Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

should i read this it sounds intersting

Everyone should read it, it's possibly the best sci-fi comic of all time, at least for the first dozen books or so. If imaginative cosmic visions and cool alien designs are your thing, you won't be disappointed. I'm still not sure whether George Lucas actually borrowed elements from it to Star Wars, but once you read it you'll understand why people (including the creators of the comic) think so.

the first volume includes Bad Dreams, City of Shifting Waters, and The Empire of a Thousand Planets. there are some more volumes slated for release, but i figured i'd just get the first one and see what he thinks. so i think i'll order it for him! he's watched the trailer probably about twenty times, i think he'll be pretty thrilled to get the book in lieu of seeing the film.

Wes Brodicus at 2:55 19 May 17

The scenes where people get swarmed by the titular birds are about as bad as the attic scene in that Hitchcock movie. Barely suitable for ten-year old me iirc.
xpost - "Les Habitants du ciel" - two volumes, neither of which was translated. The first one is grebt, haven't read the second.

I guess people's mileage may vary on this, those scenes didn't disturb me, and " Birds of the Master" was the first Valérian book I read around the age of 8. But I wasn't particularly scared by that Hitchcock movie either.

I didn't know about a second bestiary! Have to check whether they've translated that one into Finnish too.

xmessage

Yeah, that first volume should definitely be okay for a kid. It's worth noting that The Empire of a Thousand Planets is when the series really finds it's voice tho. Bad Dreams in particular is quite different from what follows, being a time travel story set mostly in the Middle Ages. So if your kid likes the cool aliens in the trailer, he might be a bit disappointed by it. TEoaTP is when depicting weird and colourful aliens and planets really becomes the series' draw.

http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/article/asian_comics

I think I've mentioned this before. I think I'll buy it but it's a shame there doesn't seem to be enough pictures. I tend to lose interest in a lot of books about comics quite quickly but in this case, everything is so vague to me that this might be more engrossing.
Lent has a book on Chinese comics coming out soon, might be a reprint because I could swear I seen a very similar book years ago.

sounds interesting but no pics.. eh

Do you mean preview pictures? There's supposed to be 178 pictures in the book but just not nearly enough to cover all that you'd want.

Drawn And Dangerous (the Italian comics book) didn't have enough images but it was a brilliant examination.

this weekend i splurged on the JOJOVELLER art book and it's worth every penny

http://i.imgur.com/CyrCeh2.jpg

basically every page is jaw-dropping. i think i like steel ball run and jojolion the best, but there are some good jolyne ones too

Finished the run of Chew. Fun book, good times.

Astonishingly, Steve Ditko is working with IDW for Mr A collections to come out. I never thought he'd bother with anyone but Robin Snyder.

This is gonna one of those things we highly regret once it comes out, won't we

Depends which end of the black and white card you're at

Mr. A is terrible

My friend and I used to try to use as many of his crazy initialized dialogue formulae

(DOWENOBU = "don't weep now, but")

In conversation as we could

I had a couple of issues of Mr. A in my first collection back in the 80s. I remember them being really f-in weird and having all sorts of wild lettering.

The earliest Mr A stories are really well drawn and appealingly weird, like the thing that shouts out letters at people. A lot of the best stuff was splash images of criminals flailing around and sinking into the black side.

The Question was overall better though. The DC reprints of it look awful though.

Crackling Blazer is still the weirdest small press thing he ever done. "CABOO!"

I agree that the early Mr A strips that appeared in Witzend and elsewhere are amongst Ditko's best-drawn comics, so to dismiss them as simply 'terrible' seems an inattentive judgement. I don't know of any comic book work (as opposed to newspaper strip work) prior to Mr A that had expressed so plainly a political viewpoint- and tbh, the 'A is A' 'philosophy' espoused isn't any cruder or lacking in nuance than the 'democratic vigilantism' of most mainstream superhero comics. There's something singular about Ditko's best 'political' comics - they're obviously very deeply felt, and that intensity radiates from the page - and in his desire to express his views, he seems to be grasping for a whole new form of comics, reaching its apogee with the utterly unhinged Avenging World comic (which I'm lucky enough to own a signed copy of, inherited from Martin Skidmore, who got a cover out of Ditko for his fanzine FA back in the day.)

Fantagraphics of course published two volumes of Ditko comics, including lots of Mr A, before they had a big fallen out with Sturdy Steve - I expect those volumes are pretty collectible now. It will be interesting to see if the hook-up with IDW lasts longer.

I was never able to get the second Fantagraphics collection.

Grrl Scouts are back!!! This totally took me by surprise, but I have a lot of nostalgia for the earlier series (they're some of the first comics I bought myself - the art really caught my eye), so I snapped the new issue up immediately. I've never really been convinced by Jim Mahfood as a writer, but who cares - it's delirious crazy fun, and of course the art is awesome.

Not quite comic-y, but I was in a London charity bookshop, flipping through Michael Cho's sketchbook of Toronto alleyways, and my old apartment in it. I was like, holy shit, Michael Cho drew my back deck and toilet window

And *found* my old... I meant

Amazon has some deal where if you buy a digital graphic novel you get one of a selection of Marvel tpbs free in digital, too. Also, I think I knew but forgot if you want a collection on comiXology, check on amazon because the kindle edition, which also gives it to you on comiXology, sometimes cost half the price (?!?)

Surprise surprise, the Mr A collections are cancelled.

lol

Just read the first volume of Clean Room by Gail Simone. Reallllllly good, nasty horror. I don't even want to spoil the premise, which is clear by the end of the first volume, but it's real good.

I thought it was really up and down in floppies, entertaining enough but the final act felt superfluous.

really up and down in floppies

*snort*

not a fan of Simone's work.
Something i read that i kinda love is "Delicious Dungeon" by Ryoko Kui, an RPG cooking manga about a group of adventurers who meet up with an oddball dwarf chef who shows them how to hunt for food inside a dungeon to better LEVEL UP
the recipes are meticulous (there are graphs showing fat/protein content) and it's all meganerdy fun.
Scanlated online here: http://mangakakalot.com/manga/dungeon_meshi

first volume available in english now
https://www.amazon.com/Delicious-Dungeon-Vol-Ryoko-Kui/dp/0316471852

I just read the three hardcovers of Casanova and man my head hurts, from the last story especially. Anyone know where I could find a good plot summary or notes to what the hell I just read?

The newer ones that follow Luxuria/Gula/Avaritia?

If you want to start a thread, I'm game. I'm not sure there's a great rundown out there, although if you're really lost, it's nice to check a wiki-style site just as a cheat sheet of who the characters were originally before they get twisted through the space-time continuum.

What's been released of the third series is both more straightforward and more of a departure.

Sorry, *fourth* series. For some reason I keep thinking it's the third they're on.

yeah i just finished Avaritia

just read josh simmons 'furry trap' and it's immensely disturbing work, right up there with graham ingels and s. clay wilson as the most genuinely unsettling comics i've ever seen. it's cumulative as much as anything but even excerpts are unpleasant.
http://68.media.tumblr.com/092c721ea67c070621ab373d996d3894/tumblr_inline_ne6kif2PEc1rb0pi4.png

checked some excerpts and it verges a bit into johnny ryan-style "macho male misanthropy is hilarious" styles for my liking. but persuade me i'm wrong!

I haven't read his most recent work but that's essentially my take on him

i understand the potential connect with Ryan (who I dig in a different way) but think Simmons work is drastically in a different vein. i don't think his stuff is misanthropic at all so much as it is an exploration of damage. It's painfully labored work and unpleasant to read but there's not really any irony or comedy at play that I can see.

http://www.tcj.com/one-more-lens-through-which-to-process-the-world-a-horror-filled-conversation-with-josh-simmons/

There’s an element of having your cake and eating it too with the violence in my stuff, I suppose: both indulging in it and commenting on it, or having some distance from it. Makes it harder to parse. I know I want the violence in my stories to have weight. I don’t want it to be violence for laughs, or to be numbing. I suppose that’s part of why people sometimes react so strongly to my stuff. Because it isn’t played for laughs, there isn’t an ironic distance. I work hard to make the characters feel believable and real. There’s humor in the stories, but it isn’t at the expense of the victim. What really perplexes me is when critics dismiss the work as a kind of calloused bro humor fuckery, when if anything the work is born out of hypersensitivity and vulnerability.

hmm

of course, he references Haneke (who i love) and Von Trier (who i hate) in the same paragraph so ymmv is about right.

Not a comics person, but I bought the first issue of the new Vader series today at Newbury Comics.

I read somewhere that the second one came out yesterday?

yep

Got it. Read it. Are all single issues of comics this quick to read?

most, sure. some are denser when it comes to dialogue or take some scrutiny to really dig into the art

I guess I just didn’t know!

It's something that sticks out for me as someone who imprinted on comics of the 70s and 80s, that many comics of the last 20 years or so are just SUCH fast reads (speaking mainly of mainstream stuff here - alternative stuff still runs the gamut from ridiculously chewy to sinfully lazy). I'm just a lot more comfortable in that verbose, purple but genuinely bizarre world of the first wave of post-Stan hippies.

When I started reading 50s-60s comics it was amazing how long they taken to read and loved seeing lots of small detailed panels but once the novelty wore off and it became apparent how redundant most of the text was, I much prefer minimal text and larger images. Can feel like a ripoff but I think it's better storytelling for the most part.

I bought Sandman Overture and decided immediately that I'd never read it. Looks like way too much work.

I like manga for the lack of clutter but the artists I like are so few and far between, unfortunately. Shouldn't be surprising how much price tag and page count restriction shape the storytelling techniques.