Fantastic Four to die!

So much truth.
Wonderfully stated, Arcanaville.
This applies to so much that is wrong with the supposed writing artists in several forms of media today and certainly in this scenario.
While it makes me sad that this is the case, it makes me happy to know others feel the same way.


And then...
This made me laugh!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

This reminds me of a letter I wrote to Steve Gerber when he was running an 'Online Comics are the Future' website:

Comic books used to be sold everywhere. They were written at an 8th grade level and drawn passably well. Now, comic books are sold only in specific shops. Written at the 12th grade level and drawn by Angry Gods! Trying to sell them online is futile as long as their average customer can get pr0n delivered free to their inboxes daily

The people who make comics no longer understand the business of creating and selling comics. That's why the entire industry is in such a mess

...and sees the Baxter building inside of a snowglobe sitting on Franklin's shelf.

Yeah, me too.

Supposedly, this is going to be the end of the Fantastic Four title. At least till the reboot next Spring when they have new costumes and everyone acts like Johnny wasn't killed.

Agreed! 100%

You don't kill off the main characters like that! You kill off their loved ones! You hurt and maime the main heroes!

Think Peter and Mary Jane can make another deal with Mephisto to return one of Spidey's friends back to life?

Someone please tell me what this refers to. Thanks.
Also Johnny isn't really dead, he'll come back even if it takes a year or two.
First rule in comics, the only people that stay dead are Bruce Wayne's parents. :P

Episode of Dallas, were Bobby Ewing was dead however it was all a dream. Pam wakes up and finds Bobby in the showers.

-Edit-

So I read the issue, and you don't even really see the kill, just Johnny getting swarmed by a bunch of bugs. For me, If you don't see the kill then it didn't happen.

Yep, it retconned a whole season of Dallas in one fell swoop. Back then, Dallas was the CSI of the TV watching world. Everyone either loved it or hated it.

Yeah, Duffy decided to leave the show so they killed him off but then his career wasn't going anywhere so he wanted to come back and thus they did the shower scene making the entire previous season just a dream.

And if you want to shake up Captain Britain or Swamp Thing by killing them, you're a genius provided you have great ideas about new directions for these middle-rank characters after their resurrections.

Nobody believes for a moment that corporate publishers will intentionally destroy their own grade-A intellectual property (and that's what the work-for-hire creations of Golden and Silver Age comics characters are, in the end). True believers, however, can perceive these panicked PR stunts by the desperate dinosaurs of the comic book-industrial complex for what they are.

Marvel and DC can neither move forward with new ideas because their financial model cannot abide by creator-owned characters, nor keep their old properties fresh and vital because that risks upsetting their financial model as well. These "death of" gimmicks seem like a subconscious admission that the joint holders of the "superhero" tradmark are unable to keep the legacy alive but subsequently have second thoughts after euthanasia. They are otherwise in the process of shifting their business away from the "newsstand" periodical format to publishing reprints and specials (you know, like normal publishers). In the meantime they have to resort to poorly conceived multi-arc crossovers and transparent stunts to generate attention for their flagging flagship monthly titles. Serial literature went through a not dissimilar upheaval with novels in the 19th century as the evolved from periodical publication to the single volumes, and pulp fiction in the 20th. Comics are the next format that will have to adapt, in their own way.

For my part, I'm just buying mostly independent, creator-owned comics where I can be assured of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe it's time to purchase the paperback edition of Unstable Molecules - now that was an intriguing new take on the Fantastic Four.

Here's some of the problems with you last bit.

Besides the fact that some people don't want an end (thusly why it's stupid to kill off the A-Listers to begin with), the problem with creator-owned comics, is they don't for the most part END.

The creator moves on, but leaves other people in charge of the comic OR the comic just stops being done with no real end OR they just abrutly give it a crappy ending as they're tired of the comic or it's not making enough money.

What Marvel and DC need to do, is hire real writers who will actually STAY with a book. Not writers who work on it for 6 issues then move on because they don't want to stay on one book for so long.

It's a job. Hire someone to fill the job

Leaving aside the question of whether comics readers prefer never-ending serial narratives to closed ones - that's a fascinating topic but far too involved to derail this FF-oriented thread - work-for-hire writing was the old model of comics, the one under which Siegel and Schuster, then their heirs, had to fight against in court to win the rights to their creation. Their object lesson hasn't been lost on the current generation of comics writers, particularly not after Neal Adams et al.'s work to establish the concept of creator ownership in comics and the successes of such self-published titles as Cerebus the Aardvark, Spawn, TMTN, etc., etc. Marvel and D.C. are never going to be able to strike such a deal out from their hired-gun writers again. If they're going to sign up someone a for a year (the minimum for a solid arc), they're either going to have to pay sufficiently for it or make a bargain over the created content.

Business conditions in the comics industry have changed to such an extent that Fantastic Four will never see runs like either the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Silver Age or John Byrne's Bronze Age again. Quesada's model of over-arching events and temporary die-offs executed by a rotating series of jobbing writers is an attempt to forestall the inevitable changes the format will have to undergo to survive.

/soapbox

The most amusing aspect of Dallas bringing back Bobby by saying an entire season of the show was just a dream was that Dallas had a spin off show called Knots Landing that regularly crossed over with the original, and in that show they acknowledged Bobby Ewing's death. When Dallas retconned it away, Knots Landing didn't. Thus, in the Dallas world the entire rest of the show Knots Landing from that point is a continuation of a dream, and in the Knotts Landing world the entire rest of the show Dallas was a counterfactual alternate reality.

So you think a parallel universe version of Johnny Storm will be appearing in the future. That or Dr. Strange's arch foe, Nightmare was behind this giving a group nightmare to the FF.

Sheesh how many times have they killed a member of the FF to only bring them back. They killed Reed Richards a decade ago. I think they killed Sue Richards in 1980's.

What happens they come back. So Johnny Storm is dead does not mean it would be the Fantastic Three, they would bring in a replacement. They have other members than the Family as FF members in the past.

It'll be Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing and Wolverine. Watch.

What about Bendis' run on Ultimate Spider-Man and Johns' run on Green Lantern, or even Morrison's run on Batman? They seem to be the exception to the rule, but they do show that good writers can stick around on a book and produce compelling stories the old-fashioned way.

See this is a mistake in that when he first came onboard as EIC, Joey Q instituted a 'no coming back from the dead rule', and while it's since been shaken off, it did manage to last for a few years until someone came to him with what sounded like a couple of interesting ideas on how to bring characters back. In this, i have no problems since in a medium where virtually anything can feasibly happen, slapping the label "characters should stay dead" is pretty stupid. Also they were doing the epic crossovers and temp die-offs before JQ got put in charge, it's just that we've seen a lot more of them in the past few years and a lot of fans are beginning to get worn out by them.

As for the rotating writers, the past few years have seen both of the big two companies establish themselves a solid stable of writers that they cycle through through books, some of them even sticking with them for large periods of time. The four that come to mind most notably being Bendis with the Avengers & Ultimate Spidey, Brubaker on Captain America, Geoff Johns on Green Lantern, & Grant Morrison on either Batman or Batman & Robin. All 4 of these guys have been writing pretty steadily with those titles for at least 5 years. (hell Bendis & Bagley already surpassed Lee & Kirbys FF run a couple years back, AND Bagley's coming back to work on the USM title with Bendis. also they recently confirmed that Bendis has written more Avenger's books than anyone else in the franchise's history... disturbing as that may seem to some)

So there are SOME titles that get maintain a single writer, and the sales for a lot of those titles show that the business can support longtime runs.

Bendis is concurrently writing his creator-owned series Powers (published by Marvel's Icon imprint at present), and Morrison did his best work on his creator-owned The Invisibles (for DC's Vertigo). While Marvel and DC aren't exactly bribing them with these arrangements, I'd argue that such concessions smooth negotiations when signing them up on company-owned properties. Even then, Bendis and Morrison apparently get to pick and choose which A-list characters they wish to put their creative marks on, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, it's significant that neither of them have launched original titles/characters or rebooted existing mid-list ones for either company, the way Frank Miller did with Daredevil and Alan Moore with Swamp Thing. Neither party is going to make those mistakes again - Miller and Moore burned their bridges over creative issues, including rights to their characters, and Marvel and DC appear to have learned to avoid alienating top talent.

At the moment, the debate over work-for-hire and creator-owned projects among comics writers has moved on to how to balance the two while earning a living, now that the latter is conclusively viable. I predict that it will be sooner rather than later that comics will resemble regular publishing in terms of author copyright.

Of course, Johnny Storm will have returned from the dead well before that.


(Geoff Johns, although a fan favorite and good comics writer, just isn't on the same level as Bendis or Morrison. The former has the sharpest ear for dialogue of anyone writing superheroes today, and the latter continues to pull out uniquely mind-bending ideas from deep within his imagination.)

That's quite true. And over in D.C., they famously re-negged on Barry Allen's permanent death in Crisis on Infinite Earths - the modern precedent for these worn-out tropes - and brought him back when interest in the Flash comic book was flagging.

In addition to the examples from Bendis and Morrison above, Brubaker is also currently scripting the creator-owned Criminal and a sequel to Incognito (also from Icon). Even Johns says he'd like to produce creator-owned work some time (i.e. when contract negotiations come up).

(EDIT: As an aside, if I'm not derailing myself, it's significant that despite the first-rate talents of these various writers, none of them have yet produced a defining masterpiece. It's entirely possible that spreading themselves among these various projects, for both financial and creative reasons, caps their quality at a certain level.)

much as i dig a lot Johns' work, bringing back Barry was definitely not one of the better ideas for them to come back with. especially after that fiasco that saw Impulse/Bart eventually buy it when he took over as Flash for a little while. But they 'renegged' on his death a couple of times over the years, though before bringing him back he was mostly used as a plot device. gotta love time travel.



i think im missing something here. i was responding initially to the idea that we won't have writers doing stints on books as long as Kirby & Lee did back in the original Marvel Bullpen days. im not quite sure where the problem with these other writers also having side projects has anything to do with that? i think i missed the point you were shooting for somewhere along the line there.

Don't you mean Wolverine, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, and Thing.