The Comic Book Thread (spoilers)

[hugobomb]

22 hours ago, GhostMachine said:

And of course most of those rip-offs were created by Rob Liefeld.

Liefeld's biggest talent is making people think he actually has talent. 

IIRC he bought the rights to Fighting American solely to try and claim he wasn't ripping off Captain America.

Didn't he also try to claim Bedrock/Badrock wasn't infringing on the Flintstones in any way despite his catchphrase being "YABBA DABBA DOOM!!"?

[Johnny Latino Heat]

18 hours ago, GhostMachine said:

Oh, and Marvel has ripped off Image. Can't remember the character's name, but they had a character pop up (in one of the Spider-Man titles, I believe) that looked waaay too much like Spawn.

Nightwatch was pretty bad, yeah. 

 

 

Also, apparently there's a rumour that Sony is interested in making a movie about him... with Spike Lee directing.

Edited March 20, 2018 by Johnny Latino Heat

[=BK=]

Which colors do you all like better? I'm curious.

[Benji]

Second. I'm a fan of that vivid 80s poster look. Top one feels a bit too much like it is trying to be grunge and not quite hitting the mark. Still good though, and I think I prefer the different depths in shade on Ollie's clothing in the top one rather than the uniform colour on the second (though I prefer the colour itself in the second).

I do think the street lights on the second could do with a tint of yellow, because the whiteness of them feels a bit un-natural as is.

[JasonM]

I feel the second one is a bit too vivid and colourful for my tastes. I like pop art and general 80s artwork, but it looks a bit weird in that page. It's all a bit too bright for darkness.

The first one is more natural and grounded. 

But most importantly, what the hell is going on with Ollie's chin?

[=BK=]

Grell GA had a big chin and I feel like part of his beard isn't drawn in well.

[GhostMachine]

Grell is my favorite Green Arrow artist, period. That's why I got him to sign my copy of Longbow Hunters #1 at a con.

I like the first better. Second is indeed too vivid.

 

[=BK=]

Bought a new Spider-Man coloring book. Who is this?

[Your Mom]

Spider-Man Noir

[=BK=]

1 hour ago, The Chiksrara Special said:

Spider-Man Noir

What a character to include in a coloring book. His universe is in black and white! He has no colors!

[Your Mom]

Hope you have a lot of black and grey crayons!  

[=BK=]

Spawn #10 is weird. It's ten issues into a(at the time) new character's book and they take an issue out to pontificate about the nature of creativity in the comics industry. It's got one of the most famous pages, the one with Marvel and DC heros arms reaching out of a cage at Spawn asking for help but it's meaningless to the story. The second half is just Cerebus the Aardvark taking him out of this hell and leading him to his dream life with his wife and a kid. Then next issue he wakes up and it was all a dream. It feels like something that should have been in a collection of stuff, not the series.

[Skummy]

I suppose you have to look at it in the context of the time - McFarlane had been involved in founding Image Comics only a year or so previously, with the whole ethos of Image being that creators would own their work, rather than the publisher owning it; McFarlane felt he had been screwed over and not paid fairly by Marvel for his work on Spider-Man, and a lot of the writers he brought in early on in Spawn's run shared that ethos - Alan Moore wrote Spawn #8, Neil Gaiman collaborated on #9, and then Dave Sim on #10.

It's basically Sim, and to a lesser extent McFarlane, using the comic book to put forward their ethos - the house, wife and kids depicted at the end are McFarlane's house and family. It's arguably a bit spiteful, very preachy, and - as you say - probably far too early in a character's existence to be getting that meta, but it's not all that out of place for the culture at the time.

 

The irony of it all is that both Sim and Gaiman ended up in legal wrangles with McFarlane years later over ownership of parts of their respective stories anyway.

[=BK=]

11 minutes ago, Skummy said:

I suppose you have to look at it in the context of the time - McFarlane had been involved in founding Image Comics only a year or so previously, with the whole ethos of Image being that creators would own their work, rather than the publisher owning it; McFarlane felt he had been screwed over and not paid fairly by Marvel for his work on Spider-Man, and a lot of the writers he brought in early on in Spawn's run shared that ethos - Alan Moore wrote Spawn #8, Neil Gaiman collaborated on #9, and then Dave Sim on #10.

It's basically Sim, and to a lesser extent McFarlane, using the comic book to put forward their ethos - the house, wife and kids depicted at the end are McFarlane's house and family. It's arguably a bit spiteful, very preachy, and - as you say - probably far too early in a character's existence to be getting that meta, but it's not all that out of place for the culture at the time.

 

The irony of it all is that both Sim and Gaiman ended up in legal wrangles with McFarlane years later over ownership of parts of their respective stories anyway.

After I made that post I looked into Sim and found this bit that made it clear why it was there.

Quote

By the end of the 1980s, Sim became an outspoken advocate of creators' rights in comics, and used the editorial pages of Cerebus to promote self-publishing and greater artist activism. Sim was also the biggest individual supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; when he guest-wrote the 10th issue of Todd McFarlane's best-selling Spawn, Sim donated his entire fee—over $100,000—to the fund.^[

 

[=BK=]

What is the clock\timer that keeps popping up in Spawn? Is it supposed to be showing how much power he has left? Or is it like a countdown to Armageddon?

[mattman1624]

I think it's the amount of power he has before he'll return to Hell.

[=BK=]

Time is a strange way to measure how much power he has left. It doesn't constantly drain, just when he uses it and it's not a thing he activates that ticks down. A bigger act takes more than a smaller one. Some kind of meter makes more sense.

[=BK=]

Spoilers for maybe NSFW page.

Spoiler

Gee Angela, maybe your buns wouldn't be freezing off if you, ya know, covered them.

 

[Colly]

So I've been rereading the UK Marvel Transformers comics I read as a kid, and they're still absolutely brilliant and well ahead of the US ones they had to reprint. One slightly troubling thing is it means they allowed Wreck-Gar to quote UK TV rather than just US, which is fine when he's referencing University Challenge, but less so when this happens:

Spoiler

 

[=BK=]