Gangbuster Thorul writes:The rest of the issues were like eating crap...but on a stick!
So is that *worse*, because you might chip your tooth on the stick? Or *better*, because you don't get any crap on your fingers? I'm lost.
Julian Perez writes:Yeah, it's piracy how they jack the prices up. But that's nothing. I pay $10 for a movie ticket and I STILL have to stand in line.
Standing in line is nothing. Watching 10-20 minutes of freaking COMMERCIALS after paying 10 dollars to escape TV is an outright kick in the nads.
The one thing I regret most about the switch to magazine paper isn't the increased cost. It's the fact that if you didn't like a story, you could always tear out pages and use the creamy, smooth pulp paper to wipe your backside (which is why I don't have very many Gerry Conway issues left). The Nuclear War surviving, nigh-indestructible paper used in comics now, though, probably will stick around in your septic tank for the next 10,000 years, to say nothing of the pain on sensitive skin.
It certainly is funny that the great classic comics of yesteryear were printed on cheap pulp paper for 10 cents a book, while the junk of today is preserved forever on high-gloss, archival quality paper. Just like it's funny that a thieving moron like Todd McFarlane could get rich on comics while geniuses like Wayne Boring and Bill Finger died in poverty and obscurity. In other words, the unfunny kind of "funny."
Many otherwise sharp writers have one eyesore of a flaw: with Roy Thomas, it's his inability to characterize female characters. Chris Claremont has the exact same problem.
The problem with Roy and Chris, I think, is that they'll never say in five words what they could say in 500. I still remember reading Chris' X-Men, where a character could get punched in the face and deliver a four-paragraph soliloquy before hitting the pavement. And I agree he did a lousy job writing female characters, which was doubly annoying as he seemed obsessed with them (apparently he thought he was great at it).
Every person has an individual tolerance for what amount of violence they find offensive. It's not a question of age; many adults can't watch THE GODFATHER, while many kids love late-night zombie movies. And SOMEBODY had to have read all those EC comics involving wives that eat their murdered husbands so there isn't any evidence.
A lot of it's context. I liked some of that old EC stuff, but the violence served the suspense...the real chills were usually psychological in nature. In contrast, superhero books are childish fantasies and extreme gore has no place in them, any more than genitalia belongs on the Teletubbies.
I find I could handle violence in films if it was handled with style and ability, but that was in the days before DVDs and home video. Then the violence was fleeting, whereas now we can pause on it all day, and it's the repetition that wears me down. Likewise, I find I can handle the occasional flash of blood and guts on the TV news, but I stay away from glossy pictorial spreads of the same images in TIME and Newsweek. Somehow it's the relative permanence of those images that offends me.
Also, here's the thing about violence: the human mind is a very, very sick thing. We hear something described (like for instance, in a spoiler post), and we tend to make it a million times more embellished and grewsome in our heads than it actually is shown to be on paper.
That may be the case in your example, but I have seen all over the Web the panels where Black Adam shoves Psycho Pirates eyeballs through his skull, SBP rips the arm off some also-ran and Pantha's head goes flying off her shoulders like a cannonball. Subtlety was not the strongsuit of this series. Granted that may not be the fault of Johns but of the artist, but the reverse is true too: how do you know it wasn't the artist's idea to draw in those obscure Lanterns rather than Johns'?
Glad Bizarro's murderous act was off-panel, but just the fact that Bizarro kills tells me this isn't the book for me. And anyway how embarassing would it be to be killed by freaking Bizarro?!