Rolling Comic Books 2023

Anyone going for this one, coolest thing I've seen in a while
https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/thomas-woodruff/products/francis-rothbart-the-tale-of-a-fastidious-feral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9HHmAK63GY

I don't know. A Gary Panter endorsement is nothing to sneeze at, but $75 is a lot of money, and it looks kind of ponderous.

Review here is largely negative: Comics Daze (scroll down).

I'm fine with that, Woodruff understood in the interview that a lot of people would really not get on with it, for multiple reasons.

Vehlmann & Kerascoet - Beautiful Darkness

Quite an extreme mixture of naiveté, cuteness and thoughtless cruelty. There's a scene in here that is a contender for the most upsetting thing I've ever seen in a comic. The watercolors are lovely and it's a stirring story but I didn't find this as satisfying as Beauty was. Still very worthwhile. Loved the maggot eating girl.

Yep, I remember that one. Horrifying.

Horrifying in a different way - One-Star Squadron by Russell/Lieber. An odd, slightly soul-crushing superhero Office Space.

Just read Little Bird by Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram. It came out in 2019 but I couldn't find any references to it in the rolling comic threads. The art is gorgeous, kinda reminds me of Moebius. The story is a little thin but it's so nice to look at that I can't fault it. There are a couple of instances where I can't tell exactly what's happening; energy blasty vacuum things, but it doesn't bother me much. There's a prequel scheduled to come out at some point this year.

I have a pile of serious comics to read but I've been stressed lately so I'm working through my kid's Raina Telgemeier books instead. Never thought I'd be reading Babysitter Club graphic novels.

This is spoilers/speculation about Beautiful Darkness but I saw a lot of reviews simply baffled about what was happening in it. I thought it seemed quite clear that the guy in the shack killed the little girl but beyond that: the varying style of the characters led me to believe that all those little people are toys, and the painful memories hinted at by the main character suggests to me that she or maybe even all the toys inherited the consciousness of the dead girl

Grant's Substack blog finally gets to ILC foundation stone Seaguy:

https://grantmorrison.substack.com/p/273-seaguy-week-captain-lotharius

Man those kids in the Drifting Classroom can't catch a break.

Loving these EC reprints from Dark Horse.

Also on a She-Hulk bender because she’s my comic book crush. Read the original series which occasionally had it’s moments. Halfway through Byrne’s Fantastic Four run and she just joined. I’m grateful that after 30 issues or so Byrne realized he didn’t have to cram The Catchphrases into every issue. IT’S CLOBBERIN TIME FLAME ON IT’S CLOBBERIN TIME FLAME ON

I guess that’s the drawback of binging these things. Probably not ad aggravating if it’s month to month.

Vehlmann & Kerascoet - Satania

Like Journey To The Centre Of The Earth but an increasingly exotic and strange hell is waiting for the team. The characters hardly ever seem as worried as you'd expect them to be but this is really fantastic, the colors are particularly good.

This is a review of the 41 volumes of Berserk when Miura was present.

The first 14 volumes are really solid and after the that the quality of the story comes and goes. There were a few times I thought it wouldn't recover but eventually it always becomes as thrilling and emotional as it used to be. It's one of my favorite fantasy stories and one of my favorite comics but it has serious problems.

The quality usually takes a dive when the story goes off in a diversion and recovers when it gets back to the main plot thread. The monkey man was wisely left out the anime because it dilutes the impact of what comes later, the fairy forest, troll rampages, sea monsters/pirates and magic school sections go on far too long and I wish those parts had been summarized quickly.
After volume 14 I think the addition of Farnese, Serpico, the religious zealot chapters and battles with the Kushan empire were as good as anything that came before. There's other good sections but I'm not going to try and remember everything.

The comic relief is woeful and the cutesiness gets worse and worse. I wish Isidro had never been included. Puck used to be tolerable but there comes a point where the writers don't know what to do with him. Schierke is not necessarily a bad character but I didn't like the style her parts of the story brought along, it's like Harry Potter meets older Final Fantasy games and a lot of the characters start looking like cosplayers rather than warriors and magicians.

I never warmed to the face drawings, some of the art team are stunningly talented (settings, monsters, architecture and the less pretty characters are reliably impressive) but I don't know who they are or what part Miura was doing. Along with the comic relief and worsening cutesiness comes the worst art, often with emoticon facial expressions. I think some of the later volumes used 3d modeling and occasionally it's a bit jarring.

I probably will keep buying the next volumes by the remaining creative team, the art doesn't look as strong but I hope what remains of the story makes it worth it.

I really liked the dog pulling the coffin in the desert and Rickert's visiting the new kingdom, surprisingly strong given how much I dislike the way younger characters are portrayed.

Dark Horse are doing a possibly huge reissue project of Richard Corben books they haven't already put out and I wonder just how much of a sucker I'll be for this because I have maybe 80% of his work at maximum and a couple of books in french editions. Do I need complete Murky World in english? I guess I'll get it and complete Mutant World if that comes out and see what the story is actually about; but Corben's books usually have very minimal plots so I don't think Murky World will hold many surprises.

I think Dimwood (his new book) will be coming out too.

Along with complete Murky World, Den 1 and 2 have been announced and I'm a tad disappointed the series wont be in larger omnibius books. I've never had Densaga or Denz but they're outside the main 5 books and I'm not positive they will happen. Would like to think they are reissuing everything the Corben family has copyright to.

Bomba is another great one for fans of Osamu Tezuka's adult phase, where he's trying to catch up with the counter-cultural developments in Japanese cinema and manga. Mistreated boy summons up the ghost of a horse that belonged to his father's general in WWII to kill his enemies. Exactly as deranged as that sounds. Totally hopeless from a gender perspective, but I dig its crazy eyed nihilism. It's kind of great, it feel like every time I hit the comic shop there's another Tezuka reissue I'd never heard of before.

The Nib is shutting down this summer after 10 years; a real loss.

Oh no! That's a real bummer.

I've never been especially interested in Bonten Taro (nothing against him) but Shameless Bastards Of The Night is an amazing title

Someone was asking for analysis videos recently and Living The Line is a really interesting channel (they also publish?) with loads of comics I've never heard of

Cool, I'll check that out.

Reading the collected edition of Blood Of The Virgin. Enjoying, but obv I'm an easy mark for a comic about working for a fictionalized version of Corman in the early 70's.

Really been digging all the youtube and social media discussion of comic art reproduction with an emphasis on colour, this often features Jose Villarrubia. Through Kayfabe I was very happy to discover Japan Book Hunter (he has his own youtube channel, shop and discord) and discover that a lot of my manga holy trails are actually attainable if I'm content with text I can't read, but here's hoping Manga Zombie will be translated soon (there's a Richard Corben chapter too) and I've heard there's talk with the author to get some of his favourites in English.

Collected edition of Blood Of The Virgin out and gathering lots of hype in the usual corners. If you have a fascination with the Corman exploitation model of cinema you'll have a good time with it. Also some interesting stuff about the dynamics between protagonist's iraqi jewish heritage and his wife's eastern european ashkenazi background.

R.I.P. John Romita Sr.

Millar outed himself as an RFK supporter and Joe Rogan fan on Twitter, lol. Don’t think it was an ironic bit

Has he ever evinced any political position more detailed than "I am an idiot and I watch TV"? Even in Saviour, it's unlikely that much nuance was going to develop if it had concluded.

Worst thing Grant Morrison ever did was hoist that cunt into the comics world.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b_SRl8UuvnM/TxGvPY_oxeI/AAAAAAAAIxs/4LFKfHvjPrM/s1600/Swampy+165+Chester+Gingrich.jpg

lol he got caught signal boosting some Peterson bullshit recently and did the "I'm a socialist but it's important to listen to ppl outside your bubble!" thing.

https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/sword-sorcery-at-warren-part-10-1980/

Don't know how comics companies have had their thumbs up the asses for so long in not publishing a complete Voltar collection

Wow! I've been searching for years for a comic i read as a kid (maybe 8 or 9)that i found in my friends garage. Two adventurers being attacked by a giant thorny vine. It left an indelible impression.
I'd checked through Eerie, 1994, epic illustrated, heavy metal... no joy. Never thought to look in The Rook... there it is in that link, Voltar!
I can rest now.

The only Voltar I could ever get was in a magazine called Magic Carpet

Seems I have posted this before but Blood Of The Virgin is really really good.

There's also been a reprint of Katie Skelly's "The Agency", which is basically a sci-fi spy smut comic, clearly influenced by Jean Claude Forest. Of niche appeal I guess, but it's pretty cool to see a female artist/writer tackle this kind of stuff, and the focus is def on female pleasure.

Dark Horse has just kicked off an effort to collect the complete Creepy and Eerie. It doesn't seem inconceivable that they'll get around to some of Warren's shorter runs, as well (dunno if Vampira is in the cards, though).

Dark Horse already issued hardcover collections of Creepy and Eerie, and these are now paperback editions of the same. I haven't checked the repro on them, but the image quality on the Creepy Presents Steve Ditto and Alex Toth hardcover volumes that Dark Horse also brought out, and that I do own, is pretty poor - obviously not shot from originals or even good stats. So I'm not sure that Dark Horse would really do justice to all that Alcala penmanship even if they were to bring out Rook collections.

I was happy with those Dark Horse reprints but my biggest issue was that they still don't own Vampirella so it made the artist focused books very incomplete unless the artist never did anything on that magazine. Would have liked Tom Sutton, Reed Crandall and Alcala books among many others.

I've been keeping up with the paperback EC Archives which have made me pretty happy. I tried the first tpb of Creepy and it's good, but not as good as EC. Hoping it gets better as they go along. The twist endings don't work quite as well for some reason.

Eerie was a powerful book. I shoplifted the one with the bright pink cover (#75) when I was 11, and was moved enough to write a letter to the editor. They printed it, after jazzing up the prose quite a bit lol

https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/md/md778269951.jpg

1) The Demons Of Jeremiah Cold [Bill DuBay/Jose Ortiz] 12p

2) The Freaks: The One Eyed Shall Be King! [Budd Lewis/Leopold Sanchez] 6p

3) Oogie And The Worm! [Bill DuBay/Esteban Maroto] 10p

4) Invasion [Esteban Maroto/Jose Bea] 5p reprinted from Dracula Book One (1972) [story

miscredited to Bea]

5) Gillian Taxi And The Sky Pirates [Budd Lewis/Luis Bermejo] 16p

My shoplifting career ended for good not long after; getting caught once was enough.

Richard Corben - Shadows On The Grave

This is in the style of old horror comic anthologies, and it's overwhelmed with cliches, but most of the stories are so brief that it's hard to be too disappointed by the endings, they barely have a middle section.
A quarter of the book is a Greco-Roman sword and sorcery story called Denaeus, it's supposed to be related to Den but I can't find much similarity or connection beyond basic genre elements and the main characters losing their hair. It also needed a bit more originality and the dialogue doesn't really try to stay in the period at all. The panels seem crammed at times and the storytelling is occasionally unclear, which is unusual for Corben.

Corben written most of this himself with a few guest authors. It's in black and white except the colour bonus pages at the end. It looks mostly great and has greytone rendering as nice as any comics I've seen. I particularly liked the rainy forest island setting and the look of the carnival dancer. The covers look surprisingly rushed by comparison.

Annoyingly there's one good drawing of Mag The Hag and Gurgy Tate from the first issue that wasn't collected in this book but the paper upgrade is a significant improvement for the art reproduction over the cheaper looking serialization. This isn't the first time Dark Horse left out non-story pages from a Corben collection.

Despite all the shortcomings I still like it a lot, but this is a tough form and even the best writers are likely to let you down on this subgenre. Doing this style of horror comic could seem like playing it safe but it's actually too ambitious in the time frame it was written in.

Gataro Man's stuff is hilarious, would love to read some to find out how much sense it makes. Nsfw, lots of shitting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVsXGbbRbeI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKsBolmqags

Can't believe there hasn't been a single American book of his, maybe outside anthology appearances. C'mon Fantagraphics.

Wonder if he has anything to do with the Cho Aniki games or if whoever made them was just kindred spirits?

Gataro Man has been published in French though. His stuff gets funnier the more of it you read, the sheer repetition of gags actually creates a giddy feeling.

As they were the latest items posted on the comics bootleg site I use, I read the two Mark Millar volumes of Nemesis, can someone recommend a good eye bleach? Yes I only have myself to blame.

He's a socialist, you know. But also Jordan Petterson has a lot of interesting ideas!

despite his consistent voice and genuine talent Millar's work is so all over the place in quality (and frankly taste) but i can't quite give up on him

As far as ppl of that era go I've enjoyed Garth Ennis morphing into a WWII dad.

So I tried out Richard Corben's Murky World.

I don't get it. The coloring is really nice? Sometimes the characters are realistic and at other times they're really blocky and goofy looking, and every woman has HUGE breasts and the plot is nonsensical. It's just standard Heavy Metal junk, not for me.

I did read Galaxy recently which I liked a lot, and I've been keeping up with Hawkgirl which also has Galaxy in it. It's the first time I've picked up floppies since I was a kid and it's a painful way to read comics!

Mark Millar had a trash run on Swamp Thing. Ugh.

That pretty much sums up Corben's work.

Never enjoyed Corben either, like looking at badly made plasticine figures hitting each other.

Monica out in a month. It might be Clowes’ best book, and definitely his best conceived-as-a-graphic-novel novel. (But would have been mindblowing if it first dropped as a run of revived Eightballs, and only revealed itself as one work upon reading the second issue or w/e.)

That’s exciting to hear. I really enjoyed Patience but iirc it fell apart a bit towards the end. Still haven’t read the one before that.

Corben rarely had interesting scripts but I have most of his stuff

Murky world had really distorted faces even by his standards. My favourites are House On The Borderland (nice adaptation), Warren era stuff for Mario Bava colour effects, Rowlf for fine drawing, Den 2 for effects and really disturbing shit.

I got a few Masami Fukushima books and I'm looking through Saint Muscle, extremely eccentric stuff but it's hard to tell who is doing the best of the drawing as he worked with plenty of assistants, often an annoyance with manga, all these uncredited artists, sometimes Wikipedia will tell you about the assistants but that information might be very incomplete.

Not sure how many more Defiler Monk books I want because they were really expensive

I really wish Corben had done of that fine line drawing style of Rowlf, more of that colour from the Warren era even if he had been using different techniques. Wish he had done more straight painting and less of the computer experimentation, but I think he maybe wanted to see what he could do with different tech all the time.

I kept thinking those naked wrestling men by Man Gataro looked like Tezuka and Miyazaki

I think he did designs for the Power Instinct fighting game series?

Corben did some work on American Splendor which was pretty good.

Gataro Man has been published in French though. His stuff gets funnier the more of it you read, the sheer repetition of gags actually creates a giddy feeling.

― gjoon1, Saturday, 26 August 2023 02:28

It's so brilliant that every time people fall down the stairs they get hit by a speeding truck

It's sad but all the best comic artists rarely get good scripts, look at all the classic graphic novels and the art is usually second or third rate

Must be lovely being a comics writer and seeing all your ideas pissed away with perfunctory art

Almost zero of the best comics artists actually need scripts tho. (And the only two REALLY good writers-of-scripts in EL assembly-line comics were both also published as writer/artists.)

((Notably more examples of long-running good writer+artist partnerships without the insertion of other assembly line steps, too))

Sorry for acting so dismissive in the last few posts, I've been anxious lately, need to calm down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSjWL3ny9Ac

I feel like Kaluta is one of the least reprinted among my favourites, always heard that The Shadow: In The Coils Of The Leviathan is one of his better books but it's never cheap (apart from the individual issues?), there was a more recent Shadow book but it was a collaboration with Russ Heath that didn't really call to me.
Really didn't care for the new colours on the Starstruck reprints.

https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/40599/34887387_1.jpg?v=8D72827834AD690

I know it's unsurprising to say that the new Simon Hanselmann is sad and gross but boy I think I may have hit my limit - doesn't help that it's mostly about the kids.

That Madam Xanadu one-shot is a classic old school comic book.

I've always wondered about Hanselmann's stuff but never really gave it a shot. I'd occasionally thumb through an issue and the writing never grabbed me.

If you’re seeing his single issues, probably worth grabbing as an investment — they leap to $60-170 on eBay within months

(I think they read much funnier in color, for the ones that do get collected)

I just finished reading The Dark Knight Returns and... wtf? I thought this was supposed to be good? Was it good for the times or something? Because the plotting is sloppy, characters are undeveloped, sometimes it's hard to understand what is actually happening.

Before that I read Year One which I was really impressed by, but ugh. No, no, no.

You won't get much of an impassioned defense from me. At the time DKR and Watchmen were seen as the two works that made superheroes "grow up" but as time passes and Miller's fash leanings become more apparent it becomes more and more obvious how adolescent DKR really is. Year One def a better work, also nicer art imo.

tbf tho "characters are underdeveloped" - book is predicated on you knowing most of these characters already

I guess I mean the setup of newer characters; Robin, the Mutants. It feels rushed and plodding at the same time.

I haven't re-read DKR in a while, but it's pretty much burned in my brain from so many readings as a kid, and I hafta disagree with these takes. Fwiw, I think Year One is boring...

Agree that Year One has 'nicer art' than DKR - I think by that point Miller and Janson weren't meshing especially well together. I once saw some of the original artwork from DKR - huge page size! - where Miller had actually reinked the artwork after it was printed, suggesting he wasn't happy with the way his pencils had been treated.

i re-read it recently and it felt like getting back in touch with an old friend

the sequels confused me though. robin's dressed like a leopard, why?

the error in the swastika on one of the pages though, that always puzzled me. i think it was corrected later.

I still can't believe they did sequels (I mean, I can "believe" it, but...). The original felt so perfectly complete.

(book 3, page 2 for the error. it's still there in the 10th anniversary hardback)

If anything, Miller's decline makes DKR look better as time passes.
Gotham Central is a worthy spiritual continuation of Year One, but no one's really come up with anything to replace DKR.
Morrison made a great landmark Superman title with All-Star Superman (compared to Miller's tepid All-Star Batman), but turning Batman into a time-traveling caveman or a franchise operator didn't quite make for a DKR replacement, though I'd take those arcs over DKR2 & 3 any day (If you thought DKR was sloppy and incoherent...)

I guess you could think of Batman Beyond as the DKR competitor?

DKR's a classic! Klaus Janson's inks - classic! The colours - classic! The story - super pompous but whatever!

It's odd that DKR was the OG "superheroes for adults" comic, because, more than anything, it's a great comic for teenagers to read. And then grow out of. And never read again.

I agree Year One is better - but the Daredevil run is miles better than either.

See, I think Watchmen is more "adolescent": kinda pretentious; squarely in the wheelhouse of a precocious youth... something you grow out of (even back then, though, I preferred DKR).

watchmen wouldn't make my Alan Moore top10 but ain't no precocious youths interested in pirate comics come on now

Well not specifically no, but that was part of the package…

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying a lot of classic 2000AD - getting towards the end of the Rogue Trooper omnibus - and I will say that one thing that I think separates me from a lot of the ppl writing for that mag back in the day is my childhood was not spent obsessing about battles from WWI&II.

It is really weird in retrospect. Do you still get kids obsessed with war who make model airplanes? Do Blue Peter style children still exist?

I still had friends who played with little green soldiers but my leftist parents would have none of this. Mind you I got into Arthurian legends and LOTR instead so still got excited by bloodshed. GI Joe was another thing my parents steered me clear off, though from all I've seen since it doesn't bear much resemblance to actual war.

I'd guess kids today who gravitate towards this kind of stuff would be into mecha animes or militaristic shooters (Call of Duty kinda the most direct equivalent?).

Isn't more that there was an existing (and successful) war comics magazine that Mills and Wagner got asked to set up an alternative to?

Which is all part of the "the generation above theirs processing wtf happened, through art"

there were a few, Battle and Action, not to mention all the Commando type things (which still exists)

Andrew I'd argue it's several generations who were obsessed - yes there were successful war comics out at the time, so ver kids were reading that stuff and the 2000ad ppl knew this, but I think the artist's loving renditions, and the writer's tendency to make their sci-fi scenarios so often end up WWI/WWII comics in disguise, wasn't just about playing to the audience, they were really into that stuff too!

https://cloud.firebrandtech.com/api/v2/img/111/9780711290761/XL
I can see why they didn't hire Rob Liefield for this one.

not out until March here, let us know how it is

lol not to be all jaymc spreadsheet but don't you both live in Australia?

I’m extremely unlikely to read this.

Needs a scratch n’ sniff foot fetish edition

Correction to something I said upthread... The Shadow: In The Coils Of Leviathan was mostly drawn by Gary Gianni and others, Kaluta only did covers and illustrations

I have lived elsewhere for six years now.

Did read a due-out-in-translation-next-year GN yesterday, that in its lurid pop-art/Peter-Maxy visuals I at first took to be inspired by the Jodelle translation, and the plot riffing on the controlling nature of hi-tech-equipped music biz svengalis to be a throwback to Phantom Of The Paradise and The Apple, until it turned out to be from 1968.

Did anyone get Perramus? It completely whooshed past me when I wasn't paying attention, even though I knew it was coming out.

Yes, I have a copy - did it go out of print? I slightly prefer the Mort Cinder style but Perramus is kind of phenomenal in terms of sheer sustained pictorial effect - you can tell ppl like Sienkiewicz and McKean have paid it very close attention.

Apart from the fantagraphics site, prices are mostly very high

Bummer

I hope this reprint series is still happening, I think the Evita book came out recently. I'm surprised the Lovecraft book still hasn't happened because that seems like the most commercially viable one, I remember David Paleo telling me how amazing it was something like 20 years ago, often been tempted to get a spanish or french edition of it (same with Dino Battaglia, except italian).

Looking through Fantagraphics recent and upcoming has been impressive, A John Severin book of westerns, the sequel to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Bill Everett's Venus, complete Web Of Horror.
I'd like to check this out in the shops before I decide
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/the-atlas-comics-library-no-3-in-the-days-of-the-rockets

I'm so grateful that comics can be flipped through before you read (presuming it's not sealed), films have sometimes reliable trailers and reading the first pages of a prose book never seems like a good indicator to me. And I like that I can get the gratification of good pictures before I actually read the thing properly (even though it spoils the impact of the storytelling a little) and a prose book really has to wait until the far off decade when I get around to reading it.

---NSFW---
Never heard of this guy (he draws actual faces!), I pre-ordered it. NSFW
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/milky-way
https://imginn.com/mig.vila/

Yeah, a decent Battaglia English language collection is sorely needed. Since Kim Thompson's death, I suspect that Fantagraphics no longer has a Euro comics advocate pushing for things like that.

I've kept up with the Breccia reprints, but I slept on some of those new Corto Maltese translations and ppl now want STUPID money for those - and again, I don't imagine it's that economically viable to reprint any time in the near future (the fact that they are reprinting those three Alex Toth volumes does gives me some slight hope ...) And I suspect those lovely Sergio Toppi collections will go the same way fairly soon ...

Definitely looking forward to those Atlas volumes from Fanta. And this looks really interesting as well:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/frank-johnson-pioneer-of-american-comics-vol-1-wallys-gang-early-years-1928-1949-and-the-bowser-boys-1946-1950

I haven't moved on the Toppi books yet but the prices seem fine so far. I find it so difficult to tell with comics what will become rare and expensive, it's so much more unpredictable than the other books I buy (aside from print on demand books that get deleted).

Talking of Fantagraphics, this all seems like a bit of a mess:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

Dang. I was wondering what the hold up was.

My initial reaction to that, which is biased due to my work in museums and galleries and is most likely unfair to Emil Ferris, is that working with artists is a total pain in the ass. Especially if there's something like a deadline involved. I say that as an artist myself, and I recognize that corporations are not to be trusted.

I liked My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, but not as much as I was hoping to. The art was often beautiful but the story felt a little shaggy. It didn't bother me too much because that was sort of baked in to the nature of the narrative and the character that was telling the story.

Still, I've been looking forward to the second book.

What a mess. Despite some wonderful art I abandoned the first book without even realising it wasn’t even the complete story. I would have been pretty pissed off to have got to the end and found it wasn’t the whole thing.

That whole lawsuit is confusing as hell. Still, glad that the book is finally coming out, been waiting since 2017!

https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/08/shigeru-mizuki-1922-2015.html
https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/07/kazuo-umezu.html

NSFW, very strange
https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/07/ichiro-ijima.html

Umezu draws some of the most intense faces

Apart from the fantagraphics site, prices are mostly very high

40% off sale on the fantagraphics site next Monday btw

Thanks

Never seen this one before
https://www.comics.org/issue/18626/cover/4/
Are any of these ever as funny as they seem from the covers? Has DC ever done a compilation of their silliest 40s-50s-60s comics?

Always wondered about this one, myself.

https://i.imgur.com/7bI7M0V.png

^That's v good art, except Supes looks 'roided-out

Saint Muscle review

I read Udagawa Takeo's online abridged english edition of Manga Zombie perhaps a decade ago and Masami Fukushima's manga became holy grails for me; I didn't always get on with his art (how much of what I like or what I don't like is by assistant artists?) but it's a special kind of crazy that I can never get enough of and a precursor to things like Fist Of The North Star. There's some impressive architectural drawings including an immense palace encrusted with the bodies of petrified body builders, an evil Moby Dick and cruel rulers dressing peasants up like bizarre sheep before they torture them. I can't read the japanese text but I think I got the gist of it. I gather that Tsutomu Miyazaki (who unfortunately shares a name with a notorious serial killer) only filled in the dialogue, I don't know how common a practice this is in japan and if Fukushima's other books are written the same way. I think this book is much nicer looking than his monk books, it has a really off-kilter look and something reminiscent of Jack Kirby. Really bizarre but Prince Shotoku is even crazier.

Superman Family cover is by Neal Adams, btw

Last night I finished the Daredevil Frank Miller omnibus (does not include Born Again or the John Romita Jr stuff). It was okay, but not as great as I was expecting. I suppose it had a lot of depth compared to what was beside it in the spinner rack, and the art was frequently quite good. Maybe I had to have read it back in the day. I probably need to give up on Frank Miller, who I’m beginning to suspect is over-rated. Or, I’m not really much of a super hero guy.

xp Thanks, that's good to know!

Something I should have mentioned: I love this establishing location shot where a man's bare ass takes up most of the space
https://www.comipress.com/files/special/mangazombie/fukushima/Saintmuscle005.jpg

xxpost The early 80s Miller DD's were unlike anything else on those racks, believe me. I was snatching them up each month as they appeared. They were something else.

Amazon wouldn't publish that Saint Muscle review because they said it looks like an attack on the author! I guess "crazy" "cruel" "serial killer" is what upset them. This is really dumb. Not as worrying as youtube but dumb.

Another great falseknees monthlong story (he does one every year now)

Starts here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzH5BnDLWhn/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Picked up an issue of Spirou as is my obligation whenever visiting France; can report Blutch is working on a Lucky Luke story and it looks lush.

Yes, hoping Cinebooks issue an English language translation of that next year.

I've actually been buying floppies this year - well, the facsimile editions that Marvel and DC are putting out. DC in particular are reprinting some incredibly rare (and expensive) Golden Age comics; I particularly like having the ads and the back up strips, really puts everything in context and - just for a moment - you can imagine yourself buying Batman 1 fresh off the newsstand.

Is it scans or recolored?

The Marvel facsimiles are all recolored; the colour on the DC ones, especially the Golden and Silver Age reprints, seem much more faithful to the originals without necessarily being scans.

Signs I'm getting to old for superhero comics: I spend a lot of time thinking about the practicality of things. Any sort of headgear that pokes out is going to constantly get knocked around. How many times does batman's little horns get donked while getting in and out of the batmobile? Does the batmobile have extra clearance to allow for the horns (or ears, I guess). Capes are always going to be a problem. If you use the bathroom and you have to sit on the toilet, that cape is going to be on the ground all around the toilet, or else you have to wad it in your lap I guess.

At work I wore a tape measure quite a bit, and that only stuck out an extra inch on my hip. I had to be pretty conscious of it to avoid knocking it on things. I can't imagine Cable with all of his pouches and tubes and extraneous bits.

Does Swamp Thing leave a trail of mulch behind him, wherever he goes?

How exactly is Cyclops visor (or his cool ruby sunglasses) held in place while all of that concussive force is pushing against it?

Do superhero costumes get laundered delicate or heavy duty, like towels?

Finished Monica by Daniel Clowes tonight. Enjoyed it a lot, especially the linked short story format. I need to reread it to get a better sense of how the stories fit together; most are very obvious but there are a few that stuck out as oddballs. The only thing I had read by him before was Ghost World, which was more relatable, but this was bigger and conveyed so much dread.

Capes are always going to be a problem.

Watchmen definitely did a number on capes. Good point on Cyclops’ glasses. I’ve always assumed costumes start smelling funky pretty fast… I remember at least one Spidey that dealt with this.

Found a really lovely piece by Gene Colan (inked by Alcala) in Marvel Preview 23, it starts with a photo sequence and really doesn't look like it's leading into any series. It stills burns me that there's so many good anthology comics and the rights are still tied up for so many of them, unlikely to be reprinted for a long time. I love short pieces but my gripe with anthology comics is that unless you're cutting out the pages, you'll accumulate hundreds of pages of comics you don't care about. I have cut out some pages from anthologies years ago but I can't bring myself to keep doing it. So rather than buying back issues I tend to save pages I want from the pirate sites.

Skywald's comics seem to have fallen into public domain and I see a bunch of print-on-demand reprints of them, some people are doing the same with Charlton. Dark Horse are reprinting Creepy and Eerie in softcover now, I hope it isn't too late for more artist specific collections (which are compromised by Harris owning all the Warren era of Vampirella).

I think this kind of thing might be what sent me down the road of mostly hating work for hire arrangements.

I recently learned about Vampirella… is it worth getting into any of that? The character seems interesting, but her Wikipedia article is absolutely baffling in its complexity.

The thing about the Warren era of Vampirella is that the bulk of it was just an anthology comic like Creepy or Eerie. The main stories that kicked off each issue started off looking like sort of a comedic (unfunny) sexy adventure thing but most of the issues I actually read she was just like a detective with two very old people as sidekicks, just played totally straight.

I downloaded a scanned copy of one of those issues recently, but only read the brief dystopian sci-fi story in the middle (which was unrelated to Vampirella).

Hardly only about comic books, and I guess most of us have heard these arguments before, but this is the best summation of them I've read:

https://buttondown.email/riteshwriter/archive/8the-grift-cycle/

Yeah.

Maybe the writers here will get a decent deal but this looks like IP farming to me and I'm worried this will only get more prevalent
https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/10/the-book-world-still-isnt-diverse-dhonielle-clayton-is-trying-to-change-that/

Says at the end that the adult side of the industry has been reluctant and I hope it stays that way, they should be giving publishing deals to people who will own their copyright.

Been looking at Mort Meskin again, his fine art too and it's amazing how varied his style could be. Wish there was bigger collections of his work, need to get the biography soon. His official site is really good.
http://www.mortmeskin.net/

With you on this, inherently dislike that idea of IP farming/work-for-hire as a gateway for minority artists to get exposure, but I suppose that has always been the case in Marvel and DC comic books, and it has worked out well for some.

The Vampirella covers were always sexier than the interiors.

The series did attract a lot of talent.

RE: Mort Meskin - I have Out of the Shadows, a pretty dece anthology of Meskin strips that Fantagraphics put out in 2012, shot from the comics and looking OK on the whole. Just flicking through now, you can really see the influence on Ditko, especially in a Kid Crusaders strip from 1946. Anyway, this appears to be p cheap still on Euro Amazon and I'm sure elsewhere.

RE: Vampirella - at one point Hammer had the rights to make a Vampirella film, but nothing came of it:
https://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/news/2019/september/calling-all-horror-fans-legendary-hammer-film-vampirella-to-be-performed.aspx

I do have Out Of The Shadows, it seems like a good selection but not sure how much of his DC work it covers if any, is the copyright still tied up? I see that some p-o-d publishers are doing series like Mortified and others, I've seen publishers like this take a chance and bootleg old DC and Marvel stuff.

I think the most obvious influence of Meskin on Ditko is the clusters of floating heads (often utilized in scenes about public opinion or opinions of a certain social circle haunting someone).

I can't recall which comic, but I'm certain Ditko used this photo (Susan Strasberg in Scream Of Fear) as reference, maybe even more than once.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/630644754084908847/

There's an interesting part in Ditko Unleashed where it compares Ditko's idealized Randian statues (in Blue Beetle) to art of idealized soviet workers and made a brief argument that Ditko was conscious of this. I wonder how much control Rand had over her cover art and how much has been the interpretation of editors/publishers, and the tastes of her fans.

I take back what I said about Frank Miller’s Daredevil. I had read the big omnibus
doesn’t have Born Again, so it was underwhelming. Just read Born Again and it’s really great, I get it now. The coloring in those issues is amazing.

I’m keeping up with the Dark Horse Creepy/Eerie paperbacks which are pretty fun. Not as good as EC comics, but the variety in artwork makes it enjoyable.

Creepy/Eerie headz might want to check out the completely complete (including unpublished) Web Of Horror for rolling comics 2024 — Wrightson, Kaluta, Reese &al.

hadn't heard about the unpublished pages!

Rolling Comic Books 2024

Happy New Year! I rhave big love for Mort Meskin as well, esp. his wild early Vigilante splashes. His stuff was often so kinetic but the quality varied wildly as he seemed to have personal issues later on that affected his drawing.

Somebody did a book as a duel tribute to him and Umezu (unusual combo) recently but I havent seen it. He's one of many artists I think might be more celebrated if the rights weren't tied up in so many companies. I think a lot of his work was collaboration too. I ordered the biography, I really like reading about that era of comic artists.