In love with this year’s reprints—Prince Valiant and Dick Tracy, and eagerly awaiting Popeye soon.

Actually, Absolute Promethea Vol 3 was a revelation. The whole section in the Immateria (which was Vol 2) had put me off when I was doing it in floppies but is absolutely bitchin’ today.

yeah I think it really improved towards the end, altho the last couple issues feel padded out (like there’s supposed to be a big conflict and then she... runs away and hides for two issues? uh okay). it’s a bit of a slog to read all in one go.

The final episode is still, to be frank, a complete mess although Jim Williams’ breakdown of what a clusterfuck it was makes it more entertaining. But the breakdown of the world, particularly Sophie/Joey’s time in Milennium City is really great.

I think one of my 2012 resolutions is going to be to invest in some strip reprint books.

Popeye. Seriously dude, you won’t regret it.

Other great stuff includes Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Rip Kirby and Walt & Skeezix (although my heart really belongs to Brit/Euro lovelies like Trigan Empire and Storm and Charley’s War).

I’ve been a Roy Crane nut for ages — I need to see what Wash Tubbs/Capn Easy/Buz Sawyer volumes are out there. Also, more Bushmiller. Popeye possibly, Dick Tracy possibly.

I find myself drawn towards Modesty Blaise, without actually having read any of them. Will they be any good?

Recommend me some DC Archives volume(s)—never read much of the silver age stuff and have no idea what’s good and what’s not, despite being curious (it’s expensive to be curious)

guys.guys.

achewood.

Yeah, this should be fun. I think I liked the last strip better though — “Dutch potatoes on the brain”, “puppet arm” “boiled nonsense” etc.

Modesty Blaise—the first four or five years of the strip, drawn by the superb Jim Holdaway, prob represent the best daily continuity comic strip ever published in the UK—fun sixties spy stuff w/ a surprisingly emotional backstory. Only David Wright’s wonderful Carol Day, still uncollected, gives it a run for its money.

Comic strip reprints—I’ve been enjoying the collected editions of The Heart of Juliet Jones by Stan Drake and On Stage by Leonard Starr—gorgeous realist soap operas, and a big influence on the whole Neal Adams school. The new Pogo collection from Fantagraphics looks a must-buy, and their forthcoming Barnaby edition will be worth the long wait. Now someone needs to do a proper edition of Connie by Frank Goodwin.

DC Archive—I wld rec ‘Action Heroes’ Vol 2, which collects together all of Ditko’s best work for Charlton, including his great Question and Blue Beetle strips.

speaking of strips: has anybody ever heard of Fetus-X? it was in the first wave of webcomix, sort of a familiar American mix of transgressive humor and political satire (main character is an aborted fetus in a jar w/ psychic powers). I dont think dude (Eric Millikin) is still doing it, but it was kinda controversial and impression I get is that dude is a bit of a big deal around the Ann Arbor/Detroit area.

Still the only way I heard of it was because dude’s mom taught a class I attended in community college. Still it wasn’t bad. Anybody else know about it?

main character is an aborted fetus in a jar w/ psychic powers

lol 90s

Grabbed a huge batch of the 90s Spectre series by John Ostrander, plus about twenty issues of Matt Wagner’s Sandman Mystery Theatre at a local second-hand shop. I’ve read very little of either but have enjoyed both writers in the past, so why not?

Also got a few issues of The Maze Agency by Mike W. Barr online and they were really enjoyable. Issues seem pretty hard to track down though.

Bought Chaykin’s Shadow miniseries finally. That is some, well... something.

lol yeah I remember reading that when it came out. not his best.

recently found this online, a story that totally freaked me out as a young’un:

http://www.rotatingcorpse.com/by_the_book/creepy-63/1901.html

so great

Sandman Mystery Theatre was great fun at the time but I’ve never bothered to re-read. hopefully your batch is all consecutive, it was almost exclusively 4-part mystery stories

Maze Agency: iirc the first four by Adam Hughes are great and then someone without his fluency in body language and spatial relationships comes on and it becomes C-level uninspired motion-going

when I say iirc I read them like four years ago

Modesty Blaise—the first four or five years of the strip, drawn by the superb Jim Holdaway, prob represent the best daily continuity comic strip ever published in the UK—

OK, I’m sold! Thanks!

was at the store yesterday and learned the Flex Mentallo reprint has now been pushed back to February? wtf

Yeah, I don’t get this either. I had this and the second Suicide Squad collection on pre-order, and they were both pushed back a couple of months (the Suicide Squad one was supposed to come out in October, now the release date is December 16th). It’s one thing for new books to be late because the artist didn’t produce the art in time, but with these ones all the material was already there, and they were announced months in advance, so how hard can it be for DC to print a book? With SS, I might just barely get it if they thought the Christmas market was better for it, but why not with the other one? What could possibly make your boy/girlfriend happier than the gift of Flex Mentallo?

As for recommendations, I’ve always fancied some feminist-oriented or at least feminist-friendly porn, which is a rare thing in comics (or visual porn in general), so I was happy to discover Colleen Cover’s Small Favors... This comic is funny, erotic, and not too intellectual to be un-titillating (the main problem I had with Lost Girls, as good as it was). Too bad she only produced it for something like 8 issues.

Sorry, that’s Colleen Coover.

RIP, Jerry Robinson. Thanks for 70+ years of comic book awesomeness.

RIP Joe Simon :(

98 years is a good long run. Makes it easier to celebrate the life rather than mourn the death (ditto for Jerry Robinson). RIP

always seemed like a standup guy

RIP, Joe. Lost two of the good ones this December.

What “graphic novels” should I ask for this X-Mas? I own Jimmy Corrigan, The Frank Book, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, Watchmen, From Hell and Ordinary Victories

Crumb’s Book of Genesis

Locas and Locas II by J. Hernandez

Hard Boiled, Miller/Darrow

The Incal

get some Joann Sfar books

thanks for the suggestions—keep them coming

Hark! A Vagrant from this year is hilarious

Fun Home

American Born Chinese

The Years Have Pants.

I randomly came across Hark! A Vagrant less than a month ago and promptly ordered the new book (half off on Amazon) and planned on giving it away as an X-Mas gift. When it came I started reading it to make sure it was good enough for a gift. It started off less funny but by the time I was halfway through the book I decided I probably should stop reading it because it was good enough to give away. I’m glad that the “guess the story by the bookcover” strips are in there. I drew K. Bates pony on a birthday card to my cousin a week ago and just now discovered the action figure.

Google pics for Joann Sfar turns up some pretty images and apparently there’s a recent movie for ‘The Rabbi’s Cat’. French people make some nice looking comics.

I want to read some J. Hernandez stuff someday

I see ‘American Born Chinese’ getting thrown around a lot like Locas and Locas. And it’s pretty cheap. I think I’ll put it on my list.

The other comics you guys mentioned look compelling too.

Besides Eddie Campbell you need to read all of Cerebus, obviously.

get some Clowes

and read all of Hate

Shifting gears back into the capes...

It has been out for a while, but I got Fantastic Four #600 this week and it was quite a fun read. Hickman’s 30+ issue arc on FF keeps on a truckin’ and while I kind of figured it would go something like that way, the whole part in the Negative Zone was pretty kick ass. Thing is in a long winding storyline as such, you hope that it will all come together in the end and so far it does look like it will finish up well.

Fantagraphics series of Jacques Tardi hardcover reprints/translations are incredible. I wld especially rec It Was the War of the Trenches and You Are There, the pair together demonstrating the way that Tardi can move so easily between grim realism and surreal nightmare and yet remain so essentially himself. Such a great stylist, and storyteller, nobody else quite like him in world comics.

get some Clowes

a friend got me mr wondrful for my birthday this year, it was excellent.

I know I’ve already said it back on the home planet, but this Warren Ellis run on Secret Avengers is amazingly good. #20 is one of the best time-travel stories I’ve ever read.

I bought and read a translated comic strip biography of M. Hergé the other day. It was quite good, but I think it didn’t really work as a standalone biography (as in, I had to keep flicking to the standalone text notes at the back to get any sense of who the various people were and why they were important).

Hmmm, i’d pretty much given up on Ellis