Ha! Nah, it was actually something like this... For some reason somebody wanted to make a Two-Face movie(go figure...)and during the courtroom scene where Harvey gets doused with the acid, somehow real acid gets switched on the set(Harvey may have done it, I can't remember)and the actor playing Harvey gets burned, and becomes Two-Face Two... "Two-Face Two"? Really?!?
Lmao. That's so damn stupid. So this second two-face is able to handle being royally screwed for the sake of a movie and doesn't go crazy, whereas Dent, a fine upstanding citizen DOES go crazy. O...kay. So what ever happened to Dos-Face?
No, Dos-Face(I LOVE that name for him!!!)DOES go crazy and begins to pull off all sorts of Two-Face-types of crimes. However, this guy can be cured, so with some plastic surgury, he's good as new. However, in this storyline, Two-Face himself throws acid at him, turning him back into Dos-Face, because he wanted the heroes distracted while he was pulling off some nefarious scheme. Jeez, DC sure does like having acid throw in people's faces...
Lmao...wait wait wait. So he went crazy, did all the two face crimes, got cured, then got acid thrown in his face for the SECOND time, and becomes Dos face again?! And why is acid so easy to come by in Gotham? So where's our buddy Dos face now?
Hell joker fell into a vat of it, well no that was "chemicals". Why do they have a vat chemicals at a playing card factory anyway?!
Lol of course he has to get messed up TWICE. Sometimes they take the Two-Face thing a little too far. Two-Faces and Dos Face. I wouldn't be surprised if he popped up again some day.
Maybe they were uno cards? :P I don't see a reason why anyone would ever even CREATE chemically treated playing cards. Is that really something the world needs?
You know, in a sick way, there really should be TWO Two-Faces...
How would you even promote chemically treated playing cards? "We've taken the steps to dunk all of our playing cards into our secret chemical formula, to provide you with the best set of playing cards you'll ever have!" Really?!?
I was thinking that. Imagine if Dos face would have been the one doing the crimes in Face The Face. That would've been an awesome swerve. And it would've converted Harvey back to being Two-Face.
Lol only person who would ever use Chemical Playing cards is Gambit. "Lissen to me, cheri. I's went and gots deez here chemikal cards so when I throws them they's make clean cuts and clot the blood so's it won't spill everywheres." Man that was hard to type.
Man, I would have loved that, because I really though Harvey still had some legs as Gotham's protector, as opposed to just being crazy again.
Sure it was hard to type, you don't speak cajan. Then again, I don't know anybody who could! Wait, so it was all Gambit's fault the Joker became who he is, all because he wanted chemically treated playing cards!?! Well then, that solves that mystery!
Yeah, seems like no one can ever reform, which sucks. Because both Harvey and Riddler were better reformed than doing the SAME crap as bad guys. I wonder who'll reform next.
Yep, that's why Joker hates all cajuns. I mean think about it, have you EVER seen Joker eat Cajun food? See, it all fits together.
And that's one of my big gripes with comics. You take a character like the Riddler for example... As a villain, what is he, c-list at best? I mean, the dude leaves clues to his frigging crimes laying around! But as a reformed villain, there's some depth to his character, he's not just some nutcase who's robbed a bank and is trying to get caught, he's a guy struggling to convince the world that he isn't the villain they all thought he was. There just seems like there's so much more story potential for a reformed Riddler then a villainous one.
Exactly. He's no one as a villain, and there's guys much better at psychological stuff than him, Ra's, Hush, etc. Yet we have to watch him as a villain. Hell Riddler is entertaining, I'd even take a Riddler comic if he stayed a good guy. Also, gonna go out on a limb and say Riddler is Oberon Sexton in the Batman & Robin comics, just because I want him redeemed.
It would be nice if Riddler was Oberon Sexton, but remember who we're dealing with in that comic... He could be anybody from an alternate reality clone of Damian to Bruce, to Grant Morrison himself! Nothing would surprise me there!
Oh man I forgot you're right! Hell it probably is future Damian, or one of those Ghots of Batman or someone stupid... First I was anxious now I'm nervous.
HA! Yeah man, when you're thinking about a Grant Morrison written comic, you have to try to think like he does! In order to do that, I'll usually smash my head into the wall a few times before spinning around in a circle for three minutes straight. After that, most of Grant's work makes perfect sense!
Oh that's easy, Grant all the way. BENDIS has only written one comic well, and that was Ultimate Spider-Man, which in all fairness, isn't a very hard comic to write... His New Avengers run is a farce, because he just cherry-picked the most popular Marvel characters and put them on the Avengers, regardless of whether it made sense or not! Although I can honestly say I don't think I like ANY of Grant's Batman work, I LOVED some of his Marvel work, New X-Men and Marvel Boy immediately spring to mind.
In a perfect world, Marvel and DC would trade Grant and BENDIS. Maybe that way Grant would be a coherent writer again, and BENDIS... well, hopefully they wouldn't give BENDIS any high profile characters... Maybe he could take on the Metal Men...
Ah, so in Marvel Grant was good? Maybe he's just phoning it in for DC. Lol @ giving Bendis the Metal Men. Or maybe they could have him write a mega high-profile character like... Beast Boy ;)
I thought Grant was good in Marvel. I thought he did a great job of taking the X-Men and shaking up the status-quo, which is what they really needed... Unlike Batman, which really didn't need a shake-up.
How about Beast Boy and the Metal Men together? That would be one comic I'd NEVER touch!
Morrison/Bendis comparisons make my head hurt, since Morrison is my favorite comics writer and Bendis is just...ugh. Bendis can write books starring one character really well (like he did with Ultimate Spider-Man, which is one of my favorite comic books ever), but he can't do team books to save his life. When he has more than one character to deal with, his sense of characterization just seems to fall apart.
Just compare his Avengers to Kurt Busiek's, or even Roy Thomas's or Stan Lee's. There was genuine interplay between the team members with those other writers, which led to the development of real interpersonal relationships between those characters. With the New Avengers, Bendis just plopped a bunch of popular characters in the same book and didn't have them do anything with each other except punch ninjas and make random quips at each other. When he was writing Ultimate X-Men, it was even worse. I believe he wrote that book for 13 issues, and although Colossus appears in every single issue, I believe he has exactly two lines of dialogue...only two lines in over a year! That is not how you use your characters in a team book.
Bendis's team books are like Gardner Fox JLA in that the characters only really interact with each other as much as it serves the plot, with the main difference being that in Bendis's team books there's very minimal actual plot progression. I mean, at least Silver Age JLA stories have a beginning, middle and end that doesn't take seven years and the coordination of every single writer, artist, and editor at the company in order to carry out.
Wow...I think I had a comic book rant blackout there. What just happened?
Marc, I agree with EVERYTHING you said there! I've actually made several of those very points about BENDIS earlier in this post! The first 75 issues or so of Ultimate Spidey were really good to great. Like I said, based on his Ultimate Spidey work, I was a fan, and a pretty big one at that. And then came New Avengers... And yeah...
As for Morrison, I genuinely LOVED most of his Marvel work, but I just can't get into his DC stuff no matter how hard I try. Batman is such an easy, straight-forward character to write imo. I think Grant just tends to overcomplicate things a bit too much when it comes to Batman. I mean it's Batman! A dash of Joker, some Two-Face and you're in business! Oh, and please feel free to rant away Marc, god knows I rant enough for three people! ;-)
You know JT, I really have to dig that issue of Titans out again, because I've completely forgotten most of their confessions. I do remember Dick's was something REALLY wierd like simply, "Bruce", but I'm blanking on most of the rest of 'em.
I haven't read Morrison's Batman straight through, but I'm very familiar with what happens in it and how Morrison goes about it. From everything I know about it I think I'll really enjoy it, and I'm hoping to finally get a chance to read the parts I haven't read very soon.
The thing about Batman is that he encapsulates so many different personas that both you and the Morrisonite can be right. You can do a great, straightforward Batman story with his traditional villains. You can also do darker, more introspective stories about why Batman does what he does. You can even do a story where he travels back in time, or where he dreams of Robin's death on a strange planet.
From what I can tell, that's the point of Morrison's story...that you can tell all these different kinds of Batman stories and they still manage to be that: Batman stories. In a way, I think Morrison is trying to celebrate the Batman character by unifying all these different aspects of his history and then using them to tell a brand-new story that somehow manages to be different from all the ones that have come before.
I don't know, to me Grant's Batman stories have just been weird, much weirder then any Batman story that has come before his run... The Batmen of the World(or whatever that was all about)those Batman clone guys, Pyg, even what he did to the Joker, it all just TOO out there for me.
That's why Marvel Boy worked so well for me, because that was the kind of story/character that Grant really could/should run wild with. I guess I'm just a Batman traditionalist... At the end of the day though, I'd say there are WAY more people who see things like you do judging by the sales charts though!
I'm not so sure...I think a lot of people buy Batman just because it's Batman, and they would buy it even if it was drawn by Rob Liefeld and written by a chimpanzee. I'll admit that even I fall into that "collector" mentality sometimes, since I buy every issue of Amazing Spider-Man even if I expect it to be awful, and I doubt that will change anytime soon. I'm a lifelong, die-hard Spidey fan, and those are the kind of fans that make up a good deal of the sales on books like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and X-Men, just to name a few.
That is to say, I don't think the sales of Batman would have been much different if Morrison had told a more traditional Batman story or even if someone other than Morrison was writing it. Of course, I'm not exactly a professional sales analyst, so I could be totally wrong. But when you're talking about figues as big as books like this sell -- books that are relatively unlikely to have a story better-written than a good deal of the books they're out-selling -- it's apparent that a lot more than story is what's selling these comics. I think it's also character devotion and the collector mentality.
The picture of Rob Liefeld and a chimp collaborating on a comic book is just insanely funny to me. I really can't explain why though... BUT, I'd have to buy that comic out of morbid curiousity.
Yeah, without a doubt you have a point with name alone selling certain comics no matter how bad they are. I'm also guilty of that with Uncanny X-Men, so yeah that definietly plays a large role in things I'm sure.
However, I do think you have certain "superstar" writers/artists whose name will also sell more books then usual amongst the fanboy community. It's probably a combination of those two things that explains why Batman & Robin outsells Batman. The causal fan sees the Batman name and buys it, the collector(ie you and I)buy it because we almost have to, and the Morrisonites buy it because they'd buy whatever he wrote, no matter what it was. So while Batman may fulfill the first two criteria, Batman and Robin has the extra advantage of the Morrison fanboys, which would explain it's higher spot on the charts.
For example, the top ten comics in the month of March were either x-overs(Siege and Blackest Night)or big names like Spidey, Bats and the X-Men, and almost every book had a "superstar" writer, be it Geoff Johns, BENDIS, Jeph Loeb or Grant.
Good points. But what makes you so sure people have been buying Batman & Robin for Morrison...and not for the mega-awesomeness that is Damian Wayne?!?!
Heh heh... I think I'll have to concede the point to you Marc. It is Damian, and he can do anything, so why wouldn't he be responsible for the high sales of the Batman & Robin comic? :p
Jeez, I guess Bruce has never heard of child labor laws...
So Two Face has a twin brother who also has two faces? Sure, why the hell not...
ReplyDeleteHa! Nah, it was actually something like this... For some reason somebody wanted to make a Two-Face movie(go figure...)and during the courtroom scene where Harvey gets doused with the acid, somehow real acid gets switched on the set(Harvey may have done it, I can't remember)and the actor playing Harvey gets burned, and becomes Two-Face Two... "Two-Face Two"? Really?!?
ReplyDeleteLmao. That's so damn stupid. So this second two-face is able to handle being royally screwed for the sake of a movie and doesn't go crazy, whereas Dent, a fine upstanding citizen DOES go crazy. O...kay. So what ever happened to Dos-Face?
ReplyDeleteNo, Dos-Face(I LOVE that name for him!!!)DOES go crazy and begins to pull off all sorts of Two-Face-types of crimes. However, this guy can be cured, so with some plastic surgury, he's good as new. However, in this storyline, Two-Face himself throws acid at him, turning him back into Dos-Face, because he wanted the heroes distracted while he was pulling off some nefarious scheme. Jeez, DC sure does like having acid throw in people's faces...
ReplyDeleteLmao...wait wait wait. So he went crazy, did all the two face crimes, got cured, then got acid thrown in his face for the SECOND time, and becomes Dos face again?! And why is acid so easy to come by in Gotham? So where's our buddy Dos face now?
ReplyDeleteHell joker fell into a vat of it, well no that was "chemicals". Why do they have a vat chemicals at a playing card factory anyway?!
Ha, yeah, he was playing Two-Face, the literally became Two-Face, was cured, and then became Two-Face AGAIN! Then he was cured again(I guess...).
ReplyDeleteI always wondered that same thing about Joker, the chemicals and the card factory! I mean really, who buys chemically treated playing cards???
Lol of course he has to get messed up TWICE. Sometimes they take the Two-Face thing a little too far. Two-Faces and Dos Face. I wouldn't be surprised if he popped up again some day.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they were uno cards? :P I don't see a reason why anyone would ever even CREATE chemically treated playing cards. Is that really something the world needs?
You know, in a sick way, there really should be TWO Two-Faces...
ReplyDeleteHow would you even promote chemically treated playing cards? "We've taken the steps to dunk all of our playing cards into our secret chemical formula, to provide you with the best set of playing cards you'll ever have!" Really?!?
I was thinking that. Imagine if Dos face would have been the one doing the crimes in Face The Face. That would've been an awesome swerve. And it would've converted Harvey back to being Two-Face.
ReplyDeleteLol only person who would ever use Chemical Playing cards is Gambit. "Lissen to me, cheri. I's went and gots deez here chemikal cards so when I throws them they's make clean cuts and clot the blood so's it won't spill everywheres." Man that was hard to type.
Man, I would have loved that, because I really though Harvey still had some legs as Gotham's protector, as opposed to just being crazy again.
ReplyDeleteSure it was hard to type, you don't speak cajan. Then again, I don't know anybody who could! Wait, so it was all Gambit's fault the Joker became who he is, all because he wanted chemically treated playing cards!?! Well then, that solves that mystery!
Yeah, seems like no one can ever reform, which sucks. Because both Harvey and Riddler were better reformed than doing the SAME crap as bad guys. I wonder who'll reform next.
ReplyDeleteYep, that's why Joker hates all cajuns. I mean think about it, have you EVER seen Joker eat Cajun food? See, it all fits together.
And that's one of my big gripes with comics. You take a character like the Riddler for example... As a villain, what is he, c-list at best? I mean, the dude leaves clues to his frigging crimes laying around! But as a reformed villain, there's some depth to his character, he's not just some nutcase who's robbed a bank and is trying to get caught, he's a guy struggling to convince the world that he isn't the villain they all thought he was. There just seems like there's so much more story potential for a reformed Riddler then a villainous one.
ReplyDeleteExactly. He's no one as a villain, and there's guys much better at psychological stuff than him, Ra's, Hush, etc. Yet we have to watch him as a villain. Hell Riddler is entertaining, I'd even take a Riddler comic if he stayed a good guy. Also, gonna go out on a limb and say Riddler is Oberon Sexton in the Batman & Robin comics, just because I want him redeemed.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if Riddler was Oberon Sexton, but remember who we're dealing with in that comic... He could be anybody from an alternate reality clone of Damian to Bruce, to Grant Morrison himself! Nothing would surprise me there!
ReplyDeleteOh man I forgot you're right! Hell it probably is future Damian, or one of those Ghots of Batman or someone stupid... First I was anxious now I'm nervous.
ReplyDeleteHA! Yeah man, when you're thinking about a Grant Morrison written comic, you have to try to think like he does! In order to do that, I'll usually smash my head into the wall a few times before spinning around in a circle for three minutes straight. After that, most of Grant's work makes perfect sense!
ReplyDeleteLol I don't know of any caves to live in and any mice to eat so yeah, I can't get into Crazy ass Grant's mind.
ReplyDeleteSo would you rather read something by Morrison or Bendis?
Oh that's easy, Grant all the way. BENDIS has only written one comic well, and that was Ultimate Spider-Man, which in all fairness, isn't a very hard comic to write... His New Avengers run is a farce, because he just cherry-picked the most popular Marvel characters and put them on the Avengers, regardless of whether it made sense or not! Although I can honestly say I don't think I like ANY of Grant's Batman work, I LOVED some of his Marvel work, New X-Men and Marvel Boy immediately spring to mind.
ReplyDeleteIn a perfect world, Marvel and DC would trade Grant and BENDIS. Maybe that way Grant would be a coherent writer again, and BENDIS... well, hopefully they wouldn't give BENDIS any high profile characters... Maybe he could take on the Metal Men...
Ah, so in Marvel Grant was good? Maybe he's just phoning it in for DC. Lol @ giving Bendis the Metal Men. Or maybe they could have him write a mega high-profile character like... Beast Boy ;)
ReplyDeleteI thought Grant was good in Marvel. I thought he did a great job of taking the X-Men and shaking up the status-quo, which is what they really needed... Unlike Batman, which really didn't need a shake-up.
ReplyDeleteHow about Beast Boy and the Metal Men together? That would be one comic I'd NEVER touch!
Good point, so is there anyone in DC who you would have had him write for instead?
ReplyDeleteWhat If I enticed you and threw in Jaime Reyes lol.
Hmm, good question... I kind of want to say the Teen Titans or even the original Titans. They all kind of need a shake-up.
ReplyDeleteYeah, and have them battle against Penguin and the Mad Hatter... Oh yeah, I'd LOOOOOVE that...
Hm.. I could see that. I'm upset we'll never find out what the Titans meant in their confessionals from that one issue with Jericho.
ReplyDeleteOkay, What If I told you you could kill them off, forever, but Wally West has to go with them?
Morrison/Bendis comparisons make my head hurt, since Morrison is my favorite comics writer and Bendis is just...ugh. Bendis can write books starring one character really well (like he did with Ultimate Spider-Man, which is one of my favorite comic books ever), but he can't do team books to save his life. When he has more than one character to deal with, his sense of characterization just seems to fall apart.
ReplyDeleteJust compare his Avengers to Kurt Busiek's, or even Roy Thomas's or Stan Lee's. There was genuine interplay between the team members with those other writers, which led to the development of real interpersonal relationships between those characters. With the New Avengers, Bendis just plopped a bunch of popular characters in the same book and didn't have them do anything with each other except punch ninjas and make random quips at each other. When he was writing Ultimate X-Men, it was even worse. I believe he wrote that book for 13 issues, and although Colossus appears in every single issue, I believe he has exactly two lines of dialogue...only two lines in over a year! That is not how you use your characters in a team book.
Bendis's team books are like Gardner Fox JLA in that the characters only really interact with each other as much as it serves the plot, with the main difference being that in Bendis's team books there's very minimal actual plot progression. I mean, at least Silver Age JLA stories have a beginning, middle and end that doesn't take seven years and the coordination of every single writer, artist, and editor at the company in order to carry out.
Wow...I think I had a comic book rant blackout there. What just happened?
Marc, I agree with EVERYTHING you said there! I've actually made several of those very points about BENDIS earlier in this post! The first 75 issues or so of Ultimate Spidey were really good to great. Like I said, based on his Ultimate Spidey work, I was a fan, and a pretty big one at that. And then came New Avengers... And yeah...
ReplyDeleteAs for Morrison, I genuinely LOVED most of his Marvel work, but I just can't get into his DC stuff no matter how hard I try. Batman is such an easy, straight-forward character to write imo. I think Grant just tends to overcomplicate things a bit too much when it comes to Batman. I mean it's Batman! A dash of Joker, some Two-Face and you're in business! Oh, and please feel free to rant away Marc, god knows I rant enough for three people! ;-)
You know JT, I really have to dig that issue of Titans out again, because I've completely forgotten most of their confessions. I do remember Dick's was something REALLY wierd like simply, "Bruce", but I'm blanking on most of the rest of 'em.
Hmm, sorry Wally, but good-bye!
I haven't read Morrison's Batman straight through, but I'm very familiar with what happens in it and how Morrison goes about it. From everything I know about it I think I'll really enjoy it, and I'm hoping to finally get a chance to read the parts I haven't read very soon.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about Batman is that he encapsulates so many different personas that both you and the Morrisonite can be right. You can do a great, straightforward Batman story with his traditional villains. You can also do darker, more introspective stories about why Batman does what he does. You can even do a story where he travels back in time, or where he dreams of Robin's death on a strange planet.
From what I can tell, that's the point of Morrison's story...that you can tell all these different kinds of Batman stories and they still manage to be that: Batman stories. In a way, I think Morrison is trying to celebrate the Batman character by unifying all these different aspects of his history and then using them to tell a brand-new story that somehow manages to be different from all the ones that have come before.
Morrisonite... I like that!
ReplyDeleteI don't know, to me Grant's Batman stories have just been weird, much weirder then any Batman story that has come before his run... The Batmen of the World(or whatever that was all about)those Batman clone guys, Pyg, even what he did to the Joker, it all just TOO out there for me.
That's why Marvel Boy worked so well for me, because that was the kind of story/character that Grant really could/should run wild with. I guess I'm just a Batman traditionalist... At the end of the day though, I'd say there are WAY more people who see things like you do judging by the sales charts though!
I'm not so sure...I think a lot of people buy Batman just because it's Batman, and they would buy it even if it was drawn by Rob Liefeld and written by a chimpanzee. I'll admit that even I fall into that "collector" mentality sometimes, since I buy every issue of Amazing Spider-Man even if I expect it to be awful, and I doubt that will change anytime soon. I'm a lifelong, die-hard Spidey fan, and those are the kind of fans that make up a good deal of the sales on books like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and X-Men, just to name a few.
ReplyDeleteThat is to say, I don't think the sales of Batman would have been much different if Morrison had told a more traditional Batman story or even if someone other than Morrison was writing it. Of course, I'm not exactly a professional sales analyst, so I could be totally wrong. But when you're talking about figues as big as books like this sell -- books that are relatively unlikely to have a story better-written than a good deal of the books they're out-selling -- it's apparent that a lot more than story is what's selling these comics. I think it's also character devotion and the collector mentality.
The picture of Rob Liefeld and a chimp collaborating on a comic book is just insanely funny to me. I really can't explain why though... BUT, I'd have to buy that comic out of morbid curiousity.
ReplyDeleteYeah, without a doubt you have a point with name alone selling certain comics no matter how bad they are. I'm also guilty of that with Uncanny X-Men, so yeah that definietly plays a large role in things I'm sure.
However, I do think you have certain "superstar" writers/artists whose name will also sell more books then usual amongst the fanboy community. It's probably a combination of those two things that explains why Batman & Robin outsells Batman. The causal fan sees the Batman name and buys it, the collector(ie you and I)buy it because we almost have to, and the Morrisonites buy it because they'd buy whatever he wrote, no matter what it was. So while Batman may fulfill the first two criteria, Batman and Robin has the extra advantage of the Morrison fanboys, which would explain it's higher spot on the charts.
For example, the top ten comics in the month of March were either x-overs(Siege and Blackest Night)or big names like Spidey, Bats and the X-Men, and almost every book had a "superstar" writer, be it Geoff Johns, BENDIS, Jeph Loeb or Grant.
Good points. But what makes you so sure people have been buying Batman & Robin for Morrison...and not for the mega-awesomeness that is Damian Wayne?!?!
ReplyDeleteJust kidding. :)
Somehow that message got posted twice, so I just went ahead and deleted the second one. Silly Blogger...
ReplyDeleteHeh heh... I think I'll have to concede the point to you Marc. It is Damian, and he can do anything, so why wouldn't he be responsible for the high sales of the Batman & Robin comic? :p
ReplyDelete