And due to the constant delays of ‘Astonishing X-Men’, there was an entire conversation in Uncanny that unloaded MAJOR spoilers before the events have even happened in Astonishing!

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Busiek’s run on Conan was just about flawless, really.

Truman’s not doing so bad, either.

Agreed about Busiek’s run. I haven’t read Truman, yet. A friend of mine collects this so I wait a while and he gives me a stack of them. I don’t think I even finished the Busiek run but what I did was one of the best combinations of great writing and art. In fact I know I am not finished because I didn’t even get to the short Mignola run (which I also hear was fun).

Busiek’s run on Conan was just about flawless, really. Truman’s not doing so bad, either.

For every hackneyed old writer, though, some still “have it.” Keith Giffen had a career high turning out the Annihilation comics last year and continues to write fun or at worst solid comics. Ostrander still has it most of the time (I hear his Star Wars books are hit or miss but I love the Suicide Squad’s return). Waid hasn’t been around forever but long enough to have gone through a fall and return to grace plenty of times. Busiek’s an older hand and still makes compelling books like his run on Conan or his own Astro City.

Still, I think you have a good podcast topic with this one.

I’m just curious about this. Do any of you feel that you’ll always remember Frank Miller for ASBAR(since I feel most on here hate or dislike it more opposed to those who do) or for Year One/DKR(two obvious Batman classics)?

I don’t think it’s as clean as that. I mean, I’ll always remember that Miller breathed life into Daredevil, DKR and Year One. But I’ll also remember that around about 300 or just after, he started slowly turning into self-parody until everything he wrote was just awful trash.

It’s the same thing that happened to Chris Claremont, or Roger Stern, or any of the other greats of the ’80s who were my favorites. They went from “These guys defined comics to me” to “Oh my God, why are they giving these guys another book now?”

It’s a shame that the comics industry doesn’t provide a good retirement package, because I’d generally rather not see guys whose work I adored turning in shitty, hackneyed work as their careers extend, causing me to look back at their previous work and see the flaws that are magnified in their current work already beginning to show through in their past work.

To give a specific example, Claremont’s dialogue these days is painful and awful. Reading it, though, I started to realize that some of his annoying catchphrase-speak was present even in those classic issues with Byrne, and so I suddenly saw a flaw in comics I had seen as damn near perfect. Same thing happened with Miller and Sin City/DK2/ASBAR. I started to see that his hard-boiled dialogue had always bordered on parody, but it was new and fresh and so it didn’t bug me.

Similar thing happened with Bendis and Millar, actually. The fresh elements I liked in their work suddenly became their only tricks, and the flaws, like bad pacing (in Bendis’s case) or shock value over decent character development or plots that made sense (in Millar’s case), were always there.

Was that a weird tangent? Felt kinda like a weird tangent.

Anyway, Cable was surprisingly good, and I say this as someone who has never been a huge Cable fan. I also think Olivetti’s over-the-top cartoony art was a huge mistake, and given Swierchynisk… Swerrcynsk… Swiercet… aw, hell, Duane’s more hard-boiled script, someone in a more realistic, gritty vein would have been better. Hell, if you’d had Igor Kordey on this book, I would have been in heaven. But that last page (and it’s freakishly gonzo looking bionic arm) was laugh-worthy, not really the cliffhanger vibe they were going for, and it’s all down to the art.

http://coroner.cuyahogacounty.us/bio/bio.htm

Just thought you needed to know that.

Speaking of Wolverine and why I won’t read Bendis any more (okay, one of many reasons) but why did Wolverine join the Avengers? Other than the cynical cash value to Marvel, of course.

I have heard a really intersting take on ASB&R. It’s been said that Miller is writing a parody of himself. An extreme take on the style he invented as a way of showing how his style has been ran into the ground by writers half as good as him. I am not sure if this is true (as DK2 was wank) but if it is, it would surely be at the most, pretentious and humorous and at the least, arrogant and wasteful.

I do have to say, for some strange reason, ASB&R is one of the first books I read on my pull list the week it comes out. I guess it’s my guilty pleasure. I don’t know what it is, probably because it’s so absurd. It’s so bad its good.

My only real gripe with the book is that Miller’s writing is almost like a big F-You to the DC universe. Like he personally holds contempt for all the characters he’s writing. If this is the way he feels, he should turn to Hollywood and not look back and leave comics alone.

I’m just curious about this. Do any of you feel that you’ll always remember Frank Miller for ASBAR(since I feel most on here hate or dislike it more opposed to those who do) or for Year One/DKR(two obvious Batman classics)?

First and foremost, I’ll always remember Miller’s Daredevil before anything. There were so many firsts in that run, so many places we hadn’t really seen in comics before, and more importantly, the stories he came up with were damn cool. Also, his art was just hardcore there too.

But yeah, I’ll agree with Gray that Year One and Dark Knight and Sin City (The Hard Goodbye, for me personally) and 300 will certainly be what he’s remembered for in the long run. Those are all near perfect things, and when you write the BEST Batman story (Year One), you’ve sort of solidified your standing in comicdom.

I’m just curious about this. Do any of you feel that you’ll always remember Frank Miller for ASBAR(since I feel most on here hate or dislike it more opposed to those who do) or for Year One/DKR(two obvious Batman classics)?

Personally as much as I dislike ASBAR I think you have to remember him for Year One/DKR because he made Batman who he is today. Would just love to hear some input. Especially if you feel you’ll remember him for ASBAR(or even DK2 for that matter).

And Daniel Way’s Wolverine Origins is tedious, decompressed, boring rubbish. Steve Dillon deserves work on a better series.

I do agree that Wolverine needs a Brand New Day style reboot but that can be simply done by everyone agreeing to start writing him well. For all the bloat and bluster of the Whedon run on Astonishing X-Men, he did his best job capturing the fun of Wolverine while not overusing him. More of that type of interpretation would be great.