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Post by Mormel on Oct 26, 2019 4:33:47 GMT -5
Uncanny X-Men #261... Okay: 'Hardcase and the Harriers'? What was Claremont thinking?!
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Post by beccabear67 on Oct 26, 2019 13:04:35 GMT -5
Avengers #38-40 (2001) written by Kurt Busiek wherein a town in Greece are all turned into Hulks. Not really the greatest story but there are other side stories and sub-plots, and the art by Alan Davis is gorgeous!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2019 15:14:53 GMT -5
DC Archives
Elfquest Archives 1 to 4
I skimmed through these books and decided not to read them ... because they aren't my cup of tea.
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Post by Mormel on Oct 27, 2019 0:50:43 GMT -5
Avengers #38-40 (2001) written by Kurt Busiek wherein a town in Greece are all turned into Hulks. Not really the greatest story but there are other side stories and sub-plots, and the art by Alan Davis is gorgeous! Yaaaasss!! I love myself some Alan Davis! I've never tracked down that famed Busiek run on Avengers, though... It's lovely to see Davis try his pencil at Earth's mightiest heroes, that action sequence looks absolutely ace.
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Post by Farrar on Oct 27, 2019 19:28:14 GMT -5
Yaaaasss!! I love myself some Alan Davis! I've never tracked down that famed Busiek run on Avengers, though... It's lovely to see Davis try his pencil at Earth's mightiest heroes, that action sequence looks absolutely ace. I don't normally read a lot of post-Silver Age comics but I did pick up the Fantastic Four:The End trade and loved his work. Davis was both writer and artist here and he did a superlative job. In particular I thought he drew a great Ben Grimm; and I loved that in this series Medusa's sporting the green costume she wore back in Amazing Spider-Man #62!
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Post by hondobrode on Oct 28, 2019 1:54:05 GMT -5
Finally getting around to reading the complete Legion Lost mini-series from around 2000.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 28, 2019 4:08:56 GMT -5
Yaaaasss!! I love myself some Alan Davis! I've never tracked down that famed Busiek run on Avengers, though... It's lovely to see Davis try his pencil at Earth's mightiest heroes, that action sequence looks absolutely ace. I don't normally read a lot of post-Silver Age comics but I did pick up the Fantastic Four:The End trade and loved his work. Davis was both writer and artist here and he did a superlative job. In particular I thought he drew a great Ben Grimm; and I loved that in this series Medusa's sporting the green costume she wore back in Amazing Spider-Man #62! FF: The End, despite its somber-sounding title, is a really fun story. And yes, the art is among the most gorgeous eye-candy I've ever seen. I'm thinking I should pull that one off of the shelf and re-read it sometime...
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 28, 2019 6:03:27 GMT -5
I finally read the famous we3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.
The art is absolutely gorgeous. The dog is a good boy. The rest is pretty Morrisonian.
I was pleasantly surprised by the happy ending, although it kind of made the entire story nonsensical. If the three main protagonists could be changed from uncontrollable killing machines back into regular pets with nothing more than a homeless dude and a pair of pliers, then why was the army so adamant about heartlessly destroying them at the start of the story? I mean, unless it was not technically possible, I would have expected these animals to be allowed to retire gracefully once their implants were removed.
Of course, once again the military and its scientists are depicted as grossly incompetent and sadistic, except for that niiiiice lady who talks to animals and who finds it acceptable to release highly dangerous living weapons in the community. I seriously doubt that grossly incompetent and sadistic people would go far in the military, and I know they’d get nowhere in science. And why is it our three heroes are not equipped with an off switch while their “bad” cyborg opponent is? Nobody had thought of it before the new model was designed?
It was all in all an enjoyable tale in the Frankenstein tradition (and who doesn’t like stories about pets?), and I understand why it made such a splash given its beautiful art and the plight of the good doggy, the cranky cat and the nice bunny, but it did suffer from plot-mandated logical shortcuts.
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Post by beccabear67 on Oct 28, 2019 22:37:17 GMT -5
Working on the 1991 Justice Society Of America (#1-8 mini-series), and... I just realized something! Doiby wears a derby hat, d'oh... how many years have I known of that sidekick character to the original Green Lantern and not realized his name is a Noo Yawk-ese version of derby? I just finished #6 (including the text pages of #1-5), so just two more to savor (because I read the ten issues of their series that followed in 1992-93 already). I still have the 1990 Power Girl min-series waiting though, and the more mature readers' Huntress (nineteen issues, yikes). Did Doiby always call him 'Lantrin'? Nice to know Solomon Grundy has a weakness for Ovaltine...
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Oct 29, 2019 0:05:43 GMT -5
I finally read the famous we3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. The art is absolutely gorgeous. The dog is a good boy. The rest is pretty Morrisonian. I was pleasantly surprised by the happy ending, although it kind of made the entire story nonsensical. If the three main protagonists could be changed from uncontrollable killing machines back into regular pets with nothing more than a homeless dude and a pair of pliers, then why was the army so adamant about heartlessly destroying them at the start of the story? I mean, unless it was not technically possible, I would have expected these animals to be allowed to retire gracefully once their implants were removed. Of course, once again the military and its scientists are depicted as grossly incompetent and sadistic, except for that niiiiice lady who talks to animals and who finds it acceptable to release highly dangerous living weapons in the community. I seriously doubt that grossly incompetent and sadistic people would go far in the military, and I know they’d get nowhere in science. And why is it our three heroes are not equipped with an off switch while their “bad” cyborg opponent is? Nobody had thought of it before the new model was designed? It was all in all an enjoyable tale in the Frankenstein tradition (and who doesn’t like stories about pets?), and I understand why it made such a splash given its beautiful art and the plight of the good doggy, the cranky cat and the nice bunny, but it did suffer from plot-mandated logical shortcuts. WE3 is pretty much my favorite mainstream comic of the past 20 years and I'm not at all objective, but... I thought the idea that the critters were viewed as weapons (to be decommissioned and discarded) as opposed to sentient animals was (at least) the most prominent theme of the story and (at most) the entire point of the mini-series. The most surface level take is that it's both a commentary on how the military industrial complex views soldiers and veterans and how - to pick one of many examples - the cosmetics industry views animals.
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Post by dbutler69 on Oct 29, 2019 8:20:21 GMT -5
Did Doiby always call him 'Lantrin'? Nice to know Solomon Grundy has a weakness for Ovaltine... Good question, so I had to look into it. It turns out that no, he didn't always call him "Lantrin", though it did happen fairly early on. He originally called him "Lantern" (though probably more often than not he actually called him "boss"). I believe the first time he said "Lantrin" was in Comic Cavalcade #2 (Spring 1943) which was I believe Doiby's 20th appearance, and nearly 2 years after his first appearance. And yeah, don't you love that low class Brooklyn accent? I have a friend that moved to Brooklyn a few years ago and I occasionally tease him about that. He hates it.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 29, 2019 19:01:58 GMT -5
I'm still working on my All-Star Comics project. I took Volume Eight back last week and got Volume Zero! It reprints All-Star Comics #1 and #2, the two issues that were published before the first appearance of the Justice Society of America in #3! Here's something I didn't know. All-Star Comics #1 came out almost the same time as All-American Comics #16, the first appearance of the Green Lantern! When All-Star Comics #3 came out, it was Green Lantern's seventh appearance. It just never struck me before what an amateur Alan Scott was when he joined the Justice Society. (Doctor Fate was also a new character. All-Star #3 was his eighth appearance.) There are a lot of good stories here, especially if you have a high tolerance of the Golden Age. There's a couple of very nice Hawkman stories. In #1, he goes to the Welsh mountains and fights a sorcerer on Cardiff Mountain! In the second issue, Hamwkman meets Nyola, the Aztec high priestess who would return many decades later in All-Star Squadron. The Sandman stories and the Hour-Man stories are average, but I kind of like ol' Wesley Dodds. Hour-Man has never done much for me at all. Both the Flash stories are interesting. In the first one, he comes across a murder! Somebody killed the Widow Jones! He decides to become a detective and solve the murder. There's a beat cop at the scene who is very dismissive of this amateur, even if his the fastest man on Earth and wears a pan on his head. The cop walks back to the station to report the murder. The Flash runs all over town, follows every clue, tracks down the murderer and takes him to the station just a few seconds before the beat cop walks in the door to report there's been a murder! Very amusing! In the Flash story in #2, Jay goes to visit his friend who works at the newspaper, The Daily Column, and there's nobody there! He puts the paper out, edits the stories, runs the press and gets the finished product to the newsies and the newsstands before investigating the disappearance of the entire newspaper staff! (Knowing newspaper folks the way I do, I would have suggested he should check the nearest bar or the nearest place where there was free food!) seems there's a gangster running around who was about to have his rackets exposed so her abducted the whole staff! The Spectre is in both issues. The second is notable for the appearance of Kulak, the three-eyed high priest of Brztal, another character who would show up in All-Star Squadron. There's also a Green Lantern story in the second issue, and also one story with Johnny Thunderbolt! (I love Johnny Thunder so much! It's too bad his stories are pretty uniformly TERRIBLE! He has so much potential! I would love to write a Johnny Thunder series set in the 1940s. it would be great for Adult Swim!) And the first issue has Gary Concord, the Ultra-Man, which reads a lot like Fletcher Hanks riffing on Buck Rogers. And Biff Bronson. I've already totally forgotten it. What I really wanted to talk about is Red, White and Blue! Red, White and Blue have been in several comics I read lately. They're in both issues of All-Star Comics in Volume Zero and they were also in a few issues of Comics Cavalcade that I recently got from Comixology because I'm reading some of the Golden Age appearances of the Wonder Woman villains from Villainy Incorporated. I originally thought "I need to say a few words about this series because it's kind of lame." Partly I wanted to mention it to see if anybody likes it. But after reading a few more Red, White and Blue stories, the series has grown on me a bit. Mostly because it's pretty dumb, but I liked the premise of one of the stories enough that I want to give the series more of a chance if I ever come across it again. It's a wartime comic. Red, White and Blue are the nicknames of three pals in the military, each from a different branch of America's armed forces. They are Sergeant Red Dugan of the Marines, Whitey Smith of the Army and Blooey Blue of the Navy. Yup. One of them is named "Whitey." And one of them is named Blooey. (If I was writing that 1940s Johnny Thunder series I mentioned earlier, there would be a few episodes covering that period in 1941 and 1942 when Johnny was in the navy. And he would meet Red, Whitey and Blooey and make fun of their names. How could he not?) There's a girl named Doris West in most of the stories. She seems to be an intelligence operative who works closely with Red, Whitey and Blooey. I'm under the impression from the few stories that I've read that the format changed a lot. The story in Comics Cavalcade #11, for example, features only Whitey, writing a letter to the others as he helps the German underground fight the Nazis in Berlin! The story in All-Star Comics #2 is about Red, White and Blue coming across a suspicious fire, investigating, and finding out that it's war-related. (I think the fires are accidental but they find out that homegrown Nazis are hiding weapons.) In the story in All-Star Comics #1, Red, Whitey and Blooey are specifically sent on a mission to Alaska. They meet up with Doris West. While the others investigate, Blooey decides to go skiing and he accidentally stumbles across a gigantic underground military base inside a volcano! The Japanese (called Kavinese, presumably because it was still 1940 and Pearl Harbor was 18 months away) have somehow secretly built this base as a foothold from which to conquer Alaska! (At first I thought this was a story acknowledging Japanese attacks on some of the Aleutian islands, but this was published long before that!) Very inventive and fun! It's still stupid, but it's entertaining in a way that I like to see in goofy-ass Golden Age comics.
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Post by Cei-U! on Oct 29, 2019 19:58:54 GMT -5
Regarding "Red, White & Blue": the series was created by none other than Jerry Siegel, who scripted most episodes through early 1941, and artist William Smith. It debuted in All-American Comics #1 and ran through #71 (March '46), plus issues of Comic Cavalcade and World's Best/Finest, as ell as The Big All-American Comic Book and the 1940 edition of New York World's Fair. Definitely one of Siegel's lesser efforts, though I find the first year or so mildly entertaining.
Cei-U! I summon the triple threat!
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 29, 2019 20:31:40 GMT -5
Regarding "Red, White & Blue": the series was created by none other than Jerry Siegel, who scripted most episodes through early 1941, and artist William Smith. It debuted in All-American Comics #1 and ran through #71 (March '46), plus issues of Comic Cavalcade and World's Best/Finest, as ell as The Big All-American Comic Book and the 1940 edition of New York World's Fair. Definitely one of Siegel's lesser efforts, though I find the first year or so mildly entertaining. Cei-U! I summon the triple threat! Thanks for the info, Cei-U! My idea for them as guest stars in an Adult Swim Johnny Thunder cartoon is the best they can hope for.
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Post by rberman on Nov 1, 2019 13:43:09 GMT -5
Discussion about Green Lantern in another thread sent me down a rabbit hole, and soon I was reading a totally bonkers Deadman story that Mike Baron ran in Action Comics Weekly #609, in which Satan and Deadman possess the bodies first of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and then of Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev. Not long after, Satan-in-Raisa is shooting up the cocktail party with a weapon left behind by an Ancient Astronaut. What the... Then Action Comics Weekly #629 holds this James Owsley (Christopher Priest) story: The title "So Long Ago the Garden" is taken from a 1973 album by Larry Norman, one of the pioneers in Christian rock: Christopher Priest himself has a background in both Christianity and rock music. He's an ordained Baptist minister, albeit the sort that writes Vampirella now. He even released an album in 1981 under the name Hollis Stone. Finally, Action Comics weekly #616 had a Peter David-penned Green Lantern story with a Hulk cameo.
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