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Post by MDG on Apr 26, 2016 7:55:45 GMT -5
Picked this up at Frank and Son (weekly collectables warehouse show) a while back. I just got to it yesterday and loved it. The panel layouts, the mood, Fleming's scripting, lead to a very engaging story. Yeah--this came out when I was deep in my Giffen phase, but it really holds up. I think I was able to get by copy autographed by Giffen, Fleming, Julie Schwartz, and Bill Wray. The thing about this series, though, was DC had to find stories by known writers that no one else had adaptation rights to. Robert Loren Fleming told me that the copy he got to work from was xeroxed from a Man From UNCLE Digest. And he and Giffen changed the ending.
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 26, 2016 12:34:36 GMT -5
I read Detective Comics #1 over the weekend. This comic is so demented! I have the Millennium Edition reprint. Re-reading it reminds me why I love it so much ... and also why I don't read it that often. On the plus side, it's so wild and crazy! And energetic. And audacious! And very in-your-face about how little it cares about common sense or conventional storytelling. Detective Comics #1 cares not a whit about your bourgeois notions of coherence or narrative or motivation! NOT ONE WHIT, DO YOU HEAR? On the other hand, it's just a little bit too nonsensical. Too flimsy. It's fun while you're reading it, but it just sort of floats away the minute you're done. Unlike, some of the other early DC or Fawcett comics, Detective #1 just doesn't have anything with enough substance or charm to make it memorable. (I would point at something like the first Johnny Thunder story in Flash Comics #1 as a memorable story from the early Golden Age. The art is sooo bad, but the story is HILARIOUS! I don't know how many times I've read it over the years.) I could make an exception for the first Slam Bradley story. OMG! Those wonderful Joe Shuster figures almost dancing out of the page to PUNCH YOU INNA FACE! I'm a huge fan of Joe Shuster. I love the anatomy of his figures and I also love the way they almost look like they're moving! Shuster seldom gets enough credit as a cartoonist! Detective Comics #1 is - or should be - famous for being incredibly offensive. It's not just the cover with the sinister gray-skinned mandarin. It's not just the way Slam Bradley takes on the whole tong in Chinatown, throws five or six burly Chinamen around like so many matchsticks and emerges with nothing worse than a torn shirt. The most obvious problem with the racism in Detective Comics #1 is how pervasive it is! Three of the stories portray Asians as either helpless or completely evil. ("Speed Saunders" gets points for not being nearly as bad as "Slam Bradley" or "The Claws of the Red Dragon." So, good for "Speed Saunders"!) And just to spread it around a little, "Brett Lawton" has an evil Inca priest. Despite how offensive it is, I actually like "The Claws of the Red Dragon" quite a bit. It's been a while since I read it, and I had forgotten that I used to be kind of obsessed with it. Not because it's good. It's really really bad. It's the comic book equivalent of Manos, the Hand of Fate or Red Zone Cuba. And the quaint, old-timey racism has nothing to do with how awful it is. "The Claws of the Red Dragon" was written by pioneer comic-book publisher Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson! I bet he was so proud of himself to present this story in his newly published comic book! Our hero Nelson is walking down the street in San Francisco and he sees an eating establishment labeled "Chinese Restaurant" with a "Red Dragon" sign over the door. He has no idea that he is walking into a place that - even 80 years later - will go down in comic-book history as the worst restaurant ever! There's no one at the door to seat him, so he makes himself at home and sits down. Then he waits for about three pages before he starts shouting for service. Finally, the employees - many of whom are eight feet tall - try to tell him there is no menu. The surly waiters do everything they can think of to make him leave. Then two more patrons arrive - a beautiful girl and a bearded man wearing a ring exactly like Nelson's ring. They are waited on promptly and treated like ... customers. About every third or fourth panel, Nelson stares at the girl and the caption tells us his heart is throbbing because of how beautiful she is. Also, Nelson thinks she's in danger! And then we get a page of sneaky Chinamen entering from an alley and walking through underground passages and meeting the tong leader and planning something mysterious and inscrutable. And probably sinister as well. And then back to the restaurant for a few pages. More bad service. More staring at the girl. This weird game of cat-and-mouse goes on for 13 pages - and finally the eight-foot Chinamen attack everybody, abduct the bearded man and the girl and knock Nelson unconscious! And it's continued in the next issue! Good luck finding the conclusion to this one in any format!
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Post by sabongero on Apr 26, 2016 12:43:22 GMT -5
One of the best "Marvel Team Ups" of the 1980's. Nothing beats a Captain America and Wolverine issue dealing with terrorists.
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Post by dbutler69 on Apr 26, 2016 13:25:50 GMT -5
I finally read JLA/Avengers. I don't know if that's considered classic or not, but anyway. The Perez art was great, and it was cool to see every JLA member and Avenger. The story was good, though not great, and I do wonder how Krona got so powerful, how he got reassembled if his atoms were scattered all over, and why, if he's destroying universes to find out the origin of the universe, he didn't start with his own. Still, Busiek does throw in lots of cool little moments and references.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 26, 2016 13:29:15 GMT -5
Having caught up completely on Chew (not a classic for these purposes), I've started a re-read of Astro City and re-read the first six issue series. I would be somewhat tempted to do a review thread...but my follow-through on those kinds of things is pretty lousy.
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 26, 2016 14:59:39 GMT -5
An Internet search reveals that "The Claws of the Red Dragon" went on for eight issues. Hopefully, writer Wheeler Nicholson eventually opened up the story to include some of San Francisco outside of the immediate vicinity of the restaurant, but you can never be sure about these things. I also found a site called "Babblings About DC Comics" that summarizes all eight chapters! I haven't read them yet. I thought I would provide the links for any CCF members interested in this particular storyline and how it turned out. You're welcome. (I should add that I'm pretty stroked to finally find out what happened in the rest of this terrible story after wondering about it for 15 years.) Detective Comics 1 - Speed Saunders, Cosmo - Phantom of Disguise, Bret Lawton, The Claws of the Red Dragon, Bart Regan - Spy, Buck Marshall and Slam Bradley beginDetective 2 - Bret Lawton ends, Bart Regan finds a statue, Mr. Chang debuts and Bruce Nelson has colourblind memoriesDetective 3 - Hope Hazzard, G-Woman, a Tong War and Sally at the chapel in SpyDetective 4 - Speed Saunders flies to Cuba, and the wrong people get arrested in SpyDetective 5 - Slam Bradley goes to school, Bart Regan stops an assassination and Larry Steele beginsDetective 6 - An opium den in Claws of the Red Dragon, equality in Spy, and Mr. Chang ends Detective 7 - Rat torture in Claws of the Red Dragon, the Hindenburg in Spy and Buck Marshall goes CSIDetective 8 - Claws of the Red Dragon ends
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Post by MDG on Apr 27, 2016 8:41:32 GMT -5
I also found a site called "Babblings About DC Comics" that summarizes all eight chapters! I haven't read them yet. I thought I would provide the links for any CCF members interested in this particular storyline and how it turned out. Someone--possibly Mike of Mike's Amazing World--had a podcast tracing all DCs from the very beginning.
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 27, 2016 11:46:51 GMT -5
I've been working through "You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!" lately. This is one of the Fletcher Hanks compilations published over the last ten years or so. I read the Fantomah story where she battles the Tiger Woman of Wildmoon Mountain a few weeks ago. (It's a must-read story for fans of the crazy days of the early Golden Age.) I realized I was only reading Stardust and Fantomah and neglecting the other creations of Fletcher Hanks, so I decided to start skipping around and read some of the other characters in this volume. I read a rather boring Tabu story. Then I read one of the Big Red McLane stories! OMG! He's hilarious! The heroic lumberjack fighting against the evil criminals and mad scientists infesting the Northwoods and interfering with the efforts of the industrious lumberjacks! And I read the lone Tiger Hart story, which is just weird, and seems to be missing the last page. (Although it's sometimes hard to figure out if a Fletcher Hanks story is missing a page.) Then I started reading Space Smith! I read the first Space Smith story. Space and his companion Dianna are a rather generic heroic space-traveling couple who zoom around the solar system in a red spaceship and meet all kinds of odd menaces. In the first installment, they are attacked and abducted by Martian Imp Men and deposited in the lair of the big-headed Martian scientist Sokomah. He has a ray that will destroy Earth civilization and enable him to be the ruler. And he's going to force Dianna to become his queen! So the Martian spaceships with the menacing and very specific Earth-destroying raygun head towards Earth. Space Smith and Dianna manage to escape and fight a giant Martian mosquito before they can get to their spaceship and fly away to stop the Martian Imp Men. Sokomah and the Great Martian Central Brain will have to wait! And it's continued! Well, I have to find out what happens next, don't I? This is where I quit skipping around and decided to focus on Space Smith. God, it's so weird! Space Smith and Dianna are very bland but they run into the craziest interplanetary menaces! In the second installment, we don't see much except a giant space battle. Space Smith manages to get the communications system working and warns Earth about the Imp Men and their armada of ships armed with the Earth-destroying rayguns. And the Earth defensive forces fly out in their spaceships to take on the Imp Men. So we get several pages of FLETCHER HANKS'S IDEA OF AN EPIC SPACE BATTLE! We get several panels here and there of the Imp Men in their control rooms, as well as a few panels of Space and Dianna wondering WHO WILL WIN! But mostly it's just spaceships shooting rays at each other. After six pages of this, Earth wins! And Space Smith and Dianna head off to Mars to get revenge on the Great Martian Central Brain. I've now read the first five Space Smith stories, and the Great Central Brain of Mars is still sitting comfortably in his chair, unrepentant and unpunished for trying to destroy Earth. In the third installment, they at least mention the revenge quest in the opening caption. But Space Smith and Dianna are distracted and attacked and abducted by the Leopard Women of Venus! They are riding flying space saurians and shooting lasers from their weird headgear! They kidnap Space and Dianna and take them to Venus where they hand them over to robot scientists! I find the robot scientists to be particularly hilarious! They are very colorful. Each robot scientist is a different color. There's an orange one and a light blue one, and a purple one and one of them is different shade of purple. They have very long, somber faces and they are very lumpy. They are going to turn Dianna into a Leopard Woman but they must change her Earth-Mind first, and that means an operation! Well, Space Smith springs into action and grabs Dianna off the operating table and fights his way through the robot scientists and the den of the flying space saurians and they get to their spaceship and escape! And so far the revenge against the Great Martian Central Brain has never been mentioned again. In the fourth issue, they go to the moon and fight hugely muscled humanoids with no heads! Just an eye where the head should be. Then they fight the hoppers, brown grasshopper space men with red suits. Well, maybe they get back to the Great Martian Central Brain later. There's a few more Space Smith installments in this collection. (What I really want to see is a panel where Dianna is pointing out the window at the vast expanse of space and yelling "Space!" to get his attention. Out of context, it would be a very funny panel. To me, anyway. But Dianna is not really the pointing-and-yelling type.) When I finish with the Space Smith stories, I'm going to go back to the start and read all the Big Red McLane stories.
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 27, 2016 12:00:11 GMT -5
Just to give you an idea of where these Space Smith classics originally appeared, I'm including the cover to Fantastic Comics #3 (February 1940). Yup! That's a Lou Fine cover! This issue featured the story with the Leopard Women and the robot scientists. This same issue also contains the story where Stardust the Super Wizard saves New York from a massive tidal wave created by an evil bearded scientist called "the Demon" who thinks there are too many people in the world.
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Post by urrutiap on Apr 27, 2016 15:27:19 GMT -5
an old comic book that I still have in a box, its the first issue of Tales of the Jedi the Sith War. Still in good shape too. I wasnt reading it all over again or anything but was flipping through the pages to look at the artwork and any old ads from Darkhorse back then
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 28, 2016 23:29:27 GMT -5
Of all the comics I'm reading now, the best is Essential Avengers, Volume 6. It reprints Avengers #120 to #140, Giant-Size Avengers #1 to #4, Fantastic Four #150 and Captain Marvel #30. The main writer is Steve Englehart. And the art is an ever-changing roster of amazing pencillers and inkers! John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Bob Brown, Don Heck, Rich Buckler, Jim Starlin, George Tuska, Dan Adkins, Joe Staton and I don't know who-all. I just read this one: It helps a lot that I love Mantis so much. It often seems like it should be called "The Adventures of Mantis" with special guest stars Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Kang, the Zodiac, Ultron, Agatha Harkness, the Fantastic Four and the Inhumans. And the Swordsman. I almost forgot.
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Post by urrutiap on Apr 29, 2016 0:45:11 GMT -5
Not really a comic book but its from Wizard Magazine.
Wizard's Dark Room Volume 1 which is about the villains. Volume 1 of the Dark Room the front cover is a bit creepy since it has Carnage on the front cover.
That and the old Wizard Magazine's 30th Anniversary of the X-Men special
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Post by Batflunkie on Apr 29, 2016 6:43:02 GMT -5
Of all the comics I'm reading now, the best is Essential Avengers, Volume 6. It reprints Avengers #120 to #140, Giant-Size Avengers #1 to #4, Fantastic Four #150 and Captain Marvel #30. The main writer is Steve Englehart. And the art is an ever-changing roster of amazing pencillers and inkers! John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Bob Brown, Don Heck, Rich Buckler, Jim Starlin, George Tuska, Dan Adkins, Joe Staton and I don't know who-all. I just read this one It helps a lot that I love Mantis so much. It often seems like it should be called "The Adventures of Mantis" with special guest stars Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Kang, the Zodiac, Ultron, Agatha Harkness, the Fantastic Four and the Inhumans. And the Swordsman. I almost forgot. I loathe how nitpicky I am about team books sometimes because I genuinely feel like I should enjoy Roy Thomas/Steve Englehart era Avengers, but I sadly don't
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 29, 2016 14:35:43 GMT -5
Normally, I would put this commentary in the Batman Fan Thread, but since it's part of my Comics - 1930s to 2010s Project, I thought I should put it in this thread. Any further comments on the stories in Batman in the Fifties will probably be in the Batman Fan Thread. Last night, I read "Two-Face Strikes Again!" in the Batman in the Fifties compilation. I've read it before. It's in one of the compilations I've had for a long time. Maybe The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told? I think it's also in the Two-Face compilation I've checked out of the library. I find it a bit disappointing. It's a pretty good story as far as it goes. Great Dick Sprang art! But they go to the trouble to bring back Two-Face and ignore so much about the character and his past. His wife isn't mentioned. His career as district attorney is mentioned once. And when he becomes Two-Face again, he sets off on another theme-crime spree, just like any Batman villain. Which is fine, I guess. That's what Batman villains do. But Harvey Dent is not just another Batman villain, and that's why I'm not a big fan of this story. Harvey Dent is walking down the street and he sees a crime being committed. He tackles the bad guys and a bomb goes off, undoing the plastic surgery and turning him back into Two-Face! Fortunately, he has a duplicate of the defaced, two-headed coin with him and he flips it to decide if he should be evil again. And the bad side comes up and Two-Face is off and running! The theme is people with two faces! So he robs a clown (well known for keeping his collection of diamond stickpins in his dressing room) because he has a clown face and a regular face. And he robs a guy who is a deep-sea diver as a hobby; his other face is a sea-diving helmet. And he robs a stage actor who plays Abraham Lincoln and keeps a valuable collection of Lincoln papers at his house. And so on. Not bad as theme crimes go. There's one very amusing scene that's been making me grin all morning whenever I think of it. One of the wealthy victims is "Chicago Al" Garver. He's a gambler, so Two-Face has targeted him because he has a "poker face" in addition to his real face. And he has a gigantic pool table at his house. You see, he started out as a "rack boy" in a pool hall ... and for some reason that made him want a gigantic pool table at his house. This thing is ridiculous! Yes, Gotham City is well-known for giant record players and giant pennies and giant stamp tongs, but they are usually promotional items at conventions or factories or other commercial settings. Chicago Al has this at his house! I was trying to figure out how big it is. The balls look to be about seven feet in diameter, so I think that means the pool table is around 70 feet high! Even King Kong wouldn't be able to see over the edge! And Chicago Al has it in his house! Of course, the answer is: People in Gotham City are WEIRD! Keep that in mind. It's frequently helpful when trying to figure out Batman stories. (And by the way, that gigantic pool table may seem like something from a Bill Finger story. But he didn't write this. Finger knew that this was weird even for Gotham City. "Two-Face Strikes Again" was written by our old buddy David V. Reed. (And I should add that I have little doubt that it's probably not that hard to find a Bill Finger story where somebody has a giant typewriter or a giant ice-cream maker in his house.)) GOTHAM GEOGRAPHY PART ONEBatman and Robin get a report that Two-Face has been seen on Gotham Point Road. And they mention that Chicago Al lives on Gotham Point. It seems to be an exclusive part of town because there are only four houses. I'm sure they are HUGE! In addition to the gigantic pool table, there's probably a gigantic jukebox, a gigantic vending machine and a huge telephone. And it's very likely that Gotham Point was never mentioned again. GOTHAM GEOGRAPHY PART TWOAs part of the plot to capture Two-Face, Bruce Wayne decides to accept an honorary chieftanship from the local Indians. (You see, Bruce Wayne will have two faces because he's a paleface and an Indian. Fortunately, Two-Face is just as insensitive as Bruce is, so he takes the bait.) Is this a chance to get a better idea where Gotham is? Maybe they'll use a real Indian nation and it will give us a clue! So which Indians have a reservation close enough to Gotham City that Bruce Wayne can travel there? It's the Sioux! Thanks for clearing that up, David V. Reed! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, there's more. This story contains the famous bit where Batman and Robin are strapped to a giant replica of Two-Face's coin and it's flipped and the Dynamic Duo are in danger of landing face down on a bunch of spikes! And there's also a bit where Two-Face and his gang - after successfully robbing a Japanese diplomat who has lost face in a corruption scandal - stop to deface a giant statue of a Japanese mandarin. They climb up and start messing up the face so it looks like Two-Face! Giving Batman and Robin plenty of time to show up. This story is so weird that I should probably like it a lot more. I like so many of Reed's 1950s stories! But Two-Face is one of the few old Batman villains with such a rich history and pre-criminal career. He was the district attorney! He has a wife! There's also several Golden Age stories where people are imitating Two-Face and frequently trying to pin it on Dent. And so "Two-Face Strikes Again!" doesn't really do justice to the character's history and turns him into just another theme villain. I realize that's just how it was at the time. I still find it kind of a letdown, giant pool table and all.
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Post by Batflunkie on Apr 29, 2016 19:41:35 GMT -5
Since IDW's version of Rom is coming out next month, I thought I try and give the original another shot. It's kind of an interesting homage to z-grade science fiction based monster movies (Rom's design actually kind of reminds me of Gort from "The Day The Earth Stood Still"), almost sort of like a parallel to The Incredible Hulk in a way
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