Archie vs. Transformers: A talk about storytelling.

Man, this is such an unfair fight.
How do you beat Archie?

So I was reading a modern Transformers comic recently and I found myself bored out of my skull. It's weird, because the story wasn't awful or anything, it's just that I couldn't engage with it.

Why not? Well, it was the art. The scenes I was trying to read were talking scenes -- scenes without any main action beyond characters yammering at each other. That's fine -- I love those sorts of comics when done right. Exposition scenes are actually something I really enjoy. The comics medium is able to create really dynamic exposition sequences because it's able to show things in such diverse ways.

But, that's not what we go here at all! All we got was a boring, grey, and very static sequence.

And y'know what? I think I know who could have done it better. Samm Schwartz.

Advertainment: Electroman

 So it turns out that Cleveland, Ohio has its own superhero!

That's some compositional fail in the first panel, there.

Unfortunately, he seems to have zero regard for public property and has black, soulless pits for eyes (but Jim there doesn't appear to have any eyes, either, so I guess that part's okay). I can't imagine a lot of supervillains make their way out to Cleveland, so I suppose becoming a shill for a correspondence school is one way to earn a living. Assuming they don't take busted walls out of his paychecks.

I have no idea what I scanned this out of anymore, but I think it was an early '80s Marvel comic.

Sal's Sunday Punch #12

Boy it's been way too long since we watched someone punch someone as drawn by the glorious Sal Buscema. So you know what that means, don't you? That means... IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!

Yup that's an evil Atlantean warlord in there! Is it Attuma?
It's not Attuma!

Oh yeah, baby! The Thing punching Nazis, Atlanteans and Nazis with sharks on their chest! It don't get any better than that.

Jughead and Sexuality #2: The Song Writers.

This story was scanned from
IDW's "Best of Samm Schwartz"
hardcover book.

Way back in one of our earliest posts we started to talk about Jughead's sexuality. Back in that post I said that it's impossible to actually judge Archie characters in a general sense. To understand them you have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

I stand by this idea, the Archie characters are players who have general roles, but the specifics change from the story to story. With that in mind, let's take a look at this story and see what it can tell us about Jughead's sexuality. The story is from 1964, written by Frank Doyle and drawn by Sam Schwartz. Doyle is hands down my favourite Archie writer, and Schwartz is my second favourite Archie artist (after Dan DeCarlo), so this is gunna be a treat, believe me!

The Illustrated Comic Art Workshop Vol. 1, Part 1

Over a year ago, I picked up the first volume of The Illustrated Comic Art Workshop, an out of print comic artist how-to book from 1982 authored by Frank McLaughlin and Dick Giordano (the latter famous for inking Neal Adams on Batman in the 1970s, among many, many other feats). When I originally made my scans, I posted them to the art section of the Allspark, a Transformers message board, as 80 Page Giant did not exist then. But now 80 Page Giant DOES exist, so it's time to share this rare gem with the rest of the world!

Apparently he was also bitten by a radioactive Robert Christgau.

(Peter Parker: Spider-Man #43, written by Zeb Wells, art by Jim Mahfood)

Spider-Man is so mean to Beyonce.

Finally Finished: Akira.

Remember that robot and fat chick from
the movie? No? Of course you don't. Read
the damn comic, you loser.

Ever have something you've been meaning to read for a long time? Something that has eluded you, that for whatever reason you've maybe read part of it, but not all of it? For me, that was Akira. About ten years ago I picked up two volumes of Akira (printed at the time by Dark Horse comics) at random because I was going to be teaching a class on "Manga Art", so I wanted some examples of Manga art in my collection.

Having bought these two volumes of Akira I found another piece of Akira at a second-hand store. This wasn't part of the six volume series I was already collecting, but part of a series published earlier by Marvel through their Epic comics imprint. This version was in full colour, and had a different (and in my opinion better) translation than the later Darkhorse reprints.


It was around five years later that I got another volume of the Darkhorse version, and maybe another four years before I got yet another volume. By this time the publisher was Kodansha Comics, but they were still using the same format as Darkhorse for the printing.

Lesbian assassins!

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  Gotta pull out the defibrillator and shock this blog back to life!  And if there's one thing that guarantees hits, it's lesbians...and if there's one thing I know how to write about, it's ridiculous '90s Spider-Man spinoffs!  So let's take a look at Silver Sable and the Wild Pack #28, written by Gregory Wright with art by Gordon Purcell.

Surprisingly, the J. Jonah Superman haircut never caught on.