Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* this story about Tom Richmond doing a ton of art for an iPhone app that then doesn't get picked up is either funny or horrifying depending on whether you're a bad or good person. I guess the nature of the caricatures is in question.

* I read a bunch of Newsboy Legion stories over the weekend for a project I took on. That's one of the two (I think) significant Golden Age Simon/Kirby kids comics efforts, and one of three significant efforts of that type (again, I think) in Kirby's career. I was surprised by how not terrible the stories were. There's a certain rudimentary A to B quality in the plots, by which I mean for example if there's a conversation of a nefarious nature anywhere in Suicide Slum to be overheard, one of the feature's lead kids is certain to be nearby. Still, the stories have a certain integrity when it comes to tone and keeping everyone within the parameters of their established character types, and there's a greater self-awareness in terms of genre and expectations of same than I remembered seeing during my past dips into the 1940s four-color pool.

* I'm not sure why I've never seen a review of Watchmen written this way before.

* I had no idea that John Stanley worked on an Aldrich Family comic book.

* a profile of Hugh Hefner, cartoonist. At one point at The Comics Journal in the late 1990s we were set to interview Hefner, and I don't know what happened. I was drinking a lot in those days.

* home team news: Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture.

* those damn muties 01: how Grant Morrison ruined the X-Men. I liked that run of comic books just fine, although I think the memory of those books is better than those books, if you know what I mean. I'm also a little bit baffled why everyone thinks those books were so forward thinking when they were as much a tribute to the original Claremont/Byrne run in point by point fashion as much as they were about adding a little emotional realism to the long-running series.

* those damn muties 02: here's some love for the X-Men story Days Of Future Past as a general time travel story. That was a cool comic to read when I was 12; its core elements have been yanked around and picked at so many times since then it's hard for me to judge the original's effectiveness. Murdering all of the good guys in brutal fashion like that was a jaw-dropper for a young superhero fan in that time period, though, and Colonel Logan of the Canadian Resistance Army sure looked cool in his black turtleneck and brown jacket.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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