Rolling Comic Books 2023

https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/sword-sorcery-at-warren-part-10-1980/

Don't know how comics companies have had their thumbs up the asses for so long in not publishing a complete Voltar collection

Wow! I've been searching for years for a comic i read as a kid (maybe 8 or 9)that i found in my friends garage. Two adventurers being attacked by a giant thorny vine. It left an indelible impression.
I'd checked through Eerie, 1994, epic illustrated, heavy metal... no joy. Never thought to look in The Rook... there it is in that link, Voltar!
I can rest now.

The only Voltar I could ever get was in a magazine called Magic Carpet

Seems I have posted this before but Blood Of The Virgin is really really good.

There's also been a reprint of Katie Skelly's "The Agency", which is basically a sci-fi spy smut comic, clearly influenced by Jean Claude Forest. Of niche appeal I guess, but it's pretty cool to see a female artist/writer tackle this kind of stuff, and the focus is def on female pleasure.

Dark Horse has just kicked off an effort to collect the complete Creepy and Eerie. It doesn't seem inconceivable that they'll get around to some of Warren's shorter runs, as well (dunno if Vampira is in the cards, though).

Dark Horse already issued hardcover collections of Creepy and Eerie, and these are now paperback editions of the same. I haven't checked the repro on them, but the image quality on the Creepy Presents Steve Ditto and Alex Toth hardcover volumes that Dark Horse also brought out, and that I do own, is pretty poor - obviously not shot from originals or even good stats. So I'm not sure that Dark Horse would really do justice to all that Alcala penmanship even if they were to bring out Rook collections.

I was happy with those Dark Horse reprints but my biggest issue was that they still don't own Vampirella so it made the artist focused books very incomplete unless the artist never did anything on that magazine. Would have liked Tom Sutton, Reed Crandall and Alcala books among many others.

I've been keeping up with the paperback EC Archives which have made me pretty happy. I tried the first tpb of Creepy and it's good, but not as good as EC. Hoping it gets better as they go along. The twist endings don't work quite as well for some reason.

Eerie was a powerful book. I shoplifted the one with the bright pink cover (#75) when I was 11, and was moved enough to write a letter to the editor. They printed it, after jazzing up the prose quite a bit lol

https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/md/md778269951.jpg

1) The Demons Of Jeremiah Cold [Bill DuBay/Jose Ortiz] 12p

2) The Freaks: The One Eyed Shall Be King! [Budd Lewis/Leopold Sanchez] 6p

3) Oogie And The Worm! [Bill DuBay/Esteban Maroto] 10p

4) Invasion [Esteban Maroto/Jose Bea] 5p reprinted from Dracula Book One (1972) [story

miscredited to Bea]

5) Gillian Taxi And The Sky Pirates [Budd Lewis/Luis Bermejo] 16p

My shoplifting career ended for good not long after; getting caught once was enough.

Richard Corben - Shadows On The Grave

This is in the style of old horror comic anthologies, and it's overwhelmed with cliches, but most of the stories are so brief that it's hard to be too disappointed by the endings, they barely have a middle section.
A quarter of the book is a Greco-Roman sword and sorcery story called Denaeus, it's supposed to be related to Den but I can't find much similarity or connection beyond basic genre elements and the main characters losing their hair. It also needed a bit more originality and the dialogue doesn't really try to stay in the period at all. The panels seem crammed at times and the storytelling is occasionally unclear, which is unusual for Corben.

Corben written most of this himself with a few guest authors. It's in black and white except the colour bonus pages at the end. It looks mostly great and has greytone rendering as nice as any comics I've seen. I particularly liked the rainy forest island setting and the look of the carnival dancer. The covers look surprisingly rushed by comparison.

Annoyingly there's one good drawing of Mag The Hag and Gurgy Tate from the first issue that wasn't collected in this book but the paper upgrade is a significant improvement for the art reproduction over the cheaper looking serialization. This isn't the first time Dark Horse left out non-story pages from a Corben collection.

Despite all the shortcomings I still like it a lot, but this is a tough form and even the best writers are likely to let you down on this subgenre. Doing this style of horror comic could seem like playing it safe but it's actually too ambitious in the time frame it was written in.

Gataro Man's stuff is hilarious, would love to read some to find out how much sense it makes. Nsfw, lots of shitting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVsXGbbRbeI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKsBolmqags

Can't believe there hasn't been a single American book of his, maybe outside anthology appearances. C'mon Fantagraphics.

Wonder if he has anything to do with the Cho Aniki games or if whoever made them was just kindred spirits?

Gataro Man has been published in French though. His stuff gets funnier the more of it you read, the sheer repetition of gags actually creates a giddy feeling.

As they were the latest items posted on the comics bootleg site I use, I read the two Mark Millar volumes of Nemesis, can someone recommend a good eye bleach? Yes I only have myself to blame.

He's a socialist, you know. But also Jordan Petterson has a lot of interesting ideas!

despite his consistent voice and genuine talent Millar's work is so all over the place in quality (and frankly taste) but i can't quite give up on him

As far as ppl of that era go I've enjoyed Garth Ennis morphing into a WWII dad.

So I tried out Richard Corben's Murky World.

I don't get it. The coloring is really nice? Sometimes the characters are realistic and at other times they're really blocky and goofy looking, and every woman has HUGE breasts and the plot is nonsensical. It's just standard Heavy Metal junk, not for me.

I did read Galaxy recently which I liked a lot, and I've been keeping up with Hawkgirl which also has Galaxy in it. It's the first time I've picked up floppies since I was a kid and it's a painful way to read comics!

Mark Millar had a trash run on Swamp Thing. Ugh.

That pretty much sums up Corben's work.

Never enjoyed Corben either, like looking at badly made plasticine figures hitting each other.

Monica out in a month. It might be Clowes’ best book, and definitely his best conceived-as-a-graphic-novel novel. (But would have been mindblowing if it first dropped as a run of revived Eightballs, and only revealed itself as one work upon reading the second issue or w/e.)

That’s exciting to hear. I really enjoyed Patience but iirc it fell apart a bit towards the end. Still haven’t read the one before that.

Corben rarely had interesting scripts but I have most of his stuff

Murky world had really distorted faces even by his standards. My favourites are House On The Borderland (nice adaptation), Warren era stuff for Mario Bava colour effects, Rowlf for fine drawing, Den 2 for effects and really disturbing shit.

I got a few Masami Fukushima books and I'm looking through Saint Muscle, extremely eccentric stuff but it's hard to tell who is doing the best of the drawing as he worked with plenty of assistants, often an annoyance with manga, all these uncredited artists, sometimes Wikipedia will tell you about the assistants but that information might be very incomplete.

Not sure how many more Defiler Monk books I want because they were really expensive

I really wish Corben had done of that fine line drawing style of Rowlf, more of that colour from the Warren era even if he had been using different techniques. Wish he had done more straight painting and less of the computer experimentation, but I think he maybe wanted to see what he could do with different tech all the time.

I kept thinking those naked wrestling men by Man Gataro looked like Tezuka and Miyazaki

I think he did designs for the Power Instinct fighting game series?

Corben did some work on American Splendor which was pretty good.

Gataro Man has been published in French though. His stuff gets funnier the more of it you read, the sheer repetition of gags actually creates a giddy feeling.

― gjoon1, Saturday, 26 August 2023 02:28

It's so brilliant that every time people fall down the stairs they get hit by a speeding truck

It's sad but all the best comic artists rarely get good scripts, look at all the classic graphic novels and the art is usually second or third rate

Must be lovely being a comics writer and seeing all your ideas pissed away with perfunctory art

Almost zero of the best comics artists actually need scripts tho. (And the only two REALLY good writers-of-scripts in EL assembly-line comics were both also published as writer/artists.)

((Notably more examples of long-running good writer+artist partnerships without the insertion of other assembly line steps, too))

Sorry for acting so dismissive in the last few posts, I've been anxious lately, need to calm down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSjWL3ny9Ac

I feel like Kaluta is one of the least reprinted among my favourites, always heard that The Shadow: In The Coils Of The Leviathan is one of his better books but it's never cheap (apart from the individual issues?), there was a more recent Shadow book but it was a collaboration with Russ Heath that didn't really call to me.
Really didn't care for the new colours on the Starstruck reprints.

https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/40599/34887387_1.jpg?v=8D72827834AD690

I know it's unsurprising to say that the new Simon Hanselmann is sad and gross but boy I think I may have hit my limit - doesn't help that it's mostly about the kids.

That Madam Xanadu one-shot is a classic old school comic book.

I've always wondered about Hanselmann's stuff but never really gave it a shot. I'd occasionally thumb through an issue and the writing never grabbed me.

If you’re seeing his single issues, probably worth grabbing as an investment — they leap to $60-170 on eBay within months

(I think they read much funnier in color, for the ones that do get collected)

I just finished reading The Dark Knight Returns and... wtf? I thought this was supposed to be good? Was it good for the times or something? Because the plotting is sloppy, characters are undeveloped, sometimes it's hard to understand what is actually happening.

Before that I read Year One which I was really impressed by, but ugh. No, no, no.

You won't get much of an impassioned defense from me. At the time DKR and Watchmen were seen as the two works that made superheroes "grow up" but as time passes and Miller's fash leanings become more apparent it becomes more and more obvious how adolescent DKR really is. Year One def a better work, also nicer art imo.

tbf tho "characters are underdeveloped" - book is predicated on you knowing most of these characters already

I guess I mean the setup of newer characters; Robin, the Mutants. It feels rushed and plodding at the same time.

I haven't re-read DKR in a while, but it's pretty much burned in my brain from so many readings as a kid, and I hafta disagree with these takes. Fwiw, I think Year One is boring...

Agree that Year One has 'nicer art' than DKR - I think by that point Miller and Janson weren't meshing especially well together. I once saw some of the original artwork from DKR - huge page size! - where Miller had actually reinked the artwork after it was printed, suggesting he wasn't happy with the way his pencils had been treated.

i re-read it recently and it felt like getting back in touch with an old friend

the sequels confused me though. robin's dressed like a leopard, why?

the error in the swastika on one of the pages though, that always puzzled me. i think it was corrected later.

I still can't believe they did sequels (I mean, I can "believe" it, but...). The original felt so perfectly complete.

Signs I'm getting to old for superhero comics: I spend a lot of time thinking about the practicality of things. Any sort of headgear that pokes out is going to constantly get knocked around. How many times does batman's little horns get donked while getting in and out of the batmobile? Does the batmobile have extra clearance to allow for the horns (or ears, I guess). Capes are always going to be a problem. If you use the bathroom and you have to sit on the toilet, that cape is going to be on the ground all around the toilet, or else you have to wad it in your lap I guess.

At work I wore a tape measure quite a bit, and that only stuck out an extra inch on my hip. I had to be pretty conscious of it to avoid knocking it on things. I can't imagine Cable with all of his pouches and tubes and extraneous bits.

Does Swamp Thing leave a trail of mulch behind him, wherever he goes?

How exactly is Cyclops visor (or his cool ruby sunglasses) held in place while all of that concussive force is pushing against it?

Do superhero costumes get laundered delicate or heavy duty, like towels?

Finished Monica by Daniel Clowes tonight. Enjoyed it a lot, especially the linked short story format. I need to reread it to get a better sense of how the stories fit together; most are very obvious but there are a few that stuck out as oddballs. The only thing I had read by him before was Ghost World, which was more relatable, but this was bigger and conveyed so much dread.

Capes are always going to be a problem.

Watchmen definitely did a number on capes. Good point on Cyclops’ glasses. I’ve always assumed costumes start smelling funky pretty fast… I remember at least one Spidey that dealt with this.

Found a really lovely piece by Gene Colan (inked by Alcala) in Marvel Preview 23, it starts with a photo sequence and really doesn't look like it's leading into any series. It stills burns me that there's so many good anthology comics and the rights are still tied up for so many of them, unlikely to be reprinted for a long time. I love short pieces but my gripe with anthology comics is that unless you're cutting out the pages, you'll accumulate hundreds of pages of comics you don't care about. I have cut out some pages from anthologies years ago but I can't bring myself to keep doing it. So rather than buying back issues I tend to save pages I want from the pirate sites.

Skywald's comics seem to have fallen into public domain and I see a bunch of print-on-demand reprints of them, some people are doing the same with Charlton. Dark Horse are reprinting Creepy and Eerie in softcover now, I hope it isn't too late for more artist specific collections (which are compromised by Harris owning all the Warren era of Vampirella).

I think this kind of thing might be what sent me down the road of mostly hating work for hire arrangements.

I recently learned about Vampirella… is it worth getting into any of that? The character seems interesting, but her Wikipedia article is absolutely baffling in its complexity.

The thing about the Warren era of Vampirella is that the bulk of it was just an anthology comic like Creepy or Eerie. The main stories that kicked off each issue started off looking like sort of a comedic (unfunny) sexy adventure thing but most of the issues I actually read she was just like a detective with two very old people as sidekicks, just played totally straight.

I downloaded a scanned copy of one of those issues recently, but only read the brief dystopian sci-fi story in the middle (which was unrelated to Vampirella).

Hardly only about comic books, and I guess most of us have heard these arguments before, but this is the best summation of them I've read:

https://buttondown.email/riteshwriter/archive/8the-grift-cycle/

Yeah.

Maybe the writers here will get a decent deal but this looks like IP farming to me and I'm worried this will only get more prevalent
https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/10/the-book-world-still-isnt-diverse-dhonielle-clayton-is-trying-to-change-that/

Says at the end that the adult side of the industry has been reluctant and I hope it stays that way, they should be giving publishing deals to people who will own their copyright.

Been looking at Mort Meskin again, his fine art too and it's amazing how varied his style could be. Wish there was bigger collections of his work, need to get the biography soon. His official site is really good.
http://www.mortmeskin.net/

With you on this, inherently dislike that idea of IP farming/work-for-hire as a gateway for minority artists to get exposure, but I suppose that has always been the case in Marvel and DC comic books, and it has worked out well for some.

The Vampirella covers were always sexier than the interiors.

The series did attract a lot of talent.

RE: Mort Meskin - I have Out of the Shadows, a pretty dece anthology of Meskin strips that Fantagraphics put out in 2012, shot from the comics and looking OK on the whole. Just flicking through now, you can really see the influence on Ditko, especially in a Kid Crusaders strip from 1946. Anyway, this appears to be p cheap still on Euro Amazon and I'm sure elsewhere.

RE: Vampirella - at one point Hammer had the rights to make a Vampirella film, but nothing came of it:
https://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/news/2019/september/calling-all-horror-fans-legendary-hammer-film-vampirella-to-be-performed.aspx

I do have Out Of The Shadows, it seems like a good selection but not sure how much of his DC work it covers if any, is the copyright still tied up? I see that some p-o-d publishers are doing series like Mortified and others, I've seen publishers like this take a chance and bootleg old DC and Marvel stuff.

I think the most obvious influence of Meskin on Ditko is the clusters of floating heads (often utilized in scenes about public opinion or opinions of a certain social circle haunting someone).

I can't recall which comic, but I'm certain Ditko used this photo (Susan Strasberg in Scream Of Fear) as reference, maybe even more than once.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/630644754084908847/

There's an interesting part in Ditko Unleashed where it compares Ditko's idealized Randian statues (in Blue Beetle) to art of idealized soviet workers and made a brief argument that Ditko was conscious of this. I wonder how much control Rand had over her cover art and how much has been the interpretation of editors/publishers, and the tastes of her fans.

I take back what I said about Frank Miller’s Daredevil. I had read the big omnibus
doesn’t have Born Again, so it was underwhelming. Just read Born Again and it’s really great, I get it now. The coloring in those issues is amazing.

I’m keeping up with the Dark Horse Creepy/Eerie paperbacks which are pretty fun. Not as good as EC comics, but the variety in artwork makes it enjoyable.

Creepy/Eerie headz might want to check out the completely complete (including unpublished) Web Of Horror for rolling comics 2024 — Wrightson, Kaluta, Reese &al.

hadn't heard about the unpublished pages!

Rolling Comic Books 2024

Happy New Year! I rhave big love for Mort Meskin as well, esp. his wild early Vigilante splashes. His stuff was often so kinetic but the quality varied wildly as he seemed to have personal issues later on that affected his drawing.

Somebody did a book as a duel tribute to him and Umezu (unusual combo) recently but I havent seen it. He's one of many artists I think might be more celebrated if the rights weren't tied up in so many companies. I think a lot of his work was collaboration too. I ordered the biography, I really like reading about that era of comic artists.