Rolling SERIOUS GRAPHIC LITERATURE Thread for Comics in 2016

Are you in the UK, Old Lunch? I could always send 'em to you when I'm done. Or, alternately, Gosh occasionally get them in and sells them at cover price, and they do fluctuate back to actual affordable prices on Amazon eventually.

didn't even know Dungeon ended. let's get an omnibus

Wonder how many pages that would be? Could it fit in one book.

i have all of them and it's sixteen books with two roughly fifty page stories apiece... plus the seventeenth book which this thread just made me buy on amazon. There's three stories not yet translated to English and, according to wikipedia, "Trondheim said that new stories were "very improbable" due to Sfar's schedule; Sfar left the door open for more stories to be told."
so that's just under 2000 pages of story. I don't think you'd want it in one book. I'd like it in a larger format than the goddamn NBM chapbooks tho'.

so it'll be three or four omnibuses, i can live with that

they're selling Twilight, Early Years and Zenith as bulk buys on NBM's website if that's what you want
http://www.nbmpub.com/humor/trondheim/dungeon/dungeonhome.html

Yeah I'd love to read it in the large French BD format.

Just thinking though - the translations are *very* good - unusual compared to the recent Spirou, Cortese, Lucky Luke, Incal etc. translations, which are awl pretty awks

i basically read one or two of the books and liked them - realized just how much more there was and have been scared off almost completely. but someday!

I have likely said it a dozen times but dungeon is ultimately probably in my top three favorite comix. It is a barks-ian sword and sorcery universe larded with noodly graphic chicken fat, boasting complex world building, unsequenced deep dive character building, genuinely funny moments, complex but sensible plots and consistent mastery of form. It moves me man.

And yes, the translations are superb.

just got up to date on warren ellis' run on James Bond (i like it better than the most recent movies) and ULTRA HEAVEN, Koike Keiichi's mega trippy psychedelic sci-fi masterpiece. All the detail of Darrow without the fetishism; highly recommended for the art but also a fun read!
http://mymangaonline.us/read-online/Ultra-Heaven-Vol-001-Ch-1-Read-Online.html
http://40.media.tumblr.com/5fa78766b5a821195e7db95b2eaec878/tumblr_myaa7olKVD1sj9p1jo4_1280.jpg
http://a.mhcdn.net/store/manga/7771/001.0/compressed/b047.jpg%3Fv%3D1404121081

lotta moebius in there too...

and plenty of morrison. it's pretty great.

I haven't read the new Michael Deforge book yet, but Annie Mok's interview with him this week seems thorough and candid: http://www.tcj.com/comics-was-the-reliable-thing-an-interview-with-michael-deforge/

xp damn this is pretty amazing

All the detail of Darrow without the fetishism

well sure. different kind tho'.

I'm reading and sort-of enjoying the Ellis Bond, but the gore seems... out of place -
and maybe without the gore, there's not much story there.

Holy shit Oprah book club just picked Rosalie Lightning

that's the best news i've heard all day

Oh wait. No it's the first book on a list of must read memoirs on the Oprah site. I spoke too soon. Still a nice coup though.

The newest version of Creepy is getting cancelled after 24 issues (I presume Eerie is finished too). I'm surprised they weren't able to muster something better and get a greater number of appropriate creators. Anthologies are tough but I'm sure there was plenty of good people who would have done it.

I thought it was a bad idea to have Eerie too, spreading themselves too thin. Doing a fantasy/SF horror version seemed more like keeping the tradition going, even in the Warren days I thought it was jarring having Cousin Eerie hosting a lot of those stories.

I presume the reprints were an effort to sell the Warren collections rather than filling up space?

Read Beautiful Darkness based on a recommendation here, damn that was incredibly disturbing

I think I might have been one of the recommenders.... Sorry, I think I should have added some kind of disclaimer: I think that book does really interesting things with scale, change and decay, and the ethical ambiguity of the protagonist, but it's an extremely dark work.

Read the first four trades of Rucka and Lark's Lazarus.... aces stuff, highly recommended. Good world building!
Reread Mike Grell's run on Green Arrow. Does not hold up, really a bummer to come back to comics I loved as a kid and find them so corny and lame.
big A+ to Assassination Classroom; outrageous concept, remarkably well executed.

I read Green River Killer, a black-and-white true crime book by Jeff Jensen, who presumably has good contacts, because the back cover has quotes from Stephen King, Damon Lindelof and Gillian Flynn.

It's actually okay! The investigation procedural stuff is interesting, and the dialogue mostly resists the easy temptations of noir cliche.

The art is super boring though - to be honest the book is more-or-less the definition of "slightly boring black and white comic book that no one ever loans from the library", to sit with all the Ho Che Andersons and Logicomix. But it's pretty good for a first effort.

c'mon, surely at least I Want To Be Your Dog is getting some loans

That looks good! We didn't have that one.

lol hey i took out Logicomix

Young hoods in love was good

Stray Bullets' big paperback omnibus has been one I have been going through an issue or two a week for a while. It's a unique comic book, Crime at the rote loser level with a changing timeline with a kinda weird fantasy sitcom element. I read the first 18 issues a few years back, so I am really just almost back through where I read it the first time and curious to see where it goes.

Stray Bullets is one of those books I would read random issues of be really impressed; I should pick up the omnibus.

Just read through Girls by the Luna Brothers. Pretty indicative of modern times indie horror comics in terms of the ridiculously excessive gore. Interesting premise, though by the end of the book I hated pretty almost every character that managed to survive. It seemed for a while like it was going to explore some issues about sexism but then just ended up saying nothing. Art was kind of bland, but the story was good enough to keep me interested for 24 issues, appropriate length. Surprised Showtime hasn't already adapted this into a TV series.

big A+ to Assassination Classroom; outrageous concept, remarkably well executed.

i loved the first volume! but i don't know if i want to read any more. but but i am willing to be swayed

it's very entertaining

it keeps moving the story forward and giving each character deeper motivations. often idiotic and silly motivations but you won't care!

i'm down, put it on reserve

how does it compare to (a series I also haven't read) Drifting Classroom? Or are they totally different

TOTALLY different. Assassination is a romp, Drifting Classroom is Lord of the Flies.

ahh ok

New installments of J Bearhat and Rory Frances's Little Teeth in Hazlitt (sad animals, radiqueer scene drama lovingly satirized): http://hazlitt.net/comics/little-teeth-returns-pt-1

(The earlier sections are available here: http://hazlitt.net/authors/j-bearhat.)

That's fun!

one of the T0rr3nt$!!?!?!? services i frequent just posted an 80 gig collection of more or less every Dell comic. 1300 issues of Four Color alone! I don't quite know what to make of it; I had no idea such a thing even existed.

Dell?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxTLgX4nS1g

basically (from the 40's until the 70's) ALL the walter lantz, disney, little lulu, merry melodies, hanna barbera, television and movie adaptation comics in existence
in their prime, more popular than marvel or dc ever were

they sold (second hand) a lot of IP to Valiant and then Dark Horse, so they're also the original home of Turok and Magnus Robot Fighter

i also just, er, ACQUIRED full publishing libraries for First and Milestone. Lots to explore!

I liked that Wendy thing from Hazlitt & Hairpin

http://wendycore.tumblr.com/

Just finished Brian K Vaughan's -collected _Private Eye_ series, which includes his original pitch emails to artist Marcos Martin. There's a weird tone in the pitch document where he's describing the future, non-Internet world he wants the book to inhabit. He's describing his problems with current society, as it were, being all digital and smartphoney and tablety, and tips his hand a little _too_ much in such a way that reads to me like "these are the complaints of a really privileged white dude in LA who's been balls-deep in too much media for too long".

The book itself is pretty good; the philosophy behind its world-building kinda off.

Weird, considering (iirc) that series was supposed to be an experiment in digital comics