From Marvel Comics Presents #45 (1990), written by Peter David, with art by Herb Trimpe, lettering by Diana Albers, and color by Mike Rockwitz.
Starting in 1984, Marvel licensed the “Hulk” name to Hogan for $100 a fight and 0.9% royalties. They also placed restrictions: he could no longer use “Incredible” in the name, couldn’t print “Hulk” in larger letters than “Hogan,” and couldn’t dress in purple and green.
wow, wwf really didn’t care about this part
(though late 80s episodes of saturday night’s main event feel a lot like fascist rallies at times, so maybe they just thought they were untouchable in reagan’s america)
I’ve been reading a lot of milestone comics again cuz it’s always been one of my favorite comics things, besides being like historically important (black owned comics company! tons of actual diversity! crazy talented writers and artists!) it is also just some of the most entertaining 90s comic book shit and they address every single issue with zero subtlety whatsoever. hardware starts with a genius black man being exploited by his wealthy white boss, functionally forced into slavery by legal threats and the white boss’ criminal empire and has an amazing early arc where hardware is forced to reckon with the way hes murdering people without a thought because dwayne mcduffie the god thinks superheroes can’t be superheroes if they do bad shit, static starts with an arc about black anti-semitism and the way white supremacy pits the two groups against each other, there’s a bizarrely good teen pregnancy story in Icon that does NOT end the way you think it does, it’s crazy!! it’s so ahead of its time!!! even the color pallette was specifically chosen to highlight diversity in dark skin tones. it’s so much better than DC being like “uh this is the first black lesbian superhero” or whatever and then never doing anything with them. blood syndicate has a member with weird gender shit going on and its actually pretty interesting! besides the fact that theres a pretty diverse cast of characters the world also feels really fleshed out and if you read everything in the intended order it feels like a coherent story across all the books even when they aren’t doing crossovers. almost all the initial batch of milestone characters have powers because of an experiment peforrmed on inner city residents without their knowledge, and the way that story unfolds is fuckin fantastic. milestone is so great and DC only put out a collected volume of its stuff last year.
also in slightly unrelated news Bruce Campbell put out a comic for DC where sgt rock shoots methed out undead nazis with a doom shotgun and it fuckin rules
Technically that’s breaking the clause under which he wasn’t supposed to go as just “Hulk.” ^ _^
I started reading Saga because I just got it in that big Humble Bundle. After years of so many people hyping this up to me, it’s kinda bad? I like the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink world building but the writing is dire.
(Rice Boy did it better imho)
Y: The Last Man kind of blew me away in high school, but I don’t look back at it with any fondness (except that it invigorated me to read more, better comics). Saga is pretty bad also. If it was on more people’s radars it would probably get a lot of flack for belonging to the writing school Joss Whedon.
I played the first mission of Destiny 2: Lightfall and the cringiest aspects of it ring of Brian K. Vaughn.
Yes, I was very disappointed in Saga after hearing such praise for it. I guess the artist is talented enough and the setting sometimes interesting enough to distract from how bad the writing is.
Though I guess I should say not to my taste rather than bad.
I didn’t think Saga was particularly bad but I’m comparing that to basically, uh, nothing.
Tbh I think the harshness of my judgement toward it is directly proportional to how much people told me it was the best comic ever
I’m frothing mad about it, it grabs every tic and trick I hate and rings them all like a big bell
All of Brian K Vaughan’s comics read like a TV pitch, he is writing comics for people who do not like comics, I really dislike his stuff, I bet I would have watched every episode of that stupid Under the Dome show if it had come out while I was still drawing comics though, I watched lots of fucking garbage while inking.
Fiona Staples can draw just fine but I cannot stand how Saga looks or reads, I do not like the digital paint or lack of backgrounds or shadows or the abundance of large panels filled with closeups, it is probably a very quick, smart way of working so good for them but like fuck I’d ever pay $4 or whatever for something so fucking barren
Tellingly, the most hype I ever heard for Saga was exclusively from folks who didn’t read comics. Always “I don’t normally read comics but Saga is amazing and incredible”
Thirty years ago, these were the same folks saying that Sandman was the greatest comic ever made
volumes 1 and 2 of runaways were great though
(although it doesn’t help vaughn’s case that whedon would write some issues later on)
(also not helping is that runaways was one of the best of marvel’s tv endeavors)
I would probably say i read Saga because other people told me it was good, then kept buying volumes because a new one was out and everyone said it was good. The plot sorta doesn’t go anywhere, but what comic does?
What was the last comic I read that I would describe as “Amazing?” probably the Naussica manga. The Incal is pretty good. That feels like a “normie” answer though. But what normie is into The Incal?
A bunch of Jean Girard’s stuff is on internet archive, but it’s all in Spanish. I keep meaning to read Metabarons but I have to zoom in on every page and the online reader kinda sucks.
While I’m here and can’t do work due to a 2-3 hour long build process…I can probably talk about The Eltingville Club! This was more tragic and depressing than I thought it would be. It’s basically a bunch of kids who come together through their love of nerd culture, but then it turns to hate, and they are constantly clashing and at odds with each other. The only thing that unites them is a loathing of things outside the group. The comic is an amalgamation of real and imagined events - one character rips open a store’s worth of bread packaging failing to find a collectors card, something that the author admits to. There’s also a very depressing comic book store which burns down spectacularly. Then the group breaks up! but we return to the group a decade plus later, one of them found Magic The Gathering and is in a much healthier state, but the rest are still at each other’s throats while chasing some form of superiority over the others. It’s a nice bit of closure.
my saga opinion is i read one of the newer daredevil comics earlier this year at random and there’s a part where he says “lying cat says lying” at a perp when he detects they’re lying with his super hearing. and i was like wait, isn’t that a saga thing, has daredevil read the popular 2010s comicbook saga, does he… trace the ink with his fingers…? do age retcons mean he’s young enough now to have read saga before he went blind…? i don’t know. maybe it’s fleshed out more in the letters section, or there’ll be a side story in one of the annuals about it.
the only brian vaughn comic i remember reading was the first issue of ex machina which was about a super hero who was mayor of new york. the issue ends with him looking sad and saying “if i were really super… i could have stopped BOTH planes” and there’s a full page shot of a solitary surviving World Trade Center building. good stuff.
i havent been reading many comics lately but i got one at random called “working kappa” by imiri sakabashira and it’s great. it turned out not to be translated so i don’t know what it’s about but just from the art it was the best comic i’ve read in years. here is the panel that sold me on it.
half of his comics are more or less about 9/11 or iraq lol runaways really is the only thing he had anything to do with that’s decent
I took out the big Saga collection from the library years ago (think it was the first 25 or so issues), it seemed fine but I also neglected to ever follow up on it.
I also read the first few Ex Machina collections and thought they were fine then never read any more.
I did read all of Pride of Baghdad as that was a one-shot with a decent set-up, it was alright.
Basically I guess he is fine but not all that compelling?
I kept up on Saga for a few volumes since it seemed to be building towards some interesting conflicts, and eventually my interest petered out. Still don’t feel as burned by having good-art-but-nothing-happens as I did with Monstress.
I read Slum Wolf over the past couple nights. I thought it was part of the recent crime comics kick I’ve been on, but it really wasn’t in the same category as the other crime comics I’ve been reading. I liked it, through.
I had a sort of a double-take moment when I got to this page, having of course seen one of the panels at SB.
