Dr.Vonsteel

So when are you gonna get around to writing that post where you defend Tom King siccing a mob on an innocent person and then lying on Twitter about things being "all good" with said person

I don’t question why Tom King’s immediate response to learning Jae Lee did a cover for EVS was “wow, I need to immediately publicly disavow him doing a cover for my book”, because that is indeed absolutely what he needed to do. I very much question why Jae Lee, the dude caught with his pants down - assuming maximum possible good faith that he’s telling the truth that he had no idea what Comicsgate is - used his post to castigate THE DUDE WHO THEN PUBLICLY EXONERATED HIM rather than the hate group he’d been unwittingly roped into doing work for.

Isn't it great that Bendis didn't kill a cat, but only destroyed the whole city of Kandor, wrote that Superman and Lois are too horrible parents to raise their son and need to have help from mass-murdering granddad. And fills the book with horribly cringy lines, mopey Superman without Lois and Martian Manhunter who wants to conquer earth. But at least there was a giant ape to fight. Everyone already knows where your priorities lie.

Anonymous said: Bendis only made Superman a mass-murderer himself, by stranding an alien Armada in outer space without hope of getting picked up “they will wonder where their fleet went”.

Anonymous said: He let’s Superman spout nonesense “I can shut it out but I never will”, when the truth is: Superman still sleeps. So he shuts things out. But hey senseless pathos in writing is all you need when writing Superman to make the masses happy.

Anonymous said: I wasn’t too happy with Tomasi’s run. But at least when a villain showed up wanting to get rid of Jon’s inferior human side he didn’t get custody of the boy. That was the lowest point in any Superman comic ever

I’ve already addressed most of what you’ve had to say (including in…uh, something you clearly read), and the remaining stuff has quick answers: there’s a difference between an abstract off-screen tragedy and a fucking charbroiled kitty corpse steaming in front of the crying child who loved it and accidentally killed it in terms of what makes sense to put in a dang Superman comic, Jurgens himself ended the Oz arc making clear his homicidal tendencies were implanted,* we’re shown the aliens survive and presumably they should be able to get home or get rescued because Superman clearly wouldn’t casually kill thousands (the question he notes they’ll ponder is how the fleet is destroyed, i.e. he moved too fast for them to tell it was him, not where it went), and Superman’s reasoning for never shutting the world out** is the opposite of a moment about how hard it sucks to be Superman. However, given you sent me four separate messages, that I only bothered answering because you at least didn’t personally insult me, I doubt that’ll much matter. And to be fair, you’re pretty on the money about the ape. But look, am I the guy who’ll suck up any excuse I can find to make Superman more mopey and maudlin - I’d love to see the evidence for that compiled from across my writings - or the guy who wants him to fight gorillas on the moon?

* Man, I’d be so much more inclined to buy the backlash as not purely on name value if Bendis were going in an UNPRECEDENTED NEW DIRECTION with a RADICAL NEW TAKE as opposed to writing such a straight-up, classicy-classic Superman aside from taking Lois and Jon off the board for a couple issues. The one big maybe-huge change with Rogol Zaar? Well, The Oz Effect was pretty much exactly that: suddenly, the foundations of Superman’s Kryptonian origin are potentially CHANGED FOREVER by the emergence of a standard-model new supervillain, with the mystery being if they can be believed or not (though Oz immediately doubles down that this is extra super-duper real). Except there I didn’t pick up much of anything from fandom aside from perhaps a shrug or two, because Jurgens wasn’t born of boiling devil jizz and the tears of good little fans to rise up and destroy all that is good in comics forever by sheer dint of his existence in the way I’ve been repeatedly informed Bendis was. Because believe you me, if Tomasi or Jurgens were writing these exact stories with these exact beats, plus some rambling dad speeches breaking up the lazy action scenes with a little additional actively disquieting violence thrown on top/basic storytelling more or less flattening out into the comics equivalent of oatmeal respectively, we’d still be hearing no end of what a bold, lovely, Right and Correct and True and Good era for Superman this is.

** Do…do you consider sleep and quiet to be literally the same thing? I like having a good nap, but I don’t consider it a release from sensory input or anything, I’m not conscious for it and it’s not at all like being in a dark silent room the way Superman basically equates space with.