iMethuselah
Did Quitely do the entire run of
New X-Men with Morrison, or just a few issues here and there like he is doing with
Batman and Robin?
Just a few here and there, but not as well-planned for as with
B&R...so it really is a case of sporadic bursts of Quietly, rather than distinct arcs with distict artistic identities like we're getting with
B&R. The good news is that there's some
fantastic work in there from other artists...Silvestri, Van Scivier, Jimnez...the further bad news is that a couple of the Igor Kordely issues are so rushed that you really can't look at the pictures without taking some sort of antiemetic medication first. It's like he's made little models of the X-Men from raw dough and then rolled them around a sink in which an eczema sufferer just shaved the stubble from his sorest patches.
Katherine Kane
In a setting where stories aren't supposed to end, I think perhaps they are. But I suppose the larger question is if it's a bad thing that Jean is "ruined"?
I think I agree..."Spidey shouldn't have his happy ending yet" being more or less my reason for being the internet's only anti-spidermarriage poster.
To the larger question...I'd say it's only a bad thing to 'conclude-ruin' a character if that character continues to be published.
Robinson concluded Jack Knight. Gaiman concluded Dream. Nobody'd say that they 'ruined' those characters though because, after they were bought to their natural ends, they stopped telling stories about them.
Jean Grey...well, Morrison brought her story to a natural end and so far nobody's (openly) telling stories about her. When they do...when they return her to the cycle of death and rebirth...then it's very possible that she will seem 'ruined'.
Or, y'know...someone amazing might suprise us all and, rather than resetting her to her role in the earthly soap-opera, give us a look at her transcended qabalistic adventures as White Crown Phoenix of the Kether Elyon. They'd look something like a cross between
Joe Chill in Hell and
Promethea and... WAIT A MINUTE! I'm talking about whether or not Jean Grey's ruined with someone I know is perfectly capable of writing a good Jean Grey story!
Wally_West
So...
Is Superboy Prime supposed to be the strawman insert for the Angry Internet Fanboy, whom we should have no sympathy for because his fanrage makes him both dangerous and impotent at the same time,
Or is Superboy Prime a mentally arrested child we're supposed to feel sorry for, because he doesn't understand his own strength and has underdeveloped mental acumen rendering him unable to relate to others,
or is he just mentally retarded? Because he seemed to be all of these things and more in Adventure Comics this week.
The first two are far from incompatable! And the relation between them might be quite interesting, if it wasn't all just drowned out by the "He's just mentally retarded!" factor which, though it's not intended, seems pretty inescapable.
Johns and metafiction are not a good combination. Did anyone else see the bit in the most recent
Green Lantern where Atrocitus spent a page responding to criticisms of
Blackest Night from an Alan Moore interview?
On to someone else for whom we're meant to feel both pity and contempt...
(Jason, not Cissy!)
Cissy-Chan
I'm more interested in Morrisons explaination for why Jason left d**k and Ibn ALONE in the truck with no other restraints than some rope. Untying knots is escape lesson one. Had it been me? Dickybird would have taken a nap for the next week, he can be humiliated when he wakes up and everybody already knows who Batman is.
What, did Jason maybe WANT TO GET CAUGHT?!
The business with the ropes was partly to set up the idea that Jason has a very different
perspective on events than the dynamic duo...he's someone who's travelelled the breadth of the multiverse and pierced the veil between life and death and so forth...but can't tie a simple knot. It's there to both give weight to, and undermine, his speech at the end.
But yeah, Jason does want to fail. Actually no, not so much that. Jason belives
he already has failed. A couple of times in the arc there are very telling moments where Jason lets slip that he knows his whole enterprise is utter bullshit.
The whole 'Red Hood' personna isn't an earnest attempt to grow beyond Batman...it's an expression of the fact that Jason sees himself as 'damaged goods', as a failure, as...well, a "ruined character."
Jason said that he's turned out the way he has because "the world had plans for him" like the world had plans for Pyg and Flamingo, whose traumas turned them into monsters. But really this seems to be an inverted commentary on Bruce who took the event that should have turned him into a monster and said, "Oh yeah? Well I've got plans for the world."
