Joe Fridays-Week 43

[King_Mungi]

Much better than the last couple ones

http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays43.html

 

[Kevin]

Much better than the last couple ones

http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays43.html

We'll see about that, mister.

 

[GNR]

Love those "homage" pages by Weeks in WorldBreaker.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Good preview art this time around. Nova's encounter with Iron Man looks like it's gonna be good. I'm a little confused by the Mystic Arcana art, though. That's the (up until recently) original Black Knight, Sir Percy of Scandia, which makes sense given the solicitation, which talks about the age of Camelot, but the cover featured a Black Knight in an updated costume. I'm wondering if there's gonna be a new Black Knight in the comic or if the cover was just Djurdjevic getting creative like Dell'Otto used to.

I'm actually a bit worried about Mystic Arcana in general. The concept of defining magic seems pretty dumb to me. Magic is supposed to be about defying definition and subverting science and all of that good stuff. Plus, tarot cards seem kind of lame to me, so defining magic along tarot lines is kind of iffy. But I'll see how it goes. Anything that shines more light on Marvel's magic side is good at this point, and if Mystic Arcana results in more stuff like Dr. Strange owning as hard as he did in the last issue of New Avengers, I'm down for it.

 

[Mogwai]

Adrian Alphona on an Avengers meets Wizard of Oz story, sounds great.

 

[Red]

Updated: http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays43_extra.html

 

[Dread]

A better Joe's than some of the previous week's stuff. Some good with the usual bit of malarky. It seems Joe Q didn't waste much time after the March 2007 sales reports to stomp on DC a bit (let's say DC's numbers for a while have not been good). And then he wonders why they don't want to do a crossover with Bendis & Batman/DD.

NEW AVENGERS #32
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Pencils and Cover by LEINIL FRANCIS YU
The New Avengers have found a huge clue to the threat that has faced them since the day they banded together. And now just the knowledge of that threat is tearing them apart. What secret could be so damning that it could do to the New Avengers what the Civil War could not??
32 PGS./Rated A …$2.99

Sigh, talk about beating a dead horse. Hasn't NEW AVENGERS ALWAYS been in some state of "being torn apart from within" or being "disorganized"? Sheesh, the Defenders are always called "a non-team", but they've fully assembled more often than the NA. First Bendis has more hero infighting when I think half the audience has had enough of it after 9 months (fans keep asking Joe Q about "when will we see a villian" for a reason), and now this. After Ronin, again. The cliche of A-List writers is once they go A-List, they merely stripmine their past stories endlessly until they retire or die, and never (or rarely) grow or do anything better. Bendis has very quickly shown which category he falls under.

- The preview for NOVA #2 naturally looks sweet. So, interestingly, the SHRA was made to prevent civilian deaths in super-brawls, and yet Iron Man is perfectly willing to engage a "Level 12" threat in the heart of a suburban neighborhood. Y'know, even cops are sometimes ordered to end a car chase if it gets too dangerous in crowded areas. What's Stark's excuse?

- Joe Q has done another about face about WORLD WAR HULK, upon seeing the amount of story chapters and tie-in's almost reaching CW levels (at least before the 2 month delay that added some chapters/one shots to CW). Can anything he says be taken seriously for long?

- Admittedly, Joe Q stated he "never got space" stuff, yet produced a monster-cool space event in ANNIHILATION, likely because it had less "cooks" in the pot than CIVIL WAR. Now he seems to want to take the same approach with magic in MYSTIC ARCANA, but treds some difficult water:

"...in Roger Rabbit it's very clear how to kill a 'toon, so the viewer gets the feeling that the characters can be placed in peril and have their backs placed against the wall. This is exactly what I'm looking for in regards to our magic characters. Rules that govern them. How do you kill Doctor Strange? How do you hurt him?"

Apples and Oranges. WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT was a children's cartoon with a very specific set of character classes; humans and toons. Marvel's mystical class ranges from mages to vampires to demons to "dhampirs" to werewolves to "people with mystical weapons who aren't quite mages" and everything in-between. They all have a set of strengths and weaknesses, some class specific and some character specific. Not even all zombies or vampires are created equal.

And I think BKV answered "how do you hurt Dr. Strange" with his THE OATH mini, which brilliantly reaffirmed that he IS STILL HUMAN. He can be surprised, he can be injured, he can suffer wounds, blood loss, fatigue, etc. You can cancel out all his magic with the right counter-trinkets or spells. And his hands have nerve damage. It's not the character's fault that too many writers simply choose to have Dr. Strange be a plot convient god-moder.

This line on magic characters needing "rules" seems horribly dubious when you compare them to, say, Wolverine, a character who has needed a clear set of "rules" as to what he can and cannot recover from FOR A DECADE. In the 90's, being shot and tortured for hours could almost kill him. Now he can regenerate from napalm, nukes, and being burnt to a skeleton. Within PANELS. And unlike the magic class, who still are within the fringes of the MU, Wolverine is a major character, with two ongoings and no end of major comic appearences. Yet no two writers can manage to handle his power levels the same. I'd like to know how Wolverine could be killed moreso than Dr. Strange these days.

JQ: In all honesty, Oolgi, no, I don’t feel that we’ve gotten a handle on this yet. Let me first say that this doesn’t mean that we can’t tell Doc stories, it just means to me that this is a crucial element that keeps Doc from becoming a successful ongoing title. It’s never been successful as an ongoing and to me that’s because we don’t have rules governing the Marvel world of magic.

Let me also add that this happens to be a problem with magic universes in general for me. When the rules are clearly defined, they work, when they’re not, they don’t.

So, moving forward, in our upcoming Mystic Arcana event, we make an effort to break down the different kinds of magic in the Marvel Universe and make the first move towards defining what magic is.

Crucial element that keeps Dr. Strange from having a successful series are:

1). Hostile market
2). He's never been terribly popular
3). No creator has managed to have a good angle since Vaughan.

Magic in itself is the absence of physical rules. Trying to make magic into some RPG rulecode usually stifles it, like JMS' STRANGE did. That was a horrid disaster to try to make Dr. Strange more "grounded", which Joe of course won't mention. He never mentions his failures. We'll see what comes of it.

JQ: Well, kaddavr, that’s not what Bendis said. He never said that the wise-cracking Spidey is what he likes as you say. That may be how you decided to take it, but let’s be clear, that’s not what Brian said.

And yes, if in fact he had come to us and said that he wanted to do it his way and to hell with what everyone else was doing, we would have had a serious discussion about it. But that’s not what Brian did and it’s something that he has never done in his years working here.

What Brian did say was that as the outsider, the loner on the Avengers team, it offered Spidey the opportunity to do more wisecracking while Joe was telling a story of a different aspect of Spidey’s life. To me, and this is just my opinion now, his time with the Avengers is a release he’s around people with problems just as big as his, on his own he’s absorbed in his thoughts and gets more intense and dark. We all know that Peter has two major ways of dealing with the incredible stress in his life. In one way he strikes out but in another he vents it through humor. I see his time with the Avengers as that time where he deals with it more with humor.

This reply is answering a question that sort of tugs on the idea that Bendis gets "special privelages" at Marvel, where other writers have to knowtow to his work but he is free to ignore anything done in other books. The realistic answer would be, "No duh. Bendis is our #1 writer on our #1 ongoing and anything he launches is an instant Top 10-20 hit. So no **** we treat him like royalty. Hell, I'd even help him burry a dead prostitute if it meant more profits." It's grating to us, but it's life. Every company has their Top Salesman who sort of acts like an unofficial boss who can float the rules that the rest have to abide by.

Naturally, though, Joe won't admit this to a lowly customer. So instead he writes this brilliant reply that implies that, No, Bendis doesn't get special privelages and I don't just agree with anything he proposes, but that once Bendis starts to argue on his behalf, I seem to usually agree with him. Which produces the same result. It reminds me of Ms. Marvel, angsting about these horribly immoral things Iron Man is asking her to do, but does them anyway, so it doesn't really matter. I'd prefer an honest man to a conflicted man if they're going to do the same thing anyway.

The Thought Balloon comment is a clear example of this. In past Friday's, Joe's lamented about how outdated and uncool they were, and then when Bendis does it, all of a sudden it is the best thing since Jesus. If any Friday's proved that Joe, perhaps too "nice" for his own good to be able to impose order and deadlines, is Bendis' b****, this is it. Bendis isn't Joe's Yes-Man. It is the other way around to the point where the line between servant and master is blurred.

- I love how he got around his "quota" comment with heroines. They may have also mentioned that the entire point of Arana's launch was hyping, "hey, a Latina superheroine!", even to the point of claiming she was their first, which wasn't correct. He always has an answer when called on his own baloney. Now why can't he manuver with that kind of pizzazz when a creator puts his comics on the backburner? At least Joe admitted that a Heinberg Vol. 2 of YA is all but a pipe dream.