Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last… month, I guess?
The Crepax omnibus series continues towards its end. These volumes are impressively big and heavy.
But I don’t think anybody would claim that this is prime Crepax.
It’s mostly later works here, and while the artwork is still… you know… Crepax… the stories are even more wispy than in the olden days.
But the pages are still impressive to look at.
Yeah, must be a month… four issues of Spirou, that makes sense.
The magazine was in the doldrums for a few months back there, but there seems to be a new buzz going around now. Did they get a new editor or something?
Like the double-sized spring issue — where all the series did special episodes dealing with the same plot: An invasion of spring flowers.
That’s just fun.
And there’s a new strip written by Lewis Trondheim! And it looks like there’s going to be a page in every issue! And the jokes mostly revolve around reading Spirou! It’s so meta!
So that’s fun. I’m a bit behind on my Spirou reading, though.
Oh yeah, I bought this thing. It’s more than 900 pages long, and it weighs several tons.
There’s about 300 pages drawn by Neal Adams, which was part of the attraction, of course, but…
… the other reason I got this is that there’s a whole bunch of other 70s DC comics here. (All featuring Deadman, though.) I’ve got a certain nostalgic thing going on for these comics, as these were just about the first American comics I read as a child. So this style — Adams, Aparo, Garcia-Lopez, Dillin, Giordano — just tickles me on some level. I guess all these artists tried to draw like Neal Adams? More or less?
But then there’s the writing, and it was kinda a slog to get through this. I dipped in and out for about a month, and that’s even with skipping a lot of stuff.
One problem with this collection is that Deadman was featured as a backup feature in a lot of comics, and there’s random team-ups with other super-heroes. And every time that happens, they reintroduce Deadman and spend several pages telling the reader what his deal is. That makes perfect sense in the original context, but it’s tedious when reading the same thing over and over again.
One non-Adams-aping artist here is Keith Giffen! We get four issues of Challengers of the Unknown drawn by him (featuring Deadman and Swamp Thing, of all people), so that’s fun.
I finally finished this book, and it took me several weeks, because… well, it’s over 200 pages of this.
While each page is amusing, collected it doesn’t really cohere into anything more. The artwork’s attractive.
Which isn’t something you could say about this. I bought this by mistake — I read “Paul B. Rainey” and my brain somehow went “yes, I must buy this new book by George Wylesol”.
This is not that. There’s No Time Like The Present is from 2016, and it’s reprinted because Rainey’s latest book has been optioned for a movie.
This book is relentlessly ugly, and it’s fucking tedious. I kept on reading, thinking there might be a twist coming that might make things more entertaining (like his recent book), but nope. It’s just page after page of the most stupid sci-fi time travel thing ever.
I mean, I like the hatred displayed towards nerds — they are the worst! — but it’s just… bad. It has the structure of oatmeal filled with toenail clippings. I haven’t done any research (oops my internet connection is down!) but I’m guessing this was originally serialised over a long period of time? It just goes on and on and on, before getting to the final section, which explains everything and is even more boring than what went on before, and that’s just a major achievement.
I got some floppies!
Of note are the Ryan North-penned Fantastic Four I mean Three I mean Two. These comics don’t look good — the current Marvel house style for artwork is really offputting — but they’re really entertaining. And these are even event tie-in comics! Unpossible!
And of course, the Ryan North-penned Star Wars comics. Also fun!
OK, that’s it.
