[Dracko]

It's My Chemical Romance covering Bob Dylan, for fuck's sake.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

It's a perfect fit, really. My Chemical Romance and Zach Snyder are both Alternative Press poster children attempting covers of the classics and falling way outside their fucking depths. They deserve each other.

Just a thought- now that Superhero movies are all the (financial) rage, will we ever get original IPs, or will they just dredge up comic book dudes till the end of time?
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[CubaLibre]

[Marshmallow]

Well, there was Hancock recently.

[CubaLibre]

way to go Cycle making me look like an asshole

It was pretty good, too. Hancock I mean.

Does Unbreakable count? Probably not.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Ebrey]

[rabite gets whacked!]

[CubaLibre]

Hancock is far more typical: the "origin" first act (though it's not the literal origin of his powers, which are the mysterious hook of the movie); the self-aware, get the costume, be a hero second act; the undercutting, villain learns the hero's weakness and exploits it but the hero overcomes anyway third act. The only difference is the overlay of the mystery of Hancock's powers. And it ends on pretty much the brightest note imaginable. I think it's quite a typical superhero movie.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[brillo]

[Dracko]

The Umbrella Academy is okay. It shines a bit more than most superhero comics these days, but it still isn't much. Worth a browse, I'd say, but I'd just re-read Casanova if I were you.

You people have heard that Neil Gaiman is going to be writing Batman, yeah? In a story entitled Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?. Beyond that, not much else is known: Whether it's part of the ongoing series or a mini-series or what. In Dark Knight-related news: Jerry fucking Robinson, the original creator of the character, is working on a Joker-centred project, and Azzarello has a Joker graphic novel in the works.

David Mack is adapting Philip K. Dick's The Electric Ant for Marvel next year too. Art by Pascal Alixe with covers by Paul Pope!
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

I don't know what this falls under, but for some reason, reading Sandman while you're tired makes it feel kind of boring.
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[Toto]

[Leau]

[Dracko]

I've ordered the complete Jerry Cornelius novels on the strength of Casanova, and finally managed to find The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I recall Morrison getting into so much shit with Moorcock because the latter felt he ripped him off when it came to the Gideon Stargrave character.
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[dark steve]

"Ripoff" isn't quite right. Gideon Stargrave IS Jerry Cornelius.

I mean, nobody complains that Mason is Bruce Wayne.

[Dracko]

Moorcock still took offence, is the point. But I wouldn't want it any other way.

I'm re-reading The Invisibles at the moment and it's strange to me that the weirder it gets, the more... consistent I suppose is the term. The melting pot of all these completely differing ideas actually builds into a world one can contemplate, rather than view through the lens of pure surreal flights of fancy. It could just be me, though.
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[Dracko]

This is important:

Jordan Mechner is doing an adaptation of his very own Prince of Persia!

This is the most exciting piece of surprise news in both gaming and comics I've heard in a while!
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[Ebrey]

I'm enjoying the hell out of the American Flagg hardcover that just came out. Even if you don't like Howard Chaykin's recent comics, you should check it out: his best work was in the 80s. It's a dense, innovative sci-fi story about a porn actor who is replaced by a hologram on his hit show. He becomes a cop and uncovers conspiracy after conspiracy in 2031 - 35 years after the US government said 'fuck it' and moved to Mars.

Chaykin mentored Frank Miller, and Flagg's media saturated future was a big influence on Dark Knight Returns.

Note: There's a weird short story that doesn't feature the main characters before the first issue in this hardcover. Anyone know if this is a framing story from the original TPBs? It's confusing because you never see these characters again.

[sawtooth]

Larry even described a scene from the film the made the brothers laugh at the time. “The funny scene we thought of that was kind of the start of it all was like he goes to the bathroom after he becomes Plastic Man and his urine is no longer bio-degradable so he like wants to kill himself,” he chuckled.
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(  (  

[sawtooth]

LOL!
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(  (  

[Dracko]

End of an era...

P.S. I now own both Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's A Disease of Language. Will comment at a later date.
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[Harveyjames]

Dracko I keep refreshing the page to see the different subversive messages in your sig, and it is BLOWING MY MIND



I've just been reading some of the companion books to Bone, Stupid Stupid Rat Tales and Rose. So, here are my reviews!

Stupid Stupid Rat Tales.

I can see what they were trying to do, here; It's a little like Terry Gilliam's Baron Von Munchhausen; a teller of tall tales gets embroiled in what will surely become another of his tall tales, and by story's end the reader sees him and all his other tall tales in a new light. It's a good concept, and it comes close to pulling it off; the situations the main character finds himself in are pretty wild, and how he gets out of them is usually even wilder!!!1

Sadly for the most part the writing, by the guy who did the Riblet comics, is not so hot. There's a talking monkey who keeps making stupid remarks for one thing. For another, it does that 'ensemble cast of cute orphan woodland creatures' routine again. Once was enough, guys, JEEZ. Jeff Smith's art is great, but that's to be expected at this stage. 2/5

Rose

I never really liked to think about it, but Bone probably did itself a disservice when it decided to go all high fantasy on our asses. I think that's why people love the first couple of books the best. I would have been happy if the series remained in a state of stasis after the Great Cow Race! We didn't need all this Royal Family of Harvestar rhubarb, really. That's why the Rock Jaw episode was such a breath of fresh air- because prior to that the series had become really bogged down in high fantasy.

Rose is a whole book of the boring high fantasy crap Bone could have done without. There's a really nice sequence at the beginning where Charles Vess illustrates the story of Mim, the great dragon who encircled the world- the Bone creation myth. After that, though, you get a bunch of people riding around on horseback and saying 'my liege'. It reads like King's Quest fan fiction. I haven't read the whole thing yet, though! Maybe it's a story that's worth telling! We'll see! tentative score: 1/5

UPDATE: Yeah, Rose is pretty good. I should know better than to prejudge these things. It's still kind of silly, though! I don't know that I could totally recommend it. Charles Vess' artwork is beautiful, although I can't understand why he's so bad at drawing human faces since he's a virtuoso at pretty much every other aspect of the art of illustration like landscapes, bodies, drapery, and especially colour. Actual score: a grudging 3/5
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

I picked up a small Grendel collection at the library, with the first Grendel story and the first three issues of the first series.

I thought it was some epic about some master crimelord who also played dress-up.

But it has werewolves?

Weird.
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[Ebrey]

They just announced the Preacher HBO show died after the pilot was produced. The writer (who also did Daredevil and Ghost Rider...) says it was because it “was just too dark and too violent and too controversial.”

I suspect the pilot simply sucked, and he's trying to save face. HBO is knows that dark, violent, and controversial is a surefire way to make money.

[Dracko]

This is interesting; Benoît Sokal - comics writer also behind the Syberia adventure game series - is seemingly working on a graphic adventure adaptation of Enki Bilal's The Carnival of Immortals, first part of the Nikopol trilogy.


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[Ebrey]

I read the first 20 Berserk manga volumes, wondering if the Black Swordsman chapters would ever become interesting. They didn't: the Golden Age is the only Berserk story arc I've liked so far.

Osamu Tezuka's Dororo is Black Swordsman era Berserk, but good. It's an extremely dark samurai story about a warrior whose body parts are all prosthetics, and a kid thief who is always getting into trouble. Dororo is one of Tezuka's darkest comics, but it's also his most action packed. It all makes for one delightfully entertaining mix of fighting, humor, and tragedy - you can't help but smile when Hyakkimaru throws off his fake arms to reveal the swords attached to his stumps. Or when an evil sword tells Dororo to kill, and he wonders if it is the reader talking to him.

[Dracko]

Top Shelf Comix has a $3 sale on their graphic novels.
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[Leau]

I get the sense from reading this thread that most of you wouldn't be caught dead reading anything at all mainstream. But I highly recommend you check out Magneto: Testament which is out this week. Now I know what you're thinking; floating asteroids, and exploding Sentinels, and "I'm the Juggernaut bitch" and things of that nature. But it's about Magneto's origin growing up as a Jew in Germany in the late 40s. And while this is a little cliche in its own way, it's still incredibly poignant in a way that doesn't paint the Nazis as an invading empire, but rather a mindset. And it's all seen from the eyes of a school-boy, who doesn't have any idea about the politics at work, but simply the things that are happening and souring around him at street level. And I also know that a lot of non-jews (myself included) have become a little weary of seeing Nazis depicted in film and literature, but as Pak says in his surprisingly heartfelt afterward, it's still an import kind of story to tell, if only because there are still fools in this world who..don't believe the holocaust happened. And to put every bit of history aside, the writing is quite moving in its own right.

I have to say this isn't at all what I was expecting when I looked at the cover and picked this book up. We'll see where the mini-series goes as a whole, but as a first issue, I was rather well blown away.
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[Dracko]

Yeah, it's okay.
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[spinach]

dracko, i'm reading invisibles now as per your suggestion and thank you, it is great. four issues to go.

also, i've filled out my anita bomba collection, all that's left is the fifth volume which has not been translated from french.

[Leau]

[Dracko]

It's not like it's particularly unique or anything. It's a good read, and more comics should be like it, but then again, there's a whole lot more out there that does a whole lot more.
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[Leau]

True. I was just so blown away to see something so honest to come out of the x-men franchise.
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[Dracko]

Oh, I'm sure there's a number of things coming out of the X-Men franchise that are worthwhile.

I think I'd sooner credit this to the Marvel Knights label, though.
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[Leau]

[Ebrey]

[Dracko]

The best part about Ellis writing Astonishing is all the inevitable one-shots that will come out as he delays the fuck out of it.

Oh yeah, and the extreme body mod porn. Jesus.

Leau, you missed out X-Force, which is fucking awesome even if it's continuity porn.

As to Mike Carey: I liked Messiah CompleX, myself. I'm not certain a lot of people share that, though.
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[haze]

I'm reading Fables it's pretty good

[Leau]

[Dracko]

Lord Horror is the creation of David Britton and Michael Butterworth, founders of Savoy Books in England. Savoy has a long and colourful history that began with independent ventures — bookshops, writings, underground zines — by Britton and Butterworth in the late 1960s. In 1976 they joined forces to launch Savoy and nearly became William S. Burroughs' UK publisher in 1979. The ink barely dry on a contract for Cities of the Red Night, Savoy's bookshops and offices were raided for the nth time by Manchester police, perpetuating what would become two and a half decades of harassment and witch-hunting by a constabulary with clearly repressive ambitions. Savoy was forced into bankruptcy and Britton obliged to serve a term in prison for selling publications deemed "obscene" (but which were openly sold elsewhere in the country).

Lord Horror is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer. Warping him from Haw-Haw to Horror, the novel views the rabble-rouser DJ through a glass darkly. It turns out to be a double negative — after Auschwitz, can you view a fascist any more darkly? — that catapults the narrative in the other direction, into exuberance, extravagance, and excess. (In the novel, Hitler's penis suffers from a gigantism that seems to epitomize the over-the-topness of the book itself.) Lord Horror takes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War II and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips, esoterica. It's a "what if the other side had won the war" trip like you've never seen before.

Though they were blind to its literary qualities, the Manchester police could not ignore the novelty and daring of the book. Once again they raided Savoy, confiscating more than half of the book's already small print run. A court declared the book obscene, less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters, and sent Britton to Strangeways Prison for four months. Though this made Lord Horror the first literary work to be suppressed in England since Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, advocates of free speech paid little heed to the plight of Lord Horror's creator. If this had happened ten years later, Britton would have become a cause célèbre fuelled by online petitions and blogger outrage. But in 1991 there was not much of an internet, and liberals had already blown their wad on Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses had been easy to stump for. It pit the good enlightened West against the bad repressive East. Lord Horror, with its exaggerated depiction of British collusion, occupied a more disturbing terrain. It wasn't us versus them. It was us versus ourselves.

In 1993 the American Jewish Year Book, which chronicles anti-semitic events around the world, noted that in Britain "racist literature continued to cause concern." Discriminatory publications included The Holohoax by "Simon Weaselstool," an Examination of Anti-Gentilism, and an edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In addition "Lord Horror by David Brent [sic], published by Savoy Books and based on the life of British World War II traitor William Joyce ('Lord Haw-Haw'), was banned under the Obscene Publications Act, though no reason was given." No reason was given because the book was railroaded, banned not by a jury but by a judge — pause on that: there was no recourse to "community standards," just the subjective assessment of one man who was unable to see the difference between being and satirizing hate speech. (This was particularly ironic since anti-gay rhetoric by the Chief Constable of Manchester had been transposed into the book, replacing gay with Jew — in other words, transforming real hate speech into satire.)

Other books, such as Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972), had utilized the "what if Hitler had won?" premise without causing much controversy. Postwar pulps regularly eroticized the Holocaust, using Nazis and Jewesses — never did the starving inhabitants of death camps look more buxom than on the lurid covers of pulp fiction — as stand-ins for sadists and masochists. These failed to ruffle feathers partly because the "politically correct" mindset dominant at the time of Lord Horror's publication had yet to prevail, and partly because the works themselves were clear about their moral positions. Spinrad appended a fake scholarly analysis to his tome to ensure that his intentions would not be misunderstood. And no one considered the pulps anti-semitic because it was obvious what their game was: to beat the censors, S&M bodice rippers posed as historical novels about the war.

Savoy has occupied a more ambiguous terrain. Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ("don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you"). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory = ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?

Potentially the most anti-semitic passage in Lord Horror depicts the protagonist literally ingesting a Jew. The description, which carries on for several pages, also happens to be the most brilliant and farcical moment in the book. After swallowing half the Jew — whole — Lord Horror

[glossolalia]

i just finished the final volume of osamu tezuka's buddha series.

i had no idea it would hit me so hard. i'm, uh, a little teary over here. the weight of having spent all these months and pages with buddha, tatta, migaila, ananda, ajatasattu, naradatta, dhepa, bimbisara... man.

what of tezuka's should i read next?