nikasaur

Comics Extravaganza - Pow Bang Smash!

Recommended Posts

That pic doesn't strike me as particularly Hewletty but I'd have to dig out my Tank Girl collections for the extras to remind myself what his pre-TG stuff looked like

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Talking about BKV, I've just started reading The Private Eye and it's fucking ace. I love the hard back, and the weird printing size too. holding this slightly cumbersome book almost as enjoyable as reading it!

 

Speaking about his most recent sojourns, We Stand On Guard is kinda rubbish. I'm not enjoying it much. Maybe it's really great if your american/Canadian?

 

His other much, much, much better venture is Paper Girls. Hot damn it's pretty good. It also looks like the tits too:

 

PaperGirls_01-1_362_557_s_c1.png

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, as I said above, Paper Girls is great. WSOG was okay, but seemed a little bit like Vaughan was on auto-pilot.

 

Don't know if you realised (there's probably an intro that tells you this!) but Private Eye was originally intended to be digital only, which is why it's 'widescreen'. As (iirc) TheLastBaron pointed out, the same team are doing another digital pwyw creator-owned comic called Barrier right now - go check out the first ish at panelsyndicate.com. I also am enjoying Universe on that site too.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Y - The Last Man is easily one of my favorite comics of all time, so I'm pleased with the current deluge of Vaughan projects. But I think it would be nice to see him do a more grounded story. Paper Girls is really good, the pacing is great and it looks amazing, but I was pretty bummed to realize just how out there it is once again. It kind of feels like he's not confident enough to just write a story about the four girls without also having an epic battle across time and space going on.

This is actually a problem I have with comics in general. Even in the exciting creator owned space everything has this weird, supernatural hook to it or is really over the top genre fiction, like Southern Bastards. Some more restrained and subtle series would be nice.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It depends what you mean/want. There's still a lot of good stuff coming out that's grounded and personal by publishers like Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics or Top Shelf or Pantheon, but I don't know if those types of books are what you're looking for (I'm assuming not).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Don't get me wrong, I really like the comics that Image, Dark Horse etc. put out. And most of the time D&Q & Co. are exactly what I'm looking for. But I wish there was kind of a middle ground as well. Ongoing series that get by without fantastical or extreme premises.

 

That said, recently I was really impressed with Zero and how much I enjoyed it. After being disappointed by the first two issues following all the hype, somehow it really got me plowing trough it around issue five. Then it got really heady all of a sudden, but still totally fascinating mainly because it was so unexpected and not at all clear where it was going.

 

I even started Kots' Winter Soldier run after reading in an interview that this, Zero and his Secret Avengers run all deal with the same topics and themes from different angles. Even though many of the things he says are not necessarily my cup of tea, it's nice to have such a unique voice doing comics for the likes of Marvel while still pushing his vision.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This is actually a problem I have with comics in general. Even in the exciting creator owned space everything has this weird, supernatural hook to it or is really over the top genre fiction, like Southern Bastards. Some more restrained and subtle series would be nice.

Not really, you just need to look at different places.

Japan and Europe have been doing what you're asking for for years. The same goes with the comics underground here in the states.

May I recommend Pope Hats, Optic Nerve, Crickets, Generous Bosom, Sam Arden, Windowpane, Blindspot, Blammo.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I want every comic from here:

http://www.breakdownpress.com/

 

UGH! Why must they be pricey?! 

 

I was able to get this from Amazon:

 

http://www.breakdownpress.com/store/ding-dong-circus

 

EDIT:
I'm currently reading Rosalie Lightning which deals with the random and rapid lose of a 1 year old child. 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Rosalie-Lightning-A-Graphic-Memoir/dp/1250049946

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Don't get me wrong, I really like the comics that Image, Dark Horse etc. put out. And most of the time D&Q & Co. are exactly what I'm looking for. But I wish there was kind of a middle ground as well. Ongoing series that get by without fantastical or extreme premises.

 

That said, recently I was really impressed with Zero and how much I enjoyed it. After being disappointed by the first two issues following all the hype, somehow it really got me plowing trough it around issue five. Then it got really heady all of a sudden, but still totally fascinating mainly because it was so unexpected and not at all clear where it was going.

 

I even started Kots' Winter Soldier run after reading in an interview that this, Zero and his Secret Avengers run all deal with the same topics and themes from different angles. Even though many of the things he says are not necessarily my cup of tea, it's nice to have such a unique voice doing comics for the likes of Marvel while still pushing his vision.

 

I think some of Boom's stuff should satisfy this. John Allison's Giant Days is a pretty down to earth "first year at college" kind of story, from what I've heard. There's also Archie (I'm serious about that - one of the mainstays of American comics is completely down to earth.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I bought some comic books after a long stretch of not reading any (except for slowly going through the Hellboy Library Editions I bought a long time ago). I'm currently reading Bitch Planet Vol. 1 and enjoying it quite a bit. I also bought The Wicked + The Divine and The Fade Out volumes 1.

 

Now that Amazon acquired comiXology, I was able to transfer my Kindle purchases over to comiXology. I'm reading the comics on my Nexus 7 and I quite like the Guided View feature. It's not perfect of course, but I prefer it to manually zooming in on the panels and rotating my tablet on two-page layouts. Plus, the transitions between the panels feel quite natural because of all the movies/tv-shows/games where reading comics is presented in that way (which is quite weird actually).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Oh shit! Conor Stechschulte (an up-and-coming cartoonist) is selling Generous Bosom at his store. You no longer have to go through Breakdown Press and pay the pricey international shipping. I HIGHLY recommend y'all get on this.

http://crepusculararchives.storenvy.com/

Re-reading BPRD and man, the Mignola/Arcudi/Davis era is solid. They're on-point with the story and the art. Everything Mignola has been working on since hellboy is slowly and creepily being parsed out through the different small (which are like 4-5 issues long and they don't overstay their welcome) arcs.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hey, I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'm curious.  Does anyone have any sports stories in American or European comics that are standout?  In particular something more relational, rather than just a testosterone fueled rise to the top (although those are fun too sometimes).

I have a deep abiding love for Mitsuru Adachi's work, which are light hearted coming of age romance stories surrounding sports.  I've never heard of or seen any interesting sports stories in western comics, and I'm curious if there's something I'm missing, or it's a genre pretty unique to manga.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There are things like The Golem's Mighty Swing by James Sturm which is about a Jewish baseball team, or Essex County by Jeff Lemire which had a lot of hockey going on especially in the second act. Or Southern Bastards by Jason Aaron which is about football kind of, but like Essex County it's really more of a character piece than a sports piece. As far as regular serialized weekly/monthly stories about sports I don't know of any, those types of books existed for sure, but not for a while.

The Comics Journal did an interview a few days ago with Sloane Leong about sports and comics, I found it to be an interesting read.

http://www.tcj.com/discussing-sports-and-comics-with-sloane-leong/

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'll be sure to check out some of the ones you recommended, and the article with Sloane Leong talks about a lot of the elements I was curious about.  I'll definitely be following Maps to the Suns now.  The article in particular is a great read, thank you!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ok so i was sorting some old spectrum games today when i randomly decided to open one of them & look inside the case

Just to answer this real quick, that's him. Well at least I think it's him, going by the eyebrows. Jamie Hewlett used to do a lot of illustrations for UK computer game magazines in the latter half of the 80s. Phillip Bond (another artist from their Deadline magazine collective) used to do a lot of the same magazines though so it's possible it could actually be Phillip, as it sort of also looks like his work because the early styles of the two often look similar to me.

 

Since I was a little boy back then and not a commodore user, I only know this because I spent a couple of years a while back collecting issues of Commodore User on ebay.co.uk because Alan Martin posted a page of Hewlett's "Groovy Arcade Stories" on some blog (which appears to be deleted) which is some long lost cyberpunk sort of comic with a not-Tank-Girl that was collected sporadically for a few years. Not sure if there's any kind of definitive list in what issues they appeared in online since looking it up just brings up me blabbing on some Gorillaz forums asking about them. Besides that though he did a lot of spot B/W illustrations for the magazine.

 

But if you go by the 1987 illustration from their self published zine Atom Tan (That oh god I wish I could own) being the first "thing" none of these are pre Tank Girl, but a lot of these computer game magazine gigs were concurrent with the first few Tank Girls stories and the development of Deadline Magazine.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I have two comics coming in this week: Goodnight punpun by Inio Asano and 5,000 Kilometers Per Second by Manuele Fior

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now