Whats everyone reading?

[Mabs]

Just finished reading Saga Vol. 2. Wow. Just......

WOW!

[Colin YNWA]

Just finished Saga Volume 2 as well and... well I'm going to go against the trend... kinda.

Its pretty good. Its not the best comic I've ever read, far from it. It won't get close to being the best comic I've read this year, but its good fun. Kinda annoying at times. Every conversation seems to be filled with sass and smarts. Its like all the characters are Doctor Who companions from NuWho, all talking sassy and smart to each other, just so BKV can show how sizzling his dialogue is, rather than real.

The world building also feels lazy. It looks astonishing, but all the folk amazingly diverse visually though they are, talk and act like... well folk. There's no sense, aside from the visual, of this diversity. Its like a fun action number, with a little more depth, but not that much.

I say these things to highlight why I think its far from the perfect comic so many others do (not just here) and thus just focus on its weaknesses rather than its plenty of strengths, as it is good fun, its just far from brilliant, though it has the odd moment

"These days, I use it as a bookmark"

being my favourite line by a country mile and for those that are reading it so powerful. While the trades continue to be such good value I'll be on board. Of the two Image books really breaking the sales mold at the minute, this one is... well... running all over the Walking Dead.

[strontium_dog_90]

Just read "The Fictional Man" by our very own Al Ewing. If anyone's not read it yet, I'd recommend it completely. High concept weirdness with great characters that really jump out at you - it's the kind of book that reminds you of why you love to read in the first place 

Crossed Wish You Were Here Volume 2 has been the most recent comic reading - I don't know if it's down to being published more often than the other on-going series in the Crossed universe, but the narrator of this one is so well-developed and it's just a great read. I'm eagerly awaiting the next part.

[dweezil2]

Just read the final issue of Fury Max (#13) and it is gut-wrenchingly superb.

This has easily been one of the finest comics I have read for a very, very long time and although not for the faint hearted I would recommend it unequivocally.
It's some of the best work Ennis has ever done and Goran Parlov's expressive and provocative art has been consistently brilliant.
It's pretty much a masterpiece of storytelling.

[Colin YNWA]

Just read the final issue of Fury Max (#13) and it is gut-wrenchingly superb.

This has easily been one of the finest comics I have read for a very, very long time and although not for the faint hearted I would recommend it unequivocally.
It's some of the best work Ennis has ever done and Goran Parlov's expressive and provocative art has been consistently brilliant.
It's pretty much a masterpiece of storytelling.

Having read the first trade I'm REALLY looking forward to the second (coming September I believe). You know I said Saga was never going to be the best thing I read this year a few posts ago. This might well be in contention if the standard keeps up!

[dweezil2]

Just read the final issue of Fury Max (#13) and it is gut-wrenchingly superb.

This has easily been one of the finest comics I have read for a very, very long time and although not for the faint hearted I would recommend it unequivocally.
It's some of the best work Ennis has ever done and Goran Parlov's expressive and provocative art has been consistently brilliant.
It's pretty much a masterpiece of storytelling.

Having read the first trade I'm REALLY looking forward to the second (coming September I believe). You know I said Saga was never going to be the best thing I read this year a few posts ago. This might well be in contention if the standard keeps up!

Glad you're enjoying it so far Colin_YNWA.

If anything it just gets better and the final part hits like a drop kick to the guts. Love to hear what you think when you catch up. 

[Ancient Otter]

Got through Heck by Zander Cannon today. Thought it was good.

[Simon Beigh]

Just finished Nemesis (the Millar version, not "The Warlock"). I was confused by the ending - I'll detail why below:

[spoiler]So just who on earth was the Nemesis character. Was he, in fact, several rich playboys who enjoy dressing up as super-villans? Or the same chap, but funded by rich playboys? I mean, he did some high-tailing martial arts stuff to take down 100 cops and shot up a load of stuff and had all sorts of gadgets and gizmos - must be the same guy, right? And c'mon - leaving the bottle of wine 10 years before! That was just silly.[/spoiler]

And it all just felt too unbelievable. I know the premise of many comics are fantastical, but the good ones have an air of credibility to them. This felt rather like my 9 year old writing a story, with the typical small child ending of him waking up at the end to find out it was all a dream... (That's not the end of the comic, BTW, I'm using it to illustrate a point).

Shame - because 5 sixths of the book are really great - it felt like an anti-Batman which was a great idea. Just let down by the end...

[Mabs]

Just finished Saga Volume 2 as well and... well I'm going to go against the trend... kinda.

Its pretty good. Its not the best comic I've ever read, far from it. It won't get close to being the best comic I've read this year, but its good fun. Kinda annoying at times. Every conversation seems to be filled with sass and smarts. Its like all the characters are Doctor Who companions from NuWho, all talking sassy and smart to each other, just so BKV can show how sizzling his dialogue is, rather than real.

The world building also feels lazy. It looks astonishing, but all the folk amazingly diverse visually though they are, talk and act like... well folk. There's no sense, aside from the visual, of this diversity. Its like a fun action number, with a little more depth, but not that much.

I say these things to highlight why I think its far from the perfect comic so many others do (not just here) and thus just focus on its weaknesses rather than its plenty of strengths, as it is good fun, its just far from brilliant, though it has the odd moment

"These days, I use it as a bookmark"

being my favourite line by a country mile and for those that are reading it so powerful. While the trades continue to be such good value I'll be on board. Of the two Image books really breaking the sales mold at the minute, this one is... well... running all over the Walking Dead.

That was one of the faults with Y tbh, and I can spot the same style in the way BKV tells the story. But in terms of the cliffhangers/ twists and the artwork by Fiona Staples, it just blew me away. By the way, Fiona is not related to Greg Staples in any way is she? I mean same surname and they're both talented as fuck!

[I, Cosh]

Boneland by Alan Garner. A belated follow up to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, it's a very different book and, while the connection does make sense, I'd say it's only really there to allow the book to be stripped of a few pages of establishing backstory.

Colin from the earlier books has no memory of their events. Now a respected astrophysicist, he is on the verge of a breakdown seemingly related to his obsessive search for the sister he doesn't remember. Alongside the unraveling of inner struggles, a secondary narrative presents us with a sort of shamanic creation myth clearly - though never explicitly - set around the same landscape which forms the backdrop of all three books.

There appear to be various levels of parallel and resonance between the two parts but, being honest, I haven't got much of a clue what's meant to be going on, just the general sense that there are things I'm missing. Not that this is an unfamiliar sensation. I've found with his last couple of books that the first read only serves to get a general idea of the shape and ear for the language being used. It takes a second or more to start to tease out the heart of the matter and they are generally short and precise enough that this isn't a chore.

[Charlie boy]

I've a ton of books to work through but I'm finding myself increasingly tempted to buy the first part in the whole Graham Prophet run so many people here seem to be talking about (although it'll have to get in line with the current DareDevil run on my purchase list).
Reading-wise, I've recently finished Chuck Palahniuk's Damned. Can't say I'm a big fan of Palahniuk but I must have had a large proportion of his work thrust in my direction over the years. Damned, without shadow of a doubt, is the worst of them. It's actually pretty difficult for me to think of anything else to add after that statement but I will ask how much longer is he going to insist on putting "You exercise and take vitamins every day, what an asshole!" etc in his work? Oh, and there's going to be a sequel for Damned. I predict he'll use this sequel to slip in "You exercise and take vitamins every day, what an asshole!" wherever he gets the chance.

[TordelBack]

Started into a re-read of Sandman, buoyed by the prospect of the prequel and in recognition that the library is never going to find me the next volume of Invisibles.  Blimey, but it's good stuff.  I've just got as far 'the Sound of her Wings', (which as I recall was the end of the Preludes and Nocturnes volume), and I'm really impressed by how well it's all aged. 

I often think of these early issues as unsure in their approach, but they really aren't, it's just that later issues take a different tack.  The close integration with the mainstream DCU is charming, and builds nicely on Moore's similar achievements in Swamp Thing.  I have slightly more of an idea of who all these superpeople are now than I did back in 1989, but to be honest they just broaden Gaiman's fictional palette.  I'm not sure how much editorial dictat went into having these 'crossovers' early in the run, but they do no harm at all.

These stories are packed with incident and ideas, and the 'Waiting for the end of the World' sequence remains as horrific as it ever did - very much the forerunner of Crossed in fact. Keith, Dringenberg and Kelley pack their art with crude grotesques and little details alike, making for very good value.  The subtle seeds that are sown for future stories and characters are abundant but unobtrusive.

Dear grud though, Robbie Busch's colouring is a crime against art.  I know there were terrible technical limitations at the time, and the later reprints tackle this, but there's surely no excuse for continually mixing up the colours of characters' hair and clothes between panels, and slopping flat purple backgrounds over every foreground line.  A ghastly murky mess that makes 2000AD's somewhat-coterminus 'mud' period look like Van Gogh's Sunflowers.  No wonder I had pretty much sworn off colour comics at the time: compare a contemporary issue of Cerebus or Love and Rockets and give your eyes a much-needed chaser.

I wonder if by the time I'm done I'll actually prefer these earlier wildly energetic issues to the slower more polished later stuff that I usually think of as 'proper' Sandman.  Either way, these are some terrific comics.

[Professor Bear]

I remember swearing off comic book subcategories all the time, TB, and suspect I am rapidly approaching swearing off superhero books after Marvel's Age of Ultron, which gleaned one bright spot in the form of an Al Ewing Captains Britain/Marvel team-up in Avengers Assemble, but was otherwise completely wretched and felt like a personal insult.  I have a theory that this story was originally intended to introduce Marvelman to regular Marvel continuity, only the rights issue hasn't been sorted so it sat on a shelf for at least two years while talent associated with it moved to other projects and continuity clogged up around it and major players were dead, crippled, replaced with their arch-nemesis and so on, so it was either publish it now or never so they went out and bought a character absolutely no-one gave two shits about to fill a double-page spread originally earmarked for Marvelman's first canon appearance, which is why we were told for months that we'd never guess the ending - not even the guy who wrote the story two years ago knew what it was, and it also explains why there were so few tie-in books and holy god what a world when 23 tie-ins barely registers as a crossover.

Doomsday.1 - another sci-fi miniseries from John Byrne, this one a bit more glum as it follows a group of astronauts on the International Space Station who decide - after a massive solar flare wipes out the human race and leaves the planet a desolate ash-covered wasteland - to return to Earth.  It reminds me of those daffy old Survivalist pulp novels, only without the off-the-rails sci-fi of the later volumes, and in keeping with that there's some clumsy dialog in here, but for the most part it's pretty good, with some spectacularly dickish exchanges that the likes of Warren Ellis would be proud of putting in print, like the son still angry at his apologetic father as the world literally ends around them both, a cowardly pope fleeing the Vatican in anonymity, and Lady President addressing the nation for no reason other than to tell them we're totally fucked and she's going to pray to baby Jesus right now on television that it will at least be quick.
There's the usual apocalyptic survivor tropes to get through like body mutilation, cannibalism and the obligatory rape scene, but the book thankfully stops short of making us sit through any of that in any graphic form, only to deliver some horribly offhand dialogue about worse having already happened off-panel to other - deader - people, which just serves to remind the reader that you don't need to splatter the page with gore and rape to horrify them.  There's a logical storytelling progression/escalation to events as things seem to follow an episodic format spun out of the seeds planted in #1 where things are set up well enough, though this maybe feels like a cheat to modern audiences used to having McGuffins set up that then go nowhere and/or the random deaths of cast members.  Likewise, misery-porn like Walking Dead might leave you with the impression that if a tight-knit post-apocalyptic group doesn't suffer sexual assaults and mutilations on a regular basis the audience is somehow being cheated, but if you like those lo-fi 1980s post-apocalyptic movies that filled shelves in VHS rental stores back in the day, this is a pretty good recreation of the general atmosphere.  The art is reliably Byrne with expressive faces and melodramatic body language (which is harder to do than you might think), and like his Star Trek: Crew books and the High Ways, it's surprisingly good old-school page-turning pulpy fun.

[Mabs]

Prophet Vol. 2:

Absolutely superb stuff. Shaping up to be the read of the month for me.

[Charlie boy]

Prophet Vol. 2:

Absolutely superb stuff. Shaping up to be the read of the month for me.

I recently said Prophet was edging its way onto my purchase list, thinking I might make it a next purchase (checked Amazon; the books are under £6!). I was going to take a chance on the new DareDevil run but part of me is thinking maybe I should keep DareDevil as the collection I've already read- you know, like albums from when you were younger that you go back to from time to time? Don't want to risk another disappointment featuring my favourite comic character here so I may just go and dip my toes in the untested waters instead.