Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

Well yeah, but if you read a scanned page you wouldn't know that the repetition of panels is because of a hole in the page, and the existence of the hole is actually an explicit part of the plot, it's all very meta and breaking-the-fourth-wall.

Forks, sorry, I don't have a copy ot the book, I've always just borrowed it from the library. But since you now know about the hole thing, just pay attention to the two consecutive pages where a panel seem to be weirdly out of order, and the characters react to that, that's where the whole is supposed to be. You should have no problem with the whole meta aspect once you know that.

In general, I think it's a shame that comic book artists don't take advantage of the format like that more often... I remember when I first read "L'Origine", at first I was like, wtf, someone's cut hole to this comic, and the feeling of surprise and joy I got when I realized the hole was a part of the story was just awesome! The only other comic I can think of that takes advantage of how paper comics are physically read is Jason Shiga's Elsewhere. (Don't want to say anything more not to spoil it, but all who like meta in their comics should check that one out... It's essentially an existential "Choose Your Own Adventure" story in a comic book form.)

probably the cost prohibitions, I would guess

Ware's Building Stories wouldn't really work in a non-physical format. Building Stories v similar to 'novel-in-a-box' The Unfortunates by B S Johnson, who also had holes cut into the pages of his second novel, Albert Angelo.

as much as i'm not stoked for the madness, i've been enjoying all the hints about universes colliding that bendis has been dropping in ultimate spider man

loonies being dragged through the background of police station dialogue like ITS COMING, ALL THE UNIVERSES ARE GONNA COLLAPSE INTO ONE

yeah, those were pretty amusing

Read #1 of Captain America, Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk this week. FF was great, might post some longer thoughts on it this weekend.

Also making my way through Yoshiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life, about a chapter a day. Sooo good, I love the long, slow burn of it.

loonies being dragged through the background of police station dialogue like ITS COMING, ALL THE UNIVERSES ARE GONNA COLLAPSE INTO ONE

https://kangaratmurdersoc.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/animal-man-10-psycho-pirate.jpg

^ a loony, yesterday*

*1990

I got the first issue of Jim Starlin's Thanos vs. Hulk a week or so back. After you read bunches of modern super hero comics, you read this Starlin issue and it's like 1982 again. Colors are a little bleh gray on the book, but it was pretty fun. The thing totally read like an old style Marvel comic, which was kind of novel.

Got Tom Sutton's Creepy Things today. Hope they do a second volume because there's quite a lot of good stuff not included. Love the way these Yoe Books are designed.

Finally read the much-ballyhhod Ros Chast memoir, which was actually pretty great in a depressing way

new bitch planet today

is that 2 or 3, i haven't been to the shop in a minute

2

Alfred Bester, Patricia Highsmith, Mickey Spillane and Manly Wade Wellman.

Are there any other writers who were better known for their prose who did comics in the golden and silver ages? And are any of these comics that notable for being good?

neil gaiman

(oh, missed the golden / silver bit)

dashiell hammett's agent x-9 is just being reissued now
http://www.tcj.com/checking-in-with-dean-mullaney/

George Melly, Barry Took, Humphrey Lyttelton, Barry Norman and Compton Mackenzie all wrote scripts for the newspaper strip Flook in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Forks beat me to Dashiell Hammett. That interview mentions the fact that Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, worked on X-9 briefly after Hammett.

i will DEFINITELY be getting this new basil wolverton book
http://www.tcj.com/creeping-death-and-snakemeat-basil-wolverton-and-max-clotfelter/
i mean, my god
http://images.tcj.com/2015/01/creep12.jpg

I was looking at that last week and the panel arrangements of the early comics look really weird.

also just zipped through the three volumes of jodo/moebius' Madwoman of the Sacred Heart... what a wobbly, wild read! The art is really first rate.

Barry Humphries wrote The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie as a weekly strip before the films. (Obviously better known as a monologue and dialogue writer and improviser than prose writer, but has about ten fiction & non-fiction & memoir books under his belt too.)

Patricia Highsmith did comics?

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/04/24/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-152/

Scroll down a bit to see the Highsmith bit. I once heard Ripley was based on a comic artist she knew but I can't remember where I read that.

I think Spillane mostly wrote those 1-2 page text stories. Apparently Bill Everett and Spillane had some sort of grudge.

I always wondered if those text stories that nobody ever read in old Comics had lots of brilliant ones scattered across them.

Oh man what an unloved unhallowed body of work, those text one-pagers.

I once made an effort to read them, but that was late on in the time I was reading those anthologies. I wish I had read all the ones I came across.

Seems like there's no cheap option for those Alfred Bester DC comics.

Bester co-created Solomon Grundy too.

Nameless #1 was a fun read. When you get down to the core plot, the bad guys in all of Grant Morrison's comics are really the same folk aren't they? I don't say that as a bad thing, but it is his story hook in many ways.

while reading it i kept wondering if this was just an artist's rendition of morrison's automatic writing journal

Patricia Highsmith was once set up on a date with Stan Lee. http://www.scottedelman.com/2010/04/04/stan-lee-was-only-interested-in-stan-lee/

love the url there; clearly not a giving lover

The one review I read of Bitch Planet talked about how odd and inauthentic the use of ersatz Ben-Day patterns was - some guy has recoloured a bunch of pages with an actually 70s-reminiscent style, and not only does it look GREAT, but wow at how ugly the original colouring is generally:

http://jonathanbogart.tumblr.com/post/110308310125/aintgotnoladytronblues-twiststreet-schwabco-i

Felt like the whole comic was kind of a letdown after the title -- found it quite difficult to follow -- ODY-C too. Maybe I don't have patience for comics that involve effort.

I'm really appreciating this coloring talk! I think it's something that bothers me in some titles but not at a conscious level.

Some of the art where the colorist work is obviously a collaboration with clearly defined palettes definitely is a strength of some titles. The Hellboy/BPRD titles, with their limited colors and shading, or most of the titles drawn by Mike Allred (notably often colored by his wife) are very appealing in this regard.

Felt like the whole comic was kind of a letdown after the title -- found it quite difficult to follow -- ODY-C too. Maybe I don't have patience for comics that involve effort.

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, February 9, 2015 11:42 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

definitely felt ODY-C was difficult to follow--had to read a few pages a few times--but idk had no trouble following BP. a bunch of people i've heard say they were lost at the climax though

I haven't had a problem understanding BP; my only problem is understanding why people are thinking it's great. ODY-C is a hot mess.

http://instagram.com/p/y5W5dqpeGQ/

never heard of eternauta, interest piqued

These are GORGEOUS
http://50watts.com/Okamoto-Kiichi

Wow, love those

Just grabbed 1 & 2 of They're Not Like Us to see what all the fuss was about, so far not really doing it for me. Feels like a Wanted-style spin on like "what if X-Men were. . .bad"

to see what all the fuss was about

literally heard of this for the first time in the words immediately preceding that quote

El Eternauta has always sounded pretty cool and way ahead of its time (a mature, long-form sci-fi/political allegory originally published in the 1950s), I hope one someone will translate it to a language I can read...

"I hope some day someone will translate it"

There are some English scanlations here, but the translator seems to have abandoned the project. Still, even those pages make it clear it's quite unlike any comic published in the US or Europe at the time.

I haven't explored too widely, but Scribd is a service that appears to be offering a brief trial right now (although they do hold your credit info in case you don't cancel) and they have a bunch of comics from a few different companies. I looked at some Marvel stuff but the image quality seemed lower than Marvel Unlimited. However, they have a lot of the recent Valiant stuff.

And lots of Top Shelf, too