2012 what are you reading thread

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

Hooray for terrible Marvel comics of the 70s.

gd luck w/ that run of mantlo-written human flys, matt

or issue 30 of the defenders feat mantlo's tap-dancing supervillain tapping tommy:

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/tappin16.gif

Gladly.

that looks amazing tbh, would happily read a blogpost with like 20 panels from the story

Word.

Rereading SLASH MARAUD. Is insane.

I have that somewhere in the house, I think. Paul Gulacy?

Moench/Gulacy. Yeah. Never been reprinted. DC in 1987 went all mental.

Moench, another guy who really had his moments among expanses of meh. Aztec Ace was awesome.

I absolutely loved MOKF at the time, but it hasn't dated very well.

My favorite Gulacy memory has nothing to do with his work. In the long, great TCJ interview with Tom Sutton, Sutton rattles off some artists of his era including 'The Gulacys'. Groth says something like 'You mean Paul Gulacy'?. Sutton: 'Yeah, aren't there a couple of them?' Groth: 'just one as far as I know'.

WmC I have been trying for ages to identify a MOKF issue from the mists of my recall. It might have been an annual or special or something-- what I remember is that it was a clear ripoff of The Circus Of Dr. Lao. Shang Chi was proceeding past a number of cages with various wise monsters in them, with whom he held dialogues. Do you remember anything like that?

Didn't ring a bell, but I looked through the scans I have and it's #36. Art by Keith Pollard/Sal Trapani -- "Cages of Myth, Menagerie of Mirrors!" lol

Moench, another guy who really had his moments among expanses of meh.

agree w/ this, tho' at the basic level of craft i think moench is a better bet than mantlo or tony isabella (tho' he's no peter b gillis or john warner, either). also, moench was just insanely prolific for marvel during the 1970s, it's kind of amazing that things like MOKF or werewolf by knight had any quality at all

oh, and i've been reading and enjoying the first five or so volumes of XIII by van hamme and vance, and IDW's first Spaghetti Bros translation, by trillo and mandrafina (dunno if DR SUPERMAN still reads any of these threads, but i think he wld really enjoy this volume, as wld p much any fan of torpedo)

My favorite Gulacy memory has nothing to do with his work. In the long, great TCJ interview with Tom Sutton,

P much my only Gulacy memory is a hugely foggy recollection of - I think - him being interviewed in AH, and telling a story about a fan who'd gotten his address out of the phone book and driven across the country to turn up at his door and shake his hand, and Gulacy looking past the kid to see his driving companion rolling around in cut grass on Gulacy's lawn. "Uh, is your friend OK?" enquires a worried Gulacy. "Oh yeah, he's just reconnecting with nature, we've been cooped up in the car for three days," reassures the kid.

And that kid's friend was......... Steve Rude.

[If anyone remembers the details of this better or I have it completely wrong, please correct me!]

slash maraud is a fun time

The thing about Bill Mantlo was he was Marvel of that period's go to guy when books hit the scheduling skids. Pretty much they could give him a comic to write in the afternoon and the guy would have a script back the next morning. I don't doubt that many of the clunkers in that period of comic creators is basically the same thing.

Paul Gulacy was definitely one of my favorite artists when I was a kid. I'd like to track down those two Six from Sirius mini-series him and Moench did for Epic (a few years before Slash Maraud for DC) and give them a read again. I remember liking them but I don't remember the stories at all.

Doug Moench also did quite a few cool things with Batman over the years. If you have never read Doug Moench's two Hugo Strange stories he did in Legend's of the Dark Knight with Paul Gulacy, they are worth searching out. There is also a pretty cool Batman annual he did with JH Williams III that is pretty much Batman meets Master of Kung Fu that is worth searching out.

DC reprinted a LOTDK Moench/W3/Gray three-parter as one of those Presents spined floppies last year

(it wasn't great and of course looked gross on that cheap shiny paper)