Things That Belong On Tumblr: Warehousing It 9/19

Hit the monthly sale at Joe Koch's place, and while the haul was smaller than trips made previously, it was solid nonetheless and in no way reflects on the epic finds left behind. Thusly:

The Rundown

Doctor Strange # 64: First Tony Salmons pencils? Seems likely.

Crisis #2 & #12: Contains "Third World War" and "New Statesmen". The former is awesome, the latter an unknown.

Moebius 5 "The Gardens of Adena": The massive stack of Moebius 5 seems to be dwindling, meaning us hungry comics wolves have found the scent. Blueberry remains in abundance.

Old Comics Journals: That's Jaime Hernandez on cover details there, but the real finds in that little stack of Journals is Kenneth "I used to make sense" Smith blistering multiple pages to yap about the brilliance of The Incal. Dig even deeper and you'll find Ed "Secret Daredevils" Brubaker tossing the word "hack" in Jim Lee's direction while talking about his summer reading list. Ouch!

Psycho Comics: Uh, that's Daniel Clowes, in 1981, doing crime/horror comics. Yep.

Comments

[Jog]

New Statesmen is quite possibly the most post-Watchmen superhero comic in all the history of superhero comics published after Watchmen. There was a collected edition released in the US a while back, which shouldn't be too hard/expensive to find online... it was the first big extended work by John Smith, an occasional Grant Morrison/Mark Millar cohort and one of the 'big' 2000 AD-and-related writers to never entirely catch on in North America. Art by Jim Baikie, with support by Sean Phillips & Duncan Fegredo, so yeah, nice looking too...

The old DC/Rebellion alliance released a few Smith books, two for his Devlin Waugh occult action man character and one for his Indigo Prime dimension-hopping series...

[Tucker Stone]

Ha! There was a stack of that New Statesmen collected edition sitting right alongside the boxes of Crying Freeman/Sanctuary 2/Lone Wolf & Cub back issues. Somebody's calling your name, Joe...

[Matthew Craig]

Oh, man, CRISIS? God damn it. I bought that when it came out - it prefaced or paralleled a whole lot of stuff that informs indy/alt/counter- comics even today - and what did I do with issue 1?

Cut it up to paste into an RE report.

Goddamnit, Craigy.

Goddamnit, British Comics.

I read New Statesman years before I read Watchmen, and while I won't pretend it's high up on my list of Important Superhero Comics, it's a shame it's been lost in the post-Watchmen conversation. I suppose Marshal Law and Zenith have superceded it.

I remember enjoying NS for the art and the world - which now, of course, seems like the most utterly ludicrous setup imaginable (Britain as a state of the American Union, complete with ultra-radicalised nationalist terrorists trying to secede, etc.)

I have issue 3 of the Fleetway/Quality US-format reprint. I suppose I could hunt down the remainng issues - five? Is that all? Damn! - but for now, just look at those covers.

http://www.comics.org/series/3926/covers/?style=default

I repeat:

Goddamnit, British Comics. ♥♥♥

//\♥♥/\\

[Chris Mautner]

Oh man, I have a copy of that issue of TCJ. That "Seduction of the Ignorant" essay is worth it's weight in gold.

[Jog]

Has any of Carter Scholz's comics criticism every been reprinted anywhere in any way, shape or form? Because I'm under the impression there's absolutely no way to access that stuff without tracking down '80s back issues of the Journal, and that's a damn shame.

[Paul C]

Like Matthew, I read New Statesmen before getting to Watchmen. I might be suffering from some sort of cognitive bias, but I distinctly remember it being pretty fucking good. John Smith is definitely one of the lost greats of British comics. "Lost" in the sense that I can't find any of his comics, that is.

[Sharif]

The New Statesmen is fantastic. Much better than the boring ass Watchmen. No pirates and no previous insider comic geekdom necessary to read it.