What comic books/graphic novels are you reading at the moment?

[alexvss]

No Longer Human. The story of a famous Japanese writer who committed suicide, told by Junji Ito. Based on the novel of the same name.

Ito is a master of Horror, so much so that he can turn anything, no matter how mundane, into dreadful things. This may be, with the exception of his cat and dog diaries, and Rasputin, his most “normal” story. But it is as terrifying as his most Eldritch works. And it all comes down to his drawings.

Strongly Recommended.

 

[Culhwch]

I have a bunch of e-graphic novels I have picked up through Humble Bundles or cheap on Comixology, and I've started finally wading though them.

Today was Southern Bastards Vol. 1, by the Jasons Aaron and Latour. I will say I'm not a huge fan of the dirty, gritty, sketchy art style, but it does work here, for the story that the pair are telling. Kind of Reacher by way of Friday Night Lights. Really engaging, simple story-telling, with an unexpected ending.

Spoiler: Ending

It actually really bummed me out, I really wasn't prepared for how bleak it was. I finished it on the train on the way home from work tonight and I just kind of sat there for a minute processing it, possibly with my jaw slightly dropped....

 

[Culhwch]

I finished Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley today. I read the Fantastic Four version of this recently, but I much preferred this one - even though I'm not generally a big fan of Spidey in his own titles.

The concept is simple - what if Spider-Man had actually aged throughout the eras he's swung through as a teen or twenty-something? It visits all the big stops on the way - Goblin, Doc Ock, Gwen, MJ, the Clone Saga, Secret Wars, Civil War, and more. And in the end surprisingly moving.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Prompted by a mention hereabouts on another thread of Kirby's Fourth World books at DC I realised I hadn't read my copy of OMAC for a while. It's such an odd comic. Really weirdly crypto-fascistic and totalitarian and liberal egalitarianism in equal measure with Kirby at his most show AND tell. Every page's super-science Kapow! action is described in word bubbles and captions in each panel. And it contains one of the best lines in comic history when, in issue 2, OMAC, who we have been told is dead, is revived, sits up, and says, "It's great to be alive again---".

I think it's probably my favourite Kirby and a pity that it was cancelled so quickly. Things were just getting interesting and it ended in mid adventure with OMAC de-OMACed and reverted to his dweeby former self and the wonderfully creepy weird Doctor Skuba in the middle of stealing the world's oceans.

My self-bound copy of the whole run:

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

Last year I discovered the Astro City Metrobook volumes. The first volume was one of the best superhero comics I'd read in a long time. Since then I've been reading the series slowly. Next to get is vol. 4. Many, many years I read and liked Kurt Busiek's Marvels, but aside from that I barely knew his comics. My motivation was to give non-Big Two comics a try.

 

[Rodders]

2000AD: The Helltrekkers.



I've been getting back into one of the architects of my you by way of reading the Judge Dredd and the 2000AD strips. It's been quite wonderful.

Helltrekkers is a story set in the Judge Dredd universe where a convoy of homesteads depart Mega City One to cross the hell that is the Cursed Earth for a better life in the New Territories.

I had kind of merged this with Patrick Tilley's Amtrak Wars in my head, so reading it again after so long has seperated them somewhat.

 

[Chris von shannow]

Dune part one

 

[Chris von shannow]

I have Legend by Gemmell

 

[Rodders]

Tales From The Black Museum



I always adored the 2000AD anthology stories, but I don’t remember these at all. Should be great fun.

 

[Rodders]

FInished Tales From The Black Museum. It was enjoyable enough, but i was expecting more and was a little underwhelmed by it.

Now on to Tharg's Creepy Chronicles.

 

[smellincoffee]

Just finished Dune: Book One, will start Dune: Book Two tonight.

 

[CupofJoe]

I have Legend by Gemmell

As a present I have a copy signed by Gemmell, Nicholls and Fangorn.
I read it once and enjoyed it.
Then put it back very carefully in the Mylar bag and safely onto the book shelf.

 

[Rodders]

Tharg’s Creepy Chronicles.



I kinda like these anthology stories as they’re easy to dip in and out of.

 

[RTGR]

Personally, I don't read comic books anymore. However, I believe the best ones for me were by Neil Gaiman: Constantine, Sandman, The Books of Magic, and Death. I haven't read anything that surpassed his comics, which might be why I stopped reading them.

 

[HareBrain]

Lightfall Book 1: The Girl and the Galdurian by Tim Probert. Impulse buy from a bookshop. Fun, colourful fantasy adventure of the kind that doesn't seem to be that common these days. Nothing groundbreaking, but enough to make me want to carry on and buy the other volumes when I go back to that shop.

 

[HareBrain]

Now bought and read Lightfall Book 2 and 3. I enjoyed the story more and more as it went on. The back cover suggests ages 8-12, but I had no problem finding plenty to like. Though it perhaps didn't quite hit the emotional peaks and chasms you might get in older fiction, it made up for it with colourful imagination, good characterisation, interesting worldbuilding, lively drawing and plenty of humour. The kind of old-skool adventure I've been looking for for ages.

 

[HareBrain]

Tintin: The Blue Lotus
Tintin: The Seven Crystal Balls

These are the only Tintin books I own. I haven't touched them in years but now I want to read all the others. I'd forgotten the Seven Crystal Balls was only the first of a two-parter, which was frustrating. Somewhat annoying was that the translated text tries to make out that it's set in England, even though the policemen wear kepis, everyone drives on the right and Captain Haddock lives in a chateau! Surely even British kids could have coped with it being set across the Channel?

 

[JunkMonkey]

Tintin: The Blue Lotus
Tintin: The Seven Crystal Balls

These are the only Tintin books I own.

Only...? Two...? Does not compute....

If you're going to read them all I would skip the first three: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo, and Tintin in America. They have not dated very well. (Especially Congo which was written at a time when Belgium was in full-on brutal colonialist exploitation mode and Hergé was working for a very Right Wing newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle - Tintin originally appeared as a newspaper strip which was then republished in collected book form - later re-editions were modified to remove some of the more egregious events - like the notorious dynamiting the Rhino sequence - but even then it still makes hard reading these days, nearly 100 years later). Come back to them later and appreciate how Hergé's style and story telling skill (and political viewpoint) developed.

 

[Matteo]

Err...yes, Tintin au Congo has definitely not dated well. The French version still has the exploded rhino, but the school room scene where he teaches about Belgium being the homeland was removed (by Hergé) decades ago.

And there's a paper(!!) about that rhino...http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/128/1285371246.pdf

 

[JunkMonkey]

Err...yes, Tintin au Congo has definitely not dated well. The French version still has the exploded rhino, but the school room scene where he teaches about Belgium being the homeland was removed (by Hergé) decades ago.

And there's a paper(!!) about that rhino...http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/128/1285371246.pdf

Jings! I hadn't realised the Rhino bit was still in contemporary French versions. My copy dates from 1982 (not 1974 as I had thought - curse the French for hiding their actual printing dates at the back of the book not in the front matter with the copyright date).

meanwhile I have been mostly reading old Spirous, Godard and Ribera's Vagabonde des limbes

And a stonkingly awful example of self-published 1980 comic book madness. It's a British, 64 page masterwork called 'Enigma : The Visual Novel" in which a spandex-clad Wiccan super-heroine fights the Powers of Evil and its endless supply of Ninja goons as they try to gain control of the dark side of the Force Wiccan Earth Spirit.


Unlike a like a regular comic book it's 32 sheets of A4 paper stapled through the edge. On the obligatory, inside front cover, typewritten, intro page we learn that this was originally a three book series but when he came to publish this anthology the author decided to "re-draw a sizable (sic) number of pages, re -work other panels and sequences to improve the quality of the presentation" the result, he hoped was "a vast improvement on the original version of the saga".

I hate to think what the first iteration looked like.

It is also probably one of the few self-published (non-erotic) superhero comics to have a representation of a woman holding open her vagina on the front cover. Because that is what that McGuffin earth mother figurine is doing in the middle there.