100 Years, 100 Creators – Part 7

Over a few posts, I’m choosing different creators or creative teams–novelist, composer, scriptwriter, comic book artist, etc–who have influenced or inspired me, and in most cases brought me a lot of enjoyment.

2016 in Review: Some of the Sad Stuff

It has been well documented that 2016 has been a terrible year.

By that, I mean that many people have documented that they haven’t liked the year.  Many of them have documented this right on my Facebook feed, in fact.

Geeking Out With My Daughters: Confusing Comic Book Epics

So I’m walking with two of my daughters to school a while ago—the middle one and the youngest one (aged 10 and nearly 12, at the time)—and the one turns to her younger sister and asks her what she thinks is the most confusing comic story that I have ever read to them.

The American Comic Book Haul

As mentioned in this post about movies on a plane, I recently visited my ancestral home in the United States (ancestral in the sense that my parents still live there) where I had all sorts of opportunities to visit old friends, eat abundant food portions, and generally do Many Fun Things.

Amongst those Many Fun Things were the chance to benefit from one of the Great Things About America, and that’s that it’s possible to find pretty cheap deals on comic books.  This is something that is traditionally nearly impossible to find where I live in Australia, just like peanut butter candy (though that is finally changing).

So I pulled in a bunch of cool stuff, thanks to the discount prices at Amazon.com, crossing over bonus threshold at Midtown Comics in New York City, and an unexpected sale on DC Comics graphic novels at Barnes & Noble.

Here’s a quick survey of the highlights:

Darwyn Cooke & the New Frontier

The comic book-related internet is awash with reports of the sad passing of creator Darwyn Cooke, who just died of some form of aggressive cancer in the last day or so at the far too young age of 53 (only 8 years older than me!)  I’m far from the best person to write any sort of eulogy for the man, who I didn’t know at all aside from a brief fan-meeting in the artist’s alley at the New York Comic-Con in 2010.  There, Mr. Cooke was gracious enough to indulge my request for an autograph in my little book and even favored me with a 15 second free sketch of Green Lantern, after I mentioned how much of a fan I was of his DC:  The New Frontier.

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