THAT COMIC SMELL: Who are you, again? (Character changes)

 

The new episode is online now, discussing how different character have changed and evolved over the years.

From the website:

"Hello everyone!

In this episode of the pod we dive into characters that have REALLY changed over time. We mainly cover ones that have changed in design from their first iterations but we also go a little deeper and cover some other angles.

This and all the usual comics chat on…

That Comic Smell!

Get us on…

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and most places you find podcasts.

Love and Rockets (Los Bros Hernandez)

Dennis the Menace (Beano, George Mooney, Davey Law)

Bananaman (The Nutty/Dandy, John Geering)

Drax the Destroyer (Jim Starlin, Mike Friedrich)

Garfield (Jim Davis)

Venom (Todd McFarlane)

Harley Quinn (Paul Dinin, Bruce Timm)

Catwoman (Bill Finger, Bob Kane)

Dragonball Z (Akira Toriyama)

Dan Dare (Frank Hampson, Ian Kennedy, Alan Moore :P Jokes, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, Gary Erskine and many more)

Robin (Bill finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson)

Iron Man (Stan Lee, Don Heck, Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber)

Nick Fury (Stan Lee, Jack Kirby)

Captain Marvel (Stan Lee, Gene Colan)"

WILD SPACE

I’ve been looking forward to this book for months. It’s a collection of odds and ends.

Back in the 70s and 80s Marvel UK reprinted Marvel US comics. They generally did so in black and white on a weekly basis instead of monthly, and hence used up more of the material than was being produced.  For Spider-Man and the Hulk and the other heroes, there was a ten year backlog of comics, and so this wasn’t going to cause a problem any time soon. For Star Wars though, there was a problem, and so Carmine Infantino got to work pencilling, with two inkers alternating to get the stuff produced more quickly. The result was that uniquely, Star Wars Weekly was printing the stories before they were appearing in the US comics. The Marvel US comics are the reprints.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back movie was released in 1980, there were a good few stories that were just dropped from the Marvel US schedule. I didn’t realise the extent , and was surprised that so many are therefore seen as obscure.

Also from Marvel UK are a series of original comics produced in the UK by creators such as Alan Davis, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, John Stokes, etc. Some of these were already reprinted in the 1990s by Dark Horse in colour, and are presented as such here. With these stories, original covers like this one by Alan Davis aren’t included in the book.

A cheeky thing to note is that although Dark Horse are not hiding altogether that these are Marvel Comics, they have gone to the trouble of whiting out “Stan Lee Presents…” from the start of every chapter and replacing it with “Lucasfilm Presents…”

Of note too are Blackthorne’s 3D comics, published between the 1986 cancellation of Marvel Star Wars and the 1991 Dark Horse series starting up. All three are here, starting with the “Tenth anniversary” #1. The 3D effects have been done away with, and it’s nice to look at these for the first time in 25 years without straining my eyes. I do miss the effect Blackthorne created for the camouflage net on these pages though.

A lot of nice curiosities here, nice to have the Pizzazz magazine stories by Howard Chaykin and Tony Dezuniga, and Gary Erskine’s art is good clean fun too.

GERALD SCARFE and DUNDEE COMICS DAY

The latest International Journal of Comic Art (Volume 12, No. 2/3) has been published. I have a couple of articles in there.

They’re reviews of two events from The University of Dundee. One is on Gerald Scarfe’s illustrated talk, and the other is on the third Dundee Comics Day. The latter featured David Bishop, Crawford Coutts, Warren Ellis, Gary Erskine, Mel Gibson, Alan Grant, Ian Hague, Peter Hughes Jachimiak, Ian Kennedy, Bill McLoughlin, Keith Robson, Julia Round, Roger Sabin and Emma Vieceli. More information can be found here.