2014 what are you reading thread

Yes! to new Druillet editions. I remember reading somewhere - probably Jack Kirby Collector - that Kirby once went into a comic shop and out of everything on display he picked up a Druillet book and said, "Now THAT's comics!"

I'm just particularly fed up with film adaptations and biopics being like this ultimate validation. Sick of familiarity being prized.

Some of my favourite films and comics are adaptations but I think it's more important to support original works in any medium.
I think in geek culture in particular (which dominates comics worse than films) there's an attitude that familiar things are unbeatable and need to be continually built up. Build shrines to what they already know, not looking for other things.

When something new comes along I wonder how many people think about how many more new things could come around? When Game Of Thrones got a bigger fandom I wonder how many people thought "maybe there are thousands of great stories that will never have a screen adaptation"? Have people totally given up hope of a giant readership for lots of newer writers without help of making a screen adaptation? Keep making adaptations probably isn't going to reverse this.

I don't refuse to buy adaptations, sequels, works with fictional celebrities (Cthulhu) etc or put people who do them on a list but I'm often a little disappointed that they didn't develop something more new. I think there is a really serious lack of confidence and conviction about what could be created (somehow contemplating all the things that could exist someday doesn't have an overwhelming allure for most). There's a lot of people who believe nothing will ever be as good as Star Wars or Marvel Universe, that needs to be fought against.

Everything is about franchises when it should be about seeking qualities that drawn people to these franchises in the first place. If a geek is entranced by Giger's vision in films, the geek is more likely to want endless collectibles based on it than Giger art and equally powerful artists like Albin Brunovsky, Robert Venosa, Andrzej Masanis, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Ernst Fuchs, Santiago Caruso, Nicholas Kalmakoff, Alison Schulnik and quite a number more (look up these guys if you like spectacular visions).

I might have said this before but geek culture desperately needs to take more from Metal fandom. Metal fandom certainly has problems but in general its worship of established acts got less in the way of finding new powerful visions.

getting around to reading Godland. Art is the main appeal, feel like it's v much Veitch doing Kirby a la 1963. It is very weird to see a Kirby homage with zero sound effects though.

Refn's version of Incal

wait waht

His Incal isn't confirmed yet but he seems intent on doing it and Jodorowsky is a close buddy so it seems like it will happen eventually.
He also wants to do the 2000AD Button Man story. Expressed an interest in a Wonder Woman film but that isn't happening now. So I guess he likes comics.

phwoar

The biggest digital comic book distributor in all of digital comics land, Comixology, just took a relatively unprecedented move for a platform its size. Customers will now be able to download DRM-free backups—meaning when you buy a book, you'll finally get to own it, too.

http://gizmodo.com/you-can-finally-download-drm-free-comic-book-backups-fr-1610443535?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

doesn't say which publishers have signed on yet and i can't imagine all the big boys will but still this is p cool

Out of the stuff I've bought it looks like Image and Top Shelf. No surprise on either of them. I haven't bought anything from the big two.

OK that's huge. That's what was keeping me away from those services. Hope more publishers get onboard.

that's good news. probably timed to go against marvel's SDCC promo

hasn't Top Shelf's digital been DRM-free for four or five years?

Not if you bought it through comixology

EZ Snapping, if you didn't see that Saxon/Whitesnake thread, I'm just telling you here that what you said has had me laughing my ass off.

I bought the Emily Carroll book, very nicely designed.

I still pick up lots of comics in the shop and can't decide if I want to buy it for a relatively small portion of the content. That book of early Joe Kubert in particular. I just love the rugged detail.

Interesting to see Waterstones dedicating part of a table to Savage Dragon.

comixology is like the diamond comics of digital. those motherfuckers.

Is there any digital comics sites with great stuff that is hard or impossible to find elsewhere?

I'm not too fond of most of the banter in comic shops. One of my friends said it's like listening to people pretend they are in a Kevin Smith film.

That's an awful thing to say.

comixology is like the diamond comics of digital.

― mh, Thursday, July 24, 2014 11:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except they show up on time

Neither of us really mind Kevin Smith films much (although I have to say I'm not very fond of hip dialogue that is so popular in tv and film), but listening to people trying to be witty/cool in that specific way can be very cringeworthy.

go to better comics shops

you know, you can go to the nicest large-city comic shop that caters to indie and original work, with friendly employees who have great recommendations, and still occasionally run into a cluster of condescending gutter nerds

so this Fantagraphics Vaughn Bode thing... curious if anything will be in there that I don't already have. Influential as he was, Bode does not seem to have been particularly prolific.

Does it have Bode's Wrightson Purple Pictography collaborations?

There's nothing really wrong with the shop I go to, Forbidden Planet Glasgow (there is lots of pointless merchandise but I don't know if the individual Forbidden Planet stores get much choice in what they buy in). It's on one of the busiest streets, so all sorts of people come in. And for annoying geeks to stay away from their natural habitat, the place would have to sell stuff that didn't appeal to most of them, which is risky business for a comic store. There is a store in Mono that exclusively does small press stuff, I don't have the foggiest how they stay afloat.

There used to be loads of comic stores years ago but now glasgow is probably down to 2
3 or 4 (there was something like 10 or more when I started shopping around 15 years ago). The guy who ran Futureshock passed away recently (Mark Millar done an obituary) so I presume that shop is gone. It was a very messy store and I didn't know how he kept that place going, but it had charm. I once reached deep into a dusty hole between boxes and expecting my hand to be covered in spiders, pulled out a Corben book!

45 cent love and rockets vol 1 on comixology today w/code LOVE

lovin it

Top Shelf has compiled the complete Bacchus for digital. 5 volumes, $7.99 each. I hope they're still doing print volumes...

I finally got that Slings & Arrows Comic Guide, it is really impressive but I can't find the contributor list anywhere.
I was looking around for reviews of the sort of 90s comics that everybody hated, because so few people ever really followed the stories consistently. Not surprising that the reviews are negative.
I've always wanted to see a genuinely good "bad girl" comic because I like the general direction Chaos and Verotik were headed but didn't like the execution. I guess Requiem by Mills/Ledroit is quite similar.
I listened to a podcast all about Vigil's Faust that was very entertaining. I love hearing about wacky oddities like that. Tarot was really mental sometimes in a way that old golden age superheroes were, if it was better written and drawn it'd be one of my favourite comics.

I wonder if the reviewers really managed to read every single issue of those old romance comics?

Top Shelf also having a completely insane digital sale all weekend

Witzend turned up this morning. I know it's supposed to be v patchy, but kind of overawed by even a quick look.

In book form or a digital service?

I'm still wondering how they got to reprint it all. I'm sure it's all creator owned material, I don't think it's old enough to be public domain. Although Ditko is the only living artist I can imagine taking action over this.
Gray Morrow did some lovely stuff for it too.

Bought Bacchus because it looks like physical reprints are not in the cards. Kinda bummed.

witzend is on amazon i think.

that 150 for most everything top shelf has made available digitally is a little tempting. what's the file format for comixology? .cbr? Is it drm free?

protected cbr (I think) but Top Shelf is one of the companies making everything available for download as a pdf or cbz backup. Not all of my prior purchases have working pdfs yet, but all have cbzs.

If I had the money I probably would get it despite only missing Bacchus from my "must haves" due to prior top shelf sales. But I could barely scrape enough for Bacchus.

okay, i'm taking the plunge. I've never paid for digital comix before! 150 for 170 graphic novels seems fair.

also my first time using comicology

too much money for me but that is a good deal. enjoy Chester 5000!

Witzend is the hard copy version.

That top shelf deal looks really good but having just dropped a load on Witzend I'm not sure I can stretch to it at the moment.

What is the current title of the storyline originally published as the Doing the Islands with Bacchus dark horse miniseries? I recall that being my favorite Bacchus stuff by some distance.

Vol.2 Details of what's in each of these editions is here: http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog/bacchus/619

originally published as the Doing the Islands with Bacchus dark horse miniseries?

originally published in Trident #5-8 and DHP &c iirc btw fwiw

So doing the islands was its 2nd us publication?

It was a collection of stories that had previously appeared in various places.

http://www.weisshahn.de/bacchus/book3.htm

My favorite Bacchus sequence also. Been waiting on the new collections for years and I am now bummed that it seems they aren't going to happen (in print).

lady got me reading 'runaways' and am loving it p hard so far

nice. love anything by BKV

any way to close one of those 2014 reading threads?

(this is the I Love Comics reading thread)

A1! How dumb to forget, I used to think #3 was possibly the best single issue of an anthology ever. Also re Trident my brain obviously thought of it as being the only reason to have #s 5-8, once St Swithin's Day wrapped.

(Keen to hear Alfred's thoughts, once hl locks and deletes the other thread for him.)

hey sic thanks for pointing out that top shelf sale, i grabbed the whole Double Barrel which i guess means like 1200 pages of comics?? idk DOIN IT

Witzend definitely a thing of its time. Some of the portfolio stuff is just beautiful, especially Reed Crandall's Edgar Rice Burroughs collection and the Frazetta portrait of Buster Crabbe from the back cover of #1.

More... ahem... singular is Steve Ditko's Avenging World, which is really just a stream of consciousness Randian rant over some collage art. Clearly Wally Wood was beginning to tire of it, because in #7 he published a piece taking the piss out of Mr A.

I was very taken by Avenging World when I was 15 or 16, and that passage about righting your own wrongs made me go to a shop and confess that I had switched price tags on something to make it slightly cheaper (so basically stolen it). The shop keeper just seemed a bit surprised and said he didn't mind me shopping there.
I considered myself an objectivist at that time, not yet knowing how crazy, irrational, unreasonable, distorted, wishful, hypocritical many objectivists were. But I still think I taken away some good things from it.

Now that Ditko isn't my God anymore, it think it's tragic how much wasted potential he had. I thought Crackling Blazer, Missing Man, Mr Quiver and his last Creeper things were good, but from the mid-70s it really is mostly a terrible decline.

Will Eisner said Wood wanted to sue Warren for refusing to publish Witzend. Eisner had to tell him the law doesn't work like that.

The Creeper volume that DC put out a couple of years ago is pretty great, but yeah, it's slim pickings after that.

Bill Pearson says in the prologue that the reason he took it over, and only paid $1 for it, was that he believed in Wally but that somehow he'd spent the entire subscription money up to #8 getting as far as #4 (and even then paid for some of that out of his own pocket) and otherwise it was just going to fold. Bill put out the other ones at a loss (splitting the damage with other believers like Phil Seuling) with as much free work as he could get hold of - which explains why #9 is just photos and a couple of essays on WC Fields, or why #13 is proto-GGA, much of which are throwaway quality.