hugosleestak

June 28, 2012 11:21 am I think I'm the only one who just flat-out loved Sentry, and it really bothers me that Marvel mishandled him the way that they did. Pretty much the way they mishandled Mar-Vell until they made him famous by killing him. Sentry had a weakness far more believable and grounded than kryptonite - his own mental stability. You think gay superheroes are edgy? How many outright mentally ill superheroes can you even count on one hand? Someone who struggles to do the right thing, even as his own grasp on reality is unraveling? Marvel had a great opportunity here - they could have shown a hero who actually struggled with mental illness and to some extent succeeded. What kind of inspiration could that have been? But they blew it - BIG TIME.

June 20, 2012 12:17 am My favorites as a kid, and still to this day ... Captain Mar-Vell. No, not the cosmic Jim Starlin version with the blond hair who died and keeps trying to psych you out that he might kinda sorta be back eventually. Not that one. The one *before* him, by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, the silver haired science fiction hero, the guy who looked like fifteen tons of dynamite when he was drawn by Neal Adams in the Kree-Skrull war. THAT guy. Starlin took the character in other directions that I tried to like and just wasn't able to. Captain Atom - the original Ditko version with the french curves on his mask,. Not the later powered down version that Ditko also drew, and definitely not the Dr. Manhattan-ish version floating around now. Shade the Changing Man - the original Ditko version. People forget just what a rich world Ditko created with Shade. The man whose powers basically came from the twisted neuroses of the people he was fighting; the man who was hunted and hated by the other-dimensional law enforcement agent he dearly loved; the hero whose real enemy was the woman he wanted for a mother-in-law, and who was usually faking a coma. Insane, awesome stuff. Plastic Man - the fairly serious hero with a dry-yet-bizarre sense of humor. For a long time now, Plas has been drawn as if he was being portrayed by Jim Carrey. Nope. In the old days, Plas would turn himself into a full set of luggage, but for him it was just kind of normal. It was everyone else who was an oddball. Manhunter - the Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson kung fu/secret agent version who got blowed up in his last eight page story. It was like combining The Fugitive, James Bond and Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name." Huge fun, and it felt more "adult" to me than anything else at the time. Iron Man - well, duh. He wasn't always raking in the big bucks with Hollywood movies. When I was a kid, he was a second stringer, and sometimes even a third, but I always believed in the potential of the character. Lots more, but I'll stop here.

May 25, 2012 8:02 am I think Marvel has given Carol Danvers the New 52 Power Girl treatment - cover every square inch of flesh and tame down the hair. It's the same body covering move as the Wonder Woman treatment was a year or two ago - put some pants and a jacket on that girl! In a world of gay superhero marriages and extreme violence, the superheroines are having to wear the comic book equivalent of a burqa. In other words, progressivism is just a short distance from puritanism. Now granted, artists can still do the cliched pose with the back arched and the butt stuck out with these costumes, but with these outfits you know that the girl is hermetically sealed inside of them. Nothing is going to accidentally come tumbling out. All is well.

March 5, 2012 8:55 pm Years ago, there was a storyline in "Flash" that featured Flashes from alternate earths. Some of the more interesting designs used what looked like an interesting take on a bike or a speed skater's helmet. I'm not even sure what I'm looking at here - it's just hard to tell what the thing is. If they're going for something like that, fine. If I were running at supersonic speed, I think I'd want a helmet of some kind. I don't care for the design of the costume, but then, I don't like any of the New 52 costumes except for Aquaman. I guess my biggest "pick" is that a lot of these characters look outrageously angry about *something* almost all of the time (e.g., the redesign pic for Shazam). I'm sure it's supposed to come across as exciting, but to me, at this point, it's just monotonous.

December 19, 2011 1:44 pm The inker not only allowed the penciller to draw more pages, he or she often actually helped make the art BETTER. Replacing the inker isn't something new. Marvel experimented with it in the late 1940's. Old Sub-Mariner pages exist which were clearly done for that process. In newspaper comics, Stan Drake tried drawing with a carbon pencil to skip the inking step back in the 1960's, but it didn't have the same zing as his inked lines. A few years back, Alex Ross did a book in black pencil, just like Bill Everett had done with the Sub-Mariner way back when. The trick is making it look good. These days, the real artist often seems to be the colorist, which is interesting. The illustration of Ben Franklin he used is a bit off, though. Ben wouldn't have handed a young artist a bottle of ink. It didn't really matter what the thing was drawn with as long as it made a fairly permanent mark. Even watercolor. What he *would* have done is given him a burin to go engrave the picture on a block of wood with. The old time wood engravers actually *carved* the printing plate by hand. They were a step in production, and yes, they were the inkers of yesteryear. And they were often BRILLIANT. When photoengraving took over in the late 19th century, it put a lot of skilled craftsmen out of work. They became tweakers instead of artists. Without them, the artistic quality of a lot of illustration work took a nosedive (my humble opinion) for quite some time. The dull gray washes and weird colors of the 1890's are a testament to that. Boring stuff. The artists had to figure it out for themselves, at last, to make it any better. Welcome back to the future.