What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

Did you guys see the Spacehawk anthology is available on Comixology now for $35?

Sorry, if I was unclear. I think if an artist disapproves that his comic is continued that's normally accepted (see Hergé). I seem to remember a couple of years ago Uderzo said he didn't want it to continue after his death and it made me sad to think that Asterix last adventure could be fighting aliens (the 1-2 before that were also pretty bad). That's why I was happy that a new comic was announced, which seems to go back to the roots. Will it be as good as the Goscinny run? Doubtful. Will it be better than the Uderzo solo-run? I think so. However I only assume that Uderzo said yes, as he is still alive and has full control over Asterix.

A great example how a new creative can give a license new life and excel the original is Franquin's Spirou & Fantasio run. He took over from Jijé (who introduced Fantasio) and made it one of the great Franco-Belgian classics, inventing a lot of classic characters during his time (most notably the Marsupilami).

I'd love to see that Franquin run translated into English, I've heard so much about it over the years...

But my point was: was Jije's run hot stuff? Or was Franquin taking over Spirou more like Frank Miller taking over Daredevil, to use a mainstream USA example (that is: Frank Miller didn't create Daredevil, but the original Daredevil comics weren't that hot in the first place)?

Sorry I went off on you before.

Re Franquin/Jijé: No, I don't think Jijé was that hot, so it probably doesn't apply to your example. Although he already further expanded Spirou it was really Franquin who made it so good that he is now considered the 'father' of the series. That being said I quite like some of his successors. There is another team that I quite like, Tome & Janry, but nobody excelled like Franquin.

I need to think more about your question (almost bedtime here in BE).

Asterix is one of the few comics that I can actually comment on to some pretty great extent. I don't think the Uderzo era was a complete loss at all. I still like the Black Gold quite a bit, and Asterix and Son had its moments too. But Magic Carpet was...less good. And the less said about the misogyny in Secret Weapon the better.

I never read anything after All At Sea, but I haven't heard great stuff.

Yeah, Jijé Spirou is not that great. The early issues are kind of really too much for little kids and not as timeless and ageless as Franquin would make it.

Black Gold is probably my favourite Uderzo only Astérix as well.

Phonogram: The Singles Club

i just read this, it's the second volume in a series by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Definitely rather leftfield. Its about a club night and the intertwining stories of seven individuals on a particular night. Its really about who the characters view / feel about the music and emotionally where they are at in life. I liked it, the characters are diverse and engaging, and McKelvie's art really suits the genre.

I read American Vampire 2 and 3 this weekend. Vol. 2 was a bit of a stinker. I felt like it was really missing Stephen King's influence and Rafael Albuquerque looked really bad as well. Vol. 3's WWII stories were much better and the art was back up to par as well. I like the series fine, but mostly reading because the local library branch had them on hand.

Then I started reading Jimmy Corrigan Smartest Kid on Earth ... I'm not sure I'm smart enough to be reading this. It's kind of hard to follow what's real and what are Jimmy's fantasies (delusions?). Hoping I'll start "getting it" as I get further in.

I love my public library. Having exhausted most of their supply of Marvel, DC and Vertigo, I have been slowly going through the more offbeat indie volumes. Here are my two latest finds:

Shooting War, by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. Just barely a science-fiction story, Shooting War was a 2007 look at the war in Iraq as of 2011. There is some cutting edge tech, and a President McCain, but otherwise this is pretty grounded in reality. It's okay, reads very much like an average quality Vertigo mini-series from the late '90s. A few interesting ideas, but none of them are really explored beyond the surface. Dan Rather plays a surprising and amusing role in the story.

Truer Than True Romance, by Jeanne Martinet and various silver age DC artists. I was slightly uncomfortable carrying this volume in the library, because it has an obvious romance comic picture on the cover with a bold yellow background. But I suspected that I was going to enjoy this and I was right. Martinet takes a number of classic DC romance comic stories and replaces all the word balloons and narrative boxes with snarky modern material, presenting the occasional page side-by-side with the painfully earnest original. She also wrote some sassy fake letter pages after each story.

Truer Than True Romance was good for a few chuckles for me, and then after I got about a third of the way in, my girlfriend grabbed it. She found it even funnier, laughing out loud at times. So far, my favorite story had a nice subtle twist. On the surface, it's a story about a ridiculously stupid pretty girl, who totally coincidentally looked a lot like dead lacrosse player Yeardly Love. But the story also has a sneaky subtext about the effects of mercury poisoning, and an unlikely happy ending.

metalface13 wrote: Then I started reading Jimmy Corrigan Smartest Kid on Earth ... I'm not sure I'm smart enough to be reading this. It's kind of hard to follow what's real and what are Jimmy's fantasies (delusions?). Hoping I'll start "getting it" as I get further in.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was serialized, two (four? Actually not sure) pages at a time in a weekly newspaper. It wasn't until he was around 80 pages into it that he realized that he actually wanted it to be a coherent novel-sized story, so yes, the first 80 pages or so are quite different from the rest of the book, more dream sequences and surreal sequences. I assure you, you are smart enough to read it.

The main thing I recommend for people who are not used to reading comics (which is not you), or even people who are used to reading comics written by a writer and drawn by someone else (which I think is also not you), is that you need to make SURE to give the pictures appropriate weight. He is a fantastic writer, but a lot of that writing is with the pictures; I'm not talking about "he makes pretty pictures" (though he does that too, when needed), I'm saying that a LOT of what is going on is told through the pictures. This is, after all, a story about a father and son (and another story too, but you'll get there later) who have an INCREDIBLY hard time talking to each other, so their body language and stutters when they talk are more important than the words. I believe Chris Ware does his comics in such a way to maximize your ability to put yourself in the character's shoes, but you HAVE to do some work bringing the pictures to life to let this happen.

The book is much more difficult emotionally than it is difficult to comprehend, just stick with it and you'll be fine, I swear.

I picked up the Kamandi Omnibus vol. 1 last week. If you're thinking about it, you should jump on it now, as it's disappearing fast.

I finished Four Color Fear; while its big page count is good of course from the perspective of getting bang for your buck (and the likelihood of many of its stories getting reprinted otherwise is slim), the high quality of the early stories (and my huge enthusiasm for the book) eventually peters out until some awesome shit at the end. It still totally changes how I think of that era of comic books, though I think I've converted back to EC being of overall higher quality. The Johnny Craig book coming out in a few months, A Fall Guy For Murder and other stories, is a seriously way underrated must-buy for anyone who likes crime fiction or comics and doesn't already have the material. Johnny Craig is far and away the most underrated EC member, second only to Harvey Kurtzman.

Now I'm back to reading Are You My Mother? and My Friend Dahmer. Getting a little impatient with Bechdel's excessive dream analysis; but then it was probably just a weaker chapter than the earlier ones. No opinion on the Dahmer book yet: inherently interesting subject matter of course, but the cartooning is so perfunctory.

dragonstout wrote: I picked up the Kamandi Omnibus vol. 1 last week. If you're thinking about it, you should jump on it now, as it's disappearing fast.

Damnit, I forgot all about this one. Off to Amazon I go...

Has anyone other than me fallen into the trap that is the IDW Artist's Editions?
The Will Eisner Spirit Artist's Edition came out today. These books are seriously painful to my credit card balance, but also seriously wonderful. Why must the world be filled with so many fabulous things?

Juniper wrote: Has anyone other than me fallen into the trap that is the IDW Artist's Editions?
The Will Eisner Spirit Artist's Edition came out today. These books are seriously painful to my credit card balance, but also seriously wonderful. Why must the world be filled with so many fabulous things?

Thank god, no. Primarily because I dislike original art for comics as anything but a "look at it once in a gallery" kind of thing; it's more like watching the deleted scenes on a DVD than the director's cut. I prefer hardcover whenever possible, I really really love Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, and the copy I've got of it is a pretty ugly softcover, but the decision for the hardcovers to shoot in color from the original art so you can see whiteout and all was enough to deter me from "upgrading" to that. That shit is too distracting.

I'm even pretty religious about color intent, too: the Spirit was meant to be published in color, so I want it in color. I even feel this way about the EC comics, which I think the majority of fans thinks looks much better in black & white (and people even mostly correctly argue "Wally Wood et al were really drawing with the intent of impressing their coworkers with their originals, the final printed version was less important").

In terms of really expensive giant books, it's the Sunday Press books for me. Forgotten Fantasy, wow! That book's a mind-blower. In terms of really REALLY expensive books that are expensive for no good reason: why the FUCK was the new set of Crumb sketchbooks $1000? And does anyone have a secret outlet for getting those cheaper?

The Four Color Fear book that I was raving about recently and then cooled on a bit by the end, which is out of print and fetching high Amazon prices, is now available on Comixology! Despite the quality being uneven, I highly recommend it; it changed my understanding of a decade of comics history:

www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?option=c...logy.html&Itemid=113