Archive for the ‘Comic News’ Category

The Walking Dead is a long running horror comic series. Image Comics has recently released a $1.00 special issue to entice new readers to the story. It’s called Image Firsts The Walking Dead. It worked. I’m enticed.

Often I only have a cover in the post but I wanted you to see some of the innards of this one. It is black and white, and fairly “comicy” styled, but the pacing and flow of the images rivals anything I’ve seen in the “new” Creepy. Plus it has ZOMBIES! (YAY!)

I am not a big fan of people ripping off the cliched “standards”, such as zombies and vampires, simply because they are selling. I consider it to be a whore-like and lazy substitute for creativity. It took all my strength not to bitch about the vampire comic I just wrote about yesterday.

Vampires have been done to death. (hee hee)

And the saddest part is that vampires have now been mutated from cold, ancient, horrid, life-sucking, degenerate unearthly abominations, to young cool nifty wonderful things that girls want to have as boyfriends. And what annoys me most is instead of them bursting into flames and dying horribly in the sun, they “sparkle”. Blecch!

Ok, so zombies are cliche. But if you’re going to do them, do them right.  Look at that inside shot. That is a great illustration. And anyone who can get away with WHUMP! and OOF!, both with exclamation points and both in the SAME PANEL certainly deserves my money.  The guys who wrote and drew this thing definitely did it right. (That would be Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, by the way.)

I would love for you to buy the dollar special, but it’s kinda’ sold out.  My link points to a page that has the TP collections on it (at a discount of course). And back ordering the $1.00 one (for $.80) is possible. Or you could wait till it becomes in stock again.

You could also wait till I get one of the collections then review it. That may take a while but I will get around to it eventually.

That’s all for today, now I have to get back down to the cellar before my thing rips its chains out of the floor…

again.

PS-Whump!  Oof!   …I love it

Hellboy in Mexico is the latest issue of some incarnation of the Hellboy comic book series. In today’s post I will be telling you what I think about it and where to get it cheap.

Hello and welcome to Monday. I usually never mention the day in the post. This is because I  write these posts, one day and edit them a different day and by the time they get up on the blog it might be several weeks. But today, in light of my new shorter, more frequent posting policy and the fact that I’m putting all my time into the newsletter instead of the blog, I can crank this thing out and post it in a short time.

I have never read Hellboy. I didn’t see the first movie. And I have yet to see the second movie. I want to see it, but haven’t.  So I came to this comic, knowing nothing about this character. Not counting the few details that I may have gleaned by watching the trailers for the movies.

So why, you may ask, did I suddenly haul-off and buy a Hellboy comic? Especially one as bizarre and specialized as Hellboy in Mexico (which by the way is subtitled “or, a drunken blur“).?

I have only one excuse. One of the credits on the cover is Richard Corben. As many of you may know, I am an ancient fan of Richard Corben.

I first discovered Corben’s work in the pages of the now defunct Eerie and/or Creepy published in the 70’s by Warren Publishing. (yes this is the Creepy Dark Horse’s new publication is supposed to be a resurrection of, or remake, or continuation, or whatever you call it when they re-do a comic) So, when I was in my early teens, Corben comprised half of my favorite artists. The other half being Bernie Wrightson.

Interesting story here. I didn’t know that one of my favorite artists was Bernie until much later.  I remembered seeing Corben stuff here and there and his name in the magazines Creepy/Eerie. It wasn’t until more recently, when I decided to revisit them that I realized the art that I really loved the most was Bernie Wrightson. (okay, maybe it’s not that interesting).

Other people may remember Richard Corbin as the creator and artist responsible for Den, a long running storyline in the old  Heavy Metal magazine. It even made it into the Heavy Metal Movie as one of the animated stories.  He was very prolific in Heavy Metal magazine, back when it was still good. ( Again the 70s and 80s.) (Interesting note…Bernie Wrightson’s work also made it into that same movie. ) Richard Corben painted the cover art for the Meatloaf album Bat Out of Hell . (And not too surprisingly, he was  enlisted to paint the cover for Bat Out of Hell II.)

But I digress…

The point to all this is I’ve read the comic. I have no idea how the story compares to other Hellboy stories. But the art is very nice, of course. It has humor, and I will be keeping an eye out for other Hellboy titles. In the meantime, I would certainly suggest you buy it or if you know someone that has it, steal it from them.

As is my new policy, you can get to a place to buy these comics by clicking on any mention of comics in my posts.  Oh!  If you buy through the vendor  I link to, you get a discount off the cover price of these things.  For example, I got my copy from the local comic shop.  I paid $3.50 plus tax.  But through my links you’re connected to a vendor from whom you can buy these things for 20% off. Which makes this $2.80.  There is also a variant cover which lists for $5.00, but you can get it for $4.00 through my link.

That’s it for today, come back soon for the next exciting installment, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to be talking about.  I’ll probably just pick something at random out of a pile I have laying here.

What should have been a week, became almost a month. Yes, kiddies, it was last month that I made the commitment to review each and every story in Dark Horse’s Creepy issue #1. I had two reasons for doing this.

The first was my mistaken belief that it would help me get used to writing everyday. It didn’t.

The second, was the need to really bitch out loud about a couple of the stories in the magazine. I wanted people to see that I could do more than just bitch. I hoped that writing reviews of the good stories would balance it out. That didn’t work either.

Free at Last…

The issue is over. Save this last couple sentences I never need to write about it ever again. Let’s get the last review out of the way quickly, shall we?

The last story in this new horror anthology was a reprint. It was called Daddy And The Pie. It may have been cool in the fifties or whenever it was originally carved on a cave wall, but in 2009 it just doesn’t cut it. Written by Who Cares, and illustrated by I. Dongiv Ashit.

I originally thought the story was one of the better ones in the rag. But that has changed. It was not a horror story. It was not new. It should not have been there.

When Creepy Did Not Suck…

The real Creepy magazine (Creepy TOS) had twice the number of pages as the new one does. If they are going to keep the page count so damned low, they don’t have room for reprints.

Many have said that it’s so wonderful that there are no ads in it. I disagree. Add about 20 pages even if they are all ads. The magazine will be better. I like seeing other things of interest. I think of ads as a service to me, not an imposition. (unless they’re Join-the-Fuckin-Army ads.) But if they are ads for things that I would like and otherwise would not know about, bring them on! I have no clue how often the best thing in some of the comics I have read has been the ads, but it’s pretty often that’s for sure.

Now that I have gotten this unnecessary challenge out of the way I get to write about things that are actually good. I recently got 2 new comics that are very good indeed. One of them is House Of Mystery and the other is Darkness: Pitt.

Come back soon kiddies and you will hear about good horror, and see way better images.

Oh, and the next issue of Creepy comes out in October (Joy). Let’s hope these guys have read my posts and improved the mag. I will buy it of course, because it’s my damned job. But if this one doesn’t show a marked improvement over the last one, I will not be as nice about the whole thing as I have been.

I need a shower.

Welcome back kiddies. Can you remember all the way back to the second or third article in this series, where I told you that when I got to the second last story. You have to remind me about something? Well this is it. This is the second last story. It’s also my second last article. The Horse at this point has been reduced almost to the point of a puddle. But I do have to get the last couple whacks in.

Then, I can finally get on to some more very interesting comic books that I found recently. The story I’m talking about today, is titled Loathsome Lore “Faustian deals”. It basically is a rambling narrative, which speculates about certain celebrities having been in league with the devil.

It’s interesting comic books stuff. The story is credited as “Haufner, Braun, and Gore. And the art is by Hilary Barta. As I said in a previous article, much of the writing in this particular piece seems to have been lifted from a 1974 issue of Hustler magazine. (That was the one in which they had the article, about Anton Szandor LaVey).

Now I have to complain about an editorial decision made in the magazine. As I said before, I had never heard of Robert Johnson before the story Hell Hound Blues. I naturally thought it was just made up for the story. That story was the second story in the magazine, Faustian deals was the second last. But in it it referenced the deal that Robert Johnson made with the devil.

I believe these two stories should have been switched in position, for two reasons. The first is that it would’ve allowed Loathsome Lore to introduce the concept of Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil before it was used in a story.

The second and possibly more important reason to switch these two stories is that Hell Hound Blues is the best story in the magazine. It should have been second last. Well, actually, it should’ve been last. But second last still would’ve been better.

As for the writing of this particular tale. It seems interesting enough. It is not however a story. I like it. But it really is not a story. The artwork is its saving grace and is unquestionably the best artwork in the entire magazine (not including the frontispiece by Bernie Wrightson).

Hallelujah! Although I’m not quite finished with this horse, yet. I feel are renewed vigor. I’m into the home stretch. There is only one more story to talk about and that one’s going to be pretty easy, because it’s a reprint. Yes kiddies, they didn’t even bother closing with something new.

The tale in question, Daddy And The Pie will have to wait for the next post. Only then will I be able to inflict the final whack.

Be careful driving home, and remember – time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

Howdy folks. Welcome to day three of the let’s-beat-Creepy-to-death marathon. Those of you with exceptional observational skills Might have noticed that this is actually day 5. It’s supposed to be 3 but sometimes things interfere with my ability to write. (Like not really wanting to.)

It’s kind of amazing how many ideas seem to be good at the time we have them, but once we have to keep doing them for a while they loose there initial charm.

Well let’s get to it. Today I shall ream Hell Hound Blues.

Just kidding! This story was wonderful. It was written by Dan Braun and illustrated by Angelo Torres. I was not able to find out much about Dan. He seems to have done some editing on other Dark Horse stuff, but I was unable to find other writing credits. Judging from how well this story was written, I have to believe that he has done some writing before.

As for Angelo, it’s a weird story. When I first got Creepy issue #1 and started reading it, I was frankly appalled by the piece-of-shit opening story. When I got to the second story in the mag, Hell Hound Blues, I was expecting the worst. But I instantly liked the artwork. It looked very professional. Definitely done by someone who wasn’t just doing comics in their spare time. It also reminded me of the kind of art I had seen in MAD magazine, many years ago when it was still good.  Just take a look a the accompanying images and you will see what I mean. These are all from this story.

I know some of you are way ahead of me here, but I need to write it anyway. After much researching and checking and such, (I had originally looked through old Creepy magazines to find him) I could not. I remembered him, but the copies I had on hand just didn’t happen to have his stuff in them. I have many others but didn’t want to dig through all of them.

To the point, I found out that he started out at (I swore I would never mention them, but…) E.C.! He worked on the horror comics that are generally credited with starting them all. (they didn’t really, but that is a different post. Yes, kiddies, he worked on Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror and such. Additionally and the reason for why it reminded me of MAD, he worked on…MAD.

I will not say that this was the best horror story ever, but it was certainly the best in this book. And it was completely fun and entertaining. I hope to see more stuff from the two of these guys, they compliment each other well. Dan seems to be writing with tongue firmly in cheek and Angelo draws comics that look like comics. It’s a great fit.

If everything else in this issue had sucked, this one story would have made the magazine worth buying.

Fortunately there was other good stuff, and to find out what it was, you need to come on back and read the rest of this series of posts. I will be hitting every story in the book.

Tomorrow’s post is going to be about Chemical 13. It is the story of Nazi hijinks involving poison gas and a room full of naked test subjects. (just keep telling yourself—it’s only a comic book)