What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

Dragonstout, I had heard a bit about Building Stories both here and at another site, and had the impression that it didn't matter where I started. So I briefly examined several pieces and then started with a couple of brief, folded comic strips. Then I read a couple of larger single sheets that were folded over. Then the gray hardcover volume, all the way through. I find it to be a bewildering combination of creativity and banality. I do have this sharp sense of the handicapped woman as a complex and credible character, but I have no interest in experiencing more of her dismal existence. I admire the craft but otherwise find no enjoyment in it. I like variety in the stories that I read. Sometimes I want horror, comedy, mystery, action, romance, or intrigue, or better yet, combinations of sensations. Building Stories offers none of those things, just shades of beige and gray and subtle shifts in ennui and sadness.

Legomancer wrote: what I'd really like to find is more like the Manga Planetes, which I read years ago and loved, and haven't found anything that compares to it (either manga-wise or theme-wise).

Yes! What a fantastic series, sadly completely out of print.
Pluto is another great manga sf series, although with a completely different tone. Twin Spica is also pretty good, although the sf elements are minor. I haven't found anything like Planetes either...

I'm pimping here for BOO! a Halloween anthology miniseries (4 issues) from Monkeybrain. It's the work of a bunch of friends of mine and each issue is only one thin buck. Digital-only, it's available through Comixology . Check it out!

So we can pitch in Manga too, here?

Agreed, Planetes is great. The anime adaptation is great too. With silent space and everything.

@iguanaDitty: Is Pluto the one made by the guy who did Monster/20th century boys, with story related to AtomBoy manga?

Now, let's go to the grosser one. I'm staying in my in-law's this week, and they have loads of manga.

I read one about boys in a boys only school with dormitory. Pointless to tell the title since it's different from the Japanese title. It's a manga for girls. Usually manga for girls have girls as the main character, so this one is quite different.

The story features 3 main male characters. All the cute-types.

The most prominent is the "cutest" one, an easy-going fella liked by all. Went to all boys school because his love interest in junior high went to all girl school (the girl died due to accident shortly after). She was a pretty girl who has difficulty in socializing, hated by most people (due to her snappy nature), but actually have tender hard. Unsurprisingly, in the high school he ended up with a surfer-girl with similar attitude.

The second is his roommate. A glasses-wearing guy with sharp mouth and always say what he wants. Love interest is the school nurse with big boobs. At first he was only interested in the boobs. The school nurse was an awkward one with plain face (that's why she's placed in the all boys school) and he taught him how to be more "interesting." End up with lots of the boys and this guy falling for her. Almost quit the school because she's worried destroying the glasses-guy's future (by having teacher & student affair).

The third one is the perfect guy, who loves her step sister. Her step sister is getting married though. Then he got close to a plain girl who pleaded him to be his temporary boyfriend to be shown off to her friend who's coming. Turned out that she used to like her friend's current boyfriend. The perfect guy and the plain girl got close. When the step sister came, the perfect guy asked the plain girl to pretend to be his girl friend.

And there's this one gay guy....................

All in all, pretty interesting manga with various plot and quite a bit of twists.

I have been reading Locke & Key and enjoying the heck out of it. The artist can't draw hair well and has a limited range for faces, but is otherwise very effective with his storytelling. The writing is even better. Four trade volumes into this series, and I can hardly wait to see what happens next. All the main characters are very well-developed, and so are plenty of the minor characters, which is very important for the horror genre. The horror only packs a punch if readers care about the characters. There are a lot of interesting concepts in the stories, and they all deliver more impact because the reactions from the characters make the concepts even more interesting. Sorry if I am being vague, but there are so many great reveals that I don't want to spoil. One particularly good element is the very gradual development of certain story ideas. If you pick up on them early, you can congratulate yourself later. If you find yourself surprised, you can go flipping back through past issues and see that the twists were introduced fairly.

I picked up all four volumes of Grant Morrison's JLA with some gift cards I got for my birthday. It's long been one of those books I've always felt bad about not reading, especially as a Batman fan, since I'd always heard that you could see back then that Morrison had a great handle on the character.

Man, oh man, oh man, is this some GREAT stuff.

In this cynical internet age we have to have our supers twisted around so that they're "believable," they've got to be fucked up so that we as fucked up human beings can relate to them. With stuff like the Nolan Bat-movies (which, granted, I love) and Arrow (which I detest) out there, it seems we've become somewhat ashamed of superheroes. The Marvel movies may go against that, but they're still incredibly formulaic, so calculated and unwilling to take risks. Not this book. I kind of always knew that he did, but Grant Morrison LOVES superheroes. Them not being at all like us, being better than us is what makes them both fun and inspiring, and he gets that on every single page of these comics. It's refreshing, to say the least.

It's very 90's though. You've got Kyle as the Green Lantern, Wally as Flash, Aquaman with the long hair, beard and hook for a hand, mullet Superman who is quickly replaced by the blue lightning one...So much of this book has come and gone, and we sort of laugh about this stuff now, but reading it makes you feel like maybe there really was something to this stuff. I sort of love it for that.

I'm nearing the end of "Rock of Ages." So, so good. So many crazy, desperate, go for broke ideas that totally work.

As for Batman...I love that you go for so long without seeing him that you forget about him. When he does show up, he makes the rest of the Justice League seem like uneducated fools. Pretty much perfect.

PS, I think I love The Flash now.

Sevej wrote: So we can pitch in Manga too, here?
@iguanaDitty: Is Pluto the one made by the guy who did Monster/20th century boys, with story related to AtomBoy manga?

Sorry, I guess I missed this. Yes, Naoki Urasawa. I haven't been able to get into Monster or 20th century boys but people love those too.

Josh Look wrote: I picked up all four volumes of Grant Morrison's JLA with some gift cards I got for my birthday. It's long been one of those books I've always felt bad about not reading, especially as a Batman fan, since I'd always heard that you could see back then that Morrison had a great handle on the character.

Man, oh man, oh man, is this some GREAT stuff.

I enjoyed the Morrison run on JLA despite the really bad artwork. There were a couple of decent-looking issues in that run by other artists, but Howard Porter messed up most of the run. I wish DC would issue a do-over edition with new artwork by somebody else.

dragonstout wrote: Y'all are dead to me, not liking Chris Ware. Best cartoonist who ever lived.

I'd agree with that. I am usually not one to feel for characters in books or movies, I'm unable to suspend-disbelief enough to get emotionally invested. With Ware though I do. When I read his books it is like I'm remembering a person I once knew very well, but had forgotten about.

Right now I'm reading Manhattan Projects...Johnathan Hickman confounds me at times. I'm never quite sure if he is super-deep and philosophical, or just crazy creative. Does he have a wall with all sorts of nouns on a wall he throws darts at and then creates a story? Or is there a method and meaning to his madness?

Shellhead wrote: Dragonstout, I had heard a bit about Building Stories both here and at another site, and had the impression that it didn't matter where I started. So I briefly examined several pieces and then started with a couple of brief, folded comic strips. Then I read a couple of larger single sheets that were folded over. Then the gray hardcover volume, all the way through. I find it to be a bewildering combination of creativity and banality. I do have this sharp sense of the handicapped woman as a complex and credible character, but I have no interest in experiencing more of her dismal existence. I admire the craft but otherwise find no enjoyment in it. I like variety in the stories that I read. Sometimes I want horror, comedy, mystery, action, romance, or intrigue, or better yet, combinations of sensations. Building Stories offers none of those things, just shades of beige and gray and subtle shifts in ennui and sadness.

Well that's fair at least, I can see how that would happen to someone. But there is no doubt that he is one of the most imaginative and inventive artists to ever work the medium, although to call his stories exciting would be a huge stretch, they also will not appeal to strict genre fans. There is a lot more than just 'shades of beige and gray and subtle shifts in ennui and sadness', but that is definitely a fair assessment that will make more sense to plenty of people. There is also lots of kindness, joy, humour and more in all of his work as well. But admittedly the most important aspect of his work is the inventiveness with the medium and in that regard no one is even close. The last person to make work this important as far as comics are concerned was Dave Sim in the height of Cerebus, especially High Society - Church and State.

Although I do think that Seth Fisher, for a pop super hero artist, was very close to being as inventive visually as Ware is.

Also, at what point did "white" and "middle class" become insults of some kind of negative aspect to art? Is a piece of art more compelling if someone is brown and upper class just because of those two aspects? Seems absurd to me. I'd love to see the people who use it as a way to dismiss someone's work explain why that's ok.

Shellhead wrote: Dragonstout, I had heard a bit about Building Stories both here and at another site, and had the impression that it didn't matter where I started. So I briefly examined several pieces and then started with a couple of brief, folded comic strips. Then I read a couple of larger single sheets that were folded over. Then the gray hardcover volume, all the way through. I find it to be a bewildering combination of creativity and banality. I do have this sharp sense of the handicapped woman as a complex and credible character, but I have no interest in experiencing more of her dismal existence. I admire the craft but otherwise find no enjoyment in it. I like variety in the stories that I read. Sometimes I want horror, comedy, mystery, action, romance, or intrigue, or better yet, combinations of sensations. Building Stories offers none of those things, just shades of beige and gray and subtle shifts in ennui and sadness.

Shellhead - you gave it a helluva shot, especially if you read through the whole gray hardcover! You're right, there is no prescribed order. Your response makes a ton of sense. Hell: "a bewildering combination of creativity and banality", I think I'd even AGREE with that! The difference is that I find that even when he's depicting the most banal activities, he makes a lot of excellent subtle observations about them.

As for variety: there's a great quote about Chris Ware's "one-note"-ness I'll have to find tonight. Suffice to say, it's a pretty common complaint that obviously has some basis. But to me there was comedy and joy in Building Stories, not just sadness, and in his entire body of work there's a LOT of comedy.

Building Stories is probably his most difficult to get into book (okay, that or Quimby the Mouse). If you want a lot of tonal variety, with a big emphasis on HUMOR, then give a shot to the big tall red book, the "ACME Novelty Library Report to Shareholders" (also sometimes just titled ACME Novelty Library, such as on Amazon; the key is that it's tall and red and skinny). There are spacemen, cowboys, superheroes, robots, and a nasty fucker named God.

Also, if you can get ahold of ACME Novelty Library #19, that has his most genre-y story ever, and is always my recommendation for where to start with Chris Ware, since it kicks off with a conventionally told sci-fi suspense story with life-and-death stakes, "The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars". Sadly that seems to be fetching high prices...hopefully a library nearby has it. I love it actually so damn much that I'd contribute a couple bucks to the inter-library transfer fee of anyone who wanted to read it (I think that's usually a $5 fee or something?).

I very much understand disliking Building Stories, despite adoring it myself. Give these two a shot anyway, especially the latter.

In this cynical internet age we have to have our supers twisted around so that they're "believable," they've got to be fucked up so that we as fucked up human beings can relate to them.

This made me think of a statement Alan Moore recently made about the success of the Avengers movie and superheroes in general...he's "appalled" that adults today are entertained by storylines and characters that were originally created to entertain pre-teen boys in the 1950s. He goes on to criticize superheroes, calling them awful and so forth.

To which my reply is "OK then, go back in time and don't write Watchmen. Or Miracleman. Or Supreme."

The point being that a lot of what you're mentioning here as well as the whole drive to "ground" superheroes is the result of Alan Moore.

You're dead on the money about Morrison's JLA- one of the things that really stands out about it, particularly from a mid-1990s perspective, is that he was not at all interested in "redefining" the characters or updating them. He just wanted to do balls-out crazy superhero books that felt like the 1980s never actually happened. But you know, you see this is most of his superhero work...Final Crisis is just like that.

I like but don't love the run. There are some cool stories and I definitely appreciate some of the more swing-for-the-fences moments. It's also definitely Morrison settling into his rock star phase, which is both good and bad.

God, the artwork though. Yeesh.

Still, the Waid stuff shortly thereafter was better in some ways. "Tower of Babel" is one of the best JLA stories ever, and it really shows how Batman has them all beat.

Me, I just look at Our Own Jason Lutes and his inks over on BoingBoing .

Hey Lutes! Yesterday I was looking over comics I'd read in 2013 and realized I had completely forgotten Bingo Baby. Backed it, downloaded it, but somehow had never moved it to the iPad for reading. I fixed that last night and I really enjoyed it. Great effort all around.

I read a blurb somewhere about zombies in Archie comics. Mostly as a goof, I bought Afterlife with Archie. I haven't read an Archie comic in over 30 years. I have to say I was completely surprised by how good it is. It has a cool 70's horror vibe- complete with reprinted backup stories from Chilling Adventures of Sorcery. I went back the next day and bought issues 2 and 3, and had the comic shop save me issues of the rest of the series.