Reply With QuoteAstro City. Get all of the trades, and then pick up the new miniseries (Astro City: Local Heroes; issue 1 is out now.)
Powers, by Brian Michael Bendis. And Alias, by Bendis as well. You can get TPBs of the early issues of both.
There seems to be a number of avid comic readers here judging by some of the posts, so I'm turning to you for suggestions.
A little background: I grew up reading '70s Marvel books, and remember when Marvel inherited the Crown of Suck from DC in the '80s. I am well familiar with the cornerstones of the genre like Watchmen, Batman: Dark Knight Returns, and Astro City. I read all the Vertigo books in the early '90s. Hell, I even suffered through the first 40 New Age-laden issues of Hellblazer to get to the decent Garth Ennis issues. :)
I was even a comic dealer for a while in the mid '90s, and got to watch the rise and fall of Valiant and Image first hand. But when bad girl books and gimmick covers became the norm, I dumped my stock and got the hell out.
Recently, though, I've been getting lured back in thanks to some high quality trade paperbacks. I've been somewhat stalking Grant Morrison's career efforts; I love his take on the JLA and X-Men (though I didn't care much for his Fantastic Four. What the hell was that all about?). I've rediscovered Bone, which, as I understand it, is nearing completion. Bruce Jones has an interesting take on the Hulk, but it's apparent he's making up the story as he goes.
So what else is out there that's worth following, and maybe even seeking out some back issues?
Astro City. Get all of the trades, and then pick up the new miniseries (Astro City: Local Heroes; issue 1 is out now.)
Powers, by Brian Michael Bendis. And Alias, by Bendis as well. You can get TPBs of the early issues of both.
Issue 2 is also out now.Originally Posted by DennyA
The Marvel "Ultimate" series are all pretty decent. Ultimate Spider-Man is solid. I just saw they were doing an "Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra". Really don't know how that'll go--hopefully they're not just cashing in on the movie.
Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra's already come and gone -- it was a four-issue mini. (I think they'll collect it in a TPB RSN, though.) It was an interesting read, considering it didn't feature Daredevil or a costumed Elektra. It's about the college romance between Matt Murdock and Elektra -- with various pre-costumed-identity superheroics thrown in.
Though it is in year 2, I highly recommend Ruse from Crossgen. It's the only Crossgen title I recommend, but it is just marvelous. Real heads-and-shoulders above the rest.
Very steampunkish Sherlock Holmes-type setting, the characters are a very Mulder & Scully-like pair, and the writing is smart, the artwork is beautiful.
You can buy the first two collections at the local bookstore.
Or...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...711462-6228650
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...711462-6228650
Stuff to check out:
-Mark Millar's The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men: The Ultimate continuity is a "fresh start" with a modern take, so classic story elements are given a 00s facelift. Millar and Morrison are buddies, and Millar's treatment of classic X-Men and Avengers stuff is pretty damn good.
-The Authority: Both Ellis and Millar's run. Morrison basically hailed the Ellis run as everything he wanted to do in JLA, but couldn't. Millar took the team in a controversial direction, and if you liked Ultimates, you can see the storylines that got him hired to do Ultimates in the first place. All of this is in TPB.
-Anything by Bendis, as Denny mentioned. He's the Mamet of comics, since he writes such sharp and terse dialogue. His Marvel stuff is neat, but look to Powers for more interesting takes on superheroics, and past works like Torso, Goldfish, and Jinx. Many TPBs.
-Spy/Military: Either Greg Rucka's Queen & Country, or Micah Ian Wright's StormWatch: Team Achilles. Q&C is an indy book about the Special Section of the Ministry of Intelligence in England. Great realistic spy book that handles stuff like terrorists gassing the World Cup, or extracting crucial info from the Taleban (written way before 9/11). StormWatch is about a UN squadron created to put down rogue superheroes, composed of people from the GIGN, SAS, GSG-9, Delta Force, Spetsnaz, and US MPSRT. As mentioned elsewhere, reads like a very left-wing Tom Clancy book. There's a TPB of every Q&C story arc, and StormWatch is having a TPB of the first six issues this June.
-Vertigo: 100 Bullets is my favorite series right now, but it's getting way too complicated. It starts out as a morality play, where people are given the chance to kill someone who's ruined their life, without consequence, but now it's a weirdly complicated conspiracy story. Y: The Last Man is a good take on the "last man on Earth" concept, where every male but this one guy dies simultaneously, and how the world is now that women run it. Fables is a fun book about classic fairy tale people mingling with modern New York. All of this stuff is TPBed.
-Misc: Gotham Central, written by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker (more on Brubaker a bit later), the two best of the current Bat-writers (I loved Jeph Loeb's Long Halloween, but his current Batman run is overrated IMO; I only read Batman for the art now). Gotham Central is a straight-up cop book, but in Gotham. Imagine Homicide, with Batman at the periphery. Both of them co-wrote the first two issues, and each writer then does an individual shift as a story arc. Brubaker also has his own book called Sleeper, which is about an agent placed in deep cover with an evil genius and his terrorist organization; except the one person who knows he's undercover is now in a coma. Brubaker cites Donnie Brasco, The Shield, and the Sopranos as his main influences for Sleeper. That one is merely on issue 4, but hearing him talk about great things like how all the superheroes think the agent is a traitor, and how far the agent is willing to go to maintain his cover (i.e. would he kill someone he used to work with?).
Whew. I still read a lot, but those are my current faves at the moment.
I'll second the nods for Y: The Last Man and Fables, both are entertaining and well written. I've enjoyed the X-Force revamp that morphed into X-Statix, though it's losing some steam lately. I'd also recommend picking up Midnight Nation by J. Michael Strazcynski, it's a Twilight Zonish mini-series that I thought was fantastic. All of these are availabe as a Trade Paperback. I'd also suggest finding a TPB of Marvels that came out a few years ago, the story is great for fans of the early days of Marvel comics and the artwork is fantastic.
Just so you know, I'm a big fan of Sandman, the Moore and Vietch runs of Swamp Thing, Cerebus (the early stuff). I dropped comics in the 90s when they dropped all pretense and wanted to tell good stories and just recently came back myself.
Bendis is really an acquired taste. You either love the guy or hate him. He tends to stretch things out to the point where issues fly by with either very little dialogue or a lot of nothing dialogue where no purpose is served other than Bendis showing off his snappy dialogue-writing skills. At times, as in Alias, this works. At times, as in Ultimate Spider-Man, the average issue of which can be read in two minutes, it doesn't.
A few other specific recommendations...
Amazing Spider-Man: Strazcynski's take is traditional compared to a lot of NuMarvel, yet it's different enough to seem fresh
Hellblazer: Steadily getting better under Carey, although stories are at times denser than they should be presumably because of problems between writer and artist
Ultimate X-Men: Millar has done a great job with this one, although he's about to leave the book and Bendis will be taking over for at least one story arc (groan)
Fantastic Four: Waid's run hasn't started off very well, but the Dr. Doom story just begun is really promising
Really? Maybe I should read it again because that story pretty much killed the series for me.
Wow, I loved that Doom story, Bub. Good intro the character for someone coming from a DC background (Marvel sucked rocks back in the 70s, my previous comic-reading period), and I definitely did *not* see the ending coming -- which is pretty rare even with the better comics.
Huh.
Go back and read the old Byrne portrayal of Doom (This Land is Mine! #239?), or maybe even all the way back to Lee and Kirby. Or even Mignola's Dr. Strange/Doom graphic novel. Anyway, I thought this issue was trite, shallow, and completely out of character, and that the ending, while surprising was mainly surprising because it was rushed. Basically Waid either misunderstood or chose to gloss over the stories he drew that story from (the stuff I mentioned above). IMO.
Look Doom is by far my favorite comic character and while I approve of the light tone Waid has taken with the FF, I haven't really liked any of the issues but the first one.
What with all the humanization of villains going on (a counter-trend to the grim and gritty heroes of the 90's), I'm just glad that there is still a villain willing to go the extra mile to be bad. It was trite though.
I would imagine it'd be easier to cope with a portrayal of Doom that you don't agree with. You can just write it off in your head as "Just Another Wacky Doom-Bot!"
Nah Thierry, it's much easier just to spend that $2.25 each month on something else. ;-)
I like Ruse, but I'd put it third on my list of favorite Crossgen comics. My favorite is Scion. I put Sojourn a distant second and Ruse just slightly behind Sojourn.
If you're interested, you can read all of Crossgen's comics for $2 per month at www.comicsontheweb.com. I randomly stumbled onto it while reading "traditional" comics (e.g., Calvin & Hobbes) and joined. I've never read comic books, but the price was low, and it looked like fun. I've enjoyed them so much, I've gone out and bought the entire set of Scion Trade Paperbacks and will likely do the same for Sojourn and Ruse.
Does anyone know of any other comic book companies that put their comics on line? I'd definitely join in a flash, and would be willing to pay considerably more than $2 per month.
This disagreement doesn't surprise me at all -- since Waid is a DC-style writer through and through, so I can understand the appeal to fans of that stuff...but I can't stand DC "superhero" stuff, and therefore hate Waid's FF.
DC (non-Vertigo) has always come across as too campy and inconsequential (trite and shallow, as Bub said) -- it's a sitcom compared to Marvel's soap opera drama-style.
I loved the first issue of Waid's FF. I really liked that he was trying to emphasize that this was a family of adventurers (not superheroes). Sort of bring back the early appeal AND Kirby's much older Challenger's of the Unknown stuff. I've found Waid's subsequent issues less appealing because they were, well, pretty damn dull.
But this Doom issue. Ugh. My real problem with how he's bringing Doom in is that Waid's FF seem like shallow cartoon versions of the characters (I like this) but Doom is brought in in scuh a tired and conventional way. Now, I'm on board with him making an internally consistent "wackier & cartoonier" Fantastic Four universe so long as it stays consistent. Part of the fun of that is seeing favorite villains appear and watching Waid's take on them. The problem is, if you're going to do that, what the hell are you doing making Doom more pathetic, and at the same time, more ruthless?
Why add unnecessary aspects to an already complicated villain? Waid should have just introduced him in a blaze of glory. This is Marvel's premiere villain, after all. He could have done this story a year from now.
Since Reed is all brains, Johnny is all ego, Thing is all bad attitude, and Susan is... well, Susan is as poorly defined as ever (aside from Byrne), I think Doom needed to burst onto the scene and try to destroy the FF in some mad scenario for his debut. Like he did in FF#5 (6?) He should have done something typically Doom, only in Waid's cartoony style. The last thing I expected/wanted was a 1st person character study.
Aside to Desslock: Do Marvel and DC really still have differing styles? I thought that went away in the 80's.
I've been reading Vertigo titles since they launched (and then digging backward for Hellblazer, Sandman, and Swamp Thing). Hellblazer is still damned good. As previously mentioned, Y and Fables are great titles, and aren't even into their second years yet. I'm still liking 100 Bullets, as well - Azzarello's noir-ish writing is hard to beat (his Hellblazer run was great; if you haven't yet, pick up the Jonny Double TPB, his first collaboration with artist Eduardo Risso, IIRC).
I've been on an Alan Moore kick lately, and have really enjoyed Top Ten (about a police force in a town where everyone has super powers - excellent - first issues collected in two TPBs), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (also in TPB, with new issues coming out, and a Major Motion Picture starring Sean Connery), and Promethea (third TPB due out soon). All great stuff.
You seem to like Ennis, so give his War Story limited series a go. If you're a completist, you might want to read his Punisher series, but really, it's all old ground he already trod in Hellblazer, Preacher, and especially Hitman. The first TPB is pretty fun, though ("Doing the town tonight, Frank?" "It's tempting."). I read it, though. Warren Ellis' Global Frequency is a good limited series about halfway through its 12 issue run.
Ultimate stuff is pretty good, for the most part, though uneven at times. Ultimates has some stupid pop culture references (Freddie Prinze Jr. as a supporting character) and odd character decisions (Captain American kicking a defenseless man), but a good cinematic feel. Ultimate Spider-Man is good, if you're into the whole teen angsty hero theme of which Spidey is the progenitor of anyway. Ultimate X-Men tries some real cool things IMO (questionable ethics in regards to mental manipulation on the part of Xavier), but some of the art (if you care) is kind of lame. You can get all the Ultimates and Punisher stuff in TPB.
There's a bunch of revamp comics out. GI Joe, Transformers (unless you dig robot art), Thundercats, Master of the Universe are all misses. The biggest hit IMO is Battle of the Planets, which has an actual involved story line and cliffhanger endings, plus great art in the spirit of the old series (without the stupid R2D2 ripoff and his dog). I'm pretty gay for the old BotP cartoons, so that may be clouding my judgment. I'm on the fence with Robotech and Micronauts.
BDR
Hellblazer is hands down the best vertigo title, great stuff. Dangerous Habits is the only Ennis worth reading
I don't get the raves about Y and Fables. Y started off okay, but soon became overly preachy when it wasn't utterly generic. All the characters aside from the monkey seemed one-dimensional to me, so I dropped it six issues in or so. I'm still with Fables, though it's done nothing for me thus far at all. Great concept, but little has been done with it aside from one-note TV-depth characterizations (Snow White's a hardass, Bigby Wolf is a lowlife with class, big goddamn deal) and snoozy plots. I mean, did anyone think that Rose Red had been murdered in that first arc? The second arc was more ripoff of Animal Farm than homage. And what's with the recent fill-in self-contained stuff? The equivalent of the sitcom clip show. Zzzzzzz.
Vertigo's in dire need of an honest-to-goodness hit. Nothing has really taken off for the imprint since Preacher. When Hellblazer is your flagship title -- and I love Hellblazer, but the series is a little tired even under Carey -- you've got problems.
I'd agree with that assessment of Waid's opening issues in his FF run. But I think the first story in Doom's return was pure Marvel soap opera at its best -- although the story was slowed down in NuMarvel fashion. In the old days, that entire issue would have been ten pages, tops. Just read the second issue of the storyline the other night and I liked it as well, although there's so much here that's Ultimate-inspired that they might as well have done some more tweaking and just relaunched the FF in the Ultimate universe. Johnny's regression to his teens retcons decades of growth in the character, no matter how much I like seeing the practical jokes between him and Ben again (the one at the start of the current issue was great).
And Marvel's soap-opera style doesn't exist any more. Continuity isn't dragged on more than a single story arc these days, so the TPB readers aren't missing out on anything. Marvel has changed so much that it's jarring to go back and read something pre-1999. Like different media. I really miss traditional Marvel stories, where you got lots of character stuff and personal events and background characters that were developed over months and months. It was like an added reward for following the series. Now we get fights, snappy dialogue, great art and color, and not much else. I don't get the sense of getting into these characters' lives like I used to. Marvel execs all seem to think they're making episodes of Law & Order these days. Stories are self-contained, there's a strict focus on real-world gritty crime crap, and we barely even get glimpses of title characters in costume (Daredevil), or at all (Hulk).
And nothing connects across the Marvel Universe any more. Kang recently conquered the world in Avengers, yet this went unnoticed in every other book Marvel published. I'm not saying I want a return to those senseless "Atlantis Attacks"-style crossovers, but some sense of a shared world where people run around in long underwear beating up guys with metal arms would be welcome.
Oh, and what's with the generic covers? To save money and accomodate the typically fucked-up production schedule, Marvel's decided not to have story-specific covers drawn any more? That's gotta be the stupidest decision ever made in an industry best known for stupid decisions, particularly when they're desperately trying to boost sales. Here's a hint, guys -- don't produce covers that all look alike. Can anyone tell one cover of Ultimate Spider-Man from another? They're like the covers of romance novels, with Spidey standing in for some open-bloused bimbo. And just as memorable.
Yeah, I'm a little bitter...
See, that's the shit I'm talking about -- in DC-land, characters never change, never evolve, and any writer can take up the character and write 'em any way the writer wants. DC has character concepts, not actual character with evolving histories.I'd agree with that assessment of Waid's opening issues in his FF run....they might as well have done some more tweaking and just relaunched the FF in the Ultimate universe. Johnny's regression to his teens retcons decades of growth in the character .
Clearly there's a lot of people who think there should always be a Batman that they can write anyway they want - so I'm not saying that approach is objectively "wrong" or anything, but as a personal preference, I prefer the ongoing serial approach that Marvel had until the late 90s (good call on the date, Brett).
It's also why the X-men under Claremont were so popular during the 80s (and even after his departure, up to the mid-90s), as opposed to "static" Marvel characters like Spider-man. He had complete creative control in a "universe" of interesting characters that had a shared history and interacted with each other. Now each Marvel book is essentially a separate book, with no history other than the writer's immediately preceding arc or two, and no interaction with other books. Good art/Good writing will still make a comic a good book, but it's disappointing to lose those other aspects that made them addictive.
It's why I'd generally rather read creator owned, or at least controlled, ongoing serials, like Preacher, etc. -- stuff happens, it ties together, characters change, and often there's an actual end.
Have you read Nightwing? Dick Grayson has changed quite a bit since he was Robin, sure there are still many of the same underlining issues, but there has to be some continuity with the character.
Barbara Gordon has certainly changed since her time as Batgirl.
Superman really isn't the same cardboard character he once was (and Smallville has given Lex Luthor a depth that the comics never could). Though admittedly, there's little you can do with character development where Superman is concerned. Yet, you can say much the same about Captain America.
Can you honestly say that Cyclops, Jean Gray and Wolverine have really changed since the late 1980's? They are the same characters with the same attitudes going through the same monthly melodramatic soap opera. And Hulk? If anything, I'd say that many of Marvel's characters have regressed back to the way they were in the early to mid 80's; the editors are trying to undo much of what was done back in the 90's.
One I forgot to mention is Lucifer, which is pretty interesting in its own right. It's no hit - even though it won an Eisner, I believe - but it is unique and different. I didn't get into Chaykin's American Century, and I kind of wish I did, but flipping through it in a store, it kind of looks mundane for some reason. I still really like Y and Fables, though. Maybe it's a cheap gimmick, but I like Y's last page cliffhangers (I guess I can thank Ennis' Hellblazer and Preacher for that) and its big scale. Maybe I'm gullible, but it didn't seem to me like Rose Red just couldn't be dead. I guess one of the reasons I like it is that it's the sort of stuff you can only get away with in a comic.
One thing I like about Vertigo is that they green light a lot of limited series (less than they used to, but still) of varied themes and types. 3, 4, 6, 12, whatever, but it's nice to collect and read a self-contained story, especially about something that isn't connected to the actual Vertigo universe. Shadows Fall is one of my favorite comics ever, a true horror comic. They also smartly reprinted my two favorite Epic limited series, Moonshadow and Blood. Although, I do have to agree with you in part that it isn't what it used to be. After Transmet and the Invisibles quit, there wasn't anything to really take up the slack, except for Hellblazer. I'm no huge fan of Carey's run so far, either, but it's right off Azzarello's award-winning run. You can thank Marvel for that. Once the Vertigo line became a hit, they scooped up all the talent (well, Alan Moore left DC of his own accord, citing profit-sharing as his reason, and he just went off on his own, as he should have), occupying their time such that a new ongoing Vertigo series isn't likely from Ennis or Ellis or Morrison. So we get limited series (War Stories, Global Frequency, The Filth) from same, at least.
In the same vein, the weird thing about Vertigo is that their oldest series besides HB are only in their 30's and 40's. The Vertigo line launched back in Hellblazer's 60s, and its pushing 180 now. Of all the pre-Vertigo co-opted titles (Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Animal Man, Shade), only HB is left. The only exclusively Vertigo title that showed any longevity was Sandman Mystery Theater, which wasn't bad (except I hate Guy Davis' art; The Far Side's Gary Larson draws prettier women than Davis), but took place in the goddamn 1930's, The Dreaming, aka AfterSandman, Tim Hunter, which was pretty good for the first 50 or so issues, then that whole future/possible future horseshit about a million possible Tims made it unreadable. There's a new volume with him, but I haven't read that, either. The Vertigo line is littered with attempted ongoing series that crapped out in thirty issues or so, plus or minus ten ("Daughter of the Swamp Thing", Seekers, House of Secrets, Kid Eternity). It wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happens to Y. The Vertigo universe is so fractured and so much of it is past tense, it's hard to build a base for it, and most of its major players aren't even in a regular book anymore, or are dead. I still consider it the best comic line by far, though.
BDR
Agreed. Other than Joe Kelly's brief run on X-men, those books were generally terrible in the 90s, precisely because of that reason -- nothing really changed. That wasn't the case when Claremont wrote them up to 91, and it's not the case these days, with Morrison writing them.
It's a real eye-opener to go from the Claremont 1980s X-Men in the Essentials (yeah, I've got the originals too, Stefan, but this way you can read 'em in the bathtub ;-) to the current X-Books. Some of the Morrison stuff in New X-Men is entertaining, but there's still this obvious corporate restraint going on where he isn't allowed to refer to things that took place in prior story arcs.
What bugs me most is that you see a lot of major events in Marvel books taking place with minor and throwaway characters, so there are no shakeups with the major characters--meaning the cash-cow title characters stay the same for movie people to license. At the end of each story arc, everything gets reset. It's like a bunch of Star Trek: TNG episodes, where everything really interesting happened to nothing characters like Deanna Troi's mother. This is really apparent when you compare old X-Men to the new X-Books. In the 1980s, Claremont focused on the team members and the soap opera stuff that happened between them, like Kitty falling for Peter, Wolverine's thing for Jean, Jean getting killed, the whole Scott-Madeline Pryor romance, Wolverine and the Japanese chick, etc. He didn't introduce some sex mutant for Angel to fall in love with, establish a rotating cast of kiddies to cause problems with drug addiction, or kill characters nobody cared about like the member of the Cuckoos that Morrison finished off a couple of issues ago.
There's so much that can still be done with major characters, but Marvel's afraid to let a writer run with any ideas because that would change how they're marketed. I don't think there's any notion of resetting things back to the 1980s. I don't think there's any planning going on at all other than Marvel trying to keep things exactly as they are with the primary characters and tell essentially the same stories in each arc. As long as everything can go right back to the way it was when the story began, so the next TPB can be plotted out, everything's cool.
Because of this, and because all the books are isolated now, nothing has any real impact, or resonance. Spider-Man is in a life or death battle with the Green Goblin for a couple of issues of Peter Parker, and then the whole thing is forgotten. So what if he left Flash Thompson in a coma? We can't refer to that now, we're in a new TPB! A lot of the dialogue and individual story-telling is better than ever at Marvel, although it's being ruined by this anthology approach that kills what's traditionally been the best part of these characters--the continuity.
And about Vertigo...
I'm still getting American Century, though I've held on the past few months because I know the series is being cancelled and I figure I might as well collect the entire run. What a waste of a promising idea. The first issue was great, the first storyline in South American was promising, but Chaykin and Tischman did nothing after that. The scripting was terrible. You could never really figure out what was going on, and it was often hard to tell one character from another.
Lucifer I would love to get into, but the story is so dense that there's no point unless I pick up the trades. Which I want to do at some point, although I've been spending so much on regular issues of everything else that I've been wary of increasing my comics budget any more. I'm very, very glad that Carey's found the time to do Hellblazer in addition to Lucifer, too. Getting rid of Azzarello was a great move in my opinion, because I found his work trite when it wasn't absurd and incomprehensible. SW Manor? The S&M scenes? Getting fellated by a dog? Ugh. Sensational, stupid, and shallow. I don't understand the raves for Azzarello at all.
BTW, I like the Vertigo mini-series idea as well. Shadows Fall was really good, I picked the run up on eBay cheap last year. Lady Constantine, which just wrapped up, was a pretty good example of this, although the ending was telegraphed from the first panel. But they don't do a whole lot with the minis. The Flith was pointless and stupid. Midnight Mass was a great idea, too, but the execution was lacking. And that new one about vampires just seems pointless. Vertigo's in real need of something that shakes up the line a bit.
Lets not forget Industrial Gothic. very rad
I'm gonna pull a jack move up in this piece.
I found this site earlier and went through and made a wishlist of originals that I'd like to own, the following is a list of them:
Ted Mckeever cover to Industrial Gothic #5, 1500$
Paul Lee Hellblazer/Books of Magic #1 page 18, 100$
Sean Phillips cover to The Invisibles #21, signed, 1000$
This entire page
Sean Phillips Hellblazer Covers, a shitload of $
jack move is now over, carry on
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