Graphic Novels/Comic Books

[kanafani]

In the past year or so I've read a number of graphic novels/comic books, something that I've not really done since childhood.

I need recommendations from the SCFZ peeps! What should I read next?

Some of the ones I've enjoyed a lot:
Palomar - Hernández
Locas - the other Hernández
Uzumaki - Ito
Alan Moore stuff
...

[greennui]

Vagabond (Takehiko Inoue) - Must read if you're into samurai cinema.
Vinland Saga (Makoto Yukimura) - Very nice especially if you're into the Viking period of European history.
Berserk (Kentaro Miura) - Monumental, dark, dark fantasy.

[MrCarmady]

pretty basic but have you read drnaso's sabrina or tomine's killing and dying? my flatmate is a big comic book fan, my knowledge is limited but i liked those two. he also swears by this series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arab_of_the_Future , would be interesting to see what you make of it / whether the middle eastern stuff resonates

[Holymanm]

Rick Veitch - Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset
Will Eisner - The Spirit Archives (Vol. 1 - infinity)

More and more Moore stuff (Top 10, Tom Strong, etc). I'm sure you've already heard about Sandman, Preacher, etc. - may or may not be interesting, if you're interested in it. And there's an enormous world of superhero stuff, of course, if you're open to it.

[nrh]

love & rockets, especially the beto stuff, is probably my favorite comics series of all time.

second would probably be corto maltese, hugo pratt's odd literary adventure comic of sorts.

one cartoonist i always recommend is taiyo matsumoto, who works somewhat on the outskirts of the japanese mainstream. my favorite of his books might be ping pong, a kind of inverted underdog sports story that really becomes about failure and personal weakness as much as triumph. sunny, a somewhat autobiographical story of kids in a foster home, is very beautiful and fully removed from genre. his samurai comic bamboo samurai is on kg in a scan, and also highly recommended.

if you liked the drawing in from hell eddie campbell's long solo series bacchus, a kind of melancholy travelogue about the greek god, is highly recommended.

i saw you were reading or re-reading some tintin, so might recommend the freddy lombard stories by yves chaland, a kind of evil reworking of herge's clean line (the comet of carthage especially is some kind of masterpiece).

[Holymanm]

ping pong

manga, anime, and live action movie are all great!

[Lencho of the Apes]

I'd suggest you look at some Grant Morrison, especially his early stuff. Animal Man, Doom Patrol... but you might have the same misgivings about him as you have about Ruiz.

[kanafani]

Thanks everyone for the recs! And keep them coming plz.

[...]

I have a great fondness for Ben Katchor's work, which used to run in the Village Voice and other weeklys and is collected in a books like Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, The Jew of New York, The Cardboard Valise and some others. I also quite like Chris Ware's work Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Boy on Earth being his most frequently noted work, but as the graphic element is so central to Ware's appeal the way the stories were originally packaged in books of various sizes and shapes, with all sorts of added design elements involved is an important part of the experience.

Guy Delisle's pretty good, his book Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea being the best of his work I've read. It's kind of a graphic reportage/interpretation of his actual visit to North Korea than anything fantastic.

I also Mike Mignola's work a lot. He created the Hellboy universe, which also has a BPRD series as a part of it. The movies don't capture the best elements of his work at all, which are in the tone and look of the stories, where the fantastic elements hold better as reaching towards something archaic and uncanny in the best way, not the glib modern mass market approach the movies take.

James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems was well worth reading, and Sturm's other books look good too.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Persepolic by Marjane Satrapi, Stitches: A Memoir by David Small, The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon, Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lute, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography By Chester Brown, A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi were pleasing and maybe glance at anything by Charles Burns, Daniel Clowe, Moebius, and Jack Kirby to see if it grabs you with its look.

Not a graphic novel exactly, but Kate Beaton's comic Hark a Vagrant is pretty great. Online, Andrew Hussie's massive Homestuck caught my interest for a long while, though probably better to start with his shorter Problem Sleuth adventure to see if the tone works for you.

I have a taste for some manga that might not translate to others all that well, like Drops of God and Summit of the Gods, where the central premise of the story bends the world the stories are set in to it in an absurd fashion, from the point of realism. In Drops of God, for example, the story is about the son of the greatest wine taster in the world who has the same gifts as his father but chose to walk away from wine tasting to pursue other interests. His father died leaving a will that gives his estate to the person who can best carry on his legacy of wine tasting by solving a series of wine tasting "riddles", either his son or his adopted protege. Essentially every person the son runs into is somehow deeply invested in wine tasting, no matter how bizarre the possible connection, like the homeless guy he runs into who happens to have a collection of rare wines and so on. The Summit of the Gods is kinda like that, but about mountain climbing, where the universe of the book bends to the importance of climbing. That structure amuses me, but isn't gonna work for everyone.

I liked the comic series Prophet for how well it manages to actually invoke a sense of the alien in an outer space story and enjoyed the series Chew for its humor and structure. Locke and Key was diverting enough to find enjoyable, We3 likewise if you can deal with the distanced sentimentalism its story of a dangerous adventure of three would-be pets undertake unavoidably draws on. And for superhero-ish stuff I liked the Starman omnibus, but in part because of its meta references to the DC universe and how it was read over time, Runaways was fine storytelling on the edge of the Marvel universe that doesn't require very much knowledge of other comics to get through, though not without some problematic elements in how it plays out, and the Matt Fraction run of Hawkeye was a nice mix of art and storytelling.

There's more, but lot's of the titles elude me now as my comic/graphic novel binge was a few years back and starting to fade from memory a bit. (As a connection to the SCFZ history thread, Matt Parks really knew this stuff.)

[nrh]

I have a great fondness for Ben Katchor's work, which used to run in the Village Voice and other weeklys and is collected in a books like Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, The Jew of New York, The Cardboard Valise and some others.

ben katchor is one of my very favorite writers in any medium or genre. the jew of new york and cardboard valise are more sustained novels, beauty supply district, cheap novelties and julius knipl real estate photographer are scattered strips about a kind of vanished version of new york and are the ones i love the best. hand washing in america is newer work, large one page stories instead of classic horizontal newspaper strips, and in full color instead of ink washed black and white; it's very good but not sure i'd suggest it as an introduction unless the form itself is just more appealing.

[...]

ben katchor is one of my very favorite writers in any medium or genre. the jew of new york and cardboard valise are more sustained novels, beauty supply district, cheap novelties and julius knipl real estate photographer are scattered strips about a kind of vanished version of new york and are the ones i love the best.

I agree with every word of that.

[nrh]

also want to put second greg's hellboy rec with some big caveats - it essentially starts out as a series called hellboy for mignola to use as a writer/artist showcase, a mix of light serialized stories and a lot of short horror stories (kind of like a mix of lovecraft horror stuff and folk horror and pulp action comics, but the action kept to a very small scale, not like the movies at all), mostly notable due to mignola's great design work.

as it goes on the series becomes both more continuity heavy and more abstracted, with mignola handing off drawing to other artists like the great underground cartoonist from the '70s richard corben and the underrated british artist duncan fegredo.

what makes it hard is that at some point he starts to spin off into a ton of other side series, most importantly bprd which is a kind of more action horror squad book (drawn by the great guy davis for the first run, increasingly written by john arcudi, and might be even better than the hellboy series), but also a ton of other miniseries. so it gets kind of hard to figure out what kind of commitment you're getting into...like you can read the long bprd story plauge of frogs as its own thing but figuring out where to jump in to the various hellboy stuff can be a little confusing.

the early grant morrison stuff lencho suggested i find harder to recommend.

animal man is basically dc hoping to get another alan moore swamp thing out of a young british writer, and the early work has a ton of moore hangover (especially the portentous narration), but the series is actually helped by chas truog being the most boring solid cartoonist of all time, and it creates this really quotidian suburban base line that makes it far more moving when morrison starts getting metaphysical later on. i like it a good deal but i've had people tell me the very '80s dc house style art is so unappealing to them they just can't deal with it.

doom patrol is the weird '50s pulp superhero team fighting against of goofy surrealist villains that more or less end up being nasty reflections of thatcherite/reaganist cultural convervatism. some very interesting attempts at reflecting queer experience and trauma that seem a little iffy around the edges but were actually pretty bold in their context, and the longing for a genuine countercultural space is still very moving. the highs (flex mentallo, the man of muscle mystery, vs the secrets under the pentagon!) are very good. helps he has great art throughout, mostly by richard case. and i think you can read it in some ways as an argument against alan moore's watchmen, arguing for a future for the superhero genre that lies in reclamation of the forgotten past.

after that things get a little iffy...

i've actually never read his long 2000ad series zentih, which has been described to me as self-consciously pop miracleman, but i have pdfs of the whole thing if you're interested.

[Lencho of the Apes]

I've never read much Hellboy related stuff, but as a footnote I'd like to mention The Goon, by Eric Powell, where I find a lot of the things people upthread are praising Mignola for.

[kanafani]

ping pong was alright. I read the 500+ page omnibus, but it went by very quickly. In fact maybe I should have read it a little slower. The impact did not register fully. I can see how someone can make an awesome sports movie/series out of it though.

I’m already on my third Corte Maltese book. I’m reading them on my screen, which kind of sucks, but boy are the drawings gorgeous. I think someone had started a thread about high seas novel recommendations sometime ago. This series qualifies.

[Holymanm]

The anime series adaptation (by *famed director* Masaaki Yuasa) is as good and wonderfully inventively animated as it possibly could have been, and probably better than the manga. Maybe give it a while to let the story recede in your mind, but I would recommend the series at some point.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Just as a very random rec, I'd like to put in a plug for George Carlson, who did his best work between 1942 and 1949. Like nothing else I know of, but if you can imagine Fleischer studios doing an adaptation of Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, you'll be on the right track. Here's a representative story, GregX in particular will love it, if he doesn't already.

http://www.bigblogcomics.com/2012/10/ge ... -1945.html

[MrCarmady]

Read this in one sitting, fun homage to Queneau:

https://mattmadden.com/comics/99x/