| Author |
|
Doug Centers
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 February 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 5490
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | 1
|
post reply
|
|
Some changes during my comic buying span that I enjoyed;Return of Wonder Man- Like many I'm not a big fan of bringing back the dead, but in short order he soon became a favorite.
Hellcat joining the Defenders- Patsy was a great addition, a fun character.
Byrne & Austin join Uncanny X-Men- I enjoyed Cockrum immensely but man did that mag take off after those guys came along.
BTW, for me at least, these were all permanent changes.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Dave Phelps
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4180
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | 2
|
post reply
|
|
Shane Matlock wrote:
| I know I absolutely hated the New 52, as did many longtime comics reader, but most of us who were teenagers reading Crisis on Infinite Earths and the reboot DC did in the late 80's we had far fewer issues. |
|
|
DC was nicer about it then. :-) When all was said and done, Post-Crisis was more about the soft reboots than the hard ones and in the immediate aftermath, all books were left to their own devices and allowed to wrap up at their own pace before getting revamped or rebooted. Even then, most were allowed to die natural deaths in the months and years to follow (All-Star Squadron was the only true "Crisis casualty" and it still got 12 issues past the Crisis). There are those who have said that made things "more confusing" than just snapping a line, but as a fan at the time I liked it better.
I did a quick skim of the DC titles that came out the month Crisis #10 came out and there would have been a heck of a lot of dropped plotlines if DC had arbitrarily decided to start everything over from scratch at that exact moment. (I've gotten the impression that the New 52 didn't come with a lot of warning.)
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/newsstand.ph p?type=cover&month=1&year=1986&publisher=dc&sort=alpha&check list=null
The gradual approach also meant that DC could give every revamp the attention it was due, give desired creative types time to be available (hard to get that Perez Wonder Woman launch out if he's busy wrapping up Crisis), etc.
With the New 52, some wrap-ups were so abrupt, it felt like a big F.U. to the people who were actually reading the books at the time and made me thoroughly dis-interested in even trying the New 52. Stuck with Legion and followed Wonder Woman for a bit, but if I wasn't thoroughly enthused, I didn't bother. If you're bringing "my" DCU to a close, so be it, but do it properly.
All that said, I will admit that I've gotten less enthused by the notion of reboots over the years. If you kill off a character, you can still access them via time travel, flashback stories and the like. If you wipe that incarnation from existence, they're just gone. I liked evil businessman Lex Luthor, but I would have liked him just as much if he'd been named "Rex Ruthless" and we still had access to evil scientist Lex Luthor. Wally West as Flash still gives you access to Barry Allen if you need him. Rebooted Young Barry Allen (as some have suggested as a preferred alternative to Wally getting the job) would've meant that we would never have seen the "proper" Barry. And the poor Silver Age Hawks...
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Jonathan A. Dowdell
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 July 2016
Location: United States
Posts: 417
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | 3
|
post reply
|
|
I liked that Peter David changed the Hulk (the Hulk's reality) each time he was paired with a new artist. At the time I didn't totally understand the changes (especially Joe Fixit) but when I look back it seems like an interesting way to approach the writer/artist collaboration.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Eric Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 27 October 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 2294
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | 4
|
post reply
|
|
The thing with DC's Silver Age "reboot" was that the old characters were long gone by the time Barry/Flash, Hal/Green Lantern, etc. came along. But, even more importantly, the creation of Earth 2 made it a wonderful "have your cake and eat it too" situation! The new reality didn't wipe away the old reality--in fact, it confirmed it! We were never going to see Jay Garrick or Alan Scott again, but the Earth 1/Earth 2 team-ups made it WONDERFUL to see them again!
Any reboot that wipes away the good stories of the past does NOT work for me! The creation of the Multiverse (even though it happened before I was born) was a change that definitely worked for me!
Edited by Eric Jansen on 28 June 2019 at 8:08pm
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Mike Norris
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4274
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | 5
|
post reply
|
|
The thing with DC's Silver Age "reboot" was that the old characters were long gone by the time Barry/Flash, Hal/Green Lantern, etc. came along. ************************************************************ ********************* By today's standards it wasn't that long. The last issue of All-Star Comics came out in 1951, the first appearance of the SA Flash was in 1956. By 50's standards those five years meant a new audience had been born. Though I guess guys like Roy Thomas spanned the generations.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Ted Pugliese
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 05 December 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 7979
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | 6
|
post reply
|
|
I was a HUGE Gil Kane fan in the 80s, especially of
his DC work with marker inks, e.g. Action Comics and
Sword of the Atom. I had only been collecting comics
for a few months when it first came out and I was
blown away.
I didn't know enough then to wonder about a shrinking
man in a village of tiny people losing that which was
supposed to make him special, but looking back at it,
Ray loses everything before he disappears into the
jungle, including his uniqueness as a Superhero. I
think it's kind of the point, finding himself while he
is fitting in as opposed to everything he was or was
supposed to be as a shrinking hero in a full size
world.
Regardless, the art is beautiful, and I can't imagine
anyone but Kane drawing like that with those markers.
And don't get me started on his Ring of the Nibelung
with Roy Thomas. It is absolutely beautiful!
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
|
| |
Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
|
| Posted: 28 June 2019 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | 7
|
post reply
|
|
I have been shaking my head and sadly disagreeing with nearly everything written on this thread... right up to Eric Jansen's post above; the first thing said here that brought a genuine smile to my face! Thank you, Eric!
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Jason Czeskleba
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 30 April 2004
Posts: 4548
|
| Posted: 29 June 2019 at 12:43am | IP Logged | 8
|
post reply
|
|
Ted Pugliese:I loved the Sword of the Atom…
JB:Hm. Take a character with a unique skill set and drop him into an environment where everyone is like him.
Me: I remember someone in the fan press dubbing that series "Sort of the Atom" for this very reason (wish I could remember who so I could properly credit the joke).
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
|
| Posted: 29 June 2019 at 1:09am | IP Logged | 9
|
post reply
|
|
Sword of the Atom was an excellent series, well-written and well-drawn. It took the premise of a modern man going native in a primitive culture and did it with imagination and elan, while intelligently advancing the story of its main character through the breakdown of his marriage.
The repetitively shrill, one-note "de-uniquing" criticism is tired and boring by this point. Only the Atom could have found himself in that situation and tiny civilizations were baked into the character's history from his very first appearance with the Bat-Knights. It's fine, everyone. There can be tiny civilizations and the Atom can be the one who deals with them. He doesn't just have to bounce off pink erasers and wave sharpened pencils at foes. The stories can be something other than that.
His size-changing abilities got him into the situation and then could not get him out. He met tribes that rode frogs and fought rats. It was still very much an Atom-style adventure, albeit one on a more grandly imagined scale. It was still something that could only happen to the Atom. That makes it unique. Didactically ticking off how many other characters in the story at one point are also the same size is a simplistic, unimaginative exercise, especially when those others cannot change size as the Atom does, and his ability to do so does play a role later when he regains his powers.
Stories can be about more than one thing, everyone. No? They can't? It's still okay. Soon enough, all the tiny people were killed dead dead dead by DC Editorial and Ryan Choi was on the scene, bouncing off erasers and waving pencils at bad people. That he himself de-uniqued the concept of the Atom, well, that doesn't mean anything, mutter mutter...
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132396
|
| Posted: 29 June 2019 at 6:08am | IP Logged | 10
|
post reply
|
|
THE FLASH OF TWO WORLDS is a wonderful, classic story. Unfortunately, the increasing influence of anal fanthink meant it could not simply be left alone. “Earth 2” had to be strip mined in some of DC’s most unrelenting and pervasive de-uniquing of their characters. Plus, it carried a major problem for characters who eventually became recurring: those characters were bound to a specific time period that kept moving further and further into the Past. Then fanboy elitism attached. O, woe! All these multiple Earths had become “too confusing for new readers.” They hadn’t, but the snobbish, clubhouse mentality that had overwhelmed fandom and was spreading fast thru DC meant it all had to be “fixed”. It could have been, by the simple expedient of not doing any more Earth 2 stories, but alas Dark Phoenix had happened by then, and so everything had to be presented as EVENTS. The result was an impenetrable mishmosh that left things more confused than before. And, somewhat ironically, created and unending cascade of ever more confusing references. (It didn’t help that one of DC’s biggest post-CRISIS events, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, could only have happened in the pre-CRISIS “universe”.) Ah, well. Maybe I SHOULD have accepted that assignment when Dick Giordano offered it to me...
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Mike Norris
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4274
|
| Posted: 29 June 2019 at 8:39am | IP Logged | 11
|
post reply
|
|
Sword of the Atom was basically an Edgar Rice Burroughs story.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132396
|
| Posted: 29 June 2019 at 8:53am | IP Logged | 12
|
post reply
|
|
An example of something I’ve griped about before. Instead of asking “Can I tell good Captain Amazing stories?” a writer asks “Can I use Captain Amazing to tell MY stories?”
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
