@qtmxd said:
Btw, I think these threads are confirming your earlier statements that Waid's defenders don't really defend his DD work. They just criticize retcons, or claim he's still a breath of fresh air after doing this cartoon show for 4 years. And as you've said, good writing demands a certain level of consistency,logic, and plausibility... it's not just a series of random events where the writer can do absolutely anything he feels like at any time. Silver age DC was like that, and looking at their old covers can still be a lot of fun, but Lee, Kirby, and Ditko changed that with Marvel, demanding a certain level of realism and maturity, and while Waid can write emotion on occasion, even if it's wrongheaded, his plots are a throwback.
Yes, over on manwithoutfear, I've run into another thing his fans do instead of making any case for him: personal smears. Now, I criticize Waid and the response is that I'm a "troll" who has never read Daredevil (even though I offer a fairly detailed critique that references the canon regularly--something Waid's defenders can't and don't do) and who just wants to hate on poor Mark Waid. Thankfully, I haven't run into that here.
Early Silver Age DC--Waid's favorite milieu--was that way because it was still being written for children. Mort Weisinger squatted across the Superman titles like some black incubus in those years, draining all the life from them. The theoretical writers and artists were allowed almost no input--he doled out the detailed plots and demanded picture-book style artwork, drawn to exact specs--none of the Kirby-style dynamism or any effort to create sequence. Characters were one-dimensional, uber-simple, and easily identified as hero or villain, with no moral grey areas. A man without vision who was a tyrant, a jerk, a plagiarist, and had been on the books far too long. I love some of the artists who worked under Weisinger, particularly Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan, but he was a constant stifling, crushing monkey on their backs (look at Wayne Boring's great early Superman artwork vs. how it looked after years of working under Weisinger). The Superman books of that period--and one can tell Waid has read them all--were terrible. The Bat-books, which, in practically every issue, put Batman through some sort of bizarre bodily transformation or had him battling aliens or some other such nonsense, were even worse.
The good things one can get from them--and this is true of Silver Age books in general, and really one of the hallmarks of that era--is a copious flow of ideas. Under Weisinger, this was a consequence of a burned-out hack who was simply throwing in everything and the kitchen sink. In more skilled hands, such as over at the then-new Green Lantern book or, much more so, over at Marvel, it was a much more deliberate outburst by extremely talented people who had real authorial skills, weren't just aiming at undemanding children, knew how to tell stories and cooked up good ones to tell. The books became lab experiments. Not every idea worked, of course. Many failed rather spectacularly. Many were silly in bad ways (as opposed to good ones), or had other problems. The ones that worked were, in competent hands, continued and shaped while the bad ones were allowed to fall by the wayside. When one reads, for example, prime Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four or Thor, they're regularly throwing out and dealing with ideas in a few panels' time that could have been turned into entire storylines that could have ran for several issues.
To note the obvious, Waid/Samnee is no Lee/Kirby. Waid's love for the Silver Age is, as already noted, blinding, but he takes all the wrong lessons from it. A literalist, he doesn't understand why it was such a great time and how its better points can still inform comics today. His delight in overbearing lightheartedness, stifling silliness for its own sake, contempt for consistency, and, in particular, aversion to moral complexity are all examples of elements that were, in their time, a product of simpler books for a simpler time--things comics outgrew--that he has converted into stifling rules for himself. A literalist "Silver Age" he tries to reimpose. And, of course, imposing them on most modern books amounts to a radical devolution of those books.
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