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Underground > Comic Books >

The General Recommendations Thread

03:07 / 11.09.05

Rather than start the thread by recommending a specific artist or comic I thought I'd get the ball rolling by recommending Andrew Arnold's column for Time Magazine.

Most online comic sites I've found are poorly written or focus exclusively on superhero comics (or some horrid combination of the two) but Andrew Arnold covers something different every week, from Osamu Tezuka's "Buddha" to The explosion of Japanese comics for girls to A Fresh Look at Porn Comix. His short columns are both interesting and informative and his reviews have prompted me to buy more new works than anyone else over the last year.

19:52 / 11.09.05

Interesting you should have you been reading the reviews on Ninthart.com? I find them particularly interesting in their scope and length, but then again I also occasionally contribute- I'd be interested in seeing what you (and anyone else) makes of their reviews section...

On recommendation tips - I really have shifted over from comics to graphic novels in my reading habits over recent years, a trend that I think both necessary and desirable for comics to adapt to as a whole as it seeks to grow and expand its readership. Which is really just a preamble to me saying i'm going to recommend a graphic novel...

As I've indicated in the past, I find it difficult to just pick one thing to recommend, so i'll start here by saying that Random House are publishing some fantastic stuff under their Pantheon/ Jonathan Cape imprints.

The particular comic I want to talk about here, (chiefly because I was reminded of it in the La Perdida thread) is Gemma Bovery. Originally published a page a week in the British newspaper The Guardian, Bovery mixes straight comic strips with diary and illustrated fiction to create a work that questions assumptions of what a graphic novel is. The story itself is equally ambitious, playing with the notion of retelling Flaubert's Madam Bovery, but giving us something distinctly different. It's a distinctly 'adult' graphic novel in that it plays with issues of marriage, and boredom and adultery and finances and all those other boring/interesting things that (middle-class) adult life is all about. It follows the life (and death) of Gemma, a bored housewife yearning for something more, who convinces her husband to upsticks and move to France and the various consequences of that move.

OK i'm not sure how appealing I'm making this sound so I'll end this short enigmatic sales pitch with this: I can't think of another graphic novel that is really like it, and that alone makes it worth reading, if only for curiosity value...

22:41 / 11.09.05

Yep, stumbled across Arnold's column a while back. Very nice stuff.

I'll steal his thunder a little and recommend OR ELSE, by Kevin Huizenga. Two issues of that to date, through Drawn and Quarterley. I've only got issue one but it's an amazing piece, the main story having a lot in common with what's interesting and challenging about contemporary short fiction and the fragmentary narratives that are often used.

The 'camera' jumps all over the place and Huigenza does that thing that comics do so well by giving you seemingly disparate pictures to accompany dialogue or narrative, the narrative itself jumping back and forth through time in a satisfying way that kind of forces you to concentrate and thus engage with the flow of hte story a little more closely.

There's a lot of - for lack of a better term - magic realism going on there too, and a lot of playing with the comics form. I'm thinking in particular of a one-pager from issue one called "fight or run" which is essentially a wordless fight between two characters' speech bubbles. Amazing stuff. Kevin's site is here, with samples and other assorted bits.

You've also got Artbomb as a good non-supers review resource, there...

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:01 / 11.09.05

"Soldiers" - the collection of the first issues of the Image run of Jack Staff, has just come out, which I intend to revive the thread on shortly. I'd recommend getting the first collection "Everything Used to be Black and White" first, but this is excellent stuff. When you look at it in comparison to, say, Albion, it really shows what you can do with the old British coomic characters without seeming too reverential or losing freshness.

00:38 / 12.09.05

I did try an issue of Jack Staff a while ago - I didn't really understand what was going on and the art seemed a bit crappy, but I'd be happy enough to be disabused of this notion.

I only want to live.

00:51 / 12.09.05

Jack Staff is fantastic, I really want to read the black and white stuff. I take it that it is true that Jack Staff was originally a Union Jack proposal that was foolishly turned down by Marvel editors.

01:02 / 12.09.05

Barbelith Jack Staff Thread. (Has a link to a free 5 page Kane story)

Barbelith Paul Grist (Writer/Artist of Jack Staff and Kane) Thread.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

19:25 / 12.09.05

Best comic I have read in the last month? The Bakers, a series of short strips by Kyle Baker based on his family. Just simple cartooning, gag strips, and autobiographical without of the angst. I LOVED it and felt like shoving a copy in the hands of every person I meet to say "This is good stuff!"

20:13 / 12.09.05

Hmmmmmm 'crappy'... that's not a particularly descriptive term is it?

I find Grist's artwork, clean, simple, iconic even, in a similar style to Marc Hempel's and Grist's work is highly design orientated, an element that altogether too many comics creators neglect... But, you know, YMMV...

But outside of all that, Jack Staff (and to an extend KANE) is also really fun and playful particularly with its dense intertextual British pop-cultural referencing...

20:38 / 12.09.05

Well-timed contest to win black and white Jack Staff trade. Should be easy for people here; just explain in fifty words why Grant Morrison is cool.

Added bonus.

Phex: Dorset Doom

21:05 / 12.09.05

My I take this opportunity to deliver 'mad props' unto:

Ex Machina: A smart comic with smarter politics, great art, believable characters. And it's written by the guy who also does...
Runaways: This is probably the only Marvel book I read regularly. Brian K. Vaughan pulls off pop-culture references and snappy dialogue a lot better here than in the staggeringly inferior Y: The Last Man.
The Walking Dead: There's been a thread about this book, I think, and I think the consensus is that it's Zom-Tastic.
Nightwing (SPOILER WARNING): This has just gone from strength to strength. Dick Grayson is shaping up to be a better Batman than Batman, and now that (SPOILER)Deathstroke knows he's Nightwing(SPOILER) there's going to be a major shake-up. A new Nightwing perhaps?
Seven Soldiers/Infinite Crisis: Obviously.
Queen And Country: It's like Spooks, only good. And it's black and white like Walking Dead.

10:03 / 13.09.05

Beaten to the punch recommending Jack Staff, top stuff. Much better than Albion, Mr Moore shame on you.

Haus of Mystery

10:59 / 13.09.05

Some recent recommendations:

The Project:Superior, and Project:Telstar anthologies, published by Adhouse books, are very fine indeed. Taking a similar approach to DC's Bizarro Comics anthology, they are collections of short pieces united by a theme. In the first (Telstar) it is Robots and Sci-Fi, the second Superheroes. The range of creators they have is refreshing, ranging from the 'well' known (Bernie Mireault, Dean Haspiel, Jeffrey Brown) to those less familair (Simone Lia for example, whose comic 'Fluffy' is self published, heart-rending and well worth your time. Designers are also present, and in the 'Superior' anthology James Jean provides a gorgeous painted 4-pager.
They range from crude slapstick to touching vignettes, and as is often the case with anthologies, vary in quality (although IMO it's of an unusually high standard) The books themselves are things of beauty, intricately designed, thoughtfully put together, eith an eye-catching sense of design. For my money Superior is the better buy, but both are pretty fantastic.