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Post by Cei-U! on Dec 19, 2015 8:41:39 GMT -5
I honestly didn't expect anybody else to cite my choice for today so I was surprised when he popped up on hondo's list on Day One. He did such a nice job of explaining the appeal of #6. Gilbert Shelton that anything I might add would be superfluous. Not that I'll let that stop me from noting that, unlike many of his contemporaries from the underground scene, Shelton's work has aged well. His Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics, especially, are as fresh and as funny as they were in the late '60s, perhaps because they simultaneously celebrate and lampoon the hippie drug culture, perhaps because Shelton transcends that paradigm in later issues, deriving his humor from the boys' reactions to the America of the Seventies, Eighties and beyond. Besides, how could I not love the cartoonist who gave us that immortal mantra “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope”? Cei-U! I summon Fat Freddy's Cat! |
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Post by Arthur Gordon Scratch on Dec 19, 2015 9:30:09 GMT -5
Great to see so much love for Shelton! So many choces, so many cuts! One that passed through those is my #6, the hilarious and versatile Kyle Baker, five time Eisner awards winner!   I guess I first was exposed to him through his run following up on Sienkiewicz (yes, I don't need to double check o spell that one!) on the Shadow.    What's great with it is how it didn't fully break away from its predecessor as it embraced the cartoony side of Sienkiewicz in a spectacular way. For many years, Baker worked with others and had to adjust, but soon enough, he became his own man and told his own stories, full of action, wit, candor and dark humor. I guess my breakthrough with him was this one :   To this day, I often use this GN to convince my friends of the value of comic books, with a 100% success rate so far. Baker is a great admirer of the greats of this medium, and this shows, but he's also not avert to modern tools and very often experiments with those. He's also a great advocate of the black sie of history in the US, self publishing comics on african american historical figures. With an amazing library of graphic novels ( You are Here, Why I Hate Saturn, Cowboy Wally Show, Undercover Genie, Nat Turner, King David, the Bakers...) and many great entries in the big two catalogue, newspaper strips and cartoons, self publications, digital comics, he really has embraced every possible sides of the medium       But his latest "classic" achivement was a healthy run on his beloved Plasticman, one where he got to fuse most of his techniques :       Oh, and there was that superman baby sitter as well...   |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2015 9:43:10 GMT -5
Day 7...
My 2nd of 2 weirded out entries... Gary Larson....best one panel gags anywhere, even during a coffee. 
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Post by MDG on Dec 19, 2015 9:47:25 GMT -5
I can't beleive I totally forgot Kyle Baker!
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Post by Arthur Gordon Scratch on Dec 19, 2015 9:55:09 GMT -5
I can't beleive I totally forgot Kyle Baker! You can't fit 'em all. I can't believe I had to leave out Toth or Tanaka... |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2015 10:28:43 GMT -5
George Perez - Wonder Woman One of the most recognizable creator/artist and one of my favorites and his work on Wonder Woman is stellar and I just have great admiration and one of my prized collection of his work is the 15 artwork of the Satellite Era of the Justice League of America and his work on Wonder Woman of which I would rate it one of his iconic in the Comic Book World. I just loved his illustrations and most of all a legend of his own time.  Some of my favorite pictures of Wonder Woman ... He made Wonder Woman very athletic, shapely legs, voluptuous hairstyle, and most of all powerful and majestic all the same time ... And, a terrific smile too ... see the artwork that I have below! I own this artwork; and it's one of 15 of the JLA that I mentioned earlier ...  All 15 are signed personally by George Perez.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2015 10:35:48 GMT -5
Kyle Baker is a great cartoonist and I totally forgot about his work on Plastic Man! ... He should never been overlooked and he is a 5-time Eisner awards winner! ... He's one of the classiest creator and I'm very mad that I left him out in this 12 days of Classic Comics Christmas! 
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,871
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Post by shaxper on Dec 19, 2015 11:24:57 GMT -5
6. Scott McCloudFew people have transformed our understanding of the graphic storytelling format like McCloud has, first with his work on Zot!, which could encapsulate the best of a simpler age of graphic storytelling   and then downshift into something stunningly real, grounded, and sophisticated to boot.   In a very short span of time, McCloud's abilities and understanding of the medium grew exponentially, eventually allowing him to write the defining text on the comic book format -- a work that could only be done AS a comic book.  .400%20pixel%20width%20of%20page.JPG) Though not an absolute favorite creator of mine, there's no denying McCloud's brilliance nor his impact upon the medium and everyone who followed him. Two decades after Understanding Comics, we still haven't raised the comic book industry to the level of art that McCloud showed us the potential for.
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Post by coke & comics on Dec 19, 2015 11:43:18 GMT -5
6. Craig Thompson...for his work on Blankets The first great romance comic I ever read was True Story, Swear to God. When I asked its creator Tom Beland what his favorite romance comic was, he pointed me to Blankets. I did not grow up in the fundamentalist household that Craig Thompson did, but I am Irish Catholic, and have a good sense of how our country’s puritan values can really twist around a young teen when it comes to the already confusing issues of sex and sexuality. Craig Thompson gives us a raw and honest autobiographical look into his struggles reconciling this first love and burgeoning desires with his strict Christian upbringing. It’s beautifully told, beautifully illustrated. Extremely powerful.  More recently, Craig Thompson has crafted the epic Habibi, a stylized look at the life of two escaped slave children in the middle east, as they grow up together, brimming with imaginative designs, making use of art and language and mathematics all blending together.
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Crimebuster
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Making comics!
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Post by Crimebuster on Dec 19, 2015 11:45:14 GMT -5
I feel like a bit of a broken record since most of my picks have turned up in one form or another on previous 12 Days lists. But we like what we like, so: 6. Alex RobinsonFor Box Office Poison, one of my favorite comics. It just spoke exactly to me at the exact right moment when it came out. But it holds up just as well today as it did in the 90's. Great stuff.   |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 19, 2015 12:09:21 GMT -5
On the Seventh Day we have the man I'd give the keys to the DCU too... Darwyn Cooke. While the vast majority of my list is usually in flux...I had one slot that was absolutely in flux. I really didn't think of Darwyn Cooke because I thought his stuff was too new...but then I discovered it wasn't...I'm just old. We've heard the praises of New Frontier...and it's brilliant. But it's Solo #5 that absolutely blows me away. And possibly the thing that blew me away the most is Cooke's coloring. The book looks like it stepped out of an magazine ad from the late 50s or early 60s. It is absolutely gorgeous. And while they don't qualify for reasons of age (and possibly because they are adaptations) Cooke's work in adapting Richard Stark's Hunter novels are automatic must buys. I mean, really...I want a world where Slam Bradley and King Farraday hang out at a bar drinking.    Okay...gotta have one panel from New Frontier. Because it's perfect.  |
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Post by Action Ace on Dec 19, 2015 12:41:31 GMT -5
#6 Dave Stevens
I saw the Rocketeer movie and loved it. It was an encounter with a helpful dealer at a convention a few years later that got me the list of comics I'd need to collect the Rocketeer. The story was quite good, but the art was too awesome to describe. He's my pick for the best artist ever for women. (#5 tomorrow is the runner up) While the Rocketeer lives on, with some great comics produced in recent years, Dave Stevens left us much too soon. Sadly, this is all of his art we will ever have.
up next at #5...yet another vote for this guy
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Post by hondobrode on Dec 19, 2015 14:20:25 GMT -5
# 6 is one of the most famous contemporary cartoonists with his work appearing over 10 years on New Yorker covers and having won the only Pulitzer awarded to a cartoonist. Said work was published in serial form in Raw magazine with the first 6 chapters collected by Pantheon and sold in bookstores as Maus : A Survivor's Tale, My Father Bleeds History by underground cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek about his experience of he and his wife Anja being captured by the Nazis and the story of their survival. The graphic novel is told in an old world woodcut-style with all characters appearing as anthropomorphic : Nazis are cats, Jews as mice and the Poles as pigs. It may sound a little odd or off the wall, but it's extremely powerful. While I respect what Spiegelman has done for the medium from Maus, co-editing Arcade and Raw, contributing to the New Yorker, teaching at the School of Visual Arts and his earlier experimental works, none of his work up to this point particularly struck me, but Maus had to be included and single-handedly puts him on this list.  The last 5 chapters were published as Maus II : And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon later reprinted the work as both hardcover and softcover sets. The Voyager Company in 1994 released The Complete Maus on CD-ROM which included transcripts of the interviews with Vladek, sketches, video interviews and other background material. Pantheon later released MetaMaus, offering further material including an interview with Art and his family, an interactive version of Maus, and more. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2015 15:12:42 GMT -5
On the Seventh Day of Christmas, my true love, comics, gave to me... Gary Spencer Millidge for Strangehaven...  Another of the cartoonists I encountered first during the Comiccon.com era of my comics life, Millidge is perhaps one of the most meticulous creators I have encountered. His research is meticulous-he provides an extensive bibliography of all his sources that influenced Strangehaven in the first volume of the trade-everything form books on myth and folklore to anthropological studies shamanism and cultures of the Amazon basic to books on Secret Societies and architecture. He is a meticulous artist-while some of my previous choices have had a simpler, more cartoony style, Millidge's work is pretty much photorealistic, I am not sure if he used models or references, but his characters look like photos of people you would meet walking down the street.  Strangehaven is a bit of an odd bird, coming out of the same 90s zeitgeist as television shows like Twin Peaks or Northern Exposure where the real and surreal mixed in equal parts. I've always thought of Strangehaven as a mix of magic realism with proper English sensibilities. It is a mystery, a character drama, a mythological allegory, and a quirky offbeat mix of stories all rolled into one. You as the reader encounter Strangehaven just as one of the protagonists Alex Hunter does...  and that starts an enthralling and intriguing voyage of discovery as you read through the series. A voyage filled with strange characters...a displaced Amazonian shaman, a dude who claims to be a visitor from another planet, a Freemason/Golden Dawn style Secret Society, and so many more...   It's won Eisners and Ignatz awards and had an 18 issue run with a long hiatus after that. Last year new strips began to appear in an anthology, so I am hoping a fourth collection eventually appears. Fro fans of Alan Moore, Millidge also put together a tribue book for Alan's 50th birthday...  featuring some original work by Millidge as well as contributions and tributes by a wide range of comic creators, and produced a how to book on comic book design...  that is gorgeously designed itself and quite insightful about the process of making comics (not Eisner or McCloud level of insight, but quite good). -M |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 19, 2015 15:40:24 GMT -5
On the seventh day of Classic Christmas I give unto thee... Richard Stevens III
Continuing after yesterday's theme, once again I'm not a huge fan of humor comics but Stevens' Diesel Sweeties has long been a favorite of mine and as a webcomic it is part of my daily routine: wake up, shower, brush my teeth, shave ...and read the newest Diesel Sweeties strip. They're short and sweet, but with their skewering of pop culture and relationship cliches they often leave an impact on me through out the day.
  My favorite part of the strip however is its Halloween tradition of having the characters dress up, we get to see some fun costume designs, some insight into the characters based on their costume choices, and some jokes that couldn’t be told outside the context of Halloween but are non the less insightful:  Perhaps not the most culturally sensitive message, but the sentiment is clear and when told by a gag a day comic it seems feel more powerful, "if a webcomic character get's it, then the world can't be totally ignorant...right?" I don't know if it's true, but it at least gives me a small dose of hope for humanity. |
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