Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Check it out here (http://www.dccomics.com/news/?nw=8280).

If you're keeping track of things, that makes two Eisner awards the series has won, the other being "Best New Series" in 2006. Congrats to Morrison and Quitely.

That was a no-brainer. :)

KONGratulations.

2 eisners
and
most popular superman comic

what else does DC need to know to get Morrison on mainstream comic and that people want the return of SA/BA superman??

heck they let an artist rewrite all of superman's history becuase his fantastic four was pretty good.

Wow, Best New Series in 2006, Best Continuing Series in 2007.  All for a book that's on, what, issue 7 now?

Maybe by the time we hit issue 12 they'll have racked up awards for 2008, 2009 and 2010.

that's the plan  ;)

Clearly it's not Grant's fault, since he is a writing machine.

The the art delays.

Great art takes time.

Didn't stop Curt Swan from cranking out great art month after month.  How'd you like to draw all the Legion of Super-Heroes month after month?

Quitely just works out a much slower personal rate evidently.  Or he's spebnding too mucvh time researching his Lois model.  ;)

Curt Swan did take a lot of short cuts. Notice how so many of his faces look the same, I started  to notice that the same faces kept showing up in character after character while looking at my showcase books.

Just think of what Curt Swan could have done if he was given the amount of time that today's artist are afforded?

Take a look at the Legionnaires Mission Monitor Board -- I assume they are all by Swan:

http://members.shaw.ca/legion_roll_call/legionnaires/

Except for the hair styles and some subtle variation at the jawlines, most of the male Legionnaires have similar facial features. 

^In the Swan-drawn World's Finest stories, Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent were pretty much identical when in civilian clothes, except for Clark's glasses. But this was standard for artists in general, not just Swan, and it was even more true for female characters than for the male ones. John Romita, for instance, drew Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy exactly the same (except for hair color), but Peter Parker and Harry Osborne looked nothing alike. And of course, there was Betty and Veronica, Lois and Lana, etc.

You know, it's funny: the more I think about it, the more apt a comparison there is between ALL-STAR SUPERMAN and TITANIC.

Both were/are runaway hits. Both utterly bamboozled critics that ought to know better. And both won an unreal amount of awards.

Thank God at least for the film critic of the L.A. Times, who panned the movie and called TITANIC the "Emperor's New Clothes" for critics.

On a creative level, both TITANIC and ALL-STAR SUPERMAN are identical. Both are hammish, insincere, and emotionally manipulative. All have wooden, unpleasant characters (though at least TITANIC had actors like Kathy Bates and Billy Zane, who realized how cheesy it all was and acted accordingly).

Both are big, loud, stupid style-over-substance action tales based on spectacle that have more in common with Michael Bay and his ilk than the previous ages they attempt to envoke.

I predict in ten years...no, five years (assuming ALL-STAR SUPERMAN isn't at issue 11 by then) that the public will have a "Coyote Ugly" moment with the aptly named ASS just as we've all fallen out of love with TITANIC.

Boy, if there were Ninjas on Hollywood's payroll, you'd better believe they'd be hired to steal James Cameron's Oscar back, and use a Vulcan Death Grip on him that causes his eyeballs to explode WITH THE FORCE OF A THOUSAND HIROSHIMAS!!!

Hamish? Maybe.  Insincere?  I'm not sure...

I tend to like comics that favor "Titanic" over "Hostel" - but I guess its a matter of taste... 8)

The more I think about, the more I hate the egocentrism present in today's comic fans; i.e. "If I don't like this comic then it must be bad! If other people like it then they're ignorant or stupid!" These fans feel the need to spread their views to others, like a meme, in a futile attempt to make their views the dominant ones. Even when they're praising something else they'll likely take a shot at the thing they don't like. This is because they do care what others think, but this will never be admitted because it's considered a sign of weakness to care about what others think. This is why you'll often hear the phrase, "I don't care what you think" in response to criticism. Of course, if they truly didn't care then they wouldn't need to respond in the first place. The fact is that they do care, often times they care too much.

Common tactics of this type of fan are to label something "overrated" (a term rendered meaningless due to the fact that there's no agreed upon universal standard of what makes a good or bad comic--it's basically a way to relieve their cognitive dissonance), to use ad hominem arguments against the creator, and to have a general condescending attitude (whether intentional or not) toward all who enjoy the comic. They'll also go into any thread related to the comic for the sole purpose of putting it down. In a way they NEED to do this, as to watch others enjoy something that they dislike is torture to them.

Arguing with them is also pointless, as instead of accepting the fact that they MAY be wrong, they will attempt to justify themselves when criticized (though to be fair, many people respond this way to criticism). Additionally, arguing online is even more pointless as (1) it helps them spread their views since attention is given to them and (2) all it results in is a string of threads where the two individuals arguing simply quote each other's statements and respond with a mean-spirited remark. It's actually kind of funny, if you consider ridiculously absurd things to be humorous.

I find it best simply to point these irrational thoughts out and then cease interacting with the individual. I have no real need to get the last word in or respond with my own mean-spirited remarks. Most of the time I don't even read their responses, as I already know that they're only interested in justifying their  beliefs. It's not in their nature to accept that they could be wrong.

Other than my initials congrats to Morrison and Quitely, that's all I have to say in this thread.

I assume by "we" you mean the general "we" of the American movie-going public who paid to see the movie and enjoyed it back when it came out and not the specific "we" of the people on this board, at least half, I'd be willing to bet, are not fans of the movie and never were.  For myself, I avoided it like the plague when it came out as the hubristic & bloated (though very shiny) piece of disaster-movie turd it seemed and only recently caught a large chunk of it on late-night tv --a situation only imaginable since I've mellowed with fast-approaching middle age and now actually deign to pay to see first-run Hollywood blockbusters instead of the foreign films, art movies, and direct-to-video b-movies I preferred 10 or 15 years ago.

Personally, I was kind of excited when I saw the trailer for TITANIC.  I thought it was going to be a quirky Buckaroo Banzai-esque movie only I would really like.

"Whoa, a disaster movie with the retard from GILBERT GRAPE as a leading man, plus the Phantom himself? This isn't going to make any money, but it'll sure be fun!"

I'm generally seldom right about "calling" movies based on trailers. I thought TARZAN AND THE LOST CITY was going to be the new ROCKETEER. Boy, was I wrong. Casper van Dien is like an evil store mannequin, and when he tries to smile it is the stuff of nightmares.

But yes, I mean "we" as the general moviegoing public. Though it helps if the people I'm talking to never liked TITANIC at all, because then they're familiar with the "are you freaking kidding me?" feeling when TITANIC won every Oscar. Which ASS's recent Eisner award is giving me deja vu.


Sweet sassy molassy, if passive-aggressiveness was an Olympic event, this post would get the Gold easy.

It's all really a lot simpler than all that.

Q: Why do people express their opinions on the internet?

A: Because it's the INTERNET.

Other than that, here's my response:

1) People DO get their opinions from other people. There is a climate that produces opinions, which people do get swept away with like a wave.

An example would be "Don Heck is the worst artist working in comics." You saw this in lettercols; people in stores groaned when Heck was put on their favorite book, etc.

And why? Now that Heck is dead, and enough time has passed from when he was an active force in the industry, the culture that said "Heck is the worst artist ever" has died out. And what happens? You now have a whole generation of people that are able to look at Heck's work and see its strengths.

2) It's illustrative to look at something like ASS and compare it to more favorable things. Because Johns and Busiek do right what Morrison does wrong, for instance.

3) The reasons people say they enjoy ASS disturb me, smack of a willful self-deleusion and self-deceit, and SHOULD be argued against with reason and sanity. For instance, the idea that ASS is the story of "Silver Age Superman," despite all evidence to the contrary. The idea that Morrison is restoring the Silver Age when he is really misrepresenting it and its strengths in order to have a sarcastic, insincere self-awareness that is ultimately mean-spirited and denigrating to the character.

I don't know, I don't think "The Deerhunter" or "Greatest Show on Earth" deserved best picture either, but I assume its something to talk about.

Neither "All Star" nor the "main line" of Busiek and Johns really is a continuation of the Silver Age and nothing I've seen makes me want to buy either. "All Star" seems to channel a sense of dignified past (a sun eater in the fortress as a sign of "past battles fought and won" - the sense of sacrifice in Shooter's story is over-hyped by most, we really were not privy to much about Ferro Lad's thoughts) and mood (something I think qualifies it as unique and award worthy - whether I agree or not). The "main line" has far too much motivation and characterization for my tastes. I like trivia from the past, but simply bringing it up doesn't make a story better (or worse).

I can't really expect a modern reader of the Silver Age to understand what it was like to read those comics WHEN THEY CAME OUT, anymore than I can get excited by the modern stuff when I'm heading toward 50 years old.

But there is no objective reason for me to dwell on it, as its just my taste. Superman was changed too much for me in the 70s as it was, though it seems like a lot of others think the Silver/Bronze transition was "seamless".

But I suppose the modern reader could just appreciate a day 40 years ago when "Superman's Pal - Jimmy Olsen" outsold the entire DC line of today.

All Star Superman is  anything but insincere. Grant Morrison (unless he has been lying for no apparent reason) has said over and over how he loves the character of Superman. I assume he went out of his way to ask DC if he could write superman, instead of it just being a job forced upon him.

As for it being hammish and/or emotionally manipulative I question this simply because Superman so "alien" in it , he hardly comes off as having your basic human emotions.  (he didn't seem very upset at learning that he was going to die from sun posioning). 


Bloated?? It probably cost as much to produce an issue of All Star Superman as it does to make any other comic.  So its not really bloated.

Titanic was a well put together movie if not very creative (which is more than I can say about most superman comics over the last 20 years or so)

I've liked All-Star Superman. Too bad it's not going to last, and it's too slow getting to my house...

One thing that has gone unnoticed in these posts is that Gardner Fox also won a lifetime achievement award for comics writing!