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  1. #16
    Better than YOU! Alan2099's Avatar
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    JMS prioritised the family life with the Parkers because he knew he had a limited amount of time in which he could write the marriage. He knew when he signed on they were getting rid of it, he wanted all the time in the run to make it seem important to the lore and to the readership.
    I love how you're able to read JMS's mind and know exactly what he knew at the time and what he was thinking when he wrote stuff.

    Oh wait...

  2. #17
    Astonishing Member boots's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DT Winslow View Post
    Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is a must read by everyone. It’s an alternate history of the creation of the comic book industry in New York by two Jewish kids. Takes a great deal of inspiration from Kirby, Lee, Ditko, Steranko and others.
    seconded on kav and klay

    mccarthy’s work across the board is great, i even loved the critically panned the counselor

    as someone who’s just been optioned with a disney subsidiary after a decade of rejection, i feel your pain. the industry requires marathon runners, especially for those of us that don’t come from money or with contacts. smiles and facades are the currency as you say: “you never have a bad meeting in hollywood”

    congrats on gethsemane

    as for JMS’ spidey; tried it but couldn’t get through it. *shrug*
    Last edited by boots; 05-18-2019 at 03:14 PM.
    troo fan or death

  3. #18
    Astonishing Member boots's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    The satellites having more supporting cast stuff will never be a good rebuttal to the main book lacking a fundamental part of Spider-Man and the franchise's appeal.
    it’s also a bit rich to ask readers to spend more money to get a complete experience, but that’s not something superhero comics are above
    troo fan or death

  4. #19
    Brandy and Coke DT Winslow's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by boots View Post
    seconded on kav and klay

    mccarthy’s work across the board is great, i even loved the critically panned the counselor

    as someone who’s just been optioned with a disney subsidiary after a decade of rejection, i feel your pain. the industry requires marathon runners, especially for those of us that don’t come from money or with contacts. smiles and facades are the currency as you say: “you never have a bad meeting in hollywood”

    congrats on gethsemane

    as for JMS’ spidey; tried it but couldn’t get through it. *shrug*
    Thanks, boots. Miles, you too. When I got married and had kids, being in that marathon became a run I couldn't do anymore. Other people needed me to make money so they could eat. So I stopped pitching and got a real job. Stupid real jobs. But I'm still writing, so it all works out.

    But not everything is for everyone. One of my favorite examples is McCarthy's The Road. Oprah put that on her book club list. I can walk into any used bookstore or Goodwill and find dozens of copies. Clearly, that means people didn't care for it as much as I did. I think it is a triumph of literature. Oprah thought so too. Conversely, it doesn't mean a thing. Not everyone keeps books like I do.

    I do think it silly to view ancillary titles as requirements. 'Oh but Flash appeared in Spectacular during that run,' is no defense. Satellite titles have had historically lower sales than ASM by their very nature. One of the reasons for the BND pare down was because they weren't selling as well as ASM. So why not have ASM be all three titles? It was a great editorial decision.

    I loved, unabashedly, BND. I own it in singles and I own it in what Complete Collections have been released. I love Big Time and I love Superior. Other people disagree but I will not begrudge them that. What I will not tolerate is belittling others' opinions because they differ. We're not all of us children. Let's not act like it.

    (I'm a little more down on post-Superior but Slott ends his run with a great last few years. But those two years immediately following Superior were not great.)

    ((I also loved The Clone Conspiracy))

    (((Yes, really)))

  5. #20
    Astonishing Member boots's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DT Winslow View Post
    Thanks, boots. Miles, you too. When I got married and had kids, being in that marathon became a run I couldn't do anymore. Other people needed me to make money so they could eat. So I stopped pitching and got a real job. Stupid real jobs. But I'm still writing, so it all works out.
    100%. i've had to delay those things, and that's a hard choice to make. if i delay them long enough, they'll eventually no longer be possible.

    i'm always impressed by peeps who can balance both.

    But not everything is for everyone. One of my favorite examples is McCarthy's The Road. Oprah put that on her book club list. I can walk into any used bookstore or Goodwill and find dozens of copies. Clearly, that means people didn't care for it as much as I did. I think it is a triumph of literature. Oprah thought so too. Conversely, it doesn't mean a thing. Not everyone keeps books like I do.
    well, the pullitzer will have to be his consolation prize.


    ((I also loved The Clone Conspiracy))

    (((Yes, really)))
    man, i wanted to love conspiracy. i tried really hard.

    love is a strong word...what was it that appealed?
    troo fan or death

  6. #21
    Brandy and Coke DT Winslow's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by boots View Post
    100%. i've had to delay those things, and that's a hard choice to make. if i delay them long enough, they'll eventually no longer be possible.

    i'm always impressed by peeps who can balance both.



    well, the pullitzer will have to be his consolation prize.




    man, i wanted to love conspiracy. i tried really hard.

    love is a strong word...what was it that appealed?
    I don't... think I can quite explain it. I love the concept of the Clone Saga but it didn't work for me. It's not all bad but it really wasn't good. A lot of that was for me, the 90'sness of it. The hair and the clothes and the extremeness of the it, even if it was tame by the standards we tend to think of when we think of Marvel in the 90's. Even Bagley, whose art I really like on USM and the current Life Story, turned out not great stuff.

    But CC? That was what I wanted out of the clone saga. The art was uniformly great. I liked the inclusion of Ben Reilly, I liked fat Doc Ock coming back, albeit briefly. I like that Ben was driven insane by being brought back and killed so many times but yet his plan still held some validity and you could understand it. It just grew out of his control.

    I don't need much from comics. Not everything has to change the world. Hell, I love Jeph Loeb's Hulk. Sometimes, I just want to punch the air, you know? I don't need every book to be as good as Miracleman. I just wanna have fun.

    Does that help?

  7. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    ASM is the primary flagship title. It always continues and spearheads the franchise while other books end. It is the book that should have the most important things happen in it, it is the book that should have all of the thing that make Spider-Man Spider-Man. This was understood in the 70's because they knew these other books only existed to make more money, became less understood in the 80's, and then not understood in the 90's, which is coincidentally when the line became a clusterfuck where nonsense like Sidekick's Revenge and Assassination Plot are getting published in the main book while Child Within is relegated to the B-Book. If you are writing ASM and can't fit in pages for the supporting cast, which is so fleshed out in comparison to other superheroes that it's fundamental, it is a flaw with your run.
    Agreed. It's a problem when an important long-time Amazing Spider-Man cast member is killed off in another series, like happened with Harry. I don't like that Marvel have reverted to this model (big events like Jonah learning Spider-Man's secret ID happening in other titles), especially while still expecting readers to buy 2-3 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a month.

  8. #23
    Take Me Higher The Negative Zone's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lee View Post
    Agreed. It's a problem when an important long-time Amazing Spider-Man cast member is killed off in another series, like happened with Harry. I don't like that Marvel have reverted to this model (big events like Jonah learning Spider-Man's secret ID happening in other titles), especially while still expecting readers to buy 2-3 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a month.
    I feel like more writers for the B-titles are going to keep trying to do "big things" so their book matters and isn't forgotten.

  9. #24
    Astonishing Member boots's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DT Winslow View Post
    I don't... think I can quite explain it. I love the concept of the Clone Saga but it didn't work for me. It's not all bad but it really wasn't good. A lot of that was for me, the 90'sness of it. The hair and the clothes and the extremeness of the it, even if it was tame by the standards we tend to think of when we think of Marvel in the 90's. Even Bagley, whose art I really like on USM and the current Life Story, turned out not great stuff.

    But CC? That was what I wanted out of the clone saga. The art was uniformly great. I liked the inclusion of Ben Reilly, I liked fat Doc Ock coming back, albeit briefly. I like that Ben was driven insane by being brought back and killed so many times but yet his plan still held some validity and you could understand it. It just grew out of his control.

    I don't need much from comics. Not everything has to change the world. Hell, I love Jeph Loeb's Hulk. Sometimes, I just want to punch the air, you know? I don't need every book to be as good as Miracleman. I just wanna have fun.

    Does that help?

    i guess asking someone to define why they love something is always a tall order

    - why do you love chocolate cake?

    - erm...i just...do

    i love the sound of all the elements you just listed too. if that were a pitch or a wiki summary i had read without benefit of the actual comic...i’d be all in. but similarly to the latest seasons of GoT, i just feel the execution wasn’t for me. it went about connecting everything in the most simple and obvious way (and no, i’m not asking for subversion)

    i guess like love, explaining why a story leaves you unsatisfied isn’t always easy.
    troo fan or death

  10. #25
    BANNED WebSlingWonder's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lee View Post
    Agreed. It's a problem when an important long-time Amazing Spider-Man cast member is killed off in another series, like happened with Harry. I don't like that Marvel have reverted to this model (big events like Jonah learning Spider-Man's secret ID happening in other titles), especially while still expecting readers to buy 2-3 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a month.
    Don't forget in that same series, Peter also found out that he had a (real) biological sister - who seems to have been forgotten. And in FNSM, spoilers:
    Aunt May has cancer.
    end of spoilers

  11. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    The satellites having more supporting cast stuff will never be a good rebuttal to the main book lacking a fundamental part of Spider-Man and the franchise's appeal.
    The idea that Spider-Man is some large ensemble story and that a good Spider-Man story involves every supporting cast member at the same time is simply bull-crap. That was something that BND and Slott people foisted but that's not actually true and in fact the way they used the supporting cast is often counter-intuitive. Spider-Man has a great supporting cast and so on but most of his best stories in the classic run and period only focused on a few characters at a time while others were at the side. Read the Lee-Romita era for instance, most of the stories focused on Peter, Gwen, and George Stacy until Stacy's death. When that happened, you had the Harry Osborn Drug Trilogy and the motivation for that was that Gwen was absent from the books at the time. Liz Allan was gone for some 100 issues between ASM#30 to the Conway run, Flash Thompson was in Vietnam from ASM#47 aside from some furlough visits for special issues, and then returning to the Spider-Man titles shortly before Gwen died, where he formed a brief romantic triangle between Peter, Flash, and Gwen because at that time Harry Osborn was a little decommissioned and not in use all that much as a supporting character.

    Quote Originally Posted by Snoop Dogg View Post
    ASM is the primary flagship title. It always continues and spearheads the franchise while other books end. It is the book that should have the most important things happen in it, it is the book that should have all of the thing that make Spider-Man Spider-Man.
    That's the Brevoort manifesto talking and not you. In the 80s, the attitude towards satellite titles was in fact to make them distinct and unique and allow for interesting stories there. Jim Salicrup considered the best Spider-Man editor by both Roger Stern and David Michelinie also said that he wanted every Spider-Man title, main, satellite, and so on to be unique and capture the flavor. The creation of the satellite titles in the 70s, i.e. Spectacular Spider-Man was precisely to put in more work with supporting cast stuff there than in the main title. That's what Stan Lee (then the publisher) and Gerry Conway (in his very brief tenure as EIC) decided on.

    This was understood in the 70's because they knew these other books only existed to make more money, became less understood in the 80's, and then not understood in the 90's,
    Jim Salicrup who I quoted above was one of Spider-Man's editors (among other titles) in the '80s and during the early 90s as well. So your argument is invalid in terms of "not understood".

    If you are writing ASM and can't fit in pages for the supporting cast, which is so fleshed out in comparison to other superheroes that it's fundamental, it is a flaw with your run.
    By the arbitary rules you invented (actually invented by Brevoort without acknowledgement on your part), sure. By the actual context and understanding of Spider-Man's publication history across time, no. It's not consistent with the patterns, with the past judgments of previous respected editors on Spider-Man titles and the general reading experiences.

    This whole ASM-Supremacist attitudes people have ignores blatantly the fact that Felicia Hardy among others got the majority of her defining stories in the pages of Spectacular. Aside from Roger Stern's Black Cat 2-Parter and "The Daydreamers", most of what we know of Felicia comes from Bill Mantlo's work in Spectacular. Most of PAD's work was also in Spectacular. Including the Death of Jean Dewolff and so on.

    As for JMS. His opening story arc was called "Coming Home". In other words, trying to get Peter back to something like his roots after the mess that the Clone Saga and the Post-Clone Saga did. Reifying the main leads of the Spider-Titles (the Parker family) was absolutely crucial at the time. Especially since you had this great movie blockbuster coming in which Peter, Mary Jane, Aunt May have crucial roles. Raimi wanted an Aunt May who sorta knew-guessed that Peter was Spider-Man, so that was in-synch with what JMS wrote. Peter becoming a high school teacher was the most grounded he had been and in that entire time as school teacher, he interacted with a cool supporting cast that brought realism and kept things grounded after a half-decade of Osborn cults and cabals. The Spider-Totem stuff isn't mysticism...it's magic realism. I.e. an elaboration of the everyday. And the everyday remained a consistent part of JMS' run. The problem with JMS was that as great as his highs are (Coming Home, The Conversation, Doomed Affairs, Spider-Man #500, the early New Avengers era, the Civil War tie-ins with Spider-Man and Cap, Back in Black) his lows are really low (Sins' Past). So I get that his run is controversial. Still his version of Peter Parker is the last real time he really worked as a character, and that applies to MJ and Aunt May as well.

    Quote Originally Posted by boots View Post
    it’s also a bit rich to ask readers to spend more money to get a complete experience, but that’s not something superhero comics are above
    Why do people act like this was ever not a thing? The tri-monthly and bi-monthly publication of ASM after BND and so on is basically the same principle as Spectacular, Web of Spider-Man and so on but just now they are all calling it ASM. It was all done to get people to spend more money per month on Spider-Man. Before it was at least honest and optional...you know that ASM had a distinct separate story that other runs are in principle take-it-or-leave-it except for crossovers like "The Other". Post-OMD, to follow Spider-Man seriously you had to triple-then-double-dip per month to keep up with the serial Spider-Man stuff. The only exception was stuff like Conway's Spiral with its unique ".1" titling trying to distinct it (basically a Spectacular Spider-Man story written by the guy who created that title to start with).

    So to me, as far as asking readers to spend more money goes, OMD-BND is the freaking nadir not before.

    Quote Originally Posted by boots View Post
    seconded on kav and klay

    mccarthy’s work across the board is great, i even loved the critically panned the counselor
    I"d like to recommend Chabon's Gentlemen on the Road, a cool historical novel about a period nobody even knew existed. It's great. As for McCarthy, I don't like the "cult of Blood Meridian". I just don't think he succeeded in trying to do a literary masterpiece about ethnic cleansing, and all he did was tell a horror story with political-military trappings. I like Don Delillo and Paul Auster best among that group and style of novelists.

  12. #27
    BANNED WebSlingWonder's Avatar
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    ^^ I actually agree with Revolutionary_Jack here. As fun as ASM is, it's the main Spider-book, but shouldn't be the only one. Someone mentioned "Child Within" and how that was told in Spectacular: I think the thing we have to be grateful for is the fact that the story was told period, not where. Who honestly cares if Harry dies in SPEC and not ASM? The lead up and story was masterfully told by DeMatteis. Or like Death of Jean DeWolffe and more. It honestly doesn't matter: the fact that we got those stories while ASM still went on is, well, amazing. And I'm happy for it. Even in present day.

  13. #28
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    Maybe I missed something, but what about the Raimi movies suggested May knew or guessed Peter was Spider-Man?

  14. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by Agent Z View Post
    Maybe I missed something, but what about the Raimi movies suggested May knew or guessed Peter was Spider-Man?
    "Spider-Man 2" strongly hinted that May knew. There's a scene where May is talking to Peter about needing a hero, which inadvertently inspires him to become Spider-Man again.

  15. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by WebSlingWonder View Post
    ^^ I actually agree with Revolutionary_Jack here. As fun as ASM is, it's the main Spider-book, but shouldn't be the only one. Someone mentioned "Child Within" and how that was told in Spectacular: I think the thing we have to be grateful for is the fact that the story was told period, not where. Who honestly cares if Harry dies in SPEC and not ASM? The lead up and story was masterfully told by DeMatteis. Or like Death of Jean DeWolffe and more. It honestly doesn't matter: the fact that we got those stories while ASM still went on is, well, amazing. And I'm happy for it. Even in present day.
    And people are acting as if Harry Osborn's death and the lead-up to that would have been the same in ASM as in Spec. if JMD had migrated there. The reason JMD was able to get that deep into Harry Osborn in the pages of Spectacular is precisely because of it being a satellite story where Peter doesn't have to always be the center. That wouldn't work consistently in the main title.

    And again Harry Osborn had been long neglected and faded into obscurity in the main titles by then. Flash Thompson btw was Peter's best man at his wedding and not Harry...and Flash was the guy who told Peter to get married in the mini-bachelor's party they had in the Wedding Annual. Had it not been for JMD's stories, Harry would likely just have been some loose end and remained forgotten.

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