Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

Love the Hated

05:14 / 11.03.09

What in comics has been popularly denounced, publicly hated on, outright loathed across the internets, that you really dig?

Around the time Dick Grayson was getting raped on a rooftop, the hatred of Devin Grayson, Nightwing's then-writer, exploded like ugly acid-soaked shrapnel in all directions. She was accused of mary-suing (a term no professional storyteller seriously uses), of being a pervert, a hack, of sleeping her way into the industry, and of destroying an icon.

On glancing back at some of the issues, y'know what? I really liked her go at Nightwing. I like a lot of her stuff, true, but that run seems to get even a lot of her fans riled up... I still like it.

And speaking of another temporarily-reviled writer, Chuck Austen... No, I'm not going to say I love Chuck Austen, who left superheroes to write a comic about teenage girls coaching baseball in their underwear or something. But, his Nurse Annie from the X-Men run? Annie was delusional, paranoid, highly emotive, and possibly the only character who even tried to have a conversation with Northstar while he was on the team. And her son was hazardous and confused.

I still to this day love Nurse Annie!

I also love when a superhero logo is used in a word balloon to represent their name, because it does - to me - communicate more of them than the words alone. The classic Fantastic Four logo or the rushing-at-you forced perspective Superman logos, in text, are like aggregates of perception/relay to my reading, but lots of people seem to despise the practice.

So, what about all of you out there in 'Lither Land?

15:30 / 11.03.09

I always liked THE MONARCHY. I still get mocked for it.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

04:57 / 12.03.09

I have deep mad love for the McDuffie run of the Fantastic Four, even though it's either hated or forgotten in the wake of Millar's take on the series. Still, he explained all of the character missteps in Civil War, made the book both interesting and fun again, and even made me like the whole "Storm/Black Panther" thing.

And should I bring up my feverish fanboy love of Robert Loren Fleming's "Thriller" and "Ambush Bug"?

Thriller was so far ahead of its time, it made American Flagg look dated, and STILL blows the doors off of most critically acclaimed modern comics.

15:56 / 12.03.09

Why? All I know about Thriller are the gags in Ambush Bug....

16:36 / 12.03.09

I own a complete run of Sleepwalker. "Sandman done right!" was the awful, awful promotion for that, if you recall.

I also love, unabashedly, concepts and comics like Aquaman, Elongated Man, Jimmy Olsen, NFL SuperPro, Ravage 2099, Thunderstrike, and generally anything maligned. I root for the underdog and I feel kinship with the shunned.

13:39 / 13.03.09

I loved. LOVED! Cowan & O'Neil's "The Question". Both 36 issue run and quarterly.

Everyone I had talked to at the comic shop I used to frequent hated it - At the time it was all about the Bat, the Punisher or Wolverine (Who I liked as well). Comics that had more than two dimensions were frowned upon (Sometimes by yours truly)

I really liked Vic for his flaws. And his potential, which he seemed he would never live up to. Maybe especially because he seemed doomed to fail.

I thought that the comic was equally intelligent, sexy, and captivating. Cowan's art blew me away and O'Neil's Zen-lite captured my imagination at that time. I also discovered some great books in the "reccomended reading" list at the end of the issues.

No-Face was the best non-hero I had ever encountered, and was the most realistic, down-to-earth one to boot. Hub City was the best, most depressing setting to keep him down and that dynamic really worked for me: he could have walked away, but then again he couldn't. Hub City reflected his conflicted nature that he constantly fought against, and it was a losing battle. The only way to win would be to give up and walk away, but that was a lesson he was never able to truly learn, even if on a certain level he actually understood it...

Yup, loving The Question gained me frowning dissaprovals and quick change-of-subject's when brought up at the local fanboy hangout, but I always stood by Cowan & O'Neil.

19:00 / 14.03.09

i know it is not very cool round here but i quite like the jeff johns JSA, fatbear stroking continuity heavy stuff that it is. i like the solid writing and sense of place and character though despair everytime it gets into the whole heritage hero riffing.

i don't like it enough to buy it, but i get the trades out the library and sneak them home.

00:29 / 16.03.09

I have a certain amount of love for Chuck Dixon's late 90's early 00's batbooks. Not a fan of the man or his politics, but I think that his competent building of the ancilliary Batman titles was pretty good reading for me. Nightwing and Birds of Prey were fun books for me to read. Birds of Prey went onto better writers and more quality storylines, but I like a lot of the work that Dixon put into there. Part of why I didn't like Devin Grayson's run on Nightwing, absent the obvious mary sue-ing, was that she basically just demolished the entire cast and setting that Dixon had created. Which might have been a function of the aforementioned mary sue stuff, but it also went towards really poor writing and plots.

03:49 / 16.03.09

I still like what Garth Ennis is doing in 'The Boys'.

There, I've said it. That Garth seems to be the artistic love child of Terry Wogan and William Burroughs interferes with my enjoyment of this series not one jot. Not an iota.

I read a lot of comics, more than I should, but 'The Boys' is far and away my fave, at the moment. It is more than a series of knob gags. Okay, there are lots of those, but the thing to do is to try to see past them. Amidst all the gore, it's actually quite a clever piece of satire. Honestly.

04:05 / 16.03.09

I know it is not very cool round here but i quite like the jeff johns JSA, fatbear stroking continuity heavy stuff that it is. i like the solid writing and sense of place and character though despair everytime it gets into the whole heritage hero riffing.

i don't like it enough to buy it, but i get the trades out the library and sneak them home.

If I was Geoff Johns (and who knows, maybe I am) I don't know if I'd take that as an unqualified endorsement of my work, thus far.

I trust we understand each other.

04:12 / 16.03.09

Call the bright dreamer 'jeff' again at your peril. It's 'Geoff'.

It is Geoff.

I suppose I ... sorry, he will be crying himself to sleep again, tonight.

18:57 / 16.03.09

sorry jeff, er geoff. i will go and buy one of your goddam comics to make up for all that library use if i can find that that doesn't contain the line 'legacy hero' of a varient thereof.

i admit it is a qualified bit of loving but then you are a hard man to love.

04:10 / 17.03.09

Michael Turner. Everyone seemed to hate his stuff but I always found it intricate and beautiful. People always emphasised his breasty superchic stuff decrying is sometimes non-proportionality, overlooking his wonderful rendering of architecture and technology completely. His work on Soulfire, right up to the end was really, really beautiful. If only he'd had time to do Ekos...

He sounded like a really nice guy too. Poor luv, may you rest in piece

14:35 / 18.03.09

I am also a fan of The Boys, though not at first. At first, I thought it was just more Ennis taking the piss out of superheroes with thinly veiled pastiches, a la The Pro. The Boys has a bit more depth to that, though maybe not much more. Or at least it uses those pastiches to try and say something. And the character of Starlight is suitably complex, though it doesn't quite make up for the fact that every other female character is paper thin.

Rachel Evil McCall

20:02 / 18.03.09

I'm actually pretty fond of a good amount of Geoff Johns' work myself.

21:37 / 20.03.09

Ennis Dredd. There's a lot of disdain for Ennis attempts at Dredd and I don't think it entirely deserves it. There have been better Dredd writers, yes, but only maybe 6 or 7. There have been many, many worse. But for somereason it's Garth's Joe that gets the stick.

At the very least there was a sense of fun about them that showed he liked what he was writing. He also knew the character and the set up. Mark Millar can't claim that.