Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

I just finished (and really enjoyed) Patience, which is Daniel Clowes in extended Death Ray/David Boring mode.

It's a lot more upbeat and sentimental than anything else Clowes has written - for me, a lot of the internal tension came from knowing his previous books rather than from the story itself, i.e. you keep waiting for something really nasty or depressing to happen, even though the story keeps not going that way.

ANYWAY some nerd must have read it on this thread surely

that would be me. i thought it was the best thing he's done since velvet glove.

by far, really.

I didn't like it much.

that surprises me. why?

I found it dull and far too long. There's a short story in the morass but as is it never grabbed me. Had to force myself to finish it.

I'm pretty hit or miss with Clowes in general. Respect him more than I've ever loved his stuff.

Like A Velvet Glove and David Boring I think are great. Ghost World is okay. Those are the only ones I'd ever want to revisit.

I've never read David Boring maybe I should give that one a shot. Everything else apart from LAVG I've thought varied from boring to actively irritating

well, of his long pieces. There's a bunch of shorter bits in 8ball that I love to death (Sensual Santa, On Sports, Pussey! etc.) and LAVG is great.

I assume this goes here

Ice Haven is peak Clowes for me but I think Wilson is the only thing of his I've read since then.

― Transformed From The Norm By The Nuclear Goop (Old Lunch), Wednesday, January 25, 2017 1:28 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read and enjoyed Patience a while ago - definitely one of the best things Clowes has done, though I thought the art was a little slapdash in places. He seems to be inking with a brush a lot more these days - I miss the sharpness and accuracy of his pen line.

Never really understood the love for Velvet Glove, which feels too much like refried David Lynch to me. Ghost World remains his masterpiece.

Not quite comics, but just watched Very Semi-Serious, the documentary about New Yorker cartoonists, which you'll enjoy if it's the sort of thing you enjoy - I did. Surprising number of LOLs, too, although me and my partner are both twee bastards.

There is zero stuff about cartooning style, or even trying to anatomize the jokes, it's mostly just "lol cartoonists are weirdos", here's a good one about bagpipes. But fun nonetheless. Remnick remains impossibly oily.

i started watching the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime which is good, but it's really the manga artwork that is blowing my mind. i'm looking to pick up some books, should i go for the new viz reissues? is rohan goes to the louvre worth getting?

also i think i'd prefer color over black and white.. i was under the impression that the viz reprints were in color? but in the amazon preview they're b&w

They're black and white with some colour pages. Worth getting but the earliest stuff isn't the best. You might want to start on the second or third part.

Some of Rohan looks quite nice, it's full colour but the story is not Araki switched on, sadly.

Went to Brussels for the weekend and made a trip to the bande dessinée museum. At the store I picked up an anthology of Péyo's Poussey (very charming comic strip about a cat) and that Trondheim Mickey Mouse thing which I think hasn't been released in English yet?

it has!

The conceit of the Trondheim "Mickey's Craziest Adventure" is that it's a reprint collection of one-page-per-issue Paul Murry style Donald'n'Mickey adventure strips, complete with printing errors and water stains but that author and artist "found" an incomplete stack of old issues so we get installment 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14 and so on through "page 82". It's remarkably clever and fun.
― A big shout out goes to the lamb chops, thos lamb chops (ulysses), Thursday, January 19, 2017

I am really enjoying this Gene Colan Batman collection I got from the library, all early 80s stuff, inked by Klaus Jansen. Colan draws amazing hands.

I'd forgotten Janson had inked Colan on Batman...googling brought me to this nice original page. You can see that Klaus is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but his bold finishing really gives Colan's pencils a solidity they sometimes lacked at this stage in his career.
http://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=249492

yeah it's not v far from the art in those Battlestar Galactica or Daredevil runs Jansen was on

er Janson

Janson deserves even more credit than he gets for all the great work he's done

I still remember the feeling as an 11-year-old, reading Marvel UK reprints of his Punisher work, when I suddenly went from "this guy is terrible and can't draw!" to "wait - this is... art?'

feel like there's a bit of Ditko in his style but more expressive, bolder

Well Janson started out as an assistant to Dick Giordano, and you can see quite a lot of similarities between their inking styles. They're also both part of that 'superb inkers/middling pencillers' club (see also: Dan Adkins, Joe Sinnott, Chic Stone, Frank Giacoia, Tom Palmer etc).

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2017/Emil-Ferris-The-Bite-That-Changed-My-Life/

An exclusive

that book is only looking better and better

also YOW at Jesse Jacobs' "Safari Honeymoon"
http://koyamapress.com/projects/safari-honeymoon/
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/safari-honeymoon/
http://www.newyorker.com/uncategorized/eyeball-kicks-a-surreal-safari-honeymoon
http://www.brokenfrontier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Safarihoneymoon3_0714.jpg
http://https%3A//cdn.bleedingcool.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Safari-Honeymoon_1.jpg

on the second volume of Silver Age JLA collection and man this book is mostly garbage, so formulaic - not nearly as fun as the Superman/Supergirl/Flash stuff

the current state of newsstand comics is such a clusterfuck that marvel is contracting with archie comics to publish and market newsstand digest versions of marvel superheroes: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/newsbrief/index.html?record=1210

So, uh...why didn't they do that decades ago? Seems like such a no-brainer.

because decades ago they still acted like a publisher of newsstand periodicals instead of the current direct market-only, single distributor, no returns mess they've now got going

pretty sure we've covered this elsewhere, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_market

by the end of the 90s the newsstand market was almost completely gone and all of the different distributors collapsed into Diamond

I was just wondering the other day what happened to all those spinning racks at 7-11 or whatever.

They've already been publishing these tiny little digest comics for years, usually under the Marvel Adventures line

xp - I had three of them at one point, but gave 'em all away

xpost Yeah, they've put out digest-sized tpbs but afaik the distribution has been basically the same as with their regular reprints. It felt like they were aiming more for the manga market than the casual 'eight-year-old bored at the grocery store with his mom' demographic.

I was super-psyched the other day when I saw some of those $5 bags of random-ass fifteen year old comics at Target. Those mysterious, context-free, random-ass issues of Micronauts: The New Voyages and Kull the Conqueror were what got me into comics in the first place.

Whoa - Target? What section?

When I do encounter a comics rack (at an actual newsstand), I notice it has only DC and Archie titles.

xpost There was just a small pile of those bags in the weird little trading card/vinyl figure keychain ghetto next to the registers. It's nice to see that someone out there is still engaged in packaging that stuff, however little respect it may be afforded. Kinda makes me want to go buy a ton of quarter bin stuff and do it myself.

I distinctly remember picking up a bag collecting Alan Davis's first solo storyline on Excalibur and being like...yeah, okay, now that I'm reading a whole story instead of just disconnected single issues of whatever's lying around, I can say that this comics thing is totally for me.

i really need to see book one first but this is strangely tempting
https://www.gofundme.com/beinagraphicnovel

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2017/02/jeddah-sci-fi-fans-flock-comic-con-expo-170219150013781.html
First Comicon in Saudi Arabia.

Mads Mikkelsen, Charles Dance and a bunch of others were there. Oddly the entrances were gender segregated but the actual event wasn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtF4YnDaUw

Shit, that's two different cons, one from 2014. Silly me.

Klaus Jansen's pencil work is a bit under appreciated. I think the last big project he penciled was the Death of the Maidens Batman/Ra's Al Ghul story with Greg Rucka. I know Jansen was doing some inks on some of JR Jr's last Marvel work, which looked a bit odd as Romita's been going with a bit more Kirby looking artwork, which seemed different with Jansen's looser inking.

Only read a few, but this French guy is pretty good and French: http://english.bouletcorp.com/2017/01/19/your-comment-here/

Love Boulet. My gf owns a bunch of his sketchbooks.

Finished Junji Ito's "Tomie". Definitley impressive, though could have been a bit shorter. I liked the bit with the photographer girl best - having an actual three dimensional protagonist to fight the threat gave it more oomph. Great art throughout, with some grody body horror.