a prodigal son returns (i.e. ILC tell me what i have missed, what i should buy, etc etc.)

oh, and nominal favorites blah blah:

l&r
moore-era swamp thing
kirby
woodring
various newspaper strips
crumb
little nemo
doom patrol
blah de friggin blah

i'm also a pisces and enjoy long walks at dusk

But what spandex books did you like?

Regardless: you wuv Doom Patrol = you need to check out the hardcovers collecting Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men.

dl motherfucker

KILLING THE INDUSTRY etc.

download?!?!

YES

1) google: bittorrent client
2a) google: bittorrent comics
2b) wait for ILC to cough up links

between grant morrison doing x-men and downloading comics my brain is pudding

anyway, all the usual suspects daver: miller daredevil, uncanny x-men (thee "classic" years), i was a fairly undiscriminating batman reader through most of my adolescence, etc etc.

i use www.demonoid.com but welcome other reccommends, i've just started doing the bittorrent thing myself (for reasons dorkier than dling comics: DLING AUDIOBOOKS)

http://trackerb.zcultfm.com:6969/ (there's a link to another tracker on that page, and on the linked page a few others)

There's a new Swamp Thing comic out, and it's a throwback to the older stuff -- not quite Moore exactly, but much more like Moore and the stuff immediately after him than anything in the last ten years.

The Morrison Doom Patrols are being collected in TPBs if you don't still have them -- same with his Animal Man, which you ought to have loved to or you're a bastard.

Bendis's current Daredevil run is pretty well-liked by fans of the Miller DD.

We'll probably think of other stuff ... keep an eye on the Best of 2004 poll too, probably (I don't remember how many of the nominations are necessarily jumping-on points).

Oh, and Astonishing X-Men -- by Buffy's Joss Whedon. Maybe read Morrison's X-Men first, since it builds out of that, but I'd only read a few of Morrison's issues before Astonishing started and I was fine.

YOU FIEND!

Oh, yeah - on the "OMG MARVERTIGO WTF" tip, you shd also know, that Peter Milligan is A) currently doing a run on X-Men, and B) did a Critically Acclaimed run on X-Force w/ Mike Allred!

As for d/ling, SH - you can use SLSK, too! Search for .cbr files! (And then d/l a cbr reader - check out that 1st link - to read the files.)

[xpost]

Hahaha - SH is actually NOMINATED in the Best of 2004 poll!

so did marvel let all these people run amok because no one reads comics anymore or what?

Morrison had already done JLA at DC, and it went over huge -- so he wasn't as much of a risk on X-Men as he might've been (I have no idea how he got JLA). X-Force was one of so many X-books that for all you know they might've given you one of them, too, and you just don't check your mail as often as Allred and Milligan. I'm pretty sure at one point Dazzler was being written by the eighth-grade winner of a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest.

(Marvel had also been playing around willy-nilly with the X-titles, giving a bunch to Warren Ellis to recreate for other writers.)

There was probably a lot of "well, X-Men ALWAYS sells, so why not get some good reviews/sell some more TPBs/maybe get new readers while we're at it" going on, too, even though that's the opposite of what the traditional argument always was ("people will always buy Superman, so save the box office draw writers/artists for characters that don't sell themselves").

Oh: and Bone ended, and the whole thing is available in a ridiculously cheap single volume, like $30 Amazon and the size of a study Bible. I don't know if that would appeal, but it's sort of in line with Little Nemo and a few of the other things.

Yes yes the Milligallred X-Force is urgent and key to pick up, though when X-F became X-Statix, only the first trade is worth any cop.

Also hi jess! I bet you are a hottie, gurl!

is demonoid good for audiobooks blount?

Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil, for my money, is notable as the first really interesting thing that's been done with the character that owes almost nothing to Miller--he's finally come up with a new approach.

I try to push Carla Speed McNeil's "aboriginal SF" series Finder on everyone.

David B.'s graphic novel Epileptic is one of the best comics I've ever read--really visually and narratively original.

Kevin Huizenga has not published much--a bunch of minicomics, a couple of anthology stories, two issues of Or Else--but what there is is fantastic.

I'm very very fond of Morrison's current multi-miniseries project Seven Soldiers of Victory.

Yes to KH & Or Else! Also along the same lines: Jeffrey Brown's Miniature Sulk.

She-Hulk
X-Statix
1602

Bear (bare) in mind my musical taste.

hello!

i am reading epileptic at work right now. i also read that (shockingly slight) (though perhaps not given his famous workrate) art spiegelman 9/11 thing that came out last year.

our comic selection at work is not as good as i had hoped.

the spiegelman thing's alright - it got hosannas it sure as hell didn't deserve (i swear to god i even saw a 'comics: they aren't just for kids anymore' piece on it), but it didn't deserve alot the snipes either. epileptic's really great.

it was a halfway-alright ten-installment magazine strip, it was a fucking ricockulous forty-dollar graphic novel (at the exact same ten pages...)

?!?

Kit's got this math problem, see...

*Paul has a Summer Job - Michael Rabagliati (elegantly drawn autobiographical GN set in Canada during the 1970s - published by Drawn & Quarterly)

*Marvel Super Pages - Johnny Ryan (hilarious, obscene U/G parodies)

*New Kingdom - Darwyn Cooke (retro-futurism that looks+reads like a penmeld of Toth and Kirby)

I'm sure it was pretty damn ricockulous at whatever the US$ price was too...

I think it was $25-30 US, which is A-OK in my book.

TEN PAGES!!!!!!!

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Eplieptic is a 300+ page behemoth! And it's only $16.95 US via Amazon!

I'm talking about In The Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman!

In the Shadow of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman
Price: $13.57 & Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details
Hardcover: 42 pages

Kit, I think living in a former prison colony is messing w/ your head.

the actual strip is only ten pages long, and the book is padded out by a) running it sideways in double-page spreads, b) having text essays further explicating the fact that Spiegelman was scared when the towers were on fire, and especially c) running an arseload of early C20th newspaper strips in the back to desperately try and make it look more substantial. (not to mention d) printing the fucker on 3mm-thick cardboard pages).

and $37.95 was the price last time I looked at a copy in a bookshop, I dare say the list price before Amazon discounts is like $20-22?

okay I just checked my copy and the Penguin edition (ie the one sold here) is £20 (converts to US$36.50 so eat my fuc non-convicts, or A$47.83), and the old strip reprints in the back take up 12 pages compared to the 20 of the double-trucked No Towers itself. that 42pp from the Amazon listing probably includes the covers and end-papers, as it's self-covered.