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Post by EdoBosnar on May 15, 2024 5:42:18 GMT -5
We've already done contests featuring women fighting, women with guns, warrior women and superhero women, but - after checking and double-checking the cover contest topics thread - it doesn't seem like we've ever done this one. To wit, this week you need to find covers that feature only women or girls - so no men or boys can appear anywhere on them, not even in the background (i.e., if there's a mixed crowd or something, not eligible, even if the men are indistinct), nor even any pictures of men/boys (so no covers that show, e.g., a man on a wanted or movie poster, or, say, Betty and Veronica with a photo of Archie somewhere on it). The only exception I'll allow is if there are male characters featured in a corner box, which mainly applies to Marvel's various titles. Also, the plural here is vital: the cover has to feature two or more women and/or girls.
It may seem a bit hard at first, but trust me, there's plenty to choose from once you start looking.
The Cover Contest rules (so the Man doesn't get his undies in even more of a twist):
- Post one, and only one, classic cover that fits the theme of the contest.
- The cover must be from a published comic book or collected volume published before May 2014.
- Please include the title and the issue number of the comic in bold (e.g., Vampirella #26) in case some posters cannot see your image.
- Covers must be posted before voting begins.
- Voting takes place on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, beginning at 12:01 am PST and ending at 11:59 am PST.
- Vote by posting the name of the poster whose cover best fits the theme or that you simply like the most in bold.
- The winner of the contest is the entrant with the most votes after the voting period ends.
- The winner chooses the theme for the next week's contest.
- If you don't think the cover fits the theme, don't vote for it; please don't post disparaging remarks about it.
- If a cover is more recent than the classic time frame, kindly point it out to the poster, who may then choose an alternate before voting begins.
Here's one to get the ball rolling, Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica #43 (Archie, 1959):
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 15, 2024 3:12:47 GMT -5
AnarchaosDonald Westlake, 1967 Written under one of his many, many pseudonyms, Curt Clark, this is, I think, Westlake’s only science fiction novel (although he wrote a few SF short stories using the same pseudonym). The titular non-rotating planet, Anarchaos, orbits a red sun that’s nicknamed Hell by its inhabitants. The planet’s name is derived from that fact that there is no government nor even any laws, so life there is cheap and cutthroat (sometimes literally), and ‘syndicates’ that are actually fronts for large interstellar corporations engaged in resource extraction are the only entities that wield any kind of power. All of the major cities also have outposts of the Union Commission, UN-like structure that links the various human colonies, where offworlders can take refuge if necessary. Otherwise, there is brief mention in the first few pages that the planet’s original settlers had wanted to set up an anarchist society in line with the writings of, say, Bakunin or Proudhon, with the first-person narrator (but actually Westlake) opining that the Hobbesian nightmare that resulted is inevitable outcome of these ideas – which is questionable, but this really isn’t important to the story as a whole. Said first-person narrator is the protagonist, Rolf Malone, who arrives on the planet after being released from prison on Earth, as he was initially supposed to be employed by one of the syndicates to assist his older brother, a mineral surveyor. However, his brother was killed shortly before Malone arrived, so he sets about finding out who killed him. Things go sideways pretty quickly, and Malone ends up going through the wringer (even getting enslaved at one point) over the course of what turns out to be several years – he loses sense of time because there are no days on the planet. I found this readable, as most of Westlake’s prose is, and the conclusion was kind of interesting, but ultimately I didn’t necessarily like it, in part because Malone is very amoral (something he has in common with the characters in many of the books I’ve read by Westlake).
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 15, 2024 2:44:09 GMT -5
Thanks for the votes, everyone. I'll post a new contest later today.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 14, 2024 17:25:42 GMT -5
Prince Hal
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 14, 2024 7:40:23 GMT -5
Bad KarmaAlex de Campi (script & letters), Ryan Howe (art), Dee Cunniffe (colors), 2020 In Boston just before Christmas, a disabled Afghan war vet named Ethan reconnects with his good friend and former comrade-at-arms, Sully. After a tense holiday meal with Ethan’s ex-wife, Cheryl, their two kids and her parents, Ethan and Sully see a news report that a young man is about to be executed in Virginia for killing a Russian émigré businessman at a golf course. The only problem is that said killing was in fact done by Ethan and Sully as part of a black op, because said businessman was a CIA informant and also arms dealer – and we learn that after their tours in Afghanistan, they both worked as ‘independent contractors’, doing a lot of dirty work for the US government. They have pangs of conscience over the pending execution, and decide to go down to Virginia and set things right. As one may expect, these two guys with severe cases of PTSD, among other things, get into a world of trouble, as it ends up that there are still some people in high places in the US intelligence community who do not want the real story about what happened at that golf course to come out. Cheryl also gets involved when she goes down to bail them out of jail after an initial scuffle with some off-duty and then on-duty cops at a donut shop, and then their car is attacked by a military drone. I have to say, I liked this one a fair bit more than two other series written by de Campi which I reviewed in this thread in recent months, i.e., Mayday and the Brandenburg School for Boys. The story here is much more engaging and, frankly, the characters here are far more likeable. It’s kind of like a buddy/action/caper movie told with a lot of humor, but also with serious stakes and emotional depth. And by the way, like the two previously-mentioned series by de Campi, I also purchased these in digital format from the Panel Syndicate, where you can name your own price. However, if you prefer a hard-copy, Image published a hard-cover edition last year, with a nice painted cover: It has over 300 pages, but it’s a really light and easy read; e.g., I had some free time yesterday and basically read it in a single sitting.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 13, 2024 14:30:48 GMT -5
The local annual SF convention Sferakon was held in Zagreb this past weekend, and among other things I attended two interesting talks held by Eric Stilwell, who had a long career in TV which included a stint as production assistant and script coordinator for TNG, as well as some production work on DS9 and Voyager. On Saturday he gave a general retrospective of his career in various Star Trek shows, as well as his activities in fandom, as he was a Trekkie since he was a little kid. On Sunday he gave a more focused talk on the making of the well-loved and acclaimed TNG season 3 episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," for which he developed the story together with Trent Ganino. Both talks were really interesting; I always like getting some of this behind the scenes info from people involved on the production side. (This was, by the way, kind of sequel to last year's convention, when one of the guests of honor was Lolita Fatjo, another TNG production staffer - which I also posted about). Anyway, Stilwell also signed my convention program...
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 12, 2024 3:32:34 GMT -5
Lest Darkness FallL. Sprague de Camp, 1941 Already reviewed here, with a capsule plot summary, by Slam. I’ll just say that for my part this is my first time reading this book, and I quite enjoyed it. One aspect that I really liked is the plausible way that de Camp made the way the main character, Martin Padway, get his bearings in 6th century Ostrogothic Italy, i.e., he was a Classically educated archeologist, so he knew Latin, as well as modern Italian, and could thus engage in rudimentary communication with the people populating Italy at the time. Also, I loved that he went about initially earning a living by brewing and selling brandy. The book is also amazingly fast-paced: there’s a brief discussion between Padway and an Italian scholar in Rome about the possibility of alternate time-lines and individuals falling through certain focal points in the four-dimensional web of time, and then on page 3 it happens to Padway and we’re off and running. And given the type of story being told, i.e., a guy changing history, it’s incredibly short – the edition I read only has about 120 pages. The book’s title by the way, is a reference to the fact that later scholars, i.e., from the Renaissance and then Enlightenment and onward, saw the 6th century, and esp. events that played out in Italy, as the beginning of the ‘Dark Ages’ – a term that became controversial by the mid-20th century and has been largely discarded by historians.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 12, 2024 2:40:08 GMT -5
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 10, 2024 11:29:08 GMT -5
Well, this time around, I'm gonna be Captain Obvious, and pick a long-time favorite of many, Justice League of America #200... As I've many times before, there's just so much awesome between that amazing wraparound cover by Perez. Conway's story is just perfect (action-packed, with serious stakes, but still unceasingly fun) and the art, by not only Perez in the bridging sequences, but also individual chapters by Brett Breeding, Pat Broderick, Terry Austin, Jim Aparo, Dick Giordano, Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, Frank Giacoia, Brian Bolland and Joe Kubert, is spectacular.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 10, 2024 9:02:58 GMT -5
Panda
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 9, 2024 13:20:30 GMT -5
Batman: Hong Kongscript: Doug Moench, art: Tony Wong; 2003 In Gotham City, a small time criminal is gruesomely killed by being hung upside down with a venomous snake released on his legs – and the whole thing is broadcast via live feed on the internet. Not long after, a hacker who gained access to the feed is also killed in the same fashion after he reported what he saw to the police – and Batman was unable to save him. Then Commisioner Gordon learns that the exact same type of murder was committed in Hong Kong. So Batman travels half-way across the world to uncover who is organizing these macabre killings. While there gains a new ally, an avenging hero called Night Dragon who was in fact inspired by Batman, and who has connections in both law enforcement and the underworld (i.e., one of his uncles is the chief of police and another uncle is the chief of the city’s most powerful triad). That’s an oversimplified capsule summary of the story, which is solid but nothing spectacular. I think it was mainly written simply to have Tony Wong (also known as Wong Yuk-long), a popular Chinese manhua artist, draw a Batman story. And speaking of, I found the art mostly good, although Wong has some odd stylistic quirks, like the way he draws Batman’s cape so that it’s not only impossibly long, a la Todd MacFarlane, but also kind of flayed into strips, so it looks like he’s dragging streamers around with him: Night Dragon has a pretty cool look, though.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 9, 2024 1:51:30 GMT -5
On the Beach Boys, yeah, my view mostly aligns with Slam's; I like a few of their songs, but that's about it. And I don't think Wilson is some kind of song-writing prodigy.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 8, 2024 6:44:17 GMT -5
Spectre #1 (DC, 1992); art by Tom Mandrake
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 8, 2024 6:17:39 GMT -5
Ljubav, zabit, rasvjetaKrešimir Biuk, 2019 The title translates to “Love, backwater, lighting,” and it tells the story of Marko, the rather portly central figure in that cover image above, who owns a lamp and lighting fixtures shop in Zagreb, but then moves to the dilapidated house of his recently deceased grandfather in a small village in inland Dalmatia. He made the move because Mia, a woman he’s in love with and with whom he had a close but platonic relationship, told him “she’s met someone.” The story goes back and forth from flashbacks to his time and Zagreb and his current life in the village as he fixes up his grandfather’s house and gets to know his fellow villagers, of whom there are a grand total of nine and all of whom are quite elderly. ( an interaction between Marko and Luca (prounounced LOO-tsa), a nosy and judgemental granny). Eventually, Mia shows up in the village together with her problem-prone younger sister, who’s bandaged and walking with crutches because she had recently been beaten within inches of her life by a pair of gangters (it’s a complicated backstory). Marko gets drawn into this whole situation, which necessitates a brief return to Zagreb. I really enjoyed this – it has a mostly light-hearted tone, but still tells a story with quite a bit of emotional depth. Those who follow this thread regularly may be familiar with Biuk’s name, as he’s the scripter of the "Zagrebljuje" series I’ve been writing about in my reviews of the anthology series Strop ( the most recent issue discussed just above), as well as the pretty recently published Kozmiči otpad. Besides being a great scripter, Biuk is also a very capable artist, and has done a number of ‘solo’ projects like this one, including a series of well-regarded YA comics. Of those I’ve read, this is my favorite so far.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 8, 2024 3:28:35 GMT -5
Fittingly - I doth protest! Not that it changes the result, but MRPs_Missives a.k.a. mrp received not two but three votes! I demand that my vote be counted!
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