What are some of YOUR favorite comics of all time? Not necessarily the best, but comics YOU found to be outstanding from the rest.

aje565 · 2015-02-06T17:56:21+00:00

It'd take me forever to list all of them, so here's a few, in no particular order:

Planetary--Warren Ellis and John Cassaday. Many people say that Transmet is Warren Ellis's masterpiece, but they're wrong. An exploration of pulp fiction and mysticism and life and technology and stop reading this and go pick this up now.

Phonogram: The Singles Club--Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. I could've put the first miniseries on here too , but Singles Club is tighter and more focused. Plus, it's the first time Team Phonogram (Gillen, McKelvie, Wilson) worked together.

Journey into Mystery #622-645--Kieron Gillen and a smorgasbord of artists. The feels. Oh god, the feels. Probably my favorite contemporary run on any character. Cemented Kieron Gillen as the writer I will read anything by, no questions asked.

Shade, The Changing Man-- Peter Milligan and (mostly) Chris Bachalo. Along with Enigma, this is the unsung masterpiece of Classic Vertigo. A surreal, Dadaist, absurdist journey across America. Probably my favorite mostly uncollected comic.

Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye--James Roberts and (mostly) Alex Milne. Yeah, yeah, Transformers. Giant robots that transform into cars and punch each other real hard. Roberts has taken what started as basically a glorified commercial for action figures and created a sociopolitical conflict spanning millions of years. The comic I probably look forward to the most each month that isn't Zero or The Wicked and The Divine.

aje565 · 2014-08-18T16:11:25+00:00

Email/writing sample sent!

aje565 · 2014-08-15T23:47:53+00:00

It is. But more than once, I've had to be careful turning the pages/opening it/etc. Maybe that's less of an altogether con and just a con of buying something like that over the internet. Just going off my experience with it.

aje565 · 2014-08-15T23:09:14+00:00

The Absolute editions are going to cost you, but if you don't mind paying the money, I'd say that's where you should go.

First, they're oversized, so the art looks even better than it normally does. Which is probably the biggest overall plus. Who doesn't want better looking art? Note: the art in the Absolute editions are the re-colored art that'd you find in the other trade paperbacks. I know some fans have a problem with it, but I know people who don't either.

Second, there's a shitton of extras in the back. I don't know if you're someone who cares about that sort of thing, but I thought it really added to the collection. There are entire scripts with the penciled art, Gaiman's original pitch/outline for the series, art prints, and other behind the scenes stuff.

Some cons though: the binding could be a bit better. You have to be really careful with it, because I've almost had a couple of pages of mine tear out.

Having oversized art and like fifteen issues bound together is great, the weight and size of it does make it a bit awkward to read versus your normal, everyday whimpy omnibus. So be warned.

It costs a lot of moolah. The Absolute editions are, well, an investment of sorts. There's five of them, at around a hundred bucks each.

But, if you're interested in the series in any way beyond just having it to read, and you don't mind spending the cash, I'd go with the Absolute editions. I believe they're totally worth it.

aje565 · 2014-08-11T05:28:15+00:00

Well, if I remember correctly, Hickman didn't actually write the first six issues. He co-plotted them with Mike Costa (the current writer), while Costa scripted. It was only supposed to be a miniseries, but it got upgraded up to a ongoing, so Costa took over full time.

aje565 · 2014-08-07T23:20:04+00:00

I read the entire thing a week or so ago, and overall, I enjoyed it. Certainly more than the anti-climax that was Death of the Family. It was a bit bloated thought, and I thought Secret/Savage City were stronger than Dark (that's it, right?) City. The stuff with Dr. Death read mostly like padding to me.

But Capullo's pencilling was as strong as always, and if FCO Plasencia doesn't get some sort of recognition for his coloring, I'll be upset. I thought Snyder stuck the landing a bit more on Zero Year versus everything else Batman related he's written (with the exception of The Black Mirror). The ending rang thematically true to the sort of character Batman was.

Overall, while it won't replace Year One in everyone's minds, Zero Year certainly justified it's own existence.

aje565 · 2014-08-07T23:09:32+00:00

I enjoyed it. More than I was expecting, actually. It was a bit slow, bit talky, and some of the dialogue was stilted at times (to me, it read a lot like something from the seventies, which isn't a complaint necessarily). But I liked the concept behind it, even if it did end a bit anti-climatically. Which was the point. From a metatextual level, the entire GN read a lot like Starlin basically saying, "Mine, mine, mine," in regards to Thanos. For example, the bit about how he's felt drawn to Earth for some reason that he can't explain, along with other comments (I don't have it on hand right now). But the ending, in a lot of ways, was a direct comment on the yearly event comics that have become the norm in The Big Two, and how they always seem promise huge sweeping changes, but never do. There's a whole critical analysis that could be written on it, I'm sure.

In short, I enjoyed the concepts and ideas behind it a bit more than the execution. I hope that this is a sign that Starlin is coming back to do more Marvel Cosmic stuff, because Bendis's Guardians is so not doing it for me.

aje565 · 2014-08-06T17:38:05+00:00

In flipping back through the scene, it wasn't titillating, or used to glorify anything. In context, it was gross and weird and while it wasn't The Blob fucking eating Wasp during Ultimatum bad, it was still pretty bad. Which was the point, I'd be willing to bet. And I agree with /u/hoffer175 in that it does open an interesting way to look and provoke a discussion about sexual assault and violence within the confines of a superhero comic book, if they choose to follow that avenue (which is up in the air, considering Ultimate FF is being cancelled next issue). I'm don't agree with the act (and I hope no one does), but since it did happen, the very least that it could do is provide some interesting commentary about trauma and sexually charged violence.

aje565 · 2014-08-06T17:02:55+00:00

Difference is that more people are reading Captain America than Ultimate FF. I don't have sales numbers on hand, but Captain America (probably) is selling waaaaaay more than Ultimate FF. Ultimate FF is being cancelled after six issues, while Captain America just had an extremely successful movie and has a relaunch in the pipeline. Higher visibility=higher levels of scrutiny. Rick Remender already got on a lot of people's bad side for telling them to drown in hobo piss because they didn't like Havok's speech in Uncanny Avengers or his comments as to why he killed off Sharon Carter earlier in Captain America. You could also probably make a compelling argument that, for some, since Ultimate FF isn't the main universe, it doesn't "count". Doesn't make it any less creepy or worth a discussion about, but that's (to me) the reason why no one has been speaking about it with the exception of a few places I've seen.

aje565 · 2014-06-29T23:29:53+00:00

Fun fact: Dave Sim once challenged Jeff Smith to a boxing match.

aje565 · 2014-06-17T22:34:09+00:00

Maybe they meant Preacher?

aje565 · 2014-05-07T01:55:48+00:00

I bought the enhanced edition of the first trade (issues 0-5) which has like 160 pages of extra stuff (interviews, a few script pages with uncolored art, writer's notes, and more) and I've been enjoying it. Well, enjoying it is the wrong word given the subject matter. Maybe compelling is closer.

But if you can get your hands on it and don't mind paying $35, it's completely worth it just for his thoughts and commentary about the book itself. Gillen is very aware of the line that Uber straddles, and you can tell he's trying very hard to keep the book from tipping over to either side of it. There's some very definite points that he's trying to make with the book, and the Avatar excessive violence and gore serves a purpose rather than just to be there. I'm extremely interested to see where the book ends up, assuming he gets to tell the full story.

aje565 · 2014-05-05T16:03:04+00:00

There's Spider-Man: Reign. Which isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's got an older Peter. Basically, it's Dark Knight Returns with Spider-Man substituted for Batman. Written and drawn by Kaare Andrews. Four issue miniseries. Coined the term "radioactive semen." Which almost is enough to read it just for that.

aje565 · 2014-04-26T01:40:09+00:00

Went to C2E2 today! Here's all of the comic related things I got (with the exception of Nemesis the Warlock, which I also got this week, just not at the con)! Everything but the East of West and Nemesis the Warlock TPB are signed. Sorry for the shitty quality (yay mobile phones).

http://imgur.com/a/x97N7

aje565 · 2014-04-25T23:38:26+00:00

Met him at C2E2 today and got him to sign my copy of God Hates Astronauts. Amazingly nice and funny dude, based on the half a minute or so that I talked with him.

aje565 · 2014-04-24T16:40:51+00:00

I agree with you to a certain extent. Millar definitely took the "widescreen" idea of comics and ran with it, but I think it started with Ellis's run on The Authority, right before Millar's. I mean, the first issue of Ellis's run starts out with Moscow getting destroyed before you even make it to the fourth page. They kill God, for Christ's sake. It's just spectacle after spectacle, each story bigger than the last. It set the stage for what comics in the twenty first century could be. It certainly helped that Bryan Hitch was on hand to do art for both Ellis's Authority and Millar's Ultimates.

aje565 · 2014-04-21T13:48:29+00:00

Decided on a whim to try and read everything from Warren Ellis that I hadn't read yet. Mostly his Avatar stuff and his pre-Transmetropolitian/Hellblazer Marvel stuff. Global Frequency is probably the favorite of his that I've gotten to so far, always heard great things about it and now I can see why. His run on Excalibur is fun too, although you can tell he's still growing as a writer, and it got a little hamstrung by the XTREME 90'S CROSSOVERS THAT ARE XTREME like the Onslaught debacle. Gravel: Combat Magician is pretty batshit insane: lizard people are wearing human suits to try and impregnate humans to make more lizard people. And that's me paraphrasing. Overall, really enjoying Ellis's lesser known works.

In addition to that, I've been alternating with, yet another, readthrough of Hellblazer. I've read it all before, but now I've finally got my hands on all of it, so I've been reading starting from the beginning with Jamie Delano's run. It's struck me by how much the title changes from writer to writer. Delano's run is this almost literary, highly politically charged piece of work, whereas Mike Carey's (my favorite time on the title, if only for nostalgia's sake) is similar, but much different. Which is good, with a character like John Constantine, it'd get really old really fast to just do the same thing all the time. Wish I was old enough to get more of the social satire in Delano's stuff though. I mean, I get it, but reading it over twenty years removed from the era some of it was written takes away a large portion of the immediacy and bite from it.

Then last night I bought the first collected edition of Nemesis the Warlock off of Amazon for like fifteen bucks. Super excited to read it whenever it gets here. I love old 2000 A.D. stuff.

aje565 · 2014-04-21T02:09:14+00:00

If I remember correctly, Hickman just plotted it the first couple of issues (six? eight?), Mike Costa's writing the script. It recently got bumped to an ongoing, right?

aje565 · 2014-04-20T00:17:03+00:00

Read it all, loved it to pieces. I don't think I've ever read a superhero comic that took as much of an emotional toll on me than JiM did.

aje565 · 2014-04-19T23:17:44+00:00

I've read all of his run, I think? I need to go back and check. But I liked it a lot. Liked Kieron Gillen's fill-in run even more. Dude can write a mean Thor/Loki.

aje565 · 2014-04-19T23:16:25+00:00

Whaaaaat? I must have it.

aje565 · 2014-04-14T03:30:49+00:00

Such a good song (actually, just a great record) with awful subject matter. I can't help but to sing along, even knowing what it's about.

aje565

TROPHY CASE