Anyone else a fan of graphic novels?

[Smurfberry]

i just ifnished Blankets by craig thompson and i have to say the whole thing was utterly beautiful and Tender but the ending was ugh waht a fucking idiot pretty much that was my response. iwanted to bury the book under a garden of rotten clumps of hair itwas fucking atrocious fuck ugh jsut fuck

[ActionClock]

I've been reading hellboy trades which are good stuff, and I'm really into the walking dead, it's pretty great stuff.  I started reading sandman, but it's kinda wacky so far.  I also like a lot of the things that have been listed so far, although I have not read tin-tin.  Should I?

[LeekClock]

recommended

[LeekClock]

year bump ++

[AmberArachnidClock]

watchmen, ghost world, black hole

[SnakeClock]

My favourite graphic novel is the one Bryan Lee O'Malley made before Scott Pilgrim, called Lost at Sea. It's about a 16-year-old girl that believes she doesn't have a soul because her mother gave it to a cat:



This was back before he became Lord of the Hipsters, obviously. I hope he makes another comic like it someday, but I'm not holding my breath.

I like some of the classics, like Watchmen and Sandman and V for Vendetta, but my tastes have mostly leaned towards less superhero-oriented comics, like Sam & Max Surfin' the Highway, the graphic novel adaptations of Neil Gaiman's novels like Neverwhere and Coraline, ElfQuest by Wendy and Richard Pini, and Whiteout by Greg Rucka. It's 50,908,267,318 times better than the movie.

ghost world

I've been meaning to read this one for a while.

black hole

This book suuuuuuuuucked.

[Topcatyo]

I was a big fan of the Scott Pilgrim books, but not anywhere near my favorite.  Everybody who reads graphic novels has read Watchmen by this point, so that's obv. at the top of the list, but I gotta say I was a big fan of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  The movie was godawful in comparison (and by itself but it was fun to watch).  I just love the art style and the pacing of the story.

I read V for Vendetta as well, and I thought it was a great story but the art I wasn't a fan of.  I had a problem where I saw one character die, then saw them again alive and I was like "Oh how long has this been a flashback?" and then I realized that it was another character who just looks the same and that I'd been reading several scenes in the book wrong.  Again, great story, you can hear Alan Moore having an orgasm for anarchy as you read it, but the art just didn't service the story well.  Not that it wasn't well drawn, but a lot of the characters were too similar looking.

[VCRClock]

Ghost World I bought sight unseen on the basis of hearing the name kicked around. A lot of that may have had to do with the film version. It was pretty good, but not the greatest comic I've ever read. Not that there aren't people I might recommend it to.

I remember liking Asterios Polyp a lot. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember what I thought was good about it.

I read Kid Koala's Space Cadet a few months ago. I'm never sure I'm doing the soundtrack/page coordination thing right, but that was good as well. The big deal about the comic (other than the accompanying soundtrack) is that it was all done on etchboard, so everything is white etching on a black background. If you like the soundtrack, you'll probably like the comic, and vice versa. Boy, am I bad at remembering/reviewing comics.

Recently I bought the first The Whole Story bundle. The comics within weren't all long-format, so maybe not all were "graphic novels." Generally I dug Nam Yong Doon's art, and the English rewritings by Internet comics superstars were sort of a mixed bag but generally good. Box Brown's comics were heavier, but had some really good spots - particularly stories like "Ben Died of a Train" in The Great Disappointment: Everything Dies Vol. 1 (which was part of the sample PDF). I wasn't as crazy about Ryan Estrada's The Kind, but my feelings about that one were sort of mixed. He's a good dude for putting the whole bundle thing together, though.

[SnakeClock]

I read V for Vendetta as well, and I thought it was a great story but the art I wasn't a fan of.  I had a problem where I saw one character die, then saw them again alive and I was like "Oh how long has this been a flashback?" and then I realized that it was another character who just looks the same and that I'd been reading several scenes in the book wrong.  Again, great story, you can hear Alan Moore having an orgasm for anarchy as you read it, but the art just didn't service the story well.  Not that it wasn't well drawn, but a lot of the characters were too similar looking.

The book also felt quite dated and silly in a lot of parts, especially compared to the film version. Sure, it watered down the character of V, it was practically giving Nineteen Eighty-Four a tongue-bath most of the time, and it was pretty anvilicious in a lot of ways, but in the comic, the government is actually run by a giant computer that Adam Sutler Sugar is so impressed by that he whacks off in its presence, and V somehow hacked it to control the government and disillusion the Chancellor. Also, Lewis Prothero is not a news pundit, but the "voice" of the supercomputer, since even though it can automate the operation of an entire country, it has no speech synthesis, which my friggin' MacBook is capable of. And V doesn't kill him, he just makes him catatonic by burning his PWECIOUSSSSS doll collection!

Also, Eric Finch's revelation at the Larkhill detention centre, in the comic, comes as a result of him dropping acid and running around without any clothes on. Given Alan Moore's tendency towards that kind of thing, I'm surprised he didn't have sex with a hallucination. I liked the character of Alistair Harper, though, even though I couldn't understand what he was saying half the time. :P He was a sorely missed character from the film version.

I seem to be one of the only people who's pretty down on Scott Pilgrim (maybe because I liked the previous author's book so much, and it has such a wildly different tone). I liked the first three volumes when the idea was fresh, but by the fourth, it seemed to become too self-aware, and by the fifth, you could tell the movie deal was already made, and he was writing the comics for the benefit of the movie version, like what happened with the later Harry Potter books.

[AmberArachnidClock]

This book suuuuuuuuucked.

I think it had good parts and bad parts. I think the LSD trip was really well done, but the fish tail girl seemed like wish fulfillment. It's been a while, I have to read it again. (the art was fantastic too)

[LeekClock]

recommended

This one by the same author is also excellent. Only in French and Dutch language unfortunately but I'm sure it will appear in English before too long.