Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

So, uh...why didn't they do that decades ago? Seems like such a no-brainer.

because decades ago they still acted like a publisher of newsstand periodicals instead of the current direct market-only, single distributor, no returns mess they've now got going

pretty sure we've covered this elsewhere, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_market

by the end of the 90s the newsstand market was almost completely gone and all of the different distributors collapsed into Diamond

I was just wondering the other day what happened to all those spinning racks at 7-11 or whatever.

They've already been publishing these tiny little digest comics for years, usually under the Marvel Adventures line

xp - I had three of them at one point, but gave 'em all away

xpost Yeah, they've put out digest-sized tpbs but afaik the distribution has been basically the same as with their regular reprints. It felt like they were aiming more for the manga market than the casual 'eight-year-old bored at the grocery store with his mom' demographic.

I was super-psyched the other day when I saw some of those $5 bags of random-ass fifteen year old comics at Target. Those mysterious, context-free, random-ass issues of Micronauts: The New Voyages and Kull the Conqueror were what got me into comics in the first place.

Whoa - Target? What section?

When I do encounter a comics rack (at an actual newsstand), I notice it has only DC and Archie titles.

xpost There was just a small pile of those bags in the weird little trading card/vinyl figure keychain ghetto next to the registers. It's nice to see that someone out there is still engaged in packaging that stuff, however little respect it may be afforded. Kinda makes me want to go buy a ton of quarter bin stuff and do it myself.

I distinctly remember picking up a bag collecting Alan Davis's first solo storyline on Excalibur and being like...yeah, okay, now that I'm reading a whole story instead of just disconnected single issues of whatever's lying around, I can say that this comics thing is totally for me.

i really need to see book one first but this is strangely tempting
https://www.gofundme.com/beinagraphicnovel

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2017/02/jeddah-sci-fi-fans-flock-comic-con-expo-170219150013781.html
First Comicon in Saudi Arabia.

Mads Mikkelsen, Charles Dance and a bunch of others were there. Oddly the entrances were gender segregated but the actual event wasn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtF4YnDaUw

Shit, that's two different cons, one from 2014. Silly me.

Klaus Jansen's pencil work is a bit under appreciated. I think the last big project he penciled was the Death of the Maidens Batman/Ra's Al Ghul story with Greg Rucka. I know Jansen was doing some inks on some of JR Jr's last Marvel work, which looked a bit odd as Romita's been going with a bit more Kirby looking artwork, which seemed different with Jansen's looser inking.

Only read a few, but this French guy is pretty good and French: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2017/01/19/your-comment-here/

Love Boulet. My gf owns a bunch of his sketchbooks.

Finished Junji Ito's "Tomie". Definitley impressive, though could have been a bit shorter. I liked the bit with the photographer girl best - having an actual three dimensional protagonist to fight the threat gave it more oomph. Great art throughout, with some grody body horror.

Yikes, that looks creepy as shit. I'll check it out!

Just read The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon, which is gorgeous and funny, but the ending is a bit shit. And Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, which is technically incredible but so, so depressing.

the Vol. 2 hardcover of True Swamp is at the printer and Uncivilized tells me there's about even odds that advance copies will make it in time for MoCCA fest. Trying not to get my hopes up. I'll be at the Uncivilized table regardless, of course. Anyone else going?

Probably, yay you!

My Favorite Thing is Monsters is quite something. It's enormous and epic, and so big I don't quite see where it's going. There are moments of genius in it.
I have to say I was INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATED when I got to the end and saw this was only Volume 1. Dying to know how this story concludes!
Forks, in particular I think you will dig it, if you haven't read yet

i ended up giving her a hundred bucks and expect to be IN the second book as a character so yeah, i'm pretty into it! My copy has been held up on amazon for weeks.

anyways, i just finished all four volumes of Manu Larcenet's 800 page investigation into psychosis, BLAST. Boy, it's good! like stupidly good. beautifully beautifully realized.

RIP Bernie Wrightson.

Next to my recommendations on the obituary thread, his Purple Pictography collaboration with Vaughn Bode is brilliant.

It's odd that he never got a proper art book after A Look Back in the late 70s. There were sketchbooks but never any other big ass books that he deserved.

RIP snappy skip williamson
http://www.tcj.com/skip-williamson-1944-2017/
back to back with Jayzey Lynch, truly sad

Yeah, it feels like the Comics Journal site is just a sucession of RIP articles these days. :( is 2017 the 2016 of comics?

http://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C1524101311#previewImages

I might go for this. I'm quite fond of Luis Garcia Mozos and Ramon Torrents. Apparently the reason so many of their women looked the same is because Mozos and a few others drew his girlfriend. They probably used a lot of the same models.

http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/3000-954/Will-Eisner-The-Centennial-Celebration-1917-2017-Ltd-Ed-HC#prettyPhoto

100 copies signed by Eisner?

A new volume of Miura's Berserk in July. Hope the story hurries up a bit but it probably won't.

you know what is low key one of the best monthly comics being made right now? The Flintstones. I shit you not.

Who's the creative team?

Barney and Wilma

I read a couple Flintstones comics after a previous recommendation on ILC. It's not bad, but it's just... too weird that it exists?

Like, it's a full colour, modern, Hanna-Barbera-approved glossy magazine,, when it feels like it should've been published in 1989, as some unofficial b&w photostatted piece of shit called the Flintstains or something.

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/books-comics/flintstones/263442/flintstones-10-exclusive-preview-pages
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/books-comics/snagglepuss/261937/theres-a-new-snagglepuss-comic-coming-and-it-sounds-great

Fred and Barney go to a porno theater is def some "1989... unofficial b&w photostatted piece of shit" steez no thx

eh, the vibe for me is peter bagge plotting with dan clowes dryness. i like it a lot.

has anyone on here read East of West? is it any good?

Well, I guess there's nowhere to go but up with Hanna Barbera characters, so good on DC, I guess.

I thought east of west was garbage

(And the most recent issue of the flintstones is the weakest unfortunately)

Much like Manhattan Projects, East of West is beautiful to look at, but gets wearyingly cynical after a few issues. Hickman is a lot like Geoff Johns sometimes - he likes pulling legs off flies and laughing about it. (He's a better writer than Johns, obviously.) And the 3000-part-storytelling gets a bit boring when he doesn't have iconic Marvel characters to hang his shtick off.

Which is to say, I think he's very smart but his sense of humour sucks.

Aside from that - just read By The Numbers, which collects a bunch of ligne-claire stories from the 90s, very much in Yves Chaland's "Tintin but ethically challenged" mode. Recommended library borrow, probably not worth paying for. The art looks better on the page than it does in JPG form below.

Also read Arkham Asylum for the first time - boy, everyone was right about it not being very good, but I guess you have to admire the fact that it was published at all. My favourite moment moment comes in GM's liner notes at the end, when he admits that the "subtextual material might have been lost on the casual reader". The 15th anniversary edition also includes GM's thumbnail panel sketches, with everything panelled out like a trad Jim Aparo comic. I think I might have preferred that comic.

https://cdn.bleedingcool.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/By-the-Numbers-lite-21.jpg

arkham asylum felt super important when if first came out and unfortunately it was

i can recommend Koren Shadmi's 'The Abaddon' as a worthwhile take on No Exit; nice art, well laid out story
https://www.amazon.com/Abaddon-Koren-Shadmi/dp/1940878055
http://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/e04ba324653975.5604a8fe7b641.jpg

arkham asylum felt super important when if first came out and unfortunately it was

― Bobson Dugnutt (ulysses), Sunday, April 9, 2017 5:20 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think more than any other lesson, living more than a couple decades has given me the insight that art that seems poignant or edgy in its time will be recycled into mainstream culture that makes you shrug or die a little years later. The comics to movie/television arc that's come to fruition of the last few years is both enlightening and soul destroying.

There's Dave McKean stuff going on in the tv/films?