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They aren't just for Spider-Man! I love graphic novels and other serious comics and since they are neither fish nor fowl for TBB or BSS now is the time to discuss serious comics with serious stories for serious people. I recently read Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse, a comic about a white gay man living in 60s Alabama and his experience with the civil rights movement. It was a dark and chilling read that kept me gripped the entire time through and gave me a new perspective on the movement for civil rights. As well, I read through Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a pseudo-trilogy by Alison Bechdel, the creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I love biography comics so this three-part examination of her relationship with her father, mother, and her own body was a deep dive into the psyche of possibly the most celebrated LGBT cartoonists in the world. What are some of your favorite graphic novels? What have you been reading recently? How much did you like reading Maus in high school? Hooray for graphic novels!!
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Apr 1, 2023 05:43
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I know it's pretty standard fare to read Alan Moore, but I quite liked Watchmen. I've never been into superhero comics, etc. but liked the genre well enough. (e.g. the Batman Arkam series of games) So my sister's partner gave me the Watchmen graphic novel as a gift some years ago and I enjoyed it a lot! I went in blind and enjoyed it quite a lot, seeing as it didn't fall for all the classic superhero tropes. (And hey, non-powered 'superheroes' are the best sort in my opinion, as they're actually creative about problem-solving) But yeah, I also read the prequel Before Watchmen and sequel+DC tie-in Doomsday Clock, even though there weren't written by Alan Moore. I mean, I get that he felt it was a done deal so he didn't want to get involved, but eh. I quite liked them too, to be honest. They weren't quite the same, but they fleshed a lot of things out, which I wanted to know about. Hard to say which one I preferred! There's a duo of new characters in the Doomsday Clock (won't say much, but one is based around a mime) which I found hilarious. However on the other hand, Before Watchmen was very interesting the whole time, as it focused on the original "superhero" group mentioned in Watchmen - The Minutemen. I longed for more info on them when initially reading Watchmen, so it was pretty great, reading about them. I haven't read many graphic novels since then, though. There was a DC one I read (DC: The New Frontier) that connected a bunch of their characters and timelines, which I enjoyed. It made me fall in love with Martian Manhunter and his noir detective persona. Absolutely hilarious! So if anyone has any Martian Manhunter recommendations, let me know! 
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Apr 1, 2023 08:52
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Even though I went through tons of European comic series as a kid (Asterix, Lucky Luke, The Adventures of Tintin, Don Rosa's "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", Spirou), I stopped reading them during my teens and never bothered picking up graphic novels until recently. Finished Blankets (Craig Thompson) in one sitting and boy did it trigger some bitter-sweet memories of romantic interactions I had as a teenager. After playing Cyberpunk 2077 I craved something similar and picked up the Essential Judge Dredd: America. Awesome read and way darker and cynical than the goofy 90s movie, which had been my only contact with the Dredd franchise until then. Being a fan of Jodorowsky's films I started reading The Incal. Loving the story so far and I'm always a sucker for images with lots of details (see Don Rosa).
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Apr 1, 2023 12:59
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I'm a big dumb nerd who loves cartoons and comic books and I have an entire book case devoted to indie graphic novels and manga. Here are a few things I've enjoyed lately. I hope you don't mind me timg'ing my shoutouts, because I feel like, you know, graphic novels, right? I really like Tillie Walden's graphic novels. On a Sunbeam is her biggest work, a queer scifi found family story in space, and it's completely free on her website. She has a great graphic memoir called Spinning as well.  Look Back by Tatsuki Fujimoto (mangaka of Chainsaw Man) is a great little graphic novel about two maladjusted middle school girls who want to make comics when they grow up.  Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni is a fairly chill slice of life about queer 30-something year olds trying to stick together.  It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood is a virtuosic doom spiral of a graphic memoir about being a gifted kid with severe depression. The art in this is really bold.  Thieves by Lucie Bryon is an adorable lesbian romance about a couple of troublemaker high schoolers. It's got just about the most charming art I've seen in a graphic novel. The story keeps it light but the vibes are nice.  The World of Edena by Moebius is a completely wild journey through psychedelic time and space. It really showcases why Moebius was so influential. 
Cephas fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 18:12
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Last graphic novel I read was https://www.amazon.com/Ducks-Two-Years-Oil-Sands/dp/1770462899 by Kate Beaton. Brilliantly put together. Has a lot to say about class and sexism, and does it oh so well.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:40
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I really enjoyed the graphic novel adaptations of Vonnegut's Slaughter-House Five and Kafka's Amerika. Slaughter-House Five in particular is way more devastating when you can visualize what's happening, and really plays up the PTSD angle of the book.
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Apr 2, 2023 04:45
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I adore the Contract with God trilogy, not only for the subject matter but also for Eisner's incredible inventiveness with page layouts. I also read Eisner's To the Heart of the Storm more recently and enjoyed it immensely for the same reasons. Glad to see this thread. When I peruse graphic novels at a bookstore, I often get the impression that many do not make great use of the medium, so I'm always looking for those that do something special.
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Apr 2, 2023 05:07
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Seconding Watchmen but also V For Vendetta For obvious reasons
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Apr 2, 2023 11:59
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Sir Mat of Dickie posted:I adore the Contract with God trilogy, not only for the subject matter but also for Eisner's incredible inventiveness with page layouts. I also read Eisner's To the Heart of the Storm more recently and enjoyed it immensely for the same reasons. This is my favorite Eisner page. I think it's beautiful in its themes of a man talking to a cockroach like the city talks to him. 
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Apr 2, 2023 19:01
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"A Life Force" is great. I also adored the scope and sweep of the history of Dropsie Avenue.
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Apr 2, 2023 20:09
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If the price of entry is too daunting to start reading graphic novels, Libraries have come a long way in putting them in their collections! Big big props to the Toronto Public Library system for their particularly huge collection, which is awesome because of the incredible amount of creators living there! They even have a yearly comic creator con!
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Apr 2, 2023 20:29
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BTW, what actually defines a graphic novel? Wikipedia seems to limit the term according to how it was originally published, making Watchmen a "comic book limited series" since it was published in periodical issues and then collected as a hardback later. I don't think that's necessarily a helpful definition, so I'm going to go ahead and include on my top list of graphic novels, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Box Set. Had it on my to-buy list for years, until I finally got a real job and could afford to start indulging in such excess. It's just over a thousand pages, published over 20 years or so, but so well planned-out and cohesive, it might as well have been published as two volumes of a GN. Amazing work by a seminal cartoonist and writer.
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Apr 2, 2023 21:35
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I don't think it's a very helpful definition either, since many great novels were originally published serially as well.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:08
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The Filth is an absolute mind gently caress work of genius filled with amazing lines. "The word 'disturbing' has acquired a new meaning today"
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Apr 2, 2023 22:29
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are any of the sandman spin offs good? i've got the first book of death (the high cost of living) and thought it was good, and reminded me of what i liked about earlier stuff like doll's house, but that's all i've read
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Apr 3, 2023 16:01
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I think it's fair to expect that you'd like Death: The High Cost of Living, considering Gaiman wrote it. I think he also did a couple of the other spin-offs, but not most of them. I have not read any! Maybe I should?
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Apr 3, 2023 20:31
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I've got a shelf full of funny books. Setting aside the usual comic book bests like Warren Ellis's Planetary anything by Morrison or the goat Alan Moore, I really like Derf's My Friend Dahmer, about going to high school with a future serial killer.
Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 20:52
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Christ, I've got so many graphic novels and trades at home to get through. The comics shop by my old job would have blowout sales in January and I would just get my weight in books day after day. Most recently, I've been working my way though Love and Rockets, but treating them as serialized and reading then alongside other things. That didn't work out so well with the Human Disastrophism volume, though, since that was mostly published as a single piece. Need to start it again, I think. My Alan Moore phase was a good while ago, but From Hell was far and away my favorite. Would like to reread some of the many books I have of his, though, especially Supreme. I'm pretty burned out on Supers in general, but my anime-loving wife got me watching Tiger and Bunny, which warmed my heart in a way that turn-of-the-millennium superhero books did (and the Marvel Machine utterly fails to). So I'm also doing the recent Astro City reprint editions, since I remember those being excellent when my friend loaned me the first handful back in the day.
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Apr 5, 2023 05:40
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I feel rather basic just talking about Moore and Morrison. I feel like there's more and better independent comics out right now than there have been in a long time, I just need to make more of an effort to actually engage with them. It's been tough not living near a comic shop anymore. As far as Moore goes, the ending of V for Vendetta has always haunted me way more than anything about the movie. They certainly made a valiant effort with the movie, but I can see why Moore can't stand to put his name to adaptations. The "everybody must be V!" ending of the movie always felt very sanitized compared to the ending of the book, which was willing to give comeuppance to the villains but also show how bleak V's "land of do-as-you-please" could turn out to be. I feel that the middle volumes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Black Dossier and Century, are very underrated. Perhaps because I've got a bit more context for the works and eras being included, but, for instance, the way Moore works in 1984 right next to '50s rocketship sci-fi is brilliant. When the last volume came out, I fell in line with the general reception that it was perhaps a bit excessively cynical, but it may be worth a revisit. His take on Harry Potter was incredibly dark Harry commits a school wanding at Hogwarts rather than a school shooting, but it's hard to say that his instincts weren't right on to skewer Rowling that hard. I've got Morrison's Batman in omnibus format now, and I really need to take a weekend and plow through those in one sitting. The omnibuses evidently finally sort out Batman & Robin and the Return of Bruce Wayne miniseries in creator-intended order; I remember the reading order was a bit of a mess as the original comics came out, due to art delays. That run is the pinnacle of the character for me, and I sincerely doubt WB is going to be able to transcend it with their new slate of movies. I feel that Annihilator is one of their more underrated non-big-publisher works from recent years; I haven't read Happy! which was actually adapted into a TV series, but Annhilator struck me as ready-made to adapt into film. It's as straightforward as Morrison's story structures have ever gotten, and I think it was published by Legendary Pictures' comic divison (which I never knew was a thing otherwise). A screenwriter dying of a brain tumor is haunted by his hit creation Max Nomax in between bouts of bacchanalia and attempts to write a sequel, and the scenarios from his screenplays start bleeding over into real life as well. Nomax lives up to his name, a parody of '90s X-TREEM superheroes, and practically demands to be played by someone capable of Ricardo Montalban-level scenery-chewing. 
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Apr 5, 2023 08:08
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Honestly, I haven't touched much lately. There are two extremes in tone and in setting that stand out to me, one from my middle school years, one from my late teens. First up, Bone by Jeff Smith was just a treat throughout. I think it's one of the first GNs that actually pulled off the descent from lighthearted fantasy humor into increasingly grim and serious stakes, and by the end of it all it's something akin to an epic. Just a great time throughout. You have your slapstick characters grow into fleshed-out, nuanced, defined heroes and anti-heroes by the end, while still retaining their core values. A classic heroes' journey, through and through. Plus, the art is a feast for the eyes - drawn over a decade, it's as much an evolution as the story. Smith just has a knack for detailed environments and textures. Here's a pane from book 1:  And here's a pane from book 8  Now, the second is, of course, Gaiman-derived rather than written. Lucifer is a really outstanding example of what a spinoff comic should be - striking within the same air of the original, while using driving ideas, absurdity, and approaches not possible in the inspiring work, producing its own atmosphere. You've got stuff like a living deck of tarot cards influencing people throughout a city, before possessing a magician's assistant, all the way into breaking the spine of an Angel to create an entirely new universe. There is never a dull moment, and any humor is balanced with intrigue and morbidity alike. It ends up leading to one of the most satisfying endings I've seen yet, as when the choice is given, he remains true to himself, however shallow or expected that may be. 
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Apr 5, 2023 17:14
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:BTW, what actually defines a graphic novel? 3 x 3 grid Image Movement Doctrine is x-axis Publishing Format Doctrine is y-axis Top Left is "Watchmen is not a graphic novel", Bottom Right is "The Sopranos with captions on is a graphic novel"
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Apr 5, 2023 17:17
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directly in the center lies "Homestuck is a graphic novel"
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Apr 5, 2023 17:46
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Thought of some other graphic novels I like: Chester Brown's biography of Louis Riel: Extremely interesting stuff if you like Canadian history. Way more informative than what I learned in public school. Guy Delisle: Fun and informative travelogues, I enjoyed his Burma and Pyongyang books. There was some other Canadian fiction title that I can't remember now, it had only three colours (black white and pink?) and it followed this woman who moved to the woods to live with talking animals. I'm kicking myself for forgetting the title/author 'cause it was very fun and absurdist.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:23
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Just checked out Habibi by Craig Thompson. Very excited, I browsed through the first chapter and I was hooked.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:29
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Pepe Silvia Browne posted:3 x 3 grid lol
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Apr 5, 2023 23:23
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I've been working my way through The Complete Eightball that I picked up in the Fantabucks sale recently and this comic has been on my mind lately. I love the beats of the last three panels.
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Apr 8, 2023 15:09
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Went through Deogratias today, which I had had on my list for a long time. It's pretty short, so maybe it doesn't qualify as a graphic "novel" per se, but it's sold bound on its own, so I'm not sure where else to discuss it. It makes great use of flashbacks (smooth transitions between the present, after the massacres in Kigali, to the past). Not much of a history lesson for anyone like me who wasn't very familiar with the Rwandan genocide, as the introduction to my edition notes (it gives no historical background at all), but it's a well-told story about unspeakably awful events.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:27
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RipkinPippin posted:Honestly, I haven't touched much lately. There are two extremes in tone and in setting that stand out to me, one from my middle school years, one from my late teens. I had to read Maus for school and while it was an incredible work of art, it just left me emotionally and mentally drained. About a week later, I started reading Bone and was through it in about a month. It was the perfect antidote to Maus's relentless (and purposeful) misery. I'm forever sad that Jeff Smith has never been able to get an animated adaptation of it made because literally every studio he's shopped it to has pulled the rug out from under him at various stages, including Netflix who was like halfway done the animation on it when they just up and killed it.
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Apr 9, 2023 04:42
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Anyone else read Jeff Smith's RASL? I thought that one was pretty interesting. Not as major of a work as Bone but it's still pretty interesting. I've got the first book of Tuki sitting unread on my shelf too. It looks interesting but I'm worried he won't finish it any time soon.
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Apr 9, 2023 04:59
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FrumpleOrz posted:Anyone else read Jeff Smith's RASL? I thought that one was pretty interesting. Not as major of a work as Bone but it's still pretty interesting. I believe I've still got volume 1 kicking around someplace. I love how he was able to transition from an all-ages story to more adult themes; I hope that Bill Watterson's upcoming volume manages the same thing. Years ago when I worked at In-n-Out Burger, the store organized a secret Santa thing for a disadvantaged family with young kids. I contributed my one-volume edition of Bone, since I first encountered it at a similar age when it was running one chapter at a time in Disney Adventures magazine. I've always hoped those kids enjoyed it as much as I did.
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Apr 9, 2023 06:14
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So, a lot of people only know Osamu Tezuka as the creator of Astro Boy or Black Jack but he also did quite a few stories that were for adults. MW Michio Yuki lives a double life, by day he is a successful banker with a bright career in front of him but by night he is a serial killer who frequently kidnaps people for ransom and then kills them anyway. Father Garai is aware of Yuki's crimes but is trapped by priest/penitent confidentiality as well as their shared past as the only survivors of a deadly chemical weapon spill on a remote Japanese island. Ode to Kirihito A young doctor investigates a mysterious disease that causes the inflicted to take on an animal like appearance. The story follows the doctor as he navigates the cutthroat world of medicine and how he loses his place in the world after becoming infected with the disease himself. The Book of Human Insects Toshiko Tomura is an incredibly talented young woman, winning prestigious acting and design awards. Her latest venture is writing and she wins the Japanese equivalent to the Noble Prize for Literature with her debut novel. When a reporter starts looking into her past he discovers an odd coincidence, every time Tomura succeeds another upcoming artist suddenly has their career derailed.
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Apr 9, 2023 20:53
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Tezuka's Buddha series is good too. I found the first volume at a used bookstore and am interested enough to seek out the rest. I think he takes quite a few liberties with the myths though...
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Apr 9, 2023 21:13
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I picked up this massive book collection of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo. DVD case next to it for scale. I'm not sure the best way to actually read it but it is gorgeous. 
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Apr 9, 2023 21:58
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This post is just a way to show off your Shoot Or Be Shot DVD isn't it
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Apr 10, 2023 01:22
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mutantIke posted:This post is just a way to show off your Shoot Or Be Shot DVD isn't it You got me! Honestly, it was just some of the thrift store trash I love to buy and it just happened to be on the table, heh. It looks miserable but maybe I'll watch it some day. I do love my gigantic book though. My wife's tired of hearing about it.
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Apr 10, 2023 02:07
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I just finished Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken and I've got a lot of mixed feelings about it. I enjoyed it in the end, though I found too much of myself in the Seth character. Obsessing over things of the past and letting those overtake your life. There's a scene where he is talking to his friend Chet, where Chet asks Seth about the new girl in his life. Seth is like "Oh yeah, it's good. She's cool but did I tell you about this silly comic panel I found that's by the author I'm obsessing over?" It hit too close to home for sure. I do think Kalo is more or less what would've happened to Seth if he had been born in the times he was obsessing over. It's an interesting kind of self-insert you don't see very often.
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Apr 10, 2023 21:53
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I really liked Cowboy, Ninja, Viking. I thought the speech bubbles with weapon symbols was a clever way to identify which voice was talking. Also, the story and art are neat. I really enjoyed the first season of Invincible so much I read the whole series and really enjoyed that as well.
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Apr 13, 2023 05:59
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Major Isoor posted:I know it's pretty standard fare to read Alan Moore, but I quite liked Watchmen. I've never been into superhero comics, etc. but liked the genre well enough. (e.g. the Batman Arkam series of games) So my sister's partner gave me the Watchmen graphic novel as a gift some years ago and I enjoyed it a lot! I went in blind and enjoyed it quite a lot, seeing as it didn't fall for all the classic superhero tropes. I am old, so was around to read this drat thing issue by issue when it was coming out. It was an experience that cannot easily be replicated. Didn't have any interwebs to go to at the time so was stuck at home speculating and theorizing by myself, re-reading each issue over and over again and trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on, only to have all theories destroyed by the next issue.
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Apr 14, 2023 12:07
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Groke posted:I am old, so was around to read this drat thing issue by issue when it was coming out. It was an experience that cannot easily be replicated. Didn't have any interwebs to go to at the time so was stuck at home speculating and theorizing by myself, re-reading each issue over and over again and trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on, only to have all theories destroyed by the next issue. drat, that must've been great! That's a very cool experience, to hear about. As a side-note, I wish there were more good limited run stuff like Watchmen, that I can just... buy, in one small bundle. The main thing stopping me from branching out is that it seems like all the main franchises etc just go on forever, for the most part. (I do have a pretty good Hawkeye omnibus though, which is fairly self-contained! Wish I had a Martian Manhunter one, though)
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Apr 14, 2023 15:00
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There's lots good contained works. They aren't as brief as Watchmen but Saga, East of West, and The Wicked and the Divine are all awesome.
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Apr 14, 2023 15:38
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