My CBR Shame

This was a mini-series back when mini-series were 'special'. It is by Ann Nocenti and somebody who can't draw. It is about the Dazzler (i.e. the beauty) and CAN YOU GUESS WHO 'THE BEAST' IS? Oh. You can. This level of subtlety is sustained throughout the comic - Dazzler is lured into the more decadent side of the Hollywood Idyll, this entails her drinking some drugged champagne and becoming Evil while an Evil Guy goes heh heh.

The best bit of the comic is a section featuring Dr Doom in his 'art room' where he goes to remind himself that man is indeed capable of beauty! The art in the art room is all atrocious (NB this is not intentional as far as I can tell), Dr Doom especially likes a statue of a man taming a horse which he got from the back of Reader's Digest.

(Especially the art, from what I remember; that dour, unpleasant art during one of those times at Marvel when anything unpleasant looking was therefore Serious.)

New ongoing Marvel series starring her-out-of-X-Men-with-the-firework-hands, you know, the one who Claremont brought in when Kitty Pryde had turned legal gone to another comic. As is apparently typical for Marvels nowadays this features very little action and lots of talking, this is because comics are apparently meant to be like TV shows, or because comics writers want to be TV writers or, well, I don't know why but it doesn't make for particularly interesting reading. Jubilee moves to a new high school and makes friends, things proceed EXACTLY as you'd expect. The dialogue is good, for what that's worth (little in my book, reading comics should not be like reading plays) - but the art is nice, there are a couple of funny moments, it makes Jubilee likeable for the first time ever (just as well if they're giving her a solo series) and I will admit that despite myself I'm interested in why her aunt is building a sniper rifle. Took five minutes to read, not bad.

The art isn't unpleasant exactly, at least not in that sub-Sienkiewicz way I think you mean. It's just kind of rubbish, like somebody actually trying to imitate Al Milgrom.

If you too feel a tremor of unease when you hear the dread words "saggy, baggy elephant" then you also read this series when young - in fairness I remembered this as being one of the better Claremont stories, and in fairness - it is! It has solid characterisation, a couple of credible moral dilemmas, a good take on Dr Doom (him again!!), too much Franklin but oh well. On the re-read the main thing I noticed is how incredibly flimsy the MacGuffin is, i.e. when Reed is confronted with 'his diary' which directly contradicts his memory of events why does he - OR ANYBODY!! - not say 'yes it's probably forged, let's use our amazing technology to see eh?' rather than 'OMG WHAT IF IT IS TEH TRUTH'. But that didn't spoil a good yarn for me when I was 13 and it doesn't spoil one now. The script is High Claremont - words by the kilo - the art I can't remember much about except it was surprising how many panels have me that whack of teenage recognition.

I can clearly picture most of the panels featuring Franklin talking to phase-state Kitty Pryde in that containment chamber, and the way she began to dissipate. (Art by Jon Bogandove & Terry Austin.) (Stop me before I trivialize again.)

However, I don't remember anything re: a "saggy, baggy elephant", unless it was something involving Kitty & Franklin...?

Tom, are you taking requests? Because your exhumation of the FF/X-Men series brings to mind another team-up mini, X-Men/Avengers, which (from my recollection) was also solid but totally went off the rails "REWRITE!" style in the 4th issue.

I am so mad at you for reminding me of the saggy, baggy elephant.

You know, we could always trade files back and forth, too, especially those of us with Gmail and/or high speed connections (somewhere I have a CD with the best of the stuff I got from the newsgroups).

I haven't had much luck with .cbr files on K*zaa, but I haven't had much luck with K*zaa in general the past few months.

I've always thought ILX should set up its own WASTE network.

MY GOD IT LIVES

(3 stars) Wow, December 11, 2002
A Kid's Review

When i was a baby my mom use to read this to me its about a elephant who trys to get rid of his bags and sags

I imagine there might be bittorrent clients out there that allow you to search through the client itself instead of through a browser, but I don't know of any.

I had a pile of .cbr files on my hard drive, including Grant's 'New Adventures Of H1tl3r', but I couldn't find them the other night. Must look harder tonight.

Avoid the others though, as without the John Paul Leon art, much of the appeal evaporates.

Jordan I use CDisplay to view the files: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay

(I'm using it to get the Opus strip, which isn't carried in any local paper here.)

(That's the easiest way to do it, isn't it? No one would be using their bandwidth without meaning to, since it's webmail...)

Oh that I have lived to see the day that Marvel puts out stories like this. Plenty happens in UFF#1 but there is no conflict at all (Reed gets his head flushed down the toilet but recovers nicely), nothing except getting Reed from A to B in the most wish-fulfilling style possible. This is my first encounter with Bendis (though I don't know if his style was modified here) and it's pretty annoying, all the cod-naturalism grates, but it does make for a slick read that doesn't talk down to you. Cute enough to make me want to steal the next few issues too. But do I prefer the old-school storytelling Marvel? LET'S SEE.....!

My God time has been unkind to this. Squadron Supreme used to be - entirely seriously - held up on some comics newsgroups as Marvel's equivalent of Watchmen. The first issue takes place AFTER some huge story which happened in some other title (God knows where, they don't tell you) and proceeds to its set-up as directly and bludgeoningly as possible, with the help of various giant captions. Said set-up of course is "superheroes try to create utopia but instead become FASCISTS". Its power is somewhat dimmed by the fact that the same superheroes had just started a world war and also by the fact that like the Krays they only hurt their own - the entire 12-issue series is just a series of fights with 'ethical difference' replacing 'misunderstanding' as the pretext. Godawful.

Also includes spidey discussion.

Download a t0rr3nt client (I use Azureus, but others use utorrent or BitComet). Azureus has a really good help wiki, you might need to open a port to get it to work as quickly as you might want and using the recommended settings re: number of active t0rr3nts etc.

Step 2

Visit a t0rr3nt host site. ZCult FM is still held to be the best, no? To register you need to validate your email address by replying to a message and posting in the Introduce Yourself thread. That's as complicated as it is.

Step 3

Find teh t0rr3nt you want. Download the t0rr3nt file, which is tiny. Your client does all the complicated stuff from there on, all you need to do is nominate the save folder.

Aldo, thanks for infoes.

which is the current page of an Indonesian site where people seem to get everything off DC++ and then upload it to most file-sharing sites known to man. Worth a look.

uh, new site for M@rv3ls anyone? Hit me by userprofilemail.

It's down at the moment, but pretty much everything usually turns up at
http://rapidsearch.yi.org/?

just type cbr into the search box

Yeah, that's what I've been using lately, but like you say, it's down right now.

It's now back.

I use www.h33t.com (actual site address, not google-proofed)

There's a small but pretty committed bunch of uploaders there, a lot of the fallout of Demonoid ended up there, including the guys who are seeding the Marvel & DC chronologies and of course the weekly DCP.

Also it's free membership and they have a good, healthy attitiude towards seeding/leeching.

If anyone would like to trade, mail me.

Do I have the patience to get Pep Comics #1-65, one file at a time?

I would, or at least for the issues (1-17?) with The Comet in them.

Urgh I have spent the last fortnight catching up on four months comics. My findings are that comics suck, or they're briefly good until Gale Simone stops writing them suddenly.

Just moved 4 GB of unread things that seemed like great ideas at the time onto DVD so I can forget about them entirely.

So what CBR programme do my fellow Mac users rely on? I'm having real problems with Jomic, it corrupts somehow and unistalls itself every time I shut down. I tried Comical for a bit, but that was even worse, prone to crashing mid-comic.

I use Simple Comic.

http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/

I ponied up for ComicBookLover. Can't remember a crash or any problems whatsoever. There is a trial version that puts a little logo in the corner while you're trying it out.

Thanks fellas. So far so good with Simple Comic.

I use ComicBookLover too. It's like iTunes for comics. Totally worth it.

Simple Comic is great!

Thirding ComicBookLover

Simple Comic is great!

Yeah, I like it so well I actually gave the guy a donation for his donationware, which I'm not the best about doing.

So, uh, why the hell was Bl@ck P@nther 6 skipped last week?!

revive

I can't remember if DCM has ever been mentioned on ILC.

http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.com/

oh cool.

I may have mentioned it before and totally forgotten about it. When I tried to register just now, I found out I'd already registered with that email address a couple of years ago.

I know I've seen it before but somehow didn't bookmark it.

Infinity Trousers

Don't know wtf I was thinking, but I acquired 3 gigs of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos scans.

i wouldn't mind!

One very low-priority goal I've had is to collect every Marvel from FF#1 until Shooter took over as Ed-in-Chief... but most of these are so bad. Even the early Kirby ones. I probably won't keep them.

Yeah, Sgt. Fury is surprisingly good. Among the better '60s Marvel stuff.

I have achieved your low-priority goal electronically and am very nearly there with physical reprints of same. Speaking of Shooter, though, one of my many shameful CBR acquisitions is the complete output of Defiant Comics. Top that.

I couldn't find the thread where somebody told the board about L!br@ry G3n3sis, so this will do -- I just discovered a new (to me) site called Re@d A11 C0mics.

http://readallcomics.com/

Thanks, I read the first three issues of The Blue Flame and some Justice League Europe. I felt dirty but good

The site makes it much easier for me to Just Fucking Read The Comic rather than store the file on my computer and put off reading it forever

TY WmC - I went looking for old letter columns in issues of Marvel's The Champions (for 'research' purposes obv) but the scans I checked on that site were all from later printings with recolouring, no ads, bullpen bulletin etc. Fine if you just need to read the story - but I like all the surrounding matter as much as the strips themselves (which always look better shot directly from the comics, imho)

I know this isn't the thread for such things but the omnibi (at least the ones I've bought) have been pretty good lately about including such ancillary material of late. No non-house ads, obvs, but everything else.

i am continuing my shameful daily metadata entry for my 150k+ megaarchive, which is a terrible OCD project i've been doing on and off for years dependent on my stress levels... more when i'm anxiety ridden. 3/4 of the way through inputting 7 or 8 meticulously managed bits of archiving info per file, for about 1M handtyped details! Oh boy, this is useless! Cheaper than medication likely.

is any of this data that could also be usefully added to the GCD, if you want to feel like your labor has a communal benefit?

or vice versa, any way of 'leveraging' that data to save yourself some work?

i am using a horribly outdated reader unfortunately and i would need a tech savvy person's work to help me figure this out. I'm on Ehon. Anybody wanna hold my hand?

Marvel Unlimited needs you forks

dang, readallcomics dot com seems to be having problems — I was going to read some Skywald crap from the early 70s