What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

Tintin is weird. By reputation I was expecting the charming adventures of some apple-cheeked boy, but it is stone cold. Tintin gets blackout drunk, pulls a gun on thieves and survives multiple murder attempts in The Broken Ear. And the pacing never stops. Every page could be its own twenty-page issue by contemporary decompressed standards.

DarthJoJo wrote: Tintin is weird. By reputation I was expecting the charming adventures of some apple-cheeked boy, but it is stone cold. Tintin gets blackout drunk, pulls a gun on thieves and survives multiple murder attempts in The Broken Ear. And the pacing never stops. Every page could be its own twenty-page issue by contemporary decompressed standards.

For me it still has no equal, warts and all. And there are some. The series started about 90 years ago and the world was quite different. The racism of the Congo album is unbelievable by today's standards. In Hergé's defense, he was willing to learn, as the China and Tibet books show. A kids' book with a raging alcoholic as a main character, hell yeah. Hergé was accused of promoting a misogynistic gay agenda at some point, too.

Over here I have been reading The Hobtown Mystery series by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes. It is awesome. Thanks Dr. Mabuse for mentioning it. Also rereading the complete Legends of the Dark Knight due to corona. Reading this today feels like a series that must have had quite an impact when first published. There are some great stories and artists in there, mostly between issues 50-100 but overall, it's two thirds mainly an ok pastime.

I think the weirdness with TinTin is mostly from it originally being a serialised strip that was later edited into complete stories, and also that the first few adventures came from a time where the expectation on periodical comic strips was for illustrated stories rather than illustrated punchlines. That style was then carried over into the post-war work; Herge eventually set up a studio so there would be dozens of people working on each book like a production line while he spent an obsessive amount of time on research, so I guess this is how they were able to keep up the density of content.
I don't know if TinTin is something I would enthuse about but I have indelible memories of several books so it certainly made an impression in my childhood, particularly the later works that have, ahem, slightly more worldly and optimistic political influences bearing on them.

Cartoonist Kayfabe is Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg talking comics and marveling at the artform from their very informed perspectives. This one on the Sienkiewicz Artist Edition is amazing:

Bill Sienkiewicz was a decent Neal Adams imitator until he worked on Moon Knight #26 ("Hit It!"), an issue dealing with child abuse. That issue gave Sienkiewicz an excuse to try a looser, more playful yet intense style of drawing, and soon that became his signature style.

There's some MOON KNIGHT in this video and Ed/Jim talk about his obvious Neal Adams influences in the early works. Then you see one of his splashes and just holy shit.

This made my day right here.

Binge reading the complete Sandman followed by the complete Invisibles.

Could probably do with some acid.

Southern Bastards is legit. Great, well-realized setting. Switch out high school football for hockey and rural Georgia for northern Minnesota and the copious murder for no murder, and it's not so far off from where I grew up. Kind of sprawls out from the third volume and loses momentum until the fourth volume ends in a ridiculous Inglorious Basterds four-plans-to-kill-Hitler climax, but it's good stuff. It's been over two years since the last issue was published, and somehow it's not an HBO or Showtime series yet, but that's fine. These are still 20 solid issues of rural Georgia crime.

And my four-year-old is asking to read Calvin and Hobbes, so once a day I have to get a volume from the definitive collection off the top shelf for him. My heart is warmed.

I haven't read marvel comics since my youth, but I signed up for Marvel Unlimited after playing a metric assload of Marvel Champions lately. I've got Immortal Hulk and Ms. Marvel as my reading list so far, who wants to populate that list with other good stuff? I don't have affinities to any heroes in particular, though I have enjoyed the Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy and Spiderman movies the most from the MCU stuff.

Ah_Pook wrote: I haven't read marvel comics since my youth, but I signed up for Marvel Unlimited after playing a metric assload of Marvel Champions lately. I've got Immortal Hulk and Ms. Marvel as my reading list so far, who wants to populate that list with other good stuff? I don't have affinities to any heroes in particular, though I have enjoyed the Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy and Spiderman movies the most from the MCU stuff.

Just off the top of my head:
Immortal Iron Fist
Dr. Strange: The Oath
Astonishing X-Men
Superior Spider-Man
Hawkeye
Ms. Marvel (2014)
Vision

And maybe:
Thor (2014) - It's good, but highly divisive and controversial for many Thor fans.
Uncanny X-Men (2013) - Controversial for X-Men fans. I don't normally like the writing of Brian Michael Bendis, but he won me over with this run.

Tom King and Mitch Gerad’s Mister Miracle

Tom King has been a bit of the ‘it’ comic writer for the last decade with talked-about runs on Vision and Batman and his Heroes in Crisis series that put a lot of DC hitters through counseling. And that’s a theme he revisits in depth in Mister Miracle. It begins with Scott Free attempting suicide but talked around and only rarely confronted head on for the length of the series. There’s minimal comic bombast and no lack of brutal war scenes.

But then it’s undercut by suggestions that this isn’t real. Issues open and close with TV announcer proclamations, static distorts images and there are breaks in the Matrix as big Barca’s eyes change color for a panel or omega appears on a heart rate monitor. I think King was trying to suggest this was all an alternate reality, that readers can feel safe none of the momentous deaths were happening in their preferred world, but it feels too like the baiting that inspires a hundred low-grade YouTube channels to play “spot the reference” and predict what’s really happening. Which seems wrong when King just wants to tell an unblinking story about trauma and depression in a fantastical setting.

I don’t know if I like it. The art is tops. But I don’t read comics for these stories. I like the bright colors and escapism and bombast. And I think it kind of breaks the setting. If you take all the suffering and trauma these characters have experienced for decades seriously, by all rights they should be borderline catatonic. They’ve been brainwashed, seen loved ones die, seen massacres, died themselves. It’s a lot.

But I’m still glad this exists. Seems very of the moment.

Ah_Pook wrote: I haven't read marvel comics since my youth, but I signed up for Marvel Unlimited after playing a metric assload of Marvel Champions lately. I've got Immortal Hulk and Ms. Marvel as my reading list so far, who wants to populate that list with other good stuff? I don't have affinities to any heroes in particular, though I have enjoyed the Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy and Spiderman movies the most from the MCU stuff.

Showing my age, but: Walt Simonson's run on THOR, and UNCANNY X-MEN by Claremont and Byrne. Also, Frank Miller's DAREDEVIL. 'Nuff said.

Adding to what Al said: Marv Wolfman and Roger Stern's Amazing Spider-Man in the late 70s/early 80s was great stuff with his personal problems reaching a more mature level, alongside good stories about the Rand Corporation and more fully-realized villains. John Byrne's Fantastic Four around that same time is also worth a look. Doug Moench's Moon Knight of that era was also worthwhile (and had Bill Sienkiewicz on art for a while.)

IMO, the coolest thing that Marvel Unlimited could provide would be the Epic line, including the original magazine, Epic Illustrated. Kinda doubt that it does, though.

Jackwraith wrote: Adding to what Al said: Marv Wolfman and Roger Stern's Amazing Spider-Man in the late 70s/early 80s was great stuff with his personal problems reaching a more mature level, alongside good stories about the Rand Corporation and more fully-realized villains. John Byrne's Fantastic Four around that same time is also worth a look. Doug Moench's Moon Knight of that era was also worthwhile (and had Bill Sienkiewicz on art for a while.)

IMO, the coolest thing that Marvel Unlimited could provide would be the Epic line, including the original magazine, Epic Illustrated. Kinda doubt that it does, though.

Yeah man, I agree with all of this!

I spent the last month reading the entirety of Hellboy and everything related (though I skipped Witchfinder and Lobster Johnson). It was essentially my first foray into reading comics. I tended to prefer the BPRD arcs over the Hellboy stuff, as I felt every entity he ran across trying to convince him to embrace his destiny got repetitive, but maybe that's just a result of reading 25 years worth of story in one go.

Random thoughts: Early on I had to train myself to actually look at the art and what was going on, as I would go too fast to get to the next dialogue. It was initially weird that the artists would change and it would look so different. I got over that fairly quickly though. I'm not sure if I'll get into other comics or not. I couldn't help thinking I would have just preferred it to be regular novels, so maybe the medium isn't for me. Though I'm glad I read Hellboy, and I think it was the perfect starting choice for me.