2014 what are you reading thread

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

My current reading stack:

The Incal
The Techopriests
Judge Death: Death Lives (just finished)
Six from Sirius I & II (re-reading)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (novel, re-reading)

The original Crossed was really good, possibly the best single story Ennis has ever written, but I don't have much trust in Moore's capabilities as a comic writer anymore... When was the last time he did a truly good comic book? I think the Smax mini was the last thing by him that I really enjoyed, and that was 10 years ago. And yeah, given the horribly, offendingly gratuitous depiction of rape in Neonomicon, I fear to think what he'll do with zombies... Ennis has actually been surprisingly sensitive on the subject of sexual violence in his recent comics (The Boys, Crossed), addressing it without exploiting it.

i didn't actually read the original Crossed, but one of the spinoffs, which featured several zombie rapes and gangbangs. one had a nun in a canoe!
definitely don't want to see what Moore does with that

When was the last time he did a truly good comic book?

Books 2 and 3 of Century were really fun and well-done, if we're using Smax as the benchmark. Promethea finished after Smax, too, iirc.

I liked Albion, but I guess he only did plotting for that (and I'm not sure I wouldn't rather read Jack Staff tbh).

I doubt he did very much plotting on it at all.

From A List Of Characters Alan Moore Sort Of Remembered.

Well so do I, but the narrative says he did. I'm also unsure how much his input was to any of the Avatar titles.

Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World

Avatar: he wrote Neonomicon for a tax bill, disavowed it years before it came out (or got drawn), then decided he quite liked it once he read it. Everything previously, he just had a chat or two to Johnston on the phone if Johnston had questions.

It's a shame I've always found the Avatar artists a bit sterile because they're the only publisher who has been around the last decade that consistently does horror titles.
Fangoria made a brief entry into comics and they looked much the same, which isn't surprising but I wonder why they were so short-lived? I've heard the company has had really bad management for several years.

Not really fond of "horrorcore" as I've heard some call it. I think "hedonistic horror" might be a better name.

Just ran through Crumb's four issues of "Hup!"
boy that guy is something

http://comicsbeat.com/dover-to-publish-a-new-edition-of-secret-teachings-of-a-comic-book-master-the-art-of-alfredo-alcala/

Nice to have a new Alfredo Alcala book coming out.

There's been a good few new things I want to buy in recent times. The comics industry is catering to me again, wheeeee!

east of west

newest humble bundle is a pile of potentially interesting comics from Dynamite...
anybody want Bob's Burgers #1?
https://www.humblebundle.com/?gift=5W2EywFvrvrRCGby

Wa-hey, got Richard McGuire's 'Here' last night, and it was great. Could have quite happily read it expanded to 3 or 5 times as long, tbh.

Alfredo Alcala was great. "The Tower of the Elephant" adaption that Alcala did with Roy Thomas and John Buscema is one of my favorite all time comics. His inking style was so signature he was like Tom Palmer in that it absorbed the pencils into a total hybrid look.

That's cool that the same company is going to reprint Puma Blues. It would be even better if they somehow could do a conclusion as if I remember right, that series just stopped, it wasn't concluded. I'm sure they never complete perhaps what was planned, but it would be cool to see the creators at least be able to put a capstone on the series. Michael Zulli obviously did other comic work after that series. There was some crazy pen and ink detail in that series too, not completely unlike Alcala's mad detail.

"would be"

I'm glad this art book is coming out partly because Alcala is one of those artists whose work is so scattered that it's hard to recommend him to people. His Conan work with Buscema wasn't always working at full power. I got one of his Voltar comics and some of the pages were incredible, others were okay.
He mostly spent the end of his career inking and his solo works I've seen from 80s-90s mostly look burned out, unfortunately.

If Dark Horse kept doing their Warren artist collections, he'd be a great candidate.

Long time no comics. Just read two collections of the Geoff Johns Justice League, #2 THE VILLAIN'S JOURNEY and #4 THE GRID. Holy smokes, them's some bad comics. Both of them use a lot of elements from older DC stories, Villain's Journey is pretty much the same story, on a wider scale as the Zoom storyline Johns did in his run on The Flash what, 10 years ago? And it really didn't actually show much of the villain's journey. It was obsessive, however, in hitting markers about the dynamics between Justice League members, which was nowhere near as interesting or entertaining as the comic thinks it is. The Grid meanwhile, is basically the Judas Contract (80s New Teen Titans) for the emotionally stunted.
For all the big whoop about adding Cyborg to the line-up of original Justice Leaguers, all he ever does is Google shit for Batman. Like, come on. In Villain's Journey, over the course of two issues (everything takes forever, because there are so many splash pages) each Leaguer revisits their defining trauma and they are related to father figures. EVEN WONDER WOMAN (ok, bit of a stretch to call Steve Trevor her father figure, but considering he's the first man she's ever known, I mean, right?)
The Grid is also utter nonsense because it's so dependent on what's going on in the other Justice League books, but never really gives you a reason to go read those books. I mean, I remember when Justice League International crossed over with the Suicide Squad in issue #13 and a) you had to go read Suicide Squad #13 to get the conclusion to the story b) they totally sold me on the Suicide Squad.
What else have I read since I last I darkened ILC's door...
I really enjoyed the first four or five Scalped trades. Bleak bleak bleak, holy moley.
Also loved the Torpedo 1936 reprints. Full of nasty stuff I hate seeing in superhero books, but gorgeous art and consistently sadistic.
I was super-excited to get the Corto Maltese reprints a while back, but didn't really get into it.
A bunch of small press stuff by people I know that's really good.
THIS IS AMAZING: http://studygroupcomics.com/main/calgary-death-milks-a-cow-by-connor-willumsen/
I have Lethem's OMEGA THE UNKNOWN in front of me right now and am looking forward to cracking it, but thought I'd check out this thread and see what's good.
I am waiting for the trade

dr supes have u seen the studygroupcomics thread?

thanks, Mordy!

Supes, if you liked Scalped, I'd check out Jason Aaron's Thor, which is probably my favourite superhero comic of the past few years -- go back to the first issue from 2012.

I just finish bingeing on Rick Remender's Captain America run -- it's exactly how I remember 80s Marvel being, kinda super dumb but insanely what-happens-next-y.

you mean like the Mark Gruenwald era?

Yep, totally!

ok, i'll remember to check that out on Unlimited. i think i'm still 3-4 years behind where i stopped in the mainstream MU, sometime around Heroic Age

Bought LB Cole - Black Light, it's mostly a cover collection but there is some art you can't find anywhere else (good thing too or else you could just look at comic databases to see it all), I nearly didn't buy it until I saw the previously unseen art. I find the more recent work pretty fascinating, it's softer but still unique. Some of this stuff has a real intensity, I love it.
Just noticed there is a swipe of Graham Ingels (or maybe it's the other way around).

Also got the Ditko Shorts book.

Are these books getting more expensive? I had planned to also get Complete Hammer (Kelley Jones), Hansel & Gretel (Mattotti/Gaiman) and the Howard Nostrand collection, but if I did get all five books it'd be over £100.
I guess I can do without the latter three.

I must admit that when I started doing mainstream comics I was at a very low point in my life and career. My own publishing company, Fantagor Press was collapsing and I didn't know what I might be doing to support my family. My first step into the mainstream was thanks to Mark Chiarello and his project, Batman Black and White. I had never done a super hero before and it was this quality or short coming that Mark wanted for his book. I did my best and apparently it was good enough. I then started doing non hero stories for Axel Alonso's books at Vertigo. Each project led to the next. I was privileged to work with Scott Allie and Mike Mignola on Hellboy. Even after doing several mainstream hero and anti-hero books I'm afraid my talent is not best suited for this kind of material. But I am eternally grateful to the editors who helped me through those hard times.

http://www.corbencomicart.com/interviews.html

I've always been interested in him talking about this. Quite a good interview.
This new site also has previews of some upcoming things that haven't been properly announced yet.

I finally finished up Local - so bummed about the accusations re: Brian J Wood, because that might be the best comic series I've read.

i went on a fairly cheap $50 ebay spree and pieced together a complete collection of Manga Vizion:
http://www.comicvine.com/manga-vizion/4050-75524/
lengthy, complete serialized (and often out of print) stories from Rumiko Takahashi, Ryuichi Ikegama, Kei Kusunoki, Tezuka, Keiko Neishi, Kia Asimiya... about two feet of paper pulp to pore through!

EXCUSE ME FOR BEING A DOG!