Anyone here read American or European comics?

Non-anime/manga-related TV, movies, books, and comics, especially but not limited to pre-2000 titles
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Animusubi
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by Animusubi »

llj wrote:Ah yes, Joe Madureira's Battle Chasers. He was a very vocal fan of anime back in the 90s. I think he used to say he watched Giant Robo to get inspiration. But he was lazy when it came to schedules. I think I remember hearing that he often got sidetracked playing video games instead of doing work. :lol:
Yeah, and then he started a family, and stopped doing comics for a while. Video games are his passion now, which kinda makes me sad, as I enjoy his comics a lot more, but I haven't played Darksiders yet. Kinda not interested to.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by _D_ »

I have access to hundreds of thousands of comics every day at my bud's comic store as well as all the new comics that come in every week...and there are a lot of them. I don't collect them anymore. I have been taking to reading runs of old Marvel and DC comics from the 1960s. Some for enjoyment, others just to see how flawed they really were. Ditko could never draw teens. His characters were all drawn like they were in their 20s to 40s. This was pointed out by more than one respondent in the letter cols at the time. Many of those people went on to work for Marvel and DC. Of recent comics, I used to read Hellboy since it was an interesting book. I seldom read the current run if Abe Sapien, Witchfinder, BPRD, etc. as its just not interesting to me. I tried to read DC's Lucifer comics of 2000 or so but lost interest part way through the story arc. I did read Asterix vs. The Picts recently. Not bad, but definitely not as good as classic Asterix. I did read a run of Harvey Little Lotta, Richie Rich and Spooky recently. Fun but I still prefer the 60s George Baker Sad Sack comics. Read a bunch of late 50s to early 60s DC Lois Lane comics. Laughable attitudes, even for the time and when Marvel hit big in the 60s with stuff that appeals directly to teens, DC refused to change. Not to say there weren't some great stories but the teen stuff (Superboy, Legion of Superheroes, etc.) was darn right laughable.

Got hundreds of comics in my own collection still but don't read them much. Got many GB of scans of old comics but will probably never get around to reading them. Not enough time in the day...
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by llj »

Ditko couldn't draw a pretty girl to save his life, either. You kinda take his idiosyncrasies in stride. He was very good at laying out a fight sequence and setting mood, though. In fact, I'd say he was probably the best guy at Marvel when it came to those elements in the 60s.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by Drew_Sutton »

llj wrote:Gen13...ahahaha...I admit I was into the whole Image craze in the 90s too.
Prior to getting into anime, I was a big comic book fan. In fact, where I saw my first fansubs that got me hooked was a local comic convention's dealers' room.

I read a lot of typical late 80s - 90s books: lot's of Marvel's X-Men and their associated X-Books, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Punisher were all my favorites. My uncle read almost exclusively DC when it came to hero books, so I think I have a strong affinity for a lot of those sixties and seventies that he held on to than the later 80s and 90s books being printed when I read comics heavily. The only book I read with any frequency on my own though was Batman. When I started buying comics less from the drug store and more from the direct market shops, I followed Jim Lee along from X-Men to Image's Wild C.A.T.s and became a huge Image fanboy with Wild C.A.T.s and Gen13 being my all-time favorites though I probably read almost any one of their books I could get my hands on. It was at this time my dad found Valiant was publishing new stories based on a bunch of old Dell/Gold Key books he read as a kid, so I read his Magnus: Robot Fighter and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter when he was done and eventually I got into Solar: Man of the Atom on my own. I also remember him having a couple issues of XO Manowar and read it, liked it, but never went past that.

Like a lot of kids though, there was only so much allowance money to be made and comics are getting expensive and hey, these Japanese cartoons are pretty great, so I stopped reading comics for the most part. I flirted with the idea of getting back into comics in college and when I asked for story updates from a friend ... I was pretty disappointed with what I heard. :lol:

So, I've thought about picking up my old collection from the folks house next time I visit, going through and getting rid of whatever I have that I don't want or can find in a collected trade. Where do folks here get their trades? I presume Amazon is probably a great place to start but I don't want to look up something like "Days of Future Past" and scouring through a ton of unrelated search results.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by yusaku »

I forgot to mention the Archie comics I was collecting when I was in high school. I was always into the everyday stuff like Ziggy. The superhero stuff was occasional. I was into Dilbert and Garfield also.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by llj »

yusaku wrote:I forgot to mention the Archie comics I was collecting when I was in high school. I was always into the everyday stuff like Ziggy. The superhero stuff was occasional. I was into Dilbert and Garfield also.
I have stacks of Archie comics. I keep all the ones with Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz or prime Dan DeCarlo (about pre-68). I also have a fondness for Al Hartley's stuff (AKA the "Christian" guy)
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by greg »

I've never even heard of Battle Chasers, but even the title sounds Japanese.

I'd forgotten about Scott Pilgrim! I never read the last volume. I've been meaning to re-read the whole series again sometime from beginning to end.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by davemerrill »

My fave Archie books fall between 1959-1970, there's a sweet spot of DeCarlo, Schwartz, Lucey work with good George Gladir scripts. Throw in some Joe Edwards and a little Doug Crane and there ya go. The run of Josie before they introduced the Pussycats is especially good, I think.

I'm not a fan of Hartley's work with the Archie characters, but when he was doing Patsy Walker and related comics for Marvel in the late 1950s, he was really hitting a sweet spot, just cartoony enough but still nailing the fashions and styles of giant tail-fin mid-America in the late Eisenhower-early Kennedy years. It's like reading a "Mad Men" comic. I'd love to see Marvel reprint his Patsy Walker work.

Hartley's Jesus comics are, strangely enough, more appealing to my eye than his straight Archie work. Maybe it's his inkers. The totally bogus religion in the scripts for his Spire comics are rage-inducing, though. I mean, there's Christianity, and then there's the Hal Lindsey Late Great Planet Earth, Satan Is Alive And Well brand of Christianity that Hartley swallowed hook line and sinker, that he promotes in every page of his books. Not that he was the only guy predicting the Antichrist would destroy the world in 1984, but he was the only one using Archie characters to do it.

When Schwartz went over to Tower in the mid 1960s to develop their line of teen books, he poached a little Archie talent, and you can find Schwartz, Lucey, and even a sole DeCarlo in "Tippy Teen" and "Go-Go." People mostly know Tower for their 'T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents' comics, but Tippy Teen outlasted all their superhero books.

I like Wallace Wood's artwork immensely, but those Thunder Agents comics are SO TEDIOUS.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by llj »

I have a handful of Tippy Teen comics, but I never got lucky with any issues of Lucey or DeCarlo.

I think issues 1-30 of the original Josie run are possibly DeCarlo's best work at Archie, with Doyle ably cranking out solid teen humour scripts. You could really tell DeCarlo treated it like his baby. Outside of Archie, I liked his work on My Friend Irma the best. His draftsmanship improved immensely when he got to Betty and Veronica, but he was able to really turn "Irma" into that perfect mix of sexy- frantic slapstick that was almost never again amped up to the same degree in his later work. Unfortunately, you'd have to put up with Stan Lee's repetitively sexist dumb blonde jokes in "Irma" (of course, the original Irma TV/radio shows were like this too), but DeCarlo's art makes Lee's scripts almost appear to be great but dated screwball dialogue when alone it would just fall flat.

I always liked Wally Wood, but never loved him. I think I liked his inking better than his actual pencilling. If I grew up in the 50s I'd probably have loved his EC comics stuff the most, but I don't have that attachment to him like older comic fans do. His later stuff for Marvel and Thunder Agents were very good comic art actually, but a bit boring in a Curt Swan "fundamentally solid but not much personality" type of way. Of the EC crew, I was more a fan of Craig and Krigstein.
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Re: Anyone here read American or European comics?

Post by greg »

davemerrill wrote:Hartley's Jesus comics are, strangely enough, more appealing to my eye than his straight Archie work. Maybe it's his inkers. The totally bogus religion in the scripts for his Spire comics are rage-inducing, though. I mean, there's Christianity, and then there's the Hal Lindsey Late Great Planet Earth, Satan Is Alive And Well brand of Christianity that Hartley swallowed hook line and sinker, that he promotes in every page of his books. Not that he was the only guy predicting the Antichrist would destroy the world in 1984, but he was the only one using Archie characters to do it.
Oh man. Hal Lindsey. I grew up in a traditional Baptist church. Star Wars is from the pit of hell because "The Force is not the Holy Spirit," etc. Come to think of it, almost everything was from "the pit of hell." My parents were a bit more reasonable, so of course I grew up a Star Wars kid. But at that church, kids were told that Duran Duran and Bon Jovi were "from the pit of hell" because they weren't Christian singers. Damn, so judgmental. Anyhow, because Hal Lindsey was always on TBN and my parents watched that station all the time, I was convinced that the Rapture would happen before I could ever enter high school, and that I wouldn't get the chance to get married, etc. So much fearmongering.

I do vaguely remember seeing a lot of Archie Comics at Christian bookstores and such. My mom would buy me Archie comics when I was growing up (not for that reason), along with Uncle Scrooge comics (those were like the precursor to Duck Tales, as he was always with Hewey, Dewey, and Louie). I didn't really read them much, though. My favorite was the ones in which Archie and Jughead were little kids.

A few years ago, I picked up an Archie vs. The Punisher comic. I kid you not. Maybe I'll scan the cover for you guys if you want to see it. I think you can find it online though.
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