Daily Scans Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Daily Scans" journal:

[<< Previous 20 entries]

November 5th, 2009
12:16 am
[zechs27]

[Link]

Oh Remember, Remember the Fifth of November...

Tags: , , ,

(22 comments | Leave a comment)

October 30th, 2009
10:02 am
[jlroberson]

[Link]

Swamp Thing 44: The Bogeyman
In many ways, Bissette's finest--and most "Bissette-ey"--sequence in the whole run.

Current Location: Seattle
Current Music: Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet, "Dracula"
Tags: , , , , , ,

(11 comments | Leave a comment)

08:56 am
[jlroberson]

[Link]

Swamp Thing 26-29 excerpted: Just Say Uncle.

Current Location: Seattle
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

(15 comments | Leave a comment)

October 8th, 2009
04:21 pm
[zechs27]

[Link]

Vader Week: Dark Lord's Conscience


Tags: , , ,

(17 comments | Leave a comment)

October 5th, 2009
02:40 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

Alan Moore's GLORY
GLORY was Alan Moore's homage to the Wonder Woman mythos, in the way SUPREME was his homage to Superman. It featured one of the more interesting takes on the idea of a secret identity that I've seen.

These pages are from issues 0 and 1.



Tags: , , ,

(21 comments | Leave a comment)

September 19th, 2009
01:27 am
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

Alan Moore speaks out on Blackest Night
He does. It's in his recent interview with Mania.com:

AM: That’s it. It’s the paucity of imagination. I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers [Blackest Night] in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating, When I have said in interviews that it doesn’t look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn’t expect the companies concerned to more or less say, “Yeah, he’s right. Let’s see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga.” It’s tragic. The comics that I read as a kid that inspired me were full of ideas. They didn’t need some upstart from England to come over there and tell them how to do comics. They’d got plenty of ideas of their own. But these days, I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night.

KA: [laughing]

AM: That’s a good image, isn’t it? They weren’t even particularly good ideas. For Christ’s sake, get some of your own ideas! It’s not that difficult. You used to be able to have them! I’ve also heard that, apparently, a fifth of the direct sales market in comics is my work—twenty percent! I’d imagine that the sales in places like Borders and the big book shops, which are increasingly where the bulk of the market is, it’s probably a higher percentage.


For legality, three pages from Volume 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Gullivar Jones from Edwin Lester Arnold's Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation meets up John Carter from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels to plot against the Martians from HG Wells's The War of the Worlds.

Tags: , , ,

(89 comments | Leave a comment)

September 13th, 2009
06:52 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Spawn/WildCATs, Part 2; Guest-starring Gen13)
The worst thing Alan Moore's ever written, I'm sure of it.

There's one scene in particular here that's in such bad taste, I don't have words.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

(7 comments | Leave a comment)

September 11th, 2009
01:50 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Spawn/WildCATs, Part 1)
Continuing the look through the sub-par stories Alan Moore produced during his mid-90s slump...
***
You've seen the rest*, now see the worst.

This.. I'm not sure how to describe this mini-series. I really wanted to like it. Moore's run on the WildCATs series proper, which I'd read before this, is genuinely good stuff, so I know he the ability to turn out good stories using these characters. However, I ended up really disappointed. This story isn't just bad by Moore standards. It's bad by anyone's standards, and mind-bogglingly so. Normally, even when a Moore story is bad, it's still original or distinct. Whatever else, he's never generic. A voice always shows through. This series, in contrast, is the very definition of generic.

There are plenty of Alan Moore work I've never read, but even so, I'd feel pretty safe betting that this is the worst thing he's ever written professionally. I mean, this is the sort of thing where, if it was written by a new writer, you'd do your hardest to avoid any future works by the guy because there is so little skill apparent here that you'd be positive the person's a lost cause. It's almost comforting in its way: The knowledge that Moore is really is just as capable as anyone else of scripting utterly uninspired schlock B-movie dialogue on an off day.

*Well, I skipped the Fire From Heaven crossover because I'd forgotten about it and didn't remember until I'd already begun composing this entry.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Tags: , , , ,

(17 comments | Leave a comment)

September 7th, 2009
12:36 am
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was *not* crap? (Violator: The World, Pt 2)
I've changed the title for this one entry because most of the people who commented on Violator Part 1 said they actually thought it was good. In some cases, very good. Personall, I don't see it.

I'm surprised because the second half of the Violator Vs. Badrock mini-series had a very similar tone to this, but the comments to that were almost uniformly negative.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Tags: , , , , , ,

(29 comments | Leave a comment)

September 6th, 2009
05:42 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Alan Moore draws Godzilla
There is a mountain of art about Godzilla, enough to bury the big guy himself in. I don't know why he haunts the unconscious memory of humankind, unless he is some sort of Great Old One left out of the NECRONOMICON and he lives in our collective unconsciousness or something. A very evocative scene from one of the movies had a group of schoolchildren drawing what they had been dreaming about. To the teacher's apalled surprise, they all drew different images of Godzilla (as the march played). Dark Horse did a 1987 one-shot called GODZILLA KING OF THE MONSTERS, which featured a few guest artists.



Alan Moore's page seems at first too gimmicky to have any resonance. The woman's rapidly turning head drawn as three exposures and the depiction of the superheated breath head-on)irritated me at first glance. But a second look reveals several amusing details (the bottom of the big guy's foot, for example) and the perspective of a difficult angle is handled well.

Tags: , ,

(22 comments | Leave a comment)

August 30th, 2009
09:44 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Violator: The World, Part One)
Continuing the look through the lowest point (quality-wise) in Moore's career... This three-issue series was called Violator: The World, or at least that's what the inside front covers of the issues will tell you. Reading carefully though, it becomes pretty clear that "The World" is only meant to be the title of the first issue, not the mini-series as a whole.

It's such an assurance of quality when they can't even do the title right.



Tags: , , , , ,

(11 comments | Leave a comment)

August 31st, 2009
12:13 am
[espanolbot]

[Link]

Daleks: All you need to Know!, the Deathsmiths of Goth! and Nostalgia Critic's 'Steel'
One huge page )
An Alan Moore-scripted Doctor Who Story )
And a funny review video )

Tags: , , ,

(37 comments | Leave a comment)

August 22nd, 2009
09:43 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Deathblow: Byblows, Part 2)
And here's the second half of the mini-series that introduced Moore's new Deathblow to the Wildstorm universe.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Tags: , , , , ,

(30 comments | Leave a comment)

August 18th, 2009
01:01 am
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Deathblow: Byblows, Part 1)
In the previous entries, about works like Violator Vs. Badrock and Spawn: Blood Feud, a lot of people were saying, "Well yeah, it's bad, but look at the quality of character he was saddled with!" In this mini-series though, he doesn't have that excuse. There was a previous character named Deathblow, Michael Cray; he died in Wildstorm's "Fire Fom Heaven" event (also written by Moore and also quite awful).

Here, in this three-part mini-series, Moore was tasked with creating a brand new Deathblow from scratch. The sky was the limit... so how the heck did we end up with this?



Tags: , , ,

(16 comments | Leave a comment)

August 15th, 2009
01:40 am
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap (Violator Vs. Badrock, Part 2)
Before we continue our trek through the absolute low point of Moore's career, here's an excerpt from an interview where he explained how he came to be working on projects such as this for McFarlane and Liefeld in the first place. I figured some people might be interested. Here it is:

Moore: "Sometime--obviously before 1963 came out, after I'd been approached for it--Todd McFarlane, who I didn't know, phoned up and asked if I wanted to do an issue of Spawn. At the time, knowing very little about this, my thinking was that all I really knew about Image was that they're the opposite of DC and Marvel and that sounded pretty good to me, you know? That was really all I needed to know. I figured that if they're making mischief, then I'm generally in favor of them even without having necessarily seen the books. Todd McFarlane called up and asked if I'd want to write an issue of Spawn, which I really didn't know what Spawn was. But I said, "Yeah I can write one," and I said that before he'd offered me any money for it, you know? When he started to tell me how much money he'd give for doing it I kind of demurred and said, "Look, I'll do this for whatever the going rate is," just to be generally supportive of something which at the time I saw as fighting back against the big companies.
"So yeah, I did a couple of other stories for Todd McFarlane, for Rob Liefeld. . ."


And thus were born some truly awful stories. Well, speaking of which, onto the second half of Violator Vs. Badrock...

Tags: , , , ,

(16 comments | Leave a comment)

August 10th, 2009
07:32 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore Was Crap (Violator Vs. Badrock, Pt 1.)
I originally said I was going to post Spawn/WildC.A.T.s, surely the nadir of Moore's sub-par Image work, next. But I've decided that I'd rather build up (down?) to it first. So I'll be posting some of the other projects Moore did for Image during the mid-90s that, while not as bad as Spawn/WildC.A.T.s, are still pretty durn bad. Here's Violator Vs. Badrock.



Yes, Alan Moore really wrote this.

Tags: , , , , ,

(38 comments | Leave a comment)

July 30th, 2009
10:11 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

When Alan Moore was crap
The 90s has a rep as a bad time for mainstream comics, and rightfully so. It was some terrible black hole of awfulness, sucking even normally decent writers into its depths. It was almost as if anything produced in the 90s (yeah, yeah, there were a couple of exceptions) would automatically suck, simply because it was 90s, and if a comic was made in the 90s, it was going to be terrible. Because it was the 90s.

Even Alan Moore managed to be complete crap in the 90s (though he recovered towards the tail end of that decade). Some of his work during this period is really appallingly bad. As evidence, I present to you the two-lane pile-up in mini-series form that is Spawn: Blood Feud.



Tags: , , ,

(42 comments | Leave a comment)

July 28th, 2009
04:44 am
[jlroberson]

[Link]

Moore/Bissette/Totleben At Their Best: "Another Green World," Two Sequences
Today is a little exhibit of how to draw mainstream horror comics.

Current Location: Seattle
Current Mood: duh
Current Music: Do Make Say Think
Tags: , , , , , ,

(13 comments | Leave a comment)

July 27th, 2009
11:28 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

Tesla Strong and Val Var Garm: An Interspecies Romance


Tracing Tesla Strong and Val Var Garm's relationship over the course of the Tom Strong series...

Tags: , , , ,

(12 comments | Leave a comment)

July 21st, 2009
10:37 pm
[arbre_rieur]

[Link]

Supreme 55: "Possibly The Most Controversial Story You'll Read All Year!" (in 1997)
Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Tags: , , , ,

(39 comments | Leave a comment)

[<< Previous 20 entries]

Powered by InsaneJournal