FFF Results Post #416—Late To The Party

On Friday, CR readers were asked, "Name Four Comics On Which You Were Late To The Party, Liking Them Far After Most People Did Or Far After You Might Have Been Expected To, For Whatever Reason; Provide The Reason For #4." This is how they responded.

*****



Danny Ceballos

1. Red Colored Elegy
2. King-Cat Comics & Stories
3. Cold Heat
4. Kramers Ergot 4
5. I vividly recall the first time I saw that "holy shit, what is THIS?!" cover at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. I thought someone had snuck this weird book on the shelf as a joke. I would spend the next couple of months leafing through that copy before I finally bought it. Owning the book didn't help either, because each time I picked it up to read it seemed to morph into something I'd never seen before. I instantly loved some of those comics and viscerally hated others. Now, I don't know what I was thinking, because I love every square inch of it. That book is one of the greatest comics reading experiences of my life.

*****



Marty Yohn

1. Pogo
2. Steve Ditko's Dr. Strange
3. Conan the Barbarian by Barry Windsor-Smith
4. Akira
5. I don't appreciate much Japanese manga (wary after Pokemon and Dragonball Z), but when my son was younger, he borrowed the entire six volume set of Akira from our local library. He insisted I read it when he finished. I was taken aback by the scope and complexity of the story, and the detail of the artwork. I'm a little more open to manga influences these days.

*****



Philippe Leblanc

1: Les Cites Obscures
2: Sandman
3: B.P.R.D
4: Paul a Quebec
5: The first time I heard of Michel Rabagliati's book Paul a Quebec, I picked it up at the library. Being from Quebec City myself, I assumed I would enjoy it. Unfortunately, the settig (time period and town) is overwhelmingly present in the beginning, overpowering all like a very potent cheese. I couldn't stand the setting. It took me several years to revisit the book and found both the style and story to be quite pleasant.

*****



Oliver Ristau

1. Pushwagner's Soft City
2. Challengers of the Unknown
3. The Winter Men
4. Moomins
5. I've read the Moomins as a kid but I always found them to be clumsy and worse, boring. I was more into dynamic drawings back then, or what I thought of being dynamic, i.e. mainly John Buscema or Romano Scarpa. When the reprints of the London Evening News strips started in 2009 I wasn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing, but a magazine asked me for a review. It was then when I realized what a gem this series is and so I had to buy all the following collections. I'm still glad I did that review, otherwise I would still think of the Moomins as some roly-poly snore bores.

*****



John Platt

1. Sam Glanzman
2. Lee Marrs
3. Foolbert Sturgeon
4. Jaime and Mario Hernandez
5. I remember reading my first issue of Love & Rockets in about 1983 or 1984 when I was working (illegally) in a little hole-in-the-wall comic shop in Freehold, New Jersey (I was 13 or 14; it was child labor, but I got paid in comics, so it was okay). I don't think I was ready for it at the time. I dipped back in again and again over the years, but I always felt that I had missed the boat; I just couldn't get into the stories. A few years ago, a review copy of Locas landed in my lap. It was too big a dose and I couldn't absorb it all. This year I finally tried again, Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I could have been reading these guys all of these years? I hate my life.

*****



Tom Spurgeon

1. William Steig's Work Generally
2. Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec
3. Skippy
4. Dennis The Menace (Newspaper Version)
5. It took me a long time to appreciate Hank Ketcham's art, but when I did I was really taken with it and remain so today. I also needed to read a bunch of the early stuff, the opportunity for which the Fantagraphics collection effort provided. Weirdly, I never had a problem taking to the best of the Wiseman/Toole comic books.

*****



James Langdell

1. Julia Wertz's Fart Party-era comics
2. Master of Kung Fu
3. Simon & Kirby romance comics
4. Eddie Campbell
5. His early randomly presented wacky pages in US anthologies struck me as the sort of thing I usually enjoyed, but felt these didn't click -- which delayed by a few years reading Eddie's Bacchus, which became a favorite comic ever.

*****



Buzz Dixon

1. Stuck Rubber Baby
2. Krazy Kat
3. Little Nemo
4. Popeye by Elzie Segar
5. I grew up on the classic Fleischer Popeye cartoons and recognized the mysterious "Segar" was somehow responsible for them, but it wasn't until much, much later that I knew who he was or his remarkable contributions to the art of the comic strip. Popeye was still on the funny pages when I was a child, but as good as Bud Sagendorf was, the particular/peculiar magic that was found in Segar's original stories wasn't there. At that time the first reprints of Segar's work were long gone from the public sphere, of course, and it was many, many decades later that I finally began encountering them, first in short run reprints and finally in the gorgeous Fantagraphics collection.

*****
*****
 
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