Johns last good book was the end of his Green Lantern run. The less said about his run on Justice League the better.

I think Johns' problems as a writer are far different than Bendis'. I guess the only real comparison you can make is that both have sort of served as the architect at their respective publishers at vastly the same time.

Tim O'Neil's "I've never read a Bendis book that was anything but a premise waiting for a story" is the most succinct and smartest criticism of all of Bendis' work. He's fantastic at setting a stage, putting the board together and making an opening gambit but never gets past that.

I know that's been No-Prized a lot but it gets dumber the more you think about it, so I try to avoid it.

Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it. Marvel's really backed off the MAX label since the end of Wolverine MAX and Jason Aaron's Punisher run and I think he's probably compensating for not being able to use that word.

I think it's interesting to compare the position Bendis is in when the original Alias series was coming out versus where the book is now. With the original, he was an up-and-comer, writing a book distinctly separate from the main universe with far fewer editorial mandates hanging over him. He was still known primarily…

The number of rapidly-aged or time-displaced forms of Franklin Richards surpasses the number of actual children in the Marvel universe by a considerable margin.

Ah, the Illyana Rasputin Effect.

True but Dani Cage isn't even that old yet and it's really strange.

I think 2 is better than 1 but I think that's mostly because it's so much more demanding of you. It requires that you master the parry system so you can reflect projectiles and perfectly block incoming attacks and builds the game around that. It fundamentally changes how you have to approach encounters, requiring…

Jessica Jones still calling everyone a "bitch" is, uh, really strange. It feels like Bendis decided he needed to follow the show rather than the character and boy does it read weird.

They were both missing from the teaser DC released so we'll see. It'd be hard to ignore them entirely since they and Grifter have been the only Wildstorm characters DC has published in a book in the last 3 years.

I really liked her interview on WTF enough that i had to look into her work and it's just very much not for me. She's charming and I love her voice work but I don't know that I've heard a bit of hers ever really land.

As the review mentioned, it's become sort of endemic lately and I think a lot of it is just a result of creating a generally agreed on subject for jokes. Writing jokes about hardcore conservatives and racists is fun, shareable and is connecting with a lot of audiences. The problem is it's not very challenging or deep…

Yeah, if I remember right, it's one of the very first Non-Kirby Darkseid stories.

The thing that made The Great Darkness Saga so much of a groundbreaking comic was that surprise when it was published. Darkseid existing in the Legion era is such a startling pronouncement, so much of an amazing twist of the knife that if Darkseid exists, then Superman and the Justice League failed. They couldn't stop…

They both have the exact same flaws and neither is really good. I can at least stomach Tim Sale's art a lot easier than Lee at his absolute sloppiest.

That early stuff is really all character work and is sort of an interesting look at how DC Comics were written in the 80s. As Levitz has said many times, he could never imagine his Legion of Superheroes run being collected and he clearly writes that way. All his stories weave in and out of each other to the point…

Yes.

It's the best team book of all time.