Post Your Comics / Destroy Your Trades Thread

[YellerDog]

Basically what the title says! Clear the laundry off the top of your scanner (or digital camera or whatever), and dig out your best funnybooks and post a few pictures from each and tell us why you like that particular book, when you got it, and what its context to you personally is. Maybe focus on one issue/trade/flyer/whatever per post. Just make sure they're YOUR pictures, and not something you just snagged off Google Image Search or some CBR file.

The idea of this is to kind of document your personal attachment to the comic, so if there's some dings or rips on the cover, all the better. Battle damage is great! Show us why you are excited about a thing. Tell us about it. Dig out your favorite stuff, maybe we'll get some awesome things to check out out of this.

We've got this rad attachment feature here, and we're all a bunch of geeky bastards as it is, so let's do this thing. Image threads are great!

Ground rules if you like:

• -100 dpi scans/photos, try to crop 'em down as best you can but maybe don't bother hiding the edges/scratches/dog chewed corners.
  
• -Try to keep to one book per post, so this thing stays semi-organised. If you've got a couple books in mind, maybe reserve a couple posts and edit 'em in so we can keep a little clarity going on.
  
• -SIMG tags!
  
• -Yeah you might hurt the book. Love hurts!

It's kind of an intensive process, scanning things and writing about 'em. You can do it!

[YellerDog]

Comic #1: Aliens vs. Predator
Drawings by Phil Norwood, written by Randy Stradley, devised by Chris Warner
Collects Dark Horse Presents #34-36, Aliens vs. Predator #1-4, and Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special
Published 1991

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one of many cool-ass chapter break illustrations made especially for this book

Why this:
This has always been one of my absolute favorite comics, and is really the first and only time that pairing was done all-the-way right, with Capcom's awesome beat-em-up game only getting close. I've had this trade since Jr. High, and it's been on a bookshelf wherever I've lived.

What it really does right is that it "gets" the Alien universe better than most everything that came afterwards, and seamlessly brings in (and expands on) the Predator lore in really awesome ways. Recall how in "Alien", everything takes place in what's basically a cargo ship making an ore delivery from some unknown planet? This takes place on that planet. Maybe the Predators want to seed a world with aliens to hunt? Maybe they've got a rad bug-looking egg-planting machine to do it with!

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cool-ass map they decided to include, just so you know where everything is happening

Not only is it a really cool miniseries that's being collected, Dark Horse really went above and beyond with the presentation. They threw in some really awesome illustrations between chapters, a map (<3), and a fairly extensive article at the end covering the genesis behind and making of the book!

It's a hell of a damn comic, and it deserves to outlive the terrible, terrible movies. It probably won't ever get adapted directly (the flicks strip-mined the Dark Horse books for ideas, after all), but it really doesn't need to be. Aliens vs. Predator is so, so great.

If you decide to find a copy, go after this edition in particular. I'm sure it got a re-colored re-release to go with the movies in the 2000s, but you're probably not going to get a lot of the awesome bonus material --plus, the chapter illustrations look SO COOL in relation to the flatter coloring in the issues themselves.

[YellerDog]

Click for full size

unused hover bike design from AvP

Here's a little bit of that Aliens vs Predator bonus material! It's a really great article with some cool concept sketches, hope you enjoy it!

(oops: article pages are in reverse order! just check the page numbers and you'll be ok!)

I really like how the artist came in to do this comic off of being a storyboard guy on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Back to the Future, and The Abyss, and just knocks it out of the park on his first try.

(OH YEAH one last thing! An ad from Aliens #2 for the upcoming AvP series, circa 1989!)

[Timber]

Wow, I love that comic (I've got the original issues) but I've never seen that collection with all the extras. Now I'm going to have to hunt it down.

I actually read the novel that was based on these comics first, then when I found out it was based on these issues I went out and bought them like a week later.

[edit]
Yeah, I just bought it on amzon for like $8 shipped. Can't wait!

[YellerDog]

Awesome! You'll dig it. The colors are different from the original issues, so it'll be a slightly different read all around.

I'm pretty sure this thread is going to crash and burn as far as participation goes (too much work/too goddamn lame?), I'll just keep it going as blog posts.

edit: Aw shucks you guys are the best.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

calm down bro.
I'll try to find something over the weekend.
It's just hard digging through all those boxes...

[Timber]

Most of my stuff is boxed up right now but I'll try to find something here in a couple of days.

[YellerDog]

Continuing the Dark Horse Aliens kick I seem to be on at the moment:

Comic #2: Aliens #2 (Volume 2)
Art by Denis Beauvais, Written by Mark Verheiden
Published December 1989

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General Spears hangin' out with the Aliens. Capcom for-sure had a look at this.

So this issue of this awesomely-violent and incredibly painted miniseries was my first exposure to the Alien movies waaaay back when. The story of how I actually got this particular comic is lost to the ages*, but I remember being super-excited about Alien stuff when the old action figures came out, and getting really confused at the character names. Being all of six, I had it in my head that this was an adaptation of the movie --turns out, not so much. In truth, it is the best possible sequel to Aliens... which I was too young to have seen yet!

Click for full size

I haven't heard of much in the way of other comics drawn by Denis Beauvais, but he does a hell of a job emulating the look of Cameron's movie.

My main reaction to all this was "what are these scary two-jawed monsters and what is this awesome sci-fi world this is all happening in?" I never even got to track down the rest of the issues until maybe ten years later (the hardcover edition they put out was amazing btw!), but the tone to all this fit exactly to the film, which all good people love to this day. This is very likely the single issue I've held on to the longest, so it's got some special significance to me; Dark Horse always brings up good feelings.

They later re-released the series with a lot of the names changed to go along with the "canon" Alien movies (so Hicks in this is no longer Hicks, and Newt is "Billie" or something), but nevermind all that; the story is kind of an alternate continuation of Aliens, with scarred up Hicks and an older Newt escaping from a now-overrun Earth. Ripley's off missing somewhere, so Hicks and Newt are fending for themselves as they're picked up by a break-off group of Space Marines lead by a deranged General Spears, who has decided he's going to breed his own Aliens and use them to retake the Earth. This goes about as well as you'd expect, but along the way you get SO MUCH cool shit going on.

So yeah! I am entirely happy I haven't managed to trade this away or lose it or destroy it over the last twenty years.


(once again, read the attchments last-to-first, sorry about that!)