Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

I got the first issue of Jim Starlin's Thanos vs. Hulk a week or so back. After you read bunches of modern super hero comics, you read this Starlin issue and it's like 1982 again. Colors are a little bleh gray on the book, but it was pretty fun. The thing totally read like an old style Marvel comic, which was kind of novel.

Got Tom Sutton's Creepy Things today. Hope they do a second volume because there's quite a lot of good stuff not included. Love the way these Yoe Books are designed.

Finally read the much-ballyhhod Ros Chast memoir, which was actually pretty great in a depressing way

new bitch planet today

is that 2 or 3, i haven't been to the shop in a minute

2

Alfred Bester, Patricia Highsmith, Mickey Spillane and Manly Wade Wellman.

Are there any other writers who were better known for their prose who did comics in the golden and silver ages? And are any of these comics that notable for being good?

neil gaiman

(oh, missed the golden / silver bit)

dashiell hammett's agent x-9 is just being reissued now
http://www.tcj.com/checking-in-with-dean-mullaney/

George Melly, Barry Took, Humphrey Lyttelton, Barry Norman and Compton Mackenzie all wrote scripts for the newspaper strip Flook in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Forks beat me to Dashiell Hammett. That interview mentions the fact that Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, worked on X-9 briefly after Hammett.

i will DEFINITELY be getting this new basil wolverton book
http://www.tcj.com/creeping-death-and-snakemeat-basil-wolverton-and-max-clotfelter/
i mean, my god
http://images.tcj.com/2015/01/creep12.jpg

I was looking at that last week and the panel arrangements of the early comics look really weird.

also just zipped through the three volumes of jodo/moebius' Madwoman of the Sacred Heart... what a wobbly, wild read! The art is really first rate.

Barry Humphries wrote The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie as a weekly strip before the films. (Obviously better known as a monologue and dialogue writer and improviser than prose writer, but has about ten fiction & non-fiction & memoir books under his belt too.)

Patricia Highsmith did comics?

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/04/24/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-152/

Scroll down a bit to see the Highsmith bit. I once heard Ripley was based on a comic artist she knew but I can't remember where I read that.

I think Spillane mostly wrote those 1-2 page text stories. Apparently Bill Everett and Spillane had some sort of grudge.

I always wondered if those text stories that nobody ever read in old Comics had lots of brilliant ones scattered across them.

Oh man what an unloved unhallowed body of work, those text one-pagers.

I once made an effort to read them, but that was late on in the time I was reading those anthologies. I wish I had read all the ones I came across.

Seems like there's no cheap option for those Alfred Bester DC comics.

Bester co-created Solomon Grundy too.

Nameless #1 was a fun read. When you get down to the core plot, the bad guys in all of Grant Morrison's comics are really the same folk aren't they? I don't say that as a bad thing, but it is his story hook in many ways.

while reading it i kept wondering if this was just an artist's rendition of morrison's automatic writing journal

Patricia Highsmith was once set up on a date with Stan Lee. http://www.scottedelman.com/2010/04/04/stan-lee-was-only-interested-in-stan-lee/

love the url there; clearly not a giving lover

The one review I read of Bitch Planet talked about how odd and inauthentic the use of ersatz Ben-Day patterns was - some guy has recoloured a bunch of pages with an actually 70s-reminiscent style, and not only does it look GREAT, but wow at how ugly the original colouring is generally:

http://jonathanbogart.tumblr.com/post/110308310125/aintgotnoladytronblues-twiststreet-schwabco-i

Felt like the whole comic was kind of a letdown after the title -- found it quite difficult to follow -- ODY-C too. Maybe I don't have patience for comics that involve effort.

I'm really appreciating this coloring talk! I think it's something that bothers me in some titles but not at a conscious level.

Some of the art where the colorist work is obviously a collaboration with clearly defined palettes definitely is a strength of some titles. The Hellboy/BPRD titles, with their limited colors and shading, or most of the titles drawn by Mike Allred (notably often colored by his wife) are very appealing in this regard.

Felt like the whole comic was kind of a letdown after the title -- found it quite difficult to follow -- ODY-C too. Maybe I don't have patience for comics that involve effort.

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, February 9, 2015 11:42 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

definitely felt ODY-C was difficult to follow--had to read a few pages a few times--but idk had no trouble following BP. a bunch of people i've heard say they were lost at the climax though

I haven't had a problem understanding BP; my only problem is understanding why people are thinking it's great. ODY-C is a hot mess.

http://instagram.com/p/y5W5dqpeGQ/

never heard of eternauta, interest piqued

These are GORGEOUS
http://50watts.com/Okamoto-Kiichi

Wow, love those

Just grabbed 1 & 2 of They're Not Like Us to see what all the fuss was about, so far not really doing it for me. Feels like a Wanted-style spin on like "what if X-Men were. . .bad"

to see what all the fuss was about

literally heard of this for the first time in the words immediately preceding that quote

El Eternauta has always sounded pretty cool and way ahead of its time (a mature, long-form sci-fi/political allegory originally published in the 1950s), I hope one someone will translate it to a language I can read...

"I hope some day someone will translate it"

There are some English scanlations here, but the translator seems to have abandoned the project. Still, even those pages make it clear it's quite unlike any comic published in the US or Europe at the time.

I haven't explored too widely, but Scribd is a service that appears to be offering a brief trial right now (although they do hold your credit info in case you don't cancel) and they have a bunch of comics from a few different companies. I looked at some Marvel stuff but the image quality seemed lower than Marvel Unlimited. However, they have a lot of the recent Valiant stuff.

And lots of Top Shelf, too

can you download drm-free files from scribd or are they 'on loan' so to speak?

on loan

Ah. Off topic for this thread but I saw they're the only ppl who seem to offer an ebook of England's Hidden Reverse.

hm. i will check that out.

https://www.comixology.com/Powers/bundle/160?tid=E150212001&utm_source=comiXology+Digital+Comics+Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=E150212001_Icon_Powers_Sale

Powers collection on sale for 50% off at Comixology

This is fascinating:
http://www.tcj.com/working-stiff-working-loose-the-1950s-career-of-john-stanley/
who among us knew that John Stanley revived Krazy Kat seven years after Herriman's death? Or that it looked like THIS?!?!?
http://images.tcj.com/2015/02/6-IgnatzPanelsFromKat-650x500.jpg

Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca's Darth Vader #1 was a really good read. I quite liked Larroca's artwork on Iron Man, but he seems to be a kid in a candy store drawing this Star Wars series. I'm definitely not a Star Wars geek but I am a fan, so it is cool to see a scene between Vader and Jabba. It was a pretty well done 'licensed' comic by filling in the blanks on scenes for the comic.

Anyone else notice that the minute Dark Horse lost the Star Wars license, Marvel instantly published their entire catalog in digital format with Marvel logos on it?

Licensed comics makes strange bedfellows. One of the weirder ones I have seen in the past few years was DC putting out a showcase of the 1975 Marvel black and white magazines

Which ones?