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Floyd Gottfredson art
by Wayne Markley
This year’s Comic con 2010 in San Diego California just wrapped up and, as always, it was full of news and events. While a lot of of the news is available on many comic book web sites, I thought this week I would take a moment to look at the announcements that were made about upcoming releases and go over which ones I am looking forward to and why, and a few of which I am not looking forward to.
To me, the best announcement was from Fantagraphics where they let the world know they are going to be reprinting the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey mouse strips. Gottfredson drew the Mickey newspaper strips from 1930 till 1975. These are some of the best of the Disney daily’s and they have been reprinted over the years a little at a time, generally as a story here and there in the old Gemstone Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. flourish did reprint a few stories in their Mickey mouse Classics: mouse Tales. Gottfredson’s MIckey stories are not only stunning to look at, but are small masterpieces of storytelling, ranging from epic adventures to short gag strips. even though this will not be out till 2011, it is something to look forward to.
Infinite Kung Fu
Top shelf announced that they will be releasing a new volume in Alan Moore’s epic league of amazing Gentleman. If you have never read any of these books, you must give them a try. They are a mix of historical (and fictional) characters in rip-roaring adventures. Do not let the horrible motion picture based on the comic put you off. They also announced that will be collecting the very fun indie series limitless Kung Fu. The book is a wild romp based on the 70’s Kung-Fu craze,. As an aside, it would be terrific if marvel re-issued their Kung-Fu comics from the 70s, particularly the Sons of the Tiger stories.
Dark horse let it be known that they are expanding their Robert E. Howard library by adding a new title, savage Sword, which will be an anthology title with all of Howard’s other characters not already being published, such as Brak Mac Morn. Plu,s it will include new Conan stories. They also announced new stories with Kull and Solomon Kane as well as continuations of their exceptional Chronicles of Conan series and savage Sword of Conan series, both of which reprint old marvel Conan stories.
While IDW’s announcement that they would be doing Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon must have been enough to through me into cardiac arrest, it is at least the fourth time they have been done. The kitchen Sink versions from years gone by were beautiful. but just to make sure people like me would get these new collections, they are adding the Jungle Jim toppers to the Flash Gordon strips which have never before been collected in this fashion. As far as I know the Jungle Jim strips have only been available in Italian reprints from the Pacific Comic Club and a some shabby reprints from Pioneer Comics. So this set of six books will be worth your money.
Rocket Raccoon & Groot
Finally, there are the big two, marvel and DC. marvel has recently suspended all of their cosmic books (Guardians of the Galaxy, Nova) while they do the exceptional Thanos Imperative. The rumor going around was these books would not be brought back but would be replaced with a new title, but this was not announced. Although a Rocket Raccoon and Groot miniseries was announced. marvel did let out they will be doing new stories of the CrossGen characters. While the original stories were a lot of fun, I am not sure how much of a following they will have in today’s market. but this does make sense considering that Disney gotten all the rights to the characters some years ago. With marvel also doing Tron, how much longer till marvel does the Mouse? (And Duck, etc.)
And for DC? Well, there are adding another Batman title and a second Flash title. They are moving Vertigo characters such as Swamp Thing, Madame Xanadu (which indicates one of my favorite books is being canceled), and death of Sandman fame back to the DC Universe. They are bringing back the Thunder Agents (based on the development art work, this looks like another bomb to me). OK, I will be honest; nothing DC announced got me very excited. That’s a shame considering that I have been a substantial DC fan for 40 years and my lifelong dream was to work for DC Comics, which I did do. but these days I am not that ecstatic by much of their output.
DC universe Legacies
But let me close with a recommendation of a DC title, DC universe Legacies. This is a 10 issues series written by Len Wein that tells the history of DC universe in a style similar to Marvels. They are solid stories that are told in a fun and satisfying way, with a bad person and villains and not some over arching story that continues into 20 other books or a storythat you need Wikipedia to understand. Plus, there are terrific short story backups in each issue featuring the characters from the time period that issue is about. For example, in the current issue, number three, the backup story features Challengers of the unknown with Sea Devils and Cave Carson. In ten pages Wein and artist Dave Gibbons tell the best story I have read in a DC book in a long time. Do yourself a favor and track down the first three issues of this series and get the next seven.
As always, the opinions and thoughts of this column are from my fevered brain and in no way reflect the opinions of Westfield Comics or their employee’s, who typically argue with me after reading this column.
The Mickey mouse cover used came from the Grand Comics Database.
