|
Post by paulie on May 27, 2015 16:29:22 GMT -5
Let's see finished the post Ditko Dr. Strange run in Strange tales...good stuff but not up to the level of Ditko's run. I did enjoy the introduction of the Living Tribunal though. Finished up through Master of Kung Fu 70-the series flounders a bit after Gulacyy leaves, Craig is the replacement artist and he is solid, but there are far too many fill in and inventory stories breaking up other stories making it somewhat annoying to try to read. Pat Broderick just came on board, so we will see how it holds up. Re-read the first few years of the Dreadstar ongoing (up through #20) and have reached the point where Vanth loses the sword and gets the super-hero costume, which is where the series started to decline a bit. There is still some very good stuff on the horizon, but something was lost with the sword and hoodie. Read the original Sabre OGN from '78 by McGregor and Gulacy, and the first handful of issues of the ongoing from '82-'83. A truly dense read, moreso than even McGregor's Marvel stuff. Interesting stuff. Not as big a fan of Billy Graham's art on the ongoing, it's solid but suffers form following Gulacy on the OGN. One thing I don't like is McGregor's tendency for abrupt and jarring transitions and scene switches that seem to come out of nowhere and break up the narrative flow. Still a worthwhile read but takes me a bit to get through. I also reread First Issue Special #9, the Simonson drawn Dr. Fate story. Great stuff, I kind of wonder what a Simonson lead ongoing would have been like if this had sold better at the time. Am making my way through the 1949 volume of Checker's Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff. Read the first "story" in there (about 3 months worth of strips). Again a dense read like McGregor as Caniff was certainly fond of text, but an interesting one. I am also about halfway through the Servants of Bit Yemen (a.k.a. The Jewels of Gwalhur) another of Howard's Conan tales, the first in the third volume of Del Rey's Conan. -M All good reading material. I'm missing Dreadstar #5 so I'm stuck having just read the Price, The Graphic Novel, and the first four issues despite the fact that I have the rest of the series. Perhaps I'm being anal about that one. Few things better than Ditko Dr. Strange but there is a steady stream of Bill Everett, Marie Severin and Dan Adkins art that comes after and... the Living Tribunal.
|
|
Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,083
|
Post by Confessor on May 28, 2015 10:36:24 GMT -5
Caught up on reading Marvel's re-publishing of Alan Moore's Mircleman/Marvelman. I love it that in issue #15, Marvel decided in their infinite wisdom to censor the word "nigger", but left in all the grisly flying body parts, heads impaled on spikes, human skins hanging on clotheslines, people hung with barb wire, and a mother with her arms torn off at the elbows. Good job, because that use of the "n-word" would've ruined an otherwise innocent and wholesome comic book story. [/sarcasm]
|
|
|
Post by wildfire2099 on May 28, 2015 13:16:25 GMT -5
I HATE when they do that sort of thing. I'd much rather have me kids ask me about that sort of thing, so I can explain it to them and let them know why it's bad and why they shouldn't do it, than just screen it from them entirely.
|
|
|
Post by berkley on May 28, 2015 17:56:51 GMT -5
Let's see finished the post Ditko Dr. Strange run in Strange tales...good stuff but not up to the level of Ditko's run. I did enjoy the introduction of the Living Tribunal though. Finished up through Master of Kung Fu 70-the series flounders a bit after Gulacyy leaves, Craig is the replacement artist and he is solid, but there are far too many fill in and inventory stories breaking up other stories making it somewhat annoying to try to read. Pat Broderick just came on board, so we will see how it holds up. Re-read the first few years of the Dreadstar ongoing (up through #20) and have reached the point where Vanth loses the sword and gets the super-hero costume, which is where the series started to decline a bit. There is still some very good stuff on the horizon, but something was lost with the sword and hoodie. Read the original Sabre OGN from '78 by McGregor and Gulacy, and the first handful of issues of the ongoing from '82-'83. A truly dense read, moreso than even McGregor's Marvel stuff. Interesting stuff. Not as big a fan of Billy Graham's art on the ongoing, it's solid but suffers form following Gulacy on the OGN. One thing I don't like is McGregor's tendency for abrupt and jarring transitions and scene switches that seem to come out of nowhere and break up the narrative flow. Still a worthwhile read but takes me a bit to get through. I also reread First Issue Special #9, the Simonson drawn Dr. Fate story. Great stuff, I kind of wonder what a Simonson lead ongoing would have been like if this had sold better at the time. Am making my way through the 1949 volume of Checker's Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff. Read the first "story" in there (about 3 months worth of strips). Again a dense read like McGregor as Caniff was certainly fond of text, but an interesting one. I am also about halfway through the Servants of Bit Yemen (a.k.a. The Jewels of Gwalhur) another of Howard's Conan tales, the first in the third volume of Del Rey's Conan. -M I forget exactly when the Living Tribunal was introduced, and I'm not sure the character wasn't a needless addition to Marvel's cosmic/mystic hierarchy, but I always thought they gave him or it a pretty damn good visual design, whoever came up with it - was that Marie Severin, or Everett, or who? I've never seen the ongoing Sabre series, but from the sounds of it I'm a much bigger Bill Graham fan than you are, so maybe I should check it out. Is the artwork comparable to, for example, his work on the Black Panther in Jungle Action?
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 28, 2015 18:06:19 GMT -5
Let's see finished the post Ditko Dr. Strange run in Strange tales...good stuff but not up to the level of Ditko's run. I did enjoy the introduction of the Living Tribunal though. Finished up through Master of Kung Fu 70-the series flounders a bit after Gulacyy leaves, Craig is the replacement artist and he is solid, but there are far too many fill in and inventory stories breaking up other stories making it somewhat annoying to try to read. Pat Broderick just came on board, so we will see how it holds up. Re-read the first few years of the Dreadstar ongoing (up through #20) and have reached the point where Vanth loses the sword and gets the super-hero costume, which is where the series started to decline a bit. There is still some very good stuff on the horizon, but something was lost with the sword and hoodie. Read the original Sabre OGN from '78 by McGregor and Gulacy, and the first handful of issues of the ongoing from '82-'83. A truly dense read, moreso than even McGregor's Marvel stuff. Interesting stuff. Not as big a fan of Billy Graham's art on the ongoing, it's solid but suffers form following Gulacy on the OGN. One thing I don't like is McGregor's tendency for abrupt and jarring transitions and scene switches that seem to come out of nowhere and break up the narrative flow. Still a worthwhile read but takes me a bit to get through. I also reread First Issue Special #9, the Simonson drawn Dr. Fate story. Great stuff, I kind of wonder what a Simonson lead ongoing would have been like if this had sold better at the time. Am making my way through the 1949 volume of Checker's Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff. Read the first "story" in there (about 3 months worth of strips). Again a dense read like McGregor as Caniff was certainly fond of text, but an interesting one. I am also about halfway through the Servants of Bit Yemen (a.k.a. The Jewels of Gwalhur) another of Howard's Conan tales, the first in the third volume of Del Rey's Conan. -M I forget exactly when the Living Tribunal was introduced, and I'm not sure the character wasn't a needless addition to Marvel's cosmic/mystic hierarchy, but I always thought they gave him or it a pretty damn good visual design, whoever came up with it - was that Marie Severin, or Everett, or who? I've never seen the ongoing Sabre series, but from the sounds of it I'm a much bigger Bill Graham fan than you are, so maybe I should check it out. Is the artwork comparable to, for example, his work on the Black Panther in Jungle Action? Tribunal debuted in ST 157 by Lee, Marie Severin and Herb Trimpe. As for the Graham art, it looks a little looser and more cartoony at times than his Jungle Action stuff. The inkers are all newbies on the Sabre stuff, so I am not sure if his inkers at MArvle gave his stuff the cleaner more polished look I remember form the Panther series. McGregor is also calling for a lot of wild layouts, which for me don't always work and are hard for the eye to follow the story and which caption to read in what order because pages will switch from left to right to up to down and it goes back and forth form 2 page spreads read left to right to 2 page spreads read top to bottom to panels in pages that are supposed to be read right to left not left to right, etc. etc. It's part of what makes it such a dense read, as you have to spend time on each page to figure out how to follow the page as intended by McGregor and executed by Graham. So McGregor is not doing Graham any favors with his page requests. Gulacy had a much stronger sense of page design and storytelling that seemed to ameliorate McGregor's attempts to push boundaries beyond readability. -M
|
|
Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,083
|
Post by Confessor on May 29, 2015 6:29:06 GMT -5
I HATE when they do that sort of thing. I'd much rather have me kids ask me about that sort of thing, so I can explain it to them and let them know why it's bad and why they shouldn't do it, than just screen it from them entirely. Yeah, I dislike it too and I also hate the revisionism of censoring the word in a 30+ year old comic story. The book is clearly labeled at "For Mature Readers" and, really, anyone who's reading it is likely an adult who knows that it's a reprint of older material. I guess it's the Spirit/Ebony White thing again, but I hate all this pretending that the word ever existed or that we're all children and should be coddled by having it code named "the n-word". The word nigger is a despicable racial slur, but unfortunately it was widely used in media and every day conversation for hundreds of years. While it's great that its use is becoming ever more socially unacceptable, pretending that the word never existed by censoring it in old media or giving it a play school code name like "the n-word" is, at best, insulting to the intelligence, and at worst, quite unhealthy. In addition, I was also making some kind of comment in my post on the warped morality that we have here in the west, where a word is deemed inappropriate, even for adult readers, but page after page of unmitigated torture gore is A-OK. Weird.
|
|
|
Post by wildfire2099 on May 29, 2015 7:14:47 GMT -5
That's another issue entirely, and I agree 100%. Sex is fine. Abusing women is fine. Horrid, unspeakable acts of violence are fine. Cultural references that are historically accurate but no longer considered polite? Nope. Smoking? Nope.
It's nuts.
|
|
|
Post by Spike-X on May 29, 2015 20:27:50 GMT -5
I can see why they did it. And I can see why people don't like that they did it. I thought all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when they did it was a bit much, though. We all know what the word is, we can just read it to ourselves in our heads when we get to that panel.
Confessor makes a valid point, though.
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Jun 1, 2015 14:01:09 GMT -5
I finally got hold of Age of Apocalypse: The Complete Epic, Volume Four! My library system only has one copy and it was checked out when I first requested it but it is now finally available. It's been several weeks since I read the previous volume but as soon as I started reading I remembered all the important things:
Some of the art is great. The first thing in the volume is drawn by Chris Bachalo.
The accent-characters are really annoying.
There always has to be a character who calls everybody "dumplin'" even when Chris Claremont isn't involved.
The most important thing about any chapter containing X-Man is that it helps you appreciate any chapter that doesn't contain X-Man.
Ditto for any chapter written by Jeph Loeb.
And I'm already up to speed and ready to enjoy the conclusion of Age of Apocalypse: The Complete Epic. And it is indeed "epic," but only in the comic-book sense of the word.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 2, 2015 21:20:14 GMT -5
Started reading The Batman Chronicles. I'm absolutely sure I have read this first Batman story from Detective 27, but I can't remember it. I do not remember Batman killing two people in six pages either. But I heard a lot about the frequent killing in old Batman stories. So far I like the heavy influences from serials, pulps, newspaper strips, ect in this old comic. And the fact there's an actual mystery he solves through detective work.
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Jun 2, 2015 23:10:31 GMT -5
Started reading The Batman Chronicles. I'm absolutely sure I have read this first Batman story from Detective 27, but I can't remember it. I do not remember Batman killing two people in six pages either. But I heard a lot about the frequent killing in old Batman stories. So far I like the heavy influences from serials, pulps, newspaper strips, ect in this old comic. And the fact there's an actual mystery he solves through detective work. The first year of Batman is pretty awesome! It does kind of go back and forth between really horrible stories and then some really cool old pulpy horror thrillers. And then you hit Batman #1 and Detective #38 (which came out about the same time) and all of a sudden it's just simply wall-to-wall cool!
|
|
|
Post by adamwarlock2099 on Jun 3, 2015 13:21:21 GMT -5
Warlord #105-115
I am enjoying Fleisher's writing of these issues. It had a nice mix of action and story. I am warming up a bit more to Randall's art. I didn't always pay attention to the inkers but it seemed that some issues were better than others. I do like the almost mandatory 2 page splash we get with the title of each issue. Having read since 102, and a few pre 100 issues from Grell, I know the story behind Morgan seeking a cure for Jennifer's condition. I was kind of hoping for a bit more than where it ended with 115, but I guess that's the sign of good story telling to get one to buy the next issue. Since Jennifer's fate is still in dire straignts, I would like to read more if I find these at the reasonable prices, as I did these issues. I particularly disliked the Shakira (if I remembering the name right) with love amulet making Morgan a cooing dumbass Not that I don't like romance triangles, but it just seemed an easy way to make the odds even more surmounting for Morgan to reach his goal, if he couldn't fend off enemies attacking cause he's too worried about her. I liked the way that finally resolved and hope she's still in future issues now that she isn't obsessed.
Ravage 2099 #1-15
I had the first two issues and #15 of this series since I was collecting all the 2099 comics that I was back in the 90's. But Ravage and Punisher never made it far with me. I got the rest of these issues from my last $1 comics purchase. I never really gave these a chance as it didn't seem to wow me as much as Spiderman, Hulk, X-Men, Ghost Rider or Doom did. Perhaps it was because it was an all new character, even though the rest are too, just not in name. I am sure, since I still feel the same, that the art really lacked. Paul Ryan's art was a fairly good start. And having read more Stan Lee since I read this the first time, it quite easy to see it's him alright. So I wasn't disappointed that he left the book to Pat Mills after issue 7, where I really started to enjoy it. Not that the plot of the issues that Lee wrote weren't good, it's just his dialogue and text box writing his so melodramatic and heavy handed. It's just more than I can take outside of the brooding Silver Surfer. I am definatly going to make it a point to finish this series. No matter where I look the issues are dirt cheap and I really like the way the story was going, before the interlude of "The Fall of the Hammer" which is why I have #15 and one issue of Punisher 2099. It's chock full of corporate espionage and dirty dealings.
|
|
|
Post by The Captain on Jun 3, 2015 13:46:07 GMT -5
I've continued my read through Thor and am now up through issue #212. Most of it is really pretty, as the transition from The King to John Buscema was not a huge drop-off, but the stories, first by Stan Lee and later by Gerry Conway, can be a mixed bag, with some really capturing the epic nature of the Asgardian mythos and others making me wonder why they ever saw the printing press.
I'm pondering a review thread for this title, although I don't have all of the issues between the end of Journey into Mystery and the mid-160's. The only thing I have to consider is if it is worth slowing down my reading pace in order to take notes and write reviews at the expense of my goal to read 1,000 comics this year. Decisions, decisions...
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Jun 3, 2015 14:08:43 GMT -5
I've continued my read through Thor and am now up through issue #212. Most of it is really pretty, as the transition from The King to John Buscema was not a huge drop-off, but the stories, first by Stan Lee and later by Gerry Conway, can be a mixed bag, with some really capturing the epic nature of the Asgardian mythos and others making me wonder why they ever saw the printing press. I'm pondering a review thread for this title, although I don't have all of the issues between the end of Journey into Mystery and the mid-160's. The only thing I have to consider is if it is worth slowing down my reading pace in order to take notes and write reviews at the expense of my goal to read 1,000 comics this year. Decisions, decisions... There's A LOT of 1960s Thor I haven't read, but I'm definitely intrigued by what I've seen. I currently have Marvel Masterworks: Thor, Volume Five, (reprinting Thor #131 to #140 and Thor Annual #2) and it's been great fun reading through these classics.
This volume includes the Colonizers of Rigel (I love Tana Nile! What a crazy nut she is!), the Recorder, the Black Galaxy, Ego the Living Planet (the Ego story is ten or twenty kinds of crazy), the High Evolutionary, the Knights of Wundagore (the panel where Jane Foster is teaching a classroom full of rhino-men, zebra-men, cat-men and whatever is one of the greatest panels! Right up there with the Hulk dressed as a juggling clown), the Destrpyer, Jane Foster fails at godhood and is abruptly written out of the series, Ulik, war with the trolls and a Kang appearance that is pretty weird.
Not to mention Tales of Asgard!
|
|
|
Post by The Captain on Jun 3, 2015 14:34:48 GMT -5
I've continued my read through Thor and am now up through issue #212. Most of it is really pretty, as the transition from The King to John Buscema was not a huge drop-off, but the stories, first by Stan Lee and later by Gerry Conway, can be a mixed bag, with some really capturing the epic nature of the Asgardian mythos and others making me wonder why they ever saw the printing press. I'm pondering a review thread for this title, although I don't have all of the issues between the end of Journey into Mystery and the mid-160's. The only thing I have to consider is if it is worth slowing down my reading pace in order to take notes and write reviews at the expense of my goal to read 1,000 comics this year. Decisions, decisions... There's A LOT of 1960s Thor I haven't read, but I'm definitely intrigued by what I've seen. I currently have Marvel Masterworks: Thor, Volume Five, (reprinting Thor #131 to #140 and Thor Annual #2) and it's been great fun reading through these classics.
This volume includes the Colonizers of Rigel (I love Tana Nile! What a crazy nut she is!), the Recorder, the Black Galaxy, Ego the Living Planet (the Ego story is ten or twenty kinds of crazy), the High Evolutionary, the Knights of Wundagore (the panel where Jane Foster is teaching a classroom full of rhino-men, zebra-men, cat-men and whatever is one of the greatest panels! Right up there with the Hulk dressed as a juggling clown), the Destrpyer, Jane Foster fails at godhood and is abruptly written out of the series, Ulik, war with the trolls and a Kang appearance that is pretty weird.
Not to mention Tales of Asgard!
I've read Journey into Mystery 121-125, Thor 126-130, 141-152, and from 163 up. I plan to get that edition of Masterworks that you have at some point this summer, but the Masterworks that reprints issues 153-162 is ridiculously expensive, so I am hoping they give that the "new" Essentials treatment at some point.
|
|