Fun Stuff > MAKE
suggest me some graphic novels.
RachelEvil:
Macedonia by Harvey Pekar, Heather Roberson, and Ed Piskor. Memoir of a student who went to Macedonia to learn how the country avoided a war. Very good. And, as far as memoirs go, Pekar's pretty much the mainstay. Some American Splendor is quite good... any given volume will really give you kind of a mix, though the recent, Vertigo-released one is quite good overall. As far as non-AS Pekar, you'd do well to check out The Quitter (a memoir of Pekar's early life) and Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story (about a guy who I thought had to be fictional until I read the jacket...). Both of those are very, very good.
And yeah, Eisner's good. A Contract With God is fantastic, but I prefer Dropsie Avenue.
Oh, and you might like some Alex Robinson. Box Office Poison and Tricked are both quite good.
You may also dig Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan (and an artist whose name I forget), if talking animals don't bother you.
Also, I second the Ghost World suggestion. I really love Clowes' work. Ice Haven, David Boring, and Caricature are also well worth picking up. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is fantastic, but probably way the hell too out there for most folks.
Oh, and, finally, if you don't mind superheroes, do get Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman. It's a thing of beauty (only the first volume (of two, I think) is out, though).
MusicScribbles:
--- Quote from: thatwittygeek on 20 Aug 2007, 20:46 ---I think there is a second persepolis coming out.
--- End quote ---
http://www.amazon.com/Persepolis-Story-Return-Marjane-Satrapi/dp/0375714669/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/103-0507834-2104663?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190772120&sr=8-3
Man, this has been out for a while. There is also an animated movie that Marjane Satrapi directed.
Grimmy:
--- Quote from: Emaline on 18 Aug 2007, 22:59 ---
Read Fables. My understanding is that it is really good. A friend who knows a lot about comics recommended it to me.
--- End quote ---
it is currently my favorite title, and the only comic book I actively collect.
All of the fairy tale characters have been driven from their homelands and are living in a community that they set up in New york called Fabletown, which they have kept hidden due to their immortality.
One of the best comics out there.
Also, I was a fan of 100 bullets, and there was a short series collected in four volumes called Sleeper which is worth reading about super powered criminal mafia type of guys,m and included a few of the Wildcats characters, with one of them being the main antagonist.
Grimmy
also participate on the Fables forums, where the author interacts with fans too
bryanthelion:
--- Quote from: MusicScribbles on 25 Sep 2007, 19:03 ---
--- Quote from: thatwittygeek on 20 Aug 2007, 20:46 ---I think there is a second persepolis coming out.
--- End quote ---
http://www.amazon.com/Persepolis-Story-Return-Marjane-Satrapi/dp/0375714669/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/103-0507834-2104663?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190772120&sr=8-3
Man, this has been out for a while. There is also an animated movie that Marjane Satrapi directed.
--- End quote ---
I've been looking ALL over theaters for that movie... any details when its coming out in america?
KharBevNor:
All the obvious ones seem to have been mentioned. If I wanted to recommend you one thing to get first, it would be Watchmen. Alan Moore is almost certainly the best writer in the comics industry, simply because he has the canniness to exploit the form to do things that can't be done in films or novels. The examples I always pull out are the 'comic within a comic' in Watchmen, where panels of the pirate comic the boy is reading are intercut with the panels of the story, and the television studio break-in in V For Vendetta, with the simultaneous lines of dialogue from the multiple television monitors. You really have to read it to understand.
Otherwise, it seems to me that people have been kind of reticent with non-western suggestions. If there's any manga that you NEED to read, it's probably Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo. This is a pity, because Akira is absolutely fucking enormous: it has to be one of the longest continous graphic novel by a single author/artist behind Cerebus (and you can quibble about Cerebus because a lot of the artwork was a collaboration). It's expensive as well. Each of the six books set me back £20 (for Volumes 1-3) or £25 (for Volumes 4-6), about four years ago. Might be cheaper now, that was before manga really blew up. It's a lot better than the film, with deeper characters, and miraculously it actually makes sense. At the end of the day though, it's probably worth it just for the artwork. It's also a great first time manga, because it doesn't employ any of the Japanese comics conventions that might alienate a reader in other manga (No chibi, no nosebleeds, etc.) Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, the english translation is only available flopped (ie mirror imaged so it reads left to right, rather than right to left like a proper manga), and all the onomatopeia and almost all the 'in world' writing has been meticulously stripped out by some poor bastard with Photoshop and replaced with english writing. Admittedly, this has been done very proffessionally, but it is jarringly noticeable now and then (for example, when the Americans show up and Otomo had english writing originally on their planes, it is all backwards) In a similiar vein, Masamune Shirow's 'Ghost in the Shell' is a good aquisition. It's been much less fucked around than Akira, mainly just flopped, and although the plot maybe isn't quite as deep, and the artwork is much more cartoony, in the Japanese sense, it still looks great and reads great, and, refreshingly, Shirow allows you the option of choosing whether to be a complete geek or not by shoving most of the hard sci-fi ephemera into copious notes at the end of the thing, which aren't really necessary to the story. Another definite is 'Barefoot Gen' by Keiji Nakazawa, a moving autobiographical account of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.
After that, you're probably, in all honesty with myself, in the territory where you have to actually like manga and its conventions, though I'd say you'd be pretty safe with Blade of the Immortal and Lone Wolf and Cub, because, hey, who doesn't like mysterious ronin beating the shit out of everyone they meet? And, judging by your selection of favourites, I probably shouldn't go in to any of the extreme stuff, though I think everyone needs to read at least one Suehiro Maruo book before they die, preferably after having taken some potent hallucinogens.
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