brings up the question of "readability" as it involves images. His stabs at copy, assisted or otherwise, tend to be unreadable but the images (and sound fx) alone tell more of the story than many superhero genre writers can.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, 18 September 2020 18:43 (four years ago) link
It's weird but on a drawing level I prefer his work in the 40s and 50s but on a design (costumes, settings) and composition level I think he peaked in the 70s.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 18 September 2020 18:46 (four years ago) link
Yeah I like him an imagemaker first and foremost, so fwiw I don’t think his work would’ve been better (perhaps the opposite!) if he’d only been paired with a good writer
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 18 September 2020 19:17 (four years ago) link
the less "other writer" there is, the more readable Kirby is. Simon & Kirby collaborating as a team: clear and coherent. Gerber writing something pitched exactly at Kirby's 1980s level of wackiness and rage at injustice: good stuff. Mark Evanier doing the odd tidy-up or copy-edit on Kirby's syntax: the balloons have the same spirit as the individual drawings and storytelling, just a great charge of the author's strengths. Stan trying to fill half the panel with entirely redundant enuniciations, or outright contradictions, of the action being powerfully depicted: gtfoh you jealous sad-sack.
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Friday, 18 September 2020 22:41 (four years ago) link
Yes, I think this thing of Kirby as imagemaker is all well and good and true to some extent, but ignores his own commitment to narrative storytelling throughout his career. Again, according to Evanier, Kirby was surprisingly indifferent about inkers, because he felt it was almost impossible for any kind of professional to fuck up the panel-to-panel continuity - the story - established by his very complete pencils. Kirby only swapped Mike Royer for Vince Colletta as the Fourth World inker when he found out Colletta was showing the pages to people in the Marvel offices prior to printing - and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them. And when Stan Lee and John Romita and Roy Thomas and others instructed artists to 'follow' (ie copy) Kirby's work at Marvel, it was his especially dynamic way of telling a story that they wanted someone like John Buscema to imitate (it seems clear that Stan in particular favoured the more elegant, illustrative style of a Romita or Buscema while, ruefully or otherwise, knowing full well that no other Marvel artist could match either Kirby's inventiveness AND his ability to engage the reader and stir their emotions.)
― Ward Fowler, Saturday, 19 September 2020 01:59 (four years ago) link
Ward, the fact that you keep dropping knowledge that I only just learned from Scioli would seem to suggest that his book is fairly accurate + granular.
― Wessonality Crisis (Old Lunch), Saturday, 19 September 2020 02:05 (four years ago) link
xxp good summary, sic
― mh, Saturday, 19 September 2020 03:34 (four years ago) link
Didn't know this was coming outhttps://www.blackgate.com/2020/09/17/fantasia-2020-part-xvii-feels-good-man/
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 19 September 2020 19:10 (four years ago) link
I think it's already rentable VOD
― Nhex, Saturday, 19 September 2020 20:28 (four years ago) link
Yep, just finished its digital "run" via one of the shuttered arthouses here.
Furie and the director were on Marc Maron's WTF a few weeks ago, and Furie kept referring to the original Boys Club issues as "zines," RIP Alvin
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Saturday, 19 September 2020 20:43 (four years ago) link
i saw it; it was okay? not deeply revealing and sorta necessarily overstructured to force a redemptive arc on it. Furie seems like a tremendously sweet guy.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Saturday, 19 September 2020 20:51 (four years ago) link
Passmore is greathttps://hyperallergic.com/586973/sports-is-hell-ben-passmore-koyama
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 21 September 2020 15:37 (four years ago) link
one helluva title page
― Nhex, Monday, 21 September 2020 15:50 (four years ago) link
and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them
I saw a blog with a bunch of these compared to Kirby's pencils and the final product and it's shocking how much he just decided to not do
― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Monday, 21 September 2020 19:48 (four years ago) link
I'm curious about that notorious Colletta defender who was around several years ago. I often suspected he was a relation of Vince but I don't know if anything was found out.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Monday, 21 September 2020 20:02 (four years ago) link
I think Eddie Campbell and Walt Simonson have both defended Colletta's work on Thor - I think their main argument is that Colletta gave Thor a distinct feel that distinguished it from Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, Sgt Fury etc. My counter-argument is that while that's sort of true about the earliest issues of Thor that Colletta inked (he's quite good on things like fur textures), the quality soon dropped off and by the end of the run the finished results are just ugly and slapdash, a travesty, even putting aside the business of erasing pencils. When Bill Everett (beautifully) inks the last few issues of Thor drawn by Kirby, the difference is obvious, throwing into stark relief the inelegant heaviness of Colletta's brushwork and cross-hatching.
Colletta's 1950s work, mainly on romance comics, isn't too bad at all, and he was a surprisingly effective inker on Alex Toth on occasion. But I've just been reading an Essentials volume some of the 1970s Englehart-written Avengers, pencilled by George Tuska or George Pere and, inked by Colletta and they're REALLY painful to look at in black and white, without colour filling in some of the absence of detail. Really wretched stuff.
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 21 September 2020 20:18 (four years ago) link
Yeah I cannot get on board with any sort of vinnie colletta rehabilitation. A vandal.
― and i can almost smell your PG Tips (Jon not Jon), Monday, 21 September 2020 21:06 (four years ago) link
I liked what he did until I found out what he didn't do.
― (show hidden tics) (WmC), Monday, 21 September 2020 23:16 (four years ago) link
there’s a lot of emphasis on getting product out the door and I got the impression Colletta was fastthe bosses like that, and artists handing in stuff late tend to forgive some lapses in inking/coloring, from what I’ve heard
― mh, Monday, 21 September 2020 23:27 (four years ago) link
the bosses like that
allegedly C0l3tt4 got lots of his work despite the quality of the output because he was allegedly connected to various low-grade mob guys and would allegedly supply call-girls to alleged editors
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Monday, 21 September 2020 23:33 (four years ago) link
that might not hurt your career, either!
― mh, Monday, 21 September 2020 23:37 (four years ago) link
post Yeah, Colletta was definitely one of those go-to guys when a penciller was horribly late on a book. But again, when you compare his stuff to other last-minute deadline savers like Mike Esposito or Frank Giacoia, it's still just as ugly as fuck. Colletta was also apparently pretty canny when it came to playing office politics and the like, perhaps partly because he 'saved the day' so often for grateful editors - he was even DC's art director at one point in the 1970s (the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")
And according to Roy Thomas, Colletta was popular with the readers; the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer - perhaps because he 'dulled down' the wonderful manic contortions of pure, unadulterated Robbins.(Roy is also the source of the call-girls story, iirc - he said that Colletta once tried to get him to appear in 'compromising' photos with some 'models' that Colletta had escorted up to the Marvel offices.)
It's hard to know if the mob rumours are just Italian stereotyping or basically true - the definitive history of comics and organised crime still needs to be written. It is a fact that Charlton Comics had mob connections (and Colletta got a lot of work out of Charlton in the 1950s) - and the mafia certainly had an interest in magazine distribution.
― Ward Fowler, Monday, 21 September 2020 23:47 (four years ago) link
the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer
dunno what this is but I'm now imagining crime comics with car chases in, drawn by Robbins & Springer, and they look great
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Tuesday, 22 September 2020 00:40 (four years ago) link
The Invaders was Roy's first extended foray into retro-necro continuity - it was set during WW2 and featured the original Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Human Torch etc.
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/07eee32bc373a77c2e360818760b8ec0.jpg
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 22 September 2020 07:41 (four years ago) link
retro-necro continuity
lol
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Tuesday, 22 September 2020 10:36 (four years ago) link
(the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")
this is a fucking quality burn btw
― and i can almost smell your PG Tips (Jon not Jon), Tuesday, 22 September 2020 15:05 (four years ago) link
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, September 22, 2020 12:47 AM
I vaguely remember there being a book about this, or maybe it was just part of the book?
I can't confirm it but there was a story claiming that the first Batman + Superman teamup was done for the mafia.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 22 September 2020 19:20 (four years ago) link
explains a lot
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, 22 September 2020 21:19 (four years ago) link
Glad to find out that Neal Adams's expanding Earth/Philadelphia Experiment conspiracy theorist side hasn't made him a Q/COVID/MAGA psycho. (I would still give most of the money I have to not have to spend a day driving him around again.)
― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Wednesday, 23 September 2020 05:22 (four years ago) link
Lol. I can only imagine how crazy he is from his recent Batman work. A likeable sort of crazy, though.
― Nhex, Wednesday, 23 September 2020 12:01 (four years ago) link
Ann Friedman, Ira Glass, & Tim Heidecker are each hosting an Online Screening + Live Stream Q&A of the 2020 Sundance-Award winning doc Feels Good Man this weekend Sept 25-27th! Only 250 tickets available per showtime at https://t.co/JPwTdcqnUx pic.twitter.com/1F8YGdku9v— Floating World Comics (@floating_world) September 23, 2020
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Friday, 25 September 2020 03:38 (four years ago) link
"For the love of Asgard, keep your Oversword sheathed!"
Every so often Stan puts down a line that gives me a chuckle.
― earlnash, Saturday, 26 September 2020 20:21 (four years ago) link
i thought this was goodhttps://thenib.com/cryptozoology-conference/
Separately, Action Bronson has a song out called Golden Eye that includes the lyric "Twenty Kawasakis looking like wild horses on stampede / I look like a character that was drawn by Stan Lee" which is the oddest self-own
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, 1 October 2020 16:22 (four years ago) link
a presentation of comics that does not permit you to read any entire panel at a time is desperately incompetent imo
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Thursday, 1 October 2020 20:58 (four years ago) link
that doesn't? its your standard vertical scroll
― Nhex, Thursday, 1 October 2020 21:26 (four years ago) link
in both firefox and chrome, at full-size or ILX-reading-size browser expansion, it takes three browser "pages" to read each panel. the speech balloon or narration in the top of the panel is frequently talking about a part of the panel that literally cannot be read without scrolling or pig downing
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Thursday, 1 October 2020 21:40 (four years ago) link
i'd rather have blown up images that can be easily shrunk down in the browser than lower-res files
― Nhex, Thursday, 1 October 2020 21:58 (four years ago) link
if we're throwing that binary on it, sure, but that adds three clicks for viewing each panel to the three clicks it takes to progress to each panel
standing by this being an incompetent way of asking someone to read a sequence of drawings
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Thursday, 1 October 2020 22:09 (four years ago) link
rotate yr screen bruh
― mh, Friday, 2 October 2020 00:54 (four years ago) link
and what is this clicks, you gotta scroll the wheel
let's talk more about the formatting and not the actual comic please, this is fascinating
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, 2 October 2020 03:24 (four years ago) link
send us all $5,000 for a computer that has a rotating screen so we can read it, apparently, and we can talk about the comic
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Friday, 2 October 2020 06:05 (four years ago) link
My crappy Dell monitor, date of manufacture January 2004, can do it.
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 2 October 2020 07:23 (four years ago) link
I have not owned a desktop computer since 2002
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Friday, 2 October 2020 07:41 (four years ago) link
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything - a monitor is not a computer (except in the most general sense that, say, a Tamagotchi is)
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 2 October 2020 08:58 (four years ago) link
send everyone one of those setups where you plug an external keyboard and an external monitor (with a rotate function) into a laptop, with all the requisite cables, and a monitor stand thingy that sits over the laptop and behind the external keyboard, then, I guess? it's still an inconvenient way to read a comic whether you're shipping one box or four boxes of computer equipment to dozens of people around the planet in order for them to be able to read a whole panel at a time tbh!
― erratic wolf angular guitarist (sic), Friday, 2 October 2020 09:26 (four years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHGJEdjCoeU
― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 2 October 2020 10:07 (four years ago) link
looked fine on my phone, fwiw
― koogs, Friday, 2 October 2020 14:41 (four years ago) link
I was being kind of tongue in cheek, but the comic looked good on my phone and tablet. looks fine on my laptop if I change the scaling and they probably should set the scaling for computers so it fits better if they run a lot of comics!
to take ulysses' point and paraphrase
They tell me about families they're trying to start and real estate that they're trying to buy, and I tell them about comics on The Nib and what devices they display in while maintaining panel integrity -- one per screen. I'm posting about it on message boards. The exchanges left me feeling that the chickens I had set free when I was 23 were coming home to roost. I could have chosen to do anything I wanted, and this is what I chose to do.
loved the comic, especially the twists and turns and expressions as the narrator's stand-in reacts to the even-keeled scientific explorers as they explain their methodology and reject woo-woo claims and show more interest in big cats than the more esoteric examples. going out to listen to what you hope is weird stuff and finding a group of very methodical and, relatively boring, investigators. special guest appearance by Steve Bissette!
― mh, Friday, 2 October 2020 16:54 (four years ago) link
yeah, i liked that it went to some surprisingly personal places. somehow i did not know that bissette did gojira!https://www.jimkeefe.com/archives/5585
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, 2 October 2020 19:45 (four years ago) link