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Well, I think the spirit of the gun (actually Lords of Gunfire) thing in Hitman was the Arkannone and Mawzir, who are actually about the most bloodcurdling terror to ever appear in a non-mature readers designated book I've ever seen. Even beyond that there's not much to rival it, outside of Uzumaki or something. It really is a horror, so I'm quite willing to let that slide. And, erm, a different writer in a different publishing wing produced Rose Tattoo (whose first appearance was, as I recall, not equally but reasonably compellingly unpleasant) and she's a pretty different character given that, well, any reasonably stocked comic shop will be able to provide you with around twenty plus analogues of the JLA, many of whom are really quite easy to identify as such.
On-topic, however, Jeph Loeb is utter shite. I can't remember if I've read both Dark Victory and The Long HallowE'en or just the latter but in either case, for books that are regularly touted as his high watermark in teh comixx, TLH is utter balls - a mystery with about the most aggravating fakeout ending conceivable, ugly hybridising of Year One characters, ciphers more (Falcone) with the then quite fashionable pseudo-Animated Series look Sale had in his art... it's really, I think, off the back of this art (which I now find distinctly unappealing; Sale stylises enough to mask a great deal of sins, and really anyone who looked at his repugnant dwarf Jimmy Olsen in Superman Confidential a few months back knows it ain't got no better - so more correctly off the back of a distortion of Bruce Timm's character designs and Frank Miller's then 15-year-old scenario + the now pretty much sickeningly omnipresent in his work as a sole 'trick', trouping of the supervillains) that Jeph Loeb made any sort of name for himself.
But, you know, fuck; his son did die about two years ago - it's a dreadful cliche to say 'no-one should have to undergo that', but still: No-one should have to undergo that. It must be almost unbearable. I've never seen that used as an excuse for his work, though having perused some true sewer forums it's not difficult to imagine (worse, one of the Bendis board once declared himself glad that Graeme 'Fanboy Rampage' McMillan's mum was dead. Well done, him.) There again, Loeb did bring it up himself in the context of writing Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, which I thought... well, I'd not judge, I'm a relatively repressed Brit and would imaginably never want to talk about such an awful thing if it happened to me, particularly in that context - it seemed weird to me, to do that. You process grief in strange ways, probably. I do feel bad for him, and likewise Michael Turner for his recurring struggle with cancer but would, nonetheless, rather spend time contemplating my own broken bones (don't worry, it's okay - just a scenario) than a comic they collaborated on. Because it is quite hard to envision a worse writer/artist team - aesthetic and personally sympathetic judgments probably shouldn't be juxtaposed together terribly often, if at all. Particularly in the context of superhero comics, which are almost innately trivialising, or apparently so. |
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