The Comic Book Discussion Thread

[Melville]

Martin Vaughn-James The Cage stunned me more than any comic I've read since The Trumpets They Play! It's Beckett's deconstruction through disintegration (and his tumbling words), Tarr's immanent apocalypse, the last minutes of L'Eclisse, a self-referencing machine, a metaphor machine in comics form. One of the best things I've ever read.

[number8]

Friend of mine's top ten list if you're looking for lesser known new comics to try:

http://doomcarousel.tumblr.com/post/...st-ones-i-read

[Melville]

Friend of mine's top ten list if you're looking for lesser known new comics to try:

http://doomcarousel.tumblr.com/post/...st-ones-i-read

Referencing Abstraction and The Cage in the opening paragraph won me over to his list pretty quick.

[number8]

Haha, that's why I posted it.

[Melville]

I'll try to check out everything on there. A bunch were already on my radar, but some, like Extract, I'd never even heard of.

[Melville]

I'd been waiting to get Black River cheap, but its appearance on that list inspired me to continue my excessive comics buying.

[Melville]

I'd been waiting to get Black River cheap, but its appearance on that list inspired me to continue my excessive comics buying.

It was worth it.

[Sven]

Hey. These were my five favorite comics from last year. The ones where every new issue gave my heart a skip:

1 All-Star Section Eight - truly, truly special
2 Transformers v. GI Joe - the great American masterpiece
3 Secret Wars (+ many ancillaries) - crossover event for the ages
4 God is Dead - brilliantly unpredictable
5 Imperium - oozes sinister compassion

Runners Up: Starve, Divinity, Low, Airboy, Trees, Nameless, Ninjak, Terminal Hero, Copra.

[Sven]

Giving Hitman a reread and it's powerfully making irrelevant so many of my favorite comics. How? By being an exemplar of brilliant artwork and dialogue-writing, skirting a style that gets so many jolleys veering into slapstick/absurd territory but careering the narrative and characterizations into truly darker, more refined zones. Zones that remind one while reading it of the vast gamut of human experience out there, funny sad, noble, puerile, angry, devoted, scared, lustful, repulsed, amused, etc etc.

It's basically perfect.

[number8]

Speaking of Ennis, apparently he's testing out working at Image...

Creatively there’s no difference between Image and Dynamite or Avatar, where I’ve done the bulk of my work for the past ten years- but it’s a chance to test them out, as I say. I look at deals, rates, competence, things like that- no complaints so far.

http://thegww.com/finding-a-new-home...nis-interview/

[Sven]

I like to think I'm pretty quick on the uptake. It is only just today I finally got that New Romancer = neuromancer. Doy!

My LCS just gave me a retailer incentive copy of V's 4001 AD. It looks so baller. Can't wait.

[Sven]

Here's a breakdown of today's acquisitions, responded to in the order in which they were engaged:

Archer and Armstrong 1: this here's the new series by Rafer Roberts (better artist than writer) and David Lafuente (whom I like better when he's doing bonkers designs as opposed to the manga-steeped modesty he's delivering here). It's a fine, zippy read that is worthy of the A&A schtick.

Second Sight 2: quease-inducing. Hine's not lost his knack for twisted and Ponticelli has a great gift for evocative blocking, as well as his gnarly line work and expressive shading. This is gonna be a tremendous book. AfterShock is hitting homeruns all over the place.

Injection 8: I'm loving this suprameta period that Ellis is bathing in right now, even if I think Trees, his more straightforward current book, is one of the best things he's done, this plus Supreme Rose, Blackcross, and Moon Knight are among his strongest works.

Wrath of the Eternal Warrior 5: Goddamn, Bellaire and Ryp should've teamed up years ago. This and their work on the Geomancer event have carved a place for their collaboration among the greats. Although Venditti's writing was suited more for the design-minded Raoul Allen, Ryp lives up to the challenge and presses against the parameters of the medium's limitations doing so. The textures achieved here, and the unique pull between Venditti's simplicity and Ryp's complexity, make for a great read.

Imperium 14: Ack. Worst book of the week, which is a tragedy. Until this week, this has been among the top of my most anticipated titles. I think I lay the blame on Khari Evans, whose work I've never really liked too much. Static action, ugly faces, generic pacing. Dysart's script, unfortunately, does appear to bear some of these hallmarks as well. It could be a publisher mandate to reintroduce HardCORPS, but I'm a touch disappointed...

Devolution 3: The artwork is so much fun that even if the story was bad, it would be worth the purchase. Luckily, the story is a wonderful twist on the zombification concept, and has some wonderful monsters and nasties. Great elastic art from Wayshak.

Low 12: Wow. I lolled, major, during the final few pages. May have even said aloud "Remender, what the f#$% are you doing?" I'm unsure about this plot development, but Remender reliably brought the whole thing together with gravitas and perspective. Typically jawdropping work from Tocchini and McCaig. But seriously...

Starve 7: Fairly certain this is the greatest book on the stands now. The kitchen sequences are beautiful, courtesy of Zezelj's brilliance. With issue 6, Wood completely blew my mind by eschewing the seduction of the concept and using it, instead, as a springboard to plunge into bigger, more essential things. Love it so much.

[number8]

I kinda wish Trees and Injection have more distinctive design aesthetics. I sometimes confuse the scenes in my memory between them.

[slqrick]

Just read JMS' Supreme Power stuff for the first time...really, really good, Hyperion and Nighthawk are the best Batman/Superman analogues I've read and I was much more fascinated by Hyperion's character than I ever was with Superman. Definitely didn't feel that depth during Hickman's Avenger run.

[Irish]

8, did you see this from Mark Evanier?

http://www.newsfromme.com/2016/03/25/not-worlds-finest/

Curious what you (and any other regular reader of superhero comics) think of it.

[number8]

8, did you see this from Mark Evanier?

http://www.newsfromme.com/2016/03/25/not-worlds-finest/

Curious what you (and any other regular reader of superhero comics) think of it.

It is an understandable (and not uncommon) argument emotionally, but it's just factually incorrect to say that Batman had a defined mortal universe his stories was set in and that crossing him over with Superman and the rest of DC broke that world. Batman was fighting mad scientists and vampires and giant monster men in the early issues of Detective Comics. Batman stories were already paranormal and outlandish to begin with. I don't know if Evanier forgot, doesn't know, or was willingly ignoring the fact that shit like this regularly happened to Batman before he ever met Superman:

[sevenarts]

Evanier is off on that, it's a poor argument that conflates a number of things. As 8 says, within the first 5 or so Batman stories EVER, he faces off against vampires and giant monsters, so Batman's world always had elements of the fantastic.

Now it's true that the sci-fi Batman stories were often bad and forced, and that Superman was indirectly to blame. Bat editor Jack Schiff, faced with relatively low sales, copied the formula of Superman editor Mort Weisinger, introducing stuff like Ace the Bat Hound (aka Krypto), Bat-Mite (aka Mr. Mxyzptlk), and giving Batman and Robin romantic interests in Batwoman and Bat-Girl. Schiff was also copying successful Silver Age revivals which tended to focus on sci-fi themes. I wouldn't defend this stuff: most, though certainly not all, of it is really bad indeed.

But those bad stories don't mean that Batman can't function in this world at all, and later stories, particularly those of Grant Morrison (in JLA and later his Batman run), have found a coherent place for Batman in a world of heroes who can fly and see through walls and breathe in outer space. Even well before Morrison there were plenty of stories - by Mike Barr, Frank Miller, etc. - that worked well in that kind of context. It's foolish to suggest that Batman as a concept falls apart in a shared superhero universe. It only falls apart, as it often did in those old stories, when he was forced to be something he's not, but that's certainly not a necessity.

[number8]

Oh my god, the Mercury Heat/Crossed crossover is hilarious.

Did anyone read this?

[Melville]

I just finished The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second Locas book in the current series of mid-size Love & Rockets collections. Despite feeling uninterested in the stories for much of the book, by the end I realized I was digging it; the cumulative effect is much greater than the sum of its parts. And the art is gorgeous.

I'm going to go back and finish the first Locas book, which I'd abandoned early on, but I'm not sure where to go from there. Love Bunglers sounds most appealing. Would much be lost by skipping directly to that? On the one hand, the long-form storytelling style suggests that reading the whole series through would be most rewarding. On the other hand, I don't really feel compelled to read that many collections.

[sevenarts]

The beauty of Jaime Hernandez's work is its cumulative impact and ability to evoke growth and change over time. It's one of the best comics ever precisely because it does so much with time, aging, and long form characterization. If you read his stories as one big work, you can come to know these characters more intimately than pretty much anyone else in fiction. Love Bunglers is one of his very best stories, but it's so great because it's the climax of 20+ years of storytelling and history between the people in the stories. I suspect it would be great even without that history but there's no question a lot would be lost.

If you just want to skip to Jaime's best later works for some reason, read at least Ghost of Hoppers and Love Bunglers. But you'll be missing possibly the most essential facet of his art.

[Melville]

After now finishing the first two books, I think there's a pretty steady increase in quality from the beginning of the first to the end of the second, both in terms of art and writing (particularly the dialogue, which was sometimes very clunky when trying to be serious in the first book). So I'll probably take your advice and try to continue sequentially. I'll at least go for the third book before jumping around any further.

Regarding that steady increase in quality, I know people love The Death of Speedy, which comes early in the second book, but I didn't think much of it. The characters aren't developed enough by that point, especially Speedy himself, for the death to have any resonance for me. And there was too much lighthearted slapstick for me to take the story seriously. This was actually the second time I've read it, and both times I was baffled by people suggesting it as a jumping on point in the series.

[sevenarts]

Jaime definitely started out rough and took a while to figure out his direction and style - the earliest stuff, with its sci-fi trappings and goofy tone, quickly fell away in favor of more character-focused material. He's just kept getting better and better and I think by the end of book 3 you'll see him more fully formed. Keep in mind, he was real young when they started doing these comics, and as he's aged the characters over time he's grown a lot with them as an artist. It's one of the things I find most rewarding about his work and why I always recommend reading it all, even the comparatively rough early years.

[megladon8]

I'd totally forgotten that I preordered Nameless. Came the other day.

Anyone read this one?

[number8]

Yeah, it's tops, although I can't tell if it's supposed to be an ongoing or not.

[dreamdead]

So the Eisner nominations came out this week and the New Series nominations included Monstress , Paper Girls, and Bitch Planet. I usually delay until trades come out, so have these series delivered so far in terms of interesting material?