Ken Aldred

Star field covers are brilliant. I should've turned that into a collecting focus. The Steranko art is a bonus.

I've liked Trimpe's work on Hulk ever since I was a kid in the 70s, especially the periods during which his pencils were inked by John Severin and Sal Trapani. He's been given a lot of very harsh and undue criticism, as I posted elsewhere here in General. A very solid, workmanlike style, of its time, and allowances have to be made for the fact that it's art from around a half century ago now.

Absolutely. It's brilliant.

A very nice set of Eric Powell monster covers...

Here's an obscure monster cover, deserving of more widespread recognition...

Summer 2014

Absolute bollocks.

I'd been a regular comics reader from around 9 years old. As I've said before, the first time I really connected to comics and excitedly waited to see what appeared on the newsstand each month was the short-lived DC 100 pager period of the early-mid 70s. Then, my interest subsided. Certainly, I still read comics, but there was nothing giving me the same buzz that had been generated by those 100 pagers. However, they served as an indication of what was to come. None of that really explains why I ended up being as obsessive about comics as I was from the very memorable summer of 1977 onwards, which has now persisted for over four decades. Something simply just clicked about the medium at that point; my interest just exploded in intensity, and I couldn't get enough of them. Mail order back issues, finding sources for comics that weren't distributed to the UK, going to comic marts in the city, all with a disregard for outrageous, nosebleed pricing: 75p for an X-Men 95? The way I connect to the medium has evolved, as I now prefer to read digitally, but the obsessiveness is still present.

Fraction and Aja work well together. Immortal Iron Fist is worth looking at too.

That’s really bad. I’ve had minimal disruption.

I thought McFarlane’s earlier work on Hulk and Spider-Man showed promise, an interesting and different style for the time, and I’d buy books from creators I thought had a lot of potential, not just big names. It was when he started the Spider-Man 1990 series that I noticed the shortcomings, in his faces and figurework especially, and also writing which I found more or less unreadable. Strange how I’d then go back to read the ASM run and notice exactly the same problems, which dulled my interest. Trimpe’s Hulk art looks much better in remastered collections, a simple style which gets a nice boost in this format. Again, like you, it wasn’t until recently that I switched on to this. In the UK, he was often referred to mockingly as Herb Tripe. I now understand that that was actually very unfair.

Only occasionally get a server / error message, and for a short period of time. Page loading can be slow.

Always loved this one, just for pure, ridiculous, comedy value....

Another classic by Richard Corben.

Yup. Difficult for me to choose just one standout cover, as his work on this title was exceptional. A great run of covers.