What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

metalface13 wrote:

Shellhead wrote: The local library had the first five volumes of Freakangels, and I was blown away by it. I liked Planetary, but nothing else that Warren Ellis had written had really grabbed my interest. Until now. Freakangels is sort of like the X-Men if they had been invented by Roger Zelazny and Hayao Miyazaki, in a very British setting. It also reminds me of the parts that I disliked in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, only those elements work just great under the pen of Warren Ellis.

Ellis introduces about a dozen of interesting characters, and made me care about them. The art is quite good, except that sometimes it seems like the artist skipped the class on how to draw human lips. Anyway, I loved the first five volumes so much that I just bought the complete six-volume set on Amazon at more than 50% off.

Wasn't Freakangels originally released as a Web comic? Seems like a read an issue or two. I think my library has them too, Warren Ellis is a bit hit or miss for me (liked Planetary, did not like Transmetropolitan) but your Zelazny reference has my curiosity piqued.

I picked up Fables "Inherit the Wind" from Half Priced Books last week, still haven't read it though.

Yeah Freakangels was originally a webcomic. I find webcomics frustrating to read, because (depending on the creator), the installments are often too short and too irregular. Freakangels reads really well in a trade format, possibly because it was a webcomic, because it flows smoothly without the usual hiccups at the start and end of a typical comic issue. The reason I mention Zelazny is that the main characters of Freakangels give off a vibe comparable to the big dysfunctional family at the center of the Amber series, and because there are so many really intelligent characters.

I recently finished re-reading Planetary, so maybe I was already primed to enjoy some Warren Ellis writing. Planetary felt less original, though. The whole point was to blend a variety of interesting cultural references from the 20th century, but aside from the three (or four) main characters on the Planetary team, there were possibly too many disparate elements. Still, there were some fantastic ideas, like the fictionauts and that eerie afterlife. And both endings (the last two issues) were very satisfying, though my favorite might be that Batman one-shot. I still haven't tried Transmet, but it looks like protagonist Spider Jerusalem is little more than a post-modern Hunter S. Thompson.

Has anyone read the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics put out by IDW?

My family got me the two Micro-Series books for Father's Day and they were really good. I'm interested in the longer ones now.

Shellhead wrote: I still haven't tried Transmet, but it looks like protagonist Spider Jerusalem is little more than a post-modern Hunter S. Thompson.

It's not like Ellis is remotely trying to hide that, though; hell, that was probably the one-liner to pitch the comic. I loooooooooooved Transmet as a teenager. Tried to reread it later and literally just found it unreadable. So so so SO obnoxious, loves hammering home "poop in your pants" jokes and many variations of "cut off or shrink your penis" jokes over and over and over again, AND I say that as someone who thinks Johnny Ryan is hilarious. And then, mixed in with the anal rape jokes, there are all these "very special episode" type stories, like about child prostitution, or drug addiction, etc., which invariably end in a couple silent pages of Spider Jerusalem smoking and sitting on the top of a building, looking sadly over the cityscape and shaking his head.

Not a big fan of Planetary either: the art's incredible but the number of new ideas is thin. I know, that's not really the point, the point is to connect and comment on a century of pop culture, but the commentary was even thinner, mostly just "wow, that stuff was cool!" The part of Planetary that made me vomit a little in my mouth was the Vertigo issue, which ends with Constantine becoming Spider Jerusalem. Essentially, the whole issue is saying "all those Vertigo comics and writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison are the musty old past, my obnoxious Transmetropolitan has obsoleted them all".

I read Elektra Lives Again this weekend, which I had basically never heard anything about and only owned because it came in an eBay lot with other Miller Daredevil hardcovers I wanted. Wow, Frank Miller is GOOD, huh? It's the most Sin-City-ish art I've seen from him pre-Sin City...I really need to read Ronin, but outside of that, I'd say it's my favorite Miller art. Really incredibly choreographed fight scenes with unusual body shapes; great fight scenes have been really hitting my comics pleasure zone for the past few years. While, thanks to Sin City, I think of Miller largely as a B&W specialist, the art in here looks so damn good largely because of Lynn Varley's colors, which, combined with the unusual size/shape of the book, make it look VERY much like a European comic.

I also read a bunch of the stories in The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore, including the Green Lantern stories and the Clayface story. Amusing fluff. I'm done with it, if anyone wants to buy for $6 + media mail shipping (it's got the Killing Joke and all three Superman stories in there, too, which are more than just fluff; also, the Green Lantern stories have apparently played a big role in the Geoff Johns run).

Also read a couple issues of the original Drake/Premiani Doom Patrol. It's alright, but...not that WEIRD. Like, contemporaneous Flash, Superman, and Legion of Super-Heroes comics were a LOT weirder. But I'll stick with it, I'm in a Silver Age DC mood.

Speaking of Legion of Super-Heroes...does anyone know where the hell to start with that title? SO confusing...so many different reboots/teams/changes/writers. Ugh. Thinking about starting with the Mark Waid stuff since I like him, or The Great Darkness Saga since it's supposed to be good and it has Darkseid.

Old Doom Patrol is good, but it's 'weirdness' is VERY overstated. I guess at the time some of the ideas were pretty different than the usual superhero fare, but the Morrison stuff blows it out of the water in terms of craziness.

The Alan Moore DC book is good, his Green Lantern stuff is really fun. The Superman stories are among the best ever. For $6, that is a real steal with lots of quality reading.

Transmetropolitan reminds me of these guys I used to know that were big comic book guys AND were also into shitty hardcore music, listening to Bill Hicks CDs constantly, smoking, and drinking. The books are perturbingly juvenile, full of grandstanding bullshit and tired-ass wannabe counterculture bamboozlery.

Warren Ellis sucks. There's not a lot of comics writers that I think are just consistently, constantly terrible, but he's one of them. His work on other characters like his Iron Man stuff is awful. Planetary had a couple of really cool concepts (the Monster Island thing, Doc Bronze) but the characters were horrible.

Old Frank Miller rules...Ronin is still pretty neat.

The Waid run on LSH started off really well, but falters after the first 12 issues or so. Then editorial mandate forced Supergirl on him, and the quality dropped a bit more. By issue #30, Waid was clearly just phoning it in, so I dropped the book. Waid has done some great work, especially in recent years, but his LSH didn't turn out well. I tried a little bit of Legion back during the Disco Era, but found it too inaccessible with so many characters. Last year, I picked up the trade hardcover edition of the Great Darkness Saga. The artwork is average, but the story is good. At the time it came out, it was pretty impressive but there have been better stories since then and standards are now higher.

Silver age DC comics were often pretty strange, and Doom Patrol was even stranger still, with villains like Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and the Brotherhood of Evil. More than any other modern comic writer, Grant Morrison has tremendous affection for that silver age weirdness, though his own work is exponentially stranger and more creative.

I'm not surprised to hear that Transmet is pretentious. It looked pretentious as hell, so I skipped it, even though I'm a fan of Hunter S. Thompson. But I honestly thought of you Barnes when I started reading Freakangels. Not because I think of you as a freak or an angel, but because based on other stuff you've liked, you would like Freakangels. For what it's worth, it's still a free webcomic, so you can read it for free starting here:

www.freakangels.com/?p=23

I was a big fan of Miller's Daredevil run back in the day, and thanks to the library, I have discovered that run holds up really well even after all these years. But Ronin was unbelievably ugly, and the ugliness of that art occasionally made it hard to follow the story, what with all the gagging.

See, I feel like Frank Miller's art is *always* "ugly", and that ugliness is a huge part of the appeal and the...beauty. He draws gnarled-ass, raggedy people, and if they have black hair, it's gooey and stringy. And I love it. What I've glimpsed of Ronin (I've got that big Absolute hardcover), I think I'll love it for the art if for nothing else.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Barnes, you and I have simultaneously become Legion-curious, so maybe you'll benefit from my reading up on "how to start". First of all: I'm currently reading the Great Darkness Saga myself, so if you want to wait, say, two weeks, I could let you know whether I'll keep or sell.

You know, actually, I don't even know where to start. Personally, I'm sampling three eras, all pre-Crisis: 1) super-early Silver Age Legion by Edmond Hamilton and John Forte, goofy as all hell. See toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2...f-space-strange.html for an example. 2) slightly later Silver Age Legion by Jim Shooter & Curt Swan, very revered by Legion fans. Shooter started writing this at age 14; lol! This is credited with being the most "Marvel-like" DC comic of the time. and 3) The Great Darkness Saga, because Levitz & Giffen seems to be far and away the most beloved run. I've always been really fascinated/perplexed by the Giffen "Five Years Later" Legion, but it's never been available with a spine, so I'll have to stop being a crybaby and buy some big eBay lot of single issues. After I've read the other stuff. And with all this stuff, anything I decide I don't want to keep in a few weeks I'll just sell, though I'm admittedly reading the silver age stuff with a "will my son like this?" in my mind as well; nostalgic memories of reading the Flash as a kid in all its Silver Age lunacy is what inspired this recent kick (okay, and the TalesOfWonder DC sale too).

The Waid/Kitson Legion seems to have really divided people: the old-school Legion fans DESPISED it. Seems like it's frequently referred to as the "eat it, Grandpa" Legion, as the primary theme of the series was generation gaps. The Abnett/Landing Legion Lost seems to have a lot of supporters. After that I stopped listening, talk about SUPER-convoluted, does DC REALLY need to reboot their entire universe every few years???!? Apparently over the last decade, both Jim Shooter and Paul Levitz returned to write LSH.

The Alan Moore Green Lantern stories are definitely fun, I hope no one took it as a diss that I called them "amusing fluff". They're definitely fluff, mostly cute 5-page twist ending stories. But good twists.

The thing that's weird to me about Warren Ellis...it's not just that people love him. People love Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman and all kinds of mediocre stuff. That's fine. But Warren Ellis, people think he's a GENIUS, like one of the greatest comic writers ever. People seem totally unafraid of putting him up there with Moore and Morrison. Thankfully, this is an excellent red flag for "AVOID THIS MESSAGE BOARD LIKE THE PLAGUE IF LOOKING FOR READING SUGGESTIONS". And I guess I get it, to an extent, because I really did love Transmet, Authority, and Planetary as a teen, and Nextwave is a guilty pleasure too.

You mentioned smoking...man-sakes-alive Warren Ellis thinks that cigarettes are the absolute coolest things ever. Pretty sure the only series he ever did where the hero wasn't a chain-smoker were the stories using pre-existing Marvel characters.

Yeah, I looked at a couple of "Where do I start reading LSH" pages and my eyes crossed. Reboot, threeboot, retroboot, Legion Lost, Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes...good grief. And the roster is like 78 characters or something, all Blah Blah Boy/Girl/Kid/Man/Woman. I tried to pick up the New 52 issues, which are written by Levitz (widely claimed to be one of the best LSH writers), and it was incomprehensible.

Not sure why it's such a mess...I like the Star Trek-meets-Silver Age notion of it, just figuring out where to go is difficult. It's the kind of title where you can throw a dart and hit a great run or a terrible one, it seems.

Do people really still rever Warren Ellis? He's a very late 90s/early 2000s comic writer in my mind...thinking over what I've read of his, I can't imagine that stuff aging well. I get a sense that it would be like Preacher- "cool" and "edgy" when you're under 25, tedious and precocious if you're over 25.

I'll look at Freakangels, I give him one last shot. But damn, what a shitty title. WAY too close to associating itself with Criss Angel's Mindfreak.

I picked up a stack of the DH Chronicles of Conan trades reprinting the old Marvel series and they're great! The first several issues are rough both dialog and art-wise (Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith) but things improve quickly as they both get a handle on things. The behind the scenes afterwords by Thomas are interesting and I'm a fan of recolouring older books (70's and 80's stuff - earlier comics should be left alone). The only strike against the books is that they didn't include the covers.

Although Levitz and Shooter turned in highly-regarded LSH runs in times past, avoid both of their 21st century runs. It's disappointing, but with the exception of Morrison and Waid and maybe a few others, comic book writers tend to stagnate badly after 10 or 20 years in the industry. One cute aspect of the original Legion run is that the writer would traditionally propose candidates for the next Legion chairperson, but the readers would choose by vote, and the writer would honor that choice.

One reason why Legion can't seem to capture the age of modern fans is the age issue. Back in the silver age when most readers were young, the idea of teenage superheroes in the future was appealing. To modern fans, there isn't that same sense of age identification. This is also a huge problem for Captain Marvel aka Shazam.

I haven't read most of the early Alan Moore stuff for DC (aside from Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and Killing Joke, of course), but he was apparently a big inspiration for much of what Geoff Johns did with Green Lantern in modern times.

Freakangels _is_ a lousy name. It works better when you realize that the name was chosen by teenagers.

The Dark Horse trades for the early Conan run are outstanding, reprinting some of the best comics of the early '70s.

Michael Barnes wrote: Do people really still rever Warren Ellis?

Peek in on anywhere where "mainstream" means Marvel and DC superheroes, and "non-mainstream" means Vertigo and Dark Horse, and you will see that yes, Warren Ellis is still revered among that circle.

This is an odd time to get interested in the Legion of Superheroes. DC has recently announced that they are cancelling LSH. Coincidentally, they are launching a new title called Justice League 3000, and assuring potential readers that they won't need any knowledge of the Legion to read JL 3000. And apparently the current LSH title is ending soon with some kind of surprise ending. My guess is that the Legion will end when it's revealed that the Time Trapper is actually Batman 3000, and he tricks the Legion into standing still while Superman Prime retcon-punches each Legionnaire out of existence.

Shellhead wrote: This is an odd time to get interested in the Legion of Superheroes. DC has recently announced that they are cancelling LSH.

Odd timing, but since I'm not even remotely curious about any LSH comics past 1990 or so (correctly or not), it doesn't really matter to me.

The Levitz Legion is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too Claremont X-Men/Wolfman Teen Titans for me so far, both in writing and in art, but I haven't even gotten to the Giffen issues yet or the Great Darkness Saga, so I'm not passing judgment yet. In the first issue they're playing Dungeons & Dragons; LOL! That feels like so much like Claremont & Wolfman's bizarre attempts at seeming hip to the young folk. I have not only never understood the appeal of the writing of those two (okay, there are definitely some Claremont X-Men stories I like, but it sure as hell ain't because the dialogue is so good), but I've also never understood the appeal of either Byrne or Perez on these books. Both of them, and Giffen, all have relatively similar art styles: clean and bland, just like Silver Age DC, but with more detail and more emphasis on exaggerated facial expressions, and therefore also without the beautiful minimalism of someone like Infantino or Gil Kane. What was the appeal of this style? I'm sure there were more practicioners of this vague style that I'm just not as familiar with.

Does anyone have anything good to say about James Robinson's Starman?

All this recent superhero-curiosity is due to realizing that lots of the superhero hardcovers I'd been very vaguely curious about are going, or have recently gone, out of print, so I'd better jump on them while the jumping's good.

I read those Starman books, I dunno, 15 years ago or so and liked them. I was kind of thinking about looking at them again myself.

I read part of The Great Darkness Saga. I have no fucking clue what is going on. It seems like every other character is named Something Lad.

Michael Barnes wrote: I read those Starman books, I dunno, 15 years ago or so and liked them. I was kind of thinking about looking at them again myself.

I read part of The Great Darkness Saga. I have no fucking clue what is going on. It seems like every other character is named Something Lad.

Starman is overrated, but not bad. The covers are generally very good, though the interior artwork is more average in quality, with artist Tony Harris relying heavily on photo-referencing. It's not as extreme as his outright tracing photos in Ex Machina. As for Robinson's writing, it's a mixed bag. He is too wordy at times, but he does handle character development and personalities really well. Several characters really come to life in the overall story. The stories are an odd mixture of very believable plot points with some very forced plot twists. I got the first 5 trades or so and then just couldn't handle the artwork anymore, plus the story took a direction that didn't really grab me.

It's tough plunging into any super team book (except for the Fantastic Four) when they have been around for decades. Like hanging out with exotic dancers or larpers, everybody has a fake name and a real name and a convoluted personal history. If you still don't care about individual Legionnaires by the end of The Great Darkness Saga, you're probably never going to love the Legion. Even so, you might still want to check out the modern Legion run by Geoff Johns, as well as his Legion of Three Worlds mini-series. I myself like the Legion, but I don't love it.

For the record, I would much rather hang out with exotic dancers than larpers.