Whats everyone reading?

[Mikey]

...does anyone remember Luke Kirby? I enjoyed those stories. Must find out if they ever released any trades.

Certainly do - some great stuff there and I've actually kept the progs off my disposal schedule. Do I remember there was some kind of falling out between the creative team and editorial about ownership?

M.

[Tombo]

Currently reading Guant's Ghosts Founding by Dan Abnett.  Its err... OK probably better than OK.  But its not a riproaring page turner, which would suit my hour on the train!
Im not normally a Warhammer Fan, so maybe my unfamilairity with the source material doesnt help! 

After you've read a few Gaunt books switch over to the Caiphas Cain series for a bit, similar theme (commissar with a Guards regiment) but a lot, lot funnier, much less grimdark, and much more reader friendly (Cain and the series' in universe editor explain quite a bit about the background to events).

Cain is a totally different character compared to Gaunt though, by his own admission he's a coward (possibly), a womanizer (certainly), a drinker, a gambler, an unreliable narrator, and an all round rogue.  He reminds me a lot of Dante without the cyberweapons (although Cain is an excellent swordmans with a chainsword).

[House of Usher]

I'm reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time in about 27 years, but this time in graphic novel form, published by Classical Comics in both original text and plain text (translated) versions.

It's not as hateful as I remember it. The premise is neat, but I can't bring myself to believe in the teen romance or care about any of the characters. The graphic novel adaptation is excellent, by the way. It helps you see the action, but there's more to it than that - the creative team had to design everything, including locations, and invent things for the characters to be doing while speaking the lines. Instead of being static on stage, the characters do quite a lot of walking around! It's an excellent study aid.

[TordelBack]

Do I remember there was some kind of falling out between the creative team and editorial about ownership?

I think the problem was that 'the creative team and editorial' were one and the same. 

[Roger Godpleton]

Blue by Pat Grant. Some of the best cartooning that's likely to be seen this year.

[the 'artist' formerly known as Slips]

Currently reading Guant's Ghosts Founding by Dan Abnett.  Its err... OK probably better than OK.  But its not a riproaring page turner, which would suit my hour on the train!
Im not normally a Warhammer Fan, so maybe my unfamilairity with the source material doesnt help! 

After you've read a few Gaunt books switch over to the Caiphas Cain series for a bit, similar theme (commissar with a Guards regiment) but a lot, lot funnier, much less grimdark, and much more reader friendly (Cain and the series' in universe editor explain quite a bit about the background to events).

Cain is a totally different character compared to Gaunt though, by his own admission he's a coward (possibly), a womanizer (certainly), a drinker, a gambler, an unreliable narrator, and an all round rogue.  He reminds me a lot of Dante without the cyberweapons (although Cain is an excellent swordmans with a chainsword).

Thanks Ill put it down for a new read, next is Dune Messiah (Im on a great Dune reRead) and Game of thrones.  I so need a kindle to help me carry this stuff.....

[JOE SOAP]

Blue by Pat Grant. Some of the best cartooning that's likely to be seen this year.

True dat.

[Professor Bear]

Thundercats issue 001: A UK-based mag with free toys on the cover and a short comic strip in the pagey bit, which I decided to check out for some reason, only to be reminded why I don't normally bother with these cash-in thingys and why the death of original Marvel UK content was probably a good thing.
The comic portion of the book is pretty terrible and falls into the trap of the worst kind of adaptations in that it seems to have been written before the writer had actually seen the show (I assume since writing this is now his job, he has actually watched it by now), with Wilycat saying things like "It's way creepy" and Tygra saying "Whoa!" as early as the second page, the first page being reserved for typos like "Yeah, I seem them now."  The 'toon is pretty accessible, but not actually that LCD as seems to be assumed by the people behind this comic, which just sort of meanders along ticking off the boxes as characters say things like "only victory matters here, female!" and I know as adults we're supposed to have a low opinion of the intelligence of kids, and that the disc-firing Sword Of Omens that comes free with the magazine is the main selling point and not the pesky bit with words joined together in some kind of fashion, but I would have thought if you're a grown man making comics within a cottage industry like what the UK has, you'd not just be throwing together charmless fun-free join-the-dots trash like this and instead having some fun with it as the makers of the 1985 Thundercats UK comic often did - I would assume there to be some evidence of a love of comics and the potential of the form, basically.  Here, there is none.
The figure art is good, though it's highly stylised and thus I can see a significant portion of kids hating it, especially since the actual storytelling from panel to panel is quite weak, relying heavily upon close-in shots of the characters and little in the way of backgrounds or expository dialogue, which I normally shun but given the weak script here wouldn't do much actual harm to the strip and would at least help in figuring out what's going on in the messy fight pages.  The lettering is pretty gash, too, if you care about that kind of thing.
Nice toy, crappy comic.

Mobot High, which I did a disservice by assuming it to be some sort of Viz-type brusque parody based on the huge size of the collection, the hardcover, "Mobot" being a derogatory term for a homosexual sci-fi fan, and the big robot on the cover having a huge pink sex organ on its chest, but it is actually an accessible and fun high school drama about bullying and Big School being different.
It falls into a great many traps when it comes to stereotypes, though this is probably intentional as the story and characters are  a matter of broad strokes that encompass a great many familiar tropes, especially so for any reader with a passing familiarity with anime or the cartoons of the last few years coming out of the US like Generator Rex, or Euro-toons like Totally Spies.
The rendering of the Mobots, while sometimes an eyestrain, also make me think the author was trying to get across that if anyone was wanting to make a series based in high school that could get away with blatantly obvious cgi (ie: cheap) robot fights, they need look no further, though the choice of fighting as the central conceit would make that deeply unlikely as tv programmers tend to look at things in terms of whether it's aimed at boys or girls, and fighting is a boys thing and the consensus is that while girls would watch a show with a male lead, boys won't watch a show with a female lead, which I think the author did address slightly in having the girls in the story go all squee to customise their robots with patterns and flowers and stuff to offset the manliness of the giant robot part of the concept.
None of which is important to the actual book itself, which is fun and looks great as a collected tome, with a nice hardcover around oversized pages giving it that old-school annual look.  Great stuff.

Mezolith, which makes me sad that UK comics are so slavishly tied to either being a 2000ad knock-off or charmless cash-in crap like Thundercats, as away from the demands of the omnipresent "twist" in the tail of the short story there is clearly mileage in just getting on with good storytelling and trusting that for the reader the payoff is the actual reading of the story and not the brief bit at the end where the main character was the killer all along or aliens/time travel has resulted in petard-hoisting from an unexpected quarter.  In Mezolith the tedious unpredictability of the twist ending is discarded in favor of the familiarity of the folk tale and the open-endedness of a book that is basically a soap opera that happens to be set a few thousand years ago (but without the constant bawling about murder or incest or whatever teen lesbianism plot has surfaced that is in no way a Freudian insight into the mind of the writers).
Mezolith is fantastic, looks absolutely beautiful, and was clearly the jewel in the crown of the DFC when it was being published even if I have no idea what people expecting another Beano or Dandy made of it.


These three books also remind me what an utter sewer British comics have become these days, as Thundercats is shite that's available anywhere while Mezolith and Mobot High couldn't be found on news stands as no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find the DFC anywhere, a problem that sank it and which I assume will also sink its successor The Phoenix, which I also can't find anywhere.  Sad.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

These three books also remind me what an utter sewer British comics have become these days, as Thundercats is shite that's available anywhere while Mezolith and Mobot High couldn't be found on news stands as no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find the DFC anywhere, a problem that sank it and which I assume will also sink its successor The Phoenix, which I also can't find anywhere.  Sad.

I agree. Even 2000AD...In my local FP the GNs are buried on the bottom shelf in the back corner on the second floor. It's not even worth checking if they have the prog on time. And Strip magazine...Jesus. They took 2 months to get issue 2 in.

[Emperor]

I've just started a re-read of Planetary as I got the final trade but it has been so long since I've read the others I think I'd be doing it a disservice to read cold. Good stuff so far but it does rather show its homework (as much of wicked uncle Warren's comics do, that is part of the fun) and the team is oddly reactive (or even inactive), turning up at places, witnessing the wonders and buggering off, but again that seems to be part of the point (although I seem to recall this was a niggle last time I read it through, I'm hoping doing it all in one go while make it seem more coherent, as there are broader storylines at work). That said I am enjoying it, for what it is.

[SmallBlueThing]

Loads on the go at the moment- as I've had more or less a couple of weeks off due to illness.

The Saga of the Swamp Thing.
I'm reading all my recently-rediscovered back issues. Having worked through what I have of the first series, I moved onto the second, and have recently finished the Alan Moore run and when I left it last, was hip-deep in Rick Veitch. Meh. Man can't write. Maybe he gets better- but memory fails me on that.

Batman- Shadow of the Bat.
I found the first sixteen or so issues of these, so have brought the first four downstairs for a read- The Last Arkham, by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle.

Seven Soldiers of Victory- collection volume two.
Cheers, Locusts! Have read a weeny bit, and will be cracking on with that a bit later, when I get off the <mumbleting> Internet.

Fever, by some old soak.
Zombie shenanigans, which so far I am very much enjoying. I read the first seventy-five pages in one sweaty sitting, but then got the screaming shits and vomits, so haven't been back to it. But it's rare for a book to grip so thoroughly so immediately.

The Hammer of God, by Arthur C Clarke.
Sheer bollocking brilliance by the master of just about everything (except maybe tax).

SBT

[Emp]

The Laundry files, 3 books by Charles Stross...The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue & The Fuller Memorandum.  James Bond meets Cthulhu.

It was a description that put me onto these :

There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of spacetime where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summonded them , HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and alan Turning mapped the paths from their universe to ours. the right calculations can call up entities from other, older universe or invoke their powers. Invisiblity? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable!

Opening up the way for the Grat Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunatley, much too easy.

Thats where the Laundry comes in - it's a branch of the British Secret Service, tasked with preventing hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on earth (an more importantly the UK). The hours are long, the pay is sub par, the co-workers are ..interseting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word) and the bureaucracy is stifling - but theres always the basilisk guns and bullet wards, and missions to quaint, legend haunted Wigan and cursed Slough.

On the down side of these, well trhe 1st anyway, the proof reader was either disgruntled or lazy as there are  times when you need to look at a sentence twice and work it out.

[HOO-HAA]

Fever, by some old soak.
Zombie shenanigans, which so far I am very much enjoying. I read the first seventy-five pages in one sweaty sitting, but then got the screaming shits and vomits, so haven't been back to it.

Geez, man, it's not that bad, is it?

But it's rare for a book to grip so thoroughly so immediately.

Aw shucks, man 

[Emperor]

The Laundry files, 3 books by Charles Stross...The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue & The Fuller Memorandum.  James Bond meets Cthulhu.

I've enjoyed them, the first stories are a bit rough around the edges but enjoyable. Also read his A Colder War:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

If you like those then give Tim Power's Declare a spin.

[GordyM]

Saucer Country: an interesting start to this comic about a presidential candidate being abducted by aliens. I'm on board for the next few issues at least.