Opening a thread to allow post-series discussion (I won't have read #8 til late tonight myself) now that it's finally completed!

just finished reading it.
i think the whole series is great. first off, i have just been recently introdiced to neil gaiman's work, and i have only really read his sandman stuff up to about #30 so far.
and i dont collect dc at all, i dont really know much about dc.
but anywyas. 1602 was great. and im pretty sure that neil will go somewhere with this title. i heard he was to do two titles for marvel, and im convinced it will be a part two, to 1602.
i love how he portrayed fury and rhojaz in issue 8, i've nver seen the characters written like that before ever.

I too enjoyed Rogers in #8...
The series as a whole... I want to reread it start to finish sometime...when I have time... but my main thought now is
It wasn't a Marvel miniseries.
It may have had Marvel characters, but that's not what makes Marvel Marvel. Marvel is a certain style of story, just as DC is a certain style or Toho studios has a style. This series doesn't match that, and that fact made the comic feel inherantly not quite right. That's why I want to reread it so. To read it as if it were not from Marvel to see how it stands in that light.

I loved the series. I hope to some day get it on TPB, because I want to put the original copies away. Not for money reasons, but because these were some of the best comics I've read in a while.
I figure I'll give them one last peek before I put them away.

I enjoyed how he teased us with the whole spider and hulk business. He's great at adding suspense, that's for sure. Who would've thought it was Rohjaz all along.

1602 was one of the best series I've read in a while. There were bits that didn't work, but overall...wow. Issue 8 was probably the messiest of the bunch. Neil apparently had to negotiate hard for the longer page count, but the truth is, he still needed a few pages more. The pacing was off. The secret origin of Rojhaz, in particular, needed fleshing out. Still, a great issue. I was especially moved by the scenes where Donal explained why it was so hard to be Thor.

Some of my problems with the issue, I realized afterward, had less to do with pacing than with gaps in my knowledge of Marvel trivia. What was the Infinity Thingamabob? And why did it pop up just as Captain America was entering his final moments? Could someone explain? Please? Oh, and who was the President-for-Life?

--Daniel

Hey, I had to think about but isn't the 'President-for-Life' in fact the 'Purple Man'? Ya, know the old DD villian whose power was that anything he said must be obeyed. Bendis did some cool things with the character in the last Alias storyline.

Wasn't one of the cool things Bendis did with the Purple Man...y'know...killing the character?

--Daniel

Good observation. Kudos.

I've read up through 7 so far. (Still have to pick up #8) But I noticed a quote in issue #5 that is related to Sandman.

1602 Issue 5, pg 4 - Fury reads a sign in front of the school "Omnia mutantur " and says "all things change, but some changes are harder than I dreamed."

Sandman Issue 74, pg 22 - Daniel mentions to Master Li "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit - Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost."

Are there any other Sandman references in 1602?

Not impressed. I read #3 to #7, borrowed from a cousin. I wouldn't buy it myself.

There are times when you come away from Gaiman with the satisfying feeling of having read a great story. And there are times when you just feel like you've watched him pull off a clever trick, like those ridiculously convoluted sestinas he likes so much.

"A Study in Emerald" is so much better! After I read that, I walked off in a daze, muttering "Damn... that was good... " And for a while afterwards I felt too exalted to read anything written by mere mortals. Sandman had that quality in spades, and there were glimmerings of that in the novels. "1602" was a clever performance. "A Study in Emerald" was wow material.

1602 was fantastic!
I was a little disappointed in 8, as an ending to this story. It seemed to make the series just a prequel to whatever comes next, which I am betting will be the war against the President for Life.
Something that seemed a little off to me: The lizards running around made me think that Roanoke was not in America at all, but in the Savage Land, did anyone else get that impression?
And where is the information on what comes next, does anybody know?

can someone tell me who is running for president, against captain america in issue 8? a lot of people belived it to be bush, however gaiman revieled that it is a marvel character and should of been obvious.

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Originally posted by GMZoe:
It wasn't a Marvel miniseries.
It may have had Marvel characters, but that's not what makes Marvel Marvel. Marvel is a certain style of story, just as DC is a certain style or Toho studios has a style. This series doesn't match that, and that fact made the comic feel inherantly not quite right. That's why I want to reread it so. To read it as if it were not from Marvel to see how it stands in that light.

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(How do you do multiple post quotes on this thing? Can you even do that?)

For me, the things that made 1602 different from the usual Marvel story are part of what makes it pretty good, just not good enough. Marvel doesn't get into politics or historical background. Neil, Terry Pratchett, William Gibson, a few others, they try to show that history can be interesting, even relevant.

"I enjoyed how he teased us with the whole spider and hulk business."

I did not. If you advertise steak, you damn well better serve up some steak. Come on, as soon as you read that the guy's name was Banner, you expected the big green guy. We get ONE panel.

Oh, and that bit where Neil and Andy Kubert were on the first page, that was just stupid.

Kubert's ok at still shots, but he sucks at action sequences.

For me, the best scenes were Magneto at the stake and Daredevil sneaking up on King John and telling him to leave Ireland alone.

Here's the stuff I spotted, obscure reference-palooza. By strange coincidence, I found out just after reading 1602 that the Roanoke settlement, Ananias Dare, Virginia Dare, are really historical. But they died the first winter.

Shakespeare stuff: 1)Strange is based partly on Prospero, partly on the historical John Dee. Strange even says something like "break my staff and drown my books." But "The Tempest" wouldn't be written til 1611. Though that's not so bad, you could just put that down to the temporal weirdness. 2)Jean Grey disguised as a boy, ensuing love triangle. Shakespeare did this a couple of times. 3)Magneto is Shylock, he's even from Venice.

On the whole I really enjoyed this series. I've read bits and bobs of Marvel comics to catch most of the characters, enough to make it interesting. And I also made sure to read the annotations to catch the bits I didn't (the President for life is Killgrave, the Purple man). I loved guessing at the mysteries presented, and the characters in a new light.

What I loved is seeing the Marvel characters as done by Neil. Basically what their 1602 counterparts would have been like if they lived to the belief systems of their day. I especially liked the incarnation of Matt Murdock/Daredevil.

What I didn't like was Rojhaz/Captain Americas explanation of the events that led to 1602. Why "NOT" creamte him? Send the ashes into space or dig a deep hole or something. Surely thats easier than zapping it into oblivion in a big machine? I would definitely have liked a better explanation!

The whole Rojhaz thing was weird. At the end of #7, when it's revealed that Rojhaz is the forerunner, he smirks, like he thinks it'a all so funny.. So I expected he was really one of the trickster Marvel characters. But then in #8, he's revealed as Captain America, and his backstory's solemn, tragic.

The story clanks along, mostly in a predictable way, and when it's not predictable, it's goofy.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being total crap, 10 being godlike magnificence, 5 being dead-center mediocre, I'd give "1602" a 6.

And that's partly what annoys me. Gaiman can do better than this. It's like you visit a cordon bleu chef and then he feeds you takeout burgers. What's up with that?

Gaiman tried to cram too much into 8 issues, and it shows, glaringly. It would've been better if he'd chosen a focus, maybe the X-Men/Witchbreed, and the rest of the Marvel characters were just hinted at, with walk-on scenes and cameos, to be further developed in later issues.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ZoneSeek,

I loved it..I would have probably gotten more out if it if i had been a Marvel fan but I did recognize most of the characters...I loved that Peter Parker never becomes spider man..He just incubates through the story

hi

First of all for everyone who's curious to read what Gaiman has to say about the Bush-purple man controversy, Jason pomerantz has cornered him on this and other matters regarding 1602 in this interview. Sorry if it has been linked or discussed before.

My 2 cents are: although the end for me didn't lived up to the premises I still ejoyed it a lot. and I definetly don't consider it the worse comic of the year although I do think that this year there has been better things that Neil Gaiman has written!! I have also the impression that it could have been a better story if Neil was allowed or allowed himself to go a little over the number of pages initially planed. From the interview it lookes like there's a lot of stuff that Neil wrote and didn't end-up in the final draft. May-be, just may-be, things would have been a little more clear and the storyline smoother having those more pages. But then again I'm a gaimanian junkie in abstinence who's dreaming about an eventual addictional dose!!!

Clever inventiveness isn't the same thing as a great story. "Midsummer Night's Dream" won an award, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that Gaiman admitted it wasn't so great in terms of story. Neil's buddies Wolfe and Pratchett are great at coming up with surprising little things, but the narrative is still paramount.

I reread the series. It bears repeating, Kubert is truly horrible at action sequences.

Grey's death, I didn't feel a thing. You know a story's in trouble if a character dies and you just don't care.

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I'm a gaimanian junkie in abstinence who's dreaming about an eventual addictional dose!!!

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I feel your pain. There's a few diehards like us who still hang around hoping that lightning will strike again. Maybe 1602 and Study in Emerald indicate that Gaiman's trying to get back on the radar.