Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

Reading those cheapo B&W collections always felt wrong to me, like it was the pan & scan of comic books. Also especially when you're used to reading manga that was produced and meant to be read in B&W in the first place, even the great Marvel/DC stuff feels strangely incomplete without color. I'd prefer it even with the "bad" color reproduction in the glossy Masterworks collections - though to be honest, it's still more readable than a 30-year-old floppy of such-and-such, dotted on newsprint.

I'm too much of a rube to really notice bad colouring jobs I guess. I own plenty of Essential/Showcase volumes (initial Showcase fever was a great time to be on ILC) but I do think Silver Age superhero comics beg for colour in a way many other comics don't; b&w feels like removing a really essential component of the aesthetic.

I'm not going to argue that any of the reproductions are ideal, but I'm glad they exist because I'm not a millionaire who can afford to buy all of the reprinted issues. And none Marvel or DC's reproductions have been anywhere near as awful as, say, Checker's Supreme reprints or Dynamite and Dark Horse's R.E. Howard reprints. The Big Two's reproductions at least look like they were done by professionals.

(And tbf, the Dark Horse Conan reprints have gotten much better since those eye-gouging early volumes.)

I find the b&w reprints too hard on my eyes - sometimes it's hard to distinguish between picture and text. Also "Ditko and Colan look superior in that form"? - I'll take a look but that's surprising.

Gene Colan even said he considered himself a black and white artist.

I had about 30 of those Masterworks and DC Archives books and if you really care about the drawings, the flaws of those books quickly become apparent.
Imagine your favourite album horribly remixed with previously subtle elements turned up really loud.
One of the most pronounced differences I saw was in the Simon+Kirby Boy's Ranch comics. Beautiful scenes turned to shit.

Here's one Fantatastic Four comparison. The original colour is not nice by any means, but the second is like drinking undiluted concentrate Orange juice or as he says, so bright you feel you'll need sunglasses to read it.
http://www.printmag.com/featured/remembrance-of-comics-past/

I know it's Fantagraphics, Who are among the best in the game and more faithful but the colour in the second Meskin page is just ugly, I'd prefer black and white.

https://ditkocultist.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/original-comic-art-steve-ditko-tales-to-astonish-13.jpg
This isn't going to look much better in colour whether you go with the original colour or take a masterworks shit on it. You'd need to do completely unfaithful colour to improve it.

Masterworks reproduce the inks better than DC Archives, which thicken the inks and ruin the drawings more.
But I've actually found DC are more variable and likely to produce good colour reprints in their other formats. Their Newsboy Legion collections used decent scans.

The Gemstone EC Archives have less overpowering new colour but it's still a bit too solid and they made the colour more literal, which destroys a lot of the effect.
Thankfully the black and white Fantagraphics EC collections taken off, you might reasonably miss the colour but if you think the EC artists look bad in black and white, you're a sick fuck.

Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives are good. I've heard that he made sure they didn't look like DC Archives.

I love the essentials/showcase books and really regret that I didn't buy more of them at the time given that a lot of them are now difficult to find for an affordable price. I guess I just assumed that they'd be around indefinitely? it seems like it was only a few years ago that they were taking up around 60% of the shelf space in my local comic shop.

http://belatednerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/monster-pants-rommbu-202x300.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/omnibus/images/TTA1959019001_col.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/236x/9b/72/65/9b72651846eddd6dacaffb80c7afdd14.jpg
What? That yellow isn't strong enough for you?
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/omnibus/images/TTA1959005001_col.jpg

http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2007/02/Astonishing56AfraidToDreamPage1.jpg
Messy but at least it's not this...
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/omnibus/images/ASTON1951056005_col.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BJjJ5EGTBC4/TL04uK5YQGI/AAAAAAAAAr8/3RKcsPZUqSc/s1600/googam.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/omnibus/images/TOS1959017001_col.jpg

Interesting. Yellows aside, I don't mind some of those recolourings. The FF panels, for example: sure, they look bad up against the originals, but without that context I'm not sure I'd notice or care that, e.g., the colour of the sky has turned from yellow to cyan. I'm more bothered by stuff like the "modernised" versions of Daredevil or Killing Joke, where the changes are so obvious they're practically unreadable.

And even relatively new recolourings like The Sandman look uncanny valley awful (even when the originals were pretty garish too).

Imagine your favourite album horribly remixed with previously subtle elements turned up really loud.

I mean the choice here is between that and an edition that removes these subtle elements entirely, so...

I'm just a philistine I guess, since I just dgaf about reproducing the precise look and feel of something that was originally produced as quickly and cheaply as possible for a mass market of children. Things being brighter and crisper doesn't seem like much of a crime to me. I have some original Kirby-era Thor and FF issues and the printing quality is atrocious and they are old and falling apart and faded. By contrast the Marvel Masterworks books I have of the same material are well-made and don't (to my eyes) look like they've been re-drawn wholesale or otherwise butchered or "updated" to a modern look (in contrast to, say, the Man from S.H.I.E.L.D. reprint that was recolored with modern shading techniques and looks like total garbage) .

Like if some clear attempt has been made to reproduce the look and feel of the original work like the Ditko panels above, I'm ok with that. the differences seem minor to me. Certainly preferable to owning a bunch of rapidly deteriorating and expensive original issues.

I think they get the spirit, if not the substance, right or close enough the majority of the time. But the Nick Fury/Strange Tales/SHIELD stuff was such a clusterfuck because Steranko played off the way the color process worked, and the dot textures, and they just kind of flatted the whole thing blindly

guys these things look hideous and you have Stockholm syndrome

I guess describing them as "hideous" implies that the original production jobs were somehow far superior and that seems weird to me. this stuff often looked like garbage when it was printed. you look at an old issue of FF and there's panels where the color separations are a total mess, for ex.

I'm not entirely convinced of the inherent superiority of, say, the medium of duller, coarser near-newsprint quality paper making colors washed out.

That's why black and white is so good.

Post-Joe Simon era Kirby survives the Masterworks approach better than Ditko, Maneely, Kubert, Colan, Krigstein, John Severin and a lot of the more textured 50s artists. If I could find comparisons for more artists I'm sure the difference would be more glaring. It particularly doesn't suit rough looking horror, war and westerns.

Maybe you can see how these pages would have benefited from different approaches.

http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/st/images/ST027015_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/menace/images/MENACE001021_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/menace/images/MENACE005009_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/menace/images/MENACE006009_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/jim/images/JIM026022_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/jim/images/JIM027007_col.jpg
http://www.collectededitions.com/marvel/mm/atlas/battlefield/images/BTFLD005001_col.jpg

Accuracy of the colour recreation isn't nearly as important to me as letting the drawings breathe because they are often what gives a lot of these comics any lasting worth, why people spend lots of money to get them. I'm sure not buying them for backstory or the writing quality. For lovers of comic art I can't stress enough how important it is to get this stuff right. It's another sad aspect of the medium that you can't get respectful versions of some of the most important comic art there is.

Personally I'd take better looking drawings on deteriorating pages over Masterworks.

Hey everyone! If you're in the NYC area Jose Muñoz ( of Alack Sinner/ Joe's Bar fame) will be at the opening of his gallery show today - 5 to 9pm - at the Scott Eder Gallery in Jersey City. Saw him speak last night at Parson's and while jetlagged he had a very cool dialogue with Peter Kuper.

I honestly wouldn't know re: most of those artists. I recently checked this out: https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP._0q2uIOBXz0WMQZmB-dZvgDlEs%26pid%3D15.1&f=1 and thought it was great, but then that's Fantagraphics.

Colan's (color) art in the Steve Englehart/Dr. Strange "Essentials" edition (this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/512M2-UxcwL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg) looked great imo

xp

I'm sure I've said before on here that I like the Essential volumes partly because they remind me of British Marvel Comics of the 1970s, which reprinted the American comics in black and white (often with a grey tone added, and printed at magazine as opposed to comic size). The lack of colour definitely allows you to study the quality of the inked artwork more closely - to see the incredible brush control of a great finisher like Joe Sinnott or Tom Palmer, or to spot the shoddy, corner-cutting work of a bodger like Vince Colletta or Mike Esposito.

A major part of the problem for Marvel in particular is that they did not start to keep good film/stats of their artwork until the late 1960s, so lots of the reprints of key Silver Age titles are produced from second or third hand film that has been extensively 'restored', redrawn, corrected etc. Some of the Essentials have whole issues where no restoration work has taken place and are barely legible as a consequence. So the recolouring - which I agree, is often ugly and inappropriate (ugh those early Marvel Masterwork hardcovers)- is by no means the only problem with regard to fidelity to an original.

My preference would always be for directly reprinting from the printed comic pages, with as little 'adjustment' as possible while still preserving legibility, but really, one's preference has to be on a case by case basis with this stuff.

I have fondness for the recoloured reprints in Mr Monster and Curse Of The Weird, some Basil Wolverton reprints and Eclipse/Pacific. They weren't at all faithful but they looked fantastic.

http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2013/10/swamp-monster-by-basil-wolverton-from.html

http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/03/basil-wolverton-swamp-monster-weird.html

I'm sure the second version was from the Mr Monster recolouring, it's very nice.

In that Image documentary, Marc Silvestri claims that the first Iron Man film saved the comic industry by changing the popular perception of comics. I think he might have been slightly joking when he said "saved" and he did focus on the increased interest in screen adaptations of comics but was there really that big an increase in comics sales?

Comic Books Ordered by Comics Shops in North America (in units)

http://www.comichron.com/pix/vitalstatistics/AM1Units.jpeg

{obviously that doesn't include bookstore and digital sales but certainly the direct market hasn't seen any boom.)

leaving out digital/bookstore/online sales makes it hard to tell if that chart has any meaning in the last decade or so

I assume those recent-ish DC spikes correspond to New 52 and other big crossover events? If so, really illustrates how that frequent-hits-of-nitrous sales model works...

New 52 was Fall 2011, that's definitely responsible for that mysterious spike for Sep '11.
Trinity War/Forever Evil was Fall 2013, surprised it was that successful.

For Marvel, big 2008 spike was Secret Invasion, after which point there are diminishing returns post-Bendis control for awhile until 2012, around the time of Avengers vs. X-Men.
2015 spike was likely Secret Wars.

Nice to see that Image has been steadily rising over the last decade, but kind of sad it stil hasn't reached the late 90s level of success.

Also those aren’t sales, unless I’m mistaken? They’re how many units you’re convincing comic shop owners to roll the dice on.

Just came to my notice: Shiver Selected Tales by Junji Ito. It's a best of.

Out in a week or two

In that Image documentary, Marc Silvestri claims that the first Iron Man film saved the comic industry by changing the popular perception of comics.

Possibly just conflation of comics and the superhero genre at work here?

without the first iron man film, there would be no johnny ryan

DC and Marvel have also played some numbers games - DC offered returnability for the first 4 issues of each Rebirth title (not featured on that chart) so any store with enough of a piggy bank could gamble), Marvel offers extra discounts for meeting thresholds on certain titles they want to push (ie order 250% of a given title for Secret Wars #1 and you get a 71% discount instead of 56%) and requiring match or exceed numbers for things like the hip-hop variants.

Anyone else reading Kaijumax? Latest issue fucked me up proper.

yeah that is absolutely the "feel-bad" comic of the moment

http://www.tcj.com/ice-cream-for-bedwetters/

^ this was, i thought, a pretty good read and hits on some points that have really resonated for me lately about what's different about being a comic reader/collector in 1990 and 2017, to wit:

Now The Saga of the Sub-Mariner seems like an odd artifact because its purpose has been supplanted by technology. Fans can learn Namor’s history on Wikipedia or any number of even more detailed fan databases. It’s less fun, I think, than when all you had was what was on the page and what you could cadge from whatever old back issues were on hand. Maybe ask the guy (almost always a guy) behind the counter of the store if they knew anything.

In that economy a book like The Saga of the Sub-Mariner made a lot more sense. After all, what kid reading about Namor in the late ’80s would ever be able to read Namor’s earliest appearances? The guy has a long history, even if it’s often a dull history. Now I can go online and if the Namor books I want aren’t available legally via Marvel or Amazon, they’re available illegally on a torrent. Or I can read the summaries on Wikipedia. Anyone who wants to learn about Namor, in other words, can find out whatever the fuck they want about Namor at any time.

Marvel used to do books like these more often, and in a world without Wikipedia sometimes they were pretty useful. The Thomas’s dry approach is difficult to stomach in 2017 only because the reader ecosystem that could support books like this – history lessons, essentially – has dried up. Regardless of how boring it may have been I would still have loved this book I was a kid – even though the approach has the effect of erasing the creators whose work inspired the book and built the character. Buckler and McLeod filter Everett and Kirby and dozens of others through Marvel house style, already stodgy in 1988 but still readable. It creates the illusion of continuity between artists working separately across decades at the expense of the artists themselves.

some interesting reflection like in your pull-quote but god the style of writing was terrible

Tegan's voice has definitely wandered in the transition.

I'm loving Blue Planet 2 right now, but I've never figured out how to interest myself in water-based superheroes. Is it the water, or the superhero?

Never been done right

Wally Wood's depiction of Atlantis and the Sub-Mariner gets it right in Daredevil 7 imho, one of the greatest of all Silver Age Marvel Comics.

The Thing/Sub-Mariner punch-up in Sub-Mariner 8 by Roy Thomas and John Buscema is also pretty special, artwise.

thanks for the tip on Daredevil 7! To the torrent jet...

i didn't mind the "you may find yourself" writing style there as a re-introduction to Tegan. ymmv.
he's right about submariner being a lost character. i always thought there could be a good Alan Moore style reboot for him that restyled him as an emissary for the blue. It would explain the whole random violence schtick.

A problem w/water-based heroes (IMO) is that they seem to be able to traverse vast undersea distances in the blink of an eye, as if distance is meaningless in the ocean. They can seemingly just show up on any shore, when needed....

Sub-Mariner's "Random violence schtick" was explained in the John Byrne series as what happens when he's either too long in the water or too long on land. He must balance both sides of his being or some such. It's been a few decades since I read those comics.

x-post

oh yeah! i actually liked that explanation.

don't think i ever read that... it's the bends?

Alas, I don't remember how it worked.