Whats everyone reading?

[Colin YNWA]

There is much of Uncle Alan's work I mean to pick up from my wilderness years and AB is high amongst them. Must get to it (and Tom Strong) at some point.

That there is so very much more there, both said and unsaid, intentional and unintenional, is what makes it worthwhile, and not just one more hateful screed that was cut and paste from a sub-reddit.

One Last Cereus one before we derail this entirely (thence I tried once to shepard Cerebus talk into its own thread. It's so compelling as to always draw comment!) But as Tordelback nails it here. I always come back to the brilliantly observed interactions  between Cerebus and Joanne. So wonderfully done, yet I think Dave wants us to get a very different set observations from it Than I do.

The hand ringing when it comes  to Cerebus is important to me. It's such a fine piece of literature that hands should be rung over it!

[TordelBack]

There's not much subtlety or depth here but the two series are great fun, and the art (by Swamp Thing artist Yanick Paquette) is dynamic, bright and breezy... with plenty of his trademark, ahem, 'pneumatic' ladies. Enjoyable fluff.

Yeah, in an odd Mooreless way Terra Obscura is almost my favourite of the ABC books, after Top Ten of course.  Paquette's art is gorgeous, the characters well defined and the world interesting. It's just a fun superhero setup. Agree about Hogan, he's a consistently enjoyable writer.

[Dark Jimbo]

Yeah, in an odd Mooreless way Terra Obscura is almost my favourite of the ABC books, after Top Ten of course.  Paquette's art is gorgeous, the characters well defined and the world interesting. It's just a fun superhero setup. Agree about Hogan, he's a consistently enjoyable writer.

I've read Top Ten before (one of my favourite Moore works full stop) but not the two sequel/prequel series, so I'm looking forward to those.

I love knowing that I can revist Terra Obscura at least once more in Tom Strong: Planet of Peril, but I'm not as excited as I would be if Paquette was still the artist - even though Chris Sprouse got there first, Paquette very much made it his own in those two series. Particularly like his craggy, slightly deformed Tom Strange.

[sheridan]

The more and more I read second hand the more and more tempted I am to just leave my Cerebus adventure at Church and State II...

It's readable up to Reads, from then on the only good bits are the picture pages, which grow less and less frequent.

[TordelBack]

No love for Minds? Or Going Home?  Both are pretty amazing comics. RicksStory and Latter Days you can keep - although the account of the lives of the Three Stooges is remarkable, it's waaaay too depressing for me. Melmoth is cheerier, and that was the grimmest omic I'd ever read at that point (Maus was just around the corner).

[TordelBack]

I've read Top Ten before (one of my favourite Moore works full stop) but not the two sequel/prequel series, so I'm looking forward to those.

Smax is good but forgettable, The 49'ers is great (and fairly essential) but for the love of crimminey don't even open Farthest Precinct. Which should be easy, since it Never Happened.

Yeah, I love Paquette's Tom, fantastic stuff.

[sheridan]

No love for Minds? Or Going Home?  Both are pretty amazing comics. RicksStory and Latter Days you can keep - although the account of the lives of the Three Stooges is remarkable, it's waaaay too depressing for me. Melmoth is cheerier, and that was the grimmest omic I'd ever read at that point (Maus was just around the corner).

I'm trying to remember precisely when I stopped getting the comic (waiting for the phonebooks instead) - I think it was soon after Guys had begun.  There were odd bits which were good when he actually got around to telling the story, but the rest of it seriously let down the 300-issue project.

[Skullmo]

I take that to mean it ultimately doesn't read as a grim polemic against women. There's more going on, and I can enjoy the sweep of it, rather than hand-wringing over perceived (perhaps-real-enough) misogyny.

Mmm-hmmm.  The misogyny is definitely real, Dave really does use Cerebus to put forward his view that the shallowness of women and their material and emotional demands drag men down and away from the true path of creativity and spiritual enlightenment that is their sole preserve.

And of course the wonderful thing of using Cerebus to voice his thoughts is that Cerebus is an unreliable source of information, he is so twisted up inside by his upbringing and his past that he cannot understand what is driving him, something that [spoiler]Dave points out to him [/spoiler]and which is later manifested in his multiple consciences. The fact that Cerebus is also a [spoiler]hermaphrodite[/spoiler], and Bear points out to him that [spoiler]he actually acts 'like a woman'[/spoiler], further confuses these messages. I felt part of it was him just trying to find and asset his masculinity in a female dominated society, which was in conflict to the land in which Cerebus was born and raised.

[TordelBack]

Nicely put, Skullmo. It really is a fabulously complex work.

Maybe one day I'll see the same kind of genius in page after page of excruciatingly re-worded pentateuch and Woody Allen parody, but I'm not there yet.

[Skullmo]

Nicely put, Skullmo. It really is a fabulously complex work.

Maybe one day I'll see the same kind of genius in page after page of excruciatingly re-worded pentateuch and Woody Allen parody, but I'm not there yet.

I skipped that book - it was just too much after pushing through reads

[Daveycandlish]

Tonight I shall be mainly trying not to drool over the pages of my newly delivered Zenith Phase One Apex edition.

Niiiice.

[SuperSurfer]

Months ago at the Crouch End comic art festival I bought To Arms, a graphic novel anthology of WW1 stories. I only just got around to reading it now.

Fascinating stuff, with a wide variety of thought provoking comic strips and stand alone illustrations as well as an interview with Pat Mills.

Recommended.

[I, Cosh]

For some reason I'd never picked up on China Mieville before, so The City and the City was a nice introduction. It does what the best sci-fi or fantasy does in coming up with a clever central conceit or metaphor and then following that to its illogical ends while keeping a straight face the whole time.

Here it's all about the way we are able to compartmentalise the world around us and casually separate whole groups of people from "ourselves" and quite literally refuse to see them or their suffering. That we are able to ignore everything that unites us and focus solely on that single thing we believe makes them different even when we know it isn't real. A pretty compelling idea at the moment.

The murder mystery plot is a classic way of allowing the writer to explore the workings and the seamy underbelly of the world he has created and so it proves here. Partly because of the non-specific East European (Balkan? On the cusp of the European and Arab worlds?) setting and because he spends much of the book not feeling the need to explain the mechanics of the central division, I find it hard to avoid using the K word but I feel like the QI klaxon might go off if I do.

Anyway, good stuff. Weakens slightly in the home stretch when it does start to deal with those pesky details but the investigation has to go that way from the start and the sequence when our dour hero is finally forced to open his eyes and see the full world he lives in is worthwhile.

Will look for more.

[TordelBack]

Mieville is great, although he can be a bit repetitive book to book and does have a tendency to overstuff with innumerable broadly-drawn (if interesting) supporting characters. And yet paradoxically he's one of the few writers whose brick-sized novels I much prefer to his shorter fiction - he's particularly good at letting his threads wander through fascinating places before pulling them tightly back in with a sense of mounting dread.

The great Perdido Street Station is the obvious place to start, but I loved Kraken, an 'under London'-type novel with a sustaining maguffin that you can readily imagine Harry Absalom or Stickleback pursuing, and a Gaimanish environment of a-la-carte magical hustlers, gangsters and petty godlings. Not sure my opinion here is the majority one, and it is v-e-r-y long.

[Theblazeuk]

Conversely I think Searching for Jake is my favourite of his works, but largely due to the free pass short fiction gets in sustaining a narrative over exploring an idea.

The City & The City is great. Would work excellently with explicit paranormal elements - but then goes one step further and makes it really weird by creating an abstract division of reality.

I loved Kraken. My favourite Weird London book by miles, even more so than Neverwhere or Roofworld. UnLondon is good but compared with Kraken, it pales. Still on the same level as the aforementioned books by other authors.

Embassytown was very interesting though at points was a bit of a slog. The weakest main character I think by far, also kinds of drags with the sheer alien-ness of the central narrative. Both its strength and its weakness.

Railsea and The Scar, I very much enjoyed but merely follow in the footsteps of Perdido Street Station. Found them toughgoing at points.