If good stories and character elements emerge from it, then it'll be good
Maybe, maybe not - does the phrase "superstar creator" make anybody else really nervous?
Grant Morrison at least, is thinking in the right direction - however, his historically demonstrated flash-over-substance approach, lack of ability to characterize, and his archaic "bottle" approach to each story makes me nervous. I personally enjoyed the cliche charm of a movie like INDEPENDENCE DAY, which is totally unoriginal and character-free and doesn't pretend to be anything else but big budget spectacle; there are so many ways however, that ID4 could not have worked. I liked Morrison's JLA in the same way I liked INDEPENDENCE DAY, by appreciating it for what it is; however, if Morrison forgets his limitations, however, they will appear.
Cat Grant and Manchester Black were two decent characters when done right. Check out the first season of L&C for fine Cat Grant moments. Manchester Black has a cool veneer to him, even his name comes from the Apache Chief / Minnesota President school. He and the Elite are certainly as good a take on '90s-era indy comic superpunks as Magog.
Really? I thought the LOIS AND CLARK Cat Grant was a fairly one-dimensional skank. And while the "Missouri President" crack brings a smile to my face, Manchester Black is a manifestation of a repetitive story of the Modern Age that irks me: "The Silver Age Gets Revenge" story, like KINGDOM COME or that JSA story arc involving Atom Smasher turning evil for some reason. While I agree with the intention, the Silver Age can be brought back by telling stories of equal imaginative power, not by smashing a straw man.
That's because the indy comic writers that went in for that sort of thing raked in the big bucks and sales, and the big comic book houses took 'em in. Like it or not, that crap sells. Sometimes, there's good stuff amidst that crap. For example, Superman: The Vanishing had some germs of good ideas (what about a contingency plan to protect the entire Earth from the worst) and really pretty Jim Lee art, amidst horrible story execution. Worst, it incorporated bad elements from other lousy plotlines (the Russian General Zod) and even bad pre-Crisis schlock (super-self-hypnosis).
Aw, man, of all the imaginative concepts the Silver Age had, they had to go and bring back THAT one?
Why do I hear Billy Friday from SUPREME shouting loudly in his nasal British voice: "THEN we'll have Omni-Dog raped and gassed, and the undersea mermaid city succumb to mercury poisoning!"
But how do you feel about Ultimate Spider-Man? Same writer and author for 90+ issues building up quite a continuity, doing stuff more interesting than any of the Spider-Man rags since the Ben Reilly mess (with maybe the exception of a JMS story arc or two, but JMS went to the cesspool). And Morrison's take on Thor (that Millar adopted) in the Ultimates is way cool, in my book.
Spider-Man isn't one of my favorite superheroes, and so I am hardly emotionally invested in his stories. However, from what I've read of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, it has him as a teenager again, and I really hate superhero teenage stories because they are universally histrionic. Teenage problems never look as irrelevant as they do when the other things on a character's mind include SAVING THE WORLD. The trendy, insincere pop culture references will make USM a thousand times more dated and unintentionally hilarious 10 years from now, a thousand times funnier than Luke Cage's tinfoil headband and little white girl Dazzler "talking street" while wearing platform shoes and a disco ball necklace. The Kingpin asks Spider-Man who hires him, and he responds "Carson Daly." It was made a few years ago, and it ALREADY feels dated - aren't his 15 minutes of fame over? And I swear they did NOT make a J-Lo butt joke. While the characters in the original Ditko run had definite personalities, in Ultimates they are hollow cardboard versions of themselves, pop-out characters, like "rich kid" or "goth."
They replace timeless character concepts with absurd, up to the moment fads that pass through the ether of our culture. Witness Kraven the Hunter as a Discovery Channel crocodile hunter-style host. Imagine if someone did Ultimate Spider-Man in the 1970s and had Kraven become a radio DJ named "Wolfman Kraven."
It's a basic truth that nothing is less cool than someone desperately trying to be cool. If this is true, then ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN is the least cool comic in world history.
Since you brought it up, here's my take on ULTIMATES:
All of the characters have devolved into vicious, ugly caricatures of themselves, with a single flaw that far superior stories have handled more subtly being exploded to disfiguring proportions (Tony Stark's alcoholism, Hank Pym's out of character incidence of spousal abuse, Captain America's Superpatriotism). They feel like Mad Magazine parody versions of the characters,
except they're not a joke. In fact, there's no humor whatsoever, it takes itself that seriously.
Captain America's characterization as a violent "love it or leave it" fanatic is downright grotesque. Captain America stands for the IDEALS of America and our stumbling, slow march toward their realization, not the morally compromised reality.
Henry Pym as a wifebeater. Leave it to a fraud like Millar to blow out of proportion a single bad Shooter story that had him act wildly out of character and interpret this as the correct way to look at Giant-Man. What, you couldn't make him an anti-semite and a child pornographer as well?
The Hulk as a bone-snapping monster with none of the characteristics that make him interesting (his innocence, his childlike personality) is also unoriginal: Mr. Hyde from LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN wants his idea back. Yes, Hulk was based on Mr. Hyde in the beginning, but he differed so much from his start point that he could be considered an original character. And who wants to bet LXG - released barely a few years ago, gave Millar this idea and not the original novel?
Special mention should go to the Scarlet Witch shacking about with the Vision robot. Suddenly, the most beautiful love story of the entire Silver Age (and possibly in comics) that could have been wonderful to see from the outset. It has Wanda go from a courageous woman willing to defy everything for her love ("Wanda...I can make you happy! Please, please forget all the human rules and marry me." "Of course! Love is for souls, not for bodies.") and cast it into a sleazy light destructive to the characterization of all involved. Hey, I know what he can do for an encore: how about doing a version of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST where Belle is a Furry?
Thankfully, Hawkeye, the Avenger with arguably the most personality, has not been made into some unrecognizeable form.
So what you're really complaining about is the lack of editorial continuity, of editors either bowing to superstar writers or editors themselves acting like superstar writers to the detriment of continuity.
That's a good way of putting it. No single individual writer or artist is not greater than a character's collective history and role in popular culture. This goes for any character with a history, but most especially for one as famous and important as Superman.
You mean the Otto Binder Brainiac, then? The one that started out as just an alien, then was retconed as a robot six years by Ed Hamilton because all things that ended in -iac had to be robots. (Never mind the fact that Otto Binder certainly knew how to do robots if that's what he had intended.) This led to retconning Jerry Siegel's Brainiac 5, who had simply been evil Brainiac's descendant but now had to be complicated for no good reason. If you want continuity police, Brainiac is not a good place to start.
They put forth a satisfactory effort to make Brainiac work, and his personality and powers and appearance after some growing pains, were constant, and when Marv Wolfman updated him, it was done logically, in the context of the story in a way that made sense.
Some stories, like it or not, are a product of their times and remembering them would make things dated. Superman ditching Supergirl in some sort of orphanage as a "secret weapon" (a.k.a. trying to decide if a Supergirl would play as well with the fans as Mary Marvel) is a problematic story for today. How far back do you go?
Good storytelling is never dated. If anything is dated, it is the constant reboots, that clearly show their age by instead of invoking timeless concepts, bring things in line with passing fads (see comments above about USM).
That said, some things about comics have been invented that strengthen them instead of weaken. For example, the idea of extended subplots and story arcs that have definite resolutions, used brilliantly by Kurt Busiek and Steve Englehart, and to a lesser extent, by Paul Levitz. A "bottle" approach to each individual story is no longer desirable because sub-stories allow characterization and have a bigger payoff.
Some folks figured this out and created the JLU cartoons.
Isn't that a great show? They deserve applause for "getting it." For thinking past "okay, who's a name that will move action figures and ceramic banks?"