Anyone currently reading comics?

[tryrushdeppy3]

Due to the Shooter news, today I will re-read some of my favorite Defiant and Broadway comics.

Here is an art by Fiffe I commissioned some years back of one of my favorite Defiant characters, Lorca from Warriors of Plasm - created by Jim Shooter and David Lapham.

 

[ATenderLad]

Guess this is how I'm finding out, RIP to Shooter.

I suppose his legacy, at least at the Big 2, will be a bit mixed. He oversaw the biggest boom Marvel ever had, but a lot of the initially profitable decisions he made can be pointed to as the downfall of the company in the following decade. (Preferring comic shops over other distribution and the hyper-focus on big merchandising events with Secret Wars, for example). He sounded like a very demanding boss according to the folks who worked with him, which was good for deadlines, but bad for retaining talent in the long run. He was a writer himself, not a corporate raider who jumped aboard. However, while he seemed to provide an environment where a guy like Chris Claremont could thrive, his own creative impulses could be a little profit-driven. The pretty horrific Avengers #200 seemed to have been written on the notion that "It's got a romance, a baby, AND a wedding! I smell a hit!"

(In fairness to Shooter, he also called the story a heinous disaster back in 2011, and accepts all criticism).

On the other hand, ya know, I did love the initial Valiant Comics as a kid; Magnus, Robot Fighter in particular. I've no idea how those hold up though, I haven't read them since...okay this is an odd association, but I remember reading them the same summer we were watching the O.J. Simpson trial on TV.

 

[Octopus]

Avengers #200

Oh Jesus, you just unlocked a memory on that one. I entirely forgot about that bizarre story until just now, somehow.

"It's got a romance, a baby, AND a wedding! I smell a hit!"

"And you'll never guess that it's all the same guy!"

I went down a weird rabbit hole last night of reading through digital scans of Black Belt magazine which was unintentional comedy and cringe gold, then somehow ended up on Savage Sword of Conan as one does, I guess. Read through the first five original issues or so, the story adaptations of the actual Howard written stories were fantastic of course; I particularly liked the Mistress of Death adaptation from the first issue, 'Curse of the Undead-Man'. The original story was unfinished by Howard himself (it was finished by another author), so they took a lot of liberties with it to say the least. Neither Red Sonja or Conan were in the original story, and they both replace the actual original main character of Dark Agnes de Chastillon who I only learned about a few weeks ago in a strange sort of coincidence. The Dark Agnes stories only got published in the 70's, 40 years after Howard's death, so makes sense why I'd never really heard much of them. Anyway, the story as an adaptation is pretty bad considering it's barely one, but that Buscema art? Hell yeah.