Stupidest Reason to Buy a Comic
- Posted by Johanna on April 15, 2007 at 8:24 pm
- Category: Comic News
I can’t be the only one to notice this, and surprisingly, it’s working on me. I don’t care about another superhero team comic, but I love this allusion:
 The Loners #1 |
 The Breakfast Club |
 The Loners #2 |
 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off |
 The Loners #3 |
 Pretty in Pink |
April 16, 2007 at 12:41 am
There was something nagging me about the book, enough to pick it up and flip through it, but I have to say that I didn;t twig to it at all. (And since TBC is my Second Favorite Movie of All Time, I really should have. I would like to think I would have gotten it ny number three though.)
Too bad the book, in addition to being a direct reult of Civil War, is smarmy and self serving, and completyely lacking in the hesitent whimsy of those films. I now know how my parents felt watching John Wayne sell beer.
(I also have to wonder exactly what the point is, since outide of Lightspeed, all of the characters are quintessential “90″ ideas. Or lack of ideas, in the case of the three attempted Spider-Man spin-offs. It seems less about a playful nod and more of the industry’s pathological obsession with 1986…)
April 16, 2007 at 7:54 am
Great catch on the covers / movie poster match ups. I wonder what will serve as the inspiration for #’s 4-6?
April 16, 2007 at 11:34 am
I just read the book last night, and quite liked it. It’s great to see Karl Moline back on a monthly book. C.B. Cebluski’s script is smart post-Civil War material, showing us a completely different angle on the aftermath of the war. It’s not just another punch-and-run book. It’s a bunch of younger snotty superheroes doing their thing and learning as they go.
April 16, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I’m more than a bit wary of Cebulski after the repulsively awful WONDERLOST, but these covers are genius. :-)
April 16, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Whew! I just dodged a bullet there.
Johanna’s observation about the covers had me wanting to check this out. Fortunately, David Oakes to the rescue.
April 16, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I flipped through it as well, and I wasn’t given any reason to care about most of the characters. Heck, with a couple of exceptions, they were just bad 90s character names and costumes. I didn’t even know what half their powers were.
April 17, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[…] A couple of days ago, Johanna Draper Carlson pointed out the ’80s teen-movie theme running through Jason Pearson’s covers for Marvel’s The Loners miniseries: Issue 1-The Breakfast Club; Issue 2-Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Issue 3-Pretty in Pink. Today, with the release of Marvel’s July solicitations, that thread continues with Issue 4 and 1985’s Weird Science. […]
April 17, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Actually, I think the book is a great example of what Mark Gruenwald once wrote about in MARVEL AGE magazine about how no character is worthless. You shouldn’t kill one because someone might come around months or years later with a new way to write the character to make him or her interesting. Yes, LONERS contains characters from the 90s that many would write off just based on their date of creation. Cebulski is looking at them a new way and giving them a second chance. I think it’s worth a shot.
April 17, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I agree with you 100%, Augie. Most of my favorite characters are ones that people ignored long enough for obscure writers to actually do something with them, instead of being sacrificed to the terrible god of Sales. Cebluski should be given all props for using them.
But I also agree with Johanna, he doesn’t use them well. The only character I cared about at the end of the issue was the character I cared about going in, Lightspeed. We named checked Mattie, as she yelled at the reader. Someone I realized after the fact was Turbo yelled at someone else for not yelling at Julie enough. And they sat around and yelled some more, so we would all know Civil War Is Very Important. Not only are they uninteresting characters, they are all *an* uninteresting character, The Angry Young Man.
I would love for this to be the next Thunderbolts. Or Heroes for Hire. Or even Craptacular B-Sides. But it seems to be shooting for nothing higher than a pale CW spin-off where both sides yell at each other, and then Hulk kicks their ass. Nothing new, not even as interesting a take on the status quo as Slott’s “Initiative”. (And that only rises to “cheap theatrics”.)
April 17, 2007 at 5:21 pm
No outrage over the fact that the covers are plagarized?
Must be okay if Marvel does it.
April 17, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Augie, he hasn’t made the characters interesting yet, at least to me. He’s just brought them back. (Well, he didn’t, but you know what I mean.)
Alan, something so obvious is generally considered an homage, not a ripoff. I didn’t notice if they included an “after ___” line (although I wouldn’t know who to credit, given that we’re talking about commercial promotion, not traditional fine art).
April 18, 2007 at 8:47 am
Interesting, though I’d heard that the vast majority of the Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane covers do the same thing?
April 18, 2007 at 11:58 am
Just noticed that the July issue continues the theme.
April 18, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Apparently issue 4 parodies the Weird Science poster.
April 18, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Matthew, that they’re based on movie posters? I hadn’t heard that. Could you elaborate?
April 18, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I don’t think they are based on movie posters, but a lot of them have that movie poster, particularly teen movie poster, feel.
Cover gallery for the current series: http://www.comics.org/covers.lasso?SeriesID=21351
April 19, 2007 at 6:10 am
Not all of them, no, though for example number 8 is fairly similar to Almost Famous’ poster, whilst number 9 is definitely based on The Breakfast Club.
May 1, 2007 at 12:20 am
*snicker*
Tell me you don’t really by them because they look like a movie poster? Eh, I guess it’s not the stupidest reason as you put it! “Becuase the writer used to work on [Cancelled Sleeper Sci-Fi TV Show]” THAT’S the stupidest reason.
Thanks for pointing out the covers. It put a smile on my bitter, ugly face.
June 6, 2007 at 9:15 pm
[…] couple of months ago, I posted about Loners covers resembling teen movie posters. The cover of Loners #3 was supposed to mimic Pretty in Pink, as […]
July 4, 2007 at 6:07 pm
[…] to finish off the series… I compared the first three Loners covers to their corresponding John Hughes movie posters. Here’s the remaining […]