John Buscema was one of the creators of Silver Surfer (1968) #1-17, and a million other comics besides. That's one of the ways we use the term in comic book fandom, as I think you might have experienced, Ceci.

Jack Kirby was the creator of the character the Silver Surfer. That's another way we use the term, absolutely, no argument.

If you (or Lawson) want to restrict the term exclusively to people who create characters, that's fine for you, but I'm going to object if you want me to restrict my usage accordingly. I want to avoid any confusion, so that the next time I say "The creators of Corporate Work-for-Hire Bloodbath issue #183 did a lousy job," Lawson doesn't jump down my throat with the side issue of whether they are really creators or not.

No problem, except that I also remember long arguments on this site and elsewhere about whether people like Buscema are really "artists" or if they should be referred to by some lesser term. Once again, it's a battle over semantics that gets us nowhere.

I never have seen "The Architects of Fear!" Is it worth watching? Does it have even a little to do with Watchmen? Since it does get a reference within the book itself, I've always wanted to see it, anyway.

But just to be clear, nobody you're talking to now is actually saying that.





It's just kind of fun to put these next to each other.

Now that's just silly. Whatever you think of his work, Carnevale has been a professional since the 1980s, while Jean only started circa 2001.

You've stumped me, Ceci. Is there some kind of contradiction between those statements?

No. Definitely not.

Carnevale's first major comics work was the cover to Y: The Last Man #23, August 2002. Jean's best known work is the Fables covers, starting in July 2002, but contributed to Meathaus starting in 2000. As far as the comics industry is concerned, Jean and Carnevale were contemporaries, both very fortunate that the interior artists were too shitty to do the covers. Carnevale was okay, but I preferred Jean. Jean is more imaginative, Carnevale is more literal.

Carnevale's Ozy alt cover is pretty loose. At first glance, I thought it was Dan Brereton. Which would have made me very sad.

It's pretty bad.

The Watchmen connection is basically the first ten minutes, wherein a boardroom of businessmen hatch out the fake alien invasion and pick which one of them is going to be turned into the alien. Robert Culp.

Then there's forty minutes in your generic lab setting of Culp being transformed, learning to pilot the spaceship, melodrama with his fiancé busting into the lab and nearly discovering the plot (she was told he was dead). The last ten minutes is Culp (I guess) in a papier maché alien head running around trying (and failing) to evade soldiers in a swamp after he crashes his ship (the original plan was to land at the U.N., I think it was).

I bought the second season of TOL at WalMart for ten bucks. I'm a fan of Robert Culp from his roles on The Greatest American Hero and Everybody Loves Raymond, so I appreciated his performance. But the production value was very shoddy.

The plot device of scientists faking an alien invasion to bring about world peace is an old science-fiction trope. Not only was Alan Moore not the first writer to use the notion, it wasn't even the first comic edited by Len Wein to use the device; Roy Thomas used the trope to re-introduce an old Golden Age Hawkman villain in All-Star Squadron #10-#12. Personally I thought the plotline in Watchmen was more similar to Vonnegut than the Architects of Fear.