Comic books – rediscovered
Lance Curran, a good friend, musician and the warehouse director over at Threadless recently took me to the local comic shop here in Boulder. He convinced me to pick up the first books of The Walking Dead and The Boys. In the 4 months since then I’ve read about another 50 books of various titles. Each softcover book typically contains about 6 issues. So that means I’ve read like 300 comic books in 4 months. WTF!
I haven’t really bothered with super hero comics. I’m more into these other alternate reality or real life type books with a sprinkle of horror/science fiction/depravity. They are pretty fun to read. My favorite of all the ones I’ve been reading so far is The Walking Dead – it just keeps getting better and better with every book. It’s funny, one of my favorite comic book authors is turning out to be Warren Ellis. Warren posted a while back about my blog and I had no idea who he was. It’s taken me 3 years since then to find out he is incredible. He also has a regular novel out called Crooked Little Vein which is amazing if you want to take baby steps into comic land.
And just for kicks, here’s some more of the books I’m reading outside of the two mentioned above:
Full disclosure! I’ve got Amazon referral URLs on all these ;)
Local TechStars company, Take Comics, is aiming to bring comic books to the computer. I’m not a collector and just enjoy reading… lots of these… fast. Wish I could do it on my computer and get them instantly! (No offense local comic shops and Amazon)
Anyone else reading comic books? Have any suggestions for some good ones??? Weeeee!
Fantastic list! Some of my favorites for sure. If you like those you should also check out:
Air
Desolation Jones
Down
DMZ
Local
Phonogram
Young Liars
Sweet, I just picked up DMZ, Air and Young Liars. Thanks for the recommends.
I always end up recommending the Scott Pilgrim series and within good reason. The pseudo anime/manga style is a turn-off for some, but it’s an all-around fun read, abound with video game and band/music references.
And for some one-shot graphic novels, I’d recommend We3, Pride of Baghdad, and Blankets. That last one especially. Not sure how you’d like slice-of-life books, but I always manage to find something new every time I reread Blankets, not to mention the great art and writing done by Craig Thompson.
Happy reading!
Hey man, it’s great to hear you’re getting in on comics.
Y: The last man is pretty sweet, I’m actually only on volume 4 of that but people push me to read more into it all the time.
You should definitely check out Bone, it’s probably one of the most essential comic reads in my opinion. They have a huge omnibus that has the entire series in it, I mean this thing is huge. it weighs as much as a 4 month old.
I just caught up on the Walking Dead. It’s by the same guy who wrote Invincible, Robert Kirkman. It’s pretty heavy stuff, but it’s probably one of the most complete and compelling stories in the genre of zombie fare that I’ve ever read.
Also, I second the things that Alvin suggested. Pride of baghdad is one of my favorite Graphic Novels of all time. Blankets is a great piece of work too.
One of my all time favorite comic series is the Goon. It might be a little bit off the radar of what you’re looking at right now, but the creator, Eric Powell is a pretty snazzy gent.
I like how I told you about walking dead when clearly you picked it up already. The walking dead gets pretty freaking crazy, I’m hooked on it.
While i think the whole marvel/DC thing is a hard to swallow capsule, there are some decent miniseries and one shots you should check out that don’t really require you to delve too far into the cannon of either universe. Like anything by the creative team of Tim Sale and Jeph Loeb.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of non-canon Marvel/DC stories that are worth checking out. Check out Superman: Red Son. Really great Elseworlds story that answers the question “what if Kal-El/Superman had crash landed in communist Russia instead of the United States?”. You honestly don’t need to know much about the DC universe to get into it.
And the essential Batman library:
Year One
Hush
The Dark Knight Returns
The Killing Joke
The Long Halloween
Dark Victory
Not necessarily in that order, but those alone will make you feel like a Batman expert. Sort of. Hush is the only canon book of that list, though The Killing Joke affects some continuity in the main storyline.
On the Marvel side, Marvel Zombies is a pretty awesome read that doesn’t require too much knowledge about the Marvel timeline, though I could see myself getting a little lost.
Dude, try “Thorgal” series this is one of my fav
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=thorgal&x=0&y=0
It can by kind of exotic 2u however… ;-)