big ups to @Jaffe & IC panelist Gita for getting me back into comics with their 52 podcast. read through 52 for the first time last month & really enjoyed it. currently following Tom Taylor’s Titans run & really loving it. It’s the “classic” New Teen Titans line-up, but the storytelling is very Geoff John’s Vol 4 Teen Titans run to me.
Also, starting to get into this Absolute Power business which so far I like for the drama but not necessarily the character work. Still too early to pass final judgement. Plus my boy Connor Kent had all of two lines in Issue #1!!
On the Image side of things, I’m reading the trade of Frontiersman by Patrick Kindlon and Marco Ferrari. Really fun story about a superhero past his prime, somewhat reconciling his sense of justice/politic with his desire to just simply be a good dude. Nice stuff 2 issues in.
I hope nobody minds if i insert a graphic novel that it is not about capes. The Wicked & The Divine is one of the coolest things i’ve read in a while in the world of words and images. Inventive, weird, and a little sexy here and there, i really like the settings and the characters. Just read the collected volumes 1 and 2, and i totally need more.
My girlfriend’s into superhero comics, and I’ve always wanted to be, so I’ve been getting her to nudge me in the direction of stuff I might like. So far I’ve enjoyed a lot from DC, especially Spirit World and the new Zatanna series called Bring Down the House, written by Mariko Tamaki. John Constantine shows up and is a pretty cool guy in both stories, so I’d like to dig into other series that might flesh out his character some more for me. Anyone have recs?
I’d also like to read some Batman like everyone else, but I’m at a loss for where to start. I read a bit of Tamaki’s Detective Comics run and liked it well enough, but I’d like to catch up with something ongoing.
edit: lol accidental reply to @HyggeState, whose She-Hulk rec I feel obligated to take on now. Looks up my alley anyways!
I’ve been reading the ol’ cape comics again lately. I had never read Morrison’s Batman run, and now seemed as good a time as any. I’ve read the Batman and Son and The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul trades so far. Oh and I read The Black Casebook as a little preparation.
The Black Casebook was really cool. Some of those stories are goofy now, and that’s great, and some of them are genuinely kinda haunting. Batman has been through a lot of trauma, especially as it concerns Robin, is the general thesis.
Batman and Son was a good start to the story proper. I only know this arc as “the one Damian comes from” so seeing some wild stuff like Bat-Mite or the batmen of other nations taken stark seriously is a cool surprise. I feel two ways about Damian and it seems to depend on who’s writing him: sometimes he’s a well-written petulant jerk and sometimes he’s Scrappy-Doo.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed The Resurrection of Ra’s al
Ghul. Really compelling Ra’s story and there’s lots of fun Robin drama.
Next on the list is Batman R.I.P.. Batman has already died twice in this run, so the title is not so foreboding.
I picked up a full run of 1963 by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Stephen Bissette, Don Simpson and others. It’s a loving homage to the dawn of Marvel comics, with analogues for the Fantastic Four, Spider Man/Daredevil, The Hulk, Dr Strange and more. The Marvel Bullpen columns are reproduced as tales from the 1963 Sweatshop. There are fake ads for things like “Earth Monkeys” and Soviet submarines. The letters section is filled with both fake letters and ones from comic creator friends.
The rights are a mess for this series due to Bissette and Moore’s falling out over a TCJ interview, so the floppies are likely all there will ever be.
That said, I’m not really a floppy guy, mostly because I don’t like bags, boards and long boxes. Luckily, I live a 30 minute drive from one of the best book binders in Canada and they were able to do this for me:
Big thanks to you, @meunierd, for teaching me that 1963 exists. It sounds awesome.
Big NOT thanks to the Wikipedia hole I went down after reading up on 1963…
I found out that Savage Dragon is the longest-running superhero book by a single creator. That’s neat! I naively thought.
But then.
I found out about what kind of stuff has started happening in Savage Dragon, and… I wish I hadn’t. I am now cursed. If anyone knows how to Eternal Sunshine comic book related knowledge, please PM me.
i don’t particularly know why but i felt like reading some superhero comics for the first time in a long time, so i checked out the current marvel runs people seem to be liking.
ultimate spider man is i think the number one most recommended superhero book out right now? and it’s pretty cool, it does the thing a lot of prestige batman stuff does where he isn’t batman for most of it. the core premise of all heroes basically being denied being a hero by aliens, and then having to get powers later in life is a pretty good way to get at different stories, outside of that, it’s just spider man, spider man is kinda fun, we’lll see how long i last.
ultimate x-men is probably my favorite of the three i’ve checked out, Naoki Urasawa mixed with a kind of magical girl thing for the x-men, a lot of fun, and you don’t need to know anything (i didn’t even realize some of the characters are psylocke or whatever)
fantastic four is also a relatively good time as an episodic quirky sci fi thing. ryan north is funny, it gets a little too wordy for me at times, but there’s an issue where dr doom makes it so people can only use the letters d, o, and m.
I read Flex for the first time this year. It has an aspect of navel gazing but it feels sincere. It revels in the joy of creation. Wallace Sage’s “tripping to death” voice grated on me. If I were watching his dialogue as live theatre, I’d be laughing.
The intertextual stuff like Hero of the Beach is absolutely delightful. Quitely is delivering gorgeous pages. I feel like this should be on a 1000 comics to read before you die list.
I haven’t read Morrison’s full run yet but I’ve been recently going through Kyle’s first series and really loving him as GL. This is the kind of stuff I love about him throughout the solo series. I’ve gotta read this next.
I’ve been enjoying it a lot, maybe not as much as Immortal Hulk but I think it’s well written and has a lot to say about authorship and some other stuff. Definitely inconsistent at times but not to the point I have felt like quitting.
My latest random comics fixation is the 2018 Justice League Dark (the team formed by Wonder Woman). There’s some corniness to it but I actually really like it.
I’m way past my comics prime but I still read a few things every year. I’m very out of touch on the last decade or so though. What’s a must-read run from that time frame? I just like to get some paperbacks from the library now and then but not sure what’s been good lately. Is any of that King in Black / Venom stuff worth reading?
edit: this question is posed generally. I have no preferences on heroes or tone. If there’s something you love, I just want to hear it
