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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 16, 2014 11:26:53 GMT -5
Superman Batman #13
I really enjoyed the first run of this series, not so much the new run. The cover on this is wonderful art work by Michael Turner and it wraps up the Supergirl storyline. Wonder Woman is also involved and you get a Darkseid battle. The Jeph Loeb/Michael Turner teamwork on this is great. Superman/Batman is one of my favorite titles to this day.
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Post by badwolf on Dec 16, 2014 12:17:38 GMT -5
Marvel Premiere #42 Did I develop a catgirl fetish as a result of having read this issue at a young age, or what it something I was genetically predisposed toward? We may never know. What is certain is that Tigra quickly became one of my favorite characters. This is Tigra as she should be portrayed: intelligent, capable, and drawn by Mike Vosburg. You can read the whole story here.
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Post by The Captain on Dec 16, 2014 12:21:32 GMT -5
G.I. Joe #49
Why this one? Because it was the true start of my comic collecting. While Star Wars #1-3 were my first comics, and while I had owned other comics here and there over the course of the next few years after receiving those first books, it was this issue that drew me into the hobby completely. It was the summer of 1986, and we were preparing to go on vacation to Ocean City, NJ, which had been the beach my father went to numerous times during his youth. A couple of weeks ahead of that trip, I went to the local newsstand with my allowance to grab some baseball cards, but while I was there, this book caught my eye. I'm not sure why, as I was not a huge G.I. Joe fan (I had a few figures that I'd gotten after acquiring most of the Star Wars figures produced to date, and I occasionally watched the cartoon if I was home when it was on), but I decided that rather than risk getting more doubles of random utility infielders for the Houston Astros, I would buy something to read in the car. Problem was, I read it before we left town, so I was left wanting more. I found issues #50 and #51 at the same newsstand, and I grabbed a three-pack of issues from the mid-40's range from a toy store when my mother took me to get a birthday present for my sister, and I put those away until the trip. Once we arrived in Ocean City, I took a walk on Monday afternoon to explore a little on my own; after all, I was almost 13 and needed my space. I came across a little sports card shop that also had comic books, and there were more issues of G.I. Joe, going almost all the way back to #1. I had some spending money that my grandmother had given me for the trip, and I bought a couple more books in the 40's, to bridge the gap between the issues from the three-pack and this issue, because I had to know what happened in the issues I didn't have. So this is the one that started my obsessive collecting and my need to complete runs so that I know everything that is going on.
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Post by berkley on Dec 16, 2014 18:41:22 GMT -5
Howard the Duck #16 (1977) During the 1970s at Marvel, a blown deadline usually meant a reprint. But in this case, we got something very different and very cool. In order to get this issue out while he was moving cross-country, Steve Gerber banged out a rambling prose essay, which was then illustrated by a host of different artists. Part polemic, part metaphor, part confessional, Gerber holds forth on everything from the nature of writing to the deeper meaning (or lack thereof) of the Grand Canyon, with Howard the Duck supplying sarcastic commentary throughout. It's a wild ride, and more than a little self-indulgent, but it certainly made for a unique reading experience, and opened up my mind to some of the possibilities of comics beyond conventional panel layouts. Great pick. This, HtD 1, or both will be on my list
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Post by DubipR on Dec 16, 2014 21:23:32 GMT -5
G.I. Joe #49
Why this one? Because it was the true start of my comic collecting. While Star Wars #1-3 were my first comics, and while I had owned other comics here and there over the course of the next few years after receiving those first books, it was this issue that drew me into the hobby completely. It was the summer of 1986, and we were preparing to go on vacation to Ocean City, NJ, which had been the beach my father went to numerous times during his youth. A couple of weeks ahead of that trip, I went to the local newsstand with my allowance to grab some baseball cards, but while I was there, this book caught my eye. I'm not sure why, as I was not a huge G.I. Joe fan (I had a few figures that I'd gotten after acquiring most of the Star Wars figures produced to date, and I occasionally watched the cartoon if I was home when it was on), but I decided that rather than risk getting more doubles of random utility infielders for the Houston Astros, I would buy something to read in the car. Problem was, I read it before we left town, so I was left wanting more. I found issues #50 and #51 at the same newsstand, and I grabbed a three-pack of issues from the mid-40's range from a toy store when my mother took me to get a birthday present for my sister, and I put those away until the trip. Once we arrived in Ocean City, I took a walk on Monday afternoon to explore a little on my own; after all, I was almost 13 and needed my space. I came across a little sports card shop that also had comic books, and there were more issues of G.I. Joe, going almost all the way back to #1. I had some spending money that my grandmother had given me for the trip, and I bought a couple more books in the 40's, to bridge the gap between the issues from the three-pack and this issue, because I had to know what happened in the issues I didn't have. So this is the one that started my obsessive collecting and my need to complete runs so that I know everything that is going on. Great story, Richard. I remember getting this issue in the mail and was pumped to see how Hama would create Serpentor. The preceding issues, especially issue 46 to the attack on Springfield are some of the best Joe books.
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Post by benday-dot on Dec 16, 2014 21:23:46 GMT -5
Day 3 No. 10 Savage Tales #1Marvel, cover date May 1971 various writers and artists Yeah, it' s a cool comic. You've got an early Roy Thomas/Barry Smith Conan story. You've got the first appearance of Man-Thing. You've got a Ka-Zar story, which . . . okay, I never really got into Ka-Zar. I liked the original 3 pulp stories better than any Ka-Zar comic I ever read. And you've got 2 other stories meant to be the start of new series, but which didn't continue. (Though the Femizons later turned up in the Fantastic Four, IIRC. Don't think Black Brother was ever seen again.) It was Marvel's attempt to go 'mature' with edgier material and semi-nudity. (Hey, a dominant woman and a black guy heading their own stories was edgy back then.) But that's not why this book made my list. I was buying everything Conan I could find back then, and I flipped when I saw this magazine on the shelf. But I didn't have any money, so I freaked. I ran home and got the money, but it was too late to go back to the store. So I determined that I would walk there after school the next day. Now you have to understand, I went to Catholic school from 1st grade through my first year of college. I'd had the whole sin/hell/eternal punishment thing hammered into me steadily from an early age. So I was a little nervous about buying the book to begin with, what with the violence, cussing and naked women (however discreetly posed). But that day, with two quarters burning their way out of my pocket, our biology class had a guest speaker. One of the older priests came in to talk to us about how hard it was to be good Catholics in a world of sin and depravity, and how we had to be sure to avoid movies and books that could lead us into sin. Talk about timing; it felt like that priest must've read my mind. I seriously wondered if it might have been a sign from God himself, telling me to shape up and not buy that sleazy magazine. It haunted me through the rest of my classes. What should I do? Oh, come on. Barry Smith. Gray Morrow. Conan. Sorta nekkid ladies. What do you think I did? God was just gonna have to understand. Sometimes the little devil on the shoulder really must have its way. God, who has done a fair share of smiting himself, would surely give a thumbs up on this awesome choice.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2014 21:26:47 GMT -5
#10 Moon Knight Special Edition 1
This was part of a 3-issue series that conveniently reprinted the first Moon Knight story I ever read - and never got to finish - as it was first published in the back of HULK magazine (that I came across in the 90s) BUT I couldn't find a copy of Hulk #18 anywhere so I was left sucking salt for freaking years. Moreso because I never knew this reprint existed until about 20 years after it first appeared in 1983. Moon Knight blew my little impressionable mind when I was still - like 10? The story was violent, dark...a nurse got an axe in her back - I loved it! Wish all my regular comics were like that at the time.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 17, 2014 10:38:44 GMT -5
That's a great comic... it barely missed the cut for my 12, actually.
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Post by paulie on Dec 17, 2014 11:18:24 GMT -5
#10 Moon Knight Special Edition 1
This was part of a 3-issue series that conveniently reprinted the first Moon Knight story I ever read - and never got to finish - as it was first published in the back of HULK magazine (that I came across in the 90s) BUT I couldn't find a copy of Hulk #18 anywhere so I was left sucking salt for freaking years. Moreso because I never knew this reprint existed until about 20 years after it first appeared in 1983. Moon Knight blew my little impressionable mind when I was still - like 10? The story was violent, dark...a nurse got an axe in her back - I loved it! Wish all my regular comics were like that at the time. That is some cover. Love the use of the purple.
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Post by paulie on Dec 17, 2014 14:17:28 GMT -5
I'm going to catch up today... I'm going to catch up today... For CCC Day 3 I'm presenting the last of my personal paradigm shift type comics (1st DC/1st Marvel) and it is... Hellblazer 40 - April 1991Concluding the stellar Jamie Delano run who had written the book since its inception. Featuring a long dream sequence, reminding me both of the flashback sequences in Bergman's Wild Strawberries and the long technicolor ballet scene in Powell and Pressberger's The Red Shoes, Hellblazer 40 represents my 16 year old self moving away from the superhero comics of my youth. Here is the moment I wanted to read Love and Rockets, Zap Comix, and Yummy Fur. Here is where I went and found myself reading 6 or 7 Vertigo titles monthly. Here is the first sign of Paulie moving towards intellectual adulthood. (Not saying I ever got there!) The issue features a stunning art job from Dave McKean doing a rare interior art job. He did the cover as well. But Delano remains the star. Aside from Alan Moore I can't think of another writer who combined the sociological, political and the phenomenal as adeptly as Jamie Delano. The denouement of the story remains elusive. Who was Constantine's 'twin' really? What really happened at Ravenscar? Does it matter to the reader or even to Constantine? I look back at age 16 and can't find much to like about it but I like Hellblazer 40 and I like the things it made think about then and now. (Side Note - I eventually did come back to superheroes but decades later and almost exclusively in their Silver Age and Bronze Age incarnations.) Attachments:
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 17, 2014 20:16:17 GMT -5
I'm going to catch up today... I'm going to catch up today... For CCC Day 3 I'm presenting the last of my personal paradigm shift type comics (1st DC/1st Marvel) and it is... Hellblazer 40 - April 1991Concluding the stellar Jamie Delano run who had written the book since its inception. Featuring a long dream sequence, reminding me both of the flashback sequences in Bergman's Wild Strawberries and the long technicolor ballet scene in Powell and Pressberger's The Red Shoes, Hellblazer 40 represents my 16 year old self moving away from the superhero comics of my youth. Here is the moment I wanted to read Love and Rockets, Zap Comix, and Yummy Fur. Here is where I went and found myself reading 6 or 7 Vertigo titles monthly. Here is the first sign of Paulie moving towards intellectual adulthood. (Not saying I ever got there!) The issue features a stunning art job from Dave McKean doing a rare interior art job. He did the cover as well. But Delano remains the star. Aside from Alan Moore I can't think of another writer who combined the sociological, political and the phenomenal as adeptly as Jamie Delano. The denouement of the story remains elusive. Who was Constantine's 'twin' really? What really happened at Ravenscar? Does it matter to the reader or even to Constantine? I look back at age 16 and can't find much to like about it but I like Hellblazer 40 and I like the things it made think about then and now. (Side Note - I eventually did come back to superheroes but decades later and almost exclusively in their Silver Age and Bronze Age incarnations.) Man do I love the art here!
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Post by coke & comics on Dec 18, 2014 3:51:32 GMT -5
10. Batman & Superman: World's Finest #7 "A Better World" by Karl Kesel, Peter Doherty and Robert Campanella October, 1999 (DC) There was always going to be a Batman comic on this list. But which? For a while, I considered Batman: The Killing Joke. That would knock out two birds with one stone, spotlighting my love of Batman and my favorite writer. But... the truth is Killing Joke is like my 10th favorite Alan Moore comic. It just happens to be eligible for this list, unlike most Moore stuff. No, I decided to let Alan Moore go from this list and focus on the more basic Batman comics. In the early '90s, Batman: Knightfall was among the first trades I ever owned and something I read over and over again and still love. But I also loved the random issues of Batman I'd ended up with, from the late '80s or so. Work by Wolman, Grant, Moench, and Milligan, with art by the likes of Breyfogle and Aparo. That's what I still think of as "my" Batman era. The Many Deaths of the Batman, The Penguin Affair, The Crimesmith, The NKVDemon, and a story with a Joker impersonator. Plus some Legends of the Dark Knight stories of the era like Shaman and Gothic. When I filled in back issues of Batman, it was slowly but surely filling in from those issues outward, and eventually I ended up with say all of Batman in the 400s and Detective Comics in the 600s. What I had never done was collect forward. For much of my early years of comic collecting, I was all about back issue bins and relatively uninterested in getting the newest thing for many series. Though I did get some comics in the mail through subscription, a lot of the Marvel 2099, for example. It was around 1998 I started getting a pull list, and by 1999 my pull list was basically "The entire Marvel universe". I liked Batman but was so far behind the present issues in my reading that getting the new ones wasn't on my radar. Until the issue pictured above. The cover struck me, hopefully for reasons that are obvious to any looking at it. It's one of the very few comics I can say I opened purely because I found the cover interesting. I opened to a page where Superman was posing a moral dilemma to Batman: If Batman were about to die and he could choose to die alone or take the Joker with him, what would he do? I loved moral dilemmas! Batman gave a typical Batman answer, that he wouldn't let it get to that: there's always a way out. The idea of this miniseries I learned was to chronicle the post-crisis relationship of Superman year by year, establishing firmly it had been 10 years since they had met. Each issue took place a year after the prior. Year 7 was the year that Robin died. In general, I have grown unfond of stories who seem to steal all their emotional weight from previous, better stories. If I never read a Spider-Man story where he is moping atop a bridge thinking about Gwen again, it will be too soon. And at a glance, this could seem to fit that pattern, as it mainly involves Superman and Batman reflecting and talking about older stories. But there's a little bit more here, something akin to the magic Kurt Busiek worked in Marvels. This issue takes its weight from previous stories, but it does so by connecting previously unconnected stories by noting they happened at about the same time, and finding that they somehow complement and enhance each other. In this case, there is the John Byrne Supergirl saga where Superman executed the Phantom Zone criminals, and the Jim Starlin classic, the Death of Robin. In the latter, Superman stops Batman from killing Joker. See what happened there? It turns out that Superman was stopping Batman from crossing the precise line he himself had just crossed. This all leads to a mainly introspective issue of two old friends hashing out a disagreement. At one point Superman whisks Batman away to Kansas to make his point, in the scene which inspired the cover and my favorite moment of the comic. Superman looks across the cornfields and says, "You fight against Joker, against Two-Face, but this... this is what I fight for. And so I began reading Batman. Actually, there's a bit more to the story, but it can wait until tomorrow. Why isn't this the story of why I started reading Superman? I dunno. Never cared for Superman, I guess. Always seemed a bit too lame to add to my pull list.
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Post by Paste Pot Paul on Dec 18, 2014 17:28:06 GMT -5
12 days of Classic Christmas # 10Fantasy Masterpieces #14 I loved this title when I discovered it around that time (1980), I had "discovered" Jim Starlin and Warlock and was desperate to read the whole story. This helped a lot, and even made me feel like I had a secret no-one else knew about. I would eventually get the Baxter Warlock reprint a few years later and see the entire story, what a blast.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 18, 2014 19:29:04 GMT -5
10. Batman & Superman: World's Finest #7 "A Better World" by Karl Kesel, Peter Doherty and Robert Campanella October, 1999 (DC) There was always going to be a Batman comic on this list. But which? For a while, I considered Batman: The Killing Joke. That would knock out two birds with one stone, spotlighting my love of Batman and my favorite writer. But... the truth is Killing Joke is like my 10th favorite Alan Moore comic. It just happens to be eligible for this list, unlike most Moore stuff. No, I decided to let Alan Moore go from this list and focus on the more basic Batman comics. In the early '90s, Batman: Knightfall was among the first trades I ever owned and something I read over and over again and still love. But I also loved the random issues of Batman I'd ended up with, from the late '80s or so. Work by Wolman, Grant, Moench, and Milligan, with art by the likes of Breyfogle and Aparo. That's what I still think of as "my" Batman era. The Many Deaths of the Batman, The Penguin Affair, The Crimesmith, The NKVDemon, and a story with a Joker impersonator. Plus some Legends of the Dark Knight stories of the era like Shaman and Gothic. When I filled in back issues of Batman, it was slowly but surely filling in from those issues outward, and eventually I ended up with say all of Batman in the 400s and Detective Comics in the 600s. What I had never done was collect forward. For much of my early years of comic collecting, I was all about back issue bins and relatively uninterested in getting the newest thing for many series. Though I did get some comics in the mail through subscription, a lot of the Marvel 2099, for example. It was around 1998 I started getting a pull list, and by 1999 my pull list was basically "The entire Marvel universe". I liked Batman but was so far behind the present issues in my reading that getting the new ones wasn't on my radar. Until the issue pictured above. The cover struck me, hopefully for reasons that are obvious to any looking at it. It's one of the very few comics I can say I opened purely because I found the cover interesting. I opened to a page where Superman was posing a moral dilemma to Batman: If Batman were about to die and he could choose to die alone or take the Joker with him, what would he do? I loved moral dilemmas! Batman gave a typical Batman answer, that he wouldn't let it get to that: there's always a way out. The idea of this miniseries I learned was to chronicle the post-crisis relationship of Superman year by year, establishing firmly it had been 10 years since they had met. Each issue took place a year after the prior. Year 7 was the year that Robin died. In general, I have grown unfond of stories who seem to steal all their emotional weight from previous, better stories. If I never read a Spider-Man story where he is moping atop a bridge thinking about Gwen again, it will be too soon. And at a glance, this could seem to fit that pattern, as it mainly involves Superman and Batman reflecting and talking about older stories. But there's a little bit more here, something akin to the magic Kurt Busiek worked in Marvels. This issue takes its weight from previous stories, but it does so by connecting previously unconnected stories by noting they happened at about the same time, and finding that they somehow complement and enhance each other. In this case, there is the John Byrne Supergirl saga where Superman executed the Phantom Zone criminals, and the Jim Starlin classic, the Death of Robin. In the latter, Superman stops Batman from killing Joker. See what happened there? It turns out that Superman was stopping Batman from crossing the precise line he himself had just crossed. This all leads to a mainly introspective issue of two old friends hashing out a disagreement. At one point Superman whisks Batman away to Kansas to make his point, in the scene which inspired the cover and my favorite moment of the comic. Superman looks across the cornfields and says, "You fight against Joker, against Two-Face, but this... this is what I fight for. And so I began reading Batman. Actually, there's a bit more to the story, but it can wait until tomorrow. Why isn't this the story of why I started reading Superman? I dunno. Never cared for Superman, I guess. Always seemed a bit too lame to add to my pull list. Wow, I've seen this around before but your write up really makes this something I need to experience...Like right away!
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Post by hondobrode on Dec 18, 2014 22:53:51 GMT -5
Also, the actual story, written by Karl Kesel. I've liked everything I've ever read by him. I'd love to see him write more.
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