Saturday, January 30, 2016

"Tycoonraker! or From Zantaf with Lumps"


LUCIANO BOTTARO. What more needs to be said? He's been published in the US! Finally! I feel very strongly that this is a momentous occasion, and there should be some sort of parade or something. And yet, it just happened, and no one's shouting from the rooftops. Why is this?!? Tell me!!! Well, I hope we see a LOT more of him in the months and years to come, is all I will say. It makes me sad to contemplate that a lot of his prime material is too obviously weird to be likely to see a US appearance, but that doesn't mean there isn't still plenty out there that oughta.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

New Disney comics forum

Since the dearly-beloved Disney Comics Forum appears to be gone forever, maybe this can take its place.  Tell your friends!

Friday, January 22, 2016

"The Eternal Knot"


I can't--and indeed I think it's fair to say that I won't--stop.

Hey, as long as IDW keeps printing vintage Italian stories, no one gets hurt. That's the long and short of it. The obscurer the better. Today the Super Barosso Bros are back in a li'l 1962 jaunt. Just our thing. It's in the inducks top 1000, so it's doing okay, but several reviewers accuse it of not making sense. But...it's pretty coherent, really, unless a LOT was changed in translation to salvage it. Maybe a few things around the margins are a bit questionable, and yeah, it's a BIT choppy in a wholly typical way, but nothing serious. Also, it's pretty rich for the country awash in Scarpa to accuse other people's stories of not making sense. WELL ANYWAY.
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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

"The Duckburg 100"


And I said let's all meet up in the year 100, won't it be strange when...okay, never mind. I realize that that is unconnected to the story and makes no sense as a parody of ANYTHING. But for whatever reason, my brain just REFUSES to not play it whenever I hear that title. What can I say?

(Okay, jokes aren't funny when you explain them, but A) that wasn't funny to start with; and B) it's not really even a "joke," so, for the perplexed, i.e.
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Saturday, January 9, 2016

... ... ...



JEEZ. It just goes to show: I don't imagine that Bill Walsh was actually a domestic violence enthusiast, but the fact that he could come up with a hilarious joke like this on the subject really does show how far we've come. We sorta get caught up on racial depictions in old Disney comics, and in comparison they don't seem as bad on issues of gender (though, granted, that's in part because there are so few female characters to be bad with, which is its own issue), but they could still be pretty darned bad.

There's another point to be made, too. I like plenty of Walsh's Gottfredson stories—and isn't it impressive that with “Pirate Ghostship, “World of Tomorrow,” and “House of Mystery,” he managed three stories in a row where characters are killed (sure, in two out of three you can argue that those deaths don't “count,” but really now)?—but you often find a kind of artifice in them—a distance, maybe. Like, they don't feel as close to the character as previous stories, and his behavior doesn't feel as “authentic.” The above is just an extreme example of that—can you really imagine Mickey Mouse, as previously depicted, getting it into his head to beat up his girlfriend? Of course not; it's total nonsense (you can see something similar, if less obviously unacceptable, in the disproportionate number of Walsh strips where Mickey is lusting after random human women). This shit is completely alien to the character. Most of Walsh's work isn't this bad, of course, but there's a prevailing air of unreality about it, for, at various times, both better and worse.

Monday, January 4, 2016

"Mummy Fearest"


These punny titles will truly be the death of me. In theory, there's nothing wrong with them, but the problem is that they so often seem to privilege the bare existence of the pun over being anything more than very vaguely related to the story in question. Like they're just being mildly clever for their own sake. If someone asked you what this was about, you certainly wouldn't say, “oh, it's about the adventures of this cool, skateboarding mummy. He's wearing sunglasses, and he rocks out to surf music. It's great.” No, you would say “it's a story where Scrooge turns his Money Bin into a pyramid.” No question. Personally, I would've gone with the less-flashy but more to-the-point “The Pyramid Scheme,” and yes, I'm aware that that's the unofficial title of a Barks short, but that doesn't seem like a big problem. Maybe it was considered too obvious? Well, I like it. ANYWAY. Enough complaining.

(Ha—as if there can EVER be enough complaining!)
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