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I don't know that on-going or perpetually serialized characters/settings really make it a better read, or anything, though. I'm quite fond of Moto Hagio's work, especially 'A, A'' (alternately, 'A, A [prime]') which is sort of romance and trauma in space, while exploring things like gender, sexuality, cloning and genetic engineering, long-distance space exploration, and the problems with trying to force someone to be someone they might've aged into, but haven't.
Likewise, while difficult (for us not-able-to-read-Japanese-comfortably types) to get ahold of, Leiji Matsumoto's space stuff is right up my alley. The online serialization, while it lasted and was somewhere I could find it, of his retelling of the Ring Cycle in space, with his stock characters, was just terribly fun.
Adam Warren's 'Dirty Pair' stuff is good, perverse entertainment of the high order. There's enough cheesecake and actual witty-bits to satisfy multiple markets simultaneously.
'Alien vs Predator' at least, the one on that ranching planet, was short, sweet, and a helluva great lot superior to the movie.
'Ghost in the Shell' was very cool; it's sequel was very cooler. And, ahain, as with the 'Dirty Pair' books, the cheesecake runs high in the second Vol., but, again, to a purpose. Shirow obsessively annotates and comments all over his own comic, with little apologies, explanations of why something is drawn one way even though realistically it would be another, and includes a note about the sexing up of characters as an eye-pull, both in-story, to the protagonist's benefit, and to keep the reader a little distracted while all this philosophy and consideration and esoterica is pumped through their optic nerve and straight up into parts of their brain where it'll never be entirely shaken loose.
I haven't read 'Sky Angel', but I have a friend who insists on its greatness. She's usually got at least partway decent tastes, so I'll vouch, sight unseen, that it probably at least deserves an in-store skimming.
Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' was SF. It was, too. And a lovely horrifying cracked-mirror slash-and-burn-your-life-away comic it was. Which, has now totally ended, so you can read the whole thing.
And, y'know, Ellis' Apparat books and 'Transmetropolitan', Morrison's 'We3' and 'The Filth' and 'The Invisibles' (author considers magick real? Then it's science. Science fiction or fantasy, but still, science) and parts of Moore's 'Tomorrow Stories' antho series would all count. Because they were all pretty good or better.
What was the Ennis thing with the nun with the gun? Helix mini. 'Bloody Mary'? That had some interesting bits, or appeared to when I read it when it was first coming out. |
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