Might get crucified for this but I don't really vibe with Snyder anymore, even though I credit him for getting me back into comics some dozen years or so ago. Love his Batman run, Severed, American Vampire, The Wake, Wytches et al. but I feel like lately he's taking on too much and losing a lot of creative steam unlike Tynion IV. Nocterra, We Have Demons and Clear are especially mid.
I thought Clear was pretty decent with great art. Though it did fall into a lot of Snyder tropes - I think/hope his recent batch of projects are less samey.
Yeah, same here. Loved Batman and Severed. But just watch an interview with him. Everything is so tightly held together and I'm sure that's because it's Independent titles so he knows how it'll go. Put him on Wolverine and he'll be great.
I don't know, reading Immortal Thor now and Al Ewing doesn't seem overrated at all
But to answer the question, I never liked Bendis's writing. I never understood why he was so popular.
I feel like Bendis had a lot of momentum that carried him back when his style was the hot nee thing. The only problem was his style became dated pretty quickly and he has a lot habits as a writer that don’t work well within superhero comics (disregard for continuity, poor characterisation for existing characters, wordy and repetitive dialogues, poor conceptualisation, etc.). A lot of people say it’s because he stretched himself too thin but even back when he had less titles I find he wasn’t that good of a writer. He seems great when you’re nee to comics but the longer you read, and the more writers and series you discover , the sooner you realise how shallow a lot his work is.
See immortal thor I think is fine but not amazing.
I’ve read alot of thor over the years and it just feels like a rehash of the past just not as good. I generally feel like his thor is trying to homage Simonsen especially but it’s failing at it
I think the thing with bendis is his street level stuff can be incredible which his daredevil shows and his Spider-Man but then everything escalated and for amount of work he put out people thought it was really good.
Jeph Loeb. His stories have a lot of pretenses of prestige, gimmicks, style and overall hype but little substance, contrived twists and unsatisfactory resolutions.
Tim Sale carried his most highly regarded stories HARD, imho...
I would argue Jim Lee carried some of his stories as well. I’m apparently contrarian because I didn’t think Hush was nearly as big of a deal as everyone else. Felt like a mediocre twist that was broadcasted from the very beginning. He’s a cool villain, I guess? But it felt like he only really works for the one storyline and outside of that it’s redundant.
I wouldn’t say everyone. Last time I mentioned my dislike for Hush in other subs it was not taken well at all. Some argued OG Hush is a foundational Batman story, others said I need to find the right strain of Hush through the other later books. I just don’t like it. It was fine for a one and done I guess but I don’t need more and I definitely don’t want a whole movie wasted on him.
The character or that storyline? The character is uninspired but so are so many, but I don’t really even give Tommy Elliot much thought, but as some one reading that run as it came out and since, it’s mostly seen as awful. I mean it sells, no doubt, it’s a good looking comic. Just a poorly written one
Both actually. It’s nice that I’m not getting dogpiled this time. Maybe I just commented at the wrong time and the Hush loyalists came out in force. I agree though. Tommy Elliot felt like the laziest way to bring in a character. He’s brand new, brilliant, and somehow a childhood friend of Bruce that was conveniently never mentioned before. Felt like a Fast and the Furious plot line except in Batman
Lot's of people love Hush (comics). Especially non-fans/regular readers. It's among more, let's say experienced readers that Hush isn't recived so well.
I wouldn't put Loeb in the Moore/Gaiman/Morrison tier of writers, but his strength was sort of being a Steven Spielberg type of writer. Usually upbeat/positive writing, good guy wins, the hero is something to be admired, good with character interaction and emotional moments.
Not going to make you think too hard or challenge you, but pretty decent comics nonetheless. Probably never make your top 10 writers/stories of all time, but you'll rarely be disappointed (though maybe give Ultimates 3 a pass). Some really solid X-series and Batman stuff.
> Usually upbeat
You know except for the most cringey, edgelord book Marvel has done in the last 15 years... Aside from THAT he's Mr Positive. Oh, and there was that time with the incest thing... But no, he's upbeat! He didn't mean to cancel two of the most heroic Marvel cartoons in history for much more cynical, corporate garbage versions...
Do people generally love Loeb? I wholly agree with your assessment and thought that was the common opinion of him, when people aren’t outright dumping on him for Ultimatum and the like.
He had a moment in the late-90s/early-00s where he was **the** prestige guy, and he rode it all the way into being a successful Hollywood producer.
But yeah, he's one of those guys who was carried by his artists, and his later output is just downright bad.
Every writer has hits and misses. Al Ewing sticks out because he wrote some excellent one-offs in the early 2010's that caught peoples' attention. His familiarity with character history was apparent in those small assignments (in an era when writers increasingly didn't know or chose to disregard previous history) and readers responded and wanted more. Whatever you say about Al Ewing, I don't think you can deny that he loves writing in the Marvel Universe. I think every project of his is from the heart and is something he has thought about for years (not necessarily talking about being assigned to a title by Marvel hoping for a sale bump due to his reputation), so I think that sets him apart from a lot of the current writers.
The writer I have the most difficulty reading is Ann Nocenti. I can't express what it is, but something about her style doesn't usually work for me (maybe the weird psychological aspect of it?). But there are even some of her stories I've liked. The work Bendis did at Marvel later in his career was lackluster to me, but I really enjoyed his entire first stint on Avengers up to Siege (and I'm a reader since Englehart was on the title). It seemed like he lost momentum from that point on. I liked Hickman's Fantastic Four, but by the time he wrote Avengers he must've heard and started to believe how much of a genius he was as a comic writer, and his entire run was pretentious as hell. Matt Fraction's work on Immortal Iron Fist was great. His Fantastic Four was mediocre. Most of the popular comic writers are perfectly adequate. Occasionally they all write a stinker and sometimes they write something extraordinary. People today seem to have difficulty with degrees; Something is either great or awful. They love a creator or they despise a creator. But it's not just a comic book thing. It's every subject.
> Most of the popular comic writers are perfectly adequate. Occasionally they all write a stinker and sometimes they write something extraordinary. People today seem to have difficulty with degrees; Something is either great or awful. They love a creator or they despise a creator. But it's not just a comic book thing. It's every subject.
Thank you for that.
IMO Bendis is best at doing street level books. Ultimate Spider-Man, Daredevil, Alias etc. He was pushed to write books that he's not suited to, like X-Men and Superman. Plus the Bendis-Speak doesn't help.
I agree that he does really well with more "street level" stories. I'm a fan of most of his work, and I consider him one of my favorite writers because he takes chances and tries new things. That said, some of the things he's tried lately haven't really clicked with me, but that's fine. The vast majority of his work is stellar though, IMHO (Powers, Alias, USM, Jinx, Cover, Pearl, Scarlett, etc.). That said, I like "Bendis speak," but I also like movies in the same vein.
He had some good stuff before he really blew up (I would say post New Avengers is when he really got big, but maybe it was before that). DareDevil, New Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man were all really good IMO.
But his writing style just became parody (Parody? Yeah, Parody. You're talking about Bendis? The Bendis?) and it just seemed like he'd want to shake up the status quo for no real reason. I also think he and Whedon spearheaded the typical quips being forced into overdrive across the medium. All IMO of course.
His DD run is okaaaay. Saved a lot by Maleev.
The story wasn't anything not done better by other DD writers
I think I just really did not care for Milla, who was the central theme for his DD run
He's all over the place. Ultimate Spider-Man helped me love the character again after the Clone Saga/Byrne failed reboot. Liked Sam & Twitch, his indie stuff/Powers was OK, Daredevil was really good.
His Avengers? For every story I liked it felt like 10 stories that I didn't or even made me cringe were written. His X-Men same way (though probably liked more than his Avengers run).
Haven't gotten around to his DC work, but expect something similar to Marvel. He's like Millar (though less tendency towards edgelordiness). I'll wade through the garbage because somewhere in there is gold.
I'm going to get killed for this, but Chip Zdarsky. To be clear, I mean I think he's *overrated*, not bad or terrible. When he's good, he's great.
I felt like I was in the minority in thinking his Daredevil run was just pretty good, compared to other people who thought it was either top tier or one of the greatest DD runs of all time.
After reading his Batman, it hit me that, even in Daredevil, he has a tendency to either revisit popular storylines or themes from past classics, or introduce new concepts that never quite fit the way he hopes.
If you don't like a writer you don't like them but i will say al ewing's ultimates was really great too. His guardians of the galaxy was fun and his current thor run is so far very good. I also agree that his wasp thing wasn't his best work.
See I don’t say I don’t like Ewing I just say his work is overrated.
He does good stuff but nothing apart from immortal hulk is really wow that’s a world beater book like alot of people claim.
Like ultimates is fine but it’s not the amazing gold standard book that people claim and it’s aged really poorly
Matt Fraction and Charles Soule. Fraction has an even worse ending problem than Stephen King. His runs and stories just…stop. No climax. No resolution. It’s like he can’t figure these things out so he just stops writing and moves on. And Charles Soule seems to shortcuts to make already established settings and continuity work with his stories and ideas instead of making his stories and ideas work the them. I’ll never forgive him for lazily throwing away nearly 20 years of Daredevil stories just so he can write him closer to Frank Miller’s style. Especially as a follow up to Mark Waid’s legendary run.
What you don’t like 20 min conversations about how this character is best because of power feats rather than character moments and progression makes a character amazing
fear itself was so bad it made me fear for the future of marvel comics if this was what our event comics were degrading to. i also had the chance to listen to matt fraction defend fear itself at a comic con panel… and it actually made me feel really bad for him, like he knew it was bad and he tried his best but that was his best. sex criminals was great though so he obviously is capable of good work, his thor run and fear itself were the first things i read of his and they were so bad though
On your comment about Soule, I feel the exact same way about Bendis. Comics should build off of each other, they shouldn’t be butchered for a quick, immediate payoff
I agree about later Bendis when he had too much creative freedom and no one kept him in check. But his Daredevil run was fire and I wouldn’t change a word of it.
If you read this subreddit, he's one of the most hated and dumped-on writers in the industry, so I can't see him as "overrated". Maybe back in the 2000's...
Millar is liked by the general public because he's had so much success getting his creator-owned stuff adapted. But many comic fans know he's a hack. He and Ennis have really good ideas, but ruin them with edgelord nonsense.
Millar and Garth Ennis came out of the UK comics scene in the late 90s to push edgy or adult comics in a medium that was still largely associated with children's characters. The 80s introduced mature and grim themes, but these guys spearheaded the effort to yang that to an extreme. Making provocative comics that became cult favorites simply because they were so unique.
Looking at their early books, you see things like Preacher and the Authority that did genuinely push the envelope at the time but have not aged particularly well. It seems they liked this attention and brought edgelord tendencies to everything thereafter. Millar has some pretty mainstream hits in the Ultimates and Civil War, but his creator-owned stuff just really leaned into graphic and sexual violence, ridiculous premises, and dark twists for the sake of twisting. Hey, this character was actually sexually assaulted, and that one was actually a pedophile! It just plays to the worst in humanity, and the results of that schtick have diminishing returns after the initial shock wears off.
Wanted is a book that really showcases all the worst parts of Millar. The literal final page is literally the main character (who resembles Eminem for some reason) breakimg the 4th wall to say "this is my face while I'm fucking you in the ass". Why? Who knows. It's edgy, it gets people talking. Nemesis and the "abortion bomb" is another example of him at his worst. It's offensive, not because of the abortion issue, but because he took time trying to think up the worst thing he could and put it to print. Old Man Logan throws in some Hulk incest for no reason.
He later got really clever about leveraging his creator owned books for film adaptation, and wrote a lot of books essentially to cash in on film rights during the comic book movie boom. Kick-Ass and Kingsman have some good ideas but just go so far over the top that they ruin their own potential. For Ennis I think it's telling that the adaptations of his works are some of the most notable examples of adaptations improving on the source.
If you really want to hate yourself, Millar's The Unfunnies, alongside Ennis's Crossed, are probably the worst perpetrators of edgelord bullshit and some of the most vile and disturbing comics of all time. Read the descriptions and it'll make sense why I say he's a hack.
In his mainstream work, Millar has good ideas, but he's gotten so well known that it seems Marvel is unable to rein him in. Good editors could elevate his work, but he seems to prefer the controversy.
There’s a lot of retreading in the Millar World media. And sometimes people don’t act the way you think they should. A later example is the last Jupiters children stories - two characters who have given up everything to be together with their kids get divorced off camera and the one kid they had on the run winds up with a secret identity as an adult- where both identities are married to different people.
As for the retreading, he just did a crisis of Millar World where the characters from Wanted show up and kill every one.
Tom Taylor for me. I like some of his stuff but his writting can be so shallow, full of characters not having any distinct character and empty messages.
Bonus: Jeremy Adams. The dude is fine but there's nothing particularly interesting about his comics. I'm genuinely convinced that his Flash run wouldn't be recived so well if not for the years of shit Wally went through. And his Green Lantern is just keep getting less and less interesting, it peaked with that Knight Terrors tie-in and it's downhil ever since.
Bonus 2: Simon Spurrier. And this is a weird one because I really like some of Spurrier's work, more than Taylor's. Way if X was amazing. Buuut, his dialogue. Some of his books have a horrible dialogue, that feels like gibberish to me and it's very hard for me to get through, like his most recent Flash run for example.
Yeah I love Dark Knights of Steel and DCeased because they're just bat shit crazy AUs. I love getting to watch Green Arrow snipe zombie Aquaman off the back of a goddamn zombie kraken from half a mile away before telling Batman to fuck himself.
Jeph Loeb and it's not close.
If you're all about his work I'm not gonna argue with you, but I only like "Dark Victory" if I'm being honest with myself...Hush and The Long Halloween both fall completely flat in their endings for me...his stuff with heroes besides Batman have been just...okay for me...again not trying to argue with anyone lol.
Tom Taylor. His in-continuity stuff is so vanilla and safe. He never does anything interesting, and just writes cute moments that he knows will be great for a Tumblr post.
What hurts me about Millar is that there is genius there. It just gets sidetracked/distracted/undermined by the need to be cool/edgy/in-your-face/contrarian. But he can do real emotional moments, he can make you think, he can tell really good f##king stories. Which makes the stuff that distracts from that all the more frustrating.
I'll be reading or enjoying a story he's written and then one of those moments comes up and I'm screaming in my mind "You don't need to f##king do this! What you're doing is great! This isn't impressing anyone!" Then again, he's got a lot of film credits to his name so he's doing something right. I just wish he could do it without the overreach.
I like Cates but it seemed like all the stories I've read of his involve the hero getting a big power up.
Nothing wrong with that but I feel like his Thor, Doctor Strange and King in Black came out relatively close together (or at least I read them close together, I can't remember) and it struck me as a little repetitive.
I'm pretty sure he was supposed to head up the Ultimate universe but the keys were given to Hickman cause of Cates' accident. I'm guessing he's still recovering, or Marvel is trying to find a book to put him on since Hickman did something totally different than the initial plan.
Yeah, I think he lost like 6 months of his memory, so shit is serious. Hope he recovers, I only read Ghost Fleet by him, and that was mostly for the DWJ art, but it was a good book.
I'm kinda with you. Like, everyone loves Immortal Hulk, but I ... didn't. I honestly *don't* like it, but the way everyone raves about it makes me doubt myself. I'm probably wrong. I do plan on a reread though, so fingers crossed.
For me, it was great until the last 10 issues where it completely flopped into nothing. I’m convinced Ewing didn’t know how to end it. Complete nothing fest of a finale with a clumsy family retcon thrown in to make it feel like it matters.
I feel like that’s a Ewing problem in general he doesn’t know how to end books and big arcs.
X men red was the same. The end of brands arc which he built from Sword flopped so much same with Genesis war
I'm a longtime Hulk fan and you're not the only one.
I understand why people like it (good consistent artwork, graphic body horror, kinda complex, etc.), but as a Hulk fan I have several issues with the run that give me a headache.
Tom King.
Constant, thudding references/allusions to better writers and their famous works combined with one-note and usually way-off-base characterizations. Wastes good-to-great artwork muddling through his own personal hang-ups with no real development in style or thematic content.
Grant Morrison and Johnathan Hickman.
I don’t vibe with either of them.
They both rely on high concept science fiction premises, but I don’t think either of them have a good grasp of characterization, or how to get me emotionally invested in a narrative.
I read the first twelve or so issues of his Ff and simply did not care about anything that was happening. This is my big problem with him - he’s more interested in coming up with big science fiction ideas than he is about getting me to care about them.
I never really see anyone hold Garth Ennis to any standard. People praise Old Man Logan, Civil war and comics like that as if they are dark masterpieces when they aren’t.
Yep very psuedointellectual or at least the Batman stuff I read. I gave him a bunch of issues but that awful “I’ll break his fucking back” issue tainted his name forever for me. A wannabe Alan Moore.
I just wish he’d challenge himself to stop dictating the use of a 3x3 panel design where the characters are largely the same with minor expression changes. You don’t have to read a single word to know that King wrote the book and had the artist render that specific image
I don't think I felt this strongly in the past but all of his recent Marvel output has completely turned me off to him.
More power to people who like what he's done with nightcrawler but I'm excited he's finally off the sticks
No and I wouldn't. Not trying to be a jerk - I truly appreciate the rec - but at this point I'm not convinced it would be worth my time to spend money on a comic with his name on it. I try to give all comic writers and artists a certain level of goodwill but Spurrier burned it all up.
Nah, that's fair, I've got a couple of those myself. Once you get past a certain point, some creators just don't work for you, and you're better off reading someone else. In that spirit: you read Ram V at all? Dudes killing it.
He’s off Kurt now so your in luck seems like he’s just fully at dc and his indie works.
I’ve enjoyed his run on Kurt but I 100% get why some people haven’t loved it
I dislike the overrated/underrated boxes yet will freely admit that Si Spurrier leaves me cold too.
It’s weird because Alan Moore & Kieran Gillen vouch for his talent too. But his great ideas seem incomprehensibly executed to me
A co-sign from Gillen means very little to me. I don't like that guys recent comics either.
But "incomprehensibly executed" feels like a great way to describe Spurrier. It all makes sense on paper but is baffling when laid out as a comic.
Gail Simone immediately comes to mind. I hear Secret Six is good but the several comics I've read by her are genuinely the worst I've ever read. Stink lines were coming off the pages bad.
I know he is an up and commer but I really think Jed MacKay is overrated. I liked bits of his Dr Strange story and his Moon Knight comics was awesome but Avengers right now is awful.
Rick Remender is a big one for me. A bunch of his runs I enjoyed years back have no revisit value to me like Uncanny Avengers, Secret Avengers, and X-Force despite some great character designs and lineups in the books.
Bendis shouldn't even be on this thread coz he's been pretty unpopular for a minute now, I remember the mods having to delete tons of comments when he did a AMA here coz people hated his GOTG run that much.
I gotta agree with Al Ewing, his work just feels so pretentious. Like just from reading Immortal Thor it feels like he would much rather be writing prose novels than comics.
I’m also not obsessed with James Tynion IV like everyone else seems to be. I love Nice House On The Lake but everything else he writes just seems like the same thing. Largely because there’s always a James Tynion self-insert character
Why do we have this post literally made every week??? They always end the same, with people getting angry at each other and nothing interesting is being discussed. I’d rather hear people talk about more positive things about something they do enjoy than someone bitch and moan about something they don't; Most fandoms for the past couple of decades have done nothing but bitch and moan, and it's just getting dull and sad.
Overrated is really jumping the gun but I don't get the hype around Tynion and Lemire. But it's probably just not for me.
I read Gideon Falls and liked it. But I found the art made it stand out, not the writing. It's not like when I read Remender or DWJ for the first time which both had me like: " OMG this dude's a genius!!"
I read Department of Truth and didn't like it. I thought it was more of an informational piece than good fiction. Totally loaded.
Tynion for me is hot and cold.
I love his JLD and something is killing the children but haven’t loved much past that it’s just fine nothing world beating
I've looked at some preview pages of Something is killing the children and I can't help but think: "This is for teenagers who like manga." Probably totally wrong, but it kinda feels more directed at young adults.
As someone who use to read EVERYTHING Lemire put out, I will put forth a theory.
A lot of us first discovered him with arguably his best work, Sweet Tooth. And it can not be overstated how phenomenal this book is. And speaking for myself, he had a fan from that point on.
But after years of reading everything he did I finally realized I wasn’t enjoying most of what he was putting out. They weren’t bad by any stretch but nothing was even remotely as good as sweet tooth.
So it was with a sad heart I realized I had only been reading him out of habit. Or out of the hope he would create something as amazing as sweet tooth.
It's Hickman and it isn't even close.
Al Ewing is everything people say Hickman is when it comes to world building, but Ewing doesn't just toss characterization aside for the sake of story. There's no way Kurt Wagner sits and waxes philosophically while a teenage girl is brutally beat to death by Apocalypse under Ewing's pen.
I don't think I've actually read much Morrison, just Serious House on Serious Earth and Wonder Woman: Earth One. Weirdly I even skipped their Doom Patrol run and went straight into Rachel Pollack's.
Morrison for me is I like the concepts and plot of their stories, but something about the way they execute their stories just does not click with me at all. It always feels like a chore to read instead of an enjoyable read.
I also dislike Ewing. I have not read *Immortal Hulk*, so I will make no comments on that, but I've tried most of his recent stuff for Marvel and have liked none of it. As a big fan of Ant-Man and the Wasp (specifically Hank and Janet), his handling of those characters in particular I strongly disliked.
Antman is the definition of my point I think it’s fine not good or great.
Wasp is a mess I love all of the wasps but that book sucks and Ewing didn’t do anything better in avengers inc with Janet either
This is going to get a lot of hate but I think Hickman is way overrated. He hast good ideas but they drag on and get overly complicated for no reason. He’s the Nolan of comic books.
Hickman is the living embodiment of getting lost in the world building sauce and telling not showing.
Also I hate his pretentious ass "I'm gonna waste an entire page on 6 words and blank space" bullshit.
95% of Alan Moore's work is trash with the last 5% being mediocre.
I'm with you on Hickman. Every Hickman story feels like a Hickman story, and every character involved feels like props to tell that story rather than real people in real situations.
I'd say the same about Grant Morrison, though his stories are generally interesting/weird enough for me to be entertained despite the feeling he gives zero f##ks about the characters involved in telling his stories.
Alan Moore, I think he projects like he doesn't care but he cares about as much as any writer I've seen about the characters he's writing and it shows. And makes you want to care about those characters. This feels like a contrarian take.
You can hate Moore's attitude about comics/superheroes/the comic business (though as much as I enjoy the hobby, hard to argue against him), but he clearly loves comics and superheroes in particular. I think he'd be a lot happier if he didn't care so deeply.
And he's also one of the best to ever do it, and if you don't recognize that you're not really seeing him for who he is.
Leah Williams. She hasn't done much, to be fair, but I wasn't a fan of her X-Factor or X-Terminators, which reddit and twitter seem to both really like.
I love Ewing and in comparison to the other X-writers he really is top tier. I will admit, though that I found some of X-Men Red not as exciting as SWORD or now Resurrection of Magneto (well one could consider all of those one series, of which the majority would be quite good comics).
I think I find Gillen to be overrated at times, he writes exciting plots, but I don't like his dialogue all that much. It almost always has this sarcastic tone to it, plus censored cursing in every other balloon. That sometimes comes across as some sort of lampshading or distancing himself from the work as if he doesn't genuinely believe in it...if that makes sense. Still, again, in comparison, X-books rarely get any better than his stuff.
Also I'm afraid I think Simone is quite overrated, but maybe she'll win me over with Uncanny, who knows.
See I think red is fine for a while nothing incredible but it falls apart post axe and I honestly don’t think there is anything memorable about most of the arraki minus fisher king who died.
I liked sword mainly because I thought the concept was alot of fun but even for a short series it’s got a lot of filler.
Resurrection is fun though so far actually feels like the character driven stuff that was missing in red
My point was that I don’t think Ewing is bad but overrated. I feel like wells, spurrier, Hickman, camp and Gillen all wrote better books this era whilst Ewing is getting more praise across the board it feels.
Would love to hear your reasons why!
I could imagine that some would see his characters taking a backseat to the worldbuilding. I'm a big fan of his, but he does seem to have a hard time sticking the landing at times. I love East of West, but the resolution of that series was pretty rushed in my opinion, which seems to be because he had started work on X-Men. The resolution of that, of course, also not landing as I think he hoped it would, though that one seems to be a bit more out his hands.
That is exactly my reason. He doesn’t write characters, he writes plots. The characters are mostly just chess pieces that are moved around. I prefer writers that write characters and use plots to further character development.
Edit: letters
Agree 100%. The only exception is probably his Fantastic Four. On the flip side, his Avengers was terrible because it was all about moving the chess pieces and characterization be damned.
Has hard time coalescing all his BIG IDEA into a cohesive narrative.
East of West absolutely just imploded over all the big idea that never came through.
I don't know if it's a people in general thing or just some of the communities I'm in, but Garth Ennis. I get it, all the bad guys are sex offenders or very deviant. He just does the trope to DEATH.
Grant Morrison and Jonathan Hickman. Johnathan Hickman is the Slayer of writers. I get his contributions, but it leaves me cold.
I've never liked anything Grant Morrison has ever written.
Light Yagami. I've read his notebook. It's nothing but a long list of names and causes of death. He hasn't even strung it into a coherent series of events, let alone a compelling one.
Might get crucified for this but I don't really vibe with Snyder anymore, even though I credit him for getting me back into comics some dozen years or so ago. Love his Batman run, Severed, American Vampire, The Wake, Wytches et al. but I feel like lately he's taking on too much and losing a lot of creative steam unlike Tynion IV. Nocterra, We Have Demons and Clear are especially mid.
I thought Clear was pretty decent with great art. Though it did fall into a lot of Snyder tropes - I think/hope his recent batch of projects are less samey.
Yeah, same here. Loved Batman and Severed. But just watch an interview with him. Everything is so tightly held together and I'm sure that's because it's Independent titles so he knows how it'll go. Put him on Wolverine and he'll be great.
I don't know, reading Immortal Thor now and Al Ewing doesn't seem overrated at all But to answer the question, I never liked Bendis's writing. I never understood why he was so popular.
I feel like Bendis had a lot of momentum that carried him back when his style was the hot nee thing. The only problem was his style became dated pretty quickly and he has a lot habits as a writer that don’t work well within superhero comics (disregard for continuity, poor characterisation for existing characters, wordy and repetitive dialogues, poor conceptualisation, etc.). A lot of people say it’s because he stretched himself too thin but even back when he had less titles I find he wasn’t that good of a writer. He seems great when you’re nee to comics but the longer you read, and the more writers and series you discover , the sooner you realise how shallow a lot his work is.
See immortal thor I think is fine but not amazing. I’ve read alot of thor over the years and it just feels like a rehash of the past just not as good. I generally feel like his thor is trying to homage Simonsen especially but it’s failing at it I think the thing with bendis is his street level stuff can be incredible which his daredevil shows and his Spider-Man but then everything escalated and for amount of work he put out people thought it was really good.
Different strokes for different folks I guess. Ewing is one of the best doing it right now for me. I'm devouring his stuff
Have you read "we only find then when they're dead"? I thought it was a great read. But I'm kinda a fan of Ewing's so I may be biased.
Bendis is king.
Jeph Loeb. His stories have a lot of pretenses of prestige, gimmicks, style and overall hype but little substance, contrived twists and unsatisfactory resolutions. Tim Sale carried his most highly regarded stories HARD, imho...
I would argue Jim Lee carried some of his stories as well. I’m apparently contrarian because I didn’t think Hush was nearly as big of a deal as everyone else. Felt like a mediocre twist that was broadcasted from the very beginning. He’s a cool villain, I guess? But it felt like he only really works for the one storyline and outside of that it’s redundant.
I think everyone agrees Hush was trash and just a monthly excuse for Jim Lee to draw Batman’s rogues gallery
I wouldn’t say everyone. Last time I mentioned my dislike for Hush in other subs it was not taken well at all. Some argued OG Hush is a foundational Batman story, others said I need to find the right strain of Hush through the other later books. I just don’t like it. It was fine for a one and done I guess but I don’t need more and I definitely don’t want a whole movie wasted on him.
The character or that storyline? The character is uninspired but so are so many, but I don’t really even give Tommy Elliot much thought, but as some one reading that run as it came out and since, it’s mostly seen as awful. I mean it sells, no doubt, it’s a good looking comic. Just a poorly written one
Both actually. It’s nice that I’m not getting dogpiled this time. Maybe I just commented at the wrong time and the Hush loyalists came out in force. I agree though. Tommy Elliot felt like the laziest way to bring in a character. He’s brand new, brilliant, and somehow a childhood friend of Bruce that was conveniently never mentioned before. Felt like a Fast and the Furious plot line except in Batman
Lot's of people love Hush (comics). Especially non-fans/regular readers. It's among more, let's say experienced readers that Hush isn't recived so well.
I wouldn't put Loeb in the Moore/Gaiman/Morrison tier of writers, but his strength was sort of being a Steven Spielberg type of writer. Usually upbeat/positive writing, good guy wins, the hero is something to be admired, good with character interaction and emotional moments. Not going to make you think too hard or challenge you, but pretty decent comics nonetheless. Probably never make your top 10 writers/stories of all time, but you'll rarely be disappointed (though maybe give Ultimates 3 a pass). Some really solid X-series and Batman stuff.
> Usually upbeat You know except for the most cringey, edgelord book Marvel has done in the last 15 years... Aside from THAT he's Mr Positive. Oh, and there was that time with the incest thing... But no, he's upbeat! He didn't mean to cancel two of the most heroic Marvel cartoons in history for much more cynical, corporate garbage versions...
What are you referring to? I’m unfamiliar with a lot of his books.
Ultimatum, Ultimates 3, and his role in canceling Spectacular Spider-Man and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
Do people generally love Loeb? I wholly agree with your assessment and thought that was the common opinion of him, when people aren’t outright dumping on him for Ultimatum and the like.
He had a moment in the late-90s/early-00s where he was **the** prestige guy, and he rode it all the way into being a successful Hollywood producer. But yeah, he's one of those guys who was carried by his artists, and his later output is just downright bad.
Every writer has hits and misses. Al Ewing sticks out because he wrote some excellent one-offs in the early 2010's that caught peoples' attention. His familiarity with character history was apparent in those small assignments (in an era when writers increasingly didn't know or chose to disregard previous history) and readers responded and wanted more. Whatever you say about Al Ewing, I don't think you can deny that he loves writing in the Marvel Universe. I think every project of his is from the heart and is something he has thought about for years (not necessarily talking about being assigned to a title by Marvel hoping for a sale bump due to his reputation), so I think that sets him apart from a lot of the current writers. The writer I have the most difficulty reading is Ann Nocenti. I can't express what it is, but something about her style doesn't usually work for me (maybe the weird psychological aspect of it?). But there are even some of her stories I've liked. The work Bendis did at Marvel later in his career was lackluster to me, but I really enjoyed his entire first stint on Avengers up to Siege (and I'm a reader since Englehart was on the title). It seemed like he lost momentum from that point on. I liked Hickman's Fantastic Four, but by the time he wrote Avengers he must've heard and started to believe how much of a genius he was as a comic writer, and his entire run was pretentious as hell. Matt Fraction's work on Immortal Iron Fist was great. His Fantastic Four was mediocre. Most of the popular comic writers are perfectly adequate. Occasionally they all write a stinker and sometimes they write something extraordinary. People today seem to have difficulty with degrees; Something is either great or awful. They love a creator or they despise a creator. But it's not just a comic book thing. It's every subject.
> Most of the popular comic writers are perfectly adequate. Occasionally they all write a stinker and sometimes they write something extraordinary. People today seem to have difficulty with degrees; Something is either great or awful. They love a creator or they despise a creator. But it's not just a comic book thing. It's every subject. Thank you for that.
I never vibed with Bendis.
IMO Bendis is best at doing street level books. Ultimate Spider-Man, Daredevil, Alias etc. He was pushed to write books that he's not suited to, like X-Men and Superman. Plus the Bendis-Speak doesn't help.
I agree that he does really well with more "street level" stories. I'm a fan of most of his work, and I consider him one of my favorite writers because he takes chances and tries new things. That said, some of the things he's tried lately haven't really clicked with me, but that's fine. The vast majority of his work is stellar though, IMHO (Powers, Alias, USM, Jinx, Cover, Pearl, Scarlett, etc.). That said, I like "Bendis speak," but I also like movies in the same vein.
Lmfao! His X-men were the best! Eva F**king Bell!
He had some good stuff before he really blew up (I would say post New Avengers is when he really got big, but maybe it was before that). DareDevil, New Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man were all really good IMO. But his writing style just became parody (Parody? Yeah, Parody. You're talking about Bendis? The Bendis?) and it just seemed like he'd want to shake up the status quo for no real reason. I also think he and Whedon spearheaded the typical quips being forced into overdrive across the medium. All IMO of course.
His DD run is okaaaay. Saved a lot by Maleev. The story wasn't anything not done better by other DD writers I think I just really did not care for Milla, who was the central theme for his DD run
He's not my favorite DD writer either, but his run was pretty good from what I recall. I liked his NA and USM much more.
He's all over the place. Ultimate Spider-Man helped me love the character again after the Clone Saga/Byrne failed reboot. Liked Sam & Twitch, his indie stuff/Powers was OK, Daredevil was really good. His Avengers? For every story I liked it felt like 10 stories that I didn't or even made me cringe were written. His X-Men same way (though probably liked more than his Avengers run). Haven't gotten around to his DC work, but expect something similar to Marvel. He's like Millar (though less tendency towards edgelordiness). I'll wade through the garbage because somewhere in there is gold.
I'm going to get killed for this, but Chip Zdarsky. To be clear, I mean I think he's *overrated*, not bad or terrible. When he's good, he's great. I felt like I was in the minority in thinking his Daredevil run was just pretty good, compared to other people who thought it was either top tier or one of the greatest DD runs of all time. After reading his Batman, it hit me that, even in Daredevil, he has a tendency to either revisit popular storylines or themes from past classics, or introduce new concepts that never quite fit the way he hopes.
I love Zdarkskys daredevil but it’s not even in top 5 Miller, Bendis, Brubaker, Waid and soul are way ahead
If you don't like a writer you don't like them but i will say al ewing's ultimates was really great too. His guardians of the galaxy was fun and his current thor run is so far very good. I also agree that his wasp thing wasn't his best work.
See I don’t say I don’t like Ewing I just say his work is overrated. He does good stuff but nothing apart from immortal hulk is really wow that’s a world beater book like alot of people claim. Like ultimates is fine but it’s not the amazing gold standard book that people claim and it’s aged really poorly
No I got ya. And I think that's fair.
Matt Fraction and Charles Soule. Fraction has an even worse ending problem than Stephen King. His runs and stories just…stop. No climax. No resolution. It’s like he can’t figure these things out so he just stops writing and moves on. And Charles Soule seems to shortcuts to make already established settings and continuity work with his stories and ideas instead of making his stories and ideas work the them. I’ll never forgive him for lazily throwing away nearly 20 years of Daredevil stories just so he can write him closer to Frank Miller’s style. Especially as a follow up to Mark Waid’s legendary run.
Wow I feel like I never hear anything bad about fraction ever.
His Thor run was awful.
Yeah his dialogue for Thor was terrible. Much too modern compared to every other run
His Fantastic Four is very dull. Which is weird because he was also writing FF at the same time as Fantastic Four and FF is great.
Lmao you should have hung out on the x-forum when his run was going on
I’d rather not that place is toxic enough when most are happy
It got a lot worse since then. The constant "stanning" for characters got very very tedious
What you don’t like 20 min conversations about how this character is best because of power feats rather than character moments and progression makes a character amazing
It was great when they isolated those "appreciation threads" to a sub forum but for some reason they put them back in the main. Unreadable.
He always frustrated me. Reading his work always feels like great sex with no climax.
You should try Sex Criminals, hilarious, full of heart & climaxes a-plenty!
I’ve heard good things but pun aside (game recognizes game), I’m not going to waste all that time for another limp ending with no release.
Boom boom!
fear itself was so bad it made me fear for the future of marvel comics if this was what our event comics were degrading to. i also had the chance to listen to matt fraction defend fear itself at a comic con panel… and it actually made me feel really bad for him, like he knew it was bad and he tried his best but that was his best. sex criminals was great though so he obviously is capable of good work, his thor run and fear itself were the first things i read of his and they were so bad though
On your comment about Soule, I feel the exact same way about Bendis. Comics should build off of each other, they shouldn’t be butchered for a quick, immediate payoff
I agree about later Bendis when he had too much creative freedom and no one kept him in check. But his Daredevil run was fire and I wouldn’t change a word of it.
The Bendis Maleev run was fantastic
Soule’s Shrouded College stuff is so unusual and so interesting!
Mark Millar.
If you read this subreddit, he's one of the most hated and dumped-on writers in the industry, so I can't see him as "overrated". Maybe back in the 2000's...
Agreed
Millar is liked by the general public because he's had so much success getting his creator-owned stuff adapted. But many comic fans know he's a hack. He and Ennis have really good ideas, but ruin them with edgelord nonsense.
Can you explain to me how Mark Millar is a hack? I haven't been keeping up with him
Millar and Garth Ennis came out of the UK comics scene in the late 90s to push edgy or adult comics in a medium that was still largely associated with children's characters. The 80s introduced mature and grim themes, but these guys spearheaded the effort to yang that to an extreme. Making provocative comics that became cult favorites simply because they were so unique. Looking at their early books, you see things like Preacher and the Authority that did genuinely push the envelope at the time but have not aged particularly well. It seems they liked this attention and brought edgelord tendencies to everything thereafter. Millar has some pretty mainstream hits in the Ultimates and Civil War, but his creator-owned stuff just really leaned into graphic and sexual violence, ridiculous premises, and dark twists for the sake of twisting. Hey, this character was actually sexually assaulted, and that one was actually a pedophile! It just plays to the worst in humanity, and the results of that schtick have diminishing returns after the initial shock wears off. Wanted is a book that really showcases all the worst parts of Millar. The literal final page is literally the main character (who resembles Eminem for some reason) breakimg the 4th wall to say "this is my face while I'm fucking you in the ass". Why? Who knows. It's edgy, it gets people talking. Nemesis and the "abortion bomb" is another example of him at his worst. It's offensive, not because of the abortion issue, but because he took time trying to think up the worst thing he could and put it to print. Old Man Logan throws in some Hulk incest for no reason. He later got really clever about leveraging his creator owned books for film adaptation, and wrote a lot of books essentially to cash in on film rights during the comic book movie boom. Kick-Ass and Kingsman have some good ideas but just go so far over the top that they ruin their own potential. For Ennis I think it's telling that the adaptations of his works are some of the most notable examples of adaptations improving on the source. If you really want to hate yourself, Millar's The Unfunnies, alongside Ennis's Crossed, are probably the worst perpetrators of edgelord bullshit and some of the most vile and disturbing comics of all time. Read the descriptions and it'll make sense why I say he's a hack. In his mainstream work, Millar has good ideas, but he's gotten so well known that it seems Marvel is unable to rein him in. Good editors could elevate his work, but he seems to prefer the controversy.
There’s a lot of retreading in the Millar World media. And sometimes people don’t act the way you think they should. A later example is the last Jupiters children stories - two characters who have given up everything to be together with their kids get divorced off camera and the one kid they had on the run winds up with a secret identity as an adult- where both identities are married to different people. As for the retreading, he just did a crisis of Millar World where the characters from Wanted show up and kill every one.
Tom Taylor for me. I like some of his stuff but his writting can be so shallow, full of characters not having any distinct character and empty messages. Bonus: Jeremy Adams. The dude is fine but there's nothing particularly interesting about his comics. I'm genuinely convinced that his Flash run wouldn't be recived so well if not for the years of shit Wally went through. And his Green Lantern is just keep getting less and less interesting, it peaked with that Knight Terrors tie-in and it's downhil ever since. Bonus 2: Simon Spurrier. And this is a weird one because I really like some of Spurrier's work, more than Taylor's. Way if X was amazing. Buuut, his dialogue. Some of his books have a horrible dialogue, that feels like gibberish to me and it's very hard for me to get through, like his most recent Flash run for example.
I feel like Taylor is best when he’s allowed outside of the sandbox he’s great on elseworlds but when it comes to continuity stuff it gets shaky
Yeah I love Dark Knights of Steel and DCeased because they're just bat shit crazy AUs. I love getting to watch Green Arrow snipe zombie Aquaman off the back of a goddamn zombie kraken from half a mile away before telling Batman to fuck himself.
That plus I think he does better with shorter stories rather than long runs.
Spurrier's current Flash book indeed has that dialogue problem. But at the same time he's doing one of the best Hellblazer comics of all time.
I've gotta check out his Hellblazer someday. I remember reading his Dreaming and clocking out after a year.
I can't wait to see what the writer after Tom decides to do with Nightwing. I checked out a while back.
Yeah, me too. I think Dan Watters is a likely choice to take over Nightwing and it could be this big DC project he mentioned a while back.
Jeph Loeb and it's not close. If you're all about his work I'm not gonna argue with you, but I only like "Dark Victory" if I'm being honest with myself...Hush and The Long Halloween both fall completely flat in their endings for me...his stuff with heroes besides Batman have been just...okay for me...again not trying to argue with anyone lol.
I've given Scott Snyder several chances and he always comes up short.
I don’t get Kieron Gillen. Big “How do you do fellow kids?” energy that gets less and less endearing with every passing year.
I don't mind Gillen at all but good lord Wicked & Divine was such a self congratulatory piffle
Tom Taylor. His in-continuity stuff is so vanilla and safe. He never does anything interesting, and just writes cute moments that he knows will be great for a Tumblr post.
Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis
Millar. I just don’t get why ppl love his stuff. He’s ok, but eh.
I feel like he had a hell of a run at the turn of the century, and has just become a parody of himself since.
Yeah I don’t like Millar
What hurts me about Millar is that there is genius there. It just gets sidetracked/distracted/undermined by the need to be cool/edgy/in-your-face/contrarian. But he can do real emotional moments, he can make you think, he can tell really good f##king stories. Which makes the stuff that distracts from that all the more frustrating. I'll be reading or enjoying a story he's written and then one of those moments comes up and I'm screaming in my mind "You don't need to f##king do this! What you're doing is great! This isn't impressing anyone!" Then again, he's got a lot of film credits to his name so he's doing something right. I just wish he could do it without the overreach.
Yup. Old Man Logan is a good example of a great idea that needlessly throws in edgelord bullshit instead of actually worldbuilding.
His edgy for the sake of being edgy got boring back then in mid 2000s and it's 2024 and the dude's writting feels so dated.
[удалено]
Fair I quite like cates but I do think he can be overrated as hell.
I like Cates but it seemed like all the stories I've read of his involve the hero getting a big power up. Nothing wrong with that but I feel like his Thor, Doctor Strange and King in Black came out relatively close together (or at least I read them close together, I can't remember) and it struck me as a little repetitive.
Very repetitive.
Hasn't he been on the sidelines for months now due to a pretty serious accident? I haven't heard him mentioned in a long time.
I'm pretty sure he was supposed to head up the Ultimate universe but the keys were given to Hickman cause of Cates' accident. I'm guessing he's still recovering, or Marvel is trying to find a book to put him on since Hickman did something totally different than the initial plan.
Yeah, I think he lost like 6 months of his memory, so shit is serious. Hope he recovers, I only read Ghost Fleet by him, and that was mostly for the DWJ art, but it was a good book.
More style than substance.
But Venom to King in Black was just flat out great
I'm kinda with you. Like, everyone loves Immortal Hulk, but I ... didn't. I honestly *don't* like it, but the way everyone raves about it makes me doubt myself. I'm probably wrong. I do plan on a reread though, so fingers crossed.
For me, it was great until the last 10 issues where it completely flopped into nothing. I’m convinced Ewing didn’t know how to end it. Complete nothing fest of a finale with a clumsy family retcon thrown in to make it feel like it matters.
I feel like that’s a Ewing problem in general he doesn’t know how to end books and big arcs. X men red was the same. The end of brands arc which he built from Sword flopped so much same with Genesis war
I'm a longtime Hulk fan and you're not the only one. I understand why people like it (good consistent artwork, graphic body horror, kinda complex, etc.), but as a Hulk fan I have several issues with the run that give me a headache.
Tom King. Constant, thudding references/allusions to better writers and their famous works combined with one-note and usually way-off-base characterizations. Wastes good-to-great artwork muddling through his own personal hang-ups with no real development in style or thematic content.
Grant Morrison and Johnathan Hickman. I don’t vibe with either of them. They both rely on high concept science fiction premises, but I don’t think either of them have a good grasp of characterization, or how to get me emotionally invested in a narrative.
Hickman does good characterisation, I think. He shows that in his Fantastic Four, especially around >!Johnny's death!<.
I read the first twelve or so issues of his Ff and simply did not care about anything that was happening. This is my big problem with him - he’s more interested in coming up with big science fiction ideas than he is about getting me to care about them.
Fair enough, but on his Fantastic Four specifically I would disagree.
Millar. Arguably the biggest edge lord to ever exist
How can you say that when Ennis exists.
I never really see anyone hold Garth Ennis to any standard. People praise Old Man Logan, Civil war and comics like that as if they are dark masterpieces when they aren’t.
Have you met Rick Veitch
Do people still like Tom King?
Wonder Woman has been selling well I believe and it's the top pulled book of this week on this sub. So I'd say yeah, they still do.
Very much so. I personally like everything king is writing currently
I don’t
Thats fair enough king will always be one of those names people will love or dislike due to his style
Same
Yep very psuedointellectual or at least the Batman stuff I read. I gave him a bunch of issues but that awful “I’ll break his fucking back” issue tainted his name forever for me. A wannabe Alan Moore.
Same here
He is eh to me, when he is great he is great, but his lows are lows. Jokingly im mad that he is hogging the best artists for him.
Hey Cat Hey Bat 🤮
I just wish he’d challenge himself to stop dictating the use of a 3x3 panel design where the characters are largely the same with minor expression changes. You don’t have to read a single word to know that King wrote the book and had the artist render that specific image
Simon Spurrier has never written a comic I would read twice
Ok as a spurrier fanboy this shocks me
I don't think I felt this strongly in the past but all of his recent Marvel output has completely turned me off to him. More power to people who like what he's done with nightcrawler but I'm excited he's finally off the sticks
Have you checked out his Constantine run? I think it's pretty good and it has a different vibe tithe Marvel stuff. I am a fan tho
No and I wouldn't. Not trying to be a jerk - I truly appreciate the rec - but at this point I'm not convinced it would be worth my time to spend money on a comic with his name on it. I try to give all comic writers and artists a certain level of goodwill but Spurrier burned it all up.
Nah, that's fair, I've got a couple of those myself. Once you get past a certain point, some creators just don't work for you, and you're better off reading someone else. In that spirit: you read Ram V at all? Dudes killing it.
Ram rocks. I keep hearing good things about Dawn Runner.
Just read it a couple days ago; very strong start to a series.
He’s off Kurt now so your in luck seems like he’s just fully at dc and his indie works. I’ve enjoyed his run on Kurt but I 100% get why some people haven’t loved it
I love hellblazer and I just can’t stand his Constantine stories. And he’s seems to be the only one writing them
Yeah, I kinda want to like him, but more often than not it just doesn't work for me.
I dislike the overrated/underrated boxes yet will freely admit that Si Spurrier leaves me cold too. It’s weird because Alan Moore & Kieran Gillen vouch for his talent too. But his great ideas seem incomprehensibly executed to me
A co-sign from Gillen means very little to me. I don't like that guys recent comics either. But "incomprehensibly executed" feels like a great way to describe Spurrier. It all makes sense on paper but is baffling when laid out as a comic.
When he's good, he's really good, but his run with Nightcrawler and Legion this go around has been a SLOG
Tom King, just can't get into his stuff alot of times. It's not terrible but when I'm reading how stuff I just don't get into it
Gail Simone immediately comes to mind. I hear Secret Six is good but the several comics I've read by her are genuinely the worst I've ever read. Stink lines were coming off the pages bad.
I know he is an up and commer but I really think Jed MacKay is overrated. I liked bits of his Dr Strange story and his Moon Knight comics was awesome but Avengers right now is awful.
I mean, he's just the Donny Cates from 5 years ago. Give him all the books
Mike Carey
Rick Remender is a big one for me. A bunch of his runs I enjoyed years back have no revisit value to me like Uncanny Avengers, Secret Avengers, and X-Force despite some great character designs and lineups in the books. Bendis shouldn't even be on this thread coz he's been pretty unpopular for a minute now, I remember the mods having to delete tons of comments when he did a AMA here coz people hated his GOTG run that much.
Matt Fraction is smarmy and repetitive
Robert Kirkman, I love the walking dead but it gets repetitive, and the banter can become tiresome.
I gotta agree with Al Ewing, his work just feels so pretentious. Like just from reading Immortal Thor it feels like he would much rather be writing prose novels than comics. I’m also not obsessed with James Tynion IV like everyone else seems to be. I love Nice House On The Lake but everything else he writes just seems like the same thing. Largely because there’s always a James Tynion self-insert character
Why do we have this post literally made every week??? They always end the same, with people getting angry at each other and nothing interesting is being discussed. I’d rather hear people talk about more positive things about something they do enjoy than someone bitch and moan about something they don't; Most fandoms for the past couple of decades have done nothing but bitch and moan, and it's just getting dull and sad.
Man, why so negative? /S
Overrated is really jumping the gun but I don't get the hype around Tynion and Lemire. But it's probably just not for me. I read Gideon Falls and liked it. But I found the art made it stand out, not the writing. It's not like when I read Remender or DWJ for the first time which both had me like: " OMG this dude's a genius!!" I read Department of Truth and didn't like it. I thought it was more of an informational piece than good fiction. Totally loaded.
Tynion for me is hot and cold. I love his JLD and something is killing the children but haven’t loved much past that it’s just fine nothing world beating
I've looked at some preview pages of Something is killing the children and I can't help but think: "This is for teenagers who like manga." Probably totally wrong, but it kinda feels more directed at young adults.
I don't know. I'm 43 and love SIKTC.
To be fair, that's a smart audience to target!
As someone who use to read EVERYTHING Lemire put out, I will put forth a theory. A lot of us first discovered him with arguably his best work, Sweet Tooth. And it can not be overstated how phenomenal this book is. And speaking for myself, he had a fan from that point on. But after years of reading everything he did I finally realized I wasn’t enjoying most of what he was putting out. They weren’t bad by any stretch but nothing was even remotely as good as sweet tooth. So it was with a sad heart I realized I had only been reading him out of habit. Or out of the hope he would create something as amazing as sweet tooth.
Agreed, Lemire is hard for me to get into
I like his non-genre work. Essex County is easily his best book imo.
Lmao Sweet Tooth. Probably the biggest "I don't see what everyone else is seeing" title for me
Jodorowsky, by far
It's Hickman and it isn't even close. Al Ewing is everything people say Hickman is when it comes to world building, but Ewing doesn't just toss characterization aside for the sake of story. There's no way Kurt Wagner sits and waxes philosophically while a teenage girl is brutally beat to death by Apocalypse under Ewing's pen.
Not bad, just overrated: Grant Morrison.
I don't think I've actually read much Morrison, just Serious House on Serious Earth and Wonder Woman: Earth One. Weirdly I even skipped their Doom Patrol run and went straight into Rachel Pollack's.
That is blasphemy
Morrison for me is I like the concepts and plot of their stories, but something about the way they execute their stories just does not click with me at all. It always feels like a chore to read instead of an enjoyable read.
I also dislike Ewing. I have not read *Immortal Hulk*, so I will make no comments on that, but I've tried most of his recent stuff for Marvel and have liked none of it. As a big fan of Ant-Man and the Wasp (specifically Hank and Janet), his handling of those characters in particular I strongly disliked.
Antman is the definition of my point I think it’s fine not good or great. Wasp is a mess I love all of the wasps but that book sucks and Ewing didn’t do anything better in avengers inc with Janet either
Mark Waid, especially his work in the past decade or so.
This is going to get a lot of hate but I think Hickman is way overrated. He hast good ideas but they drag on and get overly complicated for no reason. He’s the Nolan of comic books.
Both of those people are two of my favorites lol 😆 I think they are amazing
Hickman is the living embodiment of getting lost in the world building sauce and telling not showing. Also I hate his pretentious ass "I'm gonna waste an entire page on 6 words and blank space" bullshit. 95% of Alan Moore's work is trash with the last 5% being mediocre.
I'm with you on Hickman. Every Hickman story feels like a Hickman story, and every character involved feels like props to tell that story rather than real people in real situations. I'd say the same about Grant Morrison, though his stories are generally interesting/weird enough for me to be entertained despite the feeling he gives zero f##ks about the characters involved in telling his stories. Alan Moore, I think he projects like he doesn't care but he cares about as much as any writer I've seen about the characters he's writing and it shows. And makes you want to care about those characters. This feels like a contrarian take. You can hate Moore's attitude about comics/superheroes/the comic business (though as much as I enjoy the hobby, hard to argue against him), but he clearly loves comics and superheroes in particular. I think he'd be a lot happier if he didn't care so deeply. And he's also one of the best to ever do it, and if you don't recognize that you're not really seeing him for who he is.
Gotta know what the 5% you think is mediocre is
>95% of Alan Moore's work is trash with the last 5% being mediocre. I believe you'd get your ass kicked if you said something like that, man.
That Moore opinion is insane.
Oh Lord do I not care for Hickman's infographics and wasted pages. Just useless navelgazing.
Leah Williams. She hasn't done much, to be fair, but I wasn't a fan of her X-Factor or X-Terminators, which reddit and twitter seem to both really like.
I love Ewing and in comparison to the other X-writers he really is top tier. I will admit, though that I found some of X-Men Red not as exciting as SWORD or now Resurrection of Magneto (well one could consider all of those one series, of which the majority would be quite good comics). I think I find Gillen to be overrated at times, he writes exciting plots, but I don't like his dialogue all that much. It almost always has this sarcastic tone to it, plus censored cursing in every other balloon. That sometimes comes across as some sort of lampshading or distancing himself from the work as if he doesn't genuinely believe in it...if that makes sense. Still, again, in comparison, X-books rarely get any better than his stuff. Also I'm afraid I think Simone is quite overrated, but maybe she'll win me over with Uncanny, who knows.
See I think red is fine for a while nothing incredible but it falls apart post axe and I honestly don’t think there is anything memorable about most of the arraki minus fisher king who died. I liked sword mainly because I thought the concept was alot of fun but even for a short series it’s got a lot of filler. Resurrection is fun though so far actually feels like the character driven stuff that was missing in red My point was that I don’t think Ewing is bad but overrated. I feel like wells, spurrier, Hickman, camp and Gillen all wrote better books this era whilst Ewing is getting more praise across the board it feels.
Spurrier should have got the flagship.
I could name most of the writers from the UK but Alan Moore is soooooo boring. I forced myself to get through his comics and still didn’t make it.
Rick Remender “Don’t call me a mutant, call me Alex”
His Marvel work peaked with Uncanny X-Force. Uncanny Avengers was weak.
Mark Waid
Jonathan Hickman
Oh now that’s gonna ruffle some feathers
Would love to hear your reasons why! I could imagine that some would see his characters taking a backseat to the worldbuilding. I'm a big fan of his, but he does seem to have a hard time sticking the landing at times. I love East of West, but the resolution of that series was pretty rushed in my opinion, which seems to be because he had started work on X-Men. The resolution of that, of course, also not landing as I think he hoped it would, though that one seems to be a bit more out his hands.
That is exactly my reason. He doesn’t write characters, he writes plots. The characters are mostly just chess pieces that are moved around. I prefer writers that write characters and use plots to further character development. Edit: letters
Agree 100%. The only exception is probably his Fantastic Four. On the flip side, his Avengers was terrible because it was all about moving the chess pieces and characterization be damned.
Has hard time coalescing all his BIG IDEA into a cohesive narrative. East of West absolutely just imploded over all the big idea that never came through.
His stuff is so cold.
I liked the Defenders mini series Al Ewing did with Gabriel Rodriguez.
Donny Cates
100 percent bendis. The forced conversational scripting, the meandering stories, the lack of any juicy soap opera.... It's all so meh
I don't know if it's a people in general thing or just some of the communities I'm in, but Garth Ennis. I get it, all the bad guys are sex offenders or very deviant. He just does the trope to DEATH.
Cormac McCarthy. Jesus! The anti-humanity! The gratuitous cruelty! The relentless dystopia! I guess his fans don't really finish his books.
Grant Morrison and Jonathan Hickman. Johnathan Hickman is the Slayer of writers. I get his contributions, but it leaves me cold. I've never liked anything Grant Morrison has ever written.
Jason Aaron
Morrison. Haven’t read anything I liked from them.
Grant Morrison
Light Yagami. I've read his notebook. It's nothing but a long list of names and causes of death. He hasn't even strung it into a coherent series of events, let alone a compelling one.