Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last month or so.
Finally Fantagraphics has reached the final Carl Barks volume, and it’s the first one.
Or rather, this collects the very earliest Barks Duck material, and Fantagraphics wisely kept that as the last volume to be published, because it’s by far the weakest material.
But it’s still Carl Barks, so it’s pretty spiffy anyway.
I remember when Fantagraphics started this project in like… 2011? Finally we’d be getting Barks in sensitively recoloured editions, and everything done right. But Fantagraphics were going to do these books slowly, and I wondered whether they’d still exist to complete the series. And they did! Hooray!
I’ve slacked on my French, so I’ve just read two issues of Spirou, and I’ve got a little stack now to read…
These are pretty nice issues — there’s a Back To School special, and the Knights of the Apocadispe are trying to cram in all summer activities into one day. It’s very funny.
The Lucky Luke here (he meets Louis Riel) isn’t as successful.
I bought more volumes of the nouveau Clifton (written by Zidrou).
And it’s the best Clifton has ever been.
These albums are actually funny now. Whodathought!
It is not at all clear to me why I bought this. I may have thought it was a collection of a new Phoenix series or something? Or… even a new edition of the classic series?
But no! This 1000 page monster collects all appearances of the “Phoenix” character from this millennium, or something. Eeek! I have zero interest in reading random Marvel series just because they feature a specific character… and the Phoenix isn’t even really a character; it’s more of a plot contrivance.
But the book starts off the the last half of the Grant Morrison New X-Men run, and I don’t think I’ve read that before? It’s pretty good!
But then the rest of the book is pretty bad. For instance, this ineptly written (by Greg Pak) and ineptly drawn (by Greg Land) series…
Speaking of inept art, I laughed out loud here — this is supposed to be a big reveal or something: They have his face hidden, and then we get a big picture of his face… and the entire audience goes “who?” It’s supposed to be Magneto, but the artwork’s so bad it’s impossible to tell.
Perhaps the worst issues of the bunch are the ones written by Dennis Hopeless. There’s something just so… perverse? is that the word?… about thinking about super-heroes too much. Yes, the original Phoenix storyline was very entertaining, but then you have decades and decades of iterations, where grown up men keep adding and adding a “mythology” to make things “deep and adult” for an audience of (presumably) moronic adults, and it’s just why. Just stop. It’s dead. There is no there there.
Fluide Glacial is a long-running French humour magazine, and this is a special issue I picked up at the airport. “For grown-ups over eight years only!”
Unfortunately, my French just isn’t strong enough to be able to read this. It’s jokes upon jokes, and I just don’t get it.
One day!
There’s even some Jack Davis here…
I read a few of the DC horror anthologies as a child, so I thought I’d pick this up and see what’s what. I remember quite liking them?
As with so many of these DC’s Finest collections, it just hard to say what the rationale behind the selection is. So this 550 page book collects about a year of the run of four different horror anthologies, and one story from The Phantom Stranger. But why? Are these all the horror anthologies DC did? Was this a particularly horror-filled year? Why does it start with The Witching Hour #3? Are they collected like this because they had the same editor or something? Are we going to get more of these, each collecting one year? WHAT?! USE YOUR WORDS!
Oh, and the font used here is the worst ever — 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 look virtually identical, which makes it ever so fun when flipping back and forth to read the credits. Thanks, DC graphics dept!
In any case, it’s kinda fun. There’s a lot of really nice artwork — Wrightson, Toth, Williamson, er, Don Heck….
Jerry Grandinetti…
Unfortunately, most of the stories are really, really lame. There’s some good ones, but they’re far outweighed by the bad ones, so it’s taken me a month to diffidently get through this collection.
I have to say that the reproduction is phenomenal. It all looks like it’s been shot from original artwork. Did DC not give artwork back to the artists?
And then there’s this.
I wonder whether it was really meant to be reproduced this dark? I understand it was originally serialised as a web comic (over a decade)…
I like the artwork.
The story, though… it’s not just that it’s misery porn (but it is), but that it embraces absolutely all clichés possible when telling a story like this.
It’s totally amazing — it’s relentless cliché bingo time for five hundred pages. So it’ll probably win all the awards?
And that’s the comics I’ve been reading.