2014 what are you reading thread

I should maybe point out that I didn't intend to compare Mad to Archie in terms of its success being a mystery. That sort of parody has never died down in fashion (understandably), the constant new parodies keep it connected to the wider culture. Mad has had loads of great artists, many of the early ones worked in all sorts of genres and are considered giants of the medium.

Yeah, Feldstein was justifiably irked that Kurtzman gets the credit for Mad, when the magazine as it's best known was all Feldstein's doing. It's pretty clear that without Feldstein's work as both writer and editor EC would not have thrived as it did, nor would Mad had survived, Kurtzman or not.

I've been thinking about Wally Wood recently because of that recent Cannon reprint. I quite like Wood, but like most people I find his early work way better. I heard good things about his work like Wizard King but as with a lot of his later work, I found it kind of lifeless looking. If only he had done fantasy epics in the more lavish manner of his fifties work.

http://wallywood.tumblr.com/post/51656754836

This looks like a parody.

afaict Archie sort of sits apart from the rest of the comics industry in terms of distro/audience

Archie's one of those comics I read hungrily as a child, but am amazed that kids still read it these days

well there's been some developments
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=52012

my daughter's been interested enough to buy a few issues

ugh guys the new bendis miles morales spiderman #1 is so lovely

For a few seconds I thought that was a joke article, then I saw the artwork. With all those superhero artists doing covers it looks like a typical example of making a cartoon character way more serious than they probably should.

Another thing about Archie comics that interests me is the number of titles and number of pages for much cheaper than most thick comics.

Archie has gone super mainstream lately and gotten great press for it. I certainly can't imagine reading the comics but they're not aiming at me anyway.
http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/03/04/lena-dunham-archie-comics/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/archies-afterlife-ties-up-emotional-701717
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/business/media/archie-comic-picks-film-and-tv-writer-for-top-creative-post.html
http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/afterlife-with-archie-comic-Roberto-Aguirre-Sacasa-interview.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpz8KWpbEA0

xp some of the archie titles are digest sized and it's in that form that you'll see them in non-comics stores. more pages but less content per page. also, they have much lower quality paper than regular comics these days.

it's kind of amazing that archie have been publishing a sonic the hedgehog comic (and spinoffs) regularly since 1992.

i won't rep for archie these days but at its best it produced some of the best kids' comics ever -- the '60s era jughead comics in particular are great.

At CBBD the other week they had an "autopsy" of Canicule by Baru. Effectively a 'making of' deconstruction over the whole mezzanine floor, I couldn't help buying it despite not having that much French. But DAMN is it good.

xp i wish that stuff was getting reprinted in "essentials" style books... the collections archie puts out are crappy and scattershot and at the other extreme dark horse are publishing $50 glossy archive collections.

Finished Richard Reeves' good 2007 bio of John Stuart Mill and am almost finished w/Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days.

yes but how is the artwork

an archie dbl digest, w/ plenty of Dan DeCarlo a/work, is always a v relaxing and pleasurable reading experience imho

when i was in florida five or six years ago i was impressed by the way that i would often see archie comics racked next to the check-outs in big chain supermarkets - much better distribution than marvel or dc

yeah you still see it in big chain supermarkets out here - are they distributed by the same folks that distribute People and Weekly World News or something?

ugh guys the new bendis miles morales spiderman #1 is so lovely

― purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver),

So OTM! I was thinking about this a bit today -- David Marquez and Sara Pichelli have been essential to Ultimate Spidey's excellence because they're so good at facial expressions and body language. Bendis' books are so conversation-heavy, a lot rests on that.

I'm kicking myself because I forgotten the artist who claimed he gave W Gaines the basic ideas to do horror comics. It was this site that had a bio + interview of the artist, he said Gaines taken the ideas without paying him and told the artist he had no proof to tell anyone this really happened. I think it was one of the guys who worked on Avon's Eerie (first horror anthology comic ever), maybe Fred Kida, but I can't find anything from search engine.

Thread regulars, there has been discussion regarding this thread's title going on over here:

Request thread title change

lol
fault lies on both the threadstarter and the non-topic reading posters
too lazy to care about the thread as it already exists though

http://www.jimzub.com/creator-owned-sales-over-the-long-haul/

so this fascinates the fuck out of me

ha, I remember The Makeshift Miracle! cool to see that guy went full pro

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/aya-of-yop-city

i didn't even know this got made! Looks great!

apology for thread title change

I've been continuity to read 2000 AD related series including both some classic series and newer stories.

Strontium Dog Agency Files Vol. 1 - I'm a couple progs past the time travel story where Johnny, Wulf and Gronk capture Hitler.
Judge Dredd Case Files Vol. 3 - I'm about 1/2 way through this collection.
Slaine "Time Killer" - This was a delightfully weird and lunacy filled comic. Sections of it reminds me of the Archon parts of the Invisibles at the end of Vol. 3. I'm not sure the story really made a whole lot of sense, but it looked cool and was really fun.

Shakara "The Avenger" - I've read the first story now twice. Henry Flint's artwork is really great.
Judge Dredd "America", "Origins", "Mutants in Mega City One" & "Tour of Duty: Mega City Justice" - I've been on a run trying to catch up with more current Judge Dredd titles, so I started with these collections as while a couple of them are older stories, they do tie in with what has developed over the past couple years. I thought they were all really good. I'm going to follow through on the Tour of Duty, Day of Chaos and Trifecta collections next.

Other than that I am up to date on East of West, Lazarus and Black Science from Image.

I'd also like to try some of those Alejandro Jodorowsky/Moebius comics but am unsure really where to start, especially since The Incal looks to be out of print

What would be a reading order for The Incal, Metabarons & Techopriests? I've been trying to figure out some kind of reading order without having the stories ruined, but from what I understand they are all inter-related correct?

Incal is first

I haven't read them yet but I guess reading them in published order shouldn't spoil anything.

The UK version of Incal published by Self Made Hero is still readily available and just as good as any other version (although it is regular comic sized pages and the Humanoids version is probably magazine sized). I even saw it at Waterstones book shop last week.
Imported copies may be more expensive but just checking on the American version of Amazon, it is still far cheaper than the Humanoids version. I'd say it was a better cover too.

Humanoids put out the Incal series in a couple of different sizes. The regular hard cover is pretty much the same at least size and page count as the UK version.

Before the Incal is pretty cheap if you get the Wildstorm issues, which are like a buck each used at mycomicshop.

Received my copy of Madwoman Of The Sacred Heart and it is also not the Humanoids version, but another UK publisher, Sloth.

For those of you reading comix on tablets, here's something I didn't know:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=astro%20boy%20AND%20collection%3Aadditional_collections
https://archive.org/search.php?query=alita%20AND%20collection%3Aadditional_collections
https://archive.org/search.php?query=royale%20AND%20collection%3Aadditional_collections
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28collection%3Amanga_library%20OR%20mediatype%3Amanga_library%29%20AND%20-mediatype%3Acollection%20AND%20title%3A%22%20century%20boys%22
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28collection%3Amanga_library%20OR%20mediatype%3Amanga_library%29%20AND%20-mediatype%3Acollection%20AND%20title%3A%22adolf%22

and lots more but none of it really organized

something tells me this stuff shouldn't actually be on archive.org

the dark horse copyright was my tip off

Robert Stanley Martin has been doing extensively researched articles mainly about 70s-80s Marvel and trying to be more impartial about the people involved. Some people have been annoyed at him because they think he's anti-creator but I'd say whether he is right or wrong, I don't think he wants to flatter anyone.

I had never heard anything good about Jim Shooter for years and R S Martin managed an incredibly impressive defence of him that seems to have impressed even a lot people who were previously content to view him as a bad guy.
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/jim-shooter-a-second-opinion-part-one-the-best-job-he-can/
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/10/jim-shooter-a-second-opinion-part-two-romper-room-on-crystal-meth-installment-1/

His piece on Steve Gerber and the Howard The Duck controversies, second link is all the official documents.
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/05/all-quacked-up-steve-gerber-marvel-comics-and-howard-the-duck/
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/05/the-howard-the-duck-documents/

Another thing from the same site.
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/05/wonder-woman-bondage-feminism-all-for-20-off/

Noah Berlatsky finally got his Wonder Woman book published. He started writing about the original Wonder Woman a couple of years ago, he believes that she is one of those idiosyncratic creations (from idiosyncratic creators) that don't make much sense or hold much value when authored by anyone else. I remember being curious why more stuff like this about Wonder Woman hadn't been written a decade earlier because it seemed odd that Batman and Superman and even Green Lantern had more discussion when Wonder Woman seemed more interesting in so many ways.

I have to confess that even though I like Noah and think this book is worthwhile, I'm not interested enough in superheroes anymore to read this but for anyone who is, go for it.

"here" (mentioned upthread) gets expanded to 320 pages:

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/111690/here-by-richard-mcguire

From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of his pioneering comic vision.

Richard McGuire’s Here is the story of a corner of a room and the events that happened in that space while moving forward and backward in time. The book experiments with formal properties of comics, using multiple panels to convey the different moments in time. Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic toy that resembles the same dinosaur in the year 1999. Conversations appear to be happening between two people who are centuries apart. Someone asking, “Anyone seen my car keys?” can be “answered” by someone at a future archaeology dig. Cycles of glaciers transform into marshes, then into forests, then into farmland. A city develops and grows into a suburban sprawl. Future climate changes cause the land to submerge, if only temporarily, for the long view reveals the transient nature of all things. Meanwhile, the attention is focused on the most ordinary moments and appreciating them as the most transcendent.

(With full-color illustrations throughout.)

wow.... so is that a comic... or?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57hR44mB5u0

it's a comic:

http://imgur.com/a/EeNpT

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 6, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^def one of the greatest comic strips ever

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, May 6, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is McGuire's comic a comic or an adaptation someone made as a student film 23 years ago?

er xpost

fawa - i'm familiar with the original but that expanded book says "illustrations throughout" which doesn't sound like a comic

ok wasn't sure... yeah that press release is vague.

Pantheon has it listed as a graphic novel.

that isn't Here "in full" btw - the 1989 version has been under expansion over the last decade or so, for eventual book-length publication by Pantheon

(McGuire has also done lots of other graphic design and 3D design and toys and illustration and film, and two other comics, btw)

― (D1CK$) (sic), Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:13 PM

he's also shown sections of the work in progress as an installation a couple of times IIRC

cool, i'm excited

Robert Adam Gilmour, thank you for posting those Robert Stanley Martin links, which were of course very interesting. I don't know about him being 'anti-creator' so much as him being on the side of efficiency, capital, common-sense. That's probably the right way to run a business in America, but it makes for poor artistic-critical judgment, imho. Like, right at the start of that Shooter piece he flatly states, "From an aesthetic standpoint, the Shooter era at Marvel is easily the most vibrant time in the company’s history apart from the heyday of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko back in the 1960s" which is, to say the least, up for debate, but presented here as a simple statement of fact. And then: "The writer-editor position had always been a bad idea" - well, tell that to Harvey Kurtzman. I could go on.

I also applaud him for doing some basic journalistic digging around the Howard the Duck case which yes, should have been done years ago, but his recourse to contracts, legal obligations and court rulings does seem to blind him to the fact that Gerber's artistic achievement trumps all the cards in Marvel's portfolio of 'own-it-all grab-it-all' work-for-hire properties. Compelling as all this history and gossip is, it's no substitute for watchful appreciation and illumination of works of art, like issue three of Howard the Duck, say.

I admire a lot of his approach but in terms of taste I don't think I'd agree with much, but I guess I don't see eye to eye with many comic fans taste wise.
For my favourite 80s Marvel stuff more of the credit probably goes to Goodwin.