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Post by Roquefort Raider on Mar 6, 2019 14:36:05 GMT -5
I'm reading the Silver Age volume in the Archie Americana series. It's amazing that after all these years of digests and reprints, there could still be so many Archie stories that I didn't know!
Harry Lucey is still a physical comedy genius in my book. I didn't really like his style in the '70s, because he didn't draw like DeCarlo... but I came around since then. The man can make me cry with laughter.
I didn't realize Dan DeCarlo had had such an importance presence so early; a lot of his stuff showing him in full control of his "Archie style" predates my birth. I also learned (or re-learned) that Dan DeCarlo Jr. was not "the" Dan DeCarlo I knew, but his son... and that both he and his twin brother had tragically died young, before their parents. That's the worst thing that can happen to a parent.
(Dan Jr. and his brother James were both Archie artists, of course, but were active after I stopped reading the modern Archie titles).
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Crimebuster
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Making comics!
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Post by Crimebuster on Mar 6, 2019 15:11:16 GMT -5
The crazy thing I never realized until the last few years is that the DeCarlo's famous Archie house style wasn't even developed at Archie — you can see him doing this style fully developed troughout the mid and late 50's at Atlas, as the regular artist on Millie the Model among other titles.
Also, you're 1000% correct about Lucey. He's a genius. He's in my personal top 3 pantheon as the bridge between Alex Toth and Darwyn Cooke.
if that makes sense to anyone but me.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Mar 6, 2019 15:39:22 GMT -5
I agree about Lucey as well and I love all of the Archie stories he drew in the 1950s and 1960s. And as I'm slowly reading through the many Archie digests (including the Americana books) I've bought on the cheap recently, I'm also really liking the art by Samm Schwartz as well.
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Post by MDG on Mar 6, 2019 15:51:50 GMT -5
The crazy thing I never realized until the last few years is that the DeCarlo's famous Archie house style wasn't even developed at Archie — you can see him doing this style fully developed troughout the mid and late 50's at Atlas, as the regular artist on Millie the Model among other titles. Yes--and I really don't like the style of the pre-DeCarlo Archies--they aren't stylized enough to work with the type of humor in them.
I'm not as literate as I'd like to be on the Archie artists. I'd love a resource like this one for them.
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Post by brutalis on Mar 6, 2019 16:08:45 GMT -5
Count me in to jump on the Archie band wagon! DeCarlo's Betty and Veronica were an essential part of my puberty as a teen when growing up, just like Ginger and Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island. Lucey is pure gold in my book. Schwartz I wasn't as fond of in the day but now as an adult I appreciate his clean simple style much more. Stan Goldberg is another great one. And while I can truly see and understand the change of Archie art stylizing these last few years (due to teen tastes), it saddens me that Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz and Rex Lindsey have been kind of pushed aside in favor of "updating" for newer readers. And it is a really great time to collect Archie as there is so much being reprinted in so many different formats.
I have all the Americana series and pre-order any 1000 page digest from Amazon when they come up. Not to mention collecting the new Archie in TPB. I'm happy to see so many favorites of the past getting love of late in reprints like Jughead's Tim Police and Archie 3000 as well.
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Post by Hoosier X on Mar 6, 2019 23:09:25 GMT -5
hoosier, I'm surprised you didn't mention the one thing I remember most of all about Amazing Spider-Man #30: the serious miscommunication between Lee and Ditko over the plot. Stan the Man seems to think that the burglar called The Cat is also the leader of the masked and costumed tech thieves! Ditko, of course, meant the gang to be Dock Ock's henchmen (as revealed in #31) all along, but Stan clearly missed that. I can't help wondering if this was when (and possibly why) the realationship between the two creators finally went sour. Cei-U! I summon the kerfluffle! Are you sure? I've already taken that volume back to the library so I can't check. But having read it a few days ago, I remember it as the Cat acting independently and the masked operators reporting to a mysterious entity (that would turn out to be Doctor Octopus).
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2019 23:38:22 GMT -5
Reading through a few things lately- Omega Men #1-38, Annual 1-2 (DC; 1983-1986) Overall pretty uneven after a promising start and never quite realized its potential. The creative team of Todd Klein writing and Shawn McManus were just starting to give the book direction and get into a groove when the book got cancelled. It started strong and was picking up steam at the end, but it meandered without direction in between. Roger Slifer seemed to run out of ideas after ending the war too quickly and had creative differences with Marv Wolfman who was editing the book. Doug Moench had a short run that included some decent character portraits of the various members, but overall lacked any direction and did nothing to move the overall narrative forward, backwards, or in any direction, and then there were various fill ins that were mostly solid if not spectacular standalone stories but again did nothing to give the series any forward momentum. It's too bad it got cut short though, as there were lots of interesting things set up by Todd Klein that never got paid off in the book (I am not sure if some of them got picked up in other books or not). Ghostdancing #1-6 by Jamie Delano and Richard Case (DC/Vertigo; 1995) An interesting visionquest type of series involving a handful of power beings from Native American mythology coming into the world trying to usher the world from the Fourth World into the Fifth to escape the influence a secret society of Mammonites who control and profit from the degradation and corporatization of the world and its separation from the natural order of things. The story ranges from the summer of love in '68 to the contemporary period when the book was published (mid-nineties). If you liek Delano's stuff, you should like this, and Case gives a visual tour-de-force in his unique style, but one somewhat different than the one I first encountered with him on Morrison's Doom Patrol. It looks to have grown and evolved some since then while retaining his recognizable characteristics. I am now 3 issues into Moonshadow by JM DeMatteis and John J Muth. It's one of those books I have always wanted to read, and one I probably should have long before this, but I finally got around to picking up the original issues from Epic (rather than a trade or the reprinted edition done by Vertigo) late last year and am finally diving in. So far, it is pretty typical of DeMAtteis more personal stuff that I have read (Brooklyn Dreams, Seekers into the Mystery) rather than his more mainstream stuff, but Muth's art is a treat. -M
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Mar 7, 2019 5:09:56 GMT -5
hoosier, I'm surprised you didn't mention the one thing I remember most of all about Amazing Spider-Man #30: the serious miscommunication between Lee and Ditko over the plot. Stan the Man seems to think that the burglar called The Cat is also the leader of the masked and costumed tech thieves! Ditko, of course, meant the gang to be Dock Ock's henchmen (as revealed in #31) all along, but Stan clearly missed that. I can't help wondering if this was when (and possibly why) the realationship between the two creators finally went sour. Cei-U! I summon the kerfluffle! Are you sure? I've already taken that volume back to the library so I can't check. But having read it a few days ago, I remember it as the Cat acting independently and the masked operators reporting to a mysterious entity (that would turn out to be Doctor Octopus). Cei-U! is right, though I'd never noticed the mistake either. Cei-U!'s comments about it here intrigued me, so I dug out ASM #30 last night and gave it a read. Sure enough, the very first time that we see the masked henchmen (on top of the truck carrying radioactive material) one of them explicitly states that they are working for the Cat. I must've read this comic at least a dozen times since the '80s and I'd never noticed the mistake til now. Yeah, thanks for ruining our favourite comics, Kurt!
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Post by Hoosier X on Mar 7, 2019 9:07:36 GMT -5
Are you sure? I've already taken that volume back to the library so I can't check. But having read it a few days ago, I remember it as the Cat acting independently and the masked operators reporting to a mysterious entity (that would turn out to be Doctor Octopus). Cei-U! is right, though I'd never noticed the mistake either. Cei-U!'s comments about it here intrigued me, so I dug out ASM #30 last night and gave it a read. Sure enough, the very first time that we see the masked henchmen (on top of the truck carrying radioactive material) one of them explicitly states that they are working for the Cat. I must've read this comic at least a dozen times since the '80s and I'd never noticed the mistake til now. Yeah, thanks for ruining our favourite comics, Kurt! Wow! I didn't notice it either. Is that the only place its referenced though? It seems to me like its otherwise made pretty clear that the Cat and the operatives are acting independently of each other. It a weird little snafu, like somebody calling Liz "Liz Hilton" instead of "Liz Allan" a few issues earlier.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Mar 7, 2019 20:22:15 GMT -5
Cei-U! is right, though I'd never noticed the mistake either. Cei-U!'s comments about it here intrigued me, so I dug out ASM #30 last night and gave it a read. Sure enough, the very first time that we see the masked henchmen (on top of the truck carrying radioactive material) one of them explicitly states that they are working for the Cat. I must've read this comic at least a dozen times since the '80s and I'd never noticed the mistake til now. Yeah, thanks for ruining our favourite comics, Kurt! Wow! I didn't notice it either. Is that the only place its referenced though? No, it's referenced again later in the issue. It's in the bit where some common hoods come running out of a bank and Spidey stops them, but it turns out that some of the masked henchmen are watching and, in fact, the hoods are in their employ. The masked henchmen say something along the lines of, "the Cat ain't gonna be happy about this." In the very next panel they are talking to their boss via a radio transmitter and clearly Stan thinks they're talking to the Cat. In fact, it's the Master Planner (aka Doc Ock) that the masked henchmen are working for and talking to. Interestingly, the Cat is also twice referred to by other shady characters in the story as just a second-stringer crook, not a big time criminal at all. So, it's kind of baffling how Stan could've thought that the Cat would have the resources for masked henchmen. He was clearly unaware that Ditko was setting up the important Master Planner arc, while also telling a story about the Cat. It's an interesting speculation on Cei-U!'s part to ponder whether this was what started the rift between Stan and Steve. Clearly it's a simple error on Stan's part, but from what I've read about Ditko, I can really imagine him over-obsessing about it and refusing to forgive Stan about this misunderstanding of his intended plot. Plus, the timing is basically right, with their relationship souring rapidly (there were only 8 more issues of the Ditko run after this).
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Post by Icctrombone on Mar 8, 2019 7:19:02 GMT -5
I've been binge reading Warlock and the Infinity Watch and I can't believe the obstacles Jim Starlin had to deal with in writing that series. In the first 30 issues he had 3 different crossover events shoved into his storylines, Infinity War, Infinity Crusade and Blood and Thunder ( the last one was a Thor crossover). On top of that he had 2 artists doing the first 29 issues, Angel Medina and Tom Grindberg and they both turned out mediocre to bad work. Granted the first 2 crossovers were Starlins own Miniseries , but it made for really choppy reading. I have the entire 42 issue run and this is what happens when you buy the entire series and THEN read it. I give it 3/10.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Mar 8, 2019 17:59:56 GMT -5
Reading through a few things lately- I am now 3 issues into Moonshadow by JM DeMatteis and John J Muth. It's one of those books I have always wanted to read, and one I probably should have long before this, but I finally got around to picking up the original issues from Epic (rather than a trade or the reprinted edition done by Vertigo) late last year and am finally diving in. So far, it is pretty typical of DeMAtteis more personal stuff that I have read (Brooklyn Dreams, Seekers into the Mystery) rather than his more mainstream stuff, but Muth's art is a treat. -M I've lost track of the number of times I've tried to read Moonshadow. I've never made it through. Or even close. It just does not work for me in any way.
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Post by String on Mar 9, 2019 13:04:22 GMT -5
DC Special #11
I came across an ad for this issue while reading another Superman Family issue and I was immediately intrigued by it for I never knew about it till then. I acquired a decent reading copy and man, is it ever some good old-fashioned fun. Written by underrated Flash scribe Cary Bates, art by Irv Novick, Garcia-Lopez, Schaffenberger, Murphy Anderson, Alex Saviuk, and Wally Wood, Gorilla Grodd is sentenced to execution by Solovar and the High Council of Gorilla City. But it's all a ploy by Grodd who uses the three Flashes in an attempt to secure his freedom. Johnny Quick makes a great and hilarious guest appearance in Jay Garrick's segment as the two Golden Age speedsters end up facing off against each other as part of Grodd's plan. I never knew Johnny could fly with his abilities and once again, it raises the question of how exactly do you say that speed formula of his aloud? Do you pronounce the parentheses too? Also of importance, Jay reveals his public identity and Wally admits his dual identity to his parents as he graduates from high school The last two pages are a guide to the major villains in Flash's rogues gallery and when their first appearances occurred. That would have been sooooo much help back then for me in tracking down back issues.
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Post by urrutiap on Mar 9, 2019 17:49:00 GMT -5
Last night I started reading issues 50 and 51 of the old 1980s Marvel Comics Star Wars.
Then later tonight ill be reading some more from issues 52 to whatever I can get done reading
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Mar 9, 2019 19:28:47 GMT -5
Last night I started reading issues 50 and 51 of the old 1980s Marvel Comics Star Wars. Then later tonight ill be reading some more from issues 52 to whatever I can get done reading Three of the best issues of the entire run. The Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson "The Crimson Forever" story in SW #50 is so good that it's almost like reading a lost chapter of the original trilogy...like Episode V.5 or something. The David Michelinie penned and Walt Simonson drawn "Ressurection of Evil" and "To Take the Tarkin" two-parter is fantastic too. These three issues show Marvel's Star Wars at its best.
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