Ken Aldred

My two favourites. Used them for years. Just for writing.

2nd - far superior figure work, both Batman and Robin there, and the inking / line work looks fine for a sketch. Very nice.

Adams-influenced style when he started, back in the Bronze Age. Tom Grindberg was good as well.

What was your opinion about what was actually going on in the series? There are various theories online, and a couple, IIRC, in the thread over in Modern.

Easy. As a detective you should know what a cat looks like. The rest of the room will be filled with bipedal hairless apes. Useless.

I concur. A blatant copy of mid Silver Age Captain Marvel. Shameful.

129 to 145 Special Marvel Edition 15 and 16 Master of Kung Fu 17 to 28 Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu 1 to 3 Very consistently readable comics, keeping me engaged until the end. Definitely carried through by the stories, as the art team changes frequently between Jim Starlin, Paul Gulacy, Ron Wilson, Al Milgrom, Keith Pollard, John Buscema and Ed Hannigan. Starlin and Gulacy produce some great work here, of course. A part of the series that I found much more interesting now than it ever would’ve been to me as a teenager was comparing the mindsets of Shang-Chi and Fu Manchu. His father has lived a very, very long time due to an elixir of vitality, has an underlying psychopathic personality, always having enjoyed playing games with people, with the typical long-term evolution towards more and more extreme manipulation, until, in the end, he’s bored and emotionally unmoved unless stimulated by gameplay and control at a most extreme, worldwide level. Shang-Chi himself was basically a eugenics project; a carefully-selected, ideal mother, then, lifelong indoctrination into his father’s belief system, little more than an experiment in control via nature and nurture to create a perfectly like-minded, super-intelligent, apex killing machine. However, the plan fails completely, as, instead of creating another selfish, empathy-deficient psychopath, nature and the unpredictability of genetics results in a very caring, thoughtful individual with a strong moral compass, the exact opposite of what was intended. The stories explore the resultant conflict between the self-serving, frequently destructive and murderous directives of Fu Manchu, Shang-Chi’s conscientious distancing from those demands and from his father, and lots of debating about the subjective perception of good and evil by two polar opposite personalities. Shang-Chi’s half-sister, Fah Lo Suee, is also introduced in this run. Fu Manchu loses the genetic lottery again with her; someone just as psychopathic, manipulative and power-mad as himself; totally unsupportive and hostile, aiming to take over his organisation and kill him in the process. Just as importantly, there are also many kick-arse fight scenes to recommend in these comics.

I bet you can wiggle your ears at the same time.

I scribble notes using a 0.5, either a Zebra Drafix or M-301. Not just for artists.

I agree. From the mid 90s onwards there was a decline in quality, and that includes Wonder Woman and his later work at Marvel such as Spider-Man. On Wonder Woman, Perez was far superior. I thought Namor was consistently readable, Omac had some great black-and-white artwork and a good story, and Next Men was an excellent continuous narrative, but after that I didn't find his material that interesting.

On my part, a case of ‘didn’t do the research’, but also that I don’t find most of the Titans and Wonder Woman issues you mentioned to be particularly memorable as runs, apart from some Teen Titans, such as ‘Killers of the Doom Patrol‘, ‘Runaways’, ‘Who is Donna Troy ?’ and, of course, ‘The Judas Contract’. That said, for me, even those stories don’t feel like they’re up at the consistently all-time classic level of Byrne’s X-Men, and I still believe that Byrne proved himself far, far more as a writer, whether in partnership or alone.

No doubt a 30th century comic convention fanboy in their spare time, sharing a problem often discussed here. That would be their origin story.

Hard to believe that Hulk 181 won this contest.

30th Century space karate, possibly also incorporating Kryptonian techniques used by his 20th Century predecessor, Clark Kent, mild-mannered Master of Kung Fu.

Fair point, because even on Daredevil he did peter out a bit over his last year or so, with sketchier layouts and more and more detailed completion by his inker, Klaus Janson.

Not impossible, but Byrne at his peak was also an excellent writer as well as artist, and there’s a noticeable upswing in quality on X-Men once he’s co-writer / plotter with Chris Claremont. That’s the level that Perez would’ve needed to reach, but there’s no historical evidence to support it. IIRC he’s written a couple of short mini-series, but nothing on the classic scale of the interlinked narrative of Savage Land / Alpha Flight / Proteus / Dark Phoenix / Days of Future Past.

I always thought he was a very weak addition to the team.

Not in the 70s he wasn’t. He was quite prolific at Marvel.

It would also be interesting to see Mangog in the film, as it becomes a major threat towards the end of the Jane Foster Thor run.

I see it more as cosplaying a comic book character with a mask; Bane or the Golden Age Sandman. It’s a running joke I have at the supermarket when I bump into a comic collecting friend there. Lightens the atmosphere.

I agree. That's a great cover, and excellent Gil Kane inside. Hope you have the previous issues, inked by Tom Sutton, which I think are even better. I've just finished the Hour of the Dragon trade paperback collection, which has the complete REH 'Conan the Conqueror' adaptation that runs across the first four Giant-Sizes and two issues of SSOC, and with the Thomas-written sequels from two Conan Annuals. Well-paced, classic Bronze Age sword-and-sorcery.

I've always liked this one.

Not helped by having some poor inking choices that tended to soften or remove detail from his pencils, such as Vince Colletta and Mike DeCarlo. Hard to imagine why they'd give such detailed art to an inker with an eraser obsession, such as Colletta. I never really liked Romeo Tanghal's inking on New Teen Titans much either, though better than the previous two. When Perez inked his own pencils, retaining all the detail, his art was on another level entirely; really superb, even then.

That's why I prefer Byrne overall.

He can have minimalist tendencies.