favourite comic books

Discussion in 'The Lounge Bar' started by gash hand, Aug 2, 2020.

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  1. gash hand

    gash hand Well-Known Member

    While many of us remember the Beano and Dandy comics with characters like Dennis the menance and Desperate Dan and his cow pie, what comic was your favourite and the characters within?

    Sheila
     
  2. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Victor.
    I liked the true stories on the cover.

    Battle - Charley's War was a classic.
     
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  3. dbf

    dbf Moderatrix MOD

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  4. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    I do know of Beano through a Scottish-Canadian friend when I was a boy, but not much more than a passing knowledge.

    In the daily format/collections, Calvin & Hobbes was and is really great.

    There's a lot of other great stuff in comics/graphic novels these days.
     
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  5. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

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  6. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    What a great topic.

    When I was a kid I was a huge comics fan. I read all sorts of comics except the superhero ones--those always struck me as too ridiculous to bother with. War comics were of course among my top favorites. I read all the DC war comics, and was especially fond of Sergeant Rock. (Many years later I was honored to meet Joe Kubert, the artist for the book.) I didn't care for Sgt. Fury, I thought that one was also too ridiculous. (Lots of Nazi Sentry Syndrome.) I was fond of a book called Enemy Ace about a German flyer in WWI; the planes were great.

    I loved MAD magazine, which was still in its prime when I was a kid. It was my real introduction to the adult world, and it gave me a wiseguy outlook which I still have. I also read the horror comics magazines Creepy and Eerie, which had some great art. (Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Wallace Wood, Al Williamson. etc.) For strip comics I read and liked B.C.and the Wizard of Id; Beetle Bailey was often good too. Andy Capp was one of my favorites, I'm glad to say; it gave me my first realistic idea of what Britain was really like and in that sense was a good deal superior to the James Bond movies I saw at the same time. Dennis the Menace could be fun as well. Hank Ketcham was a great, underrated artist and now and then he would do a comic book where he would send Dennis and his family on a trip somewhere--Washington DC, the Grand Canyon, what have you. These books were wonderful, beautifully drawn and very informative as well. Once the whole family went to an army field day and I still remember how marvelous the pictures of the tanks and guns were. The best strip comic of all, though, was Peanuts, which I believe is also the best of all time. It was very funny and yet insightful and real as well. I was a precocious kid who grew up with a lot of other precocious kids, and the kids in Peanuts seemed very like me and the kids I knew. A little later I discovered Tintin, which I liked, and Asterix, which I love and still love. Oh yes, also read a lot of Archie.

    I got away from comics for a long time after that but have since rediscovered them. There are a lot of brilliantly done and very adult comics out now and a lot of exciting work has been done in the field in the last 40 years. The best of these new generation things is a book called Love and Rockets, which is done by two Mexican-American brothers, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. They do different series in the same book. Gilbert's stuff is weirdly interesting but not fully to my taste. Jaime's "Locas" series, though, is my favorite of all time. In genre it's almost a soap opera, the continuing lives of half a dozen girls--Mexican, Anglo, and Asian, straight and lesbian--who grow up together on the California punk scene. It's brilliantly drawn, but what really hooks me is that it is very real. I've known and still know people who were deep into punk and I know people who are like Jaime's people. It's about my generation, how we grew up, and what happened to us after we stopped being kids. As some of you may know, my icon is one of the Locas--Terry Downe, a tough lesbian punk in her youth who is the only one of the Locas gang to make it musically and become a star. Jaime isn't sentimental about her, but he makes her three-dimensional. She's that rarity in comics and in fiction generally, a villainess who is a real, credible human being. (Also, she's the most attractive of the Locas.)
     
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  7. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    Wow, some of those were great.
     
  8. ltdan

    ltdan Nietenzähler

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    Cool guy, cool stories, cool artwork....:cool:
    Always liked Rasputin as mad sidekick
     
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  9. AB64

    AB64 Senior Member

    Commando comics, so not really repeating character's - the only other regular I'd get were Battle (and Battle Action, Battle Action Force - agree with Owen Charlies War was always the favourite in those) - I'd get Victor and Warlord on occasion.

    I remember with Battle I sent in a few sketches as they would print a couple of readers ones each edition but nothing, my brother sent one (it was rubbish - honest, and he didn't even read it normally) and it got published - 35 years later and I still hold a grudge
     
  10. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

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  11. ltdan

    ltdan Nietenzähler

    More war-related, these were once my favorites:
    "Der II. Weltkrieg in Bildern" by Pierre Dupuis
    DUP 1.jpg
    1000 times more entertaining than history lessons at school
    44 years later, I still have copies of all the volumes stored on the hard disk for purely sentimental reasons :blush:
    DUP 3.jpg
     
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  12. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    Related to WW2, there is a graphic novel called Alan's War which is the story (nonfiction) of an American GI, by Emmanuel Gilbert.

    I have quite a lot of Asterix comics that I picked up used in the past few years. The terrible puns in them were probably formative... the Asterix comics owned by my father and his siblings were still at my grandmother's house in the back room when I'd visit, and I read them a lot.

    I do like superhero stories, at least to some degree. I like a story which actually has a start, a middle, and an ending, and that sort of doesn't tend to be the case in mainstream superhero comics. What I do really like are the Astro City collections. A lot of Astro City comics take a different look life in a city full of superheroes, like a Superman-like hero who dreams of just flying for the joy of it, because he's so busy flying to save lives all over the world that he barely gets a moment's rest. My introduction to that comic was the "Steeljack" story which was really quite noir: an ex-con looking for a job gets hired by his community to look into mysterious deaths of other ex-cons that the police don't care about.

    I also like westerns and there are a bunch of really good Jonah Hex collections. These are basically spaghetti westerns in outlook - there's no monster worse than humans, that sort of thing.

    Finally I'm a big fan of 30s/40s style pulp hero stories like The Shadow and so on. (The original written pulps, not the radio show.) The Shadow comic books have never really grabbed me, but there's a few comics about "The Black Beetle" by one artist/writer that are just fantastic both in writing and art:

    [​IMG]
     
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  13. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    I wonder if it is the same one I read. I remember the planes but the thing I remember the most is that the ace was sent home on leave to rest and he went hunting with a C96. I think he shot a pheasant on the rise with it. I can't remember if it was a carbine or not.
     
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  14. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin

    Hard to choose.
    Though I realise I'm maybe a bit stuck in the 90s.

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  15. Robert-w

    Robert-w Banned

    My comic reading dates from the 50s. Yes I remember Desperate Dan (Aunt Aggie and cow pies with the horns sticking through the pastry) but the regular comic was The Eagle (Dan Dare, Riders of the Range, Luck of the Legion, Harris Tweed etc) which had some good art work and a regular centre spread of some exploded drawing of some new technological wonder (usually British). Dan Dare's boss - Sir Hubert Guest - had been the first man on the moon which may give one a flavour of the thing. I was already into book buying from about 8 so didn't have a lot of pocket money spare for comics and favoured The Hotspur as unlike The Wizard and others it didn't do serials so I could buy the occasional copy and not be at a loss with the characters etc. When I could get it I would buy a copy of Analogue but it was difficult to find in 1950s Cheshire
     
    Last edited: Aug 4, 2020
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  16. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

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  17. Robert-w

    Robert-w Banned

  18. gash hand

    gash hand Well-Known Member

    My dad would bring home a big pile of mainly well thumbed comics like beano, eagle, dandy and cowboy things from work and me and my sister would devour every word just for the spellings, we were not that interested in the stories. We tested our spelling skills on each other, she was always better at it than me. Once we had finished with the comics my dad would pass them on again.
    Sheila
     
  19. Deacs

    Deacs Well i am from Cumbria.

    For me it was Roy of the Rovers. And not a comic as such but Shoot was always a purchase when I was a kid.
     
  20. Grasmere

    Grasmere Well-Known Member

    I used to read loads of comics. Batman was my favourite.
     
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