Hello internetters, it’s Justin again, recently returned from a self-imposed comics blogging hiatus, and I wanted to talk to you about Marvel Comics. What are the odds, right?
I didn’t mean to leave it this long; I thought, within a week of my last post, I’d get the follow-up bashed out and posted, but it’s been—gosh, over a month. Why the delay? To find out the answer, I called myself up for an interview on the subject.
Hi, Justin, thanks for sitting down with us.
No problem, Justin.
You’re looking well.
That is a lie, and you know it, but I understand that you want to be polite. I will accept the compliment, insincere though it is.
Fine, let’s get to it. Last time, you said that you “have trouble really connecting with Marvel books these days.”
That is correct.
Are you reading any of Marvel’s current output?
No, actually.
Really? I would’ve thought Mark Waid writing an Avengers book would be an easy sell, at least. We love Waid, as I’m sure you know.
I know! I know. I did actually buy the first issue of All-New, All-Different Avengers. But I couldn’t really get into it. I tried out The Ultimates, too, because I hear such good things about Al Ewing, and the concept is neat.
So what’s wrong with the books that you’re not buying them?
Honestly? I think this is a case of, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
I don’t understand.
See, now we’re coming to why this post has been so long in coming. I’ve starting writing it a bunch of times, but I can’t seem to finish. I keep looking for a way into this post, and each way I’ve tried it so far has left me with a “Who farted?” grimace about my own ponderous thoughts. I thought maybe the interview format would help me get the words out of my head. You could ask questions and we could see how I arrived at my current attitudes.
Okay, I guess. So what do you mean by, “It’s not you, it’s me,” exactly?
Well, most people on the internet with Opinions About Comics like to believe that we are evaluating things based on solid, critical reasoning, right? “X is not good because Y.” And so, when “X” is a comic and it’s not good, you try to solve for “Y”.
You should have warned me you were going to use algebra. Okay, fine, what are some of these “Y” values?
I mean, there are a lot. For one, I don’t understand why writers don’t use narrative captions and thought bubbles like they used to.
“Balloons.”
Excuse me?
“Thought balloons,” not thought bubbles. John Byrne says—
Oh, never mind, the point is, these are fantastic narrative tools that are really only found in comic books, and people shun them now. I don’t understand why you’d cut yourself off from a tool that helps convey information quickly in a medium where space is at such a premium.
Watchmen doesn’t use narrative captions or thought balloons.
I guess. I mean, I suppose I understand if it’s a stylistic choice. But in the first years of the 21st century, it became gauche to use them, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. But you’re right, ultimately it is just a choice. But it’s a choice I don’t like.
Have all the status quo shakeups over the past couple of years put you off?
Yeah. I mean, it’s like Peter Parker is Tony Stark, and Doctor Doom is Iron Man, and several different people are Captain America. Somebody else is Wolverine—it’s a very DC sort of way of doing things. The Fantastic Four aren’t around anymore. There are a bunch of different Avengers teams, and they don’t live in Avengers Mansion—this is a huge deal to me, actually. It all feels wrong.
Even the way the books look. The logos aren’t “comic booky.” There’s no corner boxes. Everyone’s costume seems over-rendered, with all the seams. Computer coloring can do some wonderful things, but I feel like it overpowers the line art sometimes, and line art is what I like about comic art, you know? Even the glossy paper. It just bugs me.
So…basically, it’s not like it was when you were a kid?
Basically, yeah. Basically.
Well, isn’t that kind of…I mean, that’s such a whiny thing to say.
That’s what I thought too! So I fought it for a long time. I thought, “Argh, these guys keep messing it up, they don’t know what they’re doing.” It had to be, right? I had all these “Y” values that I thought contributed to “X is not good.” And then one day, I realized—what if “X” is good, and “X” is simply not for me?
I feel like you’re losing the plot with this algebra thing. Can you explain it a different way?
I just mean that…the things that I like about superhero comics—specifically Marvel comics—aren’t what Marvel comics are about these days.
Well, what are the things you like about superhero comics? What is your platonic ideal of the genre?
Well, Bronze Age Marvel Comics, right? The Bronze Age is the best. Funnily enough, a big part of the reason I think that is because of Wizard magazine in the 90s. People just remember them rigging the speculator market and hyping the crap out of what we called “T&A” books at the time, but those dudes were raised on Bronze Age comics, and they wrote about how great Roger Stern’s Amazing Spider-Man run was, and the Paul Smith issues of Uncanny X-Men, and Walt Simonson’s Thor, and Byrne’s FF. It was actually a huge influence on my tastes.
Wizard. Really? That’s kind of embarrassing.
Yeah. Actually, could you strike that? I want that off the record.
Oh sure, I’ll edit that out. So you’d like modern comics if they were more like Bronze Age comics?
Well, sure, I would. But, here’s the thing. I could spend all my time complaining about how Marvel’s not doing it “right,” and whining that the books should be more like Bronze Age comics. Or, you know…I could just buy Bronze Age comics. There are literally thousands that I haven’t read, right? And if you go to Half-Price Books, you can actually get them cheaper than new comics. I filled out my Byrne FF run at Half-Price Books, most of them at only a dollar a pop.
But don’t you miss out on the “newness” of it? I mean, you know how the stories all end, basically.
I guess. It is kind of a bummer, but I don’t know, even new comics, I don’t feel emotionally attached to them, either, so it doesn’t matter. Like, when they kill someone off or whatever, or that thing with Steve Rogers being a sleeper HYDRA agent and everybody on the internet flipped out…it doesn’t bother me or make me angry. Even big retcons. Like, remember when they said Professor Xavier recruited a whole other team of X-Men between what we see in Giant-Size X-Men #1? That bugged me at the time, but it doesn’t anymore. To be honest, they don’t even take place in the same continuity.
What do you mean?
I have this idea about “the Marvel Universe,” which—to me—is a fictional spacetime continuum originating with Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 and collapsing in the first years of the 21st century with New X-Men #114. (Arguably the end of Busiek’s Avengers run is the real “end” of the Marvel Universe, as I reckon it, but Morrison and Quitely’s first issue is a clearer line in the sand.) This “Marvel Universe” was a construct that, if you only chose to believe in it, allowed you to view forty years’ worth of comics created by hundreds of hands as a single, unbroken, internally consistent tapestry of events. It wasn’t really, but that was part of the game. That’s why they used to give out No-Prizes! Anyway, the current Marvel comics, I would argue, do not take place in this same “Marvel Universe,” but rather are comics based—loosely or otherwise—on this fictional history. I mean, all of Bendis’ retcons with the Illuminati—do any of those characters sound “right” in context? Do you believe that they really could have happened between the panels? So they are quite welcome to do whatever they like; it doesn’t affect what I consider to be the “real” stuff.
That’s not a criticism? It seems dismissive.
I really don’t mean it to be. You know, I meant what I said in my last post about how it’s great that different, more diverse audiences are getting into Marvel. Like, I’ve heard that young girls like Squirrel Girl. I don’t get Squirrel Girl—I mean, I get it, but it doesn’t speak to me. But like, maybe they shouldn’t have to cater to a thirty-two-year-old man all the damn time. So I actually have made my peace with it. None of this is actually a criticism of Marvel; it’s not me angrily insisting they’ve lost a loyal customer. It’s my deal that I don’t like the books. That’s what I mean by, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
But your tastes haven’t changed at all, it’s the tastes of the market. So it is the books that have changed, not you.
Well…maybe. But, you know, the last time they were doing things that felt “right” to me was the late 90s, and Marvel was bankrupt. (You know, Marvel did have a lot of good books in the late 90s, they just got overlooked in favor of the thirty million X-books they were publishing.) They probably wouldn’t be around today anyway if they kept pandering specifically to me and people like me.
So is that it for you, then? Are you never going to buy a new Marvel comic again?
No, I mean, I still read some things, in trade and such. Waid’s Daredevil run was great, really well done. I would even say I loved it. But I enjoy it in a different way than I enjoy what I narrowly define as a “Marvel comic.” Waid’s Daredevil and some random Bill Mantlo issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man both hit the pleasure centers of my brain, but they’re totally distinct pleasure centers. I mentioned New X-Men—I think it’s probably the “best” X-Men comics have ever been…but they don’t really seem to be of a piece with, say, the Claremont/Byrne run, even when they’re explicitly referencing it. And I think I enjoy Claremont/Byrne more. And Joss Whedon’s run was, again, based on the Claremont/Byrne comics, but they don’t really “fit” if you put them side by side.
It still seems like you’re retreating into the past and not leaving yourself open to new things. Remember when you were a kid and you thought it was lame when adults didn’t like to try new music?
I have to be honest, I’m getting to that point about music, too. Part of this, I think, is being a parent of young children. When your day consists of HEY HEY WHAT IS IT WHY ARE YOU CRYING OH YOU WANT SOME JUICE OKAY HERE IS SOME JUICE OH YOU SPILLED THE JUICE GREAT JOB, you’re tired at the end of the day and maybe would rather have something comforting instead of spending your few free hours trying something you might not even like.
That is a chilling analysis of your life.
Well, the kids’ll get older and I’ll eventually get time back for myself. But the point is, I think it’s okay to say, “I like the old stuff better”…as long as you don’t insist that the old stuff is better, objectively, somehow. At the end of the day, you’re gonna like what you’re gonna like. I’m quite happy to dive through quarter bins for old comics, and I’m happy that people like the new comics. And I think if you out there in Blogland reading this feel the same way, that “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, dammit,” that you should consider what it is you really want and whether forcing everyone into your own box is the best way to go about it.
That seems…healthy, I guess.
I think so. Unless you were being sarcastic.
Oh, I don’t even know anymore.
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I feel the same way. For a while, like maybe 2005-2012 or so, I was still able to find comics here and there that appealed to me. They didn’t feel like the comics I really, really loved, which are mostly from the late 1970s through the 1980s, but they had enough echoes of those comics that I could still derive enjoyment from them. But since then, Marvel has been taking incremental steps farther and farther away from the kind of thing I love, and I just don’t have any passion at all for it anymore.
The separate universe idea is a great way to describe it. When you see, for example, Peter Parker in 2014 talking about the first time he met the Fantastic Four, it feels like Alec Guinness’s Obi Wan Kenobi talking about the Clone Wars cartoon. They’re kind of the same thing, and a lot of the same names appear, but they are fundamentally different. The comics of today actually do feel like an entirely different medium than the comics of the 1970s. Like comparing Watchmen to Beetle Bailey.
The Golden Age readers who continued reading comics probably felt the same way once the Silver Age came around! 🙂
So I’m going to do what you don’t want me to do and I’m going to recommend something. It’s over now so you may have already read it.
A few months back I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited for a month. Doing so I read Journey into Mystery, Gillen’s Young Avengers and then finally Ewing’s Agents of Asgard.
After those three….I agree with you. I couldn’t get into another marvel book. (I almost did with Ant-Man but then SECRET WARS TIME ended it).
Like, I dunno. It just all felt…flat after those. :\
I’m kind of the opposite. I started reading comics when Guardians of the Galaxy came out, and just cannot get into Bronze Age stuff. I get that people like it, but the art looks ugly as heck to me and they’re awfully overwritten.
I’m also 34, but I didn’t read comics as a kid, which I think is the difference. All of my comics experience is post-Dark Age.
41 year old male here. I agree with you completely. It’s not them, it’s me. And like you, for the past 7 years, I have been buying mostly bronze age Marvels. And it’s been a race to buy obscure, random first appearances of characters before Marvel features them on screen. I’m still trying to get Hulk 254 for a first appearance of the U-Foes, even though the U-Foes will likely never be in a movie, unless it is a blatant attempt to rub it in Fox’s nose that they can’t make a Fantastic Four movie (so yes, apparently, the U-Foes will be in the next Hulk movie (damn)).
So basically, you can’t get over the narrow standards someone else handed you when you were 11-ish? You’re right, it’s not them.
I’ve been seriously reading comics since around 2002. At one point, I was reading EVERY Spider-man title, Astonishing X-Men, a ton of Ultimate titles, Daredevil, Runwaways, Fantastic Four etc etc.
I still buy comics, but the vast majority are Image and other non-superhero stuff. The only Marvel comics I get are Ms Marvel, Amazing Spidey and Daredevil, and I’ll probably keep getting those until they stop printing them in floppies. The ridiculous cost of Marvel issues is part of it. I mean, I think the latest Civil War is $6.00 US an issue? I can go to Book Depository and purchase a decent novel for that price.
The only DC comics I regularly get are Batman and Wonder Woman. So maybe I’m over superhero comics across the board? Don’t know.
This article made me chuckle, seeing as how excited I was to get the Son of Satan Classic tpb yesterday. And Waid’s DD was the last Marvel book I was reading, also. (And Fraction’s Hawkeye, but I see that Clint Barton as an entirely different character from the Barton I knew).
I should add that I’m reading an Omnibus of Invaders Classic at the moment and loving it.
I’m right there with you, for the most part.
I was a Marvel fangirl when I was a kid, specifically the X-books, and even more specifically the classic Excalibur*. Since getting back into comics, I find I don’t even have an interest in those. They just aren’t the same characters anymore. Probably goes without saying I have no use for the Illuminati stuff, either. It feels to me like Marvel indulges in a lot of character assassination these days, whether because they think the heroes are getting stale, or just because they need to put them in a place where they can continue to have massive hero vs hero crossovers.
But I do still find new titles I enjoy. Mostly they’re in the back-corners of the universe, away from the crossovers. Maybe what I really hate is just heroes who spend all their time fighting or plotting against other heroes?
*before some dude named Warren Ellis took over. He’d apparently never read an issue, and the characters I cared about became unrecognizable. And they were shoved to the side to make room for the addition of one of his standard-issue chain-smoking damaged smartasses anyway. Man, whatever happened to that hack? 😛
(I should add, I actually really like Warren Ellis when he’s writing his own stuff, and I loved the Authority. I just hate to see him write characters I used to know and like.)
Jason: Star Wars is a good point of comparison because you’re right, it’s hard to hear Guinness talk about meeting Luke’s father and what a good pilot and friend he was and reconcile it emotionally with watching Jake Lloyd win a podrace. TECHNICALLY, you can say it all lines up, but it’s not the perfectly plotted cycle Lucas used to make it out to be. But really, I have no use for anything outside the original trilogy, but I begrudge no one the Expanded Universe of their choosing.
JCG (and this applies to Alexander Hammil as well, actually!): That’s precisely why I want to avoid framing this like contemporary superhero comics are somehow objectively bad. I don’t want to be Sean Connery in the 60s talking about needing earmuffs to listen to the Beatles.
Michael P: We are in perfect agreement.
DanielT: Hawkeye is another case like Waid’s Daredevil. I did really enjoy Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye when I read it in trade, but in my head, he’s a totally different character, an adaptation of the guy for whom Stan Lee and Steve Englehart and Kurt Busiek wrote dialogue. Much like the CW’s Barry Allen is basically unrecognizable as “Barry Allen” (or even Wally West!) but I still like the show on its own terms.
Candlejack: Yeah, Ellis likes to tweak concepts to make them palatable to himself, and I respect that he makes no apologies for it. That’s why Planetary was such a nice sandbox for him to play around in.
My Clint Barton would never, ever EVER have murdered Bruce Banner.
But my Clint Barton died as soon as there was a Hawkeye character in the Marvel movies.
It’s funny how the Ultimate line of comics eventually failed, but the movies were based on them (much more so than the Classic universe) so now the Classic universe is becoming the Ultimate one.
Hell, I’d say even Matt Fraction’s Hawkguy would never have murdered Bruce Banner, but that’s a discussion for another day.
I’m kind of in the opposite boat, that I got into superhero comics through Marvel (technically, through Archie’s Ninja Turtles, but never mind) and I’m reading more Marvel now than ever. And I’ll admit, I was pretty close to writing out a “HEY MAN you just don’t UNDERSTAND” kind of reply, but then I realized that I have just the same response you have to the Marvel U at large but with the X-Men in particular.
I started reading the X-Men in the mid 90s, which was, well, not a high point critically, let’s say. It has a lot of the same marks of current X-Men: fractured teams, mutants in peril, plotlines that seem to fizzle out or go on forever with no inbetween. It didn’t bother me then, and doesn’t bother me in other books. And yet, nothing that’s coming out right now (maybe the All-New Wolverine title, which is really only tangentially an X-book) speaks to me any more. Maybe if I’d been reading the rest of Marvel back then, I’d be feeling that way about the other books too.
Except Vision. I feel like Vision would be a favorite through whatever permutation I might have been.
Reading your article, it actually felt like you were interviewing me.
There has always been an ebb and flow to my comic collecting (I started in the mid-1970s)…but these days, it’s starting to feel like an parting of the ways of sorts.
A little over 3 years ago, I dropped my final DC book. After many years of reading their titles even though I wasn’t enjoying them – hoping like hell that they’d turn it around at some point – I grew to realise that I really didn’t like their characters anymore…at least the modern era versions. It was like I’d outgrown them…or they’d outgrown me. And it’s not just their comics either. I have zero interest in their t.v. shows and movies too. But as others have already said, I was almost surprised to learn that I still enjoy reading their old stuff.
Now the same thing is happening with me and Marvel. This time though, I don’t want to wait for me to get so fed up with them that I can’t come back. So I’ve been scaling back on my Marvel buying…which has been surprisingly easy to do. Marvel replaced the characters I liked with some minty fresh versions that I feel little or no connection to. They disbanded the Fantastic Four (that was the book that got me addicted to super-hero comics in the first place). The Avengers have so many teams now that it all feels a little diluted. They certainly look unrecognizable to me now. Everything is being reimagined with young characters infesting everything. I love the Inhumans, but they’re a fractured group spread out across multiple titles. I don’t mind other Inhumans being around…but it’s the Royal Family that I’m really interested in reading about. And that story is starting to repeat with most of what Marvel puts out now.
I don’t blame DC or Marvel for changing things…but my interest in their current universes has taken a maybe fatal hit.
People say to me…”You just don’t like it when things change.”, And maybe they are right.
But here’s the thing: If I wanted something different to read – new characters or genres – why would I buy from Marvel or DC? Why wouldn’t I do what I have done – branched out into other publishers where “new” pretty much comes with the territory? I mean, if I want to read about super-heroes going forward, DC and Marvel are going to be the first place I look. But if I don’t…or I just want to experience good and great books that aren’t connected to some greater universe; where the writers and artists are just trying to tell their particular story, it’s Image or Dark Horse or any of the many other (non-DC/non-Marvel) publishers out there hoping someone like me will give them a try.
And what I have learned is that there are a lot of terrific titles being published right now. It took some experimentation to get there, but in the end my overall title count is on the rise again. I’m happier with my purchases now than I’ve been in a while.
And I’m in the process of getting out of Marvel while I still (overall) like their characters. I still go see their movies (most of them anyways) and enjoy them.
I just can’t afford to hold my nose and buy anymore. Not when I’m clearly not the target audience anymore. I sincerely hope, for their sake, that this readership they’re chasing actually shows up and buys what they’re offering.
Two points:
1. The “reason” Hawkeye murdered Bruce Banner and got away with it is because for the purposes of CW2, Hawkeye ceased to be a well-developed character with his own history and interiority and was reduced to serving as a crude metaphor. Specifically, he is a cop who shot an innocent black who made a furtive movement and he was acquitted because Bruce Banner was, in the minds of the jury, probably a n***** who needed killing.
2. I quit comics cold turkey years ago because I was simply worn down by the naked mercenary cynicism of Marvel editorial under Quesada and Alonzo. The last straw was Civil War Frontline #11, a comic book which I thought was /evil/ in the message it conveyed. For those who don’t remember CWF, the viewpoint characters were two newspaper reporters covering the conflict between Iron Man and Captain America. And in the last issue, they confront Tony Stark with all the evidence they’ve acquired about his criminal and even treasonous conduct … and then reassure him that they’re burying the story because they support his agenda.
Imagine “All the President’s Men” ending with Woodward and Bernstein reassuring Nixon that they were burying the Watergate scandal because they were such fans of the Cambodian bombing campaign. And then, after they left, Nixon broke down and cried because of the awful burden of knowing what’s best for everyone in the world.
Like Aulayan said, I would totally recommend Marvel Unlimited. While I still read most of the “new” books (a.k.a. the six-month old ones) on it*, I use it mainly to binge on Silver and Bronze Age books (of which there are lots of full or at least extensive runs). Over the past few years, I’ve gone through the first few decades of AVENGERS and FANTASTIC FOUR and am now through nearly thirty years worth of SPIDER-MAN. Add to that runs like TOMB OF DRACULA and the early Luke Cage/Iron Fist stuff, and I can stay on my iPad as long as I want to find more gems from those decades (having gone through Miller’s DAREDEVIL and Simonson’s THOR, I’m tempted to hop back to the beginning of either next).
Being a 36-year old in a small apartment, I don’t feel like collecting a bunch of hardcopy comics or trades anymore, but spending the annual fee to ‘stream’ all those books means that I can return to favorites almost whenever.
__________
*I agree with everything you saw about the current books – in recent years, it’s only really been Jonathan Hickman’s work at Marvel that sang to me, alongside others like Waid’s DAREDEVIL, Fraction’s HAWKEYE, and Aaron’s THOR, but I basically think of the “new” books as freebies “subsidized” by getting more than my money’s worth on the classic back catalog.
Wow, I just really feel the same way. For me, I think the Marvel universe ended around 1991-93. I just don’t like much of what was coming out after that. It’s when I quit collecting, after an entire ten or twelve years of getting everything I could. The older books make me feel better. I like them more. I even like the crappy old-school coloring techniques.
But I’m glad new people like the new books. Mostly not for me, and that’s fine. I’m a bronze age boy.
My father-in-law, interestingly, loves Golden Age stuff more than anything. (And not just Marvel.) It’s what he grew up with. And he loves that other people love later books. Just mostly not for him.
Great post. Bronze age rules!
My interest in Marvel comics started in the aftermath of House of M, peaked during Planet Hulk and mostly vanished during Secret Invasion.
Mostly the same with DC, but to a smaller extent, around the time Seven Soldiers was published.
I haven’t been part of their target audience for a long time, and I think it’s for the best. I find independent, creator-owned comics much more compelling.
I know the feeling. In my ideal world, DC would still make comics the way they did in the last half of the Nineties under Paul Levitz and Marvel would still be like they were around the time that Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson got married.
“My” Marvel was a company that stubbornly insisted that Bucky would stay dead. I remember reading an issue of West Coast Avengers (featuring the version of Hawkeye I consider the real one) where the writer ranted in the letter column about how lame Crisis On Infinite Earths was and vowed that Marvel would never reboot their universe. That felt right and proper.
“My” Marvel was very much a continuation of what they did in the Seventies, but with an understanding that nobody would dwell too much on the parts they didn’t want to use any more… sort of like DC in the early Eighties when Marvel guys took over some of their titles and they just ignored some of the dumber stuff from the Silver Age (resulting in things such as the best Teen Titans series ever). So, it was kind of a best of both worlds situation. You got to feel like you were part of a tradition going back to the Silver Age, but you didn’t need to know anything about Howard the Duck or Man-Thing or Rom if you didn’t want to.
Marvel stopped being for me somewhere around the time Quesada tried to get rid of costumes and secret identities.
The stuff they do now is not for me either. I can’t even enjoy the TV shows or the movies because I get annoyed that the characters aren’t basically how they were in 1989. I hated Guardians of the Galaxy because I couldn’t stop thinking about stuff like how Drax shouldn’t need knives because he used to be able to shoot beams out of his hands or how Yondu should have had a bow.
But some of that is just me getting older and reacting differently to stuff I would have liked as a kid. Take Ant-Man for example. I spent the whole moving thinking things like “shrinking only seems useful in certain very specific situations” or “Wouldn’t it be faster to just drive there in his friend’s van instead of riding his favorite winged ant?” or “Ant-Man’s life would be easier if he had a handgun.” If that same movie came out when I was eight, I would have loved the way Paul Rudd used the suit to cheat during fist fights.