Rolling Comic Books 2019

also i swear i've made that post like three times already.

xp pretty much agree with you

Overall, my sense is that DC is overworking him and his output is watering down but he's proven himself worth following.

See also any popular superhero comics writer ever

I swear at any given time the whole industry is being written by just 5 or 6 ppl

well sure! But not all those "doing 42 books at once" guys are at all interesting even when they started; cullen bunn and jeff lemire come to mind immediately in that category.

"Hey Bill Mantlo, can you get me a script with (insert character) by 2pm tomorrow?"

"No problem."

Sounds like a dream job, even in that situation lol

I've heard that Joe Gill (who was perhaps only behind Paul S Newman as most prolific American comics writer) was asked to write stories just as he was about to leave and could whip something up in 15 minutes, probably shorter than 22 pages though.

guiltily agree that Doomsday Clock is trash but a fun read

feel kinda bad that geoff johns must think it’s his Big Artistic Statement though

why would you feel bad, he got paid $$$$ to deconstruct his own mistakes

That tweeted page (“Bros before heroes”) is indeed awful... the art sucks too. (Who’s the green, bare-breasted heroine?)

Well, she's getting hugged by Harley Quinn, so if she's not Poison Ivy, she should watch out...

Cullen Bunn and Jeff Lemire were already writing The Sixth Gun and Sweet Tooth respectively when they started their big careers - I'd rep for both. My read is that Lemire is interested in doing a bit of everything (I enjoyed Descender), whereas Bunn would rather be making horror.

guys, get this: Doomsday Cock. It’s about Dr. Manhattan’s casual nudity

i thought this run of TCJ diaries was pretty good; will keep an eye out for Melanie Gillman's work in the future:
http://www.tcj.com/author/melanie-gillman/

http://images.tcj.com/2019/05/WLAR-Day-10-768x1024.jpg

check out When the Crow Flies if you like this

Saw the couple pages where Manhattan is explaining how the timeline is shifting and I have to say that is some pretty potent DC nurd catnip. It seems an extension of the old 'hypertime' that Morrison and Mark Waid were putting out there.

I still say Johns it would have been a heck of a lot cooler if the Flash that showed up in Final Crisis and in the New 52 would have been the Barry Allen from old Earth 1. One reporters opinion.

That Morrison GL/GA issue is an absolute stinker.

Slightly off-topic but I recently became curious about DC and Marvel novels. Always wondered how well superheroes might work in this medium (same with martial arts, I wonder how much it relies on the visual and could you novelize a Fred Astaire film successfully?) and given that one of my bigger frustrations with the comics is the usually very rushed art, it might have some advantages.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?33519
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?30173

There are some authors with good reputations here but I'd imagine much of this was hack work.
Batman anthologies contain Asimov, Silverberg, Sheckley, Tepper and Landsdale. Wonder Woman anthology has Pamela Sargent. Steve Rasnic Tem is in Batman and Silver Surfer anthologies. Lansdale also wrote a Batman novel about a man who transforms into a car.

I think Joe Pulver said he'd like to do a Doctor Strange story and I was intrigued but as usual I'd prefer something in the milieu that isn't tied down to an existing IP, even ripoffs of Doctor Strange, Aquaman, Namor, Green Lantern and Swamp Thing might be preferable but how do you ripoff Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer without completely ripping them off?

Anyone read the comics of Nnedi Okorafor, Saladin Ahmed and Cassandra Khaw? It's difficult for me to understand why a prose writer would want to enter into comics where you don't get to choose the artists and probably done on tight deadlines.

Saladin Ahmed's runs on Exiles and Black Bolt were fun, to me.
Why would a writer do comics? Because, they're comics. Comics are great. ;)

But giving away the control of the visuals must be hard. I mentioned recently on another thread, Rachel Pollack (mostly a prose writer) was horrified by the art she was saddled with on New Gods (and it was particularly bad).

Ahmed’s taste in comics, as inferred from millions of retweets of him I saw before I even knew he was a writer, suggests that he has almost no interest in visual narrative & thus would be a fine Marvel writer.

Also, I wonder whether it was James O'Barr or an editor who chosen Somtow and Attanasio to write Crow novels, because that sounds pretty cool.

After reading a bit more about online fanfiction, is there any famously good fanfiction or does it all just get lost in the shuffle?

Other comics writers better known for prose works: Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, Lucius Shepard, Nancy A Collins, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Hand, Harlan Ellison, Genevieve Valentine, Catherynne M Valente, Margaret Atwood, Joe R Lansdale, John Shirley, Neal Stephenson. Any good comics in there?

Did Clive Barker write any of his own comics?

It's been a long time since I read Nancy A Collins' run on Swamp Thing but i think it was ok.

China Mieville's run on Dial H is great though.

Related: an anthology of prose by comics writers
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?284814

Kazumasa Hirai (8 Man, Wolf Guy, Spiderman) seems to be well known for both comics and books. Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D, Demon/Wicked City) done some original comics.

i should try rereading lethem's omega the unknown: y or n?

lansdale has done good comic work!

Collins's Swamp Thing run is pretty much abysmal imo.

Caitlin Kiernan's Vertigo work (she wrote the bulk of The Dreaming with a couple miniseries digressions) otoh is pretty good.

Barker wrote a lot/all(?) of the most recent run of Hellraiser comics from several years back.

I need to read more Lansdale comics, because that first Jonah Hex mini he did with Tim Truman is badass.

Loved Lethem's Omega mini-series, even though I'm not sure what he was going for with that final issue.

I like lethem’s omega way more than the one novel of his I’ve read (as she climbed across the table)

Weirdly the comic it most resembles is city of crime, the lapham batman book (but for spoilery reasons)

Ha x-post, the spoilery reason was to do with that last issue

all the lansdale jonah hex stuff is really fun imo

Related: an anthology of prose by comics writers
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?284814

Even if we put aside Gertler's actively repellent design preferences, I can't imagine that standing up to https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2037136.Words_Without_Pictures

Lethem's Omega is good, possibly aided by having a cartoonist draw it.

Barker wrote a lot/all(?) of the most recent run of Hellraiser comics from several years back.

All of those have other writers credited beside him, so he may not have been doing any hands-on comics writing, even if he worked on it month-to-month.

Other comics writers better known for prose works: ...Harlan Ellison... Any good comics in there?

The entirety of Ellison's credited scripts are:

- A Batman: Black & White backup 8-pager in 2001
- Three pages of X-Men: Heroes For Hope in 1985
(one, two, three - Stephen King and "George Martin" had 3pp apiece in this, too)
- And a Batman story that was commissioned in 1971, for which Ellison turned in a title page and fourteen blank pages in a manila envelope in 1981. (Fifteen pages saw print in 1986, eight years after the editor had left the comic.)

Ellison was a joke

Didn't Ellison also write an issue of Hulk? (Possibly in collaboration with someone else?) I remember seeing his name in the credits in one of those microverse stories of the seventies.

Oh yeah, it was The Incredible Hulk #140, though apparently Marvel only commissioned the plot from him, and Roy Thomas did the scripting.

https://static0.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/u3-20-094-3.jpg

A friend of mine began a review of (useless Dark Horse anthology comic) 'Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor' with "Not, as you might have imagined, Harlan Ellison contemplating his ideal hallway..." - and Ellison actually rang up the editor to complain about the review. Amazing that he didn't have better things to do.

That reminds me of a friend explaining that there was a band on his college campus called Godot. Their fliers said something like, "Have you been waiting for Godot? Wait no longer!"

pretty sure they came up with the band name just to make that joke

Harlan Ellison was a pain™ in the hole®.

here's two old men bitching
http://www.tcj.com/the-harlan-ellison-interview/

one of them is 24; both of them had much more curmudgeonliness to discover after that

Thatsthejoke.jpeg

I kno but other ppl scrolling might not have

He seems to have a sole writing credit on Phoenix Without Ashes, Chocolate Alphabet, some Heavy Metal issues and maybe some other stuff, but my curiosity wont go that far.

Forgot to mention Richard K Morgan, done a bunch of Black Widow and Crysis.

He seems to have a sole writing credit on Phoenix Without Ashes

An TV pilot teleplay from 1973 that he Smithee-ed when it was produced as a series, which was adapted into a novel by someone else in 1975, which in turn was adapted into a comic by a different someone else in 2011. The teleplay has been in and out of print since possibly February 1975.

Chocolate Alphabet

26 one-page prose short stories that were written in public on a typewriter in a bookshop window & hung up to be read by passers-by as Ellison continued to write, printed in typeset in The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science-Fiction in 1976, and collected in Ellison's Strange Wine in 1978, before being printed in hand-lettering by Larry Todd on Last Gasp.

some Heavy Metal issues

"How's the Night Life on Cissalda?" - prose story printed in the paperback anthology Chrysalis in 1977, reprinted in Heavy Metal November 1977, collected in Ellison's Shatterday in 1980, Datlow's Alien Sex in 1990, etc.

"Croatoan" - prose story printed in The Magazine Of F&SF in 1975, collected in Ellison's Strange Wine in 1978, reprinted in Heavy Metal September 1978, analysed in King's Danse Macabre 1981.

"Flop Sweat" - prose story written in six hours to be read on the radio in 1977, printed in Heavy Metal March 1979, collected in Ellison's Shatterday in 1980.

"Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R." - prose story printed in F&SF January 1969, collected in Ellison's The Beast Who Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World in June '69, reprinted with new introduction in Heavy Metal December 1979.

"Fear Not Your Enemies" - two-page essay about John Lennon's shooting getting more press than other famous Americans shot that day and gun control maybe being something the US should look into, published in HM March 1981, collected in Ellison's Sleepless Nights In The Procrustean Bed 1984.

but really, if you think about it, each letter of the alphabet is a pictogram, which we are reading in sequence, so words are basically comics etc etc

I always thought Jerome Charyn's collaborations with Boucq were considered the gold standard as far as prose writers scripting comics go (never read 'em myself).

Ikki Kajiwara, writer of iconic late 60s manga like Ashita no Joe and Star of the Giants, wrote the novel that Takashi Miike's film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A was based on.

I think Tom DeHaven has written a few comics, I remember liking a short he did for RAW drawn by Richard Sala.

Tom Veitch has written novels and poetry. His collaboration with Greg Irons in the 70s produced some good, if gruesome, comix.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-closing-down-vertigo-imprints-1220225
They started Ink and Zoom less than six months ago!

Don't fret, DC being DC, they'll probably reinstate the lines they cancelled after another six months have elapsed. Or at least some equally clueless + dipshitty variation thereof.