This is the place to discuss the episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast, the Comic Book Page website or pretty much anything else of interest to the Comic Book Page community...
Wood wrote:
But that's not a new thing to comics. Your issue with it is more about your personal tastes and expectations evolving over time than something the publishers are doing as a gimmick.
Well my expectations evolving are due to the gimmicks though. Because this gimmick has been employed in the past it is now meaningless to me, and any other reader that's been around for even a little while.
I know every comic has endings like "Oh no, Spider-Man is falling and his web shooters are out, he's going to die .... tune in next month", but that's different. Running promotional ads and talking about an upcoming death for months ahead is just purely motivated by money, not storytelling ... unless you actually have the balls to kill a main character permanently.
It's not balls. LOTS of writers would love to actually kill off characters permanently. It's that they're not allowed, because they don't own the characters. The characters are worth far more as icons for branding and licensing than they're worth as part of any particular piece of serialized fiction.
Now I'm confused. First you say that a permanent killing of the character was part of Hickman's grand plan. But now you are saying writers don't have permission to kill off characters. Which is it?
And I listened to the episode again this morning on my drive into work. Bob and I never said that Hickman didn't intend to kill off a member of the Fantastic Four, just that the Marvel marketing machine went overboard and the hype worked against the story for us.
I do think they could have told a definitive death scene and had it work even though they were told it was coming months in advance.
Imagine if the fight had moved to the streets of New York and during the fight, sonics were used and rendered a character temporarily deaf. Then, as the fight continues and one of the characters, having been knocked for a loop by the villain is forced backward into an intersection there are slammed into by an unseen and unheard bus, killed not by the villain but in an accident. We seen the body and the character is pronounced dead after a heroic effort by emergency responders to save them. Now, that would have been a definitive death.
Listening to the ep and I'm really confused about your take on FF. You both take issue with the way the "death" was portrayed and both convince yourselves that the use of the term "death" was due to the Marvel PR machine and not Hickmans choice. That's great and all, except it's not remotely accurate. Hickman planned on the death of that character from jump street and has been unambiguous in his discussion from the start. So maybe the problem you really should have is with Eptings choice of how to visually depict the "death" which made it far too ambiguous.
While I check out news sites more than John, I never read the interviews you're talking about, thus was unaware a real death was part of Hickman's "grand plan".
The death scene itself was really ambiguous and open to interpretation, which if it was supposed to be a definitive "death" is the fault of BOTH Hickman & Epting. I'm actually kind of sorry to hear that he meant it to be a real death, because that makes the execution of the end of the issue really clumsy in my mind.
See, that's where I'm at and why I was scratching my head as you both were blaming Marvel powers-that-be and absolving Jon and Epting of any role here. To my mind though, reading Hickman's latest interview, he intended for this to be an unquestioned death at the hands of BILLIONS of Annihilation horde foes. Seems to me that it's more a failing of Epting than Hickman.
We made no comments about Hickman's intentions as we have no insight into them. What we did know was that the Marvel marketing machine had promised a definitive death and we felt we didn't get that. As for who to blame between Hickman and Epting, without seeing the script and knowing what Hickman instructed Epting to draw, I can't really determine that. It is entirely possible that Hickman scripted the scene exactly as drawn feeling that clearly depicted an unquestionable death.
My feeling is the Hickman and Epting told a great story but that the message from marketing over-promised and over-shadowed the story. This is a case in which less marketing might have been much more effective. Instead of hyping a single issue of a single title, Marvel could have been ready to blitz the media with "an anything can happen in our comics" message that could have driven sales to every issue of every Marvel title. Sure, they wouldn't have gotten the bump for the Fantastic Four #587 but history shows that these bumps have littlelasting effect on the sales of the title.
FF #587 - How long until we see a (insert so-called dead FF character) Reborn mini-series? Marvel readers kind-of sort-of got that impression recently when another big character was supposed to be killed. It wasn't long before he showed up in a Reborn title. (I'm trying not to spoil it if someone's way behind on their reading). Still I thought #587 had a lot of "oh yeah" moments, mostly with the kids.
Infestation #1 - I had to read through comic this twice and refer back to the character list a couple times. It was a little hard to understand what was going on and why. I think the colorist embellished a little too much with the darks. I still enjoyed it enough to want issue #2. I'm only reading the two Star Trek titles crossovers. Come on though, who didn't want to see a Transformer next to a GI Joe, next to the Ghost Busters, next to the Star Trek crew, all duking it out with zombies. I know it's not going to happen due to licensing.
IanG wrote: Still I thought #587 had a lot of "oh yeah" moments, mostly with the kids.
The way he handles the kids is probably the main reason I am loving Hickman's run.
IanG wrote:
Come on though, who didn't want to see a Transformer next to a GI Joe, next to the Ghost Busters, next to the Star Trek crew, all duking it out with zombies. I know it's not going to happen due to licensing.
I'd like to see Transformers FIGHTING zombies, I just can't wrap my head around robots TURNING INTO zombies.
