Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

I don't have anywhere near a six-figure collection - or even a "collection" really, as I give most of my comics to charity shops when I'm done with them.

But - I have gone digital only too - at least for weekly floppies. Same here for me - it's totally natural. And I think some comics are actually improved by the frame-by-frame thing on Comixology - it's given me a new appreciation for artists who bother to get the storytelling right. (Marquez, the guy on the new Iron Man series, is fantastic read that way. I imagine it would be great for, like Cameron Stewart or the Hernandez bros too.)

Also! Rosa sounds like a mensch.

the idea of saying Xaime would be improved by not having his panel-to-panel storytelling available to the reader is horrifying

Ha, okay, let's substitute improved for "inferior but more interesting and delightful than you might think". Sanctity of the page and etcetera. What I like about it, though, is that it forces me (ymmv) to study individual panels more closely in a way I don't over a whole page - the wit of a specific set of panel choices and transitions over a sequence becomes clearer. Not a substitute - just interesting.

Oh man I just read that don Rosa farewell ;_;

Comics break people. They break people!

Annie Mok and Sophia Foster-Dimino's wordless and frameless comic about trauma and processing, "Swim Thru Fire," is pretty devastating and can now be read in full: http://hazlitt.net/authors/sophia-foster-dimino

(Well, wordless in the later installments at least.)

Also, on a VIDA-ish note, Kim O'Connor on the gender dynamics of alternative presses:

The numbers are pretty abysmal. As recently as 2011, D&Q’s list was just 7 percent women—two of the 27 titles they published that year. For an 11-year stretch from 1996 to 2006, they published no more than four women per year. For five of those years (2000-2004), they published just one woman. In 2005, they published zero.
Sadly, in the landscape of comics publishing, that’s enough to put D&Q ahead of pretty much everyone else, at least among publishers of similar or larger size. To return to my pal's original finding: at Drawn & Quarterly, one cartoonist in every four is a woman. That's certainly a far better showing than we get from the Big Two, where that number is something like one in six or seven (a ratio that becomes way worse if you consider their catalogs holistically instead of as a present-day snapshot). And if I may hazard a guess, it is also a much better showing than D&Q’s alt-comics counterpart, Fantagraphics. By a lot.
On the other hand, one in four is still very poor—and it's hardly a "list that tends to be 50-50, male-female." That anyone would perceive an average of 25 percent as a history of equality speaks to the extent of the problem of gender disparity in comics.

http://www.comicsandcola.com/2015/12/on-drawn-quarterlys-feminist-legacy.html

Somebody needs to make the 2016 thread and I'm not brave enough

Rolling SERIOUS GRAPHIC LITERATURE Thread for Comics in 2016