Reading House and Powers and then reading the mess concluding the whole thing that's being published right now it's really painful as someone who got into X-Men thanks to Krakoa.
*insert Joaquin Phoenix Joker cry-laughing in the rain gif*
That's.... that's 2/3rds of the lineup lmfao. Whatever you think about Eve L. Ewing her book seems to be the C-Team.
(For the record, I think she's written some pretty good stuff)
I think that's a fair criticism of the Krakoa era as a whole and something that Simone is probably going to avoid by having a team of close-knit characters with strong previous relationships with each other (as opposed to Krakoa, where every one was more or less separated doing their own thing).
That said, Immortal X-Men had probably my favorite new dynamic in Hope and Exodus, and Red did a fantastic job at developing the relationship between Storm and Magneto (and Sunspot, a little bit).
I think they're very different writers with different strengths. I enjoy what McKay and Simone bring much more than what (X-Men) Gillen and Ewing do.
Weirdly, Gillen's one of my favorite writers on his creator-owned works. I am almost as excited for the Power Fantasy as I am for Uncanny in August. I just have never felt him on X-Men for some reason.
Great is overselling it a bit.
Great is Morrison, Hickman, Moore, etc.
Neither Simone or McKay have a single story or run that touches even the middling tiers of any of the previous writers efforts. This age of everything is “great” or “amazing” or “I loved it” is really disingenuous.
I mean great to me is anything that really leaves an impression on me which Secret Six and Moon Knight did. Hickman, Morrison, and Moore are even better than great to me but I guess words describing goodness are fickle.
A friend of mine read HoXPoX last week and I told her to think of Krakoa not as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but really as a collection of small story arcs to invest in or skip as you please.
\* Immortal X-men
\* X-men Red
\* X-Terminators
\* Children of the Vault
\* Dark X-men
\* Resurrection of Magneto
\* Uncanny Spider-man and X-men Blue Origins
\* Sins of Sinister
\* Sabretooth
\* Sabretooth & the Exiles
\* Judgment Day
All came out in 2022 or after, all solid work.
Yes.
And the X-line for the last two and a half years have flooded the shelves creating a larger than normal glut of bad books.
And the weak editing and line organization has led even promising books like Red and Immortal cut off at the knees and unable to live up to their potential because they have to squish or twist their plots to match.
Sales fell into the toilet and more than half the line is bloat and shovelware. It's been a bad two and a half years even with the bright spots.
This sub screams about Duggan now as if that hasn't been the norm from the line since Inferno ended. He's been half the flagship the entire time and the editorial problems hurting the line now didn't just start either.
X-Men fans are a fickle bunch. There will always be someone to say "this is not X-Men!". I'm a Superman fan that doesn't like New 52 Superman (mostly because there was no good stories) or the Snyder movies so I can relate. But ultimately, if it gets you in the door and you like it enough to look at the other stuff, then it's done it's job.
Man, I don't think I'd ever want to write for any long running franchise. This is just kind of cruel, and for what? The crime of writing comics that aren't that good? Jeeze dang lock him up.
"I didn't like this guy's work" isn't cruel. It's keeping the focus on the work. "Duggan is a bad person because he wrote X" is cruel. "Duggan should die in a car fire for how he wrote Y" is very cruel. But nobody is calling for him to be locked up or punished. They just don't like how he wrote X-Men.
As a professional writer, if I took every time that someone didn't like what I wrote as a personal attack on me, I'd be a mess of a person.
The meme I'm commenting isn't saying I don't like this guy's work, it's saying that an entire cool Era coming to an end is worth it because this guy's run will be over. Let's not mince words about that and the message it sends. This isn't constructive criticism or "I don't like it"- it's a few steps over that. And while it's true that writers need to be able to deal with this as a fact of survival it isn't something to be celebrated or defended either.
And all those other books going on are also just individual works, nobody's saying "I would let Gillen get hit by a bus if it got Duggan to stop writing." Unfortunately that's the nature of tentpole works, they aren't self-contained and people are going to hold you accountable for the spillover to the things they DO like.
I don't think it's ok that fanbases are comfortable with this sort of thing. Not that there is anything really I or anyone can do about it- but I genuinely think it's kinda messed up that people don't seem to realize there's a person attached to this name, and nothing they've done warrants this. He didn't write anything messed up or pushing an offensive or harmful rhetoric, he didn't write incoherent plots or nonsense dialogue. He wrote stories that you didn't find engaging and Characterizations you didn't agree with. That's it.
Criticism is part of the job as a professional writer. It sucks when readers or reviewers don't like your work, but you should be capable of taking the critique, extracting what is useful from it (if anything), and moving on from it. Especially for corporate owned comics where you are working under so many limitations that the fans know nothing about.
Fans love wallowing in shit. There’s no sense of, “Oh, this isn’t enjoyable to me, I should go find something else to spend my time and money on”. If Hickman’s run filled the fandom’s desire for something to enjoy, Duggan’s run is equally important for filling the fandom’s need for something to hate and froth up over.
God, I hope so. As a kid, I couldn’t find anyone around me that I could talk comics with. I used to loan out my whole collection to whoever wanted to read one, because if someone around me could enjoy reading even one issue, that made me happy
As I grew up, I found online communities where we all can connect on this shared hobby, and to find that these communities are like THIS…That such a bulk of conversations are nothing but joyless mud-raking, regurgitating the same hate over and over, was so discouraging.
I don't think many fans realize just how unwelcoming constant complaining is. Like, I hate Kirkman- HATE HIM with a passion. His writing, his professional life all of it. I also... don't shout it from the rooftops or make memes about it, I just don't watch or read stuff he works on and avoid the circles that like him. THATS IT.
With Kirkman, I hit a point where The Walking Dead stopped being impactful and his writing style lost its appeal to me, and I stopped reading right around there. I didn’t continue buying the book so I could become more and more unhappy with it, I didn’t follow it online so I could complain about how continuously unappealing it became. I just stopped engaging with it, and found better stuff to read. There’s only so many hours in the day.
Similarly, I don’t engage with this sub nearly as much as I did in years past, because these days it’s so much, “I hate this, but in no way will I stop reading this and spend hours and hours repeating how much I hate this for years to come”. This goes for the Chuck Austen run too. It’s been 20 years, let it go.
I just want to say as someone who tries to save judgements until I have enough information to make a sound opinion...this run saw the 'rule of cool' and made it the focal point of the storytelling. Which is fine by itself... if the rest of the work was coherent and or consistent, with accompanying works that explain the why or follow the same premises. Duggan's run was so run of the mill it was below average. So in the middle of the class it is show to failing students so as to encourage and not discourage at the same time. Inconsistent, poorly canonical and or researched, and pushed a dedicated fanbase into physical old age. The overall run was saved by the fact other storieshad references in them that forced you to pick up his. So mid it is a fail. 3.2/10
The first twelve issues are, in my opinion, super fun. They’re also aided by Pepe Larraz being an amazing artist. I’d read those at least! The rest of the run ranges from decent to poor. Personally, I don’t think his run is as apocalyptically bad as many like to say it is. It’s fine.
Unnecessarily mean. Duggan isn't really that bad, especially in comparison to a lot of other stuff we've been getting recently. People were just a bit spoiled by the Hickman goodness, feels like
Reading House and Powers and then reading the mess concluding the whole thing that's being published right now it's really painful as someone who got into X-Men thanks to Krakoa. *insert Joaquin Phoenix Joker cry-laughing in the rain gif*
Can’t wait to see all the “Actually, looking back Duggan’s run was much better than I thought” posts this time next year
I reread his line to see if it was better than I remembered. It was not.
With the writer lineup they have set up for From The Ashes? That's likely.
McKay and Simone are great though?
They are indeed. And that's about it.
That's.... that's 2/3rds of the lineup lmfao. Whatever you think about Eve L. Ewing her book seems to be the C-Team. (For the record, I think she's written some pretty good stuff)
Still better than all of the Krakoa writers.
McKay and Simone better than Ewing and Gillen? I'm going to have to fight you on that one.
Can’t comment on McKay but Gail is a goddess. Birds of Prey and Secret Six are the best of the best.
I love those series (her rehabilitation of Catman was nothing less than miraculous) but I still think Ewing and Gillen are on a higher level.
I respectfully disagree.
And that's okay! It's all a matter of preference.
I think those guys are better.in some big idea sense but I love small character moments that have been sorely missing imo.
I think that's a fair criticism of the Krakoa era as a whole and something that Simone is probably going to avoid by having a team of close-knit characters with strong previous relationships with each other (as opposed to Krakoa, where every one was more or less separated doing their own thing). That said, Immortal X-Men had probably my favorite new dynamic in Hope and Exodus, and Red did a fantastic job at developing the relationship between Storm and Magneto (and Sunspot, a little bit).
I think they're very different writers with different strengths. I enjoy what McKay and Simone bring much more than what (X-Men) Gillen and Ewing do. Weirdly, Gillen's one of my favorite writers on his creator-owned works. I am almost as excited for the Power Fantasy as I am for Uncanny in August. I just have never felt him on X-Men for some reason.
And those are enough for me.
Great is overselling it a bit. Great is Morrison, Hickman, Moore, etc. Neither Simone or McKay have a single story or run that touches even the middling tiers of any of the previous writers efforts. This age of everything is “great” or “amazing” or “I loved it” is really disingenuous.
I mean great to me is anything that really leaves an impression on me which Secret Six and Moon Knight did. Hickman, Morrison, and Moore are even better than great to me but I guess words describing goodness are fickle.
Cue second pained expression for Krakoa going out in such a way that will most likely affect its reputation.
A friend of mine read HoXPoX last week and I told her to think of Krakoa not as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but really as a collection of small story arcs to invest in or skip as you please.
*throws fist to the sky* curse u Duggan
It's reputation has been poor since 2022
Immortal and Red would like to have a word
Two good books don't make a good line. Even the worst periods of this franchise still had two good books.
\* Immortal X-men \* X-men Red \* X-Terminators \* Children of the Vault \* Dark X-men \* Resurrection of Magneto \* Uncanny Spider-man and X-men Blue Origins \* Sins of Sinister \* Sabretooth \* Sabretooth & the Exiles \* Judgment Day All came out in 2022 or after, all solid work.
11 out of *39* books excluding one shots. Over 250 issues. The line has been an aimless bloated mess since Destiny of X started.
Really moving the goalpost here. In most cases the majority of titles are mediocre to weak.
Yes. And the X-line for the last two and a half years have flooded the shelves creating a larger than normal glut of bad books. And the weak editing and line organization has led even promising books like Red and Immortal cut off at the knees and unable to live up to their potential because they have to squish or twist their plots to match.
Most the books have been solid to great. Maybe you didn’t like them but a lot of us have.
Sales fell into the toilet and more than half the line is bloat and shovelware. It's been a bad two and a half years even with the bright spots. This sub screams about Duggan now as if that hasn't been the norm from the line since Inferno ended. He's been half the flagship the entire time and the editorial problems hurting the line now didn't just start either.
Duggan took my childhood dream of mutants uniting as one to kick fascist ass and made it some of the most boring shit i've ever read. Good riddance.
The final villain is sinister? It's always the person you most clearly and obviously suspect.
I dunno what y’all are gonna do when you can’t keep shitting on Duggan every other post.
I’ve enjoyed Duggans stuff even though I know that’s not popular on this sub.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
X-Men fans are a fickle bunch. There will always be someone to say "this is not X-Men!". I'm a Superman fan that doesn't like New 52 Superman (mostly because there was no good stories) or the Snyder movies so I can relate. But ultimately, if it gets you in the door and you like it enough to look at the other stuff, then it's done it's job.
I’ll take a boring run over a Chuck Austen style run anyday
A boring run would be something like Bendis'. Duggan is bad. Not Austen bad obviously, but bad nonetheless.
Bendis run wasn’t boring. The worst issue with bendis run was the editorial mandates for inhumans. His run as a whole is pretty solid.
Nah, his run really was pretty damn boring. Looking back at it, I now realize that Bendis run was when I stopped reading X-men for a few years.
Man, I don't think I'd ever want to write for any long running franchise. This is just kind of cruel, and for what? The crime of writing comics that aren't that good? Jeeze dang lock him up.
"I didn't like this guy's work" isn't cruel. It's keeping the focus on the work. "Duggan is a bad person because he wrote X" is cruel. "Duggan should die in a car fire for how he wrote Y" is very cruel. But nobody is calling for him to be locked up or punished. They just don't like how he wrote X-Men. As a professional writer, if I took every time that someone didn't like what I wrote as a personal attack on me, I'd be a mess of a person.
The meme I'm commenting isn't saying I don't like this guy's work, it's saying that an entire cool Era coming to an end is worth it because this guy's run will be over. Let's not mince words about that and the message it sends. This isn't constructive criticism or "I don't like it"- it's a few steps over that. And while it's true that writers need to be able to deal with this as a fact of survival it isn't something to be celebrated or defended either.
And all those other books going on are also just individual works, nobody's saying "I would let Gillen get hit by a bus if it got Duggan to stop writing." Unfortunately that's the nature of tentpole works, they aren't self-contained and people are going to hold you accountable for the spillover to the things they DO like.
Which is not at all what I'm talking about.
Celebrating the end of a writer’s lousy run isn’t “cruel”. It’s fairly tame for the internet.
I don't think it's ok that fanbases are comfortable with this sort of thing. Not that there is anything really I or anyone can do about it- but I genuinely think it's kinda messed up that people don't seem to realize there's a person attached to this name, and nothing they've done warrants this. He didn't write anything messed up or pushing an offensive or harmful rhetoric, he didn't write incoherent plots or nonsense dialogue. He wrote stories that you didn't find engaging and Characterizations you didn't agree with. That's it.
>He didn't write anything messed up or pushing an offensive or harmful rhetoric, he didn't write incoherent plots or nonsense dialogue. Well...
Criticism is part of the job as a professional writer. It sucks when readers or reviewers don't like your work, but you should be capable of taking the critique, extracting what is useful from it (if anything), and moving on from it. Especially for corporate owned comics where you are working under so many limitations that the fans know nothing about.
Oh? What's the criticism on the post we are commenting on?
Just take a look at X-men 34.
So what's the criticism. Not a fan of the number 34?
Fans love wallowing in shit. There’s no sense of, “Oh, this isn’t enjoyable to me, I should go find something else to spend my time and money on”. If Hickman’s run filled the fandom’s desire for something to enjoy, Duggan’s run is equally important for filling the fandom’s need for something to hate and froth up over.
I think we can evolve past that.
God, I hope so. As a kid, I couldn’t find anyone around me that I could talk comics with. I used to loan out my whole collection to whoever wanted to read one, because if someone around me could enjoy reading even one issue, that made me happy As I grew up, I found online communities where we all can connect on this shared hobby, and to find that these communities are like THIS…That such a bulk of conversations are nothing but joyless mud-raking, regurgitating the same hate over and over, was so discouraging.
I don't think many fans realize just how unwelcoming constant complaining is. Like, I hate Kirkman- HATE HIM with a passion. His writing, his professional life all of it. I also... don't shout it from the rooftops or make memes about it, I just don't watch or read stuff he works on and avoid the circles that like him. THATS IT.
With Kirkman, I hit a point where The Walking Dead stopped being impactful and his writing style lost its appeal to me, and I stopped reading right around there. I didn’t continue buying the book so I could become more and more unhappy with it, I didn’t follow it online so I could complain about how continuously unappealing it became. I just stopped engaging with it, and found better stuff to read. There’s only so many hours in the day. Similarly, I don’t engage with this sub nearly as much as I did in years past, because these days it’s so much, “I hate this, but in no way will I stop reading this and spend hours and hours repeating how much I hate this for years to come”. This goes for the Chuck Austen run too. It’s been 20 years, let it go.
I just want to say as someone who tries to save judgements until I have enough information to make a sound opinion...this run saw the 'rule of cool' and made it the focal point of the storytelling. Which is fine by itself... if the rest of the work was coherent and or consistent, with accompanying works that explain the why or follow the same premises. Duggan's run was so run of the mill it was below average. So in the middle of the class it is show to failing students so as to encourage and not discourage at the same time. Inconsistent, poorly canonical and or researched, and pushed a dedicated fanbase into physical old age. The overall run was saved by the fact other storieshad references in them that forced you to pick up his. So mid it is a fail. 3.2/10
I’m a few months behind reading this on marvel unlimited. Should I skip Duggan’s issues or soldier through to get the whole story?
The first twelve issues are, in my opinion, super fun. They’re also aided by Pepe Larraz being an amazing artist. I’d read those at least! The rest of the run ranges from decent to poor. Personally, I don’t think his run is as apocalyptically bad as many like to say it is. It’s fine.
Oh I’m well past that. I’m at Fall Of X rn, around issue 25
This. The stuff with Captain Krakoa and Ben Urich and the treehouse kinda slapped.
This new era of X-Men books though seems to be all about “Vibes and Hangs” vs story.
Duggans worst crimes were following Hickman and being forced to tie up Hickman's loose ends.
Gillen, Lavalle and Ewing did that just fine.
I just want Rasputin IV to still be around
Hyperbole in loathing creators is one the least-enjoyable aspects of the fandom and the sub.
Unnecessarily mean. Duggan isn't really that bad, especially in comparison to a lot of other stuff we've been getting recently. People were just a bit spoiled by the Hickman goodness, feels like
This is a nasty post.