What did they do with Boseman again, did they just kill him offscreen or something?
ā¦ permanently.
Hating nearly every minute of the last Spider-man movie kind of killed any enthusiasm I had for Dr Strange. But I got around to watching it while very bored the other day and I gotta say it exceeded my non-existent expectations. Itās probably the least unwatchable one of the post-Endgame MCU movies (I havenāt seen Th4 yet, is it good?), which have been uniformly mediocre.
Like NWH, I already had all the big cameos spoiled, but unlike NWH, those arenāt the most interesting parts of it, and aside from the one sequence where everyone gets killed they donāt even really have that much to do with the plot. Itās just like a very funny/gross gag that lasts a couple scenes, then the movie gets back to being weird.
I donāt want to make this sound like the best thing ever made or anything, I just liked how willing to be totally nonsensical it was. This is ironically what I hated about NWH, in that they were committed to doing just enough magic multiverse nonsense exposition to justify bringing back all the old actors, but forgot to give the rest of the movie a plot that made any sense whatsoever. But in Doctor Strange, the number of ridiculous things happening just increases so quickly that it becomes impossible to resist it, like to the point where it actually feels like it is deliberately engineered to make Cinema Sins type guys lose their minds. In fact, thatās probably the only āmadnessā that actually exists in the movie.
The other thing I liked about it was that Dr Strange gets to do a ton of different weird magic instead of just like making geometric disks appear. Like thereās a scene where he gives himself monster hands for 2 seconds, and another where dragon heads shoot out of his body. Knowing Raimi, Iām sure all of this stuff is like 100% comics accurate but I donāt know Doctor Strange comics enough to know what they are referencing.
Oh, and in the ultimate combination of āshit that makes no senseā and ācool magic spells,ā in a climactic sequence of the movie Doctor Strange fights an evil version of himself by making musical notes fly off of sheet music and become projectiles. Despite the dark premise and a fair amount of gore (well, charred corpses at least) the whole thing is surprisingly goofy. Then again, it is Sam Raimi, so not that surprising.
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a friend showed me this enormous behind the scenes history of the spiderman clone saga a while ago, but i only went back and reread the whole thing this week. very recommended as a compendium of the most delirious editorial decisions youāve ever heard in your life. i love the part where one of the writers suggests a random twist about finding a long-dead spiderman skeleton in a smokestack, and the editorial staff are impressed enough with the image to staple it on as an ending to one of the booksā¦ and then itās left to the rotating writers of four different comic books to have to figure out who the skeleton actually belongs to or what it means, shunting it around from clone to clone until it finally ends up in a one-off continuity graveyard dedicated to wrapping up loose ends (which is itself rendered out of continuity like three months later, when the new editor in chief decides to bring back aunt may). the ultimate promise and appeal of pulp storytelling!!
but itās also a funny read to me bc i was a kid during this whole thing and actually did own a couple of these issuesā¦ i never had any hope of following them, i assumed they were just like tv show reruns where they were chopped out of order by the time iād get to see any. but i remember getting a lot of sincere pleasure and intrigue from, like, the sub-vertigo maturity trappings of these books and their awkward gestures towards emotional insight. it seemed like every comic just involved spiderman creeping around someoneās house at night, or an empty school or something, with the lights off and talking to himself and occasionally seeing the ghosts of old memoriesā¦ and then heād fight The Puma or something and it would be so abstracted it was impossible to tell what was happening and then it would abruptly end on another nonsensical revelation, and you were left with this bizarre object, with nothing to do but flip through it again and try to hoover up any residual charge to the imagery, a sense of significance which would never come to anything. i kind of wish iād held onto them since i believe one of them had holographic chromium decals on the cover and iām sure this random massproduced 1995 spiderman comic would now be worth, conservatively, 100 billion dollars, just like all the beanie babies.
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My dad bought me my first issue of Spider-Man which was like, from a month or two after the clone saga. It literally opened with Petey complaining about being bit my morbius and then meeting a guy who had previously only turned up in a few issues of Kung-Fu to fight two villains who as far as I know were completely original to the comic.
The entire letters section was stuff like āthe spider-skeleton was the real Peter Parkerā and āok yeah but how did the green goblin come back to lifeā
It was kinda the most perfect little microcosm of 90s comics
(Later I got an issue that was half sexy ninjas who spoke to each other using word art for emphasis, which is a great idea that someone not writing a terrible 90s spider-man comic should do)
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i also experienced 90s superhero comics through whatever random non-sequential issues i could get ahold of (until the awesome uk marvel reprints titles took off c.1996). the main thing i remember about the clone saga is there was a huge muscular shape-shifting spider-man clone called spidercide. in particular, there was an issue where a whole bunch of spider-men were fighting in a lab, including peter parker, ben reilly, kaine (bah gawd), and spidercide. and a whole bunch of non-distinct clones too. anyway, during all this, spidercide wanders away from the pack, where he meets some kind of spooky robed wizard man?! the wizard pokes his finger into spidercideās face, and spidercide suddenly looks very happy and exclaims āI KNOW!ā
never found out what the hell that was about
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The phrase ābad writingā showed up with surprising regularity when I happened across comment threads about Dr. Strange 2. And these people are presumably Marvel movie fans, so itās not Strange being a shitty quippy guy instead of exclaiming about hoary hosts of Hoggoth thatās the issue Iāll wager (which was my main beef).
Is there some kind of coded thing going on here?
Is this nerds being upset about something not paying off from some streaming series or something? Or is the writing what they have to blame because it canāt be the āactingā or the āspecial effectsā because those are the understood building blocks of these movies and itās the only on that doesnāt implicate the rest of the series?
I havenāt seen many of these but this was certainly more interesting than the Infinity Gauntlet two parter.
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this is what a cat does when you scritch it on the forehead
cool discovery from the clone article is that i guess the wizard guy āSCRIERā is actually just one of multiple identical guys named āSCRIERā who also look like that and i guess are essentially just a boutique crime cartel that norman osborn adopted in europeā¦ because just having him be a wizard would not be grounded enough for spiderman comics.
i read the whole 35 part thing and i still canāt tell you what happened to kaineā¦ i guess he ends up being used in that spidergirl comic which is fitting bc both he and the spider baby were just kind of disappeared offscreen at some point and never mentioned again in the mainline comics
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i think kaine came back at some pointi n the past decade as a kind of anti-hero character, then died again
also that scrier origin is amazing and way more stupid than if he actually was a wizard
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Now Iām really curious about when this kind of bad writing in the form of incomprehensible slices of continuity and debut characters in never ending soap opera gave way to bad writing in the form easily trade-paperbackable story arcs told in multiples of six issues
Like it wasnāt just vertigo because theyād been chugging away for years doing their thing before the clone saga
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Watchmen, DKR, and the Vertigo books started the trend of trades becoming perennial big sellers, but into the 2000s I remember hearing a lot of anxiety that the manga shelves at book stores had become the defacto spot where people seek comics rather than one off issues at the liquor store spinner rack, so things became more focused on writing for those to compete in the same space.
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yeah i feel like pre-TPB era there was more immediate focus on maxing out sales per individual issue, which is why every comic from that period seemed to be a multi-series event that continued in a different book and also why every single one of them seemed to include, like, multiple gratuitous plot twists, deaths, all-powerful cloaked figures standing in outline saying things like āhehā¦ these fools donāt knowā¦ whoās REALLY running eventsā¦ā etc. xmenitis
and itās funny bc after they found the TPB money it was almost the opposite problem, everything tended toward being the self-contained single author ādefinitive take on established characterā, slower and more deliberate the better, like 24 Hour Psycho but for the 2-panel origin of Hydro Man or something, also with so much foreshadowing and interconnection and stuff that everything starts feeling like that weirdly narrow star wars prequel universe where itās just 3 guys causing everything that happens. truly your network is your net worth
idk itās weird to think of totally different schools of bad writing succeeding anotherā¦ i guess they both have their points. the crossover era had clones and the tpb era had that one ādark knight returns but for spidermanā comic where heās sad because his radioactive cum killed his wife. a new frontier in dead wife representation.
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I Need to go back to the Kingdom Hearts red string board now.
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They brought him back in freaking Houston, Texas of all places, a city that is very much not vertical. I remember there was an event at a Houston comics shop to debut it and it never went anywhere because Marvel didnāt want to spare any of their popular villains to do much far from any of their established titles.
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Houston does have that vast poorly signposted underground walkway system.
Dang texas you were so close to a subway systemā¦
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Despite writing for the trades, it was still the single issue pre-orders that determined if a series lived or died, so there was significant hatred for the ātradewaitersā by the staff despite them shelling out the money for the comics. The part that made crossovers less appealing for editorial was that they freaking killed readership of titles that had fans of the title instead of generic āmarvel fans,ā like the kids who signed up for high school antics with Kamala Khan checked the fuck out when the scale of the stories went from something relatable to Skrulls Are Infitrating the Federal Government.
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i always heard it was joe quesada becoming editor in chief that made marvel make the shift towards putting everything in trade paperbacks, but itās probably more likely that his tenure just happened to coincide with the tokyopop boom completely changing the uk/us comics landscape
the stuff @extrabastardformula talks about resulted in a ludicrous situation where a lot of titles, especially ones starring new characters, would constantly be getting cancelled (because of low issue sales), then re-commisioned (because of high trade sales) over and over
i think gotham academy (the best big two book of the 2010s imo) did the mandatory crossover issue pretty well: it was some joker-related story spread across all the gotham-set series, and the gotham academy part just had the kids under emergency lockdown in the gym, telling each other scary urban legends theyād heard about the joker
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Dallas also has one lol
I guess Iāll probably see this eventually because it is a Raimi but I am sort of semi rewatching/watching actually for the first time Venture Bros and in a single line āWho wants PIIIZZA ROOOOOOLLS~~!ā Dr Orpheus is a better Marvel Dr Strange than they could ever put in a hundred MCU movies
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