ITT post one of their favorite comic writers and Sup Forums tells you why they're shit

ITT post one of their favorite comic writers and Sup Forums tells you why they're shit.

I'll start: Grant Morrison

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>Hurf durf muh Hypertime villains aren't allowed to be complex they're all just evil bad dudes the good guys punch in the face look at how fucking enlightened I am I see space slugs and perform magic in drag because the magic mushrooms tell me to

He changed the race of one of my favorite characters for no good reason, I dropped that book as soon as I got to that page and I dropped it hard.

He messed up the X-men. Specifically, he misintepreted Magneto. He also destroyed Scott and Jean's marriage, though that's arguably what some people would call a good thing. And all the good things he did (new status quo for mutants, Scott and Emma's relationship's eventual blossomming) was cancelled by others.

He's a typical entry level writer. Read comics for a few more years and you'll grow out of him.

Marjorie Liu.

>entry level
please post your favorites, user

What character?

won't sleep with me

Way too focused on figure drawing rather than storytelling.

I think Steve from Wonder Woman.

>Entry level
That's not Moore.

>Outgrow him
Yeah, if you read the Mahabharata or the Gita in Sanskrit.

Warren Ellis

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Warren "I wish I was the Unibomber" Ellis

alcoholic who wants to fuck an ipod

If you mean capeshit(which is why people read Morrison in the first place), he's only one of the few non entry level writers.

David Lapham

that Age of Apocalypse series was complete trash

I forgot that he even wrote that.

Gerard way

Robert kirkman

that's the only miss in his entire career depending on your feelings on Deadpool MAX

He doesn't know how to end stories, only drag them on for thousands of issues.
He likes writing the same character and story too much. Way too many of his works involve this cynical, drunk, unkempt guy with superpowers who secretly has a heart of gold, and he teams up with this snarky woman and somebody else in order to fight the ills of their world.

There's no truth in it, but always liked the conspiracy theory that he was still on DC's payroll while he was writing X-Men

He's written comics, so he counts. Explain why Greg Weisman is shit.

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He writes shallow page turners with one dimensional characters. He also tries to act mighty and enlightened for someone with no talent.

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If anything, this man's fetishes saved the comics industry in the 80's.

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Not really. His fetishes weren't what made X-Men a hit with the direct market

>He doesn't know how to end stories, only drag them on for thousands of issues.

So he achieved the dream of getting published that most webcomic writers long for, as they don't know how to end their stories either.

>"Haha The authority sucks. Why don't you read my Superman instead."

Betsy did't deserve becoming fapbait

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Alan Moore.
I've nothing but respect for the man's skill and his bibliography.

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The man cannot write a story that isn't decompressed to hell. Just look at TWD and count how many splash pages, splash panels, or double-page spreads there are that could've been easily put into a medium-sized panel and have the same effect.

But I'll also be fair:
The man is a work-horse who has earned his spot in the comic book industry and always tries out new things as a creator, never keeping to just one series.

He's shit because Sup Forums told me he hates capes and I saw out-of-context fishman rape pages

Geoff Johns doesn't like him.

>out-of-context fishman rape pages

They aren't much better in context user

His work in the last ten years hasn't been up to snuff. Century was him shaking his fist at millennials. Neonomicon was all sensation and no meat. Jerusalem was mostly retreads of his earlier work. Providence was good though.

But seriously, what are your criticisms of his work, the themes he explores, his narrative structure, his dialogue, the scopes of his stories, his love of ambiguity, etc.

I'm genuinely curious as I like to hear criticisms of authors I like.

Garth Ennis

His longer works are crap because they tend to lose focus on what the hook was in the first place and become more about some grandiose drama between the hero and villain like so many other comics, with the hook acting as flavour-text.

See Century 2009 was depressing to read. For a writer who prides himself on doing mountains of research just to get precise panels right, that book was just awful. Nothing but dozens of pages where Moore bitched about a generation that he had no grasp on. It was like if a senile old man wrote Ready Player One.

I don't actually have too many criticisms of Moore's technical ability as a writer or storyteller. He can be a bit too dense sometimes and his more recent stuff didn't quite capture my interest. The aforementioned fishman rape, the comic in it's entirety, just struck me as lazy. I suppose my biggest criticism would be at the thematic level, especially concerning Moore's cape stuff. If you look at the body of his work there's a real driving finality to so much of it. Miracle Man, Watchmen, Killing Joke, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? His proposed Twilight of the Gods event. You get the sense that Alan Moore wants Superhero's to just die already. And I'm very much in the Grant 'put all the toys back in the box when I'm done playing' Morrison worldview.

I'd argue that Providence (as well-researched, and magnificently put together as it was) was actually weak as a story. The first ten issues become pretty pointless as they only serve for Robert to get from point A to point B or serve for his commonplace book to do the same, I should say. And it's in the final two issues that a truly interesting story comes forth, and then it ends with the heroes just sort of accepting it due to certain influences, which I found to be weak.

I would've thought this brand new setting worth more time to explore than the whole of the early 20th century, with all the implications that such a setting brought forth.

I'll have to read that eventually. I tried giving the League a shot, but the esoteric references kind of turned me off. As for the quality, I imagine that what applies to all writers applies to Moore: everyone has a shitty story in them.

Geoff Johns

Two characters in transit discussing conspiracy theories can only take you so far.

His adoration of the Silver Age plus his penchant for characters murdering people in horrible ways make for a really bipolar writing style. Like how his GL run could be the courageous adventures of Hal Jordan in one page and then Black Hand butchering his entire family in the next. It's too erratic.

Jack Kirby

DeMatteis

Stan Lee fucked his wife and stole credit

I don't really have anything bad to say about Moore. His prose skill outclasses anyone to ever work in the medium, his love of superheroes and the entire canon of Western fiction is infectious, he always collaborates with the best artists, and I admire his staunchness on his morals

If I had to list some criticisms, it'd be that pretty much everything he writes is highly referential and/or meta, being some kind of statement or take on an existing style. Nothing really WRONG with that, but it makes it so few of his works really stand on their own without the context of what they're referencing

I will admit I haven't read anything past his ABC work, though

The threat always comes from the hero side one way or another. It can be rouge shit on the JSA (Damage, black Adam, Naboo, etc...) or Luther in the JLA or a million different colored lantern rings, or superbly prime, or Alex Luther and Earth 2 Superman, Omac.
IT NEVER FUCKING ENDS.

That sounds like a positive

All of his comics read like mindless summer action movies with no substance. He's the epitome of "just turn your brain off, it's fun" writing.

>The aforementioned fishman rape, the comic in it's entirety, just struck me as lazy.
Interestingly enough, he only wrote it so he could pay off his tax debts, so the pulp-level quality is understandable. He wasn't even trying, but writing a pot-boiler.

>If you look at the body of his work there's a real driving finality to so much of it.
>You get the sense that Alan Moore wants Superhero's to just die already.
You see, I get the sense that with Moore, it's that he views stories in a very novel-istic sense, in that there is a beginning, middle and end. If a theme is explored, if character development is mined-up, then there is very little left to do with it in a way that he would find interesting. It's because of this self-contained nature of his work that I like to read it. Though I need a firm grounding in a shitzillion other fields (from literature, to physics, to history, etc.), I know I only need to read these 6, or 12 or 24 issues and that's the end of it. It'll have a build-up, followed by a crescendo and a denouement, and the emotional impact they have won't be cheapened by Writer X coming along and saying
>Bobby Badoing wasn't rendered decombobulated by Nefario's Raygun, he was merely transported into a pocket dimension due to Quantio's Insurity Principle Powers
So in closing, I don't think he writes stories with a sense of finality out of spite and hatred, but out of a certain style that he's accustomed to, one that doesn't lend itself well to franchise-creation. This style doesn't allow deus-ex machinas, or providence to save the hero, or for idealism to win over realism, but a very strict action-reaction narrative that can be foreshadowed, implied, prophecised, but never subverted simply because that is what would sell better.

I'm of the belief that anything can be made interesting, if the basis for it lends enough depth to the action or scene.

It’s not that fun, really.

His art sometimes gets sloppy in places, and his verbose overlap of exposition and narration can get sometimes be a slog to read. His dialogue can also sound overly scripted.

They're fun in the "Look at all the DBZ fight scene and giant lasers everywhere" kind of way. For some people that's all you need to make a good comic. Oh that and really easy emotional pandering

You are correct in that his works are sometimes overly esoteric. That's why I haven't read Promethea yet, I fear I won't understand shit unless I read at least 10 books on mysticism.

> writing a pot-boiler
I’m sorry user, that’s apologetics, not an acceptable excuse.

And given your final response, I have to assume we had pretty different reactions to “From Hell” (I gave away my copy the day after reading it).

His Exiles run is horrendous. He hasn't aged well.

Pat Mills

I can’t argue with any of that.
What’s weird to me, having just (breathlessly) reread Kamandi, is how well it all works despite that.

“Look at the lasers all over the place!” is far more fun, imo, with writers who don’t use artists so heavily reliant on reference as John’s usual collaborators.
Actually DC’s house style just bothers me, and it’s definitely used a lot with Johns.

>I don't think he writes stories with a sense of finality out of spite and hatred

I absolutely don't either. And I think you outlined Moores' underlying reasons for writing superhero characters in this sort of way fairly well. However that broader ongoing narrative (though it guarantees uneven quality, at best) is a large part of the fun and potential that cape comics can achieve. And stylistically Moore just seems diametrically opposed to that, and unwilling to explore it, or at his grumpiest, even acknowledge it.

> he only wrote it so he could pay off his tax debts
That explains so much

All right, here goes: John Wagner.

He overuses chessmaster villains. It was cool when Xanatos did it, but by the time he got to YJ, it got stale. I love chessmaster villains too, but he bungled it there.

>Judge Dreddit

calling something reddit is not actually a substantive criticism by itself.

>apologetics
Not really, I was just explaining the circumstances behind the comics so it was better understood why it was shit, not that Neonomicon being a pot-boiler excused it being shit. And I'm currently reading about From Hell in preparation to read it so I don't have to look up all the niggling little details later. I do find it an interesting premise, though.

In this case, his style is opposed to an ongoing narrative, but I don't think he himself is. What I think bothers him is the idea of a company (for the purpouse of this post, the company can be imagined as an accountant, competent at his job, but only at his job) keeping a story alive well past the intention of the creators solely to make money and fucking over the original vision by way of focus testing. If the creator wanted to keep the story alive for decades (like Eichiro Oda) then I think he would disagree with it, but would support the creator doing as he wishes. In this case, Moore is the archetypal arteest who's willing to make sacrifices for the sake of art. It works for him because he's creative, fast, and has a great intellect, but sadly it doesn't work for others who aren't as skilled or gifted as he is.

>What is Crossed

He's scottish.

There have been worse Crossed stories. Just look at Bemis' work on the series. The psychoanalist arc was entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons.

Neil Gaiman

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Uh, Overture felt lacking. It was good, but it didn't feel as good as the past Sandman stories. Like Neil only wrote it on a dare instead of out of an actual desire to tell another Sandman story.

I'd say it's a good sign if the biggest criticism is "his recent comic was good, but not as good as his others."

Kurt Busiek

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Al Ewing

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He's a retard.

He needs a shave and a haircut.

> he’s a retard.

Please explain user

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Not really a good writer by any means.

Better than most 60s and 70s writers.

History of violence was a let down after watching the movie.

Never wrote a good long run for the big two.

Not even close. Kirby was good at world building and didn't know what to do with his ideas.
Compare him to someone like Gerber or O'Neil, and you'd be surprised that they even belonged to the same era.

How long is long enough?

Gerber has the same problems, good ideas with stilted execution.

He did more than splashpages of fight scenes. His Man-Thing is a lot better than anything Kirby ever wrote. Gerber was just of his time and Kirby's writing was bad even for it's time period.

Iron man, Superman, Avengers, Defenders, Aquaman. So most of the long runs he wrote.

Man Thing isn't that good. And finding a few writers betters only proves my initial point.

Paul Dini

All his comics are just the same bland tripe under a different colour palette made for young teenagers who don't yet understand nuances. He's more fit for authorship than penning comics, but he doesn't have the literary skills to routinely make novels and resorts to a largely incompatible storytelling format.

I honestly do not think I've ever enjoyed anything he's ever done. Horrible at pacing, creating stakes and writing compelling characters. He's like an edgier Jurgens.

Moore uses way too much purple prose and it sometimes can kill the pacing of issues.
That's honestly my only qualm with Alan.

You don't expect me to name every writer out there.
>Man-Thing isn't that good
Kirbyfags confirmed to have shit taste.

Often tries too hard to appeal to the emotions of the readers. Has difficulty creating/writing about truly violent conflict that would and should exist in the scenarios he creates. Has a similar issue to Morrison in his retreading of themes.

How is Stray Bullets like anything Jurgens ever created?

Why are you sperging out? I says he's better than most, you said he's bad even for that time so it would be easy to list 15 better ones.

he writes exclusively for reddit and retards