2012 what are you reading thread

b&w = incredibly evocative of the way that certain britishes marvel comics fans hem hem first experienced these 'classic' stories - eg in cruddy black and white weekly reprint mags. but also, black and white sometimes lets you appreciate the line/artwork better eg i don't think colan and palmer's tomb of dracula issues have ever looked better than in the essential volumes, and also, lots of the colouring choices made on these super-deluxe 'archival' reprint problems are just as diminishing as stripping out the colour altogether - inappropriate (computer) re-colouring, muddy reproduction of original comic book colour, etc etc. as a big hunk of reading material, which wld often cost thousands to buy in the original editions, the essentials represent v v gd value for money, imho (generally, dc/national have always kept better quality stats of their titles, so the showcase series generally have nice clean pages that haven't been obviously re-drawn/'restored').

also, the early issues of warlock, pre-jim starlin, are p ho-hum and not especially deserving of hardbacked deluxoid reverence

tho i do concede that the magus shld always be in colour

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Themagusoriginal.png/250px-Themagusoriginal.png

As long as the Masterworks volumes are still being issued, I think the Essentials are a wonderful idea. There's lots of stuff that I want to read but that a) I don't think really requires the deluxe treatment and b) that I don't want to pay a lot of money for. The Essentials are just so economical. I have pretty much everything up through 1970 and it only set me back, what, a couple hundred bucks? That's pretty rad. There's stuff like Kirby's Thor that I'll probably eventually shell out for the color reprints of, but I'm cool for now.

I imagine Colan's dynamism, the hites and dites and the sense that characters in motion were moving almost too fast to see, made coloring his work a little more difficult in those pre-digital days. I should have asked Carl Gafford about that back when I was in CAPA-Alpha, but never thought of it.

but also, black and white sometimes lets you appreciate the line/artwork better eg i don't think colan and palmer's tomb of dracula issues have ever looked better than in the essential volumes,

OTM. I don't even want to see Colan in color anymore, it just gets in the way of what's great about him.

Colan was so awesome; he was like a "third way" at Marvel. No Kirby in him at all, no Ditko either. Who the fuck followed him stylistically?

Ditko also looks fucking great in Essentials black and white. Kirby/Sinnott too. Kirby/Colletta though, NAGL in B&W. You need the colors to tell you where the boundaries of the figures and objects are.

Jonah Hex also looks awesome in its B&W phonebook.

Have to say that a lot of the old ghost story/haunted house/whatevers comics look fine in B/W. Superhero stuff often suffers but I can read it just fine and it's a hundred times cheaper than the hardcovers and a lot easier than bargain bins.

After getting to peruse a lot of Colan through the MDCU I have to say that, as much as I love him on the Tomb OF Dracula I pretty much hate him on superheroes. I find his Iron Man and Daredevil issues almost unreadable. Except for covers; the man was born to do covers.

I love the Essential Spider-Man Ditko volumes. To see his line work evolve is such a joy. Can't read his Strange stuff in black and white though. Not trippy enough.

hey so I'm feeling pretty good about going off Slott as mentioned:

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/why-i-loathe-and-despise-spider-man.html

I read the Spidey/Torch team-up and I liked one out of the five issues. Tried to read the Spider-Man BIG TIME story and gave up two issues in. Slott lost the plot after that first She-Hulk series.

xp Uck. That is kinda gross. What happened to you, Dan Slott?

fucking A that spiderman costume alone is a crime

I just picked up the first Starman omnibus, and I'm two thirds trough it. I remember reading and really liking some of these stories in the 90s, but they feel much more dated now: there's the constant namedropping of Jack Knight's cultural reference points, the jaded first-person narrative, the Vertigoesque purple prose... In general I think the actual stories have some nice elements, but the narration tends to wear me down. Does it get better in future volumes, or should I just give up reading the other five omnibuses?

I made it through the first three omnibuses, and it was a fun read. The references stay dated, but they're somewhat toned down after the first volume. I guess I should get around to the other volumes... I was inspired to read them mostly from the Scott Tipton/Comics 101 columns praising the series

recently stumbled upon my old cache of Colan's run on Amethyst and whoah that shit was way darker/more psychedelic than I remembered

What issue #'s were Colan?

Dylan Horrocks occasionally reps for that comic. He wished he could write a reboot of it when he was doing bat-verse DC scripts in the early 00s.

Apparently DC is getting off the dime and reprinting AMETHYST, but as a SHOWCASE b/w book. I suppose it's better than nothing at all.

I'm remembering that the only way you used to be able to get the FOURTH WORLD comics was as a greytoned b/w set of 4 books. That's how I first read 'em, actually. Eventually they came around (I guess Morrison basing a lot of his later DC work in FW helped...)

Pretty sure Colan did JEMM: SON OF SATURN as well, or a chunk of it, and it was pretty good.

Colan also did the vastly underrated NIGHT FORCE, which became kind of a template for Vertigo-style storytelling long before Vertigo. Think that just got recently collected.

Reading through ESSENTIAL DR. STRANGE v.3 and there's a ton of Colan in that. Colan inked by Tom Palmer, even. Brunner inked by Romita and Giordiano and Janson. Good stuff. Trippy Englehart stories, too.

amethyst = drawn by ernie colon, not gene colan

d'oh that's right my bad

anyway yeah that comic is weird

I might be re-reading all the MICRONAUTS comics. Just maybe.

oh man...

Going on vacation and I should read something good for me, but man I DON'T WANT TO.

That backyard adventure issue is burned in my brain.

I have a complete run of those, one of the only big chunks of Marvel/DC I've kept with me across all the moves. Partly cause I love them and partly cause I know they'll never get collected/reprinted due to gnarly licenses/rights.

Basically the first dozen or so issues are mega and then after a lull of a year or so it picks up and gets awesome again.

That backyard adventure issue is burned in my brain.

haha yeah - look out for that lawnmower!

I still feel bad about what happened to Bill Mantlo. He did good and bad stuff but he was always at least weird.

yeah, an awful tragedy

Agreed on Mantlo. Now that I think about it, his work was probably more influential on me as a kid than Claremont or Gerber was. He was one of those workhorses who just got chucked to the wolves.

I guess Bill Mantlo was kind of schedule glue for Marvel during that time, which might be why his stuff is so maddingly inconsistent. If they needed a script in two days, he'd deliver, if they needed on the next day, he'd deliver, if they needed one in two hours it was done.

The first year of Micronauts with Mantlo and Golden is one of the best comics of that time. It really was a pretty good title most of the run even through the re-start later in the 80s.

Its kind of quaint to think back how unique it was to get into a comic that started with issue 1 was around that time (with say Rom or Micronauts or Shogun Warrior), which coincides in the period where I started reading comics on a month to month basis. Before the mini-series and the direct market taking over the comics, it was kind of a oddly unique thing to some extent. I know I would get something like Shade the Changing Man because, heck man this is a #1.

or say Machine-Man...as a #1

Its kind of quaint to think back how unique it was to get into a comic that started with issue 1 was around that time (with say Rom or Micronauts or Shogun Warrior), which coincides in the period where I started reading comics on a month to month basis.

This. (I also began serious monthly buying at that time).

Yeah, but doesn't that time period come just before the proliferation of mini-series and then it seems like there were number ones all over the place.

Then the plague of series reboots came...

Proliferation of miniseries begins with Wolverine iirc. Rom and Micronauts kicked off in... '78?

To be a pedant, ROM and MICRONAUTS weren't ever billed as miniseries (though there was an X-MEN/MICRONAUTS series that indeed was.) MICRONAUTS ran for 53 issues and then had a follow-on series that ran for almost 30. ROM went into the 80s or so, IIRC. WOLVERINE, however, may have been the miniseries that started that particular gold rush, but it wasn't until 1982 or so.

Just read Finch's THE DARK KNIGHT vol. 1. With the exception of the Morrison "Return" story (naturally) a total dud; i was kinda surprised just how bad it was, honestly. About 11 pages of story per issue, a nonsensical plot, horribly '90s storytelling hallmarks like way too many splash pages and dropped twists, etc.

xpost yes, I was making the point that ROM and MICRO come from before the miniseries explosion, when a #1 issue was a big deal.

New comics in 78-79 when I was a kid were still mostly bought on spinner or magazine racks in stores.
The whole thing with mini-series kind of started in the early 80s with a trickle building to a regular thing but only at the early book stores and comic book shops that bought 'direct' like almost all comics are sold now. That said, I remember even tracing down an odd issue here and there out of a supermarket in the mid-late 80s.

I remember when a local used book store started a sub list like maybe 83-85, which in essence was the first comic shop in my town and the ENTIRE pull list for all publishers for a month was on the front of one sheet.

You take something like Marvel in the mid-70s up till maybe 81-83 when the direct market started to happen and become popular, you can about count out easily near all of the series that started at issue 1. DC had some too, but they also did a whole lot more anthology comics back then with multiple characters in one title.

Let's see...staying out of the b&w mags looking at My Comic Shops search engine looking for new titles Marvel 76-82. 31 titles in like six years, quite a few of them being the new series they started with Kirby coming back to Marvel.

Howard the Duck
Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man
Human Fly
Star Wars
Battlestar Galactica
Shogun Warriors
Rom
Micronauts
2001
Devil Dinosaur
Godzilla
John Carter Warlord of Mars
Logans Run
Man from Atlantis
Moon Knight (I remember that this one later this one went comic book shops only at one issue and that one was always worth a buck or two more as a back issue, as it was harder to find. I think it is #23, if I remember right.)
She-Hulk
Ms. Marvel
Machine-man
Black Panther
Inhumans
Eternals
Champions
Conan the King
Marvel Fanfare (the first regular direct sold title)
Nova
Omega the Unknown
Red Sonja
Spider-Woman
Star Trek
Team America
What If

it was an odd collection of stuff, no doubt

Yeah, lots of that stuff is way below the radar. I'd completely forgotten about HUMAN FLY and the INHUMANS/ETERNALS axis of books. I miss MARVEL FANFARE. Pretty sure DAZZLER should be on that list, too, and I recall it being something of a big deal that it was direct sales shops only (though I could still get it at 7-11).

Still, that only comes out to about 5-7 new titles a year. I wonder how many of them were always intended to be limited runs, if any? Or did they really plan on SHE-HULK being in continuous publication until 2012? (The last is rhetorical.)

Speaking of Inhumans/Eternals, from the hints dropped in the Avengers books and on Newsarama and other sites, my guess is Bendis is going to take over/reboot the Cosmic Marvel U. I assume it's part of a big plan to give Thanos a high profile for a couple of years leading up to Avengers 2.

I bet those'll be the best comics ever. Brian Bendis would totally be my go-to creator for a sense of cosmic grandeur and wonder.

My knowledge abt Bendis is all second-hand but even I sense sarcasm there

Woah. Sorry. The sarcasm indicator's light burnt out. #forever

2012 What You're Listening To Thread:
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/46135
Your host, Art Spiegelman, Sophie Crumb, Nick Bertozzi, Ivan Brunetti, Seth, Megan Kelso, Joe Sacco, Gary Groth + some guy who travels to Asia to dress up as Santa also featuring interviews with Kim Deitch and Françoise Mouly

Bendis taking over the cosmic Marvel stuff would be awful! For a while the cosmic corner was the only constantly enjoyable part of Marvel because it wasn't tainted by Bendis' "realism" and tendency to write superhero comics like they were a cop show or war movie.

can't wait for the bendis cosmiccomics, might make them a bit less boring than usual

also, i don't wait to be a parade pisser but ppl are really really overrating mantlo on this thread, the man prob wrote more terrible marvel comics than any other 70s marvel hack