Nostalgia and Fatigue
The much hyped Image United was released last week. I must admit I was a fan of the crazy Image era of the early nineties. So I was intrigued by the idea of the Image founders, minus Jim Lee, each drawing their own characters with Robert Kirkman writing. I expected some early nineties nostalgia with this and that is exactly what I got. Even with Kirkman writing it had the same strengths and weaknesses of the classic Image books. The plot is thin the art is crazy and all over the place, thanks to Rob Liefeld doing the layouts, but it has all the silly fun energy of the days when the art came before the writing. This is not a book that is going to win over new fans as the bar for writing is much higher now then when Image first launched. In a somewhat ironic comparison it is everything that Kirkman’s Walking Dead is not. I can’t imagine recommending this to a fan of the Walking Dead as they would likely feel insulted by the storytelling. I would only recommend this book purely for the nineties nostalgia .
Event Fatigue
Robot 6 has a interesting look at the differing views between DC and Marvel on events, based on recent interviews with editors DiDio and Quesada. Essentially DiDio sees it as a issue of quality where if the books are good enough people will not feel warn out by them and Quesada believes it is a issue of doing too much of the same thing meaning the warn out people want something new and different. I personally think DiDio is right here as I believe quality wins out in the end. I do think Quesada’s side is a good argument with many good points. It does reflect the tendencies of each company as Marvel keeps most of their eggs in the superhero basket so there is a bigger danger for them with fatigue. DC on the other hand has a healthy balance of books. So if someone is tired of a DC event they can just read something from Vertigo, Wildstorm, or even Zuda instead. Given all that, it could be said that both companies are correct in their views and it is necessary for them to go in the different directions that they are. As a fan of both Marvel and DC I like knowing they are not both doing the exact same thing. I may side with DC on this but I’ll gladly read any well written book from Marvel and there are plenty of those.