Messages

I have some huge deluxe Hellboy editions and they're absolutely glorious - massive pages for the art, look awesome on the shelf - but to read them you do need to either sit down at a big, clear table or potentially stand at a medieval style pulpit as they're far too unwieldy for reading on the sofa or in bed.

Anything that can't be read slumped on the couch is doing something wrong! Though the idea of a medival pulpit in the living room has a certain appeal!

Also I think I'm the only person in the world who didn't get on with Hellboy. I watch a YouTube video with various YouTubes selecting their fav Dark Horse titles (it was from their 35th Ann. year) and almost everyone either picked Hellboy OR said they hadn't cos they knew everyone else would!

AND only 'For the Love of Comics' picked Concrete. So full of wrong!

I'd no real knowledge of Liberty Meadows and my main Frank Cho exposure is cheesecakey Marvel covers, so this was an interesting read, thanks Colin - I assumed it was something that might have run in Heavy Metal rather than newspapers. That Calvin & Hobbes strip is delightful.

Seriously try the free online daily strips - if you don't like it no harm. But if you enjoy them as much as I did...

Usagi Yojimbo because those DH editions are just too gorgeous not to; a few Marvel omnis because the series in question weren't compiled any other way.

I've got the first four Usagi Yojimbo Sagas in paperback charging up my 'To Read' spreadsheet. I'm eying them nervously having just read the 'Complete Eightball' in a similar, but slightly smaller (I think) format and that was a little uncomfortable to read.

There's a bit of me wondering whether I need to just bite the bullet and start collecting the floppies (well from the start of the Dark Horse stuff - as any earlier is going to get expensive!) given how much I love what I've read to date...

...sigh... once again too damned many great comics...

I can remember reading 52 but I can not remember Final Crisis. Maybe its just me but I find reading Morrison's work mostly painful with over complicating concepts and arcs which becomes difficult to follow and mostly incomprehensible. I never liked anything Morrison did except Zenith. He was always for me very much over rated writer.

And to think I had such respect for you [colin_ynwa turns away and walks away from POV, slowly, head bowed. His slow arm movements suggest he's wiping a tear from his eye]

I love Final Crisis (back to another post you made I do have that in a lovely hardcover collection as its not too big and just works so well for his story pulling everything together and has extra pages not in the comics which really add something) and I find it so wonderfully ...charming.

Comparing it to Infinite Crisis is interesting and says in some specific ways why I like it so much. In Infinite - as I recall - Superboy bends reality by hitting the wall of the world they are trapped in after Crisis on Infinite Earths (its been a while so excuse me if that is wrong). In Final Superman sings to create vibrations at specific frequencies to save the day. The former felt a little weird, the latter is entirely weird but in a way that embraces the crazy charm of the silver age and the hyper-reality of superhero comics. The former feels 90s, the latter feels like its straight form the imagination of Jack Kirby.

One thing I've noticed since the pandemic is that graphic novel prices have risen quite a bit on the 2nd hand market.  Used to be that they were cheap as chips and easy to track down.  Now though, you see crazy prices being asked.

Some of this is the print runs towards the end of series.  That's not always the case though.  I do wonder how much of this is algorithms slowly pushing prices higher and higher.

From what I've seen trade paperpacks can often be pretty easy and cheap. I'm selling at a mart this weekend (Sheffield come buy my stuff - normally not listed here as the stuff I talk about here is the stuff I'm keeping damnit!) and you'll get all sorts of offers on trades. There are of course exceptions. Its the bigger hardcover, deluxe and omnibus type things that seem to go wild in price.

In part I think (and this is utter speculation) this is to do to how good they look on shelves. If you watch YouTube videos from comics folks they so often seem to be surrounded by shelves full of lovely hardcovers and omnibuses and it makes them seem so desirable... me I find them to bulky to read comfortably. I wonder if that's a factor. Why have long box after long box of floppies if you can have lovely neat looking collections on your shelves.

Sorry about that folks. Hopefully I won't need to break things up like that in the future. The issue did seem to sort itself last time so...

[Part 5]

Part 5

Where to find it

Liberty Meadows doesn't seem to be as available as it once was. It's all been collected but I'm not sure it's all still in print and some seem to be getting a bit pricey. I'm not sure the collections are available digitally either?

Fortunately it still appears daily on 'Go Comics' in a cycle so I think if you are prepared to click 'back' enough times and we're talking maybe 1000 times - seems like you can read it online for free, as originally presented for nowt.

If you want it physically it looks like it will have to be the aftermarket. These do crop up if you are patient you can get the comics at not too crazy prices. The trades seem to pop up as well.

Other than that just wait for Frank Cho to finally get around to releasing new materials as I bet when that happens the older stuff will be re-released.

Learn more

Obligatory Wikipedia page

Grand Comics Database has a couple of cover galleries, one for Insight Studios issues and another for the later Image Comics which give an impression of how Frank Cho represent female characters visually.

A quick summary from Frank Cho's own site.

Creators.com has another collection of the strip and this one has a handy dandy date selector so hopefully that's linked to the beginning of the newspaper strip and you can scroll forward from there. Unfortunately the Sunday pages seems to have got out of sync, but the dailies seem to be in order from a quick look.

Not a load more out there, some bits and pieces. So I've linked to Goodreads - Eden vol. 1 so you can get a sense of the diversity of views on this one. Reviews of the other volumes can be found there too.

What is all this?

Conscious that this is becoming a long thread and if you're wondering what the heck you've just read and can't be arsed (quite sensibly) to search back to find out I'll link to my opening posts that try to explain all this.

What this all came from

And of course a nerd won't do a list like this without setting 'Rules' / guidelines

Some thoughts on what will not be on the list.

[Part 4]

Part 4


Copyright - Frank Cho

Then we get to the art. Oh boy, the art. Arguably the series greatest asset and greatest detriment.

Put simply, when I got back into comics after my wilderness years Frank Cho rapidly became my favourite artist. And that includes 2000ad artists which is saying something.

During the early comic strips you see him rapidly grow as an artist. I mean he starts off very good but over the course of maybe the first 6 or so issues of the comics, maybe the first 6 months of the syndicated strip his level elevated at an impressive rate. Well I guess if you have to turn out a strip a day you have to learn quickly on the job. There's a similar elevation in Bill Watterson't work on Calvin and Hobbes to my eye as well.

His art at its best is energetic, clean and incredibly comfortable on the eye. He has a smooth, slick line that captures emotion and movement with subtlety and vibrance as needed. He poses his characters, gives them body language, that enhances the storytelling immensely. He's able to capture a world of different shapes and forms perfectly. A woodland area looks magical and dreamy. Machinery and spaces look solid, real and lived in. His funny animals are perfectly cartoon like and recognisable yet always conveying even their quietest of emotional reactions to an absolute tee. When he needs to draw funny he draws funny... well funnily. When he wants to capture real, serious emotion, convey tension and atmosphere he does that superbly as well. He can bounce effortlessly from the 'cartoony' to the 'realistic' with the stroke of a pen, or indeed several strokes of pen and brush as the image he is capturing requires.

In short he's able to draw anything brilliantly and has a range of stylistic tools in his armoury to make him almost the perfect comic artist. It's no surprise he became such a big star when he moved to Marvel. His ability to master the real and hyper-real is matched by almost no artist I know and that makes him the perfect superhero artist.

The trouble is he's a big teenager in the way he draws women. Brandy and other female characters in the series are fantastic. Brandy is smart, capable, engaging, vulnerable. She feels really real and rounded as a character and I love reading her grow and develop as a character. Yet Cho seems to find it almost impossible not to sexualise her. He objectifies almost all the female characters he introduces. Or makes a point of the fact that they aren't objects of sexual desire when they aren't.

The problems with his art are exemplified at a time after he finished Liberty Meadows (at least to this point). It all came to a head when in 2016 while working at Marvel he produced a number of sexualised, objectified commission covers involving female characters. Knowing the reactions he was getting from readers like me. I'd almost stopped reading his work entirely as I was getting so fed up with his visual representation of women. It was boring, childish and at times bordering on offensive, if not outright offensive. To reflect on this silly attitude as he saw it he'd have one character or another popping up on these images proclaiming 'Outrage!' to mock the reactions of folks put off by what he was doing.

At this point folks from Comicsgate - the horrible alt-right movement in comics who see any attempt to diversify comics and their creators as taking away their toys. THEIR TOYS. Who stunningly say mainstream superhero comics should keep the politics out, they've always had the politics in them, it's just they don't like the politics they see there now, as it's not their politics. Anyway Comicsgate made him a bit of a cause celebre, an example of how leftist and feminists and progressives had an agenda to stamp on their fun.

"Look what they are doing to poor ol' Frank Cho. It's just harmless fun. If you don't like 'sexy' women just look away and don't stop us having our fun."

To his credit he quickly disassociated himself from the Comicsgaters. He made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with them and disagreed with what they stood for. All good, the problem is he didn't seem to have the self awareness to reflect on why they assumed he would be with them. Why they so associated themselves with him and what he draws.

To Frank Cho the way he drew women was all a bit of harmless fun. In fact as he sees it he used it as a way to comment on the weakness of men who are so affected and scared by strong, attractive, sexual women. In Liberty Meadows Frank (the character) is the very embodiment of that. He can't handle the fact that he's so attracted to Brandy and can't deal with his emotions. The problems very clearly Frank's not Brandy's.

The thing is he still continually sexualises and objectifies his female characters. He seems (or certainly seemed to, I've not heard a great deal from him for a while.) unable to realise there is a difference between being able to draw strong, sexual women and that being seen as what your art is about. There are countless superb artists known for being able to draw characters in a way that is powerful, sexually exciting and even titillating. The problem Frank Cho has is that is what his art was seen as and that entirely took over and dominated what he produced. In doing that he reduced his visual depiction of women to reductive titillation, not exciting liberating sexual freedom.


Copyright - Frank Cho

All that said the craft, storytelling and humour in Liberty Meadows I remember being top draw. Absolutely fantastic stuff. I think if it wasn't for the problems I've outlined above this series would be a lot higher. A lot higher. As it is until I get to a re-read and see about how I feel about it then it will have to settle for this position. Obviously folks can have very different options either way to my feeling about Frank Cho's art and reflect on whether it's something you want to read based on that. I have to say I'm really looking forward to reading it again as writing this has reminded me just how much affection I have for this incredible series. The trouble is I'm a little nervous as to how I'll feel once I'm doing that read!

[Part 3]

Part 3


Copyright - Frank Cho

The strip also ran longer story arcs as well. Always genuinely exciting, never forgetting to add humour in great dollups to the action. The sanctuary has been victim to forest fires in the surrounding woodland, characters have had to deal with terrifying snow storms. Possibly the best of these storylines involves one of Ralph's experiments going awry and opening an interdimensional portal and an evil version of Brandy coming through to 'our' world to unfurl evil plots and confusion. These longer form stories are really well put together. The four panels a day structure really adds to the pacing and excitement in the same way 2000ad's short forms anthology format requires of its adventures. Only even more so.

These longer stories work especially well in the comic format. Even though explicitly written for the 4 panel daily strip - with a full page weekly Sunday colour strip having to both add to the ongoing story and remain independent, a juggling act I always admire in strips of this type - and presented as such in the comics it really works. Having the strips back to back really gives you a sense of the pace and action so well. They are so well crafted you barely notice the need to 'recap, story, gag' in just four panels. It's done sublimely and really works as a comic. You quickly forget the artifice of its structure and the contrasts this creates.

This is further helped for me as a reader as I'm a similar age to Cho with similar interests in fiction. So once you get past the american specific references, many of which are so broadly known they are familiar in the UK, his references make this series feel as if it was specifically written for me. I mean of course it's not, but it might as well have been.

So short done and gone gags, long form stories that really work, returning ideas and storylines that cut through it all. To be honest everything in between as well. It reads like the perfectly structured daily strip... well until you read Calvin and Hobbes that is. It is an absolute delight. While it might all fit to date in 37 issues its strip nature means there is a heck of a lot packed in there and it reads as if it has twice as many issues, or more.

[Part 2]

Part 2


Copyright - Frank Cho

Okay first I need to step back and describe just what Liberty Meadows is and its interesting publication history. Long before Frank Cho became the king of cheesecake art in mainstream comics he worked up an idea he'd created for the student newspaper of the University of Maryland in a strip called University2 (University squared). In 1997 having finished University (I think, I have a niggling thought that he might have quit to concentrate on drawing Liberty Meadows?) he took the main ideas and characters of Univerity2 and turned them into a syndicated newspaper strip called Liberty Meadows.

Liberty Meadows is an animal sanctuary in the US. The vets and other staff there, notably Frank and Brandy, take care of animals and rehabilitate them from various ills. The affiliations these animals have aren't typical. Franks and Brandy support Dean, a pig who was an ex-university mascot and has an alcohol addiction as well as being a literal male chauvinist pig. Ralph a midget circus bear whose crazy inventions lead him into all sorts of misadventures. Leslie a hypochondriac bullfrog and oft victim of Ralph's inventions. The unbearably cute Truman, a duck and Oscar, a dachshund. Mike a Racoon with obsessive compulsive disorder and a cow suffering from a disturbing cartoon form of mad cow disease.

That cast gives you a sense of how Cho takes this seeming benign setting and imbues it with a host of genuinely hilarious daily strip ideas. This series and characters are all beautifully drawn and laugh out loud funny. The setting provides a backbone for daily gag strips, returning comedic favourites, Julius the sanctuary's owner has ongoing battles with Khan, a giant catfish. Oscar is troubled by squirrels bent on revenge for his chasing. There are longer arcs that push the stories in all sorts of fantastic directions. It's basically shaped like a typical ongoing newspaper funny strip. Think Calvin and Hobbes type strips and stories and you can't go far wrong.


Copyright - Frank Cho

A couple of years after the strip went to syndication Cho joined Insight Studies, a collective of creators who provided production support for fellow creators and started to release the strips he'd done to date as a comic . It remained at Insight for 26 issues before moving to Image for a further 11 issues.

Around the time he moved the series to Image, Cho stopped the newspaper strip. He's been increasingly frustrated with the editorial interference he'd received and the restrictions imposed on his story ideas and gags. The comic reprints had increasingly included uncensored versions of the strips and even some material that had never seen print. After 5 years he'd had enough, his career was increasingly taking off in the comic industry and so he decided enough was enough and he cancelled the series as a newspaper strip. The comic continued to reprint the existing strips until it caught up and then started to be completely new material, still produced as if it was a newspaper strip, but without the editorial mandates and with the freedom to do what he wanted with the 'Sunday' colour strips.

He carried on up to the (almost) end of a provital storyline in the relationship between Frank and Brandy, but delays crept in as there were increasing demands on his time. He was becoming a hot property at Marvel and the simple fact of the matter is they paid better than the income Liberty Meadows could make him. March 2004 saw him tie up the current storyline. A final issue came out in May of 2006, but nothing since.

The series might not be dead, as he has stated he always wanted to come back to it. In fact in 2021 when the rights reverted to him after the lapse of a deal for a potential TV show, he announced the series was to return by the end of the year. Nothing happened and I'm not aware of any more news since. We know new material exists as snippets have been released online but it's just not got to the top of the pile yet and more lucrative work understandably needs to take priority. I do believe one day we will get more, though I've long stopped worrying about when!


Copyright - Frank Cho

The strip itself is fantastic. Cho is a sensational artist, something I will return to. The stories are fast paced, as the format demands, sharp and very, very funny at times. They can tend towards bawdy humour, but there's nothing too bad at all, after all this was restricted by the tight controls of syndication. Even the 'uncensored' strips don't push things too hard. I have to say you are left to wonder who comes up with what is or isn't acceptable in the world of newspaper cartoons. As I followed the series as it came out and Frank Cho would comment on what did or didn't have to change to meet the criteria it was mind blowing at times what did pass and what didn't. I can really understand why Cho got exasperated.

The other thing that sets Liberty Meadows so far ahead of most strips (well art aside) is the range of story and gag types the setting and characters afford the series. It really is set up to allow itself to go anywhere and frequently did. At the heart of the strip is Franks' seemingly unrequited love for Brandy. Their classic will they, won't they relationship might be cliche but it has an old world charm that's hard to deny... well when it doesn't get a little creepy. I've been there, I've been Frank - well hopefully not the occasionally creepy part! - I suffered with my pathetic affection believing it unreturned so I've always found that part of the series very well done and entirely relatable.

It then does simple short form gags, often relating to the antics of Dean the Pig, Ralph and his inventions. Truman and Oscar's beautifully cute hijinks. Julius endless attempts to land the brutish catfish Khan. Yep it does that done in one gag strip in numerous different ways, with a seemingly endless source of charming, delightful and hilarious characters to draw from. Indeed one of the best characters in the series Frank Cho who inserts himself in his Monkey Boy guise.

[So PART 1]

Arh damnit - so much for normal service being resumed. Access to the site issues (which I think a number of folks had) and then this post being too long requiring a quick edit have caused me to be later than normal today!

So PART 1



Number 91 - Liberty Meadows

Keywords: Newspaper strip, 'Good girl art', Worried about a re-red, funny animals

Creators:
Writer - Frank Cho
Art - Frank Cho
Colours - It's black and white baby... except when it's not - the Sunday strips when Cho does the colour as well.

Publisher: King's Syndicate for newspaper strips, reprinted as comics by Insight Studios then Image

No. issues: 39
Date of Publication: 1999 - 2004

Last read: 2011

I owe this comic strip a lot. Before I got back into comics after my wilderness years I stumbled across


Copyright - Frank Cho

as an online newspaper strip. That became part of me thinking about getting back into reading comics as I enjoyed it so much. When I discovered this was available as a comic book I got back into comic shops as I tracked these down and 20 years later I have a literal room full of comics... so yeah I owe this one for playing such a big part in getting back from that wilderness.

The trouble I worry how it will hold up on re-read. Not because I think these will be bad, far from it. Rather I have changed over those 20 plus (gulp) years, quite a lot thankfully and I wonder how much some of the attitudes these stories display will hold up against my current sensibilities. I'm concerned that the frankly childish view about the depiction of woman Frank Cho has might deflect me from my enjoyment. Don't get me wrong when putting this list together Liberty Meadows was one of the first series I jotted down. As I ordered my list it dropped a lot further down as I considered some of the issues that I might not be comfortable with now. I was tempted to re-read before this entry but decided against it (and who has the time!).

So I'm reflecting on this from older memories and without more modern misgiving (which might be misplaced) so this will be a tricky one.

The issue should now be fixed.
We do apologize for inconvenience.

Admin

Thanks folks.

Ohhh I seem to be back in - WAYHEY!

Had that problem, suspect many did? But fingers crossed all good now???

[Dredd]

That looks like last week's cover. (I mean, it seems to belong to last week's Dredd.)

Yep defo agree there.

As for Dredd it drops you right into the middle of the action, but not in the good, intriguing way. Its drops us in and FIGHT and then giant Bear/slothe thing and that's it. Let's see how it goes though.

Terror Tales felt like a collection of left over words from an 90s Vertigo series slammed into a thin story to try to make it sound interesting.

Full Tilt Boogie was a step up as the Prog looked like it was going to struggle. Building nicely.

Indigo Prime clatters along at a great pace and shows the Terror Tale how its done.

Proteus Vex gives us an ending on a high and an ending on a high. Brill.

As the Prog went on it got stronger and stronger.

Misty special all written by Gail Simone sounds like a win to me! No preorder yet.

Oh wow didn't realise Gail Simone was involved. That's quite the catch!

Happy to see Aly Fell has done some art for this. It's beautiful work.

Yep he's a real talent.