Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

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.

Remember so many interesting looking alternative comics in expensive hardcover but not much actual content.

I think Warren Ellis gets some blame for his philosophical waxing about "cinematic" comics with the larger panel layouts, widescreen-emulating dual page spreads, but it didn't really become an issue for me until it turned into writers trying to pull off the same shtick without thinking it through, and handing it to artists who were in a deadline crunch.

The previous Vader book was denser, but I could see an argument for using the style with that character. You could do a hell of a lot with a guy who doesn't speak a whole lot moving through these low-dialogue scenarios just going crazy with throwing guys around, lightsaber action, etc. I'm not sure how well this current book is doing that.

Manga is for sure the real influence, but there's a reason those volumes are so thick!

The style really needs to merit the large panels. I prefer heavily illustrated comics, so bigger panels become more desirable for the images to achieve full effect.

Anyone seen Superani? It's a Korean collective of mostly very skilled artists, some of them do comics. I knew Jung Gi Kim and Woojin Oh but the rest aren't familiar.
http://www.superani.com/index01.html

I like the looser lines, don't know if that's a Korean thing, but I have heard that Korean artists are more anatomically realistic than Japanese generally.

I think Warren Ellis gets some blame for his philosophical waxing about "cinematic" comics with the larger panel layouts, widescreen-emulating dual page spreads,

― mh, Saturday, 24 June 2017 15:05

I remember some of this. My main objection at the time was mainstream comics culture's nauseating reverence for blockbuster films (which has probably gotten worse).

the "widescreen action" that's taken over since the early 2000s is the Americanization of manga tropes. always thought it was due to the much more expensive per page rates of doing full color work, slow pages, etc. it's great when it works... and i'm not clamoring to go back tons of captions and dialogue boxes tbh

xp yeah, exactly

http://comicsworkbook.tumblr.com/post/136605908622/hey-everyone-this-is-an-article-on-color-i-did
Really good article about comics coloring.

xp
I recently read the LSH "Great Darkness Saga" collection, and was struck by how dense and complex it was... sometimes I couldn't finish a single issue in one sitting! (And I grew up reading comics in the '80s, so I'm used to lots of dialogue and captions; but that book is a tour de force of density.)

The fact that comics have become more $$$ over time (significantly outpacing inflation) can contribute to the feeling you're being ripped off sometimes these days. Most single issues I read feel satisfying enough, though; and I imagine it would feel odd / "retro" to read something new that uses the old style (characters speaking full paragraphs to each other in a single panel, while frozen mid-kick, etc.)

(Btw, I'm going to hope/assume that the $$$ surcharge mentioned above is being passed along to the creators, and isn't just the add'l cost of keeping the ship running due to declining readership... a question for others here who know more about the economics of the biz.)

http://weaves.tumblr.com/post/128584557180/gerte-dorch-scorch-the-porch-opens-friday-at

This guys work is pretty creepy

https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/6/67663/5877267-01.jpg

Enjoyed this, one of those GNs done in collaboration with the Louvre. This one's about a Louvre security guard whose future in-laws are trying to force him to add a hideous old family heirloom to the gallery walls.