My haul over the past month. Mostly from IST although I grabbed a few from my LCS on FCBD since they were 50 percent off.
I had finally caught up on pretty much everything I had to read. Now I'm waaaaay behind.
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It's glued. If you can live with that it's fine. The uproar (at least from my end) was the original printing was a nice sewn hc, in the vein of a LE, or similarly to Remender's Crawlspace. Perfect for highlighting Scalera's art and all the double page spreads. When they were pulped do to a very minor text printing error, it was clear the replacement copies were made in the fastest, cheapest way possible (still the only HC i own that doesn't have head/tail bands). Of course none of these savings were passed on to the consumer.
With that being said, i consider this an outlier, and fully expect the Deadly Class HC to return to the expected quality levels.
Last edited by awayne83; 05-13-2016 at 09:13 PM.
Terrible news about Cooke, I remember he supposed to have signing at Gosh last year, bought New Frontier and Parker just for that but it was cancelled. Don't remember reason now but it might have been related to his cancer when I think about it now. RIP.
I heard Darwyn Cooke died of cancer!
Read below about his situation and on twitter it's mentioned that he passed...
http://darwyncooke.blogspot.nl/2016/05/fuck-cancer.html
Holy shit, that's terrible news. The industry really lost a good man here. This really, really sad news
"You don't ever quit. Not even to your last drop of blood. You got folks relyin' on you then you just can't afford to." Sean Noonan-Hitman #47
That might have been based on a false report which has now been pulled.
https://joeshusterawards.com/2016/05/14/an-update/
And "palliative care" doesn't have to include a hospice scenario at all. So for now, we 'll just have to wait and see.
Last edited by LordJulius; 05-14-2016 at 03:46 AM.
Ive seen a few people buying up these idw archival style books from the 30s-60s such as Tarzan and dick tracy, x-9 Corrigan, Terry and the sharks etc. I was wondering what people think of how that material holds up today. The books all look so nice, I want to pull the trigger, but I also dont want to slog through something akin to early early Stan Lee.
it's very different than Lee's work. I think the best example is Prince Valiant. At first glance I thought I won't enjoy it but despite the lack of speech bubbles and the silly haircut it is really an engaging experience with amazing art. Some would say the first volume is not as good but I had lots of fun with that too.
Rip Kirby is quite good as well, also my personal favourite, Miss Fury. That book was just so ahead of it's time and such a fun read. Art is not as impressive but suit the story perfectly.
Or you can try The Eternaut. It's an Argentinian strip from the 50's, quite Twilight zone like, it's about an alien invasion/survival story and it's even more depressing than the Walking dead.
I would say go with Eternaut or Valiant because the Fantagraphics book has a better price than IDW although the LoAC IDW books are really well made.
I had the exact same apprehensions for years. Getting through SA or GA Marvel/DC (Timly, Atlas etc.) books is such a slog and most of these don't hold up at all today. That's why I have yet to finish reading most of the SA Omnis I have (and I won't buy any more). Especially Lee's writing is much too cheesy to enjoy more than a couple of issues in a row.
So naturally I thought that these strips, which sometimes even go further back, must be even worse. But boy, I couldn't have been more wrong. I began with Prince Valiant and immediately fell in love. Then Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, and it was the same thing. Absolutely fantastic adventure strips, with art that nobody at Marvel or DC from the 40s to 60s did even come close, imo.
Another thing I thought would get in the way of enjoying these is the format of the dailies. I thought this would hamper character and story development and assumed the 22 page format of the comic books would make for longer and better development in this respect. Again, I was wrong. It's actually the other way round. The daily strips tell a story for as long as it takes, while - at least until the 80s - mainstream comic books had to tell a story within the confines of the given amount of pages - a detriment to natural story and character progression.
As for the question if the stories hold up? I think they do, some execptions notwithstanding. If you like pulpy adventure a la Indiana Jones, then you should like Terry and the Pirates; if you like hard boiled crime, Dick Tracy is for you (couldn't believe how dark and almost cynical some of the stories were); a much more recent example is Williamson and Goodwin's X-9, which you should enjoy if you like 60s or 70s Bond.
So bottomline: do what I did and see if you can find a cheap copy of one of the volumes to see if you like it.
EDIT:
You get a hell of a lot more mileage out of these collections, btw, also because they can be quite wordy. But in contrast to Lee's 60s writing, the text is always important and one doesn't get the feeling the writer is just padding things out (plus I always thought Lee's characters speak very unrealistically).
Last edited by LordJulius; 05-14-2016 at 08:07 AM.
That he's in palliative care is - sadly - correct since it was his own wife who sent out the message.
However there are conflicting reports on whether he's passed or not. But as long as nothing's confirmed, I won't speculate.
EDIT:
Shit. CBR reports his family has just put a message out that he's passed away. So sad. He will be sorely missed.