2014 what are you reading thread

Cynthia Petal's Really Fantastic Alien Sex Frenzy >>>>>> anything Fingerman ever did for Eros. but I think Ripple and, yeah, Dan & Larry are far better comics

although both are about sexuality I guess

in older stuff, reading: dark horse's conan, kirby's superman's pal, kamandi + omac, otto binder's action comics

Fingerman said in an interview that he despised his old porn comics, he thinks they are total garbage and doesn't want them reprinted again. I don't think this has anything to do with the subject matter, just the execution.

Two or three weeks ago in a comic shop there was a guy who said to his friend "why are you buying this stuff? you can get it all for free on the internet" as if paying was a really stupid error. He said it loudly within earshot of the shop employees, I can't work out if that was intentional.

Yeah, I dig Fingerman's illustration waaaaaaaaay more than his writing.

― Love Theme From Meatballs 2 (Old Lunch), Sunday, June 29, 2014 10:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i really like the dialogue in the new MW run but the opening pages of Beg the Question are oof-worthy

He said it loudly within earshot of the shop employees, I can't work out if that was intentional.

did you punch him in the mouth y/n

No but I would have liked if the shop people confronted him.

Lots of those Marvel Essentials can be found pretty cheap. My local store has gotten in quite a few of them and selling them $5 bucks each new as I think they are moving them out. I found some of them like that over the past few years like that.

I don't have the Essential Thor #4 and fxxk paying $50 bucks for one, you can about get the comics for that much. There seems to be allot of collector speculation work going on with reprints these days, especially some of the odd hard covers out there that didn't get ordered much in first print.

I'm kind of surprised that print to order hasn't really come to some of this stuff, especially since the tech is there to really be able to do it pretty well.

I have a lot of good memories of back issue hunting but I really don't miss the price watching. Occasionally something I want becomes rare and expensive but there isn't as much bullshit as there used to be. Berserk and some other Japanese stuff is the most recent trouble I've had with inflated prices.

I do feel a bit sad that those days of treasure hunting in musty old comic stores are probably gone forever. Maybe if I go to another country I'll get that excitement again.
If I went to Japan I'd worry about customs being dicks about the content in the comic stacks.
Anyone ever shop in many foreign shops just to see what you could find?

To this day I still get recurring dreams about amazing comic shops, or new toys that resemble Monster In My Pocket, Mighty Max and Boglins.

fucking loved boglins

Yup I have recurring dreams about amazing shops too, usually used paperbacks.

new morales spidey out today!

In particular I remember these dreams of weird people selling ultra obscure freaky horror comics at night in the remote countryside.

OK, having said how much I am enjoying Letter 44, issue 7 was a blatant case of pointless flashback padding, or How to Kill Your Story's Momentum in One Issue

i really like deadly class, and i just read the fantastic four + x-men limited for the first time - it's fantastic

http://the9thblog.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Starstruck

Been reading more of this blog, it's convinced me to get Starstruck, which I'd been considering on and off for a few years because I like Kaluta.
This guy thinks it's the best comic ever made. How do you guys rate it?

I've always found it fetching to look at but almost entirely unreadable.

As I've said before, dense page layouts really put me off reading comics. I couldn't read Promethea despite wanting to. I hope Starstruck won't be too hard.

It's not the density but the prose itself that puts me off.

What's wrong with the prose?

I think it's plain old bad writing. Granted, I haven't tried to read it in about a decade, so I can't remember if it's florid, lifeless, flat or whatever. I only remember it being horrible.

I concur with EZS on all points. Pretty sure I have starstruck on my shelf somewhere; may go looking.

I've been thinking of getting Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s. I can only find a review (which is short but positive) on amazon but there's been virtually no response to the book. I've seen the book in shops, sadly it barely has any pictures.

I finally found my copy of Fatale #20 and read 20-23 in prep for the last issue which is coming out soon. I'm also working through the Uber Alles version of Stray Bullets re-reading the early issues which I read a few years ago and re-reading The Sixth Gun to get caught up to present on both titles.

I also read the last two issues of Lazarus to take it up to #9. While interesting, it's a pretty depressing read and kinda slow. I never finished DMZ, which covers similar ground, but that comic had a lot more thrust out of the gate till it got bogged down about half way through the series. I'm probably going to drop Lazarus off the pull list and maybe check it out again down the line as I think it would most likely be better read as an immersion read instead of month to month.

they dont have deadly class at my shop--when i asked about it the dude pointed me at something which was not at all deadly class saying "yeah its kind of hard to recognize" so

re: Starstruck - I never got into it particularly, but its predecessor Ike Garuda elicited a similar response to EZ Snappin from me (ie, it is gorgeous and there are fantastic ideas in it but at a certain point I am completely lost by the text)

I somehow have made the transition from being All About The X-Men to being All About The Avengers and it's kind of weird, particularly since the Avengers characters I care the most about are like the least important/central Avengers characters (basically the Avengers Arena/Underground kids, The Mighty Avengers, Cannonball, Sunspot, Nightmask, Starbrand, Smasher)

Hawkeye continues to rule tho

You fell for the AvX trap

http://www.tcj.com/this-week-in-comics-7914-hell-eternal/

I didn't know Lord Horror: Reverbstorm was collected last year.

re: Starstruck - I never got into it particularly, but its predecessor Ike Garuda elicited a similar response to EZ Snappin from me (ie, it is gorgeous and there are fantastic ideas in it but at a certain point I am completely lost by the text)

Ike Garuda is from ten years after most of Starstruck (and by a different artist) btw

haha wow I had no idea they were that far apart

Read most of the first volume of Tezuka's Buddha. It had good stuff going on but I just wasn't interested enough. Hope I like the Dororo omnibus better. I loved the second book of Phoenix.

I need to reign in my compulsive buying, I've been giving up on most comics before I finish them; even though I'm very discriminating I still overestimate my interest in so many things. Probably won't get Starstruck then.

There is a big Kaluta art book coming in a few months but I'm pretty sure it was announced more than 5 years ago, so I almost expect more delays.

Another 80s comic deeply beloved by some: Moonshadow by DeMatteis and Muth. Anyone a fan?

Moonshadow looks pretty and Muth's art clearly set an example for a lot of Vertigo style painted comics, but the story is overtly hokey and new agey and narration-heavy, as is the case with most of DeMatteis' non-superhero work. I can understand why some people who read it in the 80s love it, as there probably was nothing like it in American mainstream comics back then... But I read it over 10 years after it was first published, and wasn't particularly impressed. Even the art, undebiably impressive as it is, made me think why overtly artistic painted art so rarely works in comics: it calls too much attention to the single images themselves, which hinders the flow of the narrative, and in this case it's hindered even more by DeMatteis' wordy purple prose.

i like moonshadow pretty well. i think i'm missing one random issue. :/

I've been considering Moonshadow because I've heard some people who are very difficult to please praise it. Many sky high praises.
I loved some of Muth's surrealist work for Epic Illustrated. His Dracula and M work was very impressive. I think he is mostly a book illustrator now.

The images that draw too much attention problem is a tough one sometimes. I think it's a case of how many different types of info you have to juggle on each page, how easy each element is to comprehend.
I've very much started to favour comics that are more like children's books with very few images per page and minimal text. If the images don't draw any attention, it's difficult to justify doing a comic at all unless there really needs to be a visual display; if it weren't for extravagant pictures I'd never had read a comic past childhood.

A lot of people do each comic story because that's just the way they tend to tell stories but I think a lot of comics don't really make real use of the visual aspect. Writers in the comic business will often put the story straight to comics form because a more appropriate medium might not be commercially viable for them.

I think there are damn good reasons realistic character dramas are less popular than high powered fancy fighting in comics.
Realistic character dramas are difficult because few comic artists are skilled enough (or have the time) to convincingly measure up to real actors or detailed prose in a book.
I've never read a martial arts epic or superhero books in prose form but I could see fights getting boring and there being a difficulty in conveying all sorts of fancy fight moves. Super powered fights in movies might make money but they tend to look unconvincing/bad compared with comics and videogames.

I think all genres should be welcome but there are challenges for some genres that need to be taken more seriously.

Hip Hop Family Tree vol 1 - Ed Piskor

Moonshadow is definitely a borrow, not a buy

If the images don't draw any attention, it's difficult to justify doing a comic at all unless there really needs to be a visual display; if it weren't for extravagant pictures I'd never had read a comic past childhood.

I wasn't saying that the images shouldn't draw any attention, but that in many painted comics like Moonshadow individual images become the focal point instead of the flow of images, and it's the good flow that keeps up a fluid narrative. Painted art usually tends to be stiffer than pencil/ink art, and the images become like mini-paintings instead of something that follows the previous panel and leads you to the next. (Splash pages tend to have a similar effect in pencil & ink comics too, that's why the overuse of splash pages can be pretty distracting too.)

I don't feel comics like these really play to the strenghts of comics as medium; they borrow their tricks from fine arts, where everything is about a single image, but doing that weakens what's the unique in comics when compared to fine arts, the narrative flow of a series of images.

Again, I'm not saying comics shouldn't have a striking splash page or some other kind of "still" image here and there, they can be very effective when used sparingly, but if every panel in a comic is all about "look at me", it usually doesn't work. (Or, as you mention, it may turn a comic into something that's more like an illustrated book, but that's a different medium with different rules.)

I didn't mean to say any of that as a retort to you specifically. Your criticism of Moonshadow (which I could see myself agreeing with, but since I haven't read it, I don't know) just put me in mind of how awkwardly so many things don't quite work in comics. This is why I'm hesitant to read Starstruck and Moonshadow.
CC Beck had sometimes said that readers shouldn't linger at all on the images. I used to hate him for that but I think there are grains of truth in what he said. Different styles of art require different flows, different quantities of panels and different usages of text.
There are quite a few virtuoso illustrators who got their name in comics but drifted away but occasionally came back; I think these guys would benefit from more of a children's book storytelling approach. Someone who draws like Alcala shouldn't do panel arrangements like Ware or Trondheim.

I think the splash page style comic can work. Druillet, Alex Nino (who I don't think works at all when he overlaps panels), Muth, Ian Miller, Matt Coyle (Worry Doll), Gene Colan, Martin Vaughn-James (The Cage) and some others did it on some occasions pretty well. If people want to call it an illustrated book, fine, but I still think of it as sequential art storytelling (so basically comics in my mind). Children's picture books have been increasingly crossing over with comics and I think comics people ought to study these sorts of books more. A lot of people who were creating comics for small electronic devices use one panel at a time and I think that works fine too. Each image doesn't have to fill the whole page.

I think having fewer images per page and less text is why so many people find manga more accessible. Even though Gil Kane's Black Mark was horribly overwritten and not a good story, in his basic approach, I think he was REALLY on to something for more illustrative storytelling.

Some of Brian Selznick's work too. Lots of Minicomix used a similar approach to the things I'm talking about.

just read hickman's "nightly news" and found it pretty turgid

reminded me a lot of "wanted" (and "fight club" for that matter) in its aggro condescending indictment of the reader, kept waiting for hickman to draw himself into the book in a fedora.

could very easily have seen myself loving this at 15, but outside of the cool design elements i didn't think it was all that redeeming and don't get the hype at all.

Here is a big preview of Lord Horror Reverbstorm. Quite a few of these images were in his Haunter From The Dark book. TOTALLY NSFW!
http://www.johncoulthart.com/retinacula/reverbstorm.html

there was some nice deal on comixology where three or four of hickman's image series were bundled together

pax romana probably best

yeah my cousin was telling me about pax romana it does sound p awesome

re: Moonshadow

I actually just re-read the entire thing a couple months ago when I dug out my old issues of it from me and my brother's collection. It is p good, albeit repetitive and sort of overly pleased with itself, the art is good but the text does most of the heavy lifting imo. The characterizations in it though - of Ira, of the Unkshusses, and Moonshadow - are all top notch.

it calls too much attention to the single images themselves, which hinders the flow of the narrative, and in this case it's hindered even more by DeMatteis' wordy purple prose.

kinda agree w tuomas about this; it flows in a weird way as a comic, the images are all very static (albeit often v pretty). It's more like a prose book with illustrations than it is a comic.

didn't moonshadow get cancelled and/or truncated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshadow_(comics)
http://www.amazon.com/Compleat-Moonshadow-John-Marc-DeMatteis/dp/1563893436
http://www.blackgate.com/2012/12/10/dematteis-and-muths-moonshadow/