FFF Results Post #275—Whispers And Rumors

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comics That You Heard About Or Perhaps Saw Only A Brief, Inadequate Snippet Before You Experienced Them To Full Effect." This is how they responded.

*****



Tom Spurgeon

1. Yummy Fur (mentions in other alt-comics letters columns)
2. Cerebus (that Bud Plant ad)
3. Elfquest (ditto)
4. Maakies (people in Seattle kept telling me there was a crazy guy in New York that drew beautiful comics from the depths of inebriation)
5. Lost In The Andes (kept running across mentions in interviews and articles)

*****



Art Baxter

1. Mr. Natural (Comix: A History Of Comic Books In America by Daniels)
2. Mysterious Suspense #1 (Article in a very early TCJ by Dwight Decker on best & worst comics)
3. Jesse Marsh's Tarzan (The first Hernandez Bros. interview in TCJ)
4. Screw Style (Manga! Manga! by Frederik Schodt)
5. The Wrong Place (Frank Santoro going on about it @ Comics Comics)

*****



Scott Dunbier

1) The Rocketeer -- that incredible ad in Starslayer #1
2) Mr. X -- the Paul Rivoche poster, looking down the alley
3) Chandler -- the plate by Steranko in the National Cartoonist's Portfolio
4) The Demon -- that last little panel at the end of Forever People #11
5) Marvelman -- finding a copy of Warrior #4 and then scouring New York for the first three.

*****



Danny Ceballos

1. Dirty Plotte (recommended in letter pages of Yummy Fur)
2. Windy Corners Magazine (Comics Reporter interview with Austin English)
3. Little Lulu (about twenty years ago I bought a dog-earred copy at a Thrift Store for 25 cents)
4. Krazy Kat (Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics)
5. Ernie Pook's Comeek (first started reading them in the Phoenix New Times weekly in 1985 which lead me to the collection titled Fun House)

*****



Will Pfeifer

1. Grant Morrison's Animal Man: A friend showed me the page where Buddy Bradley looks at the reader and says "I CAN SEE YOU," amazed any comic would be so crazy.
2. Love & Rockets: All those ads that used to run in the Comics Journal, plus the glowing review of the first issue
3. American Flagg: Comics Scene (remember them?) reprinted a handful of panels that made me desperate for the release of the actual comic
4. Wonder Warthog and the Nurds of November: The Journal raved about this in two separate reviews, and I spent years tracking down a copy. And I wasn't disappointed. Still a favorite.
5. Miracleman: A friend in college told me about this crazy new series from England, then we spent the day going to various shops to find the first three issues.

*****



Marc Sobel

1. Rubber Blanket #2 (all kinds of people raved about this book before I could finally track it down)
2. Mister A (read about it in Blake Bell's book first)
3. Mister X (read about it in Hernandez Bros interview in TCJ)
4. Lost Girls (early chapters first published in Taboo)
5. Hate (first read that short Buddy piece in Different Beat Comics, then bought all the back issues)

*****



Justin J. Major

1. Achewood (Comics Journal ad)
2. Cerebus (Roommate had a tee shirt)
3. Promethea (got all TPBs for a buck each at a 2nd hand store)
4. Watchmen (Christmas present)
5. Venture Brothers (I hope this counts)

*****



Mark Coale

1. Love and Rockets
2. American Flagg
3. Bone
4. Mister X
5. Asterix

*****



Jake Kujava

1. Rambo 3.5 (Comic Reporter)
2. Lewis Trondheim's Nimrod (ad in Comics Journal)
3. Eddie Campbell's Alec, (Alan Moore interview)
4. Art of Eric Stanton -- (essay on Steve Ditko)
5. Nick Bertozzi's The Salon -- (News article from school)

*****



Michael Grabowski

1. Raw Vol. 1 #8 (after years of seeing the weird covers of previous editions at Comics & Comix in Palo Alto)
2. EC New Trend comics (the 1st post-Disney Gladstone reprint editions, after years of reading about them and peeking at the Cochran Library editions)
3. Doonesbury (upon its return from that first long hiatus after years of seeing it in the SF Chronicle but not understanding it)
4. Zippy (upon its appearance in the SF Examiner after a few tantalizing years hanging around Comics & Comix waiting to be old enough to read underground comix)
5. Barks' duck comics (first Gladstone run, after years of reading about them in the Overstreet Price Guide; so far as I know, only two of the couple dozen Gold Key/Whitman Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge I had read as a kid were Barks stories, so they don't count.)

*****



Shannon Smith

1) Elfquest. To this day I've never read one panel.
2) Strangers in Paradise
3) Cerebus
4) Bone
5) Elephantman. I've never laid eyes on the thing but I remember all those nice looking ads in The Comics Journal.

*****



M. Emery

1. Watchmen (through ads in newsstand comics but had no access to DM in Provincial New Zealand)
2. Love and Rockets (A friend had cut up an issue to make a collage on his guitar)
3. 1950's Eagle/Dan Dare (got to read short adventures in the hardcover annuals, actual issues were very rare where I grew up)
4. Axa (Would get to read three panels in the New Zealand Truth occasionally if my Dad bought it)
5. Grendel (described as a violent adults only comic on the first mail order I subscribed to as a kid)

*****



Sean T. Collins

1. Love and Rockets (TCJ.com messageboard chatter)
2. Maggots (announcements that it would be published by Highwater that didn't pan out)
3. I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool (rumors that it was the scariest comic ever)
4/5 Dragon Head/Monster (buddy of mine who studied in Japan told me he thought they'd be up my alley back before they were translated)

*****



Chris Duffy

1. Fantastic Four 40-60 (John Byrne interview where he said they were the best issues of the Lee-Kirby run)
2. Thirteen (Seth essay in Comics Journal)
3. King Aroo (entry and panel in Encyclopedia of World Comics)
4. Comics by Lionel Feninger (overheard a conversation between Mark Newgarden and Chris Ware)
5. Robotman (typically vivid description in Steranko History of Comics vol. 1)

*****



Gavin Lees

1) The Incal (and pretty much all of Moebius' work) -- I knew the name and the connection to Blade Runner, but his work was impossible to find in the UK
2) Skin by Milligan and McCarthy -- a one-page ad in Strip and a whole host of tabloid outrage were all I'd had before finally tracking this down a few years ago
3) Kraven's Last Hunt -- when I was wee, this was the only Spider-Man comic I wasn't allowed to buy on account of it being too "dark and satanic"
4) Usagi Yojimbo -- he was in my Ninja Turtles comics
5) Cerebus -- Ditto.

*****



Sean Kleefeld

1. Pedro and Me (I caught the tail end of a TV interview with Judd Winick while he was writing Green Lantern)
2. First in Space (It won a Xeric and had a monkey on the cover)
3. Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword (I was sold on this almost exclusively by the "Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl Comic" tagline)
4. Whiteout (Steve Lieber offered me a free sketch of Carrie Stetko while I was waiting to talk to the person at the table next to him)
5. Captain Long Ears (I have absolutely zero recollection of where I heard of this or what was said about it, but it was sitting in my cart on Amazon when I went to place another order)

*****



Timothy Callahan

1. Swamp Thing (house ads, didn't read any of it until after Moore's run was over)
2. Flex Mentallo (saw issue #3 on the stands, didn't buy it because I didn't own #1 and #2)
3. Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four (Marvel Saga was my gateway drug for most of the Silver Age Marvel stuff)
4. Chris Ware comics (all I ever heard was how great Acme Novelty Library was, and I didn't fall in love with it until I read the collected Jimmy Corrigan)
5. Weisinger-era Superman comics (saw glimpses via reprints, they seemed like absurdly silly comics, found out they are absurdly silly and yet amazing when I finally read them)

*****



Buzz Dixon

1. 1963
2. Jimmy Corrigan
3. Azumanga Daioh
4. Fun Home
5. Yotsuba&!

*****



Patrick Ford

All these would be by way of A History of the Comic Strip. Checked it out of the local library in 1968 when I was ten. It was a tantalizing mystery to me then. Have owned a copy (actually two, because I found a used hardcover, after I had purchased the book in softcover) for many years. One of those books I had poured over so many times by the time I was 12 that it was like walking through my neighborhood. Page 203 is like the crossing at the railroad tracks on the old frontage road.

1. Little Nemo
2. Krazy Kat
3. Tintin
4. Neutron (Crepax/Figure)
5. The Upside-Downs

*****



Evan Dorkin

1. Astro Boy (Black Jack, Princess Knight) most of the work by Tezuka that's come out over the past few years that you'd always hoped you'd see.
2. King Aroo -- Picked up a back-issue of Nemo a few years ago that wrote up the strip, took a while to finally win a copy of the old collection on e-bay.
3. GeGeGe No Kitaro -- saw the anime on a local leased-time station, read about the manga, tracked down the Kodansha bilingual editions a few years later.
4. Steven -- Someone clipped an image from the strip and put it on the wall near the NYU film department equipment check-out. I had no idea what it was until the NY Press started running it.
5. Asterios Polyp -- some time before it came out David had a dummy of the book and flipped through it for me and my friend Brian to look at. When I say flipped through it I mean that he literally flipped through it, like an animation flipbook. Twice.

*****



Grant Goggans

1. Animal Man (I remember thinking, "Wait. The guy who wrote Zenith is doing a book about that loser who was in a really lame two-part Wonder Woman story [267-68]? Why?")
2. X-Men (I saw Marvel house ads for the X-Men for a good three or four years before I ever saw a copy anywhere. Nobody I knew bought it.)
3. Return of the New Gods (Little Southern Baptist me found the title of this comic book very, very troublesome. When the characters showed up in Justice League, I hid the comic from my parents, just in case.)
4. Buddy Bradley (Around 1986, I opened a Neat Stuff randomly to an exchange where Buddy was told "all white guys like Hendrix." The day before, I'd had a furious, screaming, only-teenagers-can-be-this-intense-about-irrelevant-crap argument about Hendrix, whom I could not stand, and concluded that the creator of this ugly magazine was every bit as stupid as my idiot friend. Took me years to give Bagge another chance.)
5. The Odd Man (The character was in a DC Explosion house ad in 1978 and I spent fifteen years wondering who he was. After Devlin Thompson at Bizarro Wuxtry told me his strange little publishing history, I spent the next two years looking in every back issue bin for a hundred miles for that one issue of Detective where he showed up. The very first thing ever purchased by anybody on eBay? This darn book, by me.)

*****



James Romberger

* Prince Valiant: read and look, never mind the haircut, he's deadly
* Terry and the Pirates: the fastest long-distance ride in comics
* Love and Rockets: like your own crazy family
* Black Hole: like Joe Sinnott on bad acid
* Big Questions: how did it all come together so well

*****
*****
 
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