any COMIC BOOK collectors here?
Digger_Phelps_II
174 Posts
or used to collect?picked up a recent issue of wizard & was wondering wuts going on the world of comics....anybody else wanna get thiere geek on here? wut happened to image & valiant?
Comments
I still read comics quite a bit. I'm jonesing for All Star Superman in november. Seven Soldiers is kiiling it right now. The new Frank Miller Batman title might be cool...
Image is still around. Valiant might be revived soon...
h
damn... that was about the time I fell off as well...
Still got about 4 boxes of goodies... most of the first Image series... Todd McFarlane was my hero!
Never liked Liefield or Larsen... thought they were ripping of Mcfarlane's style (which blew me away since Amazing Spiderman #298 (remember that black spidey suit???)
Funny this thread came up. I haven't bought a comic book in probably 10 years and I was walking by Comic Relief on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley and immediately recognized Jim Lee's work on the new Batman and Robin comic book being written by Frank Miller. I picked it up.
Sad to say that it's actually pretty lame. I wasn't expecting another Dark Knight Returns but the pacing of the story was all wrong and the story uninteresting. Jim Lee's artwork was great though.
Wow, really? What the hell happened?
I was a comic junkie as a kid, but had to fall off in the mid 80's when the beats / hip hop addiction began to consume me.
Eric Larsen (who always came across as a dickhead to me in editor notes) now runs Image according to a clerk at Comic Relief. Last I heard Rob Liefeld got in some legal battle with Todd Mcfarlane but that was years ago. Back in the day everyone was biting McFarlane and Jim Lee. Then the dude that drew Gen13 came along and everyone started biting him but he was pretty much biting the entire Japanese comic look.
Marvel had a rep for not treating their talent with respect. Hell, even Stan Lee had to sue Marvel to get his cut of the Spiderman movie profits. In the early 90's their hottest talent fled to start their own label (Liefeld, McFarlane, Jim Lee, that guy that did Wetworks and the dude that did The Maxx).
Todd MacFarlane actually filed for bankruptcy as he named one of the villians in the comic book after some hockey player. The hockey player sued him for defamation and won. What a chump. Suing somebody because a fictional character in a comic book is a villian?!? What bullshit.
The Maxx MTV cartoon was the shit BTW!
tony twist was the villian/hockey player..i cant believe that guy won..millions too! i expect a "alex luthor" to sue dc now!..but THE MAXX was my sh*t...deep comic & cartoon..jim lee is the greatest comic book artist ever..had the most realistic looking stuff and has been the go-to guy since like 1990...i know that all the manga style artists started to rise and become in demand..wetworks was whilce portacio..maxx was sam kieth..and i remember dale keown that did hulk had some sick stuff...i remember when image formed i was like "best.company.ever." but then you could see the egos coming out...1 year inot the company and every book has a spinoff..and rediculous tacky mechandise....
the worst sh*t i just found out is that wolverine has a kid sister with claws in her hands & feet....disgusting.
..and where is my man gambit? i heard he and colosuss got killed?!! ....i know marvel was in bad financial shae a coupla years back and did all this stupid story line stuff like make 20 different x-men titles, 10 spidey's......
Respect the architect
jack Kirby is the GOAT
Jim Steranko and Neal Adams are in the top 5
PUKE!
You're fucking kidding me! Lame shit. Remember the Weapon X storyline in Marvel Comic Presents? I think that was actually late 80's. I forget the artists name but his shit was ill. He went on to make Archer & Armstrong for Valiant which was my shit too!
yeah...he also wrote the weapon x storyline....great covers...trying to remember his name
2nd is 181 that one is worth the most cause he's in the whole issue
182 is his 3rd appearance on the first few pages
Todd fucked up on that one, though, and got a little cocky, made the major mistake of freely admitting he used the dude's name on purpose - which is a big no no if you don't wanna get sued. I always thought Twist was a loser for filing the suit (since McFarlane was actually just a big hockey fan and basically riding dude's nuts), as well as a loser on the ice, but Todd really needed someone to tell him to shut up.
First of all--Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics by scott mccloud are great, basically a thesis type paper on comics done in comic form.
Alan Moore has done some great stuff--from swamp thing to watchmen, a deconstruction of the superhero genre. Animal Man by grant morrison is in the same vein, and the invisibles by grant morrison if ridiculous. And when you read it you realize how much of the movie "The Matrix" was ripped off from it.
Dark knight returns is pretty essential. Frank miller did another crazy series called "hard boiled' that has some good artwork.
I'd say the stories on the whole have gotten a lot better. They've pretty much always had good art in american comic books, but the stories have really improved (for the most part)
1. Todd McFarlane switching either inking duties or pencil AND inking duties to another artist. Todd's art is fantastic and his replacement just didn't cut it.
2. Quality of Savage Dragon artwork got worse and worse and worse. Just no detail in his artwork anymore.
3. Wild C.A.T.S. taking fffffforever to get issue #2 out. I think it took like 6 months for the second issue to come out. Well, in fact NOBODY at Image was able to stay on schedule.
4. The artist switching duties month. All the artists decided to take a crack at each others comics. Jim Lee did Savage Dragon and a few months later Erik Larsen decided he didn't like the work Jim Lee did and released the same issue with his artwork. Chump move!
5. Switching to glossy paper. The old paper was better than the standard stuff Marvel and DC were using at the time and the colors looked fantastic on it. The glossy paper just didn't mesh well with the coloring technology they were using at the time.
Man, I totally want to bust out my old comic books and read them again.
the new glossy paper is wut drove the prices up...and drove me away..and its unneccesary...who ever complained about the newspaper print?..yeah those image guys started putting out sh*t when they felt like it...all except for todd...i remember he passed off his artist duties cuz he was workimh on the spawn movies & his toy line,,,but the comic was still good...i wonder where that storyline is today....i remember one image title "the pitt" took like a year for issue #2 to drop...but the quality line at the time was valiant...and their "unity" storyline..
- spidey
Uncanny use of jpg'ery!!!
You love it. Admit it!
Wasn't there an Image/Valiant crossover? The only thing I remember about it was that it sucked.
true story.
DC is reviving Donna Troy(WONDER GIRL). Artwork by George Perez and Phil Jimenez. DONT SLEEP!!!!!
GREEN LANTERN is also revived(HAL JORDAN). DONT SLEEP!!!!
I did like G.I. Joe, which is odd for me since I was never someone who played with war toys, wasn't into war stuff, but in 1982 it was new to me, and it was the one comic that was higher priced than most (#1 for $1.50). I collected G.I. Joe for many years before I stopped (early 90's).
For some reason I liked She-Hulk, and I think it was because I like women painted in green. Go figure.
I also got into Excalibur, which I got into because I felt since everyone was about X-Men, X-Factor, X-this, X-that, I would start from the beginning with these guys. Who were the Canadian version of them? Yellow cover? Eh.
I liked a lot of the limited series, Black Panther was one of the first ones I collected.
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DC wise, again I got into "The Unknown Soldier", another war comic. It was a 12-issue limited series, and it was more about it being limited than me getting into whomever. I did like "The Killing Joke", one of the best from that era.
If I have to pick out an all time favorite comic, it would be the 4-issue limited series known as Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz. I knew of what Sienkiewicz did, with Daredevil primarily and I liked his lettering style, but this was very different. The story was very out there, which is what I liked about it, and every few pages the artwork would be very different. Sometimes very clear, other times very distorted, a few times out of the boxes, and every now and then you'd see texture or objects placed within the frames. When the storyline got ugly, so did the artwork and lettering. It reminded me a bit of Brazil (the Terry Gilliam film), where it was futuristic but with hints of the past. The ads in the back for the toaster came off as a cross between old style advertising and World War II propaganda (one and the same?) It was the first and only time I got geeked out over a comic.
I was also a fan of "The Adventures Of Ralph Snart" and Sergio Aragones' "Groo". The artwork and storyline in "Ginger Fox" on Comico were very good too.
It's my main man, Jeff Albertson.
Miller's Daredevil (160-240)
Kirby's Kamandi: last boy on earth (my fav. comic EVER)
Starlin's original Warlock stuff