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Uncanny X-Men #160
Jul. 19th, 2024 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iamrmanThe X-Men learn why you shouldn’t let five-year-old girls wander around creepy Lovecraftian islands alone.
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iamrman
Power Pack #10
Apr. 23rd, 2023 10:15 amiamrmanPower Pack teams-up with Marrina of Alpha Flight to track down an alien serpent by the name of Snake-Eyes.
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Astro City: That Was Then #1
Apr. 28th, 2022 03:19 pmlaughing_tree
I made a rule for myself that I am not going to put anybody in the book that's simply, 'I like this character. I'll change his name, I'll change his costume and I'll stick him in my book.' If there's a strong archetype that I want to deal with, I'll go to the base of the archetype and build a new character on that archetype without regard for the other use of that archetype in comics. -- Kurt Busiek
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laughing_tree
You’re the second person to call it an ambiguous ending, and I’ll admit, I didn’t think it was ambiguous. Underplayed, perhaps, but it’s the kind of story that wouldn’t work as well if we made a big statement about Michael’s choices. But I think they’re clear, if you read the story carefully. -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #51 - "Down in the Depths"
May. 7th, 2018 08:09 pmlaughing_tree
If you don’t know what the characters do when they’re not fighting, you don’t really know who they are. This is my big complaint with the gods of Asgard and Olympus and such. When they’re not standing around in the Boss God’s Throne Room, what the hell do they do? There’s always a schemer, but what about the others? Do they have lives? Same for the Paradise Islanders. What do they do when they’re not training? Do they grow crops? Make art? Study history? Pirate TV signals? Cultures that don’t seem to have much texture beyond standing around in drafty halls aren’t convincing. -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #50 - "Aftermaths"
Mar. 18th, 2018 09:29 pmlaughing_tree
It's a pretty unusual story for us -- a look at the survivors, the people whose Astro City experience has been hellish, not inspiring. -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #49 - "Resistance"
Dec. 21st, 2017 11:27 pmlaughing_tree
Just saw someone complaining that they’ve been a Marvel reader for over 40 years, and they have no interest in the books today because of the politics, that the books should go back to like they were, with no politics. Which makes me wonder what he was reading 40+ years ago. I mean, if he doesn’t think the current books are well-done, that’s one thing, and he’d certainly be entitled to his opinion. But if he’s been reading the books for over 40 years, that means he started before 1977. So we’re talking the stridently feminist MS. MARVEL, Captain America having been Nomad (where Nixon and Exxon were the villains) before taking on entitled elitists who wanted to rule over the little people. Thor took on banana-republic dictators, there were multiple stories inspired by the Watts riots, the Sub-Mariner was in a permanent ecological snit, and more. We’re talking the heyday of Englehart, Gerber, Moench, McGregor and others, of reflexive anti-corporate stories, of flat-out anti-racist feminist stories where even Tony Stark was a liberal. You can like or dislike what you want, but the idea that the Seventies were apolitical is mind-boggling. -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #46 - "The Day the Music Died"
Sep. 7th, 2017 11:45 pmlaughing_tree
I originally conceived it in the wake of Trinity, when Dan Didio invited me to do something else for DC and encouraged me to come up with some sort of dream project.
I was exhausted from the weekly treadmill of Trinity, and my “dream project” ideas got pretty weird - at one point, I had this outline for an interlocking series of mini-series involving the Dreambound, Tomorrow Woman, and a few others, including an old Steve Ditko hero named the Odd Man. And my idea was to make him odder still, a character who wasn’t quite connected to his reality, to the point that he could see ours, and was using it as part of a plan to coordinate all these other heroes in some epic struggle that was happening on an unimaginable plane of reality.
Anyway, I really didn’t have the health to pursue any of the ideas I’d come up with, so they all fell by the wayside. But I realized that the ideas I’d cooked up for the Odd Man would fit some thematic elements that had gone on in the background of Astro City, and some characters already in there. So we built the Broken Man out of that, and he fit into Astro City wonderfully.
-- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #45 - "Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes"
Aug. 22nd, 2017 01:18 pmlaughing_tree
We always need new superheroes. But actual new ones, reflecting the modern day, rather than reflecting yesterday. Unless reflecting yesterday is the point of the story. But the idea that we don’t need new superheroes is like not needing new romances or new detectives. The moment you don’t need new characters in genre stories, the genre is as dead as Latin. It’s not a crime that superheroes don’t age, but it’s a problem that superhero series don’t more often age and die and get replaced. Imagine if Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski and other modern (well, relatively) PIs couldn’t get an audience because Sam Spade and Race Williams were taking up all the shelf space. If you’re writing X-Men and your metaphors are about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, that’s not all that much more modern than if your metaphors are about the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Ask yourself new questions, and put the results in your stories. Steve Englehart juiced up Captain America by asking what Captain America meant to the early 1970s. What does he mean now? What does Superman represent to the world? How does that, whatever it is, fit into the world today? Same for Batman, same for Wonder Woman. Tell stories you couldn’t tell ten, twenty, fifty years ago. -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #43 - "My Dad"
May. 22nd, 2017 06:50 amlaughing_tree
Too many first issues think it's enough to tell you who the characters are, and the immediate situation, but assume you already know the world, the context, the overall foundation. Particularly at Marvel and DC. A first issue that walks you in to the world, like a good novel or movie, that tries to be a foundation, rather than just the next chapter, feels like a rarity these days, all too sadly. [...] Too many first issues, though, are like "Here's the names and powers, you know the drill." Well, no, maybe we don't. Walk us in, give us a place to stand, a sense of the setting, the foundation. -- Kurt Busiek
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laughing_tree
'When I was first pitching ASTRO CITY, Lou Bank at Dark Horse described it as "Like WATCHMEN...but cheerful!" I don't think cheerful was the right word, but I appreciated the sentiment.' -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #33 - "Permanent Record"
Apr. 17th, 2016 05:27 pmlaughing_tree
"Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are different characters. Tim Hunter and Harry Potter are different characters. Derek Shepherd and Doug Ross, yeah, you got it, different characters. If you’ve got a cool new take on some preexisting character, you may be most of the way toward having a whole new character instead. You don’t need to ask permission to refurbish some company-owned character, but only to the point they’ll let you, and give away all rights. Take those cool new ideas further. Make them into your own character. You wind up with control and ownership. No one can tell you what you can and can’t do with it, and you get to reap the benefits." -- Kurt Busiek
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Astro City #30 - "Enemy of the Empire"
Jan. 24th, 2016 11:43 amlaughing_tree
"It was more because we don’t see that sort of thing in stories of the Skrulls or the Kree or the Khunds or whatever that spurred the story, so the inspiration was in the absence of material more than anything else, I think." -- Kurt Busiek
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