What ruined Marvel comics?

[Days of Future Piff]

I was reading an interview with Jim Shooter on the current state of Marvel comics, which got me thinking...

Link: Jim Shooter Isn't Happy with Current Marvel Comics

"I think they forgot what business they’re in," Shooter told Adventures In Poor Taste. "I think there’s some brilliant talent out there–if you just flip through the books, the pictures are incredible. Sometimes they don’t tell the story as well as they should, sometimes they’re actually designing pages to sell in places like this [a comic convention], and not really thinking about the best way to tell a story. The writing, I cannot account for much of the writing. You have brilliant guys like Mark Waid who will do something and it’s great, but so much of the stuff is what they call decompressed storytelling..."

Shooter even took some time to discuss his opinion and the success of Wonder Woman, telling the site that it's a strong example of keeping the core of a character, while changing certain aspects of their mythos to great success.

"I just saw the Wonder Woman movie–it was good, I liked it," Shooter said. "And I heard people say, 'Well. it’s not the original Wonder Woman.' Here’s the deal. If you go out and ask 1,000 people to tell you everything they know about Superman, you’ll hear the same things–Daily Planet, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, blah blah. You’ll never hear about Mister Mxyzptlk or even the Fortress of Solitude. Anything the 1,000 people say–keep that, don’t mess with that. Anything that 1,000 don’t say, you get a little flexibility. Wonder Woman was created during the war, so she has the red, white and blue with stars, you know? No one cares about that. When you ask people about Wonder Woman, you’re lucky if they come up with Amazons. So they made some graceful changes and it was fine. It doesn’t have to be a red white and blue suit. So to me, people are just caviler about ignoring the intentions of the original creators–ignoring the equity that was built up over the years. It’s, 'I’m in charge now so I’ll do anything I damn well please,' and that’s almost always a mistake. When Walt [Simonson] did Thor, he didn’t reboot it or throw away the past. He just made it good."

Anyhow, Imma let y'all cook.

 

[humminbird]

being influenced by the movies too much
not letting some characters grow up( breaking up peter and mary jane)
all in all the comics are still good
in a way, the comic book companies focusing on the movie audience is like when sneaker companies got too focused on having an athlete marketing the shoes instead of making shoes an athlete would want to wear.

 

[Cattle Mutilation]

I went with too many alternate timelines
Too many characters dying then being reborn
Too many #1s

I don't care much for superhero comics to begin with, but even if I was interested in getting into it, all three of those would be a 100% barrier to entry for me.

 

[Amo Husserl]

Started collecting a couple titles post-Civil War till the end of Secret Invasion, had to put it down from everything being convoluted and saw real world agendas in the material, especially during that Captain America run and the Avengers: The Initiative. Writing got real lazy and value the of earnest story-telling was gone.

I caught the first Kick-Ass series, I think I missed one or two issues to complete the set. Scourge of the Gods was amazing on Soleil, there were a couple others I kept up with that were more rewarding than what Marvel was putting out.

Comics were no longer for geeks. All I knew was Marvel, I've thought to start picking up some Dark Horse titles but don't know where to start.

Around that time, from what I still have Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the six issue Sub-Mariner series is all that stands out. The Ezekiel Stane run on Iron Man was cool and so was Ultimate Spider-Man at the time, but it seemed like all the mythos of each character was gone and all the characters were re-tooled, writers seemed like they were running out of ideas or not willing to go too far to alienate the moviegoer audience from potentially buying books.

I wanted to see new team combinations and deeper plot, that wasn't the case. Putting Spider-Woman with Psylocke on a ten issue occult detective run is something I'm still open for.

I wanted low concept, Marvel went high.

 

[AquaCityBoy]

"Preachy politics," huh?

 

[humminbird]

"Preachy comics," huh?

right? that's definitely not it. the comics always had something to say about cultural issues of the times.

 

[Thavoiceofthevoiceless]

Time and the changing of consumer habits. It's really that simple. It's only so many times you can rehash the same stories over and over again before it becomes redundant.

 

[Cattle Mutilation]

I went with too many alternate timelines
Too many characters dying then being reborn
Too many #1s

I don't care much for superhero comics to begin with, but even if I was interested in getting into it, all three of those would be a 100% barrier to entry for me.

Ultimately for me, it would be too much content in general, and it intertwines, so if you want to get a full understanding of what's going on in one series, you got to read all this other shyt.

It's like if you want to start watching something like Grey's Anatomy on streaming for the first time. That show has 399 episodes. That's just absolutely daunting.

 

[MajesticLion]

Quesada



Seriously, all of the above options + more. A big one is just having one person overseeing all of it, it's all far too weighty to leave to one person's biases...and things obviously have slipped through the cracks with writers not being supervised as they should, where you have Thanos fighting Squirrel Girl or Shang Chi in space situations or whatever. You need a brain trust, 3-5 people max, who know all of Marvel inside and out and can keep everybody on task. That way things flow better and you won't have Forget Me Not ending up in charge of the Inhumans or some such stupidity.

 

[Geek Nasty]

right? that's definitely not it. the comics always had something to say about cultural issues of the times.

The whole mutants story is based on civil rights in the 60s

 

[voltronblack]

Hmm to me the biggest problem are
1.The lack of a Stan Lee/Jim Shooter figure to rein in the editors and writers
2.Too many fanboys and fangirls writing the books
3.The direct market (only selling in specialty comic shops instead of supermarkets, newstands, 7-11's)

 

[Marks]

You gotta do what all the smart comic book readers always done. You find a good artist or writer, or artist writer team and you just follow them. If you hear of a new team or run that's good check it out. Don't stay loyal to books, teams or brand.

 

[Days of Future Piff]

"Preachy politics," huh?

By "Preachy Politics", I'm not talking about Days of Future Past, Genosha, Magneto surviving the Holocaust, or Cap punching out Hitler.

I'm talking about stories/moments like this:

Like the writer has good intentions, but they're trying WAY too hard.
There's nothing wrong with getting political in and of itself. Changing a hero's identity can also be great when done correctly (like Rhodey becoming Iron Man for example). Just tell good stories.

 

[Jmare007]

Eh, quality wise Marvel has been pretty good in the past 3-4 years. Not sure what this "ruined" stuff is about. If it's about the business side, I think that shyt goes way beyond what's being printed and it's a lot of factors.

But overall: they just came off historic runs for Hulk, Thor and Venom and they rejuvenated and put the whole X-Men line of comics back as their backbone. I guess Spiderman has been lackluster (though they are trying to bring him back with a new creative team) and Avengers went back to nobody giving a flying fukk about them but I wouldn't call Marvel comics being ruined, at all

 

[Majestyx]

marvel and dc werent ever all that fukkin great to begin with