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Post by Scott on Oct 14, 2021 22:22:41 GMT -5
I picked up some comics the other day. I grabbed Miskatonic because I’ve been on a Lovecraft kick lately. I also started reading Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, which is kind of a comedy murder mystery. Trigger Keaton is an action star and a horrible human being. After he’s found murdered six of his former movie sidekicks team up to solve the case. It’s pretty amusing so far.
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Post by Scott on Oct 24, 2021 23:38:39 GMT -5
I finished Miskatonic. I agree with Gary. It was a bunch of Lovecraft names, places, and events tied together by a very thin story and characters. They tried to cram so many events in that it ended up feeling jumbled more than anything. I picked up a few more issues of Trigger Keaton, and I’m still liking that, and I’m getting ready to start Bunny Mask.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jan 18, 2022 10:42:49 GMT -5
Eric has been bringing me so many X-titles that it has been hard to keep up. I think when this Jonathan Hickman run is over, I'm going to take a break from the X-Men comics. The whole "Dawn of X" thing feels like a big "let's play in the multiverse" event and if they wipe it all away, I'm going to be annoyed but not surprised.
Eric hasn't been getting DC for the past year due to distribution issues, so I haven't been getting any Batman.
I'm still a comics fan, but the corporate/franchise titles haven't been that great. They start out with some great ideas, but tend to meander with aimless storytelling. Whatever happened to the days when it was one self-contained story per issue? Or at least small arcs over 2-3 issues? Batman at least usually stayed closer to that model.
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Post by Scott on Jan 18, 2022 11:33:15 GMT -5
Ive been reading more lately, but so far sticking to mini series and graphic novels.
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Post by yesmar on Feb 6, 2022 5:36:33 GMT -5
Other than a brief fling with the X-Men back in the 80s, I’ve never been much of a comics person. That said, I’ve always enjoyed Heavy Metal, through which I learned about Richard Corben. I just picked up some seriously out of print Neverwhere graphic novels, which are among my favorites. Aside from being visually striking, there’s a lot of stuff you can mine for campaign use in these stories.
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Post by Scott on Feb 8, 2022 21:47:42 GMT -5
Most of what I've been reading is horror or off the wall stuff. no super hero stuff recently.
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Post by GRWelsh on Feb 9, 2022 8:42:17 GMT -5
I've always liked Heavy Metal magazine as well. I have quite a few issues from the late 70's and early 80's, and recently I bought numerous issues from the past 5 years or so. Richard Corben was doing a strip titled "Murky World" right up to the end. I always liked the way his figures were a bit cartoonish but also had a realistic "mass" to them which I assumed was from using models to accurately get the light and shadows on a 3D form. In "Den" Corben created a memorable variation of Barsoom -- Neverwhere -- that was all his own with naked warriors, beast and bug people, and fantastic and nightmarish imagery. Corben will always be one of my favorites, as well as Moebius.
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Post by Scott on Feb 9, 2022 23:36:46 GMT -5
Heavy Metal was so ubiquitous in with the gamers I knew back in the early 80s. Everybody had their own copies, or read issues older family members left lying around. Other than Möbius I never followed any of the artists.
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Post by GRWelsh on Apr 27, 2022 11:56:25 GMT -5
I finished THE VAULT OF HORROR Volume 1 from the EC Archives published by Dark Horse. It had a few other rip offs without giving credit such as "Cool Air" by H. P. Lovecraft and "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde... Disappointing, but in that era it seemed more acceptable somehow to not give credit and freely adapt the works of others into comic books. I'm glad Bradbury at least called them out on it! Some of the stories are lazy falling back on common werewolf and voodoo motifs, but most of them are still good in spite of just not being that scary for modern times. Eric also brought me TALES FROM THE CRYPT Volumes 1 and 2 and I'm going to read those next. It's sort of like travelling back in time to the 1950's, and I like reading them for the historical perspective of what comics were like for that era.
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Post by GRWelsh on Nov 20, 2022 14:57:44 GMT -5
I stopped collecting the modern X-Men comics. There have begun to be too many titles, and it never feels up like they're going to wrap up the Krakoa storyline that started with "House of X." The whole storyline feels like an issue of WHAT IF? with an intriguing beginning but no end. This doesn't feel like the Marvel Universe I grew up with in the 1970's, but an alternate universe.
Yesterday, I went to the shop my cousin recently bought and re-opened as "K & J Games" in Westview. I picked up some comic books from the 1970's that I used to own. In 1986, when I left for college at IUP, my mom sold all of my comic books and matchbox cars. I've given her grief about it over the years, but I can't really blame her because I never emphasized how much my comic books meant to me. Also, they weren't in the best shape as I had read and reread each many times -- I was a reader and not a collector. In the past twenty years I've been trying to recreate my original collection, and I'm very close to getting there... An issue I picked up yesterday that I haven't read since the mid-80's was METAL MEN #45 (April/May 1976). This issue is important to me for a number of reasons. It relaunched the Metal Men property and introduced me to something that was completely different from other super hero books. The art by Walt Simonson helped raise my consciousness about how talented different comic book artists could be -- he has a very distinct style and this was my first exposure to it. There was some very dark 'adult' stuff such as Doc Magnus having been kidnapped by political agents of a foreign country and driven insane so that although he was the creator of the Metal Men he also wanted to destroy them. Finally, it had a self contained story and the heroes -- the Metal Men robots -- ALL DIED to stop the threat of the Plutonium Man! That blew me away. There is this poignant set of panels at the end with Tina (Platinum) telling Doc Magnus that she still loves him and after the explosion her metal head bounces to Doc Magnus' feet -- and this is what finally snaps him of out his insane hatred of the Metal Men.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 20, 2022 15:39:16 GMT -5
I was into the Metal Men around the same time. There was a METAL MEN toy series that came out a few years later of die cast Star Wars sized figures that I initially thought was related to the DC Metal Men but it wasn't. I had a 1970's "CHEMO" story and a BRAVE AND THE BOLD with the typical "You've killed everyone Superman, even Lois!" type cover and the inside is a different story.
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Post by GRWelsh on Nov 20, 2022 16:19:15 GMT -5
Yep, I had two of the METAL MAN toys -- the astronaut and the one that looked like a cyclops (Radon). The 1970's "Chemo" story was the very next issue: METAL MEN # 46. I had that one, too... When Chemo attacked Venice Iron turned into a drill and made a hole in Chemo's ankle draining the waste out of his glass-like body!
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Post by GRWelsh on Jan 14, 2023 14:59:30 GMT -5
I've been trying to finish reading all of my X-Men comic books. Even though I stopped collecting them a few months ago, I still haven't read them all because there are so many of them and they piled up. I was thinking about why I don't find them that compelling anymore. One thing that bothers me about superhero comic books is how death is never permanent. Superhero comic books could be improved by 100% if death was permanent. It would allow characters to have heroic or tragic deaths that mean something, and it would give an edge and stakes to all of the conflicts. It would remind the reader that being a superhero is dangerous and that there are real consequences. And therefore, the value of them putting their lives at risk to help and defend others would be much higher. This is a rather obvious point, but it just reminds me of how juvenile superhero comic books are when they don't have to be. Comic book companies want the drama and impact -- and sales -- they can get from a character death but don't want to suffer the consequences of not being able to use that character any longer. I was thinking about how much I loved the Dark Phoenix Saga as a kid. Jean Grey was a goody too-shoes in the 60's and 70's, not the most interesting character in the world, but when she got the Phoenix force and had her power augmented and then later was corrupted by it, her self-sacrifice and death meant something. This made her one of my favorite characters. Her arc was fantastic, and her end was tragic but also heroic. But Marvel Comics just couldn't leave her dead, and within a few years the Avengers found her at the bottom of the ocean... And worst of all, the explanation was that the version of Jean that died wasn't the real Jean at all, but a replica created by the Phoenix Force. They ruined one of the greatest story arcs in comic books, ever! And since then, they've had Jean die and come back again, and at this point I feel very blasé about it.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 14, 2023 18:46:44 GMT -5
I had did that "hero return" with one of the heroes in my scribbled comics where the swarthy mastermind who controls the ninja reveals that he is a monster and sucks one of the team dry life energy. Then in my overwrought unfinished* "INFINITE SECRET EARTH WARS OF CHAMPIONS" type story the dead guy returns as a god-like villain to kill the heroes for letting him die. Yeah, it was that bad.
*Unfinished because its an endless series of three panel introductions to try and feature every single character that I ever made in one story and it became overly complicated and the main character was so "macho" that I couldn't take it after a while.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jan 15, 2023 9:25:44 GMT -5
I also drew my own comics in the 70's and early 80's. I was well known for this among my peers and classmates, but sadly didn't continue it into my teens which is when I discovered D&D and switched my interests to reading science fiction and fantasy. My own comic book creations never developed past knock offs of Marvel and DC. In the mid 70's I wanted to start my own newspaper which was really just a one page production -- a 'newspage.' I didn't have much news to report, but included what my mom, dad, sister and relatives were doing and what was happening in the local neighborhood. But then I included a comic strip that took up part of the newspage, just as I'd seen in the newspaper. The first ones I did were Green Lantern, because green was my favorite color and his powers came out of a ring. My first issue of THE FLASH had a back up story featuring GREEN LANTERN flying through space and that caught my imagination, so for a long time he was my favorite superhero and the one I drew most frequently. A bit later, I created my own original characters although they weren't very original. Some of the earliest were Superdad and Supermom who were super-versions of my own parents. Since my Dad's favorite superhero was Superman I basically drew him as Superman. I drew my sister with wings and called her Red Falcon and she was basically just another version of Angel from the X-Men. I went through various iterations of what the brand should be named, but by 1980 I was drawing everything under the banner of Sun Comics. There were many more covers, first pages and character designs than completed issues. One was FIGHT TO THE FINISH with a cover page of all of my heroes and villains charging at each other for the battle royale, and ironically, it was never finished.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 15, 2023 16:10:55 GMT -5
I started thinking about making my own when my dad drew the Submariner in the 1940's style which I couldn't appreciate at the time since it didn't match the clean silver age Marvel look. Then I had asked him to draw a whole slew including the Thing and the Hulk and he also drew a character that he had made up who was like a detective vigilante type. He had drawn them all together. It was at that point that I started drawing the Thing fighting the Hulk about a million times. My idol was this teenager who lived upstairs who went to art school but that went sour when his mom, who was my mom's "best friend" died. Then my mom started dating his dad (She later married him. Barf!), so that went sour (his large family disowned the dad) and all that initial "you can be a comic artist" road just fizzled away when this meathead was discouraging my mom from getting me into art and dad was religious crazy. "What about seminary school?" So I had a lot of energy for creating comics with zero outlet. The comics from 1982 to 1989 are well preserved but the problem with scanning them to the internet is a lot of it is very urban looking with ethnic heroes and villains. One of my main ethnic characters is missing his origin which is so good it had to be stolen. I was hoping it would turn up someday but it just never happened. When all this politically correct culture nonsense dies off eventually then I can get it going. Hopefully it won be posthumously at this rate!
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