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Anyone itt know where I might acquire a copy of Corto Maltese: The Secret Rose? It’s my white whale and I’m just kind of contemplating potential avenues for finding a copy and coming up empty handed every time
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Aug 11, 2023 14:38
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For any fans of older horror comics, the British classic girls fright comic “Misty” is getting a nice big hardback release from Rebellion and Amazon is sending it out tomorrow with the new Robo-Hunter book even though it isn’t technically out until Wednesday. 2000 AD has really been knocking it out of the park with their historical collections and reprints
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Sep 26, 2023 03:34
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Jedit posted:In a similar vein, the current issues of 2000AD and the Megazine are a "what if?" crossover that speculates what would have happened if Battle Action had merged with 2000AD in 1983 instead of becoming the licensed GI Joe comic. I highly recommend - Prog 2350 is an onboarding issue anyway, and Megazine 460 is double sized so you still get VFM even though it's full of Part 5s. Yeah I’m currently in the process of buying and reading through everything from before/adjacent 2000 AD in the 70s and 80s and it has been so much fun reading through Battle. I was super surprised to see The Sarge and Major Eazy on the cover, having just read those + Fighting Mann and with two more Hebden books coming (Death Squad and Clash of the Guards) it was the first time I’ve been tempted to subscribe to the actual 2000 AD progs. It’s unfortunate how expensive it is and since I’ve had major issues with almost every order I’ve placed directly with them I’m super leery about it though - they once told me they had shipped a Sláine book then the next day told me it was never even in the warehouse, and when I bought the signed Charley’s War bookplate editions a couple months ago they only sent the signed plates and not the books. It’s always something on top of the outrageous $50 shipping, which feels extra bad considering Blackwell’s sells the same books from the same area with free shipping. I might try to subscribe and see what happens anyway, old Battle, Action, Lion, Eagle, Wildcat, Jinty, etc stories has become my main hobby so it’d be edifying to have those around The girl comics in particular seem really interesting. I’ve also got the Complete Sugar Jones, Fran From the Floods, and Jinty: The Land of No Tears en route. Being an American older millennial this stuff is all new to me and local comic shops have no idea what I’m talking about when I bring these up, so I’m stoked there are some goons ITT who like this stuff too. Actually maybe I’ll make a 2000 AD/Rebellion/Midcentury British comics thread it seems like there’s enough content and interest to sustain one with all the new releases 2000 AD has been churning out lately. My copies of Robo Hunter and Misty just arrived and I’m stoked to read them, though RH really illustrates how they’ve pared down their printings - the Droid Files collections have like four additional arcs on top of the one included in this, but it is in full color, at least Sentinel Red posted:God I loved Scream!. Dracula as a 'defector' legging it over an Iron Curtain checkpoint, the insane story about cats gone mad attacking everyone, and of course the greatest caretaker/building manager ever with Max in The Thirteenth Floor. Scream! looks like a ton of fun. I was all set to buy the 13th floor softbacks that Blackwell's has for sale but then I saw there's a gigantic hardback getting released next year so I held off. I guess all these reprints have been successful because a lot of them seem to sell out and Rebellion is pushing ahead with them. I hope it means they reprint some of the old stuff that's so hard to find like Rogue Trooper Volume 3, El Mestizo, Ace Trucking Company, Flesh, and so many others Frog Act fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 17:36
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Jedit posted:The Thirteenth Floor books actually contain a lot more stuff than was in Scream!, as it was cancelled after just 15 issues and folded into Eagle where the story ran for another three years. If you buy the Scream! compendium then you'll not even get half the stories in Thirteenth Floor volume 1. Oh poo poo, well, then I'll definitely be adding those to my next order, thanks friend. Anything else adjacent to Scream!/Misty you'd recommend? Black Max is on my list and I keep an eye on the Treasury of British Comics but I'm totally ignorant about this stuff
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Sep 26, 2023 18:12
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Danknificent posted:My local shop gets me 2000ad which comes in bags that include all the progs from a given month and Megazine with no apparent extra cost for shipping but the downside is that the delivery schedule is weird and I’m several months behind at any given moment because they just never know when the stuff is coming in. Interesting. There are like five comic shops in town and four of them had never heard of 2000 AD, including one who had never heard of Judge Dredd. But there is one where the owner is at least passingly familiar, he sold me the 80s printing of the Complete Halo Jones for $10 and once gave me $20 off the Jodorowsky library box set because he was just happy to see someone give a poo poo about Euro comics, maybe I can come to a similar arrangement with him. It’s like $30 a month for just the physical 2000 AD non-megazine prog and I just can’t stomach paying that much for a thin paperback that will invariably be lost/late
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Sep 26, 2023 18:46
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Jedit posted:Assuming you want me to exclude anything from 2000AD/Starlord: The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire is a must read. The basic premise is a spaceship crashes on Earth, the crew - who look human but are 12 feet tall - are all dead, and it turns out that they came from a faux-Roman Empire in space. It's great pulp action adventure in the Rice Burroughs mould (down to the slight racism, unfortunately) and painted by the legendary Don Lawrence. It inspired a lot of British artists including Brian Bolland and Chris Weston, who was Lawrence's pupil. Starlord or lesser 2000 AD stuff would be cool too! Thanks! The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire is actually one of the things I'm reading right now, I picked up the first three books last month. It's unfortunate that there are so many caricatures in the vein you mentioned, though I think they start trying to consciously improve that a little bit around the middle of the second book (Look and Learn issues 4-500ish), where the Lokans have finally gone from "literally yellow with fu manchus and poo poo" to "green and usually not super racist, except every once in awhile when they're rendered with outrageously exaggerated racial features". That stuff aside the complete incoherence is probably what makes it so much fun. The world makes no sense but it doesn't really have to since they weren't following in the footsteps of Gibbons and attempting to write a "real" history of the fictional empire, but are instead mashing together every major western oral tradition to create something that feels mythopoeic, and in that regard they totally succeeded. I wasn't sure if it'd be good enough to merit going all the way through but I'm definitely going to get the fourth book soon and the fifth when it comes out. I also picked up Dan Dare: The 2000 AD Years and have been having a lot of fun with that. It's astonishing how much better it is than something like Turbo Jones or Loner, which were somehow contemporary to 2000 AD but come off as hopelessly anachronistic. I've been hearing a lot about Zenith and I'm kind of interested in the Leopard of Lime Street and the Spider Syndicate books, as well as Adam Eterno. There's just so much!
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Sep 26, 2023 19:53
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Danknificent posted:Honestly, a digital subscription might be the way to go. Looks like it costs about 10 bucks a month for AD and Meg and it says 'free back issues' -- I don't know how extensive that library is, but it's way more affordable than the paper stuff. I want to say I'm paying like 14 bucks per Megazine and probably 20 for a bundle of ADs, so 34 a month ish. I feel slightly guilty about it, but I hate paying for digital comics and mostly refuse to do so. I'll just read 'em on readcomiconline until such a time as they're affordable, and the guilt is only slight given how many times Rebellion has gouged me Gravitas Shortfall posted:Zenith is pretty great (I've got the hardcovers), and it's pretty much an outline for all of Morrison's work that comes after it. Dope! I'm not super familiar with him, and indeed I only started reading comics like a year and a half ago, so these kinds of foundational works feel like a good thing to experience early. Jedit posted:Yeah, British boys action comics are a seam that goes back to the 1950s when the likes of the Beano, Dandy and Whizzer began losing ground to the new gritty "comics" like Eagle, Lion, and Warrior - that last being where V For Vendetta was first published. Tiger also got great numbers, although its focus was sport over war. It's that generation of comic which Grant Morrison would draw on heavily for Zenith Phase III, which is about twenty times more readable if you can spot all the references. Moving on into the 60s and 70s you had Valiant, Warlord, Battle and Action - the latter two would merge into Battle Action. Thanks buddy! I really appreciate these recommendations. There are a lot of familiar names in your post that I've seen floating around this region of comics, and I'm adding them to my list to keep an eye out for! I feel confident they're all going to be good ones since you've listed a few i really enjoyed - I've got the Strontium Dog, Ro-Busters, and ABC Warriors (except Mek-Files 1!  ) hardbacks which I picked up after spending like a year acquiring all of Nemesis, which got me into the medium in the first place. I ordered Skizz and Karl the Viking last month and really enjoyed the former, though the last story by just Baike was a gigantic tonal shift that I felt didn't really hold up next to the first two. Karl the Viking was a lot of fun but riddled with offensive caricatures, weird nonsense narratives, and oddly enough, misprints where Karl would be rendered as Erik for a page or two at a time. I reckon that is a result of their mixing up scans from later republications of the stories where he was renamed, which seems like something they should've caught.Belardinelli is my absolute favorite 2000 AD artist, slightly edging out O'Neil/Bisley, for his work on Slaine and Dan Dare so Ace Trucking Company is at the tip top of my list. It's sort of a perfect example of the problems with 2000 AD's printing patterns, I can't find a copy of the first book for less than $100 from a reputable seller, but I'm gonna be keeping a look out for it for the forseeable future. The House of Dolmann and Kelly's Eye sound great too, I'm enough of a maniac to have watched all thirteen puppet master movies and am thus open to any puppet horror media. As for the war comics those are great suggestions, thank you! I've got Major Eazy but I had no idea it was reworked into Kursed Earth Koburn. I mostly ignore the Megazine as I feel ambivalent about Dredd after the first ~8 files books (though I'm excited about Helltrekkers soon) but that sounds great. Haven't heard of One-Eyed Jack but that's going on my list, and I recently read a modern Johnny Red by Garth Ennis in his Battle collection from like 2018 and really liked it, so seeking out the rest of those is something I for sure intend to do in the future. I've never heard of Bad Company so that's going on the list too - I actually have a copy of Darkie's Mob en route since I felt it'd complement Clash of the Guards, The Sarge, and Major Eazy, too. I read these critically ofc and my master's degree is in history, so the tension between the comparatively sophisticated narrative content and the unambigously problematic depictions of Japanese/Indian/Black people in a lot of these books interests me as a discrete topic on top of the books themselves. Charley's War is also loving incredible and I can't overstate how fuckin cool it is you got a copy that way! I have the 2018 era collections with bookplates signed by Mills - I also have a signed Marshal Law and Diceman, they're the heart of my collection. Sentinel Red posted:lmao the Leopard of Lime Street was one of the most ridiculous of concepts: a Scouse superhero, basically Spider-Man but with a radioactive leopard in Liverpool. yeah, I had ignored it in all my previous browsings but I randomly clicked it and realized it's like British proletarian knockoff Spiderman which seems like something I've just got to get my hands on eventually. I broadly despise superhero comics with rare exceptions and that kind of nonsense culturally and chronologically bound take on something is pretty much the only time I really dig those sorts of stories. and yeah Dan Dare is shockingly violent for a children's comic. One of the very first stories deals with alien monsters who use humans as fuel, they constantly reference the preferred method of execution in the Dan Dare universe which is just straight up spacing someone, his fortship has a giant complement just so there are a half dozen redshirt style guys to get brutalized during every prog, etc. I've enjoyed DD more than I expected, it tempers the violence with interesting worlds and aliens where other magazines like Wildcat tried to get along with just the violence. seriously, Wildcat's Turbo Jones spinoff Loner really had no idea what to do with itself and so it just kept turning into the kind of body horror I'm sure would legitimately frighten children of any era: First he gets shrunk  Then turned into a skeleton  Then, like immediately afterwards, reduced to liquid  Frog Act fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Sep 27, 2023 |
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Sep 27, 2023 19:22
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Jedit posted:How do you feel about digital editions? Ambivalent, I usually read things on one of the free sites with an adblocker and strongly prefer to own a physical copy but this might be the rare circumstance where I just acquire a digital one, like when they sold and shipped me Sláine: Treasures of Britain only it turned out they never had any copies so they refunded me and credited a digital copy. I think I’m just gonna put Ace on my high price threshold list and grab the first copy I can find for ~$50-$70 since the parts I’ve read online so far we’re just perfect Button Man is one of those things I’ve passed by a dozen plus times since there’s just so much to read (as alluded to two posts up) since I am also not a prestige comics kind of guy, I could read these forever and I absolutely love John Wagner, I’m really beginning to appreciate his tremendous range outside of Dredd. Given how excellent everything else you’ve listed is that’s gonna go in my next actual order to 2000AD, which is going to be outrageously expensive since I wanna preorder Strontium Dog, the next Hugo Pratt War Stories book, the Nemesis hardback, the webshop hardback for the last Trigan empire book, Helltrekkers, and at least one other thing and because they’re extremely bad at business they charge for pre orders immediately instead of when they ship
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Sep 28, 2023 14:58
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Jedit posted:I can possibly save you some money on Helltrekkers - it's in volume 68 of the Judge Dredd Mega-Collection piecework from Hachette. Check their website, they may have back issues available. Oh dope thanks, I’m probably gonna get the hardback because it looks really neat but I didn’t know Hachette was still printing those and they were attainable without paying $60 in shipping every time so I’ll be keeping my eyes on em. Seems like at the vet least it’ll be a good way to read Dredd past the 7th volume someday, since that’s as far as I’ve gotten
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Sep 28, 2023 16:06
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Got two big boxes of comics from rebellion and Blackwell’s yesterday, gonna have a ton of fun reading through these over the next month or so. I also got the first Future Shocks book on Amazon and they’re so much fun, just delightful little ironic horror vignettes in the style of the twilight zone which works really well for 2000 AD and is a fun opportunity to see some of the unfamiliar names and their work, too. Anyway I got pretty much all the WW2 Battle comics I’d been keeping an eye on, plus some stuff from the “girl” publications. Sugar Jones, Fran From the Floods, and Jinty: The Land of No Tears all seem like they’re going to be a lot of fun. I started Sugar Jones and it is classic Pat Mills but in a very different context, and definitely a bit anachronistic but I really enjoy the basic premise, which feels like any writer but Mills would have a hard time doing in a non-sexist way but his matriarchal proclivities, manifested so clearly in Nemesis, Finn, and Sláine restrain him enough. I also got Clash of the Guards, Hellman of Hammer Force, Deathsquad, El Mestizo, Darkie’s Mob, Black Max 1+2, Major Eazy vs Rat Pack, Rat Pack, Ian Kennedy’s War Picture Library (same series that did all the Pratt stories), the first Johnny Red, and Steel Commando (which has bazooka Joe bubblegum pack vibes). Hellman of Hammer Force feels extremely problematic and not in a good way, but tracks with the graduate seminar I took with a big segment on popular memories of the Second World War and is a good illustration of the way the clean Wehrmacht myth was propagated. Similarly El Mestizo takes an extremely odd position by modern standards and spends his time taking jobs from both the confederates and the Union, with an internal narrative that is broadly anti-war but has to contort itself in odd ways to justify working with slavers. Was also quite amused to learn that Death Squad was written under a pseudonym because Hebden was also writing Fighting Mann and they didn’t want the overlap, even though Fighting Mann felt lackluster next to basically anything else Hebden wrote
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Oct 3, 2023 14:08
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Wanderer posted:There's an interesting series from Rebellion right now where Garth Ennis and a bunch of other 2000 AD writers like Mills and Rob Williams are doing new stories with a bunch of those old British war comics. Yeah it looks cool! I heard about it only with the recent prog featuring Major Eazy and the Sarge since I don’t follow the actual magazine, it’s just too hard to find/subscribe to in the US. That being said I hadn’t heard about a Hellman revival being part of it, so thank you for posting it! my interest is piqued, though honestly I’m deeply skeptical about the character, his history and context, and any attempt to make him legible and enjoyable for a modern audience without also perpetuating the clean Wehrmacht framing that permeates the original run. Death Squad is also fairly problematic, but not in an almost reasonable documentary way like Darkie’s Mob, which mostly avoids overt racial caricatures in the art, though I think that mostly is like a very slim majority of the art and doesn’t extend to the dialect and stuff. InDeath Squad, on the other hand, Ezquerra often can’t seem to restrain himself from rendering Soviet soldiers as Asiatic barbarians in a way that feels borderline cribbed from Der Sturmer. It’s not 100% and there are infrequent Russian foes or characters drawn in a more normative (white) way, but the moments where it happens were very noticeable. This weird confluence of the Cold War, increasing chronological distance from the crimes of the third reich, old fashioned western racism, and spectacular artists/writers trying to produce something new and comparatively transgressive or unique within the parameters of war stories the public would consume created some pretty bizarre and discursively harmful stuff. I’m just not sure Ennis is even remotely capable of parsing the things necessary to tell a story like that (his intro to Darkie’s Mob sucks) but I definitely intend to find out!
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Oct 3, 2023 23:21
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Wanderer posted:For what it's worth, Ennis didn't handle Death Squad; that's in issue #4, by Rob Williams. Oh that's cool, I have more faith in basically anyone else. I don't even dislike Ennis, I just don't think he's really sophisticated enough to actually understand some of the dynamics he perpetuates or reproduces with some of his war comics. Those are a bunch of unfamiliar comics (besides a few) but I love most of those authors, so thanks! I had no idea Abnett did a WW2 story. I love Abnett's Warhammer Monthly work and if I had more money I'd still be trying to collect every issue of WHM instead of just accumulating cheap ~$10 rebellion hardbacks, so that sounds like a grat confluence for me. Crazy Keller, Dredger, Cooley's Gun, Hotwheels are all new names for me though, same with HMS Nightshade. Definitely gonna be seeking those out at some point My copy of Rat Pack and the first Johnny Red book came yesterday too, I've really enjoyed Rat Pack thus far even if sometimes individual panels border on the absurd  I also got a copy of Alan Moore's Complete Future shocks to go with the two future shocks collections and they were surprisingly a ton of fun. I didn't used to be a huge fan of Moore but I've decided the problem was I started with V for Vendetta and Watchmen years ago when they hit the american mainstream before I started reading comics, and thought they were just, like, fine. Recently I've read Skizz, Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, and his goofy pun-based future shocks and absolutely loved 'em
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Oct 12, 2023 14:00
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Jedit posted:Skizz is much underrated. It's quite a bit more than ET set in Birmingham. It also has some nice subtle references - the scientist Van Owen is most certainly a son of a bitch - and one of my favourite exchanges in comics, which comes when he's interrogating Skizz about what Roxy has told him about Earth's military defences and Skizz mentions the police. Yeah Skizz doesn't really deserve to be compared to ET because it's so much more coherent with regards to using the platonic outsider to do a scifi social criticism while also telling a compelling story, which is, like, the whole thing you want from good science fiction. The contrast between intergalactic standards and the hellworld barbarity of earth was used to great effect largely because Moore, unlike US film directors, actually understood what "alien" implies and made hay with that in a distinct way other similar stories just...don't. Moore's class consciousness is especially important in that regard and his layered proletarian characters suffering in the context of Thatcherist barbarism is incredibly good. I also think it's a great comparison to ET in that particular way since the relevance of wealth and power in Spielberg's story is totally insipid compared to Moore's framing. That being said the third story after Moore had wrapped it up, the one written by Baike, was weird and not so good. I appreciated the running joke with the alien cops time traveling in very imprecise and ineffective ways, but it just felt like a really jarring tonal shift from the legible human stories Moore wrote. Couldn't agree more about Halo Jones, after I finished it I went looking around online for the rest because it felt unresolved. Halo obviously has some kind of tremendously important future ahead of her - thus the "historians narrating her life in the distant future" - inter-story moments, and it is a gigantic shame that never happened. Halo Jones also feels pretty groundbreaking the context of the early 80s for the female protagonist, her attitude/approach to the world, and the scifi setting but I suspect that has more to do with stuff like Wildcat, Eagle, Lion etc being so staid next to it since, with the benefit of hindsight, it feels like a pretty typically excellent original 2000 AD story. also I tried to subscribe since my friendly local comic shop said they used to get progs in but stopped because there wasn't an audience, but they emailed me two days later saying their distributor stopped carrying 2000 AD and the Megazine three years ago. I guess there's literally just nobody else around here who wants it but me.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:43
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Just wanna shout out for the recommendation re: the 13th floor comics, I just finished the third volume and absolutely loved them. They're so much fun and evince that type of weird class consciousness so typical of British comics emanating from the 2000 AD types, even if it was technically in Lion/Tiger/Scream or whatever. Anyway there was a big rear end 2000 AD sale and I've been continuing my mission to acquire copies of all the weird deep cuts that nobody really remembers anymore, so I just got copies of Adam Eterno: A Hero for All Time in the cool webshop hardback, 45 years of Gerry-Finley Day, Ace Trucking Co Vol. 2, The Leopard from Lime Street Vol. 2 (also the fun hardback), Ant Wars, and 2000 AD Presents: Sci-Fi Thrillers. It goes without saying that anyone interested in and unfamiliar with 2000 AD should start with Nemesis/Ro-Busters/ABC Warriors/Slaine or one of the other more creative and lauded properties they own, but I'm also increasingly of the opinion that this old Treasury of British Comics stuff deserves a lot more attention than it gets. I've also been reading Von Hoffman's Invasion and it absolutely locks down the whole "giant animals attack" angle, I'm hoping Ant Wars will be similarly delightful in the manner of campy midcentury science fiction
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Oct 30, 2023 17:02
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I don't know a single person IRL who would give a gently caress about or recognize any of these books but I'm feeling pretty happy with how my little collection is coming along and want to post it somewhere, so I'm gonna do it here    I've got a bunch of other stuff like the Aliens omnibuses, some whole runs of classic manga, etc but the weird British midcentury stuff is increasingly my favorite. I gotta rearrange all of these into some nice coherent thing on a shelf
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Oct 31, 2023 15:01
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Sentinel Red posted:For real, Max will always have a place in my heart as the One Good Landlord. Maybe could do with turning down his Murder parameters from 90 to 50 but eh. I just love the whole "oh dear, yet another heart attack in the lift, how tragic" shtick. Absolutely same, the sensibilities it reflects fascinate me on account of their kind of odd working class character that is deeply embedded and interested in British day-to-day governance and welfare systems that exert a meaningful and inescapable influence on their lives. Max is never really a bad guy, just petulant and narcissistic, and the way that manifests itself in the first book with repeated killings of debt collectors, callous bureaucrats, greedy merchants etc is the perfect way to make a murderous computer constantly lost in fantasy worlds into a compelling protagonist The Misty book was very similar, the story about the abandoned tower blocks that are also a portal to an alternate Britain where the nazis won is steeped in those same sentiments - the protagonist is made homeless by a council screw up - and the Loving Cup’s story is driven almost entirely by the poverty of the main character and her family. It’s a major contrast with what little I know about US comics from the same period, where working class backgrounds and anxieties are barely acknowledged or engaged with lazily
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Oct 31, 2023 15:22
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Heavy Metal posted:Now I'm curious what classic manga titles you like? I've been getting Fist of the North Star lately. FOTN looks dope, it’s on my list to get around to eventually, since stuff from the bubble era and early 90s is generally my favorite. I’d definitely call that classic so most of the stuff I’ve bought/read/enjoyed would fit into that category too. My favorite is definitely without question Lone Wolf and Cub, which has some of the most beautiful sequential art ever created framing a story I think is as timeless as consequential as any part of any canon. Just an incredible experience, my favorite director is a tie with Masaki Kobayashi and LWAC has the same combination of historical accuracy/authenticity as all-time samurai movies like Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion. I’m also a history fan and since I was stupid enough to get a BA/MA in the field there’s a special place in my heart for books where I actually learn something new every time I read one. There isn’t a single collection in the LWAC printing where I didn’t learn something fascinating about Japan under the shogunate The other one id sing unqualified praises for would be Dorohedoro, which is a bit newer but finished and an all-timer. It’s a really fascinating world and somehow Hayashida tells a really human story using inhuman characters in a borderline incoherent setting. Wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did but I ended up absolutely devouring it, it’s a really neat kind of intersection of genres and ideas I’ve never encountered elsewhere and it managed to wrap everything up nicely. Extra praise for not being gratuitous but not avoiding nudity and violence, and even more for the author’s tremendous ability to balance levity and shocking seriousness with side bits and interstitial joke panels. The third one I am extremely positive about in every respect but would be more circumspect about recommending to people - Blame!. Blame! does things with scale that sated something in me that I didn’t even know was empty. I’ve always been super into scifi about megastructures because of the utopian social base their existence implies but it’s also insanely difficult to write or articulate in a way that is both legible to human readers and approaches an accurate accounting of a real megastructure’s incomprehensible size. Had trouble with the prequels and Blame! leaves a lot of questions unanswered but I think in many ways it’s one of the most artistically/visually significant works of science fiction ever and will one day be remembered as seminal in the same way 2001 is in cinema. Not much in the way of dialogue and stuff, extremely plodding and mostly devoted to illustrating those incredible landscapes, and incredibly good. Finally, this one is still ongoing so it doesn’t count as a classic but it’s so loving good I can’t not mention it - Golden Kamuy. GK is a historical adventure story set in Hokkaido after the Russo-Japanese war, concerning a group of veterans, prisoners, and misfits working with an Ainu girl to find a cache of gold hidden by Ainu partisans to fund a struggle for far eastern independence. It’s like a more crass version of LWAC, in the sense that the author worked with professors of Ainu history, linguists, etc to produce a work that is extremely accurate where it can be and authentic everywhere else. Like LWAC, I’ve learned a lot about Ainu history and Hokkaido, which was always confirmed elsewhere. The art even accurately renders notable individual buildings in historical towns and cities in Hokkaido, it’s probably the most committed I’ve ever seen any piece be regarding historicity. Only one qualifier though: it’s full of weird filthy sex stuff that doesn’t feel totally shoehorned in but also comes close to going over the line sometimes. It’s not a sex manga or anything of course, it just occasionally goes all in on weird characters. Despite that it’s so good I read it all in like a month and am very eagerly awaiting the last two There’s also Hellsing, which wasn’t what I expected but once I accommodated myself to the underlying stupidity and accepted it was a Japanese guy who doesn’t know poo poo about European history or Christian theology doing a reverse orientalism to tell a badass story with unfamiliar tropes, i enjoyed it a lot knowing it was just kind of dumb spectacle rather than a “real” narrative Finally, there’s Spriggan, which I bought and enjoyed up to the third book (mostly) up until the offensively ahistorical stuff just got to be too much. I’d recommend not bothering with Spriggan in that it borders on nazi apologism via the author’s overwhelming stupidity too frequently to be accidental. I’ve also got Akira and Ghost in the Shell, but that probably goes without saying. Recently picked up several Lupin III books and absolutely loved them, it’s this wonderful combination of silly slapstick with “adult” sensibilities so it ends up feeling like a kind of synthesis of kid’s comedy and spy thrillers, with tits, silly physics, fast cars etc. just so much fun Post ended up longer than I intended but it’s fun to discuss this stuff in the context of the 2000 AD books, I’m genuinely curious what other people ITT familiar with Rebellion enjoy as far as manga goes. I don’t consider manga and western stuff to be separate categories that should be separate either, really, it’s all sequential art at the end of the day
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Oct 31, 2023 22:23
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Heavy Metal posted:Right on, happy to read! The Lupin manga is wild for sure, and I'm glad it happened, though I prefer the anime a lot. Monkey Punch is a hero, and I appreciate his work's insanity anyway. My fav anime franchise for sure. Haven’t thought about Ranma ½ since like 2003 but I remember it being screened at an early aughts anime convention I went to, thank you for knocking that loose in my brain. Never heard of Gunsmith Cats but it looks 100% up my alley, going on the list along with Bastard!!. Blade of the Immortal looks great but as far as I can tell it’s only available in English in this weird hosed up translation that reformats it to read left to right, which drives me bonkers with manga. I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled and am gonna get it as soon as there’s a proper version available though, premise looks great Also I started Leopard of Lime Street just now after finishing The Spider’s Syndicate of Crime and it’s pretty fun how these evince the things I stereotypically expect from superhero comics, like silly declaratory statements and unexplained or outrageous non-sequiturs. I was inspired to start LoLS because there was a bit where The Spider flipped a switch which caused a hatch to open, from which two leopards in silhouette emerged, before he gassed them and it struck me that Reg Bunn was apparently totally unwilling to draw a leopard and felt compelled to see what Eric Bradbury’s would look like
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Oct 31, 2023 23:10
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Jedit posted:How do you feel about digital editions? Thanks for this recommendation, I got a box of Blackwell’s today that included Get Harry Ex and I’m super into it so far. Just really enjoyable in that kind of world-weary 90s action movie way and I’m excited to see what kind of depth it attains as the story progresses. Also after reading Ant Wars I feel a little less confident about Gerry Finley-Day’s opinions, the unrelenting racism that was supposed to be some kind of heavy handed satire didn’t really land and the narration using the phrase “semi-civilized Indian” in every single prog didn’t help one iota Frog Act fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Nov 14, 2023 01:21
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Jedit posted:Don’t worry, this only increases as you read more Finley-Day. It should come as no surprise to you that he created nearly all of Battle's "honourable German" stories and most of his stories featured at least one racially stereotyped character. Bill Savage in Invasion is also absolutely a man who would have voted to leave the EU despite being a lorry driver and the evil of the invading Volgans - who are coded as Russian but frequently depicted as Mongolian - is first shown by them summarily executing Margaret Thatcher. Yeah I started with Rogue Trooper which is actually pretty thematically sophisticated and consistent with my expectations for 2000 AD stuff. The war is totally pointless, it's environmental impact and dystopian administrative structures are constantly emphasized, there's no meaningful ideological distinction between the factions grinding one another down, etc. I guess that's why I've been so surprised as I've gone through his other stuff and slowly concluded he's just a straight up racist. Like, Hellman of Hammer force includes a lot of stuff that's just an uncritical reproduction of nazi racial coding on top of the extremely unpleasant clean Wehrmacht stuff that's all over the place, and it seems to get worse the deeper I go. I got the best of GFD hardback recently for Harry on the High Rock, which I hadn't read and isn't printed elsewhere, and that was also pretty loving offensive in a lot of slightly more subtle ways. I've got a copy of Invasion 1984 coming in my next order, looking forward to reading it and learning more about GFD and the worse-people-than-Pat-Mills writers of the era. Very unexpectedly, as much as I enjoy war comics, the old Misty comics are quickly becoming my favorites. I got the Jaume Remeu collection recently and I really, really love his style of art. It's also one of the most interesting Rebellion books in that it has a bunch of genuinely substantial academic essays emanating from literary PhDs discussing the book, it's much more interesting than most of the framing material they provide. I'm also slowly moving through a bunch of even older Tom Tully stuff and I really like him. He's like if Finley-Day possessed meaningful class consciousness instead of weird chauvinism. The Steel Claw books are great fun and after reading most of Leopard From Lime Street it's the only superhero comic I've ever actually finished. 10,000 Disasters of Dort is a lot of fun so far too, just really silly classic pulp stuff.
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Nov 14, 2023 18:47
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While we're on the subject of 2000 AD deep cuts with problematic material, this came in the mail today. Got the last copy from Oxford for only $25, which is extremely fair for a 13 year old book that was never even priced in USD (on the back, at least). Mills, Tully, and Bellardinelli are my three favorites affiliated with any of these things so I'm excited to see where it goes. Less familiar with Gibbon but I'm sure I'll recognize his stuff when I come across it
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Nov 15, 2023 19:49
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Heavy Metal posted:There sure is a lot of 2000AD stuff to read, I don't know how much I'll get to in my lifetime. I've been into it since 2006, and I'm on Dredd Case Files 26 (around 1997) for example. No that’s a totally fair question I’ve often asked myself - like why am I reading a totally forgotten and poorly reviewed Jinty special called “A Spell of Trouble” instead of Brink/Nicolai Dante/Dredd (only up to CCF 7)? I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself a very good answer but I think a big part of it is the intersection of novelty, niche, and historical relevance. Historical trends as expressed via the medium of pop culture is something that has always fascinated me and I wasted enough time in college getting an MA in the field that I can’t help but tend towards finding things I really enjoy and then subjecting them to a kind of historical contextual analysis, but it’s hard to decide whether I enjoy them generally or on account of that particular context. I think also I got into the medium in a weird way. Nemesis two years ago was what showed me comics could be more than superheroes and then a year later I had all of Mills’s books at stupid expense, Corto Maltese, etc and felt like I had read a lot of the stuff I knew was perfect for me and I’d never top and became fascinated thinking about their antecedents. I have a percolating idea in the back of my head to write a monograph about radically transgressive science fiction in the 80s and the history of mainstream social allegory in sequential art and the way fictionalized history influences popular views of the field and I feel like these books offer a more incisive and accessible source material than American stuff, which is so numerous (and, imo, bad) that I wouldn’t know where to start. I think I’m particularly interested in the stuff that isn’t quite bad but also isn’t exactly good - like the Trigan books, Karl the Viking, 10,000 Disasters of Dort, Jinty, Jane Bond, Steel Commando, Hellman, etc - for the specific kind of above-referenced historical-political insight. It’s a view into a sort of low art expression of the way people then understood historical causality, demographics, geopolitics, satire etc that’s made so much more interesting for its flaws. Even the one or two actually truly bad books - which for my money are only Loner and Turbo Jones, which ironically introduced me to the Treasury - offer some valuable insights along those lines. It’s not usually good allegory like Mills or Wagner and certainly doesn’t even approach the timelessly mythological qualities Corto Maltese possesses (but I think those are the best thing done in the medium ever) and for that reason in a way it feels more relevant than those comparatively rarified greats. It’s also fascinating how forgotten they are. I just got the best of Jane Bond webshop hardback (only $12 goddamn) and there’s no credited author because the artist died in ‘76 and nobody remembers their name. Also got the TOBC annual 24 in the same box and that has a fabulous story from Buster, which itself seems totally forgotten outside of publishing one or two other very small stories also now owned by the Treasury. Stuff like that just really gets me going I WFH and am a gigantic loser so I read a lot and up until my last couple months of orgiastic unrestrained 2000 AD purchases I actually didn’t have a backlog at all, but now I have like five books I haven’t started and twice as many I’m halfway through. Something I’ve learned as a comparatively new reader is that juggling a bunch of different stories is totally viable with comics, like you can just kinda pick them back in a way that you can’t with books, so it’s easier to browse and sort of slowly burrow through 20+ books at a time while somehow not losing track of anything owing to the cadence and nature of the stories. Seems like that’s something everyone does to some degree or another. Also I got a copy of the Complete Johnny Future and it is totally ridiculous, even knowing the premise I didn’t anticipate it’d be that silly. Sorry if this post is a bit incoherent btw I had to have my cat of 13 years put down this morning and I’m just trying to distract myself some, wanted to respond earlier but he was so sick I couldn’t gather myself. Jedit posted:Thankfully it doesn't go anywhere particularly bad, although the sequels are pretty dire. It's also a Dredd prequel: John "Giant" Clay is the grandfather of Judge Giant. Oh neat, that explains the weird pseudo-megacity vibes that seem to be present, but it must be a pre-war thing since there are still plenty of distinctive modern cities with teams. As for Dave Gibbons I totally didn’t realize that until you mentioned it but I think that’s just a reflection of my spotty comics knowledge, I read Watchmen decades ago and liked it but it was just a kind of one off like with Maus, Persepolis, V for Vendetta, Transmet, etc fairly mainstream things I found via being a scifi fan and then read without re-engaging with the medium. Actually being interested in comics has been recent enough that I have this kind of lopsided thing going on where I can tell people a lot about British comics in the 60s-80s but don’t know dick about more basic stuff Frog Act fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Nov 17, 2023 |
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Nov 17, 2023 22:47
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Heavy Metal posted:Good answer! Well said, cool stuff. And I should mix it up more with less top of my list stuff too. Hell yeah thanks buddy, I literally haven’t read a single thing you’ve listed here but they’re all things I’ve always had at least a passing interest in or sound cool as poo poo. X-Men has been a particular challenge for me as I was born in 1990 so I grew up half assedly collecting the like goofy beach vacation cards, watching the show, bought the action figures, and I even read one trade comic when I was like eight but it’s just too big to figure out as an adult so that seems like a great starting point. The only Miller I’ve read is Ronin - which I quite liked - so I’ve been meaning to check out his work It’s also funny you mention invincible I’ve been avoiding it as I am a weird outlier (I guess from what I see online) in that I’m a fan of the original Boys comic and appreciate what Ennis was doing there even if it’s gratuitous by any standard and problematic by any modern one, so I’d always kinda ignored it as a pale imitator. I started the show last night by sheer coincidence and was getting bored/annoyed and figured I wouldn’t watch the second episode before the Thing happened with Omni-Man, and that piqued my interest along with JK Simmons. It’s better than I expected so I’m definitely gonna check out the comic soon I appreciate the recs, I do plan to broaden my horizons one day especially since I’ve accumulated like half of the TOBC library already Sentinel Red posted:Yo Frog, your posts have been my fav thing in BSS for a while now so keep ‘em coming. Never thought I’d see anyone bring up Buster or the Leopard of Lime Street round here, it’s all stuff I grew up with but is now a half-remembered dream at best. Genuinely warms my heart to know other posters besides the handful of us who’ve been talking about it the last few pages appreciate them! I was concerned I was just rambling to myself at first and since I don’t know a single soul IRL who is familiar with it (I stopped at a local comic shop today and the lady had never heard of 2000 AD, third time that’s happened) this thread is a major outlet for me Also I totally understand that about Charley’s War, I’m ashamed to confess that I haven’t finished it yet either - I’m exactly halfway through the series but it’s just so relentlessly sad and evinces a specific kind of affinity for the suffering of the working classes under the yoke of industrial bourgeois and the aristocracy that I can’t binge it for too long. That being said every time I do read a few issues I’m stuck for a bit afterwards dwelling on how it set a standard for war comics that has yet to be matched Jedit posted:If you like Brubaker then you should try Velvet, his James Bond pastiche set in the 1960s with the high concept "What if Moneypenny was the real super-spy?" Putting this on my list too because “well executed Jane Bond” sounds great Frog Act fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Nov 18, 2023 |
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Nov 18, 2023 22:14
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So I just had a copy of All-Star Future Shocks arrive and I’m curious about this one, because it seems to have been totally removed from 2000 AD’s catalogue. Given how heavily marketed the recent future shocks collections were, plus the terror tales and scifi thrillers books being more problematic/older than this one but still being acknowledged makes me wonder why this particular book has been memory holed Also I think Tharg’s favorite shock must be Superbean, the bizarre one-off joke from Alan Moore about a green bean superhero, because it’s printed in three out of six future shock and related collections
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Nov 22, 2023 21:02
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I absolutely cannot handle sad cats in literature. Everything else is fine, but that's the red line where I go from enjoying a well-crafted allegory to actually suffering myself, which is too bad because I've heard both that and WE3 are really good. Anyway I don't know anyone else who might appreciate this but I recently learned that Lion, home of Robot Archie, Karl the Viking, The Spider, and countless other characters I've come to really enjoy over the last year, used to publish an "annual" hardback every year, a collection of what they thought were their best strips etc. I guess that's what the Treasury of British Comics is trying to do with their own annual releases, which I totally endorse and indeed really enjoyed the 2024 one. I guess there were a ton of copies printed and/or nobody gives a gently caress about these comics anymore because the Lion annuals are all over eBay for super low prices. I spent $35 for these two which are en route and I'm super stoked on:   They seem to be $10-$20 each (though there was a version of the 1982 annual for $160 on eBay, I paid $14 for one that isn't "very fine" or whatever) and if they're what I'm hoping for I think I might have to pursue an even more weird niche thing and start accumulating as many of them as I can, since it turns out finding a copy of every Warhammer Monthly ever printed would be prohibitively expensive 
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Nov 30, 2023 15:40
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Jedit posted:Oh my, I didn’t realise that people weren't aware of the annuals. They were such a staple of Christmas morning when I was a kid that I never stopped to think about them. Sentinel Red posted:Oh yeah! One of the very best things about Christmas was deffo ANNUAL TIME! Popping to Smiths and just hoovering up as many as I could, Battle, Eagle, Whizzer & Chips, Buster, Transformers, The Dandy, The Beano, Topper, even the strange, mysterious works of *The Scotch* like Oor Wullie, which weren't generally available down here the rest of the year. There was a Battle annual with my favourite non-Hama Snake Eyes story ever, he gets shot down on a flight home and Destro takes a squad to mop up - it was basically Predator a couple of years before the film came out. And an Eagle annual (I think?) with a kid mates with some kids from outer space in a red & white chequered spaceship, they got a really great artist for the annual story, it just popped amazingly. Oh gently caress that sounds great. I can’t believe how cheap these are and knowing there are 2000 AD and Eagle ones as well gets my motor running big time. I’m very excited at the prospect of finding comics from those publications that haven’t been reprinted in the interim/didn’t survive to the present day and I’m double pumped knowing they’re not just yearly collections or articles or something. I’ll post ITT when I get em and let people know what kind of stories I find inside, I’m having a lot of fun digging these things up and enjoying them in their own right only to come to this thread and learn what feels like a weird esoteric historical mystery to me is just happy Christmas memories for you guys
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Nov 30, 2023 18:15
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The new Nemesis, Fiends of the Eastern Front, and Helltrekkers hardbacks showed up this morning. They’re all really high quality which is nice, the Robo-Hunter collection I got recently wasn’t just kind of lame, it had a half torn cover and had been knocked around a lot. These are sturdier and well-manifested, Nemesis in particular really benefits from the oversize format. I’ve never read Fiends or Helltrekkers but I expect GFD to racistly contort himself into a situation where vampires are bad for eating Einsatzgruppe and Helltrekkers to be my favorite Dredd stuff, stories unrelated to the judges
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Dec 7, 2023 17:46
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