Air Your Grievances

>tl;dr What's bothering you about the industry, and why do you still read comics?

>inb4 'buying comics'

Sorting through my books after much too long and I looked down at all the little piles I made and realized how much money I've spent on these fucking things, and I just felt furious.
I dunno Sup Forums I'm down on the floor sorting through these books I used to love but in hindsight I think i can count on one hand the ones I've actually enjoyed, instead of following just because I wanted to know what happened. I'm young and idealistic and blah blah blah I wanted to support artists and art but right now my knees fucking hurt and I'm ready to just torrent the shit out of whatever I want.

I'm pissed about all the Marvel Event Burnout and the flat writing on most books. Hell, I'm into the diversity push and I like some of the new takes on old characters, that doesn't bother me like it does a lot of people. But when the writing is shit I wonder why I'm even paying for it and whether people even notice how fucking bad it is! Whether people are balls-to-the-wall into it or hardcore opposed, it seems like the only attention paid is to the political message, not the quality of the delivery of that message.
I'm pissed off about how it seems like people here get angrier over Thor being a woman than Thor being in a shitty book, or how people call Captain Marvel slurs more than they complain about how the shitty events and Bendis derail what could've been a decent story!

I dunno. Sure a lot of this is me seeing only a few threads maybe it's not true whatever. What I wanna know is why do you still read comics Sup Forums?

Also can we just vent for a while and get Sup Forums stuff you're angry about off our chest? Air your grievances here.

pic unrelated, found in Annihilation Conquest last night when I was enjoying a comic.

I still read comics because there's at least 30-60 years of material in capes alone that's entertaining.
Seriously, read some Golden or Silver Age stuff, and go down through the late 80s. That's still tons of content.

And, beyond that, there's non-superhero stuff that's just as worth reading. Not all indie stuff is pretentious or self-aggrandizing or turbo-leftist.

If you're passionate about a hobby, you'll find that there's always a way around some facet of it that seems to bog it down for a while.

Oh I'm a huge Chris Ware, Burns, Clowes fan. Lynda Barry and Anders Nielsen have been recent faves. I also follow some Image and Oni stuff.
I guess this is really more directed at Marvel or when I tried to get into New 52 more than anything. Golden and Silver age is something I've never really gotten into. What are some of your faves? I'll check it out.

I'll probably make my own thread about it sometime but I feel like Marvel really stopped giving a shit about continuity at some point in the 90s.
Reading the old stuff, stories sync up perfectly. No detail forgotten, no death overlooked, no plot thread left dangling. The further into the 00s we got, the more and more examples there were of writers not even knowing shit about the title character they were writing.
It was probably inevitable, one day there'd be too much accumulated history to keep tabs on. Nonetheless, there's a clear cut-off point after which events really stopped feeling important.

Really annoyed with Marvel for canceling titles I was enjoying (Illuminati, Squadron Supreme, Hyperion) and the constant hero vs hero events.

Really annoyed with DC for continuing to show Batman into everything, the upcoming JL series with Lobo being the biggest offender and the fact that DC has been promising us a Shazam (Captain Marvel) ongoing for the better half of a decade now, only to give us nothing.

Really annoyed with IDW and TOR for discontinuing the Wheel of Time comic adaptations. New Spring was short but good, Eye of the World was long and fucking excellent, and it's a damp shame we'll never get any of the other books made into comics. That means no Lanfear trying to seduce and corrupt Rand In His Dreams, No bearded Wolfbrother Perrin, no Mat and his Army of the Black Hand, no Nanyeve learning how to restore the One Power in someone who has been cut off.

Fuck man, now I'm sad

I can't believe they made Superman's boots blue for Rebirth. That's pretty much my biggest pet peeve with DC. Also I can't stand how everyone fellates Batman so much. I can't stand Batman.

Marvel is too liberal now, I read some of their newer stuff and it makes me cringe. Clone Conspiracy is dumb, they already did that in the 90s and it was called Clone Saga.

That's pretty much it. Don't know enough about other brands to really say anything.

Dynamite, not IDW, my bad.

I wish Marvel and DC would put the amount of effort into making quality editions of their older stories. Just look at how pretty you can make classic stories look.

I'm not even mad, because
is right.
I'm gonna get high as fuck and read the Galactus trilogy.

P.S. OP is it just me or does Conquest have the most nipple through costum shots of any comic ever?

As for why I still bother: I've downsized, man. Think back to when you started reading comics, to the issue that made you go "damn this is awesome I can't NOT know what happens next", to the series that you'd pick up the very day of release each month because you didn't dare wait. What comics are coming out now that inspire that same feeling?
When the comics that first gave me that feeling stopped publication, I started buying any old shit to just fill the void: there's blasphemy in my longbox I dare not name. I also tried characterfagging somewhere along the line; It took 10 issues for me to finally accept that the writer either didn't know or didn't care about the things that made me like the character, I gave the whole thing away to my LCS. Then I got that old excited feeling again reading a one-shot and realized "...why the fuck have I been wasting money on this other shit? It ain't muh cawmix!".
Now I'm only buying two ongoings. Plus a slow-as-fuck indie book and the odd self-contained issues that impress me. Scale back, dude. Set yourself a high standard and only buy what vaults it. If you just want to catch up on events or take part in Sup Forums banter, use any one of the numerous comic reading websites. The few bits of info you want aren't worth 3 bucks a pop, especially not in this post-90s continuity a shit environment.

one of my main problems in the current day is that there are too many redundant books out there. do we really need multiple avengers teams? do we need amazing spiderman events outside of the main title, while also crossing over with the main title? as an x-men fan, why don't we go back to two books? why do so many uninteresting characters keep getting solo books? why can't we get new writers that are good? why do they think that comic book universes are exactly the same as ours, and hence can apply our dumb social justice issues to universes that are so divergent from ours?

I love the X-Men. There is no part of me that can ever stop reading about these gay babies. I am trapped with no way out and I have to fucking sit and suffer through massive reams of shit that are shoved down my throat of bullshit writing that I have long since grown cold and dead because of it.

The culprit is bad writing and the constant rename:renumber scheme that has been corrupting the quality of our books for decades. Look at the new X-Lineup. Comics unironically named X-Men:Blue and X-Men:Gold. Are you fucking kidding me? That is the most idiotic fill in name. Why are they even trying this? The books is named Uncanny X-Men or X-Men (adjectiveless). The only reason they have stopped using these names is so that when they relaunch them there will be a big draw to buying those #1s. This is idiotic and inherently degrading to the piece of art that is the X-Men and taints the writing of whomever should agree to shepherd these titles. That's my complaint for the whole industry, Rebirth, New 52, it's the same thing. More renumbering for no reason than to drive sales.

Specifically X-Men have also suffered from shit writing, which I attribute ultimately to taste. You can't always agree with every artist. But the number of titles that have been truly great have been few and far between of late. When you recruit from an absolutely massive number of professional writers there is ultimately little excuse to not hit more home runs. Writing is not some magical force that no one can control. Quality can be screened for, some people are just more skilled in the craft than others. It just isn't defensible for Marvel Editorial to keep hiring sub-par talent.

I don't I'm here to post about cartoons.

Op here

X-Men is what really did it in for me. First thing I got really into was Age of Apocalypse. I fell in love with fucking every character and that carried over to mainstream books. Unfortunately I jumped on right at Battle of the Fucking Atom. But I held on after that and tried to keep up with continuity (lol) but I've backtracked and picked up and read trades of most X Crossovers and all of House of M thru Second Coming etc etc. Whatever. It's great. There are great stories to be had.

And I don't want to be one of those "Marvel booted Mutants cuz Inhuman rights for movies" but it's just such a backwards fucking convoluted plot to pit them against each other because, like you said, Hero vs. Hero shit is inexplicably popular, overdone, and easy.

And you're right. There are so many writers trying to break into the business that there should be no excuse for boring stories, bad stories, poor dialogue straight out of a shitty david mamet play (@Bendis)

THat and too many x books to follow. It's impossible for a college student to keep up with everything and support the artists on a college student budget. xtraordinary, uncanny, all new, AN wolverine, now champions if you're following cyc, uncanny avengers for Rogue and Cable, and now a whole other EVENT!!!! RIGHT AFTER DEATH OF X.

And the next round of books won't be any better, still to many of them, with more events around the corner.

yikes

When I was still reading ongoing Marvel, I just used unlimited. A six month lag is easy to get over.

>DC makes bimonthly comics
>instead of getting double the content they just extend a 20 page issue over 40 pages
lol

FUCK YOU FOR REMINDING ME OF HER
I'M STILL MAD

Prax?

or Thor or Carol?

Praxagora. I will never not be mad, goddamn.
If I ever get to writing comics you bet your ass I'm bringing her back.

The fact that so few creators care about the medium. Almost all comics written nowadays are written and drawn like television or a storyboard. Reading Eisner really shows what the medium is capable of doing, but no one cares about that; they just want to license their shit for tv and easy money.

I want my favorite franchise back, why is that so hard?

Yeah, it's weird to look at how film and tv adaptations have changed the medium by almost trying to resemble the way film and tv are structured? I think of Eisner like you said, Jim Woodring and "The Portable Frank" stand out too, even Steranko and the early Nick Fury stuff, it's like reading a comic illustrated by Dali. A lot of artists seem to be just illustrating the action, not using the medium to its full potential. Aja played around with it a lot in hawkeye, even all-new hawkeye had a cool simultaneous stories-deal changing from pencils to watercolors on the same page. I want more stuff like that.

I feel you. I finished Conquest today and it still hurts. I don't think I'll ever be rid of this.

That's exactly my fucking problem with most of images line-up even if they're great so much of them are slowly dragging TV-pitches Glitterbomb, Kill or be Killed, Bedlam, walking dead hell even invincible, they're still good but sometimes blow they're load by the first arcs end and by the time they continue you've forgotten about