The Boys Went To The Comic Book Convention

After the break, take a gander at the new episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell!

There was a comic book show called CAB, and everybody went and now they are talking about it. They bought things! They read them! It was a thing.

Need a direct download? No problem: iTunes or the show's rss feed have you covered.

Comments

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Hello, this is a general comment, not a comment on this specific episode. I've listened to the bulk of these CBABIH podcasts over the past few weeks and I enjoyed them a lot.

Joe, I've been reading and enjoying a lot of your work and I really appreciate the type of stuff you tend to focus on. I feel like you are one of the small bunch of writers who highlights some of the stuff I like (others being Sarah Horrocks and Milo from BlogOfTheNorthstar) and thanks for taking my suggestion and writing about Skala's Cecil's Quest on TCJ.
I feel like (broadly speaking) there are roughly 5 or 6 types of comic fans and too many other styles get neglected and I think the lack of coverage and fan cultivation of certain styles and genres has helped marginalise certain creators and made it hard for them to get much work in the industry or stopped them getting reprinted and translated.

I'm really dying for those Masami Fukushima stories (and other stuff from Manga Zombie), Ron Embleton girls comics, Alberto Breccia, Philippines and south american horror/fantasy comics, Carlos Nine, more Junji Ito, Hino, Umezu, Araki, Nagai and much, much more.
There are some artists like John Zack and Leo Summers who did very little comics but I'd hope if you tracked them or their families down, you could find a lot more artwork.
There needs to be a lot more Alex Nino books, that one art book barely scratched the surface. Check out his newest stuff, he gets madder with age...
alexnino.net/

This is also interesting if you haven't seen it...
http://theartofluisgarciamozos.blogspot.co.uk/

I know that comics journalists/reviewers/critics have their own priorities but I think more should consider actively writing about the stuff the deserves attention most or things that might not be that great but are nonetheless interesting but never get talked about.
I don't understand why more people don't have the impulse to explore and find out if the greatest thing ever is just slightly out of reach or around the corner; admittedly, I have wasted a lot of hours searching too much and often the thrill of the hunt sometimes makes an obscure comic seem far better than it actually is.

The podcast I enjoyed the most was the Faust one, partly because I remember seeing adverts in Previews more than a decade ago and wondering about it. It got me thinking about how in my teens, a least a third of the comics I bought I couldn't make sense of since this was before collected editions really took off and most comics you try out were going to be well into the middle of their run and was really difficult to locate and afford to pay for enough issues for it all to make sense.
I wonder if the majority of comics buyers were confused by the bulk of what they bought? Surely only a minority could afford to follow lots of titles for long enough to make story sense? Now with a lot of this stuff in collected editions and in cheapo back issue bins, they can be better assessed. To me there is something bizarre about the idea of reading them in sequence as they were intended because I was so used to buying them for the artwork and not being able to follow the story. Even the bigger Marvel titles that I did follow often seemed haphazard and incoherent.
I kind of wish I could clone myself to have one of me dedicated to writing about comics because my priorities wont allow me to do it; because I love reading about comics nobody ever writes about; especially old stuff from defunct publishers. I'm kind of curious how those Crossgen and Chaos comics would hold up if someone read them all, even though they aren't the type of thing I would want to buy.

I listened to one of the film podcasts and I disagree with the assessment of the Argento films. I'm sorry that I cant remember who was talking about them.
I usually to see Inferno listed as one of his top 3 films (the other being Suspiria and Deep Red). Kim Newman listed it as one of his top 10 favourite films ever. It is my second favourite after Suspiria and I think it is enjoyed best if you watch it like Inland Empire (curious about the story but not caring too much, mostly taking pleasure in wandering dark corridors and stuff like that).
When you talked about audiences being repulsed by the eye injury in Terror At The Opera are you talking about general Italian filmgoers? Because most of his viewers want and expect that sort of stuff. I like it quite a lot despite some glaring flaws.
I quite enjoyed Phenomena, but I'd been prepared for a lot worse because it is often treated like a train wreck.

I recommend this guy to anyone interested in horror films and books. He is one of the best hunters for buried treasure I've ever seen...
http://www.fright.com/edge/

[Matt Seneca]

Get that epoxy: http://instagram.com/p/gbhh85RHDy/#

[Joe McCulloch]

I'm terrified the site will eat my whole comment if I put up a link, but let me advise all of our readers/listeners to google "Manga Zombie", follow the ComiPress link and get themselves an alternative education - rarely has something so authoritative on an area of comics so completely obscure to the West been dropped onto the scene with so little hype... and it's free!

Anyway, Robert, I'm tempted to demand you list your 5 or 6 types of comics fans -- which sounds like the premise of a Peter Greenaway movie in which nobody gets laid -- but instead I'll thank you for these very kind remarks. I'd love to see more of everything you list... I used to have this theory that Breccia was going to be the 'big' translated thing in a few more years, but it was predicated on Fantagraphics releasing Muñoz's & Sampayo's Sinner to touch off a wave of interest in Argentinean comics art - it wasn't an airtight theory, admittedly, and now I fear it was just a daydream.

Niño just had a new one out the other week (as I suspect you know) - The Legion of Molly Doves, which I'm still trying to find in a store...

For a while I was throwing around the idea of putting together a tumblr or a website or something and just blowing through the entirety of Continuity Comics over the course of two or three months - such a totally weird group of books, centered almost entirely around slight deviations from an already-weird creator's aesthetic - they did some okay French and Spanish translations early on, though! I'd like to see a rundown of Chaos! myself... Crossgen, I couldn't stomach the house 'look' of any of them, even when they were new. It was totally indistinguishable from Top Cow to me... although this would be the value of such analysis. I'm already marked down for the great Avatar apologia of 2019, btw.

Re: Italian horror, I think you've got me mixed up with Sean Witzke - I've talked a little about some of that stuff but it was him who covered Inferno and Opera and the like. Personally I feel Opera is Argento's last really good genre piece, although I admit I've completely fallen off with him lately... given the choice to see his Dracula or Escape from Tomorrow a month or two ago, I went for the latter without much hesitation. Inferno, I haven't seen in at least a decade... I still have a VHS copy stored away at my parents' house.

Thanks again for commenting...

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I have a vague memory of reading about Molly Doves but I don't know why I didn't take note. I remember God The Dyslexic Dog (and saw it in the shops and never picked it up) but never heard of the other Bliss On Tap things he did that I only just saw looking for Molly Doves.
Nino is odd in that he has loads of work that I never saw listed among comics. I tend to think of comics made for bookstores as a modern thing, but Nino seems to have been doing that since the 70s. Lots of Byron Preiss books are never listed in comic databases or guides. Nino did graphic novels of Moby Dick, Call Of The Wild, Tales From The One Eyed Crow, More Than Human and the original story Orc's Treasure; rarely see these mentioned. His one-shot Nightmare looked really cool, I'd like that too.

There are a few things I think to recommend Crossgen I think. Although I'm not really into mainstream comic art; I think they had a generally higher standard of art than Marvel or DC at the time.
- Claudio Castellini (a rare example of an extreme superhero artist I quite admire; quite possibly the most dynamic comic artist ever) did one issue of a comic for them.
- A few issues of Ploog's Abadazad.
- There was a horror comic called Raven House by Chuck Dixon and Leonardo Manco, it was supposed to be a gothic Victorian thing, but it never came out because Crossgen died, but I wanted to read it at the time.
- Rob Zombie's comic had some Gene Colan.
- Way of The Rat was one of their longer running titles. I thought the art looked well researched and I think the artist did martial arts and the poses looked more convincing in that way.

They also taken on Chaos's Lady Death. I used to be a Chaos fan, but they were yet more comics I didn't understand. Did you read any of the Avatar Lady Death stuff?
I kind of like the idea of comics with sexy girls in horror/goth/metal worlds but the execution never satisfies me. I kind of appreciated Balent's Tarot just because it is so unique and oddball, and that most of the readers are girls (most wicca people are girls I guess), but the writing and art just aren't strong enough. You may have seen some bloggers talk about the 9/11 ghosts, Saddam Hussein and haunted vaginas; in some ways it is like a wacky golden age superhero comic.
Verotik often had really good artists but not so great writing.

Just in case you haven't seen this, this is some of the Ron Embleton UK girls comics I scanned...
http://idemandreprints.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ron-embleton.html

Do you like Glenn Chadbourne? His comics are exceedingly rare but Farmer Fiend's Horror Harvest is like nothing else I own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Chadbourne

I wish there was some sort of site for people adding their requests for things to be reprinted, collected or translated. I once thought I could make a site for gathering demand for things so maybe publishers could see what is viable to print. It could work for books, films and music or anything really; but I'm not up to creating such a website but I'd like to think someone else could make something similar.
I was planning to write a long wishlist of all the unavailable comics I want someday and I'd like to see what other people's lists would be like. But the trouble is by the time they finally come out, I might not want them anymore. On that IDemandReprints blog I written about loads of stuff that has come out but I stopped caring, but I'm glad they are there for people who want them.

I think I saw you say Berserk was unending but I've heard people say the story is a quarter away from finishing; some have said Miura planned 50 volumes. I'm a big fan but I think it is way too padded out and really needs an ending.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Oh, I forgot to mention that Nino also did these Macbeth and Sunn books in a manga style, sharing both books with another artist.

[Joe McCulloch]

Oh god, that Glenn Chadbourne stuff... never even heard of that!

Way of the Rat was penciled by Jeff Johnson - who, for a few heart-throbbing seconds at one point in time, I thought was the same Jeff Johnson from a bunch of '90s Fantagraphics anthologies like Dirty Stories and Zero Zero... he even had his own series for a while, Nurture the Devil, which I've never read. But they're two different people.

I looked through a few of Avatar's Lady Death comics - I recall at one point in the Origins Annual a few years back she was dressed in an anime-style maid costume...?? The cartoon movie that came out a while back was TERRIBLE. I think Mike Wolfer's been writing the series for a while now, and he's an okay (if pretty nondescript) writer... I dunno, it's never held my interest. My own nonsensical '90s metal/violence itch is traditionally scratched by Rebel Studios... they did four issues of this totally weird manga-esque SF thing titled Darkstar - Scott Frantz was the creator, clearly into some Star Blazers/Leiji Matsumoto shit.

Right now Miura is working on a completely different project: a six-chapter miniseries titled Gigantomaxia. I get the impression he sees Berserk as a sort of life's work, which he can stop and start at will...

[Jeppe]

Thanks a ton for sharing the link to Epoxy, Matt.

Also, Manga Zombie fuck yeah!

[Larry B Vossler]

Robert, I'm currently beginning my research on the Argentinean comic scene and itsls affects on American comic creators.

I'm also doing a small quick blog on Mort Cinder and Slack Sinner.

If the Argentinean thing goes well, I may do it on the entire Latin American comic scene. I would start with Mexico, since that's my home country.