Rolling comic books 2021

Had no idea he wrote comics, is it any good/worth looking for?

Wasteland is pretty classic as i remember it, Bill Loebs / David Lloyd / Dandy Don Simpson on the art for the most part
https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Wasteland-1987

Thanks! I remember the cover design so vividly but never read it

Just looking at Lovern Kindzierski's garish-but-amazing colouring is instantly transporting

For some reason I only just realised he was a guy

Feels like this thread is slower than usual. Because of covid? Do you buy less comics when you can't browse around shops? For years I haven't been reading much comics other than little online quickies. I seen that Barry Windsor Smith's Monsters (35 years in the making) is coming very soon and I just want to flip through it quickly, I truly respect the dedication but I don't think it's something I want to read much, will be interested to hear reactions.

i'm reading a lot of digital comics and could talk about them but they're really all over the place.

I've actually gotten more into comics during the pandemic, especially once my LCS opened back up (although they were doing curbside pickup almost immediately and actually implemented a delivery van as well!). I used to just wait until tpbs came out of the stuff I was interested in, but now I'm subscribed to a bunch of comics. I just don't participate because I feel like I don't have the depth of knowledge about comics shit that most everybody else on here has. Shit I've read lately:

True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem (great series; wasn't thrilled by the ending)
You Look Like Death
We Only Find Them When They're Dead (have all the issues, but I'm not fully caught up on reading)
Something Is Killing the Children (and lots of other James Tynion-involved stuff: Razorblades, Department of Truth...)
Redfork (by Alex Paknadel on TKO, whose Giga I'm also following, although I'm not totally into it yet)
All the little TKO Shorts books
Bitter Root, which is really beautifully colored
Just got the first issues of both Nocterra and Stray Dogs, which are both promising in very different ways.

I bought four paper comics last year (one miniseries) and read the last two of them this week

Am enjoying Something is Killing the Children. Reading that via Hoopla from library, which has the first two graphic novels (1-5, 6-10) and single issues of 11-15. Waiting for the next collection to finish it in one borrow.

Red Mother looked interesting - any opinions?

I think it's in the current Boom Humble Bundle - might grab that, lots of new stuff in there
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/best-year-of-boom-studios-books

^^ I came here to post this! I've been off comics since around September in favour of other hobbies and because libraries (where I get a lot of my books) are closed, but this bundle looks like some fun weekend reading

Physical comics stuff I have bought this year, mostly from online sources

Morbius Epic Collection 1 by Gerber, Moench, Gulacy et al
Crashpad by Gary Panter
New Yorker cartoons issue
Trigan Empire Vol 2 by Butterworth and Lawrence
The Steel Claw: Invisible Man by Bulmer, Tully and Blasco
A 'facsimile edition' of Black Knight 1 (1955) by Lee and Maneely

I've been bulk reading piles of manga and had to stop reading Berserk because it was starting to giving me nightmares
http://i.imgur.com/Nzcp13Q.png

http://i.redd.it/qypeyxt0lot41.jpg

http://pm1.narvii.com/6748/694570930e51e1292942b5410ac79eb11868329bv2_hq.jpg

my understanding is that this is where Dark Souls got its look and that seems about right
http://i.pinimg.com/736x/91/1a/34/911a3450962f40438a4bf9d0d6a923e9.jpg

just thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff, it's really astonishing
http://www.bogleech.com/manga/berserk-cave.jpg

Where did you get to? I still haven't read the last few.

Book 19? I was knocking out three a night before bed and had to stop.

Wow, that looks bonkers.

I forgot that I tried reading some manga earlier this year - Junji Ito's Remina. The concept - sci-fi horror about a planet-eating planet - really appealed to me but the story wasn't all that compelling and the ending was just plain stupid. Couple that with the learning curve of reading right-to-left and it will probably be a while before I dip back into manga again. After reading it, I went and checked some reviews and apparently other people feel the same way.

i have definitely completed the rewiring necessary for right to left reading. i am occasionally accidentally reading american comics the wrong way!

Important warning for anyone trying to read Berserk: it uses rape as a major plot point for its major characters (male and female) and it is brutal about it.
https://www.jacksonpbrown.com/anime-and-manga/2018/10/12/thoughts-on-casca-and-some-uncomfortable-truths-in-berserk

Oh? You don't say!

I've been bulk reading piles of manga and had to stop reading Berserk because it was starting to giving me nightmares
http://i.imgur.com/Nzcp13Q.png

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, March 27, 2021 2:34 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

http://i.redd.it/qypeyxt0lot41.jpg

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, March 27, 2021 2:35 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

http://pm1.narvii.com/6748/694570930e51e1292942b5410ac79eb11868329bv2_hq.jpg

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, March 27, 2021 2:36 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

my understanding is that this is where Dark Souls got its look and that seems about right
http://i.pinimg.com/736x/91/1a/34/911a3450962f40438a4bf9d0d6a923e9.jpg

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, March 27, 2021 2:40 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

just thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff, it's really astonishing
http://www.bogleech.com/manga/berserk-cave.jpg

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Saturday, March 27, 2021 2:42 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, though. When I bought that Junji Ito book, I was worried that getting into manga would eventually end up with me buying something like that and that I would be harshly judged by the nice women behind the counter at my shop.

I think about sometimes picking up some of those books by Shintaro Kago with similar feelings. Not being judged so much as just acclimating myself to excessive nightmare gore. Like the Berzerk stuff up there, still pretty astonishing to look at.

I love Kago's work but some of it is deeply nauseating.

As a corrective, I've been plowing through Space Brothers instead. Which is fun! But occasionally inconsequential.

I don't think Berserk is especially gory given it's a dark fantasy, it's about what I'd expect.

This publisher is new to me but the magazine they publish is something I mentioned here once.
https://hollow-press.net/

i LOVE those guys, went to their table at Comic Arts Brooklyn a few years ago and basically bought everything they had.

okay yeah I just finished vol 1 of Something is Killing the Children and it's the highlight of the humblebundle so far. think I'm going to regret having read it right before bed though

the berserker art is interesting - that sort of busy/dense B&W style tends to put me off bc it takes me so long to parse what's going on. but in the context of berserker, does that 'slow parse' -- i.e. having to take time to read the art/having it reveal itself more slowly -- do a better job of building up the unsettling/horror vibes than art styles where you can understand the scene with a glance?

berserk? berserker? the thing forks posted above, obv.

Berzerker is the brand new comic that starts with the Sad Keanu meme, Berzerk the ultra-gory '90s medieval horror fantasy

I went back to Berserk again last night. Jesus it is relentless.
You can certainly take your time with each page for sure but it's... well, it's a lot.

Here's five sample pages from the first quarter of book 20 that i saw last night while trying to fall asleep.
http://i.imgur.com/MQ9ctVI.png
http://i.imgur.com/gh0yopo.png
http://i.imgur.com/KWAGVc5.png
http://i.imgur.com/pWUGorY.png
http://i.imgur.com/0SMn8kz.png

The epidemic did make me purchase stuff much more often, in order to support my local shop (Gosh in London). Reading them is another matter - previously my non-comic prose reading was done almost entirely on public transport, and this having vanished it now encroaches on my funnybook reading time.

That being said, I've recently gotten back into a groove. Read Crepax's American Stories; I was skeptical that I could draw something from what are clearly comics to masturbate to w/o sharing the author's fetishes, but actually once I started paying close attention to the actual drawing style it was a pretty wild ride. Helps that I have a soft spot for the kind of mid-century European culture that Crepax belongs to - radical leftist politics, fascination with American jazz and cinema. Pretentious as fuck, too - there's a really long story concerning Valentina's lover trying to make his way back to her from the US in a very obvious retelling of the Odyssey, with captions saying CIRCE or ITHACA in case you didn't get it. Except, of course, instead of defeating the Cyclops or whatever dude just keeps getting abducted by women who want to fuck his brains out. Fair play to the one who did taxidermy sculptures and wanted to turn his corpse into an alligator statue tho. Wild stuff, as I said. There's also a noir story with a black protagonist that has little masturbatory content and is a lot less cringy than you'd expect from a white Italian boomer writing about a black guy (onetime ILXor Nate Patrin contributes an essay about it).

I then moved on to Les Grands Espaces, Catherine Meurisse. She was one of the Charlie Hebdo ppl and apparently wrote a v good graphic novel about the attacks. Anyway this has no culture war talking points, it's just about growing up in the countryside as the child of ex-city dweller ecologists/intellectuals. That's my background, too, and it was really interesting to see which bits resonated, and which were very different - Portuguese villages in the 90's weren't yet experiecing the fever for cultural events and rural tourism that Meurisse depicts invading her hamlet in 80's France, though I understand they're at that stage now. Anyway, lovely stuff.

Currently I'm halfway through Mujirushi by Naoki Urasawa, a magna made with the official collaboration of the Louvre. Strong bonkers start: Trump is about to get elected, except in this reality it's a woman, and her opponent gets metooed shortly before the election so she wins. Problem is the protagonist's father invested in novelty masks of her and now that she's actually won she turns out to be a very vannila politician and no one cares anymore. This was all written in 2016, not quite how it panned out! Anyway after that strong start it all feels a bit half baked, meandering plot with French art thieves and such. Still the Japanese fixation with France is always fun - magna Mitterand! Manga Sylvie Vartan!

I have also suscribed to 2000AD. You'll all be pleased to know the reader's mailbag section currently includes ppl whining because the magazine made fun of Trump and Keep The Politics Out Of My Judge Dread, Godamnit. What planet these people live on even Tharg can't say. I might also fuck around and get a Spirou subscription.

It's funny, in most comics those Berserk pages just posted might seem memorable but I don't really remember the context for that part.

I was laughing at Savage Dragon fans who objected to the Trump skewering but I remembered that however much I might respect the writers doing what they want, I really don't like seeing real horrible politicians in cool comics either. It feels sort of yucky to me. Part of the fun of supervillains is that they're cool and often have a kind of dignity. Robert Crumb said he just couldn't stand drawing people he hated that much and that political cartooning was "a dirty job but somebody's got to do it".

It's a bit different when political satire is at the heart of your most iconic character though.

The idea of someone reading Judge Dread "without the politics" is...scary.

True but I also sympathize with people who just really didn't want to see Tony Blair's face in 2000AD regularly. The documentary regarded the Blair comic as a failure but I don't know why.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/02/nigel-farage-morphs-into-2000-ad-cartoon-villain-bilious-barrage
Farage is a perfect target but again, yuck, I don't want to see his face. But I've never really been a 2000AD guy.

Not keen on political caricature either, always seemed to me like it's feeding into the problem of politicians images being more important than what they do and say. All those politicians who got ridiculed for years for being fat or ginger.
I think my "yuck" is both about the caricature and the horrible banality of the actual politicians.

Also in Savage Dragon was Hitler in the form of BraniApe, it was kind of weird seeing him kill a huge crowd of people. And wasn't there an acclaimed comic where a superpowered Hitler actually kills some DC heroes?

Or did he just beat them up?

Farage is a particular case because, while that cartoon would never be mistaken for an actual human, it's not too far from how he actually looks.

While I think it's valid not to want to see their faces all the time, I also think we can't have this convo w/o acknowledging that 90% of the time "keep politics out of it" is code for "I'm angry because your politics differ from mine". And yeah, I think if you'd rather just not have that shit in yr comics 2000AD is not the place for you.

What you say about political caricature is true but you can easily take the next logical step and say that villains being portrayed as ugly and grotesque is messed up in the first place, reinforcing prejudices even without a real world target. We live in a fallen world and so on.

The new IDW Usagi Yojimbo Origins color collections - do they effectively replace the material that was originally collected in the Fantagraphics Special Edition? Or should I still read that (digitally) before grabbing Origins v.1?

I'm decades behind on Usagi but I'd read the B&W material in B&W rather than digitally colourised: he did draw differently for each mode.

Finished the first Megahex collection, or as I like to think of it, Noise Board: The Comic.

Also watched the 2000AD documentary, which was good as far as these things go. Pat Mills is quite the character! Alan Moore conspicous by his absence.

Portishead's David Cameron "obey" concert graphics must have turned up in the trenchant social commentary thread. Documentary was pretty good though.

The black and white Usagis are immeasurably better, imo. Bone, on the other hand, I liked better in colour.

i think i agree with that

hmm. ok you've all convinced me to not buy the new color editions

Portishead's David Cameron "obey" concert graphics must have turned up in the trenchant social commentary thread.

I like that judging by this doc 2000AD's influence on music consisted of 1)Portishead and 2)Anthrax.

After the Judge Dredd soundtrack I am stumped to think of more examples. I think Robert Smith did say he was a genuine fan of The Crow and 2000AD.

Madness' record label Zarjazz, which also released the Chas Smash and Suggs side-project Mutants In Mega-City One by The Fink Brothers, might have taken some influence, or it could just be a coincidence.

There's also Geoff Barrow's DROKK album, if that's not a cheat.

Did we mention this?

DC’s new Rorschach comic just took a turn from “unnecessary and sort of dumb” to “impossibly stupid” and I for one couldn’t be happier. pic.twitter.com/31r9bvuNqx

— K. Thor Jensen (@kthorjensen) April 13, 2021

Who written that?

Zdarsky's DD run is one of the weaker ones imo - it's not bad! it's just DD is probably the most consistently good mainstream superhero comic (tends to get good writers on long runs) so there's a lot to live up to and I wasn't sure this one did. I thought it had too much repetition over the whole DD manslaughtering a guy thing. Or idk maybe I was just a bit fatigued bc I caned all of Soule + Zdarsky over Xmas break.

i'm curious too, but never started the run. one day i'll catch up with the last 20 years of Daredevil. someday...

https://treasuryofbritishcomics.com/between-the-historical-and-the-fantastical-on-don-lawrences-karl-the-viking/
Never seen this stuff before

rebellion is constantly pumping out old boy's comic collections that confound me.

Who knew about Marney the Fox for instance?
http://doomrocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/marneyTF_01.jpg

Didn't know about the Karl The Viking release so it is now on my buy list

Good artwork on both

we're not even gonna try for a 2022 thread?

Agreed that Rebellion are finally doing justice to the IPC library that they inherited, though there is still so much that has never been reprinted.

The Book Palace company have also been reprinting classic Brit comics for a number of years now. They're a small publisher, so their prices are not cheap, but I would especially recommend the Larrigan collection in their Fleetway Picture Library series, with great illustrative artwork by Arturo del Castillo:

https://bookpalace.com/bpb/Larriganpeek/26/index.html

Of course, the cream of Leo Baxendale, Ken Reid, Davey Law's etc work for DC Thomson's humour comics has never been reprinted in any kind of coherent fashion. Which makes this two-volume set of Reid's non-Thomson stuff especially essential:

https://www.brokenfrontier.com/frankie-stein-ken-reid-power-pack-jasper-grasper/

Rolling Comic Books 2022

I like how Marney the Fox thinks: "'Tis the stumbling approach of hated man!"

I do too!

the reference point is at least partially the original Bambi book