Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

aw yeah
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.207954002578217.59091.207950722578545&type=3

that link requires a facebook account

How odd - I don't have a facebook account, this computer has never been used by anyone with a facebook account, but I can see the page.

That's rad. I'd be more psyched if it was Marvel, but still rad.

maybe a zing issue?

If you can't open it, it's Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's 1982 DC Comics Style Guide, page by page.

http://scontent-yyz1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/525448_547992328574381_625728319_n.jpg%3Foh%3Da4bd92e3496611d9adb252908be328bf%26oe%3D56F66685

bah.

The Divine by Boaz Lavie, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka. Great linework and color, arresting magical violence.
Personal interest specifically that two Israelis would draw a story with Southeast Asian roots, and they did a decent job!

The hanukas are really talented, would love to read that

I have new comics to read! A friend loaned me tpbs for Saga (book 1), Gotham Central, and Ex Machina. Beyond knowing who Vaughn and Brubaker are idk anything about these. (Well, I flipped through an issue of Saga at the shop once and it looked promising)

All good stuff!

oh, saga is ~very~ promising...

I love saga, gotta get the latest one. Hoping Christmas will bring wicked & divine, bitch planet, and hip hop family tree

i guess i haven't discussed this anywhere on ilx but i have gotten on a few private trackers and the amount, complexity and range of what's out there in the wild has inspired me to get rid of a big chunk of my 14 bookshelves worth of stuff and go digital. I have less and less affinity to paper these days; reading the books on a big screen imac or on the run on a tablet feels, after three or so years of indoctrination, natural. and i am SO TIRED of lugging these literal tons of paper pulp from apartment to apartment. so maybe i'll start selling the trades and hardbacks on amazon and start farming out the floppies to ebay.
I keep running into files that even a few years ago would've made my ears pop and they're still kinda hard to believe. Last night someone posted a complete Uncle Scrooge run. I don't even know how to respond to that.

I don't think Don Rosa or Carl Barks are going to be threatened by your piracy, so have at it!

Don has some opinions iirc.
tbh, at this point i have to have paid well into the six figures for the collection i have and, like a new car now used, it's probably worth ten grand total. I sleep soundly.

he's younger than I thought!

in the early days of the internet, he left his phone number up on his published articles and i foolishly called him to discuss philosophy and comics at odd hours and he was strangely up for it!
he's a real character and one of the great cartoonists.

This seems to be the most recent last word from him:
http://career-end.donrosa.de/

I still have my childhood collections. An entire “vault”, like a Money Bin, filled with 40,000 comics. All the Barks comics, but also most every American comic book 1945-1970. My old MAD magazines. My monster movie magazines. My full set of “TV GUIDE” magazine. Plus a room full of DVDs of my favorite movies, another two or three rooms filled with books by my favorite authors, a room of books about old movies and newspaper comics. When I finally learn to relax, I plan on just sitting and rereading and rewatching all of these favorite entertainments. That’s my new fondest dream.

I thank Carl Barks for creating the comics that I loved so much that I serendipitously fell into the blessed work of paying homage to those great comics for over 20 years. And I thank you for receiving that work so graciously and making me feel very special… until they broke my spirit.

dude looks like larry david and talks like him too!
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Community/images/01-Aug-2011/973829-rosa.jpg

The other “curse” of popularity was the amount of fanmail I started to receive. Now, normally when someone is as “successful” and popular as these characters had made me, they would be able to afford to hire assistants to help with the work and the correspondence. But my pay was not even quite enough for one person much less several. And again, as a fan myself, I certainly could not allow myself to simply ignore the loads of fanmail as I am told the more sane authors or artists can do. So I always answered 100% of my fanmail myself with personal replies. I would send free drawings if the fan requested one, and I would only hope that the fan would not request a full-color drawing, because then I would send a full-color drawing. I was taking perhaps a day off per week, or a week off between story projects, just to answer fanmail. Any of you who wrote to me in those days can attest to the truth of this.

tbh, at this point i have to have paid well into the six figures for the collection i have

I hear you.

28 vols of The Spirit Archives
14 vols of Dick Tracy
12 vols of Prince Valiant
Complete Trigan Empire
Complete Storm
...

I'm stopping before that gets too depressing

I don't have anywhere near a six-figure collection - or even a "collection" really, as I give most of my comics to charity shops when I'm done with them.

But - I have gone digital only too - at least for weekly floppies. Same here for me - it's totally natural. And I think some comics are actually improved by the frame-by-frame thing on Comixology - it's given me a new appreciation for artists who bother to get the storytelling right. (Marquez, the guy on the new Iron Man series, is fantastic read that way. I imagine it would be great for, like Cameron Stewart or the Hernandez bros too.)

Also! Rosa sounds like a mensch.

the idea of saying Xaime would be improved by not having his panel-to-panel storytelling available to the reader is horrifying

Ha, okay, let's substitute improved for "inferior but more interesting and delightful than you might think". Sanctity of the page and etcetera. What I like about it, though, is that it forces me (ymmv) to study individual panels more closely in a way I don't over a whole page - the wit of a specific set of panel choices and transitions over a sequence becomes clearer. Not a substitute - just interesting.

Oh man I just read that don Rosa farewell ;_;

Comics break people. They break people!

Annie Mok and Sophia Foster-Dimino's wordless and frameless comic about trauma and processing, "Swim Thru Fire," is pretty devastating and can now be read in full: http://hazlitt.net/authors/sophia-foster-dimino

(Well, wordless in the later installments at least.)

Also, on a VIDA-ish note, Kim O'Connor on the gender dynamics of alternative presses:

The numbers are pretty abysmal. As recently as 2011, D&Q’s list was just 7 percent women—two of the 27 titles they published that year. For an 11-year stretch from 1996 to 2006, they published no more than four women per year. For five of those years (2000-2004), they published just one woman. In 2005, they published zero.
Sadly, in the landscape of comics publishing, that’s enough to put D&Q ahead of pretty much everyone else, at least among publishers of similar or larger size. To return to my pal's original finding: at Drawn & Quarterly, one cartoonist in every four is a woman. That's certainly a far better showing than we get from the Big Two, where that number is something like one in six or seven (a ratio that becomes way worse if you consider their catalogs holistically instead of as a present-day snapshot). And if I may hazard a guess, it is also a much better showing than D&Q’s alt-comics counterpart, Fantagraphics. By a lot.
On the other hand, one in four is still very poor—and it's hardly a "list that tends to be 50-50, male-female." That anyone would perceive an average of 25 percent as a history of equality speaks to the extent of the problem of gender disparity in comics.

http://www.comicsandcola.com/2015/12/on-drawn-quarterlys-feminist-legacy.html

Somebody needs to make the 2016 thread and I'm not brave enough

Rolling SERIOUS GRAPHIC LITERATURE Thread for Comics in 2016