Rolling Comic Books 2022

I don't think you can bracket them like that - graphic novels (mostly YA stuff) are self contained stories, manga is serialized sure but usually has the advantage that you can start with a Volume 1. So both are easier to access than US superhero comics and both also provide better value for money. I don't think US comics are super popular with kids at all, in fact what I hear from art teachers and such is that manga is universally adored, western comics (not just DC and Marvel either) mostly ignored and the graphic novel stuff that's popular bases itself on manga, in style and storytelling.

Yup 100% the US floppy format kinda sucks ass and is so expensive. Only benefits are getting regular material every month (hopefully) in color and on nice paper compared to manga

I know we're likely sort of using "Big Two/Image/DH/etc." as shorthand for US comics en total, but that's really not true anymore. You have to include Scholastic as a major publisher and very representative of the industry at this point (as well as companies like First Second, Boom, etc.)

and yes, also 100% every series being discrete/being easy to pick up is a huge reason why these YA series and manga are doing well, i mean look at the Babysitter's Club series and flippin' jankass Dog Man. (lots of books also that aren't really manga style, closer to Cartoon Network/Disney TV, many current animators putting out GAs) there is ZERO reason American superhero comics can't be produced like this and DC is at least trying with their standalone YA books with Batgirl, Raven etc.

we have tons of checkouts in my school of the low-effort "ready to read" paperbacks in Marvel and DC, they love the MCU movies and cartoons, but sadly few decent comics actually aimed at the audience (age 5-11). (The Marvel Adventures stuff is clearly B and C-tier work, and DC seems content reprinting old Batman Adventures comics from 20 years ago.) Meanwhile these same kids are reading everything put out by Jennifer Holm and Raina Telgemeier while constantly asking me for manga like Jujutsu Kaisen and Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun which we're never going to buy for them (lol)

so - yeah, i get that it's not completely fair to bridge YA material with standard superhero comics, but trust me, the audience and interest is there. they are just completely blowing the opportunity on a massive scale OR choosing not to understand it

A counter example might be Grant Morrison's JLA's run - it's incredible! But there's a lot of DC continuity tied into it, and I can't imagine a new fan being patient with Howard Porter's dreadful art

I mean ultimately most of these comics and pieces of shit that you had to be young to enjoy and still be sentimental about. Like, I don't think David Tennant's Doctor Who ever resulted in a mass audience run on Castrovalva DVDs

no idea what's in Marvel Adventures these days, but these digest collections c. 16 years ago were great* - about six bucks, fun all-ages superhero stories with jokes in. basically the only way that C21st superhero comics should even exist.

https://i.imgur.com/YcU3n6J.jpg

* I mean, eventually I bought one that wasn't primarily written by Jeff Parker and tapped out - probably the third one - but kids don't need them to be as funny as I did.

lol ok, but tbf the Doctor Who 2000s reboot actually DID get me to watch a bunch of the old serials

Ha yeah I was quite happy to revisit Happiness Patrol and Paradise Towers but I didn't see a lot of Tumblrs posting Kandyman and Richard Briers gifs

It's interesting how incomprehensible continuity is often brought up as the #1 reason the comics don't get more new readers but at this stage going to see a MCU movie w/o having seen the last thirty or so must be equally disorientating and yet ppl love it.

I dispute that a bit - the continuity is huge but the movies (or at lest the successful ones) usually work well as simplistic and discrete units -- like, no one who missed the first 45 minutes of Ragnorok is going to have trouble fingering out who the good and bad guys are, or whatever the MacGuffin is this time round.

But, like that's a way smaller measure of difficulty than DC's obsession with deep cut characters ("who are these yellow headed men and why are they suddenly in my Animal Man comic") or, like, trying to fathom the fuck of what happened in Secret Empire (I still don't get it), or why this Bendis can't ever start or finish a story etc.

Or, e.g. I loved the Hickman revival of X-Men but it just became a TOO MANY COMICS headache and who has time

this is why I said "at this stage" - try going into Doc Strange 2 not having seen anything except Doc Strange 1.

agreed on the Hickman thing, i was really sad that it eventually just turned back into your standard overpublished morass

i had some big problems with Dr Strange 2 (mostly regarding how it followed up Wandavision) but at its core it's still a very watchable/fun theme park ride that people can just show up for and see CGI pew-pew and some funny jokes

Lol, I was considering watching Doctor Strange 2, as I had finally caved to a years-long MCU apathy and watched Doctor Strange 1 a month ago and thought it wasn't bad. I guess that's a fool's errand, huh?

Also enjoyed House of X/Powers of X, but gave up after too many side-projects came out.

That may have turned me off of superhero books altogether, although I make an exception for Swamp Thing.

nah, go see it! it's totally fun. and if you haven't seen Wandavision it definitely won't bug you the way it did me
i do think it's a little more restrained than the first Doctor Strange was, ironically, at least with the wacky VFX set pieces

but at its core it's still a very watchable/fun theme park ride that people can just show up for and see CGI pew-pew and some funny jokes

Sure, but you can also pick up a continuity wank comic and enjoy it for the cool battles and grody art. A generation of X-Men fans happily read entirely incomprehensible comics for those reasons.

ha, fair enough!

I haven't seen Doctor Strange 2 yet, but 'more restrained' is not what I'm looking for there!

xp I remember starting to read Marvel comics, specifically the X-Men, during one of the worst on-boarding period (early 90s) and part of the draw was figuring out what the hell was going on, who these characters are, and why they're battling each other

There was a huge audience boost at the time! It's still really funny that they had a semblance of an entry point with X-Men #1, with Chris Claremont/Jim Lee and Claremont's overly verbose "this is who this character is, their powers, and what drives them" excessive text boxes, and managed to completely blow it up after six or seven issues.

My initial experience with comics as a child was buying random issues off the spinner racks in 7-11, just plopping down in the middle of a story and forgetting about it again for several months before grabbing an issue and finding new incomprehensible action and drama.

When I was trying to seriously get back into comics a few years ago, I tried this tactic. I wanted to recapture the chaos. I would just walk into my LCS, grab a bunch of issues off the wall, semi-randomly. I was also storing them in accordion folders, as a little rebellion against bags and boards. After a while, I concluded that this was not a satisfying means of reading or storage for me and switched to bags and boards and pull-box.

i feel like i'm unintentionally misleading a bit. DS2 is NOT more restrained in most ways! It's more like i feel there's nothing quite as cool looking as the "glass" effects in DS1, but there's PLENTY else to watch in it, especially going in as a horror or Sam Raimi fan

on occasion i do like to pick up random issues of stuff i've never read just to try, and it's just not really how comics are built nowadays

Yeah, I really have to get in on a first issue or if something I missed has been getting a lot of hype, I'll go pick up a trade and start from there.

at this stage going to see a MCU movie w/o having seen the last thirty or so must be equally disorientating

will report back in a week or three

like, no one who missed the first 45 minutes of Ragnorok is going to have trouble fingering out who the good and bad guys are, or whatever the MacGuffin is this time round.

fingering out your mum morelike tbf I was fairly bemused by the first 45 minutes of Ragnarok because I had no idea who was being introduced for the first time and who was from one or three or eight other films

Beyond wanting decently scanned reprints of DC and Marvel (hopefully people are torrenting good scans), I'm kind of glad that people are looking to other things, but I bet Disney owns some of them too. I don't have high hopes for this Disney Must Pay thing, I'd rather people didn't work for them.

the whole point of Disney Must Pay is that the people didn't work for Disney. you're free to agitate instead on a case-by-case basis, hundreds and hundreds of times over, for eg Alan Dean Foster to not write the Alien novelisation in the first place because he will receive royalties for 40 years, and then Disney will buy 20th Century Fox, but it might be less practical than the current movement.

Of course there's many more issues than the royalties situation.

I got this little series Knighthawk in the mail
https://www.comics.org/series/5322/covers/
Because there was a Filipino special issue of Comic Book Artist in their Top Shelf era that cited Knighthawk as some of the most accomplished Xtreme 90s comics, a highlight for Nestor Infante and the picture shown looked pretty good. It is nice but Neal Adams really dominates the thing, sometimes it looks like he's doing most of the work.
I forgotten how much adverts break up the mood of a comic when they keep interrupting the story.

This was the issue, really worth tracking down, it was probably my favorite of all the ones I read
https://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog/comic-book-artist-vol-2-4/209

Neal Adams is the only one credited on first issue of Knighthawk.

Re: "is there a Gorilla on the cover?"
It even features another variation of the gorilla robbing famous novels from a library in order to take over the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpLBzGfuk1s
It doesn't mention any of the possible racist undercurrents that have often been discussed around giant or humanoid ape stories. There are a bunch of french stories that predate Planet Of The Apes, including this one
https://thebedlamfiles.com/fiction/balaoo/

Even after hearing some explanations, I'm still a bit mystified that gorillas were so popular with children. I don't remember kids ever being that excited about anything like that.

I own this history of comics hardcover and I remember a non-comics geek friend leafing through it and just being reduced to hysterics by an issue of Tales Of The Unexpected featuring a guy frantically gesturing at a green gorilla and the gorilla saying "no you fool, none but you can see me!".

Sorry, I know, wrong medium but I Can't find any talk of Owen Kline's Funny Pages, I thought it might be well received on ilx. Has drawings by Johnny Ryan and a couple of others, feels much like a Zwigoff film. Really worth seeing.

Felt really bad for the Miles character throughout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXDeAcyt8Ng

was hoping for a local theater release, but i guess it came and went

oh actually it's currently playing still. i might get lucky

Found this perplexing review on youtube: "A24 producing it just made it more pretentious, it did not add anything."

I didn’t care much for it, though it is clearly a labor of love and has a great deal of fidelity. Without giving too much away, I felt like the amount of anxiety it made me carry didn’t equal the story’s extremely pfffft ending.

I was a bit letdown by the ending but it felt like it made enough sense that I can't complain too much and a good bunch of my favorite films made me say "oh shit, that's it?"

i'm good at complaining

I generally don't care about references but it was still an odd novelty to have a scene in which people rip into some guy for copying Larry Marder's Beanworld

not just people: andy milonakis!

Finished Kerascoet and Hubert's Beauty. Good fun, including the Prince Valiant style character. Kerascoet has another book coming soon.

It's called The Court Charade and hopefully there will be a paper version, I only see a digital one for the end of this month

Coddie was supposed to be cute?

English version hasn't been in print a long time? I really love this cover and hope new editions will include all the covers
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1456289940i/18214409._SX540_.gif

Does anybody even read these anymore?

―(forksclovetofu) (eight months ago)

???

I've been getting back into reading them recently (just found a better rotation of reading different things) but this might be the slimmest Rolling Comics thread. Is the business doing worse than even the last two years?

I've been reading, I just rarely post. Currently making my way through Hellblazer from 0 onwards. Mostly enjoying, only a few real dud issues. Nice to see something UK based. Some really creepy/grotesque demons to gawp at.

ILComics was to be fair always one of the smallest communities on here.

Also when it was at its most active it was a lot about following Big Two titles month to month - I never did this but yeah I think less ppl are doing so now.

Anyway, recent reads I've enjoyed: Chainsaw Man (still only up to vol.4), Orochi (by the guy who did The Drifting Classroom - mysterious woman in a sort of crypt keeper role witnessing the brutality of postwar Japan), Falconspeake (short vampire hunter thing, just a lot of fun) and Newburn (ex-cop private investigator working as a detective for all sections of organised crime in NYC).

what's Hellblazer 0? i think i have the first 200 as floppies somewhere, probably the thing i have most of (or maybe swamp thing)

the DC Infinite app has added a few runs of MAD magazine now

I was curious about Hellblazer #0 too: a 2018 Halloween freebie reprint of #27 (1990, Gaiman & McKean), but with the cover of Warren Ellis’ first issue (#134, 1999) by Tim Bradstreet, instead of Dave McKean’s cover

i still read a ton, but more manga these days
also all my library reads tend to be forgotten already by the time i get to them
current Marvel/DC is basically OK but nothing to shout about

Chainsaw Man is great! i read all the trades and started reading them contemporaneously on Shonen Jump, who post the last three chapters for free

In fact I liked Chainsaw Man so much I went out and got the first volume of the author's previous series, Fire Punch, which good god was fucking terrible edgelord shit

Yeah, it's really fucking funny as well is the thing. Obviously it jives with our zeitgeist - overworked gen z'ers in a cruel capitalist society. I love how the protagonist is such a loveable goofball - those early volumes where he says stuff "maybe one day, if I work really hard, I will be able to touch a boob"...that could very well feel icky in many other manga but here he's such an innocent kid that it just feels endearing. I also really love Power, whose behaviour is a very accurate depiction of cat.

He did a one shot story for the Shonen Jump app as well that from what I've heard is a lot more self-conciously artsy.