#popular comics

[artoflunatik]

"Judgement Time" Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson piece inspired by the 2012 "Dredd" movie starring Carl Urban. Drawn on a wacom tablet.

[browsethestacks]

5 Random Comics

[dellcomics]

Doctor Hormone comics begin in Popular Comics No.54 

by Bob Bugg (Aug. 1940)

READ HERE

[gswain]

I've been working on my comic for a while now, like since the 8th grade. I am now 21, graduated, married and recently started getting serious about this project. I'm excited to tell this story!

I have recently finished the first issue and made a website for it. It will be a series of books/webcomics going for as long as I can work on it. Please check it out. www.thesquad.me

also, constructive criticism is welcomed, if you have any tips or feedback please inbox me, dm me, email me, anything is welcome. (don't hate tho)

[whitelippedviper]

Pop Comics #1: Titans #14 and Slanty Ass Panels

This article originally appeared on my patreon, which you can subscribe to for as little as one dollar a month.  As a patreon subscriber you get to see these and other articles sometimes weeks before everyone else.  Subscribe now.

So I’m going to try a new thing in terms of comics criticism where I will write a little bit about a popular comic of the week.  I’m going to use the top 10 list at Comixology as my reference point.  The idea basically is writing about shit that people are actually reading, and engaging with more comics that are probably not for me, and creating a larger body of working diving into shit that I think is lame. So this week is Titans #14.  A comic written by Dan Abnett, drawn by Brett Booth, inked by Norm Rapund, and colored by Andrew Dalhouse.  Now I haven’t really read DC comics in earnest since the 52 comic reboot where they made Amanda Waller some skinny lady.  I was like “you know, this is a good jumping off place” so I did.  And I haven’t missed it at all.  There’s a lot of great comics out there to read.  More than I even have time to.  And none of them are from DC or Marvel.  So even saying that, when I was reading superhero stuff, I didn’t read Teen Titans.  I liked the cartoon because I think Raven is cool.  But beyond that, when it comes to teen team comics, I went with the X-men and assorted spin offs.  Still.  I kinda know who 90 percent of these people are.  So what’s going on.  Tempest is being chased by the Trident Three who are trying to recruit Garth to help fight back against some king who has overthrown Aquaman--or they are recruiting him to help that guy, I’m not sure.  I kind of don’t care.  But anyways, they are recruiting him by trying to kill him.  Like you would.  He touches a magic tomato box, and the Titans appear and they start a fight with the Trident Three, who are rarely fully on panel.   Most of the issue cuts between this fight which is happening….at some pizza place...but it just looks like...the docks somewhere or something?  It cuts between that and the team at their HQ accusing each other of being the traitor in their midst.  Dick makes everyone take a lie detector test basically, but they don’t know the results immediately, they order pizza, but it’s poisoned pizza from the Trident Three who apparently run pizza in...wherever this is.  One of my friends used to run this corporate watchdog site called Knowmore.org where you could look up companies and like see all the bad shit to do with them--I feel like that would have been helpful here.  Don’t patronize Trident Three businesses.  Would be my advice.  Anyways.  So because of the poisoned pizza the team has to go fight the Trident Three--thus the fight.  And the comic largely splices between these two things, while characters midfight accuse each other of trying to fuck Donna Troy or the other girl...Lilith something. And then at the end you find out Dick is the traitor.  Which is weird because he wanted to do the test.  So of course he deletes the results and reports to his bosses.  Really didn’t understand that. Basically the comic tries to give us our fight and our melodrama in equal measure, but because it’s all squeezed into these tiny horizontal panels and cut up into like one page increments--we really get neither.  One of the things those X-men comics were good at with Claremont and Byrne was having the groundwork of the internal melodrama handled in street clothes mostly, and away from the action--and then the action would bring the revelations, which they’d then deal with later in street clothes.  But here it’s all jammed together so nothing really hits or means anything.  I mean I think the decision to have them hanging out in costume at their HQ probably doesn’t help in creating any kind of separation between the places.

But what really hurts the comic is the page layouts.  Which insist on these stacked horizontal slanty panels crammed with faces and dialogue boxes.  I get that the design is somewhat necessitated by the way the script has put so many people’s tiny speeches in the same space.  But what it creates is very little dramatic space for characters to truly react to one another, and creates a predictable visual space that isn’t all that exciting to look at.  Just kind of backgroundless panels of people in action figure poses trying to act like people. Even worse is how this lack of differentiation and scale hurts the fight in the book.  This is supposed to be an action comic nominally.  So you would expect the punches and kicks to be cool.  But they are super shrunk down and cropped to the extent that we rarely see who or what is being punched by any of the Titans.  This creates this complete lack of stakes that left me wondering why this fight was even necessary?  Why not just have the whole comic of them in the HQ arguing with each other?  I mean Bendis does that all the time.  There was a New Avengers book that was just them arguing on a crashing plane like the last Seinfeld episode.  I mean it sucked to read.  But this isn’t an improvement. Also why is the composition for an action scene the same as the composition for a dramatic scene between characters?  I don’t think simply slanting panels makes drama more intense.  It just looks silly and cramped.

Color wise there’s not much to talk about.  Sort of the same DC thing I read years ago in color style.  There’s some attempt to use the color to underline various dramatic moments, but the only spot where that kind of works is the part where Tempest and Wally are using their powers on the same page, so there’s like this separation of red between blue and this completely purple panel.  But on the whole, the colors are bland.  And there’s not much to really color since the backgrounds are mostly nonexistent, and the settings are so unspectacular.  One building interior looks like another. So yeah.  There you go.  That’s the 7th best selling comic from last week.  Just bland, unremarkable, continuity porn without much consideration for like...making something singularly interesting with your month at the mic.  Or week.  I don’t know if this is a monthly or weekly comic.

[browsethestacks]

Vintage Comic - Popular Comics #085

Pencils: ? Inks: ? Dell (Mar1943)

[shadowwingtronix]

"Yesterday's" Comic> Popular Comics #44

BW's "Yesterday's" Comic> Popular Comics #44

“Hey, my mother-in-law is down there. Drops the bombs!” Popular Comics #44 Dell Publishing Company (October, 1939) I was kind of hoping to hit at least one Christmas comic by the end of the year, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. We’ll be doing our own version of Christmas 2 (if you get that reference, kudos) or Christmas In July. I can, however, stick it to our old “friend”…

"Yesterday's" Comic> Popular Comics #44