What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?

dragonstout wrote: Best comic I've read in months and months though is Yuichi Yokoyama's GARDEN. I actually found TRAVEL annoying, but Garden was fun with every turn of the page. I'm looking forward to reading WORLD MAP ROOM, in which there is apparently a little bit of a story.

Well now I'm torn on whether to get this. I read (is that even the right word? perused maybe) his New Engineering a while ago, well half of it or so. It was fun but incomprehensible. Certainly unique.

I think I talked myself into at least one more. What did you like better about Garden?

iguanaDitty wrote:

dragonstout wrote: Best comic I've read in months and months though is Yuichi Yokoyama's GARDEN. I actually found TRAVEL annoying, but Garden was fun with every turn of the page. I'm looking forward to reading WORLD MAP ROOM, in which there is apparently a little bit of a story.

Well now I'm torn on whether to get this. I read (is that even the right word? perused maybe) his New Engineering a while ago, well half of it or so. It was fun but incomprehensible. Certainly unique.

I think I talked myself into at least one more. What did you like better about Garden?

New Engineering is the one I've heard the least about...I feel like I started really hearing about him with Travel. So I don't know how it compares to New Engineering.

With Travel, the deal is that it's basically a long train trip through a somewhat fantastical world, but the emphasis in Travel is taking very normal things, like buying a ticket, and making them seem super-dramatic and weird. Lots of Travel is the main characters walking through the train, looking at the passengers. Something like the way rain looks on the window is abstracted and celebrated. Maybe I'm a philistine, but I found Travel boring.

But then Picturebox had their 50% off sale at the end of last year, so I took a risk on some books I otherwise would not have.

Garden is actually *never* boring. As in Travel, there's basically no "story" to speak of: it's still just emotionless people walking through an environment. But where the environment of Travel was a normal train, the environment in Garden is NUTS. It's a gigantic amusement park kind of thing? A huge man-made "garden", where everything natural has been replaced by unnatural things. As they walk through the garden, they narrate what they're seeing and how it works the way it does, which is helpful and entertaining; you definitely know exactly what's going on at every moment. It's very inventive; I both wanted to find out what they'd see next both for the *concept* and also for *how it'd be depicted*. It's much more open than the claustrophobic Travel; it's like a gigantic playground. Also, there are a ton of people on the walk, and the character designs are a lot of fun.

So basically, Travel is about making the everyday look unnatural and super-dramatic via the art, whereas Garden is about exploring a totally crazy future playground.

I don't recommend it without reservations; you have to know what you're getting into, i.e. very geometric art, no meaningful characters, no story beyond "walking through a big playground". It's avant-garde, and as with all avant-garde stuff your mileage may really really vary. In my experience sometimes avant-garde stuff is insufferable, but sometimes it really really clicks, usually when it's infused with fun and exploration rather than being dead-serious. Un Chien Andalou, for example, is really fun. I really like a lot of Brakhage movies, mainly because they're fun and surprising (and short!); Window Water Baby Moving is probably my favorite, though, even though it's not a lot of "fun". Man With a Movie Camera is one of my all-time top 10 favorite movies; there's a part in the middle that moves me to tears, but mainly it's just so damn inventive and fun. GARDEN is fun.

While we're talking Picturebox books, which are mostly misses for me, GOLD POLLEN AND OTHER STORIES was not fun. I also couldn't stand 1-800-MICE, literally could not read that book past a couple dozen pages. I love Mat Brinkman's comics (who also did a lot of the art for Cave Evil), both TERATOID HEIGHTS and MULTIFORCE. It's been a few years since I read STOREYVILLE, but was completely unimpressed. I love Gary Panter's art a lot of the time, especially when he's going kaleidoscopic as in JIMBO: ADVENTURES IN PARADISE, but found the INFERNO and PURGATORY books close to unreadable and the DAL TOKYO book *actually* unreadable; all three of those books are insufferably pretentious.

Hope that description of Garden, as well as Picturebox likes/dislikes, helps you figure out whether you want to buy Garden!

Iron Fist: Living Weapon
I know Barnes said it sucked, but I really liked it. I do have a soft spot for the character having read it pretty regular in the 80's. I thought the writing was tight, the art was mostly very good, and the action scenes well done. I've hadn't previously heard of Kaare Kyle Andrews he is both the writer and artist. He did a very nice piece in the back of the book about the influence of Steranko's Nick Fury run. A hugh plus in my book. Also undead ninja robots are just plain cool.

This isn't really about anything I'm reading, but more my four-year-old...

I got the Walt Simonson run of Thor in the math trade from Barnes, and it arrived just yesterday. My son has a lot of interest in superheroes, and especially in Marvel. He already loves Thor, so I assumed he would love these books. Sure enough, while I was getting dinner ready with my wife he parked on the sofa and looked at the pictures all the way through the first volume.

I got back last night from seeing Godzilla, and my wife informed me that he spent the rest of the evening going through the next two volumes. He was so engrossed that my wife actually delayed giving him a bath so he could finish some more. And then this morning, while we were getting ready to go he asked if he could read some more.

He told me "I like the colors."

San Il Defanso wrote: This isn't really about anything I'm reading, but more my four-year-old...

I got the Walt Simonson run of Thor in the math trade from Barnes, and it arrived just yesterday. My son has a lot of interest in superheroes, and especially in Marvel. He already loves Thor, so I assumed he would love these books. Sure enough, while I was getting dinner ready with my wife he parked on the sofa and looked at the pictures all the way through the first volume.

I got back last night from seeing Godzilla, and my wife informed me that he spent the rest of the evening going through the next two volumes. He was so engrossed that my wife actually delayed giving him a bath so he could finish some more. And then this morning, while we were getting ready to go he asked if he could read some more.

He told me "I like the colors."

I was startled by this comment, because that was one of several things that I disliked about the Simonson Thor run. The colors always looked so washed out. Turns out, the omnibus edition has dialed up the colors to a more vivid level:

[image] 1.bp.blogspot.com/_fZ37jdy-g4M/TIWvbDR1r.../Thor_%23350_p01.jpg [/image]

The first trade in the Fraction/Aja run on Hawkeye was reasonably good. Hawkeye was always one of my favorite heroes, but I haven't enjoyed any of Fraction's writing much in recent years. Although Fraction still has his tedious hipster moments, the pacing here is crisp and the dialogue is snappy and fun. Aja used to have a terrible time meeting deadlines, and it looks like he has simplified his style somewhat for the sake of speed.

So I have a random pet peeve about modern comics that the Fraction Hawkeye run comment made me think of. I got the first trade, enjoying the pitter-patter, like the art style. Two or three issues in, hey! guest artist! or new artist! or something. Everyone looks different! Who are these people?

Drives me crazy. It's like reading a novel where suddenly the main characters change in small yet annoyingly obvious ways three chapters in.

The first Daredevil Waid trade (heh) has the same thing. It really turns me off and breaks my immersion.

dragonstout wrote: I love Mat Brinkman's comics (who also did a lot of the art for Cave Evil), both TERATOID HEIGHTS and MULTIFORCE.

I love Brinkman too -- I had no idea he worked on Cave Evil! That's nuts!

It's been a few years since I read STOREYVILLE, but was completely unimpressed.

Yeah, me too. Santoro has gotten a lot of mileage out of that thing. My students loved him as a guest artist, though, they found all of his talk about "unfinished" art and his Golden Mean grid philosophy super-inspiring. I was sad to have missed his talk.

I was picking up a few things in Comixology and picked up the first volume of Nowhere Men from Image. By the end of the first issue I was stoked, by the end of the trade I was infuriated. An absolutely terrific premise (what if scientists were given the kind of treatment and fandom and rock stars?) was pushed aside for yet another goddamn "superpowered people in a world that hates and fears them" book, like we needed more of that. The more I think about it the more it bugs me, because I *really* want to read the book it started out as. I wrote more details on my blog .

I said that I would never read any of the Before Watchmen material. But the public library had a couple of volumes in hardcover, and I have so much free time right now, so I checked them out. Disappointing. Len Wein did a great job of telling the back story of Ozymandias, but ultimately added nothing essential. The tale of the Crimson Corsair was a frenzied mess of ultraviolence and pointlessness. The Dollar Bill story was slightly entertaining but utterly unconsequential. The Rorschach storyline was also extremely violent and pointless, and also too heavily inspired by Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle even makes a cameo appearance!

Worst of all was the Comedian storyline. There was a gawdawful effort to make him a more sympathetic character, despite the fact that one of his earliest acts as the Comedian was an attempt to rape the original Silk Spectre. Writer Brian Azzarello askes us to believe that the Comedian was close friends with Jack and Bobby Kennedy, but also murdered Marilyn Monroe. That he personally helped defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis but then did nothing while Bobby got assassinated. He spends a hefty chunk of the storyline in Vietnam, but without even a single panel showing his relationship with a certain Vietnamese woman, or for that matter, Dr. Manhattan.

The art was decent. That's the best that I can say about Before Watchmen. There was one particular splash page that showed someone kicking down a wooden door, and the pattern on the sole of the show combined with the shattering wood creates this fleeting impression of Rorschach's mask that was cool. Otherwise, nothing memorable, just solid storytelling with the art.