WE3 by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. It's a three-issue miniseries that's been almost universally praised. Personally, I thought it was kind of mediocre, but I'm in a VERY small minority on that one.CiSTM said:Where is this from ?
WE3 by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. It's a three-issue miniseries that's been almost universally praised. Personally, I thought it was kind of mediocre, but I'm in a VERY small minority on that one.CiSTM said:Where is this from ?
Viewt said:WE3 by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. It's a three-issue miniseries that's been almost universally praised. Personally, I thought it was kind of mediocre, but I'm in a VERY small minority on that one.
Phthisis said:The Killing Joke
The Man Who Laughs
Also, when you're done with those, the third chapter of Dark Knight Returns (and probably the best chapter) is the conclusion of the Batman/Joker rivalry (and it's fucking amazing).
It's mostly because I'm not a big fan of the way Morrison plots his stories. I think he's a lot more effective when he tones himself down a bit like he did with his JLA run, or when he just takes his time like he did with Animal Man.CiSTM said:Thanks. I hope it's good as all the people say. But it's possible that I end up in same boat with you
I haven't read The Man Who Laughs, but for The Killing Joke, you don't really need to know anything about Batman history to get into it, and it definitely has its own ending.drkOne said:I was thinking about getting these along with the Watchmen as I'm a bit tired of Manga and need a change, just wanted to know if there is a timeline/connection (other than the characters) on the Batman comics, or each of them has their own beginning and end?
Caspel said:I'd love to hear some feedback / recommendation on graphic novels. I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan and might be venturing into The Sandman Absolute collections if the girlfriend decides to pick them up for our anniversary.
Want to know which graphic novels I should start collecting and in what order.
I know of the following that are on my list:
Batman The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, Year One, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, The Killing Joke
All Star Superman
Y: The Last Man
V for Vendetta
Watchmen
Signal to Noise
Feel free to chime in and let me know, going to start collecting the best graphic novels and catching up in on a world I've missed out on since I was a child.
Caspel said:Want to know which graphic novels I should start collecting and in what order.
I know of the following that are on my list:
Batman The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, Year One, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, The Killing Joke
All Star Superman
Y: The Last Man
V for Vendetta
Watchmen
Signal to Noise
Bootaaay said:I just got done reading El Diablo & Loveless by Brian Azzarello - can GAF reccomend me any more awesome Western-themed graphics novels? (If there are any).
FnordChan said:For Batman, The Dark Knight Returns is one of the first things anyone will mention to you. As a satirical, near-future look at an aging, unrelenting Bruce Wayne it's great in an atypical sort of way.
Blader5489 said:I've seen you call DKR this before, and I really have to disagree. DKR is definitely not satire.
FnordChan said:I'll have to disagree here as well. While the basic premise - an aging Bruce Wayne takes up the cape again - is played (more or less) straight, the near future setting, with it's over the top, blackly humorous depictions of decaying urban life under an aging President Reagan, looks pretty satirical to me.
Kipe said:Reagan and talking heads part, I agree is satire, but overall I don't consider DKR a satire. 300, Sin City, and Ronin are further evidence of where Frank Miller's head was at during that time. DKSA belongs in Frank Miller's weird new phase with All Star Batman and Robin.
Listen to his interviews on NPR. He's very jingoistic.
Blader5489 said:I think you give Miller more credit than maybe he deserves. =P
The dark and gritty tone wasn't meant to be satire, imo, it's the tone Miller was setting for the book because that's how he saw Batman. When you consider that DKR was one of the first examples of "realism" in a superhero comic, and that Batman had been treated as campy up until that point, I don't really see how DKR could be satirizing anything. The bleak and gritty setting is just what Miller thought a Batman comic should be. DKR was all about bringing Batman back to his darker 1930/40s roots.
All Star Batman & Robin is that same kind of over-the-top grittiness that has been a part of all of Miller's work. DKR, Ronin, Daredevil, Sin City, 300--tonally, they're all the same.
FnordChan said:I'll have to disagree here as well. While the basic premise - an aging Bruce Wayne takes up the cape again - is played (more or less) straight, the near future setting, with it's over the top, blackly humorous depictions of decaying urban life under an aging President Reagan, looks pretty satirical to me. When Miller went back to setting with The Dark Knight Strikes Again he cranked up the satire level up to 11 or so. Whether this works very well is open to debate, but it strikes me as a clear successor to the Dark Knight Returns.
FnordChan
FnordChan said:Contemporary Frank Miller may have succumbed to the brain eater, but during the mid-80s the man was non-stop amazing.
FnordChan said:A couple of things I'd like to point out here:
First off, let's not give Miller too much credit for realism here. Batman had been written in a serious, realistic manner by Denny O'Neil since the 1970s.
FnordChan said:Second, if you look at Batman: Year One, written a year later, you'll see Miller writing a serious take on Batman that puts the satirical aspects of TDKR into stark relief. Miller's other major work during the period was on Daredevil and that ranged from street level, realistic superheroics (such as Born Again) to gonzo ninjas and cyborgs (such as Elektra: Assassin). It's not as if the man had one mode, grim and gritty, that he stuck to.
FnordChan said:I disagree with you here as well. Tonally, there's a world of difference between, say, the serious take on Batman in Year One, the satirical elements of TDKR, and the extremely stylized (and, at times, hysterical) elements of The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Miller's early Daredevil work incorporates some noir elements and tells serious, street level crime fighting stories, where Sin City takes the noir elements and runs wild with them. Some of his later works like Hard Boiled are gleefully satirical - gritty (and squishy, for that matter), but not what you would call grim. Let's not pigeonhole the man's output.
FnordChan
Blader5489 said:Well, like I mentioned earlier, I think of all Miller's work makes use of the same stylistic elements (noir, hyper-masculinity, grittiness, violence, etc).
Obviously, some of his books ran further with those elements than others; stuff like 300 and Ronin are more graphic than, say, Daredevil and Year One. And of course some of his comics are just flat out better written than some of his other stuff. But fundamentally, I don't see much of a difference in tone between any of his work.
D&Q said:The Box Man
Imiri Sakabashira
THE FIRST STORY TO BE TRANSLATED IN ENGLISH FROM THE SURREALIST AND ALTERNATIVE MANGA-KA
Enter the strange world of Imiri Sakabashira whose denizens are zoomorphic creatures that emerge from one another as well as their equally bizarre environs. The Box Man follows its protagonists along a scooter trip through a complex landscape that oscillates between a dense city, a countryside simplified to near abstraction, and hybrids of the two; the theme of hybridity permeates throughout. One is unsurprised to encounter a creature that is half elderly man, half crab or a flying frog in this world where our guide apparent is an anthropomorphic, mollusk-like cat. Sakabashira weaves this absurdist tale in a seamless tapestry constructed of elements as seemingly disparate as Japanese folklore, pop culture, and surrealism. Within these panels, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the imagined, a tension that adds a layer of complexity to this near-wordless psychedelic travelogue.
Imiri Sakabashira (real name Mochizuki Katsuhiro) was born in Shizuoka, Japan in 1964, the same year that Garo, the influential manga anthology in which he would first be published, was founded.
Black and White, 128 pages, 6.25 x 8.5 inches
D&Q said:Red Snow
Susumu Katsumata
AN AWARD-WINNING BOOK FROM A LEGENDARY MANGA-KA AUTHOR
Red Snow continues D+Q's groundbreaking exploration of the fascinating world of Gekiga in this collection of short stories drawn with great delicacy and told with subtle nuance by legendary Japanese artist Susumu Katsumata. The setting is the pre-modern Japanese countryside of the author's youth, a slightly magical world where ancestral traditions hold sway over a people in the full vigor of life, struggling to survive the harsh seasons and the difficult life of manual laborers and farmers. While the world they inhabit has faded into memory and myth, the universal fundamental emotions of the human heart prevail at the center of these tender stories.
Susumu Katsumata began publishing comic strips in the legendary avant-garde magazine Garo (which also published his contemporaries Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Yoshiharu Tsuge) in 1965 while enrolled in the faculty of Science in Tokyo. He abandoned his studies in 1971 to become a professional comics artist, alternating the short humorous strips, upon which he built his reputation, with stories of a more personal nature in which he tenderly depicted the lives of peasants and farmers from his native region. In 2006, Susumu Katsumata won the 35th Japanese Cartoonists Association Award Grand prize for Red Snow.
Black and White/232 pages/6.25X8.5 inches
Haruspex said:Just to let you folks know Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing (amongst others) two stunning works this September...
D&Q said:A Drifting Life
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
April 2009
Edited and designed by Adrian Tomine
Acclaimed for his visionary short-story collections The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye, originally created nearly forty years ago, but just as resonant now as ever, the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has come to be recognized in North America as a precursor of today's graphic novel movement. A Drifting Life is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.
Spanning fifteen years from August of 1945 to June of 1960, Tatsumi's stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father's financial burdens and his parents' failing marriage, his jealous brother's deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, manga artist Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Apollo's Song, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha), with whom Tatsumi eventually became peers and, at times, stylistic rivals.
Praise for Yoshihiro Tatsumi:
'In the hands of a talent like Tatsumi, hidden worlds are excavated and dark corners of the human condition illuminated.'- Bookforum
'His nakedly personal work, created when the medium was predominantly impersonal, made Tatsumi unique in Japan and around the world.'- Print
Paperback, 840 pages, 6.125 x 8.25 inches, b/w.
If you don't mind manga: Genshiken. Completely devoid of fantasy or fantastic elements. It's comedy, for the most part.RadioHeadAche said:I'm looking for graphic novels that can be considered a "slice of life". I'm not looking for any fantasy-based stories such as superheroes or science fiction. I want to read stories about characters and their lives, and they can be autobiographical or fictional.
It's a bit of a strange request, but does anyone have a suggestion?
Ghost world sounds like what you are looking for, and one of my favorite comic books ever, it's seriously amazing.RadioHeadAche said:I'm looking for graphic novels that can be considered a "slice of life". I'm not looking for any fantasy-based stories such as superheroes or science fiction. I want to read stories about characters and their lives, and they can be autobiographical or fictional.
It's a bit of a strange request, but does anyone have a suggestion?
RadioHeadAche said:I'm looking for graphic novels that can be considered a "slice of life". I'm not looking for any fantasy-based stories such as superheroes or science fiction. I want to read stories about characters and their lives, and they can be autobiographical or fictional.
It's a bit of a strange request, but does anyone have a suggestion?
Halycon said:If you don't mind manga: Genshiken. Completely devoid of fantasy or fantastic elements. It's comedy, for the most part.
Yotsuba& is also a very good slice of life comedy about a 5 year old girl.
Phthisis said:Sleeper by Ed Brubaker.
JESUS CHRIST is it awesome. I read the whole thing (all 29 issues) yesterday. Fucking amazing series. Highly recommended; it's a noir crime drama set in the Wildstorm universe about a double agent serving undercover in a terrorist organization whose contact in America, the only guy who knows he's undercover, gets shot and goes into a coma, basically stranding this agent in this organization with no way out. Comic is about him and his relationship to all the characters in this organization and trying to avoid being found out as being undercover. That's how it starts, but oh man does it go some places.
It's got a prequel called Point Blank starring Grifter from the Wildcats that sets up the story that's pretty much required reading, and then 24 issues of Sleeper, divided into 2 "seasons" of 12 issues each. Checking Amazon, it looks like Wildstorm is going to re-release the series in 12-issue trades instead of the current 6 beginning in June.
exarkun said:Since this the Recommendation thread I wanted to ask something: Do I have to finish Final Crisis to understand the universe after that comic series? Its kind of confusing with all of its references and off shoots sooo I would just like an easy to understand summary.
So can I just skip the series and move on to other books in hopes that they don't continually reference the material? Is there anything anyone can recommend that just sums up what happens during the series? Or should I just slug through it? It isn't bad, it is just pretty over whelming.
RadioHeadAche said:I'm looking for graphic novels that can be considered a "slice of life". I'm not looking for any fantasy-based stories such as superheroes or science fiction. I want to read stories about characters and their lives, and they can be autobiographical or fictional.
It's a bit of a strange request, but does anyone have a suggestion?
favouriteflavour said:They are more strip collections than anything but James Kochalka's American Elf are about as slice of life as you get.
RadioHeadAche said:I'm looking for graphic novels that can be considered a "slice of life". I'm not looking for any fantasy-based stories such as superheroes or science fiction. I want to read stories about characters and their lives, and they can be autobiographical or fictional.
It's a bit of a strange request, but does anyone have a suggestion?
Sec the Shortcomings recHaruspex said:Adrian Tomine sounds right up your street, check out Shortcomings or his Optic Nerve series. There are some previews here.
In fact if you have a search around the Drawn & Quarterly website I'm sure you'll find a number of artists who meet what you're looking for. And if I haven't mentioned it already... Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi fits the bill too. Its very much a 'slice of life' tale but the art really encourages contemplation and poetic thought. Here's a little blurb about it.
gdt5016 said:Recently been reading Lucifer (spin off of Sandman) and liking it quite a bit. It's drenched in Sandman's tone and style, but thats ok with me. Finished The Walking Dead before that which I absolutely adored.