What (comics) are you reading right now?

[Spandex]

For showy art and an intricate plot there's the epic steampunk-fantasy series Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, which has been running for 10 years now and still maintaining quality. Maika Halfwolf tries to uncover and understand her past, against backdrop of a war between magic wielding humans and half-animal arcainics in a matriarchal society with ancient gods looming around threateningly. If I'm in the mood for something fantasy this delivers. And it looks amazing.

 

[Spandex]

But I came to post what I've been reading this afternoon... Dark Spaces: Wildfire by Scott Snyder & Hayden Sherman.

A team of women prisoners on work release fighting an out of control forest fire are talked into robbing a mansion in the danger zone by their newest member. Will the simple heist go to plan? Of course not.

Like watching a good film, but in comic form.

 

[tommers]

Love all of those.

I opened my comic shop today. Been sitting up to midnight every night looking through 14,000 line spreadsheets or adding stock to inventory systems, building bookshelves and humping racks up hills. Been non stop for 10 days and I'm so tired. But everybody was so lovely and loads of people said they've been waiting for ages for a shop to open in town and we sold loads of books to loads of different people and people said we had a good range of stuff. So I'm really happy.

Haven't had any time to read any comics.

 

[krtek a houby]

It's not got showy art, it's not got a tight and intricate plot, but sometimes a comic just works and keeps me reading and wanting to know where it's going and then I keep thinking about it afterwards. This is one of them.

View attachment 454882

Looks like Robert Crumb hanging out with Silent Running

 

[krtek a houby]

Love all of those.

I opened my comic shop today. Been sitting up to midnight every night looking through 14,000 line spreadsheets or adding stock to inventory systems, building bookshelves and humping racks up hills. Been non stop for 10 days and I'm so tired. But everybody was so lovely and loads of people said they've been waiting for ages for a shop to open in town and we sold loads of books to loads of different people and people said we had a good range of stuff. So I'm really happy.

Haven't had any time to read any comics.

That's so wonderful, when younger you just couldn't get me out of comic shops. Of course, before FP came to Dublin, the choice wasn't as wide as now.

You'd be buying your comics in Easons, or you'd find the occasional US Marvel in a newsagent, or a DC if you were lucky.

O'Connell St world have the paper stalls selling some of the old horror comics, but your best bet was usually in The Alchemists Head in Temple Bar, or the tiny Twilight Zone in the Ilac.

It's impossible to impart to non comic people the absolute joy of buying the latest issue of your favourite ongoing story.

Wishing you much satisfaction and success.

 

[Spandex]

Good luck tommers

I love browsing comic shops. I love reading a good comic more than watching telly or a film.

I still remember my first comic. My dad was in hospital for a minor operation in about 1980 and I was visiting and obviously looking a bit bored as the bloke in the next bed in the ward gave me Chiller #10, a pocket sized Marvel comic reprinting early 70s Man Thing and The Tomb of Dracula:

I then had to hunt out other copies to meet my need for more, going to the third closest newsagents to where I lived, which had a small and random collection of Marvel comics on the bottom shelf. There was always the question of would they get the next issue in? I got a subscription to Battle purely for Pat Mills' Charley's War strip. Friends at school were buying 2000AD, so I read their copies of that too. I got into buying Amazing Spiderman and then Walt Simonson's run on Thor.

I'd get the train up to central London to go to Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street (I met Stan Lee there once, who signed my copy of Punisher #1, so it must've been in 1987). Then a comic shop opened in a run down building in the town centre and that became a teen hang out, going after school and Saturdays to spend all my money discovering the kind comics that just wouldn't appear in a news agent, like Love & Rockets.

Comics were all I read as a teenager. After a lull reading them in my 20s I got back into them in them one acid comedown day reading Halo Jones and I've loved reading them since.

So I hope your comic shop goes well. They can be so much more than just a business, they can be a focus for a small community.

 

[krtek a houby]

Ah, the pilgrimage to Denmark St. And the cool Brian Bolland bag designs!

 

[Spandex]

Ah, the pilgrimage to Denmark St. And the cool Brian Bolland bag designs!

 

[tommers]

So I hope your comic shop goes well. They can be so much more than just a business, they can be a focus for a small community.

Thank you. A small community is exactly what I want it to be. We've got a basement downstairs so I'm trying to decide what to do with it. Could fill it with back issues (already had two people ask if I want to buy / sell their old collections) or make it into a reading room / library or something. Run events down there. I don't know yet.

I also want to get people in who don't normally read comics and showcase the range of current stuff, and hopefully get them into it. Or at least show people that it's not all Batman and Superman. Most of the stuff we sold yesterday wasn't superheroes, it was biographies and novels and underground stuff from the 60s. It'll be interesting (to me at least) to see how that goes. Yesterday might have just been Xmas presents but I think there's an audience for Pee Pee Poo Poo alongside Hush or Ultimate Spiderman.

And I'm going to resist funko pops until the store is repossessed.

 

[Silas Loom]

Good luck with it tommers! Did you choose an ecommerce platform in the end? Much more interesting than the comics aspect, although I have just bought a set of One Punch Man books for my nephew.

 

[Spandex]

My daughter is the manga fan in our family. Here's her bookshelf to give an idea what a 12 year old manga fan is into:



Demon Slayer is her favourite at the moment. The Promised Neverland was the one I got into.

 

[A380]

Trace my life Story.

Denmark Street
New Oxford Street
Shaftesbury Avenue….



Also been to the New York, Cardiff ( is this closed now? ) and Cambridge ones. There was a chap on YouTube that visited all the UK branches over a weekend, which might be a challenge to replicate…

 

[Buddy Bradley]

Our local place (Peterborough in the 80s) was The House On The Borderland, which was tucked away at the end of a dirty alley and run by a crusty old hippy who also dealt a bit of weed. It had a random selection of clothes, bags, incense and secondhand records as well. My brother and I went most weekends because they got all the American indie comics in, stuff like Fantagraphics titles.

Sadly it went out of business in the 90s I think; the owner switched to eBay but then lost all his stock in a house fire.

Thank you. A small community is exactly what I want it to be. We've got a basement downstairs so I'm trying to decide what to do with it. Could fill it with back issues (already had two people ask if I want to buy / sell their old collections) or make it into a reading room / library or something. Run events down there. I don't know yet.

Whereabouts are you based, UK or elsewhere? And are you doing mail order?

 

[Spandex]

Like all right minded people I love Miyazaki's Ghibli films, but for my birthday I got a box set of the complete Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga.

There's so much more to it than the film, which only skips through the first two chapters. The artwork is up to the quality you'd expect from Miyazaki, the story is properly epic, dense and apocalyptic. Need to go back to the beginning and read it all over again.

 

[Buddy Bradley]

Anyone interested in comic book history should definitely subscribe to this guy on YouTube - he's jumped to the top of my favourite channels with his long-form, well-researched video essays on all kinds of comics history:

matttt - comic & manga history

Share your videos with friends, family and the world

www.youtube.com

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I got a box set of the complete Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga.

There's so much more to it than the film, which only skips through the first two chapters. The artwork is up to the quality you'd expect from Miyazaki, the story is properly epic, dense and apocalyptic. Need to go back to the beginning and read it all over again.

It's a fucking journey. If you have only seen the film you basically get the first 5 to 10% of the story with a bit of a tacked on ending.

Similar to comparing the Akira movie and manga but even more so as that move takes the first 25% and a parts of the last 10% to make its story.

 

[tommers]

I read the first few pages of the new part of "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters". I missed the first one when it came out so I'm going to order that (they reprinted it last year) and then read the second one.

 

[tommers]

That prompted a whole "is it comics though?" discussion yesterday.

 

[Spandex]

That prompted a whole "is it comics though?" discussion yesterday.

Ah, the wonderful time killing pastime of a pointless semantic debate

Comics as a term to describe the things your shop sells of course derives from their origins as humourous strips in newspapers, 'the funny pages', that sometimes came as a separate insert in the paper, which then developed into non-humourous story telling, longer strips that eventually filled whole comic with ongoing stories, before eventually people started writing long form graphic novels (you can start another argument over what counts as the first graphic novel: Joseph Franz von Goez’s Leonardo and Blandine (1783), Rodolphe Töpffer's The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1849), Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978)?)

The term comic therefore isn't specific to a rigid format. If My Favorite Thing Is Monsters doesn't count as a comic, what about Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light?



They're not the traditional comics format with speech bubbles (there are a few speech bubbles in MFTIM), but they're just a further development of the form.

In Japan there's a distinction between manga (with talking in speech bubbles) and emonogatari (with pictures illustrating the written narrative), for example Miyazaki's Shura's Journey:



But we don't really have that linguistic distinction in English.

Anyway, tldr: it's all comics

 

[tommers]

Ah, the wonderful time killing pastime of a pointless semantic debate

Comics as a term to describe the things your shop sells of course derives from their origins as humourous strips in newspapers, 'the funny pages', that sometimes came as a separate insert in the paper, which then developed into non-humourous story telling, longer strips that eventually filled whole comic with ongoing stories, before eventually people started writing long form graphic novels (you can start another argument over what counts as the first graphic novel: Joseph Franz von Goez’s Leonardo and Blandine (1783), Rodolphe Töpffer's The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1849), Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978)?)

The term comic therefore isn't specific to a rigid format. If My Favorite Thing Is Monsters doesn't count as a comic, what about Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light?

View attachment 456221

They're not the traditional comics format with speech bubbles (there are a few speech bubbles in MFTIM), but they're just a further development of the form.

In Japan there's a distinction between manga (with talking in speech bubbles) and emonogatari (with pictures illustrating the written narrative), for example Miyazaki's Shura's Journey:

View attachment 456222

But we don't really have that linguistic distinction in English.

Anyway, tldr: it's all comics

Yes. We decided text comics was a term. Like Rupert the Bear.

I don't care, they're all comics. But as my friend said "just cos something doesn't matter doesn't mean you can't have an opinion"

 

[Spandex]

Something brilliantly stupid...



The great Gatsby is throwing a lavish party to impress love of his life Daisy Buchanan, when Godzilla attacks. Fearing Daisy lost Gatsby uses his fortune to form a super team of Sherlock Holmes, HG Well's time machinist and cyborg Jules Verne to battle the monster as it rampages across the world destroying cities.

Similiar-ish premise to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but while that was a great idea that was ultimately a bit shit this ploughs on with fabulously basic golden age style artwork, caring not for logic or sense as Godzilla rampages and Gatsby's G-Force bumbles around in pursuit.

 

[Silas Loom]

Disappointed that it’s modern pastiche, though.

 

[tommers]

I bought my daughter BirdKing for Christmas.


Anyway. I've just read BirdKing. It's really good.

 

[Spandex]

My Xmas haul:

I've wanted those Blueberrys for literally decades but they've always been hard to find (out of print since 1989, unlikely to be reprinted in English any time soon), so I'm fucking delighted

 

[tommers]

My Xmas haul:
View attachment 456820
I've wanted those Blueberrys for literally decades but they've always been hard to find (out of print since 1989, unlikely to be reprinted in English any time soon), so I'm fucking delighted

Lovely.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I posted a breakdown on the 2024 books thread but it looks like I read about 800 manga titles this year.

I may try to go through the list and point out any that stood out.

 

[Dom Traynor]

Hey tommers where is your shop? PM if preferred want to make sure I send anyone I know nearby to it...

 

[tommers]

I posted a breakdown on the 2024 books thread but it looks like I read about 800 manga titles this year.

I may try to go through the list and point out any that stood out.

Sweet jesus. 800??

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

Sweet jesus. 800??

Some of them I may have only read one or two chapters. But yeah. About 3 a day sounds right.
Some days I'll read like 10 or more different ones.

 

[heinous seamus]

Found this in a pile of stuff in my room. Checked eBay and the last two that sold went for £20 and £27! Sadly it's not in great nick, someone has stabbed it with a pen