Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

You can address all those things without making the “not respecting comics as art” argument your key issue. If it’s really about making an affordable thing for fans, then print it in a softcover without blowing up bad scans to huge size. There’s a lot of scanned older stuff online, either in the public domain or a grey area, and I wonder if some of these projects aren’t even doing scanning work

It's funny that so many commenters on that post talk about how inexpensive yoe books are - I find them way too expensive for what you get. If they were trade paperbacks at normal size and ten bucks less, we'd be talking.

But then, the whole hardcover thing has pretty much taken most new feature length comics work out of the realm of possibility for me anyway. I literally can't afford comics anymore now that everything comes out in HC. Supporting two people on my paycheck, etc etc. (also I know I shouldn't talk as my last two things have been HC only)

there's some ambiguity in how "coffee table books" is being used, I think. on one end, that evokes some really expensive curated books that are done with an archivist's eye, where someone's dug through archives and inside sources to compile a large-sized book that might pair art with commentary

on the other end, you get the stuff that ends up on the large discounted shelves in the area in front of the cash register at big book chains like B&N with mediocre production values that are made to sell copies

there's overlap, and some publishers do both, but neither is really targeting people who just love flipping through comics

file me under "just glad he's getting this stuff in print"; i have discovered a few artists via Yoe (Boody Rogers for instance) that might've escaped me.

According to some these would have been in print by someone else in better shape.

Some of those complaints sound fair (unpaid people working on the books, not the best scans, Spiegelman lawsuit, apparently beating other people to the punch so that their version is less viable) but I like the designs of them better than a lot of otherwise superior Fantagraphics books. I'd go as far to say Fantagraphics are the best American comics publisher ever but some of their book design is a bit sterilizing and "arty" in a bad way.

I really dislike this cover
https://www.comics.org/issue/1153115/cover/4/
Why not just use one of the best drawings inside the book? I hate those closeups that fetishize the dots and roughness. I think that's a disservice to the artist.

Some felt that they made Peanuts look like something it wasn't. Exaggerated the glumness to make it more like Chris Ware or betrayed its true spirit? I don't know.
https://www.comics.org/series/15711/covers/
What do you think?

Quite a lot of Fantagraphics books are in softcover and have minimal commentary, so some of the people defending Yoe are talking rubbish.
Can't believe that guy complaining about political correctness.

I'll keep buying Yoe Books, atleast they're not as abominable as Marvel and DC reprints.

tacky reprints of peanuts continue to be published for those who aren't interested in fantagraphics' series.

That Yoe Books argument went on for a while. Somebody brought up Derf and insulted him, then him and some friends came in.

For something that was a big part of my life for a while and important in meeting a bunch of people (plus other nice people I don't see anymore), I don't really miss that Comics Journal forum crowd at all.

I don't think it's just that I was frustrated by a lot of the comics that were a bad fit for me and feeling tortured by wondering what was good and bad. So many of the people seemed similarly tortured and insecure. But also a lot of really constipated people. I didn't feel a lot of warmth from them like I do in other communities.

I imagine that a lot of fine art and literary fiction communities are like that. These confused, insecure, deeply unfulfilled people who hate each other.

Comics fandom probably the most insecure crowd of them all though, especially the artsier end of it - the Inferior Medium neurosis still lives for a lot of people, and US readers specifically seem to spend a lot of time untangling their own tortured relationships with the superhero stuff that probably drew them in in the first place but also lords over mainstream awareness of the medium; I mean these are all very old hat concerns and you'd think we'd be past them but it doesn't feel like we have, and so I often detect a lot of self-loathing in the more intelligent comic critics I know of. Which frankly I sometimes appreciate, especially contrasted with the acritical fanboy shit that a lot of mainstream comic/geek culture sites trade in.

Sure but I meant more than that. Like, a lot of the artists seemed a bit repressed or something. As if they were trying to live up to this ideal of what respectable comics were.
People closer to the Fort Thunder end were refreshing to me because they seemed like they were just doing whatever the hell they liked.

Part of it could be my prejudice because I always disliked that New Yorker/Drawn & Quarterly aesthetic. Although I have liked more D&Q stuff in the last 5 years.

I read someone's account of the New York poetry scene and he talked a lot about people just following respectable trends and not really expressing themselves. It reminded of those alt comix people but I think the arty art world in general has loads of that.

Jim Stenstrum turned Asskickers Of The Fantastic into a book series.

I'll be at SPX this weekend for the first time in many years. At the Uncivilized Books booth. Saturday only, as I want to be back in NYC to sit at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. P excited though, SPX used to be such a fixture of my year.

In case I forgot to mention it, the second True Swamp hardcover collection came out about a month ago, so I'm promoting that obv.

say hi to gilbert for me

sup from forks, beto

Jon, I'm gonna be in DC on Saturday for a loud rock/metal show. You should come out Saturday night!

And bring me a book.

aw man
i'm coming home Saturday evening.
it would be good to see you!
Email me your number in case I somehow decide to stay the extra night.

"Hi, you have cool breasts"
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/house-of-1000-manga/2010-11-11

Takashi Miike's Jojo film has came out but just like a ton of recent manga adaptations it looks excessively artificial. He done the recent Blade Of The Immortal too and I cant get excited about that either. anyone know if Miike does super-commercial stuff exclusively now?

xp heh. in an alternate universe this guy would've drawn The New Teen Titans

Why Teen Titans?

Everyone buy Strange Growths, a squarebound collection of sublime minicomics created over many years by Jenny Zervakis, just published by John Porcellino's Spit and a Half imprint. I have loved her comics for so long and it is so great to be able to direct people to a convenient motherlode of them.

xp at least one of the outfits in the article reminded me of Starfire at her most porny.

Read Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler, which was interesting but also deeply flawed

sounds like Hitler amirite

Teehee

I read it a long time ago - seem to remember that it starts well but ends up all over the place, and not in an interesting way like Phoenix.

Indeed. The language, translated via French, is ridiculous, rendering Hitler, Mussolini, etc all sounding like teenagers in a 1980s cartoon; the mishmash of art styles doesn't look good; it acts almost as though the death camps were just an incidental thing that happened to be going on at the same time as Hitler was in power.

I got the Abe Sapien book Lost Lives. Santiago Caruso is one of my favourite living artists (this is his first comic interiors) but the children in this look like small adults and I don't think they were supposed to.

Had a look at the Spirits Of Vengeance collection. Joe Kubert inks one of his sons pencil work and it looks great. Too bad it's only for two issues because I couldn't justify buying the whole collection for that. But I still kind of want it.

I loved it when Bill Sienkiewicz jazzed all over someone else's competent pencil work.

Surprised I didn't see any Black Flame comics in Forbidden Planet. Devil's Due usually gets their books in there.

Got very mixed feelings about Kelley Jones but the guy draws ribs, trees and mushrooms so well that I had to get his complete Deadman and Swamp Thing: The Dead Don't Sleep.

Still not sure it was a wise choice.

Comics often look better when you're standing with them in the shop and pondering if you need them.

Got the Black Flame stuff on kindle, glad I didn't buy it through mail because it's none of the artists best work, the older stuff is really hacky at times. Black Flame Archives series is drawn by Tom Sutton and Don Lomax (it's recolored) and the graphic novel Black Flame: Nobody Knows This Is Everywhere is drawn by Kelley Jones and Alex Nino. It's sword and sorcery with Dr Strange style travelling.

Head Lopper, y'all!

Has the price of softcover collections gone up recently because those Abe Sapien and Swamp Thing collections I bought yesterday were pretty steeply priced for not that many pages.

Collapse of the pound against the dollar

Oh yeah, I hadn't really kept an eye out for that.

Yes my friend who just moved here (nyc) from London was bemoaning the loss of that all powerful 1.8 conversion rate feeling. Said when he used to come over he’d just buy anything cause it felt like play money.

Have to say a lot of my recent magazine buying on ebay from America has been hurting.

This (forthcoming) book looks interesting -- anyone familiar w/the authors?: http://www.fantagraphics.com/howtoreadnancy/

i don't know if you're being sarcastic or not but newgarden and karasik set the table for that book about thirty years ago
http://www.laffpix.com/howtoreadnancy.pdf

no snark intended if this is new to you morrisp. they're both well known cartoonists and comic wonks.

not a Nancy fan but that PDF was pretty dang good, i gotta say

Thanks, I had no idea! :P

(Same thing happened when I was casually unfamiliar w/Warren Ellis in the Marvel thread, lol. I may be better suited for the I Like Comics But Easily Betray the Shallowness of My Knowledge About Them board.)

aw, now i feel bad. it's me, not you.
anyways, as apologies, here's online 5 card nancy solitaire 4 u
http://www.7415comics.com/nancy/

LOL, thanks. Odd that Fantagraphics doesn’t mention the history at all, in their blurb on the book.

I loved their first volume of “Nancy” strips (the jokes maybe not as fresh in the 2nd one).

http://www.tcj.com/reviews/last-girl-standing/

https://www.avclub.com/get-an-exclusive-first-look-at-berger-books-inaugural-1819107492

Shelly Bond also has a Vertigo-esque sub-imprint of her own kicking off at IDW: https://www.idwpublishing.com/blackcrown/

http://www.tcj.com/everything-sells-everything/

Whenever fans go into that "iconic modern myths" thing I want to bite out their wisdom teeth.

Started reading that a few days ago, nodding sagely along but then a few paragraphs into I realised I'd been nodding sagely along to the same arguments on the internet for 10+ years. Like I dunno, is anyone who reads TCJ gonna disagree with any of it?

Also read The Death Of Stalin; didn't do much for me, though I could see it as good source material for Ianucci's film, like he'll be able to fit in the character that's missing.

There still aren't enough critiques of franchise culture. It would be nice if it appeared on a larger site, although I would fear for the writer.

There were a few things I didn't know and its one of the better articles of this type. Things appear to have accelerated and the Northrup Grumman thing seems like a new low.