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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2019 11:47:55 GMT -5
Hoosier X ... read Farrar's post ... I was wrong, very wrong about All Star #41 Cover
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Post by spoon on Nov 11, 2019 13:38:21 GMT -5
I've continued reading my big Hulk binge read into the Peter David run. I've read through Incredible Hulk #352, but I'll probably move on to something else, because I only have two more issues before I'm done with the Hulk Visionaries Peter David vol. 3 TPB, and then I hit a gap in my collection. I don't feel like filling in that gap & pausing right now. The later TPBs seem to be out of print, so I'd have to get individual issues.
So I'm trying to decide where to go next. I have a few Essential Thor TPBs I have read. I have the Silver Age Doom Patrol Omnibus. I have a complete run of Spider-Girl vol. 1. I could also binge through my Showcase Present Green Lantern TPBs, and then go on to my Bronze Age Green Lantern collection, which is nearly complete.
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Post by beccabear67 on Nov 13, 2019 19:48:48 GMT -5
Thunderbolts Annual 2000 -> Avengers Annual 2000 -> Hellcat #1-3 (2000). Writers being Fabian Nicieza, Kurt Busiek and Steve Englehart, art by Norm Breyfogle and on the Avengers Annual a chapter is by Rich Howell. A bonus in the Thunderbolts Annual is by Mark Bagley. Hawkeye and some super friends go to Hell to free the dead Mockingbird (I'm just finding these things out) from Mephisto, but they end up freeing the dead Hellcat (I'm just finding these things out) instead. Then she and some Avengers and erstwhile Avengers (plus one T-bolt/future Avenger) free her home town (as seen in the Atlas to '60s Marvel Patsy Walker comics) from demons, mini-series follows. I really wanted to love this but it's just okay I guess, it brings back Patsy/Hellcat, the art is sometimes super cool, sometimes rushed looking (like the one Howell part), and there are a few ropey bits to the story, and sometimes an overly hokey bit of humor in the dialogue... considering how many rulers of netherworlds are involved this could be really bad though, so well done for the most part. I don't know if they ever brought Mockingbird back... as with Hellcat (Avengers #144) I have her first appearance comics (Marvel Team-Up #95) so I would like the character to be popular. I definitely like the new darker hellcat uniform of the mini-series, though I don't like her ability to conjure costume changes. It doesn't comfortably fit in with the suit amplifying her natural skills which was in place originally, but then maybe it fits in with her being able to change it's appearance which she shouldn't have been able to do before.
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 14, 2019 8:14:55 GMT -5
I had that Hellcat mini-series. It was okay, but I eventually gave it to my comics-loving niece. The Avengers Nnual, however, is high up on my want list.
Cei-U! I summon Patsy... and Hedy!
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Post by brutalis on Nov 14, 2019 8:42:32 GMT -5
Finished up reading my bunch of Charlton Comic's Fightin' Army. Slowly this month I have been reading through and enjoying immensely this series of new and reprinted war stories. Some issues have chapters from the Lonely War of Willy Schultz by Will Franz and Sam Glanzman (a splendid find when opening an issue) alongside other writers and artists. Lots of short morality tales of interest and variety mostly set in WWII but you will find stories set during the Civil War, WWI and Korea. These were all comics I missed out on as they came out during the 60's and early 70's before I was reading comics so it is a blast (sorry) reading these war stories for the 1st time. Next to DC, the Charlton series of War comics (Attack, World at War, Army War Heroes, Fightin' Navy, Fightin Marines, etc) is likely the largest and best compilations for stories you will ever read and see.
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Post by beccabear67 on Nov 14, 2019 14:43:22 GMT -5
I had one early 'Patsy And Hedy' from the early or mid '50s. I just never developed an interest in much outside of Archie but I would find one example of something like Tippy Teen, Patsy Walker, Swing With Scooter, That Wilkin Boy, and be satisfied with that one 'specimen' to represent them. I never had a single romance comic, never remember seeing one outside the British comics with a girl's name for a title, never knew anyone even an aunt that ever bought them, just the Archie or paperdoll types. Maybe I'd be more romantic now if I had?
There's a lot of love for Charlton here. I remember them being laughed at by most comic fans I knew of in the '80s outside maybe a little respect for Ditko or well okay, you probably collect Byrne or Newton and have to buy Charlton just for that reason. I really know zero about their war or romance comics, sounds like they were pretty interesting. I had their horror comics (loved a nice filthy Tom Sutton rat), Space 1999, Emergency (oh that Randolph Mantooth eh), Bionic Woman, whatever I could find of Captain Atom, Blue Beetle and Konga by Ditko, also Thunderbolt, Peacemaker, House Of Yang, and Hercules (all Modern reprints of those) and only E-Man and Doomsday+1 were top-tier series to me.
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Post by profholt82 on Nov 18, 2019 11:22:15 GMT -5
Picked up Iron Man #178 recently, and it was a good read. The issue is split up into two separate stories. The first story is similar to the classic 'Our Gang' tales as it follows a neighborhood group of kids on their summer vacation. They each dress as their favorite Avenger, and try to protect the neighborhood from bullies and hooligans. It was a fun read. The second story was quite a bit darker as it deals with Tony Stark's alcoholism and depression. This story takes place during a period in which he lost his company and is no longer in the Avengers. He has fallen so far, that a person on the street mistakes him for a bum and gives him some change. A police officer recognizes him, and challenges him with a deal. It's around noon at this point in the story, and the officer bets him $50 that he can't make it until midnight without having a drink. Tony accepts. You see, Tony doesn't believe that he has an alcohol problem, and alcoholism is an important issue to the officer we learn, because his father was an alcoholic. Well, throughout the issue, Tony becomes more and more desperate, and realizes how awful he has been to people who are close to him. And he comes to realize that he does indeed have an alcohol problem. The story is told rather well in my opinion, and is poignant without being overly preachy. I thought this was a great issue.
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Post by dbutler69 on Nov 18, 2019 13:36:34 GMT -5
I read two comics from 1999 which take place in the distant past. The first one is Avengers #1.5 by Roger Stern and Bruce Timm. I enjoyed the story. It of course take place between Avengers #1 and 2, and seemed like a nice "untold story" told with more modern sensibilities. I have to say, though, I didn't love the art. I also read All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant #1. Most of the stories take place during WWII, though the last story seems to take place during the then present day. Overall, it was a very enjoyable issue.
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 18, 2019 23:44:38 GMT -5
I finished All-Star Comics Archives, Volume 10, reprinting All-Star Comics #44 to #49. I'm not going to review each issue separately. I was pretty busy while I was reading them and now I'm having trouble remembering a whole lot. They were pretty good, covering a variety of menaces and challenges. The JSA goes Hollywood in #44! There's a western-themed issue where they fight Billy the Kid! (That's #47.) Also, flame-headed aliens who live on a comet and come awfully close to destroying the world! (#49) But there is one segment, from #46, that I wanted to mention. I've stated that one problem with the JSA that bugs me is how often they are beaten very easily. All-Star Comics #46 has a sequence that is so silly that it's actually kind of precious. It's so danged funny that I forgive it for how easily the JSA members are taken down. Listen to this: Wonder Woman and Doctor Mid-Nite are investigating a criminal organization called "the Invisible Band" and they end up on the subway. In this particular issue, the JSA is being trailed by an amateur detective who, for reasons far more contrived than I care to go into right now, knows the crimes are about to be committed and he also think the JSA members are the bad guys in disguise! He's also very clumsy! He shows up on the subway seconds after WW and Doc Mid-Nite have beaten the bad guys, and then he accidentally pulls the emergency cord that stops the train. Wonder Woman and Doc Mid-Nite lose their balance and are knocked unconscious when they hit the wall of the subway! It made me laugh out loud! How could I be mad at that?
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Nov 19, 2019 14:25:26 GMT -5
Holy s**t, this was good! Five volumes in and The Sandman just keeps getting better and better. Volume 5: A Game of You centres around a young, recently divorced woman named Barbie, who we first met in The Doll's House. She's residing in a run down apartment in New York City, and is no longer able to dream – thanks to having been caught up in the Dream Vortex from Volume 2. As the story begins, Barbie is being summoned to her own childhood dreamland, in which she is a princess, by a group of talking animals who are being menaced by the mysterious "Cuckoo". This is all observed by Dream (a.k.a. Morpheus) as nothing more than the routine death of an outlying "skerry" of dreamland (skerry being a Scottish word for a rocky island, apparently). Actually, Morpheus is kind of absent from a lot of this book, but I've gotta say that I really didn't miss him. There's so much to praise in this volume of The Sandman, but to start at the beginning, one of the best things about this book is how utterly three-dimensional and memorable the other residents of Barbie's apartment block are. For one thing, apart from George (who it turns out is working for the Cuckoo), the story's heroes are all female, which is itself highly unusual for a comic book. The group consist of a lesbian couple, a transgendered woman, a shy bookish lady who turns out to be a witch, and the aforementioned Barbie. The main thrust of the plot concerns Barbie's quest to defeat the Cuckoo, with the help of her anthropomorphic animal friends, while her human friends' attempt to rescue her from her own dreamland. The Cuckoo looks like a little girl, but I don't think this is actually meant to be Barbie herself, but a facet of her personality, although someone else might correct me on that point. Anyway, it seems that the Cuckoo became trapped in Barbie's dream-land, thus keeping her from becoming what she was supposed to be as an adult. The implication (as I see it) being that, if children stubbornly cling to their fantasies, they won't be able to become functioning adults. The fact that this message is packaged in a comic book for adults is ironic as hell, but I think that's wholly intentional and kind of the point. In Barbie, Neil Gaiman writes an utterly convincing female character – in fact, all of the female characters are brilliantly realised. Shawn McManus drew all but one of the issues collected here, and he really gives each character a unique face, which, when coupled with Gaimen's scripting, really makes the characters live and breath. The gay and transgendered characters are written as proper individuals, not just cookie-cutter clichés, as is so often the case in comic books. Ultimately, this is a tale about human psychology and how we use fantasy to endure the trials and tribulations of our lives. This is also a story which examines the psychology of being female, and, in one particularly memorable scene, the Cuckoo explains just how little girls' dreams differ from those of little boys: "Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds...
Little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies, much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands.
And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little cuckoos." There's so much going on in A Game of You and so much for the reader to unpack that this post would be of epic length if I really got into it all. Suffice it to say, this is an amazingly good graphic novel. It's simultaneously charming, violent, moving, gritty, and horrific – quite an impressive mix of narrative "plates" that Gaiman keeps spinning at once. At times, it might also be the saddest story in The Sandman so far: the fate of Barbie's animal friends – especially the dog-like Martin Tenbones – is heartbreaking. But it's also one of the most human stories that Gaiman has served up in the series so far, in spite of its fantasy-land setting. For me, this was the most enjoyable volume of The Sandman so far. I can't wait to get stuck into volume 6.
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Post by Duragizer on Nov 19, 2019 20:05:26 GMT -5
Darkly beautiful surreality in luscious B&W. Incredible. Just incredible. There are times when I make impulse sight-unseen purchases which I end up regretting; this certainly isn't one of those times.
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Post by spoon on Nov 23, 2019 22:13:20 GMT -5
I read the Avengers: Hawkeye TPB from 2012. It reprints the Hawkeye limited series from the 1980s where he meets and marries Mockingbird. Then, it reprints various stories that predate the mini-series that feature Hawkeye or Mockingbird. There's Hawkeye's first appearance in Tales of Suspense #57. Then, years before she became Mockingbird, Bobbi Morse appears as the Huntress in Marvel Super Action #1 (a black-and-white magazine that ran for just one issue. I looked it up the story came out a few years before DC introduced the Helena Wayne Huntress. Then, it reprints Avengers #189, which most features the solo exploits of Hawkeye, who is hired to head security for Cross Technologies (the company he's still working for at the beginning of the mini-series. Finally, Marvel Team-Up #95 features Bobbi's first appearance as Mockingbird. Apparently, this was her first appearance since that Huntress story many years before. I'm guessing Marvel decided to abandon that name because a DC character using that name had become well-known in the interim.
The mini is also where Hawkeye injures his hearing. I know that's been a subject in recent years in his solo series, but I can't ever recall reading anything about it in the period in-between. Did writers just ignore his hearing impairment after the mini, or did it come up in issues I haven't read or can't remember?
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Post by Hoosier X on Nov 23, 2019 22:27:14 GMT -5
My branch of the Los Angeles County Library has some cool comic book related stuff, so I don't always have to request stuff from the library system and wait a few days. Right now I got the Golden Age Doctor Fate Archives! I haven't read much of it. It's pretty cool so far. Last week, I had All-Star Superman! My favorite Grant Morrison story! And also one of my top two or three superman stories! I don't know why I like Morrison's Superman so much more than I like pretty much anything else he's done. His Batman stories are very nearly unreadable to me. But he seems to get Superman a lot better than he gets Batman. Clark, Lois, Perry, Lex, Lucy and the Bizarros are pretty cool, and any changes he made are pretty subtle. He always seems to how to stay true to the character. That Bizarro two-parter with Zibarro is amazing. And Morrison's Jimmy Olsen is HILARIOUS! The art is great too! I call it Cabbage Patch Superman, but that doesn't mean I don't like it.
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 23, 2019 23:41:36 GMT -5
The mini is also where Hawkeye injures his hearing. I know that's been a subject in recent years in his solo series, but I can't ever recall reading anything about it in the period in-between. Did writers just ignore his hearing impairment after the mini, or did it come up in issues I haven't read or can't remember? There were occasional references to Hawkeye's deafness after the mini, notably in the David Letterman issue of Avengers where his hearing aids malfunction* with (allegedly) hilarious results, but for the most part it stayed in the background. Of course, my knowledge of the character's continuity ends at West Coast Avengers Annual #1 until the Busiek-Perez reboot twelve years later so, in this case, I'm not the most reliable source.
Cei-U! I summon the sounds of silence!
*Or he forgot 'em at home or didn't want to wear 'em on TV or some damn thing.
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Post by berkley on Nov 23, 2019 23:48:39 GMT -5
Holy s**t, this was good! Five volumes in and The Sandman just keeps getting better and better. Volume 5: A Game of You centres around a young, recently divorced woman named Barbie, who we first met in The Doll's House. She's residing in a run down apartment in New York City, and is no longer able to dream – thanks to having been caught up in the Dream Vortex from Volume 2. As the story begins, Barbie is being summoned to her own childhood dreamland, in which she is a princess, by a group of talking animals who are being menaced by the mysterious "Cuckoo". This is all observed by Dream (a.k.a. Morpheus) as nothing more than the routine death of an outlying "skerry" of dreamland (skerry being a Scottish word for a rocky island, apparently). Actually, Morpheus is kind of absent from a lot of this book, but I've gotta say that I really didn't miss him. There's so much to praise in this volume of The Sandman, but to start at the beginning, one of the best things about this book is how utterly three-dimensional and memorable the other residents of Barbie's apartment block are. For one thing, apart from George (who it turns out is working for the Cuckoo), the story's heroes are all female, which is itself highly unusual for a comic book. The group consist of a lesbian couple, a transgendered woman, a shy bookish lady who turns out to be a witch, and the aforementioned Barbie. The main thrust of the plot concerns Barbie's quest to defeat the Cuckoo, with the help of her anthropomorphic animal friends, while her human friends' attempt to rescue her from her own dreamland. The Cuckoo looks like a little girl, but I don't think this is actually meant to be Barbie herself, but a facet of her personality, although someone else might correct me on that point. Anyway, it seems that the Cuckoo became trapped in Barbie's dream-land, thus keeping her from becoming what she was supposed to be as an adult. The implication (as I see it) being that, if children stubbornly cling to their fantasies, they won't be able to become functioning adults. The fact that this message is packaged in a comic book for adults is ironic as hell, but I think that's wholly intentional and kind of the point. In Barbie, Neil Gaiman writes an utterly convincing female character – in fact, all of the female characters are brilliantly realised. Shawn McManus drew all but one of the issues collected here, and he really gives each character a unique face, which, when coupled with Gaimen's scripting, really makes the characters live and breath. The gay and transgendered characters are written as proper individuals, not just cookie-cutter clichés, as is so often the case in comic books. Ultimately, this is a tale about human psychology and how we use fantasy to endure the trials and tribulations of our lives. This is also a story which examines the psychology of being female, and, in one particularly memorable scene, the Cuckoo explains just how little girls' dreams differ from those of little boys: "Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds...
Little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies, much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands.
And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little cuckoos." There's so much going on in A Game of You and so much for the reader to unpack that this post would be of epic length if I really got into it all. Suffice it to say, this is an amazingly good graphic novel. It's simultaneously charming, violent, moving, gritty, and horrific – quite an impressive mix of narrative "plates" that Gaiman keeps spinning at once. At times, it might also be the saddest story in The Sandman so far: the fate of Barbie's animal friends – especially the dog-like Martin Tenbones – is heartbreaking. But it's also one of the most human stories that Gaiman has served up in the series so far, in spite of its fantasy-land setting. For me, this was the most enjoyable volume of The Sandman so far. I can't wait to get stuck into volume 6. Sandman question: I presume it's best to read the volumes in order, but can the first one be skipped? I read it a few years ago but don't recall much about it at this point, apart from finding it just OK. So I'd refer to skip ahead to the 2nd volume unless forgetting everything that happened in the 1st is likely to lessen my appreciation of the later books.
I think I asked this before and was told that the 1st book isn't really characteristic of Sandman as a whole but again, it's been so long I'm not sure how reliable that memory is either.
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