I sort of expected that but as I read the GN I see the characters in the show...it's weird as I couldn't stand some of them more than others... If I didn't see the show first it may have been a better experience or not? ...
As I've said before, I hope that Doomsday Clock is worth the wait. Right before the DC Rebirth I had decided to drop out of comics because I how much I disliked The New 52, and dropped all of my titles for about 2 months. It was Rebirth that caused me to give DC another chance. In turn, for me Doomsday Clock is DC's last chance. I don't expect it to fix everything, but if it doesn't fix most of what is wrong with DC Continuity I've decided to quit reading DC when Doomsday Clock and Heroes In Crisis are over. At that point, I will only give a Legion Of Super-Heroes title a try (if they ever bring the series back), and maybe an occasionally interesting trade paperback. Otherwise, I will limit myself to TV/movies/animated series for superheroes for the most part.
I haven't liked Heroes In Crisis at all. As a fan of Wally West and Booster Gold, there's not much to like about it.
BTW, much like GOT became GRR Martin's cash cow, TWD did exactly the same for Robert Kirkman. He's a terrific writer. If yr feeling 'adventurous', I would highly recommend his OTHER masterpiece; Invincible! It's basically Kirkman's take on Superboy! But taken to the next level. Great stuff!
I strongly agree about both. With Booster Gold, he has one of the most important jobs in the DC Universe (and one that no one can know he is actually doing): Keeping history on track. One of the aspects about Booster Gold that seems lost is that he is not the same person he was when he arrived in the 20th Century. Booster should be portrayed kind of like Columbo: he looks like a fool but he knows far more than he lets on. With Wally West, I was there when he assumed The Flash mantle and followed his progress, seeing him truly become The Flash (during the "Return Of Barry Allen" story arc), and through the bad times ("Ignition"). One of things I disliked most about The New 52 is that Wally was just deleted from history, his long history as The Flash was just gone without even a nod of acknowledgement. One of the aspects of Wally's return that seems inconsistent is when memories of Wally return when he encounters people he knew. I recently read an issue of The Flash where Wally encounters Frances Kane (aka Magenta), a friend he knew before Flashpoint. There were good friends and Wally was able to restore her memories just by talking to her. Yet he wasn't able to restore the memories of Linda Park (the love of his life and the person who brought him back from The Speed Force)?
I'm still reading it and I still love it. It makes me roll my eyes on occasion, but nothing like the show (which I dropped last year).
They definitely enjoy torturing Wally West. It almost would have been better if he hadn't returned for a couple more years.
It is two days after my 63rd birthday, and two weeks beyond Free Comic Book Day, and I have just completed Howard Chaykin's sublime takedown of the industry itself. The "Hollywood Babylon" of the comic book phenomenon in America, Hey Kids! Comics! is a masterful poke in the eye at the greed, hypocracy and just plain ugly business ethics that birthed hundreds of childhood millions of dreams in kids too young to know what these poor artisans really had to go through so they could believe a man can fly. Nobody's ever done a comic book about the comic book profession before, that got so many closet skeletons right. With the closet doors, wide open. Chaykin was probably my first "fan favorite", once I was old enough to want to learn and appreciate the best of the artform, yet with no sense yet of what graphic narrative could really be, just a generation later. Before The Comics Journal, before America started taking the Graphic Novel seriously, before Steranko and Marshall Rogers pulled my eye outside of the mundane, there was Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser, Ironwolf, and the pre-Millenium-Falcon badass starship, the Limerick Rake (a name so nice, he used it twice!), which eventually pulled me to the indie effort Star*Reach. He was the first comics creator I sought out, and bravely walked across a hotel meeting room to shake his hand, at my very first comics convention. As little as I really understood about the industry and its' history at that point, I could tell, he was truly emmeshed in a business he was just settling-into, with far much more history and legacy at his back even then, that I could have even supposed. He was barely a blip on the profession, yet here he was representing that concept of hero-worship he'd perhaps only experienced for himself, within the past three years as a Hot New Artist For A Major Comics Company. That was 19-(ohmigod) 1973...and since then, he has amassed the following, the industry respect and the cult of appreciation that has finally given him both the craft and the cred to convincingly and truthfully spill the beans about abysmal pit of petty aspiration and frustration that propelled so many of the field's "leading lights" through decades of slavish pursuit of personal ideals, clinging to the opportunities and talents at their fingertips to stay alive long enough in it to make a difference. All the archetypes are there, in rich characters you don't really know from their libel-lawsuit-proof depictions and modified career tracks as depicted in these five issues crammed full of just-enough-truth to give you the real skinny, just-enough obfuscation to establish reasonable doubt...and just-enough visceral honesty to send a marvelling zombie of any brand-name house of "ideas", merrily marching back to a real library, with a shameful sour taste in their mouth. Oh it's all there, from wide-eyed Clevelanders with dreams of superpowers, to shady pay practices, origins borne out of ciggie cartels, racial scorn, mysogeny, property theft, Wertham, public facades, shysters, desperation, Hollywood larceny, rubes, dummies, innocents, and funky flashmen. And yes, a good old-fashioned book-burinig. And through it all, the tight-pencilled, acid-tongued, hard-nosed Chaykin style turns Hey Kids! Comics into an operatic saga of history generations of us grew up on, but were no closer to the truth than the Hostess Twinkies ads that paid for the staples. Forget Hemback, Scott McCloud, and for god sakes, take all the excelciorated soapboxes you want, but only with a grain of salt; if you want to know what really happened right under your noses, start with Howard Chaykin's real love letter to the comics.
Too bad we likely won't see a scene like that in Animal Man: After a series of horrible events in his life Animal Man literally confronts his writer (Grant Morrison) in the Real World about why he put him through so much.
Spanking is the least of what goes on in this one! Chaykin's never shied away from sexuality in his work. His crowning achievement, Amerikan Flagg, was among other things, a sexy book. He sort of just went nuts with Black Kiss. Its the ONLY series I ever bought that was sold BEHIND the counter!
I read this recently and loved it. I've got to give Chaykin props for telling the story and not caring who he pisses off.
I’d love to see all of American Flagg reprinted, including the non- Chaykin issues. I loved that series back then and it’s even more relevant today.
This would be a good place to ask, who knows a comprehensive data site where I could find an anwwer to Cerebus' question (after all, why would you not want to answer a question by a guy named, "Cerebus"?); I could have sworn it's been out in trade paper for awhile now...? Jaka says hello, by the way.
You could go to Amazon and buy the separate volumes (Vol. 1, the 1st year of the book was by far, Chaykins finest hour!). I've never used it but maybe you oughtta give comixology.com a shot.
Only the first 14 issues of AF! have been reprinted. There was a hardcover of the first 12 issued about ten years ago and later two softcover volumes with the first 14 were released. They’re also available digitally in comiXology The rest of the issues of the first series and the second series have never been collected.
I just read the first two compilations of Jeff Lemire's Royal City. Without giving much away, it's about a family in a small one industry town. There's lots of symbolism in the story and images, and had his trademark slow reveals. Excellent stuff.
Like you it has given me a cautious optimism, and I may still continue reading a few titles...however there are still two issues to go.
