check out When the Crow Flies if you like this
― Nhex, Sunday, 9 June 2019 06:10 (five years ago) link
Saw the couple pages where Manhattan is explaining how the timeline is shifting and I have to say that is some pretty potent DC nurd catnip. It seems an extension of the old 'hypertime' that Morrison and Mark Waid were putting out there.
I still say Johns it would have been a heck of a lot cooler if the Flash that showed up in Final Crisis and in the New 52 would have been the Barry Allen from old Earth 1. One reporters opinion.
― earlnash, Sunday, 9 June 2019 14:41 (five years ago) link
That Morrison GL/GA issue is an absolute stinker.
― Elitist cheese photos (aldo), Sunday, 9 June 2019 16:22 (five years ago) link
Slightly off-topic but I recently became curious about DC and Marvel novels. Always wondered how well superheroes might work in this medium (same with martial arts, I wonder how much it relies on the visual and could you novelize a Fred Astaire film successfully?) and given that one of my bigger frustrations with the comics is the usually very rushed art, it might have some advantages.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?33519http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?30173
There are some authors with good reputations here but I'd imagine much of this was hack work.Batman anthologies contain Asimov, Silverberg, Sheckley, Tepper and Landsdale. Wonder Woman anthology has Pamela Sargent. Steve Rasnic Tem is in Batman and Silver Surfer anthologies. Lansdale also wrote a Batman novel about a man who transforms into a car.
I think Joe Pulver said he'd like to do a Doctor Strange story and I was intrigued but as usual I'd prefer something in the milieu that isn't tied down to an existing IP, even ripoffs of Doctor Strange, Aquaman, Namor, Green Lantern and Swamp Thing might be preferable but how do you ripoff Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer without completely ripping them off?
Anyone read the comics of Nnedi Okorafor, Saladin Ahmed and Cassandra Khaw? It's difficult for me to understand why a prose writer would want to enter into comics where you don't get to choose the artists and probably done on tight deadlines.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 June 2019 17:14 (five years ago) link
Saladin Ahmed's runs on Exiles and Black Bolt were fun, to me.Why would a writer do comics? Because, they're comics. Comics are great. ;)
― Nhex, Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:03 (five years ago) link
But giving away the control of the visuals must be hard. I mentioned recently on another thread, Rachel Pollack (mostly a prose writer) was horrified by the art she was saddled with on New Gods (and it was particularly bad).
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:24 (five years ago) link
Ahmed’s taste in comics, as inferred from millions of retweets of him I saw before I even knew he was a writer, suggests that he has almost no interest in visual narrative & thus would be a fine Marvel writer.
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:53 (five years ago) link
Also, I wonder whether it was James O'Barr or an editor who chosen Somtow and Attanasio to write Crow novels, because that sounds pretty cool.
After reading a bit more about online fanfiction, is there any famously good fanfiction or does it all just get lost in the shuffle?
Other comics writers better known for prose works: Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, Lucius Shepard, Nancy A Collins, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Hand, Harlan Ellison, Genevieve Valentine, Catherynne M Valente, Margaret Atwood, Joe R Lansdale, John Shirley, Neal Stephenson. Any good comics in there?
Did Clive Barker write any of his own comics?
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 June 2019 19:43 (five years ago) link
It's been a long time since I read Nancy A Collins' run on Swamp Thing but i think it was ok.
China Mieville's run on Dial H is great though.
― Elitist cheese photos (aldo), Sunday, 9 June 2019 19:49 (five years ago) link
Related: an anthology of prose by comics writershttp://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?284814
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 June 2019 20:09 (five years ago) link
Kazumasa Hirai (8 Man, Wolf Guy, Spiderman) seems to be well known for both comics and books. Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D, Demon/Wicked City) done some original comics.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 9 June 2019 20:15 (five years ago) link
i should try rereading lethem's omega the unknown: y or n?
lansdale has done good comic work!
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Sunday, 9 June 2019 20:24 (five years ago) link
Collins's Swamp Thing run is pretty much abysmal imo.Caitlin Kiernan's Vertigo work (she wrote the bulk of The Dreaming with a couple miniseries digressions) otoh is pretty good.
― Fiat Earther (Old Lunch), Sunday, 9 June 2019 22:34 (five years ago) link
Barker wrote a lot/all(?) of the most recent run of Hellraiser comics from several years back.
― Fiat Earther (Old Lunch), Sunday, 9 June 2019 22:35 (five years ago) link
I need to read more Lansdale comics, because that first Jonah Hex mini he did with Tim Truman is badass.
Loved Lethem's Omega mini-series, even though I'm not sure what he was going for with that final issue.
― Duane Barry, Monday, 10 June 2019 23:22 (five years ago) link
I like lethem’s omega way more than the one novel of his I’ve read (as she climbed across the table)
Weirdly the comic it most resembles is city of crime, the lapham batman book (but for spoilery reasons)
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 10 June 2019 23:23 (five years ago) link
Ha x-post, the spoilery reason was to do with that last issue
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 10 June 2019 23:24 (five years ago) link
all the lansdale jonah hex stuff is really fun imo
― mh, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 03:24 (five years ago) link
Even if we put aside Gertler's actively repellent design preferences, I can't imagine that standing up to https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2037136.Words_Without_Pictures
Lethem's Omega is good, possibly aided by having a cartoonist draw it.
All of those have other writers credited beside him, so he may not have been doing any hands-on comics writing, even if he worked on it month-to-month.
Other comics writers better known for prose works: ...Harlan Ellison... Any good comics in there?
The entirety of Ellison's credited scripts are:
- A Batman: Black & White backup 8-pager in 2001- Three pages of X-Men: Heroes For Hope in 1985(one, two, three - Stephen King and "George Martin" had 3pp apiece in this, too)- And a Batman story that was commissioned in 1971, for which Ellison turned in a title page and fourteen blank pages in a manila envelope in 1981. (Fifteen pages saw print in 1986, eight years after the editor had left the comic.)
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Tuesday, 11 June 2019 05:29 (five years ago) link
Ellison was a joke
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 05:46 (five years ago) link
Didn't Ellison also write an issue of Hulk? (Possibly in collaboration with someone else?) I remember seeing his name in the credits in one of those microverse stories of the seventies.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 06:52 (five years ago) link
Oh yeah, it was The Incredible Hulk #140, though apparently Marvel only commissioned the plot from him, and Roy Thomas did the scripting.https://static0.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/u3-20-094-3.jpg
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 06:56 (five years ago) link
A friend of mine began a review of (useless Dark Horse anthology comic) 'Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor' with "Not, as you might have imagined, Harlan Ellison contemplating his ideal hallway..." - and Ellison actually rang up the editor to complain about the review. Amazing that he didn't have better things to do.
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 08:20 (five years ago) link
That reminds me of a friend explaining that there was a band on his college campus called Godot. Their fliers said something like, "Have you been waiting for Godot? Wait no longer!"
pretty sure they came up with the band name just to make that joke
― mh, Tuesday, 11 June 2019 14:48 (five years ago) link
Harlan Ellison was a pain™ in the hole®.
― And according to some websites, there were “sexcapades.” (James Morrison), Wednesday, 12 June 2019 01:08 (five years ago) link
here's two old men bitchinghttp://www.tcj.com/the-harlan-ellison-interview/
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Wednesday, 12 June 2019 02:32 (five years ago) link
one of them is 24; both of them had much more curmudgeonliness to discover after that
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Wednesday, 12 June 2019 03:28 (five years ago) link
Thatsthejoke.jpeg
― i believe that (s)he is sincere (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 12 June 2019 12:41 (five years ago) link
I kno but other ppl scrolling might not have
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Wednesday, 12 June 2019 21:30 (five years ago) link
He seems to have a sole writing credit on Phoenix Without Ashes, Chocolate Alphabet, some Heavy Metal issues and maybe some other stuff, but my curiosity wont go that far.
Forgot to mention Richard K Morgan, done a bunch of Black Widow and Crysis.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 14 June 2019 19:09 (five years ago) link
He seems to have a sole writing credit on Phoenix Without Ashes
An TV pilot teleplay from 1973 that he Smithee-ed when it was produced as a series, which was adapted into a novel by someone else in 1975, which in turn was adapted into a comic by a different someone else in 2011. The teleplay has been in and out of print since possibly February 1975.
Chocolate Alphabet
26 one-page prose short stories that were written in public on a typewriter in a bookshop window & hung up to be read by passers-by as Ellison continued to write, printed in typeset in The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science-Fiction in 1976, and collected in Ellison's Strange Wine in 1978, before being printed in hand-lettering by Larry Todd on Last Gasp.
some Heavy Metal issues
"How's the Night Life on Cissalda?" - prose story printed in the paperback anthology Chrysalis in 1977, reprinted in Heavy Metal November 1977, collected in Ellison's Shatterday in 1980, Datlow's Alien Sex in 1990, etc.
"Croatoan" - prose story printed in The Magazine Of F&SF in 1975, collected in Ellison's Strange Wine in 1978, reprinted in Heavy Metal September 1978, analysed in King's Danse Macabre 1981.
"Flop Sweat" - prose story written in six hours to be read on the radio in 1977, printed in Heavy Metal March 1979, collected in Ellison's Shatterday in 1980.
"Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R." - prose story printed in F&SF January 1969, collected in Ellison's The Beast Who Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World in June '69, reprinted with new introduction in Heavy Metal December 1979.
"Fear Not Your Enemies" - two-page essay about John Lennon's shooting getting more press than other famous Americans shot that day and gun control maybe being something the US should look into, published in HM March 1981, collected in Ellison's Sleepless Nights In The Procrustean Bed 1984.
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Friday, 14 June 2019 21:43 (five years ago) link
but really, if you think about it, each letter of the alphabet is a pictogram, which we are reading in sequence, so words are basically comics etc etc
― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Friday, 14 June 2019 21:51 (five years ago) link
I always thought Jerome Charyn's collaborations with Boucq were considered the gold standard as far as prose writers scripting comics go (never read 'em myself).
Ikki Kajiwara, writer of iconic late 60s manga like Ashita no Joe and Star of the Giants, wrote the novel that Takashi Miike's film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A was based on.
I think Tom DeHaven has written a few comics, I remember liking a short he did for RAW drawn by Richard Sala.
Tom Veitch has written novels and poetry. His collaboration with Greg Irons in the 70s produced some good, if gruesome, comix.
― gjoon1, Friday, 21 June 2019 21:52 (five years ago) link
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-closing-down-vertigo-imprints-1220225They started Ink and Zoom less than six months ago!
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, 21 June 2019 22:10 (five years ago) link
Don't fret, DC being DC, they'll probably reinstate the lines they cancelled after another six months have elapsed. Or at least some equally clueless + dipshitty variation thereof.
― a fan of the Beetles, the Beach boys, the Monkeys (Old Lunch), Saturday, 22 June 2019 00:32 (five years ago) link
Ha, didn't realize this was a thing but of course it is: http://www.hasdcdonesomethingstupidtoday.com/
― a fan of the Beetles, the Beach boys, the Monkeys (Old Lunch), Saturday, 22 June 2019 00:34 (five years ago) link
Just read Petit (Ogre Gods Vol. 1) and wow. Is there some kind of weird French comics tradition of stories about incredibly scary giants
― Nhex, Monday, 24 June 2019 06:30 (five years ago) link
And so now, less than a week after shuttering Vertigo and streamlining their sub-imprints into three age-delimited lines, DC announces that Joe Hill will be running his own Vertigo-esque sub-imprint under the mature readers Black Label (a sub-sub-imprint, if you will). This is definitely the work of people with a clear vision and a firm hand on the wheel.
― Sly Bradbury's The Marion Cobretti-cles (Old Lunch), Wednesday, 26 June 2019 22:13 (five years ago) link
it's impressive! DC did similar shit back in 1975 if i recall correctly.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Wednesday, 26 June 2019 23:26 (five years ago) link
it's honestly a shame because i liked the Black Label imprint idea - out of continuity, well known creators, often magazine format limited series
― Nhex, Thursday, 27 June 2019 19:41 (five years ago) link
Oh, Black Label will apparently still exist. It will just be housing the forthcoming Hill House line (as well as whatever lines will in time presumably be nested within that line). They're simplifying things, do u see, I cannot possibly fathom what part of this organizational structure doesn't make sense to u.
― I Ate Those Food (Old Lunch), Thursday, 27 June 2019 19:49 (five years ago) link
https://s3.amazonaws.com/comicgeeks/comics/covers/large-4202640.jpg
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 28 June 2019 13:14 (five years ago) link
IN ORIGINAL LOOSE-LEAF FORMAT!
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, 28 June 2019 17:36 (five years ago) link
I'd been wondering about the origins of the loose-leaf format.
― I Ate Those Food (Old Lunch), Friday, 28 June 2019 17:39 (five years ago) link
Recommended investment: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/laab-the-art-newspaper-powered-by-the-radical-imagination
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 8 July 2019 18:37 (five years ago) link
The English language edition of Maggy Garrisson from SelfMadeHero is the best hunk of comics I've read in quite some time, and the best European homage to Engerland since Jacobs' The Yellow M:
https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/maggy-garrisson
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 9 July 2019 12:45 (five years ago) link
wow, Lewis Trondheim!
― Screamin' Jay Gould (The Yellow Kid), Tuesday, 9 July 2019 12:49 (five years ago) link
yeah, i fucks with anything he or anyone from l'association does
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, 9 July 2019 19:27 (five years ago) link
From a while back, but I re-read Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #31 - the one-shot story where Nancy and Doreen get stuck in hypertime - gotta be one of the best single issues I've read of any comic in years. Such a wonderful series.
― Nhex, Sunday, 14 July 2019 18:17 (five years ago) link
Yeah, Squirrel Girl is great. Still haven't totally understood if it's getting cancelled or if the creative team just decided they were done and Marvel went "well, no point in carrying on the title then". If it's the latter that's a bit of a paradigm shift for a Big Two title, no?
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 14 July 2019 21:20 (five years ago) link