posted
I'll stand by Irredeemable and my assessment of it over on Random Review corner. It's a flawed book, but "grim n' gritty" is a little too shoehorning a term for my tastes. It's got plenty of other merit including some complexity in theme. The characters have been a little flat, but that's improving a lot.
"Grim n' Gritty", to me, implies two-dimensional/black & white/violence for violence's sake--and that ain't the Irredeemable/Incorruptible Waidverse at all. Most DC and Marvel books have more violence than these titles, have very little thematic value and are simpler in their moral divisions.
Yeah, these are not shiny, happy heroes, but calling them grim n' gritty does Mark Waid and Boom! Studios a disservice. I respect your opinion, FL, but I'll respectfully disagree and assert that Waid is turning in work worthy of his heyday.
-------------------- "Suck it, depressos!"--M. Lash
From: The Underbelly of Society | Registered: Jul 2003
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OT, I just read your assessment, and it's enough to convince me to give the book another chance. Maybe I'll browse through the second trade, since it sounds like that's where the story picks up steam.
And I should clarify that I don't have anything against Waid exploring the dark side of superpowers. I loved Empire. The difference to me is that Empire was ground-breaking and briskly paced, where Irredeemable seems "decompressed" in a way that was fashionable in the recent past but is currently becoming unfashionable, as well as highly derivative of Miracleman and Squadron Supreme and other stories. Despite what might have seemed like a rather dismissive reaction to Irredeemable, I really did WANT to like it. Maybe the second time around will be different.
Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
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quote:Originally posted by Fanfic Lass: Re: Wolfman, the kind of success I was referring to was not fan acclaim, but commercial success. NTT sold truckloads and highly influential. Same with COIE. What I wonder is whether this degree of commercial success permanently took away the "hunger" that I think a writer needs in order to stay good.
I don't know much about his post Teen Titans stuff, but with other creative sorts, I've noticed that sometimes when one is called a 'genius' too many times by the fans, it seems that a decline is soon to follow.
Since I'm not up on Wolfman's later work, I'll expand on this idea with a creator I do know something about;
The more 'revolutionary' Joss Whedon was said to be, the less he seemed to care about the consistency of the stories he was crafting, and the more characterization was abandoned for quippy one-liners (since that's what he was 'famous for') or 'power shots,' etc. to the point where one could read lines in a script and recognize that he'd written them in the voice of a completely different character, but since that character wasn't in this scene, some other character, who would *never* talk like that, was going to utter those lines anyway, so that the 'joke' got told.
The more 'feminist' he was said to be, the more he felt free to reverse his originally subversive 'blonde cheerleader goes into alley and kicks vampires ass, instead of getting eaten by it' base and begin portraying his female characters as abusers, unable to handle power, repeatedly running away / giving up, etc.
The more 'gay-friendly' he was said to be, the more freedom he felt to gank off or turn 'dark' gay characters, to serve the characterization / story of the straight protagonist.
In Joss' case, his reactions to fan praise seemed to be corrosive / destructive to his very real creative genius.
On the other hand, I liked what he did with Astonishing X-Men, and, from what I understand of it, he had the basic outline for that arc (if not the specific scenes or dialogue), right up to the final act, planned before he started writing it, which kind of took the power out of the fan's hands to push him in other directions.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that he was pandering, in his earlier works, as being influenced to push back against fan reactions (anti-pandering, really, but still letting the inmates run the asylum, since he should have stuck to his own plans and not kept changing them based on fan reaction), in some cases deliberately shooting down their assumptions, or even, by his own admission, specifically targetting characters because they were much-loved, because it would have a greater emotional impact. That may have been a true thing, but it ended up making it seem like being a fan of a character was setting a target on that character, and I remember quite well people commenting that their favorite character got very little screen time and wasn't very popular and how *happy* that made them, because it meant that Joss wouldn't kill them...
I carried that notion with me into Astonishing, and was pleasantly surprised that he didn't 'go back to that well' as it were.
Registered: Aug 2006
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Good post, Set. I admit I'm not up on my Buffy/Whedon lore, and that I think Astonishing X-Men had a superb first arc and it was all downhill from there. But what you describe as happening to Whedon is what I feel has happened to a lot of writers, the most recent cases being Geoff Johns and Gail Simone. Both of them grew increasingly heavy-handed, self-indulgent and gimmicky in direct proportion to sales and acclaim for their earlier work, both weathered a backlash, and both have now retreated to the safety of revisiting old haunts -- Flash and Birds of Prey, respecitively. That all this happened within a relatively few amount of years is pretty sad.
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Set, you bring up a really good point about creators being 'labeled' as genius and then buying into it; and then pushing back so their subsequent works take on all sorts of bad qualities.
What's funny is the people calling them 'genius' are probably like 2.5% of the fanbase, while most people don't have the time or inclination to find a method of giving praise in the first place. So the other 97.5% of people are probably left wondering what the hell happened--why has the writer gone in the other direction?
Great analysis of Whedon. I've never really seen any early Buffy so I've missed anything that might make fans enjoy him. Most of Joss's work I've seen or read has come across as pretty weak IMO. Astonishing's first arc was really great, like you & FL say; I agree with FL that afterward it gradually declined to the point of the last arc where I hardly cared anymore.
From: If you don't want my peaches, honey... | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Fanfic Lass: OT, I just read your assessment, and it's enough to convince me to give the book another chance. Maybe I'll browse through the second trade, since it sounds like that's where the story picks up steam.
Hey, that's cool. I wasn't necessarily offended by your reaction, but I did want to avoid labelling what Waid is doing in those stories. But your impression really underlines what I ended up with as my recommendation in my review:
quote:Originally posted by Officer Taylor: If you decide to try it, consider trades or buying complete issue sets on eBay. If you pick up a random issue, I think you won't be all that impressed.
Criticizing it for being decompressed is a very fair criticism! I'm still enjoying it enough in monthly doses to continue supporting Irredeemable in serialized form, but I can see how the trades would be much more gratifying. That's part of what I take into account in my reviews is whether or not to recommend the trades or the floppies, and this one was squarely on the trade side.
However. any time you have an intricate, serialized series such as this one, I'd NEVER recommend skipping to the second trade, Stealth--even if the second trade is "better". There's a decent level of accessibility in each issue, but I couldn't imagine starting this one in medias res. Maybe it's more practical than doing same with, say, The Walking Dead, but I'd definitely say start from the beginning in this case. (This assumes you read an individual issue and not the first trade, of course--you only said that you'd check out "the floppies", so I'm not sure.)
That said, I still can't promise that you'll like them!
-------------------- "Suck it, depressos!"--M. Lash
From: The Underbelly of Society | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Cobalt Kid: Set, you bring up a really good point about creators being 'labeled' as genius and then buying into it; and then pushing back so their subsequent works take on all sorts of bad qualities.
Even if the writer doesn't buy into it - and unless they confess that they did, we really don't know - once the "genius" tag is thrown around often enough to stick, everything they do is colored by tag. So even if they do something that is decent but not exemplary, you can seea backlash kick in.
posted
So I gave Irredeemable's two trades a more considered re-read.
Sad to say, it still didn't do it for me.
The most interesting thing was Grant Morrison's afterword in the first trade about how he and Waid don't want to be "boxed in." I'm sure he and Waid are doing the best work that they can at this point in their lives and their careers, but Morrison rarely clicks with me and Waid's recent work seems to be missing some crucial ingredient I can't quite find the words to describe. The best way I can put it is that Waid's best work in the past was driven by the tension between full-color exhuberant joy in fantasy worlds and the grey knottiness of reality. Irreedeemable suggests to me that the tension has been resolved and Waid has fully gone over to the grey.
posted
Did you absolutely LOATHE it, Stealthie? Any redeemable ( ) qualities at all? Can you distill what didn't do it for you beyond its relative darkness?
quote:Originally posted by Fanfic Lass: The best way I can put it is that Waid's best work in the past was driven by the tension between full-color exhuberant joy in fantasy worlds and the grey knottiness of reality. Irreedeemable suggests to me that the tension has been resolved and Waid has fully gone over to the grey.
I can see how you'd fill that way. I, however, feel he's just scratching the itch to explore darker themes as opposed to it being his new reality or anything. I feel he's revisiting the themes he bagan with Kingdom Come and Empire with a slightly different spin. His participation among the Spidey creative team leads me to believe Waid is far from disinterested in telling more upbeat fare.(Granted, I haven't read any of his Spidey contributions, and reviews of them I've read have been mixed.)
-------------------- "Suck it, depressos!"--M. Lash
From: The Underbelly of Society | Registered: Jul 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Outdoor Miner: Even if the writer doesn't buy into it - and unless they confess that they did, we really don't know - once the "genius" tag is thrown around often enough to stick, everything they do is colored by tag.
And that is a good point. The most enthusiastic fans often oversell their favorite creator, and leave those picking up their work with a built-in desire to 'prove them wrong' by finding fault with the product of this 'hard sell.'
I felt this way about Sandman, having heard it talked up so much and so fervently that I wasn't sure if the appropriate reaction was to have multiple spontaneous orgasms or to be bodily snatched up in celestial Rapture, but, after reading some of it, thinking that it wasn't all that life-changing of an event.
Registered: Aug 2006
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OT, I didn't loathe it, but it did leave me cold. It just all seems so...second-hand to me. I had mentioned before that it seems to owe a lot to Miracleman and Squadron Supreme and similar stories, whereas Empire was fresh and original.
I haven't read his Spidey stories (or anyone else's recent Spidey stories, not even Roger Stern's!) Cobie has, though. Care to chime in, Cobie? Does Waid's more light-hearted work feel to you like it has any conviction?
quote:Originally posted by Set: I felt this way about Sandman, having heard it talked up so much and so fervently that I wasn't sure if the appropriate reaction was to have multiple spontaneous orgasms or to be bodily snatched up in celestial Rapture, but, after reading some of it, thinking that it wasn't all that life-changing of an event.
I loved Sandman, but this is similar to how I felt after reading Umbrella Academy with all the buildup here and all over the 'net. I could kinda see why people liked it, but it left me cold, personally.
quote:Originally posted by Fanfic Lass: OT, I didn't loathe it, but it did leave me cold. It just all seems so...second-hand to me. I had mentioned before that it seems to owe a lot to Miracleman and Squadron Supreme and similar stories, whereas Empire was fresh and original.
My major criticism of Irredeemable relates to the kind of disconnect you refer to. For me, it originates from the heroes of the Paradigm being on the two-dimensional side and not very well-rounded. Recent issues have improved this shortcoming somewhat, I feel. A lot of this has centered around waid's deeper examination of Bette Noir and her past with the Plutonian. Not sure if that began in the trades. This has dovetailed into better character work for the other characters as they are affected by what they learn.
quote:I haven't read his Spidey stories (or anyone else's recent Spidey stories, not even Roger Stern's!) Cobie has, though. Care to chime in, Cobie? Does Waid's more light-hearted work feel to you like it has any conviction?
Set, I agree with you about Sandman.
Cobie's reviews of Waid's Spidey stories have reflected the hit-or-miss nature of the criticism of professional reviewers, but I invite him to respond.
[ June 04, 2010, 09:13 PM: Message edited by: Officer Taylor ]
-------------------- "Suck it, depressos!"--M. Lash
From: The Underbelly of Society | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Officer Taylor: My major criticism of Irredeemable relates to the kind of disconnect you refer to. For me, it originates from the heroes of the Paradigm being on the two-dimensional side and not very well-rounded. Recent issues have improved this shortcoming somewhat, I feel. A lot of this has centered around waid's deeper examination of Bette Noir and her past with the Plutonian. Not sure if that began in the trades. This has dovetailed into better character work for the other characters as they are affected by what they learn.
The trades haven't reached that point yet -- they're only 4 issues each, I guess so they can keep the prices low.
I still WANT to like this, because it's Mark Waid, so I'll probably look at the third trade whenever it comes out and see what I think.
As for comics that failed to live up to the hype, my own personal bugaboo would have to be Gail Simone's first run on Birds of Prey.
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) qualities at all? Can you distill what didn't do it for you beyond its relative darkness?
