Flash!

This summer, in Paris, I picked up two old reprints of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon comics (pictured on the right), and a few days ago I bought the new, stunning reprint from IDW (on the left). And the difference is just staggering. Not only were the panels rearranged for the old edition, but the colors are horrendous and the text is actually slighly different between the two! I have no idea why, but there you go.

But, worst of all, the panels in the right-hand edition have actually been recropped from the original. Pay attention to the first panel, which has been cropped, and the panel with Zarkov in his lab, which has been extended.

Plz I Can Haz Kindle?

Facing the worst nightmare for any man—a worm under the skin, according to H.R. Giger; figuring out what reading material to bring along for our trip home over Easter according to me—is all the more reason to creave a Kindle. It is of course still not available outside the US, and given the adoption rate of the non-rythmic parts of the iTunes Store in the EU, it’s unlikely to see the light of day until just before the Event Horizon eats us all up. And then what’s the point really? Well, I guess it’s better late than never.

Anyway, I can’t help but wonder if the seemingly rather well adopted Kindle is a sign that we in ten years time or so will have dispensed with bookshelves in the home? We’ve got somewhere in the area of 500 books, and while we’re unlikely to throw them away in the same way we’ve done with all of our CD’s and most of our DVD’s as digital solutions have become available, I’ll certainly be first in line for when I can pick up Invincible, Powers and The Walking Dead issues on my ebook reader rather than having to wait for the tradeI pick up trades because I hate the messiness (and ads!) of issues. But on a digital reader, issues wouldn’t be a problem at all.. Being able to bring along, or at least have wireless access to, our entire library when on vacation would really be quite a revolution.

Though, whether or not Rikke will go for it, her being a librarian and all, is another question. And fair enough, despite positive reviews from most corners, there is something to be said for bringing a book to the beach rather than a $350 techno tablet with a ‘Steal Me Plz’ baloon hovering over it. Sure, it’s somewhat remedied with the Kindle reader for the iPhone, which I bring everywhere anyway, but still.

I don’t want to choose one or two books, even though I’ll only get ten or so pages read anyway; I want it all and I want it now.

Thanks Freddy.

Warren Ellis and Superheros

I’m not pointing any fingers, but note this interview with Warren Ellis in Writers on Comics Scriptwriting:

And yet you continue to write superhero comics, why is that?

At the moment, yeah, I’m still writing superhero comics. But Planetary I’m only expecting to run about three years, and that will be the last superhero project I do. Once Planetary is complete, that’s it, I’m out of the genre. Planetary is designed to say everything I have left to say about superheroes.

Page 63, Writers on Comics Scriptwriting by Mark Salisbury

Now note who is scheduled to take over Astonishing X-Men after Joss Whedon.

Not that I’m complaining. I’m just waiting for the damn trade to be released and rereading my Iron Man: Extremis in the interim.

Comic Club: The Prophet

Alright, so I promised to get started on Comic Club quite a while back, but I never picked up the reins and got it going proper. Well, it’s never too late I hope.

prophet

A while back, I picked up the second album of The Prophet, a comic about a guy who gets mysteriously transported into the future, where he frolicks with demons and odd creatures in a rather spectacular post-apocalyptic world.

Unfortunately, the Danish translation—which is the one I’ve got—is piss-poor. I can’t compare it to the original version, but if that is even half as confusing and skin-deep in its character portrayals and story, I must weep. Hopefully it doesn’t have the text-spacing-errors or missing characters, and that in itself would be a ste up.

Too bad really, because it is really very very well done, with some awe-inspiring images of demon-like titans tearing New York to pieces, and oil tanker embedded in a skyscraper and so on and so forth. You can check out some sample pages I found online, though they’re all rather meager in comparison to the true money-shots in there.

1

Buy it to look at the pretties, but pay little attention to the slightly-cliché story of the ‘chosen one’, which so far hasn’t brought anything new to the table.

Comic Club: Not Your Father's Turtles

Splinter

While I didn’t mean for this to slip all the way to now—life intervened—I’m now very happy to be able to let you in on my first personal ‘comics discovery’. It’s a little three-issue gem—of which I have two—featuring none other than the turtles and their sensei Splinter.

But this is not your father’s turtles, or your brothers. Hell, this isn’t anyone else’s turtles!

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For some reason I happened to have a couple of days not too long ago where I got interested in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles again. So I read up on their origins, saw the movies:”(I like both, but the first is by far the best, what with Casey Jones and Splinter’s outrageous backstory.)”: and decided to check out some of the comics, since I remembered hearing that some of them were quite different from the turtles we know and love.

I didn’t expect them to actually have any TMNT comics, I mean they not exactly hot stuff these days (though they will be soon), but I asked at my local comics store nonetheless. And much to my surprise, I was taken ‘backstage’, through their claustrophobic Neverending Story-worthy backrooms. No kidding; those backrooms are scarily cool. Row upon row, floor to ceiling of comics. Stacked. More comics than you can shake a graphic novel at. I’m telling you.

Anyway, they pull down a stack and let me go through it, to see what there is to see. These are the old Mirage comics, which vary wildly in style and artists and look and feel like they were printed in a basement somewhere and then shipped out in the dead of night by ninja/bike messengers and dumped on the doormats of comic store owners, who would then in turn proceed to haul them in before first light and file them away in their vast storage cabinets.

It felt like no one had touched these comics since they were put on that shelf back in 1991…

Turtles, #36

The earliest issues in the stack were #35. I flipped through it and was… surprised. Wow. This is fucked. Up. I love it!

Unfortunately it looked like it was a two-issue, #35 and #36. So I picked up both (as well as some other stuff, which I’m sure I’ll get around to reviewing at some later date).

It turns out however, that I got my hands on the second and third part of a trilogy of stories, so I still need to dig up issue #31 somewhere… Damn.

The story and art was all done by Michael Zulli, whom I have no other experience with. He’s worked on The Sandman. And might I add that both the writing and the art complement each other in ways I’ve rarely seen before. It is dark, disturbing, violent, abstract, nightmarish and very poetic. And it is by no means a children’s comic!

Really, the only thing I can think of being wrong with this short storyline, is that it isn’t longer and that it’s so damned hard to get ahold of.

You can check out the story arc for Zulli’s trilogy if you’re interested, complete with page-samples and if you’re up for it, you can compare Zulli’s turtles to other artists takes. Also, I gathered some scans and some found images into a flickr group.

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If you can get it. Get it. And if you have an extra copy of #31, drop a comment and I’ll give you the address of a doormat you can have your ninja-bikers drop it at.

A Day Like Today

Kaneda

In an apparent attempt to compensate for its absence, the sun has decided to bring its full strength to bear on a Copenhagen in dire need of some revitalising after an eternity half a year of drab grey skies.

I went to Fantask, our local geek store and picked up Hellboy: Seed of Destruction as well as, quite shamelessly, a new Zits (Crack of Noon). Really I should have started collecting Hellboy a long time ago; I hang my head in shame.

While I was there, I stumbled onto issue 4 of The Walking Dead, and suddenly remembered that I had bought issue 3 a while back, but never got around to reading it (I started reading Walking Dead last year).

With Rikke at work, I hunkered up on our bed with a Coke, some chokolate and a friendly warm ray sunshine to keep me company.

I finished the first of the two Akira volumes I’d gotten yesterday from Amazon. And despite wanting so badly to read the second as well, I don’t want to waste it away just like that. Even though it ain’t easy! I guess I’ll have to get the remaining four volumes one of these days.

So I read me some Walking Dead 3 instead, drank some coke, lounged in the sun with the occasional gentle breeze from the open windows letting me know that while this may seem like a good day, it is nothing compared to the summer lying ahead.

Now, what might you be up to a day like today?