Marvel's First Alien Series Announced!

[426Buddy]

I stand corrected

[Voodoo Magic]

And with 5 stars (how we used to do things around here), if you're going with half stars, it's really just another 10 scale system.

Yep

Yeah, you're going to have the same differences described with a 5 point or 10 point scale.

Maybe we should go to 7 point system! 

Just look at Rotten Tomatoes as the way the U.S. looks at things. Anything under 60% or under 6/10 is a failure and represents just degrees of failure. Because basically... if your product gets as many things wrong as it does right... it does not pass muster.

RT is really more of a two point system, fresh and rotten. They do their own thing.

Sure, the individual critic determines if their review results in a recommend or not recommend, fresh or rotten, based on where they individually determine that fail line is (or RT will determine that for them if left undetermined)...

...but the Rotten Tomatoes side, they are an aggregator of reviews, of recommends and not-recommends from critics, that is percentage based. And 60% or 6/10 is their pass/fail line, their fresh or rotten decider, not 50%.  If it falls below that 60%, it's all degrees of failure/rotten. Now mainting 75% or higher gets you that certified fresh. We get excited to see a movie in that 90% range, and we're more doubtful of a film that has 10% positive than 45%.

So it's all about that pass/fail line. And Grading/Rating is synonymous to so many people. Do I think often it's regional, and often always going to be perceived differently based on where you live and your educational system? Sure. Here in the US, 5 out of 10, half wrong / half right equals failure. It seems in the UK, not so much.



Probably the best way to overcome all this where the podcast is concerned is attach a word to every grading number "9 = Excellent" spoken in every podcast, so no matter what perspective someone is coming from region based or not, they know exactly what someone means. Or drop the number entirely, considering it's coming from a spoken media. A simple fix I think.

[Nightmare Asylum]

Alternatively, not rating things numerically or with stars but instead merely stating your opinion on a particular piece of work also does the job without any weird preconceived baggage that comes along with a particular "rating." 

[Voodoo Magic]

Alternatively, not rating things numerically or with stars but instead merely stating your opinion on a particular piece of work also does the job without any weird preconceived baggage that comes along with a particular "rating." 

Ah, yes, Occam's Razor - the simplest solution is usually the best.

But alas, I digrsss. RidgeTop and I alone are proof that people in the U.S. could & do take scoring a different way than someone in the U.K. for instance. We have for years. I think sites like IGN does a good job avoiding that confusion with labels next to their scores.

[XenoHunter99]

The podcast was fun. No one was that enthused with the series.

Re: Rating scales: I look at those as simple scale with 1 being terrible and 10 being impossibly great! 5 is sort of OK, mediocre, whatever.

Re: Artwork: I agree most people don't care as long as it looks good. They're not plugged into the theft of fanart (which studio reps too often treat as their property) or evidence of extensive tracing. I do have a few thoughts about it. First, drawing a comic is no trivial undertaking. A 32 page book has something like 500 figure drawings in it - pictures of the characters doing whatever in the book. As a subject, the Alien - any sort of xenomorph - is a bit demanding. Yes, one can abstract it down to simplicity; but people respond to detail. And detail takes time.

My preference is for actual fresh drawing compared to tracing. The fresh drawing may have more energy and better flow (though there are plenty of stiff drawings floating around). But in illustration, most any means of getting the picture done is considered ok. Projection, tracing, digital paint-over, you name it might be considered ok, depending on the circumstance. And there is the issue of perceived quality. How well did the artist capture a character's likeness? How do the colors look? And so on.

It's not a situation where the characters are intentionally drawn in a generic way so that readers can more easily imagine themselves as those characters. There are still stylized works; but these days, people like the characters to really look like the characters in every frame. And achieving that likeness by whatever means makes the comic that much more seductive. And in an Alien comic, the creature is an important character.

[Voodoo Magic]

I enjoyed reading your perspective/analysis XenoHunter99👍

[XenoHunter99]

Thanks Voodoo and cheers to you 

[Kimarhi]

When I was in HS we had harder scale than when I was in college.  In college it was the ten point scale, in HS it was made up bullshit.

100-93 A
85-92 B
84-75-C
74-65-D
64 and below F.

It is weird that when I do use the 100 point scale, I use my HS grading scale though, and not the college ten point scale.

[Nostromo]

[HuDaFuK]

I don't get the over-thinking/needless complicating of the 1-10 scale, or equating it to educational grades.

1 is shit, 10 is excellent, anything in between is a sliding scale. I don't see how or why anyone would make it more complicated than that.

[BlueMarsalis79]

If you still don't get it after reading all this in full clarity I don't know what to tell you.

[[cancerblack]]

I don't get the over-thinking/needless complicating of the 1-10 scale, or equating it to educational grades.

1 is shit, 10 is excellent, anything in between is a sliding scale. I don't see how or why anyone would make it more complicated than that.

It's one of those things where so many people do something wrong that doing it right is meaningless because nobody will understand it correctly.

[Corporal Hicks]

It annoys me, so we'll be working off the same hymn sheet going forwards. 

[Engineer]

It annoys me, so we'll be working off the same hymn sheet going forwards. 

Can we just keep it simple? Like:
3 stars for great
19 thumbs-up for good
6 smiley faces and 6 sad faces for mediocre
13 $ for its just a cash-grab
2 facepalms for bad
And 9 💩 for really really bad

[Local Trouble]

Garbage Tier vs. God Tier

No middle-ground.