
After the pointless and self-destructive horror of ‘Ultimate Week’, wherein I forgot what I actually enjoyed about comics, why I read them in the first place, and what my eyes can handle before they just give up and see a brown sludge where once there was glorious colour, I decided “Only good comics for me from now on! Only the best! I’ll rediscover what this medium can do!”
Part of my subsequent rehabilitation has involved taking only interesting comics from the library. One of these is Young Gods and Friends by Barry Windsor-Smith. And while I’ve only just started reading it and am yet to form an opinion on the actual content, I’ve finished reading the introduction by Dave “Him” Sim, Rob Vollmar, Alan David Doane, Bruce Costa and “a guy signing himself Seriously pissed off joe“.
This introduction is full of the sort of yawny bleating you tend to see when anyone discusses ‘proper’ comics from the early 90s. “Oh woe was us, it didn’t do well, it’s not got superheroes, collectors ruin everything, if it ain’t got an ‘X’ then it ain’t sales, we are real artists, they are youngsters who like muscles and guns”. You know.
I mean, it’s basically true observations, but MY GOD this is a collection from 2003, yet it still sounds like a bunch of 45 year olds who’ve just seen a bit of Rob Liefeld pec for the first time.
Don’t start your collected edition with a big complaint that makes you seem as square and grey as the film 54!
Where’s the joy, huh? Where’s the celebration of what the non-superhero mainstream CAN do?
Oh well.
I mean, everything they say is correct, but it kills all my enthusiasm for actually reading the comic itself. So what did I read instead (assuming I had to read some sort of comic)?
THESE gems, which I found for 25p each in Oxfam (having failed to find the comics mart I was going to, which was no doubt populated with SPECULATORS who don’t like REAL comics crafted of MUD and BRICKS)!
So, pack away your sexual organs, place your guns and swords and gunswords in your pouches, leap from your helicopter on your tiny feet, and enjoy these reviews?
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