Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

and that's having stayed current

For those interested, a complete edition of Puma Blues is being solicited for release in September.

The only two titles I currently have any self-control about are Saga and Lazarus. Hopefully by the time the trade comes out an arc will have appeared out of Hoos's confusion.

commenter goes thermonuclear on the Eisners:

It’s been fascinating watching the comic industry have the least amount of black people represented in any creative field while its participants praise themselves constantly for diversity. What they really mean, as reflected by the Eisners, is that they are having more kinds of white people (homosexuals and women) win awards, and maybe 1 black person per year. And if you’re a white person CREATING a story about white women it’s a gold rush.

sick burn

def enjoying Lazarus more than Saga but that's not nec saying a whole lot right now

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/07/06/heavy-metal

Sounds interesting but really don't like the sound of more movie/tv franchises. And how are they going to establish a music label called Heavy Metal?

publishing full-color Lord of Light is cool, not sure I've ever seen those (iirc everything I've seen was b&w)

I always thought they were just black and white.

This week sees the debut of Islands, which is basically Image's own Heavy Metal. I'm not really grabbed by any of the previews but I'll be interested to see where it goes.

I keep forgetting to try to t0rren7 Epic Illustrated. I never really succumbed to HM as a tween but I was a huuuge epic illustrated fan

looks like I haven't been lax in reading and Brandon Graham's Prophet: Earth War is coming out next week

I might switch back to buying it monthly

Island, not Islands, and Brandon Graham's, not "Image's"

should I have said Rob Liefeld's?

the story is more Graham's, although the property sure isn't

Island is 100% commissioned by Graham

So he's effectively the editor as well as providing some words and some pictures?

oh hey I misread, never mind

time to check out Island

My library just picked it up (and it's a couple of years old) so I read Room For Love by ILYA. A small scale romantic drama between a middle aged divorced woman and a teen male prostitute. A little cliched in some ways, but a decent effort.

Anyone still buy back issues at all? I rarely do. I just bought a Bernie Wrightson sketchbook and the second issue of Grave Tales for a Tom Sutton story and I'm fairly sure I'll be disappointed for what I paid.
Last time I bought anything from an online back issue shop was like 3 or more years ago (Mile High or MyComicShop) getting anthologies.
Now with so many collections I just keep my fingers crossed everything I want will resurface in book form eventually. Getting old anthologies is just such a gamble for what you have to pay, although I still love tatty old Charlton comics and if I happened to see a Skywald thing in a charity shop by chance, I'd have to pick it up. Don't see Psycho, Nightmare and Scream getting reprints any time soon.

if I find a good quarterbox, sure

if I'm in America and finding things never distributed by Diamond

I found an excellnt glitch (I think it's a glitch) on the comixology iPad apps that allows you to get full width in portrait mode. Seems to work on the Marvel/DC apps too (but not Unlimited, sadly). Bascially:

1. Start reading a comic in portrait mode -- you should be able to see the whole page on one screen.
2. Turn to landscape, with the "full width" option enabled, so the image stretches out.
3. Click the little button on the top right of the ipad to lock the screen.
4. Turn the iPad back to portrait, then unlock it
5. Comixology should reopen with the portrait mode locked in full-width, like Comic Zeal allows you to do.

Kind of minor, but helps with the eyestrain for me.

I guess Island turns out to be maybe 63% commissioned and 85% put together by Graham

The Emma Rios story that opens #1 might be kind of bad? But the lettering hurts too much to re-read and figure out

Bought:

The 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane - Druillet - first in a new series of Druillet reprints/translations from Titan Books - nice large-size European hardcover album format

The two hardcover reprint volumes dedicated to Alex Toth and Steve Ditko's strips for Eerie and Creepy magazines - good vfm collections of these artists' work for Warren - the bigger, slightly more expensive Corben collection in the same series, including his full colour work, also looked very tempting, too.

Really enjoying an Image series, Invisible Republic, by a husband-wife writing-art team I've never heard of before. It's being pitched as Breaking Bad meets Interstellar (or something) but it's better and less dumb than that sounds. The art is lovely, sort of Sean Murphy style, and the writing feels more like Eurocomix than the usual Image style (i.e. boy's own adventure gone gritty). Anyway - I've only read two issues and it's up to #5 now, so interesting to see if it keeps the quality up.

I'm also really digging Jason Aaron's run on Ghost Rider, via Marvel Unlimited. It's dumb but impeccably constructed (and therefore smart).

IR sounds interesting. Trade comes out in September
Never need an excuse to try Ghost Rider, but it seems like most writers don't do a good job

COWL unexpectedly ended! :/

Got the first in the Wrightson sketchbook series Creatures Featured (now I only need the second one). It's okay. Mostly designs for films like The Faculty and Galaxy Quest but also a bunch of Resident Evil drawings that some ComicArtFans pages says were for variant covers but somehow never used.
The Tom Sutton story in Grave Tales 2 looks pretty decent.

Has anyone seen Better Things, the Jeffrey Catherine Jones documentary? I've heard very good things about it. It's been around a while.

I have a semi-random, state-of-the-industry type question. The peak period of my regular comics buying coincided with the 80s/90s explosion in the "direct market", which suddenly meant there were a bunch of other publishers putting out regular (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, whatever) issues of non-big two superhero comics. Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, Kitchen Sink, Drawn & Quarterly etc. Weirdo indie comics creators had their own regular books/series. Does this even exist anymore? It seems like a lot of the non-mainstream comics stuff has gravitated to just being put out as standalone books. Most of the individual creators I follow (which, granted, is not a lot) don't have regular series anymore (if they ever did in the first place). I assume the economics just became untenable at some point - no one's gonna buy monthly issues of Fart Party, for ex. Am I wrong about this or am I just overlooking stuff?

Those things seem to still exist, but only at conventions and printed by micropresses, rather than, like, Kitchen Sink or D&Q. And then it seems like a greater portion of the stuff printed by bigger publishers are art book things - like Marc Bell abstractions rather than Julie Doucet short stories (although, bad example, Doucet doesn't really do narrative stuff any more). But - yeah - I think more and more stuff is standalones - the idea being that regular bookstores would stock them as well as comic shops - but now those regular bookstores are mostly closed now too! I think the moral is: go into illustration or be Adrian Tomine.

Somewhere in Montreal, Bernie Mireault is still cursing the death of Capital City Distribution.

like in retrospect it seems v strange that there were ever regular issues of HATE, it's like there's no cultural space for anything like that anymore, where it's in the format and conventions of standard monthly superhero comics but the content is completely different. A semi-monthly semi-autobiographical comic, who would read that?

xp

Even the series have turned into thicker books, like Prison Pit and Love And Rockets.

Love and Rockets is still put out as a regular floppy?!

I feel like that's the direction in which the entire industry is headed and that the bigger publishers are basically intentionally pricing floppies out of the market at this point.

No, L+R is just a big squarebound annual at this point.

As mentioned, Optic Nerve is still coming out as, and is explicitly designed as, a floppy -- but once every two years.

Michael DeForge puts out more than enough to have an Eightball-style bimonthly anthology, but with a dozen different publishers in different formats, with his "main" book being a 60pp annual.

Minimum Wage is back as a floppy, in six-issue monthly "arcs."

Copra is written, pencilled, inked, coloured, lettered, published and distributed by Fiffe as a monthly on amazing paper with incredible printing, but Diamond don't carry it.

Oh, and while L&R is a 100pp annual now, Beto is so prolific that he usually does a couple of separate graphic novels and a floppy miniseries in a year.

Final few issues of Berlin are about to come out after a dayjob-related hiatus.

lots of people put out weekly or twice weekly pages online and then sell bound books post facto, that's where i think that "revolution" went

http://www.tcj.com/chinese-web-comics-scarlet-faced-dog-and-bu-er-mia/

cool!

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/22/8870089/texas-comic-book-heist-anthony-chiofalo-tadano

huh, good story

WOoooooooooWWWW
http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/index.html

i mean, holy shit at these
http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/images/nemofinal1095.jpg
http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/images/felixplane21095.jpg
http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/images/sammy21095.jpg
http://melbirnkrant.com/carving/images/charles1095.jpg

Cool.

yeah that sneeze one especially is like bonkers!

Any voices in support of buying this? I'm trying to remember the D&D comics of the 90's and failing. The samples look very Vertigo.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books

Found a torrent with a complete collection of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Worlds

kinda excited

I'm pretty impressed so far with Liz Suburbia's Sacred Heart, the setting of which is a little like Hoppers and a little like Bellona from Dhalgren, with teenagers wandering through a deserted suburb. Suburbia seems to have picked up a lot from the Hernandez brothers, but her art has its own rough energy. Annie Mok has a long interview with Suburbia here (http://www.tcj.com/a-conversation-with-liz-suburbia/) and the initial draft of Sacred Heart is available here (http://lizsuburbia.com/sacredheart/index.php), although the style in the early chapters online isn't really representative of the finished book.