Hey I am in the same room as brandon graham right now. He bought a comic from my friend
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Neat! You must be at the Olympia comics thing?
Brandon is a pretty cool dude. He stopped by my friend’s little local comics expo during Emerald City and was earnestly checking out what local people had been doing. He asked if I saw anything cool and was nice enough to look at all the stuff I showed him even though in hindsight he was talking about being late for a meeting. I can really only say nice things about him, he earnestly seems to be trying to make comics a better scene.
started reading gotham academy based on a friend’s recommmendation.
i never had an habit of reading comics (i.e western) so i can’t tell how it fits in comic-book categories/age group but i fancy the atmosphere a whole lot. got a great sunday-morning cartoon feel to it and the ‘yearbook’ stories are cute.
now i have to wait for the continuation and dc wasn’t specific about the date as far as i know ;-[
hey if you like gotham academy check out We Are Robin its got a very late era batman the animated series vibe, a good one for you too might be Hawkeye
i love gotham academy! you don’t actually have to wait to read more, either: the first issue of a miniseries crossing over with lumberjanes just came out, and the miniseries’ll pretty much fill the months until the second volume of gotham academy starts 
here’s some stuff i wrote on tumblr a while back about some of the reasons i love GA so much
i think the magic of gotham academy lies in the way that all the
spooky craziness with monsters and stuff is so perfectly blended with
the story of olive’s emotional recovery/healing. like they aren’t two
halves, they’re a part of each other. i think olive’s encounters with
the various monsters is actually helping her deal with her trauma and
the related issues she has regarding batman. and because she’s scared of
the possibility that she might one day be a monster herself, it gives
her a different perspective in these encounters too (#13 is a pretty
good example of this)
you mention olive building her own
family of friends, because she doesn’t have anyone else, too, and i
think that’s a really cool use of the boarding school setting (which has
been used in childrens & young adult fiction for decades as an easy
way for kids to have adventures in a safe-ish world without parents) (i
guess maybe harry potter did something like that too, he was an orphan
right? i know practically nothing about that series tbh)
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thanks~! i will check em out.
oh, i saw that. i have no idea what lumberjanes is but i like the character designs on the front cover.
i agree with what you said but to me the aspect of olive’s issues, although great, is not really why i like it. what i think i like the most is how confident the world is to be completely self-centered without throwing knee-jerk ‘referential’ jokes. it’s like, heck yeah let’s solve mysteries and hang out and there are these monsters and larger-than-life people roaming about and that’s just the way it is. the characters are caricatures of themselves without a lick of irony or shame. of course this guy’s sunglasses have an infra-red mode, etc etc. it’s a lovely breed of magical realism i seldom see, unfortunately.
maybe it’s got something to do with me not knowing how people in comics usually deal with seeing bizarre things happening daily.
this sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would hate reading but love for the aesthetic purposes of hand drawn art mixed with photographs
I think I like the Chunkyness though. I used to read Holyland purely for its off kilter, grimy artwork.
HolyLand is a pretty good fight manga about a kid in a slum area of a big city in Japan ( I can’t remember if it’s Tokyo or not) who’s a really naturally gifted boxer. It’s about him getting involved in a street fighting ring in middleschool/highschool as a way to deal with the stresses of life. It has a very…Streets of Fire / 1980’s Martial Arts film vibe.
I haven’t read it in 5+ years, but I remember them being pretty nice. It can kind of be a tough read because some of the characters are a little slovenly and tough to like, but honestly that’s something I’m into w/r/t characters
I have not been doing my duty.
READING UPDATES
I read all of Gotham Centralit’s great as I assume you’ve heard. It’s a little sad that they had to have a rouge in every arc, but the idea of a police pocedral in Gotham turns out better than it should, then remembering the Gotham TV show I realised it is. The detectives and circumstanced word so well, also the fact that there’s an uneasy feeling around Batman in the department makes for so much depth to be read into every interaction around that point it really shows where that show falls off and the comic does nearly everything right.
I read all of the Joker’s Las Laugh Event, It was a DC event where many villans got Jokerized because Joker was dying and this was his last hurrah. It was stupid and silly. Then the ethics of superheros saving him from a blood clot was just beyond anything understandable. (sorry spoilers, but really never read this)
As wikipedia puts it “Private Eye is a science fiction mystery comics series written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Marcos Martín and colored by Muntsa Vicente.” It’s a great comic, made for digital and can be read for free via: http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye I don’t even want to spoil anything. But if you have a tablet read it on there, it’s perfect for that. And it’s great, seriously go read, good stuff.
Also been digging into DC Rebirth, more turtles, and my Spider-Man.
Beyond that.
I went the the land of manga, glorious Nippon, and saw the manga stories, took in their fish stuffs, and wept. For I am illeterate in Japan. Comics comics everywhere and not a one to read. But I do want to check out One peice something feirce now as @mosesplan has put upon me to do for years. Sadly I think an illegal route might be best? Saw a few other interesting prospects. Even picked up some of that fan comic porn, how they do erotica is so facsinating there on so many levels.
The first Manga I’ll be diving into though is the Wounded Man in full, I just ordered the 4th volume and have the entire English collection.
Lastly I leave you with this. Is Morrison’s 18 days worth picking up? https://www.humblebundle.com/books/grant-morrison-comics
I’ll probably buckle but thought I should ask.
I’d say the Halo Graphic Novel is worth getting not just for the silent Nihei short, but also on account of containing two other stories illustrated by Simon Bisley and Jean Giraud. Brett Lewis wrote the piece Moebius did the artwork for and is sort of notable for achieving in writing one of the best post-Watchmen works in the form of The Winter Men.
I don’t know what the odds of seeing reprints on NOiSE, Abara or Nihei’s other shorts look like now, but the former is on Kindle.
Have you tried the Bendis Halo thing? I’m scared to touch it.
I don’t think I have time for Bendis any more, not even for Scarlet. The only thing that stood out from Halo: Uprising were the spare few, thankfully wordless, action sequences focusing on Master Chief onboard the Dreadnought.
How can you not have time for Bendis. His stuff reads like popcorn, super light.
I will say Scarlet is the only book of his I’m reading currently, and I think yes that book is worth it, all 2-3 issues we get a year apparently.
It isn’t, I was talking about NOiSE.
Blame! is getting reprinted!
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