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[Why I hate Saturn]

On a tangent. While on me holidays I've just read 'Why I hate Saturn' and it BRILLIANT. Might well be another addition to the already bulging list. I'm going to have to get a better collection - by 30th anniverary collection with Cowboy Wally doesn't get close to doing it justice. Any recommendations as to the definative version?

I've still got my old Piranha Press edition and I don't think any of the reprints have surpassed it. I know Baker's released a deluxe edition ("with rarities", which I think is the script for the TV pilot that was never made), but I think that edition's page size is smaller

I really wish someone with loads of spare time and no doubt extremely deep pockets could put together an official collection of the scattered odds and ends he drew (and sometimes wrote) in the 90s before he got steady work with LOEG - the Death Race issues he did with Mills, the John Pain comics he wrote and drew, that Nightspeeder short with Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier...

So glad the Fourth World scored a mention! It's easily my favourite of the Kirby comics - I'm just not a fan of the Stan Lee bluster, and with the Fourth World Kirby was clearly going all out... until DC pulled the plug.

On that point, aside from The Hunger Dogs, there's another "ending" Kirby did for The New Gods buried in the last few issues of Captain Victory (I think #10-#12 are the ones to grab) where it's revealed that the lead has family ties to some thinly disguised versions of the New Gods.

It's not exactly the epic wrap up the series deserved but it does provide a touch of Kirby greatness, and if you're a fan the issues are well worth getting

There were parts of From Hell that did feel a little homework-esque to me at the time - reading it as it came out in comic form meant that you'd be waiting a year or more and then get an installment that was just a crowd gathering around a body for 40 pages (well, maybe not, but that's what it felt like). But the horror / magical stuff was just so exactly in my wheelhouse at the time that those snippets early on more than made up for it.

Then the episode where Gull "gives birth" to the 20th Century and gets to hang out in a modern office was so amazing to me that I pretty much assumed that was going to be the high point (and I was fine with that). Then that final episode in the asylum that tripled down on everything just made the more slog-like chapters a minor speedbump at best.

End result: way more entertaining than any of the homework I was assigned at school

Metalzoic what a great cover. I just wish we can get a reprint. I believe DC is the problem

It's such a weird thing. Why wouldn't DC be up for allowing a reprint of this strip? Or perhaps it wanted too much money, which made the endeavour unviable. I'd bloody love to see Metalzoic (ideally in B+W) given the full-on HC oversized treatment, with those glorious full-colour covers included as well. Alas, Kev is no longer around to provide insight into the strip, but I'm sure Mills could be roped in to write an intro.

I'm still very happy that I somehow, years ago, managed to buy a fairly good copy of the DC trade for a price that wasn't bonkers. But it is a skinny and fragile little thing. And that Kev artwork always looked all the more powerful in black and white.

It's a real puzzle why DC blocked a reprint of Metalzoic - it's not like it's earning anything for them now. All I can think is that there were various contractual bonuses or payouts attached if they ever went to a second printing which made it not worth their while (or they would have had to pay a lawyer to look at the contract and they couldn't be bothered). It was during that weird period in US comics where they would give the creators some rights but not all, which made untangling things tricky later on - I think the only time DC has ever reprinted one of the graphic novels they published in that format was the final New Gods story by Jack Kirby, which is a very different thing to a stand-alone GN by a couple of creators they don't care about.

Sadly the colours on the DC version aren't much even by the standards of the time, but the B&W pages look incredible - definitely put me down for a B&W version when the powers that be realise how good it is

Its a warning to Alan M fans really... I think my next one will really not go down well with them. I do explain myself and say sorry a lot (in so many words) but who knows if that will be enough?!?

So... American Reaper then?

In theory I'm all for the more political Dredd stories - my younger self was clamoring for them, and always got excited when the Council of Five showed up for a handful of panels - but these days I don't see the point. Or I do, but I can also see beyond the immediate thrill of having Dredd up against the system (the one bad guy he can't beat) to the point where all these stories do is set Dredd up to lose.

We know Dredd is bad at politics, because he's always been bad at politics: it's a core part of the character. And with Dredd pretty much proved to be the Greatest Judge Who Ever Lived, it's hard to come up with plausible bad guys that provide a threat. But the system's never going to really change, because if it does that's the end of the series. In the past there's been a bunch of good stories exploring Dredd vs Justice Department, ranging from The Day the Law Died to Necropolis to Tour of Duty. But they were all focused on Dredd himself: either the system (for whatever reason) wanted Dredd out, or Dredd himself had enough doubts to quit (and then come back because MC1 wouldn't last a week without him).

Of late we get stories where Dredd is off to the side, a bystander to events he doesn't like but isn't comfortable tackling head-on. Those earlier stories were all about Dredd restoring the system and a lot of the dramatic tension came from our knowing the system Dredd was defending was actually pretty bad. Now it's all about rubbing how bad things are in old man Dredd's nose while he just... puts up with it, because otherwise there's no series.

If all this was leading to something - Dredd quits, Dredd guns down the Council of Five and takes over - then the downbeat endings would have some meaning. But what seems to be the pattern in recent years is that Dredd eventually takes out the trash (usually by playing second fiddle to some other character that does a lot of the hard work), only for a new batch of corrupt or dodgy Judges to turn up. It might be realistic, but dramatically it's not all that satisfying to read.

And that Kyle Baker Plastic Man looks phenomenal and has instantly gone on my Amazon wish list!

It really is.

Why I Hate Saturn is excellent, but it's in no way a serious work - it's very much a New York comedy in the vein of things like Seinfeld or even Friends. Nate Turner is the exception in Baker's body of work - pretty much everything he does is either comedy or action-comedy, and it's all very much well worth checking out (The Cowboy Wally Show and I Die at Midnight are two of my faves).

Even his work on The Shadow pretty quickly takes the character down a very absurdist path - his final story (it ends on a cliffhanger because they'd gone so far from what the owners of the character wanted from a Shadow comic that they pulled the plug) was just a bunch of wacky support characters fighting over, uh, something closely related to The Shadow, and the way it was resolved would have led into a plotline a lot closer to Robocop than you might have expected.

Out of interest I forgot to ask 13school have you read Plastic Man and how does it standup compared to Baker's other work?

I have! It's a bit more 'all ages' than the rest of Baker's work, especially the early issues - I vaguely remember the first storyline was going to be a stand alone GN but it was turned into an ongoing series. As JohnW points out, it's a bit of an outlier in Baker's work. It's much more focused on animation-style visual gags, whereas on the whole his other work is a lot more grounded (that is, the visual stuff usually sticks to the limits of a very well directed Hollywood comedy or action movie).

But above all else he's an excellent cartoonist, and his art is always really strong whether he's going more for realism or cartoony - he's one of those artists where I just love looking at his drawing no matter what the story, and his visual storytelling is always rock solid even when he's writing something that's dialogue driven.

Baker's currently publishing his new stuff (and a lot of his old stuff) through Amazon, and though I haven't got his latest book yet I did enjoy the two volumes of Deathcathalon that're out if you're wondering what he's up to now

Why I Hate Saturn is excellent, but it's in no way a serious work - it's very much a New York comedy in the vein of things like Seinfeld or even Friends. Nate Turner is the exception in Baker's body of work - pretty much everything he does is either comedy or action-comedy, and it's all very much well worth checking out (The Cowboy Wally Show and I Die at Midnight are two of my faves).

Even his work on The Shadow pretty quickly takes the character down a very absurdist path - his final story (it ends on a cliffhanger because they'd gone so far from what the owners of the character wanted from a Shadow comic that they pulled the plug) was just a bunch of wacky support characters fighting over, uh, something closely related to The Shadow, and the way it was resolved would have led into a plotline a lot closer to Robocop than you might have expected.

The thing that always sticks with me about Miller's projects around this time was that he was extremely willing to listen to his artists and change his stories in major ways depending on what they wanted to do (or what they were giving him art wise).

Supposedly with Elektra the idea was going to be that each issue after the first was going to be narrated from the point of view of another supporting character - Garrett was going to die in issue #2 (or be stuck forever in a hospital bed) so someone else would step up in #3 and so on. But Miller liked the design of Garrett so much he kept him around and by the end it's easily as much his story as it is Elektra's.

Changing views on a character or strip I tend to think are a result of advanced writing - which I wouldn't automatically call "good writing" myself, as there's a number of strips over the years that are pretty straightforward that I also think are well written. But if there's a certain level of complexity or sophistication there (even if the strip is also going for broad laughs) then there's going to be room for multiple readings.

And the reverse is true as well. There's been a few strips over the years that are clearly aiming for something more complex as far as characterisation goes but they never clicked with me. Sometimes what you want is a story that states its aims loud and clear up front and sticks to them throughout. Or just some decent art.

Am I right in thinking the final Bad Company story hasn't been collected anywhere? Is it in the Hatchette series?

I always felt there was an extremely small Dredd influence on DKR, just on the "grim future city where gangs rule the streets and only one man dealing out instant justice can beat back the wave of crime" level. Which is much more just something going around pop culture at the time, but hey, they're both comics.

I read DKR when it first came out so I always wonder how much new readers (if it even has any) get the sense that it's meant to be taking place in the future, and not just a grim present day. There's been so many elseworlds and what if superhero stories since then that are set in the present but have had superheroes retire or change in the past that I assume these days DKR is seen in that light - the story is set now and Batman retired ten years ago, rather than Batman will retire in the near future and this is happening ten years beyond that.

Or I could stop worrying and just read Batman Year 100, which is more than decent in its own right.

Weirdly (as I still have every issue of Crisis here somewhere) I barely remember anything about buying or reading Crisis in the first few years. I don't think much of anything in those issues really grabbed my attention* - I must have become a Garth Ennis fan at some stage but neither Troubled Souls nor True Faith won me over.

Knowing me, it was probably A Few Troubles More that won me over. I definitely remember being much more excited about Toxic! when that was announced.

_{*the first time I was really excited about a story in Crisis was The New Adventures of Hitler, though I was looking forward to Skin as well and we all know how that turned out}

Wagner's Star Wars /  Boba Fett comics were pretty decent.

Did anyone ever read Chain Gang War?