Graphic Novel Reading Group discussion

I pretty much use goodreads to keep track of my graphic novel reading, which we all know is an embarrassment of riches these days. I started some writing and other projects on my comicsjuice.com website, but the ongoing effort to stay current with the medium takes place here.

Tonight I added number 975 to my read list (and I don't even include all the series I read as an adolescent), and I've got almost 250 books, digitally and physically, to choose from on my march to the big 1,000 number. If you want to pick something on my "currently reading" list and request it, I'll read it next and make a comment about it here. I'm still wide open to what I'll read for my 1000th book!

Sorry, superhero and Image serial fans, most of my books are Original Graphic Novels with just a sprinkling of European, Japanese and only very specific series that catch my attention. It's just my preference to be super-ecclectic with the "done-in-one" books. Join me for the journey!

Wow, that is impressive!! o_O

Wow, that is impressive!! o_O

I don't see Atomic Robo or Skullkickers on your list. I highly recommend those. Robo may be too close to superheroes for you, but each story is self-contained and you don't need to read them in any order.

Highly recommend Cowboy Ninja Viking Deluxe HC.

Daisy Kutter: The Last Train is not too bad for an art school project.

The Griff: A Graphic Novel is a lot of fun, written by the terrific Christopher Moore.

The Locke & Key collection by Joe Hill is something you might want to check out. There are six graphic novels total. So it's more "half-dozen and done."

Jesus, I've tried writing a long post three times, and the site screwed me up all three times. I've got to get to it later. New update coming soon.

I read Strong Female Protagonist online. It's a great comic. Very strong characters, and an interesting story.

12 Reasons Why I Love Her was great. A very well-done story about a relationship, told in snippets placed out of order. Really good.

You got it, Tiamatty. I'll read those next!

I also think you should read Pretty Deadly Vol. 1, because it's frigging amazing, but you've said you don't want more additions. Even though it's one of the best comics I've ever read.

Good times in comics, more so than any one human being can absorb. You've got to accept that you'll never get to all the good work being produced. I read four, and five more take their place.

I've been at this long enough to remember when comics readers could keep up. It's gone from ten great graphic novels a year to thirty a month. Our cup runneth over.

Pretty Deadly does look good, as does Prophet, Sex Criminals, Zero, etc. etc. My brains! My brains!

So, hokay. I started this post, lost it, started, lost it, and now I’m writing in Microsoft Word so my computer saves a backup.

For those playing at home, starting at 975 I've read six more graphic novels, and now I’m on number… 975! No, I didn’t fall into a Goodreads/Star Trek wormhole creating an alternate future reboot where the characters from Watchmen grew up in oppressive Iran with mouse and cat heads who have winged babies. I just noticed that I had some individual issues of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Comics listed along with the collections of those issues, so I really can't count both of those. Yes, I’m really that obsessive about my counting and listing. I can stop any time I want.

So here's where I’ve been graphic novel-wise. If it seems like I gush over near everything, it’s just because this was an especially good run of books.

This turned out so long, I'm gonna break it up into individual posts. See below.

- Nemo: River of Ghosts - Yeah, I still keep up with the latest LOEG releases even though diminishing returns set in long ago. It was fine, though I sure wish Moore would dedicate himself to a longer comics story like in the old days (I still need to tackle Lost Girls).

Licensable Bear Big Book of Officially Licensed Fun! - Writer Nat Gertler graciously gave me a couple of free issues of this some time ago at a convention, and I was thrilled to find a collection of them in the dollar bin. It’s a send up of licensed properties and consumer culture with the bear (who’s an amusing combination of chipper and cynical) selling himself to get pasted on any product that will have him – cereal, garden implements, feminine hygiene products, paint. The strips only run a page to eight or nine pages, so they hit the point hard and move on. Co-stars Joe Camel and a Captain America spoof. Great obscure find.

The Eternal Smile: Three Stories - One of the few original books I hadn’t read from creators Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Boxers and Saints) and Derek Kirk Kim (Tune: Still Life, Same Difference). Both are big fans of magical realism, and this is a super Sunday afternoon chill book. First is a fantasy tale that twists to something darker, then a Disney riff that would hold its own with Licensable Bear (my personal fave) and then a melancholy tale of a computer drone whose fantasy life helps her build new confidence. Nothing groundbreaking, but these two know their storytelling.

The People Inside - Now, this one is groundbreaking. It’s the second of Ray Fawkes’ magnificent cross-sectional studies of the human experience, the first of which was One Soul, tracing the journey of a single soul through multiple lives and deaths. People Inside takes on romantic relationships, putting eleven such pairings and two individuals under the microscope. The conceit is that he shows the stories he establishes simultaneously in two-page spreads. A passionate lesbian couple owns the upper right corner panel throughout the book; an abusive marriage occupies the lower left, while a gay celebrity and his lovelorn beard is middle-lower just past the spread. You need a good memory to keep track of each storyline (actually, there’s three different ways you can read this book, and all are worthwhile), so there’s lots of flipping back and forth with a, “Wait, which one was that again?” If it sounds frustrating, the challenge really pays off with the uncanny amount of parallels, clever overlapping of stories and Fawkes’ bracing, poetic humanism. When a character dies, the panel they’ve occupied simply goes black for the rest of the book, those dark panels increasing in number the longer you read, giving you a powerful sense of the brief, brief candle that is our existence. It’s a wonderfully inventive use of the comics toolbox, thought-provoking, multi-layered and affective. If you love the medium of comics, I highly recommend reading both books.

The Complete Multiple Warheads – I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on in my first Brandon Graham book, and I absolutely love it! A young couple on a road trip in a living car who shares the driving; she sews a wolf penis on her boyfriend who then has wolf dreams; a hired assassin (?) chases a floating man with a discolored face and magical organs who relishes the idea of being kidnapped; cities are built amidst giant mythological statues; and there’s some kind of empire building schemata in the background involving semi-organic soldiers and an antagonist with only snakes for a face. Every page, meanwhile, is dripping with visual puns, plays on words, graphic invention and micro-sized clues about the nature of this world. It’s the kind of balls-out lunacy that can only exist in a comic book, and it’s all tremendous fun. I just wish it was a complete story, but there’s a promise at the end he’ll keep going soon. This strikes me as just act one (if that) of a massive story, and I’m on board.

Grandville Bête Noire - Third chapter of Englishman Bryan Talbot’s luminous detective series where most characters have animal heads and concurrent personalities. The series rates high on “clever” with lots of cameos a la Alan Moore in Top Ten mode. In this world, humanity is a minority race called doughheads demanding their civil rights, who are actually appearances by established comics characters (one animal bystander shouts at them, “Go back to Angouleme!” – the French city that sponsors the famed European comics convention). The stories surround LeBrock, a scrapping badger and Holmesian detective of Scotland Yard sussing out deadly conspiracies to overthrow one scheming political faction or another. The background here is an alternative history where France once colonized Great Britain under Napoleon and a succession of Napoleonic kings have been displaced by a Socialist government. There’s a great many joys to be had here – LeBrock’s steamy, tragic love life, his uncompromising tactics and deductive reasoning, the resourcefulness of his Watson-like mouse sidekick and the astonishing variety of animal faces Talbot is able to draw. The art defines the word “lush”, all digital shine and steampunk gadgetry. Best is that LeBrock’s adventures really do shift the political equation from book to book, giving his stories a sense of weight. This third volume has a didactic subplot on corporate Fascism perverting the art world that doesn’t quite work as well as themes in the earlier stories, but it’s a minor complaint. Talbot seems to be a master at tossing together a giant genre salad and making it look easy.

Can anyone tell me how to post the cover art?

When adding a reference click on the Cover option instead of the link (on the bottom)

Thanks!

I'm back, and I'm at 999 graphic novels!

It's been a great run since I left off in April (yeesh, was it that long ago?). My favorites:

The Year of Loving Dangerously: Ted Rall's memoir of a harrowing summer spent sleeping with women in New York City in order to stave off homelessness and starvation after being mistakenly expelled from college. Than God he decided not to do the art (he can't draw for crap) and hand it over to the lush Paplo Callejo. Rall's a magnetic narrator though and his story is very worth telling. Terrific book.

House: This book has its detractors, but I think they didn't take enough time with this silent comic (a huge pitfall for silent comics). It's a chilling story of three teenagers who explore an empty, probably haunted house in a post-apocalyptic future and are sucked into the darkness to their doom. It's a bold experiment in atmospherics. Nobody does horror comics better than Josh Simmons, and his stories aren't for the faint of heart.

The Gigantic Beard that Was Evil is a fable in a land of order that is invaded with chaos via the protagonists whiskers. The story is gentle, layered with meaning and graphically fascinating.

Crater XV - I LOVE the cannon brothers' books, fiction and non-fiction. They both do these wonderful improvisational works, and this is the superior follow up to the excellent Far Arden, following the adventures of a pirate with a painful past. This one involves handmade rockets, Canadian public officials and man-eating wolves. It's pure joy from beginning to end.

12 Reasons Why I Love Her - every romance in comics should be drawn and written by Jamie Rich. This is literally what the title says, in vignettes, covering the history of a relationship out of chronological order. It's lump-in-the-throat sweet and touching.

The Big Feminist But: A series of cartoonists, male and female, are asked what feminism means to them today, and the result is one of the best anthologies I've read in ages. Clearly a provocative question that elicited a range of compelling answers from artists who are emerging into their full creative voices.

Blood Song: Gorgeous, Gorgeous, Gorgeous. Eric Drooker takes after the woodcut novels of the 1930s and makes a modern spiritual/nativist tale with silent art that is beautiful beyond measure. Wish I had some of this hanging on my wall.

Those were my personal favorites out of the last 25 books, which included the two volume adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, the last chapter in the Scott Pilgrim series (I was reading it in color), Rutu Modan's drama of the past The Property, and a pulp adventure from Gene Luen Yang, The Shadow Hero among others.

So now, here's the big moment... What book will I read to hit my round number. I've decided to tackle...

*drum roll...*

Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza!!!

I have been in awe of Joe Sacco's comics journalism for the better part of twenty years, and this is 440 pages of pure Sacco, back to tell a story from the reaches and depths of the Middle East. With just shy of 2,000 pages published in his career, the man is a drawing machine, and I can't wait to dive into his longest work. This will not be a book I can polish off in a single sitting by a longshot. His books take some commitment.

I wrote a tribute to the man here if you want to read it: http://www.culturalweekly.com/joe-sac...

I love non-fiction comics and I love Sacco and this is a big, fat meal of comics. It feels just perfect to bring me to 1,000 reads. I'll come back when I'm done and review the book in full.

Congratulations in advance on reaching your goal! Graphic novels are a fascinating medium of entertainment; the marriage of visual art and the written word. If you're going to dedicate your time to a hobby then you certainly can't go wrong with this one.

Thanks, Sarah. Of course, I couldn't agree more.

I want to hang billboards around Los Angeles saying, "Angelenos, you DO have time to read."

Atomic Robo, a webcomic, is awesome. So are A Redtail's Dream, and now Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna. I have one of her books, not yet claimed on goodreads. It's about 650 pages and beautiful. (How would I claim them? If they're only online, as yet? I'm buying her books. Robo recently had a kickstarter I was interested in, but the price, though good, was beyond my budget.)

I can guarantee that I've topped 1000 graphic novels. I could count them on my shelves. Most are not entered on .goodreads, since I've been reading them for about 25 yrs. ;)

It's too time consuming to put my library of over 6200 books on here. So I'm doing it as I go now.

I need a few clones. Lol

I adore the medium. (And heavily suggest reading those mentioned above. minna got a WORKD AWARD recently for her two comics. Redtail's is finished. The other, which she refers to as SSSS, in about 1/4 done. She posts a new page 5 days a week! This Norwegian young woman is prolific, her tales are mostly new to us Westerners, and the recent one actually had me crying at one of the very sad events. It's pretty damned good when you can get so involved on a personal level. Tell her I sent you

Oh and Joe Sacco is awesome! To be read in stages. The truth of his reporting can be devastating.

And congrats for reaching a goal and being as obsessed as I am