2014 what are you reading thread

didn't moonshadow get cancelled and/or truncated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshadow_(comics)
http://www.amazon.com/Compleat-Moonshadow-John-Marc-DeMatteis/dp/1563893436
http://www.blackgate.com/2012/12/10/dematteis-and-muths-moonshadow/

I don't think so...? There's 12 issues. The ending is a bit of a cop-out but it doesn't feel forced or rushed.

grabbed the bendis guardians reboot to read over lunch, pleasant surprise to run into iron man a few pages in

I'm sort of enjoying that, but get the feeling that it exists mainly as exposition and scene-setting for other titles and a way to familiarize people with the general outlines of the characters and milieu in advance of the movie.

xp, those links address that: the moonshadow ending was rewritten for the rerelease.

You fell for the AvX trap

Yes. Yes I did. (I also fell for the "let's put two of the original New Mutants on the main Avengers roster and then never do anything interesting with them" trap)

lol

has anybody read the 'just fights' AvX issues cuz idk......if they're just gonzo ridic consequenceless fights without any real dialogue that kind of sounds fun to look at

i "read" them on marvel unlimited, you more or less nailed the description there. i don't even remember who won.

there’s that one extended vision near the end, in the last issue, which in the new version has captions added to it in which Moonshadow tells us what he’s thinking and feeling

honestly this sounds even stupider than the original ending

moonshadow is some weak piss

Yeah, I read the Vertigo reprints as they were coming out and I was really not into it. And at that time, I was a) in high school, b) voraciously reading anything Vertigo, and c) a fairly big DeMatteis fan, which I think should've made me the perfect audience.

i liked it a lot in high school but that was my dematteis period

In an amazon review some guy said the couple of rewritten pages really spoiled one of the best parts of the book.

I think I realized fairly quickly back then (although not as quickly as I would've liked) that non-superhero DeMatteis was decidedly Not For Me. This, Brooklyn Dreams, Mercy, and especially Seekers: Into The Mystery (ugh...) were pretty heavy duds IMO. His hippified mysticism DO YOU SEE-ness only worked for me when it wasn't so front and center.

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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(DC_Comics)

xpost See I DO want that kind of thing in my Defenders issues but not in the center ring of the show.

Yeah, totally still dig most of his Marvel work and the mainstream DC stuff that I've read. Dr. Fate and his Spectacular Spider-Man run with Sal Buscema were particular favorites.

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.