Rules for Marvel/DC

I'd alter the team rule to "one permanent team and one group of allies that meet up when required." That is, Spider-Man can be an Avenger and do teamups with Daredevil, Cloak and Dagger, Prowler, Silver Sable, Black Cat, etc, but he can't be an Avenger and a member of the Fantastic Four. This rule especially applies to Wolverine.

-Wolverine is contractually required to make one background appearance every couple of comics. Yes, this includes Wolverine comics.

Hear me out on this. There is no salvaging Wolverine from Wolverine Publicity; he's the Trope Namer. Overexposure is his thing now. I think the only way to rescue Wolverine is to go the opposite direction and crank it up to 11. Having lunch in a diner? Wolverine is at the counter. Shopping in the mall? Wolverine wants to know if you'd like to try on shoes. School dance? Wolverine is chaperoning.

Turn it from "obnoxious, annoying obligatory Wolverine appearance" to a hilarious running gag. Personally, I think they missed a golden opportunity during Civil War to put Wolverine on both sides, pro-Reg and anti-Reg, culminating in a single gag during the climactic final battle where you can clearly see Wolverine fighting Wolverine in the background.

edited 12th Oct '12 3:48:32 PM by TobiasDrake

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Actually, now that you've suggested it, I'm surprised something like that hasn't happened yet. Especially Wolverine fighting himself in the background. That'd be a nice easter egg gag.

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It's not just Wolverine Publicity, it's that he's in so many issues that are happening in a compressed timeline (at one point three days in the Marvel Universe was one day in the real world) that there's literally no way he can fit all of this into his itinerary. None. In New York fighting with the Avengers on Sunday, in Madripoor on Monday, fighting the Silver Samurai in Japan on Tuesday, offworld with the X-Men on Wednesday, etc. This is blatantly impossible.

There was an issue of his solo series playing with that. A two-page splash of 14 panels, going across two weeks, and each day he was in a different place, with different people, fighting different enemies. It was actually kinda amusing, but it did also point out that he was running himself ragged, and was going to suffer for it.

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This is why I wanted Secret Invasion to reveal that, due to a managerial error, Wolverine was actually three Skrulls operating in tandem.

But that never happened.

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DC: Stop bringing back characters just because they were the Silver Age version. The only thing people remember about Barry Allen is that he died. He didn't need to replace Wally in the New 52. Likewise, Barbara Gordon most definitely did not need to be Batgirl again.

No character shall ever again be changed to fit some boring cookie-cutter hip young twenty-something mold. I'm looking at you, Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, and Morrison-Supes.

Marvel: Repeat after me. I will never have another heroes vs heroes event again. I will never have another heroes vs heroes event again.

No event can be undone by another event. Grow some stones and play for keeps. I mean seriously, can you name one thing since Disassembled that's stuck? Scarlet Witch is OK, mutants aren't endangered, everyone is buddies again after Civil War... Stop going back to the status quo.

edited 26th Oct '12 9:01:38 PM by RedM

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As an alternative to "grow a pair and play for keeps" (which is good advice, for sure), I would offer "just stop pretending that you're playing for keeps." By this point, many of the changes to the status quo that Marvel offers seem arbitrary and stupid, and I'd just as soon not see them stick, you know what I mean?

Marvel: you shold do like Bonelli comics and make Spider-man a period comic. Let's say, all his stories be set in the seventies.

DC: You should consider doing the same to Batman.

I see what you mean, but at the same time, it's annoying to adjust to the big changes and get excited to see where they go from there, only to see everything revert to normal. Look at everything that's happened to the Avengers since Bendis. Scarlet Witch went crazy, but now she's a hero again. Wasp is dead except now she's not anymore. Steve Rogers was dead, Bucky was Captain America, Iron Man was director of SHIELD, Spidey's identity was public, the SHRA changed everything about how superheroes operated... and that's all kaput. It's just irritating, and retroactively cheapens everything that changed, while destroying whatever interesting possibilities those changes could have brought.

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Likewise, just never changing anything would stagnate the stories. There's only so many times you can tell the story of "Iron Man fights the Mandarin, and everything is exactly the same at the end of the story as it was at the beginning," before it becomes evident that every version of the story is the same damn story.

Without change, there is no urgency, there is no threat, there is no reason to invest in characters who will never grow, never be anything but what they are now.

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When designing a costume for an unpowered heroine or villainess, before adding any aspect, you shall ask yourself "Why doesn't Batman's costume have this aspect?" If the answer is to do with looking good, it doesn't go in.

(Exposed skin below the neck counts as an aspect. Also, high-heeled shoes for men◊ do exist.)

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Tobias: your ideas for dealing with Wolverine Publicity are hilarious. :D

...elaborate please?

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

For Marvel: Lampshading a problem is not the same as fixing it. This is in response to some things that were said some pages ago in this thread. Namely, that all the superheroes were in New York or situated somewhere in the US. At some point both her addressed in a comic or two.

The first was in one of those Civil War prequels. Mr. Fantastic mentions that he and Iron Man had discussed setting up a super hero team in Chicago so that they wouldn't all be bundled up on New York. I'm not impressed by disposable C-list heroes or fresh meat introduced just to get killed off so that the big heroes can come to save the day during his vacation to Florida or Wyoming.

The second one was War Machine talking to somebody or another, I cannot recall. But they said that America "won" the super race. Without even trying, the US just found itself with way more super powered people than anywhere else. And that was that.

The second example there is from the first issue of The Initiative, and it wasn't War Machine; it was an Army General expositing on why M-Day was a good thing from the perspective of the United States, because mutants were the great equalizer; without them, it was just *paraphrased* "aliens, magic, and good old-fashioned lab accidents, just like God intended," which America had far more of than anywhere else in the world.

That said, I agree wholeheartedly with your point. I find it interesting that it scales, too. Earth is the New York of the universe. And then the universe is the New York of the multiverse. Other planets have maybe two or three super[alien]s AT MOST among them, and then you get into other dimensions and they have a handful of super[dimensional]s among THEM.

edited 29th May '13 11:02:22 AM by TobiasDrake

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Well, a lot of superhumans are created from industrial accidents involving high-tech equipment. Maybe America just has the right combination of advanced technology and piss-poor safety regulations.

edited 29th May '13 11:07:53 AM by RavenWilder

Ah, darn my memory.

You'd think the former Soviet Union would have a ton of supers then.

Perhaps Soviet safety regulations were so poor that the victims kept getting killed instead of superpowers?

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There's still be a bunch of aliens and magic users.

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For both:

All stories should possess no less than three things: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

1) A beginning is well defined and clearly pointed out with the number 1 on the front cover of the issue. There must be no preludes, countdowns, #0 issues or cash-in prequels. References to past events should be kept to a minimum. Basically, the story starts where it starts.

2) A middle is linearly structured and developed inside a single title. Enough with the family crossovers and tie-ins already. If external characters have to enter the story, this should not affect their own books, thereby forcing prospective readers to buy issues from titles they don't already follow. It's cheap, it's ugly, and it's a put-off for the story at hand.

3) The end is just as clearly defined as the beginning, and again, develops in the same title. Dangling plot threads should be kept to a minimum. It doesn't really matter if the story returns to the initial status quo or heads off in a new direction, but it should be clear if anything has changed.

In short, I drifted toward Dark Horse because whenever I saw a title of theirs that I liked, labeled something to the effect of "issue 2/6", I knew I'd have to buy no more than five other books and have a complete story to read from beginning to end. Y'know - just like in any other media, save from suddenly cancelled TV shows. Continuity Lockout is problematic enough; but Archive Panic due to simply not finding all the issues of all the titles comprising a single story - now that's just nasty.

this is for both companies: never take any sort of anatomy or costume design inspiration from Rob Liefeld. this is for your own good.

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I don't know, I kinda like cross-title crossovers. The X-Men have always done that sort of thing - Battle of the X-Men being the latest example - and I think it's a lot of fun. Journey Into Mystery, during Kieron Gillen's run, had crossovers with New Mutants and Mighty Thor. (It also started off tied into Fear Itself.) It's fun seeing those sorts of stories where multiple writers are working together to tell a story.

The Avengers trend for the past few years, of course, has been the complete opposite. An event series, with a bunch of other books tying in to give more depth. Unfortunately, I feel like too many of those events relied on the tie-ins to provide real emotional context. That's just disappointing.

I also feel like Continuity Lockout is only a problem because people keep saying it's a problem. I get annoyed every time I see a comic book reader bring that up, because there is no reason why it should be true. If you pick up #4 of that 6-part Dark Horse story, you can probably follow along well enough. You're told what you need to know. Most comics do that. There aren't that many instances where a comic doesn't do that. Writers and editors know that every single issue could be someone's first. So they make a real effort to ensure that a person picking up any given issue will be able to read the recap page and pick up the story as they go along. All the reader needs to do is accept that there's backstory shit that they don't know. And if that backstory shit isn't explained in the story, then it's completely irrelevant. If they need to know something, it'll be explained. If it's not explained, they don't need to know it. They just need to accept that they don't need to know anything that isn't explained.

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most of the recent comics i've seen give a brief recap of the arc at the beginning of each book to help prevent Continuity Lockout.

edited 4th Sep '13 12:32:44 PM by crimsonstorm15

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.

Personally, I love tie-ins. If Mephisto opens the gates of Hell and demons spill out into the world everywhere and the entire globe is caught up in a war to defeat Mephisto, I want to know what Spider-Man's doing right now. I want to know what's happening to the X-Men. And I want there to be consequences.

Tie-ins can flesh out events that are happening that are too personal for the main story. Spider-Man trying to protect his family from Mephisto's demons and then finding them a safe place where they'll be protected before he can go off to join the Avengers and fight Mephisto is a great story and is very important to Spider-Man, but utterly meaningless to the central plot. I would hate to see the core book waste 15 pages on this, but it would just feel wrong if Spidey showed up with just a throwaway line of, "My aunt's safe, don't worry, let's fight demons."

And I like consequences, and the effects they have on titles. To me, it feels like, "Life happens." Does it screw with the narrative? Absolutely. And I like that. I like the idea that this plotline or that plotline might get a chunk of rebar rammed through it because of this world-shattering event, because life happens. You can't always predict everything that's going to occur, and sometimes, forces from outside the plot intervene in your life.

Say, the last three storylines have fleshed out a cold war between Tony Stark and James Rhodes versus an alliance of the Mandarin and Doom. Well, now Rhodey's in a coma because Blackheart beat him into a coma during the war, leaving Tony one man down, and the cold war is now broken by Doom and Mandarin moving in on him. Everything is escalating due to forces completely outside the plot stepping in and mauling the event sequence. That's very lifelike, to me.

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I really don't mind when a tie-in is of the Hero of Another Story variety - that is a nice way of providing outside context to the plot at hand. What I dislike is the blatant "continued in issue ### of [title you're not currently following]" cross-promotion gimmicks that can ruin the pace of a good story.