2014 what are you reading thread

not that I would sell them

iirc 1963 was printed during the time when shops ordered hundreds of copies of Image titles

the last time I went to a comic show (which, admittedly, was years ago) you could still find bins of copies

looks like you can get the full run of 1963 on ebay for less than the cost of shipping

1963 kept chester brown solvent for years just off of inking one issue

a shame it was never finished, the issues that were published were good

Oh, I assume 1963 is worth zilch but I've never seen a floppy copy, it was a nice surprise amongst the Valiants and Zero Hours.

The Flex comics have a ton of loose pages, I'm just happy 'cause I'm a saddo Morrison completist.

1963 kept chester brown solvent for years just off of inking one issue

sadly, this immediately made me think of how many prostitutes this paid for

guilty lol

My order from the Top Shelf insanely-cheap clearance sale arrived today, so that's what I'll be reading for a while. My wife could barely pick up the box from our front porch.

Chester wasn't whoring in the early '90s APART FROM INKING THAT HALF AN ISSUE amirite, oh man it looked so good

and i think joe matt lived for like a decade (?) off coloring that one Grendel thing. These wily canucks know how to stretch a dollah!

^ also looked so good, one of the best colour jobs on a DC comic ever, and a huge leap foward for him. if it hadn't been delayed so many years before it came out, he could have had a happy and fulfilling career, or at least rented a place with its own bathroom.

yeah it was gorgeous.

veering afield here but did Bernie Mireault used to color his own stuff? I used to love the palette on his covers and that color special

he never did much in colour iirc, apart from the recoloured Jam for Tundra (can't remember if that was him), the Jam colour special for Comico (which was him), the Gaiman Riddler story (which was Joe) and three Grendels (Joe iirc?)

oh wait The Everyman by Allred and BEM, that was coloured by him. I'll assume he did the Tundra reprints too then, that was around the same period

hey look, he's colourising old stories on tumblr: http://berniemireaultcomicart.tumblr.com/

(or don't look, it's pretty :( )

Forest's Barbarella getting reprints. I'm fairly interested.

Any fans here?

Started reading the Multiversity title from a couple of weeks ago (Society of Superheroes), it's a lot of fun and in many ways better than the extant pulp universes from other publishers.

The thing I like best by Forest is his collaboration w/ Tardi, You Are There:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdnBrIGgcbI

http://vimeo.com/106526309

god hates astronauts is the best

It seems like there are two Gilbert Hernandez graphic novels in the last two weeks.

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Been thinking about Will Eisner lately. It seems that The Spirit reprints have become scarce and his status isn't as high as it was (it seems only 7 or 8 years ago when I would hear people debate whether Kirby or Eisner was the top comics god).
The Spirit Archives was handled very well compared to similar hardcover collections but they probably should have had more pages per volume.
The Best Of The Spirit is a good selection but it's way too small and the followup Femme Fatale collection had lots of overlapping content, which was really ridiculous. They should put out another Spirit Best Of but much bigger this time.

I think the visual compositions, beautiful cityscapes, slapstick and physical humour is what makes early Eisner so good; he did some really impressive short works here and there that really should be collected. I haven't read any of his graphic novels but the modern response seems to be that he couldn't do realistic drama well enough and they didn't have the same visual flair as his earlier work.
His guides also have some very old fashioned attitudes too.

My main reservation about The Spirit is that the plots were never memorable, just very well told. I once totally forgotten that I had already read a pile of Spirit comics and I pretty much never forget the comics I've read.

Does anyone have any Eisner favourites?

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Re: Underground Comix. It seems fairly clear that a large amount of alternative comic fans today also don't think as highly of these as they previously did. Nobody can deny their importance though.

The view seems to be that quite a few underground guys portrayed disadvantaged groups of people in a provocative way for shock value. "Sticking It To The Man" is harder to get a real subversive charge from because it was usually so rote and commonplace, it's more difficult to do intelligently and it probably wont be seen by the targets of the satire; so it seems making fun of disadvantaged social groups was an easy shortcut to shock.

I haven't read a huge amount of underground comix but I think that view is probably closer to accurate than seeing them as politically subversive heroes.

i forewent my usual book reading in september and had a month of reading comics. the result was a 10" pile of things, mostly re-reads.

Hellboy: Wolves of St August
Hellboy: The Corpse & The Iron Shoes
Vertigo Pop: London x4
Promethea x32
Dark Knight Returns x4
Plastic Forks x5
Red Son tpb
Batman Halloween 1, 2, 3
Cages x10
Batman: Long Halloween x13
Stray Toasters x4
Miracleman x24
Batman: Black & White (Vol1) x4
Courtyard

some old favourites. wasn't impressed by red son or long halloween tbh but everything else was fine.

my eisner favorite is contract w/ god

Robert you're probably right about Eisner - I get the feeling awareness of him rose greatly around the time of his death, the years before and after. That film version of The Spirit and as well Frank Miller's general decline in status has also probably hurt Eisner indirectly

re-reading Promethea... the art is uniformly great, and there are flashes of brilliance in the storytelling but it really gets bogged down with all the explication. Love this a little less than I did when it came out.

That film version of The Spirit and as well Frank Miller's general decline in status has also probably hurt Eisner indirectly

that film should never have been made, was worried about precisely this when it was released

It seems fairly clear that a large amount of alternative comic fans today also don't think as highly of these as they previously did.

Spain and Crumb are gods, but I don't have much use for a lot of the others. Vaughn Bode I guess, but he seems of a different sort.

people like to say that adaptations don't hurt the source material because the original still exists, but...

god hates astronauts is the best

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 7:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i gotta get in on this huh

oh yo is anyone reading the phil noto black widow?

I actually hadn't considered the impact of the film much. I think that the film was maybe forgotten too quickly and stylistically so different from Eisner that it wouldn't have affected him.

Vaughn Bode deserves serious credit for how original he was. Even if I'm not a huge fan of the stories, I'm amazed how fully formed he came out.

I like some of Spain's art but his political sympathies are utterly loathsome and I'm amazed he didn't get more associated with Dave Sim, Ditko, Frank Miller and Jack Chick (all different views but all made black sheep for them).

I highly respect Crumb's drawings, love his heavily rendered drawings with heavy doses of realism but never interested to read his comics.
I respect peoples discomfort with the misogyny parts (I've never got how a guy into big robust women wants to dominate them so much, it tends to be the other way around) but I think it's really unfair to dismiss him on those grounds. He did often draw women lovingly and I cant think of another artist whose sexually idealised version of women was so totally different from the culture around them. I've heard people dismiss them as grotesques but I think they have a far more meaningful beauty than the majority of alternative comic artists' drawings of women.

http://markmcleod.org/wp_clevelandstateart/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/crumb-1.jpg

Xpost don't forget justin green, maybe not prolific but his UG shit ruled

Somehow I've never seen a Jaxon book before. Seems he is another who has been left behind.

I don't really know about Eisner's status or reputation today, although I would say his place amongst the very top tier of American comic strip creators - along with Barks, Kurtzman, Kirby, Crumb - is pretty secure, and likely to remain so. I mean, the Eisner Awards were inaugurated in 1988, seventeen years before his death, and even then, Eisner was considered pre-eminent in the field. If you were at all serious about comics, he was one of the first figures you had to reckon with, wrestle with.

It's a very crude division to say that critical discourse about pre-Underground American comics has traditionally been split between the Eisner and Kurtzman camps, but there's some truth to it, too (The Comics Journal was strongly pro-Kurtzman, and when Gary Groth offered (by his standards) a fairly mild critique of some of Eisner's post-Spirit work, it was considered pretty daring, against the grain.) Eisner is the first American cartoonist to show the assimilation of a culture outside comics - Damon Runyon, Orson Welles, Dali - and for that alone his influence is inescapable and enduring; and by retaining copyright of the Spirit, he set a different creative example to other cartoonists - take care of business.

I used to say that I preferred the late comics that Eisner produced after he returned to comics in the 1970s. I'm not sure that would be true if I went back to them today, but they are at least very personal, quite idiosyncratic comics, unlike anything else, if not always very visceral or compelling.

Both Eisner and Kurtzman were partly fascinated, partly repulsed, partly jealous of the American underground. To my mind, the best of the Underground cartoonists - Crumb, Shelton, Spiegelman, S. Clay Wilson, Spain, Bill Griffiths, Jay Lynch, Kim Deitch, the awesome Rory Hayes, Bode, Moscoso, Corben etc etc - represents the greatest cluster of cartooning talent in America since EC, and unmatched until Fantagraphics in its pomp. Iit's a collective kind of genius, best experienced in comic book form, rather than single artist anthologies, imho (which is why I'm really keen to gets my paws on that collected Zap set coming from Fanta). There are still many significant Comix that have never been reprinted in any form - yet deluxe hardcover volumes of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom are available from Dark Horse. What a world.

his political sympathies are utterly loathsome

honestly never heard anybody complain about his politics - he's not associated with Dave Sim, Ditko, Frank Miller or Jack Chick because as an uber-Marxist/anarchist left-wing dude his politics are totally antithetical to theirs

ward you don't rate J Green?

yes! oh yes! the fact that he was included in my 'etc' points to the deep richness of American U/G comix between 1966-1976 (or, the end of Arcade).

I'm not blind to the very masculine and sexist (and frequently racist) culture that underpinned 60s U/G comix, either - but that was part of a larger countercultural problematic, and I would at least say that U/G Comix initiated auto-critque p early on (in the form of feminist UGs like Tits and Clits, or Aline Kominsky-Crumb's pioneering female autobiographical comics)

i guess you could say that Green's reputation rest largely on one landmark comic bk - but again, there must be a ton of Justin Green stuff still uncollected (and uncontextualised, which is what this stuff often needs, these days).

xpost yeah that's a hippie problem (the biggest hippie problem IMO) and yr right the comix self-critiqued a lot faster than say the rock scene did.

It's weird I almost want to file Starlin's first several years of 'auteur' superhero stuff in the US UG file. It looks like UG stuff to me in a lot of ways.

(which is why I'm really keen to gets my paws on that collected Zap set coming from Fanta)

This looks amazing and beautiful but saw the price tag for it this morning and ay yi yi.

lol yeah besides Binky Brown I have only read his rock and roll comics he did for Tower Pulse in the 90s. But man, Binky motherfucking Brown (Jim Woodring's favorite comic as is probably well known by now)

I don't know if Spain was in favour of violence in politics, ignores it or denies it but he portrayed Che Guevara as a hero and it seems he was a fan of the soviet union. Whether he was in denial about the violent realities, I don't know but I'd say his passionate belief in freedom of speech is completely at odds with the dictatorships he seems to like.
That sort of thing is what makes him similar to the other political black sheeps of comics.

I've never read any Justin Green cuz I have never actually seen a reprint of his supposedly classic work in a store

That sort of thing is what makes him similar to the other political black sheeps of comics

if you think portraying Che Guevara as a hero is akin to Miller's overt fascist/racist tendencies, or Sim's mysogyny-as-political-philosophy or Ditko's bizzare-o Objectivist nonsense I don't really know what to tell you.

haven't read any of Spain's apologias for Stalin or Mao plz enlighten me if these exist

but another reason he's unlike those other guys is as a leftist latino Spain was drawing on a long history of political activism from within his community - romanticizing the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, or Che Guevara, or inventing Trashman - these were not unusual opinions or deviant points-of-view to espouse within his context of the times. Whereas Sim and Miller and Ditko are all to a man crackpot loners who burrowed deeper and deeper into their own hermetic insanity.

XPost to Jon

Yeah, there's def an Underground vibe to lots of 70s Marvels, but from what I know/have read, Marvel guys like Starlin, Gerber, Englehart weren't really into Underground Comix as such. Tho I know at least one of that Marvel crew retains a fondness for soft drugs. Plus, by the early '70s, ppl like Corben were clearly producing UG Comix that were partly influenced by dynamic Kirby/Marvel storytelling values as much as by say R. Crumb's Jizz Comix.

XPost to WMC

Yeah, it is even more crippingly expensive in the UK! I think it will be on my Amazon WishList for a while