Christian

I hope for either HB or Immortal Hulk to win. Probably more likely to see Hulk out of that list, since a lot more people are reading that book.

Childress certainly seems to have gotten interested in the concept of war elephants. Your patience for this chapter may vary. I am getting tempted to start skimming this chapter. It is very tangential, to say the least.

It’s official. Now that Disney owns the Alien franchise (where’s the fun theme park attractions, Disney?), the Aliens comic series will be moving to Marvel. So, Dark Horse has lost another property.

Marvel has announced their first Alien comic tie-in to be released in early 2021. The creative team isn’t anyone major. Nothing to get excited about here. Just news.

In other news, Disney said they have plans to acquire the Earth in early 2022. Amazon originally put in a high bid, but dropped out allowing Disney to acquire the property at below-value. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying that the planet is pretty used up, and probably only has about ten more good years left. Amazon said they might have been interested in merging Earth with their AbeBooks division, but the cost was too high to be worth it.

Disney, on the other hand, says that a washed up, once valuable/now dying property that they can stripmine for decades of future movie ideas and related merchandise is exactly what they wanted.

I’m reading The Lost World of the Cham by David Hatcher Childress. I didn’t realize he had a new book. Well, it’s from 2017.

Childress didn’t travel to Southeast Asia for his Lost Cities series of books, so this book sort of fills the gap. The Cham are a Malay-related people, once more widespread in the area, who now are an ethnic minority group in Vietnam.

Childress travels through Southeast Asia, investigating “ancient mysteries” of the area, and also uses some of his ideas from previous books relating to areas in the Pacific, South America, and Mexico.

I don’t know why Childress is on Ancient Aliens. Well, he probably considers it fun and I’m sure the big payday is a major reason. It makes people class Childress with the Von Daniken camp, but he doesn’t write about the ancient alien theory. He continually dismissed the ancient alien proponents in his books. So, it does a disservice to Childress. He’s more akin to writes like Graham Hancock.

There’s a lot of pseudo-archaeology, but also interesting theories, and I feel some ideas which fill in some missing puzzle pieces about ancient history.

The current book takes as a starting point that the Champa Empire was an advanced sea-going civilization. His theory is that they made a large amount of the wealth to fund their empire by offering sea transport across the Pacific to free traders from China, India, and Africa which included voyages to the so-called New World. It seems to makes sense to me.

We’ll see how much reads as inspired ideas that seem more believable than accepted knowledge, and which comes across as outdated or straining credulity.

Yeah, he’s one of the proles. Now if it were someone like Barr or Pompeo that would be a different story.

Only the elite have access to tax-funded health insurance (or the cash, if it’s someone outside of government, as most wealthy people don’t even bother with health insurance in the US) that would fund a $100,000 treatment.

Well, the electoral vote is just about finalized now and Trump has failed.

It’s hilarious to hear Trump yelling at the Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia (which he once praised) for not canceling their electoral college votes.

”What is wrong with you? Are you going to side with democracy, the law, and the Constitution; or are you going to listen to your god and make me your dictator? Huh?”

Not to mention, if any of Trump’s cabinet did get it and got seriously ill, they could just get the real treatment for the virus (the one Trumpy and Rudy got as alluded to in the Tom Tomorrow strip) paid for by their lavish government-funded healthcare....the tax-paid healthcare that is far too comprehensive and high-quality for us mere proles.

Trump decided to change his mind on saying that senior White House officials would be the first Americans to get the vaccine.

I guess that prioritizing the members of his cabinet as the most important people in the country, even over health care workers, wasn’t the best position.

Unless he was just planning to experiment on them.

Too bad you didn’t write “roast a turkey” because I have some ideas for that!

Here’s something that will make Christmas 2020 better for everyone. Nothing says Christmas like the true tale of the Mince Pie Martians!

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/franticplanet.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/forgotten-forteana-would-you-like-a-mince-pie/amp/

You probably should have stuck with the Nick Redfern book.

At least Redfern is entertaining.

Ha.

That’s why the Dems wanted to impeach him so bad. Just like the Repubs wanted to impeach Clinton so badly because he was implementing most of their economic positions and doing it better than them.

Trump’s message was a lot more complex, with a lot of fascist overtones. Fascism has always had a stronger resonance with the lower classes than conservatism, after all.

Bannon is a pretty clever guy and knows his history, he’s just not as clever as he thinks he is.

Some say the Trump’s heart grew three sizes that day.

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It was actually the Heritage Foundation which picked the Supreme Court justices for Trump.

The Republican establishment put their full-faith in the Heritage Foundation; which was heavily behind the Reagan and W. Bush administrations, plus the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton.

Too bad Trump and Evola-brainwashed Bannon are too egocentric to be able to admit that they were used by the Republicans, rather than being the all-powerful masterminds they thought they were when they got Trump involved with politics.

Oh well, I guess the Republicans give them those upper class tax breaks.

”Bannon, your puny occultism is nothing against the power of Satanic establishment politics! Mwa-ha-ha!” said the Heritage Foundation.

You have to give the Repubs credit though. They were aware enough to realize that when the best they could get to run for office was John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Ted Cruz that they needed to take drastic actions.

Unlike the completely tone deaf Dems who are still running the same old corrupt candidates like Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden with their motto being, “Hey, we’re not Republicans, right? Vote for us!”.

The one that W. Bush nominated voted in Trump’s favour, because anyone associated with George W. Bush knows all about the stealing of an election.

I was going to mention the House on the Borderlands GN as perhaps my favourite comic work by Corben.

Did you ask me because I didn’t realize Corben was eighty, Dog? To put it in perspective, though, Gerry Conway isn’t quite seventy years old yet, and he started in comics quite a bit before Heavy Metal existed. Chris Claremont only turned seventy this year.

Granted, Conway was only about seventeen when he started writing comic stories for DC.

Oh wow. I didn’t realize he was 80 years old.

I can’t say I was a fan of his HB work (his style didn’t fit the book), but most everything else which he did the art I found to be excellent.

His style perfectly suited weird fiction.

Trump must be getting really desperate now, saying that Venezuela stole the election from him.

I don’t know if this still counts as hilarious or if we’ve reached the point of just sad now.

He continues to say that he’s not leaving office (we can’t allow the election to be stolen by Socialist illegal immigrants!), which simply sounds like an elderly man suffering from dementia at this point, and talks about how he’ll be hailed as a hero when he personally hands out the coronavirus vaccine.

Will he be injecting people with the vaccine too? One has to wonder.

I heard there’s this great comic coming out called the X-Men. It won’t seem great at first, but within the next thirteen years, it’s going to end up being really popular.

Since this is 1963, I have no idea where I am writing this message, but in the year 2020, I bet someone will be able to pick it up. Maybe someone on a futuristic Jupiter space-colony.

Man, I bet everything in the year 2020 is going to be so amazing! They probably think it’s the best year ever. In the year 2020, I can imagine that comics read you.

Since the Marvel Sentinel series was from seventeen years ago, I am going to guess that was not what he meant.

Hellblazer

Immortal Hulk

That’s about it for great comics that I’ve read in 2020, and Hulk was on the list last year. It simply has continued the ongoing greatness from past years.

Of course, there are extenuating circumstances for that, but I don’t think 2020 will go down as one of the better years from comic books (or, well, anything).

The majority of Marvel’s publishing year was taken up by two cross-overs in a row...first Empyre, then X of Swords.

Mignola is usually good for one top comic contender of the year, but there have hardly been any Mignolaverse comics this year. The few that were published weren’t exactly strong.

My pick for best comic this year has come to an end.

Once Morrison is finished on GL, soon, I won’t be reading any DC books.

He wrote a mini-series called the Doll House Family for that Joe Hill line of horror comics recently published by DC.

I read the first issue and it was pretty good, but for whatever reason, I didn’t continue with the rest of the series.

Besides that, the last title I remember him writing was a Barbarella revamp. That was back in 2017.

It does seem he is moving on to concentrate more on prose work going forward.

Yes, Liefield has been bitching about the current Hickman era on X-Men.
I just think he’s upset about any comics that aren’t like the comics were in the 1990s when fans thought he was a great creator.

Carey’s writing on X-Men wasn’t the equivalent of, say, his Lucifer. It was still very good, although if you aren’t well-versed in X-continuity, it’s probably not the most accessible comic.

It ranks as one of my very favourite periods on one of the main X-Men titles. I only like Chris Claremont’s original Uncanny X-Men and Grant Morrison’s New X-Men more than the Mike Carey issues.

The editor was printing those letters from outraged Liefield fans just to mock them. They were printing the most obviously laughable examples and laughing at them.

I think X-Statix had a pretty respectable run for a new series in the comic book industry of the time. It was simply a matter of eventual lower sales leading the book to be canceled. Most titles that don’t have a long legacy behind them don’t last more than two years.
Marvel was still hoping that the Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada vision for Marvel would revitalize sales to where Marvel was during the 1990s, but those fans were not coming back. Marvel had a habit of canceling titles more quickly if sales faltered in the early-2000s. Apparently, X-Statix’ sales figures began to drop off when it was canceled.

They even allowed Milligan to use the Avengers in the last story-arc to try to boost sales again, and it didn’t help.

Marvel has had a hard time sustaining sales on any titles not with a big name that have been ongoing since 1963. The comic market never actually recovered after the bursting of the comic book bubble. There has been a steady decline in comic sales since 2002, basically.

Grant Morrison’s X-Men run was considered a huge success but its sales were around the same level as X-Men was selling back in 1997, when Steven Seagle and Joe Kelly took over the two main books. Marvel panicked and fired Seagle and Kelly pretty quickly at the time because of how low sales on the X-Men comics were at that time. They expected that sales would go back up again once the bubble bursting recovered. Instead, sales kept slipping.

Morrison’s sales figures weren’t even great by Claremont-era or early-‘90s figures, but Morrison was the first writer since Scott Lobdell took over Uncanny X-Men in 1992 which saw sales figures actually increase after they took over writing the X-Men comic. Marvel raves about Morrison’s popularity on X-Men because they had figured out that the numbers they were seeing in the early-1990s were never coming back by that point (the TPB market has really changed how publishers see sales too). Of course, Marvel would kill to see sustained sales like under Morrison on their titles in 2020.

Hickman’s initial House/Powers of X books saw sales soar back to where they were under Morrison again, but fans thought that it was a “special event” mini-series, not an open-ended prologue for a new ongoing line. Hickman’s sales on X-Men are considered good by 2019 standards, but the sales dropped considerably between Powers of X #6 and X-Men #2.

——————————————

I’m not sure what you mean, Dog. Mike Carey stayed on X-Men longer than any writer outside of Claremont. He wrote X-Men for six years straight.
Carey was also working on one of the main X-series, writing X-Men, rather than a side title like X-Factor or X-Force. Marvel usually allows greater leeway for the X-spin-offs than the main X-books. Plus, Carey showed a true love for the X-Men that, frankly, surprised me. He knew the minutiae of X-history of someone who was very well-versed in the reading of X-Men comics.

Also, you have to remember that this is a very different world for comics than the early-2000s. X-Men is no longer a cash cow that is a guaranteed sale. Marvel has allowed Jonathan Hickman to get away with things that past writers on X-Men books could have never done (even much more than Morrison). Marvel is pretty desperate to turn X-Men back in to a bestseller for Marvel, even if it turns off the fanboys.

Probably so. It may also play in to the similarities with Taxi Driver.

At the end of that film, it seems that we are seeing a dream by Bickle, where he is embraced as a hero.

He has written for X-comics in the past. He did a quite good job with the books he was working on in the past...X-Club, Legion, and X-Force.

Si Spurrier is moving on to a X-title at Marvel.

He still could work on HB in the future too, unless he gets a lot more work at Marvel.