Sure, most of the stuff you listed, plus his Avengers stuff is kind of the capeshit cruft of his.
But
-Jinxworld
-USM
-Daredevil
-Alias
-Torso
-Scarlett
-Powers
That’s the shit people like him for.
1 Like
I’m reading more this year and that extends from words to comics. Here are three I finished in the past two days:
Monica
Daniel Clowes’s Ditko obsession really pays off in this one. There’s so much paranoia and anxiety buzzing through this story. The cadmium yellow accents the atmosphere so effectively. The chapter breaks are perfectly out of sync and I never felt comfortable inhabiting anyone’s point of view. It’s been awhile since I’ve read what could be described as a “graphic novel” and this was a nice reminder that they can be really cool sometimes.
William Softkey and the Purple Spider
Last year, I read Distant Ruptures, the anthology of C.F.‘s work from around 2010. In his short works, the world is barely coherent and often implodes from its contradictions or explodes in orgiastic chaos. William Softkey is from 2020 and it bears many trademarks, but I don’ think I’ve ever read a C.F. comic where things held together for this long. He is so casually brilliant with his style. It’s a very studied amateurism, sort of on the same branch as what Picasso did. I was in awe of certain sequences: the plane that was not a plane silently landing, the wavy pointilist backgroudn that produced psychedelic optical illusions, and of course, the world condensing into a single entity. The dream logic, as always, is indisputably sound.
The goats my father talked about
Saori Hata was sitting at a table in Durham for their zinefest. She was selling one of the highest-grade printed objects on the whole floor, not really what I’d call a zine at all. It’s a memoir told through ephemera: a father’s emails to his college-age daughter with photos of goats attached. The concept itself is fanciful enough, but she even inserts pieces of her own childhood: cartoon letters telling him she misses him and haphazardly-cut manga. Reading this, I was reminded of Earthbound and calling dad on the phone. It made me think about the loneliness that kids feel when their parents aren’t around. Then it made me think about the loneliness that parents feel when they aren’t around their kids.
5 Likes
do you have any idea how many drafts I had asking how you read a book that only just came out so early before seeing the 2025 in my calendar
2 Likes
I actually did get Distant Ruptures before its official publication date because they were selling it at SPX.
3 Likes
Read through the first two volumes of Astro Boy, which I guess aren’t so much traditional chronological release volumes as a sort of collected best-of set of chapters.
Anyway, somehow I haven’t read any Tezuka up to this point, and while some of the stories kinda drag they are most certainly wild as hell.
4 Likes
Astro Boy is one of the few things by Tezuka I haven’t read, but some of his other books are great. My favorite of them is Ode to Kirihito.
4 Likes
I’ve been reading some Hellboy omnibuses lately. And while the general vibe (and art) of the series is good, I have not really fallen in love with anything. But I got my hands on an omnibus of short stories featuring Hellboy, and these are changing my tune. There was a great Something Wicked This Way Comes type story about a little kid Hellboy running away to the circus, and being chased by 20th century freaks; an entire arc of his lost borracho tales from his time spent in Mexico during the 50s, wherein he gangs up with luchador triplets turned monster hunters; and then this last long story set in Appalachia, called The Crooked Man, which was just nasty and mean and super creepy. I figure this must be the hellboy people love.
Curious to check out the recent film adaptation of The Crooked Man. It didn’t seem to garner strong praise, from what I’ve encountered online. But I am curious how much of that is people’s preciousness about Ron Pearlman and GDT’s production value being absent.
6 Likes
With Hellboy I pretty much stuck to the Mignola-drawn stuff. I don’t know if there’s other HB stuff that’s really good but the stuff I looked at drawn by other people didn’t really grab me.
Although I did pick up that Krampusnatch issue written by Mignola and drawn by Adam Hughes, a lengthy preview of which is here:
It was okay.
Basically though I just did Hellboy Volumes 1-6 and Hellboy in Hell Volumes 1 and 2. I enjoyed them.
3 Likes
I have actually really enjoyed the issues not illustrated by Mignola. Some times even more. I think they are usually at least co-written, if not fully written by him.
2 Likes
i read a bunch of hellboy a while back, a single intense burst through i think most of the omnibusses, and my main conclusion is that mignola’s interests in epic long-form narrative and episodic stuff are really at odds with one another in a way that doesn’t really work ultimately, but is still sort of charming. i loved all the characters, but began to resent how, the more effort was taken to go into their back story, the more they all just became different variants on some kind of chosen one arc. i know there’s more to it than that and also maybe this is the point and i’m missing it, but i like it better when the bprd people, incl hellboy, are sort of… supporting characters to whatever the freak of the week is, rather than the people the stories are about
3 Likes
butt
I know it’s some weird angle of his leg but shh
shut up
butt
7 Likes
what moomin is this?
2 Likes
hahahaha cerebus in moomin land would be wild
4 Likes
a status came up in my facebook memories the other day, were in january 2013 i said “i love how moomin just openly dislikes the sniff and doesn’t want him around”
storm’s new solo series has her going to the x-men’s current home to hang out because she wasn’t allowed to use her powers for seven days because of a deal she made with a voodoo diety. while there, she has casual sex with wolverine, and that just makes so much sense for both of them. they’ve always been very close, and i think in recent years, x-men has become a place for characters to be, i guess, more sexually and emotionally open than most mainstream super-characters. (of course, no marvel comic will ever come close to empowered in this regard, though)
i started re-reading excalibur, and i’d forgotten how weird and silly and british it is. i wish the scans i was reading had the letters pages, because i would like to know how american fans reacted to it at the time.
4 Likes
I finally finished reading all of my small press comics from the past year. I should start reading Cerebus again
4 Likes
The Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer details are genuinely monstrous. That kid needs out of there ASAP.
8 Likes
i got through the bathtub recounting and was like fuck it that’s enough this guy can rot
6 Likes
Yeah that vulture article is a rough read, especially the stuff about the kid being in the room.
2 Likes
everything he writes is smug facile trash so it makes sense that it’s the product of a kind of superficial screen personality
7 Likes