JSA Storytime: Omega the Unknown

Good evening owls,

Your Steve Gerber fix, here

oh shit!

(I'm waiting for us to hit some 80s and get Trapper Keeper ads)

>Fantastic Four pocket portfolio with the shithumans rightfully presented as background characters
Those were the days...

Black Lightning mini

Hello, Storyteller.

Yesterday's news, but I'm actually really disappointed that the incident of Riri accidentally conquering Latveria was just skipped over. And here I was thinking I'd want to read this book since it did something interesting. Bendis is a grand champion of killing ideas.

I'm kind of conflicted on Lemire Hawkman, I don't have a lot of faith in Lemire currently but he has enough fans that he might make people pay attention to Hawkman

Hey guys. I've been reading Spencer's Cap and I really like it and the jabs at Bendis in the CW2 issues make me feel like I'm reading Illuminating Comics.

All the Metal tie in solicits sound so boring.

Sounds mediocre

I share this conflicted take

James-Michael is just straight up autistic.

I made the joke some time ago that they'd get Isabella to write when the show gets closer to debuting and they'll launch his comic...

that's a quality wall-breaker, dang

Lately a particular Bendisism for me has been that there is a perceivable cool idea in the pitch/initial issue and then he takes a hard turn on it in the execution.

I am always there for Hawkman beating up Batman.

>abloo bloo wheres muh Hawkman
>*DC gives you a Hawkman series spinning out of an event*
>abloo bloo I don't like the writer
Fuck's sake.

Not digging Black Hammer and Descender?

>"the joke"
Nice try Andy.

What do you mean?

Yeah, look where "I'm excited for that new Thunderbolts book" got us

We all disliked JLD/JLU on a variety of levels but especially basic competence

He posted on his blog that he's been very happy about DC acknowledging his work, and that the writers for the new show invited him to come give them some pointers.

Hawkman deserves better than Lemire. He's no Humphries or Based Lobdell.

Last issue, he got a faceful of cats for his trouble

Yep, it was the 70s

I know you're memeing, but that still got me. Fuck you.

I haven't read those yet, although I've heard good things

More recently his big two/Marvel stuff leaves something to be desired

Black Hammer is pretty good considering it's ensemble cast but it's really just about these fuck-ups processing their emotions. I dunno what Lemire's Hawkman will be like but I'm not all that opposed to it.

My platonic Hawkman is Hawkworld/those early John Ostrander issues (just in particular moments Hawkman looking at the US constitution and Hawkwoman joining the police - those characters can go so many places from there) and I know that's never likely coming back.

JLD is a garbage idea. Milligan ann DeMatteis couldn't make it work either and that says it all. Fair point on JLU, Equinox deserved better than being abandoned by her creator like that. Still, these aren't "currently".
The Terrifics is a really stupid fucking idea, his Hawkman has a much higher chance of turning out good.

>girls notice me now

>KUNG-FU SANDALS
>AUTHENTIC! WORN FOR CENTURIES BY ORIENTAL FIGHTING MASTERS

Counterpoint: The Terrifics is a TERRIFIC idea and fuck Marvel for their F4 IP bitching.

Agree that JLD was inherently garbage; the revealing connection between JLD and JLU is that Lemire is absolute shit at writing teams, which made his Legionboner even more painfully ironic

Woah, how about the Challengers deserve better than being shoved off for more of Snyder's BS?

plz tell me the secret

Hey guys

The Defenders is out...and it's pretty mediocre so far

JJJ is evergreen comic gold

JJJ cameo, cover should have said "FEATURING characters from the SPIDER-MAN series!!!!!!"

Muscles. Girls notice only muscles.

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>fuck Marvel for their F4 IP bitching.
This all there is to the damn thing. It's a bunch of characters with no chemistry thrown together because they can fit a stupid role to be pastiches for a different franchise. And it's sold as a "family" title despite the characters not being fucking finally. I like those characters too. Need I remind you all that Lemire also write Future's End which featured a real garbage Mr. Terrific?
Oh and it's a stupid name for a comic, they should've been the new Challengers of The Unknown.

JLD is just kinda conceptually shitty. Demon Knights is probably closer to what you want for that kind of thing?

Like the JLD characters are all pretty inherently weird and connected to different things, so a team-up book just makes them all worse. And in a mainline DC book some of them can't really be who they are, or were.

This new Mystik U is like a way of doing that and redefining the interpretations of the characters you're gonna use too, I guess.

They're OCs anyway and I don't dislike Snyder.

You'd think they'd want to hide how shitty the costumes actually look.

The man with brown hair seems a bit familar...

Have you seen the Spidey newspaper arc where JJJ starts using an old Iron Man suit?

>they should've been the new Challengers of The Unknown.

Bingo.

Their being tied into this Dark Multiverse stuff makes me wary

JLD was lots of shitty magic as lasers

that sounds awesome

Do we know what parts of Future's End that he worked on? Because that also had Azzarello, Giffen, and Jurgens on it.

>Lemire also write Future's End which featured a real garbage Mr. Terrific?
Proper blame to Futures End Terrific goes to Azzarello who wrote most (all?) of his scenes.

DC spoiled it's readers with good magic titles in the past so when they come out with shitty pew pew lasers Day of Vengeance style stories then these fans will bail.

It was great. He had a translucent faceplate. IIRC it ends with Tony finding out about it drunk in a limo in some European country and having to shut it down.

>JLD was lots of shitty magic as lasers
The Geoff Johns kind of magic.

He did the Stormwatch stuff with Atom, Hawkman, Black Adam, Engineer & Amethyst

I forget what other parts he did

lmao

Fucking having Shade scream "MY VEST" half the time that he appeared and just shooting out random madness circles the other half of the time

Because their magic stuff was all in Vertigo and Harry Potter was hot with the teenies so they had to make it all PG.

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If Lemire cared he could've said something. It's part of the strength of co-writing something.

That was my biggest disappointment with MCU Dr. Strange. Magic is basically just kung-fu.

It's also like, what the fuck are you doing taking Rac Shade and Constantine and putting them in that sitch?

Although that was kinda how he behaved in Suicide Squad too.

relevant to our discussion.jpg

But were they co-writing? I vaguely recall with Worlds End, one of the writers admitted that they didn't talk with any of the others at all.

Except with a weekly they probably barely got to talk to each other other than giving plot summaries.

DeMatteis Spectre, Dr. Fate and Phantom Stranger were not Vertigo. Neither was Ostrander Spectre or Morrison Klarion and Zatanna. Or Moore Swamp Thing.

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Yeah, communication on Future's End was tight, that's one of the reasons we thought it was going to turn out well when it was announced.

>JLD was lots of shitty magic as lasers
I know you read a bunch of fantasy OP. What kinda implementation of magic do you like? Goes for anyone else in the thread too, I know we're all a bunch of nerds too.

Hey, remember when DC tried to push Wonder Woman as representing the magic side of the DCU? That was stupid.

True, though I'd still argue those were all a lot more adult than the audience JLD was aimed at.

That was a pretty different Shade back in Suicide Squad though, before Milligan did the Vertigo treatment on him. And weirdly enough, the JLD Shade kept referencing stuff from the 1990s series.
I really need to read those Ditko issues sometime.

My preference is for it to make *some* kind of sense and all because honestly, I prefer plot-driven stories to atmospheric "who knows what the fuck actually happened here" moody/drifty stuff 99% of the time, or no, I never managed to finish Little, Big

Preferably it connects in an interesting way to whatever the metaphysical backbone of your secondary world is

The kinds seen in these as well as Books of Magic, Mr. E, Madam Xanadu, Hellblazer, Kid Eternity(if that counts), Invisibles, classic Englehart/Stern/DeMatteis Dr. Strange.

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>Little, Big
Jesus Christ OP you don't know how long I've been trying to remember the name of this book for. Fuck!

I find most of the time magic is super boring, like bad technobabble but even less comprehensible. Just a wizard going "now I must summon the powers of Buttfuckillago!".

Magic has to have rules in order for it to be interesting.

My favorite is Hellblazer, where John is basically just regular street scum who uses magic tricks to scam his way through life, but often his past and his use of magic catches up with him.

My ideal Hellblazer is "occult Trainspotting".

Some of the conflicts in Phantom Stranger seem like they would have required more thought than "pew pew magic"....would have been neat to see in a team context if need be

I never liked this whole "magic is faith" idea. How the fuck does that even work? If I believe that magic exists, suddenly I can do it? That's whoreshit. And if it does work that way, every sapient being has the potential to be a reality warped, and the whole of existence ought to have shat itself backwards by now.

>more adult than the audience JLD was aimed at.
This is the fault of the editors then. You don't take Rac Shade, John Constantine and then say "let's do blockbuster action with them, that's surely what the fans of those characters want to see, it's what they've gotten for years after all." The fact that they unironically called themselves Justice League Dark in story is just facepalm worthy.

More Gerber being storytimed here:
>Hey, remember when DC tried to push Wonder Woman as representing the magic side of the DCU? That was stupid.
I only remember that happening in DCUO.

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I'm kind of a pleb when it comes to fantasy, but I remember really liking the magic system in the "Old Kingdom" series when I read the three books years ago. I have no idea if it was based off another kind of system though.

The only interpretation of Justice League Dark Constantine that works is the self-aware Garth Ennis Hard Travellin' Heroez one.

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Abhorsen was really one of my favourite books as a kid. The bells are great, really evocative, and the charter magic/free magic dichotomy is free enough to write with rules enough to be interesting.

I nearly cried laughing at HECKBLAZER

The fact that DC allowed that to be published and yet still continues one with their Heckblazer unironically means that they take pleasure in shitting down their old fans throats.

It's a line a lot of IRL magic practitioners take, and there's a kind of self-help self-belief aspect to it independent of any actual magic? I can see why it gets picked up especially if the writer of a comic is a "real" """practitioner"""

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Sympathetic magic and curses and conditional stuff is just a lot more interesting than outright force.

Except Jason Aaron's 'Dr Strange cannot eat now lol' anyway.

>cuddly little demons

He just cannot get a break with these cats.

I need to go visit my sister's lovey slutty cat

Magic to me only works if it has a well defied set of rules from the beginning. Not particularly picky about the underlying system. Exotic material, special energy type, some manner of theurgy, whatever.

Like, if magic works, and spells can be cast with any measure of reliability, then logically it must operate under a set of physical laws. Otherwise there wouldn't and couldn't be spellbooks and schools created to pass on this meticulously studied knowledge.

Plus, from a narrative perspective, well defined rules put reasonable limits on what the characters can do, which maintains tension.

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>slutty cat
Please don't remind me of that thread.

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>This can't compare with the pulling my hair usually gets!
Uh

>Twinkies have the power to rehabilitate villains

Fuck off namefag.

All this magic talk makes me want to storytime something. Anyone interested in Hellblazer: All His Engines after?

Remember the cosmic cube, user. Twinkies are reality warpers in their own right.

go for it because I have a date with a book after this issue

Capeshit has never done good magic and fantasy as much as people meme about muh good series in past.

I'm down for it