Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Lardy's Roundtable (Gym'll's Ed.): Grant Morrison

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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!

Thanks, OT.

I'll start with the first trade.

And I'll definitely share my thoughts.

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.

You're right, OM. We really don't know. But the sea change in the quality of the writers' work would often seem to speak volumes.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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?

Set, I agree with you about Sandman.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lardy summarizes my feelings towards Waid's recent Spidey work, which mirrors the general publics too I believe: they are really hit or miss. Specifically he had some really great stories early on when he joined the Webheads but then got mixed up with screwing up Peter's personal life--and the way he did it was a bit of a big plunder.

I'm going to quote some of those specific reviews from the Spidey thread but then add some more commentary, as I usually review the Spidey stories en masse so I don't spend too much time on them.

What we’ve basically seen on Spider-Man is Waid being hit & miss. The above would make it seem like he started off great and then his latest stories have been crappy, but he’s also had one additional story with a new version of the Vulture which fell somewhere in the middle; not a bad story but he did another ‘misstep’ in which Peter purposely fakes a photo and is caught and then publicly humiliated and fired. Ugh.

He’s where Waid is good & bad: in his first story with the Shocker, Waid was able to tell a solid story where Peter actually went through something during the course of the issue. It was both serious but had a sense of fun to it, where Waid was enjoying himself. In the second story, Waid really showcased how he can use his writing talent while using the context of a supporting character’s larger history—something he’s done time and time again elsewhere. So these two stories really were excellent, with Waid at his finest.

Then his next three, which include the above Michele Gonzales debacle, the kind of partially being responsible for crippling Dexter Bennett and the ‘Peter faking a photo and having his reputation ruined’ fall into the territory that Dan Slott usually falls into: he tried to ‘screw up’ Peter’s personal life based on some false-sense of what Spidey is all about as a series and goes way too far, taking things beyond the point of where it feels forced and out of place.

But they go beyond that relatively minor subplot point; the Electro story just felt wrong in that it had Spider-Man acting far too selfish and immature. He’s been at this a long time now—he should have known better than to be so careless. That I feel is Waid’s biggest mistake: he has this notion that Peter is a very selfish individual that is always screwing up. That’s really not the case historically; there is some of that, but almost always, Pete would purposely allow bad things to happen in order to help someone or for the greater good. He was selfish in the same way a teenager or college kid was selfish—NOT because he was a selfish person. I think perhaps some of the jaded, cynicism FL refers to above is taking effect. Waid is writing Peter to be a ‘pretty decent person though not always that good’; for the first 30 years of Spidey’s life, he was the very definition of a hero, albeit a tragic one.

In the larger context of crafting a story (pacing, plots, etc.), he is still a master. He hasn’t lost a step at all in that regard and its his ability to do that where you can see Waid is still having a lot of fun, and it translates into the material. His dialogue is still great with the one caveat that sometimes his having Peter joke is a little forced. He’s not as bad as Slott (who when he tries to make Spidey funny, makes him anything but) but he’s not as effortless and hilarious as Joe Kelly (who has taken to writing Spidey like few others have before).

FYI, of the current Spider-Man writers (the Webheads as they call themselves), I’d rank the very best to be Joe Kelly & Fred Van Lente who are doing as good a job as I’ve ever seen before, including EVERYONE whose ever written Spider-Man. Plus, Roger Stern is doing stories and they’ve all been terrific. Bob Gale & Zeb Wells fall somewhere in the middle, followed by Waid, whose above missteps are too glaring for me not to take issue. Worst of the bunch is Dan Slott, whose stories are really pretty bad. Guggenheim was in the Gale / Wells category.

In a way, I’m worried this post will either be too positive or too negative about Waid. It’s really neither—he is very much hit or miss and when he’s a miss, it usually has several redeeming factors that are just mired by a few serious missteps.

You were both talking about letdowns and I've kind of got one that wasn't so much a letdown where it had been hyped up and I couldn't understand why, but a letdown in where I was collecting it as it was coming out and other people were praising it and I was left wondering why: Jim Shooter's Threeboot Legion.

I honestly wanted to post: "Are you guys out of your minds? This is a giant steaming pile of shit!!!" I could not for the life of me understand why people thought it was any good. I thought it was the equivalent of a man dying of thirst getting a glass of Sunny D--you think you love it at the time but its only because you're dying of thirst.

I dunno, I guess many of us were so looking forward to Shooter coming on that we tended to overlook some of the problems. Also didn't hurt that Manapul was the latest in a long line of terrific artists to cut his teeth on the LSH. I'm not gonna back down and agree with you that it was crap, but I can say in hindsight that it wasn't all that and a bag of chips. In some ways, though, it just felt more like a Legion book than it had been previously in Threeboot. For me that was enough.

I also think if Shooter were allowed to end it as he planned, it wouldn't have hurt!

I admit my above post is over the top. And Manupal's phenomenal art took the sting out of it--I'm certainly glad I own the issues for that.

I've actually been trying to think of other letdowns I've had but can't quite remember. Power Girl was one that another more recent.

With his work on this particular book, I'd keep in mind that even though he's the writer on his issues, the plot points could not be 100% his. A book written in this style must have plenty of plot points hashed out by the group of them. It sounds like a lot of his storytelling fundamentals are still sound, but I'm sure Peter's sleeping with that chick (or not?) was a beat that the team decided to go ahead with as was that possible way out with it being Mary Jane. Sounds like the issues with Peter's selfish portrayal may have been Waid's, though.

Anyhow, despite all appearances, I'm not trying to be a Waid apologist, guys!

Lots of people dig that one, too, though! I quit after two issues, but all the praise makes me second-guess a little. How far did you get?

Three issues.

I think I voted it the single worst comic book of Comic Book Review Month I read all month. The only way I'll buy it is if I can white out all the words and just look at Amanda's art.

In regards to Waid, you're absolutely correct and I should have said that. All major plot points are hashed out in advance so I'm not sure if Waid is to blame or not. He certainly seems to be willing to be the trigger man though. It's the portrayal of Peter has selfish, immature and somewhat of an idiot that I don't like (you kind of took my thoughts and ironed them out for me ).

Story fundamentals are all still solid. If you asked me: okay, yes or no, would you recommend I buy the Waid Spider-Man issues? I'd probably say yes.

What you mean to say, Des, is: "Once again, Lardy, you have crystallized my thoughts eloquently!"

(Wonder if anyone gets the reference? )

Oh, I thought of some other letdowns of more classic stuff:

- Silver Age JLA stories that aren't JLA/JSA crossovers. Generally the pre-Satellite years aren't all that much to write about unless there is a JSA crossover or an awesome guest-star (Batgirl, Zatanna, etc.). Gardner Fox was a legend and immense talent but I kind of feel like he did the JLA as more of a favor to Julie than something he truly loved like Adam Strange, Atom, Hawkman, Wyoming Kid or his sci-fi stuff.

- Silver Age X-Men - LWers know I'm a major Silver Age Marvel fan and a devout Kirby-aholic, but the Silver Age X-Men is probably my least favorite of the entire line. If I don't reread it anytime soon, I'm cool with it. Other than the Ka-Zar issue, the Namor issue and the Avengers issue, it just never really clicked with me. My father always said it was his least favorite of the Marvels as well so maybe that influenced me. Then again, the way the X-Men are more associated with the All-New, All-Different era probably is evidence more people feel as I do.

I will say, neither of these runs have ever quite gotten quite the serious universal praise as some other things.

What about the Neal Adams run? Or do you consider that more in the Bronze Age category?