2014 what are you reading thread

agree he's pretty one-note with his protagonists

Chaykin has always had the reputation of being an outspoken guy - he's slagged off Alex Toth and Will Eisner in the past for their alleged personal failings - but you can't really argue w/ his design skills (tho' it's the lettering that makes a lot of those American Flagg pages really sing, imho.)

He also had harsh words for Grant Morrison.

i love the idea of a gun that yells MOW

You do get the "Surfin' Bird" ref, right?

man, i don't like american flagg as comics at all. always struck me as unreadable, excellent illustration.

You do get the "Surfin' Bird" ref, right?

Still love American Flagg (though I take the point about lettering and layouts being the high spots) but there are things to be enjoyed until comparatively recently - the American Century thing he did for Vertigo at the beginning of the century felt good at the time, though I haven't gone back to it.

I think the weird mid-80s Shadow he did is the last Chaykin I love. I find the style he developed into over the last couple of decades incredibly off-putting. Love almost all of his 70s and 80s stuff, especially Ironwolf.

That Shadow series is all up great (Chaykin did a mini, then the first 6 of the ongoing iirc) and the Helfer/Baker run is surely the next great 'missing' DC reprint after Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo finally got collected?

I hope so. Well-deserving, but I wonder if they'd have to pay the current rights holders. DC sure can be cheap

Chaykin only did the Shadow mini-series. The ongoing series' early issues were by Helfer and Sienkiewicz.

Mea culpa.

http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2014/at-last-helfer-and-bakers-shadow-returns/

i have the first six floppies; they're awful good

it gets ENORMOUSLY better under Baker, trust

Hang on, that was OVER A MONTH AGO. These are some of the best modern era comics of all, honestly. Hopefully the Justice Inc stuff gets collected with it.

you've lost me - what are we talkin' about?

Have Helfer or Baker ever talked about their (excellent) Shadow run and why it got cancelled? I can guess someone wasn't happy with what had transpired in the comic but iirc it just stopped without announcement (though it had reached the end of a storyline).

ah

I found this explanation on a Shadow fansite:

The Shadow made an appearance in Batman's issue #253. DC Comics published a 12 issue series from 1973 to 1975, featuring art by Mike Kaluta and Berni Wrightson. This is considered (and deservedly so) one of the best adaptations. Issue #11 features an appearance by The Avenger, another pulp character. Howard Chaykin tried to update the character in 1986's four-issue The Shadow for DC, with great success. There was another series in 1987, by Andrew Helfer and Kyle Baker, with 19 issues. According to Tim Elliott, "The Baker/Helfer series was probably the best written series among them all, but was cancelled at the request of Condé Nast, not due to weak sales, but they disliked what DC was doing with the character. DC had no choice but to abruptly cancel the series, but restarted with the good but still inferior The Shadow Strikes!, returning the character to the 1930's." It lasted 31 issues, until Dark Horse obtained the rights for the character before DC could renew their license.

― aldo_cowpat (aldo_cowpat), Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wowee the new hawkeye--next to no dialogue, sign language diagrams interspersed throughout, had me choked up in the mexican restaurant.

My partner came back from Canada with a copy of Seconds - it's really good! At least for the first two-thirds as a character hangout comic. Then the plot stuff kicks in a little too much in a big budget "soon to be at theatres near you" kinda way. But the art and colouring are gorgeous throughout.

Cool, I tried to order a copy over the weekend, but it got screwed up. Will try to grab another copy soon.

http://4thletter.net/2014/07/diversity-marketing/

Good piece by David Brothers about Marvel's recent moves in character diversity.

Since I've been considering Thorgal recently I imagined asking for some at a shop and someone replying "it's not Thor Gal you prick, she's just Thor!"

There actually is a superhero called Thor Girl, they'd just think you're talking about her.

You can imagine the tremendous mental labor that went into that one... "She's like THOR! Except she's a GIRL! Now what should we call her?"

Hammer Wielder Lass

No, no one in 2014 would hear "Thor gal" (which is horrible and seems like a corruption of Thogal, but tibetan buddhism aside..) and think of some obscure character barely used in the Marvel universe when this new thing is the talk of every comics/non-comics publication in the present time

People may be really literalist in Tuomas-world, though. It's been a thing.

Well, she's been used far more than I would have imagined, even in recent years. Romita Jr is said to be the guy who designed her and drew her for a while but I can't find any of his images of her.

I picked up he Chaykin Shadow mini and the trades with Billy The Sink art and the Helfer/Baker Finns plot line.

Damn.

I was right saying these were the great lost reprint trades, because they're exactly as great as I remember them and, more tellingly, EXACTLY as I remember them. Every line and every frame. I can't think how many times I must have read them bitd, because all of it is so, so familiar.

It's definitely the lettering and layouts that make the Chaykin mini sing though, transcendent stuff.

I got Tales From The One Eyed Crow in the post. Nino's interior art is among his blandest but the cover art is lovely (I should scan it soon because there isn't any large images of the cover online).
It's one of the Byron Preiss books that he seemed to sell to the wider book market than comic shops. There is another called Starfawn, drawn by fantasy artist Stephen Fabian, I never knew he did any comic art.
Preiss had a line of Bank Street comic adaptations of genre fiction classics, but they are extremely rare. I cant find one image of Bank Street Book Of Horror or any trace of copies for sale. Some of the others are on amazon.

I've always found it interesting seeing in the library what looks like Young Adult novels but are actually comics inside.

What do you guys use to read CBRs?

(just got the x-statix omnibus and uhhh stoked)

I've used Simple Comic for years, love it.

http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/

SImple Comic is great. I use that for a lot of my stuff, but manage my library through Comic Book Lover, which I can also use on the ipad.

+1 on Simple Comic, great viewer for the Mac

where were we talking about ROM?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wO3rSqqgoII/U9fbH5iSrCI/AAAAAAAA9-4/oxC289PgiHE/s1600/Rom+%2302_01.jpg`

I think it was the Guardians of the Galaxy film thread? Relating to Mantlo's authorship of Rom and Rocket Raccoon, I believe?

Still plowing through my massive Marvel silver age undertaking. I've read everything up through the end of '65 now, and after a hell of a lot of gasps and sputters, they're finally starting to fire on...well, if not all cylinders at least more than before. I appreciate the move to longer storylines (some over a year long!). Just finished reading the intro of Galactus and Silver Surfer for the first time. Much more nuanced (and almost small scale) than I had imagined all these years. And also almost casually dropped in between a couple of other storylines. Just started Spidey: The College Years. I've been surprisingly enjoying the Fury stuff (both Howling Commandos and SHIELD) quite a bit. Both books had a weightiness and sense of purpose that was in a bit shorter supply among the other titles at the time.

In all honesty, I still haven't finished reading Ant Man. That shit went from poor to downright dire pretty quickly.

Also, that recent color collection of Lee & Kirby's Tales of Asgard is the only thing I've read thus far that I'm thinking of getting as an upgrade to my current Essential copies. Storywise, it's almost exactly what I always wanted from Thor, and it looks great even in black and white.

Tales of Asgard is so awesome

I thought those weren't included in Essential Thor?

After the first miniseries, a lot of the early Hulk stuff really sucks.

Any good artists you guys been noticing in mainstream American comics in the past few years?

is anybody reading batman '66?

Tumblr has way too many amazing artists on it. Just discovered Manu Larcenet and Loic Locatelli today.

Here's a bunch of tumblrs.

http://www.loiclocatelli.com/
http://unomoralez.tumblr.com/
http://nightofthecomics.tumblr.com/
http://samhiti.tumblr.com/

Sometimes I'm like "Bah! There's hardly any good comic artists around today" but there might be more than ever, they are just a bit hard to find sometimes. Also, all these comic artists really blend in with a general amazing scene of illustrators, concept designers and cartoonists. Loads of them are French.

reading legion of super-heroes. started w/ the waid series and now moving onto some other stuff. i've never really read them before (i've only seen them crossing over into other titles i've read) but some of these stories are pretty great.

man i torrented the fourth world omnibus and reading it feels like homework, but out of curiosity i grabbed a hard copy off a shelf at the shop friday and it was like 'wow,' i instantly understood why it was worth the money

I kind of would be interested to read all the LOSH comics from start to finish tbh. Insane there isnt currently a title being published.

Levitz was fired

Not that his recent Legion run was any good.

no (idk I only read the two issues that Giffen did) (the only Legion comics I have bought in the last 20 years were also reunion jobs by Levitz/Giffen) but him writing is not the point

true. He kept the Legion going through thick and thin because it mattered to him. And his 70s and 80s work is what made me a fan.

The Abnett & Lanning led run in the 90s/early 00s was quite god. I hope people rediscover that sooner or later.

OK, so Grant Morrison's Multiversity #1 finally appeared, and it's pretty promising. Structure seems to be going to be a mini-7-Soldiers thing.