comics

[connect_icut]

Corps - If you like Seth, you'll love Chester Brown who also publishes on the Canadian publishing label par excellence, Drawn and Quarterly.
Some recommendations: I Never Liked You, Ed The Happy Clown, and Louis Riel.

Yes! Not so big on Ed the Happy Clown but those other two are amazing.

While we're talking Canadian Content, the first six books in Dave Sim's Cerebus saga are entirely brilliant (before he had his divorce, breakdown and conversion to right-wing extremism).

 

[droid]

Yes! Picked up volume one before Christmas and loved it. Got volume 2, but haven't had a chance to read it yet.

There are about 10 massive volumes out so far!

Yeah, I've picked up 8 of them over the last 2 years, then I cracked and read the rest online. Still nowhere near finished though. Its worth reading up on the real-life historical characters.

Something else I avoided for years (Josef K was asking about it in another thread), is Gantz. Stupendously violent and nihilistic. The only downside is the ridiculous fan service, which put me off for ages everytime I flicked through it in the shops.

 

[Corpsey]

Thanks to Sick Boy and Benny for recommendations too, will try and check some of these comics out.

 

[droid]

I finally found a copy of Marvano's comic adaptation of Joe Haldeman's 'forever war'. Will upload if anyones interested.

 

[adruu]

aw man i could never get into jimmy corrigan...i cant be the only one

 

[Sick Boy]

aw man i could never get into jimmy corrigan...i cant be the only one

I wasn't too taken with the story itself - I couldn't get over how annoyingly retarded Jimmy is - but that's besides the point. As an illustrator and simply as a contributor to the medium of comics in general, Chris Ware has few peers. His illustrations are just gorgeous: that fifties newspaper cartoonist style, but rendered with this perverse geometrical immaculateness that is done, astonishingly, entirely by hand. Most of all though is what he does conceptually. Chris Ware is a true auteur when it comes to what you can hope to accomplish on a page of a comic. Everything from his framing, to the arrangement of panels, to using entire and sometimes multiple page layouts to subtly enforce themes of the narrative, it's all what makes him so great and it's all in Jimmy Corrigan.

 

[connect_icut]

I didn't find the character of Jimmy annoying at all. I probably relate to him more than I'm comfortable with. In any case, he certainly is a pathetic character and the book certainly is an uncomfortable read but it's so shot through with beauty on so many levels that you just can't write it off. If anything, though, the Rusty Brown stuff Ware has been doing since then is even more blindingly brilliant and subtly profound.

 

[petergunn]

aw man i could never get into jimmy corrigan...i cant be the only one

it's overly precious... i don't like it either...

 

[zhao]

well it's an epic meditation on loneliness and social dysfunction in 20th century middle america. it is what it is, and surely not everyone's cup of tea.

but it does what it does with tremendous ingenuity, inventiveness, innovation, grace and beauty. and the mood it evokes is so powerful i can not even read it sometimes because it makes me so sad. other times it's like a comforting depression to stew in for a while.

 

[connect_icut]

it's overly precious... i don't like it either...

"Precious"? Don't see that at all.

 

[petergunn]

"Precious"? Don't see that at all.

it's packaged in a gigantic cumbersome oversized format and it's called "the smartest kid on earth" and you can't see that i would find it precious?

it's not even that either... it's the fiddly "old timey-ness" (like arm garters on a bartender in a nouveau cocktails bar, it grates...) of the art and the stories that go nowhere fast... it's sort of like the comic version of a New Yorker short story, a pretense to literary depth w/o there being much there... again, this is just my opinion...

it's just not for me... for none-superhero/mainstream stuff, i like funnier more down to earth stuff... like as much as love later Dan Clowes like David Boring or Ice Haven, i miss the juvenile giggle factor from stuff like this:

 

[Sick Boy]

it's the fiddly "old timey-ness" (like arm garters on a bartender in a nouveau cocktails bar, it grates...) of the art and the stories that go nowhere fast...

The story has an "old-timey-ness" in the sense that a large portion of it takes part in the past, I guess? Though I get what you're saying about the NYC literary solipsistic thing, that's what puts me off about the story as well. I can see that aspect as being described as "precious."

But I really don't see where you are coming from on the art being either "old-timey" or as going nowhere fast. It has an old newspaper style in its inspiration, but artistically Jimmy Corrigan is one of the most modern comic books I have ever read, and each page pretty much just hums with possibilities that the medium can aspire to. Artistically it is pretty monumental.

 

[connect_icut]

I think maybe he's talking about the Acme Novelty Library generally, rather than Jimmy Corrigan specifically - otherwise, how do you account for the comment about "gigantic cumbersome oversized format"? The Corrigan graphic novel is extremely compact but some Acme issues/collections have been published in extremely oversize formats.

 

[Sick Boy]

Yeah, that confused me a little too. My copy of Jimmy is printed on 7.5 x 6.5 pages, which is relatively small as far as comics go. I haven't seen it any other format (aside from as a serialized part of Acme Novelty Library). I should also point out the bindings on the spine are completely fucking useless, due to its short width and the weight of the pages, and I'm dreading the day the pages start to fall out. It'd probably benefit from being bigger, actually.

 

[Dunninger]

Ware's art is a bit retro in the sense that he references modernist graphic design a lot. Personally I think he is great, but I understand how it all can be seen as too tasteful.

it's sort of like the comic version of a New Yorker short story

Incidentally he has done illustration work for the New Yorker several times

 

[connect_icut]

Personally, I find it hard to think of Ware's work as "precious" or "tasteful" just because it's so fucking harsh. The latest issue of Acme is brutal.

It's worth pointing out that The New Yorker has published actual comic strips by Ware, not just illustrations. They've also recently published stories by Clowes, Crumb and Adrian Tomine (who is crap, in my opinion).

 

[petergunn]

Adrian Tomine (who is crap, in my opinion).

AGREED!

 

[Sick Boy]

Just finished vol.1 of Grant Morrisson's The Invisibles. It was a little poorly paced (you definitely get the impression that he tries to cram far too much into a single issue), and the premise is a little trite (teenage rebel without a cause gets recruited by gnostic secret society - peopled by trannys and grant morrison wearing a black mesh tanktop and nipple rings - to fight systems of psychic oppression maaaan), but I think by the end it managed to transcend these things.

I liked it enough to buy vol. 2 anyway. I understand it's an early work of his, so I'm hoping he improves on his faults as he goes along. Art was a bit of a let-down. I feel like he could've benefited from artists with the same kind of psychedelic enthusiasm as him.

 

[connect_icut]

I understand it's an early work of his, so I'm hoping he improves on his faults as he goes along.

TBH, I actually think Morrison's work has gotten more adolescent as it's gone along. If you read really early stuff like the first Zenith story, that thing he did about Hitler or even his Dan Dare story, it's much more contemplative and evenly paced in style and more interesting and mature in content. Some of his later stuff is great (All Star Superman, in particular) but a lot of it falls into that excruciating area of Stuff That Nerdy Teenage Boys Think is Really Cool and Edgy.

 

[Sick Boy]

Stuff That Nerdy Teenage Boys Think is Really Cool and Edgy.

You can always tell how dorky the author/artist is by their depiction of "Things That Are Cool." It always seems to consist of people who smoke cigarettes and wear eyeliner and long black trench coats. And occasionally some sort of complicated looking cyberpunk-styled electronic accessory with questionable function. It gets even worse with the dialogue: all totally out-of-syntax uses of swear words and slang that evidently neither the writer nor anyone he knows ever uses. Neil Gaiman is the worst when it comes to this. His character, Death, does my head in. She's basically just every little teenage goth girl's fantasy self and every teenage goth boy's fantasy girlfriend. So lame.

In fact now I think about it, it is funny that Neil Gaiman did exactly with Morpheus (from Sandman) what Morrisson did with King Mob by pretty much transparently writing a "cool" version of himself into the book as the main character. It's a bit embarrassing really. I feel like if they want to be taken more seriously for what they do, these guys really need to cut the internet fan-fic shit out.