In this issue: Dark Horse, Dark Horse, Dark Horse, plus Arcana! Champions of the Wild Weird West, Spike, Lobster Johnson, Rob Liefeld and more get the treatment in the latest installment of the Major Spoilers Podcast!
[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/majorspoilers/msp440.mp3[/podcast]Show Notes after the Jump!
NEWS
Rob Liefeld leaves DC Comics
LINK
REVIEWS
Stephen
Lobster Johnson Prayer of Neferu One Shot
Writer: Mike Mignola, John Arcudi
Artist: Wilfredo Torres
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
The Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra hold a Victorian themed party complete with the unrolling of a mummy, with decidedly unexpected results, including a gun-blazing vigilante promising justice!
Rodrigo
Axe Cop: President of the World #2
Writer: Malachi Nicolle
Artist: Ethan Nicolle
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Axe Cop has taken the comics world by storm! The cop with an axe fights bad guys by any means necessary! Written by 8-year-old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his 31-year-old brother Ethan Nicolle, this brand-new Axe Cop story promises a mind-bending joy ride of imaginative fun!
Matthew
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Spike #1
Writer: Victor Gischler
Artist: Paul Lee
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Having fought to regain his soul after falling in love with the Slayer Buffy, the once-terrifying vampire villain Spike has been a bit less fearsome (to humans, at least). On his own adventure, Spike is forced to examine the man he once was, the man he is now, and the man he still hopes to become.
As master of a steampunk ship filled with loyal, oversized alien cockroaches, Spike embarks on a journey to the dark side of the moon, setting into motion an adventure filled with demons, witches, and others who brew new evil in the world without magic!
Major Spoilers Poll of the Week
Everything in pop culture moves in cycles, and every so often, or flights of fancy return to the time travel movie from 1985, Back to the Future. But there is more than one Back to the Future movie. Which movie is the best? You hold the answer to this week’s Major Spoilers Poll of the Week!
Discussion:
Champions of the Wild Weird West
Writer: Michael David Nelsen and Erik Hendrix
Artist: George Kambadais
The honor of a samurai, the mysticism of the Native American Culture, and a whole heck of a lot of Old West Action. When a fallen samurai is drawn to the United States to save his wife-to-be and her father, he is drawn into a plot much more complex than a simple rescue. Meeting up with an adventurer, his Indian financial advisor, a mercenary, and a former priest, they set off on a quest to save the West from the strange and unimaginable. Zombie Indians, mystical beings, and mad science are just a few of they must face on their quest to save themselves, those they love, and the whole of the Old West.
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7 Comments
@ Stephen and Matthew, there is a Word Balloon Podcast from April of this year, wherein they interview Rob Liefeld right around the time he decided to take on new books for DC. I understand all the negative remarks about Liefeld’s drawings and his stories, and there accurate most of the time, but if you want to really hear his voice, it was a great interview. The guy is in his 40’s but he still has the passion and excitement for the characters he writes and draws, the guy sounds like he’s still in high school, visiting comic shops weekly.
http://wordballoon.blogspot.com/2012/04/download-mp3-here-on-this-episode-of.html
It is the passion I’m more interested in when interviewing people, not the PR :)
Oh God. Liefeld’s work already had me disliking him immensely. I cannot respect someone that repeatedly traced other artists and ripped off concepts left and right (you can imagine my surprise when you mentioned his involvement with deterring Granito….pots and kettles). I can’t respect someone that draws in the way that he does.
There have always been bad artists. But unfortunately, he was, and still is, an extremely influential artist. He set a standard and a style that even today there are still echoes. To me, his work brought to light all the bad things of comics. Ridiculously muscled men with enraged, roided out expressions. Women with contorted, wasplike midsections with jutting breasts, standing on tip toe. Every face was exactly the same. His work is basically like Michael Bay, to me. Or Uwe Boll. It upsets so many of his peers because it lowers the bar and it attracts the worst sorts of fans (to me, at least).
Being an incredibly judgmental person, I can make assumptions about someone who draws in such a, let’s say “puerile” manner and then does nothing to address those issues (his reappearance in comic books did not show that he’d been practicing very much). So, being thusly judgmental, and then reading the explosion that happened, I can’t say I’m surprised that this sort of immaturity was what was there.
Stephen, my love, you seem so interested in how someone can handle straddling that line. I’ve known a lot of artists (personally or professionally or just in passing) that enjoy incredible popularity and monetary success while being wholly without respect in their field by their peers. The reason they can handle straddling that line is (and follow me on this) because that is the reason they are on that line in the first place. In my experience, no amount of urging (be it gentle, polite, professional, impromptu, aggressive, rude, relentless, massive) will make this person take the slightest bit of criticism and try to learn from it. Someone sends you a quick email going “hey the blahblah is off on blahblah”, you look at it, you fix it if it needs fixing. These people, they don’t do that. And they don’t HAVE to because they’ve found an audience and niche that loves the thing that they do.
It’s that ability and willigness to straddle that line that is really of interest. Ultimately, when talking to people like Leifeld, something is bound to show, or something bigger should be revealed than just the public image. What makes that person tick? What makes them shrug off the nay-sayers? What makes them embrace what they do? Why did DC hire Leifeld if he is so reviled? Regardless if it is Leifeld, Kevin Smith, Olivia Munn, Stan Lee, or Joss Whedon, they all have their followers, they all have their detractors, but they still seem to carry on without completely cracking. Why that happens is very specific for each person – and that is what I would love to explore.
I recently watched Once Upon a Time in the West, and ever since then I’ve been digging around to find out why Henry Fonda would play the villain, since up to that time he had played the hero….
Good comments and thoughts Adriana! Thanks for sharing!
I’m just saying those Word Balloon podcasts were a peek at who Liefeld is. The guy is in his 40’s now, and he was there when Image was founded. There us no denying how much that changed the industry. There is a very similar movement now in comics, with the people jumping from DC. Liefeld, he’s always said he’s nothing without his fans. His lines at the shows are always massive, yet he always stays to the last person in line is satisfied. The guy has an remarkable business mind at it comes across in those interviews.
Sure, sure! My comment was on the episode, not your linkage and comment!
I haven’t read Champions of the Wild Weird West but the collective description in this episode made it sound like a comic book transcription of an RPG session :)