It Was Meant to Be A Thing of Beauty, Not This Abomination

DAMN HIM! DAMN HIM! DAMN HIM!

CLAAAAAAARRREMMOOOOOONNNNNT!

NO! NO NO NO NO NO!

Comic Book Resources: Claremont Unveils 'X-Men Forever' at NY Comic-Con

This, on the heels of Grant Morrison's worst screwing-over yet in the aftermath of the... unfortunate business of Final Crisis #7. Yeah. This is why I haven't written in like two weeks.

A comic book made me so depressed that I couldn't write. Truly, as Bill Hicks once said, this is a world where good men are murdered in their prime and mediocre hacks thrive and proliferate.

And now I've quit drinking-- for thirty days at least. I might just see if I can hold out until the beginning of Spring.

All of this led me to a clear conclusion yesterday.

I hereby renounce DC and Marvel and am suspending my subscriptions indefinitely. I'm going to read Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" story, but that's it. I'm taking a break.
On the DC side, I'm sick of Dan DiDio and Geoff Johns conspiring to never let anything from the Silver Age die, ever. I'm sick of Grant Morrison in that he pulls so hard on his editorial leash that he strangles himself. I'm sick of books like Justice League, Justice Society and the Titans titles being put in the hands of people like Dwayne McDuffie and Judd Winick (and Zeus knows who they'll get to fill Johns's seat on JSA), who don't know how to treat A-list characters or how to write dialogue that doesn't sound like a bad cartoon (hint: DC Comics dialogue should sound like a good cartoon). I know that it's a business, but going with what people like, what sells, is one thing (and that one thing is Wolverine, apparently). Forcing a million interconnected things onto fans in the hopes that they'll panic and buy it all seems to be more akin to DiDio's strategy. I dunno. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. But I'm tired of continuity arguments, I'm tired of being disappointed by late books and lame endings, I'm tired of defending all the retarded plot twists and I'm tired of wishing things would be more like they were when... well, DC's never really had an era of across-the-board excellence or even decency, so I'm making things up in my head, but back when Grant was first writing JLA and I was in middle school, it seemed like a much less aggravating hobby.

And I haven't even started with Marvel yet.
Allowing Chris Claremont to live is, unfortunately, legal. Allowing him to write should not be, at the very least. Giving him opportunity after opportunity to write the X-Men, my first love, is Colossus's boot stamping on Matt Fraction's face, forever. They let him write X-Men: The End, then GeNext, and now X-Men Forever, where he basically picks up where he left off with X-Men #2 in 1991. He keeps going back to the same shit over and over and his style of dialogue and narration has been the same since 1987.
I had to stop writing for a minute there because I couldn't unclench my fists. Seriously, go read anything by this guy, starting with X-Men #1 with Jim Lee in '91. I encourage you to discover for yourself how much he sucks. I want to break his fingers Rorschach-style to keep him from writing.



Comparatively I guess I love Bendis. At least he can write an exchange between characters that doesn't sound like it was pulled from the script of a Nicolas Cage action movie. Like, one of the really bad ones. Like, Bangkok Dangerous bad. (Ranting about Claremont again. Sorry.) Anyway, I guess I'm not terribly pissed at Marvel, but I feel like I'm treading water with them. I'm following what's going on in Astonishing and Uncanny X-Men, but I'm not all that interested in Dark Reign, I'm sick of Wolverine, his clone and now his son permeating the entire universe, and I feel bad for Dan Slott getting pulled in to clean up everbody else's messes-- see Avengers: The Initiative, the second arc of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and now Mighty Avengers, where I hope to the gods it wasn't his idea to bring the Scarlet Witch back, as a good girl, with no warning and no arc of character development to it at all, or I'll renounce him too. I'd hate to do that. Who'd have thought She-Hulk and The Thing could have two of the best solo series of the past five years? Everyone, thanks to Slott. Anyway.

I've been re-organising my comics this week because I've spent the past six months just leaving every book in a pile on the floor instead of putting it in the right place in its longbox. So I've set some stuff aside that I wanted to reread. In the weeks ahead I'm going to reread some of the stories that make me love comics, as well as some of the ones that make me feel like there is a God and He hates us and wants us to suffer in life as well as in death. Er, but yeah, I think a little proverbial navel-gazing is in order after Final Crisis and the Further Ascent of the Dark Lord Claremont. More soon.