Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

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!

I bought all those Marvel Swimsuit issues as a teenager. I bought all those crappy pinup gallery comics. The Marvel specials were different in that they did feature a lot of male characters.

Check out the letter from a woman requesting nude Thor.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19446_the-6-most-wtf-special-edition-comics-ever-released.html
http://www.cbr.com/flipping-through-the-weirdly-subversive-marvel-swimsuit-specials/

There was actually a fully naked Ghost Rider but he was just a flaming skeleton on a beach.

I'm not really into Savage Dragon or those type of comics anymore but I still think it did have a sense of consequences that Marvel and DC didn't and it could be very funny and sweet sometimes. Had a lot of problems too but it was fun.
It had a very mixed following with some typical 90s Image artists doing collaborations and backups but also Mike Mignola, Bob Burden, Don Simpson, Michel Fiffe, Jim Rugg, Benjamin Marra and weirder guys like Dieter Van Der Ougstraete.

The X-Men had Jim Lee during the swimsuit special years and they shoehorned in at least a few "Psylocke in the pool" scenes, which is p funny in retrospect, and given I was abt 13 vv ok with me at the time.

I swear half the x-men issues had one of those scenes and they had to majorly retcon the character later to insist her mind wasn't her own and there was subtle psychic manipulation of the other x-men because they were on the verge of having to rename the book The Horny X-Men

Did anyone ever listen to that podcast devoted to trying to explain ridiculous X-Men plots? I never listened but it was supposed to be quite funny.

Just remembered that Stan Lee didn't rate Gil Kane very high and complained his men were too "faggy".

There were so many x-books, and the art was so pin-uppy, it wouldn't have been a huge stretch for there to've been a pg13 "X-Men Nights" or something book, tbh. And yeah retcon mind control otm, lol.

psylocke has always been the most ridiculously broken backed, sexploited x-woman, even more than rogue

http://40.media.tumblr.com/b105f781f4d3281a9063e8e3b92426de/tumblr_nrd5qficfa1r34y4ho3_r1_500.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gKBSaKejhDA/TtoqEqvQuwI/AAAAAAAAAPY/l9AjT72SZPM/s600/x%20men%20wallpaper-bananasprice.blogspot.com-x-men.jpg
http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b0/e6/68/b0e6686c93d08f0cc26684f3194e22af--wolverine-art-deadpool-wolverine.jpg
http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d1/92/e0/d192e0bef19af7f8bdf855f1f631899b.jpg
http://i.pinimg.com/736x/6b/38/ce/6b38ce558fdc9772847f48bfc6733778--jim-lee-jim-orourke.jpg

grrroosss

Grant Morrison's Doom Force just confused me when I was a teenager

psylocke has always been the most ridiculously broken backed, sexploited x-woman, even more than rogue

I don't really recall seeing Rogue treated that way(?) At least not in the era in which I was reading (pre-"Fall of Mutants" through post-"Inferno"). She was even spared from having to wear a skimpy costume, thanks to "can't-touch-her-skin"...

Yeah, Rogue was a weirdly arbitrary choice from the era when every female character was risking permanent spinal injury in an attempt to show off their quad-D cups.

https://letterpile.com/books/Psylocke-Costume-History

go back to Armored Psylocke IMO

iirc jim lee's 90's rogue was a "look-but-don't-touch" cheerleader fantasy and was regularly depicted in a similarly creepy way but after crawling through the muck to get those psylocke clips, i'm gonna leave a GIS for "sexy rogue marvel" to someone else.

are you thinking of Savage Land Rogue?

prob

yup, a classically sleazy storyline that was. she hooks up with Magneto which is eww

Lee/Liefield/McFarlane, and the "trends" they drove and exemplified, were 90% of the reason I stopped reading comics in the early '90s. (I also went off to college, but that alone wouldn't have stopped me.)

everything they've touched in the past fifteen years (at least) is hot garbage
still angry i bought those damn gold ink spiderman #1s as a teenager; I WAS IMPRESSIONABLE

As much as I dislike the 90s xtreme style* and variant covers, the increased prevalence of multi-title storylines was far more damaging. I don't know if it's still a big problem but I remember they kept saying "okay, we know you hate that so we'll stop it now" then start doing it again later. Probably lost them lots of readers.

I remember some comic artists saying they felt ripped off if a story lasted beyond one issue. I wonder how many people try these comics and feel that way?

*but I still think McFarlane did some interesting things and no matter how bad their anatomy, some of those Image artists at least gave a shit. There's a lot of dull stuff that nobody remembers or particularly likes.

I liked McFarlane well enough as an artist on "ASM"; his faces could be weird, and anatomy funky, but his style felt fresh at the time, and he & Michelinie made a good team. The problem began when he started writing...

(...his own books, not "ASM" specifically; which had moved on to McFarlane knockoff Erik Larsen.)

He drew some things similar but Larsen was far more talented overall. I think he once defended himself saying that he had drawn crazy poses Spiderman before McFarlane did. He done a few issues before McFarlane but I can't remember them well.

Don't know if everybody's seen this cover recently, maybe it's been circulating? Somebody used it with regard to female Dr Who. Quite funny, Superman not getting with the times.

https://www.comics.org/issue/34518/cover/4/

Lee/Liefield/McFarlane, and the "trends" they drove and exemplified, were 90% of the reason I stopped reading comics in the early '90s. (I also went off to college, but that alone wouldn't have stopped me.)

Yeah this is what happened to me. I haven't really been back tbh. (Speaking specifically of superhero stuff here). Superhero art eventually recovered from that trough to some extent but there's still something deeply off-putting to me about the way the stuff is colored, I just hate it.

Yeah the colouring really destroys so much good drawing.

can't lie i loved that shit (Liefeld, McFarlane, Lee, etc) as a kid so i can't hate on it too much now. it was for its target audience, teenage boys, who still buy comics if one can believe it

As a battle-scarred half-cybernetic survivor of those times, I am still regularly amazed that I buy more Image comics than Marvel and DC combined. Partly because they seem the most aware that "our defence is that teenage boys buy it" is contemptible bullshit.

I was a huge McFarlane, Larsen fan and I liked most of the main Image guys as a teen. Dislike most of it now except little bits of Larsen, McFarlane and Joe Chiodo. Sam Kieth is pretty good. Jae Lee was always a bit different and he evolved into something quite interesting.

J Scott Campbell is an odd case, because he's capable of genuinely good caricatures and you'd think he'd pursue his greatest strengths but nope. I realise he probably wants to do more than caricatures but if he used real life + photo reference more extensively, his output would be way better.

I still have a soft spot for Steven Hughes.

it's weird, I got into comics right before Image and that sales boom, but I was more into the myriad of half-forgotten Marvel titles than I was any of the Image properties

the only things that really stuck with me, that I got into from the very first issues, were Mike Allred's Madman and Sam Kieth's The Maxx

Feeling the entirety of mh's post!

The only one of the original Image titles I stuck with for any length of time was Spawn and its spin-offs, and that was almost entirely because he had wisely pulled in a lot of big-time writers (Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Miller, Sim...were there others?) to prop up his own questionable chops. Almost all of the rest of that first wave crap was unreadable.

I followed Warren Ellis to Image and started picking up his Stormwatch, which I loved to death. I liked the concept behind Gen13 but disliked most of the books (although I did dig Ellis's DV8 a lot). Never really read anything outside of the Wildstorm universe aside from one or two issues of Witchblade.

My engagement with Spawn began and ended with the movie, really.