recommend me some essential graphic novels to acquire

OMG TEP IS REALLY NEIL TENNANT

1) The superhero genre provides the bulk of comic books in the U.S. and probably Canada and the UK, whether this accords to your intuition or not.

2) Dan and I, for starters, have explained on multiple threads you've read that our preference for superhero comics stems largely from an interest in the genre itself, beyond the medium: and that that genre simply isn't represented elsewhere except in adaptations. This isn't a desire to read that genre to the exclusion of others, as we've explicitly pointed out; I read more books, and watch more movies, than I read comics.

3) As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, there is a large segment of People Who Read Comic Books who don't identify as comics fans and wouldn't be drawn to I Love Comics.

4) Comics readership being what it is in the English-speaking world, complaining that comics readers talk about superheroes is like complaining television watchers talk about network television. It's the common denominator, the available shared experience. That's been pointed out on other threads, too. Are the X-Men my favorite damn thing in comics? No, nowhere near, but I've probably typed more about the X-Men on ILC than any other group of characters, because there's more conversation I can have about them -- they've been around a long time, they've enjoyed long stretches of popularity, and there's a greater chance another poster and I will have read the same story -- or know of it -- than there is with many other titles.

5) I'm not even going to bother getting much into the issue of "is there more to say about pie than cake?", but a great many of the conversations on ILC have taken place around -- not about -- specific titles, in a way that can't happen naturally when the subject doesn't happen to be characters with an extraordinary pagecount to their presence, and multiple adaptations into other media.

Two posters who are both reasonably familiar with the X-Men and Why I Hate Saturn can have a much longer conversation, with more side-roads, about the X-Men than they can about WIHS. That's not even preference, that's just math.

In 7th grade I thought that 4-volume original Elfquest stuff was the shit! Made me have funny feelings about...things.

-- andrew m.

Errk. I saw the entire collected Elfquest on my shelves on a visit to my mum's this past weekend and felt almost guilty at the amount of attention I lavished on them back in the day. They are pretty, though.

Ha ha ha, me to thread! Anyway, yeah, I love love love Roman Dirge, and I think James Kochalka is awesome, but aside from that... ugh. I go into comic book stores (to look for anything Dirge/Kochalka-related, obv) and I peruse the aisles and there is no way I could ever get into a lot of what's out there, purely because I don't get the whole spandex-clad superheroes thing. Because of that, I think I'm perfectly entitled to call myself a Dirge fan or a Kochalka fan, but not a comic books fan. (Ergo, no involvement in ILC.)

i think the superheroes thing is a American / English thing and that a lot of mainland europe is the same as finland (he says, thinking of moebius and aragones and, er, others...).

there is (was?) a comic shop in nottingham called Page 45 which made a point of downplaying the superhero thing and put all the 'european' graphic novels by the door to try and look more like a usual bookshop (it figured that the fanboy market was only so big and getting normal people into their shop was a good idea). seems to have worked. http://www.page45.couk.com/P45main.html

Thanks for always sounding reasonable when I'm being cranky. It's just one of those things, when you come down to it. The comics situation in the US, and I think Canada/UK (I keep disclaiming my statements about the non-American English-speaking comics world because there are some differences that are significant to me, but maybe only in that "clementine vs minneola" way, where you're still talking about oranges), is culturally complex, for better and worse.

only if japanese superheroes dont count.

I am a rookie graphic novel reader, but I just picked up Fun Home and it was impossible to put down. Can someone either recommend me a good compilation of Dykes to Watch Out For or another good, comparable graphic novel?

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse

FUN HOME was great, wasn't it? I have to say, though, if I'd have known it was by the author of "Dykes to Watch Out For" (I didn't make the connection), I may not have picked it up. DTWOF is more like a daily strip...I guess the closest comparison would be Doonesbury or Boondocks, but with much busier panels and way less funnies. It made me think, "Man, I don't want to be a lesbian, all politics 24/7 and no sexy." (Not true, of course, iRL, but not untrue.)

Another good autobio-thing would be Persepolis I and II, pretty similar in impact. I find a lot of autobio comics are kind of embarrassing "my first relationship in high school was awkward" kind of thing, if only bcz the newer generation of their authors are college-aged or generally pretty young, not a lot of auto to bio about. In spite of that "Blankets" pulls off that template pretty well & has very nice art.

You'd probably enjoy Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" collections. Lotsa good recs upthread, too.

xposty

Avoid "Strangers in Paradise" at all costs; just thinking about that shit makes me want to give the guy Ben & Jerry's enemas until he dies of reverse dairy vomit.

What is Persepolis about, roughly?

It's about her growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution, and her family and basic life. First one is approx. first ten years of her life and second one is maybe age 10-25. Really fucking splendid memoirs and not really "struggle" tales like I'd expect from that kind of a description.

That sounds great. I think I'll blow some loan money on Persepolis I and Maus, based on several recommendations above. Maybe Watchmen as well. Based on the Amazon description, Watchmen sounds a little...superhero based. It revolves around former "Crimebusters"? I think I may have to skip out on that for now.

Watchmen... superhero based... oh man, I don't even know where to start with that statement.

I liked Watchmen but I found it much easier to approach after reading Alan Moore's "Tomorrow Stores," which is stories about a boy genius, a '40s-type superheroine, and other tongue-in-cheek figures. It's got four stories a few pages long each book (more in the graphic novel compendiums, obviously), and they've got the same cleverness/great storytelling of the Watchmen, but without feeling unapproachable. Watchmen's treated so reverentially these days.

ZS, basically Watchmen is a deconstruction of superheroes and the comic book medium and 80s politics and all sorts of whatever the hell else happened to pop into Alan Moore's head. It's brilliant, and it does involve superheroes, but not the superheroes that I suspect you don't like.

I think my friend put it best when he said "Alan Moore's the sort of guy who has 25 years worth of newspapers in his closet."

Also, I cannot recommend Gotham Central highly enough. Absolutely fantastic read. Greg Rucka has to be my favorite current writer. Just really great police procedural stories, with believable regular people stuck in a world created for irregular people.

In addition to the above: the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster's "City of Glass" is one of my favorites ever. "Capote in Kansas" is also v v good. Not to stray too far from the "self-contained book" topic, buuuuut....

Gotham Central most def, POWERS is a must, The Walking Dead is worth getting into.

Walking Dead seconded. Not a pleasurable moment reading it, due to the fact near every page is a cliffhanger, but it's excellent. DMZ is also worth checking out, too.

epileptic by david B
wimbledon green by seth
black hole by charles burns

American Psycho is pretty graphic, as novels go.

Seriously, though. It's difficult to recommend comics to an altogether new reader. Foremost reason being that comics require a different kind of literacy than regular books do. I've tried introducing comics to a number of people who had never read them before, and they often have difficulty getting into them. Not because of content or quality necessarily but because they just aren't used to the form.

With that in mind, I'd feel compelled to avoid recommending anything that wasn't made by a competent draftsman/storyteller. I turned someone onto to New X-Men briefly, but she immediately lost interest once Quitely left. So maybe the first collection of All-Star Superman would be a good place to start.

Although ASS is a good starter superhero comic (as it requires pretty much nothing in the way of foreknowledge of the characters or themes), most superhero stuff is way too mired in years of continuity to recommend to newcomers. So that's another obstacle. Because most of the stuff I personally like the most is mainstream stuff. But there are a few good, relatively self-contained titles out there for beginners.

I guess, given the above criteria, I would recommend The Frank Book, Sleeper, Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiends collections, the new Love and Rockets collections, From Hell, Milligan's X-Force/X-Statix, Stray Bullets, and, for the person who's never looked at a comic book before, Understanding Comics ain't a bad place to start.

One ongoing title I'm really enjoying is The Boys, a couple of steps farther out on the superheroes-in-the-real-world branch from Watchmen, and with a lot more cynicism and black humor. (DC got cold feet and pushed it to another publisher after a gerbil-up-the-ass scene.) I think the trade paperback of the first few issues is just out, or about to come out.

Although ASS is a good starter superhero comic (as it requires pretty much nothing in the way of foreknowledge of the characters or themes), most superhero stuff is way too mired in years of continuity to recommend to newcomers.

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment of ASS -- it can be read on the surface without much knowledge of Superman mythos, but if you only give it that surface reading, it's merely an okay comic book. It's a brilliant comic for people who have really internalized decades of Superman stories.

Yeah, you know, I've never really been interested in Watchmen for the same reason: it's supposed to be this marvelous deconstruction of superheroes, but I don't have much experience with superheroes in the first place that warrants deconstructing.

Which is exactly why I don't understand Watchmen's position as Standard Introductory Comic.

Maybe the Silver-Age Marvel Essentials trades are a good place to start if you're a new reader and interested in getting into superheroes. Although I've started reading that early stuff and it's mostly kinda dire for the first couple of years.

you can wind up blowing LOTS of money on graphic novels/nu-comix. I certainly did for a few years. so addictive. I had to stop. everytime a thread like this comes up it makes me want to blow $100 at the comic store down the street.

Well, fortunately for you, the entirety of western civilization is now available for illegal download.

At this point, that barely seems like an exaggeration.

I wouldn't recommend Watchmen to someone new to comics.

"The Last Man" is awesome, although I have to admit I don't like the idea of paying $10 for every book in the series.

Graphic novels are awesome.

I'm lucky in that my public library gets in like 90% of the graphic novels I've ever heard of.

Also, what is ASS? That's an acronym, right?

NEW YORK—Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. released a new Archie Comics graphic novel Tuesday, Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown, an examination of the complex inner workings of longtime Archie compatriot Forsythe "Jughead" Jones. "Readers will be fascinated by Forsythe's agonizing realization that his love of food was really just a substitute for loving himself, something he deems impossible due to his guilt over the premature death of his baby sister, Forsythia, and the predatory sexual overtures he suffers at the hands of Mr. Flutesnoot," author and cartoonist Adrian Tomine said. "The poignancy is further emphasized by the glimpses of Forsythe's future, as a divorced, self-doubting, alcoholic psychiatrist with an uncontrollable weight problem." A Knopf spokesman rejected allegations that the novel is nothing more than an apologia for the character's misogyny, saying that readers "will find the truth is rather more complicated."

ASS = All Star Superman. It was named in full when Deric first cited it.

While I agree that Watchmen isn't a good introduction to "serious" comics for someone who's neve read comics, I don't think the main problem for the ininitiated is that it is a "deconstruction of the superhero genre". This deconstruction isn't even the biggest theme in the comic, more important is Moore deconstruction of American politics of the era, and how the superheroes in the story stand in as symbols and vehicles of those politics. So anyone who has a basic knowledge of what superheroes are can understand that part. I think the harder thing is that Watchmen is so loaded with comic (meta)narrative tricks and techniques that it almost becomes saturated with them. So anyone who doesn't fully understand the language of comics is bound to miss the ridiculous amount of details Moore and Gibbons have put to Watchmen.

To take just one minor detail: the speech bubbles in the story change throughout the different decades it depicts, so the softer, more round bubbles of the 40's gradually become the sharper, more angular bubbles of the 80's. I think I'd read the comic four times before I even noticed this.

xpost

Just on Watchmen, I think it would work well as an early introduction to comics because it has nice art, interesting characters, and a multilayered narrative. I can't see the superhero thing being that much of a problem. Everyone is dimly aware of superheroes, but you don't have to read much of Watchmen to gather that this is not zap! bang! pow! territory.

and just on Tuomas' point about Watchmen metanarratice tricks etc.: it was probably ten years after reading Watchmen that I noticed any of theses, so I wouldn't worry about it.

xpost xpost and I've never noticed that thing about the speech bubbles... must go and re-read Watchmen. Why does all that kind of stuff count as something that makes Watchmen bad for new readers if most people never notice it?

tell me more watchmen metanarrative tricks i have a copy in my hand right now

Those comics by Joe Sacco ("Palestine", "Safe Area Gorazde", "The Fixer", and so on) are all entertaining and probably easy enough for a new reader, even if they are part of that ultimately problematic world of autobiographical comics.

I don't think it's the multilayered narrative aspect that would keep me from recommending Watchmen to a newcomer, it's the length. If they're really a newcomer to the comics form, I would start with a good anthology title with a wide variety of wrwiting and art styles, linear and nonlinear storytelling, humor and serious stories, etc. Specifically, the A1 anthology from Atomeka in 1989-1992. After they picked and chose their way through those six issues, I'd say "what worked for you and what didn't?" and give further recommendations from there.

I don't know. These new readers. We have to do everything for them, and what do we get back?

Coupons for free sexual favors?

also, I'd highly recommend "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. The sequel to that is good, too.

I've always stayed away from that, on the basis that I don't need some know-all telling me how to understand comics. But maybe it is good for people who are new to the game.