Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,144
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Post by Confessor on Jan 8, 2021 22:05:16 GMT -5
I re-read Amazing Spider-Man #29 last night, which is the second appearance of the Scorpion. I loved the Scorpion's first appearance in ASM #20 and depending on which day you ask me, I might even cite it as my favourite Lee/Ditko issue. But I've always felt that ASM #29 was a bit of a let down. For one thing, one of the best things about issue #20 is J. Jonah Jameson's realisation of his guilt in having created the Scorpion and it's pretty powerfully handled in the comic. So, the prospect of the Scorpion busting out of jail, hell bent on confronting Jameson, while the irascible editor has to once again face his sins has the potential to produce some high caliber material. Unfortunately, the opportunity for great character drama is largely wasted in favour of humour and an overly long and not terribly interesting fight scene between Spidey and Scorp. In addition, the artwork is really uneven -- which is unusual for Ditko. Some panels look fine, while others look a bit slap-dash, as if "Sturdy" Steve is for all the world dialling it in. Serval panels also feature the central cast with rather weird and unusual facial expressions. It's almost as if another artist has redrawn certain panels or helped Ditko out on parts of the comic, but I've never read anything that supports that theory. All in all, ASM #29 is an OK comic, by the standards of most Silver Age books. But I expect so much more from the Lee/Ditko team. That said, some of Stan's dialogue here is properly laugh out loud funny, but overall this comic doesn't come close to the heights of ASM #20.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 8, 2021 22:40:23 GMT -5
I re-read Amazing Spider-Man #29 last night, which is the second appearance of the Scorpion. I bought this one when it came out. I remember liking it a lot, but I hadn't read #20 so there was no letdown for me.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 8, 2021 22:43:35 GMT -5
Is he called "Pieface" from the beginning or does that start later? And is the nickname derived from "Eskimo Pie" (which is currently being renamed because people have noticed that "Eskimo" is inappropriate)? Yes, I didn't even note that part. Hal calls him Pieface or sometimes just Pie. Other people just call him Thomas or Tom. At least in the stories in the first Showcase volume, they don't explain the nickname's origin. I've actually seen a few explanations on the internet. Coincidentally, someone posted this panel to Facebook today: Looks like Hal gave him that nickname. But that doesn't look like Gil Kane art, so I don't know when or where this panel appeared.
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Post by spoon on Jan 8, 2021 23:44:56 GMT -5
Yes, I didn't even note that part. Hal calls him Pieface or sometimes just Pie. Other people just call him Thomas or Tom. At least in the stories in the first Showcase volume, they don't explain the nickname's origin. I've actually seen a few explanations on the internet. Coincidentally, someone posted this panel to Facebook today: Looks like Hal gave him that nickname. But that doesn't look like Gil Kane art, so I don't know when or where this panel appeared. I'm pretty sure that's Joe Staton's art. He wasn't drawing Green Lantern until the 1980s. He had at least two separate stints as the GL penciler. In the first one, I think he often inked his own pencils. This looks like the later run when he was mostly inked by Bruce Patterson. So essentially that's a flashback scene published over 20 years after Tom "Pieface" Kalmaku first appeared.
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Post by profh0011 on Jan 8, 2021 23:50:30 GMT -5
CONAN THE BARBARIAN #22, 23, 24 ("Chronicles Of Conan" Vol. 4 had not been filed away properly, so I decided to re-read it before putting it with the other volumes).
MONSTERS AND HEROES #1 by Larry Ivie (I just ordered issues #2 & 3, which I've always been missing, and decided to read or re-read the entire short-lived run).
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 9, 2021 7:11:52 GMT -5
I have been reading West coast Avengers 12-20 where part of the storyline involves the team stranded n the past and Mockingbird abducted by the Nightrider. It's not bad but Englehart is wordy in this run. Maybe more though balloons and less exposition would have helped.
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Post by earl on Jan 9, 2021 7:26:00 GMT -5
That is definitely Joe Staton's 80s Green Lantern.
Been so busy, I have not read much yet this year. I am re-reading Dark Horse's Conan series and am in the 'Rogues in the House' story and it is so good.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 9, 2021 10:07:49 GMT -5
I have been reading West coast Avengers 12-20 where part of the storyline involves the team stranded n the past and Mockingbird abducted by the Nightrider. It's not bad but Englehart is wordy in this run. Maybe more though balloons and less exposition would have helped. That's a good storyline... I think that's the only thing of Englehart's that a REALLY liked.
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Post by profh0011 on Jan 9, 2021 10:23:49 GMT -5
I was just saying on another thread how Englehart was NEVER the same guy when he came back to comics in the 80s (after a few years of trying to become a novelist). My former comics-shop owner once suggested (based on a rumor he heard) that both Englehart & Marshall Rogers took TOO MUCH L.S.D., and while it expanded their creativity up to a point, beyond that point, it FRIED their brains... especially Englehart's. His 80s output was VERY erratic and inconsistent. Some great, some average, some UNREADABLE dreck.
It's like he became the new Gary Friedrich............
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Post by spoon on Jan 9, 2021 10:35:34 GMT -5
I have been reading West coast Avengers 12-20 where part of the storyline involves the team stranded n the past and Mockingbird abducted by the Nightrider. It's not bad but Englehart is wordy in this run. Maybe more though balloons and less exposition would have helped. For Christmas, one of my brothers got me an Epic Collection TPB that includes those issues.
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Post by chaykinstevens on Jan 9, 2021 10:59:17 GMT -5
But that doesn't look like Gil Kane art, so I don't know when or where this panel appeared. It's from Secret Origins #36, cover dated January 1989, pencilled and inked by Joe Staton.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2021 11:57:33 GMT -5
I was just saying on another thread how Englehart was NEVER the same guy when he came back to comics in the 80s (after a few years of trying to become a novelist). My former comics-shop owner once suggested (based on a rumor he heard) that both Englehart & Marshall Rogers took TOO MUCH L.S.D., and while it expanded their creativity up to a point, beyond that point, it FRIED their brains... especially Englehart's. His 80s output was VERY erratic and inconsistent. Some great, some average, some UNREADABLE dreck. It's like he became the new Gary Friedrich............ When talking about his time in the 80s at a panel I attended a couple years back, Steve said the biggest difference between the 70s and 80s was the he was given free reign at Marvel in the 70s to tell the stories he wanted, when he came back, he had to work with editors who thought they were better storytellers than the writers they hired and would tweak things after Steve had turned in the script and he wouldn't see the changes until it saw print, so he would have to adjust plots/stories on the fly to adapt to what actually appeared in print vs. what he intended and had turned in. It's what led to the Harkness pen name eventually as he didn't want the results to be in his name. The free-wheeling Marvel fo the 70s was a hotbed of creativity where story came first, DC had more editorial control when he went there, but he still was able to tell the stories he wanted, when he returned to Marvel in the 80s, sales and marketing via editorial vision trumped story and editors would make decisions based on those factors rather than what the story needed and either the writers played ball, or had their work altered and if they didn't like it, they were told, there's the door. So I would say the Englehart you saw in the 80s was a diluted version of his work filtered through the lends of editorial rather than the more purer form of Englehart that you got in his first stint. -M
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Post by Cei-U! on Jan 9, 2021 12:04:07 GMT -5
Here's a weird factoid I just stumbled across. According to the indicia, the legal title of the magazine we know as "Tales of the Zombie" was simply "Zombie." Only #4, #10 and Annual #1 bore the actual TotZ title. But no matter what it was legally registered as, it wss still hands down the best of that first generation of b&w horror mags.
Cei-U! I summon the Amulet of Damballah!
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Post by profh0011 on Jan 9, 2021 16:08:47 GMT -5
The free-wheeling Marvel fo the 70s was a hotbed of creativity where story came first, DC had more editorial control when he went there, but he still was able to tell the stories he wanted, when he returned to Marvel in the 80s, sales and marketing via editorial vision trumped story and editors would make decisions based on those factors rather than what the story needed and either the writers played ball, or had their work altered and if they didn't like it, they were told, there's the door. So I would say the Englehart you saw in the 80s was a diluted version of his work filtered through the lends of editorial rather than the more purer form of Englehart that you got in his first stint. I'm sure this was a big part of it.
A number of interviews I've read (notably Don McGregor, if memory serves) described a situation where, when Marvel expanded from 8 books a month to 60s or more, it became impossible for there to be too much editorial control, the main thing was knocking out the product as fast as possible. Writers became their own de-facto editors (apart from assigning who was doing the art) and could virtually do whatever they wanted, "getting away with murder" unless or until some serious problem would arise, which usually happened after a book had been printed, distributed, sold & read.
The staff of uncredited assistant editors (in the office by day while writing books at night) usually only had time to do proofreading and shuffling pages from one step of the assembly-line to another.
Only certain writers really high up the chain had a say in artists-- like Roy Thomas and John Romita (who apparently did all of his work in the office). Don McGregor talked about a lot of the things he did in his stories that might never have been approved if "editorial" were tighter than it was... not to mention, he was the only one working full-script (with panel layouts added), so no matter who the artist was, it never affected his stories. (Artists in the 70s were usually writing 50% OR MORE of the resulting stories, but not in Don's case.)
A rare instance of a problem making it to the printed books was when Steve Gerber was doing "Guardians of the Galaxy" with Al Milgrom, and in the finale of a 4-part story, somehow managed to sneak an ON-CAMERA SEX SCENE into the book. A "climax" in more ways than one (heh). It wasn't until it was already in the hands of readers that all hell broke loose, and Gerber was FIRED off the series he helped revive from oblivion! (Crazy enough, a nearly-identical scene later appeared at the finale of the 1st STAR TREK movie... about 4 years later. The Guardian's spaceship was inspired by The Enterprise from ST, so it was like the inspiration appeared to be going full-circle.)
When Jim Shooter took over as Editor, he decided to change the whole system to make it more like what DC had-- a staff of editors, each with an assistant editor, assigned to handle certain books, and having heavy-handed approval of EACH step of the assembly-line. And with only one exception that I'm aware of, Shooter ALWAYS sided with "editorial" over "the freelancers".
That one exception, by the way, I heard about from 2 completely different sources, at opposite ends of things, about 30 years apart! Back in the 80s I met artist Brett Breeding. Once I got past how young he looked (I wondered if he'd started in the biz at age 13 or something) he told a story about how the editor on a book he was inking kept screwing around so much, the book was constantly running late, and he was forced to choose between doing a good job or getting the work in on time, and he chose the latter. He didn't mention the editor's name.
30 years later, I suddenly realized that Jim Shooter was telling the SAME story, from the other end, at his website. The editor in question had been doing his freelance writing during the day in the office, instead of his editorial duties! Shooter suggested the guy get his act together, or find work elsewhere.
I believe it was not long after that... the guy took over as editor of the BATMAN books.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,144
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Post by Confessor on Jan 9, 2021 18:50:12 GMT -5
Carrying on from ASM #29, I re-read Amazing Spider-Man #30, which features Spidey facing off against the Cat. This is really the beginning of the famous Master Planner storyline. Steve Ditko's artwork is much better and more on point in this issue that it was in #29, while the story unfolds in a much more satisfactory manner also. It's a well paced adventure, with more than a few shades of noir, and it keeps you interested all the way through. Stan Lee ramps up the soap opera elements -- Aunt May is suffering from recurring fainting fits, which will eventually see her in hospital, and Betty Brant tells Peter that Ned Leeds has proposed to her and she's considering accepting because he's such a calm, safe and responsible guy, not like that adventurer Spider-Man (ooh, the irony). Peter reacts badly to this news, flying into a rage and storming out, devastated that they can never be together while he is Spider-Man. Actually, Betty loves Peter more than Ned and would much rather marry him, but Peter never gives her the chance to explain that. Actually, Peter is kind of a self-absorbed dick in this issue. Ah well, that's teenagers for ya! All in all, this is a really good little comic. It feels very Ditko led to me, in terms of the noir elements and Peter's angry outbursts, and it sets the stage for the forthcoming Master Planner story arc very nicely.
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