tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post3833818101693229079..comments2024-03-27T21:12:28.287-05:00Comments on Collected Editions: Review: Static Shock Vol. 1: Supercharged trade paperback (DC Comics)collectededitionshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14698269790653953645noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-18522752611639454962012-07-29T15:29:51.240-05:002012-07-29T15:29:51.240-05:00I think you paint this site with a broad brush, To...I think you paint this site with a broad brush, Tony. I appreciate your interest in a more literary analysis of a book, though I don't find every title lends itself to that. Consider, however, my reviews of <a href="http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-catwoman-game-vol-1-trade.html" rel="nofollow">Catwoman: The Game</a>, <a href="http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2009/08/review-final-crisis-collected.html" rel="nofollow">Final Crisis</a>, and my retrospectives on Geoff Johns's <a href="http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2006/12/flash-retrospective-flash-rogue-war.html" rel="nofollow">Flash</a>, Greg Rucka's <a href="http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2007/05/wonder-woman-missions-end-trade.html" rel="nofollow">Wonder Woman</a>, and <a href="http://collectededitions.blogspot.com/2007/10/review-gotham-central-dead-robin-trade.html" rel="nofollow">Gotham Central</a>, among others, for examples of the kinds of reviews you're looking for.<br /><br />We can of course agree to disagree on our assessment of Static Shock, especially since, as you point out, we're coming at the book from different perspectives -- I've read all of Supercharged, and you read only the first issue. I agree that the first issue was good and portended good things for the series, though I'd didn't feel the rest of the issues lived up to the first (no way to know for sure, but my guess is Rozum's presence was strongest in the first issue). <br /><br />A Static "Johnny DC" book would be cool, though I disagree that Supercharged was kid-appropriate just without the labeling -- see the ghostly hands extending emerging from the characters' mouths on two occasions and the dismembered finger in issue eight. From a "whole book" perspective, I think the potential for catering to a younger audience that you see in the first issue dissipates by the end.<br /><br />Irrespective, I wanted this book to be better, and I appreciate your speaking up in defense of it.collectededitionshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14698269790653953645noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-8544165209507834452012-07-26T12:01:47.851-05:002012-07-26T12:01:47.851-05:00I've only visited your site a couple of times,...I've only visited your site a couple of times, and having just read through a review for the new Batwoman collection...it's clear that you guys really love to talk in infinite detail about the good and the bad, and continuity issues, of the things you read. That is not necessarily my style. If I read a book, I try to get a feel for what the creators were trying to accomplish, and if they succeeded. If the result is not something I particularly agree with, then nine times out of ten I probably won't have read it in the first place. But selectivity is not always possible, especially wen you run a fairly comprehensive site, as you do.<br /><br />This is a difference of approaches. Clearly mine is different from yours. I understand what you did and why you did it. As a fan of McDaniel, it pained me to see his New 52 effort come naught, but I have very little to show for my support in this enterprise, as I have already admitted to having only read the first issue, which to my mind was dominated by McDaniel's art, and was totally against the grain of nearly every other book (at least among the ones I sampled) leading with heavy characterization. I know McDaniel can handle books where characters come first, but for some reason he didn't seem to go that way this time, and as you pointed out there were certainly creative differences with his writing partner that seem to have drastically affected the book.<br /><br />It just seems to me that the approach was from a different vantage point than you are willing to admit. If this had had "Johnny DC" slapped on the cover, it would have been the coolest kids' read on the rack. Not every book needs to feature the same kind of storytelling. Maybe this was a flawed execution of an alternative, but it was already clear to me from the one issue that it was at least an alternative, a fact that you somewhat casually ignore.<br /><br />Regardless, I love that you're doing this, so I don't want to sound like I think this was a waste of my time. Any comprehensive look is worth the effort.Tony Laplumehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07854455859399339169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-51724153602067822382012-07-25T15:13:43.108-05:002012-07-25T15:13:43.108-05:00Tony,
I appreciate your taking the time to share ...Tony,<br /><br />I appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts. <br /><br />You state that "the unfortunate thing about this review is that it assumes readers will care about the backstage politics as if they really affect the quality, without actually explaining how they do so." While none of us are privy to the minute details of the creators' conflict, and therefore can't specifically say that argument X lead to bad scene Y, I do conclude that whatever the case, some disfunction behind the scenes has lead to the book ceasing to make sense page to page by the sixth issue (see, in that issue, Sunspot suddenly appearing on the page with no lead-in). <br /><br />It's possible I could lay this all at McDaniel's feet and simply state that it's McDaniel doing the writing and therefore the problem is McDaniel's poor writing, but I don't know for sure that the issue is all McDaniel's. What I could say with honesty is that I know there was conflict behind the scenes and that by the sixth issue the book had stopped making sense to me, and then I intuited that the two facts were related.<br /><br />I disagree, therefore, with your statement that in my review I don't demonstrate how the "backstage politics" leads to the problems with the quality of the book; as I've explained above, I do think I show a connection between one and the other. If you don't agree with my conclusion, that's fine -- I respect your opinion -- but I maintain that I have shown the cause and effect. <br /><br />I take your point that the best tribute to Static, the character, here would be to ignore the background and just focus on the character in an "impartial" review. I would very much have liked to have done that; when I finished Supercharged, however, I felt (as I related earlier to Ryan S.) that trying to treat Supercharged as a coherent story would have been 1) futile and 2) a joke on me -- like taking a farcical movie and trying to review it as something serious. <br /><br />You can see from my review index that I've reviewed hundreds of comics, and I'll say I have never encountered anything as poorly constructed as Static Shock. I have offered cogent reviews of comics that I thought were badly written or drawn before, but with Static, I felt the creative team simply gave up -- there was no consistency of characterization or motivation for the villains throughout the story, and the latter issues in part contradicted the earlier ones. I just did not feel that a story-based review, as is the custom here, was possible. Instead, ultimately unable to separate story from context, I took another tack and looked at how this kind of backchatter can affect a reader, especially a collections reader.<br /><br />If you feel you can review Static Shock: Supercharged on the basis of its story, please do so, post on your site, and drop a link here; I'd be interested to read that review. It wasn't where I ended up. Again, however, I appreciate that you stopped by and cared enough about this book to leave your thoughts; hope you'll come around again sometime. Thanks.collectededitionshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14698269790653953645noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-13077621480902683302012-07-25T12:12:18.944-05:002012-07-25T12:12:18.944-05:00The unfortunate thing about this review is that it...The unfortunate thing about this review is that it assumes readers will care about the backstage politics as if they really affect the quality, without actually explaining how they do so. I read the first issue primarily on the strength of my interest in Scott McDaniel's art. I didn't read others not because of the quality of the book but for financial reasons. To my mind, McDaniel's art was a good match for Static's character, or at least established a definite tone, which in a very general sense could be called, as with all of McDaniel's work, kinetic. If there was a conflict in the writing between McDaniel and Rozum's artistic sensibilities, I would err on the side of McDaniel, because Rozum at this point should have known that if his writing didn't match the art, then the artist would win out, since McDaniel was already billed as the primary creator on the book.<br /><br />All of this is to say that the review and indeed popular opinion that this book was a mess had already been ordained from the start, and primarily due to the fact that among these opinions, it was Rozum and not McDaniel who should have been allowed to set the tone. I don't know if the book is worth reading, and I certainly don't believe that this is a judgment that can be determined by the internal conflicts behind it. I do know that it was a completely different book than the other New 52 books I sampled in the beginning, and most of that is due to the fact that Static as a property is something DC is still trying to figure out, blessed with an inordinate amount of popularity, but inconsistent with its common approach, even before this relaunch.<br /><br />To say that the failure of this series will in any way determine the future of Static is to say that the character had a stake in this enterprise to begin with. He didn't, and this review does an injustice to assume that he did. If anything, it was a different kind of visibility that he would have won. A new and more impartial review would in order.Tony Laplumehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07854455859399339169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-37152827772607188862012-07-23T05:05:12.884-05:002012-07-23T05:05:12.884-05:00I guess I'll stay with Milestone's Static ...I guess I'll stay with Milestone's Static then :PEyzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05350758607787528425noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-67614847994233556862012-07-19T15:48:08.338-05:002012-07-19T15:48:08.338-05:00All I know is, if I edited a book and had two guys...All I know is, if I edited a book and had two guys vying for who gets to plot it, I'd go with the guy who wrote Xombi, not the artist with zero writing experience. Maybe Rozum's approach would be less commercial, but good word of mouth would probably make DC more supportive of the book even if it lost a lot of readers.shagamuhttp://mbbforum.com/mbbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-78075357522513610812012-07-19T14:36:43.096-05:002012-07-19T14:36:43.096-05:00True shag, though the conflict between Rozum and M...True shag, though the conflict between Rozum and McDaniel offers an interesting insight into two schools of thought as to how to make a comic successful. Rozum wanted to do his thing and trust that if he wrote a good book, the fans would come; McDaniel had one eye on the sales figures and thought they needed constant shocks to keep the fans reading. <br /><br />It's easy to vilify McDaniel here (and the proof might be in the pudding), but his approach is not entirely crazy. It seems like Rozum was hoping to "pull a Starman," so to speak, building up Static by word of mouth, but it seems to me that's terribly, terribly hard to do, like a million-to-one shot; in the fact of that, maybe McDaniel's sensationalism isn't such a bad idea. <br /><br />Then again, I think this is the difference between the Static and Mr. Terrific titles -- Terrific also bombed, but I loved it, because Eric Wallace just plain wrote a good story; if Rozum or McDaniel had written a good story, irrespective of being cancelled, this would be a different review.collectededitionshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14698269790653953645noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-72646951492098857012012-07-19T12:44:32.896-05:002012-07-19T12:44:32.896-05:00What really sickens me about what happened with th...What really sickens me about what happened with this book is that the editor hired the writer of one of DC's most critically-acclaimed books in recent memory and then proceeded to not only second-guess every single idea he had, but also let an artist who had never written a comic before plot the book pretty much by himself. How could it not end in a disaster?shagamuhttp://mbbforum.com/mbbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-62884745448627872212012-07-19T10:16:09.249-05:002012-07-19T10:16:09.249-05:00I regretted that I couldn't offer a larger per...I regretted that I couldn't offer a larger perspective on the story as a whole here, but that would have been artifice -- there's no story to treat seriously here, and in trying to do so the joke would've been on me. <br /><br />I read both Rozum and McDaniel's statements and I know who I thought sounded more reasonable, but I didn't want to get in to that -- but again, the book is so disjointed that to try to review it from the "reader off the street"'s perspective would've been an exercise in futility. <br /><br />I thought it best just to meditate a bit on what it means for the reader when things just go bad creatively, as they did here -- and then surprised myself when I realized that Rozum and McDaniel's conflict still isn't as bad, in my opinion, as what's happened with George Perez and Superman. So that ultimately left me with some grudging respect for McDaniel, which wasn't exactly where I started out this post.collectededitionshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14698269790653953645noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10945794.post-59734715167199624732012-07-19T09:28:58.642-05:002012-07-19T09:28:58.642-05:00At this point, it’s probably impossible to separat...At this point, it’s probably impossible to separate the controversy surrounding Static Shock with the poor quality of the resulting product. I’m glad you address this in your review; because it’s clear that what is presented on the comic page doesn’t tell the whole story and this can leave the uninformed reader confused. Static is a great character (the TV show did well) and he deserved better.<br /><br />At its core, comics are a collaborative process (with the writer, artist and editor working in tandem to, hopefully, make the best product they can). When it works together beautifully you get Animal Man; when everything breaks down you sadly end up with Static Shock.<br /><br />Hope you enjoy the Dark Knight Rises, trailers looks awesome!Ryan Snoreply@blogger.com