2014 what are you reading thread

Is Frank Quitely drawing that one? If so, I might give it a look.

yeah it's Quitely, great work as usual

Sutton book sounds great! His tcj interview is all-time.

I've got a bunch of his Dementia porn work and its just as uneven as a lot of his general comics work. You'd think this was him finally getting free reign (and I'm sure he was) but some of it is really hacked out.
Some of the rendering techniques don't quite gel together and it always annoyed me how high he placed nipples on breasts (it just didn't look right). A lot of it lacks something or other.
But I like the cheeky faces he drew and he had a knack for detailed complex morbid S&M imagery. And "Vault Of Whores" is a hilarious title.

Of all my favourite comic artists, I think Sutton had done more hack work than any of them. And he didn't mind admitting a lot of his work was no good.

Another thing; Sutton changed his style (and his name to Sean Todd) quite a lot for his Skywald work and he genuinely manages to seem like a totally different artist. He did this to some extent for various titles, especially anything superhero related and it was always awkward. He clearly didn't care for a lot of the material he was working on. He tried a more cartoony style on Vampirella and it didn't work well.

I'd like a Warren collection of Sutton but I don't think it's likely. I wonder if Dark Horse are ever going to do artist focused Warren collections again.

Another unlikely Sutton collection I'd like is his Man-Thing work with Steve Gerber on Marvel Comics Presents. That was weird and fascinatingly ugly stuff.

Just gonna post so no one feels like they need to weigh in on cartoon nipple placement in order to keep the thread going.

As you were.

Well it was pornography and getting nipple placement right in that context seems important to me. There are tumblr pages dedicated to these type of anatomy screwups.

Anyway, over the years I always keep coming back to Gene Colan's official commission page. It always inspires me how far he taken these and I really think a lot of this stuff is the best art he ever did. There really should be a book of these. The Dracula and Dr Strange sections are particularly amazing. It's great how he maintained his peak until death.
http://comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=4158

I gave up on GMoz's Action Comics around the Obama issue, so I could read the whole run in one sitting - but that didn't help much. It's a weird run - bad art, bland writing, godawful backups. Some parts have unnecessary longeurs and others have the action telescoped to meaninglessness. Lois and Jimmy just stand around commenting on things without contributing to the plot. There are things Morrison's done lately that weren't so great (Joe the Barbarian, Happy) but he's never been quite as half assed as this before.

...anhillator is more of the same but a lot more fun.

Yeah, the AC run was a big disappointment, it really showed what's bad about Morrison's writing: half-assed plotting, focus on pointless details instead of the big picture, etc. And it didn't help that the artist was pretty bad at comic book storytelling, which just served to magnify the problems in the scripting. I think Happy and Joe the Barbarian were disappointing in an opposite way: the art was good and the story was mostly easy to follow, but there simply wasn't that much into it, Morrison was just rehashing ideas he's done a million times in an uninteresting way.

i would call them less interesting than past efforts, but still entertaining and worth reading. the quality of art pushed Joe pretty far for me, and Happy was a short, less ambitious story

http://vimeo.com/111690998
^20 minute documentary on Richard Thompson. I still haven't read any of his collected work, think i'm gonna hit amazon and alleviate that.

http://www.fright.com/edge/HorrorGraphicNovels.htm

I've only heard of a third of these! I'm a big fan of Pigeons From Hell and Toadswart D'Amplestone.

I often link to this site but Groves is a first rate treasure hunter and cultural justice warrior.

yeah, wow - that's new to me too.

http://dwdesign.tumblr.com/

This guy k*l*an Eng is amazing. He does the Druillet and Heavy Metal thing better than any artist in many years.

Why was his first name censored?

weird. but yeah that guy is pretty damn talented

k*ll*an

ha, that's a weird artifact from a past ilx clusterfuck

board invader?

Yesterday in another forum Yoshitaka got censored because it has a curse word in the middle.

50% off the online D&Q catalog for purchase. I may blow some cash.
https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shop

Ooh, I'd get the Moomin collection but it's not that much diff once postage is included.

Any other recommendations here? I might pick up a book by Seth, Tomine or Tatsumi's A Drifting Life from several years back. Maybe support that Kate Beaton book.

the kate beaton is fantastic tho i don't remember if there's anything new on it that she didn't post online

Would recommend the Paul books by Michel Rabagliati - Canadian-set autobiographical comics drawn in a lovely 'clear line' style; they're like the sunshiney opposite of Joe Matt's stuff.

pyongyang is good

My favourite D&Q books are Nonnonba by Shigeru Mizuki and Beautiful Darkness by Kerascoet.

If I had to get more I'd go for Brecht Evens and Michael DeForge.

A Drifting Life is imo not a great read all the way through. There are standout elements, but it drags badly in places.

i just bought the newest Gilbert Hernandez book, 'Bumperheads'; the 1600 page three-volume Shigeru Mizuki wartime history of Japan, 'Showa' (i love nonnonba too); the early days of Frank King collection 'Walt Before Skeezix; and 'Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story' by Peter Bagge. With postage, about 15 bucks per book which feels very fair for that stack.

As far as recommendations, I daresay I own/have read a good quarter of their catalog and you go right more than you go wrong.
It's really terribly organized on their site tho!

sorry: "own a quarter of their catalog and have read more than half"

actually i suppose that's overstating it. Anyways fuck it: good stuff there.

Matt Fraction's new feminist space epic Odyssey adaptation ODY-C is trippy and the huge double sided gatefold cosmic map & timeline are ridiculous and awesome. The Humans, new Image thing that's sort of "gonzo biker gangs on Planet of the Apes" is seedy (funeral blowjobs!) and fun to look at.

thanks for the recs everyone - i should probably crosscheck them with my local library first before i snag some stuff before the 7th

I posted above last week that I wished for an LB Cole collection, well Fantagraphics is doing one called Black Light. Great!

maybe biased due to geography but Aaron/Latour's Southern Bastards is the only thing I'm really excited about at the moment. well that and Multiversity.

Yeah, it's great. In fact, although Aaron's been around for a while, he's kind of been my great comic find for 2014 -- Thor is incredibly fun, and even his hackier stuff is just really well written. Just tons of good one-off issues on Marvel Unlimited. He's like Ennis without the juvenilia.

Really surprised Alan Moore is doing Crossed. Apparently Moore and Ennis are friends but I thought they wouldn't like each other's type of work.

What? I do not want to read that.

He's doing Crossed+100 i.e. a hundred years after the outbreak.

how many rape scenes can Alan Moore write

has he done zombie rape yet?

Apparently Moore and Ennis are friends

Have they ever met?

Don't know, it doesn't really say much about their relationship.
http://www.crossedcomic.com/2014/09/15/crossed100-a-new-monthly-series-from-alan-moore-and-gabriel-andrade/

In Kickstarter updates; LOVED The Will of Captain Crown, a pirate treasure story by Tristan Roulot and Patrick Henaff. Also got the two volumes of Sex And Violence by Gray & Palmiotti, the first was very good but the second a little formulaic.

He’s the most talented individual the medium’s ever seen or ever will;

lol

Yeah, I don't get it when fans make statements like that, even when said about my favourite comic creators it seems a bit pessimistic to say things will never surpass that level.

music hit its peak in the 1600s and it's been downhill ever since

Its a ridiculous statement even without the "ever will" imo