Oct 9
Housekeeping
Posted on Saturday, October 9, 2010 by Paul in Uncategorized
Still waiting on this week’s comics, which I probably wouldn’t have had time to read anyway – so reviews will be, ooh, some time during the week. Frankly, I’m mainly glad of the extra time.
Before anyone else asks: no, I’m not especially thrilled to hear that we’re getting yet more Astonishing X-Men, whoever’s writing it. Four X-Men books a month is at least two too many.
Oh, and if any of you know WordPress – I’ve set the “Add New Post” screen to one column, and when I try to go back to two columns, the right-hand column is blank. Doesn’t seem to matter which browser I use. Any idea how to fix that?
Way is really becoming Marvel’s go-to guy for superfluous over-saturation books isn’t he.
Well, to be fair to him, when he started writing Deadpool, it was just the one book.
Although that said – I have no particular interest in reading another Daniel Way comic. ASTONISHING’s niche, until now, seems to have been “the book where a big name writer gets to write the X-Men his way”. You can do that with Whedon or Ellis, but I really don’t think it’s going to fly with a writer like Daniel Way (whether or not the stories are any good). Sales on that book are in serious decline already and I can’t see how this is going to help.
I thought that the new adjectiveless X-Men with the vampire stuff was launching to take its place as the third core book and that they were using “Astonishing” as a branding thing line-wide for quasi out of continuity mini’s.
Astonishing X-Men ? A monthly book ? Are you kidding ?
(Although with Jason Pearson on art, there might be a chance for it to stick to its schedule for once.)
Is the Ultimate Universe dead to you? If not, Ultimate Thor is sweet.
You can do that with Whedon or Ellis, but I really don’t think it’s going to fly with a writer like Daniel Way
They’re running out of Big Names. Be grateful they didn’t give it to Jeph Loeb.
I hope this isn’t Way’s “tryout” for Uncanny
It would take a pretty noble effort by Marvel to get me to not buy an X-Men book with Jason Pearson art. Unfortunately, putting Way as writer qualifies.
Going from Joss Whedon to Warren Ellis to Daniel Way is like trading in your Camaro for a Trans Am, then trading in your Trans Am for a bowl of asparagus and the bowl of asparagus has a hair in it.
Way is a dreadful writer and his stories are usually so dull & boring they would induce a coma. Furthermore he heavily favours decompression so you never feel like you’ve got your money’s worth.
I’m always baffled that Marvel continually seem to think that he is some sort of superstar.
They think he’s the next Chuck Austin, who at one point, Marvel had on X-Men AND the Avengers!!
I hope we’re not going down that road again…
Paul C:[Regarding Daniel Way] “I’m always baffled that Marvel continually seem to think that he is some sort of superstar.”
They don’t, but Axel Alonso does. I thought it was obvious that Daniel Way’s biggest fan was Alonso, so as long as he rules the Kingdom Of X then Daniel Way will always have work there.
PPP: “I hope this isn’t Way’s “tryout” for Uncanny”
Well, he couldn’t do any worse than work we are getting from Fraction and he’s no where near as over-rated either. Besides, until he proves to Nick Lowe that he’s willing to give the writing equivalent of fellatio to the Cyclops character, he won’t be allowed anywhere near Uncanny unless Alonso steps in for him.
Don’t be ridiculous. Whatever your opinion of Fraction’s Uncanny, there’s no way you can possibly think he’s comparable to Daniel Way.
Anyway, Marvel definitely put Chuck Austin all over the place before wising up and abruptly firing him. They did the same thing with Igor Kordey.
It’s kind of funny because both of them were awful, and I hated seeing them on the stands, but I also think both of them were treated pretty poorly. They were stretched pretty thin, asked to work on several books at a time despite our collective repulsion, always got their books in on time, and then were fired abruptly because someone in editorial got that they were the worrrrrst.
In other words, they may both have sucked, but that is a raw deal any way you cut it.
Dude, I loved Igor Kordey, both on ‘Cable’ (or ‘Soldier X’, or whatever) and on ‘X-treme X-Men’. He may not have been to everyone’s taste, but he wasn’t tangibly awful like Chuck Austin was.
Yeah, Igor Kordey is an excellent artist. Don’t confuse rushed work, or a style that’s not to your liking, with lack of talent!
Kordey was good for certain types of books. His style works very well on books like Cable (at the time) and Soldier X. It’s the rushed work on Morrison’s New X-Men butting up against Quitely’s and him following Larroca on X-treme that makes his work suffer, just by comparison. Both books had a very sleek sensibility to them that his rougher, and too-often rushed, style didn’t gel with. That style, when ccompared side to side with Quitely & Larroca isn’t going to look good on anything that high profile.
Chuck Austen is probably good on some kind of book as well, though I couldn’t imagine what it would be because from what I read in them, Marvel’s two premiere super-team books weren’t it.
And Daniel Way has his strengths as a storyteller, I suppose, but the stories themselves just bore me to tears.
Igor Kordey is basically a very good artist who had the misfortune to end up doing some of his most high-profile work on books where he had unrealistically short deadlines. With hindsight his reputation would probably have been better served by turning the assignment down, but that’s easier said than done.
Austen, to be fair to him, did get some quite good reviews for books like U.S. WAR MACHINE when he first started writing for Marvel.
Daniel Way’s strength as a story-teller is analagous to Rob Liefeld’s strength as an artist: in both cases, the characters are always posing, but to such an exaggerated and inartful degree that it becomes eye-rollingly bad.
They’re like the Napoleon Dynamites of comic writing and drawing.
“Austen, to be fair to him, did get some quite good reviews for books like U.S. WAR MACHINE when he first started writing for Marvel.”
Really? Because I read that first U.S. War Machine book, and it was horrible. I recall that it had tits and graphic violence as its primary selling points.
I love Kordey too. I picked up the first part of Smoke from a bargain bin recently. Beautiful. Also I got his whole run on Cable for 10p an issue. I’ve just noticed I’m doing quite well ou of most comics fans hating him.
I agree, US War Machine was really awful.
I actually disagree pretty strongly about Kordey, and I didn’t care for any of what you guys are citing as his good work- but I can certainly accept that he’s an artist a fair amount of people do appreciate, even if I don’t. So okay.
I still think Austen’s worst work was on JLA. His worst Uncanny work at least took more than 3 minutes to read. And he put Juggernaut on the team, which I liked.
One of the awful scenes I’ve ever read (we’re talking all-time here) was in Austen’s Avengers run. Specifically, the scene where Hank walked in on Janet and Clint messing around.
Janet and Clint apparently decided that of all the places in the mansion, the best place to fool around would be in the room Jan shared with Hank. Not in Hawkeye’s room. Not in the back of a quinjet. In Hank and Janet’s room.
Oh, and she locked the door. Why? The only people in the mansion likely to open Hank and Janet’s bedroom door were Jarvis (to dust or something) and Hank— who had a key, which he of course used to open the door.
Just stupid. I couldn’t believe it. I nearly lost all respect for Brevoort as an editor after reading that scene.
Brian, nothing got stupider from Austin than his run in ‘Uncanny’ which featured jailbait Paige Guthrie, a perplexing retelling of Romeo and Juliet featuring mechanical battle-suits, his staggeringly tone-deaf mysoginism toward Lorna Dane and Annie Kazakstanian, and the cherry on the top of his months-long shit sundae, the Draco.
That they let him write Avengers after all of that was more offensive than anything he actually wrote there.
The only Daniel Way-written books I’ve read were Wolverine Origins #1 and Ghost Rider #1, and they were both so terrible I was shocked that people kept coming back for more. Comic readers often have really poor taste.
“Brian, nothing got stupider from Austin than his run in ‘Uncanny'”
Oh, I believe you. Never read Austen’s X-Men run. Paul’s reviews warded me away, thankfully.
Although what I get from Paul’s reviews was that Austen didn’t start out crap right away. He slowly built up to crap and after that, his run remained fairly crap-steady except for occasional glimmers of not-entirely-crap.
Austen’s Avengers run was much shorter, but he went crap right out of the gates and kept the crap level high. Heck, the next thing Marvel did was blow everything up and start over. Come to think of it, from a certain perspective, Austen can be viewed as the man responsible for the Avengers being the top-selling franchise that it is today. If he merely did a so-so job of it, Marvel might not have felt the need to take drastic measures and do “Avengers Disassembled.” Hmmm…
Austen’s Captain Britain was hilariously awful. Parts of the country would explode every time she got injured, so of course she went across the pond to join the Avengers. Because when an entire country might destroyed by personal injury to you, you should of course put yourself in the most dangerous city in the (Marvel) world, fighting amongst the top tier of super-powered people. Still, I probably would have got the hell out of Britain if it was going to have earthquakes everytime I sprained an ankle or something.
@Martin: Yeah, lol! If I lived in England, and I knew about the injury-causing-random-explosions thing, I’d be demanding that Captain Britain be permanently remanded to a padded cell.
“I stopped the villain from robbing the bank, everyone!”
“Yeah, but that punch you took to the ribs blew up a middle school in Sudbury, you asshole!”
I couldn’t find any figures for it on ICV2, but is there any truth in the rumour that Chuck Austen’s $50cent issue (#77, March ’04) of ‘Avengers’ is famous in that it had pretty much zero increase on sales?
Hey Paul – I noticed the X-Axis site is gone now. Any chance it’ll be back up as an archive site, or in some other form? I liked going through the site to find your takes on some older comics as discovered/reread them.
Matt: I have no plans to bring the site back up. Somebody posted a link to an archive on another comment thread, but I don’t have it to hand.
Paul C: We don’t know the sales on Austen’s 50c debut issue of AVENGERS because books at that price point aren’t eligible for the Diamond chart. However, there was no increase on sales for the next issue. Austen was kicked off the books pretty quickly to make way for Avengers Disassembled – but the fact that they through a 50c promotional price tag at his debut tends to suggest that he was originally intended to stick around for longer. For a low-price issue to have no lasting effect on sales was unprecedented and may well have contribute to Marvel and DC’s change of attitude towards him at around that time.
The most baffling thing about the Astonishing news is that the new X-men series has been revealed as essentially Astonishing Team-Up. At NYCC, they said every arc would feature a different big artist, with the X-men teaming up with different Marvel heroes and fighting a different big bad. Can the market really support two continuity-free X-books?
Thanks for the info Paul! Sounds like a right embarrassment for everybody that was involved.
hey Paul, what was that group that you used to email the reviews out to? I can’t remember what service it was on. and did you keep doing it up until the end? I found it online one time and I think I was even subscribed to it, but have no idea what email address I used or what mailing list service you used. yahoo? google? something?
If it’s complete, that might be a handy link to post in these circumstances. or on the front page of the blog, perhaps.
Within 12 months of that .50c issue he fell completely out of favour and was dumped by both Marvel and DC.
Good times.
X-Axis archived. (I asked about it recently myself. Thanks to whomever posted it when I asked!)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080715013959/www.thexaxis.com/index.html
@AaronForever
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/x-axis-reviews/
And, yes, if Paul made it openly viewable and linked to it, that would be better. (Although better still would be if he just uploaded the whole old site to housetoastonish.com/xaxis – I don’t believe the Yahoo group has his indexes]
@JP:
The Wayback Machine is missing a few weeks of reviews from the end. Someone uploaded a complete archive to a megaupload-type site and linked to it here, though…
All of the older x-axis reviews are still available through google’s archive of the rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks group.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks
Reading the old discussion threads is pretty funny. Paul, you have certainly become a much better writer since the 90’s!
Neither Astonishing X-Men nor X-Men is out of continuity. They’re just not obsessed with the nerd tapestry.
Of course, lack of said obsession translates to bottom-of-the-ladder sales these days, so we’ll see how long they last.
I know they’re not out-of-continuity. But they don’t build a continuity among themselves – there’s no reason to read Ellis’ Simone Bianchi arc before his Phil Jiminez one, for instance – and it seems the same will be the case for “X-men”. They’re essentially X-procedurals, and personally I don’t care for that.
“Neither Astonishing X-Men nor X-Men is out of continuity. They’re just not obsessed with the nerd tapestry.”
One would assume that the appeal of reading about characters from a shared universe is to see how they integrate with said universe.
“One would assume that the appeal of reading about characters from a shared universe is to see how they integrate with said universe.”
That assumes characters sharing a universe trumps any other concern (plot, characterization, writing, art, ideas being explored, etc.) when it comes to deciding whether to read a particular comics story or not.
“All of the older x-axis reviews are still available through google’s archive of the rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks group.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks
Reading the old discussion threads is pretty funny. Paul, you have certainly become a much better writer since the 90′s!”
The old X-Axis site I read went back to 1999. Some of these reviews go back as far as 1997, quite the interesting read!
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=PV7N2DYF
Might as well post this again.