Search: genuinely good comic writers

was not a good writer of comics, some of the comics he wrote were good

think this goes for most of the names I was thinking of throwing out tbh. Like, I think Chaykin's writing for the initial 14-issue run of American Flagg is incredible, but then there's all the other stuff he's written.

he’s the Stan Lee of navel-gazing autobio

his comics were sometimes good when a cartoonist who knew how to tell stories would put a visual story on the page, and it would be printed with Pekar’s words in the balloons

(so, for eg, Crumb or Moore could make a Pekar script of stick figures talking into a compelling page; if you’ve got Gary Dumm drawing Pekar going somewhere and doing something, the best you’re going to get is a Gary Dumm page)

xpost! sorry WmC, don’t read that

I think Pekar's writing (in his prime) was really great, but I'm not to spend time arguing whether or not it qualifies as great "comic" writing. It's sort of in another category.

Are we purposefully avoiding obvious/old Big 2 stalwarts like Claremont, Michelinie, Nocenti, Gruenwald, etc.?

Claremont is a terrible writer.

yeah, I said it.

He kept me reading all that crazy soap-opera shit for years! I wasn't doing it for Marc Silvestri's pencils... :P

yeah I'm not saying Pekar sucks

I don't make many qualitative distinctions based on height of brow, so for my money 'good' and 'entertaining' are both worthy (if nebulous) yardsticks. I'd say Claremont is favored more by the latter measurement.

I mean let's be real here: I obviously love Marvel to bits but I would face an uphill slog in trying to argue that many of their writers past or present hit the level of 'genuinely good'.

That's the thing with the original question -- is "genuine writer" supposed to mean they transcend the limitations of the piddling, juvenile medium, or something?

I think I don't find Claremont entertaining because the underlying ideas (space pirates, 18th century costume romance, Legion of Superheroes ripoff, Alien ripoff, etc.) are actually really bad, and the only thing holding them together is this never-ending soap opera cycle of storylines/character arcs that never have any resolution.

You don't find hours of diversion in the tragic saga of a humorless dude in a love triangle w/two redheads?

I think the LSH comparison is actually interesting -- b/c while I'm much more of a Legion fan than an X-Men fan, I think Claremont handled the demands of managing a big cast of characters (and their respective characterizations) much better than Levitz/Giffen did at their peak.

(There were probably somewhat fewer X-Men/X-allies than Legionnaires, but still.)

Dude, there are 4,261,278,912 X-characters, r u mad

All I'm sayin' is, I recently read thru huge chunks of prime Levitz/Giffen "Legion" in collected form (I love that shit) -- but I couldn't tell ya "Imra" from "Ayla" from "Shady" from "PG."

I didn't mean to imply that X-Men was a ripoff of LSH, I was referring to this very blatant ripoff of LSH: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Guard_(comics) (which yes is just a minor blip in the X-Men mythos but it still is not a good idea)

altho I probably do prefer LSH to X-Men just because the ideas are still goofy but it's all (mostly) done in a spirit of "fun" scifi with few attempts at realism, emotional or otherwise. It's mostly a dumb space opera and it knows it.

thread made me think of Bill Messner-Loebs, whose work -especially in Journey - really blew me away, and a little reading suggested he's having a pretty hard time of it.
http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/one-armed-comic-book-artist-worked-on-wonder-woman-now-homeless-in-michigan
https://www.gofundme.com/billmessnerloebs
https://www.tcj.com/baron-and-messner-loebs-flash/2/

oof jesus wtf

a pair of L&R cameo homages from WML's run on flash courtesy Fiffe
http://66.media.tumblr.com/f7e5e7f63e40be23e3a6e840f102c4e8/tumblr_meo0wsVovT1rqostyo1_500.jpg
http://66.media.tumblr.com/5f8400c519ce664492729d17ee864213/tumblr_meo1equC8F1rqostyo1_640.jpg

much better than Levitz/Giffen did at their peak

Giffen's a unique proposition as a writer - nearly everything he's written solo is actively bad, but whenever he's written with someone else, he's raised their quality far higher than they could ever achieve on their own. (Even when he's so aggressive a collaborator that he'd, for example, give Levitz pages where someone dead for decades turned up alive in the last panel. And Levitz wouldn't pull rank as publisher OR writer and ask for changes!)

Yeah, those two were really on fire... one of those volumes (I think "The Great Darkness"?) has an appendix illustrating how by the final issues, they were working with the barest of script outlines for those huge, complex stories, and had developed a sort of innate understanding of what each other wanted.

give Levitz pages where someone dead for decades turned up alive in the last panel.

Did he steal this from Kirby or Munoz?

Peter Milligan, despite some huge inconsistency, is a genuinely good writer IMO. I read a Batman story by him a few years ago, and it's one of the few instances where I immediately thought "I have GOT to read more by this guy!" I prefer 80s and 90s Milligan to most of his (more famous) peers.

Giffen's a unique proposition as a writer - nearly everything he's written solo is actively bad

I loved The Heckler!

Yeah, I thought of Milligan but, as you mention, he's all over the goddamn. place. His highs are quite high, though.

Writing good comics does not prevent one from writing bad ones. There are no only good comic writers.

I guess the question could be phrased as 'which comics writers have demonstrated that they are capable of genuinely good work?' Because, yeah, I struggle even thinking of an acclaimed novelist with an unblemished track record.

Did he steal this from Kirby or Munoz?

ha ha, Ward you love jazz, right? how can you stay mad at someone for forty years for playing sax for a while because they liked Art Pepper, and then playing some quotes from Miles on a few gigs in 1985?

"Giffen's a unique proposition as a writer - nearly everything he's written solo is actively bad"

I loved The Heckler!

The Heckler was written with the Bierbaums. (Trencher was solo, if you're thinking of that?)

i feel like there's someone brilliant from the eclipse/first comics boom era that I'm forgetting

i mean loebs from that batch, definitely

20 years ago dave sim would be a popular answer itt

I almost posted Sim earlier but yeah it's... complicated

speaking of other writers I think are p great but whose politics are mostly loathsome, there's Mike Baron

it's... complicated

boy is it ever

Anthea Bell?

no mention of gaiman as yet, heart u ilx

I do like Gaiman. But no.

I would say, though, that as a writer he's a genuinely good reader.

I bow to nobody in my appreciation of Anthea Bell but she never wrote a comic afaik

I would say, though, that as a writer he's a genuinely good reader.

lol sick burn

The Heckler was written with the Bierbaums. (Trencher was solo, if you're thinking of that?)

Oh, I'd forgotten that. I did try to read the original Ambush Bug mini not long ago, and couldn't get into it. I had just read through `Mazing Man and Angel Love, so maybe I'd had my fill of 80s DC curios by that point.

on the creator/artist front, i will say that jaime and huizenga come to mind immediately

Lewis Trondheim

Sfar too. All the l'association guys really

I bow to nobody in my appreciation of Anthea Bell but she never wrote a comic afaik

some of the english dialogue in asterix is so far from the french original, so created-from-whole-cloth, i want to say the books should almost be credited to uderzo-goscinny-bell-hockridge

just because there's no lee-ditko-kirby fight for authorship or bad treatment, it doesn't mean she shouldn't get equal credit

i might be remembering wrong, but i think goscinny claimed some of the asterix books were better in english (eco said the same thing about name of the rose)

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo. Bell should - at best - be credited w/ 'additional dialogue' imho (and that's not to denigrate her contribution, they're great translations, but a writer she is not). Herge said similarly complimentary things about the English language versions of the Tintin albums (translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner) but you can be damm sure he wouldn't have recognised them or credited them as writers.

While we're on the subject of European comics, Pierre Christin definitely rates as 'genuinely good' imho.

how can you stay mad at someone for forty years for playing sax for a while because they liked Art Pepper, and then playing some quotes from Miles on a few gigs in 1985?

LOL nice try sic, but c'mon - Giffen profited from the work and imagination of another artist without any kind of acknowledgement (until he was caught swiping panel after panel after panel) - really don't see the difference between him and Stan Lee here.

Ethics aside, I give Giffen a pass because his (non-swiped) work is so good, especially the Heckler, 5YL-era stuff. It's such a shame that he never paired with better writers.

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo. Bell should - at best - be credited w/ 'additional dialogue' imho (and that's not to denigrate her contribution, they're great translations, but a writer she is not). Herge said similarly complimentary things about the English language versions of the Tintin albums (translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner) but you can be damm sure he wouldn't have recognised them or credited them as writers.

fwiw German readers make this sort of claim for Erika Fuchs, who translated a bunch of Barks and other Disney comics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs

Comic writers have had much more luck being able to move into the bigger money of working in TV quite a bit more now than before, since so many comic properties have made a gazillion dollars. A couple of the old 70s-80s comic guys like Chaykin did some tv work, but it was less common.

Thief Giffen

:D :D

I think Giffen’s mostly absent from that arc.

yeah, he dropped out as penciller after issue #2, and altogether after #5

--

Chuck, try this as an illustration of why I'm disagreeing: with any English-language volume of Asterix, take away any of the captions that refer to the scenario, plot or setting; remove any of the dialogue that illustrates or depends upon characterisation, or that advances the plot; then get rid of all of the drawings, the colour, and the panel borders. What's left is a comic originated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge.

the good funny bits

https://srikrishnadas.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/obelix-crazy_thumb.jpg?w=166&h=149

Will Eisner is kinda like this, obviously great drawings/compositions and his writing goes down easy, but the tales are instantly forgettable

loads of the late 1940s Spirits he wrote himself are absolutely crackerjack on "plotting or concepts. " nearly everything after the 1950s is absolute waste in both writing and compositions.

I thought Gaiman a textbook example of both

yah

Now that RAG has clarified that he does mean cartoonists, not just writer-only ppl, some genuinely good writers:

George Herriman
Frank King
Elzie Segar
Walt Kelly
Charles Schulz
Bill Watterson
Georges Remi
Rene Goscinny
Harvey Kurtzman
John Stanley
Carl Barks
Jules Feiffer
Robert Crumb
Bill Griffith
Shary Flenniken
Dori Seda
Justin Green
Claire Bretecher
Phoebe Gloeckner
Gahan Wilson
Tove Jansson
Gregory Gallant
Jaime Hernandez
Gilbert Hernandez
Franklin C. Ware
Chester Brown
Jim Woodring
Peter Bagge
Dan Clowes
Eddie Campbell
Roger Langridge
Simon Hanselmann
Kevin Huizenga
Dash Shaw
Jacques Tardi
Tim Hensley
Lewis Trondheim
Ho Che Anderson
Sammy Harkham
Michael DeForge
Lisa Hanawalt
Jason Shiga
Peter Blegvad
Emily Carroll
Kate Beaton
Julia Gforer
Alan Moore
Olivia Jaimes

yeah, he dropped out as penciller after issue #2, and altogether after #5

Looks like he did a little penciling in #11: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes_Vol_3_11

I ordered a “Like New” copy of this collection for $15, looking forward to it.

(I actually have #10 on my shelf already; it’s one of the few LSH comics I picked up as a kid: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes_Vol_3_10)

Reading up a little more, perhaps I should just stop at #18 (the Crisis crossover issue),
as I understand that everything afterward is now apocryphal/non-canon... (lol)

pretty sure I have linked morris to this before but if you want to record your readalong: The Legion Of Super Heroes: Classic Or Dud?

Thanks, sic (and sorry to sidetrack yet another thread with Cliff Claven–esque LSH ramblings, if that’s what I’ve done here...)

I mean, don't all translators create their own approximations and variations of linguistic puns, local jokes, character names etc - that's the job of a translator!

This is fair! I guess what makes me want to stand up for Bell is that the jokes and puns in her translations are (in UK culture, at least) as iconic and essential contributions to the book as Goscinny's or Uderzo's - although, of course, as Sic notes, her contribution wouldn't exist without their previous work.

That's not to take away from G & U, more to acknowledge that a simple "translated by..." note never seems like enough recognition to me.

I think we're all agreed that Bell and Hockridge were exceptional translators, and that Asterix was an especially tricky text to translate well.

But when I was a kid, getting into Asterix, most of the puns - and all of the classical allusions - soared right over my head. I was responding to the slapstick, the characters, the energy of Uderzo's drawing, the structural precision of Goscinny's plotting.

I think it's interesting that all of that witty wordplay is absent from Goscinny's Lucky Luke scripts - apparently because Morris simply didn't care for puns.

Speaking of Munoz, what about Sampayo as a writer?

john stanley was a genuinely great writer who wrote terrific dialogue and clever plots, he is def worth checking out

Yeah, I got one of the old Another Rainbow sets a decade ago and was amazed at how good he was, especially since the structure was so formulaic. I would roll my eyes every time there was yet another "Lulu babysits Alvin and tells him a tale" story and then by the end of each one be like "Wow, that was great!"

Iou Kuroda is a good writer, but his best work (the eggplant themed Nasu series, and his short stories) hasn't been officially translated.

Agree on Trondheim. Lapinot has great dialogue and situations. Burned out on Sfar (he's reeeeeally hated by a lot of French readers on an almost-visceral level - not sure why).

Late 70s-early 80s Bill Griffith is incredible - the Rousseau bio, the Claude Funston wet dreams one, Griffith's Observatory. Peter Bagge once said that Griffith may have been the best cartoonist on earth in that period and I'm tempted to agree.

Yoshiharu Tsuge of course.

I quite like that early 60s John Stanley horror story about the hand coming from the sewers, it was allowed to be a bit grimmer because the publisher (Dell?) was one of the few to escape the comics code. I never seen any of those other stories from that era. I think he only did a few of them.

Bagge otm re pre-syndicate Griffith

just finished the most recent issues of Piskor's X-Men recap (which is fun in its silliness) and man this really cemented my opinion upthread re: Claremont and his terrible ideas. Had forgotten the whole yakuza/ninja plotline but you can throw that on the trash heap with the Alien ripoff, space pirates, 18thc. costume drama, etc.

Hard mild-mannered disagree

I have no good reasons but I love the Alien ripoff and also the idea that 80s teenagers spent the decade following Claremont's wackadoo idiosyncrasies and fetishes like they were the Talmud or something