Rolling Comic Books 2023

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

xxpost The early 80s Miller DD's were unlike anything else on those racks, believe me. I was snatching them up each month as they appeared. They were something else.

Amazon wouldn't publish that Saint Muscle review because they said it looks like an attack on the author! I guess "crazy" "cruel" "serial killer" is what upset them. This is really dumb. Not as worrying as youtube but dumb.

Another great falseknees monthlong story (he does one every year now)

Starts here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzH5BnDLWhn/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Picked up an issue of Spirou as is my obligation whenever visiting France; can report Blutch is working on a Lucky Luke story and it looks lush.

Yes, hoping Cinebooks issue an English language translation of that next year.

I've actually been buying floppies this year - well, the facsimile editions that Marvel and DC are putting out. DC in particular are reprinting some incredibly rare (and expensive) Golden Age comics; I particularly like having the ads and the back up strips, really puts everything in context and - just for a moment - you can imagine yourself buying Batman 1 fresh off the newsstand.

Is it scans or recolored?

The Marvel facsimiles are all recolored; the colour on the DC ones, especially the Golden and Silver Age reprints, seem much more faithful to the originals without necessarily being scans.

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!