Search: genuinely good comic writers

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.

jeph_loeb_filmography.docx

Although I was clearly going for lazy snark re: Gaiman upthread, I think he does some things very well even though I can't quite bring myself to drop his name into the 'I think _____ is a genuinely good writer' construction. Like when I saw that he did a book about Norse mythology? I was like, I'll bet that's an awesome book of Norse mythology.

yeah, i've enjoyed plenty of gaiman, i just don't think anyone so inclined towards tweeness can be recommended without reservation

these days i think the gaiman-adjacent thing i enjoy most is the stardust movie tbh

The older I get, the more I'm inclined to like and enjoy Gaiman, even though he's done a lot of rubbish.

I think what I like is, he treats almost every project like a potential starting point for a new reader (there's that "good reader" thing) again. But at the same time, he's not a gateway drug and he's not a "comics for people who don't like comics" writer.

None of the people I know who enjoy his work are twee goths, either.

But yes, a lot of it is bad. My family love Neverwhere and I can't bring myself to talk to them about it.

Also interested to see what he comes up with showrunning Good Omens. It could be the ultimate in Gaimanny indulgence, or it could be really good, or it could be both!

Again, just to be clear, I do actually enjoy at least some of Gaiman's work, but, as is the case with probably 95% of what I enjoy, I don't think 'enjoyment' alone is enough to elevate a work to the status of 'genuinely good'. I also enjoy the film Robot Monster.

it'd be interesting to see whom collaborating artists consider the best writers. if gaiman turned in incoherent outlines scribbled on the back of rolling papers we'd be none the wiser.

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

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, November 20, 2018 8:19 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Horrocks, let's not forget

Plots/Structures/Characters/Settings etc in Asterix all come from Goscinny/Uderzo.

also, the comic. Bell and Hockridge wrote some jokes over the top of a comic that already existed.

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.

Herge didn't even credit the artists!

"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.

I'm not familiar with his work before he started half-writing it, but my impression of the Kirby period is that he was influenced by Kirby body language (certainly he was the only Marvel artist ever to be so) and stuck Starlin faces over the top, not that he was ripping Kirby panels.

And the Munoz rips sit extremely different in context 33 years later, having seen many instances of Giffen first taking on another style and then adapting it to his own ends (eg keeping shadowy faces through a couple of styles after Munoz, taking on a fine-lined Maguire-esque approach to faces on the Invasion fill-in, then rebuilding his entire structure of body language around those blocky heads by The Magic Wars [and then dumping that style and inventing an entirely new one in two months before 5YL!]). Out of hundreds of panels he did in the Munoz style, directly quoting 8 or so of them doesn't bother me overmuch. It's 1985! Half the best records out are made of huge actual samples of other records. Plus at the same time he was working on ways of arranging panels and panel-to-panel flow that had nothing to do with Munoz' storytelling.

Denying it once was nagl, fessing up immediately after that and continuing to give shine to Munoz and apologies to the entire world for decades afterwards has surely earned him your slightly-reduced enmity.

I wish the Magic Wars stuff was collected, doesn’t seem to be(?); so I haven’t read the end of the Baxter series (and the end of “true”/classic LSH, as far as I’m concerned).

(5YL also hasn’t been collected, and probably should be, for historical interest — but I don’t think it’s aged very well.)

All of it's on Comixology.

Cool, maybe I’ll check it out next time they run a promotion or something.

I think they're $1.99 an issue. I've never seen them on sale but fingers crossed.

Huh, that does seem more economical (on a per-issue basis) than the collections themselves, when they exist (I think the Magic Wars arc itself is only 4 issues, but there are a lot of issues prior to that I’d like to go through).

afaik only the first 5 out of 63 issues of the Baxter series were collected? It’s probably still cheaper to buy on paper than digital even today (I bought the Tales Of newsprint reprints in the ‘90s when I caught up during 5YL)

There are for sure some reallly fallow periods when Giffen’s not on the book, but it all pays off (yeah, he’s back a year or so before Magic Wars) & Levitz is good at keeping the soap churning.

afaik only the first 5 out of 63 issues of the Baxter series were collected?

I thought so too, but searched last night and apparently there’s one more (collecting #7-12): http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_of_Super-Heroes:_The_More_Things_Change

I think Giffen’s mostly absent from that arc.

That still leaves 51 issues of the Baxter series floating out there; maybe I will try to track them down on paper (my preferred format); make it a 2019 hobby.

Bell and Hockridge wrote some jokes over the top of a comic that already existed.

that is a pretty insulting summary of their work!