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I noticed that no one has recommended any webcomics yet, so I'm going to fix that.

Hell, I'll throw some in too.

Achewood

Questionable Content

Dinosaur Comics (qwantz.com)

A Softer World

and, of course,

Cyanide & Happiness.

Also, on the superhero tip, I just finished the first TPB of Ultimate Spider-Man and I thought it was amazing.

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I thought the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was great, the second was so-so, and the last was absolutely abysmal. Recently at the bookstore I saw that there's a fourth one, does anyone know if it's any good?

Ooh, got to disagree with you there. I thought the first two LoEGs were equally fantastic (the second one perhaps having a slight edge) and The Black Dossier (which isn't intended to be "the third story", but just Moore's take on those "source books" that were once a comic staple) was amazing -- but it's intended to be a "source book", not a story.

The "fourth one" (actually the third story), Century, is interesting... It's three separate stories that come together to form one larger story. The first volume has been released (1910) and volume two (1968) is due next year. I'm not completely convinced by it, however. It certainly left an impression on me, and the artwork is fantastic, but I found the plot to be non-existent and the characters somewhat ill-defined (the latter being extremely unusual for Moore). I still don't quite know what to make of it.

Jess Nevins's Annotations are somewhat useful for increasing enjoyment of the LoEG series, too.

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I'm so much of a Moore fan I even own the box set of Lost Girls (wiki link sans images, a Google search will be NSFW because the comic contains Alice, Wendy and Dorothy goin' at it) so my opinions on comics might be suspect.

I go for non-traditional comics (except Booster Gold, which I recommend only if you're comfortable with time-travel and familiar with Superboy punching the multiverse) and in that vein, I'd suggest:

Fables, and/or Jack of Fables

Drew Weing's Journal Comic

Edited by subbes
I also recommend I learn how to use BBCode

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Lost Girls was excellent. It was precisely what it was set out to be: Artistic, beautiful pornography that caters for both men and women. The people I've spoken to who didn't like it always seem to complain about the "lack of story"... as if it was supposed to be a dense tome or something. Very bizarre.

Yes, you're supposed to read it when you're feeling horny, not when you want to be intellectually challenged. It boggles my mind that people need that explaining to them.

Moore and Gebbie's success comes from creating characters that are actually three-dimensional people who can also, plausibly, engage in sexual acts at the drop of a hat without being stripped of their personalities. Most porn does precisely the opposite: Badly devised characters, in absurd situations, who are immediately stripped of any and all personality the second their clothes come off. Aka, soulless, horrible affairs.

As Moore put it:

Well, Melinda [Gebbie] and I have had 16 years to talk about this, and I think our position is pretty solid. If we're serious about this stuff, and we are, we have to be prepared to defend it. One of the reasons we started this was because we were sick of the approach to sex in the culture. It seemed to us unhealthy, unproductive, and unbeautiful. In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.

I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful. It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place—quite hardcore pornography—but they do not have anywhere the incidence of sex crimes. Particularly not the sex crimes against children that we suffer from in Britain, and that I believe you suffer from in the United States. It seems at least potentially that pornography might be providing an essential pressure valve in those countries, which we do not have access to here. Rather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we're driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters. Things that cross the line between the kind of pornography Melinda and I are doing, which only occurs in the realm of the mind, to the very unpleasant things that can occur in real life.

My copy is signed by them both :)

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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Ooh, got to disagree with you there. I thought the first two LoEGs were equally fantastic (the second one perhaps having a slight edge) and The Black Dossier (which isn't intended to be "the third story", but just Moore's take on those "source books" that were once a comic staple) was amazing -- but it's intended to be a "source book", not a story.

The Black Dossier may have been intended to be a source book, but it didn't turn out as one. I'll grant you there is source materials inside (all of which is impenetrably dense), but the majority of the book is dedicated to a story about Quatermain and Murray running to and from god knows where, with the titular dossier.

However regardless of whether or not it is a comic or a source book, the fact of the matter is that I am now far less interested in the world of the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, than I would have been had I never been subjected to the Black Dossier. For my money, Moore more to harm his franchise in his volume than the almost universally panned movie could ever hope to attempt.

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I noticed that no one has recommended any webcomics yet, so I'm going to fix that.

It's not at ALL serious or anything, but I love Sinfest. It's hilarious.

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Over the past couple days I've read the first two trade paperbacks of Ultimate Spider-Man and loved them. I'm also getting into the relaunched Ultimates series (namely spidey and avengers) See...they did one of those crazy things comic book companies do, where they relaunch a story all of a sudden. The old Ultimate Spider-man, X-Men etc... are now considered complete and were under an imprint that's now referred to as Ultimate Marvel. Now, for these new series, they've created an imprint called Ultimate Comics. Basically, it's because there was a huge cataclysm where a tidal wave destroyed a large part of New York and other stuff happened...so now everyone is picking up the pieces, including the superheroes.

So, I was lucky enough to get into comics when a few series that interest me were just starting. There's only two issues of each of the Ultimate Comics series at this point, so I'm all caught up.

Everybody made a lot of highbrow, promising suggestions...but I end up reading fanboy stuff (sorry guys) I will get to your recommendations. In fact...momentarily, I'm going to start reading WE 3 by Grant Morrison on the toilet. I don't think anybody mentioned that book, but I know Grant is considered one of the better writers in comics. Also...I have Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth by Chris Ware, but I never finished reading it. Hopefully I can plow through that soon too. I'm going to try and at least look further into everything that people mentioned...but there's just so much out there...so it will be a while before I check it all off the list.

So...I guess if I really enjoy Spider-Man...I'm into very mainstream superhero stuff in addition to my finicky criteria from earlier. So, what do you guys consider the best reading in terms of superhero stuff...no qualifiers except for the fact that I'm thinking mostly DC and Marvel. You know, characters that have been around for a while.

Planet Hulk looks really good. Did anyone read it?

What about Ultimate Fantastic Four?

Spider Man Legend (or whatever) by Todd McFarlane (sp?)

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Furthermore, (yes, I'm double posting...I figure if I had one post that was too long, no one would read it) something interesting has occurred to me about comics. They are the perfect medium for sci-fi and superhero stories. Because if I have to explain what Captain America looks like in a novel, it will be so much more apparent how goofy it is...because you're moving at a slower pace and figuring out in your imagination what this stuff actually looks like. And film is also not ideal, because the kind of movies that are made about these subjects usually cost a shit ton of money to make, which always just makes everything about them seem pretty unnecessary. But comics are humble.

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Over the past couple days I've read the first two trade paperbacks of Ultimate Spider-Man and loved them. I'm also getting into the relaunched Ultimates series (namely spidey and avengers) See...they did one of those crazy things comic book companies do, where they relaunch a story all of a sudden. The old Ultimate Spider-man, X-Men etc... are now considered complete and were under an imprint that's now referred to as Ultimate Marvel. Now, for these new series, they've created an imprint called Ultimate Comics. Basically, it's because there was a huge cataclysm where a tidal wave destroyed a large part of New York and other stuff happened...so now everyone is picking up the pieces, including the superheroes.

So, I was lucky enough to get into comics when a few series that interest me were just starting. There's only two issues of each of the Ultimate Comics series at this point, so I'm all caught up.

Ultimate spider-man was awesome, I only read the original run of them (origin story) but yeah.

With other comics I used to read a hell of a lot, mostly star wars ones (the KotOR and other ones set in the distant past being my favourites). More recently I have read Sam and max hit the road (get it), bone books 1-3 (very good) and angel: after the fall (fans only).

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Heh. Me too. Is it on an insert?

Not sure what that means... I got them to sign inside the book when I saw them talk with Stuart Lee in London. (Where you there?)

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Not sure what that means... I got them to sign inside the book when I saw them talk with Stuart Lee in London. (Where you there?)

Oh I see. I got a numbered copy that was signed. On an insert though.

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Oh I see. I got a numbered copy that was signed. On an insert though.

Oh really? That's a bit sucky... was it a Lost Girls themed insert? I guess, come to think of it, that that's the only way they could do it, though.

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Yeh, it's an illustrated page of the three girls signed by moore and gebbie. Three colour hardback volumes in a box.

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Furthermore, (yes, I'm double posting...I figure if I had one post that was too long, no one would read it) something interesting has occurred to me about comics. They are the perfect medium for sci-fi and superhero stories. Because if I have to explain what Captain America looks like in a novel, it will be so much more apparent how goofy it is...because you're moving at a slower pace and figuring out in your imagination what this stuff actually looks like. And film is also not ideal, because the kind of movies that are made about these subjects usually cost a shit ton of money to make, which always just makes everything about them seem pretty unnecessary. But comics are humble.

I don't know about that, for one thing, there's animation, some of the best super hero stories I've ever experiences have been cartoons. and its certainly possible to have super heroes that don't have rediculous outfits that would be embarrassing to describe in print, for instance the Shadow was a long running super hero radio franchise.

There's nothing particular about comics that make them work better for superheroes. It's just that American comics have been wrapped up so completely in super heroes that we've come to associate conceits created to make the superhero genre fit into the comic medium with super heroes themselves.

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I don't know about that, for one thing, there's animation, some of the best super hero stories I've ever experiences have been cartoons. and its certainly possible to have super heroes that don't have rediculous outfits that would be embarrassing to describe in print, for instance the Shadow was a long running super hero radio franchise.

There's nothing particular about comics that make them work better for superheroes. It's just that American comics have been wrapped up so completely in super heroes that we've come to associate conceits created to make the superhero genre fit into the comic medium with super heroes themselves.

I forgot about cartoons.

As far as there being nothing in particular that makes comics a superior medium for superheroes...well, there's nothing in particular about anything that makes anything anything. All ascribed characteristics are arbitrary, so there's no sense arguing about them in terms of absolutes (which, of course, you're doing when you say there's nothing about comics that's more suited to superheroes than other mediums)

It is true that mediums are supposed to be a means of conveyance and not of categorization, so you do have a point. Any idea should be suited to any medium. So perhaps I should say, "I, personally, have been most affected by superheroes when experiencing them through comics. At least, insofar as I can comprehend my own experience and convert it into shared language to be communicated to other lifeforms."

Edit: I just looked back and realized that I called comics "perfect" medium for superheroes, which is, of course, unfairly speaking in absolutes. And I know, my statements here are full of holes, philosophically speaking...but none of the above is meant to be taken seriously.

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Don't get too attached to the Ultimates, it goes to shit pretty quickly after the second or third TPB (if I remember correctly...).

People seem to be divided over Planet Hulk, but I liked it. The way it's tied into the events of Civil War and seeing everyone sorta backed into a corner when it comes down to figuring out what to do with this walking wrecking ball is pretty interesting.

We3 is excellent and illustrated by Frank Quitely, so if you like it then that's just one more reason to check out All-Star Superman (same creative team, seriously, I'll keep suggesting this to you until I die :deranged:).

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All-Star Superman (same creative team, seriously, I'll keep suggesting this to you until I die :deranged:).

Ok. I'll seriously consider buying the first trade today (I'm heading to the shop anyway, later on...) What went wrong with the Ultimates? and what would you suggest instead for spiderman TPBs?

Has anyone read any of The Phantom?

Also: This Exists: http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/comics.htm

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Don't get too attached to the Ultimates, it goes to shit pretty quickly after the second or third TPB (if I remember correctly...).

Good grief, I barely made it through the first TPB.

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Good grief, I barely made it through the first TPB.

I can see why those would be divisive. Or why you would be turned off at first. I got the first TPB of Ult. Spidey from the library...so I figured I might as well read it for free; It's not like comics take a long time to read. At first, the hokey dialogue bugged me a little, but the pacing is really good so it quickly became a page-turner for me.

Shakes, I looked at All Star Superman, it looks great. I didn't buy it, because my comic money is tied up in Ultimate Spiderman for the moment...but it looks really unusual and interesting, so I'll definitely get to it. I may stick exclusively to Marvel stuff for a little bit, just so I can get a feel for that universe before I move on to DC. I'm very interested in reading Identity Crisis, Crisis on Infinite Earths, 52 and Kingdom Come, as well as a bunch of Batman stuff, so I will get to DC...but I think it's probably best not to mix between the two, because it seems that a lot of the enjoyment of superhero comics comes out of familiarity with the IP...so I don't want to get myself confused by jumping all over the place.

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I can see why those would be divisive. Or why you would be turned off at first. I got the first TPB of Ult. Spidey from the library...so I figured I might as well read it for free; It's not like comics take a long time to read. At first, the hokey dialogue bugged me a little, but the pacing is really good so it quickly became a page-turner for me.

I have a friend who loves a lot of the "Ultimate" stuff, but I felt that Millar's writing in The Ultimates itself was so heavy-handed that I stopped being interested in them. I'm sure there's some good stuff there.

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I have a friend who loves a lot of the "Ultimate" stuff, but I felt that Millar's writing in The Ultimates itself was so heavy-handed that I stopped being interested in them. I'm sure there's some good stuff there.

This is the reason why I've not checked out The Ultimates yet. I've read quite a bit of Millar (Civil War, Kick-Ass, 1985, Wanted), and I've only found myself liking Superman: Red Son, which somehow manages to get away from his heavy-handedness (or at least his broad ideas and posturing fit that alternate Super Cold War story).

Hey, comics! Already a huge amount of great stuff here.

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One thing about Ultimate Spider-Man is that there's a lot of stale pop culture references. One of the employees of the Daily Bugle says "this story has more holes than the plot of a Michael Bay movie."

And Kraven the Hunter is a reality tv star in the ultimate continuity; he's like a parody of Steve Urwin. That concept was probably pretty interesting back in 2001, when the story was written and reality tv was a hot topic for social commentary, but now it's more like when I was reading Don Delillo's White Noise and thinking, "this is so dated. I barely know anyone who even watches much tv."

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