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Buy This Trade

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

20:07 / 27.09.04

I noticed in the "I want my mind bowl regularly" that a lot of people were recommending favorite trade paperbacks rather than mind blowing ones...so that means that there is some pent up demand for people to pimp out their favorites.

So, I'll start:

All of the Jack Kirby Fourth World trades (including the Jimmy Olsen ones). Sure, they are in that horrid shaded black and white, but you've got Jack Kirby at the height of his creativity. He tosses out ideas that DC is STILL mining and getting good concepts and series from. Yeah, the dialogue is a bit messy, and Kirby tried a bit too hard to get ideas back from Marvel (Anyone who thinks the Black Racer is something other than a new version of the Silver Surfer needs to be paying a bit more attention), but the sheer energy of the art makes up for any faults.

Plus, the stories are just plain FUN. Anything can happen from page to page, in a GOOD way. They also showed that Kirby had great stories still in him like "The Pact" and the Forever People story where they find the man with the Anti-Life formula... I find them to be so fun that I read them through once a year.

21:53 / 27.09.04

The Fourth World stuff is great, especially the New Gods and Mr Miracle.

I'm going to opt for Nick Fury Agent of Shield, the Jim Sterenko books. They are gorgous and so much fun - it's amazing to see Jim's work develop from Kirby clone to pop artist and designer.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:44 / 28.09.04

Rather more modern, but at present I am buying my way through the James Robinson "Starman" TPBs, having picked up a load in the British equivalent of the quarter bin. They're really good fun - I'm enjoying the way that Jack Knight isn't allowed to dominate the narrative space - for example, in "Night and Day", the second collection (I think), there are five episodes all describing the same day from the perspective of different characters before we return to the "Starman" storyline. It's nice, and it has some good effects.

While we're on retro-superhero goodness, I'll once again recommend "Jack Staff: Everything used to be Black and White". There's a whole thread on why this is great... the entire B&W run of Jack Staff collected in one volume.

09:11 / 28.09.04

I agree with everything listed so far, and just want to add Milligan's 'The Enigma' 'cause I never see/hear/read anybody saying anything about it and it's just the grandest sort of good great grand thing and everyone should have a copy, even the fucked-up bomb-victim chemical-warfare-assaulted refugee-camp kid and and soccer moms from Wisconsin.
Okeh, it's not really that important, but it's one of my fave re-reads of comics, and just loaded with fun - and poignant moments... remarkable in a medium that seems to think moody, depressing, overly-arranged and sterile, are the best points a work can have.

Also, Moto Hagio's 'A, A'' (eh, that's - A comma A prime, but I cannot do the prime mark rightly, with the inverted commas and all), which may not be entirely politic, but it's cute and makes me tear and smile in quick succession.

I'll cheat a bit, and tell y'all to pick up Dave Cockrum's 'Nightcrawler' mini... to make it fit, feel free to bind all four issues together and pretend. Or, marvel at a mutant book with no mutant-issue-social-commentary paranoia, but plenty of swords, dimensional travel, cabbage patch 'crawlers, and the occasional random nudity. Plus, what I'm pretty sure is the only mention of Magik's er, dirty book collection.

I'm sensing a pattern here...

23:41 / 29.09.04

Been reading the AGE of BRONZE trades... very dence and one of the most enjoyable B/W reads I've had in a while.

I hear blankets is good but haven't picked it up.

00:49 / 30.09.04

The Essential Tomb of Dracula trades. Coolest. Shit. Ever. Hard to believe there was once a time when monthly comics really came out every month, and had art -- in! every! issue! -- by Gene Colan. Only Gil Kane may have been more badass. Wolfman's writing is slightly dated, but holds up remarkably well overall, especially when you compare it to the (*sigh*) also-collected "giant-sized" issues scripted by Chris Claremont...man, if you think he's hacky *now*...

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

03:46 / 30.09.04

I agree on the Tomb of Draculas, and even though they come off a bit overwritten now, it does make it more of a read. Colan and Palmer was a great team, with Palmer cleaning up Colan's shortcuts without overpowering the mood Colan was able to set. It was probably the best work by all three.

As I read the Essentials, I'm struck by just how much story they were able to cram into each comic. Some of the TOD stories take longer to read than many trade paperbacks of Ultimate comics. But then, I'm an old fogey on that end of things, and dislike the "decompressed storytelling" that is all the vogue now.

17:49 / 30.09.04

Indeed. I already railed on about this at great length in some other thread, but it blows me away that people are even willing to buy a lot of contemporary tpbs, given the cost to entertainment value ratio. "Decompression," it seems to me, might be just fine if the expansion meant greater depth, but it doesn't -- as far as I can tell, the reader is usually getting the exact same story that once might have been told in 22 pages, only all...flabbed out. Conversely, a book like ToD only suffers when the creators are trying to do too *much* in a single issue -- and man, I can't remember the last time I saw a new comic that had *that* problem. Not to sound, y'know, all old and shit.

21:18 / 30.09.04

...it blows me away that people are even willing to buy a lot of contemporary tpbs, given the cost to entertainment value ratio.

Indeed...
Average tpb: $15-20, 1.5 hours entertainment (generously).
Average film: $8-10 in theater/$4 rental, 2 hours entertainment.
Average novel: $5-15, 5-20 hours entertainment, depending on length and your reading speed.

If it wasn't for online discount retailers like Amazon.com and Talesofwonder.com, my TP purchases would be limited to the meager selection found at local used bookstores.

That said, I'd still pay full price for the afforementioned Tomb of Dracula volumes. Dense, convoluted, and with artwork that's if anything better in black and white than it was in color.

Another vote also for the previously mentioned Jack Staff: B/W; excellent all around. Motivated me to preorder the upcoming slim, in-color volume 2 sight unseen.

There are a number of other books I'd love to recommend, but hesitate to do so because of the ludicrous prices of the tpbs; The Red Star and Heavy Liquid top the list in that respect. Great books, but priced so high you're unlikely to be all that satisfied with your purchase when you're done reading them. OTOH, if you spot them used at half-price, grab them immediately.

And what the hell, may as well throw in one of the usual suspects here... They're a little pricey too, but the tpbs of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run are entirely worth the cover price. With Swamp Thing, Moore really set the gold standard for the subsequent trend of postmodern updatings of old C-list characters, and rereading this recently I was struck by how well Swamp Thing still holds up against later examples of the genre; I don't think its really been outdone yet. This is really one of the classic runs in all of comics (IMO, of course).

Also worthwhile if you're going there is Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis, which collects the first ten issues of the original Wein/Wrightson run. It's a lot of fun and pretty well-written for its time, and I'd actually recommend reading it ahead of the Moore stuff so you have some idea of what Swamp Thing was before Moore got ahold of him.

08:37 / 01.10.04

If you enjoyed Jack Staff - Try picking up KANE, Paul Grist's cop comic - currently reprinting all the previous material in preparation to continue publication as a series of OGNs...