Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

"Hi, you have cool breasts"
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/house-of-1000-manga/2010-11-11

Takashi Miike's Jojo film has came out but just like a ton of recent manga adaptations it looks excessively artificial. He done the recent Blade Of The Immortal too and I cant get excited about that either. anyone know if Miike does super-commercial stuff exclusively now?

xp heh. in an alternate universe this guy would've drawn The New Teen Titans

Why Teen Titans?

Everyone buy Strange Growths, a squarebound collection of sublime minicomics created over many years by Jenny Zervakis, just published by John Porcellino's Spit and a Half imprint. I have loved her comics for so long and it is so great to be able to direct people to a convenient motherlode of them.

xp at least one of the outfits in the article reminded me of Starfire at her most porny.

Read Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler, which was interesting but also deeply flawed

sounds like Hitler amirite

Teehee

I read it a long time ago - seem to remember that it starts well but ends up all over the place, and not in an interesting way like Phoenix.

Indeed. The language, translated via French, is ridiculous, rendering Hitler, Mussolini, etc all sounding like teenagers in a 1980s cartoon; the mishmash of art styles doesn't look good; it acts almost as though the death camps were just an incidental thing that happened to be going on at the same time as Hitler was in power.

I got the Abe Sapien book Lost Lives. Santiago Caruso is one of my favourite living artists (this is his first comic interiors) but the children in this look like small adults and I don't think they were supposed to.

Had a look at the Spirits Of Vengeance collection. Joe Kubert inks one of his sons pencil work and it looks great. Too bad it's only for two issues because I couldn't justify buying the whole collection for that. But I still kind of want it.

I loved it when Bill Sienkiewicz jazzed all over someone else's competent pencil work.

Surprised I didn't see any Black Flame comics in Forbidden Planet. Devil's Due usually gets their books in there.

Got very mixed feelings about Kelley Jones but the guy draws ribs, trees and mushrooms so well that I had to get his complete Deadman and Swamp Thing: The Dead Don't Sleep.

Still not sure it was a wise choice.

Comics often look better when you're standing with them in the shop and pondering if you need them.

Got the Black Flame stuff on kindle, glad I didn't buy it through mail because it's none of the artists best work, the older stuff is really hacky at times. Black Flame Archives series is drawn by Tom Sutton and Don Lomax (it's recolored) and the graphic novel Black Flame: Nobody Knows This Is Everywhere is drawn by Kelley Jones and Alex Nino. It's sword and sorcery with Dr Strange style travelling.

Head Lopper, y'all!

Has the price of softcover collections gone up recently because those Abe Sapien and Swamp Thing collections I bought yesterday were pretty steeply priced for not that many pages.

Collapse of the pound against the dollar

Oh yeah, I hadn't really kept an eye out for that.

Yes my friend who just moved here (nyc) from London was bemoaning the loss of that all powerful 1.8 conversion rate feeling. Said when he used to come over he’d just buy anything cause it felt like play money.

Have to say a lot of my recent magazine buying on ebay from America has been hurting.

This (forthcoming) book looks interesting -- anyone familiar w/the authors?: http://www.fantagraphics.com/howtoreadnancy/

i don't know if you're being sarcastic or not but newgarden and karasik set the table for that book about thirty years ago
http://www.laffpix.com/howtoreadnancy.pdf

no snark intended if this is new to you morrisp. they're both well known cartoonists and comic wonks.

not a Nancy fan but that PDF was pretty dang good, i gotta say

Thanks, I had no idea! :P

(Same thing happened when I was casually unfamiliar w/Warren Ellis in the Marvel thread, lol. I may be better suited for the I Like Comics But Easily Betray the Shallowness of My Knowledge About Them board.)

aw, now i feel bad. it's me, not you.
anyways, as apologies, here's online 5 card nancy solitaire 4 u
http://www.7415comics.com/nancy/

LOL, thanks. Odd that Fantagraphics doesn’t mention the history at all, in their blurb on the book.

I loved their first volume of “Nancy” strips (the jokes maybe not as fresh in the 2nd one).

http://www.tcj.com/reviews/last-girl-standing/

https://www.avclub.com/get-an-exclusive-first-look-at-berger-books-inaugural-1819107492

Shelly Bond also has a Vertigo-esque sub-imprint of her own kicking off at IDW: https://www.idwpublishing.com/blackcrown/

http://www.tcj.com/everything-sells-everything/

Whenever fans go into that "iconic modern myths" thing I want to bite out their wisdom teeth.

Started reading that a few days ago, nodding sagely along but then a few paragraphs into I realised I'd been nodding sagely along to the same arguments on the internet for 10+ years. Like I dunno, is anyone who reads TCJ gonna disagree with any of it?

Also read The Death Of Stalin; didn't do much for me, though I could see it as good source material for Ianucci's film, like he'll be able to fit in the character that's missing.

There still aren't enough critiques of franchise culture. It would be nice if it appeared on a larger site, although I would fear for the writer.

There were a few things I didn't know and its one of the better articles of this type. Things appear to have accelerated and the Northrup Grumman thing seems like a new low.

It's comforting to see TCJ is still that dude who comes back home from his first semester at college and hands his younger brother a stack of Adbusters in the hopes that he'll open his eyes and wake up from his consumerist coma.

That older brother would have helped me! When I started buying TCJ, I really wrestled with and was tortured by a lot of that stuff (but to be honest some of the articles weren't very persuasive at all) and it taken years for me to agree, partially because I didn't quite understand what they were saying.

I did meet an illustrator who sometimes drew comics and he was making fun of the stuff I was reading while being friendly about it, I think that might have planted seeds.

There has been some awful writing in TCJ, including a review that persuaded me to buy the Little Annie Fanny collection, he said it was timeless humour but it was mostly rape and sexual harassment jokes. Some of the art was pretty good though.

I found that TCJ thing kind of incoherent... what was its point, exactly, beyond "ads are bad"?

The point is that we all could have avoided our crippling, lifelong addictions to Hostess Fruit Pies if Spider-Man hadn't been such a sell-out.

I remember thinking even when I subscribed to TCJ 15+ years ago that they could've saved themselves the energy of writing yet another in a long series of articles on the subject by just inserting a little 'we still think mainstream comics are garbage' item in every issue.

i didn't think the point was that ads are bad; moreso that the characters in many ways are ads to sell 5 dollar leaflets and whatever else comes down the pike
corporate creations exist for the sake of the corporation and, as such, any attempt to heighten their status to folk myth in the age of continual copyright is quixotic
obvs none of this is new or shocking but it don't hurt to remind fanboys every once in awhile. tho of course, the self selecting TCJ audience already knew all that; this would've been more fun on buzzfeed.

Old Lunch- explaining the problems with them is important. Criticizing DC and Marvel has a lot more to it than just some crappy creator owned comic in a similar style.

I love my older brother but he asked me if I wanted to see Thor 3 and he didn't appear to be trying to annoy me, I need to ask him what was going on there.

I've never really understood why people have such difficulty seeing the big Big Two characters as both corporate trademarks which undeniably exist to make $$$ and iconic representations which have evolved beyond the mundane intentions of (and which will almost certainly outlive) those making $$$ off of them.

BTW, RAG, I totally agree with you. I would never suggest that people ignore the problematic elements of the Big Two.

That’s only true if by ‘those’ you mean actual execs rather than the corporations, though.

It's almost like it's possible to enjoy superhero comics without being an entitled fanboy, an indie snob, or an advertising exec

xxxp maybe your brother just wanted to go to a movie and was inviting you?

I get having objections to particular aspects of the corporate comic/superhero empires, but at some level there are cultural norms where you can just consume media or products on occasion without it being a morality play.

Like if someone offers me a Coke with lunch I don't immediately start questioning if my stances are being tested

^^ yep

Meanwhile, the past month has happened and DC still employ Eddie Berganza

Yeah, I was thinking about that exact situation the other day. How? How is that still possible?