Robert Summitt wrote:

Boy, Count, you are so right about the current Poop age. I was looking over some current comics at Borders last night, and they were all hideous,HIDEOUS I tell you!
Hideous is an understatement! I just can't for the life of me imagine spending $3 a pop on that vapid nonsense. I've read a few issues at the comic shop here and there, and it's just...empty. Like a sandwich that has no meat.

Professor Leibstrum wote:

Much as I liked Perez' work on Avengers at the time, it seems very crude to me now. I think it shows what a lot of drek was around at the time that Perez stood out . His last run on Avengers was breathtaking, he's an artist who has consistently improved over the years and never been content to rest on his laurels.

Wow, we see things in total, polar opposites! I thought Perez hit his peak in the late 70's. His modern stuff sucks. I keep seeing him drawing Wonderman with a flat, featureless face (outside of the mullet-like shading that looks like a badly done sideburn), Scarlet Witch with a hideous Barbara Streisand-sized honkner of a nose, excessive veins in Hawkeye's arms, and he's turned Thor into a waifish elf with that silly, upturned nose. Much of his stuff looks like stock drawings now. Maybe if he'd stop spending all his time doing those idiotic and relenentless "JLA vs Avengers" and other "Group X vs Group Y" drawings, he'd retain his skills. I hate most of his new stuff. Compare his stuff during that goofy Ultron crisis thing a few years back to his work on History of the DC Universe. Worlds apart.

Captainmarvel1957 wrote:

I would agree with what the Count said with just a handful of exceptions. I thought JIm Lee's X-Men during this period was very good. A couple of the Image titles were pretty good as well.
I've always hated Jim Lee's stuff. He's from that Leifield/Larson school where the more extraneous lines you can cram into each square micrometer of a panel, the more praise you get. It's too crowded, too busy, too hard on the eyes.

But my question is, the Count points out that during this period that some characters were forever damaged with idiotic changes. I think a couple of these that stand out in my mind are Barry Allen's Flash running himself into a cinder and Aquaman losing his left hand. Those two changes were like saying that The Flash and Aquaman were disposable characters. Another biggie that comes to mind is when Batman's back was broken. Then along came Kingdom Come and we saw that the back injury had lifelong effects on Batman. Nonsense.
And look at what they did to Supergirl, and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan, the only true GL!), Thor, etc. The problem is that the people running the companies basically inherited their grandfathers' characters. They did not grow up with them, they did not grow up reading the classic, and they see the characters are playthings, objects to be used and abused without respect.

My question is, what change do you think has been the most damaging to a character? Feel free to be brutal in your assessment.

While I (thankfully) did not read the trash, I'd have go with what they did to Hal Jordan/Green Lantern. They utterly destroyed that character and everything he/it stood for in the first 25-30 years of its existence, and totally warped him. The whole GL/Spectre thing makes me want to puke, then go behead whoever came up with that idiocy. I tried not to even hear what they did to Thor, since Thor is perhaps my all time favorite comic character. But they really screwed him up as well. Perhaps the greatest travesty though, would be how Marvel took its truly cosmic characters...Galactus, Eternity, the Living Tribunal, and turned them into common punching bags for whichever Uber-Being of the Month came along (Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet, Adam Warlock, the Beyonder, etc). Those cosmic beings were once seen with awe and wonder. Now they've been relegated to common bowling pins to be knocked about by the latest godlike being that the company keeps creating. A total waste, a total disrespect, a total lack of understanding about those characters. Pathetic. Totally and absolutely pathetic. This is why I can say with total authority and conviction that comic writers and editors these days are worthless hacks. They just don't get it and never will.

Wich2 wrote:

Count, you obviously love comical bookies, know your stuff, and state your case well.
Thanks! image

Folks running the biz then would have freely admitted they were writing for kids - but so were most of the classic fairy tale,and children's lit, writers for centuries; doesn't automatically make the stuff of no worth. The problem I have with much GA Timely/Marvel, is that it seems written BY kindergarteners, whereas most of National/DC's is at least coherent.
That may be true. However, even as a little kid, I always felt that the GA stories were simplistic and not very interesting compared to the then-current SA stuff and alter the BA stuff.

Since that means Segar's POPEYE, Gould's TRACY, Raymond's GORDON & X-9, Foster's TARZAN, Crane's WASH TUBBS & BUZZ SAWYER, etc., I don't see that as a failing?
No, what I mean is just that. It looked like a comic strip. Which isn't bad. If you're drawing comic strips for newspapers. Comic books have far more potential. Compare any comic strip with Kirby's comic book work, or Stearanko's. I want cool backgrounds and detail in my comics, not newspaper-bare blank backgrounds or simple filler.

I can only say that the best of the Siegel/Shuster shop's SUPERMAN; Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN; Will Eisner's SPIRIT; Reed Crandall's BLACKHAWK; Mac Raboy's CAP. MARVEL JR.; the best of Simon & Kirby's GA work; Carl Barks' DONALD DUCK; the best of Finger & Robinson's BATMAN; much of the EC shop's work, etc., needs no apology that I can see?

Again, it wasn't necessarily bad, just not up to par with the later SA stuff. I consider the Golden Age of comics to be essentially its infancy stage. It's when we first started with regular superheroes and ongoing continuity, etc. It was still in the early stages of development and had not yet achieved anywhere near its full potential. That potential did not get fulfilled until the Silver and Bronze Ages. It's not that the GA was bad per se, just that it was in a crude, immature form compared to later ages.

To dismiss it all out of hand comes close to being analgaous to the thread elsewhere calling Silent Film "not Real Movies." And worst of all, closes off some dang satisfying reading!

That's not all that bad an analogy though. Silent films had bad, grainy stock, poor lighting, nearly no special effects, no sound, no color, etc. I enjoy Nosferatu (1922) as much as anyone, but it was still a film in its infancy stage. It wasn't until much later that we got mature films, ie films that had sound, color, the ability to film day and night and not need tinting to figure out what time of day it was, etc. Put in computer terms, the Golden Age of comics was like having a Commodore 64 computer. It was new, it was a breakthrough, but it were merely a seed for what it was later to develop into decades later.

Evilskippy wrote:

Frank Miller's Dark Knight. Suddenly every writer after that "template" steered Batman slowly but surely into a friendless brooding paranoid psychopath.

That bores me to death. It's not the Batman I knew for all those decades. Most modern readers and writers/creators just don't get it. I don't even frequent the various comic book discussion boards because there are so many idiots there. For example, people who've bought into the foolishness propagated in recent years about how Batman can defeat "anyone" if he just has enough time to plan for the encounter. image

Gimme a break! One lunatic claimed that given enough time, Batman could devise a way to defeat Galactus. Get real! If Batman spent the rest of his life secretly gaining control of the entire nuclear arsenal of the entire planet Earth, he would still amount to less than a flea to Galactus, who would yawn, wave his hand, and absorb all those nukes, then burp to let Batman know he enjoyed the meal. And all this nonsense about Batman stockpiling kryptonite in case he has to kill his buddy Superman, or that storyline where they claimed Batman had files on the weaknesses of every JLA member in case he had to take them out. That's not Batman! That's some paranoid schizophrenic wearing the Batman costume.

The only way modern comics can be any good anymore is to declare everything from say the mid-80's null and void, pretend it didn't happen, and pick up each title from the last good issue where it left off, then have it written by people like me who grew up reading the classics and who care about and understand the character and respect them, as opposed to hiring hacks who see them as Play-Doh to be used and abused in order to act out their latest goofy fetish fantasy.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society."

- Krishnamurti