2012 what are you reading thread

OK, so where _is_ a good starting point? Which book should I buy first?

The most economical method would probably be to get The Locas Collection directly from Fantagraphics -- 1320 pages in 5 volumes, all the Locas stories from vols. 1 and 2 for $65. But if you want to go one volume at a time, I'd say start with vol. 2, The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.

So, uh, I'm not hallucinating the extended Mountain Goats reference in the new Mighty Thor, am I?

Nope. Fraction said Marvel goofed and forgot to put in the title - "the best ever death metal band out of Broxton".

deets!

There's a Jeff, a mention of his buddy Cyrus and the band they were in, and a few "Hail Satans". How those are integrated to a larger story you have to read for yourself.

ok i'm never gonna understand it then

now reading: old Berni Wrightson horror comics

I just finished reading Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk. Surprisingly fun. Maybe I should read his Spider-Man stuff next.

She-Hulk went so off the boil by the end that I no longer felt like following Slott's work anywhere

His Spider-Man/Human Torch mini is terrific fun, though - drawn (and ghost-co-written) by Ty Templeton. The collection was a digest, so mildly annoyingly tiny and difficult to read, but appealingly only eight bucks or so.

The first 12 issue She-Hulk series was much better than the following run. It definitely ran down as it got caught up in continuity and had to be reined in by editorial. Of course, that was also when it sold the most. People are silly.

I'll look for the Spider-Man/Human Torch. Not sure if they have it in the digital reader thing.

They do have it on MDCU. That's my next read.

Thumbs-up on the SPIDEY/TORCH mini. Bonus Spidermobile.

Just reread the WARLOCK series from Marvel (pre INFINITY-EVERYTHING). It's still great. It's still terrible at the same time. Things were done with pages there that defy description.

There's finally an Essential Warlock coming later this year with all that early stuff in it.

Best news I've heard all month. But it'll be b/w won't it? I've got scans of the WARLOCK SPECIAL EDITION from 1984 or so (as well as paper originals). Might pass on that, but probably don't have the willpower.

AFAIK, all the original 70s Warlock comics have already been collected in Marvel Masteworks Warlock Vol. 1. (the pre-Starlin stuff), and Vol. 2 (the Starlin comics). They're kinda pricey, but both are hardcover and about 300 pages.

Eh, I always hate those B&W reprints. You can feel the missing color.

yup. They feel sort of pointless

I guess the point is paying 15 bucks for the B&W Essential edition, instead of 50 bucks for the coloured Marvel Masterworks one?

Pretty much. They're designed for us poors.

b&w = incredibly evocative of the way that certain britishes marvel comics fans hem hem first experienced these 'classic' stories - eg in cruddy black and white weekly reprint mags. but also, black and white sometimes lets you appreciate the line/artwork better eg i don't think colan and palmer's tomb of dracula issues have ever looked better than in the essential volumes, and also, lots of the colouring choices made on these super-deluxe 'archival' reprint problems are just as diminishing as stripping out the colour altogether - inappropriate (computer) re-colouring, muddy reproduction of original comic book colour, etc etc. as a big hunk of reading material, which wld often cost thousands to buy in the original editions, the essentials represent v v gd value for money, imho (generally, dc/national have always kept better quality stats of their titles, so the showcase series generally have nice clean pages that haven't been obviously re-drawn/'restored').

also, the early issues of warlock, pre-jim starlin, are p ho-hum and not especially deserving of hardbacked deluxoid reverence

tho i do concede that the magus shld always be in colour

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Themagusoriginal.png/250px-Themagusoriginal.png

As long as the Masterworks volumes are still being issued, I think the Essentials are a wonderful idea. There's lots of stuff that I want to read but that a) I don't think really requires the deluxe treatment and b) that I don't want to pay a lot of money for. The Essentials are just so economical. I have pretty much everything up through 1970 and it only set me back, what, a couple hundred bucks? That's pretty rad. There's stuff like Kirby's Thor that I'll probably eventually shell out for the color reprints of, but I'm cool for now.

I imagine Colan's dynamism, the hites and dites and the sense that characters in motion were moving almost too fast to see, made coloring his work a little more difficult in those pre-digital days. I should have asked Carl Gafford about that back when I was in CAPA-Alpha, but never thought of it.

but also, black and white sometimes lets you appreciate the line/artwork better eg i don't think colan and palmer's tomb of dracula issues have ever looked better than in the essential volumes,

OTM. I don't even want to see Colan in color anymore, it just gets in the way of what's great about him.

Colan was so awesome; he was like a "third way" at Marvel. No Kirby in him at all, no Ditko either. Who the fuck followed him stylistically?

Ditko also looks fucking great in Essentials black and white. Kirby/Sinnott too. Kirby/Colletta though, NAGL in B&W. You need the colors to tell you where the boundaries of the figures and objects are.

Jonah Hex also looks awesome in its B&W phonebook.

Have to say that a lot of the old ghost story/haunted house/whatevers comics look fine in B/W. Superhero stuff often suffers but I can read it just fine and it's a hundred times cheaper than the hardcovers and a lot easier than bargain bins.

After getting to peruse a lot of Colan through the MDCU I have to say that, as much as I love him on the Tomb OF Dracula I pretty much hate him on superheroes. I find his Iron Man and Daredevil issues almost unreadable. Except for covers; the man was born to do covers.

I love the Essential Spider-Man Ditko volumes. To see his line work evolve is such a joy. Can't read his Strange stuff in black and white though. Not trippy enough.

hey so I'm feeling pretty good about going off Slott as mentioned:

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/why-i-loathe-and-despise-spider-man.html

I read the Spidey/Torch team-up and I liked one out of the five issues. Tried to read the Spider-Man BIG TIME story and gave up two issues in. Slott lost the plot after that first She-Hulk series.

xp Uck. That is kinda gross. What happened to you, Dan Slott?

fucking A that spiderman costume alone is a crime

I just picked up the first Starman omnibus, and I'm two thirds trough it. I remember reading and really liking some of these stories in the 90s, but they feel much more dated now: there's the constant namedropping of Jack Knight's cultural reference points, the jaded first-person narrative, the Vertigoesque purple prose... In general I think the actual stories have some nice elements, but the narration tends to wear me down. Does it get better in future volumes, or should I just give up reading the other five omnibuses?

I made it through the first three omnibuses, and it was a fun read. The references stay dated, but they're somewhat toned down after the first volume. I guess I should get around to the other volumes... I was inspired to read them mostly from the Scott Tipton/Comics 101 columns praising the series

recently stumbled upon my old cache of Colan's run on Amethyst and whoah that shit was way darker/more psychedelic than I remembered

What issue #'s were Colan?

Dylan Horrocks occasionally reps for that comic. He wished he could write a reboot of it when he was doing bat-verse DC scripts in the early 00s.

Apparently DC is getting off the dime and reprinting AMETHYST, but as a SHOWCASE b/w book. I suppose it's better than nothing at all.

I'm remembering that the only way you used to be able to get the FOURTH WORLD comics was as a greytoned b/w set of 4 books. That's how I first read 'em, actually. Eventually they came around (I guess Morrison basing a lot of his later DC work in FW helped...)

Pretty sure Colan did JEMM: SON OF SATURN as well, or a chunk of it, and it was pretty good.

Colan also did the vastly underrated NIGHT FORCE, which became kind of a template for Vertigo-style storytelling long before Vertigo. Think that just got recently collected.

Reading through ESSENTIAL DR. STRANGE v.3 and there's a ton of Colan in that. Colan inked by Tom Palmer, even. Brunner inked by Romita and Giordiano and Janson. Good stuff. Trippy Englehart stories, too.

amethyst = drawn by ernie colon, not gene colan

d'oh that's right my bad

anyway yeah that comic is weird

I might be re-reading all the MICRONAUTS comics. Just maybe.

oh man...

Going on vacation and I should read something good for me, but man I DON'T WANT TO.

That backyard adventure issue is burned in my brain.

I have a complete run of those, one of the only big chunks of Marvel/DC I've kept with me across all the moves. Partly cause I love them and partly cause I know they'll never get collected/reprinted due to gnarly licenses/rights.

Basically the first dozen or so issues are mega and then after a lull of a year or so it picks up and gets awesome again.

That backyard adventure issue is burned in my brain.

haha yeah - look out for that lawnmower!

I still feel bad about what happened to Bill Mantlo. He did good and bad stuff but he was always at least weird.

yeah, an awful tragedy

Agreed on Mantlo. Now that I think about it, his work was probably more influential on me as a kid than Claremont or Gerber was. He was one of those workhorses who just got chucked to the wolves.