2014 what are you reading thread

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/

I don't think so...? There's 12 issues. The ending is a bit of a cop-out but it doesn't feel forced or rushed.

grabbed the bendis guardians reboot to read over lunch, pleasant surprise to run into iron man a few pages in

I'm sort of enjoying that, but get the feeling that it exists mainly as exposition and scene-setting for other titles and a way to familiarize people with the general outlines of the characters and milieu in advance of the movie.

xp, those links address that: the moonshadow ending was rewritten for the rerelease.

You fell for the AvX trap

Yes. Yes I did. (I also fell for the "let's put two of the original New Mutants on the main Avengers roster and then never do anything interesting with them" trap)

lol

has anybody read the 'just fights' AvX issues cuz idk......if they're just gonzo ridic consequenceless fights without any real dialogue that kind of sounds fun to look at

i "read" them on marvel unlimited, you more or less nailed the description there. i don't even remember who won.

there’s that one extended vision near the end, in the last issue, which in the new version has captions added to it in which Moonshadow tells us what he’s thinking and feeling

honestly this sounds even stupider than the original ending

moonshadow is some weak piss

Yeah, I read the Vertigo reprints as they were coming out and I was really not into it. And at that time, I was a) in high school, b) voraciously reading anything Vertigo, and c) a fairly big DeMatteis fan, which I think should've made me the perfect audience.

i liked it a lot in high school but that was my dematteis period

In an amazon review some guy said the couple of rewritten pages really spoiled one of the best parts of the book.

I think I realized fairly quickly back then (although not as quickly as I would've liked) that non-superhero DeMatteis was decidedly Not For Me. This, Brooklyn Dreams, Mercy, and especially Seekers: Into The Mystery (ugh...) were pretty heavy duds IMO. His hippified mysticism DO YOU SEE-ness only worked for me when it wasn't so front and center.

i associate Del Close's Wasteland with that stuff but man, Wasteland was much better... and maybe still good? I need to dig up old issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(DC_Comics)

xpost See I DO want that kind of thing in my Defenders issues but not in the center ring of the show.

Yeah, totally still dig most of his Marvel work and the mainstream DC stuff that I've read. Dr. Fate and his Spectacular Spider-Man run with Sal Buscema were particular favorites.

i was very very much 'bout his work on justice league

could've sworn there was something odd about moonshadow, like the followup was shortened or something, down from 3 to 1. could be thinking of something else though, or that it was a vertigo reprint. wonder if i can find my copy... wikipedia also reminded me that Blood exists, which i should re-read. M also.

and this thread has also prompted me to search ebay for Promethea #31 which i missed at the time. £4.99 later and i'll finally be able to read all that, after 10 years. (i haven't read #19 onwards)

Promethea is weird in that I really enjoyed it at the time - each new issue done in some wacky different style! - but going back and trying to read it all in one sitting is such a slog; the formula becomes apparent and repetitive once she's on her journey up the tree of life

still pretty gorgeous though. the most fun is really all the stuff going on in the background,

Blood any good?

I've read quite a bit of DeMatteis but I don't remember any specific style. He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.
I've read lots of his Spiderman but even as someone who has read more Spiderman than any other superhero, not one writer's run really stands out to me. I still have love for Peter Parker but almost everything was a big repetitive waste of time.
Stardust Kid was a perfectly okay comic for kids but Mike Ploog was the real attraction.

He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.

ugh I tried reading that recently and was really put off by all the smirky in-jokey self-referential bullshit. otoh Giffen's Ambush Bug stuff are some of my favorite 80s comics.

I'd quite like to reread DeMatteis's Dr Fate run, I've always thought it was underrated, but it's possible my taste in high school just wasn't very good.

I've read quite a few people saying a lot of Vertigo stuff looks worse in retrospect. Because they were taken aback by things they'd never seen in comics at the time. But now the novelty has worn off.

i associate Del Close's Wasteland with that stuff but man, Wasteland was much better... and maybe still good? I need to dig up old issues.

Wasteland was great, one of the high points of DC’s excellent late-80s period of genre experimentation

could've sworn there was something odd about moonshadow, like the followup was shortened or something, down from 3 to 1. could be thinking of something else though, or that it was a vertigo reprint. wonder if i can find my copy...

The Vertigo reprint was 12 issues, as with the Epic version, and the changed pages in #12. Farewell Moonshadow, the Vertigo followup that was then included in their TPB, was only ever solicited as a 56pp prestige format thing AFAIR.

I've read quite a bit of DeMatteis but I don't remember any specific style. He was collaborating with Giffen on Justice League stuff so I didn't know which writer was doing what.

You would if you read the credits!

(Long-range planning was done by Giffen with DeMatteis & Helfer; Giffen plotted actual stories, down to drawing the panel breakdowns for every issue, and sometimes wrote rough dialogue; DeMatteis wrote the words that actually got lettered onto the page.)

(In the behind-the-scenes story written by Kyle Baker for JLI #50, JMDM’s contribution to plotting is made fun of as being repeatedly suggesting “what if the JLI find a giant alien but it turns out the alien is God and then they realise God was inside them all along” and being told to stfu)

I thought that Justice League stuff was okay, very much like a sitcom. I used to hate how they made Blue Beetle look like such an ordinary dork. Because I thought Ditko's Blue Beetle was really cool; actually quite a lot like Batman.

Something positive I can say about 90s Spectacular Spiderman: Sal Buscema with Sienkiewicz inking looked great.