Unpopular Opinions?

I just don’t like her. She’s kinda arrogant at times and I feel like the only reason she’s so popular is because of the hole in her suit

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It’s fine that she was made. However, if Helena had to go when COIE happened, Karen had to go too.

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To be fair, the Amazons aren’t usually misandrists in my experience. Mostly in the n52. But I do find the bondage stuff to be very difficult to deal with. You don’t get that with Superman or Batman that much, so it feels unfair and a bit wrong for it to be so much a part of the main lady hero.

Batman needs Tim and Steph for sure. And Dick needs Damian! :slight_smile:

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Tim becoming Blue Beetle would have worked

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I think if they’d done the Blue Beetle Inc thing, Tim could have been Beetle, but we still could have gotten Jaime!

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I think it’s inevitable that those stories will be recommended simply because they’ve proven successful in hooking new readers, but I do agree that a little more variety is helpful.

If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been known to express my disdain for TLH:

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Palmiotti’s All-Star Western is a better comedy than Palmiotti’s Harley Quinn.

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OK, I’m gonna go on a bit of a rant here, because I’ve been stewing over this for a while and I need to get it off my chest. I don’t find the “Keith Giffen comedy books” (don’t know what else to call 'em) to be funny. At all. In fact, I think they’re incredibly obnoxious. There have now been three occasions when I’ve accidentally stumbled across a Giffen “funny” book (DC Retroactive: JLA – The '90s, Defenders [2005], Starman [1988] #35) and each time my immediate thought while reading them has been “What the hell is this crap?”. (I think I also read a couple Ambush Bug issues [DC Comics Presents and Secret Origins] that did nothing for me either.) I find them off-putting. Distasteful. His style of humor is the class-clown, elbow-to-the-ribs, nose-tweaking, back-slapping type that I just cannot stand. It’s not that I lack a sense of humor. When I read the “funny” books that he’s written, I know where and what the jokes are. I just don’t laugh. I sit there stonefaced. I know that I’m supposed to be laughing, but I don’t. I feel like a stick in the mud. Then, I think, maybe I should lighten up, not take things so seriously. They’re just comics, after all. But no. They’re just not funny to me.

Worse yet is that, most of the time, Giffen ropes J.M. DeMatteis into this nonsense with him. J.M. DeMatteis is one of my absolute favorite comics writers… when he’s on his own. I find him to be incredibly thoughtful, his writing almost poetic. It’s evident that he truly cares about the souls of the characters that he’s writing about. But when he’s paired up with Giffen, it’s like when the smartest kid in class gets seated in the back row next to the class clown, and he starts goofing off too, and his work starts suffering, and his grades start slipping. You hate to see it.

Mostly though, I think the reason that I despise these books so much is not just that I find them unfunny, but that I find them disrespectful. Yes, disrespectful. I don’t know what other word to use. I like my superhero characterization treated with some seriousness. And so did the writers and artists who created and worked on those characters for years, sometimes decades, before Giffen and his sometime partner-in-crime DeMatteis came along and made a mockery of them. Don’t get me wrong. A little levity and humor is a good thing, even welcome. You need some light-heartedness to balance out the darkness that these stories often descend into. But there’s a big difference between having fun and making fun. Taking established characters that were created and developed by others with a serious intent and turning them into jokes just absolutely rubs me the wrong way. The Justice League, the Defenders, Starman… they had always been treated with seriousness before Giffen and DeMatteis (and Peter David, on the Starman issue) got their grubby mitts on them and, thankfully, that seriousness was reestablished after they left. If they want to engage in such tomfoolery in their own books with their own original characters (as they did in Hero Squared/Planetary Brigade), that’s perfectly fine. More power to them. But these established teams and characters should never have been allowed to be turned into jokes.

In conclusion: “Bwahaha”? No. Boohoohoo.

(You and me both, Canary. You and me both. Booster knows what’s up.)

/rant

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You must hate Adam West Batman and Batman the Brave and the Bold. And all the weird Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comics from the 50’s. In all seriousness I just think that you don’t really jell with the sense of humor of Giffen and DeMatteis together. They don’t disrespect the charactors, disrespecting the charactors is making them all depressed like Tom King does.

Here is the thing about the whole Justice League International run, it was never intended to be funny it just kinda happened.

The humorous thing to me is that the best work that DeMatteis and Giffen did apart in comics are the darker stories like Kraven’s Last Hunt and Annilation.

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I didn’t read the books you mentioned, but have a similar sentiment towards recent DC material on the screen. Take your pick between The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, and Harley Quinn. JL characters are made fun of constantly in those shows, and in Harley Quinn’s case, portrayed in ways that make them rather obnoxious and off putting. A little self deprecation doesn’t hurt; I get it… but how about finding big mainstream success with these characters the way they were meant to be portrayed before turning to satire?

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I like the idea of a Justice League comic that laughs at the heroes. I just don’t think that JLI is really all that funny. It’s very . . . sitcom-y. And I think that sense of humor works better when it’s delivered by actors, not still pictures.

Granted, the one time they tried to turn JLI into a TV show, it was unbearably awful.

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I’ll go even further – Power Girl is second only to Superman himself as the best Kryptonian character in DC.

Some books just aren’t for everyone, so I don’t blame you at all for it. I will say that I don’t think most people don’t really consider that the peak of Giffen/DeMatteis’ superhero comedy work. I think if you want a purer, more beloved take on the creative team’s work, I would check out the 80s run of Justice League International. It’s been ages since I read the work, but I remember at least the early years being more balanced between solid superhero drama and comedy.

Also, I would say that Giffen’s more serious work is absolutely solid, especially his run on Legion of Super-Heroes.

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When Giffen did Annilation for Marvel that was Damn good. Thats how events are done

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DC shouldn’t have replaced David Zavimbe with Luke Fox.

DC should’ve stuck with one spelling of “Zavimbe” (in his first few appearances it’s spelled “Zavimbi”). Make up your mind, DC!

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Did he die or just decide being Bat-Iron-Man got stale after a while?

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His friend died so he decided to leave


Spud, I am about to change the spelling of Hitman’s name too.

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Actually, I have no problem with any of these (I quite enjoyed Batman the Brave and the Bold, in fact), because they all take place in their own self-contained, tonally-consistent interpretations of the DC Universe. I like superhero satires, light-hearted takes on superheroics, and comics that parody other comics, even (especially!) when they’re published by their own company. Fred Hembeck, Sergio Aragones Destroys DC, Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD parodies, Not Brand Echh, Wha…Huh?, just to name a few examples, are all great fun. My main problem with the Giffen books, though (which I think I failed to adequately state in my initial post), aside from their unfunniness (my opinion), is that they all take place in the mainline DC/Marvel continuities. They are established canon. Characters that were previously created with a serious intent are now all of a sudden being treated as jokes. It’s not just disrespectful to other creators, but to the readership as well. When I read certain series in the mainline continuity, I have a certain expectation for how characters will be handled. I don’t expect those characters to be mocked. When I want comedy, I’ll read comedy. The Giffen books are what I would call “intrusive comedy”. Unwanted comedy. Like a drunken uncle showing up and imposing himself upon a previously staid, cordial dinner party, cracking bawdy jokes, making lots of noise, and generally ruining the mood.

I hear you. And I know that a lot of people swear by the Justice League International/Justice League America/Justice League Europe series.* But I just can’t imagine spending my time reading something that I know will make me miserable.

*(Brian Cronin, for example, the great comics historian from CBR, whose judgment and opinions I otherwise trust and respect, considers it to be his favorite series, even including his all-time favorite issue: https://www.cbr.com/31-days-comics-your-favorite-comic/. He thinks it’s hilarious. But when I look at those pages, I just sit there grimly staring at the screen. It’s just such a desperately unfunny style of comedy to me. Like those pages were printed with flopsweat for ink.)

Much of my personal animosity towards the Giffen comedy work stems from the fact that, what I’ve read of it I read after reading lengthy runs that I really, really enjoyed: the Defenders and Roger Stern’s Starman '88. Seeing characters that I fell in love with being turned into jokes was like a slap in the face. (The Defenders in particular was especially heartbreaking: DeMatteis wrote my favorite run on the original series, one of my all-time favorite comic runs, period, and then to find out that he had a hand in that 2005 piece of garbage was galling). I don’t want or need to see the same thing happen to other characters that I like.

For example, another series that I really enjoyed was the original 1986 Dan Jurgens Booster Gold series. I found Booster in that series to be a very well-rounded, unexpectedly capable, surprisingly sympathetic character. Not at all what I was expecting, based on the limited description that I had read of the character based on his portrayal in the JLI series, as a greedy, inept buffoon. Why would I want to read a series that turns a three-dimensional character that I love into a degraded caricature of himself? No thank you!

The idea that these characterizations were then carried forward into the DC Universe in subsequent series by different writers simply because of the popularity of the JLI series and its establishment as mainline canon makes me slightly nauseous. It’s just a shame how outsized their influence was on the DC Universe going forward.

(The Martian Manhunter cookie thing is another one that bothers me. Oh, the Martian Manhunter cookie thing. Everyone just looooooves the Martian Manhunter cookie thing. Well, I don’t love the Martian Manhunter cookie thing. I think it’s dumb. The Martian Manhunter cookie thing is dumb, OK? And yet, because of JLI, Ostrander felt it necessary to devote an entire issue of his otherwise-exceptional Martian Manhunter series to the dumb cookie thing because everyone just loves it soooooo much. smh)

OK, I’ve belabored the point enough. This all happened decades ago, anyway. What’s done is done. Guess I should just try to lighten up. :man_shrugging:

Thanks, all, for indulging me on my little rant. I’m sure I’ve rubbed more than a few people the wrong way with this, since I know how popular and well-loved these series are. They’re just… not for me.

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I do too, and didn’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Like I said, I’ve enjoyed those shows/movies. The reason it does bother me just a bit though is, especially in Superman’s case, I don’t feel like we have a mainstream cinematic version that is the critical and financial success it should be.

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The '70s and 80’s movies.

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