Ixnay by Night

I've not read it yet, but I've heard so many good things about it that I'll have to check it out eventually, probably when it's released in trade.  Tom King's Vision series at Marvel last year was phenomenal, so I'm sure Mister Miracle is quite good as well.

We were discussing that Wildstorm 25 Years hardcover in another thread last week, did anyone actually pick it up?  I'm curious as to what material was reprinted in it and if the new stories were worth the price of admission.

I took a look at the cover for it online, and wow, yeah it was pretty awful.  The copy I picked up had the Yasmine Putri variant, which was a lot better.  I agree that the DCU stuff thrown into the last issue read like unnecessary filler, but the rest of the issue was pretty spot-on for me.  I liked that Seely came up with something unique and bizarre for the "villains" and narrative structure, he put more time into research and plot mapping than most writers that have been on this series.  I also liked both how John defeated the dwarves, I thought it was a clever way to turn their power back on them.  I also thought the ending, while yes it was something we'd seen before from John, really hit home with how dire and brutal it was to the supporting character.

All in all, I maintain that this was a very good (not great) arc.  I recommend it.

I'm really surprised no one's talking about this series anymore, I guess Oliver's terrible Djinn storyline really drove everyone away.  That's actually a shame, because Tim Seely's 3-issue arc was actually pretty great.  I thought the final chapter kind of stumbled in the middle, with a completely unnecessary Justice League appearance that had me rolling my eyes, but then it finished with a really great last couple of pages.  This has been the best story John's had since he was brought back into the DCU (except for maybe Fawkes' Earth 2 arc, that was really well done, too), and I recommend you guys trying it out.  

Due to a Ghost Rider guest-appearance, I picked up Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur # 20 this week, fully expecting it to be terrible.  Instead, I found it to be an endearingly charming and often-times really funny comic.  I was pleasantly surprised!  Won't be following the rest of the series, but I certainly didn't regret buying it.

I've been keeping up with Metal, and it's been a perfectly decent crossover event so far.  However, I gave up reading Snyder's Batman run after "Zero Year", and since Metal springs heavily out of that run I've been really confused about parts of it.  Still and all, it really reads like Snyder is channeling Morrison as hard as he can, so GMozz taking part in the event doesn't really surprise me.

Punisher: The Platoon # 2...god damn did I miss Garth Ennis writing the Punisher.  So far this series is everything I was hoping it would be, and the way it so closely ties together so many things from Ennis' MAX work is amazing.  You've got elements from "Born" and "Valley Forge, Valley Forge", naturally, but there's also stuff from Fury: My War Gone By that works itself in effortlessly.  I noted that Marvel's January solicitations had the first volume of Ennis' Punisher MAX Omnibus, and if it doesn't include Fury and Platoon in the last volume, I'll be greatly disappointed.

Speaking of Milligan, did anyone else read his Image series with Leandro Fernandez, The Discipline?  I made it to issue # 3, and it was another series filled with some weird psycho-sexual stuff about a woman contracting monsterism from an immortal demon lover like it was an STD.  Very weird, but interesting and with beautiful art by Fernandez.

I couldn't remember, nor be bothered to search for, the thread that had us all talking about Rachel Pollack's run on Doom Patrol (and Elizabeth Hand's Anima series), so I figured I'd stick this here.  Really interesting interview with Pollack about her Doom Patrol run and the editorial/critical reception of it at the time.  No big surprise that Axel Alonso taking over as editor when Lou Stathis died is what ultimately forced her out of Vertigo.

https://www.newsarama.com/37024-rachel-pollack-talks-doom-patrol-prose-writing-and-making-a-return-to-comics.html

That's a great sum-up of Milligan's HB run, actually.  Every story just chained into one another, yet still lacked an overarching narrative.  It was exactly like you described, this happened and then this happened and then this happened etc...

You're right that Milligan had a lengthy break from Vertigo after the Minx, though I don't remember if Greek Street was before or after his Hellblazer run started.  He migrated to Marvel and did some pretty awful work on books like Elektra and X-Men.  X-Force/X-Statix was of course the exception, because it was pretty great.

Man, Outlaw Nation and The Crusades were both such wonderful reads, I remember reading those monthly and it was like a one-two punch of them being cancelled near simultaneously.  Seagle in particular had real bad luck with Vertigo titles getting pulled out from under him.  House of Secrets, The Crusades, American Virgin, probably others that I'm forgetting...

Tony, glad it wasn't as serious as you feared.  I can't imagine being told that news, but try not to let the dread of it happening again hang over you.  Best wishes, man!

16 hours ago, dogpoet said:

The comic where all of the weird shit is clearly tied to cabbalistic notions about the qlipoth and the stuff that happens underneath reality?

Milligan hasn't done anything that grounded and coherent since the Minx was cancelled fifteen years back...

God, the Minx!  I forgot all about that series, some sweet sweet Sean Phillips art on that one.  It's the series he left Hellblazer for, wasn't it?

I wasn't trying to say that all of Milligan's comics have been incoherent gibberish, because as Christian points out most of his works are pretty straight-forward, I just thought Kid Lobotomy was absolute nonsense that needed a firmer editorial hand to keep its focus.  You said that his Hellblazer suffered from piss poor ideas instead of lack of coherency, that's absolutely right, and had Bond been willing to slap some editorial sense into him maybe some of those ideas wouldn't have made it past the plotting stage.  

Here's an interview I did with DeMatteis many years ago about his Ghost Rider run.  I'll say it again, guy was so genuine and appreciative to talk about work he did 20 years ago (at that time).  My goal is to get him on the podcast at some point as well, I'll squee like a fangirl in heat if that happens.

Vengeance Unbound - J.M. DeMatteis Interview

I don't think Milligan WILL pare down his ideas into something coherent, mainly because he has an editor (Shelly Bond) who doesn't want to step in and filter out the nonsense.  She was his editor on Hellblazer, after all, and I think had there been someone with a bit firmer hand to go "c'mon Pete, you can do better than this" that run would have turned out much better.  Ditto for Kid Lobotomy, which managed to take that rather basic plot that you jotted down Christian and turned it into the most obtuse comic I've read recently. 

You are right about Morrison taking the same approach, fuck look at something like Nameless as an example, but I never get the sense that he loses his way in the narrative while throwing out all the random ass ideas.  I don't have the same confidence in Milligan.

I can't argue with any of your points, in fact I agree with most of them.  Ghost Rider IS a problematic character that Marvel doesn't know what to do with, and really never have, that has had just as many low creative points as high ones.  I'm a fan of most of the Mackie run on the character, it is by FAR the best work he ever did, but you're dead-accurate about the rest.  Fleisher did really well for his first year or so before degenerating into fill-in quality stories near the end, the earlier superhero style stuff by Tony Isabella and Jim Shooter was nothing to write home about either.  

The Felipe Smith/Tradd Moore series had such promise, with Robbie Reyes as a new Ghost Rider, but even that petered out after the first arc and never really recovered.

40 minutes ago, Christian said:

I was pretty sure that you had read more by DeMatteis, Lou. Didn't you also read his run on Ghost Rider? I thought I remembered you agreeing with me that his run on Ghost Rider was the only really quality work on that character. Although, I do have a fondness for the early issues of that series, when Marvel allowed Jesus to be used as a character.

A lot of DeMatteis' best work was non-creator owned books (although Seekers would have to stand out as his best, period)....well, considering that he's been writing comics since the early-1980s, and has only had a handful of creator owned books in that time, the majority of his work has been for Marvel or DC properties.

Ghost Rider's my boy, I run both a blog AND a podcast about the character.  He's had LOTS of great creative teams in his history, but DeMatteis (and Roger Stern before him, I sort of lump them together since they both had Bob Budiansky as artist/co-plotter) was responsible for the character's highest quality run, bar none.  Jason Aaron came the closest to matching him, I think.

22 hours ago, Christian said:

Kid Lobotomy #1 (by Peter Milligan)-This is worth checking out the second issue. Milligan seems to be trying too hard to recapture his run on Shade, at times. Still, looking back to one of Milligan's best comic works isn't the worst thing that Milligan has done. There are some interesting things going on in the book, outside of Milligan (and Shelley Bond) trying to recapture past magic. The references to Franz Kafka are certainly intriguing (the phone call scene), and the Dr. Burroughs' cut-up technique brain surgery is some fun word-play from a writer who excelled at that sort of thing in his earlier comic work.

It's nice to see that Milligan has recovered so well from the trauma of his run on Hellblazer....

Also, next issue of Jeff Lemire's Sherlock Frankenstein will feature the origin story of Cthu-Lou. he he

I tried Kid Lobotomy # 1, won't be back for Kid Lobotomy # 2.  I enjoyed Milligan's Shade, hell I even dug a lot of his Hellblazer up to a point, but KL just read like nonsense to me.  It was like he was just throwing every random thought he had against the page without cutting out the detritus.  Detestable comic and not a good indicator of what Black Crown is going to be serving us.  I wasn't much looking forward to Shelly Bond's imprint anyway, especially when you've got Karen Berger setting up a near-identical shop across the street at Dark Horse in the near future that looks so much more promising.  

Wild Storm # 8 out this week, and I'm getting some mixed emotions about this series.  While I love a lot of what he's doing with the Wildcats (though where the fuck have Voodoo and Zealot vanished to after the first couple of issues?), I'm not exactly digging how he's mixing and matching the Authority characters.  We get three Authority revamps in this issue, sort of, and I don't think they work in comparison to how elegant and streamlined the original character concepts were.  I'm dancing around spoiler territory, so I'll wait until others get to read it before I talk about it any more.  I'm still sold on the series, will still be reading for the foreseeable future, but this was the first big crack in the series for me.

I got to speak with him about his run on Ghost Rider several years ago, he did an interview for my blog, and he was so nice and agreeable to all of the questions I had for him about what was an important and defining set of comics for me in my youth.  I have nothing but the highest regard for DeMatteis, the guy is a class act.

Other than Seekers, what other Vertigo work did DeMatteis have?  Moonshadow and Blood were republishing of his Epic work and his Doctor Fate series was pre-Vertigo, so what am I forgetting? 

Yeah, you're right about Greenberg being published as a graphic novel, not through Epic.  Out of the three original works that DeMatteis did for Marvel, I think Greenberg was my least favorite, though I admit that I barely remember Blood at all.  One day I need to revisit all three.

I've not read Moonshadow in over a decade, but I remember it being really touching when I first read it.  That was when Vertigo was re-releasing it in the 1990s, I was too young for most Epic stuff in the 80s.  That said, though, didn't DeMatteis originally publish Blood: A Tale through Epic as well?  Or was that one a later Vertigo thing like Seekers: Into the Mystery?

49 minutes ago, Christian said:

I would rank Elektra: Assassin as the best book Epic published, but otherwise, yeah, I'd agree that those are Epic's four best titles.

Jim Starlin's Dreadstar ranks pretty highly, as well. So, a top five, maybe, instead of a top four. Well, McKeever's Metropol is definitely worth reading too. So, top six.

I'd add Moonshadow by DeMatteis and Muth near the top of that list as well.

I can't remember the issue number (# 26 maybe?), but the story "Hit It" was where Sienkiewicz REALLY took off on Moon Knight.  The Neal Adams impressions had already started to fade into the background (whereas in the beginning of the series where he was deliberately swiping Adams Batman poses for MK) and his art style was evolving rapidly.  His progression as an artist on those early 80s Marvel books like Moon Knight and New Mutants was fascinating to watch; funny, though.  I was a kid when those books were coming out, and I loved his work on Moon Knight.  When he came over to New Mutants, though, I HATED the art; now, I can see just how great his experimentation was, but Kid Chris definitely did not like square headed Cannonball, lol.

Oh my god, I had to stop reading it during the Juggernaut example, I'm laughing way too hard while at work and am starting to get funny looks.