Kurt Busiek
@kurtbusiek
Writer, mostly of comics. MARVELS, ASTRO CITY, ARROWSMITH, AUTUMNLANDS, THUNDERBOLTS, SUPERMAN, AVENGERS, UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, more. NYT bestseller, Harvey & Eisner Awards, yaddita yaddita. My head hurts. sheltre me from þe poudre & þe fingre
I really want to read MARVEL EXPLODES: FROM BULLPEN TO BIG BUSINESS, Paul Levitz's upcoming book about how Marvel changed, told by a guy who saw it all happen from the POV of the guy across the street, as it were. I was around for a lot of it...but I bet Paul saw it a lot more clearly than I did.
The printing is good -- Lulu's very good at that. The image sources Kurtis worked from are not of the best quality, but he did a whole lot of cleanup, and they look good.
Comics are good. And America...America used to have snappy floor shows with good lookin' tomatoes.
And hey, there's no actual swiping going on there, but I'd bet dollars to donuts Howard was thinking of this strip when he drew that FLAGG cover. There've been a lot of airport farewells in movies, TV and other pop culture, but still, my money would be on this memorable good-bye.
#FridayReads Still working on THE SHAMPOO EFFECT by Jenny Jackson. I've been recovering from surgery and adjusting to new meds and stuff, and I'm falling asleep early without getting much reading done.
To be fair, Tana Nile, you were pale yellow yourself, at least when you weren't in disguise...
MASTER OF KUNG FU was...inconsistent. Shang-Chi was orange, Leiko Wu was regular white-person color, Fu Manchu and Fah Lo Suee were pale yellow. Other Asians could be any of these, sometimes changing color from panel to panel. They were at least trying for variation, but, well, yellow.
And I just ordered these, but how about books this fat that focus on a single decade? Or writer- or artist-specific collections? I know there are shorter "Americana" volumes, but they're (a) short and (b) have incredibly inappropriate covers.
The D&Q LITTLE LULU collections are very nice packages. It baffles me, though, why there's no credit beyond "by John Stanley," or a list of where the various stories came from. And it's a little odd that LULU's available in pristine black and white or in fuzzy color, but not a crisp color version.
Glad as I am to have these, the narrow focus (while appropriate!) feels a little dry, too. It'd be fun to have collections of this classic stuff that were a little more open to the variety of the old comics. MICKEY MOUSE & FRIENDS. DONALD DUCK ALBUM. WALT DISNEY'S COMICS & STORIES.
...Li'l Bad Wolf or Scamp stories, whatever. I admire the Fantagraphics collections, and I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. But for some reason, to me the Disney comics experience is about multiple features; the stories feel built to be leavened by gags and side-features.
Where in DC and Marvel archival collections, I'm something of a purist -- I want it to be artist- or writer-focused, or a complete history, or something, it feels to me like the Disney stuff wasn't built to be read that way. It wants to be interrupted by one-page Pluto gags or short...
Anyway, I had some thoughts. The Fantagraphics editions of the Disney stuff are really nice. I have the Another Rainbow Barks Library, but as impressive as it is, big and heavy and black and white is not the way to read those stories. But there's one thing that bugs me.
So I've been feeling nostalgic for classic Disney comics and other such stuff, so I ordered some Gottfredson & Murry MICKEY MOUSE and Barks DONALD DUCK from Fantagraphics, and a D&Q LITTLE LULU volume. And I've just ordered some Archie collections, but they seriously need better archival editions.
So we saw SUPERGIRL. I liked it. I think it could have used a little more depth here and there, more meat on the skeleton. But it was fun. Space Mattie Ross was fun. Lobo was fun. The villains were pretty generic, could have used a more badass central figure. But it was a treat. Krypto rocks.
#FridayReads I've put A DOUBTER'S ALMANAC aside, for now -- I'm just too tired right now for it -- and have started THE SHAMPOO EFFECT by Jenny Jackson, which promises to be a lot lighter. And I loved her debut, PINEAPPLE STREET.
Arrived today from the fine folks at DC Comics: A box of copies of the “facsimile” edition of AVENGERS/JLA 2; all variants included, I believe. [Do I have any copies of the facsimile JLA/AVENGERS 1? Hah! Maybe the fair-to-good folks at Marvel will send some in a month or three…]
Two Bluesky bios of accounts that followed me at almost the same time. These are the same person, right? And they're both fake?