2014 what are you reading thread

You mean the Chris Sprouse issue? I spent the whole time thinking it was some kind of overly complicated Tom Strong parody set on Earth-2.

The one that came out last week with the Ben Oliver art was very uninspiring; the "Neil Gaiman's Sandman" line had my eyes rolling so fast the Flash couldn't have caught up with them.

That said, I'm still excited to see Cameron Stewart do Captain Marvel.

But then I don't really want to see "Watchmen using the characters it should have been, updated so it's about terrorism".

But Frank Quitely, so...

woo my copy of fukitor came in

Best bag of comic I've taken home in a long time:

Hubert/Kerascoet - Beauty (but no cover gallery, as I feared)
Hubert/Kerascoet - Miss Don't Touch Me
Corben/Poe - Spirits Of The Dead

Couldn't find the new Sergio Toppi book or any Dungeon reissues.

Just saw that there's a new Corben series out next year called Rat God, based on native American mythology.

I looked at the Russ Heath book yesterday. Lots of unpublished art and what looks like reprints of some of his Warren stories, still impressive work but it doesn't quite hit me like it used to.

Keeping my fingers crossed that those long delayed Kaluta and Krenkel Women art books will finally surface in the next few months.

I really enjoyed the Sprouse issue of Multiversity. The next one, not so much, and then it just kind of ended when it ran out of pages. Generally the project seems entertaining but hasn't really persuaded me why it needs to exist yet.

Apart from that, I read Scott Snyder's The Deep, which is fun for the first nine issues, then has the worst ending since the end of Lost - actually, perhaps even worse.

Warren Ellis' Trees is looking to be a loooooong build, but i'm really enjoying the early developments

guys fukitor is really insane. recommended for sickos only.

Was looking at the Kelley Jones Batman collection. His art is often very uneven but some of his compositions and the shapes he makes characters into are incredible. Still thinking about buying it but I gave most of my Kelley Jones stuff to a friend and I feel reluctant to buy it all again.

Wonder what the books do when there are gaps between story that the artist didn't draw? Maybe they have a paragraph explaining what happened?
Some of those DC characters by specific artist collections seem to have stop and I wonder if Jones will get a second one. Gene Colan only got a first volume and I think Kirby's golden age DC books all stopped after first volume.

I read some reviews and it says that the Moench/Jones Batman collection does have real problems with the story gaps but annoyingly omits some Jones covers too.

Prices for Niles/Jones- Gotham After Midnight have shot up way further than I thought they would. Batman Unseen is still affordable though.

I don't follow that many artists through floppies anymore and I don't miss it. But I'm still a Jones and Phil Winslade fan but their work is appearing in little bits in issues of Phantom Stranger, Martian Manhunter, Justice League and Harley Quinn. Probably not worth it.

Mattotti's Hansel & Gretel supposed to be out this week. Excellent.

Trying to resist going back to town for another comic binge.

guys fukitor is really insane. recommended for sickos only.

how many nazi zombie nurse decapitations are there (rough estimate)

idk, two dozen per page?

Complete Hammer by Kelley Jones in November.
Ditko's Shorts in December.
Ditko Archives 5 hopefully in the next few months.

Excellent.

Just finished Beauty by the 'Little Miss Don't Touch Me' team of Hubert and Kerascoet; it's an A+ fairy tale
http://www.nbmpub.com/comicslit/dontouchme/beaupre1.html

Superman: Man of Tomorrow Volume 2
https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/675907.jpg

Have ordered Beauty, am impatiently waiting for it.

After years of being baffled by Love & Rockets, being unable to get past the awful early sci-fi cavewomen in space stuff, have cracked it by just reading Gilbert Hernandez stuff. OK, so I can see why people like this!

Beto's the one who did the sci-fi cavewomen in space stuff! (and still does)

I got into Beto first too, though, when Jaime’s stuff was too continuity-mired and (I thought!) slick to find a way into easily - Gilbert had more stand-alone (or seemingly so, like the 10” X) stuff, and his variety let one dabble as a reader.

Once I started buying the magazine-size TPBs in order, Jaime popped as pre-eminent genius on Death Of Speedy; they’ve switched order since then a few times, but post Ti-Girls the pendulum has swung so hard that I can’t see Beto rising to the top again.

(Though this is partly because 90% of his output now is in hardcover – if he was putting out four US$12 gns a year on top of L&R, it’d be easier to keep up [and, I’ve always said, would suit the content of the pulp/B-movie series better] than it is with, as in September, two US$30 books in two weeks...)

Well I'm confused. I guess I'm just talking about the Palomar stuff, then.

I got into Beto first too, though, when Jaime’s stuff was too continuity-mired and (I thought!) slick to find a way into easily

Hah, my only problem with Jaime is that he doesn't seem to care about continuity too much... Like, all of sudden Maggie is getting a divorce, even though her being married has never been mentioned before, and the husband isn't even shown until she'd divorcing him, even though she's apparently known him since the early 1980s. And later on Maggie suddenly has a psycho brother who'd never been mentioned before either. That plus the way the characters can drift out of focus for years makes it kinda confusing, when some old acquaintance of Maggie & Hopey shows up, it's kind hard to remember whether it's someone who actually appeared in the comic years ago, or some new character Jaime just retconned into the story.

But Locas does have some sci-fi stuff in the early stories too, it's just not cavemen in space, rather than dinosaurs and superheroes... So maybe that's what you were thinking of, James?

I think the "all of a suddens" you mention above are part of the point! I like the idea that there's so much about Maggie we don't know.

Jaime skipping 11 months of Maggie's life between chapters is the same style of storytelling as him skipping 23 minutes between panels, not of him disregarding continuity.

And the creation of Calvin was entirely because someone pointed out to Jaime that he'd given a different number of brothers to Maggie in one dialogue balloon years and years apart from another one, and he started coming up with a reason why one of them might not have been mentioned again -- ie paying INCREDIBLY CLOSE ATTENTION to continuity, not ignoring it.

ie Chuck otm, xpost

Yeah, I just recently reread all of L&R and I can confirm that the Locas stuff is amazingly tight, continuity-wise, particularly given the fact that Jaime's been adding to it for 30+ years.

Reminds me I need to get the new New Stories

Dungeon Monstres Vol 5 in June

glad the next one is lined up; pissed that this is on a yearly US release schedule

I wish more stuff was on a yearly schedule. Dungeon is one of the few things I feel like I can keep up with.

i would take dungeon on a weekly schedule if i could

Finished Y The Last Man - kind of peters out at the end? Felt like it needed a lot more room over the last 2-3 GNs to get where it was going.

This is an issue with BKV in general imo

But Locas does have some sci-fi stuff in the early stories too, it's just not cavemen in space, rather than dinosaurs and superheroes... So maybe that's what you were thinking of, James?

Thanks, yes, that was what I was thinking of.

I looked around at some of the recently Winslade floppies (Bodies, Phantom Stranger) and nothing really caught my eye but Judge Dredd Megazine issues were sealed so I couldn't peek (I hate that. I probably would have bought more Heavy Metal issues if I could check the interiors).

There was a Corben bit in a new Buffy issue but it was only 3 pages. Nice but not enough.

Bought Batman 35 for a nice Kelley Jones backup feature.
Harley Quinn was sealed because it has an unusual scratch and sniff gimmick that I'm surprised DC would go for (a measure against piracy and full digital takeover?). I took a risk and bought it but waaahhhhh, only 2 Kelley Jones pages, so it wasn't worth it.

Also bought the Batman Unseen GN by Moench/Jones

I'll probably clip out the Jones pages from those floppies.
Years ago on the Comics Journal forum I said I wanted to clip pages out of anthologies (which was the majority of my collection and took up a lot of space) but was scared/reluctant to.
Eddie Campbell replied and said he loves doing that and didn't hesitate to clip from fancy hardcover books, just taking one panel sometimes. He talked about enjoying how your clipping collections change over the years.
I did clip out plenty but there was still some comics I was reluctant to clip apart, especially if I thought I might give it away later on. But it was really nice to condense the best parts of your collection and get rid of hundreds of pages of stuff you never wanted.

I have dozens of Kirby monster stories clipped out of 70s monster anthology reprints

The last issue of Saga was amazing!

I sometimes think about carefully cutting "The Trumpets They Play!" out of my copy of BLAB! #10 as it's one of the greatest comics things ever surrounded by a ton of crap I never need to see again.

Yeah I clipped from loads of those titles like Where Monsters Dwell and Where Creatures Roam. I kept my 90s reprints like Curse Of The Weird and Monster Menace because the overall contents were much stronger.
Marvel would go up in my estimation if they finally did nicely reproduced monster/weird tale collections focusing on artists on Best Ofs instead of title archives.

Xpost oh man that story. That's Al finally nailing what he was going for all along.

It's an enduring tragedy that it's never been reprinted and given its proper due. It's part of the canon, AFAIC.

Otm

jon, i have the amazing fantasy marvel omnibus; is that nnot the vast majority of kirby's giant monster material?

Not even close, he did loads of that monster stuff. Even the less prolific Ditko has loads more.

I think the vast majority of the Kirby monsters for Marvel are on the Unlimited app.

The last issue of Saga was amazing!

― Frederik B, Friday, October 31, 2014 5:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wowwwwww yes

Just finished Drawn And Dangerous: Italian Comics Of The 1970s & 1980s by Simone Castaldi.

He makes an argument that this era of Italian adult comics is a unique thing that embodied that time like no other cultural artefacts. Similar to american underground comix but way more political and more extensive cultural crossover.
It packs a lot into just 150 pages. It establishes all the previous Italian comics movements and talks about the relationship between French and Italian scenes. There's a lot about the political movements, rock bands, writers and fine artists of Italy at the time and how they related to the comics.
What I know about Italian rock and horror movies also makes more sense now, about the climate they came from.

I'd highly recommend it even though I'm not really interested in buying the comics of the core artists he focuses on. I prefer the artists he devotes just a few paragraphs to like Mattotti, Battaglia and Buzzelli.

But I was skimming a lot of the more analytic and political parts because I just barely understand it. I'm not a very good noon-fiction reader and I need to stop overestimating my ability to read non-fiction unless it's something I'm crazy about.

Another interesting thing is how he talks about the intellectual justifications or condemnations some Italians made for Johnny Hart's BC and Gould's Dick Tracy. About self-censorship because of oppressive ideology.

Castaldi is a university professor and I think he writes for the more academic comic journals. The only other major comics-related credit I can find is that he is a translator on the new version of Corto Maltese.

I think this is him.
http://www.hofstra.edu/Faculty/fac_profiles.cfm?id=222

just read gil hernandez's "chance in hell" on the train this morning, seeing it billed everywhere as a "stand-alone graphic novel" and found it kinda abstract and weird and didn't really dig it.

read up afterwards to discover it's part of a meta-series of "Fritz B-movie" standalone graphic novels, which are comics adaptations of fictional movies starring or co-starring [love & rockets character] Fritz"; understanding its place in the L&R universe might have made it way more comprehensible to me, but maybe not, idk