Cipher wrote:Woah, woah, woah.
Golden Age comics, especially in the late '30s and early '40s, are 1) almost never about world-domination plots, and 2) super bomb. They're anything-goes pulp with the charm of the race to invent iconography and figure out how to use a nascent medium.
Plus, Superman as a working-class radical is *okay emoji*.
Clearly the stereotype being invoked here is that of the Silver Age (and its not thaaaaaaat far off from being fairly on the money either, though even then there are certainly some relatively rare, but super notable and important Silver Age books that buck a lot of those conventions in their own ways).
Golden Age U.S. comics are indeed a WHOLE other different (and vastly better than Silver) breed unto themselves.
Polyphase Avatron wrote:precita wrote:If you're speaking of mainstream comics, the vast majority of DC/Marvel has aged poor.
Comics from the 30's-60's are too cheesy/silly or simple to hold up to today's standards. We know what these comics were like, characters were bland with silly world domination plots that we see parodied in shows today.
Yeah, but they have a certain charm to them because of that.
That... is HIGHLY debatable at best. I would contend personally that no, no they
absolutely do not contain one bit of "charm" to them because of those factors. Sometimes occasionally they do, sure (when they go really and especially above and beyond mind bendingly epic levels of daft stupidity), but more often than not on average they tend to be merely brain-damaged and witless beyond belief. And on those occasional instances where the stupidity does cross over into legit unintentional comedy, it is clearly a case of the reader laughing AT and not WITH the material.
Note: This is regarding the Silver Age, so this would be applying to comics of the 1950s and 60s. 30s-40s are the Golden Age, which tend to overall be MUCH better in comparison. Bronze Age (1970s and early-most 1980s) are where things start becoming actually readable and worthwhile again.
Polyphase Avatron wrote:Kunzait_83 wrote:the legions upon legions of generic crap (I mean take your pick here, there are far too many examples, but I'll single out pretty much 99% of anything having to do with The Avengers across virtually any given decade: probably one of the single most consistently ungodly boring and dull of the "major marquee names" in superheroes)
Call me a hipster, but I was a fan of the Avengers before the movies came out, and they had tons of great stories. The Kang Dynasty, Under Siege, Ultron Unlimited, the Kree/Skrull war... all good stuff.
By that same "hipster" token, I've been reading comics since the latter half of the 1980s. I was more than well aware of who the Avengers were and read more than my share of their storylines decades long before something akin to the MCU was ever anything more than a wet dream fantasy in the minds of a typical fanboy of the time. And with that having been said, my view of them as "the 2nd most boring major superhero team in all of comics" (1st going to the Justice League) still stands firm. I've read Kang Dynasty, I've read Under Siege, I've read the Kree/Skrull War, Ultron Unlimited, etc. God help me, I remember Operation Galactic Storm, and *shudder* The Crossing.
The Avengers was NEVER a good comic. Ever. Ever-ever. Until Bendis' Disassembled storyline and then the MCU films, almost NO ONE at ANY point in history (outside of the Silver Age, their commercial heyday) reading comics prior gave so much as two flying fucks about The Avengers and the book/team spent numerous
decades before eternally wallowing and staggering about in the perpetual shadow of vastly better, more cutting edge and mold-shattering books like the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Daredevil for damn good reason.
While Marvel's X books were trailblazing a daring new vision of superhero comics as voices of counter-cultural thinking and tackling the most sensitive and volatile of finger-on-the-pulse social and political issues (while presenting a TRULY diverse and staggeringly well developed and fleshed cast of characters who were boundlessly more human and relatable than just about anything else coming from the Big Two at the time), Avengers was content to spend the better part of 40-someodd years dithering around in boilerplate Saturday morning cartoon "gotta save the world from the Evil Robots/Alien Space Invaders" schlock shenanigans.
At the same time that Avengers was going through its *ahem* "magnum opus" epic story of the Avengers' mansion being attacked and destroyed by the Masters of Evil (Mwahahahaha!) the X-Men and their satellite books were tackling geopolitical issues like slavery, apartheid, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and of course social ills like racism/bigotry, social Darwinism, poverty, the AIDS epidemic, etc. All under the veneer of allegorical superhero trappings. And all with VASTLY better - and
insanely more experimental - artwork from the likes of everyone from Bill Sienkiewicz, Jai Lee, Arthur Adams, Jon J. Muth, Sam Kieth, Barry Windsor-Smith, and on and on.
AND while still making time in between for more "out there" silly/ridiculous storylines and ideas (the Mojoverse, Siege Perilous, Excalibur, etc) whose inspirations came less from boilerplate Silver Age cliches and cartoon nonsense, and more from the kinds of drugged out, hallucinogenic dreamscapes that feel much more of a piece with the surrealist works of people like Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut than they do Z grade Saturday matinee serials with mustache twirling supervillains.
There's a damn well justified reason for why The Avengers - up until Bendis and the MCU - went largely ignored and laughed off by even much of hardcore comic book nerd culture of the latter 70s, 80s, and 90s (aside from their own niche-within-a-niche fanbase) while X-Men just grew and grew and grew into Marvel's overwhelmingly biggest non-Spider-Man success story (inevitably being ran thoroughly into the ground themselves obviously, but still not after a helluva near 20-ish year run of mostly solid work): they had the cutting edge premise, the creative talent, the stellar character lineup, and the balls to push the envelope and go to places that NO other mainstream superhero comic before (or since) would ever dare to.
The Avengers meanwhile had cheesy, awful villains, cliche "beat up bad guys/save the world" plots, and a central cast of characters whose potentials were FAR better and more successfully explored in their own solo books (which mostly contain at bare minimum one solidly great, classic run apiece; Cap had Jim Steranko and then later Ed Brubaker, Hulk had Peter David of course, Thor had Walt Simonson, Black Widow had a kickass supporting role throughout Frank Miller's Daredevil, and Iron Man had... uh... that Armor Wars story that was kinda fun?
Seriously, even solo Iron Man was fairly worthless) than at almost ANY point when they were all together as a team doing
painfully little else besides running around and punching green spacemen and robots at almost any given interval (to say nothing of their inane, transparent, and torturous attempts at ripping off the X-Men at various points in time, to humiliatingly cringe-worthy results).
Seriously: try slogging through ANY given Avengers storyline pre-Bendis. Hell, even from Bendis onward. Literally almost ANY story of ANY era. The Avengers were, are, and always will remain a fucking tedious snore and the single most uninteresting and unappealing aspect of the Marvel Universe. If the X-Men were The Beatles: artful and envelope pushing iconoclasts, and the street level heroes (Daredevil, Punisher, Cloak & Dagger, Moon Knight, Blade, Ghost Rider, etc) were the Rolling Stones: hard rocking, cooler-than-the-rest badasses among badasses, then the Avengers were The Monkeeys: vanilla, milquetoast, whitebread goobers through and through.