2014 what are you reading thread

do you mean a pull box or something, HOOS? a longbox is like... a cardboard box you put comics in

― mh, Monday, June 23, 2014 7:47 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i mean i'm assuming that my pull box takes physical form as a long box, yes

but its probably just a bag

*sigh*

Sex Criminals is kind of entertaining but it's mostly leaning on its premise for novelty factor?

yeah i mean i'm reading it for the dialogue basically, makes me laugh & i like the characters and their relationship--the 'criminal' side of the story & even the art aren't really that interesting to me

don't feel bad, HOOS, it's probably a little section in a longbox with dividers on either side so your books don't dirty up someone else's

is anyone checking out COWL? curious

sex criminals is okay but the whole SECRET SOCIETY WATCHING YOU schtick felt sub-orphan black and The Fermata is more interesting.

I've been reading whatever shit marvel puts up on the unlimited tablet thing every week, quay d'Orsay (which is spectacular), prophet in trades and going back to the obscure cities again.

going back to the obscure cities

this should be a euphemism

might be!

I'm plowing through silver age Marvel from day one. I'm up to about '64 right now. There's been plenty of dire crap thus far, but Stan's dialogue is starting to pop and Jack's art is starting to get wonderfully weird and abstract, so the good stuff is right around the corner. I have Essential trades for everything through about 1970, so we'll see how ambitious I ultimately am.

Also just learned that Lapham is finally putting out Stray Bullets again, so I ordered the complete Uber Alles trade and will be taking a brief Marvel hiatus for that once it arrives.

I read the first couple volumes of Saga over my weekend vacation and enjoyed them more than I expected

― mh, Monday, June 23, 2014 7:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

3 is great too! 1 my favorite so far tho

yeah, I was wrong, I read all three!

just picked up the start of the new arc over the weekend, its a gutpuncher

I'm plowing through silver age Marvel from day one. I'm up to about '64 right now

Did you find some sort of chronological month by month list for this? I've always wanted to do something similar.

Yeah, in typical fashion for undertakings of this nature, I'm being pretty anal about it. I find The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators to be an utterly invaluable resource for lots of Marvel stuff, including publication dates. There's also a really detailed site with an issue-by-issue timeline that I can dig up if you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole.

In mainstream comics am currently enjoying:

Saga
She-Hulk
Miss Marvel
Letter 44 - this is good, could be a lot better, but has me hooked enough for now
Wonder Woman (the only DC book I bother with now, and I always used to be a DC>Marvel person)
And, bizarrely enough, the two IDW Transformers series, which have become (for the most part) often very funny behind-the-scenes political stories (along with lots of big robots hitting each other)

I wanna rescind my opinion on Black Science btw, now that I've finished the trade I'm suuuuuuuper into it--really, uh, rockets upward after the first issue-and-a-half

Letter 44 - this is good, could be a lot better, but has me hooked enough for now

this looks interesting how deep is it so far

does a hoos read manhattan projects?

not yet, been considering it

Letter 44 is only 7 issues in: The first trade is out or about to be out, collecting the first 6 issues.

Also, I forgot that I'm also really digging Superior Foes of Spider-Man

Feeling like there are a ton of indies right now (Letter 44, God is Dead, Manhattan Projects, Black Science, Mind MGMT, etc etc) that are getting really good writeups, and have great art, but just doing absolutely nothing for me whatsoever.

I'm also reading the first-half of the Sean Howe book (which I skipped first time) and checking lots of 60s-80s Marvel on Marvel Unlimited. It's *really* hard to pick up any Steve Gerber that's not Howard the Duck - any recommendations how to do that?

Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary for me - I've gotten back into Avengers/New Avengers since Infinity ended (thankfully) and they are both SUPER fun right now. That plus something called, er, Albert the Alien on Thrillbent, whcih is really cute.

The Hickman Avengers stuff where they're trying to figure out exactly how far they're willing to go to protect their earth is getting intense

It's *really* hard to pick up any Steve Gerber that's not Howard the Duck - any recommendations how to do that?

Idk how in print the essentials volumes are but you need Essential Marvel Horror (the one that focuses on Man Thing and the one that focuses on Son of Satan) and Essential Defenders vol 2 and 3.

xxpost A lot of Gerber's '70s work (Defenders, Omega the Unknown, OG Guardians of the Galaxy, Man Thing) has been reprinted in recent years. Whether those reprints are currently in print is a whole other question.

Where did they reprint og guardians?

They've put out two trades that I think cover all of their pre-Valentino appearances. Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers, I believe they're called.

In sort of similar news, they just solicited a complete '70s Deathlok the Demolisher trade for September.

these are in color i suppose? (aka I can't afford them)

Yeah, they are. And I guess Marvel has unofficially (but basically officially, since they haven't issued any since early last year) nixed the Essentials in favor of the color Epic Collections, so all of the old reprints are going to be unaffordable from here on out. The realization of which having kicked my Essentials collecting/hoarding into overdrive.

oh fuck that's bad news but thanks for telling me

are a lot of them already pricey?

Some of them are ridiculous {like Black Panther, which was released <2 years ago and is currently selling for >$50, and the fourth Thor volume, which I just paid more for than I care to disclose) but a lot of them are available really cheap used. I'd like to think that the prices will drop as the Epic Collections replace them but I'm not taking any chances.

I never even saw the black panther one :(

Didn't know that about the Essentials ending, wot a pisser. Think I've got most of the ones I actually want, but there's a few I'd hope would continue on a bit further (eg the FF volumes reaching the Byrne issues). This is a pretty useful list:

http://collectededitions.com/storefront/buy_essentials.html

I don't know about current in-print status, but most of Gerber's major work has been reprinted in some form or other over the last ten years (aside from the things Jon mentions, there's also a good Omega the Unknown colour collection from Marvel).

If you don't mind the overpriced color editions, they've been doing a decent job of bridging the post-Essential gaps. F'rinstance, I think there's only six-ish issues uncollected between the end of the Essential Avengers run and the more recent color trades they've done which collect everything through the late '80s. I'll give Marvel credit for effort and chutzpah (although we'll see what the final result is) inasmuch as these Epic Collections, much like Fantagraphics' Barks collections, have been released out of sequence but numbered with the apparent intention of being complete collections of a given title. Remains to be seen what "complete" really means in this context, and it's sure to be a frustrating endeavor for collectors, given Marvel's complete disinterest towards keeping stuff in print.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers, I believe they're called.

fuck yah

Not to derail too far towards making this an "old-school Marvel"-centric thread, but I just read yesteday that Dan Abnett is going to be writing an OG Guardians series starting this fall. I'll be reading that.

oh cool

damn man i think min wage might come off my pull list, i'm so bummed at the way fingerman only includes POC as cab drivers and barely-drawn shadowy beggars. i like rob, i like the writing, but i can't deal with the consistent gross stereotyping.

Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth. What he's lost in verve he's compensated with (minor) ambition

Who drew that one?

i was about to say that i found sweet tooth to be really mediocre, but i now realize that's not the sweet tooth under discussion

oh hey issue one of Letter 44 is up free in this old i09 post:

http://io9.com/read-the-first-issue-of-letter-44-the-comic-everyones-1472795323

lol mordy

i'm surprised u like letter 44, h00s - seems pretty idk, jingoistic?

I've been thinking of giving Minimum Wage and other Fingerman stuff a go. I listened to an interview with him a couple of years ago and he was pretty funny.

I'm curious to see what the color is like in these new Marvel collections, because it tends to look bad in their reprint titles.
I honestly think those Essential collections are the best thing Marvel have done since the 90s, but I see them piling up in shops as if they aren't selling and they do take up lots of space.
Gene Colan's work in particular looks way better that way. I've been considering looking for other Essential books by him.

It's a shame with all their resources they've still never done a lot of the material justice for fans of the artists. Everything seems to be sold as continuity history. There has been some artist focused collections but they were done with the bad Masterworks reproduction.
With half decent scans, large collections of Ditko, Gene Colan, Basil Wolverton, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Bill Everett would be sweet as fuck. But it probably would make an incoherent reading experience.
Maybe best-ofs might be better because frankly, some of Everett's work was very poor. In the unlikely situation there is a Tom Sutton collection, I'd rather his superhero hackwork wasn't there because it really shows that he didn't enjoy doing it (some of the genres he did enjoy had lots of his hackwork too).

I read an interview with Mike Mignola recently where he said the Colan/Wolfman collection of Night Force was cancelled due to low orders. Out of all the crap sold in comic shops!?
There is copies listed with insane prices but I've seen that several times for books that seem to have never came out. I kinda wanted that Krenkel-Women book but I doubt it came out, I think the sellers are lying.

Yeah the tomb of Dracula essentials are probably my favorites, visually, of the ones I have. The buscema-Palmer avengers stuff looks awesome in essentials too.

Have they gotten round to collecting the power man & iron fist stuff yet? I've been hankering to read those for awhile. I love that faux-streetwise 70s marvel stuff.

they did an Essentials - maybe 2? - of the Power Man and Iron Fist series.

Ok I gotta get those asap

30 bucks good grief

Current stuff I'm enjoying at Marvel:
the various Avengers (not counting Rememder's mess or the Assemble title)
All-New Ghost Rider
Black Widow
Superior Foes of Spider-Man (the best of the lot by far)

At DC it's just All-Star Western and Wonder Woman (the latter because it feels the long story might be wrapping soon - it lost a lot of momentum). I expect to be reading zero DC books soon, which feels wrong.

Other stuff:
Archer & Armstrong
East of West
Flash Gordon (might be the most fun of them all)
Magnus Robot-Fighter
Southern Bastards
The Manhattan Projects
Turok Dinosaur Hunter

I'm really enjoying the Ghost Rider too, and the Doop mini has been a blast. Vic Fluro is knocking it out of the park on all his books at the moment too. One of the books published last week had the return to Marvel continuity (although not named, and in a clunky way which made it look deliberate) of The Fury, from the Moore/Davis Captain Britain.

You're not wrong about DC, and ASW is cancelled in 2 (?) issues. WW May well not be worth reading once Azzarello is gone which is only a couple of issues away.

I'm reading the usual suspects at the big indies, probably the only one nobody else has mentioned yet is Brain Boy printed by Dark Horse; this month it introduced a villain who is a direct rip-off of Herbie the Fat Fury.