Rolling Comic Books 2019

buying direct from the artists, or from What Things Do, or Wow Cool, or Spit And A Half (though I think he's reducing his operations?), or Emerald Comics Distro, or direct from publishers, or from comic shops that do mail order, or etc etc etc

Try doing that from Australia and you'll be bankrupt in a day.

I pretty much used to use my tax return to clear off my comics-ordering bill for the year, before postage went completely insane 5-6 years ago.

buying Australian comics direct from the artists has pretty much been the only option in Sydney since Land Beyond Beyond closed 20-odd years ago

i looked at those but they're pretty specific to particular artists and labels
looking for more general stuff. maybe i'll just stick to midtowncomics

well you did just ask for more ethical sources of comics w/ no further guidelines! buying direct from the artists is usu. going to limit you to those artists’ comics, yeah

closing entry on the ham fisher/al capp feud on TCJ comes with a solidly intriguing theory on the grit that caused the pearl:
http://www.tcj.com/hubris-and-chutzpah-how-lil-abner-kayod-joe-palooka-and-both-their-creators-came-to-grief-part-9/

Was surprised to find this on spotify btw:
https://folkways.si.edu/al-capp/an-interview-with/oral-history-biography/album/smithsonian
https://open.spotify.com/album/1eWf9BydlQx4uTfH7WodAt?si=bDnVHUCFTCmyy9ga5bpoLA

In December, Viz releases Junji Ito's adaptation of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human. I had no idea he had done such a thing.

Gahan Wilson is suffering from advanced dementia and needs help. His wife of many decades passed away Saturday and as a result he is going to be discharged from the assisted living facility where they lived.

https://www.gofundme.com/gahan-wilson-team-effort

Speaking for myself, Wilson was the first invasion of my little mind by the Weird - my uncle gave my dad a copy of And Then We’ll Get Him for Xmas when I was 7 or 8 and I imbibed it utterly, terrified and transfixed by a world of bodily instability, disease and mutation which was also, apparently, funny??? God bless this man.

that's hugely sad to hear

I'm reading Uncomfortably Happily by Yeon-sik Hong. Comics artist couple move from Seoul to the sticks and deal with career and money worries, the cold, transportation. The protagonist is an archetypal Indie Comics Dude in a way - self loathing, neurotic, frequently a dick to his wife. But despite that I'm finding the narrative likeable and engaging - also fascinated by the author's choice of doing frequent musical numbers, which surely is not what the medium of comics is best suited to.

that's an interesting book but soooooooooooooooo long.
but it's a biography so he's really gotta makes you feel their pain

Yeah, it's super long. I got through most of it at one sitting because I was waiting for something, otherwise I dunno if I would have had the patience.

That Kirkman related Die!Die!Die! was not very good at all. I liked some of Chris Burhams earlier comics but man this one is gory as he!!. It's definitely trying to go over the top like something written by Garth Ennis, Millar or Hickman have done but with even less nuance.

Also kinda weird that it came out through Image the same time as Gillen/Hans' Die (which I'm liking so far!)

Kirkman is not very good at all

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbpnUgulSSI/
Jeremy Bastian is killing it these days.

Have not finished it, but I liked Outcast pretty well. I've tried with Walking Dead but have never finished the first omnibus. I liked his run on Ant-man, that was pretty fun.

Picked up a volume of the Fantagraphics Disney collection focusing on European artists - this stuff is super interesting to me, having read Disney comics as a kid and never having gotten any kind of explainer of how the system works - there's Italian, Danish and Brazilian writers that I know of, probably there's a ton more. And of course they wouldn't get credit on the comics themselves.

Half-off sale on a hundred books at Fanta (plus some other things, like early-90s postcard sets): http://www.fantagraphics.com/bargain-books/

good heads up

Love this cover line

https://getcomics.info/dc/aquaman-46-2019/

Oops

http://s24195.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Aquaman-46.jpg

how pathetic does Warner Brothers expect the Captain Marvel movie to sell if they have to advertise on the front cover of comic books

Did he look back at Sodom?

5 easy ways to survive when you turn to salt... #3 will shock you

Am also shocked that Impact font is still allowed (or desired by people whose job it is to put fonts on things)

DC has spent much of the year thus far (arguably for a number of years prior but really ramped up for 2019) demonstrating their dedication to questionable decisions. Subpar typefaces and movie ads on their covers are just skimming the surface.

(So much upheaval over such a little Batwang.)

I like the Bendis Superman books and assumed things were getting better. What have they fucked up now?

lengthy sidestep into crime-world and sudden introduction of superboy is readable i thought, sprawling super syndicate underground a little less so
in general they seem okay so far?

Finished the two volumes of Queen Esmeraldas by Leiji Matsumoto. I like how quiet and spacious it is, there's some cool places, and there is atmosphere but it's very annoying how Esmeraldas introduces herself constantly and keeps saying the same things about herself, the story is just way too impressed by the characters and ominous plot points seem to be dropped or ignored (unless they carried into other related stories).
There's a Harlock crossover with lots more humor, the cat being attached to the pole to eat the bird was funny. I was amused by the dad executing his own bratty daughter in the main story but I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be funny.

Read half of the first Captain Harlock book, much more comedic but still has some of the same annoyances. I dropped it, completely leaving the second book (hopefully I'll finally stop buying multiple comics in a series before I've read the first, thank fuck I didn't buy the third Harlock book and Space Battleship Yamato book. I'm worried I wont have the patience for my Hellboy omnibuses).

Having said all this I think others may want to give them a try. It does come off like a libertarian fantasy sometimes though, it's a cruel galaxy until kindred spirits with similar goals of absoloute freedom help each other out.

Some of the animated versions (Matsumoto seems to write most of them?) are supposed to be great, but there's hundreds of them. It's all one big Matsumoto universe.

I dug into some Marvel stuff lately to catch up and read the up-to-date runs of Conan, Punisher, Immortal Hulk and Avengers No Road Home. All pretty good, especially the last two. Ewing is on a roll!

So I guess Paul P0pe got out from under #metoo by virtue of getting #metoo'd before #metoo?

do I actually want to know what that’s in reference to, or would it just be more extraneous shit that makes me throw out things I could actually sell?

serial sexual creep allegations back in 2015? 2016?

He disappeared for a while following harassment allegations (haven't heard of anything he did since the third Battling Boy/West book in 2015), but i notice he's come back doing covers for Brian Azzarello/Maria Llovet's Faithless mini.
Not that I'm trying to raise pitchforks, honestly, but i'm surprised nobody noticed this

A film adaptation of that graphic novel Sabrina is being developed:

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/drew-goddard-sabrina-movie-1203183484/

They will probably have to (or will want to) change the title for the movie version...

when does Top Notch get a movie though #nichetweet

lol "a grieving man"

Die's first arc just completed. I'm definitely into it - the art alone is very nice, and I dig the idea of this RPG/social deconstruction. Warning though: super teen goth angst!

I like it more than WICDIV, but I'm not so sure about the art! Just a general Vertigo-era fear of painted comics

so i may have access to a seedbox that is slowly being populated with complete runs of FF, Hulk, Tales to Astonish, 1940's Cap and more for cbr download or on screen viewing
if that's a thing ilxors might be interested in, maybe note here and you could possibly get an ilxmail

don't you already have those as part of that mega chrono collection? Or are these better versions.

no, i got em already; just found this as a resource to share.

I thought this was a cool tribute to Carlos Ezquerra by Chris Weston. It's being auctioned off for a Cancer charity. I can name quite a few of the characters, but a bunch I don't know. Bloody Mary is hidden way up in the right top corner. I like how Gronk is right by Carlos.

https://assets.catawiki.nl/assets/2019/4/23/d/4/d/d4df869f-259c-4b98-b981-1c57375eaac2.jpg

so the conan books have been really good! like surprisingly so! There's a cohesive story, a long game, due deference to tradition, and the art does what it's supposed to do.

You know an old-school Marvel artist like Ron Garney is LOVING being able to do some Conan. If the editor is good, I would not be surprised you see quite a few names drop in doing issues.

Marvel for the first time really does the back matter really great on those Conan omnibuses. You can tell they got Roy Thomas in to work on it to make it a good book. They should be doing that type of context work on all of the old really classic Marvel reprints.

If you're into it, there's a whole serialized conan short story in text going on in the main book too.

Thoughts on Ales Kot?

Got into his stuff a couple years back. Ok, loves dropping all of his interests/reading into things, stories are kind of flat. Doesn’t come off as clever as he’s aiming for but a couple books were ok.

that splash is amazing - is it all Ditko?

Yep - he had a real golden period after he was newly liberated from Marvel - see also those amazing black and white strips for Warren he was doing at about the same time

Man. Wonder if he'd kept up a style like that through the '80s, his overtly ideological work might have caught on better under direct market distribution?

(I love the fact that his drawing and techniques changed so often, and that switching to doing his own lettering eventually let him integrate it so much better in the polemic work - Tuomas is right that even on paper those rant-balloons would be foreboding - but the inking and especially shading there show how drastically undermined as an artist he was at Marvel.)

Right at the end of the 60s Ditko got very ill and he when he came back - mainly at Charlton - his style had notably deteriorated, even on the creator-owned material, sadly.

This site has 'Collector's Edition', his best-known strip for Warren - again decent page rates, and the opportunity to stick it to Stan Lee, brought out the best in him

http://steveditkostuff.blogspot.com/2019/02/collector-edition-creepy-presents-steve.html

very good!

The Mr A stuff is terrible. Huge slabs of libertarian bullshit text taking up half the page.

Right at the end of the 60s Ditko got very ill and he when he came back - mainly at Charlton - his style had notably deteriorated, even on the creator-owned material, sadly.

Ah / aw. if I'd ever read that I'd forgotten it, but certainly tracks with what I've seen of his '70s and '80s WFH (though I think Shade was good? I bought the first few back when the Milligan series started. Notably created and head-written by Ditko, which no doubt makes a difference.).

Thanks for the Collectors Edition link. Goodwin's adherence to both 1970s prolix standards and Feldstein homage shows how well-planned the lettering placement really is on that Mr A splash, by contrast! Do you mean "stick it to Stan Lee" by putting in more careful work for better money, or that Danforth, with his mustache and grasping insensitivity about art, is intended as a Lee dis?

I thought Gray Morrow's Witzend work was pretty good but there wasnt quite enough to be enticed to buy that. Not enough of the artists raised their game that much.

Is Silver Surfer: Black any good?

Huge slabs of libertarian bullshit text taking up half the page.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, March 18, 2020 12:36 AM

My comic collection: 98% good art with 90% slabs of bullshit text.

i like that we're so desperate to pretend we're not in the moment that we've gone back in time for this thread

but yes, Surfer: Black is excellent. You're right to make the Ditko connection with Moore.

but yes, Surfer: Black is excellent. You're right to make the Ditko connection with Moore.

(though I think Shade was good? I bought the first few back when the Milligan series started. Notably created and head-written by Ditko, which no doubt makes a difference.)

Oh yes, there are still plenty of highlights post-sixties - Avenging World (his densest, most intense tract where the word/text balloons REALLY go wild), the 'Killjoy' back-up strips in Charlton's E-Man, Stalker (a nice four-issue fantasy series inked by Wally Wood et al), Shade for certain, lots of things. But always the drawing is looser, cruder, than before, the panels larger and less detailed. I almost hate to invoke the phrase 'folk art' but there is a kind of individualistic intensity to Ditko's most engaged work that to seems to me beyond good and evil, left and right, just a unique personal iconography and mode of expression.

Do you mean "stick it to Stan Lee" by putting in more careful work for better money, or that Danforth, with his mustache and grasping insensitivity about art, is intended as a Lee dis?

Mostly the former, although Archie Goodwin wrote a number of variations on the grasping insensitive-exploited artist theme for Warren, and yes, the model is definitely EC. Goodwin and Warren used EC artists on Creepy and Eerie whenever the could, plus Ditko, Colan, Adams etc from the post-EC generation.

I think he was still doing some of his best work for Charlton in the early 70s.

Of his later creator owned stuff I prefer the loopiest things like Crackling Blazer, Missing Man and Mr Quiver. The drawing was a bit more oomph when he did humor. Then there was that ink wash thing he did for Strange Avenging Tales.