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Post by rberman on Mar 14, 2024 13:31:42 GMT -5
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Post by rberman on Mar 4, 2024 11:58:08 GMT -5
I really appreciated a fun Sunday after a pair of very personally difficult weekends, and I guess it showed when I talked about five times as much as I usually do! It was a pleasure to have rberman join the Zoomers. Boy, does that Sekowsky art look way more impressive as original art than it did as four-color newsprint! Your Jimmy Olsen was one of my cousin's 1970s stash which I read in the 1980s, so it's nostalgic for me. I later learned how heavily both DC and Marvel were leaning into horror monsters at that time as the Comics Code relaxed.
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Post by rberman on Mar 3, 2024 11:45:30 GMT -5
I should be able to attend.
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Post by rberman on Mar 2, 2024 17:10:06 GMT -5
Get well soon! What is your favorite re-read so far?
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Post by rberman on Mar 1, 2024 9:12:48 GMT -5
Among modern artists, the one who most deserves a thread of his own is Jeremy Bastian for his series Cursed Pirate Girl. I have to use a magnifying glass to see all the detail he puts in each page; it really needs an oversized Artist Edition. I ran into him at a con, and was astonished to see that he was drawing the originals at ACTUAL SIZE. Which was standard comic book size, not even magazine size. He was really nice, but extremely introverted and it was actually very difficult to communicate with him in a noisy environment. Yes, Jeremy's work is shockingly small even without taking his detail into consideration, but much moreso considering it. Here he is with a Cursed Pirate Girl page I own. Many artists are introverts, and he's no exception, but I didn't find communication difficult at Heroes Con. It may have helped that it wasn't noisy there.
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Post by rberman on Mar 1, 2024 9:08:07 GMT -5
I collect original pieces, but for me a blank cover is not where I want it, attached to 22 pages of interiors that makes the art 22x more bulky. Also, cover paper is not generally an artist's first choice to produce a quality piece of original art. However, I have bought a few pieces of original art even though they were rendered on blank covers. Here's one by Stanley "Artgerm" Lau. It's cool to put a face with the name. You should join us in our zoom meetings. We have them on Sunday afternoons. Shoot me the details, and I'll see what I can do.
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Post by rberman on Feb 28, 2024 18:53:07 GMT -5
I collect original pieces, but for me a blank cover is not where I want it, attached to 22 pages of interiors that makes the art 22x more bulky. Also, cover paper is not generally an artist's first choice to produce a quality piece of original art. However, I have bought a few pieces of original art even though they were rendered on blank covers. Here's one by Stanley "Artgerm" Lau.
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Post by rberman on Feb 28, 2024 11:56:52 GMT -5
Among modern artists, the one who most deserves a thread of his own is Jeremy Bastian for his series Cursed Pirate Girl. I have to use a magnifying glass to see all the detail he puts in each page; it really needs an oversized Artist Edition. Here's Martin Simmonds in "Universal Monsters: Dracula" #1, an adaptation by James Tynion IV Daniel Govar's book "Tuskers" is about efforts to stop elephant poaching. He mixes caricaturish humans with fully rendered animals. Jared Cullum's' "Kodi" is about a girl and a bear. His passion for landscapes and scenery is evident. Eric Powell's recent series "Hillbilly" is an Appalachian fantasy. Sean Gordon Murphy's "The Plot Holes" is a lovely adventure tale about Murphy and his feisty grandmother helping fictional characters fix the problems in their various stories. Terry Moore is well known for his cleverly written stories of super-women and super-spies. He's great with faces and body language. "Rachel Rising" is about a zombie woman. Jackson Guice and Mike Perkins for the "Amber Blake" series: In the early 1990s, Gray Morrow produced a Buck Rogers series which was published by TSR along with role-playing material: Is Aspen an indie? This "Eternal Soulfire" series is "fantasy vs sci-fi." Alex Konat's pencils were colored without inking.
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Post by rberman on Feb 23, 2024 15:39:17 GMT -5
I just read it and quite liked it. The back cover says it's a mix of "The Big Chill" and "Lost," and I can see that; throw in "St. Elmo's Fire" and "Dollhouse" and we're in the ballpark. It's one of those stories like "The Matrix" or "Everything Everywhere All At Once" that you're better off not knowing what it's about before you start reading, but suffice I found its theme intriguing, of getting your childhood and adult friends together. I was already a fan of Alvaro Martinez Bueno, and this series confirmed it further.
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Post by rberman on Feb 21, 2024 8:37:24 GMT -5
Nathan Never, I figli della nottewritten by Michele Medda, art by Nicola Mari (no. 38 in the original Italian series, first published in July 1994; included in vol. 13 of the Croatian editions published by Libellus under the title “Djeca noći”) This is a direct sequel to “Vampyrus” ( reviewed above). Here the focus is on Mina Harker (who had a rough time of it in that latter story, like her namesake in Dracula); she’s moved back to Earth and found work as a make-up artist in a mortuary. Despite the rather macabre job, she’s doing quite well and seems content, but then she abruptly quits after falling in with a bad crowd – several of them are the bored and disaffected children of wealthy families, and all are fans of the most popular musician of the time, Tadeusz, who has this whole Goth vampire gimmick. Fans ‘attend’ his concerts by putting on VR headsets. The sci-fi vampire concepts introduced in Nathan Never spilled over into its spin-off series Legs Weaver. Vampirism became a legislated phenomenon, with vampires seeking government permission to infect their family members so that they could live together forever. Interesting take on the whole Highlander "Who wants to live forever?" thing. But the resulting society of vampires also has their own intrigues, including vamp-on-vamp crime. The Legs Weaver series tended to homage a different theme each issue. It might be MacBeth one month, or giant mecha, or vampires, etc. One issue was a complete homage to John Byrne's Alpha Flight comics, including a long-haired shaman with a magic medicine bag. His name was Duegiovani, which means "Twoyoungmen!" Plus there was a Sasquatch, a Talisman, a story involving the ancient gods of the Northern Lights, and more. They apparently weren't worried about copyright litigation; the language barrier made it unlikely they would be discovered in the short run.
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Post by rberman on Feb 20, 2024 22:54:12 GMT -5
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Post by rberman on Feb 19, 2024 16:33:21 GMT -5
You convinced me, rberman ! I'm getting that!!! Mister Miracle, or Starman? Or both perhaps?
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Post by rberman on Feb 19, 2024 10:47:54 GMT -5
Mister Miracle #12 (September 2018)Scott’s Shirt: It has a compass rose with astrological signs and a five pointed star superimposed. I don’t know whose logo that is. Later Scott wears an Adam Strange T-shirt. Jack has bibs with Batman and Flash logos. Another mystery solved by more reading: Scott is wearing the emblem on the back of the leather jacket worn by the Copper Age version of Starman, Jack Knight, the son of Golden Age Starman, Ted Knight. Does that series have a review thread here yet? If not, it might be worth looking at.
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Post by rberman on Feb 2, 2024 9:09:04 GMT -5
It helps, because Superman often carries regular people at incredibly high speed too, and some hand-waving semblance of an explanation helps our suspension of disbelief. Walt Disney called it the “plausible impossible.”
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Post by rberman on Jan 16, 2024 16:48:01 GMT -5
This is a behind-the-scenes question about the post-Crisis Legion and Superboy. It is clear about what happened. The post-COIE Superman no longer had a career as Superboy, who in theory could no longer be the inspiration for the Legion. This led to all sorts of problems with continuity and the creation of the Pocket Universe. What happened on an editorial level we pretty much only have what Byrne says: he warned everyone involved with the Legion that Superboy would no longer exist and that this would probably lead to problems. He was told not to worry and that they would take care of it. But months later they called him in desperation basically saying that when he said Superboy would no longer exist they didn't really understand what that meant. Now they realized it, they didn't know what to do and only he (Byrne) could save them!!! So he had to invent something (the Pocket Universe). Why not just say that the Legion was inspired by Superman? Or by superheroes in general? Kids can be inspired by grown ups. Mention the Teen Titans in the process if you have to namecheck younger heroes.
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