#People will talk shit about lois in one sentence and then follow it up with how much they love Canonically Unrepentant School Bully Reese

[patentedsun]

sorry I'm so MIA but I've been rewatching Malcolm in the middle and a lot of the opinions I've seen online COUGH REDDIT COUGH r quite frankly just bizarre as in, quoting myself, "when The Boys in mitm do something genuinely illegal and terrible and everyone understands it's a sitcom and can giggle but when The Mom is yelling exaggeratedly suddenly this is a Serious Show and she's abusive and narcissistic and should die 🤨"

[batfamily--headcanons]

I really want to understand this universe(the golden era I think) so could you guide me on which comics I should read

I will first admit that I am no expert on comics and I’m not particularly good at keeping track of the different eras. However, I can give you a list of what I think are some of the most classic Batman/Batfam/DC stories and the ones I just adore.

Batman: A Death In the Family-Classic story, everyone pretty much knows of this story but not everyone has read it. This is when Jason Todd (Robin #2) is brutally murdered by the Joker and it is the first introduction to Robin #3, Tim Drake. It gets really weird in the middle, when the Joker becomes an ambassador for Iran, but stick with it because Tim’s introduction is one of the most interesting Robin origin stories.

Batman: Death Of the Family-This is a different story despite the way too similar name. It’s newer and more gruesome than you might expect. This is the story where the Joker taunts the entire Batfamily and kidnaps them all. It has the whole Batfam in it which is what made me want to pick it up and read it in the first place and is definitely a great way to understand the characters as all of their greatest fears are revealed in this story. There are multiple issues spanning across different series from Batman to Red Hood and The Outlaws, so I definitely recommend getting the trade paperback of it because it’s easier than hunting down each issue in order.

Batman: The Long Halloween-This is such a classic story with lots of Batman Rogues running around and causing mayhem. They’re also speculating that this is potentially what the new Robert Pattinson Batman movie is based on, so it might be good to read if you’re excited for that movie (I have mixed feelings, but I’m hopeful). Also as a huge Agents of SHIELD and comic fan in general, I love so much of what Jeph Loeb does.

Tom King’s current Batman run-Pretty good until the wedding issue and then shit goes off the rails fast and it angered a lot of fans, myself included. Nevertheless, it did have some great moments. He also wrote Heroes in Crisis, which I do not recommend at all.

Batman:The Killing Joke-The animated movie did this story so dirty and I will always be mad. It’s one of the many possible Joker origin stories and the most popular by far. It’s not a very long story, but it absolutely regarded as a classic and it is when Barbara gets shot by the Joker so it’s also important for a major change in canon as well. Solid writing, beautiful art. I could go on about this forever. If you do decide to watch the movie, skip the first half, it’s ridiculous filler (with a ridiculous 90′s stereotypical gay character to boot).

Dick Grayson as Agent 37-This was a pretty fun storyline all things considered. It’s great if you want to fully understand Dick’s character without getting confused about the baggage that is having all of the Batfam characters around. For some people, they get the Robins easily confused (part of that is DC’s fault for literally drawing the same character but just taller or shorter) so it shines the spotlight on Dick.

Red Hood and The Outlaws (The one with Roy and Kori)-I so badly want to recommend this because I love these characters together, but Lobdell’s writing is not always spot-on and his depiction of Kori is comic book misogyny at its finest at times. Maybe read the first few issues just to get a better feel for post-Lazarus pit Jason, but it’s not the best series.

Red Hood:The Lost Years:I am a slut for Jason Todd angst, I won’t lie and so this is one of my personal favourites and it helps to establish resurrected Jason’s character to new readers. You really see how he struggled after his death and Talia al Ghul is there too which is even better. Jason is one of the most interesting and complex characters in all of DC comics and they almost never do anything exciting with his character so this series is a breath of fresh air. 

Batman:Under the Red Hood-This is about Jason’s return to Gotham after being resurrected and it’s great. The conflict between him and Bruce once he learns that it’s Jason under the hood is so well-written and you find yourself agreeing with both of them to an extent. Another great Jason Todd story. There’s also an animated movie based on this as well and it’s pretty good all things considered (I have Jay’s speech to Bruce at the end memorized so that should tell how much I enjoy it).

A lot of the new 52 stuff is not great. Tim’s new 52 Titans team were just kind of meh and like I said, Red Hood and the Outlaws had potential but was brought down by not so great writing. I wish I could remember some good Tim or Damian stories right now, but I’m blanking. Super Sons is newer, but I liked it quite a bit. It’s about Damian, Bruce’s blood son, and Jon Kent, Superman and Lois’ son fighting crime and going on adventures together. It’s a nice bit of fluff in the darkness that comics has become these days.

Harley Quinn (The Jimmy Palmiotti/Amanda Conner series)-This one is probably one of my favourite new 52 releases. I love where they’ve taken Harley’s character, she’s more than just the Joker’s girlfriend and this series shows it. It’s not too serious and most of the time, it can be downright weird, but it’s so fun you can’t help but love it. I own every single issue from the Conner/Palmiotti run. I haven’t read it since they left, so if anyone has, let me know if it’s any good because from what I did see of it, I wasn’t super impressed.

I do have some non-DC recs too so I’ll put them here as well because why not

House of X/Powers of X-The best X-Men story in recent memory and I love the X-Men so much so this makes me so happy. They’ve done some very interesting things with the characters and I love the acknowledgement that Franklin Richards is technically a mutant and the catty way that Cyclops does it is great.

House of M-One of the best X-Men stories and probably what WandaVision will be taking a lot of inspiration from. If you like alternate universes and reality bending, this is for you.

Matt Fraction’s run on the Hawkeye solo series-This is what made me fall in love with Clint and Kate as characters. It shows that the Hawkeyes are not useless Avengers and it has a bit of humour to it, which I love. The Kate Bishop follow-up to this is pretty good too, but I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t vouch for the whole series.

Deadpool Killustrated Series-This is just Wade murdering his way through the Marvel Universe and then through the classic literary characters that those characters were based on. It’s dark, funny, strange story that’s a whole lot of fun without having to worry about keeping up with 80 years of canon. 

I hope this helped in some small way. I am always up for talking comic recommendations since none of my real life friends care about comics. If anyone has any recommendations for me, I am all ears. I read stuff from all over so brand is no issue. I don’t really feed into that Marvel vs DC stuff anymore. Both companies have their strengths and weaknesses and that’s okay. It’s really late here and I’m procrastinating writing a paper so do forgive any spelling errors or completely incoherent sentences :) Stay safe everyone!

[arecomicsevengood]

Contemporary Superhero Comics Annoy The Shit Out Of Me

A coworker was kind enough to lend me a trade paperback collecting the beginning of a Dan Slott and Mike Allred’s run on Silver Surfer, and now I must be asshole enough to talk publicly about how much it sucks.  It’s been awhile since I’ve kept up with any Marvel comic, but one of the last ones I read was Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix. I have an idea of what it means when Marvel asks Mike Allred to draw a comic. It’s a mark of quality, but also signals that it will be a little oddball. The issue is that what “oddball” means for a mainstream comic varies by the year. Currently it means a superhero story that feels like a sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel.

People who keep up with mainstream comics might have noticed how often superhero stories feel indebted to Rob Zombie movies, or Law & Order: SVU episodes, which is the other extreme. The amount of violence, often with a sexual element, has been slowly ratcheted up since I stopped giving these companies my money. In order to posit an alternative to this grimness, other superhero books respond with a twee sensibility.

DC currently has an imprint edited by the singer of the emo band My Chemical Romance, that’s clearly designed to be something of a throwback to the early days of Vertigo. I love a lot of those comics: The Peter Milligan Shade The Changing Man, the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol. My interest in reading the revivals falls apart on flip-through. The difference between the nineties iterations and their contemporary revivals is that, if the older audience identified with the label “alternative,” the ideal audience for these Young Animal comics are people who would describe themselves as “adorkable.”

It’s as if, in response to a world of “dudebro” “edgelord” culture, the desire is to retreat into a world of basic-ass YA literature. Still these are comics that take basically no time to read, utilizing this incredibly simplified storytelling language that you can breeze through in less time than it takes an adult to get dressed. The art, or page design, does nothing to slow you down or focus on and appreciate. No captions carry their own voice. It’s all dialogue, all patter.

The idea of relying on dialogue in a comic, thinking that narrating captions get in the way of art, and putting less panels on a page at the same time, counterintuitively tends to fail the artist: It demands they draw the same characters, over and over, and generally gives those characters less space to move through over the course of a page, as the focus falls more to body language than setting. The overall effect moves away from cinema, with its paces to get through, and towards television with its limited budget and dialogue that stalls more than it moves forward. The amount of weight each page needs to carry is virtually nil. This is freeing for the artist only in the sense of giving them less work to do, but not actually liberating in terms of leaving space for self-expression. There is less evidence of thinking, which has an end result that is even more dispiriting than just being boring.

If you’ve seen the Netflix show Master Of None, you might have noticed the speed with which the characters talk feels different from the speed of how characters talk on, say, a Tina Fey show. There is this feeling that it’s not just the actors reciting lines, but that the characters themselves seem to have rehearsed the bits they are performing for the people around them. This is an aspect of how people just sort of are now, the way that people sometimes talk in public like they are imagining themselves the star of a sitcom, being acted out for the edification of those around them. I can assure you, they are all annoyed. But the presumption of an amused audience must be comforting to them, as they talk with such smug self-satisfaction.

The other day I saw a page on Twitter taken from some Tom King written comic where Batman and Superman interact, while Lois Lane and Catwoman look on. Superman speaks in sentence fragments, punctuated by ellipsis. The combination of how bad it read on the page and how widely it was acclaimed online shows it as this contrived version of naturalism that doesn’t seem to be based on how people actually talk to one another, but more like people referencing a meme that attempts to refer to things that people say. It’s a fucking nightmare. A hall of mirrors of simulacra, it is the depoliticized version of thinking someone disagreeing with you online is probably just a Russian bot: It’s people agreeing with each other about how brilliant something is because it was designed to be self-congratulatory, so people choose to identify with the self being congratulated.

Watching a performance, there’s a very thin line between “bad acting” and “insufferable people,” which gets multiplied as we watch real, insufferable people learn how to behave from watching bad acting. In comics, we’re dealing with bad writing, obviously, but the writing is bad because it’s making poor decisions in terms of craft and storytelling. There seems to be a misunderstanding of the page as a unit of time, and how to pace things out accordingly. There’s these fucking silent panels in the sequence that are similar to the panel that precedes and follows them, that don’t do anything in terms of a comics page or storytelling but point at beats of silence: Not for atmosphere like a silent panel in Hellboy but to capture a moment of “awkwardness” like when Jim looks into the camera on The Office.

Picture me now raising my eyes from the comic, and looking into the computer’s camera. But know also that this is a performance, as what happened when I was actually reading the comic, was commenting out loud about how annoyed I was with it, to no one, alone in my room.