Rolling Comic Books 2024

https://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2017/04/steve-ditko-at-charlton-1969-1971.html
https://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2017/04/ditko-at-charlton-part-2-1972-1974.html
There's some recent and fairly expensive Robin Snyder print-on-demand compilations of some of these years, I'm preparing to be disappointed but these are some of my favorite comics. Would very much appreciate a complete Ditko and Tom Sutton compilations of this era, and maybe highlights from miscellaneous artists, because I can't image someone doing the entire run of these titles and it probably wouldn't be a good idea anyway.

https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=95_137&products_id=1711
I totally missed this, had no idea

Was wondering if anyone is ever been cool enough to cosplay as Winnie The Witch and yes, there was someone
https://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2010/06/winnie-witch.html

Didn't know this Charlton revival was a thing
https://morttodd.com/charlton.html

https://steveditkostuff.blogspot.com/2024/07/routine-many-ghosts-of-doctor-graves-7.html

Just finished Sususmu Higa's Okinawa. Mix of stories from WWII and ones from modern Okinawa. Really hits home how much the local population has a collective industry distinct from the mainland Japanese one. Also features an interview with the artist from the Mangasplaining crew.

It taken me a while to discover Alan Class comics(though I guess I may have been 15, so it wasn't a long time) because hardly anyone sold them, it was like opening up a weird hidden history. There's an article somewhere about all the art variations in them because they had wider covers that showed extra stuff that wasn't on the american covers, or drawings that were covered up by lettering on the american versions, or things that didn't pass the comics code but somehow made it to britain. There was an extensive article about the variations but I can't find it.

I'm guessing the comics code rejected this cover because they didn't want children looking so directly at Spiderman's butt, but it was okay for Italy
https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/kirby/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2006/04/AmazingSpiderMan35_190a.jpg

🚨New License🚨

Suburban Hell by Taro Kanafuro

192 Pages. 1 Volume. Extremely violent and gory.

We have acquired WORLDWIDE English rights.

A collection of seven short stories focused on human decay and corruption in everyday suburban settings.

Coming Summer 2024 pic.twitter.com/teJL8CIRrA

— Star Fruit Books (@starfruitbooks) February 16, 2024

Looked at this guy's twitter account and some of it's pretty unsettling, gives Suehiro Maruo a run for his money

I've had fun looking around the trading card database because I know who a lot of these painters are now, like fantasy artists who never drew comics interiors or comic artists drawing characters they normally wouldn't. There's Spiderman characters by Ian Miller and Bob Eggleton.

I got the Steve Ditko reprints published by Robin Snyder (I can't see a consistent publisher name listed) called Touch Of Genius, This Is How It Is and Tonight I'll Dream Of You, these collect all his Charlton work from 1971-73, and it seems like the next book (Introducing Captain Atom) is going back to 1960. I really don't understand this publishing order but I would prefer it went back to 1966-70 and 74 to the late 70s. I don't think most would be happy paying these prices for paperbacks (two of them were significantly cheaper on Awesomebooks) but I think these look really great, I'm impressed, it's pretty nice colour scans.
I also got a newer edition of Sweeter Gwen that he did with Eric Stanton. I love this stuff and I'll have to see if there is a more comprehensive list of his Stanton collaborations because for years it was only Kinky Hook and Sweeter Gwen that were noted but I'm sure there's more with his very distinctive early 60s inking style.

Been ordering back issues for the first time in years. I kind of hate getting 30 page comics for anthology stories that are just a third or fourth of the length. It reminded me of when I was more of an obsessive collector of lots of comic artists and I would have lots of comics for just their cover, or one page, or some other small fraction of a full comic. It meant that a huge chunk of my comic collection was just pages of stuff I tolerated because it was sharing space with the thing I really wanted. One time I got annoyed enough with this that I considered cutting out the pages I wanted and throwing out the rest but I didn't feel great about that. I asked on the old Comics Journal forum and some people were horrified but Eddie Campbell was very encouraging and said he was very comfortable cutting out one image from a nice hardcover book. So I cut out loads of pages and it's one of those things that really made me rethink the value of it all and I was glad I did it, but now I feel more conflicted about it because there are probably people who would have liked those comics whole and maybe I should have made harder choices about what to put in the charity shops. I haven't clipped out pages in over a decade and I don't think I'll do it again.

The idea of buying anthologies is still irritating because of all the pages I don't want. But comics that first appeared in anthologies are much of my favorite comics and I used to agree with people that there should be much more of them. I remember one really evangelical anthology fan saying that they pushed the medium forward more than any other type of comic. Now I really begrudge buying all the unwanted pages, I much prefer the idea of comic artists doing more solo short story collections because getting an anthology full of artists you really like is a freakishly unlikely thing now. However, it would take a long time to make a book full of short stories and I think many artists would find it frustrating to have finished stories waiting until they had a book length of them.

I have stacks on prose anthologies and magazines now and I haven't yet got to the point where I'm struggling to make tough choices with them. Luckily short prose fiction collections by one author are a common thing (despite not selling especially well).

How do you feel about your own anthology collecting? Do you wish there were more comics anthologies? Or solo collections?

Do none of the EC artist collections by Fantagraphics have cover art inside? Seems like an odd choice not to have the covers

“the covers” …of what?

The cover art of the EC Comics titles, they only have the stories, as far as I've seen

what covers would you put in each book though

According to the artist who did them: Johnny Craig covers in the Johnny Craig books, Al Feldstein covers in the Al Feldstein books, etc...

in greyscale?

I don't know, I guess regular black and white would be fitting? Not sure why the big Russ Cochran library editions did the covers in colour

...so where would they get the cover art in B&W?

I only have the Krigstein volume in that Fanta series - no covers, but then he didn't draw many, and this all-time banger wouldn't work in black and white anyway:

https://storage.googleapis.com/hipcomic/p/ab05abcae0c873b1b9cfb4ce5cbd659f.jpg

There's an 'artisan' edition of the EC covers collection from IDW that's pretty affordable.

Fanta used the main image from that Piracy cover on their paperback Krigstein best-of 20-odd years ago

Yeah, Messages in a Bottle, I have that. And the two biography/anthology hardcovers that Fanta issued prior to Messages. All good stuff (not sure about some of the Marie Sev recolouring).

Will lay off the Krig after posting this, one of the greatest fanzine covers of all time:

https://www.budsartbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SQ06.jpg

https://heroinesinfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Agar-Agar

Would love a collection of this, Alberto Solsona's Agar-Agar

Nice! Very strong Enric Sió vibe. And Trade Moore's recentish Doctor Strange comics carry on that technicolour dreamscape style.

A shame he didn't do a lot of comics and his fine art isn't doing much for me (looks nothing like his comics at all), he died young

Picked up a bunch of packs at WorldCon, so far I've only read two:

Batman/Dylan Dog - A lot of fun this! Dylan's helper gets to keep his Groucho moustache, unlike those Dark Horse reprints. Really gorgeous art throughout, and since it's an Italian project the issues themselves are longer than US style floppies. Brief moment of cringe when Constantine breaks into a reactionary speech and Dylan Dog goes "ok boomer", the dangers of someone with good intentions writing outside their experience I guess - the writer mixes up the usual claptrap about social media, virtue signalling, etc. with laments about Piccadilly Circus being "taken over by ethnic eateries owned by multinationals". Except the gentrification of central London is super real and has bollocks to do with "ethnic eateries", in fact if you're in Piccadilly it's just a few steps to an enormous concentration of family owned Chinese restaurants. Anyway it's just a dumb moment, clumsy attempt at putting the reactionary UK in its place, mostly this rocks, you should read it.

Cinder & Ashe - "Mature readers only" miniseries by Gerry Conway and the great José Luís García Lopez. Ads for Killing Joke and Animal Man, DC at its 80's peak. I guess this was Conway's attempt at swimming in that stream, and he turns out...a not particularly good Cannon film. Cajun Vietnam vet teams up with the daughter of a black GI and Vietnamese woman, who somehow still has red hair, and whom he adopted in a relationship that thanfkully does not turn sexual but still gives me the creeps. Lots of sexual assault. Just dumb as rocks, really, but elucidative as a time capsule I guess.

Thomas Woodruff - Francis Rothbart

Two parents get struck by lightning in the wilderness and their baby is brought up by animals, bizarre shenanigans and much elaborate decoration ensue. Most of this is drawings but there's occasional paintings.

I'm completely blown away by the art in this, it might be the most lavish comic I've ever seen, it taken 7 years to make and it shows. It's got heaps of personality and odd ideas, the lettering is so creative that it would be extremely difficult to translate faithfully. The only thing I didn't like is that the whimsical rhyming text is a lot to deal with and made it difficult to get through at times, I kind of wish he'd been more minimal with the text but it's also hard to imagine it being that different. That problem aside, I really love this book and it's a towering achievement.

If you're going to buy this fairly expensive book (the size of the thing, hardcovers and quality of the paper feel completely necessary) you need to be able to tolerate that the young boy main character Francis is naked for the whole book, he has a couple of troubling sexual experiences, there's some weirdly creative defecation and animals killed in brutal ways.

Thanks to Fantagraphics for publishing this, despite the extremely high quality of the work, hardly anyone else would have published this.

I had heard in an interview that Francis is modeled on Sabu but I seen a review that says the father is supposed to be the actual Sabu and the mother is Dorothy Lamour (who I know nothing about)

Not new news, but I just heard about this and am in disbelief that someone -- Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis, of all people! - decided to make this into a movie
https://www.firstshowing.net/2024/first-trailer-for-zemeckis-single-shot-here-movie-starring-tom-hanks/

I read Here as part of a comic book club recently. I loved it!

The movie looks lame-o.

RIP Bernie Mireault :(

Is it too late to talk about Daniel Clowes's MONICA? Bloody hell. Very curious how others found it. I loved it and was (naturally) also a bit creeped out.

Haven't read but heard nothing but great things.

Ex-ilxor Tom is reviewing all of 2000AD:

https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/08/lets-all-meet-up-in-the-year-2000-intro

Monica definitely among the best things Clowes has ever done but bleak as fuck even by his standards.

Monica was outstanding. The only Clowes I had previously read was Ghost World, which was a different sort of thing. Monica reminded me a lot of Twin Peaks s3, in the ways that it was disjointed in the best ways, like looking at a story reflected in a shattered mirror.

I recently read David Boring which was very good. Thinking about diving into the Complete Eight Ball set.

(“The Complete Eightball 1-18”)

Clowes is a fantastic stylist with the sensibility of a sociopathic robot. I don't know why I bother. He hasn't been funny or surprising in 30 years.

ok 20 years

Need to check out Monica. Remember really liking Patience of his more recent stuff

Monica out in a month. It might be Clowes’ best book, and definitely his best conceived-as-a-graphic-novel novel. (But would have been mindblowing if it first dropped as a run of revived Eightballs, and only revealed itself as one work upon reading the second issue or w/e.)

― vashti funyuns (sic), Thursday, 31 August 2023 22:59 (one year ago)

I foolishly expected a happy ending right until the final page - I had my hand covering the last panels but could see the page of red to the right and thought, "that doesn't look good." DON'T OPEN THE EGG MONICA!!!

Totally agree re: Twin Peaks Season 3 - I wonder if it was an influence, Clowes must have been starting Monica around the same time that it came out. And of course they're both absolutely creepy and weird, without ever being all "Hey, I'm creepy and weird!".

In other "noted indie comix guys of the 90s/00s" news, I also just finished Adrian Tomine's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist" and thought it was delightful, it's basically comics Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Getting my ass kicked by Riyoko Ikeda's Rose Of Versailles. A formative girl's comic in Japan. Just an amazing sense of page design, and such expressiveness, character's emotional states reinforced by lettering, panel shapes, etc. Author was a communist and if that shows up, so far it's been in the refusal to cast Marie Antoinette as an innocent victim, she is portrayed as calculating though oblivious, an anti-heroine just trying to get hers, but also the comic doesn't pass judgement, it's made clear this is the only role she could have in that system.

Seeing manga portrayals of her, Louis XIV, etc. also just objectively very funny.

i think i've heard of this one before - probably in relation to Utena, which seems to have taken a lot from it. definitely will keep a lookout for it

https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/3010-746/Dimwood-HC
Was wondering when this would come out. Nice to have a nice big chunk of new comics without any serialization. More exciting to me anyway.

I really wish the newest Den reprints hadn't been spread across five books because I wouldn't have felt like a sucker at all if it was just one or two books.

Taken a look at Dan Nadel's Art In Time anthology (sequel to Art Out Of Time) and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, Willy Mendes is pretty fascinating hippy stuff and I need to see if Sharon Rudahl painted more stuff.
Isn't this nice?
https://64.media.tumblr.com/e57893a66f7f93247c3fd42bd14cb3da/80d5ccb0ccddf4f3-7a/s1280x1920/3ca9386fe2f66eed0f3e56ca8d749a7b52577cdb.jpg

Looks cool! Art Out Of Time rules, even if you do have to get the magnifying glass out for some of those strips.

https://shop.treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/RCA-B0279
more Don Lawrence adventure comics

https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/british-fantasy-comics-1955-1984/

Her boyfriend has the same hair as her
https://shop.treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/RCA-G0044

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t08t94t6UQA
I found this quite fascinating. Pulp Empire came out in 2021 but it's getting a new printing, it's about government influence on american comics and Hirsch seems to have uncovered quite a bit of new information (although surely some of this was discussed in Alter Ego or Comics Journal interviews?), a good deal of it is about racist depictions. Didn't know Lev Gleason was a communist.