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Post by arecomicsevengood on Mar 28, 2023 20:38:25 GMT
It's funny that in that interview he says he's working on a "tao of comics" which will explain how to actually make comics and stay motivated to keep making them, etc. Unless the book specifies that the way to make comics is to self-publish.
The thing in P-City Parade where the dimensions are square but oversized and he runs pages from THB that are like regular comics pages and uses the extra gutter space to provide a commentary track is really cool. All the THB stuff provides a very good example of my idea about how comics is so much about the design of an individual object adding to its impact that comics pages alone, as in an anthology context, can't match it.
There's some CF interview where CF says he likes Paul Pope (in reference to the "by Paul Pope" thing at the bottom of a page of the Batman paper he did with Ben Jones) and I definitely think of each of them in relation to each other now - Both artists of course having huge paradigm-shifting effects on so many people upon first exposure, due to a combination of unconventional storytelling choices and design decisions that highlight how different the work is from what surrounds it.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Mar 28, 2023 22:31:02 GMT
Oh my god - I ordered a copy of The Ballad Of Doctor Richardson and it arrived today and I just read it. I kinda can't believe it, I was cracking up reading it. If your stance is that Pope is pretentious, and that his libertarian vibe has aged poorly, or he'd get "canceled" today, this comic, his first "hit," really highlights all that stuff. It's a comic made by a young dude that's all about an older man, an academic, (who can't get his work published because he's politically out of step) finding love with a younger woman (who once took his class, but dropped out of school because he was the only good professor) and they go to jazz clubs. The afterword has Pope saying that "if ever a poet like Rimbaud comes along with the talent of a Jack Kirby or a Roy Crane, then we'll see some amazing comics."
Very interesting that it was edited by Robin Snyder, who handled all of the latter-era Ditko stuff.
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Post by junkflower on Mar 29, 2023 14:20:10 GMT
I've expounded about Pope quite a bit in the discord and am sadly not really in touch with my thoughts on him right now, but I do love the eternal Pope discussion dichotomy of "he sucks and is embarrassing/yet he's also sort of THE GOAT"
Someone posted some very early Connor Willumsen work in the discord recently with a very overt Pope influence. Pretty surprising and interesting.
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Post by bluebed on Mar 29, 2023 20:41:09 GMT
This thread made me pull out my copy of Buzz Buzz. One funny thing about Pope how he leaves strewn behind him a true wasteland of announced and never released projects. Just in Buzz Buzz, he mentions Smoke Navigator (the comic excerpted in Buzz Buzz, which I actually think is great just in terms of atmospherics), THB-A, THB-B (separate from THB6a-d, since he also mentions THB single issues 6-7 and 12 (but not 8-11, of course)), Giant THB, Big Big THB, THB Color Special #1, Welcome to Mars, The Pigdog Parade, and obviously future Buzz Buzz issues. The often announced and more often delayed THB collection is hardly an aberration, this is someone who has been completely unable to estimate his own release schedule for decades! On the one hand, he's 24 at this time, riding high on the success of THB 1-5 which had recently come out on a monthly schedule and about to pour years into work for Kodansha that will be mostly unreleased. On the other hand, he's certainly continued to present himself with self-serious bravado over the years, as the interview Mike links above demonstrates. I have to say I'm really not looking forward to any THB collection, since it really does work best as a confused, sprawling epic and I can't imagine any attempt to end it would work well. Plus of course the matter of color. I remember Clowes had an event some 10 years ago, and someone in the audience asked what he's working on next--he said at this point he made a decision not to talk about upcoming things anymore, because, he doesn't want to say that he's working on a book about a NASCAR driver for instance, in case he abandons it and people keep asking him about the NASCAR driver book. Then Patience came out--and I remember reading it and constantly thinking, when is the NASCAR driver going to show up? I feel like the same thing will happen with Monica, I'm sure... maybe Monica is one of the dinosaurs from the beginning, and the rest of the book is about that NASCAR driver, MGS2 style. I'm probably the only person from that event who's still hung up on the Dan Clowes NASCAR driver book... got to make one myself, I guess. Anyway, Paul Pope. At this point he could look through everything and make a curated book of bits and pieces, really own the abandoned stuff as the thing itself, I feel like it would make more sense than trying to wrap up the loose ends from decades ago.
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Post by mikesheawright on Mar 30, 2023 14:09:05 GMT
Oh my god - I ordered a copy of The Ballad Of Doctor Richardson and it arrived today and I just read it. I kinda can't believe it, I was cracking up reading it. If your stance is that Pope is pretentious, and that his libertarian vibe has aged poorly, or he'd get "canceled" today, this comic, his first "hit," really highlights all that stuff. It's a comic made by a young dude that's all about an older man, an academic, (who can't get his work published because he's politically out of step) finding love with a younger woman (who once took his class, but dropped out of school because he was the only good professor) and they go to jazz clubs. The afterword has Pope saying that "if ever a poet like Rimbaud comes along with the talent of a Jack Kirby or a Roy Crane, then we'll see some amazing comics." Very interesting that it was edited by Robin Snyder, who handled all of the latter-era Ditko stuff. haha that one is so awful to me, unreadable trash. looks bad, reads bad, full of nonsense.
how do i join the Discord?
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Post by manoopuesta on Mar 30, 2023 15:43:41 GMT
how do i join the Discord?
(it expires in 7 days)
edit: btw, I bought a very cheap THB issue some months ago just based on the discord discussion about it. Haven't read Paul Pope ever, I don't think it is the kind of comics I like at this point but I will try to find out where the hell I left my copy, to read and check out this thread soon.
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Post by mikesheawright on Mar 30, 2023 20:13:06 GMT
how do i join the Discord?
(it expires in 7 days) awesome thanks!
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Post by mikesheawright on Apr 9, 2023 15:43:37 GMT
I just read through the first 3 issues again and it's actually like 1000% better than I remembered it haha. In my memory this is a pretty amateur part of the story but I'm sort of blown away by how wrong I was about that. It's really well-written and funny and the world feels gigantic and full of potential. There's all kinds of neat staging in it, I was struck by a sequence in the first issue where the room is sort of shifting and changing in the background while HR and Augustus are talking about something. His style definitely hasn't "arrived" yet but it's just super confident balls out creativity, you can feel how much fun he was having making it. He's also really good at shifting tone, even this early on. The main storyline is fun but it also has a severity to it where the stakes feel high and there's danger involved, and that bounces neatly off the short stuff like the milkshake story and the Buzz Buzz guy. I love that idea of taking a small detail from the main storyline and giving it a little extra attention, makes the world feel bigger than the boundaries of the pages/issues, like every little idea or character could have a side story. And the vernacular makes funny overlaps too, like how one of them asks for a milkshake "fat & bubbly" and then the Fat & Bubbly makes an appearance next issue as some sort of expanding grenade weapon. Great stuff. Neat to read this with fresh eyes after probably ten years.
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Post by mikesheawright on Apr 14, 2023 17:11:40 GMT
That being said, there is nothing like issue 6(ABCD) haha. The artistic leap between issue 5 and issue 6A is astonishing. It's like watching a middle school play get picked up by HBO or something. THB from issue 6 onward is some true hall of fame shit, the raw energy in those drawings blows my mind.
Curious what you all think about this but I think there's only a couple ways to draw action in comics: one way is to be really selective about still poses balanced with moments of impact and the reader's brain fills in the motion (Frank Quitely I think is a master of this approach), another way is to try to actually draw the motion and capture things like speed and impact viscerally. I can't think of any other American/Western(?) artists who can do the second one as well as Pope does here. It feels like you can HEAR these drawings. And to include the kind of variety of movement here is wild, there's a definite difference between something moving fast and something moving REALLY FAST. And then when something gets hit or destroyed the impact is just colossal.
Daniel Warren Johnson and Tradd Moore are a couple others who come to mind who do a nice job with this sort of thing, love to hear about any others. My next book is gonna be an action thing so I'm reading this stuff sort of for research. Maybe a new thread for action stuff?
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Post by mikesheawright on Apr 18, 2023 23:03:42 GMT
youtu.be/6jWyvkrNTx8 scanning through this, some updates that start around 1:13:29 - BB2 is forthcoming soonish (again), but First Second is going to release both BB1 and BB2 in much bigger formats which is cool news. he says he didn't realize that there would be a print size requirement to get it into libraries and schools and would've drawn fewer panels per page if he had known (I kind of think that book is not good but I still love looking at it) - THB is coming from First Second after that and is going to be 6 graphic novels also at a large-ish size ("treasury edition"), he doesn't mention color vs. b&w or any redrawing of pages - "coffee table book" of album art and screenprints and stuff, illustrations - working again on the Psychenaut book of dream comics (released before BB2 probably)
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Apr 18, 2023 23:05:50 GMT
OK haven't watched it yet but apparently in this video of a conversation about Alex Toth Paul says that he's going to reissue volume one of Battling Boy at a larger size to match a larger-formatted volume two. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jWyvkrNTx8
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Post by mikesheawright on Apr 18, 2023 23:10:27 GMT
haha must've been watching at the same time
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Post by eheitner on Apr 19, 2023 15:08:45 GMT
youtu.be/6jWyvkrNTx8 scanning through this, some updates that start around 1:13:29 - BB2 is forthcoming soonish (again), but First Second is going to release both BB1 and BB2 in much bigger formats which is cool news. he says he didn't realize that there would be a print size requirement to get it into libraries and schools and would've drawn fewer panels per page if he had known (I kind of think that book is not good but I still love looking at it) - THB is coming from First Second after that and is going to be 6 graphic novels also at a large-ish size ("treasury edition"), he doesn't mention color vs. b&w or any redrawing of pages - "coffee table book" of album art and screenprints and stuff, illustrations - working again on the Psychenaut book of dream comics (released before BB2 probably) Ok but why believe him this time?
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Post by mikesheawright on Apr 19, 2023 19:50:53 GMT
i want to belieeevvvveee
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Post by manoopuesta on Apr 23, 2023 14:18:06 GMT
Finally read my copy of THB #5. I found this for very cheap in the wild. Thanks to all the THB talk here and in Discord I learnt about it, cause I never had any contact with Pope's work before.
I liked the story, I was happily surprised since I usually don't read genre comics (at least the American ones). It reminded me a bit of Finder by Carla Speed MacNeil. But I don't know if this is because like I said I don't read many of these type of comics and that saga is one I really really like and hence I remember often about it. (Though I've only read the two big collected volumes).
Back to THB: only thing in this issue was just that the tone in his editorial writing was, as many of you mentioned, pretty arrogant. Maybe it is his young age and getting so much praise, I don't know.
And... that shirtless pic in the inside cover was specially off-putting, hahaha.
So how many issues of THB got made? In the editorial Pope says he is putting an end to THB after #6 because of other projects. I guess I won't luck out again on finding another issue, but I am curious.
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