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All Comics All The Time! Current comics and what we're all reading.
DasUberEdward
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This is a lofty idea so feel free to shut it down mods but as this sub forum doesn't see much traffic and the Awesome Moments thread is Awesome but not everything is awesome I was hoping to start a thread about what we're all reading and what is happening in comics now.
We have DC Rebirth and Marvel Legacy along with a slew of amazing comics from other publishers worth reading. Let's talk as a community. Spoiler things within the current month. Everything else is fair game unless it's a big twist.
Example with real spoilers.
Holy crap I can't believe Marvel Legacy brought back
If you read Invincible (which you really should seriously don't click this spoiler if you haven't)
Let's talk about current comics.
We have DC Rebirth and Marvel Legacy along with a slew of amazing comics from other publishers worth reading. Let's talk as a community. Spoiler things within the current month. Everything else is fair game unless it's a big twist.
Example with real spoilers.
Holy crap I can't believe Marvel Legacy brought back
Wolverine
If you read Invincible (which you really should seriously don't click this spoiler if you haven't)
It was a great twist when Omni-Man was set up as a bad guy
Let's talk about current comics.
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Grant Morrison's Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery.
Look, I read the Grant Morrison run of Animal Man. I liked that, it was interesting and well written and tightly wound and it made sense to me.
Flex Mentallo? I had nothing to grip, I can say what happened but I don't know what happened, if it makes any sense.
I don't think I enjoyed it very much.
Gonna go to the library borrow something else, dunno what, tho. Probably gonna try and grab "La Femme Piege" by Enki Bilal, I liked the first one, "La Foire aux Immortels". (The nikopol trilogy, as it is known in English)
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Well, like Flex Mentallo says in the series itself, "being clever is a good thing, but sometimes you have to go outside", paraphrased. Thats always been Morrissons problems, he has all these complex ideas that he puts in without thinking if he SHOULD put them in. The series is supposed to be a metaphysical exploration of fiction and it's creators but... well, it doesnt do it very good. It has a few interesting characters and ideas but overall, it feels like Morrisson trying to be Alan Moore.
Here's Comics Explained doing a run down on the whole bit but gosh it seems unnecessary. I do like that the Venom symbiote has been given more of a story with Flash Thompson and Mac Gargan, heck I even like the Anti-Venom story.
What do you guys think?
I read Flex Mentallo a long time ago, and didn't really understand it and - as a consequence - didn't really like it. I re-read it some years later, and came away with a much more favorable impression. My approach to Grant Morrison's work is that for his more out-there writing, I don't need to understand what is happening with my rational mind, because it's often going to be weird and messy and tangled, not following the straight lines laid down by conventions and tropes; rather, I should just let it wash over me and let my emotions react to it, come away with an impression rather than an understanding. Like... I don't know, "Alice In Wonderland" is a weird, trippy book that isn't very rational, yet still reflects on society and communicates ideas. I feel like Flex Mentallo is cut from a similar cloth.
Anyway, the one thing from Flex Mentallo that made a deep impression on me, that I'm never ever going to forget (and, frankly, that I think maybe changed my own outlook on life a little) is this panel (spoilered for being a bit large):
Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism. Oooof, been there.
I think people apparently liked Spider Island, so this was the logical consequence.
Edit:Also, I have tended to stay away from GV because I have not been very positive on comics lately. I will do my best to keep that out of here.
I dont know, I've found that cynicism is basically the same as experience. Belive the worst about everyone, and you'll usually be right.
Anyway, I don't think any of this is something one can flip a switch and just decide to believe; I think one's own experience will shape one's emotions on the subject. "Believe the worst and be pleasantly surprised when something good happens" seems like an approach that minimizes getting hurt. My own experience has been that ascribing ill intent to others has led to other flavors of getting hurt (like being upset at people when they haven't done anything intentionally wrong).
It's Superboy and Robin teaming up and being kids. Dumb kids trying to use their powers and abilities to git gud like their fathers and doing their cape work after school or on the weekends. What the book does that a lot, a lot of other teen hero books fail at right now is showing them not being super amazing and constantly besting other established heroes. Tomasi is also such an experienced writer he knows not to make the stories this bad fanfic that use heroics by proxy to tell another story entirely and is first and foremost a superhero book, only through the eyes of the new generation. Kid heroes put in kid hero situations, and communicating with their parents who encourage their heroics (...most of the time). I mean look at this, who else is the bestest mom who makes her son a snack for his Friday Night Metropolis patrols? It's delightful and you can't help but smile at this:
More importantly, Super Sons shows them being kids, and not exaggerated everything is awesome kids who teach their parents a lesson a derp, they get put in their place all the time.
Damian carries his usual cockiness but Jon, being just like his dad, has that built-in bullshit detector that knows when to let his partner brag and when to call him on it.
And Damian in return looks to toughen Jon up, because he would never say it outright but he respects Clark much in the same way Dick looked to Clark when he was Robin. You have a perfect example of heart and brain working together as they grow and are now in the grudging respect phase of their team-ups. The first arc dealt with a Kid Amazo while setting the groundwork with each respective family to let them continue to be heroes (although much more in Jon's case since Damian's been doing this so long he's died and resurrected already), and the most recent arc not only had the Teen Titans appear with nice continuity connections but brought back an old school DC villain named Kraklow that essentially used Superboy and Robin as beacons of hope for a whole new world of kid heroes who were fighting against clay putty capes who were empty vessels (a not so subtle jab at Marvel and DC for the past few years).
The art is phenomenal and very consistent, Jorge Jiminez jumped over from Superman to handle this book monthly and in 9 issues has drawn 7.5 of them, which is about the best you can do these days. But man is his work amazingly energetic and fun, Karl Kerschl and Olivier Coipel combined with fantastic coloring. And it's just the little things in his work, I can't see a lot of photo referencing or modeling in his art, everyone is drawn differently and with emotion that conveys the story without even reading the bubbles.
The trade of the first five or six issues should be out now, I highly recommend it for kids and adults. You can't go wrong with this series.
Also recently got Empowered vol. 10, which ended on a cliff-hanger, so now I'm desperately awaiting vol. 11, which is rumored to be out sooner than most volumes have been! Since it's usually a year between books, I hope that's true.
Super Sons does look good, I should try looking into it.
Invincible is a great series, and it's actually building up to its final issue in the next few months. So now is the time to get into it, you can be caught up just in time for the finish!
Venomverse was pretty much a semi-serious spin on the earlier Spiderverse storyline, where everyone was Spider-Man (not to be confused with Spider Island, where everyone was also Spider-Man).
Not exactly parodic, but basically someone going 'hey, remember when everyone was Spider-Man was from across the multiverse? What about if everyone was Venom from across the multiverse?' I did find the villains surprisingly fun, the Poisons (womp womp) are basically little symbiote mini-cons that super-charged Venoms at the cost of killing the host.
Overall I enjoyed it more than Spiderverse, which was super somber and ran way too long. I don't think Venomverse was ever meant to be a huge deal with far reaching ramifications the way they built Spiderverse up to be, it was just a short, fun story about crazy dimension-hopping alien shenanigans.
Completely agree. Damian Wayne and Jonathan Kent work so well together. Like that needs to be a cartoon immediately.
That's why he has chemistry with numerous characters, and his bullshit is so entertaining.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/brian-michael-bendis-leaves-marvel-signs-exclusive-dea-1820213198
I am both shocked and excited as at this point I mostly read DC and indies. Marvel makes great movies though I cannot wait to see what Bendis does to shape the landscape of the DC universe.
I wonder if him writing all the big characters finally took its toll and he got bored. Greener pastures, and all that.
So I got back to reading Ultimate Spider-Man (had read from the start up until just before Miles hung up the suit a while back) through Cataclysm and up to Secret Wars. I liked the team-ups with Jessica Drew, Cloak and Dagger and co in those books but really was not enjoying All-New Ultimates and gave up about halfway through that.
I've previously read bits of the stuff dealing with the Incursions but MU makes reading even the good big events a bit painful (unless I'm missing something?) so I'm thinking of just bypassing it and picking up the story afterwards - would this just be 'Spider-Man' in the post SW universe?
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Started with a Top 10 for Marvel and had seperate ones for DC and Image, but that was a bad idea. So here's a mixed list of my 2017 comics (not including non-American comics) in no particular order. (Some are 2016 comics that released in trade in 2017)
Doom Patrol (DC comics)
Flintstones (DC comics)
Descender (Image Comics)
Black Monday Murders (Image Comics)
Black Panther (Marvel Comics)
My problem with Wakanda has always been the same as with Atlantis, Latveria and many other fictional countries; they usually are a bunch of stereotypes with a single gimmick and never feel like a real country. Priest tried to change this a little, but Coates is doing some real worldbuilding here. Most advanced nation in the world and isolationist don’t go together as history has shown again and again. The man who meditates at the top of a mountain for 10 year to find the meaning of life, will find that he was better served by finding another human being to exchange ideas with. So Wakanda is highly advanced and appears to be isolationist, but that advancement came at a cost to neighbouring nations and Wakanda’s traditions are not as immutable as the Wakandan conservatives pretend it is. This is the lesson T’Challa learns (with some help from his sister): study the past, learn its lessons, but don’t be beholden to it.
Moon Knight (Marvel Comics)
Sunstone (Image Comics)
The Wildstorm (DC Comics)
Seven to Eternity (Image Comics)
Mage: The Hero Denied (Image Comics) (this feels weird, I want to say Comico even though it's been 30 years)
Linda Sejic's webseries Blood Stain was the first one*. Now joined by Swing and Sugar. All four series are published as collections/OGNs instead of in singles like other American comics, avoiding the direct market mostly and aiming for bookstores and so far it seems to be working. (At least for Sunstone and Blood Stain, Swing and Sugar are too new to have any numbers published.) I really wanted to talk about both series/graphic novels (as I've just read the both of them) and the two comic threads on SE are not exactly the right place for it. This board itself has been pretty dead the last few years, but this thread fits the best (not confident enough to actually make a new thread for it and not sure it will receive any replies), so:
From the Ashes You Shall Rise, dear GV general comics thread
I'll start with Sugar first, even though it came out later. Because I actually like it the least of the four series and I want to end on a positive note. The only one of the four series that doesn't have the Sejics involved, even though it's unofficially named the Sejic-verse. Sugar is written by Hawkins and Jenni Cheung (husband and wife.) and has art by Yishan Li.
It deals with student Julia Capello, a poor student who has several jobs to pay for her tuition and to support her recently unemployed mother and younger sister. Understandably, she has trouble making ends meet. Too busy with jobs and her study, Julia has had no time for any relationships recently. The other protagonist is John Markham, a middle-aged divorcee, who still has trouble getting over his wife. Halfway through the book, the two meet up and begin a relationship. John has heard from his business partner/friend Richard about sugaring, where a wealthy man will get companionship from a young woman (usually a student) in exchange for support with their tuition, rent and other needs. John wants to help Julia, but Julia is uncomfortable with the idea, feeling it too close to prostitution. She does really need to money though, so she agrees to the proposition with the understanding that all the money will be a loan, not a gift.
Hawkins, usually a writer of sci-fi titles for Top Cow, admits how hard it is to write romance, even with the help from Jenni and it's most noticeable in this title. Both Julia and John don't really feel like characters, they are parts of the plot. Compare this to any of the main characters in the other three titles where we get to know them as people, their passions and hobbies. Both John and Julia are portrayed sympathetically (a bit too much so even, it's John's ex-wife who is portrayed as basically everything that was wrong with the relationship. So much that you would have trouble understanding what John ever saw in her. Then again, this is true of many relationships I have seen in real life. The series also sidesteps some of the more problematic aspects of the relationship between John and Julia, though they may be explored more in the next two installments.
The art is also a big factor in why I'm liking this less than the other series, Yishan Li is not a bad artist, but her faces are not as expressive as those of the Sejics, whose mix of cartoony and realistic art somehow works at making the characters feel more like real persons.
Also a super minor complaint, the story is divided into 5 chapters, but each chapter seems to end at a random point. It was written as a single story, so the need to divide it into chapters feels weird and if it needed to be divided you expect the endpoints to be the major moments in the story. You even have 5 major moments in the story: the moment the two meet, the moment the relationship starts, the moment Julia decides to accept the proposal, the moment the ex-wife shows up, the end. Those would easily have been the major breaks in the story to start a new chapter each time.
So on to Swing and it's quite a difference. Still Hawkins and Cheung writing, but Linda Sejic is drawing (interesting to note Linda Sejic is the first creator credited on the cover. In American comics it's usually the writer first/artist second, while in Europe, it usually is artist first/writer second (though there are many exceptions to that rule). Cathy Chang goes to college and is finally out under her strict mothers supervision. Time to meet some boys. But the boys are mostly disappointing, until she meets teaching assistant Dan Lincoln. The two hit it off and Cathy even convinces her mother that Dan is a good catch. And then she ends up pregnant. Jump several years, Cathy and Dan are married and have two children. Both are happy with their life, their partner and their children, but the spark has gone out of the relationship. Cathy finds out about swinging and wants to spice up the relationship by trying it out.
The writing in this just is so much better, both Cathy and Dan are established as characters with interests and passions outside of the relationship (for instance, Dan loves poetry and we see a short crossover with Blood Stain and Sunstone as he is in the same MMORPG guild as characters from those two titles). Both characters are sympathetic, but not flawless. They acknowledge that there are problems with their relationship, problems which they are both responsible for. Their first visit to the club is awkward. Sejic's more cartoony art works wonders with making the characters feel like actual human beings, but I think that Hawkins/Cheung feel more engaged with the content in this than in Sugar (the afterword has Hawkins talk about the research they did and the clubs they visited and some scenes from the comic are taken from their own experiences). I think Sunstone is still the best of the four titles, but I enjoyed Swing and will be getting the next parts.
* = Blood Stain itself is a bit of the odd duck of the four. The other three are all focused on romance and non-conventional relationships. Blood Stain is more slice-of-life/comedy. Unless Vlad and Elliott will be getting it on in later volumes... but that's just... no... Vlad is so not ready for any type of sexual relationship.
Note: All four series are intended for adult audiences. In case of Blood Stain it's just the slice-of-life story would hold little interest to younger readers IMHO, but there is no adult content in it: no sex, nudity or violence. Sunstone has some nudity in it (which I guess by American standards immediately turns it into an Adults Only title, though the BDSM aspects may be more of a factor in getting the Adult Only tag. I've seen some reviewers describe it as pornographic, but I guess we have very different definitions of porn.)
Sugar is a bit more explicit than Sunstone, but has no BDSM, just naked people and R-rated sex.
Swing is significantly more explicit than the other titles, so beware if that bothers you.
Don't know if I have the energy to talk about them all, so let's start with:
Grendel: Devil's Odyssey: The first thread I ever made on Penny Arcade was about Grendel. It got no replies (or maybe 1 or so). Anyway, Grendel is written and drawn by Matt Wagner (these days with help from his son Brennan who does the colouring). It started out as a villain protagonist story, but over the years Grendel has been many different people spread over several centuries. The one thing all Grendel's had in common was that they were all creatures of violence, who in the end doomed themselves (maybe Brian Li Sung was not, as he recognised that Grendel itself was an outside force controlling him and chose death rather than being controlled).
In Devil's Odyssey, Wagner send Grendel-Prime, a zealous cyborg in a far future, in outer space to find a new home for humanity. The first five issues of this 8 issue mini were kinda by numbers: Grendel and his companion drone land on a planet, find that the planet in the end is not suitable for one reason or another and move on. I was worried that Wagner was wrapping up both his series (Mage, his other series, wrapped up a year or two ago and Grendel Prime, the last of Wagner's Grendels, was last seen in 1995, after which Wagner went back to write about Hunter Rose, the first Grendel, again. So it felt like he wanted to wrap up the ongoing story of Grendel as well) to get ready for retirement and both would have been lackluster endings of great series. But the last 3 issues all had me invested in this title again (and I think Wagner himself reignited his interest, because he immediately announced 3 upcoming Grendel mini-series that continue the story of Grendel-Prime).
Each of the last 3 issues had something different that made them great to me and I need to get into spoilers to say exactly what it was:
Issue #6: Grendel and his drone arrive on a planet occupied by 3 distinct alien races. Each form of conflict (personal or idealogical) is resolved by a duel to the death.
Issue #7: Grendel has gathered a following and has made his way to the capitol city of the planet to confront the planet's greatest, undefeated champion.
Issue #8: Grendel's voyage into space continues
This one is more closely related to Punderworld btw, as it has mythical and supernatural elements, while the other four titles are all deal with more mundane issues, but the series can still be read independently of the others (all links are just minor details in the wider world).
The usual warning: Like Sunstone, this comic contains "scenes of an adult nature" as the Americans tend to say. Like Sunstone sex is an important part of the story and with a lot of the main cast being Succubi and Incubi, you're going to see some nipples and bottoms.
It's part 1 so it's mostly setup; we have a prologue and six chapters (though Chapter Six is just a few pages) to introduce us to this world and its rules:
Prologue
Fantasy writer Rachel Simms walks into a bookshop and notices that Meryl, the shopkeeper has horns and a tail, but nobody else seems to notice. When asking her about them, Meryl reveals that she is a succubus (note: Not a Demon, this is very important to her). In this world, Succubi, Incubi (basically the same thing as far as I can tell and they all seem capable of changing their forms, so no real difference between the two) and Cupids are the descendents of Eros, the god of love and desire (with the Cubi focusing on Desire and the Cupids focusing on Love, though some of the old Greek Gods seem also to have changed from deity to Cubi, more about that later). Only special people can see through her disguise though, so Meryl offers Rachel a very rare Golden Contract. Rachel accepts and an incubus appears, Cale Morningstar, the highest Incubus, who offers her unimaginable pleasure. Slight problem: Rachel is asexual, but the Incubus is confident and welcomes the challenge. 2 years later, Cale still hasn't returned to his realm.
Chapters 1-6
In the next chapters we're introduced to the various characters that make will make up the story and there are quite a few: Lauren Thomas, a supermodel who abandoned the man she loved years ago to focus on fame and fortune and now regrets that choice, seems to be the main character.
Then there are Thadeus and Leliah, two Cubi who are both striving to become the new top Cubi now that Cale has disappeared and while Cubi should only be interested in Desire and not Love, both of them have their own lovers that they care more about than they should.
There is Meryl, who is in a heap of trouble because she gave Cale an unsolveable Golden Contract and her mothers Bauphette (aka the former Fury Alecto turned Cubi) and Charon (the ferry-woman turned Cubi) who rank above the others and really want to protect their daughter from the fallout of another Golden Contract.
Overall
In Punderworld (and this was a thing I liked the most in Punderworld) and in Fine Print, all the divine characters have "Crowns", a combination of horns and/or halo's (appearance depending on which part of the divide the owner is from, but also their own feelings at the time). Linda, whose art is a bit more cartoony, used these to great effect in Punderworld to show-not-tell character emotions with Persephone (whose crown as Goddess of Spring and Fertility, is made of leaves and flowers or weeds and thorns depending on her inner feelings). Stjepan's art is less cartoony, but the crowns and their appearance still form an important part of the story.
It's a Stjepan Šejić story so we get a lesson on what BDSM actually is (I don't mind these): A depressed Lauren enters a BDSM club and asks several dommes (in succession) to use and abuse her so that she can forget her past. All three refuse her, having enough experience to tell a submissive from a depressed person in need of therapy.
It's both funny and endearing, but a small glimpse of the future at the start of the story shows that things may not have a happy ending like Sunstone had. Eagerly awaiting part 2, but it'll probably be a while.
In short, this is torture porn. It is just a book to showcase gory deaths, at the hands of what amounts to a no-name villain for the DC line (Surtur, the fire giant.) There are multiple scenes of my beloved Golden Age heroes and their children (also heroes in their own right) being messily killed and basically not acting like the heroes I've known all these years. No plans, except one, which lasts half a page before we learn it had no chance at working. I have no need to see a power ring go through someone's skull. Or see Hawkwoman used as a battering ram, while she holds onto her mace, and the mace knocks Dr Fate's head and helmet off. It all just seems so unnecessary.
What has become of my DC? Did they really learn all the wrong lessons from the 90's? Marvel got it. They realized people wanted colorful costumes and heroism, but DC seems stuck on ultra-violence for it's own sake, with no thought to an actual story. I am disappointed.
Between this and SaGa I'm all in on Brian K Vaughn.
Garth Ennis can get the good bones of a story and fill it with deal that utterly takes me out of said story
Garth Ennis has got one of the biggest asterisks next to his name in terms of ideas versus execution.
You should probably stick it out, because the arc of that book is not "Jesse is a cool guy who is right about masculinity".
Ennis spends a lot of his career writing about that kind of Hard Man Doing Hard Things, going all the way back to his time writing Dredd, and almost universally those guys are absolute monsters at worst or deeply flawed people at best. Preacher falls into the latter. It's still one of my least favorite books of his, becuase I think the plot is incredibly bad and 90s edgy but I adore every single part where the plot stops and we just spend time listening to these fucked up weirdos working through their shit. The last issue genuinely makes me cry. Whether any of this is worth toughing it out for is up to you.
Disclaimer I am absolutely fascinated by Ennis, even the things I think are absolute dogshit, and have read I think every major thing he's done outside of his Dredd (which I'm working on, I'll get to it eventually as part of reading all of 2000ad)
Saturday I pick up The Autumlands (2 volumes). It's not the same artist or writer, Kurt Busiek, but pretty cool quasi animals as people in a fantasy/magic world. But then some human get summoned up cause they need an ultra violent future warrior. I hope book 3 gets written. This is a re-buy because of my digi-pocalypse.
I would have been all over this science fantasy story, that mixes in a side of 70s earth people as giants. I don’t remember the toys having a particular backstory other than good guys/bad guys. What sealed the deal for the comic was the aerial dog-fight scene where they try to take cover in a skate park and the mayhem that ensues. To top it off, the authorities don’t believe anyone after the battling UFOs fly off.
I’m only 4 issues in. The comic is pretty rich in themes and captures the art style I remember from that era pretty well. The story has some wonderfully weird dark implications and class conflict that puts it up there with other 70/80s disaster and post-apocalyptic media I like.
Anyhow, I recommend the book if Micronauts has you curious. It’s expensive though, but it’s full color and on good paper.
Sort of related, I ebay-ed the first issue of The Doomsday Squad (Fantagraphic, Joe Gill, John Byrne) because I wanted the Dalgoda b-story for my collection. Reading Doomsday also scratches my itch for this type of comic story and I guess I’ll have to hunt down the other 6 issues.
It kind of dawned on me that I can just buy any old media if I want to. Now I’ve got a page open for Max Headroom bubblegum cards. Maybe this isn’t a good idea.
I’ll have to post about Jan Strnad books next. I didn’t realize he made several fantasy books that I liked.
Last time... a horde of fungal zombies is closing in on Gotham and Ivy's nemesis has returned after Ivy literally ate him about a dozen issues ago.
And now... Three issues of (this version of) Poison Ivy's backstory. Which... OK.
In the trade, this sort of works. It's only three issues out of the collected six and it does still form a fairly complete story. But I do wonder what the people who buy singles would think of three issues of backstory just before the climax of a storyline.
I've finished picking up the Roy Thomas years of the two Marvel Conan books in Omnibus, so I'm done with those as well. A few Claremont/Byrne issues of Uncanny left to find on eBay.
Last week I picked up the first issue of Jamie McKelvie's One For Sorrow, which looks gorgeous.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Used to have quite a bit of Marvel titles, now it's just Moon Knight in trades and I'm kinda losing interest in that title as well.
Trades for Saga, Department of Truth, Nice House on the Lake/By the Sea
Whenever Brubaker/Phillips (Reckless, Criminal, etc.) , Adam Warren (Empowered) or Stjepan/Linda Sejic (Sunstone, Fine Print, Death Vigil, Punderworld) bring out something.
In singles it's only Mystique (5-issue limited, so not for long), Grendel (mini just ended, new mini will be next year), The Power Fantasy (which lead me to check out Home Sick Pilots and now I have some more of Wijngaard's work on my backlog) and Monstress (including Night Eaters, even though those two are not connected).
Occassionally I pick up something like We Called Them Giants (Gillen/Haas) and I'm waiting on the Get Fury trade end this year.
I did miss that Jamie McKelvie was bringing something out so I might check that out.
Manga has also slowed down a lot for me.
On the European comics front this month has been very busy though (but those titles are also the 1 issue every 1/2 years or in some sad cases this year, some posthume releases.)