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Axis Spinning Comics

  
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
13:46 / 30.10.03
Houdini said, in an earlier topic:

"Which were the others?"

Well...

Cerebus The Aardvark
The first issue I picked up of this was from the early part of the 'Mothers & Daughters' storyline, about 18 months before the "Dave Sim: chauvinist" thing really broke. The plot was incredibly complex and weird, and written like a William Gibson novel: None of that stopping to spell out all this history and religion for the reader, just left in the background to make it organic, and real. The art (esp. Gerhard's backgrounds) was unbelievable. The letters page was a dozen pages long and filled with people who swore, talked about philosophy and clearly felt themselves to be part of a community. And in the back was an excerpt from a new upcoming comic, a comic about comics itself by some guy called Scott McCloud. And next issue was a 12 page polemic by Sim about creator's rights, self publishing and artistic integrity. At the age of 17 this was the book that made me drop all the X-titles and start picking up Bone, Thieves & Kings, 1963, Miracleman, Sandman, Shade etc.

Ed The Happy Clown
I never really understood what "underground" comics were about until I read this. Mr Natural crapping in his pants and lusting after girls whose buttocks were even more unnatural than those drawn by Rob Liefeld just didn't make any sense to me. But Ed the Happy Clown had zombie hunters, disembodied hands, vampires, skinny emaciated clowns, men who couldn't stop pooping and a chap with the disembodied head of Ronald Reagan attached to the end of his penis. I read it in one seating, jammed into the narrow space next to the cat's sleeping basket between the radiator and the couch one Easter Sunday afternoon. Same day I smoked ... certain substances ... for the first time, now that I come to think of it, although this was earlier in the day. And again it just totally dissolved all of my preconceptions about what comics could and couldn't do. Chester Brown is a genius.

I could mention others here, like Shade, Sandman, Big Numbers - hell, even Stray Toasters in a way... but I don't want to rot this thread much further.

To be honest, I think there's very little that GM has written that isn't far above average for the "mainstream" comics field. But all of his works are still flawed, so we can spend forever nitpicking over which is the greatest.... Joy.

So, what are some other comics that broke your head open? I'll list mine in a bit.
 
 
Krug
14:41 / 31.10.03
It's hard to really pin down what broke my head. I have no real love for Sandman but the Brief Lives trade was the first adult comic I read. Alan Moore's Swamp Thing story "Pog" was another early one.

But if there's a comic that broke my head, it was definitely Animal Man. I'd already read Bend Sinister (though hadn't read Breakfast of Champions yet) but when I read Coyote Gospel I knew that there was so much to be done with the fourth wall with obvious parallels to our own reality. This was obviously refined in the Invisibles but Animal Man is where it is purest and it's where I see Grant's heart in the story. I think where Animal Man suceeds in being a better story than Invisibles is that the story and the characters never fall prey to "idea ate the character" syndrome. The ideas are bigger than anything but you can feel the suffering of Crafty, of Psycho Pirate and every forgotten character in Limbo or in the Asylum. It's a very emotional and heartbreaking work. It's not fair for me to say that Animal Man is his best work or that Grant's heart wasn't in it, because it's a decade and a half in the past for Grant but I prefer my stories to be trips inside very interesting people's heads and hearts. Invisibles only accomplishes being the former.
I'm rambling but christ you should look into Crafty's eyes on the last page of Coyote Gospel, or look at Mad Hatter screaming "No room!" or just about anything in the last five issues.

I read it again last night after a year and boy it's still the best.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
16:57 / 03.11.03
Hmmm...

As a kid just starting to read comics, Steve Gerber's work at Marvel was something that blew my mind. It is STILL amazing to me that Howard the Duck and his Man-Thing were mainstream comics published by the same people who published Bill Mantilo's work.

By the time I was a teenager, Howard Chaykin was blowing my mind with his work on American Flagg (and I actually saw someone wearing the old American Flagg t-shirt on The Joe Schmoe Show this weekend). Not only was Chaykin at the height of his artistic muscle, and the story was amazingly complex, the vision he had of the future was pure pop-fetish that worked.
 
 
Mister Six, whom all the girls
00:42 / 07.11.03
I'm gonna go old school and say X-Men 142 (is that right), 'Days of Future Past' part two. I was like 10 at the time and reading about a future that was a bombed-out wasteland where ALL the heroes were killed by robots blew my mind. And seeing Wolverine, no costume (which made the story seem somehow very real), still duking it out got my blood going. I mean, I KNEW he didn't stand a chance and no one was going to save him.

Another contender is the Daredevil issue where DD plays Russian roulette with Bullseye. Another fave I read in my brother's bedroom when he was out.

Not cool choices, but honest ones.
 
 
doctorbeck
08:10 / 07.11.03
got to be watchmen for me, by the time issues 12 came out i just thought, well that's it, no one has anything to say about superheroes anymore and marvel and DC may as well just pack it in now (may have been a bit hasty but that's how it felt at the time)

don't think i bought another men in tights comic, or any comic come to that, so it broke me comic head at any rate
until a friend got me onto barbelith and i started reading NXM again, which has been alright and a nice diversion but has not broke anything, i did try invisibles borrowed from a mate a few years ago but didn't really like it

may look animal man up after what people here have said

i suppose the other was v for vendetta, just felt so inspired by it, although in retrospect the idea that social change coems about from great mens actions rather than collective hard work seems a bit wrong, but it certainly made a great comic

andrew
 
 
houdini
20:07 / 07.11.03

Mister Six,

Fair call about those early comics experiences. About 10 years before that Cerebus "headspin" I was buying the UK b+w reprints in Mighty World of Marvel and The Daredevils. Two issues in particular stand out: MWoM #2, which reprinted Uncanny #142 ("X-Men: Everybody Dies" read the cover, above the clip art from The Vision & The Scarlet Witch) and an (unknown) issue of The Daredevils which was both my first contact with Alan Moore (a story in which Sir James Jaspers gives and anti-superhero hate speech in the Commons and the Fury comes to Braddock Manor) and a reprint of the first Elektra story.

Despite the fact that I was doomed to spend the next three years collecting 'The Transformers', I believe it was these two comics that made me into the slavering half-man I am today.

Hit 'em low, Olive Oil.
 
  
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