Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

(Except Sfar/Trondheim's Dungeon, I guess)

I'd have to think David Lapham is a fan of Love and Rockets. It's not obvious as an influence in that he's aping the Hernandez brothers, but I got to figure Lapham read that series as a teenager in the 80s and it was something that said, yeah I can go this way on this series.

I loved the first two Stray Bullets hardcovers, then for some reason the third one was really scarce and cost close to $100 here, and then went OOP and they never did a fourth so I’m still in 1996 going “gosh I’d like to read the rest of this series”

Ditto!! I have those first two HCs in a box somewhere and never got any further on my first readthrough because I could never find the third for a reasonable price. It was frustrating.

i'm sorry to be a crank but i've always disliked stray bullets and i find the new issues equally unpalatable.

i also find Yang's Nu-Superman to be a missed opportunity and it suggests he's not any better suited for capes and tights than T.N. Coates is... both are overly wordy and relying on awkwardly plodding plots

i will agree on squirrel girl tho'. Soule's Darth Vader book is shaping up nicely as well.

Brubaker's Kill or Be Killed for Image is pretty solid.
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/kill-or-be-killed

I was surprised as you would be but R Aguirre-Sacasa's 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' is good stuff or leastwise the newest issue is... though the art is emphatically bad:
https://www.previewsworld.com/Article/195555-First-Look-Chilling-Adventures-of-Sabrina-7-from-Archie-Comics

New Groo miniseries for Dark Horse is the treat they always are; the full page panels are astonishing work from sergio... how does this guy still manage to do work of this quality?
https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3000-070/Groo-Play-of-the-Gods-1

WIth the second TPB out, I'm giving Monstress another shot. I like the Final Fantasy style visuals but the story is so jargon heavy and convoluted it's been hard to really embrace.

Isn't Aragones, like, 112 years old at this point? He's astounding.

aragones and stan sakai are two of comics most underrated creators imo simply because we take them for granted

so i was looking to get a compendium of precode horror comics, my understanding was that Four Color Fear from Fantagraphics is a really good one. Is that worthy of a pickup? are there others i could also get? is there any overlap between them?

Don't know Four Color Fear - is it a Craig Yoe joint? I'm kinda dubious abt that guy, but he def unearths some good stuff.

The one I have is The Horror! The Horror! published by Abrams. Pretty dece contextual notes; more than acceptable repro from comic book pages; some really great artists represented; lots of juicy rare cover imagery; comes with a DVD lol. Only downside I wld say is that some of the stories are excerpted rather than reprinted in full. (Also doesn't include any E.C. but that material is easily available in reprint).

it's this one:

http://fantagraphics.com/flog/now-in-stock-four-color-fear-2nd-printing/

http://fantagraphics.com/images/flog/covers/2011/bookcover_fofear.2.jpg

Looks good - the editors John Benson and Greg Sadowski are both E.C. experts and really know their stuff.

Editorial finesse is pretty important when you consider the comics themselves are p much all in the public domain now (apart from E.C., Atlas (notionally owned by Disney now I guess) and DC comics (tho DC's horror comics were v anodyne compared to 'the good stuff')).

Four Color Fear and The Horror! The Horror! are both very good. The Haunt Of Horror series is the only other multi-publisher/multi-artist book I can think of. There's 5 books so far.

I think Craig Yoe is doing a great job. Some people take issue with the reproduction (still miles better than Marvel and DC reprints) and there was some controversy about one book having a printing error, a missing page or something.

Well worth a look...

http://yoebooks.com/horror_books.php

My only issue with Yoe Books is that their artist focused books aren't long enough. The Bob Powell and Tom Sutton books could have been much longer. I think there was a possibility of sequels but it's been years.

I'd highly recommend the first Ditko Archives book and all the Graham Ingels Fantagraphics collections. Best Of Harvey Horrors is good but expensive.

I actually happened to buy the first 3 volumes of This Magazine Is Haunted today (all the good stuff in the 4th volume is in the Ditko Archives series). I don't buy much of this stuff anymore (they're not cheap) but I was amazed by the colour in some of these. I maintain that most old comics look better in black and white but the non-literal colouring in 50s horror comics can be amazing and in some of the This Magazine Is Haunted stories, it looks like some of the colorists really knew what they were doing and pushes competent drawing into amazing art.

Some examples

http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2008/12/secret-of-walking-dead.html
http://creatfeatforever.blogspot.com/2013/12/touch-of-death.html
Bob Powell in this one

Dr Death and Dr Haunt are really cool too.

Those scans have much sharper black than the books I got. Normally I'd prefer sharper line art but I quite like the softer blacks and the way it mixes with the colour in the books.

btw, Tom King is starting a new Mister Miracle book next month and I am very much looking forward to that. He appears to be limiting his workload thus far thankfully.

*Theoretically* that is such a great fit for him, fingers crossed

I'm very excited about this

Marvel just dropped the news that they gave me the reins to make a comic encompassing Uncanny X-Men issues 1-280 into one tight story. #sdcc pic.twitter.com/bEINnmQJRg

— Ed Piskor (@EdPiskor) July 20, 2017

so he's going to ... re-write some old comics?

the majors are so creatively bankrupt

ed piskor? that's awesome!
i'd love to see how he handles it

I think it's not a horrible idea? The way different plot arcs fit together, and the way newer writers rely on plot points from stories that weren't that great.

It reminds me of an article I read about how Stephen King originally thought of his early Dark Tower books as a sketch of a book he'd write later as a more cohesive story. I think he decided a revision of only the beginning from a short story collection into a single work was sufficient.

If nothing else, it gives newer readers a starting point without it being the Readers Digest edition

Not going to lie, I thought KFC/Green Lantern was one of the most fun reads this week.

(Col Sanders gets made an honorary GL at the end for his services to suppressing the Orange Lantern. He offered Larfleeze the opportunity to run a KFC franchise because he has been stealing all the zinger burgers the GLC have been firing into space for publicity reasons. Yes, really.)

ok i gotta read these

let me tell ya, it's no batfudd

Absolutely not, but it is fun.

Anyone else think the Flash's costume is really bad? Jay Garrick's hat is kinda nice but I've always thought all the Flash guys had really dorky costumes.

derf's "my friend dahmer" movie has a trailer; could be good, will almost certainly be depressing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX8ajObK81A

did not know that was happening

Maybe the trailer is misleading but I thought Derf would feature more prominently

I got Lent's Asian Comics overview last week. As I feared, it talks about way more comics than it shows and most of the pictures don't really grab me. Should still be very interesting though.

Here's his new book with Xu Ying focusing entirely on Chinese comics, cartoons and animation.
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/2027

This is very expensive so you might want to wait and hope for a paperback. My copy of Asian Comics was paperback.

http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/stan-lees-universe-c-v-r.html

Nothing most of you didn't already know but I was amused by Lee's Wu-Tang Clan quote and his names for the aborted Playboy characters.

Quite a few questionable claims in there too from the author and some writers.

good article

if you're gonna do a xxx rated cover of your 225th issue and put a censored version on the internet, here's the way to do it i guess
http://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/savage-dragon-issue-225-1.jpg

Lee cooked up one superhero after another: Thunderer! Oxblood! Imitatia! The Streak!

Stan stole all these from Bob Burden iirc

Odd about the Savage Dragon cover, maybe it's a special order variant to be sold discreetly? At points Larsen seemed to want it to be an all-ages comic but now and again he goes heavy on the sex. The violence never stopped but in the last few years I read it, the sex had mostly disappeared.

yeah it's a limited edition variant cover with an all-white modesty cover on top of it.
as part of my quest to read every book the majors release, i've been flipping through it over the past year; the sex (and OTT violence and language) is most definitely still there.
Larsen was great when i was in high school.

I'm just looking at the cover going "..."

same here

and I bought at least one marvel swimsuit special

...

I never read Savage Dragon and had no idea that it had any sex in it, let alone that

Although somehow it's still no Ant-Man/Wasp

xp to self
I was twelve years old, though

I thought it was kind of funny and I don't think I understood the "people cranking it to cartoon characters" thing until much later in life, long after I'd perused it and thrown it away

it really is hilarious, but for all kinds of reasons I wouldn't have understood at the time

I had no idea such a thing existed and now have to resist searching for it so thx

namor in a speedo

(that's the funniest one, it's no different than namor on most other days)

namor in a speedo

I know, I know; it's serious

haha

http://i.redd.it/janpdeq8h5uy.png

^ this looks suspiciously like what normal people think people who read comic books think sex is like

well I am not psyched that I clicked on that on my work computer

lol, sorry; meant to link. mod?

PLUH!