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[CortJstr]

Also, I hasten to add, dragons from every edition of D&D onward. Some things never change, really...

For YOUR convenience!

[littlefallsmets]

Peter David is, like, The Meta-Satan.

Guy gets on a book, mines a few good stories out of riffs on old semi-forgotten continuity and... invariably descends into "Look at me! Look at me! I can break the fourth wall! I'm ever so clever, teacher, look at me!" drivel.

Or is it just that ultimately it's a medium you're supposed to exhaust in your middle teens when all such tricks are clean and new and... the audience is supposed to turn over every five years or so, keeping such crap evergreen for the purposes of the market? As if I'm the problem for reading comics into my middle twenties and he's just doing what works?

[Choop]

One.
Two.
Three.

[Ben-San]

The thing about Peter David that frustrates the hell out of me is that he is totally capable of writing interesting and emotionally effective character pieces. He can be a good comic-book writer when he tries. It's just that he hardly ever bothers to apply brakes to what he thinks is high-larious wacky comedy and tends to just toss it in without trying to anchor it on the grounds that it will be inherently funny to have Stephen Colbert appear, spout a few catchphrases at Peter Parker in a bookstore, and then vanish again.

Personally I think his run on Supergirl is among his better work, and the pink Kryptonite benefits from being a single-panel gag that fits with the theme of the story rather than lurching out of nowhere.

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, like I say, the guy will occasionally bang out a good story, no question.

But... it tends to be when he first starts off with a given set of material and then he sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiides slowly into meta-nonsense and, as you pointed out, forced "Family Guy" type wackiness and other such punnery.

Hulk's gonna go to the future and meet Evil Old Hulk or... Supergirl's gonna meet the pre-Crisis Supergirl and they're gonna meet some other Supergirls or... Q turns out to be Trelane's father and the whole Star Trek whiz-bang gets retconned for that book or... Captain Marvel turns out to be his own son and then he fights a sister who doesn't exist or...

Yeah, that or Impulse thinks someone's crazy so he pictures a screw and a ball in a thought bubble.

Of course, I guess he WAS involved in the whole Babylon 5 thing which was like... if a bunch of Star Trek fans got together and said "Look, we love the whole IDEA of Star Trek but we'd really like something a bit more arcane and convoluted and nitpicky and continuity-dense and we'd really only want people to understand it if they've seen every episode in order three or four times. Thanks."

Which then begat Lost and Heroes, two more shows which everyone tells me are good but I clearly would not be able to get into without buying all the DVDs and starting from scratch. God help us with, like, the new Battlestar Galactica or "the Buffyverse". You don't just need a scorecard for those, you need... like... a scorecard and a decoder ring and that whirly-translo thing from "The DiVinci Code".

[Choop]

Completely off-topic, but Netflix is renting DVDs with every episode of Heroes to date. So that'll save you some fun money.

[Ben-San]

The story with Supergirl and pre-Crisis Supergirl was actually quite good and did not fall into PAD's usual Komedy! trap. I take it more as a commentary on DC's attitude at that point (and, to a large degree, now) towards characters and stories that they feel no longer project the correct Mature Graphic Novels For Thoughtful Readers Plus Boobs And Hey Let's Torture A Sidekick To Death With A Power Drill company image. I do think that as a result it's likely to be less than completely accessible to non-comics-fans, though.

Unless I'm seriously misremembering, Captain Marvel was only "his own son" in that his father was the previous Captain Marvel. Did PAD put in some bizarre time-travel-sex nonsense that I missed?

Impulse.. I want to say that the "Impulse's thought balloons have images rather than text" thing actually originated with Mark Waid, but I may be wrong. I don't know, it usually struck me as appropriate to the character.

And as to Lost, I haven't seen it. I've been enjoying Heroes (although it does have some problems) but part of that is that there are currently few enough episodes out that it's not completely insane to try to catch up, via either Netflix or Illegal Internet Acquisition.

[vivouk]

I can believe the dude can lift cars. I can believe the dude is bulletproof.

I can't believe the dude would spend years of his life chasing Lana while Chloe has been practically sending him postcards with a picture of her pu$$y and the words "Wish You Were Here" and is... exactly the kind of girl I wanted to like me in high school. Except those girls all liked boys with leather jackets and bass guitars and drinking problems and self-esteem and so forth.

Can.