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Post by Cei-U! on Dec 15, 2014 8:56:33 GMT -5
It was in Mr. Bumgardner's art class at Truman Junior High that I saw my first underground comics. One of the boys had hijacked some of his older brother's stash and we passed around his issues of Young Lust and Zap with a combination of awe, excitement and fear. Drugs! Violence! Left-wing politics! Hardcore sex! This was a world of comics I had no idea existed and it opened my young mind to the infinite possibilities of the medium. But none of the above is the reason #10. Zap #0 makes my list. No, much as I love all that Robert Crumb awesomeness (yes, his stuff is racist and misogynistic but he drew Bertrand Russell being hit in the head with a meatball!!!), this particular issue's claim to fame is that it was the first comic I ever bought at a comics convention, a portent of the HUGE roll cons would come to play in my world. Cei-U! I summon the turning point! |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 15, 2014 13:06:28 GMT -5
Watchmen 5 (DC Jan. '87)  With this issue Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons showed exactly what could be done with the comic format. And it was something that really can't be done with prose, movies or TV. "Fearful Symmetry" is one of the most technically brilliant uses of the comic medium that I've ever seen. I never looked at comics the same way again. 
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Post by Cei-U! on Dec 15, 2014 13:17:36 GMT -5
As I've said a gazillion times before, it's not the story that's brillant about Watchmen, it's the storytelling. Great choice, Slam!
Cei-U!
I summon the breakthrough!
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 15, 2014 13:25:06 GMT -5
As I've said a gazillion times before, it's not the story that's brillant about Watchmen, it's the storytelling. Great choice, Slam! Cei-U! I summon the breakthrough! There are things about the story that are brilliant. There are also things about the story that I really don't like and aren't well thought out. There are also a LOT of things about the story that are still really poorly understood by the general reader. But the storytelling is utterly brilliant and it is still very near the pinnacle of the medium for fully exploring the medium and how it can be used. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 15, 2014 14:07:02 GMT -5
On the third day of Classic Comic Christmas I give unto thee...  "Jennifer" Written by Bruce Jones Art by Berni Wrightson Pacific Comics, 1983 (though originally Creepy #63, Warren Publishing 1974) At age 13 I was refereeing soccer matches every weekend and earning what was a tidy wage for a young teenager with no bills or responsibilities and that wage was almost completely spent on comics. This was probably my most active reading period and my tastes exploded for no other reason other than I had a disposable income and nothing better to spend it on and it was a perfect time to do so as it was 1999 and with the business still trying to dig out of the speculator bust back issues were pretty cheap at my lcs. I of course, didn't know any of that then but I took full advantage and bought just about anything my hands fell upon.
It was in this period that I fell in love with old sci-fi and especially horror comics, but before you jump to any conclusions I'm not including this issue because it was my first horror, it was far from that, I'm including it because it was the first comic I hid from my father. Until this point I would share every purchase with him, we loved reading books together but as I cracked open this one at home that afternoon I was shocked, scared and slightly ashamed all at the same time for you see "Jennifer" was like a nightmare that preyed upon me through my both my boyhood power fantasies and my unspoken fear of the opposite sex. Our unsuspecting hero accidentally comes across a damsel in distress and saves the day...only to become repulsed by her face. Still he's some how captivated by her and takes her home to his family, even though she is hideous and scares his wife he cannot give her away and so his wife is driven away...and Jennifer takes the wife's place in his bed.
There's no nudity, or graphic sex but I had a young mind with an active imagination that had already witnessed glimpses of grainy porn on cable so all I needed was the hint of Jennifer in a night gown approaching the bed and I could fill in the rest. But it got worse as this encounter sent the "hero's" life into a tail spin until he himself ended up in the woods losing his life to yet another "hero" rescuing the "damsel in distress". It simultaneously evoked lust and fear and I immediately hid it under my bed, too afraid to be seen with it and have to explain it to my father but too seduced by it to simply throw it away and rid myself of the evidence.
It's not the most frightening comic I ever read, or the most risque but it was the first comic to elicit such a complicated emotional response from me and I think it perfectly encapsulates my teen age years. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 15, 2014 14:10:50 GMT -5
Watchmen 5 (DC Jan. '87) With this issue Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons showed exactly what could be done with the comic format. And it was something that really can't be done with prose, movies or TV. "Fearful Symmetry" is one of the most technically brilliant uses of the comic medium that I've ever seen. I never looked at comics the same way again. Gibbons really is a master of panel lay outs, the way the action is showcased there is fantastic. I mean, just look at how balanced it all is, especially in the middle where it bridges both pages and you get the V in the exact center and the reflections on the gunman's head and the pharaoh statue's head in the water. I haven't read this in a good long while, I think it's time I remedied that. Just out of curiosity though, what do you feel is poorly understood? |
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metarog
Junior Member
Waking up in an alternate universe
Posts: 25 
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Post by metarog on Dec 15, 2014 15:28:11 GMT -5
10. 1963 Book 6 Image _  I actually got the whole 6 issue run together but was never really into Image until a friend in college put me on to this series and boy am I glad he did. Initially I was resistant as I was a 70s guy all the way when it came to comics. This series just seemed different than what was coming out at the time and so I bought the set. This particular issue takes all the characters from the previous 5 issues and teams them up in grand finale style. There are obvious parallels to Marvels of the Silver Age and to me this is a great homage to those comics. It is almost like a time warp when I read this issue and I yearned for more of these stories yet no more came that I recall. Still it was a thrilling flashback to simpler yet exciting times. I want to thank my old college bud Frank for thinking of me when he experienced this issue. It is one of my favorites for helping me realize that newer comics can have old souls. |
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Post by foxley on Dec 15, 2014 15:33:27 GMT -5
10. Thunderbolts #1
Synopsis: Earth's newest heroic team, the Thunderbolts, bursts on the scene to widespread acclaim ... but all is not as it seems. Why I picked it: Because this one of the few 'shocking swerves' in recent comic history that actually shocked me. I honestly did not see the revelation at the end of this issue coming. And unlike many modern 'shocking' comics where the shocks are inserted merely for the purpose of being shocking (such as the Joker having his face cut off), this surprise made sense from a plot perspective and promised all kinds of interesting plot directions that the book could take. The ending of Thunderbolts #1 told me that this was not your ordinary superhero team book, and I was extremely interested to see where Kurt Busiek would take it. You can bet that I came back and bought the next issue. This book is a reminder that even this jaded comics reader cane be pleasantly surprised and excited by an unexpected plot twist.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,231
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Post by Confessor on Dec 15, 2014 15:51:30 GMT -5
#10 - Dick Tracy: Popped Wheat Giveaway Comic (1947)  This is the only Golden Age comic that I own and for that reason alone, it was always gonna be on my list. I'm really not a fan of Golden Age comics or newspaper strips generally: I find their storytelling and artwork just a bit too crude and primitive for me to really enjoy. The Dick Tracy newspaper strip is one of the few exceptions to that rule though. Sure, the writing is still a little primitive and the artwork is a little crude too, but the gritty, violent criminal underworld that Tracy attempts to clean up in these stories is utterly compelling, while the characters are so strong and (in the case of the villains) grotesque, that the strip holds up really well to modern eyes. This unnumbered giveaway issue reprints the first arc of the "Trohs & Mamma" storyline from 1941 (which has nothing to do with the image on the cover). It's a good Dick Tracy story, but it's not necessarily any better or worse than any other story from the period. The reason this comic is on my list is simply because of it's age. Because, even though I'm not really a Golden Age fan, I still get a kick out of owning a comic book that is 67 years old (and counting). And, you know, it's Dick Tracy.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,231
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Post by Confessor on Dec 15, 2014 15:57:18 GMT -5
On the third day of Classic Comic Christmas I give unto thee... "Jennifer" Written by Bruce Jones Art by Berni Wrightson Pacific Comics, 1983 (though originally Creepy #63, Warren Publishing 1974) At age 13 I was refereeing soccer matches every weekend and earning what was a tidy wage for a young teenager with no bills or responsibilities and that wage was almost completely spent on comics. This was probably my most active reading period and my tastes exploded for no other reason other than I had a disposable income and nothing better to spend it on and it was a perfect time to do so as it was 1999 and with the business still trying to dig out of the speculator bust back issues were pretty cheap at my lcs. I of course, didn't know any of that then but I took full advantage and bought just about anything my hands fell upon.
It was in this period that I fell in love with old sci-fi and especially horror comics, but before you jump to any conclusions I'm not including this issue because it was my first horror, it was far from that, I'm including it because it was the first comic I hid from my father. Until this point I would share every purchase with him, we loved reading books together but as I cracked open this one at home that afternoon I was shocked, scared and slightly ashamed all at the same time for you see "Jennifer" was like a nightmare that preyed upon me through my both my boyhood power fantasies and my unspoken fear of the opposite sex. Our unsuspecting hero accidentally comes across a damsel in distress and saves the day...only to become repulsed by her face. Still he's some how captivated by her and takes her home to his family, even though she is hideous and scares his wife he cannot give her away and so his wife is driven away...and Jennifer takes the wife's place in his bed.
There's no nudity, or graphic sex but I had a young mind with an active imagination that had already witnessed glimpses of grainy porn on cable so all I needed was the hint of Jennifer in a night gown approaching the bed and I could fill in the rest. But it got worse as this encounter sent the "hero's" life into a tail spin until he himself ended up in the woods losing his life to yet another "hero" rescuing the "damsel in distress". It simultaneously evoked lust and fear and I immediately hid it under my bed, too afraid to be seen with it and have to explain it to my father but too seduced by it to simply throw it away and rid myself of the evidence.
It's not the most frightening comic I ever read, or the most risque but it was the first comic to elicit such a complicated emotional response from me and I think it perfectly encapsulates my teen age years. Great write up, thwhtguardian. Very well articulated. |
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Post by Pharozonk on Dec 15, 2014 16:50:32 GMT -5
#10: Legion of Super-heroes v4 #61
This one of those comics I saw many times before I ever read it. When I was just getting into the Legion of Superheroes about two years ago, I saw this comic pop up a lot and the "postboot Legion" get mentioned all the time. It was until I was really into Legion lore that I understood the importance of this issue in Legion history. This issue was the tie in to the Zero Hour event DC was doing at the time to "clean up"continuity at the time and the Legion was at the top of the list. The post-Giffen( and even the Giffen after a while) 5YL Legion had descended into a morbid, dour mess of bad retcons and stories and a massive change was in order. Luckily, DC sent out the original Legion with a bang. Standing on top of molten lava as their timeline crumbles around them, Rokk, Garth, and Irma stand together with their SW6 duplicates(LONG story there) and sacrifice their existence for the preservation of the future. It's a tearjerking scene as panels of the Legion's adventures are shown as they fade to white, ending on the dissolving scene of the three founders stopping the crooks who were attacking RJ Brande, signaling a new beginning of the future's greatest heroes. |
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Post by Paste Pot Paul on Dec 15, 2014 17:45:52 GMT -5
Superman 162
Dorfman, Swan, and Klein
 This is an issue that encapsulates my entire childhood. The vast majority of superhero books I read as a kid (as opposed to after I started collecting as a teenager) were B&W aussie reprints. As such I got to experience a huge range of genres and eras, with golden age stories as readily available as modern. I loved Superman as a kid, as I suspect most of us here did, and the era I have always treasured most is that drawn by the maestro Curt Swan with his greatest collaborator, George Klein. Their depiction of the Man of Steel is definitive in my minds eye, despite Swans work with Murphy Anderson. So, this art team is what I see when I think of Superman, and the first story that always comes to mind is "The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue". In what DC would eventually term an Elseworlds tale, this perfectly sums up the beauty and charm of the wonderful books these people blessed us with.
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Post by Paste Pot Paul on Dec 15, 2014 17:48:21 GMT -5
#10: Legion of Super-heroes v4 #61
This one of those comics I saw many times before I ever read it. When I was just getting into the Legion of Superheroes about two years ago, I saw this comic pop up a lot and the "postboot Legion" get mentioned all the time. It was until I was really into Legion lore that I understood the importance of this issue in Legion history. This issue was the tie in to the Zero Hour event DC was doing at the time to "clean up"continuity at the time and the Legion was at the top of the list. The post-Giffen( and even the Giffen after a while) 5YL Legion had descended into a morbid, dour mess of bad retcons and stories and a massive change was in order. Luckily, DC sent out the original Legion with a bang. Standing on top of molten lava as their timeline crumbles around them, Rokk, Garth, and Irma stand together with their SW6 duplicates(LONG story there) and sacrifice their existence for the preservation of the future. It's a tearjerking scene as panels of the Legion's adventures are shown as they fade to white, ending on the dissolving scene of the three founders stopping the crooks who were attacking RJ Brande, signaling a new beginning of the future's greatest heroes. What synchronicity, I read this last night at work, great story finishing off a long run of drivel. Hoping things turn around real soon. Thanks for sharing...Long Live the Legion. |
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,960
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Post by Crimebuster on Dec 15, 2014 17:58:19 GMT -5
In 1986, when I was 13, a guy my dad worked with gave me his old comic collection. This consisted of about 1000 comics from 1973-76, mostly DC, but also with some Atlas, some Marvel, and some magazines like Vampirella. As a result, while most of my friends were reading X-Men or G.I. Joe, I was busy getting immersed in the weirder corners of DC's Bronze Age genre books. Wolverine? Sorry, too busy reading Unknown Soldier. Needless to say, this event had a dramatic and permament effect on shaping my reading and collecting habits. But there was one drawback to it in those pre-ebay days: Finding back issues for these out of favor and obscure old titles was difficult. Very difficult. Even with some great comic shops in the area, locating that one issue I was missing from some old DC war or fantasy title was like pulling teeth. Often it felt like I was the only person in the world who cared at all about those books - and I think in some cases, I probably was. So imagine my shock two years later when I finally stumbled upon an obscure holy grail of a comic, one that I desperately wanted, but never thought I would actually be able to find! Just one problem: I didn't have any money to buy it with. And it was $15, which was a lot of money for a high school freshman. Now, while I had sympathetic parents who would on some occasions really come through in the collecting department (as we will definitely be seeing later on in this countdown), on this occasion, I was tapped out with them. And while I had a couple friends who read comics, getting one of them to fork over $15 for some bizarre and obscure old back issue was pretty much impossible. So I turned to probably the most unlikely source in comic collecting history - my youth pastor. I went to a private school run by the church, and as a result, our youth pastor wasn't just a guy we saw once a week at church, he actually had an office in the school and was there every day, basically acting as a de-facto councilor for the kids. His name was Ernie. He was a very big, gregarious guy who could get a little too intense playing sports, and a little too intense about his love of the Yankees, given that we were in New England. But one thing he had going for him that made us (almost) forgive his Yankees bias: he was a hard core baseball card collector. And in 1988, baseball cards were king. Ernie would often organize trips to baseball card shows for us, and we'd have meetings at his house where we'd spend all afternoon trading cards, sometimes even for some of Ernie's own cards he bought as a kid in the early 60's. As a result, though Ernie didn't read or collect comics, he understood collecting. So when I went to him and tried to tell him just how much this comic meant to me, well, the details probably didn't make any sense, but the gist was there. For whatever reason, I needed that thing. He could relate. And so he loaned me, a kid with no prospects, the $15 I needed for this old, weird comic that nobody else in the world seemed to care about except me. That's why this book will always have a special place for me. Thanks, Ernie, for understanding: 10. All-Star Western #10 |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 15, 2014 18:10:24 GMT -5
In 1986, when I was 13, a guy my dad worked with gave me his old comic collection. This consisted of about 1000 comics from 1973-76, mostly DC, but also with some Atlas, some Marvel, and some magazines like Vampirella. As a result, while most of my friends were reading X-Men or G.I. Joe, I was busy getting immersed in the weirder corners of DC's Bronze Age genre books. Wolverine? Sorry, too busy reading Unknown Soldier. Needless to say, this event had a dramatic and permament effect on shaping my reading and collecting habits. But there was one drawback to it in those pre-ebay days: Finding back issues for these out of favor and obscure old titles was difficult. Very difficult. Even with some great comic shops in the area, locating that one issue I was missing from some old DC war or fantasy title was like pulling teeth. Often it felt like I was the only person in the world who cared at all about those books - and I think in some cases, I probably was. So imagine my shock two years later when I finally stumbled upon an obscure holy grail of a comic, one that I desperately wanted, but never thought I would actually be able to find! Just one problem: I didn't have any money to buy it with. And it was $15, which was a lot of money for a high school freshman. Now, while I had sympathetic parents who would on some occasions really come through in the collecting department (as we will definitely be seeing later on in this countdown), on this occasion, I was tapped out with them. And while I had a couple friends who read comics, getting one of them to fork over $15 for some bizarre and obscure old back issue was pretty much impossible. So I turned to probably the most unlikely source in comic collecting history - my youth pastor. I went to a private school run by the church, and as a result, our youth pastor wasn't just a guy we saw once a week at church, he actually had an office in the school and was there every day, basically acting as a de-facto councilor for the kids. His name was Ernie. He was a very big, gregarious guy who could get a little too intense playing sports, and a little too intense about his love of the Yankees, given that we were in New England. But one thing he had going for him that made us (almost) forgive his Yankees bias: he was a hard core baseball card collector. And in 1988, baseball cards were king. Ernie would often organize trips to baseball card shows for us, and we'd have meetings at his house where we'd spend all afternoon trading cards, sometimes even for some of Ernie's own cards he bought as a kid in the early 60's. As a result, though Ernie didn't read or collect comics, he understood collecting. So when I went to him and tried to tell him just how much this comic meant to me, well, the details probably didn't make any sense, but the gist was there. For whatever reason, I needed that thing. He could relate. And so he loaned me, a kid with no prospects, the $15 I needed for this old, weird comic that nobody else in the world seemed to care about except me. That's why this book will always have a special place for me. Thanks, Ernie, for understanding: 10. All-Star Western #10 As a mild to casual fan of Jonah Hex since I first saw him on Batman: The Animated Series this is a series I have always wanted to check out but for one reason or another just haven't gotten to it. |
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