What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

Berserk is the one that keeps coming back up in stuff I read online over and over again, even among quarters that I don't super associate with manga or the like.

re: Dragonball. Yeah, some real Me Too teaching moments in some of this shit that is/was surprisingly very mainstream.

Eastman and Waltz’s The Last Ronin was getting some good attention after selling out multiple print runs of the single issues, but I wasn’t the biggest fan after reading the collected volume. What if Splinter and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lose? Not just Stockman and Shredder’s grandson ruling New York fifteen years in the future but the turtles losing their values and turning the Purple Dragons into their personal shock troops to match the Foot Ninja until all that’s left is for the last turtle is to kill the last Oroku. It’s just a downer without any TMNT fun or weirdness but also not willing to dip all the way into the almost subversive nihilism of a Marvel What If?

Also a lot of Calvin and Hobbes. So much Calvin and Hobbes. It goes without saying it would never be printed today. Calvin regularly fantasizes about the destruction of his school and is never repentant for pasting Susie with water balloons or slush balls unless Christmas is next week, but there’s something irrepressibly human and child about his enthusiasm and passion and laziness and pettiness and cruelty and, most of all, his imagination. Even while I’m siding with his parents in the struggle of raising him, Calvin and his tiger make me smile.

I am in process of re-reading the entire Grimjack series, including the Starslayer backups, the two prequel minis, and the graphic novel. This series had a big impact on me when I first got into it at the end of the '80s, and the cynical writing holds up well. The artwork varies considerably. Tim Truman is the definitive Grimjack artist, but Tom Mandrake was also decent. Flint Henry has moments of brilliance, but his overall work looks rushed and excessively busy with distracting details. Tom Sutton's art also had its moments, but was generally fugly. Steve Pugh seemed capable, but kept veering into cartoonishly hideous faces. The backup feature Munden's Bar had completely random quality due to the great variety of writers and artists. Sometimes Munden's was entertaining or at least shed more light on the characters and setting, but other times Munden's was an absurd waste of several pages.

I know what Barnes will be doing this week

DarthJoJo wrote: Also a lot of Calvin and Hobbes. So much Calvin and Hobbes. It goes without saying it would never be printed today. Calvin regularly fantasizes about the destruction of his school and is never repentant for pasting Susie with water balloons or slush balls unless Christmas is next week, but there’s something irrepressibly human and child about his enthusiasm and passion and laziness and pettiness and cruelty and, most of all, his imagination. Even while I’m siding with his parents in the struggle of raising him, Calvin and his tiger make me smile.

Phoebe and Her Unicorn is a recent strip that comes closer than anything since C&H to capturing that madcap childhood energy of boundless possibility, wistfulness, and angst. Collected in a bunch of volumes already. My kid loves it, but (like C&H) most of the jokes are aimed at adults.

My 6 year old (and I) LOVE Phoebe and Her Unicorn. I hadn't thought about it, but you are spot on about it being akin to C&H.

I want to list my favorite comics that appeal to me as kind of a muggle:

• Planetary
• Y: the Last Man

Hellboy[/li]

All-Star Superman

Frank Miller Batman

Animal Man (recommended by you all)

[/ul]

That's all I can think of. I find these volumes hugely enjoyable and accessible. Our campus librarian has asked for graphic novel recommendations. What are some awesome omnibus editions that I could never afford that I should order? They have Sandman, but I don't think they have Swamp Thing. You can check here if you want:

uvu.edu/library

It's time to burn that budget!

Madman by Michael Allred
Fables
Usagi Yojimbo

Cranberries wrote: Our campus librarian has asked for graphic novel recommendations. What are some awesome omnibus editions that I could never afford that I should order?

Shang-Chi: Master of Kung-Fu omnibus volume 2. Specifically volume 2, which opens with a great two-part story and also includes an excellent six-issue storyline from #45 - #50, where each issue is from the POV of a different character, including the villain. Great writing and artwork.

Conan the Barbarian: The Original Marvel Years omnibus volume 1. This includes every issue penciled by the wonderful Barry Windsor-Smith, and it is all written by Roy Thomas at his peak.

Uncanny X-Men omnibus volumes 1 and 2. Covers the whole outstanding Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne/Austin run that took the X-Men out of cancellation and to the top of the industry. The highlight is the Dark Phoenix saga, but it is all good. Claremont and Byrne shared an incredible synergy of writing and artwork for a few years, and all their best is right here.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow: Hard Travelin' Heroes Deluxe Edition. Denny O'Neill took some fairly generic Silver Age heroes and ran them through a gauntlet of challenging ethical and socially relevant situations. Neal Adams made it all look amazing.

Absolute Swamp Thing. You mentioned Swamp Thing, but I am guessing that you were thinking about the excellent run written by Alan Moore. That is worthwhile, but just in case, I am also mentioning this volume, which features an excellent collaborative run between Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson that established Swamp Thing and made the subsequent Moore run possible.

Dreadstar omnibus volumes 1 - 3. Volume 1 includes the Metamorphosis Odyssey installments from Epic magazine and the standalone issue The Price. Jim Starlin does both the art and the writing, and this is his finest work. Normal comics often revert to status quo not long after a big change, but Dreadstar leans into permanent change as the series goes on, and takes on some serious issues punched up with some epic action.

Nodens wrote: Madman by Michael Allred
Fables
Usagi Yojimbo

We actually don't have Madman, so I'll pass it along, thanks.

Rebellion currently have a Humble Bundle deal on - complete arcs for Slaine, Brink, Niklai Dante, Devlin Waugh, Caballistics/Absalom, along with a sprinkling of Dredd.
Humble Bundle - Rebellion

The deal is worth it alone for all five books of Brink ("true detective in space") which is one of the best things I've read in a long time and gets the highest recommendation from me, so the cheaper $10 bundle with Caballistics, Absalom and Waugh is an absolute steal.

Thanks to the public library, I recently read The Coldest City, from Oni Press. It is pure Cold War spy drama in Berlin, in late 1989 as the Wall is about to come down. Written by Antony Johnston but definitely inspired by John le Carré. I almost didn't check it out, as a brief perusal showed 100% black and white art and no action scenes. But the art by Sam Hart is sufficient to tell the story without any color or flashiness. As I read the story, it seemed familiar, and a subsequent google search confirmed my suspicion that this comic was turned into the movie Atomic Blonde. There is some action in The Coldest City, but it's brief and realistic, so Atomic Blonde definitely took some liberties with the story. Anyway, if you really like Cold War spy drama and comics, you should definitely read The Coldest City.

This is seriously old news for most readers, but Saga started up again a while back, after Vaughn and Staples' hiatus. I'm behind the times because I only read comics in collected editions now and it still took me a while to even get to the latest collection . But I finally did and... it's still one of the best comics I've ever read and I've been reading since the 70s. Such a great story.

Three months ago, an old friend talked me into buying an Amazon Fire tablet. It was on sale for CyberMonday, and I had some credit card points to spend, so I ended up getting it for just $40. I tried digital comics a long time ago on a laptop, but it was a sub-optimal experience because of the weight and heat of the laptop. Plus, it was my girlfriend's laptop, so not consistently available for my use. But I thought that I would be willing to try digital comics again if I had a lightweight tablet like Fire.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to boot up my fully-charged Fire and try some digital comics. I had already found this amazing site, which has a vast amount of comics plus some slightly annoying ads:

viewcomics.me/

I don't know if it's a legal site, so I figure I might as well enjoy it while I can. Last week, I read Avengers vs X-Men (the notorious AvX event), and now I am partway through the first run of Uncanny Avengers. There are some minor drawbacks. The default page size is somewhat smaller than a comic page, so reading the text is a slight strain. When a comic has a big two-page layout, the Fire defaults to showing it as a small one-page layout, forcing me to rotate the device 90 degrees and hit the plus sign to get a legible, more visible view. The ads sit towards the top of the screen, so I need to swipe down slightly to view the page. A different problem is that DC and Marvel keep re-starting their titles, because apparently modern fans lose interest once the issue number gets above 12 or 24 or maybe 30. So figuring out reading order is somewhat opaque, especially when the comic title goes through variations, like Mighty Avengers or Uncanny Avengers or Savage Avengers. But all of these issue are tolerable, because I am reading lots of free comics instead of paying $4.00 per 20-page issue.

Thanks to the local library, I have been reading Copra, which is published by Image Comics. The artwork is slightly crude, but evocative, the work of a talented child or an outsider artist named Michel Fiffe. He is also the writer. Fiffe's writing is more character-driven, but the action is often both ultra-violent and somehow ancillary. The lettering is a bit crude, and sometimes requires me to re-read a sentence because I misread a given word. I was initially unimpressed, but the writing has gradually drawn me in.

The cover blurbs are from a variety of comic industry greats, and are overwhelming in their praise. None of these blurbs address the elephant in the room, which is that Copra is basically a recycled version of the Suicide Squad comic of the late '80s that was written by John Ostrander. I am not exaggerating. There is a character who is very clearly Amanda Waller, another character who is definitely Deadshot, and there is even a character who is unquestionably inspired by Shade the Changing Man. Shade was only part of Ostrander's Suicide Squad for maybe a year, and not a member of any other iteration of the team, so it's a very specific reference. Oddly enough, there is also a character who is basically Grace Jones, circa 1985, and another one who is Doctor Strange. The overall team is very much like Ostrander's Suicide Squad, with a mixture of criminals, outcasts, and heroes with serious issues, all run as an American black ops team.