A few whiles back I did a list of “reasons I will love comics forever,” which were mostly awesome panels. I haven’t had a lot of those lately; there just aren’t as many moments in comics these days that make me sit up and go “yeeeEEAAAAAAH!” I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or because I have. Possibly it’s both. Aging, whether it be you or an artform, can suck in this regard.
But that having been said, I absolutely adore this bit from Prince of Power #4, a scene that is so totally comics that it really couldn’t have originated anywhere else:
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I loved their take on Hercules. What a great, fun book. Where else would you see Herc tweak Thor’s nips with a big purple NURP sound effect?
Greg Pak’s work on Hulk/Herc/Cho has been truly great work. It’s definitely been the most enjoyable run I’ve read for quite some time.
Yes, but then right after that scene comes a bullshit ending that is basically “NOW STAY TUNED FOR THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT OF *CHAOS*, WHERE DEAD HEROES WILL COME BACK TO LIFE, AND BASICALLY IT IS A CROSS BETWEEN BLACKEST NIGHT AND FABLES VOLUME TWELVE SO WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG, ALSO NO ENDING FOR YOU EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A MINISERIES.”
Comics, everyone!
And I love Fred Van Lente dearly but when I see him next I will have a long, interesting, fun conversation and then stop RIGHT in the middle of a sentence and squirt vinegar up his nose.
If I heard that dialogue being spoken I would cringe, but in comic form it’s slightly less offensive.
Now that I think about it, they could’ve left this page without any dialogue at all. The faces are expressive enough.
I’ve pretty much loved all things Hercules. That sort of buddy/road trip comic is funny and awesome.
Speaking of “NO ENDING FOR YOU EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A MINISERIES”, did Persons Unknown suck huge or what? Am I right people? Wocka wocka wocka!
“…ALSO NO ENDING FOR YOU EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A MINISERIES”
Herc came back from the dead and Amadeus and Delphyne got back together. That’s a good ending, even if it did have a sequel hook stuck on as well.
I’m haven’t read this yet (just finished Assault on New Olympus), but I love everything Van Lente & Pak have been doing on Incredible Herc.
It has an ending (Amadeus and Delphyne get together, Vali is defeated, Herc returns), but it’s also a prelude to another story (which is hardly unknown in other realms of fiction), and it was marketed as such from the start. It’s essentially an arc in the ongoing Herc saga.
My favourite bit about Delphyne’s line there is that since she’s an Amazon, you could conceivably read that as not sarcastic at all.
@SC: Uh, I think that is the intent of the author. ^^
Also-> Avengers: The Children’s Crusade was great fun this week and gives us the tantalizing idea that Clint Barton may have slept with a sexbot built by Doctor Doom. ^^
My only problem with the ending was that it felt rushed–I can see where it flies by so quickly on the way to the tease for the next story that it seems like more middle instead of a true end. It felt like they really needed a fifth issue to spend on Amadeus experiencing godhood and wrapping everything up before they moved on to setting up Chaos War.
Then I realized that once Amadeus attained godhood, of course everything wraps up so quickly, because he’s his own literal deus ex machina. So that was probably deliberate.
“If I heard that dialogue being spoken I would cringe”
I too cringe when people in stories say things that… aren’t really said any differently from the way anyone else, anywhere, says things.
@ ilan
At this point I’m pleasantly surprised when a mini from Marvel or DC actually has an ending. Remember how Loners was basically written as the slowly paced first arc (heck, those six issues read like the first HALF of an arc) of an onging that never happened? Remember how only two things happened in the Drax mini and they both happened in the first couple issues? Remember how nothing happened in Annihilation: Wraith and it never even spilled over into the other cosmic books? Remember how Villains United was the only Infinite Crisis lead-in that felt like a complete story? Actually we shouldn’t even bring up recent DC books with the word “Crisis” in them and their tie-ins.
Also, it should be noted that the Chaos War thing doesn’t come in completely out of left field. I mean, yes, it’s stretching back a bit now, but the Big Bad for Chaos War is Amatsu-Mikaboshi, whose last appearance, during the “God Squad” Secret Invasion arc of Incredible Herc, had pretty clearly set up that he’d be coming back to Earth someday with all of the power that he usurped from the Skrull gods and fuck some shit up. I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a couple of years now, and I’m not really surprised they’re using the resolution of the latest chapter of Herc and Cho’s story to set it up.
Magnuskin- If Hawkeye did, in fact, have sex with a Doombot, then that Doombot would instantly have become good. Clint Barton has a magic penis that clouds the minds of women, alien women and women shaped robots.
@SomeGuy – Alas, she was not long for the world. ^^
I think ya’ll are missing the point here. That panel. . . That panel is a piece of sublime beauty and balls-out pure comics goodness. And that is the truth.
Maybe I’m missing out on the sublime goodness, but it can’t be in the first panel’s art. Buddy’s face looks like it’s been stretched by a widescreen TV that’s set up wrong, Ms. Green looks like she’s sneering when I think she’s supposed to be smiling, and those cheekbones on both of them…
@Beacon: that’s it on the nose. The Annihilation/Cosmic stuff seems to be allergic to endings, or even “save points”.
At least the Van Pakte stuff gives us moments like this, though.
@Eric S. Smith
Boo-fucking-hoo. Enjoy the awesomeness and stopped getting bogged down in bitchery.
@ Ilan
I thought – with some exceptions like the one I mentioned or the fact that we haven’t seen Cami in years – the first two Annihilations (and arguably War of Kings) did a decent enough job at setting up a threat, having the heroes form unlikely alliances to fight it, having the heroes defeat/neutralize the threat, and then moving on with the new status quo. That’s as close to an ending as I expect in serialized fiction*.
Realm of Kings just kind of happened without anything remotely resembling a resolution though. It just hangs there.
*That reminds me. I’m still a little annoyed that the real ending to Civil War happened in Captain America #25. “Self-contained mini” my butt.
“That reminds me. I’m still a little annoyed that the real ending to Civil War happened in Captain America #25.”
I don’t really see how that’s the “real” ending; the ending of Civil War was Cap’s decision to stand down. His assassination was a plot by the Red Skull that was completely unrelated to the Civil War.
If CW ended with #7 then the story ended with the world’s greatest soldier throwing up his hands and saying “I know the SHRA tramples all over the civil rights of a bunch of good Sumerians who mostly didn’t ask to have powers in the first place and some heinous war crimes have been committed while enforcing it but those firemen seem really upset so I surrender”
CA#25 at least offered some closure.
How? CW #7 resolved that miniseries’ conflict (albeit not in a way that many people found satisfactory), which was the superhero rebellion against Registration.
Cap then getting killed by the Red Skull in a completely unrelated plot offers no closure to that story at all. It would have come totally out of nowhere.
But it DIDN’T resolve the rebellion story. They captured the leader of the rebellion but most of the rebels remained rebels right up until the SHRA was repealed. You could argue that it ended Cap’s participation in the story but it seemed to me that he was still planning to fight it in court so his being gunned down on the way into a trial is the real ending to his involvement in CW.
” of good Sumerians who mostly ”
I think I missed the part of Civil War where the Babylonian gods showed up. Maybe it was in that crappy Front Line sister series?
The rebel heroes were a fraction of the size post-CW; Cap’s standing down marked registration’s emergence as the status quo for the next several years of publication. And Cap’s death still has nothing whatsoever to do with the story of CW; it doesn’t belong in that miniseries (not to mention it would have adversely affected how Brubaker told his story).
I think the important thing to remember is, Mark Millar doesn’t have enough respect for his readers or his craft to do a good job.
*facepalm*
“Samaritans”
I need to stop trusting my spell-check to compensate for my awful spelling.
And – Cap aside – the Anti-Reg side didn’t suffer significant enough looses at the end of CW for there to be any real differences between the middle of the mini and the end of it (“Oh no! Justice sold out to the Man! However are we going to move on?”).
CW works fine as an Iron Man story (though the prelude where he’s fighting against the registration gives him a fuller arc) but it falls short of being a full Cap story unless you know he was robbed of his day in court.