Can someone tell Batman why not?!?

gonna do a first readthru finally in about five minutes

oh my god every page is immensely impossible and utterly insane
this is kind of magic

I liked Ra's moping around like Charlie Brown. "Sigh..."

i was drowsy when i read this and i fell asleep and when i woke up everything i heard or read sounded like gibberish to me

i was drowsy when i read this and i fell asleep and when i woke up everything i heard or read sounded like gibberish to me

So Batman: Odyssey was the only sane thing in an insane world? Awesome.

Might as well post this here because it's a goddamn Batman book by any other name -- but omg, Holy Terror is so insane and bad. Miller didn't even try to make it good, he just had to get the loathing down on paper as quickly as possible.

explains why he spent eight years working on it

oh what an octopus of a thing

he did a fantastic job of making it look like he spent three weeks working on it

Margaret Atwood on Batman http://www.beamsandstruts.com/bits-a-pieces/item/653-atwood-on-batman

real insightful there

jesus fuck, adams is digging a lot deeper than atwood there.

bought v2 #1 today because of this thread. jesus. <3 neal adams

When is Odyssey going to be collected? I hate buying floppies but want to support this madness.

Volume 1 should be available by now.

Holly crap! Odyssey just keeps getting better. If this isn't hailed as a classic when it's through I weep for humanity.

coming in September:

BATMAN: ODYSSEY HC
Writer: Neal Adams
Artists: Neal Adams, Josh Adams, Michael Golden, Kevin Nowlan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Scott Williams and Paul Neary
Collects: BATMAN: ODYSSEY VOL. 1 #1-6 and VOL. 2 #1-7
$29.99 US, 368 pg

I am so there.

All that crazy for only thirty bones? THAT'S A LOT OF CRAZY.

It'll do until we get the ABSOLUTE LUNACY EDITION

this is full of double pp spreads y/n? will be unreadable in DC's glue-bound, no-gutter-space binding if so

hmm. Hadn't thought of that.

It'll probably do until the IDW artist edition.

Bill Sienkiewicz,

wait waht

He's been inking most of the second volume. You can tell.

So does that mean we're on the other side of the mirror here? Didn't Bill S. start out very much in the vein of Adams (along with half the other artists who started out in the 70s).

WE'VE CROSSED THE STREAMS.

adams even drew a cartoon for the comics journal basically accusing sienkiewicz of copying his old batman comics for moon knight

but then adams has often surrounded himself w. 'school of adams' associates and fellow travellers - for example, the DC artist mike nasser/netzer was a straight adams copyist who went on to do an awful lot of 'ghosting' for adams on shit like ms mystic and skateman. almost everything adams has signed his name to since the late seventies - and possibly earlier - has been the work of 'diverse hands', inc colouring, inking, layouts, etc.

it is incredible, tho, what has happened to bill sienkiewicz's career - did he lose interest, heart, credibility, compulsion?

I get the feeling he never wanted the ultra-high profile he was getting. He also stepped away into commercial art for a while.

I know there was a documentary done a few years ago about him but I never saw it.

He always did commercial art on the side AFAIK, another aspect of following Adams – his turn to inking schlock in the 90s seemed to me to be entirely of a piece with that, something he could churn out quickly for money, except without dealing with revisions from ad house art directors.

I’ve also always taken as significant that he abandoned storytelling in comics completely* two episodes into A River In Egypt – he was starting his third self-written story ever, what was meant to be a second major work, and it immediately revealed itself to be about the same topic as his previous two stories (ie ǝsnqɐ pʃıɥɔ). It looked to me like he’d realised this was the main theme that was going to come out every time he wrote, and he made either a deliberate or visceral reaction to walk away, for understandable reasons.

*As far as I know, the only pages of comics he’s done himself since then were for the Endless Somethingorother hardcover – and there, he turned in 20-some paintings for a 12-page story (or whatever), including multiple takes at various ones, and not matching the script - such that Gaiman ended up picking the ones he liked the look of best, choosing an order for them to go in, and rewriting a new story over the top.

Also he started advocating for earth expansion theory

always thought of him as a great illustrator, not a good comic artist.

i dunno, was never much of a fan of 'painted comics', but the fact that sienkiewicz had done a long hard slog as a penciller beforehand meant that his more illustrative stuff still had a comic book vitality and sensibility, it wasn't static or frozen on the page.

yeah, forks is offtm - Sienkiewicz' New Mutants are ASTOUNDING comics for BigTwo of the time, Elektra #1 I'll rep all day every day, and #2-8 obviously come from a passionate desire to expand, push forward, and express himself through comics, not single paintings.

dude, i own all those! I just am not a fan of him as a graphic storyteller! Great illustrator but he's not strong with narrative

he got a lot better in a really short span -- I don't have any problem with his layouts and storytelling on Elektra Assassin

Gotta agree with Forks here: even if Elektra Assassin looks great, it's still a struggle to read through as a narrative. The same goes for his other "post-modern" stuff that I've read, except maybe for New Mutants.

His New Mutants run is largely responsible for why I still read comic books, tbh.

Bill S on New Mutants -> greatest thing ever

nah, pretty pictures but the same old claremont guff

underrated sienkiewicz comics - his moby dick adaptation, the first six issues of the Shadow w/ Helfer, his half of the brought to light gn

Yeah, Claremont...

not all Claremont has aged well but Demon Bear still amazes me

at this point, I like it more than the Dark Phoenix saga

i tell you what, i just found a bunch of x-factors in a box when i moved and the first 20 issues so far are TIGHT

my fave sienk comics are the Shadow run; he found a balance there.
A lot of the late New Mutants stuff is hyperkinetic to the point of near unreadability to me

I liked Moon Knight. And New Mutants. And Stray Toasters. And The Shadow. And Elektra.

I guess I'm a bit of a SInk stan.

Demon Bear is the one ish of New Mutants I've read that, without seeing again, I'd be certain I could recommend to someone as ace (nb I am allergic to claremont generally)

underrated sienkiewicz comics - his moby dick adaptation,

lent this to someone in 94 and never got it back, have now become ;_; about it for the first time

the first six issues of the Shadow w/ Helfer,

absolutely, but justly outshone by the subsequent issues by Baker (also iirc the colourist didn't rly know what to do with him. should reread!)

his half of the brought to light gn

an amazing piece overall, but I can give forks this one on the illustration front - one could argue it strongly as being more like political cartoons than comics/cartooning/storytelling

I have that Moby Dick adaptation too! Quite good.

I realize the work I go back to most often is the Bill Sienkiewicz Sketchbook that Fantagraphics published back in1990.

The latest:

http://i1158.photobucket.com/albums/p615/mrpaulisaacs/stringknees.jpg

wow

that computer lettering really lets the entire tone down, imagine it with Gaspar Saladino

I can't imagine a context that would make that set of panels make any more sense

Adams' Batman: Odyssey = Loutallica's Lulu?

Way better than Lulu