2014 what are you reading thread

i was very very much 'bout his work on justice league

could've sworn there was something odd about moonshadow, like the followup was shortened or something, down from 3 to 1. could be thinking of something else though, or that it was a vertigo reprint. wonder if i can find my copy... wikipedia also reminded me that Blood exists, which i should re-read. M also.

and this thread has also prompted me to search ebay for Promethea #31 which i missed at the time. £4.99 later and i'll finally be able to read all that, after 10 years. (i haven't read #19 onwards)

Promethea is weird in that I really enjoyed it at the time - each new issue done in some wacky different style! - but going back and trying to read it all in one sitting is such a slog; the formula becomes apparent and repetitive once she's on her journey up the tree of life

still pretty gorgeous though. the most fun is really all the stuff going on in the background,

Blood any good?

I've read quite a bit of DeMatteis but I don't remember any specific style. He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.
I've read lots of his Spiderman but even as someone who has read more Spiderman than any other superhero, not one writer's run really stands out to me. I still have love for Peter Parker but almost everything was a big repetitive waste of time.
Stardust Kid was a perfectly okay comic for kids but Mike Ploog was the real attraction.

He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.

ugh I tried reading that recently and was really put off by all the smirky in-jokey self-referential bullshit. otoh Giffen's Ambush Bug stuff are some of my favorite 80s comics.

I'd quite like to reread DeMatteis's Dr Fate run, I've always thought it was underrated, but it's possible my taste in high school just wasn't very good.

I've read quite a few people saying a lot of Vertigo stuff looks worse in retrospect. Because they were taken aback by things they'd never seen in comics at the time. But now the novelty has worn off.

i associate Del Close's Wasteland with that stuff but man, Wasteland was much better... and maybe still good? I need to dig up old issues.

Wasteland was great, one of the high points of DC’s excellent late-80s period of genre experimentation

could've sworn there was something odd about moonshadow, like the followup was shortened or something, down from 3 to 1. could be thinking of something else though, or that it was a vertigo reprint. wonder if i can find my copy...

The Vertigo reprint was 12 issues, as with the Epic version, and the changed pages in #12. Farewell Moonshadow, the Vertigo followup that was then included in their TPB, was only ever solicited as a 56pp prestige format thing AFAIR.

I've read quite a bit of DeMatteis but I don't remember any specific style. He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.

You would if you read the credits!

(Long-range planning was done by Giffen with DeMatteis & Helfer; Giffen plotted actual stories, down to drawing the panel breakdowns for every issue, and sometimes wrote rough dialogue; DeMatteis wrote the words that actually got lettered onto the page.)

(In the behind-the-scenes story written by Kyle Baker for JLI #50, JMDM’s contribution to plotting is made fun of as being repeatedly suggesting “what if the JLI find a giant alien but it turns out the alien is God and then they realise God was inside them all along” and being told to stfu)

I thought that Justice League stuff was okay, very much like a sitcom. I used to hate how they made Blue Beetle look like such an ordinary dork. Because I thought Ditko's Blue Beetle was really cool; actually quite a lot like Batman.

Something positive I can say about 90s Spectacular Spiderman: Sal Buscema with Sienkiewicz inking looked great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Piranha_Press
http://www.supermanartists.comics.org/dchistory/piranhapress.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paradox_Press

Been trying to remember 80s/90s cult comics and found these imprints. I have no memory of Piranha. Amazing that DC used to do stuff like this. I think Vertigo and these imprints really gave DC an edge over the competition. I've heard that in the Nelson era, DC has wanted to rid itself of anything creator owned.

Since you guys have been quite responsive about Starstruck and Moonshadow, how about this stuff? Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children in particular.

Why I Hate Saturn obv the standout

I like BS4US as an exercise but it never really engaged too much

Gregory, Epicurus, Saturn are all must reads

Sienkiewicz inking is so good

That one issue of Beautiful Stories about the dog was fantastic. Often they were fairly empty or uninspired or pretentious. Sometimes they were good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Drowned Girl was one of my favourite comics of the early 90s, and I used to buy extra copies and give them away, but the same author's Nation Of Snitches was terrible, so I could be wrong about it.

A Glass Of Water, in FF>>, is the best ~comics~ McKean and Morrison have ever done.

the clown issue of BS4UC is the only one i remember.

Disney almost had its own edgy comics imprint, Touchmark, which was aborted at the eleventh hour, and many of those aborted books showed up in Vertigo's first wave: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2011/07/01/comic-book-legends-revealed-321/

did any not?

there are a few names in the list that i don't recognise as vertigo artists.

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/touchmark1.jpg

There's so much impressive cover art for Vertigo titles. I've been looking through databases to see titles I'm not familiar with.
I love this Kaluta stuff...
http://www.comics.org/series/4980/covers/
He did loads of great covers for Lucifer too, hope it will all be in the upcoming Kaluta art book.

This cover used to creep me out big time...
http://www.comics.org/issue/65925/cover/4/

I'm fairly sure there is a book all about Vertigo but it would be great if someone read all the titles, plus the Piranha and Paradox stuff and gave it all a intelligent write-up. It always amazes me how much stuff never gets written about.

It would have been nice if there was more separation between DC's characters and those titles. A lot of them are such radical reinventions that they could have been something totally separate, but most of them never would have existed had DC not had the characters to reinvent in the first place.

How did DC come to own V For Vendetta?

same way as Watchmen, iirc: by keeping it in print to dodge a reversion clause

there are a few names in the list that i don't recognise as vertigo artists.

I don't think any of those were attached to actual projects though. (a Wagner/Grant/Rayner teamup seems likely, but idr hearing of a title, let alone anything beyond that. p much everyone else is just someone whose number Young had?)

it would be great if someone read all the titles, plus the Piranha and Paradox stuff and gave it all a intelligent write-up. It always amazes me how much stuff never gets written about.

I'm biased because I was one of the contributors, but the Slings and Arrows guide reviews pretty much every American comic released in the last 50 years or so:

http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-comics-5-essential-books-about-comics/56853

I'm fairly sure there is a book all about Vertigo but it would be great if someone read all the titles, plus the Piranha and Paradox stuff and gave it all a intelligent write-up.

I've read probably 95% of everything Vertigo through roughly the turn of the century. I don't know how much insight I have, but I'm somewhat conversant if you have particular questions. I'm an unabashed superfan of the shared universe titles in particular (e.g. Swamp Thing, Sandman, Books of Magic, Hellblazer, et al) and I reread all of that stuff every couple of years. Even moreso than Marvel's (which I didn't get heavily into until my later teen years), that was the formative fire upon which my love of intertwined comic universes was forged.

Even though the majority of the first wave Vertigo books technically took place in the main DC universe, definitely felt like there was an attempt to create a separate Vertigo universe. Mainstream DC characters rarely appeared in those books (not counting the pre-Vertigo era Sandman, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Hellblazer, and Doom Patrol stories), but the Vertigo characters kept on visiting each others books, and there was even a crossover of some sort called Children's Crusade (I never read that one). In the mid-90s, I think only The Invisibles and Preacher were the only ongoing Vertigo series not set in this universe?

They seem to have gradually dropped this idea as those 90s titles folded in, though... I think Lucifer (which debuted in 1999) was the last new ongoing series to be set in the Vertigo universe. Though recently there was a crossover between Fables and The Unwritten, so it seems they haven't completely buried the idea of a shared universe.

I think the success of Sandman made them realize urban fantasy/horror was really their thing, so if they were gonna start new ongoing series, why not have them be spinoffs of Sandman, or at least set in the same universe? Back in the 90s Vertigo even had it's own short-lived sub-imprint devoted to sci-fi, apparenly because they felt sci-fi didn't fit into the "main" Vertigo books.

They did a near-complete purge of the shared Vertigo universe with the New 52 shitstorm (wherein Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Shade, John Constantine, etc. were reincorporated into the DCU proper) and the cancellation of Hellblazer (the last of the hangers-on), but new Vertigo-specific projects have popped up here and there (e.g. Gaiman's current Sandman miniseries and the Dead Boy Detectives ongoing).

They got a lot of mileage with that expansion. Books of Magic (not technically a Sandman spin-off, I know) and Lucifer were great, and I really dug the homestretch of The Dreaming once they figured out what they wanted that series to be.

Also, since Vertigo had a different reader demographic than the main DC books (older folks, more female readers), I'm sure they didn't want to do too many crossovers with the main universe, so the readers wouldn't be reminded too much that these books had their origin in superhero comics (whose main target group was still seen to be preteen boys). So the crossovers were mostly limited to one-panel gags (like Superman, Batman, and Martian Manhunter appearing in Morpheus's wake), and to occasional appearances by "Vertigo friendly" DC universe characters (like Zatanna, Etrigan, or The Phantom Stranger).

(xxpost)

Books of Magic I felt was the strongest of the Sandman spinoffs (I think you can call it that, since Dream and Destiny appeared in the original mini); it felt like John Ney Rieber had a unique vision for his version of urban fantasy, one that wasn't derivative the Moore/Gaiman template. But sadly it felt like his long-term plans for the series eventually petered out, since his run ended with several plot arcs left unresolved. Apparently Peter Ross, the artist of the series, then started writing the book too, but AFAIK his run has never been collected, so I've never read it.

As much affection as I have for John Ney Reiber's run, I think I almost prefer Peter Gross's solo run. It's a real shame that DC never collected it. It's totally worth seeking out, though. The Dylan Horrocks follow-up mini and ongoing are also decent (and largely uncollected) if not quite as high in my esteem.

Ward- I had seen that book loads of times but never knew it was any different from a lot of other general surveys. Thanks, I'll definitely be getting this.

I thought 1001 Comics To Read Before You Die was an impressive effort but it was marred by a few things: I think it should have been a bit more critical and not included so many comics for their iconic status or historical value (Death Of Gwen Stacy? Really?).
The other thing is that there wasn't nearly enough art examples, which I don't think are a necessity but lots of comics in short synopsis sound too samey (particularly humour and satire) and make no impression without any real criticism to make it interesting. I don't know if they had to go through rights clearances for every image (which would be a nightmare).
It did get me off the fence about buying a few things but best of all it introduced me to Frantisek Skala.

I've been thinking about getting some more books about manga but knowing that the majority are drawn in the same flat style is offputting despite the wide array of subjects. I read Jason Thompson's House Of 1000 Manga now and then but if the art examples aren't interesting it's hard to imagine the stories coming to life.

the majority of the first wave Vertigo books technically took place in the main DC universe

it is nuts that i didn't know this

Yeah, many of the core characters around whom Vertigo was initially established were "dark" reimaginings of older DC characters (WWII-era Sandman and Jack Kirby's '70s Sandman, DC's variety of horror comics hosts which comprised a lot of Sandman's cast, Steve Ditko's '70s Shade, the costumed crimefighter version of Black Orchid, etc). I think the first original main characters were John Constantine and Tim Hunter (who both originated in pre-Vertigo DC books).

There were lots of references to the various Sandmen of DC's past in Gaiman's run! It gives me a headache even thinking about it. Very significant to the eventual fate of Dream on it by the end of the series.

that WAS the vertigo brand for the first several years. this is not your older brother's [semi-forgotten DCU character]! holy crap someone's shooting heroin on page 3!

Yeah, I thought it was cool that, by the end of Sandman...

(SPOILERS!)

...Gaiman kinda acknowledged the nature of Sandman as a legacy character, when the son of the Hector Hall Sandman became the new Dream (though obviously Gaiman's Sandman had little to do with the previous characters of that name). I think Hippolyta and Hector Hall have also appeared in some post-Sandman main universe DC comics, since they were DC superheroes before Gaiman snatched them for his book.

But yeah, I too wasn't particularly well versed in DC comics when I started reading Sandman, so I was bit surprised to learn years later that "Dr. Destiny" was actually an old JLA villain who looked like Skeletor. And he was also related to the Garret Sandford Sandman (the guy who preceded Hector Hall), as Sandford and the Justice League fought against him in a JLA annual. A lot of the first Sandman arc is actually Gaiman actually trying to fit his series into the previous DC chronology (pretty much every major character who appeared in that arc was an established DC character), but most of that was lost on me when I first read it.

(xpost)

xpost The Vertigo Voices one-shots stretched that conceit to its near-breaking point. The totally grungified son of Prez in search of the dark, twisted heart of America! AKA the first Brubaker I ever read, and not exactly his high water mark.

i was roommates with Ed when he started pitching that one-shot; it was intended to stretch the Vertigo brand conceit to its breaking point and the ridiculousness of its elevator pitch was not lost on him.

I'm still picking up new references in Sandman (like the barely-mentioned Fashion Thing character, who, as the Mad Mod Witch, had her own stint as a horror host).

Re: crossovers in Vertigo. I thought it was an uncomfortable mixture to have superheroes in some of those titles. Moore's Swamp Thing is the only Vertigo run I ever read the whole of and I think the guest stars rarely strengthened it, Etrigan's riddles were fun, some of the Spectre stuff was cool but most of it didn't help the story of the plant guy.
Crossovers only really work for me when the shared universe element was a major feature to start with, otherwise I feel it's a rude interruption. Lots of writers used to complain that they wanted to tell a story of a character and then got big crossovers forced on them.

I think if Moore could do it all over again he'd not work for DC but have a comic called Plant God. But again, it's difficult to imagine these things happening without DC having a stable of artists and characters to reinvent. I just wish the whole British invasion could have just stayed in Britain with creator owned books that Americans could read. DC was attracted by what was happening in Britain, so if everyone stayed I think the attention would have kept gathering. The rates would be lower but the fruits would be better.

I'm curious about Caitlin R Kiernan's Vertigo work.

Old Lunch and anyone else- just asking what runs you liked the best and what it was they did well.

(there's a vertigo thread. might be a better place for this)

/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=57&threadid=210

Lots of writers used to complain that they wanted to tell a story of a character and then got big crossovers forced on them.

*raises hand*

the second issue of my run writing Robin (#101) was a mandated, inescapable crossover event with Young Justice (of all things), and I was informed of this fact AFTER my script for the first issue of my run was already locked in. Meaning any tension generated by the end of my first issue had to be punted offstage for this interdimensional something or other garbage event where I had to hit notes D, E and F. Then find a way to get back to stage position where I'd left off. Had irl panic attacks over this.

Did not realize you'd written any mainstream stuff! Yes, I can imagine being thrust into a crossover with no lead time would be incredibly frustrating. Although...is that when Peter David was writing Young Justice? Because I thought I remembered him being pretty vocal about his lack of appreciation for having crossovers thrust upon him.

(I moved the Vertigo-specific conversation over to the Vertigo thread, btw.)

I don't know why I said "used to complain" because these huge multi-title crossovers are worse than ever now. Maybe writers of superheroes today fully expect to deal with this. There was a period in the late 90s/early 00s when Marvel said they were trying to avoid this but that didn't last long.

I feel like Marvel is doing a much more elegant job of it nowadays, at least inasmuch as the elements of a given crossover don't usually feel quite as forced or perfunctory as they used to. I think there's a lot more pre-planning and I'm sure the writers involved have plenty of heads-up. Although there's certainly an argument to be made that a lot of individual flavor is lost when everything is just a discrete component of a larger, neverending tapestry.

xpost the writer of YJ at the time was Todd somebody. My editor owed his editor a favor or some shit like that. The plotting/concept of the crossover was godawful. I mean, it would have been fine if I'd known in advance about it.

I managed to stay on the title for 21 issues, by the end of which DiDio had taken a dislike to my work. Until the last few issues I loved doing it, tbrr. Pete Woods was the artist on almost every ish which was a lucky stroke on my part. Dylan Horrocks, who was writing Birds of Prey at the same time as my Robin run, put it perfectly after we both got canned when he described it as "the best job I never felt I had".

Oh, yeah, that was that weird period when Horrocks did Batgirl and Gilbert Hernandez also did a stretch on Birds of Prey, yeah? I would've loved to see DC go more in that direction, but I figured even at the time that editorial interference would wind up deep sixing anything really interesting.