Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

xpost We're talking about Vertigo. Same character, different take. Ditko Shade lasted < 10 issues, IIRC.

i've never read it but u've all inspired me

Ditko Shade is great too, but a totally different thing from the Vertigo series.

Milligan's Shade series is cool, but two of the miniseries he wrote for Vertigo around the same sort of time are even better (and reach fully satisfying conclusions) - The Extremist drawn by Ted Mckeever and Enigma drawn by Duncan Fegredo.

Milligan has some stuff that is more workmanlike but as far as writers go, I think he's generally underrated

Milligan has had a patchy career, but he's certainly underrated. Enigma was one of the best miniseries Vertigo ever put out. Skreemer (which probably would've been a Vertigo mini if it had been issued a year or two later) is another great early '90s Milligan project. And his one-shots like Face and Tainted were pretty good, too. Then he had those weird post-Vertigo wilderness years where he wrote awful stuff like Elektra before he came back in full force with X-Force/-Statix and the Human Target ongoing. Lots of stuff worth checking out.

There was a stretch of time when Shade was my favorite ongoing title, so I'd still highly recommend it despite its unevenness. I reread it two years ago or so and most of it still holds up.

I loved Milligan's run on Shade at the time. Would almost say its better than Sandman (certainly the art is better)

Too true. The early Bachalo stuff was a little muddy and not terribly special (which may have been due to the inking), but I became a huge fan once he hit his stride a year or so in. Even most of the guest artists during his tenure (like Glynn Dillon and Phillip Bond) were great.

I hadn't really thought about it until now but I probably learned a lot about drawing by heavily aping Shade-era Bachalo.

Saw something unexpected today: a complete(?) Marvel collection of Weirdworld. The title isn't very appropriate, it looks a lot like Elfquest and any number of Tolkien inspired 70s-80s stuff.
Some nice black and white Mike Ploog at the start but later on John Buscema with someone painting over him, it looks a bit cheesy but it's still impressive.

I didn't know about that collection. There weren't all that many Weirdworld installments (it just popped up now and again in anthology titles like Marvel Fanfare and Epic Illustrated), so I would assume it's complete. I wonder if it's been released to promote the (apparently) completely unrelated Weirdworld miniseries that's part of Secret Wars.

Yeah I just heard about that. Marvel pretty much never reprints anything for its own sake, it always has to tie into a larger plan.

There's a notorious early issue of The Comics Journal where they fawned over the full color Weirdworld strip, which first ran in a colour Marvel magazine. The airbrushy finishing (from memory, by Rudy Nebres?) was pretty 'advanced' for Marvel at that time, but nothing that wasn't being done better in Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, and of course the story was the usual sub-Tolkein bollox, cranked out by good old reliable Doug Moench.

I saw that new collection in the window of Forbidden Planet today - smaller than the original magazine printings, which can't help.

more gorgeous ogden whitney superhero stuff
http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2015/04/skyman-ogden-whitney-1940.html

Kodansha are translating Junji Ito's Cat Diary! Hooray hooray! Maybe we'll get Hellstar Remina soon.

http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2015/04/STK668561-300x461.jpg

real or shopped?

out today

o brave new world

i flipped through the archie and predator book
there's a scene where the gang are on a tropical island and there's red rain coming down from a palm tree on a confused moose and its two flayed bodies hung by a predator.
this is played for laffs

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2015/04/ty-templeton-in-critical-but-stable-condition-after-heart-attack/

coming soon

http://i2.wp.com/pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/sharknado-promo_2.jpg?crop=0px%2C61px%2C900px%2C603px&resize=446%2C299&zoom=2

Okay, I thought for sure that one was a shop (mostly because the art looks like some shit) until I just now saw the news story. I guess literally anything can happen at Archie Comics now.

it's been like that for a few years now - the gay character w his own book, Archie gets killed, zombies vs archie etc.

This was linked to in the Comics Journal Herb Trimpe obituary. His diary from his last days at Marvel to being unemployed then becoming a teacher. I found it very interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/010900edlife-56-edu.html

I could imagine a good book full of accounts from artists who became too unfashionable to make a living in the mainstream.

I can't decide whether this is the greatest ever solicit or the worst ever.

DOOMED #2
Written by SCOTT LOBDELL
Art and cover by JAVIER FERNANDEZ
1:25 Variant cover by MATEUS SANTOLUOCO
On sale JULY 15 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T

The secret origin of our Doomed hero is revealed! Plus: Tons of stuff gets smashed!

just digitally paged through Schau and Runde's "Margarin"
good lord

https://tytempletonart.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/daredevil-hearts.jpg

Yay!

haha wow

Got preview copies of Secret Wars #1 in the mail, just finished it, zero idea WTF is going on in it. It's like an Avengers 2 fight scene across 32 pages

Bought Johnny Viable And His Terse Friends for my brother because he's a big Aylett fan. Read some of the fake letters pages and they were hilarious. He has such an impressive knack for surreal absurdity.

Bitch Planet is awful good.

i haven't read the newest one yet--i liked it a lot at first but it feels a little like the story is wandering and i'm losing a little interest.

I tapped out on Bitch Planet. Wasn't clicking with me at all.

Picked up a used copy of Toppi's Sharaz-De: Tales from the Arabian Nights that Archaia published in 2013. It's gorgeous.

alex + ada wrapping up this month, i've really been enjoying that one.

Crickets #4 came out (!!!) and I haven't held a better-smelling comic book in years

It's a liiittle frustrating in that the whole issue is Part 2 of one of the stories from #3, but that wouldn't be a problem if Harkham gets another issue out within a year.

I never got #2 because of Diamond dumping it; just looked and it's going for $100 on Amazon. WELP

Black River is about the ugliest and most dispiriting comic i've ever read, think Johnny Ryan with a straight face
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/colville-and-black-river/
panel clips don't really do it justice, it's the sheer accumulation that does it.

anybody gonna read a-force

i read it. it's cute. i think we discussed it briefly over on the secret wars thread?

Xpost forks you could have just said "josh Simmons"

He obviously has his thing, idgi but there it is.

A-Force is in my ever-increasing to-read stack.

Black River was my first exposure to Josh Simmons. A bit of internet reading suggests this is his milieu, eh? It's dark as fuck; a grimmer and messier Chris Ware in spirit.

yeah it does nothing for me whatsoever. facile.

in other news, I can report that Avengers #50 (1968) has both a full page ad for The Mothers' We're Only In It For The Money LP and an in-story reference to Wonder Warthog...

*frantically pulls up the issue*

I've gathered most of the Secret Wars comics from the last couple of weeks but haven't started them, I don't think I can do the whole mess Aldo-like justice.

Sales are crazy but I think people might burn out quickly with so many miniseries and wrap-up series and the main one.

Haven't read this week's stuff but last week's crossovery stuff was pretty fun. Nothing exceptional but I think there's something to be said for "fun and forgettable". So far they really seem to be getting the portentous-to-goofiness ratio just right.

Simmons shifted into that blacker-none-blacker mode in the last ten years; his earlier stuff was played more goofy and jaunty, even when dark at the core. In, for eg, House it added up to less than the sum of its parts for me, but Cockbone was a masterpiece for that accumulative effect.

Is Priest's Black Panther run supposed to be making me nauseous? I'm 15 issues in, does this get better?

Just read Superman: Earth One Volume Three, I'm sorry to say. It's basically the same as Morrison's Action Comics. He even gets armour at the end. I can't imagine who DC thinks the audience for this is, aside from grumpy old jerks who hate-read library copies.