I’d save your Edgington money for the first TPB of he and Steve Yeowell’s “The Red Seas”, which is due out this month or next, instead.

One side of my brain was thinking; “Wow… a non superhero book by Byrne. And STAR TREK at that. Cool!”

And the other side of my brain just wanted to implode with the thoughts of HOW and WHY this came to be.

~P~
P-TOR

I absolutely loathed him growing up… the only artists I dreaded seeing on a book more than JK were Ditko and Sal Buscema. (Heresy!) All three had these overwhelming stylistic tics that drove me nuts. I would literally groan when I opened a cover and saw their pencils.

As an adult, I have developed a minor appreciation of Kirby… not a love, but I get it now. (Byrne’s FF helped a lot.) And I see the artistic merit in Ditko finally, even if it doesn’t appeal to me. Sal, though… that’s a mountain I doubt I’ll ever climb.

So speaketh the blogaxy.

And a-freakin’-men about people who are too scared to purchase a book featuring characters they aren’t “into”. I mean, if you have no interest in something and there’s no particular reason to buy a book, that’s one thing. But if it’s just a fear of stepping outside your comics-purchasing comfort zone, then up yours. That attitude is why superhero event sludge keeps cluttering up the market while terrific lesser books languish at the bottom of the charts.

Seriously: next time you’re tempted by “superhero event comic #97260″, even though you KNOW it’s gonna suck, do yourself a favour and pick up a random, non-big two, non-superhero comic instead. Even if you hate it, at least you didn’t *know* you were going to hate it.

And I have conerns about the Millar/Hitch Fantastic Four too. Not so much the Hitch part. I loved the cosmic art he did for DC (especially in JLA: Heaven’s Ladder). So, in my mind, he’s the perfect choice for Marvel’s premiere cosmic team. But I have no faith in Millar to tell the kinds of stories best suited for the FF.

Early on when he spent the letter columns bragging about how Oliver Stone, John Malkovich and Quentin Tarantino were all interested in making the movie, it was at least a moderately readable series, but the longer it went on, the more it fell apart as Schrab started to lose interest in it. By the end, when all of the movie deals had fallen through and all he had to show for it was a failed videogame for the Sega Saturn, you could tell that he just absolutely hated everything about making the series, and his contempt for the characters and the entire endeavor was pretty clear at that point.

Needless to say, I’m not particularly interested in the upcoming “final issue,” but I guess it’s good that Schrab feels excited enough about the series again to actually return to it. It’s cool that he’s finally giving his remaining fans some closure after all these years.