Saturday, June 18, 2016

Alan Davis´ Excalibur, the sword is drawn

One of my favorite comic artists celebrates his 60th birthday and since I had a DC post Yesterday I thought I could do a post about one of his greatest series. And to make this a special post this is also a black and white post. Now usually I put the original black and white art next to the colored version but while I have all of the pages of Excalibur - The Sword Is Drawn I don´t have all the color pages. So if you know where I can find them send me a line. Anyway, maybe this post will finally convince Disney to do an EXCALIBUR BY ALAN DAVIS omnibus or at least an Epic collection.


Today´s other birthdays include David Giuntoli who turns 36 and he plays the lead character on Grimm. Here in Germany the show is currently on hiatus but I think we´re at least two seasons behind the US episodes.



Celebrating her 55th anniversary is Alison Moyet and I didn´t even have to think about which video I would be posting. Come on, there is no contest.



Also celebrating are Isabella Rossellini at 64 and Paul McCartney at 74 and because of the video above I´m skipping a music video for Sir Paul.

We start the section of the dearly departed with another comic birthday, Robert Kanigher who co created a lot of characters that I enjoyed in the pages of Jim Aparo´s The Brave and The Bold like Ragman, Rose and Thorn and the Metal Man, the last two together with artist Ross Andru.


He also co created characters like Poison Ivy, The Viking Prince, Enemy Ace, The Losers, The Unknown Soldier, The Haunted Tank, The Sea Devils, The Losers, Sgt. Rock and the original version of the Suicide Squad. Since there will be a movie about the group here´s some history.



We stay with the comic related anniversaries with Mark Gruenwald, one of the most beloved creators at Marvel. One of his pet projects was the Squadron Supreme which in my opinion is a much better comic than Watchmen. While Alan Moore and David Gibbons mini series has its place in comic history they didn´t have to work in an already established continuity and so didn´t have to leave the characters intact for further use. So they had it easy and I don´t doubt that Mark Gruenwald would have created something at least as good under the same circumstances.


There have been many versions of the team since and most recently there was a mini series about the Squadron Sinister - the evil incarnation of the team that first appeared in the Avengers - by Carlos Pacheco that was one of the few New Secret Wars tie in series ( I can´t call it Secret Wars because whatever you might think about the quality of Secret Wars or Secret Wars II at least those were original ideas ) I bought. Apparently the series was a huge success which according to Carlos Pacheco is due in part to the fact that Guggenheim is an even bigger fanboy than him.



On Sunday I posted Siskel and Ebert´s review of Swamp Thing and Today would have been Roger Ebert´s birthday so I looked for more reviews and found one with another Roger, married to the best known female toon.


The quality of the video is not very good but I guess you have all seen the important parts with Jessica and in much better resolution than here. Who Framed Roger Rabbitt ? is in ever guy´s video / DVD collection.



Speaking about DVD collections what is still missing in mine is the Bionic Six cartoon which would be the perfect birthday gift for my brother.



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN : top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best


I´m not bad. I´m just drawn that way. 

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