Comics
Alan Moore Is Fucking Insane
Alan Moore’s recent interview with IGN is causing the usual kerfuffle & arguments, about which I frankly do not wish to comment… except… EXCEPT… for this one astonishing remark he made…
“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
This man is an absolute loon.
Where do I start?! Firstly, I agree 100% with this statement.
Beard Or No Beard?
So, for a while I have been pondering & developing a Sunday Comics idea. I have hit some snags & sometimes been busy on other stuff, but would like to put out a comics strip once a week and maybe make it rotating features—one week an SF strip, following week a humour strip, etc. And I’m probably inclined to make it a subscription model, using Patreon and/or similar. (I had a failed Patreon running for a while but killed it about four years ago.) The “fee” for access would have a pretty small baseline, BTW.
Interested in any feedback on this.
Furthermore (per the question in the title)…
Conan, drawn by someone much better than me… or you.
Underrated Artists I Love #1: Frank Robbins
The first in a series? Also, coming up: Overrated Artists I Hate! 🙂
Frank Robbins. He’s that Invaders guy. He’s that weird artist who drew rubber-limbed, contorted figures with insanely distorted, grimacing faces. Everything he drew looked bizarre & wrong, didn’t it? He wasn’t very good, was he?
No. He was GREAT! I mean, come on, get a load of this…
Cover of THE SHADOW #7 (DC Comics, 1974).
Hulk vs Boris Johnson
As this idiot is still in the news, somehow, I present an old strip pertaining to The Man With No Comb… which references the UK’s supremely annoying NLP three-sting “COVID” mantra (Hands! Face! Space!).
John Romita, RIP
Thought I’d give a quick mention to John, who passed away aged 93 on June 12th. His death is no tragedy—he had a very long life, well lived—but a sad loss nonetheless, especially as the Silver Age greats of comics are dwindling rapidly now.
John was, of course, the third best Spider-Man artist.
THUNDER Agents #7 (1966)
I’ve been reading & re-reading a lot of THUNDER Agents tales of late. By way of hopefully starting a trend of longer reviews, this is my thoughts on the seventh issue…
Out of the first eight issues of THUNDER Agents, #7 definitely stands out as the best to me. Is it, perhaps, also the best issue of the entire 20-issue run? It must be in the running.
Marie Portrait 2021
LOL, as they say. This is my third try at this Marie Portrait concept, done last December… I think I’ll leave it at that now! Please! No fourth tries!!
(NOTE: Marie is one of my characters, late of Club Vamporama [RIP], and, forthcomingly, Adventures of M.)
Previous attempts below, from 2019 and 2011 respectively…
Neal Adams
Really, really sad to hear about the passing of Neal Adams. I think most of us can agree that he’s a highly significant figure in comics history.
I thought Neal was sure to be around for another 10-15 years, and producing decent art more or less till the day he died. The latter is virtually true—he was working on commissions as recently as ten days ago—but sadly, he had been fighting the effects of a sepsis infection for the past 11 months. That’s a tough battle at any age.
His later work is probably the stuff that will come to mind for some folks, and that’s… well, a small part of the story!! Neal’s art, for the past 30-35 years, has been generally solid and consistent, sometimes quite beautiful, if seldom a match for his peak stuff from the late ’60s through mid-’70s. But, it might be his increasingly eccentric writing that’s gained the most attention in recent years.
Batman: Odyssey, from 2010-11, which ran for 13 issues over two mini-series, had a lot of people scratching their heads. The distinctive and occasionally stunning visuals were a given, but Neal’s writing—barely flirting with conventional structure or internal logic—made the series something of a cult item. His writing only got weirder and more esoteric later on!
