|
Post by kirby101 on Apr 7, 2021 9:34:23 GMT -5
Giacoia up his game later (though I always thought him one of the very good Kirby inkers) He inked some issues in the FF #90s that look remarkably almost as good as Sinnott. FF #93 FF#97 He also did a great job on Kirby's 2001 Treasury Size adaptation.
|
|
|
Post by MDG on Apr 7, 2021 10:16:11 GMT -5
Giacoia up his game later (though I always thought him one of the very good Kirby inkers) He inked some issues in the FF #90s that look remarkably almost as good as Sinnott. ... He also did a great job on Kirby's 2001 Treasury Size adaptation. I think Sinnott's approach, though slick, showed how effective it was to lean into Kirby's, let's call them "non-illustrative" aspects instead of trying to soften or work around them.
|
|
|
Post by Rob Allen on Apr 7, 2021 13:04:02 GMT -5
Giacoia was really good, but he wasn't fast. He had a lot of trouble making deadlines. Sometimes his friends Mike Esposito and Joe Giella would help him out when he was hopelessly behind schedule. That's one reason why his work didn't always look as good.
|
|
|
Post by kirby101 on Apr 7, 2021 15:11:47 GMT -5
Giacoia was really good, but he wasn't fast. He had a lot of trouble making deadlines. Sometimes his friends Mike Esposito and Joe Giella would help him out when he was hopelessly behind schedule. That's one reason why his work didn't always look as good. I heard that even though he was a good inker, and artists like Kirby and Buscema loved it when they inked them, he suffered from "inker's block" and often procrastinated because of it.
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Apr 10, 2021 9:38:18 GMT -5
I started reading FF again and I read #68 and #69 yesterday. It’s a multi-part “Ben Turns Bad” storyline and I’m liking it a lot. I’ve read this, but it’s been awhile, it’s almost like reading a new story.
The mystery villain is ... well, that would be giving it away!
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Apr 18, 2021 9:02:46 GMT -5
I’m up to FF #78. Sue is in the hospital about to give birth. Crystal is staying with her. Reed changes the Thing back to his human form.
And the Wizard, out for revenge because he has a new set of gloves, attacks the FF while the active membership is only two members!
Johnny whips his butt fairly easily.
This starts off a run of nonstop wonders (even the Toomozooma issue gets a lot of points for being hilarious) that includes the Inhumans, Dr Doom, one of my favorite Mole Man arcs and the Skrull gangster planet!
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Apr 24, 2021 11:09:54 GMT -5
I’m up to FF #83. FF # 78 up to about #92 is nonstop magic for me! I’m reading one or two issues most days and it just occurred to me that - since I’m only reading the Kirby issues - I’ll probably finish in about two weeks. It’s making me sad to be so close to the end. When I started, it seemed like I’d be reading it forever.
These next few issues are very nostalgic for me because these are the issues being reprinted when I started reading Marvel’s Greatest Comics. So this was my introduction to late-Kirby FF. Those reprints cut out a few panels here and there, mostly the full-page panels, and I remember when I read the original 1960s comics, how amazed I was by all these unknown panels in stories I thought I knew so well!
|
|
|
Post by kirby101 on Apr 24, 2021 13:06:27 GMT -5
Make sure you read FF Annual #6, the introduction of Annihilus. Could be the best Kirby artwork of his entire run.
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on Apr 24, 2021 13:12:11 GMT -5
Make sure you read FF Annual #6, the introduction of Annihilus. Could be the best Kirby artwork of his entire run. I’m reading the Epic Collection for these issues, and the annuals are included between the issues where they first appeared. So Annual #6 was between #80 and #81. And yes, it’s a doozy!
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on May 3, 2021 9:19:42 GMT -5
I’m up to FF #91, so I’m in the middle of the four-part Skrull Gangster Planet arc. The Thing is now a slave and is being forced to engage in gladiatorial combat to save the Earth!
So I read the arc where Crystal is abducted by Alpha Primitives sent by Maximus, and the FF are captured when they go to rescue her and they escape to find the Inhumans have defeated Maximus without the FF’s help.
And then that wonderful Dr Doom arc where the FF are trapped in Latveria and Doom is going to rest his new robots by destroying a village and murdering the inhabitants.
I love the issues where Crystal is a member of the FF, and I wish it had lasted longer. I also wish they had done more with her! The end of the Dr Doom arc would have been very satisfying if Crystal had fought Doom and she clobbered him because he under-estimated her.
Crystal is just about done as a potentially interesting character. In just a few years, she will marry Quicksilver because reasons and both characters will dissolve into irrelevance.
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on May 13, 2021 11:45:29 GMT -5
I finished my Kirby FF project! I read the Epic Collection that ends with FF #104 and the “Lost Adventure” re-creation of FF #108, the Janus story.
It’s been a long time since I read the four-part Skrull Gangster Planet storyline in FF’s #90 to #93 and it’s just as much fun as ever! This is not one of the storylines I read as a kid (I quit buying Marvel's Greatest Comics just before it reprinted this arc) so it’s not one of the storylines I’ve read over and over, so it’s still very fresh to me, almost like new.
And then FF #94 to #101 are all done-in-one stories, apparently because publisher Martin Goodman thought that multi-part stories were the cause of declining sales and the non-continued stories were instituted through the whole Marvel line. (But as I’m also reading Spider-Man from the same era, I noticed that Spider-Man only had a few done-in-one stories (#80 to #82, #86 to #87) before it resumed the multi-part stories, including the storyline that wrapped up the Kingpin’s arc (for a while) and the Dr. Octopus arc where Captain Stacy was killed.)
I haven’t been much of a fan of the one-part stories in FF from this period. FF #94 is really good. It was reprinted in an FF Marvel Treasury Edition that I bought new and I always liked it. But I’ve never really liked these stories and I’ve not made it a habit to read them over and over. I bet I’ve only read most of them once, back in the 1990s when I had low- to mid-grade copies of FF #51 to #116.
But I liked them this time. I was reading them slowly and accepting them on their own terms and not comparing them to the Kirby epics of the last few years. Kirby is using a four-panel grid with several full-page panels per issue, and it’s hard to tell a full story in one issue doing this. But Kirby does it. But the story flow is different from what he had been doing in the previous issues, so I guess I’ve always found it jarring.
It’s more like a series of photographs of an event than what you usually expect in a comic book. And it’s all held together by a minimal number of captions and word balloons. It comes awfully close to being a photo album.
I especially liked the Thinker one-shot in #96. I’ve developed a new appreciation for the Thinker lately, and this is a pretty good Thinker story. And I scarcely remember ever reading it before. It was like a new story to me.
I’m thinking about waiting a few weeks and re-reading FF #90 to #101 again.
|
|
|
Post by Farrar on May 13, 2021 14:34:45 GMT -5
...It’s been a long time since I read the four-part Skrull Gangster Planet storyline in FF’s #90 to #93 and it’s just as much fun as ever! This is not one of the storylines I read as a kid (I quit buying Marvel's Greatest Comics just before it reprinted this arc) so it’s not one of the storylines I’ve read over and over, so it’s still very fresh to me, almost like new. I was reading these issues as they came out, so this arc was "fresh" and "new" for me too. But evidently it was so "new" for some FF readers. Readers who also watched Star Trek wrote in (not me--I didn't watch the original series) and pointed out this 1969 FF arc was a mash-up of several Star Trek episodes that had aired in 1968 and that had been rerun in syndication. A couple of examples: "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (IMDb: "Kirk, Uhura and Chekov are trapped on a planet where abducted aliens are enslaved and trained to perform as gladiators for the amusement of bored, faceless aliens") and "A Piece of the Action" (IMDb: "The crew of Enterprise struggles to cope with a planet of imitative people who have modeled their society on 1920's gangsters"). Earlier, readers had also pointed out that the FF #84-87 arc was based on The Prisoner series. Some months later in the Bullpen Bulletins, Marvel claimed these were deliberate homages.
|
|
|
Post by Farrar on May 13, 2021 14:44:09 GMT -5
...And then FF #94 to #101 are all done-in-one stories, apparently because publisher Martin Goodman thought that multi-part stories were the cause of declining sales and the non-continued stories were instituted through the whole Marvel line. Goodman was glad that college kids and older people were into Marvel, as they'd be the type who'd stick with Marvel for years, but he was worried that Marvel wasn't attracting a sufficient number of new readers: children. He felt the simpler, old-fashioned, done-in-one stories were what was needed to draw in the young kids. As he stated in a 1971 New York Times interview:"... [We] got a lot of college kids reading us. They make up a segment of our readership, but when you play it to them you lose the very young kids who just can't follow the whole damn thing. We try to keep a balance. Because I read some stories sometimes and I can't even understand them. I really can't!”
|
|
|
Post by Hoosier X on May 13, 2021 15:56:58 GMT -5
I certainly noticed the resemblance to the Star Trek gangster planet episode but I’ve been reading sci-fi-fantasy for a long time and I very much doubt that Star Trek is the first time somebody thought of it.
And I don’t know how anybody could take it seriously that Star Trek is the original source for the outer-space gladiatorial combat trope!
|
|
|
Post by codystarbuck on May 13, 2021 19:38:34 GMT -5
I certainly noticed the resemblance to the Star Trek gangster planet episode but I’ve been reading sci-fi-fantasy for a long time and I very much doubt that Star Trek is the first time somebody thought of it. And I don’t know how anybody could take it seriously that Star Trek is the original source for the outer-space gladiatorial combat trope! Flash Gordon had the hero in a gladiatorial tournament in the 1930s, where he ends up facing a masked Prince Barin and wins a kingdom for himself. Both the cartoon The New Adventures of Flash Gordon and the 1980 motion picture reference this sequence, in an altered form (the cartoon includes the climactic fight, on a tightrope, over a burning pit).
|
|