Posted On Today at 04:24:58 am EDT by Menshevik
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Quote:Quote:What I'm on about is the way a lot of people seem to conflate "breaking a taboo" or "breaking the rules" with "good writing", to mistake the former w...
Posted On Today at 04:24:58 am EDT by Menshevik
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Quote:Quote:What I'm on about is the way a lot of people seem to conflate "breaking a taboo" or "breaking the rules" with "good writing", to mistake the former with the latter. And I think Blargh's contention
Quote:Quote:Quote:Quote:Without Bucky coming back from the dead, we would never have had Brubaker's wonderful runs on Cap and Winter Solider.
Quote:Quote:comes dangerously close to that. So I wrote that if Brubaker is as great as his admirers say then I see no reason why his runs on Captain America and Winter Soldier couldn't have been as great with a Winter Soldier who wasn't Bucky Barnes. (It shouldn't surprise you that I think any competent writer should have been able to do this). This was not, as you seem to think, an attempt to have Brubaker judged on stories he didn't write. But I would like to remind people that breaking rules/taboo can be and all too often is just a sales ploy, a way of generating publicity. In this case, was resurrecting Bucky Barnes essential to the Winter Soldier stories, or was it primarily a way of attracting people to pick up those stories which, not being readers of Captain America, they might not have done with a Winter Soldier who wasn't Bucky Barnes?
Quote:Quote:I think that if a rule is considered important (as the taboo against resurrecting certain characters was), it should generally apply to everyone. It should only be broken for a very important reason, and I do not consider the addition of yet another grim and gritty character to Marvel's roster of heroes important enough, not even for the (Golden Age and Cold War) nostalgia appeal, especially as we already have Jack Monroe.
Quote:I guess I'm not one who thinks the rules should be followed just because it is a rule. If a good story can be told by breaking a rule then by all means break the rule. For example I personally enjoyed seeing Ben Grimm's Aunt Petunia and that she was presented as attractive instead of the old battleax Ben described her as. Everyone else but me probably hated it though.
Well, I didn't say rules should be followed just because they are rules, and as you see from my statement above I was speaking of important rules and having them only broken for important reasons. The death of Gwen Stacey broke major taboos at the time (killing off the hero's major love interest, having this happen under circumstances that made the hero appear partially responsible for her death), but the effect was a major change of not only ASM but superhero comics in general.
That FF story did not bother me at all, but it was very much a flash in the pan - Aunt Petunia made an appearance and then was basically never shown again. Had there actually been a significant taboo about showing her, what happened would have amounted to a waste of the effort of breaking it. But as far as I recall, she simply wasn't important enough. Even her "old battleaxe" image was largely extrapolated by the readers, as Ben Grimm would on several occasions invoke her, but never really described her and it wasn't even clear if she was a real person. Because Ben Grimm is middle-aged most people assumed that if Petunia is his aunt she must be older than him. So I'd say here it wasn't an actual rule, more an accidental habit developing into an unwritten tradition. It was not a hard and fast rule like e. g. never showing Dr. Doom's scarred face - which John Byrne broke for a story that I consider a big failure and so badly written that I would prefer it had never been printed. But in the words of Futurama, I watched it and I can't un-watch it.
A story that a writer and editor may love is one that readers (or at least myself) consider rotten. Case in point: the return of Jean Grey, which managed to work a way around the rule Jim Shooter had set up, but the only rationale behind it was that some nos
