I finally got through my backlog and picked this up. it’s just Buffy in Riverdale but Greg Smallwood’s art makes it so enjoyable. the whiplash from issues 4 & 5 switching artists was tough to deal with
speaking of retouched reference photos, Greg shares a lot of his techniques & is a heavy fan of references
On one hand, Wally Wood’s rules, on the other hand I’ve always been a fan of folks who play fast and loose with anatomy. And if everyone is sketching over poser models whether those Kirby foreshortened foreground hands?
A few weeks ago, I came across a super violent comic panel involving a double decker bus in an unrelated image search and I had to figure out what it was from. After a few reverse image searches I tracked it to Crossed: Wish You Were Here and ended up reading the whole run. (I should note that my saying this isn’t an endorsement as I’d have to add a few caveats were I to consider recommending it to anyone.)
I see now that the one I read was a spin-off and not the one by the same artist as Providence.
I was introduced to my series long ago when one of my friends answered the door to his Halloween party in some whitey tighties, covered in fake blood, with the trademark rash on his face.
Appropriately he was otherwise one of the most straight laced guys I knew.
I like Hellboy. I think Hellboy in Hell is the peak, taken as a whole, but obviously you kind of need the rest of it (plus a few ancillary books) for context. From the main Hellboy run I prefer the isolated cases, the short stories, over the big overarching plot shit. It doesn’t get any better than The Corpse!
I’ve read that a lot of people actually like BPRD more and, while it is generally consistent and Pretty Good it’s also much, much more material and I have no idea how it would read without the spine of Hellboy behind it. It’s basically The X-Files Copes With The End of the World. It lacks Hellboy’s “stumbling through fragments of international folklore” rhythm which is a formula I like. I like folklore and mythology. I like a big red demon guy punching refugees from folklore and mythology. BPRD is all Original Content internal lore all the time.
Lobster Johnson and Witchfinder are both fun but disposable. The Hellboy and the BPRD books are diverting but not as memorable as the older stuff. Of the most recent material I enjoyed Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea but maybe I just like an Ancient Gladiator Woman hitting things with an axe.
You don’t get the actual end of Hellboy’s story without reading BPRD: The Devil You Know, which isn’t fantastic. Or maybe I was biased against it because Scott Allie’s a sex creep. We may never know the whole truth…
will cosign being mostly underwhelmed by devil you know even though the last batch of mignola pages in the final issue were perfect. i got into the books through reading bprd trades out of order which i still recommend a lot as an experience - like, seeing all the characters cycle in and out, wondering what’s HIS deal and then having to hope it eventually comes up, catching the end of someone’s story and then reading the earlier one which prefigures it, the perfect pulp fiugue experience. in theory army guy stuff turns me off but i feel like the rambling prolonged depiction of the end of the world as just one endless series of bungled lowering expectations, nobody knowing what’s happening, maybe a single panel of glimpsing a guy dressed like a skeleton getting carried away by frogs and everyone having no idea what it means, is one of the more effective ways i’ve ever seen that stuff conveyed, and the way it lacks the folklore elegance of the hellboy ones sort of makes it more horribly convincing to me. also, guy davis!!!
really liked the witchfinder one with the eels, sledgehammer 41 went some odd places, could not get into baltimore at all, hate that so many of the new ones are done by chris roberson whose default mode just seems to be tv writer level banter
So I’m once again in a G.I. Joe kick, which is a problem, since the percentage of G.I. Joe things that are actually good and easily available is in reality quite low. Even modern Harry Lama is, in the best of times, only slightly better than modern Chris Claremont–his G.I. Joe: Origins run a decade and change ago was really good, but his ongoing work on his original continuity feels like spinning in wheels. My best bet was finding that original run, but that’s tricky business…or it was until today.
