I’m currently reading Five Tales by Herman Melville. I also have a Herman Melville short stories book waiting for me at my library.

This is why I don’t read Marvel Comics anymore, because they overwrite the whole continuity when all I want is to read something.

As far as I know, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four all have their own agendas (heck, Spidey himself was the mascot of the company already) and the Avengers were were just another part of the continuity.

But because Marvel wanted to adapt their films into movies so badly, when they went bankrupt and sold the rights to their characters Kevin Fiege took the remains and made THAT into the main continuity with all the other prominent characters now playing second-fiddle to the Avengers (Spidey ended up playinh second-fiddle to Iron Man because Tony Stark is more important in the movies than Peter Parker was back in the Bronze Age of Comics, and he didn’t even have the same storyline as the comics) while the whole continuity got overhauled for film adaptation and most of the lesser films Marvel has made have raking in the dough since their inception (Iron Man’s arch nemesis The Mandarin was readapted into another version of Syndrome from The Incredibles as a wannabe nerd turned villain who ends up getting killed off).

DC is a better mainstream comic publisher because I hear they’re doing a better job writing comics with so many classic characters and even though they’re not perfect with all film adaptations they still write and make comics on a regular basis.

I normally have sensory issues with movies anyway because I’m sensitive to noises.

Amen.

Ba-dum bum.

Ba-dum bum.

Huh, okay.

Thanks, user! You should meet Maria.

Very good! Though the colors make it look like the soldier is wearing Patrick Star’s clothes.

I get that.

That would be why I just left WordPress.

I don’t know.

I heard from my social feed that people are claiming WordPress is getting worse because of their CEO, kind of like mainstream social.

I think Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead wasn’t a good read: when I last read it, it focused less on the ‘walkers’ and more on how humans are the REAL monsters with so many humans setting bad examples for themselves, and what does that have to do with zombies roaming the earth and all that? I know about Rick Grimes and The Governor the farthest I’ve read into the series and it’s very bleak and violent and it spawned an ongoing franchise to boot.

I used to read Spawn by Todd Macfarlane, but that series played like a serious drama between Spawn (Al SImmons) and Terry Fitzgerald since the latter man married Wanda and I eventually got tired of reading it just because I couldn’t stand all the drama between two guys fighting over one wife.

Invincible (also by Robert Kirkman) is supposedly all the rage, but I find it violent, trendy, subversive, and a composition of superhero tropes and cliches because modernism is popular with the current generation, and although I know who Omni-Man is now I’m afriad of reading it because he outright performed an ultra graphic Fatality on Homelander from Dynamite Entertainment’s The Boys with is pretty much the same thing as Invincible except written by a creator who explicitly hates superheroes and God yet somehow made lots of money with his television series and popular comic book franchise.

Me, I’m willing to read what Dark Horse has because since I like Hellboy for being a good work by a good man in my opinion (we’re both Catholic) and I while I withdrew from the manga communities on Lemmy I’m sort of debating going back to reading manga if only I could handle actually reading it: my last few manga works were Bleach, which going to Hueco Mundo was stupid on everyone’s behalf and yet it advanced the plot; there’s Berserk, which I kind of respect as a fellow Dark Horse published work but I don’t know if I can pick it back up again due to how graphic and intense it was (no offense, Guts); and then there’s Sankarea, which had a dangerous premise of zombifying a girl because the boy has a fetish for zombies (which somehow translates to necromancy…why do so many zombie works involve necromancy yet the zombies are still DEAD? cough cough Zombie Land Saga cough cough And that’s not all…they go to a research facility being run by a psychopathic bad guy who murders people and then Rea bathes with a girl younger than her.

And that’s how I ended up resetting my Fediverse accounts, because I wanted to avoid the stigma I created about the stuff I don’t like.

But generally, I don’t read manga anymore unless I can read something from Dark Horse I can actually handle this time…until then, Hellboy it is: I seem to be handling that series much better in my opinion due to my sensory input as an autistic adult…oh yeah, I’m autistic too: I even switched to Autism Place.

I hope discussing manga doesn’t infringe on discussing comic books, but I did grow up on manga and anime before growing out of it and becoming religious, which is how I ended up enjoying Hellboy so much thanks to Mike Mignola being a creative genius in my book. But that’s my take.

I asked about other comics in case there might be better titles from Marvel or DC.

Personally, I find Stan Lee in the original Marvel comics to be corny no matter what character you’re reading about but those comics had other people working on them as well (Steve Ditko is one of them) that don’t get as much credit. Stan Lee pretty much took all the credit for every character created. Todd Macfarlane did create Venom and worked on Spider-Man in the 90s but he gets less credit than Lee; the same goes for the creators of the X-Men…Stan Lee takes all the credit here…you get the idea. I have really bad memories of them taking over film and television with their MCU rewriting the main Marvel Universe by replacing the characters who got their own movies to the lesser and smaller characters they still had the rights to.

DC, however, I read that they seem to be leading the industry despite their small market share compared to Marvel:

MARVEL COMICS - 36%

DC COMICS - 23.3%

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/438242/comic-direct-market-share/

DC usually has more of their most famous characters taking center stage and they seem to be doing fine, but I suspect that sometimes they mishandle their characters like in Superman: American Alien where Superman’s origins are haphazardly refreshed and Pete calls him out for fighting Batman (wow, so clever) or in Injustice 2 (which is a comic book video game, but still) has superheroes doing horrendous things and has Harley Quinn do good things while she lasts, no to mention the Red Sun Prison segment where Firestorm is scapegoated for the plot of releasing Superman without Batman telling him about it. Not to say I haven’t read any much more comics from them considering I read the Golden Years of Batman: Volumes 1-4 on Hoopla and they were more innocent. You could chalk it up to Mortal Kombat creators running the show and twisting up the morals and plot points that they think suits their own ideas.

And then we have Dark Horse, which is what I’ve been reading lately:

DARK HORSE COMICS - 3.9% (same source)

So far, I’ve been reading Hellboy and I feel like they tell a much better story than the Big Two because even though Hellboy is a devil he was raised by humans and given much character development throughout the series. There’s wit, charm, supernatural hijinks, Lovecraftian horror and pulp fiction storytelling at its finest despite the dark occult setting while Hellboy I’ve read was raised a Catholic despite being a…well…a devil, because Mike Mignola grew up a Catholic and learned things while writing the comic. He isn’t religious, and that’s okay because he’s very talented at what he does…drawing monsters (no really, that’s the documentary) and demons and religion and supernatural activity and paranormal evil and Nazis and making it cool.

As far as I know, there are lots of spinoffs by the author and maybe I can read DC Universe by Mike Mignola but I haven’t been willing to go back.

Hellboy is more like a piece of graphic literary fiction inspired by history which I believe is right up my alley after all the Big Two comics I could handle.

Perhaps some other Dark Horse titles as well? I trust that they publish what I want to read, and I might even read their manga if I can possibly handle it with my sensory issues in that particular medium (and anime, but I’m not going there anymore: this is why I reset my accounts) and maybe Dark Horse has some lighter titles that I can enjoy too? Maybe not everything at Dark Horse is dark, gloomy and strange? Those would be the titles I would want to read.

Thanks.

Those are some very good recommendations…

Thanks.

Si, yo acordar.

Nice.

“Right back at ya, bud.” -Hellboy, Injustice 2