The Comic Book Thread

[lhb412]

[mr.negativity]

From THR:


[quote]“Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score,â€

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

[MekaGojira3k]

Hellboy died?

Methinks I've been spoiled.
Sounds neat though.

[lhb412]

I just finished reading my copy of Fantagraphics' Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man, collecting the first 6 issues of Scrooge from the early '50s. If you've heard me yakking (quacking?) about how great these old Carl Barks duck comic are and are the slightest bit interested in them then this is the best place to start.

[MekaGojira3k]

[king_ghidorah]

[MekaGojira3k]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

Agh - the comics in my pull list have piled up and I have a stack of unread ones from the last month or so. A new Baltimore series is out and I've not read the previous one. I have 7 issues of Baltimore to read! How do you folks who have far more than my average of 10 (or less) issues a month keep up with this?!

Anyway, I just made a cool find at a local used bookstore: The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, an enormous collection of American comic strips from the first half of the 20th century that was released in '77 and is pretty much the direct ancestor of those classy archive editions of comics (books and strips) that we still enjoy today. I've been interested in checking out more newspaper strips for a while, but the costs are usually pretty steep for something you don't know if you'll like. This collection provides a great sampling of a whole lot of major strips, including entire storylines of Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google, Moon Mullins, Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs (107 strips!), Mickey Mouse (102 strips!), and Popeye (32 full-page Sunday strips!). Little Nemo and Krazy Kat, two of the most artistically gorgeous strips ever, get 7 and 11 full-page Sundays, respectively.

The only bad thing? Only one full-page Sunday for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Apparently they were both already well-known and apparently reprinted back then and the makers of the book didn't think they needed attention called to them the way the other, some almost forgotten, strips did.

PS- Drawn and Quarterly is about to release Shigeru Mizuki's manga in English. Has this stuff ever been available in the US?

[The Giant Pacific Octopus]

[MekaGojira3k]

[klen7]

'The Score' is next on my stack to read, but I just finished reading "Enormous" and was surprised there wasn't more chatter on the forum about it since its related to giant monsters. I thought it was decent and i would buy an issue 2 if it were released.. much more satisfying than "Dinosaurs vs Aliens" in the story department, but not perfect.

http://www.theenormouscomic.com/

[The Giant Pacific Octopus]

[klen7]

[klen7]

[lhb412]

[MekaGojira3k]

Picked up Issues 1-12 of IDW's Ongoing Star Trek series that takes place in the new timeline.

Genuinely enjoyed issues 1 and 2. It's cool to see new takes on old concepts here. Plus, I'm anxious to try and discern the clues or hints at Star Trek Into Darkness's plot.

[The Real McCoy]

[MekaGojira3k]

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

^I might have to get the 'Pixar-esque' Captain Marvel issue.

Recently did one of those times were I buy but don't read my comics for about two months and then spend a week reading them all. That's always fun. I'm so glad the Adventure Time and Popeye comics have turned out so good. I was looking forward to them both and I could easily have gotten burned, but they're going from strength to strength. The Mignolaverse books are probably the best they've ever been. Each new BPRD series knocks my socks off and Mignola and Co. have finally cracked that perfect pulp adventure code and are making wonderful Lobster Johnson stories. Really enjoying the Nexus stories serialized in Dark Horse Presents, like Finder, this is one of those series that's been around for forever that I didn't know about 'till DHP. It's like John Carter of Mars meets '60s Space Ghost... there's almost an Adventure Time vibe to it, in that it's this very classical hero (in this case a superhero seemingly ripped out of either a silver age book or a '60s Hanna-Barbera show) and he's in this crazy, over-the-top world that takes every genre trope imaginable, combines them in strange ways, and turns the whole thing up to 11. Soon, DH will release the first omnibus volume of the original series. I'm lookin' forward to reading the rest of this (apparently long and epic) series.

I just finished re-reading one of my all-time favorite Usagi tpbs: Duel at Kitanoji.



Usagi is one of the strongest sustained comic narratives that's every been done, but from around the mid to late '90s to the early '00s was a particularly rich period, when it seemed like every issue was a stone-cold classic. Kitanoji wraps up a subplot that had been ticking away quietly in the book for a few years (though, in the chronology of the book the entire storyline takes place over the course exactly one year). To put it simply: Usagi meets a samurai named Koji who dedicated his life entirely to swordsmanship after being severely humbled by a losing duel with Usagi's sensei Katsuichi some years before. Usagi duels Koji, is promptly defeated, and Koji tells Usagi to tell Katsuichi that he's finally ready for a rematch, taking place exactly one year later at Kitanoji temple. Some of the best Usagi stories take place directly after this event, and through them all we're always reminded that the players are gradually making their way towards Kitanoji.

The finale to this story is one of my favorite examples of just what a great storyteller Stan Sakai is. We learn to really like the character of Koji, and it seems that had and Katsuichi would easily be good friends given different circumstances. We see just how much Usagi has grown as a character since the somewhat simplistic, idealized samurai of the comic's beginning. It's the moment where it's made implicit that Usagi has developed a much more '21st century' morality within the setting of feudal Japan. There was every chance in the world for Sakai to wuss out and deliver a finale that doesn't go through with a duel where one of the characters is killed, but he doesn't. It's heartbreaking, we're left to ponder just what it all means, and the series is stronger for it.

[MekaGojira3k]

So these Mars Attacks one-shots are coming out, and some of them are bound to be hilarious:

[The Real McCoy]