Ken Aldred

Not impressed by that attitude, as visual storytelling ability is just as important to comics as writing. A paradigm of that would be Richard Corben, whose breakdown of the plot was so good that you could basically follow the story just by looking at the art, with the text giving extra detail, sure, but, even without using words, a talented comic artist can be just as much of a storyteller. A shame to learn that Lee had no consideration for that.

Orlando's style was more closely aligned with Wally Wood's than Kirby's, both of them being great EC science-fiction artists. Both worked briefly on Daredevil, and I also wonder if Wood quickly lost patience with Lee for similar reasons?

Possibly why I soon got tired of Lee's writing on Silver Surfer, and the lack of the warmth and humour present in his earlier work.

You can't really do much better in these circumstances than The Colonel.

I'd pick "Lady Cab Driver" from the 1999 album over "Darling Nikki" from Purple Rain.

In a recent BBC documentary about holocaust denial it was found to be available on Amazon. Appalling drivel, but some groups would take the material at face value.

I’m sure not all of them. Just the trolls.

One theory was that it was a sensitivity issue that led to its removal, negativity such as mocking and sarcasm. Even laughter has its dark side. Alternatively, the boards were just getting too silly, and that just couldn’t go on, and so activity to restrict the silliness had to be taken.

Most of the remaining budget was spent on Mr Fantastic’s arm stretching, which consisted of a couple of pipes from a builders’ merchant, possibly Home Depot.

I watched this a few weeks ago on Amazon Prime U.K. Very interesting indeed. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doomed-Untold-Story-Cormans-Fantastic/dp/B06XJBGWGS

Yup. He’s been involved for a very long time, and I’m sure I can learn something interesting.

Yup. He was clearly a young talent to watch and to poach from Charlton, where the stories he was given, certainly post-Code, were pretty much uniformly appalling, and he was being wasted there. I believe opportunities had also slowed down a bit for Kirby over at DC, and time for a change.

It’s a good point to focus on the product they created rather than maintain a largely delusional sense of ‘connection’ to someone that you barely know. A good example is Rush’s lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart, an intensely-private individual who was very uncomfortable with how fans idolised him, and retreated away from contact, leaving that meeting-and-greeting to Lee and Lifeson. A significant loss for me last year, but discovering that about him made me think that he has a strong argument; enjoy what was created, don’t get that fixated on the writer or artist personally, on a fallacy at a distance. I’m pretty much following his strategy now; read the comics, have little interest in meeting the creators in person, even whenever that becomes possible again. I still don’t mind learning new character traits or bits of history about the creators, iconoclasm, maybe, as here, or also maybe constructive, fleshing them out more three-dimensionally as real human beings rather than shining, flawless paragons.

As a kid he was always the genius creator of Silver Age Marvel, and considered so by me very naively. His death was very affecting, and I still felt grateful for what he'd created and how much enjoyment that world had given me over the decades. But, with age and maturity, I was also able to recognise and accept the major contributions of other creators such as Kirby and Ditko, and that Silver Age Marvel was increasingly becoming a grey area for me, enclosing the efforts of many different contributors, not just those of a writer / editor solely going forward with a unique, focused vision and masterplan. So, it's a good time to read a book like this, the full story of struggle and success, of fair accrediting and underhanded dismissal of others' achievements, of manipulation by him and, in the end, of him by others. It’s something that happens frequently with enough time, such as idolising a creator at a distance, based upon very limited, filtered social information, and then meeting them at a convention and being disappointed by some of their character traits and that they’re not the paragon you imagined.

Good point. Could be a variation on Jackson Pollock; spray rather than drip art.

I like the pretentious, artistic beret, when all he’s doing is covering people with glue.

Fairly common. Same thing with Cavewoman variants on there. I just checked for research and confirmation purposes.

That’s a good one.

I only have a couple of them, but I thought the off-colour paper stock looked a bit artificial, nothing like even the dulled, slightly greyish tone in late 70s comics, or better quality snow-white newsprint. Maybe an attempt to introduce an aged, yellowing or browning effect similar to Night Shift’s on iPad when I read digitally. Nor did I think the reproduction was that crisp, and a bit dark in the copies I own. I also wasn’t that impressed with the stories and art generally, which is why I stopped very quickly. Spoiled by my EC hardcovers, I would guess.

Even the Ultimate Spider-Man version...

Each to their own. For me, not even close.

Drax Star Lord Him / Warlock Thunderbird / Warpath Vanisher Captain Atom Wonder Girl / Donna Troy The Beyonders

LOSH is a great run. Nice collection, Silver Age through to the Dave Cockrum era for me. Although, mine’s Archive hardcovers.

I don’t have the long-term mental focus for ambitious, mono tasking, completist goals, as well as often being priced out for many major characters. Attention deficit outweighs OCD. I recognise my shortcomings in this respect.