MezzMezzrow

I'm still catching up on Hellblazer. I read the Jamie Delano run maybe 5 years ago and started with Garth Ennis about 3 months ago. Currently on Dennis Mina.

Quite a few titles that I've favoured on this re-introduction to comics are coming to an end (The Boys and Sweet Tooth being two others that I've taken a shine to).

I always thought Gary Chaloner the artist/creator of Jackaroo was the standout artist from that bunch. ...

 

Yeah, definitely. The other names pop up every now and again — today I spotted a book by Lumsden & DeVries in a library.

Would that have been a new comic?

As you guys have remarked upon already Garth Ennis often returns to explore the same territory in his work. Does anyone else see the thematic similarities in the roles of Billy Butcher and Cassidy the Vampire?

I can't help but wonder if Ennis had a real life situation where he was betrayed by someone he was very close to.....

Not the most profound insight on my behalf (I know) but wondering if anyone else caught this.

When I first read Preacher I thought that Cassidy was perhaps a cruel practical joke played on the Irish fans that had found an affinity for the hard living, hard drinking vampire.

Marcelo Frusin pretty much made John Constantine look like Clint Eastwood in issue 200, particularly on pages 19, 21 and 23 of that issue

Full kredit to Kris!

But I'm glad I'm not alone.

Also with regard to the art of the current issues I'm reading I suspect Leonardo Manco traces or lightboxes at times. In particular facial close ups. I'm pretty disdainful of this practice even when it's openly acknowledged. I despise the 'art' of Tim Bradstreet which as you guys would realise leaves me in a bit of a quandary as a Hellblazer devotee.

I'm catching up on RASL and the second Incognito series at the moment and they are both great effortless reads.

Has anyone else noticed that a young Clint Eastwood served as the inspiration for Frusin's Constantine during the Carey run?

I consider it an insult to the writer and to the fans that not only is NONE of Jenkins' run traded, but that they traded Milligan's stuff almost as soon as it came out AND never traded any of Jenkins. It's such a huge "Fuck you!" that seems unwarranted. It's a tall cool glass of lemonade with a turd in it. Did Jenkins give Berger a dirty sanchez or a donkey punch or a rusty venture or something? What's with the Jenkins hate over to Vertigo? It seems a bit severe.

At the end of Jenkins run there was some kind of kerfuffle in the letters pages where readers thought he had been disrespected for some reason....oh it was cause the very last letter published in his final issue was from a guy saying how glad he was the run was over.

So yeah maybe there were some issues there. But then again maybe sales declined during Jenkins stint and that's why they haven't TPB'd them....

Did you ever read the Australian comic Cyclone which evolved into Southern Squadron?

Sure did. I still have 'em, along with Dark Nebula and the others from that era.

I always thought Gary Chaloner the artist/creator of Jackaroo was the standout artist from that bunch. Later on Shea Anton Pensa came through and he ended up getting a few gigs in US comics which I think was down to Mike Baron's friendship with the Cyclone people.

Nahh John that was just the year. Sad to say I haven't been back but the farm is still in my Dad's posession outside of Abbeyfeale. The Celtic Tiger was not even a cub at that time and so rather than get paid NOT to produce milk we all packed up and came back to the same house in Sydney.

Was an interesting time for me personally - despite my joke at the expense of RTE it introduced me to Miami Vice on a Saturday night, MTV which had yet to reach Australia and even saw the movie Airplane for the first time on Christmas day and it was so heavily censored that it ran for less than an hour. :)

Long trips with my aunt. We took AMTRAK alot, so she would give me a few bucks to spend at the bookstore at the train station. Dig this, when I was 10 years old the price of comics had just gone up from a quarter to 35 cents. I felt ripped off because I couldn't buy as many. My first comics were the X Men and Batman and the Metal Men. I also read Action Comics but always found Superman so boring until I saw the movie in 1979. I had a lot of Whitman comics back then. I also bought a lot of Heavy Metal magazines which had great comics in them. I wouldn't call me a comic collector though until I became an adult and learned how to take care of them and store them. I have the first ever issue of Teen Titans which is wortha ton of money in good condition. Mine isn't so it's worth $10 or so .

I'm sure collectors would be mortified by the state my comics were kept. Which is why I have to use the term comic reader.....

I'm an Aussie ...

Damn. Now I feel less special.

 

 

One of my earliest memories is reading Australian reprints of Donald Duck comics. Most of them were by Carl Barks, so I was guaranteed a lifelong love of comics.

Hi Jason

Did you ever read the Australian comic Cyclone which evolved into Southern Squadron?

For such a long run on the title I felt I really didn't 'get to know' Jenkins secondary players.

I'm still reading Frusin drawn issues and, yeah, he's a talent. Is he still around? Last night I read the one with the card game and swamp thing...forgive me the name of the story escapes me and was just appreciating how lush his art can be.

How have you come to be a comic book reader?

I'm an Aussie but it was in Ireland that my connection to comics began....For the first 11 years of my life I was raised in western Sydney but shortly after my eleventh birthday the family was uprooted and moved to rural Limerick not far from the Kerry border where my dad had inherited the family farm. Up until then I'd never really read comics.

Rural Ireland in the 80's was a bit of a shock to my system. In the suburbs of Oz I'd ridden my bike around the streets until it was dark with dozens of kids. Every day there was a game of rugby league or cricket on someone's front lawn. In Ireland there were barely a dozen kids at my local national school. The nearest kid my age lived miles away from the house.

As far as entertainment went, inside the house was not much better. On TV we had RTE1 and RTE2. If my dad was home this meant news, current affairs and more news. If my mum was lucky she might get to watch some Glenroe. For me and my little brother things were looking grim.

Anyway in town after midday mass one Sunday I picked up a British reprint of Marvel's Secret Wars, Mike Zeck's artwork mesmerised me and I was hooked. The magazine came out weekly which meant you only got a few pages of the story each issue and they had various back ups.

At the newsagent there was actually another comic that was jumping out from the stands with mind blowing covers (to these virgin eyes at the time) but I was leery of this title due to a juvenile nationalism.....that title was Captain Britain.

When boredom finally outweighed republican sentiment I caved and bought an issue and kicked myself that I hadn't done it months earlier. Written at the time by Jamie Delano and with powerful black and white artwork by Alan Davis this was the title that cemented my addiction to comics.

It also created a domino effect as I discovered old Mighty World of Marvel's and The Daredevils' issues in a used book store in Tralee. The Daredevils' reprinted Frank Miller's (first?) Daredevil run as well as new episodes of Alan Moore's Captain Britain so I was fortunate to be exposed to both these guys in the same magazine. There was a also V for Vendetta's David Lloyd illustrating Night Raven strips and short stories.

British Marvel magazines didn't toe the party line as much as American Marvel which refused to even acknowledged other comics publishers existed and so through the letters and review columns I discovered various other titles that would become favourites (although it wasn't until we returned to Australia and I discovered that shops devoted entirely to comics existed that I was able to track down some of the books mentioned).

We only ended up staying in Ireland for a year but I brought that love of comics back with me, after all these books had helped stave off the isolation and loneliness that I was feeling. It's also probably responsible for my tendency to follow books and writers outside the mainstream superhero universe(s).

TL;DR:

I discovered comic books when the family moved to Ireland in the 80's.

Hi Christian, I haven't reached Milligan's issues yet but agree with your other opinions on Azzarello. I'll get back to you when I've caught up on the others

Welcome aboard, Mezz!

Cheers :)

Interesting that quite a few folks seem to have come to appreciate Jenkins after initial misgivings. I've only read his run once. I agree that 'boring' is a fair adjective for some of his issues and I too found myself flipping through issues to get them over and done with. I will have to see if it holds true that you appreciate him more on second glance. Not ready for it at the moment.

His supporting characters were not fleshed out or agreeable.

Hi everyone. I'm new here and I know this is quite a bump with my first post but my situation is that I've been catching up on Hellblazer from issue 40 and recently finished issue 180. By the end of Azzarello's run I had major problems with what he'd done with the character.

The biggest problem is that I didn't like his John Constantine. In fact I hated him. I think that if I had been reading Hellblazer on a monthly basis at the time of this run I would have dropped the title. He took away John's humanity which to me has always been his redeeming feature in the face of his past and his sins.

I've only read a little of Azzarello outside of Hellblazer - that being the first few issues of 100 Bullets and a couple of trades from much later in that series. So far I don't rate him. He strikes me as the Brett Ratner of comics.

Since we got some really good discussion out of the "I hate Garth Ennis Hellblazer" thread, I figure I might as well start one for Brian Azzarello.

 

I don't know who Brian Azzarello thought was writing, but it wasn't John Constantine. And I don't know what he was writing, but they weren't stories. Stories have a plotline, which consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end. And while his stories generally had beginnings, the middles tended to be muddled, to say the least, and the ends were more stopping points, rahter than conclusions to storylines.

 

Which is not to say I hate everything he wrote. I do appreciate his work with Mucous Membrane, giving us a positively iconic shot of the band, the glints of good stories and character interest were far too few and far between to make reading the issues worth my time.

 

I think my other irritation is that he used such horrible shit for background. Prison, White Supremacy, bullshit S&M clubs, STUPID towns build on porn; Azz seemed to think that dropping the main character in the middle of horrible shit equated a horror story. How much <i>pleasure</i> did I get from readint the racist screed in <i>Highwater</i>? Hell, if I wanted to read that, I'd go pick up a KKK brochure. Azzarello seemed to be filling in, making his stories longer than they needed to be, because very little happened in <i>Highwater</i>.

This

And let's talk about the lack of humanity in his J.C. - though he did have one "long lost love", J.C. was more of a bastard than ever, and like i said before - compare the J.C. from #27 with the one you can see in "Highwater and "Ashes And Dust", and you'll see two different people.

 

In 20-something issues going on 30, Azz managed to drop the ball. it is all quite readable, but not very representative of the title.

And this.