Okay, he is his brother, but he really seems more like an uncle to me.
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olaf lowkenuinely has unc status
Iâm washing my own mouth out with soap donât worry
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Wow! Did not expect that, good to see him back at it.
what is it
loss
Oh itâs that cell-alt-dlt comic about the guyâs wifeâs miscarriage.
ohhh I ddint see the face on the conveyor belt in the last one at first. finally I didnât see loss in something, I am healing
In case anyoneâs wondering whatâs up with the new Youngblood series as we mark âissue 100â today.
The current story arc kicks off with a knock off stryfe/doctor doom armored villain who is kidnapping people across time from the crucifixion and imprisoning them below deck on a luxury yacht but thatâs all suddenly out the window because bootleg Celestials and the buff Watcher show up to take over the earth after the Supreme family gets their asses kicked by the armored guy. Meanwhile thereâs a peace conference going on about whatâs going to happen to space Gaza thatâs keeping the alien members of the team busy. Badrock falls off the boat sinks to the bottom of the ocean Concrete style but is saved by Atlantean royalty in the mold of Namor and Aquaman. Theres a time jump where the Celestials now have been ruling the earth for a couple months, using giant Days of Future Past Sentinel-style Die-Hards. Oh and Chapel is back to being the quasi-Spawn demon thing from the cliffhanger from the unfinished Image United book from like ten years back.
Comics are cool.
Weirdly the art doesnât look as crisp as it did in his recent self published books about an aging Brigade involved in a futuristic war between Canada and the US.
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I am now fully caught up on new Youngblood.
Thereâs a whole section in issue 5 aka issue 99 where Badrock has to round up a rhino in the bootleg Savage Land, and I expected it to pay off in issue 100, but it never comes up again and instead the story fastforwards a couple years more for the big final battle, which outside of a bunch of villains getting involved and the Thorâs hammer thing actually paying off from a previous issue feels like a lot more telling than showing, with the epic scope of everything falling just off panel and the heroes never really feeling more in danger than they did in that first issueâs fight against the villain with the mysterious scheme that didnât matter in the long run.
Giant Sized Youngblood is supposed to be a bit of a fresh start (and I think has been available to people willing to spend $25 on it for months already), so maybe he just wanted to move the cast to setting where the earth had been dominated by high tech aliens for years as quickly as possible. I know decompressed storytelling is a problem with comics, but this seemed to err too far in the other direction.
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All of this makes me think about the time I heard someone talking about Rob Liefeldâs original Youngblood pitch and how there was this cool backstory and setup stuff that actually wasnât in that first issue at all. I guess itâs just Rob has all this stuff in his head for stories and characters but heâs not really planning it out heâs just doing it all off the cuff one page at a time.
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It was kinda wild how his original concept for celebrity super heroes was such a back seat detail in those early Youngblood issues, where as Mike Allredâs relaunch of X-Force ran with that.
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Made it to issue #100 of the Marvel G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic book, which Iâm still surprised works as well as it does. On one hand, âsuper-hero + military/espionage actionâ is precisely my thing. On the other hand, thereâs zero characters who could be considered to have more than 1.3 dimensions, and the main conflict relies on endless wheel-spinning; if I werenât consuming the series in huge fifty-issue volumes, it would probably be quite intolerable.
As is, though, itâs a great comic book junk food. Itâs hard to call it good, compared to its genre-mates like Ostranderâs Suicide Squad or Metal Gear (Solid) or something like Chris Claremontâs X-Men, all of which have things like characters and themes, but the combination of Hamaâs commitment to specific military tactics and languageâeven when dealing with objectively ridiculous toysâand his complete lack of subtlety when it comes to politics (Sierra Gordo and the North American Banana Monopoly are favorites) all make a frequently pleasantly surprising read. And I absolutely love Cobra, which manages to feel very specific in ways its counterparts in other books often arenât, with its pyramid schemes, real estate scams, and focus on real areas of dissatisfaction within Americana.
Hama, I feel, has also managed to largely avoid the quality degradation that has marked creators like Claremont. If the current ARAH doesnât work quite as well as it did during its classic run, itâs largely because he has less to say about the current geopolitics than he did about the Cold War, and/or has had a harder time incorporating it into the story, leaving the story to mostly center on the less-resonant central factions. In that sense, the stand-alone issues work a lot better than the larger stories (the same was arguably true of the Marvel book): the most recent issue Iâve read, focused on drones and their role in asymmetrical warfare in Not!Ukraine, worked better than anything having to do with Cobra.
I also appreciate Hamaâs continued resistance to winnowing down the teamâs membership to a manageable number, even now that selling toys is not the primary concern. Yes, giving yourself only a dozen Joes to worry about would probably make things a lot easier, which is why every run not intentionally emulating him culls the cast. Still, I love that more obscure team members still have a chance to show up. My only wishâand this applies to comic books in generalâis that characters were allowed to age in real time: Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow/Stalkerâs Vietnam War back story should be about Vietnam!
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have you tried dcâs captain atom ongoing from the late 80s? itâs kind of a captain america riff, with a guy being a couple of decades out of time, but made more interesting with stuff like his now-adult children, military buddies whoâve had a couple ofdecades of career advancement without him, and having to deal with living in reagan/bush i-era america (and having the true, nasty nature of america, its government and its military revealed to him in various ways)
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dracula in hell #2: i spent the evening hitting the random comic button on the site i use to see if itâd throw up anything i hadnt seen before. i probably wouldnt have checked this one out if it werenât for the wild looking old man dracula on the cover of the missing first issue
issue #2 looks more generic, and has a caption reading âIts Bloody Its Brutal The Unholy ORIGIN Of Draculaâ so i wasnt that interested at first. i think i eventually checked it out bc it was funny to me that the publisher was listed as âappleâ (no relation to the beatles org or the other one). anyway i was glad i looked inside bc this was the very first panel sequence of the comic (BLURRED SEQUENCES ARE NSFW)
dracula spends the first four pages as a giant detached penis roaming around. some naked ladies try to grab him and he boldly slaps them away before escaping by realising he can still transmogrify into a wolf and a bat
then he turns into a man again and thereâs an earthquake and heâs nearly ââŚdrowned in an eruption of volcanic semen!â. then heâs turned into a baby and chained in a pit in front of a giant lactating earth mother. his hands fall off and he escapes by pulling off his own head and climbing the giant woman to bite her neck (classic dracula). a demon shows up to scold him and the comic abruptly ends 14 pages in. the rest of the pages are totally unrelated abstract pinups of things like a vampire cheerleader and a lady with a weird crab thing for a crotch. i guess whatâs odd about it is that both the writing and art feel kinda too âstraightâ and stagey to be a head comic and i canât really imagine anyone anywhere finding it erotic enough to work as porn. the comic ended on this and according to the db i checked the writer never worked on any comics before or after. just an odd thing buried in the heap of the other odd-looking apple dracula comics. moral of the story is never give up bc theres magic everywhere you look :^)
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Iâve read the one issue that tangentially tied in to the Suicide Squad / Checkmate âJanus Directiveâ crossover, and was included in the TPB collection. I have enough of a sense of the series that Iâd normally be interested, if not for the fact that the writer I most associate with it is Greg Weisman, whoâs at the absolute top of my creator shit list (âcreators whose only crime is bad artâ division). While thereâs enough reason to think that Captain Atom wonât include his most infuriating ticsâat least if the editor does their job) an actually good book by him is likely to just piss me off even more about his current work. Does he do the whole series, or are there runs by other writers?
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unfortunately, i canât remember, i read it years ago
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I spent a large part of my day reading Tintin: Objectif Lune. I first read it 15 years ago in English. It felt so satisfying to hit a decent pace of French reading fluency, I didnât want to stop. I love how the scenario is just an excuse to have Capitaine Haddock hit his head and invent swears. I think I read âfaire le zouaveâ 100 times. Such an obscure referenceâŚdoesnât mean anythingâŚ
The clean line and composition of colors across the panels is so beautiful to me. Itâs the same as how Chris Ware thinks about Gasoline Alley, I think.
Does anyone else have an interest in bandes dessinĂŠes? Iâm thinking of grabbing some Corto Maltese or Adèle Blanc-Sec. I would love some recommendations.
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