The Comic Book Thread

[mr.negativity]

Comics Alliance:

[klen7]

Its being reported this morning that Darwyn Cooke passed away. Cancer. He was 54.

[lhb412]

Damn it. They family just released a statement about the cancer yesterday. Damn damn damn damn.

Such a talent, and so young.

[klen7]

Just last week I was wondering when we'd see another Parker story...

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

Seems I'll be at the beach on vacation for a few days before I'll be able to get home and get my copy of the last issue (#10) of Hellboy in Hell.

... I should probably avoid all the geeky news sites until then, eh?

[lhb412]

I'm still milling over those last two issues of Hellboy in Hell... on one level they're very light, but on the other, well, they use images and visual symbolism built up over the entire history of the character in its 20+ years of publication. So, it is both dense and light at the same time. A classic non-Hellboy Mignola story, The Magician and the Snake (featured in the Screw-On Head collection), is also invoked, which Mignola famously wrote with his then 7 year old daughter... there's a distinct feeling of autobiographical elements in here, too.

...


Anyway, this arrived today:



ge ge gegege no ge....

[mr.negativity]

PREVIEW: KONG OF SKULL ISLAND #1

[klen7]

^ I'm happy with the interior art. Looking forward to seeing this in my monthly pulls.

^^ Argh, its out! Not sure why i didn't preorder.. time to remedy.

[mr.negativity]

2015 "Secret Wars" Spoilers

Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev's latest collaboration puts Doctor Doom in the Iron Man armor, looking to succeed where Tony Stark failed.

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

The ascension of Geoff Johns at DC Entertainment continues.

[lhb412]

Jack Davis (one of the founding artists behind MAD Magazine and a cartooning and illustrating legend) and Richard Thompson (the cartoonist behind the 20th century's greatest newspaper strip, Cul de Sac) both died today.

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

The site redesigns of CBR and Previewsworld have made searching for the coming months' new comic solicitations a pain in the ass.

[mr.negativity]

^Yeah!

[lhb412]

It seemed everyone was posting crazy Fourth World art on Kirby's 99th, and that just made me bummed that I haven't read any of the Fourth World stuff.

[mr.negativity]

The creator of WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA gets out while the getting's good.

[mr.negativity]

[klen7]

^ So is this just a stunt to keep the copyright active so the characters don't go public domain? I was excited to hear they were bringing back "Where Monsters Dwell" for a miniseries last year.. and then it just ended up being a few issues of generic dinosaurs mainly featuring the largely forgotten Marvel pilot "Phantom Eagle".

[lhb412]

^Well, those certainly appear to be a horde of Kirby monsters in that preview image, and Marvel's putting out a big paperback omnibus of Kirby monster comics titled "Monsters Unleashed Prelude" to tie into it:

https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Unleash ... jack+kirby

[mr.negativity]

Defining Runs & Sticking To His Guns: A Birthday Tribute To Peter David

[lhb412]

Details are sketchy, but it appears religious micro-comic legend Jack Chick died. I know when I found one of his 'Chick Tracks' on the ground at a gas station as a kid I became somewhat frightened of the human sacrifice-happy witches that he insisted control Halloween. In high school me and my friends spent hours reading his various comics (all for free on his site) and marveling at his strange, unhinged views on Islam, Dungeons and Dragons, homosexuality, evolution, high school popularity, human sacrifices, and the like.

He was a crazy "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!", but I'm kinda sad he's dead.

https://boingboing.net/2016/10/24/rip-j ... f-the.html

In happier news: this week an issue of Hellboy ('Hellboy and the BPRD' to be precise), Usagi Yojimbo, and the now relaunched Love and Rockets came out. If Uncle Scrooge had come also come out I would've had the neat experience of having all four of my fav comics series release new issues in the same week. Not a big deal for folks into more mainstream stuff, but crazy for me.

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

I got a great present this year: Jim Woodring's Frank in the 3rd Dimension !



I've read all of Woodring's Frank comics in the last year and become a big fan. Besides this new book (which is a collection of unrelated scenes, and not a narrative comic book like every other Frank work) there's a big treasury of all the Frank comics published in various issues and anthologies throughout the '90s (The Frank Book) and three hardcover graphic novels produced in the last couple of years (Wrathercraft, Congress of the Animals, and Fran). They deal with Frank, an anthropomorphic character straight out of a '30s cartoon, who lives in a surrealistic world called The Unifactor along with a few other reoccurring characters. It's almost impossible to describe these comics with words, they just have to be experienced; iIn fact, there are no words in a Frank comic: it's all images, and while the storytelling is clear to one reading it's hard to summarize afterwards. I can only say that they deal with strange Cronenbergian transformations, spiritual visions, horrible violence, and occasional acts of kindness.

This new book, Frank in the 3rd Dimension, features 27 3D drawings (plus ones on the front and back cover) that show some scenes taken or inspired by events in the comics and others that are totally original and it's amazing. 3D artist Charles Bernard took Woodring's drawings and created 3D images that not only have an incredible variety of depth (extreme and subtle), but the objects often have volume. I've never seen anything like that in 3D before. I've kept coming back to this book in the last few days and my appreciation for it only grows.