Mary Sue is a terrible concept that needs to be retired.

"Clearly" seems like the wrong word. And of course Bran is still alive.

Plenty of King's Landing scenes with lots of major characters - the Purple Wedding had Sansa, Tyrion, Joffrey, Tywin, Margaery, Olenna, Cersei, Jaime, Varys, Brienne, Pycelle, Loras…

Why would you hold out hope for that? Why would that even make sense? It seems like Euron secretly murdered Balon, then left again, and will return for the Kingsmoot so nobody will be ready for him.

The implication was very much that it's the Lannisters.

Jesus, she's not a red-herring false-protagonist who is actually an antagonist.

That's not what reactionary means. People need to stop using it that way.

Once it was clear that Robin was on Littlefinger's side, Royce basically had the choice between rebelling against his lord or giving in to Littlefinger

The books have utterly escaped Martin's control, and he seems to have no idea how to finish them, instead bringing in more and more extraneous plots that only push the story's conclusion further and further into the future. That being said, I think "terrible" is the wrong word.

Right. X-Factor's civil war plotline had a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent dupe of Madrox came to register the X-Factor team, and a few of them sign, and the rest don't, and then Madrox comes out against registration and then nothing happens to them. So that was kind of incoherent.

Many of the crossovers were written by Bendis, but the crossover structure was editorially mandated. You can't blame Bendis for Marvel's general editorial policies over the last decade.

Is Bendis actually the problem? Having just slogged through his whole Avengers run and all the associated crossovers from Disassembled through Avengers vs. X-Men, and also having read Alias and the first half of his Daredevil, it seems to me that Bendis is perfectly capable of writing a good story, and does so at…

Hank Pym was a Skrull, as it turns out! Bendis actually teased the idea that Tony supported registration because he was secretly a Skrull in New Avengers/Mighty Avengers.

It should be noted that Cap acts like a giant, out of character asshole throughout the Millar series, too (he's much better in the Brubaker-written tie-ins, as you'd expect)

The fact that it was about a bunch of schoolkids getting killed in Connecticut (even though it obviously was published *years* before Sandy Hook) makes the confusion understandable, though not really excusable.

Not immediately. They let him do a big mission, and then kicked him out a bit later when he murders some super-villains who show up to discuss joining forces with Cap.

But even the main book is totally incoherent. The X-Men declare neutrality, even though it seems perfectly clear that you either register or you don't. Did the X-Men register, but Tony agreed not to make them actually fight? That kind of goes against everything the X-Men have typically stood for. Did the X-Men not…

Lee's dialogue: not usually good in any absolute sense, though occasionally inspired and certainly iconic. Kirby's dialogue: just not very good. Going from sort of peak mid-60s Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four to Fourth World stuff, I have a hard time understanding how anyone could prefer the dialogue in the latter.

Lee's dialogue: not usually good in any absolute sense, though occasionally inspired and certainly iconic. Kirby's dialogue: just not very good. Going from sort of peak mid-60s Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four to Fourth World stuff, I have a hard time understanding how anyone could prefer the dialogue in the latter.

I've always thought that, if you look at it in a vacuum, Kirby kind of comes off worse: Lee was almost always willing to give a ton of credit to Kirby; by the end, Kirby was basically trying to say Lee hadn't contributed anything, which seems pretty clearly unfair. But, of course, it wasn't in a vacuum - Lee, though…