Ken Aldred

Showing Doom Guy how to take out the trash….

Currently thinking more of pulling out the Grant / Breyfogle run to re-read.

That issue was a bit tragic. In addition it contains some equally phoned-in art from another all-time great, Alex Toth. A sad sight when I saw it on the stands back then.

Yup. Everything lives, everything dies. Every Crisis has a solution.

All the classics.

It’s astonishing that the period gets regularly dismissed as being complete rubbish, across the board, when that misconception’s easy to disprove. So many highlights.

Utilising the same foot-based aerodynamic effect exploited by Namor's foot wings, but using rockets instead of miniature wings. It's entirely plausible.

In my case it's more than the expense, just a case of knowing my limitations, and that something like this would absolutely do me in. I'm someone else who likes these reports, looking at images at a distance, experiencing it vicariously too. For me, that's enough at this stage. Thanks for the opportunity. Appreciated.

A very good point, which I forgot about. So far, perhaps I’ve been lucky, but flooding has become a worsening complication here as well thanks to global warming.

Always a problem in England, dampness and cold, or the recent very humid heatwave.

I liked Jason Momoa as Aquaman. He had a sense of humour in the role, without that being quite as forced as Thor’s has been. If Namor’s as arrogant and narcissistic as he is in the comics, I can’t see that interpretation working well at all. Even positioned as a villain against Wakanda, he’d be irritating.

Mid 80s will be very popular, so I’ll vote for EC’s New Trend golden period.

That’s a relief, rather than Apocalypto.

Ryan Coogler’s a very good director. The film has potential. Hopefully, with a decent story and dialogue to work with we’ll see him halt the decline in quality in Marvel films over the last year or so.

I never think volume is necessary. Look at David Mazzucchelli, a small body of brilliant, classic mainstream work on Daredevil and Batman and then some very, very different indie material, such as Asterios Polyp. He made his mark quickly, nothing else to prove to anyone.

There’s also European material such as from Metal Hurlant, or maybe be even more adventurous and try some manga. I wasn’t disappointed. Blueberry, Metabarons, Ghost in the Shell, Alita; start with the classics.

And Image. Big name creators they’d be familiar with from Marvel and DC; Morrison, Kirkman, Hickman, Rucka, Brubaker, Azzarello, Millar, Lemire, and, conversely, to me it seems that those companies have headhunted a lot of the newer talent from there; Seeley, Cates, Williamson. Well, at least that’s where I first encountered their work. More interesting material, not constrained by a corporate house style. Hardly a complete step into the unknown.

I can’t argue with that level of respect for EC.

You’re a lot like me, having an appreciation across all the comic book Ages. You can see that in your posts in the collected edition thread. Variety.

It’s a bit like late Bronze Age and early Copper Age getting merged together. Over in Golden Age, many will often merge late Golden Age and early 50s Atom Age publications together. However, to solve the finger-wagging, maybe we could agree on pre-Code instead? That then covers both my ECs and the Wertham-bothering splash page and panel shown earlier.

Claremont remains one of my all-time favourite comic book writers, along with John Byrne. I’m pretty much immune to his tendency to be somewhat verbose and purple in style, and, by modern standards, could’ve perhaps delegated some of his descriptors to the artist for greater economy, and that younger readers might, overall, find his work a bit cold, dry and angst-ridden as well. For me, those caveats are quite irrelevant. When I first started collecting, 1977 onwards, the first continuous run that I looked forward to, month after month, with a sequence of brilliantly written-and-drawn stories. The X-Men have always been one of my favourites, even during the fallow years preceding this classic writer-artist team, but so exciting to witness the standard being raised so high and for so long by them.

I don’t recall it being much different to the other Spidey titles. Nothing that exceptional.

Sorry if I’m posting too much in this thread, but I’ve been killing time on the phone waiting for someone to come round to unblock a drain at the back of the house.

Eisner’s Spirit stories, though short, are quite brilliant, especially the post-War Sections. EC’s stories, likewise, were short, often gory, disturbing, political, making social commentary, but could pack a lot in despite their brevity, and were prolifically capable of that. Hardly vacuous.

I’ve always preferred diversification to repetition, stagnation, boredom and disillusionment.