recommend me some essential graphic novels to acquire

(maybe you couldn't make it look more better)

Or American Splendor by Harvey Pekar. Drawn by Crumb.

Sacco is brilliant.

Love and Rockets received numerous props upthread. I've been reading it since issue 18.

Gilbert Hernandez is a nightmare, he's been working on a soap opera of a story involving the same characters since 1982/83. I'd say, just go out and buy the Palomar book, then the Poison River collection, which is not contained in the book frustratingly, because it contains essential flashback/back-story about Luba. Read that last.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560975393/qid=1097273528/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-9932494-7466215?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560971517/qid=1097273558/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-9932494-7466215?v=glance&s=books

Hey! my amazon review is up there!

Burns's art is beautiful, but his stories don't amount to all that much, for me. I've not read Black Hole.

GNs/albums/TPBs I've been spending money on lately: various Bendis things (I'm enjoying the Daredevil ones especially) and Phoenix (my single highest GN recommendation) and Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka.

Oh well, for the record, my favourite comics (available in handy book format - I was gonna get all pedantic about the TPB/GN thing):

* It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken - Seth
* Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron - Clowes
* The Poor Bastard - Joe Matt
* Uncanny X-men - Dark Phoenix Saga
* Quit Your Job - James Kochalka
* American Elf - James Kochalka
* Dark Knight Returns - Miller, Janson, Varley
* Lum: Uruseia Yatsura Perfect Collection - Rumiko Takahashi
* Summer of Love - Debbie Drechsler
* Star Wars: Dark Empire - Veitch, Kennedy
* The 3 X-Statix books collected so far.

If you want to read good, non-twee, non-artsy comics about relationships and everyday human intreaction, I'd suggest you grab anything by Claire Bretécher or Ralf König. The latter writes about gay men in Germany, but his themes are mostly universal.

Howard Cruse's "Stuck Rubber Baby" is one of the best American graphic novels of the recent years, it links the civil right struggles of black people in the early sixties to gay issues. Cruse's characterisation is deep and emphatic, and the whole book has sort of a "this really happened" feel, partly because it's based on his own experiences.

For a wonderful blend of cynical humour and women's issues, you should check out Roberta McGregory's "Naughty Bits/Bitchy Bitch". Another great comic dealing with feminist issues as well as everyday lesbian life is Alison Bechdel's "Dykes To Watch Out For.".

Will Eisner has also published several wonderful, deeply humanist graphic novels, most of which take place in the depression-era New York of thirties. My particular favourite is "Life Force".

Both really great, I agree.

"So what's for dinner?"

"Szechuan vegetarian PULP!"

So if you were turned off by older Burns stuff, really give Black Hole a chance, it is super creepy and wonderful.

Stuck Rubber Baby is great, and while speakng of Charles Burns and non-superhero comics, his recent Louis Reil is fantastic.

Which reminds me: is his Underground still going? It was great, and his version of the New Testament in the back no less so.

1) That's the thing about a lot of the comics mentioned, they're mostly liked by people who "don't read comics all that much". Which is why some comics fans get chips on their shoulders regarding comics that have come to save us (even if they're really good, like Maus). Imagine if newspapers started writing articles about "Radiohead: music isn't just for kids any more". Okay, that is regularly the subtext, but imagine if it was the headline :)

2) I think pretty much anyone on ILC (which is hardly packed full of Comic Book Guys by any standards) would agree that this is a shame, that there should be a lot less superhero comics, written by people who can do them well (instead of just exercising trademarks) (note: well does not necessarily mean tastefully or sensibly), and more comics about everything else. That people who want to write a soap opera about young people falling in love shouldn't have to stick them in spandex to earn enough to live. But that's not how things are.

And now some rantings by Warren Ellis:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=1

But it's always been fits and starts for me, not anything like continuity, and while there is much that I'm impressed by that I encounter randomly, in my case three other fields -- music, books and movies -- capture my interest and my desire to talk about them much more constantly and readily. So for instance at the same time in the late eighties I was learning about the troika I was spending infinitely more time chasing down obscurities in the KLA archives at UCLA and discovering new music by the day and spending all my free cash on new CDs and so forth. That's where the focus was and while things have changed it is arguably where the focus still is for me to a large degree.

But there are a lot of comics about "everything else", it's just that they aren't discussed in ILC. I haven't seen any threads there on Hugo Pratt or Claire Bretécher or Roberta McGregory, not even on Will Eisner! From what I gather, most of the ILCers realize these "other" comics exist, but many people don't bother trying to look for them, they're quite content with the spandex stuff. I started a "your favourite gay comics" thread there thinking *that* wouldn't lead people talking about superheroes - but it did.

Not by comparison. Not outside of this magical world, this "Fin-land" :)

most of the ILCers realize these "other" comics exist, but many people don't bother trying to look for them, they're quite content with the spandex stuff.

Hmm. You seem to be slipping into the same error as people who assume that if radio stations played Grime/Jazz/Peruvian Nose Flute as much as it did pop, then it would sell in the same volume. It's possible, in fact likely, that they looked around for them and didn't like it.

(also bad things are easier to talk about than good)

I visited ILC once or twice and went off on a few subjects you may find interesting:

New Eightball Noise!

Not by comparison. Not outside of this magical world, this "Fin-land" :)

I'm pretty sure that if you counted all the comic titles that appear throughout the world, superheroes would loose 100-1. I admit that this is different in the Anglo-Saxon world most of you inhabit, but there's still tons of good non-superhero stuff written in and translated to English. I should know it, because I read a lot of English translations of non-English comics, not being able to read French/Italian/Japanese/etc.

most of the ILCers realize these "other" comics exist, but many people don't bother trying to look for them, they're quite content with the spandex stuff.

Hmm. You seem to be slipping into the same error as people who assume that if radio stations played Grime/Jazz/Peruvian Nose Flute as much as it did pop, then it would sell in the same volume. It's possible, in fact likely, that they looked around for them and didn't like it.

But you yourself said that "I think pretty much anyone on ILC.. would agree that this is a shame, that there should be a lot less superhero comics, written by people who can do them well.., and more comics about everything else". As for myself, I can't imagine why someone would like only superhero comics but not anything else. It's like watching only soap operas and sitcoms but hating films.

OMG TEP IS REALLY NEIL TENNANT

1) The superhero genre provides the bulk of comic books in the U.S. and probably Canada and the UK, whether this accords to your intuition or not.

2) Dan and I, for starters, have explained on multiple threads you've read that our preference for superhero comics stems largely from an interest in the genre itself, beyond the medium: and that that genre simply isn't represented elsewhere except in adaptations. This isn't a desire to read that genre to the exclusion of others, as we've explicitly pointed out; I read more books, and watch more movies, than I read comics.

3) As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, there is a large segment of People Who Read Comic Books who don't identify as comics fans and wouldn't be drawn to I Love Comics.

4) Comics readership being what it is in the English-speaking world, complaining that comics readers talk about superheroes is like complaining television watchers talk about network television. It's the common denominator, the available shared experience. That's been pointed out on other threads, too. Are the X-Men my favorite damn thing in comics? No, nowhere near, but I've probably typed more about the X-Men on ILC than any other group of characters, because there's more conversation I can have about them -- they've been around a long time, they've enjoyed long stretches of popularity, and there's a greater chance another poster and I will have read the same story -- or know of it -- than there is with many other titles.

5) I'm not even going to bother getting much into the issue of "is there more to say about pie than cake?", but a great many of the conversations on ILC have taken place around -- not about -- specific titles, in a way that can't happen naturally when the subject doesn't happen to be characters with an extraordinary pagecount to their presence, and multiple adaptations into other media.

Two posters who are both reasonably familiar with the X-Men and Why I Hate Saturn can have a much longer conversation, with more side-roads, about the X-Men than they can about WIHS. That's not even preference, that's just math.

In 7th grade I thought that 4-volume original Elfquest stuff was the shit! Made me have funny feelings about...things.

-- andrew m.

Errk. I saw the entire collected Elfquest on my shelves on a visit to my mum's this past weekend and felt almost guilty at the amount of attention I lavished on them back in the day. They are pretty, though.