Rolling Comics 2025

Kicking this off with my read-in-2024 list. Have you got any good reads from last year? What are you looking forward to next year? Comics: are they not just for kids anymore? Smash that bookmark thread button.

* for particular faves

Piscou: Les Misérables & Hamlet, Giovan Battista
Lucky Luke: Les Indomptés, Blutch
Best Of 2000AD, Vol.a4, VA
Chainsaw Man, Vol.12-15, Tatsuki Fujimoto
Silly Synmphonies, Vol.2, Todd Osborne, Al Taliaferro et al
River's Edge, Kyoko Okazaki
Mobilis, Juni Ba
Lapin #24, VA
A Favorable Wind On Full Sails, Arantochika
Peepee Poopoo #8008S, Caroline Cash
Black Phoenix, Vol.2, Rich Tommaso
One Hundred Tales, Osamu Tezuka
Fiends Of The Eastern Front, Gerry Finlay-Davies et al
Thieves, Lucy Barton
Santos Sisters #4, Greg & Fake, Graham Swift, et al
Dragon Ball 1-3, Akira Toriyama
Best Of 2000AD, Vol.5, VA
Old Caves, Tyler Landry
The 13th Floor, John Wagner, Alan Grant, José Ortiz et al
Fantastic Four Taschen Edition, Vol.1, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee et al
Açoriante Aguda E Outras Maleitas, Luís Cardoso
Michel Valliant: Macao, Benéteam, Gratm, Lapiére
Transformers, Vol.1, Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spieer et al
My Name Is Shingo, Vol.1-2, Kazou Umezz
Best Of 2000AD, Vol.6, VA
Self Esteem & The End Of The World, Luke Healy
Okinawa, Susumu Higa *
Robohunter, John Wagner, Ian Gibson, et al
Batman/Dylan Dog, Recchioni, Cavenago et al *
Cinder & Ashe, Gerry Conway, José Luís Garcia Lopez et al
Ana, António Jorges Gonçalves, Nuno Artur Silva et al
Spider Man: India, Shukla, Gyadu et al
The Steel Claw, Ken Bulmer, Jesús Blasco et al
The Rose Of Versailles, Vol.1, Riyoko Ikeda *
A Guest In The House, Emil Carrol
Hobtown Mystery Stories, Vol.1, Bertin, Forbes et al
Iris: A Novel For Viewers, Van Banda, Tijong-Khing *
Dynamite Diva, Jasper Jubenvill *
Black Phoenix: Lewton & Associates, Rich Tommaso *
Spirou: La Memóire Du Futur, Guerrive, Abilan, Schwarz, Doucet *
Sonic In Waifu World, Jake Machen
Igagauri, Fukui *
Sonic The Comic, issues 1 to 21, VA

Read very little this year except Monica by Clowes (incredible) and whatever Brubaker put out (increasingly mundane). How’s the new Spirou team?

The art is 100% the kind of midcentury modern stuff I crave from the series. It's quite self-consciously in dialogue with the serie's past in a way that might feel a little pandering, but otoh it is a legacy title, so. This latest volume gets very explicit in trapping Spirou in a fake late 50's and the way they find out of it is through throwing a wilder and wilder party, so you get a pantheon of midcentury BD icons dancing to Daft Punk, which is surely worth price of admission.

It's also clearly no longer aimed at kids as there's a fantasy sequence where Fantasio and the Comte die in rather a grizzly way!

Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, Sugiura Shigeru - Out on NYRC. Kind of a middle point between regular genre entertainment and the pop art deconstruction I expected it to be. Frequently escapes the Japanese period piece setting to include yokai monsters, western settings and pop culture icons (Jean Paul Belmondo has a cameo), but these flights of fancy are explained in universe as ninja mind tricks summoned by Shigeru. The characters also often quote old Japanese pop songs, which the translator has seen fit to replace with western pop tracks. This irks me, but: would I laugh in recognition at the Japanese songs? No. So I'm more invested in gathering ephemera than in enjoying the reading experience, I guess.

The Marvel Art Of The Brothers Hildebrandt

This might be the first new Marvel thing I've bought in 15 years or so, the main attraction was the trading card art which I loved as a kid. A lot of the artists I loved back then don't hold up that well, but even now after looking at hundreds of great painters I still think the brothers had an amazing sense of light and color, and now I notice their paintings also tended to look very hot, so you could feel all the fire and energy blasts.

For the 1994 Marvel Masterpieces trading card series, Greg was tasked with creating 158 paintings in six months, on top of his daily strip and sunday strip work on Terry And The Pirates!!! Originally he was going to do it all himself (and he said he could have done it too) but he asked Tim to help him, they hadn't been collaborators in a decade. There's a few duds and I was kind of dismayed that a lot of the paintings looked better at trading card size, some of the details look a little too rough at this size with better scanners. But most of them look great, it's a staggering that they could do this in six months.

A fifth of the characters are probably left behind in that era, I barely know a lot these and I was a big Marvel fan in the late 90s. Incredibly, Greg and Tim hadn't been reading superhero comics since the early 50s, so they weren't very familiar with even some of the more popular characters, so they had to do all that research too (their agent helped and I imagine Marvel gave them lots of material). Some of the characters have never looked better.

One of the main features of the book is that a lot of the paintings are sat next to the rough sketches and the photos of all the bodybuilders who modeled for them, it's really great seeing all this, especially the guy who was the model for most of the male characters. I wish the interview with Greg hadn't been chopped up between the pictures, it would have read much better separately. There's several trading cards that they don't have the original art for, so scans of the cards are there; I would have liked to see the original art for the Mister Sinister & Goblin Queen card, but it can't be helped. I think this book was supposed to be their complete Marvel art but there's a few pieces missing like a Silver Surfer & Thanos by Tim, a Spiderman 2099 cover and maybe more? There's some careless mistakes like the last painting being obviously a small fraction of the size it was supposed to be, and some of the characters are not named.

There's a full X-Men 2099 comic, the story isn't that interesting but it's printed with the correct page order for the first time. I don't know the characters well but I like how different they looked from the regular X-Men.

A lot of the later paintings are very uneven. There's some surprisingly bland advertising and theme park art. In the case of the theme park art, lots of changes were requested by the art directors, so that probably didn't help. Greg's mural is weirdly anonymous in style (aside from Psylocke, he obviously loves her), maybe he was uncomfortable working at that size. And the compositions of the later pieces are a lot less dynamic. It's not like an obvious decline in skill, there's just something missing in some of them.

I was surprised that even at age 80, Greg was thrilled to still be doing Marvel and Star Wars art, he even loves all the Marvel films and tv shows. I don't think he ever designed many of his own heroes and villains, he mostly did pinup girls for himself.

This should be reprinted with some corrections but there also hasn't been enough Hildebrandt books for decades, they need a huge retrospective book.

That looks very interesting, hadn't heard of them before.

I think their most famous work is a Star Wars poster, but they pop up in loads of places.

The Hildebrandts were always a bit too Thomas Kinkade with wizards for my tastes but their 'art of' book and Tolkien calendars were as ubiquitous as Frazetta and Boris collections back in the day.

https://www.muddycolors.com/2025/01/1994-marvel-masterpieces/
This isn't all the cards but has most of them, I particularly like the Morbius and Blackout, and this is my favorite Rogue
https://www.spiderwebart.com/images/art/111829a.jpg

I knew an artist called Goblinko and he hated the Hildebrandts and compared the Peter Jackson films negatively to them, as if their art was too polite for even Tolkien. But I think they're awesome, those cards have all the excitement you'd hope for in a superhero story (even though I still sit awkwardly with the genre).

Greg's Phantom Of The Opera and Hel art was pretty great too
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/60/71/ad/6071ad04720ef9e710977d89ed4baea1.jpg
https://www.spiderwebart.com/images/art/102147.jpg
https://www.germanicmythology.com/works/images6/Hildebrandt6.jpg

Also: isn't Hendrick Goltzius the Xtreme superhero artist of his time?
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/343586/731548/main-image
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/340036/771665/main-image

Any Phil Winslade admirers here? I realize I missed a few things by him I might like. There's also highly specific eras of Steven Butler, Steve Lightle and Steve Epting I quite like and wonder if it's worth seeking out some back issues.

I know I used to look over checklists and I never remember anything about Winslade drawing Wonder Woman Amazonia.

There's so little Lightle in general that you might have everything from any highly specific era already.

Diamond file for bankruptcy.

lol that DC gave Diamond a monopoly and killed every other distributor by signing an exclusive deal, then 25 years later may have caused the death of the entire direct market by switching their exclusive to a retailer

I forgot all about Steve Lightle. I had to look him up because the name was familiar; he did those great Classic X-Men covers. Did he have a regular comic that was good or was he mainly a cover guy?

A spotty run as nominal main penciller on the early baxter format Legion of Super-Heroes (12 issues across two years from ‘84, but he stayed on covers another couple yrs — all good stuff), then the first five of the Kupperberg Doom Patrol (‘87, on newsprint), then mostly pinups and covers.

Classic X-Men also had those John Bolton bonus comics that were pretty good.

The very definition of a Who's Who artist I feel.

The Lightle stuff I was interested in was Daredevil + Wolverine + Typhoid Mary stories in Marvel Comics Presents, it's all in Daredevil: Typhoid's Kiss apparently, so I just bought that.

Don’t really think of Sabbath’s Mob Rules cover by Greg Hildebrant as like a Kincade portrait.

https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/0/229/92095-138809-century.jpg
I like how it looks like Century's superpower is lgbt pride, another image from the 1994 card set

https://bsky.app/profile/dialhforhagai.bsky.social/post/3lgicodrp7s2b
Dino Battaglia in english

more pictures
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/epicentercomics/dino-battaglias-inspector-coke-trilogy-graphic-novels

Les Petits Hommes, Seron - Picked up the first L'Integral volume of this series due to the recommendation of the youtube channel earl grey (whom I do recommend; he's not super articulate about his tastes but he does keep up with bande dessinee, US mainstream comics and indie stuff, which is impressive...less big on manga but lord knows there's no shortage of sources for that). It's...interesting. Feels very much like an also-ran for that era of BD but the series did make it to like 40 volumes so it must've gotten pretty big.

The story is that a mysterious meteor comes in contact with people in a small Belgian town and shrinks them. Since no cure seems apparent, the tiny folks just decide to fuck off and build their own civilization in a field near a military base. This being a kid friendly series from the 60's there is no big moping about around this development, ppl adapt to it pretty quickly, but there is also a hippieish side to it all - the little men end up reacting negatively when the possibility of being brought back to actual size is presented, much preferring their new society over their previous lives, and the antagonists are the military or police trying to uncover their mystery. There's also a charming gag where they keep saying "when I was big" in the way you'd say "when I was small". Things only really start getting stakes during the last story, where they have to leave their safe haven and travel to a cave undetected - I'm guessing that's when the series really started going.

Artwise...the ancilliary material mentions Seron was heavily influenced by Franquin, but tbh for me it crosses the line into rip-off. I mean look at the protagonist of Petits Hommes:

http://www.dupuis.com/v5/img/visuels_resume/petitshommesint.jpg

And then look at Franquin's Gaston Lagaffe:

http://www.dupuis.com/images_blog/images_entete/gaston.jpg

I dunno, prob wouldn't bother me at all if I was reading someone doing company work for Marvel or DC, but within the more auteurist world of bande dessinee...

It's pretty uncanny!

Is Franquin alone in having multiple "tribute" artists mimicking different eras? Chaland does 50s Franquin and Seron does the late 60s version - although it reminds me of the Fournier books too. (It seems like Tome & Janry are the only sui generis Spirou creators after Franquin.)

Related but unrelated - the English versions of the Spirou/Lucky Luke/Dupuis books have been a real monkey's paw. They finally arrived and the translations totally suck.

DO NOT GOOGLE FOURNIER WITHOUT ADDING "BANDE DESSINEE".

I'm guessing there must be Hergé tribute guys at least? But I've never encountered one.

Bummer on those Lucky Luke/Spirou translations...I've resigned myself to just buying the originals when I'm in France. It is perhaps the most space consuming kind of comic culture tho, just having the Intégrales of the biggest classics would take up quite a few shelves.

IMO the sheer volume of books was part of the appeal - I remember, as a kid, reading the catalogue pages at the back of Dupuis books, and getting excited about *how much* there was to read. And then on holiday my parents would just leave me in the BD section of a hypermarche for two hours, quite content

Also lol I obviously had to google Fournier by itself

And yeah, it'll probably take me less time to learn French properly than wait for a better translation

I don't think those Cinebook translations are all bad - certainly the Blake and Mortimer translations are an improvement on the previous English language editions, and I've found the Lucky Luke, Valerian, Bluecoats, Clifton volumes I've sampled to be readable enough. I agree that the Franquin translations are more problematic, starting with that awful Gomer Goof name for Gaston, but I suspect Franquin is just very tricky to translate (the Gaston strips that Fantagraphics translated many years ago (in one of their humour anthologies iirc) were similarly clunky.

I'm guessing there must be Hergé tribute guys at least?

I'm sorry Daniel, probably missing the point here - but there are LOADS of Herge tribute artists, or at least people working in that clear line style, starting from past Herge associates like Edgar P Jacobs and Bob De Moor, through to ppl like Joost Swarte and even Chaland:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/Freddylombard.jpg

Just last year, a Scottish comics artist did a pretty nice Herge homage called Tara Togs – The Silence of Unicorns:

https://comicon.com/2024/02/13/comicscene-to-launch-tintin-inspired-original-graphic-novel-tara-togs-the-silence-of-unicorns/

Oh no, I am aware of Hergé's tremendous influence and the ligne claire thing and etc. But looking at that Chaland cover you posted I don't think anyone could actually confuse it with Hergé's style and Jacobs, too, I think has a an identifiable style. It's the difference between influence and shameless imitation, which is what I see in Seron - though that sounds quite cruel when I do think he's very good at it.

I have Bad Completist Tendencies and I’m stuck in a Creepie/Eerie/EC Comics reprint pit. Those things are a river that will never stop.

Recently read Stone Fruit by Lee Lai which I enjoyed. Family drama with a trans main character and lovely artwork, especially in scenes when two parental figures play with a child and they transform into wild things.

I keep trying to like Megahex and it repulses me. Then i’m back at the comic book shop picking it up again, every time, thumbing through it, wrinkling my nose and putting it back. It’s like sardines. I really, really want to like sardines but it’s not happening. But maybe next time.

Yeah I got off the Megahex train a while ago. Think that series peaked during the covid years.

EC Comics seem tailor made to best of anthologies but I certainly understand the completist impulse.

I thought there was a million french artists who drew like Seron?

xpost to Daniel

Well to totally imitate the studio style of the postwar Tintin albums - all that 'authentic' research and background detail - would require time and resources simply unavailable to most other comics creators.

Unrelatedly, I've been enjoying the 'Treasury' facsimile editions that DC have been bringing out - large format reproductions of reproductions of old Superman, Batman etc comics etc, or original material like the Neal Adams Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic.

Oh, and EC reprints are so complicated! The old black and white Ross Cochrane box sets are beautiful - nice large size, shot in almost all cases directly from the original artwork, with exemplary 'liner notes' and colour cover repros. But - nowadays some of them are pretty expensive to pick up (if you can find them) and nice as they are, they don't actually 'feel' exactly like an EC comic from the 1950s - you need the interior colour. That's why those black and white Fanta single artist anthologies are also slightly lacking - again, good repro, nice design, and you can't really deny a whole book of Kurtzman or Krigstein or Wood or Davis at their best, but they're a bit too small, and part of the appeal of EC is getting that different mixture of styles and sensibilities within a single comic. Now the Dark Horse volumes have colour, and in paperback are pretty good value for money - six issues of an EC title for under $20. But - the computer colouring they've used is really, really REALLY horrible and inappropriate. So, to my mind, until now the best EC reprints are those colour comics that Cochrane brought out in the 80s/90s - pretty faithful repro, decent colour approximation and in most cases still pretty easy to pick up. They did some 'annuals' that stitched together five repro issues of eg Vault of Horror that are especially sweet.

And now we have the first in a large format high price reprint series from Taschen, starting with Weird Science. Here they've gone with tweaked original colour which is possibly the best solution for 70 year old comics. Here's a link:
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/comics/08179/ec-comics-library-weird-science-vol-1/

It's sort of blasphemy but there was some thicker EC reprints in the eighties or nineties (not the annuals) that had slightly shitty printing and it was one of those cases where the ratty quality added something to it for me. Of course I'd prefer the best reproduction possible but I like a cheap and nasty look sometimes. I have a Barbara Steele 60s Italian gothic (The Ghost?) that looks 1000 years old somehow but still very watchable and I really like that.

I feel the same way about certain Lucio Fulci films I first saw on VHS - they’re just not the same all cleaned up for blu ray, something - an eerie effect - has been lost.

Robert Eggers was saying something similar about the best quality versions of Murnau's Nosferatu, you can see the flaws in the makeup now but in worse prints the film looked more ancient and frightening.
But there's lots of poor quality versions of films I find unwatchable and annoying.

Funnily enough this review of a recente EC collection dovetails with this discussion:

Looking at the black and white version of “Foul Play” and comparing it to the original coloring; the impact, the meaning of the text, is changed entirely. “Foul Play” as originally published, is a gruesome little story about revenge. The lurid coloring is as much a part of it as the crackling sound on old Blues records or the grain in classic noir films – there is only so much you can clean them up before something becomes "lost."5 The effect of the art in Foul Play and Other Stories is completely different – what the eye perceives is not the story but the lines. Whatever mood created by the colors, and Davis and Co. knew their stories would be printed with coloring, is discarded. Therefore, we have two “Foul Play” tales – one is a horror story, and the other a celebration of the artist.

https://www.tcj.com/reviews/foul-play-and-other-stories/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=foul-play-and-other-stories

the effect is certainly different but the stories still work great, I keep colored versions and black & white versions

it's a worthy discussion, for sure. i personally lean towards crappier, more authentic colors vs. linework only, but on that TCJ article they use some good examples that could go either way

went back to the Midwest to see family and dug around in the basement, found the box with my old comics

(1) why was I so into West Coast Avengers

(2) this is better than I remember (this is the only issue I had) - makes me want to track down the rest https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Tailgunner_Jo_Vol_1_4

(3) found a FF with Reed and Sue being tortured by Mephisto in hell until Franklin vaporized him, that was fun

I can get the appeal of West Coast Avengers. It wasn't good but it was a deep pull, the superhero comic equivalent of finding your favourite rare old r&b single.

Last night I started Habibi by Craig "Blankets" Thompson. I've been putting it off because it's so big but it reads really quickly and the art is gorgeous. It'll take me a few more nights to finish but it's very impressive so far.

It made me wonder what he's been up to and it looks like he has a new thing coming out soon, collecting a serialized memoir about ginseng farming? I'll probably pre-order it.

I remember a Muslim friend being very not impressed with Habibi, don't remember the actual points of contention tho.

Re: Steve Lightle. Marvel Comics Presents 175 (the last issue) is more sought after than I would have thought (people selling it for stupid money on ebay). I used to get bundles of that series in back issue bins.

Deep dive look at the new Taschen Weird Science, with comparison to previous reprints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWm4fS7Vhqw

Just discovered James Spratt. He done an unfinished adaptation of A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's extremely NSFW. There's a short appreciation by Dan Nadel linked, makes total sense he'd like it, Spratt is very outsiderish. There's also links to Spratt's sculptures. A shame his personal site is falling to pieces on the wayback machine.
https://www.erbzine.com/spratt/
For some reason if you get to page 23a, it stops and you need to come back to the main page and see the last pages.

Started reading Promethea last night. It’s kind of a slog? Like a cross between Miracle Man and Wonder Woman with stiff dialogue. The art is beautiful, I hung out and went to some concerts with the inker Mick Gray when I lived in San Jose. Super nice guy and he was very proud of how it turned out. I’m going to work at it some more but I don’t know if I’ll make it to the end.

Yeah I didn't have enough interest in magic as a practice to get into that one.

Over forty years, which I note specifically because

Now you've read the new beginning for Britain's premier super-action hero, Dez Skinn takes you back almost thirty years, to a time of 6d comics, and the creation of the mightiest man in the universe.

I’m comfortable with “you had to be there”! I’m not a fan of the art, either in Warrior or recoloured or whatever the hell the reissue did. But it’s mostly the writing - thinking of the Kid Miracleman massacre at the end - it’s sort of overblown and mean in ways that are usually just under the surface with Moore, but it seemed a little crude. Like Killing Joke Moore, but even moreso.

I mean I guess it upset me, so it worked? But also, yuck.

Finished the doorstop Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan Question omnibus - and this was volume one of two! O'Neil takes Ditko's objectivist hero and turns him into a buddhist. Very proto-Vertigo vibes, I think he literally reads Watchmen early on? As is often the case with O'Neil, it's overambitious, trying hard to fit existentialist philosophy and Eastern religion into this city-on-fire crime series, leading to some insanely stylized dialogues. But O'Neil had his heart in the right place, and so I find it endearing as often as I find it lame. Cowan's art is nice - this is prob just Old Man Shouting At Cloud but boy do I prefer the sort of page layouts that were popular at that time.

Also read issue #13 of Black Phoenix, nothing to do with Jean Grey but rather an indie series where Rich Tommaso makes these beautiful tributes to old timey comics, funny animals and such. This issue has a story about filming a movie with actual ghosts that I feel must be a reference to William Castle's 13 Ghosts.

Always thought it was a shame that O'Neil didn't resurrect his old Charlton pseudonym - Sergius O'Shaughnessy! - for The Question.

Does the Question omnibus have the letters pages? It was interesting because it had a book club and it seemed like O'Neil was trying to encourage a more intellectual dialogue with the fans. I think I read several issues.

It does, but tucked away at the end. I skipped that because I always have, but the book club thing sounds interesting.

Boy Wonder, Juni Ba - Juni Ba truly has an instantly recognisable visual style; his bio mentions watching Cartoon Network a lot, and you can def see the Samurai Jack in the angular characters he draws, along with influences from bande dessinée and Senegalese traditional art. Writingwise he is a softie, and so this sometimes feels a bit too pedagogical, although I enjoyed the effort to bring some humanity to Ras Al Ghoul and the mutual aid ending was genuinely moving. Just a major talent this guy, glad DC gave him the Black Label opportunity.

When I was in (maybe) my early teens I had an issue of Fantastic Four Unlimited with what I thought was possibly the ugliest comic art I had ever seen, it was 90s era Herb Trimpe when he was updating himself for the times. A friend showed me what he considered the worst comic art was and it was 70s or 80s Herb Trimpe. Since then I had learned that he had a decent following (Erik Larsen and Benjamin Marra are big fans) and his 90s art was considered his nadir; someone said he was deliberately parodying the era.

https://www.alejandrobruzzese.com/
https://bsky.app/profile/bruzzeseonline.bsky.social/post/3lq3c6gdxxs2q
I've been fascinated by Alejandro Bruzzese recently and he's a big fan of extreme 90s Trimpe.

Then I seen this video (skip to 17:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5-MR_Uv3_k
and it seems like Trimpe thinks his early 90s work is some of his best (I can't find the ComicBookResources interview quoted) and now I want to look at it again. I can't say I love the look of it but it's funky looking in a way I really want to investigate.

Early Trimpe on Hulk, inking himself, is a pretty dece mash-up of Jacks Kirby and Davis. Then there’s a long spell where Herb is inked by John Severin, which is p great - you get Sev’s intricate slightly dominating pen ink style over Trimpe’s more dynamic ‘Marvel’ storytelling.

After that it is diminishing returns but as late as Shogun Warriors he’s still turning out efficient if uninspired pages. But we all gotta eat.

I'm always very curious about what commercial artists (including many fine artists across the centuries who probably didn't want to be painting what they made their living on) would do if they were left to their own choices entirely. Seems like Trimpe was really into drawing flying vehicles. I've looked around for what John Buscema really wanted to do, there's times where he said he liked Conan and times where he said he hated doing Conan, Evanier speculated his ideal genre was probably swashbuckling adventure.

I was recently seeing what Steven Butler was up to because I liked his mid-90s Spiderman and he's doing something along the lines of his Sonic The Hedgehog comics on Patreon. I have no idea if this is a passion project or if it's just what most of his fans will pay for.

It's kind of fascinating that an artist who mostly just loved funny animal comics would end up being so into flying vehicles. I guess he had to find something in the genre to enjoy.

Another look back: Used to love Mark Bagley like a lot of kids, then I discovered he was quite polarizing and by the time of the Ultimate years I lost interest, but I still think around 96-98 that he had some real qualities. Some of the Thunderbolts looked pretty cool.

https://www.comics.org/series/116933/covers/
I thought it was a shame that Creeps never lasted more than 4 issues, but the quick cancellation probably surprised no-one because it was super gross and I was pretty scandalized by the adverts in 2001, but I don't think it taken long for me to come around to it. It was definitely a passion project for Mishkin and Mandrake, it had one black and white anthology appearance much later and I guess there's been nothing since then.

They were like a homeless version of X-Men with zero glamour.

I think you can get the series on digital, probably without the black and white story.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010801194618/http://www.creepscomic.com/Creeps/creeps.html

Time Waits - Co written by Chip Zdarsky and David Brothers, a comics critic I've been following for ages (I think I found him through ComicsAlliance?); they're also co hosts of the Mangasplaining podcast with a few others. Really gripping story in this, includes a take on time travel that I don't think I've seen before: once you travel time passes at both ends, meaning if you travelled back to the middle ages and spent five minutes there, you would return to the present five minutes after you left. This is a neat trick to add stakes and tension by eliminating the deus ex machina of "well you could just travel back". Outside of that it's like a superior DTV film, tropey but it knows exactly what it's doing. If you're at all in the market for smart action trash I highly recommend it.

The Farewell Song of Marcel Labrume - Always in the market to discover a new titan of European comics so I picked this up. Lovely art, but...I was already somewhat rolling my eyes at the clear Casablanca rip (world weary cynic gets converted into idealist by glamorous woman in exotic locale - in this case, Lebanon), but then it also turned out to be about helping smuggle zionist activists across state lines, with Arab characters mostly mercenary and/or hostile and...I'm not even saying the book gets anything in particular wrong, I sure as shit don't know enough about Lebanon during WWII to say. But I do know that an Italian writer is not whom I'd seek out to educate myself on these matters, and in the current historical moment I can't really dig into it as just a fun adventure story divorced from its historical context. Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few years.

Just reading Brink Vol 5, it's still excellent, even with a different (for now) lead character.

Anyone read this?

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781524898779?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

^
How Comics Are Made:
A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page
Glenn Fleishman

Haven't seen a copy for sale yet, definitely a good idea for a bk - a history of comics is also a history of mechanical reproduction.

Yeah, last time my comics group met there was a lot of talk about the scourge of redrawing/recolouring and then others going "ok but have you tried reading really early 2000AD in the original issues, the ink quality is nigh unreadable" and I was just sat there thinking "well this is a whole aspect of the medium I've not paid enough attention to".

Meanwhile, comics criterion closet? This was fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww3n_9Z1KZE

Anyone read this?

Hardback (03 Jul 2025)

It's ok you can tell me if you've read the softcover too

Your assessments of comics magazines outside of Comic Book Artist, Comic Book Marketplace, Alter Ego, Wizard and Comics Journal? Those were the ones I mostly read but I never read a single issue of Comic Buyer's Guide, don't know what it was like. Tony Isabella is Jenny Blake Isabella now.

I had a few issues of Comics International, the criticism could be as blunt as Comics Journal but as far as I can remember it was mostly focused on more mainstream comics?

Comics Buyer's Guide had lots of listings from dealers, and - when it was edited by Don and Maggie Thompson - a heavy bias against alternative and underground comics. There was definitely bad blood between CBG and Fantagraphics (I think Alan Light, the former owner of CBG, tried to sue them at one point?)

Comics International was definitely a UK answer to CBG, and yes, very focused on mainstream comics. I don't remember a lot of insight in their capsule reviews. The standard of critical writing was a bit higher in English comics fanzines like BEM and Fantasy Advertiser, especially when the latter was edited by a certain Martin Skidmore.

Of the American comics fanzines, Squa Tront reigns supreme, although obviously you have to be interested in EC to get anything from it. The longest serving Squa Tront editor, John Benson, also produced a couple of issues of a more general comics magazine called Panels that is well worth tracking down. I also rate Comic Art, The Imp, and (primarily for its Golden Age info and scholarship) Roy Thomas's Alter Ego, with the usual caveats...

Oh and I haven't seen a copy yet, but John Kelly's new Dummy zine looks very promising:

https://www.dummyzine.com

Bubbles has a lot of good ppl writing for it iirc.

Thanks, not seen Bubbles before, looks good.

I'm guessing that a lot of the most interesting writing about comics these days comes out of academic institutions and conferences that completely bypasses the local comic shop. A yearly Best Essays About Comics would be welcome.

I subscribed to TBG in 1977 (under Alan Light's ownership, it was The Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom; changed to the Comics Buyer's Guide when Light sold it to Krause in 1983 and the Thompsons took over). There must have been an ad for it in the Overstreet Guide, which I started buying in 1976. I know there were columns other than the Thompsons' "Beautiful Balloons,", cat yronwode's "Fit to Print" and Terry Beatty's "Sideways," but they've faded in memory now. None of the editorial content took a really critical tack like the Comics Journal did. I started getting it in 1980 iirc, and the hostilities between TBG and TCJ were pretty fascinating. I generally approved of Groth's "standards must be higher!" but thought there was room for everyone and thought the hostilities were pretty misguided. I was still in my teens and couldn't articulate anything about my own aesthetic, so I just sat back and absorbed as much as I could. (not much has changed in that regard)

CBG wasn't widely distributed in the UK, but the owner of the comic shop I worked in in the 1980s used to subscribe, and the arrival of CBG was always something of a treat, pre-internet - it was almost certainly where we would first hear of industry deaths, new titles, new companies etc, so it did have value as a news source.

Yeah, CBG expanded its news coverage enormously when Don & Maggie took over — Don's background was in actual journalism, I believe at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. TBG was an adzine with just enough editorial content to get newspaper mailing rates. Any actual industry news I got from it was oblique and gossipy.

I got bunch of those 90s Trimpe comics, was it worth it? I guess. The way he draws the male version of Phoenix is fascinatingly bulky and weird.

Also got the Pulp Library compilation of Mystery In Space, color reproduction as bad as expected, but how did I get to this age not knowing that Virgil Finlay had drawn comics? It doesn't look great but it has a few authors better known for their science fiction writing outside comics.

Been looking out for more artists who really go for the statuesque bodies even if they're quite crudely drawn, can't help but feel a lot of artists lost their way when they became more sober and realistic, even if they became more accomplished in a lot of ways. Looking forward to getting more dumbass Continuity Comics.

Sale
https://blog.fantagraphics.com/the-fantagraphics-weve-been-robbed-sale/

^^ court hearing barring nu-Diamond from continuing to sell, or old Diamond to liquidate, unpaid stock was pushed back six weeks

Ashita no Joe: Fighting For Tomorrow, Vol.1 - Big deluxe edition of the classic manga that had fans conduct real life funerals when one of the characters died. It's good stuff even if it didn't entirely wow me: I think the most interesting aspect is how much of an anti-hero Joe is, just unfailingly rude and scornful to everyone around him. Great to have this essential piece of manga history in english edition at least, might cop vol.2.

Finally finished Promethea. It's good! First book is definitely the slowest and I don't know that it ever really overcomes the weight of the text, but it's a beautiful book. I have the Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic sitting on my shelf, staring at me. I need a break before I tackle it.

Reread Lost Girls for the first time since it came out. I remember being pretty disappointed in it at the time but this time, maybe without the weight of expectation, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The art is lovely, soft and feminine. Whatever problems I had with it before have evaporated.

I love that Moore's and Gebbie's big porn opus ends up being mostly about the sadness of WWI.

There's multiple layers in Lost Girls and I think it falls in between a lot of our expectations or conceptions. It is pornographic, in the sense that it is made to lead the viewer sexually and it honors porn convention by having all of the characters fuck in every combination, regardless of gender, age, relation, or species. If an animal shows up in this book, that animal is going to be licking pussy or getting a handjob at some point. This is what we call "Chekhov's horse." It makes recommending the book difficult, the necessary trigger warnings would likely put most people right off.

It's hard to speak to this because our response to pornography is personal, but while Lost Girls is pornographic it is from such a different perspective than I'm used to. When I first read the book, at the time of publication, that seemed like a failure. This is supposed to be porn but it didn't get me off. Maybe that's not the goal of this porn? Maybe it is, but it's just not MY porn? Maybe it throws me because the artwork is decidedly feminine and doesn't cater to the male view in the way that I'm accustomed to? And what does that say about porn and what does it say about me? I remember thinking that the artwork just wasn't very good and now it's gorgeous, constantly referencing other works and styles but always being true to itself, an orgasm of color.

In Promethea and Swamp Thing Moore gives us a soft apocalypse; the world seemingly ends but then keeps moving on. Lost Girls gives us another one of these, the end of the world as a paradigm shift. A fork in the road that changes everything. We could have had all the lusciousness of creation but man repeatedly chooses to shoot his dick off rather than open himself. To a gun, everything looks like a target.

Well, I think it evades porn convention somewhat as you describe it because it does also feature men fucking men, which the vast majority of porn, aimed at straight men, goes to great lenghts to avoid showing.

But yeah the thing is whether it "works" or not as porn I think comes down to such random and personal factors that it doesn't really merit thinking too hard about; I thinik there's def value to it beyond that function, and that's easier to talk about I guess.

If there’s one kink in Moore and Gebbie’s approach, it is honoring the conventions of porn which are inherently masculine, for men and made by men. So when Lost Girls alludes to Tijuana Bibles, Moore is adding a historical layer as part of this larger scaffolding around his central story. But the gender balance is already tipped heavily masculine by everything surrounding Tijuana bibles. I don’t know that there’s a way around this problem, or if it is a problem. I guess it’s hard to talk about what porn can be without talking about what it is.

I got Keizo Miyanishi's Lyrica (in French) and Esther (in Italian), there doesn't seem to be much overlap between them if any, I have no idea if an english collection is in the works (Fantagraphics would be a good fit), I think these came out at roughly the same time. Lyrica has earlier work that is closer to conventional manga, and Esther has more new stuff. His newer works are like nothing else, extremely meticulous. He's always drawing extremely detailed genitals. I recall someone a couple of years ago saying he tells the most idiosyncratic stories and I'd like to know what they're about. If you only get one book, get Esther. I want to hear his music too, I think he's in a fairly prominent underground band.

https://www.ibs.it/images/9788897571766_0_200_0_75.jpg

So…. my 15 year old daughter was at our desktop computer and she says “why is this in incognito mode?” and I sprint over to close whatever horrible things some horrid person had forgotten to close earlier in the day. Thankfully, the window is on an empty tab and the only inappropriate thing that can be seen is video titles on two other tabs that are jumbled keywords that I don’t remember. “Anal” was definitely in there. As i’m closing the window kid asks what I had been doing.

“I’m reading an Alan Moore graphic novel called Lost Girls and it’s extremely inappropriate, more than I was expecting. It talked about a sex act that I wasn’t sure was real or not so I looked it up.”

“Oh! Was it real?”

“Yes, I should have known, but yes.” and we laughed about it.

Thank you, Alan Moore.

Kind of surprised just how little story pages Claudio Castellini has done for american comics, most of his DC and Marvel work was covers, even in the 90s when I didn't think Marvel had any cover art specialists. There's an english edition of Nathan Never: Special Agent Alpha, might get that soon. Dan Jurgens is fine but Castellini really should have drawn DC vs Marvel by himself.

https://www.tcj.com/horror-it-girl-gretchen-felker-martin-on-dc-pulling-red-hood-after-charlie-kirk-comments-i-had-no-regrets/

pretty funny for DC Comics to draw the line against "promoting hostility or violence"

Yeah, they are cowards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SH5GdCumyQ
I've got a pretty good grip on this era but for some reason I just never was able to consistently identify Michael Golden's style (despite being so influential), a lot of his stuff looks like different artists to me.

I like the look of that Crystar comic.

https://comicvine.gamespot.com/starblazer/4050-32432/
Don't believe I've ever seen or heard of this series

There's two recent-ish reprint books