!
 
  

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