the vynsane asylum

He wrote one absolutely brilliant story in the last decade.

It was Hush.

More specifically, it was Hush, up until the point where Batman runs into Jason in the graveyard. Everything afterward (Clayface was pretending to be Jason, Riddler being the mastermind, Hush being this childhood friend) was shit.

We had a brilliant story, and we didn't know whether it was in Bruce's mind or not (a lot of elements seemed like wish fulfillment).

But he blew it because he was too stupid to recognize he had something awesome in progress, and he fucked with it. And killed Harold. Fuck him.

Read the story up to that point, then imagine that it ended with Hush being Jason, driven insane by by a Lazarus Pit.

Yeah, he seemed to be trying really really hard to make Tommy look like the red herring, but then he actually turned out to be Hush, and that retroactively made the Tommy stuff the most clunky, atrocious, and obvious foreshadowing ever.

Ew. That was all one sentence. Shame on me.

What he should've done was make Tommy the halfway point false reveal, then had Jason be Hush and Tommy should've been shot instead of Harold. And left the Riddler BS out of it. That isn't to say Riddler doesn't have the potential to be a badass villain, but this wasn't the way to do it.

Agreed on the Riddler. This actually made him a threat for the first time ever. (Despite the praise it garnered, I always thought "Dark Knight, Dark City" was cheesy and made him more ridiculous than scary.) But the road to that point was pretty stupid.

I remember talking to the owner of my (former ) LCS as the story was progressing--he's the one who suggested the entire story was taking place in Bruce's mind while he was suffering from massive head trauma from his fall. Superman in particular, he said, was portrayed not the way Superman should be, but as the sort of "big boy scout" Batman perceives him to be (particularly with Krypto playing a pretty sizable role). Villains also weren't consistent at all with previous appearances (if you go this route and progress beyond the false Jason appearance, there's also the fact that Clayface II is alive with no explanation). Seen from this light (again, ignoring the ending), it's also well-done. Batman is forced to confront that part of him that wants to kill the Joker, admit his feelings for Catwoman, and finally deal with the ghost of Jason.

I liked Dark City for the hoops Riddler was making Bats jump through, but his motivation for doing so I did not like. That made no sense for the Riddler to be some kind of occult junkie monkey all of the sudden.

As for other Loeb works, his first two Super/Bat arcs were fun, if kinda dumb, in a summer action film kinda way. The next two were a jumbled mess with the time travel and the dimension hopping.

Then his kid died.

Onslaught Reborn was a mess.
His Wolverine story where he introduced Romulus and killed Sabretooth was awful.
Fallen Son(the aftermath of Cap's death) wasn't awful, but it was schmaltzy. And the five issues were hit and miss.
Ultimates 3 was horrid mess.(Incest, Jeph? Really?)
Ultimatum was an abortion.
[Red] Hulk started out limp, and by the time it got anywhere near decent, it'd been two goddamn years and there's no reason it should take 24 issues to tell one comic story.
I've not read his Ultimate X or Ultimate New Ultimates series.
Avengers:X-Sanction was a decompressed mess.

I don't think I've read too much of Loeb's work, but The Long Halloween and Dark Victory are crazy good.

And I really liked Hush, but this conversation is making me reexanine the latter parts.




Dicks.

Loeb's good stuff includes his Batman stuff, and Catwoman:When in Rome was decent.

I personally think his Marvel:Color books were overrated (Spidey:Blue, Daredevil:Yellow, and Hulk:Gray) but others seem to like them. I think I liked one better than the others, and I know Hulk was the worst of the three. And five years later we are still waiting on Cap:White.

I own but haven't read his Cable run from the 90s.
His X-Force retconned a bunch of Liefeld's stupidity so he gets props for that.
Haven't read his Superman stuff.
Superman For All Seasons was kinda limp.
I won't hold the Heroes Reborn crap against him. That was no one single person's fault.
And his short FF run wasn't memorable, but on the heels of Claremont's shit, it probably read golden.

But you know who's REALLY godawful? Jeph's daughter Audrey Loeb. Holy shit, she is a pathetic, wretched "writer". She must be a world class throat fuck, because goddamn that's the only way the editors on Hulk would've let her smear shit on the last page of every Hulk comic for two years and call it a comic. I've read funnier obits at a Children's Hospital.

I didn't realize she was a writer (or "writer," as it seems I should've said based on your comment).

However, there are some damned funny obituaries if you go to the right children's hospital.

This is the opposite of funny.

The sad thing is, Chris G. is a hilarious cartoonist on his own. So having him draw Audrey's scripts instead of his own stuff was doubly heinous.

Jesus, that is bad. What's next, Rob Liefeld's daughter shitting on all the pages at Image?

She wrote enough of those unfunny blemishes that they were able to collect them into a oneshot.

A member of our forum(who shall remain in nameless obscurity) actually accidentally purchased it.*







*And no, it wasn't me.

i still contend that Spider-man: Blue and Daredevil: Yellow were great. Hulk: Gray, not so much.

I went back and looked at my comments after reading them.
I loved Yellow. The story was good, and omg Sale's art is just...the best it's ever been.
Blue wasn't bad, but it was overrated IMO. I've read other stories that went back to the Gwen well that we're better done. Basically it felt like Loeb was just rehashing those stories rather than coming up with something new to say.
Grey was a limp series. But I'm willing to concede that's partly because the Betty/Bruce relationship isn't as powerful as the Matt/Karen and Peter/Gwen ones. So there was less for Loeb to work with. But also, he was writing turds at that point.

My thoughts on Jeph Loeb?

Jeph Loeb is one nerdy honky.