Rolling Comic Books 2023

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.

(book 3, page 2 for the error. it's still there in the 10th anniversary hardback)

If anything, Miller's decline makes DKR look better as time passes.
Gotham Central is a worthy spiritual continuation of Year One, but no one's really come up with anything to replace DKR.
Morrison made a great landmark Superman title with All-Star Superman (compared to Miller's tepid All-Star Batman), but turning Batman into a time-traveling caveman or a franchise operator didn't quite make for a DKR replacement, though I'd take those arcs over DKR2 & 3 any day (If you thought DKR was sloppy and incoherent...)

I guess you could think of Batman Beyond as the DKR competitor?

DKR's a classic! Klaus Janson's inks - classic! The colours - classic! The story - super pompous but whatever!

It's odd that DKR was the OG "superheroes for adults" comic, because, more than anything, it's a great comic for teenagers to read. And then grow out of. And never read again.

I agree Year One is better - but the Daredevil run is miles better than either.

See, I think Watchmen is more "adolescent": kinda pretentious; squarely in the wheelhouse of a precocious youth... something you grow out of (even back then, though, I preferred DKR).

watchmen wouldn't make my Alan Moore top10 but ain't no precocious youths interested in pirate comics come on now

Well not specifically no, but that was part of the package…

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying a lot of classic 2000AD - getting towards the end of the Rogue Trooper omnibus - and I will say that one thing that I think separates me from a lot of the ppl writing for that mag back in the day is my childhood was not spent obsessing about battles from WWI&II.

It is really weird in retrospect. Do you still get kids obsessed with war who make model airplanes? Do Blue Peter style children still exist?

I still had friends who played with little green soldiers but my leftist parents would have none of this. Mind you I got into Arthurian legends and LOTR instead so still got excited by bloodshed. GI Joe was another thing my parents steered me clear off, though from all I've seen since it doesn't bear much resemblance to actual war.

I'd guess kids today who gravitate towards this kind of stuff would be into mecha animes or militaristic shooters (Call of Duty kinda the most direct equivalent?).

Isn't more that there was an existing (and successful) war comics magazine that Mills and Wagner got asked to set up an alternative to?

Which is all part of the "the generation above theirs processing wtf happened, through art"

there were a few, Battle and Action, not to mention all the Commando type things (which still exists)

Andrew I'd argue it's several generations who were obsessed - yes there were successful war comics out at the time, so ver kids were reading that stuff and the 2000ad ppl knew this, but I think the artist's loving renditions, and the writer's tendency to make their sci-fi scenarios so often end up WWI/WWII comics in disguise, wasn't just about playing to the audience, they were really into that stuff too!

https://cloud.firebrandtech.com/api/v2/img/111/9780711290761/XL
I can see why they didn't hire Rob Liefield for this one.

not out until March here, let us know how it is

lol not to be all jaymc spreadsheet but don't you both live in Australia?

I’m extremely unlikely to read this.

Needs a scratch n’ sniff foot fetish edition

Correction to something I said upthread... The Shadow: In The Coils Of Leviathan was mostly drawn by Gary Gianni and others, Kaluta only did covers and illustrations

I have lived elsewhere for six years now.

Did read a due-out-in-translation-next-year GN yesterday, that in its lurid pop-art/Peter-Maxy visuals I at first took to be inspired by the Jodelle translation, and the plot riffing on the controlling nature of hi-tech-equipped music biz svengalis to be a throwback to Phantom Of The Paradise and The Apple, until it turned out to be from 1968.

Did anyone get Perramus? It completely whooshed past me when I wasn't paying attention, even though I knew it was coming out.

Yes, I have a copy - did it go out of print? I slightly prefer the Mort Cinder style but Perramus is kind of phenomenal in terms of sheer sustained pictorial effect - you can tell ppl like Sienkiewicz and McKean have paid it very close attention.

Apart from the fantagraphics site, prices are mostly very high

Bummer

I hope this reprint series is still happening, I think the Evita book came out recently. I'm surprised the Lovecraft book still hasn't happened because that seems like the most commercially viable one, I remember David Paleo telling me how amazing it was something like 20 years ago, often been tempted to get a spanish or french edition of it (same with Dino Battaglia, except italian).

Looking through Fantagraphics recent and upcoming has been impressive, A John Severin book of westerns, the sequel to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Bill Everett's Venus, complete Web Of Horror.
I'd like to check this out in the shops before I decide
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/the-atlas-comics-library-no-3-in-the-days-of-the-rockets

I'm so grateful that comics can be flipped through before you read (presuming it's not sealed), films have sometimes reliable trailers and reading the first pages of a prose book never seems like a good indicator to me. And I like that I can get the gratification of good pictures before I actually read the thing properly (even though it spoils the impact of the storytelling a little) and a prose book really has to wait until the far off decade when I get around to reading it.

---NSFW---
Never heard of this guy (he draws actual faces!), I pre-ordered it. NSFW
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/milky-way
https://imginn.com/mig.vila/

Yeah, a decent Battaglia English language collection is sorely needed. Since Kim Thompson's death, I suspect that Fantagraphics no longer has a Euro comics advocate pushing for things like that.

I've kept up with the Breccia reprints, but I slept on some of those new Corto Maltese translations and ppl now want STUPID money for those - and again, I don't imagine it's that economically viable to reprint any time in the near future (the fact that they are reprinting those three Alex Toth volumes does gives me some slight hope ...) And I suspect those lovely Sergio Toppi collections will go the same way fairly soon ...

Definitely looking forward to those Atlas volumes from Fanta. And this looks really interesting as well:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/frank-johnson-pioneer-of-american-comics-vol-1-wallys-gang-early-years-1928-1949-and-the-bowser-boys-1946-1950

I haven't moved on the Toppi books yet but the prices seem fine so far. I find it so difficult to tell with comics what will become rare and expensive, it's so much more unpredictable than the other books I buy (aside from print on demand books that get deleted).

Talking of Fantagraphics, this all seems like a bit of a mess:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

Dang. I was wondering what the hold up was.

My initial reaction to that, which is biased due to my work in museums and galleries and is most likely unfair to Emil Ferris, is that working with artists is a total pain in the ass. Especially if there's something like a deadline involved. I say that as an artist myself, and I recognize that corporations are not to be trusted.

I liked My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, but not as much as I was hoping to. The art was often beautiful but the story felt a little shaggy. It didn't bother me too much because that was sort of baked in to the nature of the narrative and the character that was telling the story.

Still, I've been looking forward to the second book.

What a mess. Despite some wonderful art I abandoned the first book without even realising it wasn’t even the complete story. I would have been pretty pissed off to have got to the end and found it wasn’t the whole thing.

That whole lawsuit is confusing as hell. Still, glad that the book is finally coming out, been waiting since 2017!

https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/08/shigeru-mizuki-1922-2015.html
https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/07/kazuo-umezu.html

NSFW, very strange
https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/07/ichiro-ijima.html

Umezu draws some of the most intense faces

Apart from the fantagraphics site, prices are mostly very high

40% off sale on the fantagraphics site next Monday btw

Thanks

Never seen this one before
https://www.comics.org/issue/18626/cover/4/
Are any of these ever as funny as they seem from the covers? Has DC ever done a compilation of their silliest 40s-50s-60s comics?

Always wondered about this one, myself.

https://i.imgur.com/7bI7M0V.png

^That's v good art, except Supes looks 'roided-out

Saint Muscle review

I read Udagawa Takeo's online abridged english edition of Manga Zombie perhaps a decade ago and Masami Fukushima's manga became holy grails for me; I didn't always get on with his art (how much of what I like or what I don't like is by assistant artists?) but it's a special kind of crazy that I can never get enough of and a precursor to things like Fist Of The North Star. There's some impressive architectural drawings including an immense palace encrusted with the bodies of petrified body builders, an evil Moby Dick and cruel rulers dressing peasants up like bizarre sheep before they torture them. I can't read the japanese text but I think I got the gist of it. I gather that Tsutomu Miyazaki (who unfortunately shares a name with a notorious serial killer) only filled in the dialogue, I don't know how common a practice this is in japan and if Fukushima's other books are written the same way. I think this book is much nicer looking than his monk books, it has a really off-kilter look and something reminiscent of Jack Kirby. Really bizarre but Prince Shotoku is even crazier.

Superman Family cover is by Neal Adams, btw

Last night I finished the Daredevil Frank Miller omnibus (does not include Born Again or the John Romita Jr stuff). It was okay, but not as great as I was expecting. I suppose it had a lot of depth compared to what was beside it in the spinner rack, and the art was frequently quite good. Maybe I had to have read it back in the day. I probably need to give up on Frank Miller, who I’m beginning to suspect is over-rated. Or, I’m not really much of a super hero guy.

xp Thanks, that's good to know!

Something I should have mentioned: I love this establishing location shot where a man's bare ass takes up most of the space
https://www.comipress.com/files/special/mangazombie/fukushima/Saintmuscle005.jpg