Rolling Comic Book thread 2017

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?

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.

if you think that's bad imagine reading those ads in a part of the world where hostess fruit pies could not be had for love nor money

The day when I got to finally taste a Hostess Twinkie was both the best and worst day of my life.

Chuck- the problems are only partially about the genre itself.

I think people too attached to public domain characters are worth criticizing too.

Life's short, enjoy what you enjoy.

I did wonder if the Hostess products had made their way across the ocean. It's unfortunate, on the one hand, that your Hostess access is so restricted, but on the other hand, you presumably don't weigh 785 lbs (55.7 stone, for you Brits) like me.

'Brits'. You know what I mean. All you people that live over there in Non-American Accent Land.

Old Lunch- Life being short is all the more reason to convince people to explore more. I did say upthread that I recently bought some Deadman, Swamp Thing and would have got that Joe Kubert Spirits Of Vengeance thing if I was rich.

Stereotypical geeks and otakus really don't have the space to explore much more. I don't think they know how much they're missing, they just wait for the next franchise to get big enough to attract their notice.
Most people here only occasionally go for the big franchises and some who spend a lot of time on them admit it's not the healthiest way to be.

I like it when people challenge me about the things I'm spending my time on because I'm quite conflicted about a lot of it. Like the comics I mentioned above and some of the Shaw Brothers films I've been buying.

I knew someone who argued with people in comic shops about what they were buying. That probably sounds like jerk behaviour to most people but I really liked that.

I've got a friend who mostly does comic adaptations of books and he said he appreciated my arguing to do mostly original material, even though he still does adaptations and recently secured permission from an estate to do another.

I want people to make the most of their imagination and people who're doing the most imaginative work to get the attention they deserve.

most of my friends and coworkers don't have the time to seek out a lot of material because modern life is tiring and after they get their kids fed and to bed after work, your energy for exploration doesn't go much further than scanning through recommended netflix titles

It's a little reductive to assume that because someone is a fan of mainstream comics that they don't necessarily have wide-ranging interests beyond that. I read pretty much everything Marvel puts out but that's a relatively small fraction of/not particularly reflective of my reading habits overall.

(And I will also concede that reading pretty much everything Marvel puts out is probably a sickness of a sort, but it's one that I've come to accept as a chronic life partner.)

I think the risk with things like Marvel Unlimited or w/e is time allocation. As in, it's worthwhile to subscribe because if you're patient you can read all these mainstream corporate properties, but the extra content makes you lazy. If I read comics (or books or whatever) for a half hour before bed I could read the one comic I wanted to and then pick up something else, or I can stay there and read another four comics I had no strong interest in

some people are just reading prodigies, ilxor ulysses reads every single weekly title just about AND most of the indie stuff AND torrented scans of old stuff AND has time to go for long walks somehow and do pottery?

There's always something better you can replace your current reading material with.

I won't be happy until Old Lunch and Aldo's worst habit is reading even the worst titles in the Penguin, Oxford, Wordsworth Vintage, NYRB classics lines.

I hope you're able to make peace with your unhappiness, RAG. If it makes you feel any better, I am currently in the midst of reading a Penguin Classic and an Oxford (University Press) book. And a Stephen King novel, tbf.

btw NYRB has a comics imprint now? I met the two editors at SPX, the first year of books looked great and very hole-plugging and they were super smart ppl

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/new-york-review-comics

I have made peace with RAG's unhappiness for him - frankly I'm rather happy with it.

i'm a bit behind on my reading as of late jon... been focused more on the good stuff! my trash reading has been the complete dark horse alien collections...
NYRB comix tend to be very very good

Dark Horse Alien collections? Hell yeah!

lol, they are really pretty dumb tbh! sometimes you hit a good story.