Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past couple weeks.
I’m not at all sure what’s up with the X-Men continuity, but this is apparently set before the current status quo, but after Krakoa (yeah I know).
It’s yet another one of those “ooo Wolverine is all savage now, in the woods” story that I think must have been done a few hundred times before, but I guess the Marvel edict is “back to basics”.
It’s not horrible, but it seems like they’re also trying to create a more mythosey (that’s a word) mythos around the adamantium metal — probably making it sentient or something, and just I can’t.
I’ve only been reading these things for like half a decade…
The new development this time around is that Ben Snakepit is drawing things on a tablet. And amazingly enough, it works! There’s quite a few that move from drawing with a pencil to a tablet and lose whatever they had going for them, but this is fine. The only problem is that the lettering is way too small for me — I couldn’t really read the first year or so of this.
But when he ups the lettering size a bit, everything’s fine.
And it’s a pretty eventful couple years, so it’s pretty entertaining.
This is a long-running Swedish sort-of-fanzine — there’s a lot of different texts (poetry, rants, reviews, interviews), but also comics.
There’s a kinda gnarly aesthetic to the comics that I like. (And boy is the story above fucked up.)
All the stories are kinda devastating.
But some are funny!
In one issue, there’s dozens of illustrations by Caroline Sury, and that’s pretty neat.
OK, this story is even more fucked up.
It’s mostly Swedish artists, but here’s Grace Wilson, who I assume is British? It’s a really strong piece.
But then again, there’s a lot of strong pieces here.
This batch of Spirous isn’t all that exciting…
But there’s a new Spirou serialisation (yes I know — Spirou in Spirou magazine — so unusual) written by Lewis Trondheim, so that’s fun.
And this thing was pretty surprising (and unusual for Spirou).
I’ve been buying these DC Finest collections, but then giving up on them half-way through, because most DC comics from before the 70s are pretty lame. But this one I did read!
It’s an odd collection, though — it starts with the tail end of Jim Shooter’s reign in the late 60s, and then there’s a couple hundred pages from that era where the Legion ran as 10-ish page backups, before rounding out the book with the start of the Legion resurgence (when Dave Cockrum came aboard). And these collections never even try to hint at why the collection contains whatever issues they contain.
If I’m to hazard a guess, I think this is basically the period nobody wants to read — the early parts of the Legion story has been collected in those “archive” books, and the mid-70s period (after Mike Grell entered the picture) is a perennial seller. But you can’t really put that on the back cover: “This is for completists only! Don’t buy this!” It’s not good salesmanship, probably.
Shooter is obviously mostly out of ideas by this point (he was a teenager when he wrote this run), but I quite like the stories. Shooter ups the soap opera factor, so we get Matter Eating Lad having conflict with his horrible parents, for instance.
E. Nelson Bridwell writes stories in between Shooter, and they’re just. so. fucking. awful.
Then Cary Bates takes over, but it’s not until Dave Cockrum takes over the art that things start getting entertaining again. I’m biased — these are comics that I read when first when I was, like, ten years old, so it’s a thrill to see them again after all these years, but they’re just solid super-hero comics.
It’s one of the major comics mysteries why they can’t seem to keep the Legion going as a viable series — it was huge in the 60s for a time, then for a time in the 70s, and finally it was super duper popular in the early 80s. I guess some parts of the 90s were also popular, but it’s not been a success the last three decades.
Is it because people who read super-hero comics are The Elderly these days, and they don’t like reading about teenagers? I doubt it — I read most of the Legion comics like 15 years ago, and it seemed like all the fun was sucked out of it after the Crisis on Infinite Earths thing: Instead of just writing fun super-hero stories, they spent year after year trying to retcon everything, what with “pocket universes” and alternate time lines and all that tedious stuff.
And then the book ends with the first issue Mike Grell did the artwork for, because why not. Very puzzling selection!
(And I wonder whether the two top left panels were supposed to have a blurrification effect applied?)
While reading this collection, I’ve also been reading this blog. It’s fun! They concentrate on recapping the stories, which I find to be a rather incomprehensible hobby to have, but there’s a lot of good, snarky comments.
I apparently bought this last Xmas? But never got around to reading it.
We get a kinda amusing Don Rosa…
… but the rest isn’t very exciting. I mean, even for a child.
New Clifton! Written by Zidrou.
It’s fun, but it’s an oddly brutal album. No less than three of Clifton’s relatives are killed off. I expected that at least his father’s death would be a fake-out, but nope — not only just dead as a doornail, but also cremated.
The humour is mostly based on French and English stereotypes, and it works well. Zidrou keeps the gags coming seemingly effortlessly, and while few of them make you laugh out loud, there’s just so many of them that it doesn’t matter.
And that’s it.