I Hold About Current "Mainstream" Comics
- Alex Ross may be a fine photorealistic painter, but as a superhero comics artist, I find his work to remove just about any trace of magic from the material. The only project he's worked on that I'm truly fond of is Marvels, and that's because it's explicitely presented as commentary from the "real" world.
Seeing the man's Super Friends fetish writ large in Justice is creepy beyond words to me. - In general, I want my superhero comics featuring the mainline DC and Marvel heroes to be bright, pop, and good for just about anyone. The fact that a 9-year-old girl can't easily read recent issues of Wonder Woman drives me up the wall. The next person who cites Watchmen or The Killing Joke as examples of how to use superheroes to tell an "adult" story is going to be reminded that Brad Metzler, Geoff Johns, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar are not Alan Moore.
All-Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder is my grotesque exception to this theory, simply because I think this is Frank Miller giving a certain, very vocal group of fans exactly what they think want and watching them choke with rage and bile. I am nothing if not straightforward in my hypocrisy. - I would take a thousand Sal Buscemas over one Greg Land. His picture-perfect style kills any sense of movement in his stories and if I can play "match the source model" from his photoreferencing, then I suspect he's much more reliant on images than any "artist" should be. The fact that Wizard magazine keeps riding his crotch and leering at me only raises my ire towards his material further.
- Since this came up on another blog, I have to say that Action Comics #775 is not in any way, shape, form, or fashion a good Superman story, nor is it anything more than the clumsiest of commentary on The Authority, which is a book that is commentary in itself. Also: Superman comes off as being a self-righteous prick, which is exactly the problem with the character since the Byrne reboot - he's often gratingly smug without the humor that characterizes my favorite stories with the character.
- Marvel Comics, there's a reason your back catalog is selling so well to guys like me: your current material, for the most part, comes across as a bad photocopy of DC's exactingly-produced Crisis-related materials, rushed together at the last minute after watching your bitter, hated enemy conquer the marketplace and devouring your marketshare like lions wolfing down Christians back in the day. There's exceptions here and there, but I see so little in the way of joy coming from your customers outside of the most meatheaded defenses of their precious superheroes in message boards where "Gay" is commonly used as an insult.
You earn exceptions for the Ellis projects, and if I hadn't heard that much of the stuff I liked in the first Brubaker Daredevil was cribbed from shows like Prison Break, I may not have even included you on this list.
