I am so NOT impressed with about the death and burial of Capt. America, though it does tell, curiously enough, that the sniper who was captured wasn’t the one who shot at Cap. It does, however, seem to give some focus on the othewise overrated Jeph Loeb, who’s been writing some of the pointless stories connected with this. But it doesn’t ask why it’s so easy to kill of Cap but not to deal with any raw issues of the current day and age.

I’m glad to see that Wieringo, co-creator of Impulse along with Mark Waid, , and also talking about how comics were ruined by Image Comics for starters (Via ):

I’ve had many conversations with creator friends of mine about the pendulum swing that happened in the wake of the IMAGE explosion back in the early 1990’s. The sort of ‘we don’t need no stinking writers’ attitude of the IMAGE founders resulted in what were nicely drawn comics with little story, for the most part. They became commodities and not comic books with good stories to go with the flashy drawings. The other major companies, in response, tried to emulate the initial massive success IMAGE had by doing similar types of books with crazy cover gimmicks thrown in for good measure… and the quality of the entire industry, for the most part, suffered. It drove many long-time fans away. In the aftermath of that sales bloodbath, the creative pendulum swung in the writers direction and away from the emphasis only on artwork as the selling point. It’s been that way for some 15 years or so now…. and I think that pendulum swing may have reached its apex. My feeling is that in recent years, the quality of writing in comics has diminished. Maybe it’s not the writers’ fault… maybe it’s editorial edict that has replaced good story, plot and character development with the stunt… the event… to sell comics. Maybe I’m just a middle-aged fuddy-duddy who has lost touch with what makes for interesting comics.

I think that Jim Shooter, who was one of the co-founders of the early Image Comics, can be remembered in history as what helped to bring down much of comicdom today, as he too has a role in leading to a lot of what destroyed today’s comics. But let’s not forget that editorial mandates are also what are ruining a lot of them: now, it seems as though they think that only “stunts” and “events” are what can get things to sell.

It’s to be hoped that eventually, they’ll discover that even that isn’t getting them anywhere, and that both Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio will be removed from their posts and replaced with people who do have an interest in slowly building things back up again. If the sales numbers on Amazons Attack are any indication, things may just be starting to backfire on them.

From we move on to the even more disturbing case of Amazons being tarnished in the DCU. , Amazons Attack sounds even more sick. Now, Wonder Woman’s sisters, including her revived mother, are being villified by executing innocent civilians in Washington D.C.

Even if this isn’t a camoflaged attack on the US government’s policies in real life, or an anti-war metaphor, or even an attack on policies regarding illegal immigrants, it’s still in very bad taste, and is going to require tons in order to fix. Years ago, most other writers respectfully depicted them as noble and honorable, but this is very one-dimensional. It doesn’t matter if they do push the reset button, this is clearly wallowing in sensationalism.

Here’s one description from the responses on the thread about what this is like here:

What I’m surprised [at] are the prison camps for women who might know an Amazon.

I mean come the heck on.

DC just hit Marvel Civil War levels of stupid with that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to duplicate the very iffy success of that wretched Marvel miniseries here. I say iffy because selling 200,000 to 300,000 copies is a far cry from the millions they all used to sell years ago. If they think they’re making a statement against McCarthyism, they’ve done a very laughable and tiresome job here.

If they want to redeem themselves, they’re going to have to revive all those killed by the Amazons in this horrid miniseries, or to push the reset button, and by that I mean a very big reset button. , I see that it fortunately hasn’t been a big seller, but in its own way, 47,000 copies is still too much. No one should have to buy it, and I’d advise against completing it.

The worst part is how it does what quite a few other comics of recent have done: it features the return of some celebrated characters such as the Amazons and Diana’s mother in a joyless storyline that gives the reader nothing to be happy about. It would seem as though joyless storytelling is what’s becoming the norm just now.

Discovered on that the new series that’s been running for about four years now is ending with the 50th issue. This reminds me of how The Titans ended at that very number too. And what’s this supposed to lead to? It seems that they may be making Batman into a leader of this team once again, as he was in the mid-80s.

, an older story in which Capt. America may have pretended to be dead, if anything, and a time when he had a meeting with Banshee in one of his earliest appearances, as well as the X-Men.

(via ), Secret Wars is what killed many major comic books of today with the overkill of company wide crossover “events”:

For a very long time I read comic books religiously, perhaps literally so since Batman and Superman had a greater impact on my moral outlook than any church did. Even when I drifted away I would still occasionally visit the comic book shop or see a cover that caught my eye at the rare newsstand that still carried comics and pick it up to visit with my old friends.

I can’t do that anymore. If I pick up a mainstream Marvel or DC comic I don’t have a clue what is going on and I’m not going to get anything approaching a complete story. I’ll get one part of a six part story arc if I’m lucky; if I’m not I’ll get one part of a story spread over six different titles instead.

I understand the motivation. It is to get the reader hooked. If the story ends on page 22 they don’t have to buy the next one but there is no greater impetus to return next month than a blurb that says “to be continued.”

And if you can tie a whole bunch of books together you can make fans buy them all, or so you hope. “Hey, Superman has been selling pretty well lately but Aquaman could use some help. How about we continue the story over there?” I suppose if you’re super-power is swimming you need all the help you can get.

But unless the reader is already well versed in your fictional universe it’s heavy seas without a lifejacket and he’s drowning by page two.

That is the monster from under the bed slowly sucking the lifeblood out of the comic book industry; tightly woven interrelated continuity. I’m not calling for a return to the days when every story was neatly wrapped up in eight pages or twelve pages or even twenty-two but in order to be accessible to new readers there has to be a balance. Dare I dream of a complete entertainment story in one or two issues without crossing over into another title or are those days gone forever?

A story that takes just several pages and not several issues to finish is something I’d like to see making a serious return too. And if the publishers wanted to, I think they could get comics back into the bookstores more visibly without having to resort to just trade paperbacks to do so, and could make them more family friendly too. They could even come up with more interesting covers like what were seen up until the early 90s without just making it seem like some computerized pinup art. The ball is in their court but they’re not tossing it correctly.

that’s partly taken from a book Douglas Wolk is going to publish about comic books next month (“Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean” by De Capo Press). The beginning subline, though, is something I’ve got to at least partly disagree with:

With the rise of the graphic novel, comics have hit the big time. It’s time for fans to quit whining and celebrate their favorite art.

It depends on what we’re talking about. If it’s the indies, of course there can be what to celebrate there. But if it’s majors, how can we when they’ve been turned into a politicized, prejudiced wasteland?

Jun. 23, 2007 It’s frustrating to love comics, because there’s so much cultural baggage that goes along with loving them. The blessing and curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as “comics culture.” The core audience of comics is really into them: we know that Wednesdays are the day when new issues appear in the stores, we populate endless Web sites and message boards, we preserve our comics with some degree of care even if we think of ourselves as “readers” rather than “collectors.” A few times a year, we congregate at conventions of one kind or another. (The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival — which is happening this weekend in New York City — is one of our Sundances, where small-press and independent publishers display their wares; Wizard World Chicago is where the superhero buffs go; Comic-Con International, held in San Diego at the end of July, is where everybody goes.) We gravitate to our kind.

That’s part of the problem. Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

That incestuous relationship between audience and medium has been encouraged by the big comics publishers. Mainstream comics pamphlets that are incomprehensible to anyone not already immersed in their culture aren’t just the standard now; they’re the point. If you pick up a story crammed full of inside references, and you’re enough of an insider to catch them all, you’re going to feel like it was made just for you, and it will intensify the sense of difference between you and “normal people.” (I know from experience; some of the comics I enjoy most are stories I can’t explain to a lot of my friends without using phrases like “pre-Crisis continuity” and “the 616 universe,” sounding severely schizophrenic, or both.)

Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ll expand upon this point by saying that - DC and certainly Marvel have succeeded in forming a zombie-like following, no matter how small it is compared to some larger movie followings, that buys what they tell them to no matter how horrid they are. And while it’s not like I want to slam the customer, I guess the time has come when that’ll have to be done, and be critical of readers like “Marvel Zombies” for just buying because they were told to by the publishers:

To anyone out there who’s just buying books like House of M, Civil War, the 25th issue of Capt. America’s current volume and even World War Hulk because the publishers are promoting those particular items above all else on their publishing schedules, I’d like to say that I’m ashamed of them. How can you empty out your wallets over something so awful, without any consideration of the overall story quality? Important message: don’t buy a crossover simply because that’s what’s being promoted, and certainly don’t do it out of knee-jerk loyalty to the publishers heading the editorially mandated story. Otherwise, I’ll have you know that I, and others, consider you to be the biggest problem behind why major comics are becoming so bad.

I’ve come to realize now that knee-jerk followings are part of the problem, and that obviously, if anything’s to be done in order to turn off the tap of crossovers flowing out, that knee-jerk followings are going to have to come under criticism. Wolk certainly seems to understand that too. The term “Marvel zombie” may have once had a positive meaning (in slang style, I think), but now when I think about it, it’s starting to become a very negative meaning when you think about it in depth: it could mean someone with no ability to tell the difference between good and bad, and just buys the items being hyped by the company because they said so! Clearly, that’s not the way to go anymore. Only by thinking for oneself will it be possible to get comics back on track again.

And Wolk is certainly right about this: comics fans need to grow up and move past all these stories that deprive the characters of any real development, and that are really just being done to milk the audience for all they’re worth. Nor is buying comics for collectibility the right way to go anymore.

, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. (Interestingly enough, on , blogmaster Hyacinth ran a poll about this, and I discovered on said poll that all those who cast their votes think Meltzer is even worse than Bendis). Let’s hope that Brad Meltzer doesn’t ever get hired to work on any major comic books ever again, because it’s high time already to be hiring writers according to how well they understand the concepts, and not out of publicity stunts.

about a miniseries he’s going to write called the Last Fantastic Four Story, and about his experiences when he’d first entered the comics field.