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Shane Matlock
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 August 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 1760
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| Posted: 20 December 2017 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | 1
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If Marvel handled Northstar's AIDS with the subtlety of his coming out it's probably a good thing they went with the elf thing instead, no matter how dumb it was.
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Scott Morrissey
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 03 July 2012
Location: Australia
Posts: 107
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| Posted: 21 December 2017 at 6:38am | IP Logged | 2
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Alpha Flight as a comic did become very bleak under Bills writing. And even before it it was a rather dark comic. Bad things do happen to good people. A message that was always coming through.
Bills work on the Hulk was becoming progressively darker as it went on. As did Micronauts.
Micronauts you essentially had the entire population of Homework either killed or genetically mutated into monsters. The heroes won, but essentially there was nothing left to liberate, and it was the most hollow of victories. Not the kind of ending one would have expected.
This progressed to Alpha Flight. There was no genocide, but the characters were tortured. Roger Bochs especially. Who was, an incredibly bright guy when first introduced. Different writers do take characters in new directions. But with Roger, Snowbird, Talisman and Jeffries. They were just given such a hard time. Much like the leads in the Micronauts and Bruce Banner/Hulk.
There wasn't one of the Micronauts leads who were not put through, what would seem an ultimate test leading up to the series finale. You could argue the personalities changed, in this case through war. Where the Alphans going through a similar sort of war? I can't recall.
I think that Bill may have been going through some very dark times when he was writing in the mid 80's. Both the Hulk and the Micronauts were fun comics initially. Peter Parker did have an amount of social commentary in it. And was a little dark, but not overall a bleak book like Hulk, Alpha Flight and Micronauts became.
It's a tragedy with happened to Bill, and that we didn't get any new comics from him after Alpha Flight. Was it his last series, I think Invasion was released in 1987. Would his stories have brightened up? A question that won't ever be answered.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132315
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| Posted: 21 December 2017 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | 3
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The Bill Mantlo I worked with did have a bleak attitude about many things. He criticized the original STAR WARS for being "white supremacist."
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Andrew Bitner
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Joined: 01 June 2004
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 8:11am | IP Logged | 4
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JB, when you switched places with Mantlo--swapping AF for Hulk--did you have any particular expectations of how he would proceed with the team?
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 10:44am | IP Logged | 5
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JB, when you switched places with Mantlo--swapping AF for Hulk--did you have any particular expectations of how he would proceed with the team?•• He told me he'd gotten copies of every issue, and cut thrm up to create a scrapbook of various character scenes, to use as reference. So I assumed he was going to be as faithful as he could.
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Andrew Bitner
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Joined: 01 June 2004
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 11:10am | IP Logged | 6
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That's really interesting. Thank you!
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Dave Phelps
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4178
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | 7
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JB wrote:
| Somewhere in there I did a cover or two as favors to the editor without fully understanding what I was "endorsing"! |
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If it helps, the story you did the two covers for was the one that debunked the notion Northstar (and by extension, Aurora) was an elf.
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Shane Matlock
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 August 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 1760
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | 8
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The Hudnall run actually seemed like he enjoyed the JB issues and had actually read them rather than just scrapbooking them. It wasn't even close to as good as the Byrne run, but it was way better than Mantlo's run though that's likely damning it with faint praise.
Edited by Shane Matlock on 22 December 2017 at 4:36pm
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 22 December 2017 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | 9
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Don't dismiss what Bill did as "scrapbookinh". I thought at the time that the approach was a good one, and a clever way to keep track of character quirks.
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Shane Matlock
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 August 2012
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Posts: 1760
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| Posted: 23 December 2017 at 12:24am | IP Logged | 10
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I didn't mean to disparage his method of organizing the characters. I agree that it is a clever way to keep track of them. I was jokingly calling it scrapbooking because he didn't seem to use any of what he'd clipped. As you said earlier in this thread, you had even named Puck's condition which caused his dwarfism and Mantlo ignored it and went with the whole demon trapped inside him making him a dwarf. Same with what he did with Heather giving her powers and the elf stuff with Aurora and Northstar. Or what he did to Roger Bochs. In addition to some of those things which stand out as particularly bad, much of the characterization just seemed off, like with Talisman. I was a big fan of what Bill Mantlo did with the Marvel toy line of books like Micronauts, Micronauts: The New Voyages, Rom (I absolutely loved Rom as a teenager and had every issue), and a good deal of his Hulk run. He wrote a lot of good comics for Marvel, but Alpha Flight really suffered under his tenure which lasted 37 issues. Apparently he was fired at the end of it for wanting the editor to come up with ideas for him, at least according to this interview with James Hudnall. Hudnall also mentions that one of his goals was getting the book back to how it was when John Byrne wrote and drew it. The weird thing is Hudnall mentions how the editor wouldn't let him write the book and was always telling him what to do with the characters like demanding fight scenes every other page, which makes me wonder if part of why Bill's take on Alpha Flight is so much worse than his other comics I've read is because the editor was micromanaging him too and then complaining about how he didn't bring any ideas to the table.
http://alphaflight.net/content.php?124-James-D-Hudnall-Inter view
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Shane Matlock
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 August 2012
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Posts: 1760
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| Posted: 23 December 2017 at 1:08am | IP Logged | 11
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While looking for an interview with Bill Mantlo about his Alpha Flight run for his side of the story, I did find this article which corroborates what JB said earlier in this thread about how Mantlo originally was going to have Northstar have AIDS, but Carl Potts and Jim Shooter said it was too controversial and thus we got the elf story. So that bit at least was not entirely Mantlo's fault. I do get why Potts didn't want Mantlo to do the story since they still hadn't even had Jean-Paul come out yet at that point and to have his coming out be him having and dying of AIDS probably wouldn't have gone over very well.
https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-551/
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Jason Ditzel
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Joined: 16 April 2004
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Posts: 438
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| Posted: 24 December 2017 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | 12
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There were so many highlights in the JB AF run. The stories and art were very interesting and hit me at the perfect age. I liked the mix of aliens, myth (Sasquatch, Intuit, Shaman), and sci-fi tech (Guardian, Box). I also liked your inking line especially in the 2nd half of the run.
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