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Posted: |
Nov 20, 2015 - 2:43 PM
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By: |
drop_forge
(Member)
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Man, the '80s were something. One LCS (local comic shop) in my area closed, which sucked, because it was amazing. Then another opened. Thankfully, actually having a LCS — along with copies of Bud Plant's always-amazing retail catalog and The Comics Buyer's Guide, in its then-newspaper-style format, landing in my paws — for most of the decade opened many a door beyond the usual grab-'em-off-the-spinner-rack routine at 7-11.
Cat Yronwode's name was a fairly frequent one back then. She was married to Dean Mullaney, publisher of Eclipse Comics. Cat was also a columnist at TCBG.
Yes, she's a life-long occult practitioner. After her divorce from Dean, she went to another comics publisher (which folded in '07) and remarried. Here's what she does now: http://www.luckymojo.com/catalogue.html
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I enjoy Romita, Jr.'s work. His early '80s work is the best, including Amazing Spider-Man with Roger Stern, and Iron Man with David Micheline. I agree that X-Men wasn't a great fit, and yeah, Jim, you nailed it with the '80s fashion he drew. Interestingly enough, even though his X-Men art didn't always work, I thought he absolutely nailed the Wolverine story Enemy of the State. I think Romita's greatest strength is his choreographing and portrayal of action sequences. He can also portray a broad range of emotion with his faces. I agree that his looser style doesn't work with every title, but he has had some solid runs over the years.
Some of my favorite of his work include the aforementioned Wolverine, Spider-Man, and Iron Man runs. I also enjoyed his work on Thor with Dan Jurgens, Daredevil with Ann Nocenti and later Frank Miller. He also did some nice work with Punisher, with his Punisher/Batman story being my favorite. I also enjoy his later Spider-Man work. In fact, his work on that book was at times the only real selling point when illustrating some awful stories by Howard Mackie and J. Michael Straczynski.
As for his convention behavior you mentioned Jim, well, I can't defend that. To be fair though, he can't be a complete jerk when he does charitable work like this: http://geek-news.mtv.com/2012/04/26/john-romita-jr-guiness-world-record/
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I was out of new comics by the time Punisher got his own miniseries and (multiple) monthly titles.
The very first miniseries debuted in January 1986. It was a few more years for me before I stopped buying the new monthlies. http://www.comics.org/issue/41003/
Imo he was always best in small doses; same goes for Wolverine. I also resented there being multiple X-Men books (by the same token, I felt that way about Batman over at DC, though I eventually warmed to them due to the quality).
I feel the same. Punisher's miniseries was great, but giving him an ongoing was a mistake. Frank Miller's Wolverine miniseries was incredible, perfect. And I could see giving him more miniseries spread out over time. But they really got out of hand with the mutant crap. Rebooting X-Men was one of Marvel's major gaffes, IMO. X-Force was crap.
Batman is a far more nuanced character than any of those so-called mutants (I really did burn out on them). Having Batman and Detective Comics, and eventually Miller's The Dark Knight, wasn't overkill, IMO.
I don't agree that Batman is more nuanced than the X-Men, although I do think DC has done a far, far better job cultivating Batman over the years, and keeping him very close to his mission statement, which is dressing up as a bat and saving Gotham from street level criminals. Thanks to how well DC has handled Batman, the character is about the only DC character who hasn't been truly rebooted. He emerged both Post-Crisis and New 52 relatively unscathed. The character has certainly evolved with the times, but the DC editors have never let him get too far away from what makes him work best.
The X-Men, on the other hand, have become a huge mess. The X-Men work best when they are helping students adjust to their powers, standing up to threats to mutants, and saving the world from dangerous mutants. That isn't to say that the occasional adventure in space, or any other adventure against type won't work, it just can't be the status quo. I thought the book went off the rails after Claremont sent most of the team through the siege perilous, and there wasn't a consistent team for a while. IMHO the X-books never really got back on the rails despite several attempts to bring the series "back to basics". Now, I barely recognize any of the members, and those I do recognize have changed dramatically.
As for the Punisher, I agree that the Steven Grant/Mike Zeck series is great, and that Zeck is the definitive Punisher artist. I think that Punisher can work as an ongoing, but only if they either take him out of New York, or if they separate him from the rest of the Marvel Universe. He doesn't work in New York, because I don't believe for a second that characters like Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America, or any number of other heroes operating there would ever let him run around. Most of the time he interacts with the other superheroes he almost always gets a free pass despite having murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Heck, even Batman let him go with a threat of what would happen if he ever shows up in Gotham. There are only so many stories where the hero reluctantly works with the Punisher, and at the end, when they are ready to take him to jail, the Punisher outsmarts, or otherwise slips away from the hero. Also, he can't really go up against any major villains, because they would all need to survive so they can appear in other titles, and it is implausible that Punisher would let them go.
No, I think for Punisher to work, he needs to be mostly segregated from the rest of the Marvel Universe. Marvel did this a while ago by giving him a Max title, which was an out of continuity series, and I thought it worked well, particularly when Garth Ennis was writing him. With Punisher set to appear in the next season of Daredevil on Netflix, it will be interesting to see if interest in the character becomes renewed.
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Posted: |
Nov 26, 2015 - 10:12 AM
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By: |
drop_forge
(Member)
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I think that Punisher can work as an ongoing, but only if they either take him out of New York, or if they separate him from the rest of the Marvel Universe. He doesn't work in New York, because I don't believe for a second that characters like Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America, or any number of other heroes operating there would ever let him run around.
Which is absolutely true. I've always thought there are too many heroes based in NYC/Manhattan, anyway. I like how Batman has Gotham City, Superman has Metropolis, Green Arrow has Star(ling) City, and so on.
The Punisher should be a nomadic antihero. Go where "the action" is, i.e. everywhere.
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Posted: |
Dec 1, 2015 - 5:45 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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I'll have to retract the "Claremont's wife" thing. After exploring my "Mind Shack" I found the name of Cat(therine) Yronwode but I have yet to locate the online discussion or article--it was probably the Chronomonkey Marvel site--where her influence on Claremont's work is alleged to have occurred. Shame on me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Yronwode
Ah! Found it! The woman's name is Bonnie Wilford and she was in fact Chris Claremont's wife:
"A Question for JB [John Byrne] Regarding Chris Claremont" August 16, 2006
"Into this bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda, aka "Simon." Charming, soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects of occult theory and practice, he eased his way to the center of the scene...
He cultivated an elusive, secretive persona, giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of bullshit to cover the book’s (the Necronomicon) origins. He had no telephone. He always wore business suits, in stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance fair, proto-goth costuming that dominated the scene. He never got high in public.
In short, he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played them to the hilt. He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence agencies and secret societies operating at global levels of social influence. He began teaching classes in the back room, and showed a genuine knack for clarifying and elucidating such baroque encrypted arcana as John Dee’s Enochian magick system in such a way as to make it understandable even to a novice. He also lacked the guts to let a woman know when he was through with her, or so Bonnie said. She was positioned to know at the time, despite her failing marriage to Chris Claremont, the comic book author who put the X-Men on the map. Chris was her third husband. I was her fourth, and last."
"The woman in question, called Bonnie, was, according to this article, the infamous Wiccan High Priestess Graymalkin that held court in New York in the late seventies and early eighties.
I had no idea she had been married to Chris Claremont, and seeing as how you and he were working together at this time, I was wondering if you might have some insights into his former wife.
Did she play the role of High Priestess in your presence? Was Chris involved with magic as well?
I noticed throughout the early runs of the New X-Men references to the Kabbalah (Tree of Life) and the Hellfire Club,in and of itself, had all the trappings of a Hermetic Order.
How much influence, if any do you feel she may have had on those early X-Men adventures? Amanda Sefton comes to mind..."
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13764
and also:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/11/weird-tales.html
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Man, I'm expressin' the HELL out of myself over here! The best conversations are the ones I have with myself. 
I've prattled on about this series before in this thread but here I go again (on my own, natch):
http://io9.com/rom-spaceknight-might-be-the-best-science-fiction-comi-1708849468
I missed out on this when it came out, and I never owned the toy. With any luck IDW will work out a deal with Marvel to reprint the original storyline. Fortunately, it is IDW that has the license, and they seem to have a good relationship with Marvel. They have even reprinted some of Marvel's work with their Artist's Edition line. http://www.idwpublishing.com/artists-edition/
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