Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

yes and Eddie Berganza is finally suffering some consequences at DC about a decade too late

All I remember about Azpiri is he was yet another Heavy Metal artist who liked doing rape comics, just his style was more cartoony than most

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 10 November 2017 04:56 (three days ago)

I'm not sure I ever read his work but he was often in issues I bought. I don't remember the original Metal Hurlant crew doing that sort of thing but there is a lot of European artists who do these sexual odysseys with the main character having sex with nearly everyone they meet.

Bought the new Heavy Metal. £9, ouch, my pocket is bleeding! Barely anything interested me in there, including adverts for Motley Crue albums.

Got an issue of Comic Book Creator, a Kaluta & Ramona Fradon issue. Fradon writes studies of Faust in more recent times.

Not a comic but I seen it in the comic shop today and I think a lot of you will like it: Illustrated Dust Jacket 1920-1970.

i spent about 200 bucks at Comics Art Brooklyn and I found some winners. will report back.

yeah i was p jealous of the stuff ulysses hoovered up at the show. i was trying to make grocery money from book sales so I had to absolutely forbid myself to shop.

new stuff about Julie Schwartz?

never heard of either Burkholder or Pickrodt but this review shows "being able to be self-reflective about that shit," or something

http://www.tcj.com/reviews/qviet/

I do want that dust jacket book, yes!

yeah that... looks kinda cool!

wonder if the Paul Pope allegations will also come back along with Wood

new stuff about Julie Schwartz?

Well obviously, rumours and gossip about him have been floating round for years, but in the last couple of days people like Martin Pasko, Heidi Macdonald, Mark Evanier and Steve Bissette, amongst others, have all printed accounts on Facebook of Schwartz's harassing behaviour that go further than anything I've personally seen in print before. So I don't know if it's new, so much as pretty concrete confirmation of things long suspected, or spoken about mostly in private.

I don't Facebook, but Colleen Doran, Jill Thompson and Jo Duffy all went on record in the Journal in 2004 (Doran had also spoken earlier, and her Cerebus strip was about Schwartz), so it's been more than rumour for a long time

OK, missed that Journal issue, and the Cerebus strip. I know Doran has spoken about sexual harassment in the past, didn't know Schwartz was involved, but obviously not surprised.

This piece is two years old!

http://www.comicsbeat.com/how-a-toxic-history-of-harassment-has-damaged-the-comics-industry/

I've seen a bunch of Schwartz stories over several years and even one of his friends try to make it look less bad.

Steve Bissette's testimony the most interesting in the thread I think, not least for the Joe Orlando detour.

Is it on facebook only?

That's where I'm reading it. A Marty Pasko post that has a large number of very detailed comments.

Actually, the Vince Colletta stuff is new to me.

Facebook is not usefully googleable, so if the thread is open to the public, a link would be helpful.

Here's the Colleen Doran Cerebus short, and linked below that is Sim's intro from the original issue. In which Dave Sim, 31 years ago, warns that editors for the Big Two are sexual predators and aspiring women in comics should not be alone with them. Also that he didn't take it seriously at first, but quickly realised he should believe women's reports.

http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2014/05/colleen-doran-applicant.html

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155773819277310&id=726372309

The Marty Pasko thread.

ty templeton weighs in
http://tytempletonart.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/julie-schwartz-cop.jpg

Thanks Aldo. Is there a link - possibly non-mobile? - where the discussed comments are viewable?

I'll try and storify it (NB this means me learning how to use storify)

You can do that with facebook? I thought it was only a twitter thing?

Shows how much I know so that plan is probably doomed to failure.

https://www.facebook.com/martin.pasko/posts/10155773819277310?pnref=story

there you go, you just have to go to his profile on the non-mobile site and find the story

fwiw it's worth I tried that on both phone and computer and was not able to load his profile either way, let alone find a specific post, let alone load comments on it

I am guessing you have to be logged into a facebook account and it's not accessible outside the site, unfortunately. It's open to anyone on the site.

the most depressing/irritating part is the singular rando who has shown up to repeatedly argue every stock woman-blaming talking point, only to have a number of women who I respect in the comics field who I never would have expected to see chime in on a facebook thread repudiate him or provide an anecdote from personal experience

I've seen this too many places lately, that idea that if you can talk women back into silence, then there was never a problem

In a nutshell: Julie was a different sort of guy when his wife jean was alive (when he was also Pasko’s mentor); after Pasko moved out west to pursue tv Julie’s wife passed away; this was when he became DC’s ‘goodwill ambassador’ at shows etc. Pasko heard the stories and tried to deny it to himself, eventually couldn’t. States he is not an apologist and says Julie’s behavior was wrong.

On a side note, is there anything I could read about the bias against Kubert school students at DC?

prolly just Truman and Bissette interviews in TCJ circa 1995

the Bissette one was fire emoji x3 btw, I photocopied the whole thing to be able to read bits to people about the intersection and clashes between art and business

all right, I was searching for that interview to see if it was online and stumbled on a different one, with a passage about Alan Moore's scripts for Swamp Thing that I have to share because it's great

Alan’s scripts were dense. They were like long, narrative letters to the cartoonist. And they were playful in a lot of ways, too. We did a two-part zombie story that was set in the antebellum South. And Alan’s script for the first page of the first issue, it was a page where you’re underground and you’re looking at a body in a coffin. And in every panel description, Alan had a beetle family. He had a description to me of the beetle family, that these two beetles are on the body, and they’re arguing. Now this is nothing I was supposed to draw, it was just like a joke. And at the sixth panel, he said “I’ve decided to kill the beetles. They don’t have any character potential, and there’s no future for them in this comic series.”

(excerpt from here: https://www.avclub.com/steve-bissette-1798217824)

ha ha, from there:

> AVC: You’ve also criticized the Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover in Swamp Thing #46, which was an odd interruption.

> SB: Oh God, that was a nightmare. And you read it now in the context of the collected issues, and suddenly it’s like “What is this?” And we were forced to take part in it.

that was the first one i ever read

I still think it's the best part of crisis!

The most practical, 'lite' version of burning it down wrt the entertainment industry is probably to avoid personally helping to subsidize people/companies who create or prop up regressive shit. You vote with your dollars. They're called 'dollar votes'.

― Home of the Ill-Considered Gravy Spigot (Old Lunch), Wednesday, 15 November 2017 17:23

So you stopped buying Marvel stuff? (Joking)

That isn't a joke.

huh I had no idea about this Julie Schwartz stuff

oh well

xp

Every so often I forget how anxious many comic artists and illustrators are about having an old fashioned style. I've seen many people fret about that. Neal Adams has said he had bad dreams about people criticizing him for not drawing like manga.

I think this is part of why so much comic and book illustration and even films look so ugly because for a lot of them modern = the newest kind of shiny and fake.

Been thinking about how many musicians regret trying to keep up with trends and that maybe a lot of them skipped over a well of great music because they felt they had to keep reinventing themselves with each album.

I appreciated some of the points in Reynolds Retromania but there should also be a book exploring what a cancer it can be to be scared of looking stuck in the past.

How many of you have seen Herb Trimpe's horrible 90s art? I later heard it was an intentional parody of the 90s "hot" artist style but it was truly awful and I'd guess kind of a fuck you to the pressure put on older artists who were afraid of looking uncool. Several years ago Jerry Ordway wrote a blog about feeling left behind and editors responded to it and gave him more work.
As much as I feel sorry for these older artists and think they were usually superior to the "hot" artists, I don't think comic companies were obligated to give them work. I think Gene Colan was one of those under pressure but even at his wonkiest (I think there were health and eyesight problems) he was one of their best artists. Like Neal Adams, he never seemed old fashioned to me.

Saw that Doris Sutherland wrote a short article about Lady Death in Belladonna magazine, I had a surprisingly exciting dream about huge thick collections of the Chaos era stories (I told Sutherland about this too) as I never thought I'd give any of this another look and despite knowing there's a good chance I'd regret buying the small 90s collections, I couldn't kick the craving, I bought four of them.

Don't know why the craving remained. Steven Hughes was one of the better artists of his type and his main colorist was decent as far as these things go(I don't care for the later artists). Might have been the unexpectedly cool plot synopses, there's enough ideas in there for a really good sword and sorcery novel.
There's no way the ideas will be given their full potential in these comics (so many demons wearing bikinis might be a clue) but it's a stark contrast to recently reading through the last decade of Spiderman synopses that surely can't be as stupid as they sound.

If I'm ever going to get them, it might as well be now because they might never be reprinted. Pulido had to sell most of his characters and another publisher nearly stole Lady Death from him a few years ago, so I don't think he or anyone else has the rights to reprint Chaos Comics.

A big part of the retrospective appeal of this era of comics is that I think most people who bought them did not follow them consistently enough to follow the story and they didn't get collected editions often.
Which is part of why listening to Joe McCulloch's review of the Faust 777 series was so fun. How many people read Faust 777 from start to finish?

I think I heard McCulloch (or maybe one of his associates?) remark how silly Ms Mystic was. Would love to hear his overview of that series.

There's a listing for Breccia's Mort Cinder from Fantagraphics in July.

Santiperez recently had American comics come out but despite his skills I'm not totally into it.
This guy Corominas was also from the Toutain version of Creepy and this book of his looks awesome. The bad guy looks quite Trumpish on the cover too.

http://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2016/04/tragaldabas-enrique-jimenez- corominas.html

His version of Dorian Grey is quite something too.
https://corominas.viewbook.com/album/doriangray

http://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2016/04/tragaldabas-enrique-jimenez-corominas.html

http://www.loiclocatelli.com/post/159951034303/persephone

Al Ewing, formerly of this parish, has recently added “Oh, <name>paws” to the vocabulary of the Marvel universe, for which he is I unserstand writing every book. The recipient of the upbraiding was a thinly disguised Steve Bannon.

oh man which book was it?

Al is an absolute fucking treat and I hope he browses in an idle moment, because I have loved his work

You are gonna have to show me a clip of an 'oh blank paws' but if marvel dialogue

holding out for galactus to apply his great machines to the task of transforming a face into a heart

- HERALD, WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN THIS PLANET?
- because it look intersting

As requested: https://imgur.com/a/ubvwv