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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 31, 2024 12:12:43 GMT -5
Whizzer and Miss America report to Namor's flagship, do a bit of groveling to be let on the team, then join the rest. Meanwhile, Cap puts in a radio call to his child decoy...sidekick. The Invaders are being sent to San Diego, to look into spy activity and they decide to meet up, in Tijuana, for a donk....uh...a show. Whizzer and Miss America again revel in leaving behind a bunch of losers, to join the winning team.... I wrote a fanfic once where Roosevelt's idea was for the superhero teams to learn each others' tactics by rotating members. So the Invaders got Whizzer & Miss America; the Liberty Legion got Super Sabre and Yankee Clipper; and the Crimson Commando's squad got Miss Patriot and (the original) Human Top.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 24, 2024 12:06:41 GMT -5
I consider myself a Doc Savage fan, though I haven't read all that much, and I imagine that's what they were going for with the safari jacket but it never worked for me: didn't like the look in itself and also thought it inappropriate for a super-duper character like Wonder Man, as opposed to the relatively more down to earth pulp hero. My only objection to the outfit is that whenever I see it, I go looking for the rest of the THUNDER Squad.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 22, 2024 12:34:49 GMT -5
I quite enjoyed The Golden Age, although it was clear to me it was a transitional book. And I enjoyed the first couple episodes of The Silver Age, published by Eclipse.
But yeah, this completely underwhelmed me. Not so much the abuse revelation (which felt meretricious to me), but the pretense that anything being offered by YM was somehow profound or worldchanging, when it was all pretty much the obvious critiques one would make in that kind of situation.
And the Dark Ages are supposed to be about the return of Bates ... whom I am thoroughly bored of by now.
Grant Morrison had wanted to take over the title, but that didn't happen because of the acrimony between him and Moore; I usually rate Gaiman over Morrison but now I'm wondering where he'd have gone with it.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 22, 2024 12:28:28 GMT -5
Though at times he could lay it on just too thick. His Silver Surfer being an example. People say Kirby failed without Stan. Though the reality behind the cancellation of the Fourth World is more complex than "it didn't sell". It sold better than other books that were not cancelled. Moreover, this was a period of time when there was an enormous amount of fraud in the comic retailing world. A lot of store owners were hoarding titles they considered collectible, which resulted in Marvel and DC being convinced that some highly commercial properties were not selling. The 4th World books, and a lot of Neal Adams' comics, received that treatment.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 19, 2024 14:53:34 GMT -5
I tend to take anything said by a guy who says he is a wizard and worships a 3000 year old snake god who lives in his toilet with a grain of salt. No offense, but I always chuckle when people wat to reduce Moore down to something that simple. I read that long interview session he did, I forget with whom, but it was collected into a book or special magazine, in the 00s (or very early 10s), where he described his beliefs and practices and, basically, it boiled down to meditative practices and the whole snake god thing merely a focal point for meditation. Not very dissimilar to a mandala. At least, that was my take. Moreover, he has explicitly stated that the reason he chose the snake god to worship, is that it was (even in antiquity) an obvious con and didn't really exist!
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 12, 2024 12:57:17 GMT -5
Top 10 came back for Season 2, but in far lesser hands and it isn't worth covering, without Moore, just as Tom Strong continued and I will skip those, apart from Moore's last story, which was withheld, until the end. One question I've never received an answer to: I know Moore had plans for a Season 3, but I don't know whether anything was ever written down and whether any notes of his were ever applied to the subsequent publications.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 9, 2024 11:54:11 GMT -5
What's everyone's favourite Manara recommendations, while we're talking about him? I personally don't care for Milo Manara's artwork all that much. The only one I've ever liked was Gullivera (his soft-core porn take on Gulliver's Travels) because the absurdity of the original text leant itself well to rather silly erotic fantasies.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 5, 2024 11:56:33 GMT -5
It certainly seems lazy and creatively bankrupt. I just read your reply after reading about Ramona Fradon retiring... and somehow, for a split second, thought you were replying to that. I did too! (but it was obvious sarcasm in that case)
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 5, 2024 11:52:24 GMT -5
So I have acquired (from the library) the previously mentioned Maggie the Mechanic collections. There are no references to were any of the stories come from, just that this is the 'first five years of Locus stories'. It claims them to be presented in 'perfect chronological order' (no idea if that means in story or release. I read the first few and the art is nice (great in the first one, good but rushed feeling in the others) but I'm throughly confused. If it's the collection I'm thinking of, it's the Jamie material from L&R in chronological order ... plus a couple of stories which appeared elsewhere, inserted here in chronological order. Sci-fi Maggie! This is a mood piece, which you'll either gravitate to or not. It's not about Hopey; it's about Isabel (Izzy) Ruebens. We see her as a well put together writer her, and ... something dramatic happens to her ... because we see her many years later as the burnout in the next story. The purpose of the story is to show different aspects of the characters' lives. They're a bunch of punks, but Maggie also has a job which takes her to some pretty wild locations and adventures. The threads unite better as the series continues. This is really just a humorous one-shot ... but Penny is also a continuing character and will meet up with Maggie and Hopey later on. To be fair, I never liked Maggie much either. I like it for the other characters and the things happening around her, more than her personally.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 26, 2023 11:58:57 GMT -5
I bought the original tpb. It does nothing for me. I don’t think there’s a plot to these stories. I've tried to get into the book multiple times and it just doesn't work for me at all. So, yeah, I don't get it. Well, not everything's for everybody. I like it a lot (though I still have to catch up with a lot of stuff from after the original run). It really is very well done on a technical level, and, especially when it came out originally, one of the few thing that didn't seem to be trying to be--or even more importantly, trying not to be--something that already existed. You called it. L&R isn't a comic I'd recommend to everyone, necessarily. And certainly a reader who prefers a plot, as opposed to a meandering slice of life, it's not for them!
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 18, 2023 12:07:00 GMT -5
I love a 'G-good Lord! >choke<' I try to quote it in my own writing when I have opportunity.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 15, 2023 13:18:11 GMT -5
I know the Armless Tiger Man appeared in an issue of Pak/Van Lente's Hercules (not a big part). I expect several others to have similar appearances. ARMLESS TIGER MAN!! He’s awesome! I want to do a story in which he encounters a Cockney detective who says: " 'E's 'ardly 'armless!"
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 15, 2023 13:13:50 GMT -5
Is John Cassaday just a bad cartoonist? Is that why I don’t like Planetary? The drawing is pretty good but from the samples here there’s not much sense of kinetic motion or panels flowing into each other. If, say, Steve Dillon had drawn the doll throwing scene above it woulda been hilarious! It may be that this is such a writer-dominated series; but it might also be that Cassaday is another of those who looks at comic storytelling as storyboarding a movie. I loved Cassaday's art on Planetary, it seemed to fit the subject matter perfectly. However (to my surprise) when I've seen anything by him since then ... I've found his style really boring.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 13, 2023 12:36:27 GMT -5
This was a fast moving story. But there's a lot of depth here. The first overall arc of Planetary explored the 20th Century through what would be to us its popular culture. It only makes sense that Ellis and Cassaday would look at what came before and that exploration would focus on the archetypes of the genres that grew out of 19th Century literature, science fiction (Frankenstein), the detective novel (Holmes) and horror (Dracula). While those never went away, the 20th century saw different, but related cultural artifacts that had been previously explored in the series. Interestingly, Frankenstein's monster appears on the cover but not the actual issue. Some of the Wold Newton folks have postulated that the story in which Bulldog Denny gathers together a force to battle the monster is actually a disguised prelude to this issue, with Elijah Snow = Dr Frost, etc etc.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 13, 2023 12:29:54 GMT -5
I’m afraid to buy this book.
Mine comes in 3 books actually, in a boxed set in a slipcase. It was a present from someone who heard the name Alan Moore but didn't exactly know what it was.
That's actually kind of hilarious. I wasn't bothered by the use of the characters ... once the authors are long dead and the material has passed into public domain, anything goes so far as I'm concerned. But in this case it was a visually lovely, intellectually overwrought mess.
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