The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

by **Jubilee** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 12:58 pm

If you like the Big 2 business model fair enough.

I think the big 2 business model is to treat the customers like idiots, produce storyboards and to stifle creativity.

But by all means get behind that model. I hope for your sake and the other miniscule percentage of people who read superhero comics they last longer than a few more years without completely crashing and burning.

by **chap22** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 1:09 pm

Jubilee wrote:If you like the Big 2 business model fair enough.

I think the big 2 business model is to treat the customers like idiots, produce storyboards and to stifle creativity.

But by all means get behind that model. I hope for your sake and the other miniscule percentage of people who read superhero comics they last longer than a few more years without completely crashing and burning.

end of the day, the model is to preserve and protect the characters. and guess what? i LIKE the characters! just like i'll happily plop down and watch hour and a half modernizations of classic Sherlock Holmes stories, or probably sit through a two-hour Bruckheimer 'splosion-fest of a Lone Ranger movie, i will be happy to know i can read Batman or Thing or Captain America stories for as long as the companies will publish them. I honestly don't read comic books hoping for innovative changes to the art form every month. i look for stories about characters i like..heroes overcoming villains and fighting evil...as a means of escapism from real life. for a couple hours a week i get to see familiar, long-loved good guys beat the stew out of bad guys. for that short period of time, it beats the shit out of reading a proposed contract, or writing a brief, or worrying about paying two house notes next month, or having to tell my kid 50 times to turn off the Playstation and go to bed and "if i have to come in there you're gonna get a spanking". if the stories feel familiar, i'm ok with that as long as there's some changes to the beats and some craft in the telling.

then i can enjoy the great stories that much more, b/c if they're rarer, and come about organically when a writer actually feels the creative muse, rather than trying to force a "classic" every month or so, it means more to me.

by **Jubilee** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 1:11 pm

That was sweet. I like that Chap. You're ok with me.

by **nietoperz** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 1:21 pm

chap22 wrote:
end of the day, the model is to preserve and protect the characters. and guess what? i LIKE the characters! just like i'll happily plop down and watch hour and a half modernizations of classic Sherlock Holmes stories, or probably sit through a two-hour Bruckheimer 'splosion-fest of a Lone Ranger movie, i will be happy to know i can read Batman or Thing or Captain America stories for as long as the companies will publish them. I honestly don't read comic books hoping for innovative changes to the art form every month. i look for stories about characters i like..heroes overcoming villains and fighting evil...as a means of escapism from real life. for a couple hours a week i get to see familiar, long-loved good guys beat the stew out of bad guys. for that short period of time, it beats the shit out of reading a proposed contract, or writing a brief, or worrying about paying two house notes next month, or having to tell my kid 50 times to turn off the Playstation and go to bed and "if i have to come in there you're gonna get a spanking". if the stories feel familiar, i'm ok with that as long as there's some changes to the beats and some craft in the telling.

then i can enjoy the great stories that much more, b/c if they're rarer, and come about organically when a writer actually feels the creative muse, rather than trying to force a "classic" every month or so, it means more to me.

Amen!

by **oogy** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 2:02 pm

chap22 wrote:
end of the day, the model is to preserve and protect the characters. and guess what? i LIKE the characters! just like i'll happily plop down and watch hour and a half modernizations of classic Sherlock Holmes stories, or probably sit through a two-hour Bruckheimer 'splosion-fest of a Lone Ranger movie, i will be happy to know i can read Batman or Thing or Captain America stories for as long as the companies will publish them. I honestly don't read comic books hoping for innovative changes to the art form every month. i look for stories about characters i like..heroes overcoming villains and fighting evil...as a means of escapism from real life. for a couple hours a week i get to see familiar, long-loved good guys beat the stew out of bad guys. for that short period of time, it beats the shit out of reading a proposed contract, or writing a brief, or worrying about paying two house notes next month, or having to tell my kid 50 times to turn off the Playstation and go to bed and "if i have to come in there you're gonna get a spanking". if the stories feel familiar, i'm ok with that as long as there's some changes to the beats and some craft in the telling.

then i can enjoy the great stories that much more, b/c if they're rarer, and come about organically when a writer actually feels the creative muse, rather than trying to force a "classic" every month or so, it means more to me.

by **ElijahSnowFan** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 2:18 pm

chap22 wrote:
end of the day, the model is to preserve and protect the characters. and guess what? i LIKE the characters! just like i'll happily plop down and watch hour and a half modernizations of classic Sherlock Holmes stories, or probably sit through a two-hour Bruckheimer 'splosion-fest of a Lone Ranger movie, i will be happy to know i can read Batman or Thing or Captain America stories for as long as the companies will publish them. I honestly don't read comic books hoping for innovative changes to the art form every month. i look for stories about characters i like..heroes overcoming villains and fighting evil...as a means of escapism from real life. for a couple hours a week i get to see familiar, long-loved good guys beat the stew out of bad guys. for that short period of time, it beats the shit out of reading a proposed contract, or writing a brief, or worrying about paying two house notes next month, or having to tell my kid 50 times to turn off the Playstation and go to bed and "if i have to come in there you're gonna get a spanking". if the stories feel familiar, i'm ok with that as long as there's some changes to the beats and some craft in the telling.

then i can enjoy the great stories that much more, b/c if they're rarer, and come about organically when a writer actually feels the creative muse, rather than trying to force a "classic" every month or so, it means more to me.

My man!

by **Victorian Squid** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:29 pm

To each his or her own, and after all that's why they keep writing those same superhero stories over and over, but there's very little there I can identify with as a reader. It's all very earnest and nice and all, but I wouldn't co-sign that today because that was why I read comics when I was a juvenile or young adult.

To me, when a writer like Jonathan Hickman, who's written Nightly New, Transhuman, and Manhattan Projects, takes over a flagship superhero book and turns in a debut issue like the one I read in the shop last week, it underscores the lack of true fertility left in the narrative soil there.

We had a small tropical tree in the shop for many years early on, but the soil was probably never changed in the plant's lifetime, and eventually it became as thin as sand, and water poured through it like a sieve. There were no real nutrients left, it got no true sunlight, and people casually tossed cigarette butts into the pot. The branches dropped off as the leaves became yellow and anemic, until it was just a dry husky trunk with several wilted leaves at the top, and then those died too.

by **Rockman** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:36 pm

you're better than that squid :smt013

by **chap22** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:40 pm

Victorian Squid wrote:To me, when a writer like Jonathan Hickman, who's written Nightly New, Transhuman, and Manhattan Projects, takes over a flagship superhero book and turns in a debut issue like the one I read in the shop last week, it underscores the lack of true fertility left in the narrative soil there.

but you say that right on the heels of Hickman completing an innovative and defining run on Fantastic Four, which is Marvel-as-we-know-it's oldest book. the very writer you use as an example just disproved your point.

by **Victorian Squid** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:15 pm

because I don't think it was as innovative as you do?

by **Jubilee** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:23 pm

Yeah there's nothing innovative about that run at all. Standard superhero fluff (the last book I stopped reading)

by **chap22** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:26 pm

Victorian Squid wrote:because I don't think it was as innovative as you do?

so now we have to quantify innovative?

it was innovative. it was a classic FF mix of high concepts with family dynamics, but in more of a long-form way than had ever been done with the book (or in many other superhero books historically), while still providing single issues packed to the gills with new ideas and full stories as well. Reed got truly proactive by forming the Foundation, a new twist to the mythos.

he did exactly what you said isn't being done, he found fertility in the soil of that book and those characters that hadn't been used before, at least not in the ways he used it.

by **chap22** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:26 pm

Jubilee wrote:Yeah there's nothing innovative about that run at all. Standard superhero fluff (the last book I stopped reading)

by **Jubilee** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:32 pm

Well it was. I mean I read up to Jonny dying and came back.

It was my favorite Marvel book at the time.

I still don't see it as innovative. None of the characters were changed. There were a few new branches to already existing ideas, but it still remained at it's core a standard superhero story with "good v bad"

I see it as the best as a bad bunch.

by **oogy** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:34 pm

Jubilee wrote:Yeah there's nothing innovative about that run at all. Standard superhero fluff (the last book I stopped reading)

Some of us like the standard superhero fluff and aren't looking to have our minds blown with every issue of every book.

Comics are entertainment IMO. If I wanted something to really expand my mind I'd read something else.