No, i mean that O'neill feels like overly harsh and elitist when it comes to comic characters and their adaptations at times.
These are her thoughts on GOTG 2: http://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogsp...believers.html
I disagree with her about the movie's characters. Yes, Drax and Mantis are pretty bad, but most of the team members weren't conceived with some grand ideal and metaphysical voice in mind like a Thanos or a Warlock. Groot was pretty much a monster of the week in a random issue of Tales to Astonish. Even Stan Lee forgot about him. Rocket was made by Mantlo and Giffen as a joke character based on a Beatles song who didn't have much purpose Beyond having a quirky adventure with Hulk and a miniseries where he fought an evil mole on a galactic insane asylum. Yes, Pratt-Lord is nothing like his 1976 version from a B/W magazine that was ignored by everyone's radar. He was a Buck Rogers pastiche with a theme related to astrology until Steve Englehart left the writing to Claremont. He barely had a consistent characterisation until Giffen brought him back in 2006 as a remorseful and sardonic veteran with a Killzone mask. (does anyone knows that Tymothy Zhann made a successor to Star-Lord?)"Watching the 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy on the big screen, I was taken aback by just how banal these wonderful characters had become. Gamora and Drax the Destroyer were both created by Jim Starlin, the latter with Mike Friedrich; Mantis by Steve Englehart and Don Heck; Groot and Ego by Lee & Kirby; Rocket Raccoon by Bill Mantlo & Keith Giffen. Every character onscreen was the product of distinctive creators with distinctive ideas, who each worked under different constraints, exploring different themes and telling very different kinds of stories. The Guardians who appear onscreen are based not on the original Guardians of the Galaxy, created in 1969 by Arnold Drake and Gene Colan, but on a version of the team created in the mid-2000s by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning and built off the Annihilation crossover written by Giffen. The Star-Lord who appears onscreen as played by Chris Pratt bears little resemblance to the Star-Lord created by Englehart and Steve Gan in 1976. I go down this laundry list of creators and reinventions in order to point out just how many individual voices went into the creation and continued relevancy of every character.
"None of these voices can be heard onscreen. Only the endless empty howl of IP management, the essences of characters ground down into thin pulp to be processed into the standard action movie template. Complete with quips.
"The effect is that of seeing children soiling the legacy of their betters – even Lee’s contributions ultimately being little more than grist for the mill of endless bowdlerization. (It doesn’t help that these video game creatures move around onscreen to the sound of classic rock songs produced by greater talents. Seeing George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” soundtrack a weightless sequence of CGI “splendor” almost inspired me to walk out of the theater on its own.) Marvel is both the unified sum of thousands of different characters and the product of the sweat of hundreds of creators working to express themselves through a limited but also paradoxically unrestricted genre. Anything goes as long as you can fit your ideas through certain narrow apertures. It’s surprisingly easy to use comic books to tell very personal stories, whatever your definition of personal may be. If the stories are any good they stick around and become definitive, and new creators take these stories and use them as the foundation for new stories. If they aren't, whatever is left survives in a Handbook entry, awaiting another creator to come along and see something of value in a space raccoon with a jetpack.
"Everyone was always getting screwed but no one was making much money. The irony is that a creator’s given IP could only become valuable once every shred of personality was drained, leaving multicolored action figures to be digitally manipulated onscreen while screenwriters hammer every character into the same Marvel Studios formula template. Now Drax the Destroyer is worth quite a lot of money, even as everything that ever made the character interesting has fallen by the wayside."
And as noted, the meta-commentary of both GotG and GotG2, with its notions of friendship, family, neuro-diversity, shared pain and healing...there's a LOT going on there besides being a fun action comedy, even though Gunn messed up Ronan and the Nova Corps. Marvel has always been popular entertainment. It seems silly to me to claim that the movies are somehow betraying the artistic voices of the characters original creators (especially after reading stuff like ''Marvel: The Untold Story''. A lot of these creators were creating popular entertainment as part of an industry; sometimes they weren't above hiding a dick joke in a comic or taking a swipe at the competition or at each other in their own meta-text. Changing something like 'Watchmen'? I get that argument. You have some characters who had a handful of backup stories in the late 1960s, a handful of guest appearances in the 1970s and then a moderately successful series in the 1990s and then a new, unrelated team in the 2000s that used a bunch of almost totally forgotten characters to reboot the team.
I think an easy way to look at Thanos stories is that anything written by Jim Starlin, Ron Marz and Keith Giffen is the real Thanos while anything written by other authors should be dismissed as a Thanosi clone.
Eh, I'm just not too much of a Bendis fan. His style of writing worked really well for Spider-Man, but he took that and applied it to all of his runs, and it just didn't work. I definitely agree with the criticism that he writes all his characters the same.
I feel like the reason why Bendis has made so much money for Marvel is because of how tpb friendly his storylines are. I think he writes his stories, keeping in mind that they'll probably be sold in tpb form at bookstores. I mean didn't Ultimate Spider-Man kind of start Marvel's preference for tpb's? Obviously, they were done before, but it seems like they were pushed really hard starting in the mid 2000's.
Last edited by manymade1; 10-14-2019 at 02:41 PM.
I think an easy way to look at Thanos stories is that anything written by Jim Starlin, Ron Marz and Keith Giffen is the real Thanos while anything written by other authors should be dismissed as a Thanosi clone.
I'm curious--as a writer, would you find the critiques of professional critics or your audience to be more informative? I'd argue the answer is not necessarily so clear-cut. On Rotten Tomatoes, why does a movie such as Captain Marvel hold a higher critic rating than its audience rating? In contrast, why does Joker hold a higher audience rating than critic rating? What was it that critics saw in Captain Marvel that they did not see in Joker? On the other side of the spectrum, how was such a poorly written book like Fifty Shades of Grey able to garner 100+ million in sold copies? What did audiences see in this book that critics did not? There is questionable judgement on both sides; however, ultimately, the audience decides whether a piece of media is successful or not.
As for me, I've found a happy medium. I look for the articulate non-professionals, as I find that they hold the best understanding of both worlds--it's why I recommended such critiques. Even after admitting this, I still believe I hold the audience's opinion in higher regard than that of a professional critic's. A critic can tell me all day that Zack Snyder's Watchmen was a disappointment, but that will never stop me from appreciating it for what it is. That lack of audience awareness from critics--it's why I've found myself completely disregarding most of their opinions.
Last edited by Citizen Kane; 11-03-2019 at 10:01 PM.
There is an issue with Bendis in interpreting the super hero genre. Most super hero writers up to the time of Bendis saw super heroes as infallible, and rotated the hero through encounters in a very standard fashion - the hero never losers, and the hero has a very static character.
Comes Bendis, and he changes that standard interpretation. With Bendis, we have fallible character traits now. Captain America isn’t always obeyed now. Luke Cage doesn’t have bombastic Street power that can’t be touched. A lot of characters had their mojo removed, both mystique and super powers, to make them more human. Was that a good or bad thing? We got a Dr Strange that couldn’t just snap his fingers anymore to make things better, like in Avengers Disassembled. There were limitations put on super heroes. That really grated on some fans. It seemed like another, different, Marvel Universe, where super heroes were being reimagined as “lesser” than they had been before.
I suppose Marvel were going through a stage where their brands were under fire. The almost collapse of Marvel scared the companies pants off, so they experimented with all sorts of alternatives to the standard play in the MU - Ultimate Universe, Marvel Knights, MC2, Earth X, MAX. It was confusing to me at the time. That Marvel was open to what Bendis, Millar, and Ellis did during that time, seemed quite in tone with what was happening at Marvel. You had a company tottering on the brink for so long, that if they didn’t bring on something fresh and strong, they could have lost it - the comics side of the business. Were they wrong to take it in the Bendis, Millar, and Ellis direction? (I also mean that Straczinski and Jenkins and others did some wonderful work in this period too).
And I felt it strange that Jenkins was not offered the Dark Avengers to examine the Sentry and Goblin dynamic. But then Jenkins did seem to do a sort of Sentry expose’ while doing the psychological piece on Penance.
Last edited by jackolover; 11-10-2019 at 08:29 PM.
With my favorite character that he completely destroyed, it wasn't to make her flawed. She was already. It wasn't to make her so she can't be untouched, he took away the limits of her abilities. The reason I hated what he did is he forgot everything that came before to force his world. When he could have completely created his own without completely destroying a classic character. Maybe for good.
Love is for souls, not bodies.
Err, what?
No, just...no.
Bendis is not the Stan Lee of comics. Stan Lee, is the Stan Lee of comics.
Nor is the the first to write a fallible Cap. Hell, Kurt Buseik did that in his run
When you get down to it, Bendis meanders, he putters around, talks talk and talks but doesn't develop his characters or his plots.
Can anyone point to a solid character arc from his Avengers? Hell, when Norman Osborn was the villain, all Spider-Man did was provide quips.
Bendis took popular characters and threw them together in a book. Not exactly what one would call rocket science
Luke Cage and his family kind of got one...Jessica Drew as well.
I dunno, I guess Clint went from being dead, coming back as an unhappy Superhero, to being happy again?
And I guess he fixed The Avengers Trinity's relationship...?
Dr. Strange went from not being Dr. Strange to being Dr. Strange again?