What’s kicking your ass right now, ILC-er?

BAKUNE YOUNG VOL. 1 by Toyokazu Matsunaga
Judging by this, which I happened upon over the weekend at a Half Price Books for five bucks, this may be the most awesome thing that ever awesomed. A hulking man-child in his early twenties decides to take on the Yakuza, Johnny Law, and the entire world, basically, by holding the most powerful gangster in Japan (along with the National Treasures) hostage in return for a hundred trillion yen. From this premise builds crescendo after crescendo of game logic, giddy satire (with masculine self-regard a favored target), and glorious, relentless violence! Pretty much every page is intent upon leaving the reader breathless, but a hallucinogenic set piece involving countless thugs besieging a building guarded by a lone, quite unstable police commissioner seems particularly worthy of note. And there’s two more volumes out there, just waiting to reduce the world to cinders!

MISTER O and MISTER I by Lewis Trondheim
My nephews and I discovered these together. MISTER O concerns, solely, the eponymous little round man and his travails attempting to cross a chasm, each page a different iteration of this dilemma within the same silent sixty-panel layout - the “Roadrunner” cartoons are an oft-mentioned and wholly appropriate point of reference. MISTER I is equally entertaining but more varied in situation – it applies the same formal constraints and doodling art style to our I-shaped protagonist and his preoccupation with hunger, with each and every strip involving Mister I’s attempts, either by methods fair or foul, to feed himself. There’s a scenario of pie theft, repeated every four or five pages, which serves as a close approximation of Mister O and his damned need to close that gap, but otherwise, where there’s food to be had, Mister I will probably come to a blood-drenched end over it. COOLEST THING EVER: Seeing my nephews inspired to draw their own versions. Rock!

Trades are my saving grace at the moment. I've been buying a collection every week along with my weekly batch of disappointment. Mostly, it's just stuff that I already own in single-issue form and love (i.e. Delano's Hellblazer). I've been buying Seven Soldiers trades for the past couple of weeks, so that's all good. I'm also working on the second LOSH Showcase volume, too. Fun enough, but I imagine the truly classic stuff is still on the horizon.

Oh, I know something that kicked my ass fairly recently: Yuichi Yokoyama's New Engineering.

I skipped most of G-Mo's mainstream superhero stuff, so recently dled new x men and libraried JLA. The first is kicking my ass. The second, not so much. I think it has to do with the art being SO much better in NXM.

Baez, you owe it to yourself to go get Dungeon.

GMo's NXM is fucking choice.

Lately:
Marvel's omnibus hc of Kirby's Devil Dinosaur. A dinosaur stomps on things. I am a simple man, with simple tastes.
PulpHope, Paul Pope artbook- Pope is an annoyingly pretentious twat, college libertarian and can't spell for crap, but he's also very very good.
Maggie the Mechanic- first volume of Jaime's L&R stuff. Yes, I am way behind; yes, I know.
Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis- trade paperback of the original Len Wein Swamp Thing material. Incredibly fast-paced tour of every horror milieu the 70's could offer, with something awesome or completely fucking bizarre happening nearly every page. Highly recommended.

To add to TT's "Yes, I am way behind," I'm also really enjoying (for the first time ever), er, The Dark Phoenix Saga.

I love Mister O and Mister I.

I saw Mister O like, a year ago at the library and loved it. Better look for I.

I've been diving into Kamandi. After devouring the Fourth World omnibuses I was still craving more Kirby. Never having even dipped my toes into the world of the Last Boy on Earth, I'm reveling.

Mister O is amazing. I too must look for Mister I.

Been taking out stuff by Jason from the library - good work. When I first saw his style I thought it might overly ironic and bare, but then I enjoyed reading I killed Adolf Hitler.

Been in that mood, since I read some of Gilbert Hernandez's books a couple of months ago. Hey, Wait... reminded me of Sloth and No Chance in Hell - not as grisly, of course, but the same sense of inner disconnection exemplified by these enormous mid-story narrative changes.

Chiggers by Hope Larson: charming YA graphic novel
Various minis and others by Tom Gauld from Cabanon Press (see www.cabanonpress.com for heaps of his stuff free online)

have been increasing eyeing the Jason stuff--where to start???

Chronicles of Wormwood - I like Garth Ennis much more than some around the ILC site and this one does kind of reuse a couple of the same jokes from the Preacher series, but there is still some stuff that really made me laugh. It definitely is not a series for someone that is easily offended, especially from a religious standpoint. The talking rabbit really cracks me up.

Fell - I finally got and read this first trade by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. It is a darkly comic book, but in a way the central character is a bit more optimistic than some of Ellis' other protagonists. Too bad the series has stopped at issue #9 and has not gone on. I also give some props to Ellis for like his Global Frequency book, these are some tightly put together single issue stories.

Sandman Mystery Theatre- I've read the first 32 issues and the one issue special done by Gaiman. This was a really good series and one of the most grounded 'mask' titles maybe ever done. It is also one of the best titles set in the age of pulp, as the book is set in the late 30s. I think it is really underrated.

Conan- I liked the first couple of issues of the new series, so I have gone back and started to get some of the first run of Conan on Dark Horse. At least through the first year of the series, it is a really great read. Kurt Busiek's stories are really solid and have a much different feel than the old Marvel books. Cary Nord's artwork is really great, they use just penciled artwork that is digitally colored. It works really well. My Conan kick started from working through the first collection of the old 70s black and white Savage Sword of Conan, which goes from good to fantastic.

I thought Mister O was one of the funniest things I'd ever read, but was kinda let down by Mister I.

The new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle is kicking my ass RIGHT NOW.

I've been reading one of the Fantagraphics Dennis the Menace collections. It's easy to see why the comic was once adored.

I just torrented the complete run of ACTION!, the notorious mid-70s UK weekly comic (forerunner of 2000AD) which was pulled off the shelves for being too violent after questions were asked in the House Of Commons. I have only read issue #1 so far but it is awesome two-fisted stuff. A full breakdown of its thrill-powered contents may appear on this site soon.

I always found ACTION! a bit too gruesome. I reckon I still would not be able to hack it.

As well as the Hookjaw style grue there are a number of stories in Action #1 which are a bit off-message, eg SPORT'S NOT FOR LOSERS where the cliffhanger is "Can Jack persuade his brother to give up smoking?"

The new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle is kicking my ass RIGHT NOW.

Wait, whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut?!? When did that happen? Quimby's, here I come!

re: Sandman Mystery Theater, that's on my 'to buy' list. I dig the first trade and always wanted to read more. I kinda want to wait and see whether they're going to actually collect the whole thing before I get too gung-ho about it, though. You know how Vertigo can be.

SMT was a joy to read on a month by month basis. I loved that each storyline was the same length, and also that the motivation of the villains in each storyline was always related to a kind of bigotry, giving it an amazing thematic cohesiveness for a four-year long series with a dozen different 'episodes.' Also the way the introduction of golden age DC characters was handled, seeping into the jazz age milieu bit by bit ('The Hourman' was especially good in this respect.)

I don't think Tales Designed To Thrizzle #4 is actually out yet, right? I think it's at Comic-Con, but I don't think stores have it yet.

Yeah, Thrizzle is Comic-Con only for the moment...

That is unthrizzling.

I wish I could convince my local shop to actually sell Thrizzle.

Tell them that every hundredth issue has an Alex Ross zombie incentive cover.

PLANET HULK was a surprisingly cracking read. SQADRON SUPREME is oddly compelling reading as well. Latest AGE OF BRONZE is wonderful and makes me sad that another collection won't be out for awhile. The new Ditko retrospective is pretty keen too.

Another great thing about Sandman Mystery Theatre, is that the relationship between the characters Wesley Dodds (aka The Sandman) and Dian Belmont. It is really well done.

I think DC should really do a series about the Justice Society set in that time period and get someone like Matt Wagner or James Robinson to get it right.

Oh yeah, the Wesley/Dian romance was great. I can't believe I forgot that.

SQADRON SUPREME is oddly compelling reading as well.

Mind-boggling - subject for further research...

Which Squadron Supreme are we talking about here? The Gruenwald one (which is simultaneously dated and ahead of the curve) or the Straczynski one (which felt like Rising Stars but moving at 1/2 speed)?

"Which Squadron Supreme are we talking about here?"

There is also that Supreme Power series that was done for Marvel Max. I've never read that one, but I have been curious about it.

I think Supreme Power is the Stanislavski (or whatever) one.

Gruenwald's version is the one I'm reading currently. It's...mind-boggling.

Not kicking my ass, really, not even close- but Geoff Johns's run on the Flash. Reading it after enjoying Rogues' Revenge #1 a lot more than I expected to, and while it's just okay most of the time, and Johns has some really grating habits (like the "Rogue Profile" issues where every single goddamn thing in these characters' lives has inexorably pointed them toward their gimmick, really heinous in the Mirror Master issue; and Murmur, who just fucking sucks) there are surprisingly enjoyable bits throughout. Zoom, for instance- weird science powers, creepy gimmick, tons of potential as a character (even if Johns himself doesn't make the best of it) and the way he's defeated in his first arc is just nifty, the kind of too-clever-by-half sci-fi bullshit that drives all the best Flash stories.

Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme is very odd. I loved it as a kid for all the wrong reasons, but I reread it a couple years back. It's certainly ahead of its time thematically (it's actually not a bad refutation of the Millar-era Authority argument), but it's laden with awkward thought balloons and ham-handed character development.

Mind-boggling isn't really a bad word for it, now that I think of it.

I tried to read it recently. So very, very bad. Has not aged well.

At the time I am positive I remember people (OK maybe "someone in MARVEL AGE magazine" but I think it was in a fanzine) bracketing it with WATCHMEN as 'realistic approaches to superheroes'.

That was the accepted wisdom for a (brief) while more recently, too, tho that might be just folks parroting 9th-generation hearsay in their News@rama sigs or something.

My copy of the Squadron Supreme graphic novel has the following caveat - 'Fourth Printing. Contains No Ashes'

I would argue that, despite the really awful writing (and I can't stress that enough - it's painful to read), it's pretty openly dealing with the same issues that Millar and, to a lesser degree, Ellis were writing about fairly recently. It certainly wasn't the first (Moore had wrapped up his Miracleman run by 85, right?) to question why characters who are inclined to save the world would overlook underlying societal issues (aside from the editorial need to keep the world of the narrative recognizable to readers), but it's the first title I recall from the big two American publishers to deal with it. I don't really have any objections to it getting some credit for, if nothing else, being an early (if somewhat poorly thought-out) refutation of why superheroes don't just run the world.

Doesn't mean I'd actually recommend anyone read it, though...

I'd recommend it to superhero revisionist fetishists. It's interesting, but only to scholars. As a story, it's pretty flat and not all that well-written, and it's probably the most unusually-paced comic I've ever read. WATCHMEN is interesting and readable as a piece of fiction on its own. SQUADRON SUPREME doesn't enjoy that advantage.

Chewing through the Blake Bell book on Steve Ditko currently. I bet I won't like how it ends...

Strong recommendation for Bryan Talbot's 'Alice In Sunderland'. Astonishingly dense and complex, beautifully rendered and brilliant in its duplicity; helluva run down the rabbit hole!

Alice in Sunderland was fantastic. I'll second that one.

I'm currently working my way through the various Gilbert Hernandez Palomar trades. It's kicking my ass in a way that's probably not the way the thread intends (in that I periodically have to say "wait, she's whose daughter again?" and "wait, when did she lose an eye?"). I'm just about up to "Love and Rockets X," which, based on what I've heard, will cause me to give up altogether.

Alice is Sunderland is a very deliberate "Hey, Alan Moore can do this, so can I".

Which I enjoyed, on those grounds!

I KILLED ADOLF HITLER: Awesome. So much better than the Midnighter story with the same plot.

Alice In Sunderland was the worst comic I read last year, I had to keep getting up and walking around the room venting to $blokewhosecopyIwasreading. I probably went into it on another ILC thread but its biggest sins were a) pretending there was something SERIOUS AND LINKED about all this random shit instead of it being a tenuous connection to jump from one thing to another because Talbot liked it - mainly in This Is A Weighty Tome stylee rather than the tone taken in making each link, TBF, but it would have suited a 90s-style single-artist anthology floppy rather than a $50 hardcover, and b) the art and cartooning were BOTH really horrible - no cleverness in working disparate elements together, just blurring the edges of shit in photoshop and slapping them next to another blurred edge --- which led to pages not actually reading especially well.

Still got big love for Arkwright/HoE, Bad Rat, first vol of Teknophage etc, but for mine Sunderland is a huge triumph of Marketing The Artist's Intent rather than the actual work finding its level.

I KILLED ADOLF HITLER: Awesome

wait, new Tales Designed To Thrizzle? WANT.

Speaking of Kupperman ... anyone here seen a picture of that octopus in a top hat drinking a cup of tea that - I think - he used in The New Yorker whenever he couldn't be bothered illustrating a story?

I'd disagree with you on almost all points gordo. I thought the style was breezy and easy to follow regardless of the convoluted plot. It was a severely aspie shot (this took him three years to unwind, yes?) at "the heavy story" that seemed to have tongue pretty firmly in cheek a'la E. Campbell (you think he meant for the God McCloud to be taken seriously?). The jarring jump in tone from photoblur pages and line cartooning (and while I wasn't overwhelmed with his computer skills, I liked the hodgepodge collage and have ALWAYS appreciatd his eye and drawring skills) is kind of the point, isn't it?

I paid fifteen bucks for it and certainly got my money's worth.

KRAZY KAT I'm quite liking. Something clicked when I read the strip from April 8, 1942 and I'm now ready to renounce capes, Palestinian lesbians, and coherence. Because personal preferences are always either/or - DON'T DENY IT.

Love Kupperman, but haven't bought or even seen a new thrizzle in a couple years.

Digging Morrison's All-Star Superman, but like a lot of his writing lately, it feels as though he's cut out every other panel. Tons of detail and density, which is great, but it's all spat out too fast to establish any rhythm or tone. As a result, it's a dazzling but only half-coherent mess. Quitely's art is beyond reproach, though.

Finally bought Green Lantern: Willworld the other day. Only discovered Fisher through Big in Japan and Frost a few years back, but had put off reading this for some reason (sadness, I guess). Art's good, but the story bugged the hell out of me. Matteis wrote Moonshadow right? Liked that as a kid, but again, more for the art than the story.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic. One of the best things I've read in ages! Great characters, wonderful linework, a sly sense of humor, and a real sense of human complexity. Want to read everything she ever did.

Omega: The Unknown. Drawn into this by Lethem's name alone, 'cuz Farel Dalrymple's art sure wouldn't have done the job. Now that it's done, I'm a bit underwhelmed. It's fun, but too digressive and half-baked to add up to much. Get the impression that Lethem couldn't entirely commit to the source material, but couldn't come up with anything better, either. So he just rambled along until he ran out of issues.

The "Marvel MAX" (WTF?) reissue of Sky Doll is fantastic. Can see why a lot of folks might be put off by the cheezeball T&A aspects, but the art is spectacular, and the story's damn good too. I thought it was just a three-issue thing, but though there's a complete story arc here, most of the major threads are unresolved at the end of #3. Have more been written but not yet published, or is it a story in progress? What's the deal?

Not yet sure how far I wanna venture into this Final Crisis business...

Moomin! Hanging out for volume three.

Just finished the second trade of The Goon. Not much to say that everyone else on the internets hasn't already; just pure, mean-spirited fun, and one of the rare cases I find myself looking forward to the movie adaptation of something I love.

Got Evanier's Kirby King of Comics out of the library. My butt hurts.

Turns out Leon Klinghoffer of Achille Lauro/"The Death of Klinghoffer" infamy was one of Jack's childhood buddies.

Got Evanier's Kirby King of Comics out of the library. My butt hurts.

Use your hands to pick it up next time.

I'd like to read the Jack Kirby book, but I have to say that I'm disappointed with the art Evanier chose to include. It's fairly representative of his career as a whole, but I wanted to see more of the batshit, gasp-inducing stuff. Although the Kirby Five-Oh! book fills that need nicely.

Near as I can tell, Evanier chose the art based on how 'raw' the material he could find was. He seems to want to show Kirby pencils whenever possible without inks or color. Can't say as I blame him for that, but I guess it cuts down on what's available pretty considerably. Also there may have been issues with exclusivity cascading from other Kirby books. Anyway, that teenaged thing with the double page spread of the 'block war' kicking off is mindboggling enough to be worth the price of the volume.

the selection process in the evanier/kirby book seems to have been heavily biased towards the use of original artwork wherever possible.

i too am not that fussed abt most of kirby's 40s work, and think that evanier/abrams played it a little safe (rights-wise etc) by presenting a relatively paltry selection of primo 60s marvel stuff - but almost all of of the 50s and onwards work reproduced is very fine - that FOXHOLE cover, just for example, is as 'gasp-inducing' as any of the more overtly cosmic/out seventies stuff.

ASHEN VICTOR is a neat bit of silliness, interesting in that I, in my rather limited experience in Asian comic-bookery, never seen a manga so permeated with American influence. It’s basically a book-length valentine to the mid-nineties American mainstream – every page is a big sloppy kiss to Sin City-era Frank Miller, art-wise (with a character named “Marvin” as a little bow on top), featuring a protagonist who bears the lithe frame and chemically tortured hair of a certain King O’ Dreams who reigned over me and my somber brethren back in the day. (Now it can be told!) The plot is something or other about a brutal “Rollerball”-like game in the future and corruption, I forget – there’s hookers with hearts of gold and corporate mayhem involving designer drugs and high tech armor and other stuff, I GUESS. All fairly familiar despite lacking any immediate frame of reference, or rather, having so many frames of reference that, really, who can be bothered; as an adrenaline high though, it’s tops. In one bit there’s a kid wailing in pre-adolescent panic in “gritty urban environment template #3” who gets a running jump kick to the head by an irate passerby, making the entire affair EXTREME or something. Far from brilliant, but fun and, being a one volume manga digest, not a bad way of passing the time on a dull commute.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

I wuz delighted to walk into Forbidden Planet NYC the other and to see that a bunch of old, out of print trades were on the shelves: apparently they bought a bunch from some warehouse somewhere…

I nearly jumped out of mah skin when I saw 2 hardcovers of the complete Fighting American by Simon and the King ('54-'55) from 1989 that Marvel put out. bolted up to the counter and happily paid $35.

It's fucking great; incredibly self-aware and EC-ish…

I wuz delighted to walk into Forbidden Planet NYC the other and to see that a bunch of old, out of print trades were on the shelves: apparently they bought a bunch from some warehouse somewhere…

Oh, please do tell. What other kinds of stuff did they have? Maybe I should stop by today.

Top 10: The Forty-Niners kinda kicked my ass a bit, but I'd just been reunited with my trades of the orig run. It's like a really nice Watchmen! Lots of love for goofy superheros and a JLA=paedos plotline that STILL doesn't ground it in grittiness.

My library has just got put a copy of CHIGGERS on my hold list, which I suspect will be kicking my ass very soon. Wish me luck!

The Boys continues to kick my ass. Plus, I read today that it is intended to end after 60 (?) issues, which makes me happy. And #21 is another demo of how well Ennis can stack the emotional deck.

Brubaker's Captain America. Dropped $37 on the Omnibus in one of Amazon's occasional spot sales, not regretting it one bit. I tend to stick to the DC side of the fence, since more gonzo shit happens over there and Marvel's current quasi-realistic approach doesn't really do it for me, but somehow it's just perfect for this series.

I read "Turtle, Keep It Steady!" by Joseph Lambert just recently (found in that best-of thing Lynda Barry edited) and find it's made everyday since a perpetual smile. It's just the niftiest thing.

I just mail-ordered a super-cheap ($2.75) copy of Scott McCloud's DESTROY!! from Mile High Comics (which is running a ridonkulous sale right now). I mean, I always knew that comic was great, but now it's kicking my ass all over again.

(Also picked up a pile of late-'70s issues of SUPERBOY & THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES and some oddities I'd missed the first time around, like FRED HEMBECK DESTROYS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE.)

a super-cheap ($2.75) copy of Scott McCloud's DESTROY!!

cool, is this the big Treasury Edition-sized version? Actually I don't know if it was ever published smaller.

There was also a normal-sized version in 3-D. If only there'd been a Treasury Edition-sized 3-D version. Sadly, I strongly suspect it will never be reprinted, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who's read the ending...

I finally got around to the first LoSH Waid/Kitson trade and - yowza, tremendous stuff. God, it occurs to me that I've found another burden on my finances.

Hey, I'm having an ass-y week and need a comfort food superhero epic to read over the weekend. Any recommendations? Something actually good, as opposed to kitschy. Anyone read the Busiek JLA/Avengers -- something along those lines. Maybe I'll get to finally read The Dark Phoenix...

Great Darkness Saga!

I greatly miss my 3D copy of Destroy!! from when I was a youngin. Very strange to realize many years later that the same guy did Understanding Comics.

Walt Simonson's Thor, Chuck!! The Surtur Saga!

Chuck, I like the Busiek JLA/Avengers a bunch--just read the whole thing in one sitting recently. (Also, Trinity turns out to be a sequel to it in part. The first few chapters of Trinity didn't do a lot for me, but it's ramped up into something I'm enjoying a lot in a read-on-the-treadmill-at-the-gym way.)

Maybe it's a good time to read a bunch of Ultimate Spider-Man? Kicks into comfort-food-style high gear a few volumes in.

Only tangentially comics related, but I've just got into The Venture Bros and it's fucking great.

Chewing through the Blake Bell book on Steve Ditko currently. I bet I won't like how it ends...

Just read this recently. I wish this book had more detail about his technique during his prime, but I liked that it wasn't a fanboy piece. Dude's take seems to be that Ditko basically wasted the last 40 years of his career. His summation is pretty bleak.

Digging Morrison's All-Star Superman, but like a lot of his writing lately, it feels as though he's cut out every other panel. Tons of detail and density, which is great, but it's all spat out too fast to establish any rhythm or tone.

Concur, but it was still the last thing I read that was kicking my ass. I'm hoping that the new Scott Pilgrim and Seaguy 2 do some asskicking for me when they come out.

Actually, no, I don't concur with that at all. Rhythm and tone is what kicked my ass about GM's Superman in the first place! I get what you're saying, but I think cutting out every other panel works out really well in the first half of the series and establishes those things nicely. The second half got a lot more slack and I was somewhat disappointed in it as a result-- it didn't seem to have the same breathless pace as the first six issues.

Also it helps that he's working with Superman, not the most obscure cultural figure. I am thinking specifically here of the opening four-panel eight-sentence page, which basically just goes "This is a story about Superman. You know, Superman!".

On the second volume of Rocky - swedish cartoon animal character gets drunk, tries to get laid, hates the world, listens to Hip-Hop. Peter Bagge is a big fan and so am I.

That Rocky strip appears in a local newspaper, I like the general feel of the strip, but it rarely seems to have any proper jokes. Maybe it works better in collections though? Personally I prefer Arne Anka, an earlier Swedish strip which had a very similar basic idea (a cynical antropomorphic animal sits in pubs, hates the world, tries to get laid), except that the protagonist was a Donald Duck parody. Actually, I think Rocky must've been influence by Arne Anka, since it was quite well known in Sweden, even outside the comic scene. I don't think Arne Anka has ever been translated to English though...?

I dig Rocky more as a mood piece, I guess? The humor is more in the general desperation of the dude's lifestyle than in the punch-lines, which yeah seldom work. A swedish friend bought me the first volume and I was sorta underwhelmed, but strangely when the second showed up I was all "sweet!" and am enjoying reading it quite a lot...yeah, I'd say the collection format suits it well.

I think many "punchlineless" comic strips (like Mutts for example) generally work better as collections than as individual strips in the papers, because you get a better feel of the general mood then.

reading Cerebus vol. 1...yeah the art's not that great, those early issues look nothing like, say, High Society, but the writing isn't bad at all...I wouldn't mind recommending this...

Yeah, it gets a bad rap, and certainly it isn't as ambitious as the rest of Cerebus, but if you have even moderate interest in sword & sorcery stuff it's pretty solid reading.

Once it hits its stride about a third of the way in, vol 1 is consistently very funny as well. And it's fascinating to watch Sim's draughtsmanship improve noticeably by the issue - his style develops before your eyes.

by issue 300 he can almost draw

I think many "punchlineless" comic strips (like Mutts for example) generally work better as collections than as individual strips in the papers, because you get a better feel of the general mood then.

What's even better is something like 'Get Fuzzy', which tends not to be 3 frames of set-up, 1 frame of punchline, but have a decent joke in almost every panel, and in collected form combines this really well with the ongoing storylines.

okay if you guys aren't reading X-Factor right now, you are FOOLS

oh and I also recommend the "oddly compelling" Squadron Supreme because it shouldn't work AT ALL yet... it does!

okay if you guys aren't reading X-Factor right now, you are FOOLS

If you didn't bail when Larry Stroman was stinking up the joint a few months ago, then you are made of sterner stuff than most (or are just lazy when it comes to updating yr pull list).

Can we talk about the last X-Factor issue yet? Cause seriously OMGWTF HOLY SHIT-KABOBS

Stroman was sucking hardcore, yes; however, the story has gone to an incredibly amazing place.

PAD wants people to wait 3 MONTHS before talking about what's happening! Obv this is total crazypants but part of me wants to honor that because I don't think the issue would have worked as well for me if I'd known what was going to happen.

Notes for a War Story by Gipi continues First Second's astonishing track record; it's as fully realized and intelligent a story as I've ever seen in the medium.
http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/warStory.html

Crogan's Vengeance is awesome pirate pulp, recommended for fans of Stan Sakai and Trondheim and Tin Tin. I tend to be dismissive of the parade of Oni Press stuff but this was hawt and I can't wait to see where Schweizer goes next with this story!
http://www.onipress.com/preview.php?bid=352&pid=172

Reading the new What If? anthology. The Namor story is on a real pulpy horror kick.

ESSENTIAL MAN-THING v.2 - Ass is being kicked. Haven't read much of the post-Gerber stuff (though I did dip into the Claremont run when I was first getting into comics) so quality may drop precipitiously (sp-too lazy to fix) after he leaves.

Also reading the Nikolai Dante collections as they filter over here. I'm behind, sadly. Boy but I loves me some Simon Fraser.

http://www.sparehed.com/2007/05/14/dagwood-splits-the-atom/

Other than what has been coming out new, here is some of my current reading list:

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1 - I've been commenting on the issues. I read the back to back Doom issues 16 and 17, but just haven't posted on them yet.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World - I actually started with Byrnes run on vol. 3 New Gods #12-15 and am up to #14 of the Fourth World title. I also read the Genesis mini-series as it fell in the storyline. The Genesis series is pretty rub, way too many characters needed for the story. It would have worked better with just maybe the New Gods and the JLA, as they really forced all of these goofy characters in that only lasted for another six months. Lord that version of the DC Universe is just freaking strange. The actual New Gods/Fourth World run is not bad and parts are pretty good. I think Byrne did a pretty good job fleshing out the backgrounds on some of the characters, especially some of the flashbacks with Mister Miracle. I get into it and read a couple of issues then come back a week or so later. Eventually I am going to read Walt Simonson's Orion, as it followed this run.

I really like Doktor Sleepless. I read the last two issues a week or so ago. The first arc introduced the good Doktor and what he is all about. The second arc changes the perspective as it is more looking at what the Doktor has wrought, which works pretty well.

Another series I have been working through is the newer Jonah Hex book. My comic shop guy is like a crack dealer with a discount, the dude knows I am a sucker for runs so he fronts me the first three years for like $30 bucks. It is a pretty cool book with some nice artwork. Not every issue works, but some of them have been really good. I just finished #24 which is a Halloween story and features other DC Western Comic characters Bat Lash and El Diablo, who have appeared in a few issues.

The same 'dealer' also has set me up with sets or near sets of some Vertigo books like The Losers, Outlaw Nation and Deadenders which I will eventually get to reading. My boxes runneth over with stuff yet to read, but I like going out every week or so to get more comics.

I've also been reading through Frank Miller's Daredevil run for the first time in 20 years and reading verious old Batman issues, some I have read before and some are new to me (like the Doug Moench/Kelley Jones stuff and some of Alan Grant's various stories).

I've also gotten caught up on some of the Marvel titles I was following like Iron Man, the two Avengers books and I am getting near caught up on Captain America and Daredevil.

I Will Destroy All The Civilized Planets is one hell of a ride. What do you guys think of the conclusion? Because the easy thing to do when reading the original comics is to sentimentalize it "yeah the dude was amazingly incompetent but boy did he love his medium", sort've an Ed Wood thing, but then you get this portrait of the guy and he doesn't come across as even remotley sympathetic, does he?

Also read second volume of Lady Snowblood, which is great nasty pulp fun. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the volume ends with an ur gonna get raped cliffhanger, tho NO MORE SPOILER

I am still loving X-Factor, to the point where I am tempted to seek out and buy everything else PAD has ever written.

I followed your Thunderbolts recommendation and loved it, Dan, but I don't think I can follow you to X-Franchise-Land. But just in case I do, what issues am I looking for?

There was a recent reboot of X-Factor where they were turned into a detective agency; you're basically looking for X-Factor Volume 3:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Factor_(comics)#X-Factor_.282005_-_Present.29

Trades of 1 - 25 are available; they went through a recent patch of hideous art but came out the other side with some glorious storytelling.

Was PAD's detective Madrox mini-series collected? That might be a better place to start.

Just got a couple of Howard Cruze collections and I forgot what a good cartoonist and storyteller dude was/is.

Was PAD's detective Madrox mini-series collected? That might be a better place to start.

Yes, it was. There are also several collections of PAD's first run on X-Factor from the '90s, featuring the aforementioned hideous artist's hideous art when it was slightly less hideous.

The METAMORPHO showcase volume is off the rails. That is all.

I got off the Showcase wagon so long ago, when I noticed I had like ten volumes taking up lots of space and I really didn't read most of them all the way through. I bet there's been so much good stuff since I stopped checking!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I'm off all the Showcases except the Superman stuff.

oh, and the Legion books.

HALL OF BEST KNOWLEDGE

Scott Pilgrim, too (obv).

Oh, and this, despite the fact that I've yet to crack open a copy.

My favourite gag in this Scott Pilgrim is when Scott gets asked about what he's gonna do with his future and he goes "the future? like, with jet packs?"

Just finished James Sturm's America triology - very good, unassuming stuff. Saw him do a lecture and interviewed the man as well, really nice guy.

Path Of The Assassin, first volume. On a level with Lone Wolf, probably funnier too. And hope I don't sound too broken recordy here, but yeah, rapey rape rape again. I suppose I should stop reading Koike if I have such a problem with that, but damn, he's too good.

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 - AMAZING art. Sort've generic fantasy plot, but he pulls it off well.

Also is there any discussion on ILC about SCALPED? A friend has called it "The Wire on a reservation".

Bodyworld - I just love it so much...the colour, the characters, the sci-fi touches that grow to become what the story is about, the romance angle... Read it! It's free!

I thought scalped was somewhat sub-par and predictable 'angry-young-man' comicslop based on the one trade I bought, but I don't care for Jason Aaron.

I am not sold on Scalped either, but it did get better after the first trade. The first volume was a little preposterous. I didn't really think you could still use nunchucks to try to convince readers your protagonist was badass.

YOUNG LIARS is heady sensationalist fun - sure every other attempt at "hipness" the book aims for falls flat, but, gosh, it's genuinely exhilirating. I'm especially fond of the way the central point of audience identification is probably quite psychotic.

Everybody on this board has to go buy a copy of Guibert's The Photographer now; it's the best thing I've read this year in any medium.

I do like "The Photographer" a hell of a lot (and hated Young Liars at first but have come to enjoy it enormously).

The book I've been saying "omigod you have to see" about, though, is C. Tyler's "You'll Never Know," which I think comes out in a couple of weeks. Best thing she's ever done.

I love Tyler and will buy that on sight.
I went to this event: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/events/exhibits/thephotographer/
and got to meet Guibert. Real sweet guy! I ended up buying another copy just to have him sign it.
Also got to meet and talk to Juliette; she's a real force.

I posted this on ILE at recommend me some essential graphic novels to acquire

but it was suggested that I post it here too:

My gf just referred this question to me, since I've been reading a decent amount of graphic novels the past year or so, but now I'm passing this on to you all to see if you have any advice:

I'm a magazine editor who needs to solicit an article on graphic
novels-only I'm not overly familiar with the genre and don't have a ton
of time for research. The magazine I work for covers issues related to
war and peace, poverty, and social justice, so I'd like the writer to
focus on new graphic novels (out within the last couple years) that
address these issues. Anyone out there who follows the genre and can
point me in a few directions - or know of good writing on it?

"out within the last couple years" is the difficult part for me, since I've spent the last year mainly trying to get familiar with touchstones that have been out for a long time. So while Maus would be great, it's also a few decades old.

Persepolis seems like a decent recommendation, although it's a few years old now. Anyone else have any ideas?

btw, the responses I've gotten so far have mentioned Joe Sacco's Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, Pyongyang by Guy Delisle, and Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan.

Again, The Photographer is in this group. Maybe Brought To Light?

Brought To Light is worth mentioning for historical context and maybe as a template that other social justice graphic novels could be measured against, but it's 20 years old now.

Yep, that's the only problem with most of these recommendations. Sacco's stuff is several years old, so is Stuck Rubber Baby. Exit Wounds is from last year, and Pyongyang and Persepolis from 2005, so probably recent enough.

Photographer came out this month...

Oh, sorry Forks, I didn't see that. The amazon description looks like it would fit well.

Jeez, I'm coming up with this list for some magazine editor but I'm going to end up buying all of these myself..

http://us.macmillan.com/alanswar

also deogratias, ayo, vietnam war journal, laika, notes for a war story...
and of course, cosign on alan's war, though it feels less contemporary

more info: http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/collection.html

Oh and James Sturm! God, Gold and Golems!

deogratias, ayo, notes for a war story and sturm are all around a year or two old.

also REALLY feeling the Kim Dong Hwa "Color of" series, based on the first book.

great recommendations, all!

I'm writing up an email to this person. She probably doesn't want to read 15 books. If you could pick 4, which would you go for?

my vote would be photographer, exit wounds, palestine and god gold and golems

with notes for a war story as a close fifth.

How about throwing in some fiction? The first volume or two of DMZ, maybe? I might even say Special Forces, depending on who I was talking to...

But yes, The Photographer and Exit Wounds both get a big thumbs-up. (And yes I know the latter is fiction.)

Palestine was first published in 1993, I believe.

The Sturm books go back to 1996, 1997-ish too.

the compilation is fairly new though.

Wow 'Brought To Light' is over twenty years old now - it still packs quite a punch and some of the coverage is like a template for the future (removes tinfoil hat)...

I think she should definitely check out Jason Lutes' Berlin too, if the fact that it's unfinished is not a problem. The second book came out last year, so it's quite recent.

RE: YOUNG LIARS VOL. 2 AND ITS CONTENTS, WHICH I READ LATE INTO A VERY HUMID EVENING

Ah, now there's something you don't see often.

New Richard Sala is pretty dope; definite refinement of his technique and talents.

DYLAN DOG

wish there was an english omnibus of DD

ALSO:

A DRIFTING LIFE by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES by Giffen/Bierbaums/Gordon
and that scene in SHORTCOMINGS (Tomine) where the fence-sitter tells our all-around unpleasant protagonist that she's afraid she'll pretty much destroy him if she reveals her true opinion about him.

DYLAN DOG

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 12 June 2009 05:39 (Yesterday)

wish there was an english omnibus of DD

― Want some guap-a-mole or salsa with your chips? (forksclovetofu), Friday, 12 June 2009 06:36 (Yesterday)

err... apart from the one that came out in April? I kvetched about them retaining the Groucho-censoring from the last version

http://www.amazon.com/Dylan-Dog-Case-Files/dp/1595822062/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244780995&sr=8-1
did not know this came out, will buy.

err... apart from the one that came out in April? I kvetched about them retaining the Groucho-censoring from the last version

It's really no big deal. Sure they changed the name but it's not like it isn't obvious it's him, in look and behaviour.

Forks, I heartily reccomend that omnibus. The format's a bit unwieldly (if you gather that much material you really should make the damn thing hardcover imo), but the contents are great - wonderful tongue-in-cheek giallo influenced adventures, plus beautiful Mike Mignola covers. I'm surprised by all the mentions of DD as Italy's best selling comic book, though, since it ain't exactly all ages.

they changed the name

and the art.

That sounds weird... I didn't know anyone could own the copyright to the name and appearance of a real person.

and the art.

Huh, you're right, I had no idea. That is quite puzzling, I have to say - all they did was remove the moustache! So why is Cerebus allowed to feature a moustachoid Lord Julius, and Dylan Dog can't have his groucho sidekick? Because DD sells more? In Italy, sure, but in the US? And it's not like Dylan Dog couldn't make the same claims to satire that I imagine get Cerebus off free...

War That Time Forgot - hell of a franchise to revive. Lots of geeky fun with soldiers from all eras and nations trying to survive in a dinosaur filled island. GI Robot even makes an appearence!

ATTN Eurocomix fans - the latest entry in the Spirou & Fantasio Par... series is pretty fucking awesome. Spirou and Fantasio in occupied Belgium fighting nazis - mostly comical but often quite shockingly bloody (for Spirou, I mean, this isn't Ennis or anything.) Main attraction, though, is Olivier Schwartz's amazing art. Just a breathatking amount of detail, the dude really takes advantage of the deluxe format. Tons of visual cameos by eurocomix characters, too, this feels like a belgian League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and I'd be very thankful if there were a Jess Nevins type to tackle it, since I don't know the belgian/french canon that well.)

Also features a dicussion on Herge's status as a german collaborator.

What's the deal with that? I thought the extent of his "collaboration" was that he continued publishing Tintin in Belgian newspapers during the German occupation, and that he was later cleared of any charges?

Well yeah. The paper he originally worked for shut down and he ended up at Le Soir, which at the time was 100% a mouthpiece for nazi propaganda. The extent to which "collaboration" in this sense is excusable is a big part of what the new Spirou is about, actually - the hotel Spirou works at as a bell hop gets drafted into being the new headquarters of the Gestapo.

Wikipedia says it's all a bit more irksome than that, though:

In these stories, Hergé placed more emphasis on characters than plot, and indeed Tintin's most memorable companions, Captain Haddock and Cuthbert Calculus (In French Professeur Tryphon Tournesol), were introduced at this time. Haddock debuted in The Crab with the Golden Claws and Calculus in Red Rackham's Treasure.

The Shooting Star was nonetheless controversial. The story line involved a race between two crews trying to reach a meteorite which had landed in the Arctic. Hergé chose a subject that was as fantastic as possible to avoid issues related to the crisis of the times and to thereby avoid trouble with the censors. Nonetheless politics intruded. The crew Tintin joined was composed of Europeans from Axis or neutral countries ("Europe") while their underhanded rivals were Americans (although in later editions the US flag was removed from the rival ship, see the image on The Shooting Star page), financed by a person with a Jewish name and what Nazi propagandists would dub "Jewish features"[20]. Tintin also flies in a German plane in the book (an Arado Ar 196).

In a scene which appeared when the story was being serialised in Le Soir, two Jews, depicted in classic anti-Semitic caricature, are shown watching Philippulus harassing Tintin. One actually looks forward to the end of the world, arguing that it would mean that he would not be obliged to settle with his creditors (see the image on the Ideology of Tintin page).

and later:

During and after the German occupation Hergé was accused of being a collaborator because of the Nazi control of the paper (Le Soir), and he was briefly taken for interrogation after the war.[22] He claimed that he was simply doing a job under the occupation, like a plumber or carpenter.

After the war Hergé admitted that: "I recognize that I myself believed that the future of the West could depend on the New Order. For many, democracy had proved a disappointment, and the New Order brought new hope. In light of everything which has happened, it is of course a huge error to have believed for an instant in the New Order"[23]. However, the Tintin character was never depicted as adhering to these beliefs. However, it has been argued that anti-Semitic themes continued, especially in the post-war Flight 714.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the Jewish bad guys in Shooting Star. Even though they only appear in a few panels, it's kinda obvious they're Jewish stereotypes, which I guess shows Hergé hadn't yet shed all of his right-wing bigotry, even though it's less obvious than in the first few Tintin books.

However, I don't really see any anti-semitism in Flight 714. Okay, Laszlo Carreidas is a manipulative penny-pincher, but so is Scrooge McDuck. Nothing in Carreidas' character makes him feel particularly Jewish, and it'd be kinda weird to claim that every rich miser in fiction is supposed to be a Jewish stereotype.

I don't think Herge was actively a Nazi by any means, but he undoubtedly held a few of the prejudices common for a man of his time. Harry Thompson's biog pretty much completely exonerates him of any accusations of racism, but I think gives him a bit of an easy ride.

"Nazi" and "collaborator" are distinct accusations, too - I think the commonly held view of collaborators in the occu+ied countries is that they did what they did because of greed, selfishness, cowardice, etc. and not too often because they actually believed in nazi ideals, though anti-semitism might often factor into it.

King Ottakar's Sceptre (1938) is actually explicitly anti-Nazi, the ruler of Borduria being called Mustler - though it attacks expansionism and militarism rather than any specific ideologies.

There's some good material on this in the documentary (Tintin and Me? I think it's called.) But, uh, I get the impression Herge was more of a Wodehousian "useful idiot".

If you read the first handful of Tintin books (especially Tintin in Congo), it's pretty obvious he was a racist at least until The Blue Lotus. Then again, like Chap said, his racial views are pretty much in line with the mainstream European colonialist thinking of that era. The Blue Lotus, of course, is famous for its strong (at least strong for its time) anti-racist depiction of the Chinese, but even after that Hergé's views on race and culture were kinda convoluted. You have those Jewish stereotypes in The Shooting Star, yet in Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun he shows a lot of respect for the Incas, so it's hard to imagine him believing in some Aryan Nazi ideal. After The Blue Lotus, Hergé tried to show respect for the various ethnicities and cultures he depicted in Tintin, but from time to time he still falls for the "noble savage" stereotype. Even in The Red Sea Sharks, a story that was written as a response to Hergé finding out that the slavery of Africans still exists, the Africans themselves are depicted as not particularly bright.

In fact, you could view the whole Tintin series as a story of a man who was born into a conservative family during a racist era gradually trying to shed away the prejudices he had learned, even if remnants of those prejudices still remained with him until the end. Still, I think The Blue Lotus and the stories that followed it clearly show more respect for various cultures and ethnicities that most other Western children's fiction of that era.

I can get with that interpretation.

It's worth noting that while the Blue Lotus' portrayal of Chinese culture is quite progressive its depictions of the Japanese is just flat out racist.

READINGS OVER THE PAST MONTH OR THEREABOUTS:

Old-ass comics
DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES VOL. 1: Squishes X-Men.

Way old-ass comics
I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS by Fletcher Hanks: God, the only way that title could've been more perfect, was if there was some unexpected punctuation. And in much the same vein...
SUPERMEN!: THE FIRST WAVE OF COMIC BOOK HEROES 1936 - 1941: One mind-bending aspect guaranteed per story, and sometimes four or five - I doubt the viability of having a dopefiend as one's own alter-ego, but then again I've never been compelled to fight crime. Also: you learn to appreciate the brio of early Gardner Fox.

Comics That Wouldn't Exist Without Way Old-Ass Comics:
MR. MONSTER VOL. 1 by Michael T. Gilbert
SNAKE 'N' BACON'S CARTOON CABARET by Michael Kupperman

Comics That Wouldn't Exist Without Gary Panter:
KRAMERS ERGOT 5 by Sundry And Various: Extra-textual tid-bit: Three bucks!
NINJA by Brian Chippendale: As commentary, I suppose I'll allow an ellipsis here to stand for both awe and exasperation.

Comics That Wouldn't Exist Without Mark Beyer:
AMY + JORDAN by Mark Beyer

SNAKE 'N' BACON'S CARTOON CABARET by Michael Kupperman

This dude is pure quality on Twitter.

It doesn't appear to be too popular around here, but I thought the end of the fourth Scalped trade "Gravel In your Guts" was pretty wild. I think the series has accelerated and improved as it has went, as this filled in quite a bit about Red Crow (the gangster running the reservation). If you like Criminal, I would figure you would like this series.

Mr. Monster was pretty cool. I was a big fan of that series when it was coming out. Michael Gilbert was also one of the cooler guys I remember meeting at a convention. Too bad the character and Gilbert have vanished. Another kind of similar odd ball super hero comic from the 80s, one that really reminds me of Mike Allred's Madman I dug from that time was The Jam by Bernie Mireault.

yeah, i liked that too! comico, i think.

I loved The Jam. Pretty sure I still have my copies of that one. Loved that golden age of indies...Grendel, Elementals, Nexus and Badger, Melody and Omaha for the softcore-smut-inclined...

too bad the character and Gilbert have vanished

mercy killing, given the late-90s material

ripping liefeld by hiring teenagers to draw Alan Moore scripts

gilbert has been a regular contributor to ALTER EGO magazine since the first issue, so he's not 'vanished' really

is it just me, or is there a real shortage of good comics out there at the moment?

The Jam bounced around between several pubbers, iirc. And yeah, I loved that thing. Wonder when Mage III is gonna kick out? Soon as the DC money pays off Wagner's house, I guess.

Hasn't Mage III been in the works for over 10 years now?

Maybe, but wouldn't that mean he's been on the job since Mage II? I sorta had the idea he was waiting to get old so it could be a little more metaphorically pseudoautobiographical.

I've been pretty disappointed with the current slate of comics (X-Factor & Cap excepted), so I've been reading the Dark Horse reprints of The Savage Sword Of Conan. In the midst of volume 3 and absolutely loving it. Roy Thomas really hit his stride midway through the issues covered in volume 2.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle collection is a very fine volume. It's bound like a five grade math text.

I got some issue of it that came out a few weeks or months ago and have no idea what is supposed to be good about it besides some ok art.

Burma Chronicles is good.

BATMAN AND ROBIN is good. Really good. Like just as insightful and entertaining as ALL STAR SUPERMAN good.

Which is pretty good.

Speak of the Devil was brief noir fun; seems like a gimme for a film.

is that Gilbert?

yup. good stuff, but short and violent and unhinged.

Read The Photographer a few weeks ago - good story, beautiful photographs, but I found the drawings and graphic storytelling to be somewhat lacking (especially in comparison to the photos).

Asterios Polyp was just wonderful.

I've been looking for someone to discuss Polyp with: didn't you find the ending trite and hackneyed?
Couldn't disagree with you more about the photographer btw.

I admit it did work for me, I'm just a soft-hearted fool. (Also for some reason I'm a sucker for the Orpheus/Eurydice myth.) Really connected to Polyp as a character, he was amazingly well-captured. I guess I knew I would like this as soon as that early bit appeared explaining that the book was being narrated by his non-existent dead twin brother.

Unless you're referring to the shooting star bit, at which point I was just thinking, "Really? Was that necessary?" But man, the color choices, layouts, shifting styles, visual references and general invention were just so classic, I loved it.

By coincidence I also stumbled into two glowing reviews for it today, good points thereabouts.

I'm with you actually; I'm referring to the death meteor. That shit was old when Bradbury tried it.

The acrobatics Mazzucchelli engages in artistically are impressive as hell, no doubt. He's innovative and clever but also hella pretentious and it often smacked of trying a bit too hard. More than other comics, it reminded me of Moody or Eggers; similar high points and similar failings.

Definite must-read for any comic book fan but a bit stunning in how hard it's trying.

the fact that nobody's calling him on the obviousness of the metaphors and the ending suggests that you can get away with anything in comics if you cop to being literary. As much as I liked Fun Home, Bechdel gets away with some clumsy storytelling on the back of erudite aspiration in ways that lots of capes and tights guys would never dream of.

I think that's harsh - it also helps that, while the duality metaphors aren't the most subtle, I think the illustrated applications (applying technical geometric perfection and organic curves and linework, as well as the sheer variance of techniques used) are quite rich. It worked to connect the art with the story emotionally, for me, at least.

Some of the references did strike me as possibly pretentious, but they did make sense in the world of a main character who seemed not to live much outside of academia (the wife as well). Admittedly I didn't know the majority of them offhand, but it didn't bother me too much.

Kind of agree with you about Fun Home, that was a solid book but a bit static on the visual storytelling front... also, Bradbury, lol.

when applied VISUALLY, I had no issue. Beating me over the head with your grad school philosophy and greek myth references in wordy double page spreads nakedly displaying your desire to be taken seriously as MODERN LITERATURE HEM HEM smacks of an inferiority complex.

I _am_ being harsh here, but Dave M's been working on this thang 4EVA and I think I wanted something a tetch more pitch perfect. It's a necessary addition to anybody's reading list who's interested in the heights of the current comix golden age. I'm just greedy and wanted more.

Just finished the last Doom Patrol trade - X-Force pisstake at the back might be my favourite thing Morrison's ever written (nb I'm not a huge fan.)

Also read first volume of Green Manor by Fabien Vehlmann. A collection of short macabre episodes all set in the 19th century and connected to the club that gives the book its name. Pretty cool if you like Poe or the twisted morality of classic horror comics. It's available in english.

Six Hundred And Seventy-Six Apparitions Of Killoffer by Killoffer, which I think may be one of my favorite comics ever. And really, why is a self-on-self-on-self-ad-infinitum orgy such a blind spot in the arts in general?

Jason's Low Moon. It doesn't show much evolution, but I gotta say, by now I consider him to be one of the all-time greats and he can keep doing exactly what he's done for infinity.

Yeah, his style isn't that versatile, but every one of his books that I've read has been more or less great. Except for the murder mystery book that was based on some novel (what was it called?), that was a bit underwhelming. I haven't read Low Moon yet, what's it about?

Five different stories, all using genre settings (noir, western, victoriana, sci-fi, contract killers), usually subverted by anachronisms. Melancholy and downbeat endings abound, of course. The best one is probably the title story, a western about a town where everybody plays chess.

Johny Hiro will undoubtedly suffer because of the Scott Pilgrim comparsions, and the b&w takes some getting used to, but it's cute, exciting and funny. Also love the parts that are just him chilling with Grand Puba out of Brand Nubian.

Never heard of this but sounds like I should check it out, because of course Puba makes no mistakes.

It's by Fred Chao, out on AdHouse books. 'S about this asian dude who lives in NYC with his japanese girlfriend and works at a sushi joint. The Pilgrim comparsions come in because it's about a Joe Average type who keeps having aburd crazy shit happen to him; but Hiro is a lot less oblivious, and more industrious, than Scott.

i've just read "Rue Britannia", the first "Phongram" collection - the one about the Britpop obsessed magician who can power his magical stuff from people's enjoyment of music. It is entertaining.

Another shout-out for Johnny Hiro. It's really funny and very sweet, and not in that "worried about being hip" way that SP is, either.

Kamandi in Wednesday Comics is a beaut. As is Hawkman.

PROBABLY A SLIGHT REITERATION OF SOMETHING I WROTE ABOVE:

It's been mostly eurocomics as of late, but the Drake/Premiani DOOM PATROLs have also been making my day.

what eurocomics have you been reading?

KILLOFFER, KILLOFFER, KILLOFFER, KILLOFFER, KILLOFFER (i.e. the one book he's got in english - it's kicked my ass more than anything has in months; kicking myself for not picking up that MOME he contributed to)

AND:
Guibert's THE PHOTOGRAPHER

i bought a random book of Pluto last night thinking it was a Tezuka one shot and discovered it was book 4. Think I'm gonna go buy the full series today. For those unfamiliar, it's a retelling of the seminal 'strongest robot in the world' story in Astro Boy.

it's so good man

is the whole run done/out yet? i started reading it in scanlations but got impatient, it being a monthly series

Vol 4 just hit.

Do I need to have read Astro Boy for it make sense? Sounds fun otherwise.

I've read the first 2 volumes and enjoyed them fine, not knowing anything about Astro Boy besides "there is a character called Astro Boy." The only problem I've noticed is that both volumes have ended on "Wow, it's X" scenes, both of which won't have any impact unless you know who X already is. Which I didn't, but whatever.

Pluto is based on one of the best known (and most awesome) long form Astro Boy stories 'the greatest robot on earth' which is currently available in English in volume three of the shamefully miniature Dark Horse reprint edition. You don't HAVE to know that story or even anything about Mighty Atom, but it helps with a lot of GOTCHA moments and adds layers to the storytelling.

Yeah, it's not necessary at all - in fact the main character of Pluto was based on a minor one in the original story. That said, hell, it's all contained in one cheap, small Astro Boy volume and a fun story to boot. It will definitely enhance your enjoyment of Pluto (the layers and re-interpetations are fantastic), so you might as well nab it.

Done, I'll pick them both up tomorrow. I love Tezuka anyway, so no harm.

that reissue of Moriarty's JACK SURVIVES looks super-delish

Just finished the second volume of the Chaland anthologies that Les Humanoids did a few years back. The quality of the stories seemed to decline over time (Holiday in Budapest is a good idea, the execution not quite so good) until F-52, which is an utterly stunning piece of work. A murder mystery without a murder set on a futuristic passenger plane, hauntingly beautiful artwork, genuinely unforgettable.

Just read "The Comet Of Carthage" myself (from the first Chaland volume), and floored as floored can be. It's rare to be utterly seduced by the rhythms of a work - whenever I think of that reveal of the collapsed road and the aghast faces of the driver and the passenger, I'm always inclined to smile.

Mentioned this elsewhere, but the manga Parasyte is spectacular.

Why oh why is so little of Manu Larcenet's work available in English? Just finished both books of Ordinary Victories and it's beyond striking. GF read it through and burst out crying multiple times.

Earthboy Jacobus was a pretty fun read, I picked it up after enjoying CreatureTech. But then I made a mistake - after being a little weirded out by some political talking points that awkwardly cropped up in the story, I looked up Doug TenNapel on the internet and what he's written and awwwwwww man. Well, the guy's got some visual style, at least!

Just finished Darwyn Cooke's The Hunter, fun stuff! I suppose if you're looking for something more groundbreaking it's not gonna be satisfying, but man, his characters and layouts are just like candy to me. It was a little unusual to see such sparse dialogue and overused captioning/narration in his stuff (even compared to his Spirit work), but it's been a while since I read a fun ride, crime comic like this, maybe since the earlier Sin City series.

I wasn't familiar with Westlake/Stark, so as I was reading it I was totally thinking, "wow, this is a lot like Point Blank!" Heh.

Not a big comics stan, but a recent Alan Moore convert and am currently finishing off the second volume of League of Extraordinary Gents (that rambling dossier at the back is fun, but phew!). Looking forward to reading the next ones. What should I check out now I've read these and Watchmen?

Top 10 is fun. Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Miracleman and From Hell are all pretty essential.

If you liked Watchmen more than LOEG, check out V for Vendetta and From Hell first. Both are among his more serious, philosophical and "dark" works, and both are excellent. Top 10 is essentially a police series taking place in a city where everyone's a superhero, it's great fun and less serious than Watchmen (though there's some drama too), just like LOEG. And if you like that one, you should also read Smax, which is kind of a sequel to Top 10, except that it's a fantasy parody, and even more humorous than Top 10.

If you like to explore Moore's sci-fi side, check out Halo Jones. It's not as meticulously plotted as Watchmen or From Hell, but it has some truly moving and cool moments. The same could be said of Swamp Thing (which is horror/fantasy rather than sci-fi), it's kinda uneven but the best bits are quite awesome and chilling too.

If you want to read a non-genre comic from him, A Small Killing is a nifty little book with beautiful art by Oscar Zarate. It's a (mostly) realistic story about a yuppie guy facing an identity crisis. For some reason it's not mentioned that often when people rate Moore's work, but it's one of my favourite comics by him.

Promethea is of acquired taste, but if you like to check out a comic that's essentially a lecture on Moore's beliefs about magic and the way the world works (with some mind-blowingly imaginative art by J. H. Williams III), it's certainly worth a read.

thank tuomas - i guess i liked watchmen for completely different reasons from league. i love the humour of league and the incredible amount of references to victorian/edwardian literary figures. i spent a whole morning on wikipedia looking up the ones i didn't recognise. otoh watchmen is a masterpiece - superbly drawn of course, but this somehow helps to turn the comic book format into more than just words and pictures. i think i appreciated the delicately woven plot more than that of league, but i like them equally.

*thanks - of and thanks to forksclove too.

This site http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/7160/annos.html has some extremely comprehensive annotations for all volumes of the League. Really makes you appreciate the level of detail that Moore has crammed in there.

The wait for the 5th volume of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto to arrive in the mail is starting to kill me.

Is it out now?!?!?! Comic book run today if so!

I don't know - it was in stock at amazon last week though, so probably. Viz says, "In stores: Sep. 15, 2009"

Dope! Midtown comix and me!

Dog Latin, I'm gonna second The Ballad of Halo Jones--I reread it recently, and it does a lot of things I think are pretty fantastic. Also co-sign on From Hell. And, if you can find a friend's copies, I adore (the unfinished) Big Numbers.

Just read one of the Roy Thomas/Michael Gilbert/P. Craig Russel Elric adaptations from 1986 or so. Far better than I expected it to be, though would seem awfully wordy by today's standards.

Do I want to read that third volume of LOEG?

The Black Dossier isn't the third volume, if that's what you're asking - the third volume is currently being serialised, one issue a year or so.

(You do want to read the Black Dossier, but borrow it instead of paying DC)

Do you mean it's not worth buying or that DC shouldn't be paid for something they did? (Not that I would anyway, go-go public library!)

I didn't think Black Dossier was all that great tbh--lots of candy for nerds but little in the way of compelling content (for me.)

DC don't deserve money for that book based on their extreme fuckery of authors, customers, and retailers with regard to it, imo

New Pluto was again excellent... now the painful wait for volume six begins. I really feel like this is the best comic book story I've read in at least twenty years. It's hitting me like nothing else I've read in at least that long, and like I never thought anything would again. Kind of reminds me of when I was first reading Watchmen (which it's similar to in a lot of ways).

What's New Pluto, I've never heard of it?

Sorry, should read, The new Pluto (i.e. Naoki Urasawa's Pluto)...
http://www.viz.com/products/products.php?product_id=7969

pretty spectacular.

WE ALL DIE ALONE by Mark Newgarden - Baez's "Religious Conversion" of the month. Mindboggling and kinda sui generis.

So I'm gonna stan for Jason again but Why Are You Doing This? is amazing franco-belgian inspired (those tiny panels!) Hitchcockian goodness, with a pretty devastating ending.

Also Pax Romana, which I realise I'm way late to the party on.

Seven Soldiers really clicked for me. It's great!
and the new Dungeon is, per usual, awe inspiring. Sfar, Blain and Trondheim are as good as anybody in the game.

I really got into Jason this past year myself - really dig his stuff. I think my favorite story so far might be Hitler.

Those Elric comics written by Roy Thomas are all pretty good. Elric: The Dreaming City has some really amazing artwork by P. Craig Russell.

Turns out Why Are You Doing This? is from 2005. Coulda sworn I got it from the new releases section!

I Killed Adolf Hitler is great. I also love The Last Musketeer for its loving homage to 19th century proto-pulp, and the early work compilation Pocket Full Of Rain.

Srsly, why am I smoking the Blackest Night rock when there's so much Jason left to chase?

Just read the first two volumes of Robert Kirkman's The Astounding Wolf-Man - fun stuff! It feels somewhat like Ultimate Spider-Man did in the beginning. The pacing so far is pretty good.

Stitches: A Memoir by David Small. Probably one of the most messed up childhood autobios I've read that didn't involve physical or sexual abuse. Some really great imagery sprinkled throughout, especially this one page where the father admits something terrible, and another where the mother is caught. Don't read the blurbs or previews - the hooks that got me to read it actually aren't revealed until towards the end, so some of the surprise was lost on me.

I just reviewed it over at Bookforum (warning: spoilers): http://u.nu/5ukg3

Last volume of Larry Gonick's History of the Modern World hits shelves; might spur me to reread universe and modern in order.

this picture
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bdVR-JIDi2g/RvH4V_HZ04I/AAAAAAAADcI/a7WwZqpkf0c/s1600-h/5510_4_011.jpg

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7974/55104011.jpg

destroyer max, mostly because of the artwork. cory walkers drawings + val staples colouring = magic.

God, I fucking love Batman and Robin. Haven't read #5 yet (I don't get my comics til the end of the month), and it suffers from the loss of Quitely on issue #4, but Jesus. SEXY DISCO HOT

Is anyone reading Jeff Lamire's "Sweet Tooth"? Certainly on basis of first two issues it is a comic of total amazingness.

FINDER: DREAM SEQUENCE. Just that. Why Carl Speed McNeil isn't lording over all of comicdom with an iron fist, I just don't know.

I will sing Carla Speed McNeil's praises any time anyone gives me the slightest opportunity to. (I think the only reason she's not lording over all of comicdom is that she's not the greatest self-promoter, e.g. her web site currently lists only one of her many books.) She's got a couple of projects in the hopper that I suspect are going to blow some minds, too.

I really like Finder but haven't read too much of it (though I did read Dream Sequence.)

That's about the only thing that Carla and I have in common, it seems. Maybe I should take some Prozac and then I'd learn to get over my pathologic fear of self-promotion. Maybe.

Just got my copy of Crumb's Genesis today and it is WONDERFUL.

tru

Woah, I want Genesis and the new History of the world really bad now!

I got the big omnibus of Brubaker's Iron Fist and it's kicking my ass all kinds of ways. What's the ILC stance on the Brub?

on a par with Ellis for me, for better and worse.

Is there any reason why R. Crumb's Book of Genesis takes "1 to 3 months" to ship from Amazon? Did it really sell that much better than they expected?

There was certainly a big scramble for it at my local comic book store, new Crumb + (unearned) controversy = $$$$$

gonna reiterate that it's astounding work

otm -- I sat back down with it last night and read the 2nd half pretty quickly. I've never really read the Bible before so I was basically getting the plot, lol. I'll be going back to study the artwork at more leisure.

I'm mindboggled at all the thumbnail portraits in the "begat" sections -- the variety and individuality in all those faces.

It's extremely amusing to think of Robert Crumb being the one to get some people to read the Bible for the first time.

i am having my ass kicked by the unforgivable shittiness of the art in batman & robin #6

Vagabond, in large doses, is truly the dopeness.
A nice companion to the Samurai trilogy! I love the Miyamoti Musashi story.

Wow, Ode to Kirohito was NUTS. Really weird to look at it now, though I guess it was somewhat socially progressive for its time. There are a lot of gorgeous layouts and artwork throughout. Really enjoyed it, as I was baffled and dazzled by it equally. Hail Tezuka!

This review gets it right, and the comparison to Sam Fuller is perfect!

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/6608/

You've read most of his stuff right, Nhex?

No way! I only even started reading his stuff a few years ago, starting with 17 or so volumes of Astro Boy and been devouring what else my local libraries have. (Wish they had more than that one volume of Phoenix!) Ate up Buddha as well. So happy about these modern reprints of his work that have been coming out in recent years - definitely going to get to MW and Apollo's Song sometime soon.

I enjoyed Crumb's Book of Genesis but am staggered that it took him 5 years to do. Dang! I'm no big Crumb fan and would happily take recommendations on what collection of his to explore first. Also, the lit professor/critic Harold Bloom reviews it in the latest (Dec. 3) New York Review of Books. The web version is subscription only, and it's not worth the cover price, but if you're in a bookstore anytime soon, it's worth skimming. (I'm not saying that Harold Bloom is good or anything, I'm just saying that a well-known biblical scholar has reviewed Crumb's book.)

Wooo, it's comix Tuesday! I received Crumb's Genesis, the Fall issue of MOME, the Burns-edited Best American Comics 2009, and The Wolverton Bible. I am boning up on my illustrated Old Testament works this week.

I ordered the upcoming Marshal Law omnibus today. Supposedly shipping in December, but Top Shelf was supposed to have the Alec omnibus out in June/July and now they're saying that it might not ship until January. So if I get Marshal Law by next Thanksgiving I'll be happy.

I re-read the Marvel run recently and it holds up quite well. Still my favorite riff on the grim and gritty thing, especially because of O'Neill's grotesques. I like him better on Law and Nemesis than on the Alan Moore LoEG stuff.

That MARSHAL LAW omnibus is very tempting, even though I own all the original material (at least I think I do.) ODE TO KIROHITO is indeed totally nutso genius and should be read by everyone here. Imagine getting a chunk of that in your weekly comics reading in what, the seventies?

The best thing I've read recently was the latest trade of BPRD, which combined giant insects, corrupted Shangri-las and mechanized troops in a way that had me cackling the entire time. Bonus: Yeti shock troopers!

I took a chance and splurged on the first two volumes of the Jesse Marsh/Gaylord DuBois Dell Tarzan archives and they are AMAZIN'. The art is astonishing, almost naive but with panels so beautifully and brilliantly and consistently laid out that you can read entire stories on each page. Every figure is so CLEAN and well-thought. The perspective and musculature is nutty but the concern to impact is clear. It's very very obviously where the Hernandez Bros. draw their technique from.

That new issue of Detective: whoa. Also Fraction & Larroca's Iron Man continues to be totally swell.

Forks, for more marsh love try and track down a copy of this old fanzine, which includes a lovely handwritten tribute to marsh by alex toth:

http://www.seriesam.com/barks/bm_pn02.jpg

i do also like large breasted ducks so that looks win-win

Just got all the current issues of season two of phonogram. I think i love Gillen. Is his marvel stuff any good?

Uh... what did you guys like about that Fletcher Hanks book?

the mentalness.

Gillen posted on ILM a handful of times back in the day, incidentally

The mentalness and the proto-Basil Wolverton lunacy, too.

One thing I loved about the Fletcher Hanks book is that even though his actual rendering is... eccentric (and he has exactly one pose/facial expression for each character), his composition is AMAZING. The image reproduced at http://fletcherhanks.com/CONTACT.html --wow.

^ this - the compositions are astounding. he's erratic, so it's not like his ON all the way through, but the best pages are some of the most striking and distinctive i've ever seen. love the composition, stylization, psychedelic wtf-ness, weird crutches to get around his limitations, everything.

can't find it, but there's a single panel in the "civilized planets" collection that depicts two jungle explorer dudes looking through a thicket of tropical foliage. seen from behind (of course), framing an opening in the leaves, with ridiculous hats on their heads, and it is so fucking perfect and strange and wonderful to look at. i couldn't draw like that no matter how long and hard i worked - not cuz he's so gifted, but cuz he's such a goddam kook.

here's a good example:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/199/521690724_b32b950560.jpg

last panel is spectacularly eerie, and those leading up to it are so weirdly abstracted that they look like ur-comics, like the primordial muck that comics rose up out of. like every fucking panel is perfectly iconic, both debased and transcendent, exactly what "that sort of thing" ought to look like. a hero, a villain, a sun, a planet.

this too:

http://www.kevinwolf.com/images/F%20Hanks%20art%202.jpg

so brilliant and ridiculous and crazed. it looks like nothing else in the world, and it makes me want to scream it is so amazing. i want that shit on my wall like 10 feet high and 20 feet across. he's a goddam genius.

you should TOTALLY check out the Tarzan reissues. Same effect.

Ok, I'll give you some of those panel compositions are pretty great, especially the ones that involve masses of floating people or objects like the examples above. I feel like it was almost accidental on his part, though, his limitations are pretty obvious. Often I felt like I was looking at the Ultimate Comic Book! as envisioned by a 9-year-old or Family Guy storyboards.

great bushmiller's ghost!

LOW MOON by Jason: all swell, but specifically "&", the two sad bastards converging in a bar story (the climax of which is illustrated on the cover).

The last volume of Akumetsu has been scanlated - man what a crazy ride. I can't believe I actually read 18 volumes of it, but damned if I wasn't enjoying it all the way. Best sci-fi hyper violence revenge fantasy political agitprop EVER.

Oishinbo is obsessive, strange and loads of fun.

"sci-fi hyper violence revenge fantasy political agitprop"

why have i not read this?

It's really heavily focused on the Japanese government (and their failures) from during the '90s, lots of very specific satirization of political figures. Thankfully, the scanlators put in a lot of notes. This is the kind of thing that will never ever get an official translation.

Sacco's 'Footnotes at Gaza' feels like a career defining work.

I've only read Palestine - you think it's worth skipping straight ahead to this one?

sacco really gets better with every release. though i still think the war crimes strip he did for details remains his defining work.

Footnotes is like 400+ illustrated pages devoted to two specific atrocities that took place in the gaza strip. it really shows a refinement of his style, storytelling and perspective. And, though I wouldn't have believed it to be likely, he's drastically improved his art. There are multiple appendices and transcribed interviews. It's meant to be a history. By merit of the research and length alone, it's pretty eyepopping. If he had released it a bit earlier, it would be neck-and-neck with Asterios Polyp for the "token-comic-best-of-09-book-list" sweepstakes.

Second volume of Wonton Soup is a pretty huge leap forward, sick and wrong like Ennis in his prime - arguably funnier, too.

The Sikoryak collection that came out recently was excellent!

http://thedailycrosshatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/rsikoryakmasterpiecegarfieldpanel.jpg

charley's war is Grrrrreat, shame this was never a US thing

^This.

I just got finally up to date with the reprints over the weekend, and it continues to be unremittingly bleak. I wish I could remember what my 10 year old brain made of it.

That ODE TO KIRIHITO recommendation from a month or two back: OTM.

Man, that Tezuka wielded his thrillpower adeptly.

I know, right!!?

Every five pages he outdoes himself! AND HE DOES IT FOR EIGHT-HUNDRED-SOME PAGES!

buddha and phoenix are both these endless extravaganzas of that cycle

Still need to catch up on the last four volumes of BUDDHA, probably via interlibrary loan.

ALSO: DORORO

dororo is unbelievable too
sequence where dororo faces the reader straight on and screams DAMN YOU = A+

hahah, +'d to my library list

haha ode to kirihito is just one big wonderful "WTF?" after another. it may be my favorite comic of the decade*. A WOMAN IS BAKED INTO A GIANT QUICHE (or whatever) FFS.

*obvious temporal caveats apply.

"mw" is probably a step down on the "perpetual wtf-ery" scale -- what wouldn't be? -- and the pre-yaoi homoeroticism is...conflicted at best. but jesus.

I haven't read it yet, but my gf just finished Tezuka's 'Swallowing The Earth' and pronounced it the most fucked up tezuka yet.

don't neglect BLACK JACK, ppl!

I read the first volume of that a long while ago and was slightly weirded out. It seems so tame now, in retrospect! I will revisit it, though, now that my library has the new reprints.

Not a heavy comics person, but Asterios Polyp was pretty wonderful -- got it from the library, but I'm thinking about buying it! The only thing I know by the author is Batman Year One! What else is good by him?

Mazzuchelli made his breakthrough in Daredevil, and the Daredevil story Born Again, written by Frank Miller (like Batman Year One) is one of the finest superhero stories of all time, both visually and plotwise. I think you have to be at least somewhat familiar with Daredevil, though, for it to have a maximum impact. Mazzuchelli's adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass is also a fine example of experimental storytelling in comics, though the plot sometimes get a bit too far-out for my tastes. It's definitely worth a read, still, just to see how Mazzuchelli bends the rules of comic book narration.

I think Born Again, Year One, City of Glass, and Asterios Polyp are pretty much the whole of Mazzuchelli's major comic book work. As far as I know he only released a handful of short stories in the 15 years between City of Glass and Asterios Polyp.

Thanks! Maybe I read some of Born Again when I was a kid? It's the Kingpin/Elektra stuff? Didn't know he did an adaptation of City of Glass! Love that book. Will have to check it out! But yeah, Batman Year One is incredible -- one of the few superhero comics from my youth that I still own and enjoy.

I don't know - for me, Rubber Blanket 1-3 was where Mazzuchelli really found his voice - those comics had a huge impact (at the time). I guess they're probably hard to come by these days?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Rubber Blanket has never been anthologized. I'd buy em in a second if i could find em.

rubber blanket is about half genius and half too-experimental-for-its-own-good. but "near miss," "discovering america," and "the big man" are definitely worth the hype.

i've never heard of any of these! too bad they're not collected?

Mazzuchelli refused all offers for a Blanket collection while he was working on Polyp - chances are higher we'll see one in the next couple of years

hm, i get it; didn't want to water down the impact of his first single volume novel with a bunch of shorter pieces.

plus stuff that is now almost (gack) twenty years old.

also the rb stuff is obviously closer to polyp than (say) "born again" was to rubber blanket, but it's still very different.

buying the rubber blanket issues @ the first spx back in '94, i definitely remember there being a "vibe" about them. (the series had already finished by then, though i'm not sure if even mazzucchelli knew that at the time.) there was just nothing else that even looked like them at the time. (oversized! fancy paper stock! ridiculously swank printing techniques! two-tone art! euro-influenced narrative stuff alternating with near-abstract shit!) i guess at the time it felt more like a throwback to the "raw" artists/books -- when most alt comics were still in the hate/eightball/yummy fur/post-sim-self-publishers floppy/pamphlet format -- but now it feels more like a sort of advance notice for the acme novelty/fort thunder design-heavy-weird-formats present we now inhabit.

finally bought the rucka/williams detective run thanks to a 50-percent-off sale. (reading it onscreen is just not the same.) probably the first floppies i've bought since all-star supes. rucka's rucka, but i want all super hero comics to look like this in the next decade. (guess you only get one or two virtuosos per generation, though.)

I think the story has been pretty good too, but it probably reads better in a big chunk. Most books would do well to have Jock be the fill-in artist.

The Question backup has been OK too, but I have to save up and read about three of them as eight pages a month just really doesn't work.

The nothingness of the Question backup shows you just how much Williams III is bringing to the main strip. Hope he gets a Moore or Morrison to team with again sometime, but he's plainly going to be worth buying no matter what.

STILL ON TEZUKA:

APOLLO'S SONG: Manages to be fun and tremendously weird, but something of a comedown after ODE TO KIRIHITO (and really, what wouldn't be?). Probably reads as sheer awesomeness in summary form, though...

OH:

and MOBY DICK, which I'm about a third through right now, but that's not a comic. Mind you, those Rockwell Kent illustrations ARE swell.

OH AND:

ALIAS THE CAT: That Kim Deitch is the Guy Maddin of comics. Actually you could make that same comparison about plenty of cartoonists (none of whom I can name right now), but Maddin's recent autobio trilogy reminds me alot of Deitch's continuing adventures with Waldo and the like. MY RATING: NIFTY!

Wow, this second Fletcher Hanks collection is maybe even better than the first.

The TOON TREASURY anthology edited by Spiegelman and Mouly. Shld really be called the AMERICAN Toon Treasury, but still lots of great and gorgeous things within, nonetheless - the Barks and Stanley strips are especially well chosen, and the Dennis the Menace comic book stories are superbly drawn. Liked the "Hey, comics aren't just for adults" tagline, too.

great comp. i love the dennis descending a staircase visual.

Not that I've read any of this stuff, but wow, cover art nowadays sure is slick and pretty ain't it? As a trade reader I'm often forget just how much well-produced, well-colored cover art there is out there for the dailies.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/01/the-50-best-covers-of-2009/

Rly? Maybe it's that they're such tiny jpgs, but a good thirty of those look like dogshit to me.

just plowed through R. Crumb's Complete Book of Genesis... his art's fantastic, and it made me re-think a lot of the stories from a more political/socio-historical perspective but its also y'know a bit dry and boring. kinda wondering if it woulda been more enjoyable if he'd taken more liberties with it, put in some jokes/hot sexxxin' etc.

i found it anything BUT dry and boring

I do think it's dry. I mean, less dry than reading a non-illustrated version of the Bible, but dry nonetheless. But I appreciate the sense of purpose Crumb had in doing a straight adaptation and don't think it would've been much cop to have a jokey/sexxxy Crumb subversive version, thats' been done enough times.

yeah that's true - I'm of two minds about it, cuz I do think it suffers a little bit from his "I R BEING TOTALLY FAITHFUL" tack... it kinda made me wanna dig out those old Chester Brown adaptations of the New Testament, which were kind of a mixture of straight adaptation and dramatic imagery/recontextualization.

CB's versions of the Gospels were seriously unnerving stuff.

Not that I've read any of this stuff, but wow, cover art nowadays sure is slick and pretty ain't it? As a trade reader I'm often forget just how much well-produced, well-colored cover art there is out there for the dailies.

I'm on the fence about covers these days, what with them mainly just being context-less pin-up pages. On the one hand, they look better by a million miles than when I was growing up and Al Milgrom drew 99% of them, and I'm sure editors love being able to assign the art way in advance without needing to know the contents of the book, but on the other hand, I grew up when I grew up and back then comics' covers at least tried to convey some idea of their contents. PS, you damn kids get off my lawn!

okay I really like the Thor one

someone REALLY needs to collect those brown gospels. they are my favorite thing he's ever done. jesus is suck a mean prick!

angry wizard jesus!

god in the crumb bk is also totally a mean prick

i like what daniel says abt crumb's 'sense of purpose' - there is something curiously devotional in all that obsessive crosshatching - he arrives at something not very far removed from basil wolverton's equally dense, striped biblical illustrations where every pen line is a kind of penance - i also thought there was humour, quieter than normal w/ crumb maybe, but typically human and touching (for example, the dazed look on jonah's face throughout made me grin w/ pleasure at crumb's ability to bring to life a rather remote historical figure)

re: covers - now that newsstand comics don't really exist, and most comic sales are based on pull lists rather than impulse purchases, covers on dopey superhero comics prob mean less than ever as a 'marketing tool' etc - but in my childhood, lots of my favourite marvel comics had GREAT Gil Kane covers, even Kirby kovers, and only a v few were by al milgrom (thank god!)

http://www.comicsreporter.com/images/uploads/kirby70s01.jpg

there's a reason Stan told everyone to draw like Kirby

totally feelin you on the "devotional cross-hatching" too lolz, I was marvelling at it and had to explain to my wife what cross-hatching was

haha I wonder if every comic nerd my age did Alfredo Alcala doodling in their notebooks at school

THINGS I'VE RECENTLY ENJOYED A GREAT DEAL THAT AREN'T TEZUKA:

THE BEST OF NANCY by Ernie Bushmiller - The ILC bible by any other name.

INCREDIBLE HERCULES by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, and a host of quite competent artists - Picked up 124 and 125 at a 25 cent sale and am now, quite a few far less frugal purchases later, wondering why I ever stopped after the first arc.

AWAITING ME ON MY DESK, UNTAINTED BY MY WANTON LEER!

M/W, featuring hot double-splash page man-on-man action (but that may have just been the endpapers, I can't remember), and ISSAC THE PIRATE, which I don't think features any sodomy (but should, being a pirate comic and all).

Isaac is spectacular.

ha - thanks for reminding me about herc, i also lost track of it after the first arc

"Romp" seems an apt description of HERC's virtues. It's swell - 135 (the "amadeus cho role-playing issue") is, retrospectively, one of my favorite issues of the past year.

Isaac is spectacular.

An opinion I can now legitimately second - VOL. 2 went immediately on my queue.

KING CITY is about the only thing recently that fits the ass-kicking bill.

king city is indeed great. sometimes i wish i lived in a world of brandon graham girls. ("sometimes.") his livejournal is also like nostalgia-a-go-go for any one who grew up obsessed with anime/manga in the '80s/early '90s.

Highlight of APE last year: Talking SLASH MARAUD with Brandon Graham and having him draw one of the fuzzies on the copy of KING CITY #1 I bought from him.

I still love X-Factor btw

finally got Volume 2 of the American Flagg! reprint and that is definitely ass-kicking. such an amazing year, weird to think I was reading it (and totally missing lots and lots of subtext/in-jokes) when it came out

Making my way through the second volume of the complete Franquin Spirou; loving all the meta stuff which got lost in translation when I read these in german as a kid (like Fantasio actually working for Spirou magazine!); also love how they call it each other "mon vieux" all the time.

IIRC Spirou & Fantasio also continue the fine tradition of heterosexual life partners in comics by sharing a flat together...

In the Finnish translation Fantasio (and Gaston, of course) works for the Finnish publisher of Spirou & Fantasio comics.

Not actually kicking my butt at the moment due to logistics, but I just picked up a sealed copy of that massive Don Martin at Mad set for $30 at The Strand. Shipped it home because it is far too cumbersome to cart around airports. They had maybe a dozen copies scattered around the store if others want to save $120 off cover price.

daaaamn, i should go get that!

I met AlexinNYC for drinks last night and told him to get it too. Maybe we can have a Don Martin reading group.

sadly it's likely already gone

Really? There were an easy dozen last night. Glad I stopped in but I'm sorry for you. :(

They got through a lotta copies of anything that's a bargain. I may be wrong but I doubt it?

the don martin set was also v. v. cheap at barnesandnoble.com, dunno if it still is

MORE TEZUKA, BECAUSE WHY NOT (but not MW):

BLACK JACK VOL. 1 - Probably the greatest superhero comic that doesn't call itself a superhero comic. I've raved about this before, but awesomeness doesn't stop being awesome. Black Jack's kinda like the Punisher or the Spirit - he's as comfortable at the edges of a story as he is at its center; a brief appearance at the end, with all attendant mind-blowing surgical skill, and, ta-da, you've got yourself a Black Jack comic.

I've made a solemn vow (before a candle, the better to display a bat-eared silhouette) to read as much Tezuka as possible, even all those tedious ASTRO BOY volumes.

(but not MW)

YET (NATCH).

If you believe the Strand Website, they still have 95 more copies of that Don Martin book at 30 bucks each.

I was REALLY surprised how inventive/weird even Astro Boy could get sometimes - probably just from the sheer volume of output, they were able to just pull crazy stuff - wait until you get to the "reboot". But yeah, admittedly there's a ton of tedious fluff between those moments of genius, but for a while it'll still be entertaining at least.

I've read "The Greatest Robot On Earth" (oui, PLUTO waiting in the wings, I know) and a bit of Astro that involves said littlest robot hanging out with an alien grasshopper lady (who wouldn't????) and meeting an entrepreneurial family of hobos - something like that. "Greatest" was nifty, but the latter storyline swerved back and forth from sleep-inducing to charming. Someday...

Actually I'd push you on Monster before Pluto, just because it's GREAT and also by the time he got around to Pluto, Urasawa's artwork was much better (helps that it was a monthly series). But yeah I know it's only an 18-volume series in a totally different genre and all..

20th century boys > anything else by urasawa currently available in legit translation

i did love pluto (and the bulk of monster) but man everything urasawa haters (or skeptics) say about his ott melodrama streak is otm. he WILL make you cry, dammit. or he'll flop into uncomfortable silliness trying.

I feel like Pluto is mostly really tight and compelling, while 20th Century Boys (though I'm liking it) has a little too much drift at times - it's telling a bigger story, yes, but sometimes it's too big (to completely hold my interest)...

NO. 437 IN A SERIES OF "N" (collect 'em all!)

I like the fact that MW registers as relatively subdued Tezuka, despite the fact that it concerns a crossdressing sociopath bent upon exterminating a large portion of the human race via chemical warfare - it's like Tezuka's I CONFESS.

Oh, and INCREDIBLE HERCULES remains a blast the deeper I delve - I think my initial reaction to that first storyline was as a witty and well-executed bit of meat-and-potatoes superheroics; good relative to what surrounded it, certainly, but not something that would sustain my interest as a going concern. Thankfully, it gets far more ambitious and ferociously imaginative as it goes along - man, "Sacred Invasion" is just the bee's knees, the best SECRET INVASION storyline by far.

In the Dept. of Completely Unsurprising Sentiments: I really liked the first issue of "Joe the Barbarian."

I thought it deserves a thread of its own:

Joe the Barbarian

Al Columbia's Pim & Francie collection. Concentrated, industrial-strength nightmare fuel.

Between Alec: The Years Have Pants and Don Martin I'm on hardcover overkill. I had most of the Alec stuff before, but what a great collection front to back. The Don Martin is just too much to absorb. Reading little chunks here and there and marveling at some of the directions he goes in just a few quick panels. Most of it really is genius.

yeah, columbia is terrifying.

i will probably never forgive columbia for not making an actual "comic" out of pim & francie -- not that his "actual comics" are models of three-act structure and cathartic resolution to begin with -- but damn that is a fine book.

Currently having arse kicked by David Small's 'Stitches'

Really wishing the new stuff in Alec would be published as a separate comic, as I spent a lot of time and money in the past getting sll the Alec volumes, and can't afford the big new collection.

even the non-new stuff has been rejiggered, as per every reprint, and there's probably some shorts and things that you haven't seen if you only have the old paperbacks

I feel you though

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Hercules_Thumbs_Up.jpg

so good

Really enjoying Marcos Martin's story arcs on Spider-Man. Ditkoesque.

i found a bookstore selling the first slipcased Uncle Scrooge Carl Barks library for sixty bucks. Also the first Fanta Bernie Krigstein book fjor eighteen and three volumes of the complete crumb library for ten a pop.
Let me know if you're NY based and want a point in the right direction.

ugh that's what i get for direct linking
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/5686/herculesthumbsup.jpg

ha. just read HERC #122 yesterday - that pic brings a smile to my face every time I think about it.

TANGENTIALLY: Man, now I need to hunt down every comic Reilly Brown has been a part of. I'm tempted to believe he's just a pseudonym for Cameron Stewart!

Just read the entire run so far of Fear Agent in a little more than one sitting! I can dig it.

Batman: Cacophony by Kevin Smith is an average story, but I have to admit I loved the return of Onomatopoeia - great silly yet scary villain, back in the Green Arrow book, too. Smith's still not redeemed for that godawful Black Cat story, though.

The Art Of Tony Millionaire by T. Millionaire - Well, obviously. Apparently, MAAKIES began life as a bid for free beer.

Tekkonkinkreet/Black & White/Whatever by Taiyo Matsumoto - Still processing; first impressions - a) wow, and b) clearly this stuff mortally wounded Brandon Graham.

Galaxy Express 999 by Leiji Matsumoto. Awesome 70's manga about this kid who gets on a space train (looks exactly like a classic train, too) to travel to a world where he can get a free android body. Very episodic, with him and the mysterious woman who's protecting him visiting various planets on their way there, including some very spaghetti westernish locations. Grim as fuck, too - kid's mother gets offed by robots within the first pages and he personally takes his revenge. Highly reccomended, tho as far as I can tell it's not available in english (I'm reading in french.)

http://www.horreur.net/img/GALAXY-EXPRESS-999-101503.jpg

Why do all manga blondes look like this person:

http://www.independent.ie/multimedia/archive/00158/SaoirseRonan_opt_158378b.jpg

I dunno, Brandon Graham's a million times more sensual than the Matsumoto that I've seen (if TEKKON KINKKREET is any suitable example, that is.)

Latest CRIMINAL is really, really good. INCOGNITO was beautiful, but not as meaty. Jason Aaron's new PUNISHER is pretty sturdy as well, though it's hard to separate Dillon's work from that on PREACHER (which I'm on and off reading for the first time now.)

It was the same thing for me too when reading the older Punisher stuff with Dillon/Ennis as well as his later work on Wolverine. He has a tendency to reuse the same faces/figures for all his characters. This kind of thing w/artists used to bother me, but not really anymore.

I dunno, Brandon Graham's a million times more sensual than the Matsumoto that I've seen (if TEKKON KINKKREET is any suitable example, that is.)

I don't think sensuality is really Matsumoto's thing, though there's the obligatory panels of the chick in underwear. Mostly I read him for weird cold sci-fi alienation and how his drawing alternates between absolutley gorgeous shots of vehicles/locations and scribbled, frantic tiny panels of the characters.

Brandon Graham's livejournal has done much to make me more receptive to vintage manga.

He has a tendency to reuse the same faces/figures for all his characters.

I started a thread about this phenomenon a while ago, using Dillon as an example:

Why do so many male comic artists draw women that look like each other?

Ha! Funny. I think the two things that really convinced me to stop caring was a)buying the idea that the more general looking faces/caricatures are in comics, the more the reader can identify with them (ala that section in Understanding Comics) - especially effective in superhero/adventure/fantasy stories - and b)Tezuka did it quite blatantly and with purpose in countless books, and made it work. It's not good to have several characters in the same book to look too similar, but among different books, I think it's all right.

buying the idea that the more general looking faces/caricatures are in comics, the more the reader can identify with them (ala that section in Understanding Comics)

Even if you buy this idea, it doesn't mean the faces have to look the same! You can do pretty simplistic/caricaturistic faces without repeating the same face, it just takes some skill. Look at Tintin for example: Herge created dozens and dozens of different characters, all of them drawn with a few simple lines, yet they all look different.

I think more than skill, it takes effort, but there's so many avenues of laziness comics can go down that repetitive faces gets trumped by the practice of actual copy + pasting.

also herge cld spend years and years, w/ the aid an army of assistants, on a single graphic album, whereas poor old steve dillon has to bash out twenty pages of pencils&inks a month (admittedly w/ the aid of that trusty assistant the photocopier - i've seen at least one Preacher original where he's used the same photocopied background for three consecutive panels)

http://joeljohnson.com/images2/wallywood22panel2560.jpg

^awesome!

I am really loving the current Batman and Robin storyline. It manages to combine Grant Morrison mentalism with total thrillpower.

I've discovered that I'm not entirely averse to ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, although I've only read some of the more recent storylines (GOBLIN ANGST/FIRESTAR ANGST/VENOM ANGST) i.e. those without Bagley (NOT A COINCIDENCE).

Perhaps I'll read more.

RIGHT NOW, Batman & Robin 10 just finished kicking my arse. That's the sort of comic I want more of.

In that vein, Christ, COMIC BOOK COMICS #5 can't come out soon enough. June, I think.

Picking up B&R tomorrow, my appetite very whetted.

B&R 10 was indeed brilliant - a most excellent combo of raw thrillpower and GM craziness, with added Jedward.

Enough thrillpower in Powers #3 for a month of Wednesdays. I mean dang!

The Jack Kirby run on The Losers - absolutley grotesque faces, tons of explosions leading to panels full of Akropolis-level destruction, the Losers as sort of Spiritesque supporting players in their own comic.

BLACK JACK remains awesome - Halfway through vol. 3 at the moment, wherein Black Jack encounters his Kevorkian-ish counterpart, Doctor Assisted Suicide, replete with eye patch and tortured military background! This stuff never stops.

Obvious silliness - amending "medical thriller" to "medical thrillpower". I'm very ridiculous.

That Black Jack story sounds fun! Must get back on the Tezuka train.

Been reading LOGICOMIX - pretty dope. Surprisingly good as being a sort of part-Amadeus-style biography, part-self-reflexive examination of Bertrand Russell's logical career, with lots of bits involving the four authors discussing the creation of the book amongst themselves while narrating it.

J. Wellington Wimpy is http://www.tmb32.com/Links_Images/nextlevel.gif in Popeye Vol. 4

i'll provide the dux

my name is jones

The whole Fred Van Lente/Ryan Dunlavey informal Humanities project is pretty nifty - am seriously considering getting the more-than-complete Action Philosophers sometime soon. That Marx bio...heh. Swell stuff!

That and Lynda Barry's ONE HUNDRED DEMONS. Also swell.

THREE DAYS LATER:

I now have a political consciousness, thanks to Joe Sacco (specifically FOOTNOTES IN GAZA)! Someday soon I expect to be officially "all growed up". Yup.

This is gonna rock!

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/04/01/top-shelf-announces-league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen-1988/

Actually laughed. Out loud, even.

Wonderful!

wait, is that not a joke?

We can only dream...

I would really actually love to read a comic where Doc Brown and MacGyver team up, they were both my childhood heroes. But who is this "Lisa" supposed to be?

The created woman from Weird Science.

Oh wait, she's the girl from Weird Science, right?

(x-post)

If the cast would also include Johnny 5 and Prince Akeem, it would be like my childhood dream come true.

Good-Bye, the third collection of stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I love the bleakness of his short stories.

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER = Nifty, natch - McCarthy gets his bronze-age Marvel on. But you know this. Gotta luv 'em splash pages!

fever is pretty great. it's rare that someone does dr strange's nerdy rambling disinterest so well.

Currently writing a piece about my two favorite comics from this week: James Sturm's "Market Day" and Jonathan Hickman & Dustin Weaver's scientists-as-secret-agents detail-freakout S.H.I.E.L.D. #1...

really looking forward to Market Day. It lives up to expectations?

It's very small-scale/low-key, but I liked it a lot.

Not for the first time, I wish I was gay and svelte. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/04/17/the-superhero-gay-set-of-new-york/

The Unclothed Man In The 35th Century - more formally experimental vignettes, less drab 1997 forgettable Miramax - fine by me.

On Tekkonkinkreet: Wow. I have to say it took me literally weeks of crawling through the opening chapters - more than that, probably closer to 200 pages - merely to adjust to the craziness of the art style, its hyper-flatness, its crudeness and lack of consistency, not to mention the totally alienating and mysteriously nostalgic world and characters of Treasure Town. But I'm incredibly glad I persevered - at a certain moment, everything clicked, and I was deeply invested and everything the book was trying to say, all its brutality and sentimentality, burning through 2/3rds of it all tonight. Alternatingly terrifying and heartbreaking at moments. Even having the seen and liked the anime, I felt totally unprepared. Really great stuff.

I bought UNCLOTHED MAN this week, just thinking it was a collection of miscellaneous Shaw shawts. Imagine my annoyance when, removed from plastic shrinkwrap, the inside flap helpfully explains that it's 20% storyboards for a cartoon I can't watch, and 80% stuff I already have. Fuuuuck off, helpful bookshop.

the new peter bagge, other lives, is great.

Mercury, latest Hope Larson - fine, fine work.

Am currently tearing through the collected works of Joe Sacco, in backwards chronological order apparently.

Canadian Comix Artists Draw Superfolx for Charity, Prizes

includes Seth's Dr. Fate

Kate Beaton's Wonder Woman is currently tied w/ Chester Brown's Batman for highest bids.

I think I like Matthew Forsythe's Hawkman the best though.

Kenk the true story fumetti of Toronto's most prolific bike thief is hitting several different pleasure centres for me.

Dan Nadel's new anthology ART IN TIME maybe quite as eye-opening as his previous ART OUT OF TIME selection, but it's still a mouth-watering collection - great to see things like KONA by Sam Glanzman and CHILDREN OF DOOM by Pat Boyette in a nicely reproduced/shot hardcover art bk

The Chris Ware cover to Blab #8, as seen in Raeburn's Ware monograph. That'll brighten up your week.

Oh, and as seen here

More recs: Sexy Voice and Robo by Iou Kuroda (fun teen spy book, a little more original than most of these kind of adventure books. average art with the occasional brilliant page that pops). Grandville by Bryan Talbot (ridiculous 24-esque furry steampunk Bush administration-inspired conspiracy thriller).

http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/06/rocks-fall-everybody-dies-asterios-polyp/
^bang on with my assessment of it

Weird how it didn't bother me much when I read it since I still really liked the rest of the story - just another "well, at least they learned before it was time to go" sort of fable - but OTOH, walking out of A Serious Man I wanted to repeatedly stab the Coen Brothers for wasting my time

GRANDVILLE was an utter disaster

it looked way less disaster-y than Sunderland, but that one was so bad I didn't dare spend money on Grandville. what were some major flaws?

didn't hate SUNDERLAND as much as you did, sic, tho' it was def v v flawed. but GRANDVILLE just seemed to me totally misconceived on almost every level - it wasn't cute enough, or clever enough, it was surprisingly vulgar and violent yet at the same time totally juvenile, the 'contemporary parallels' (to homeland security/the dr david kelly business/9-11 etc etc) were drawn really clumsily and didn't tell us anything new, the lead character was actually quite unlikeable, every situation and person was nothing more than a cipher or a cliche, and the simple, basic story was boring and unsurprising. there were too many fight scenes/chase scenes, too many crappy computer effects - and a lot of the animals used simply didn't lend themselves to the expressions and postures that the stupid story required of them (i'm thinking of a really fugly horsey dude in particular.) i cld go on...

hmm. wonder how much he might have used computer architecture and poser programs overall. last time I saw a copy it was shrinkwrapped, but I'm extremely curious about this in general!

prob the best thing abt jonathan cape publishing graphic novs now is that it means their stuff turns up a lot in UK public libraries, which is how I came to read GRANDVILLE (a friend of mine leant me SUNDERLAND, but sooo glad i didn't pay for this lemon)

I thought Grandville was pretty good. Sure, the political allegory was quite heavy-handed, but the fact that it was a steampunk comic with talking animals made it quite obvious that you weren't supposed to take it too seriously. And it's true that Talbot's detailed art style probably isn't best suited for cute animals, but on the other hand I loved how much effort he put into building this world - like drawing animalized versions of famous artworks as minor background details. And with the characters who weren't supposed to look cute in the first place, like the rhino guy, I thought his style fitted well. The basic story and characters were kinda cliched, but I thought they worked well enough that it didn't matter, like in your basic Hollywood spectacle where the emphasis is on the visuals and not on an original plot. And the overall visual design here was quite impressive. The computer effects surely were more subtle and less numerous here than in Alice in Sunderland? The only part where I really noticed them was the opening chase scene, but other than that Talbot used them sparingly. As far as his steampunk comics go, Grandville was no Heart of the Empire, but it was still an enjoyable and nice-looking yarn.

WHAT I'M LIKING LATELY:

The Bulletproof Coffin: Made my week.

Morrison Bat-stuff: NATCH.

Doing The Islands With Bacchus: Can't really go wrong there - "Last Of The Summer Wine" is some kind of perfect, though I can't explain why.

Sub-Life by John Pham: The opening vignette, the autobio elementary school thing, everything else.

Sub-Life was pretty good, but in that way where I'm more excited about what Pham is going to do in the future than what he's got done right now

my copy of batman 700 has like 8 pages of the latest (bad) issue of titans where a chunk of the bruce wayne story should be. :(

bulletproof coffin was pretty good. enjoying giffen on booster gold.

New english language ish of Dungeon is remarkable.
Consistently the best comic out there and it's several years old already.

No idea what that is; for future reference please list author when it comes to such generic titles

Trondheim & Sfar. All awesome.

I haven't read the newest one yet, but I'd definitely agree with "Consistently the best comic out there". Dungeon is brilliant.

Yeah, what they all said; sorry, I thought we've discussed Dungeon enough that they were commonly known.
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/04/comics-college-lewis-trondheim/
http://www.nbmpub.com/humor/trondheim/dungeon/dungeonhome.html
They're unduly expensive ($16 for a pamphlet?) but absolutely worth it.
The second chapter of the newest ish (Twilight v. 3) is a brilliant allegory for world politics.

Trondheim has done the latest volume of that Spirou Elseworlds series, which has been consistently high quality (and unavailable in english), I'm very excited.

At this point, anything from Sfar/Trondheim/Blain is must buy.
also got the last volume of Pluto and am settling in to read from volume one.

thanks for the links

Not comics, but writing about comics (we don't have a Things Worth Reading About Comics thread, right?):

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g922763634

old news to most of you i bet, but damn, Marvel's Strange Tales has tons of great creators and funny stories in it. so many!

The Puma Blues - Vol. 2: Sense Of Doubt: What an odd book.

I just read the last issue of The Sword (by Luna Bros.) and it absolutely kicked my ass. Every issue overflowed with Thrillpower.

Surprisingly, Second Coming. This is the best X-crossover I've read in maybe 25 years.

(particularly Hellbound)

The first issue of Paul Cornell's Action Comics Starring Lex Luthor Because We Can't Use Superman is pretty terrific, as such things go.

I. Love. Puma Blues.

Due for a re-reading actually. But that'll have to wait until after I finish re-reading DOOM PATROL, which in many ways is my total ideal comic book. There's a lot of references that are dated now, but the stories still hold up. At least they do so far.

SCALPED and CRIMINAL are reliable stand-bys as well.

if someone's enjoyed some of Cornell's Dr Who but is leery of horrible DC dismemberape crossover continuity, is this Action Lex worth a try?

I think Cornell's "Action" basically explains all of the crossovery stuff you need to know to enjoy it. (Opening scene: mysterious costumed people are dangling Lex upside-down from a rooftop. His eyes are closed, and he's got a beatific expression on his face. "What are you doing?" one of them asks. He responds: "What am I doing? I'm meditating. What are _you_ doing?")

Aight, if it's still on the shelf when I go next, will give it a look

Yes, DOOM PATROL was as good as I'd remembered it. Better in places. Though that middle part sure gets wacky with a capital Q.

I think Cornell's "Action" basically explains all of the crossovery stuff you need to know to enjoy it. (Opening scene: mysterious costumed people are dangling Lex upside-down from a rooftop. His eyes are closed, and he's got a beatific expression on his face. "What are you doing?" one of them asks. He responds: "What am I doing? I'm meditating. What are _you_ doing?")

I was reading Action on the basis of this, and the Lois thing was really bugging me--seemed a huge continuity thing that needed explaining--but then it was explained. Very enjoyable stuff actually.

Yes, DOOM PATROL was as good as I'd remembered it. Better in places. Though that middle part sure gets wacky with a capital Q.

I assume you're referring to the grand and wacky space/SPACE war saga? Christ, that's one of my favorite stories ever - every other panel comes adorned with a swell idea.

No, not that. I like how it's a total sideways take on space operas. Was talking about the Sex Men and Shadowy Mr. Evans, which came dangerously close to going right off the rails.

In many ways, I think it's the best thing Morrison's ever done. Well, not exactly true. FLEX MENTALLO is better. But it's an amazing comic from a time that's overlooked in general, or at least overshadowed by the rise of Image comics.

May re-read THE INVISIBLES next. Wish I had a digital version so I could read on my laptop when I go on vacation. Books is heavy.

Really, Morrison's Doom Patrol is my favourite comic ever. I read it at just the right time in my life, and the magic has never faded with rereading.

I assume you're referring to the grand and wacky space/SPACE war saga? Christ, that's one of my favorite stories ever - every other panel comes adorned with a swell idea.

I love Doom Patrol to death, but I think space war arc was the worst part of Morrison's run. Sure there were plenty of ideas, but the pacing and plotting of the story was awful - it was just a bunch of ideas stacked on top of each other. Thankfully the plotting got much better again towards the end of Morrison's run.

Really, Morrison's Doom Patrol is my favourite comic ever. I read it at just the right time in my life, and the magic has never faded with rereading.

So very OTM

Weirdly, Keith Giffen has just brought back Crazy Jane and Mr Nobody in the current Doom Patrol book. I've only browsed through them quickly at the comic store, but he seems to be making a right old hash of it, as you might expect.

Point I never get tired of making: Is there a better next issue box than "Next Issue: [Weird Squiggle]" towards the end of the run?

I'd heard that Giffen was using Danny the Bungalow and was kinda afraid. This just cements it.

But then I found the first couple issues of the recent DOOM PATROL relaunch to be borderline unreadable and so off the mark as to not want read a third.

Honestly, the only way it seems a DOOM PATROL book would work now would be to just start over from scratch, which is the last thing anyone wants to do in big-two comics, it seems.

Suppose we should move this to a DOOM PATROL love thread.

Threadmancy instigated. Continue talking about other books that you are liking right now.

Just read the first book of HITMAN and I was thinking "What an odd little book." I'm not sure it's as good as I was led to believe, but at least it's something different. Though I'm largely impervious to Garth Ennis' charms, so perhaps I'm not the best subject for this.

I am sort of excited about reading JEPH! LOEB'S! Challengers of the Unknown, which I enjoyed as a kid, and just bought for $4. Although I maybe I shouldn't read it, and pretend I did.

In other news, Kate Beaton still kicking it every single time.

Hitman gets better and better as it goes along.

It's true: Hitman doesn't really hit its stride until "Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium" and the Catwoman storyline after that, but subsequently it's pretty reliable.

This response to a (pretty good) piece on Scott Pilgrim in the Walrus: http://sequential.spiltink.org/?p=4531