This. The only other superhero fare I indulge in anymore are Doom Patrol and Legends Of Tomorrow. Legends is one of those rare series that has gotten better every season, in large part because they have jettisoned seriousness and embraced the absurd. The show is just pure fun.
I will say that if they make a decent Howard The Duck movie, I will so be there.
Legends is just SO good.
And the Howard The Duck movie is also great, and should be in the MCU.
I still think Ant Man (both movies) were a lot of fun, a little off the beaten path in the MCU (though he was thrown deeper into that)
New 52? It gave me Azzarello & Chiang’s Wonder Woman - and reading that was like being a kid again, breathlessly looking forward to a superhero comic each month. To me, that’s the New 52 in its purest form, to hell with continuity, to hell with cross-overs, events, and tie-ins, just get a talented writer and a talented artist and let their creative freak flag fly. DCs Black Label line has taken that role currently… and I’m enjoying both the BL Catwoman and Human Target titles. There’s also a Supergirl mini I’m digging.
But these days I mostly enjoy crime comics, Ed Brubakers a must-read for me.
And yeah, movie-wise, Guardian’s is one to look forward to, I forgot about that.
I’m all about the indie comics now. Always have been, really. I was big into Vertigo back in its heyday (Transmetropolitan, Preacher, Sandman, Fables, X the Last Man, etc.) and now Image comics top my pull list.
I have been a comics fan for most of my life, except for a decade or so between the mid-80’s and mid-90’s when I was much too cool for comics. I have never chosen sides between DC and Marvel, and I read plenty of independent comics as well. DC has the most main stream superheroes though, Batman and Superman have been pop culture icons for nearly a century now. They have both had very good, and very bad movies made in their names for decades. Marvel struggled to get anything good film wise off the ground for years, they had nothing to compare to Burton’s Batman, or Donner’s Superman, or anything even close until Raimi’s Spider-man came out in 2002. That almost seemed like a fluke, and DC regained the superhero movie crown with Chis Nolan’s Dark Knight just a few years later.
Then along came Kevin Feige with a vision that Marvel bought into. Iron Man was a very good movie, but it wasn’t quite the Dark Knight either. The next couple of releases were a bit rocky though. The Incredible Hulk was a good movie, but not good enough, and it was one and done for their biggest star, Edward Norton, and Iron Man 2 did not live up to the previous movie. Marvel could have called it quits on the MCU, but they kept with it, and then along came Thor, and Captain America and the MCU became a behemoth. So much so that they eclipsed everything DC had ever done. I think the MCU is still in good hands. Kevin Feige has shown he can bring his vision to life, and he definitely has one for where the MCU is currently headed.
The Eternals was never going to replace The Avengers, either as a single movie or a basis for the MCU. If that were Feige’s intention, there would have been much more of a slow burn getting there. The slow burn we are seeing for me, as a decades long reader of Marvel comics all points to the Fantastic Four as being the new focus for the MCU. I think Feige can pull it off, and I am as excited for what the MCU has in store as ever. Meanwhile, DC is floundering with their movies, and can’t seem to pull together a vision for a shared universe. They have had a few notable successes with Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and Shazam, but they could not pull it together long enough to release a good Justice League movie. The Snyder Cut showed that the pieces were there, but no one had the vision to follow through with it.
TV shows have just as storied of a past, but suffice to say that the Disney+ shows are light years ahead of anything the Berlantiverse thought it could be. They also seem to have squandered the potential of the HBO Max shows, Titans and Doom Patrol (Doom Patrol is awesome, btw). Their failure to spin off a new shared universe from those shows is really going to hurt their TV potential.
I do love the Harley Quinn animated series. And her comic is the only DC title I still read.
I really liked the first season of The Umbrella Academy too, but that’s Dark Horse.
And Andrew’s comic list made me think of “Planetary”… man, that’s one of my top 5 comics of all time. (sorry, I know I’m drifting off-topic, but I just had to gush about that one)
Well, if we’re talking comic books, most of my reading there are imports (manga and bandes dessinees). But I can definitely recommend these:
Britannia
Adventures of the world’s earliest detective, working for Nero in pagan Britannia. I’m a long-time fan of Milligan.
Dungeon
This fantastic series is getting a new volume, along with re-issues of all previous volumes in omnibus format. Endlessly inventive and brilliant.
The Iliad
Gorgeous adaptation makes the epic work accessible and is enjoyable for its own merits as well.
I enjoyed those as well. It had the same vibe as the Guardians movies, lots of humor and a fun romp. Maybe that’s the thing with the DC movies, they are so po-faced and serious. Iron Man was fun because Tony Stark was so wonderfully sarcastic. The Guardians movies speak for themselves. But even the more serious in tone characters like Captain America and Thor had humor in the stories. That is something I hope continues as the movies move forward.
Comics other than Marvel/DC may be a bit off topic, but far be it from me to be a buzzkill.
I have been a Spawn (Image) and Hellboy (Darkhorse) fan for quite some time. Spawn was the comic that brought me back to reading comics in the 90s after having dropped them for about a decade. It is still going strong, and McFarlane has recently started expanding the Spawn universe. On the Hellboy side, Mignola keeps finding ways of telling new Hellboy stories long after he killed off Hellboy, and without resorting to reviving or rebooting him. I have enjoyed tons of other independent comics over the years, and many have been at least as good as anything Marvel or DC have put out.
(I nearly said “better than anything Marvel or DC have put out”, but then I looked at my copy of Watchmen on the shelf, published by DC, and thought I should tone it down a bit)
I would be totally remiss if I did not also give a shout out to the Super Powered Revenge Christmas graphic novel, written by MST3Ks Bill Corbett, given the time of year and all:
Super Powered Revenge Christmas
ETA: this would make a blockbuster movie!
I’m hoping to see the new Spiderman next week, time permitting. The only other one I’m looking forward to is Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
On the DC front, I am (extremely) cautiously optimistic about Black Adam. But considering that company’s track record… let’s just say that I’m not holding out too much hope.
Black Adam will, I hope, be fun, but I’m really looking forward to She-Hulk and Moon Knight.
Not sure how I feel about She-Hulk. I was never a fan of let’s take this character and change him into a girl because … reasons. (and the Incredible Hulk wasn’t that interesting to me, to begin with. /shrug/)
I am interested in Moon Knight just because I don’t know anything about the character.
I used to read Moon Knight. There are a lot of ways they can take the character. I’m looking forward to it.
It looks like DC is actually going to try to compete with Disney+ on the TV series front. They have announced several new live action series, including Peacemaker (rebooted Suicide Squad spinoff), Green Lantern, and Justice League Dark which is apparently going to have movie tie-ins as well (my guess would be a Black Adam tie-in). Seems like Berlanti is at the helm for most (if not all) of this, but he does not have the proven track record Feige has. Will certainly make for entertaining viewing one way or another, and I really think we are in a media golden age for all us who grew up on these books as kids, and dreamed of there being big budget movies and shows to bring them to life.
I just wonder with Disney/Marvel making a continuation of the 90s X-Men cartoon (X-Men '97) for TV if WB/DC will consider such for the DCAU (or to get one friend of mine to stop being angry for a little bit, 2000s Teen Titans).
And yes, I had to specify 2000s for Teen Titans, because there was one before (siezure warning):
I loved Planetary, the 11 years it took to be released… that’s a different story…
I just got home from seeing it.
I enjoyed it immensely.
So I read everything. EVERYTHING. If it’s got a superhero, I wanna read it. Marvel holds my heart, but I love all superhero comics.
It’s so incredibly weird seeing what I though was something only I knew deeply about become such a grand phenomenon. And frankly, I love it.
As for what I’d like to see? The list is too long and far too obscure. But if you put a gun to my head I’d lead with Nextwave. Maybe one of the funniest comics ever made.