and Dead Tree Comics

[Thad]

Quesada's stepping down. Here is a tweet of a JPG of a text document, because we live in the dumbest timeline.



What this actually means for Marvel, well, I don't expect much to change. Disney isn't WB; they've been competent, confident stewards of Marvel as a publisher and haven't shown any interest in shaking up the ant farm. The biggest change they've made is to increasingly marginalize Perlmutter and give Feige progressively more control, which is a move I can't really find anything to criticize about.

[Thad]

[Büge]

No, but did YOU know that Machine Man first appeared in Marvel's adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, also written and illustrated by Jack Kirby?

[Thad]

I did! Though I never got that far into 2001. I've read maybe the first two-three issues multiple times.

[Thad]

After a number of delays, volumes 1 and 13 of the new Clover Press Terry and the Pirates collection are out. I got mine today.

And this is one of those things where god damn does it look good but also it is racist as fuck. The first line spoken by a nonwhite character is "So solly!" (sarcastically, by a Chinese pirate shooting someone in the back) and it does not get better from there.

So that's a pretty big asterisk that significantly inhibits my enjoyment of the strip. But damn is it good cartooning. The back-cover blurb quotes Howard Chaykin saying "Milton Caniff invented the visual and textual language that defines the very vocabulary of all adventure and character based comic art." He's not exaggerating. You can see the Caniff influence in basically everybody who came up in action/adventure comics in the '30s and '40s -- Will Eisner, Joe Shuster, Jerry Robinson, Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, CC Beck, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Wayne Boring, Wally Wood, to name just a few off the top of my head -- and everybody who followed who was influenced by them. It's that good and that influential and, unfortunately, also incredibly racist.

[Thad]

So Variants is called Variants so that when you ask your LCS if they have it it turns into an Abbott and Costello routine, right?

[Thad]

Superman: Space Age dares to ask the question, "Do we really need yet another alternate history of the DC Universe set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race?"

And the answer is "No. No we do not. But the art sure is pretty."

[Thad]

Among other things, it makes some weird continuity choices for what's supposed to be an out-of-continuity story.

Like, it starts off in 1985, with the world about to end.

So okay, world ending, 1985. So this isn't just an alternate Earth, it's one of those infinite earths that had that whatchacallit that year. In itself that could just be a cute continuity touch, put it out there, wink at the audience, and move on, but nope, we flash back to the '60s and fucking Pariah shows up and explains his backstory and the Anti-Monitor and how the world's going to end in 20 years. This fucking thing is all-in on not just being a '60s throwback but also a tie-in to an event story from 37 years ago, and that is certainly a choice.

It's also too cute. There's a bit a little later where Clark's trying to talk himself out of believing Pariah's dire warning about the end of the world, and he says something like, "Eh, he was just some crank. He also said the US was about to be invaded by insects." Cue the TV over his shoulder and Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles.

(Aside from everything else that's groan-inducing about that, it strains the timeline of the story for the sake of a dumb joke. The story establishes that Clark moves to Metropolis after the Kennedy assassination. This means that he took his first flight, discovered the Fortress of Solitude, moved to Metropolis, got a job at the Daily Planet, got assigned to the Kooks and Kranks beat, interviewed Pariah, and then returned to the bar where he'd met him enough times to say "I've been coming to this bar ever since" within a period of about two months. Like, if you're going to make a point of rooting your story in actual historical events, fucking commit to it; make the timeline make sense.)

I still plan on picking up the rest of it, because what's better than an Allred comic? An Allred comic full of '60s fashions. The art is flippin' fantastic. Wish I could say the same about Mark Russell's writing. I hear his Flintstones series was really good.

[Thad]

Marvel's got a '60s throwback out too, in Ant-Man #1 by Al Ewing, Tom Reilly, and Jordie Bellaire.

Ewing does a solid impression of Stan Lee, complete with flowery dialogue, thought balloons, unnecessary narrative captions of the sort that have since gone out of style, and even nice little touches like one scene where a background character has arbitrary dialogue that doesn't really match the art. (And he does a good job splitting the difference on Jan, evoking her '60s personality but not the sexist baggage that went with it.)

When I talked about how Superman: Space Age would have worked better if it had kept its Crisis continuity down to just a brief nod instead of going whole-hog with it, that's the kind of thing this book does right. It starts with Hank and Jan going to a movie that shows the Fantastic Four fighting Namor. That's a reference to Fantastic Four #9 and it is beautiful, and they have the good sense not to linger on it; it's a fun detail if you happen to catch it, but it's not necessary to the plot.

There are a couple of cameos in there, too, that evoke the sorts of cameos you'd see in '60s Marvel books, even if the characters themselves weren't around back then -- future Ant-Men Eric O'Grady and Scott Lang both briefly show up in the story.

Reilly's art and Bellaire's colors evoke a retro aesthetic without doing a full-on Kirby impression. You wouldn't mistake this for a comic from the '60s, but it manages a '60s feel. It reminds me a bit of Doc Shaner's recent work on Strange Adventures that way, which kinda had that Toth influence but wasn't a straight-up Toth imitation like his earlier work on Future Quest.

All in all, I liked this one a lot! I'll be sticking around for #2, and not as ambivalently as I will be for Superman: Space Age.

[Thad]

I've been hearing for years that Len Starr's run on Little Orphan Annie is one of the all-time great series in comics history. @DonaldRexJr has been posting them and I like them but didn't really see how they were contenders for GOAT.

This strip's the one where I got it.



That silent panel. That right there is some brilliant dramatic storytelling. And in a strip made up almost entirely of two characters talking in a car.

(Tangentially: Leonard Starr was also the original head writer on Thundercats. He built most of the lore and wrote a number of important episodes throughout the first season, plus the between-seasons TV movie, Thundercats-Ho! which introduced the New Thundercats. Rankin and Bass stiffed him on profit participation, so he quit after writing the opening five-parter of season 2, Mumm-Ra Lives!, which introduced the Lunatacs; Peter Lawrence was the head writer for the remainder of the series.)

[Crick]

Superman: Space Age dares to ask the question, "Do we really need yet another alternate history of the DC Universe set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race?"

And the answer is "No. No we do not. But the art sure is pretty."

You mentioned some issues I had as well, but also:

1. I felt the way Bruce was lead into Batman to be weird? Like it was a kind of an afterthought for him? And also... everyone would know? Lex, especially

2. Things were out of order for a weird reason? The oops at Coast City before Hal even gets a ring? It robs the event of some of the punch the original has, seemingly just to have a "hey you recognize this" moment. Some thing, as you mentioned, with Clark finding the fortress, etc, etc

[Thad]

The next Fantastic Four team will be Ryan North and Iban Coello.

I'm not familiar with Coello and TBH after a quick search I don't think he's really my cuppa. But man I love me some Ryan North; he'll be great.

[Mongrel]

Those covers are pretty bananas though, damn!

[Thad]

Yeah, it's always kinda funny seeing Ross do Kirby; I once saw someone describe him as "like the antithesis of Kirby" and y'know, I think that's about right. It's interesting how, even given how fundamentally different their styles are, you can take one look at those Ross paintings and know he's doing a Kirby riff.

(I mean the colors make it pretty obvious, but even without them you'd still have the big old Kirby Fist on Ben, and Reed with the giant forehead, high cheekbones, and eyes a little too far apart.)

[Mongrel]

eyes a little too far apart.

I had to laugh; it's so true.

[nosimpleway]

Drawing shapeshifters is easy because you never have to worry about them being off-model

[beatbandito]

DC Exec: it's not Mexican unless they have a tortilla-based food

[Crick]

Poster for some Midwestern hero with sorta German, sorta Norwegian heritage just holding a weird casserole

[Mongrel]

That tamales bag, lolwtflol

Though Hawkgirl as a waitress in a taqueria manages to be the most comically offensive, which is kind of sad because that one at least had the most effort put into composition & storytelling. The other three are HEY I GOT A TACO.

Invoking the Beagle Boys always puts a smile on my face though.

[Thad]

It's Jack Kirby's birthday today, and in case you want something to celebrate, there's a new edition of Kamandi out this week.

The current reprint run of Kirby's '70s DC work is excellent; I gushed about OMAC a little bit upthread. It looks great; it's got the right paper stock so the colors look like they should. And I'm immensely fond of this period in Kirby's career even if it doesn't get as much respect as his '60s Marvel work.

Presumably The Demon is up next; I'm looking forward to that one. I've already got most of it in single issues (thanks eBay) but not the whole run, so it'll be nice to have it collected in one place.