Hey, two weeks of old movie & comics reviews? Okay, well, here’s some doodles. In the last year, I bought a lot of books. I bought them digitally through Humble Bundle, a lot of comic books I hadn’t downloaded. There’s also a used bookstore next to the post office that I drop my dayjob’s outgoing mail to. On Fridays, as the last act of WORK, I drop off the mail and head into the bookstore, they have a decent selection of graphic novels and books on design. So this weekend after various stressful weeks, I felt like doing nothing, and remembered I had a stack of books on my table and a bunch of ebooks to download. So that’s what I did. I read some of the books while downloading the ebooks.

One of the eBooks was the b&w reprints of Savage Dragon. I like Erik Larson but I’ve never read Savage Dragon outside of a few outside appearances in other people’s books. One of my favorites was a Spidey/Howard The Duck comic where he made an unofficial cameo, and then there was a Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck comic that followed up with a weird ending: Howard The Duck was switched out with a clone, and now lives in an Image universe of some sort as Leonard. Even though I was reading indie comics back in high school, this drove home the importance of creator rights. It was a strange way to drive it home, but now I had a better idea of how creators thought they get raw deals, or really like some of their characters and can’t do anything about how the powers that be treat them if they don’t actually own the property. ANYWAY, Savage Dragon in b&w is very Frank Miller-esque. It’s also bizarrely simple in those early issues – just fight after fight after fight, with characters being introduced and then pummeling each other and maybe a backstory (in the first dozen issues I’ve read) barely hinted at or explored without exposition, until it’s just exposition and then the next fight. Maybe he didn’t know how long he’d keep up the series (now at 260 or so issues). Maybe he knows he can charge more for pages from collectors with just large figures of his characters taking up the page & hitting each other. It’s not terrible but It’s not deep and there’s 260 issues of this? I know there are shakeups in the story. I can’t unread it. I like looking at it in black & white. I know some things shift after issue #75 and I think the reprints I bought go up that far? So it’ll be an interesting journey to read through. I am talking about a goofy Image comic and not, say, the comic about Bertrand Russell I picked up, which I am making my way through. READING! with pictures.

Here’s some robros: