Bargains. Bargains. Bargains. (Comics Edition)

there's a Chris bachalo issue as well (#64, £33!)

i have the first so many of those but i was buying them and not reading them. am missing the odd issue of later sets and then stopped completely. i should go back and read them all, fill in gaps with digital copies.

(£3 on eBay)

just found a pile of them. about 80 of them at a guess and nothing after 109 so unless there's another pile elsewhere i have a lot of holes

One or two forgettable stories aside, the first 50 issues of LotDK are pretty great the whole way through.

Any opinions on Going Sane by DeMattis and Staton? It’s a bit divisive but I really like it. I can understand why some people find the story a little hard to swallow though!

Talbot expanded Mask slightly for a best-of TPB — I wonder if the digital single issues include those revisions

Snow is great. Seth Fisher was gonna be a star.

I love those Mignola, Russell and Tony Salmons issues. Salmons was a beast.

I think I stopped reading after Mask — does anyone have a “if you had to choose one or two” pick from the stories that came after that?

It’s a shame they ditched the initial idea of every story being five issues long as it made some of the subsequent stories seem less special, like filler issues from the other titles (which they probably were).

My initial memory was feeling quite adult for enjoying the initial artybats stories, Shaman and Gothic. And then I have a specific memory of someone in my school snatching an issue of Prey from me, then passing it around to the other kids who made “phwooor” type noises at Gulacy’s drawings of Catwoman (fair enough when you’re twelve I guess).

What a weird writer Doug Moench was at the time: Prey and Red Rain were excellent and thoughtful, while at the same time he was doing strained DeMatteis parodies in Mister Miracle… and Knightfall was total bollocks.

Matt Wagner's re-imaging of couple early Batman stories collected as "Batman and the Mad Monk" and "Batman and the Monster Men" are good reads.

Batman "Year 100" by Paul Pope is a good read.

There are a bunch of Legends of the Dark Knight worth reading. That last issue one shot about Deadshot I always really liked.

You could look at Going Sane by DeMatteis and Joe Staton. Good read, though it's a bit divisive as some find the central idea ridiculous. Hothouse and Sanctum are really good.

Moench must have written more Batman issues than just about anyone. Prey is great. I haven't read enough of his 80s run to judge. Some of Knightfall, and the stuff leading up to it, was OK. I like his 90s run with Kelley Jones - the stories aren't always necessarily great, but it has a consistent solo-dark knight focus and stands apart from the other books of the time, with their shocking big event crossovers and ever-expanding Batfamily (and, you know, Chuck Dixon).

It’s a shame they ditched the initial idea of every story being five issues long as it made some of the subsequent stories seem less special, like filler issues from the other titles (which they probably were).

Absolutely not. Letting the stories be the length that suited them, instead of drawn out for three issues of filler, made them far more worthwhile.

(Was Goodwin the editor of the whole bat-line? Even if so, the set-in-the-past nature of most of the material was a boon to standaloneitude, and probably not imposed after the fact on inventory.)

I think I stopped reading after Mask — does anyone have a “if you had to choose one or two” pick from the stories that came after that?

forks' list is a good guide if you're interested in one or two of the creators on it imo! esp his specific recommendation for Snow.

Was Goodwin the editor of the whole bat-line?

No, just Legends. Denny O’Neil was editor of the Bat books post-crisis up to the early 00s.

Ta, thought so. Any inventory / filler would have a tell-tale co-editor credit, then.

not really been keeping up with this since they broke comixology, but there's a huge sale on DC at amazon at the moment

and google play books generally echoes amazon sales and, lo, the thing that caught my eye (2021 swamp thing) was indeed cheap there too. not as cheap (about 20% more than the £1.99). turns out they are adobe-protected pdfs and the usual methods will also remove the drm from those.

(although if amz thinks i'm going to look through 1200+ books on a single infinite scrolling page, loading 16 at a time, they can jog on)

Google Play sometimes makes comics not downloadable, can only read from the cloud, but doesn't let you know beforehand that this is what they're doing with certain books. Very fucking irritating.

useful to know, thanks. i did screencap and then stitch together an entire issue of something (loeg?) when amz did the same but it's a pain with long books

i notice they have the two books that make up the whole of the tefe-led series (vol 3?) which I've never read so i might buy some more.

oh, 'about book' does list exportability towards the bottom, and for those two it is 'not available'

Ah, never spotted that

it does raise the question of what you're meant to do with unexportable books. is it only app / web viewer? is the app a replacement for comixology or does it struggle with, say, double page spreads (the ST i bought has a bunch)

audiobooks, bubble zoom, google assistant, google drive... i need none of these things

Tempted by swamp thing but whenever I try to read Volume 1 I get stuck on the verbose captions. It’s worse than Claremont! Is there a better story I can skip forward to? I know the basic character setup.

the classic alan moore run is volume 2 issue 21*-64. there are collections that cover this. but he does kinda emulate the verbosity, at least at first.

(* technically he starts at issue 20, but it's really just wrapping up the existing storyline ad typically)

the short len wein series from 2016 also a highpoint. he's the original writer, the one you didn't like, but the kelley jones pencils are great.

so
Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One - Book Six collects moore's run and the first 5 are in the sale. (this does actually include #20)

and
Swamp Thing (2016) (subtitled "The Dead Don't Sleep") currently £3.60

Alan Moore ST is wordy but good wordy. I like the Len stuff but it does blabber a lot. For a while he makes a point of writing “A MONSTROUS MAN OF MUCK!” in every issue.

another comixology DC sale (halloween this time), another swamp thing volume purchased.

hard keeping these straight, not least because all the collected editions are volume n, when the various different reboots are all themselves mostly volume n ('72- was vol 1, '82-'96 is vol 2, 2000-1 is vol 3...). today's purchases were 28-40 of volume 5, 2011 onwards, but volumes 6 and 7 of that run. and £4 for the two.