[brydeemer]

The heroic age has begun.

Listen here

Bry

[inflames01]

Well i hated the Avengers comic it had bad drawing and a bad story. I did not like this at all.

[brydeemer]

Well i hated the Avengers comic it had bad drawing and a bad story. I did not like this at all.

Bad drawing!? It's JR JR. He's one of the all-time greatest comic artists.

I'm speechless.

Bry

[Brack]

It's JR JR. He's one of the all-time greatest comic artists.

I agree. However he's not living up to that reputation on Avengers #1.

Also amusing to hear Pants complain about Hack Slash being wordy and yet no one takes issue with Avengers #1's Basil Exposition monologues from Kang. It's like they were giving away speech bubbles! In fact I think sheer density of dialogue and the constant standing around talking really hurt Romita's art as it doesn't play to his strengths.

[mguy1977]

I have seen his art on Amazing Spider Man New Ways to Die arc & it was stunning by JRJR. So unless he had artists amnesia & forget how to draw on Avengers #1 I am giving JRJR a heavy benefit of the doubt on this. I will read the issue in June as I wait patiently for my DCBS shipment.

Matthew

This post has been edited by mguy1977: 24 May 2010 - 02:34 PM

[Brack]

I have seen his art on Amazing Spider Man New Ways to Die arc & it was stunning by JRJR. So unless he had artists amnesia & forget how to draw on Avengers #1 I am giving JRJR a heavy benefit of the doubt on this. I will read the issue in June as I wait patiently for my DCBS shipment.

Matthew

It's not BAD bad. It's just not as good as he can be, certainly not as good as that ASM arc. There's been a definite change in how he draws faces that you could see in Kick-Ass, and while that's slightly off putting seeing it transferred to Marvel icons, the real problem is that you don't really get him cutting loose (except on the Thor/Kang double page sequence mentioned on the podcast). It feels like a waste of his talent drawing a book where superbeings stand around monologuing for much of it.

[Peter]

Show notes and links are up!

[luckymustard]

links that i found in the forum to stump the rios wiki pages are broken. they say "oops! this link appears to be broken".

[jaynote25]

Hey CGS crew,

Thanks for reviewing my book and giving me a plug. I put a good amount of time and effort into it, but still have to refine things ... hopefully I can improve my craft as I do more work. Also, it was nice that someone got the last starfighter reference, I try to play homage to a lot of things I like in comics and movies. Yeah, this is just the soft release for the MoCCA book festival and to get feedback, but if there are any CGS listens that have a background in editing or proofing I would love some help ... it's just me doing this book so pm if you want to help.

Also, everyone check out Joe's book ... I got one at Supershow, Joe's a passionate writer and a great guy (he set up all those awesome supershow panels)!

I'll have more news in the future about a kickstarter.com campaign I'll be running in the next few weeks for my type comic and a talk in NYC on the topic of type comics.

Thanks,
JP

[max headroom]

Geeks - been using the iPhone app quite a bit - it's been working great. Just an aside, but wanted to pass it along.

-bh

[inflames01]

Bad drawing!? It's JR JR. He's one of the all-time greatest comic artists.

I'm speechless.

Bry

Okay be speechless. I don't care if it's JR JR, the comic was just really bad. It just wasn't my taste at all. I will not keep reading this, maybe one more issue but to my personal taste it need to get a hell of a lot better in every department. And to me they made Civil War mean nothing at all. I am in a really bad mood right now because of flashforward ending, the stupid season finale to Supernatural, 24 and Lost is ending. Thank god for Sons Of Anarchy.

[Steeven]

I enjoyed the heck out of Avengers #1.

I love me some JRJR, but I have to say that some of the stuff he's done recently just didn't do it for me. Enemey of the State and World War Hulk being two.

Avengers #1 however, pretty much rocked my socks off. I felt a "Old School JRJR from the X-Men in the 80's" vibe on this issue. It felt good. It felt right.

[bamfbamf]

let's enjoy some JR JR art!







sweeet...

[Koete]

Bad drawing!? It's JR JR. He's one of the all-time greatest comic artists.

I'm speechless.

Bry

It might not necessarily be JR Jr. For me, Klaus Janson's inks and Dean White's colors detract from his art.

This post has been edited by Koete: 24 May 2010 - 07:41 PM

[Brack]

Dean White's colors detract from his art.

This is a big issue I have with Marvel especially in recent years. It's not necessarily Dean White's fault, it's just that that there are some artists who look better with flat colours rather than what now seems to be the standard digital colouring approach. JRjr is one of them, but Howard Chaykin comes off even worse.

[BillDoughty]

I really want to look back at both The Heroic Age and Brightest Day in a year and see how closely Marvel and DC followed the stated directions/themes/goals they set forth with these efforts. Both were initially sold as a return to bright, bold superheroic storytelling. DC seems to be wavering right out of the gate, showing a commitment to bringing back the "iconic" versions of their major characters, but dropping them into a world that seems just as grim and violent as everything else since Identity Crisis or so. Based on what I've been hearing, Marvel seems a little more "on message," but with only two weeks' worth of Heroic Age-bannered books out, it's far too soon to tell how they're truly faring.

This post has been edited by BillDoughty: 24 May 2010 - 09:41 PM

[Magneto_Guevara]

Yeah, I've noticed this a lot in the last few weeks, people complaining about JRJR's art. I've always loved it, with the exception of his mid-'90s Uncanny X-Men run. I never noticed this much dissension on JRJR before. I thought he was universally liked (if not loved). His art on the recent Spidey stuff was indeed better than what I've seen since (that includes Kick-Ass and the Avengers images), but I don't notice so much of a change. Don't see how someone could love the Spidey stuff yet hate the stuff since. Visual art's subjective like that, but...I like it. From his early stuff in the early '80s on Spider-Man, up through his earlier run on Uncanny X-Men in the mid-80s--his first style was great too. At first I didn't like his "blocky" stuff all that much, not even on the Daredevil mini, but in the last ten years or so he's really stylized it and come into his own. It looks distinct and solid to me.

However, it seems that even though "The Heroic Age" has begun..."The Era of Smalltalk" a/k/a "The Eon of Chattiness" a/k/a "The Epoch of Sitcom Dialogue" has continued unabated. So, yeah, despite trying and trying to get into a Bendis Avengers run, I just can't do it. His Daredevil was one of my favorite runs of anything ever. I enjoyed the hell out of the first 50-ish issues of Ultimate Spidey. But, maybe it's just me having changed as a person or something, I cannot f**king STAND the irreverent, filler-filled dialogue he's done in the last few years. I WISH I could enjoy it the way so many others do, but it really gets under my skin. Even something like how he had Tony Stark end that one description in the oral history with a line like "Did I mention she was hot?"--just needlessly cutesy, jokey and pseudo-quippish. Uck.

[Brack]

I really want to look back at both The Heroic Age and Brightest Day in a year and see how closely Marvel and DC followed the stated directions/themes/goals they set forth with these efforts. Both were initially sold as a return to bright, bold superheroic storytelling. DC seems to be wavering right out of the gate, showing a commitment to bringing back the "iconic" versions of their major characters, but dropping them into a world that seems just as grim and violent as everything else since Identity Crisis or so. Based on what I've been hearing, Marvel seems a little more "on message," but with only two weeks' worth of Heroic Age-bannered books out, it's far too soon to tell how they're truly faring.

Paul O'Brien on House To Astonish hit the nail on the head with what Marvel did right - they allowed the heroes to have a clean victory against Osborn and The Hood. How they ended Dark Reign (w/ New Avengers Finale and the last Dark Avengers) was more important than how they started the Heroic Age, as Bendis drew a line under that whole storyline.

Compare that to Blackest Night where you have a clear continuation of stories started in Blackest Night, Infinite Crisis, 52 etc. It's still the same all encompassing mega-event, so it's not that surprising that Brightest Day is still full of superhero angst and maniacs stabbing and chopping folks up with knives.

[DarkKnightJared]

On the "other Avenger," I seem to remember hearing that in the Heroic Age page, we saw Steve meeting with Captain Britain and agreed to join the Avengers.

[BillDoughty]

Paul O'Brien on House To Astonish hit the nail on the head with what Marvel did right - they allowed the heroes to have a clean victory against Osborn and The Hood. How they ended Dark Reign (w/ New Avengers Finale and the last Dark Avengers) was more important than how they started the Heroic Age, as Bendis drew a line under that whole storyline.

Compare that to Blackest Night where you have a clear continuation of stories started in Blackest Night, Infinite Crisis, 52 etc. It's still the same all encompassing mega-event, so it's not that surprising that Brightest Day is still full of superhero angst and maniacs stabbing and chopping folks up with knives.

I hadn't thought of that before, but it makes perfect sense. Definitely hard to start a new direction if you never brought the old one to an end.

As for Amber's review of Powers, I do remember pages going all-white in various DC books (wanna make a joke, but I won't ) as Zero Hour was happening, but I think the story she's thinking of is that issue of Alpha Flight where John Byrne "drew" Snowbird fighting a snow monster in a blizzard, and most of the issue was all-white pages with intermittent word balloons. Pretty sure that was an Assistant Editor's Month issue.

And lastly, Pants, I assume you have this David Letterman comic book appearance, right?



Very fun issue of a criminally overlooked series. Lots of great comics parody in this series - Samor (pronounced Say-More) the Sub-Plotter, Mices on Infinite Earths, The Dark Might Returns... funny stuff.