Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

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.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books
Pretty good bundle, may bite. Wait, who on earth wanted to ban Bone?

there's a tiny link about why each book was banned

http://cbldf.org/banned-comic/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-bone/

there is nothing so innocuous that it won't come up against moral outrage

This isn't the place to have this discussion in earnest, but I often wonder about the differences in brain chemistry or composition that would lead a person to, say, jump straight past 'I don't want my kid to read this' to 'I must engage in a crusade to ensure that no one's kids are able to read this'.

... you think it's wrong? A lot of folk have "people shouldn't do things that are wrong, even if they want to" front and centre in their morality.

you need to have a second part that says "I live in a society where we have a debated-upon standard of right and wrong and I must allow some leeway between things I hold true to and society's norms"

I think all kinds of things are against my own ethics but putting them in law or pulling a book from the library that doesn't strictly follow my ethical code is wrong because I wouldn't want others doing the same to me.

I mean, Bone isn't exactly the Christian Bible or Koran but only having books that conform to your world view is a little messed up. A children's library doesn't (and shouldn't) have all books in it, but portraying drinking or smoking in a book that is otherwise a child-appropriate narrative doesn't make it not good for kids -- no one is advocating the kids act like the characters and it's not giving some secret knowledge about smoking or drinking.

cue the waltons episode where they are burning all the german books... only one of them, they realise just in time, is Die Bibel...

Two of my fellow EatenByDucks members have books out.

http://graphicpolicy.com/2015/09/17/preview-hieronymus/
This is Marcel Ruijters biography of Bosch. He said he worked on it for 4 years. I think his only other book in English was Troglodytes published by Top Shelf.

http://issuu.com/sherpacomics
On this page you'll find (along with one of Marcel's non-English books) a preview of Ibrahim R Ineke's The White People, which is not an adaptation of Arthur Machen but sort of a response piece.

For those of you who feel overwhelmed by Beto Hernandez's recent output and dig his more experimental stuff (a la Fear Of Comics), I would recommend his new Fantagraphics series, Blubber. First issue out now and second out soon. It's...pretty far out.

Given the timing (ie, after Sam Wilson has taken up the mantle of Captain America), it's really, REALLY hard for me to not rmde at all solicitations for Captain America: White

you and me both

I thought it was an incredibly awkward title to use, but it being a Jeph Loeb thing means I'm staying even further away

haha yup

It could be worse. Given his demonstrated willingness to create unfortunate portmanteaux of a character's name and the color of said character, the book could've been called Whiteptain Whitemerica.

not wanting to leave out that key "Captain America for white people" demographic

i haven't had a problem with his various X:Y color books tbh
BLUE was already used for Spider-Man. more surprised he didn't already use RED but i guess that would be also weird for Cap...

he is a bad writer man

I didn't know about the other color books until I did some reading/research (I do try to ignore Loeb as much as I can) so I know there's nothing overtly nefarious going on there but... it still makes me rmde

the timing/title combo is incredibly bad

Caucasian American: White

At least it wasn't called "Real Captain America"

lol. takin' our country back from deep color schemes

just noticed that it's been almost an entire decade since Joe Matt put anything out :(

https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/blog/2015/03/new-joe-matt-0

new piece is in the D&Q 25th anniversary book; he's pretty much right where you remember him, just in LA
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/03/cartoonist-joe-matts-porn-pr.html