So, I’ve had plenty of friends, at one point or another, who read comics. I’ve even bought a few comics as gifts to said friends. However, I’ve never actually looked at one past the cover or even tried reading them.
So what would be a good place to start if I decided to read a few?
Y: The Last Man is a good series. (Now compiled into a series of softback books.) The premise is that some mysterious ailment kills all men on Earth except one.
Y?
That’s like saying “I thought I’d give books a try. Which ones should I read?”.
Give us some idea about your tastes in prose fiction, movies TV etc as a pointer. Do you prefer Jane Austen or Steven King? The Wire or Sex & The City? John Sayles or Tony Scott?
Comics these days cover just as wide a range as any other media, from quiet, introspective personal stories, to big dumb action adventures, meticulously-researched historical epics, first-person journalism, scatalogical humour and adolescent torture porn. Which of these genres do you find appealing?
Ok, I could do that. I was actually thinking of getting some “essentials,” rather than something specifically tuned for me but I think your idea is probably better.
Recently, I’ve read a bunch of Hemmingway, The Great Gatsby, Princess Bride, Oliver Twist, The Sookie Stackhouse Novels (a vampire type thing along those lines might be cool). Lord of the Rings is awesome as well. I haven’t read a bad book in a while so I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
I’ve read, and enjoyed, a book of Norse Myths and I understand there’s a comic series about Thor. Maybe that’s worth a read?
Read a good chunk of the Arabian Nights too.
There aren’t too many comic book based movies that I’ve enjoyed. I liked Sin City, 300 and Ghost World which are all graphic novels from what I understand. I didn’t like the new Batman movie and think the whole concept behind Batman is kind of lame. Never watched Superman, didn’t like Spiderman and, while I’ve seen the first two or three X-Men movies, I don’t really remember anything about them.
I don’t like horror movies. Few exceptions are torture type flicks like Hostel and Saw and zombie infestation type movies. Vampires are cool if they’re like the True Blood variety but not so much the horror movie type of vampires (if that makes any sense). Also, Battle Royal was a fun watch too, although I’m not sure if it qualifies as a horror movie.
I can enjoy just about anything else from westerns and kung fu movies to classics like Casablanca and Maltese Falcon.
Also, Miyazaki makes good anime, although, anime in general, is not something I usually end up enjoying. Akira and Cowboy Bebop are the only other one’s I can think of that I liked.
TV shows I’ve watched over the last year or two include Terminator, 24, House, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, True Blood, Burn Notice and a few others I can’t think of at the moment.
That’s about it I guess…
My top 3:
The Sandman
Y: The Last Man
Fables
Since you liked the *Sin City *and 300 movies, and they were both based on comics written by Frank Miller, you might like these:
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (story that wasn’t used in the movie, some of the same characters though)
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear (Miller had written for the Daredevil comic earlier–this was a return and a retelling of the origin story; a good introduction to the character; don’t judge this character on the movie)
Elektra Saga (introduction of the character Miller created in his Daredevil stories; again, don’t judge this character on the movies)
The Dark Knight Returns (I know you said you don’t care for Batman, but if you decide you like Miller’s writing, you might enjoy this–it’s widely considered one of the greatest comic book stories ever)
Non Frank Miller stuff:
Preacher (outrageous, shocking, and funny; not for the easily offended)
V for Vendetta (a 1984-type future, a morally questionable antihero)
Watchmen (deconstruction of the super-hero genre, Cold War commentary)
Moonshadow (whimsical fairy tale)
Did you watch the Firefly series, or the movie Serenity? There is a comic series that bridges the gap between the two, collected in a softbound edition.
I didn’t like the V for Vandetta movie.
And yes, I did enjoy Firefly and Serenity.
OK, that’s useful. Sorry if my last post sounded a little rude.
I’m not sure how much our tastes will coincide, but here’s a few suggestions:
From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Moore is generally acknowledged to be the best writer in comics, and in my view this is by far his best work. It uses the Jack The Ripper killings of 1888 to examine London’s dark and convoluted past, investigating the same sort of territory as prose writers like Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Eddie Campbell’s understated artwork evokes Victorian London wonderfully well, and Moore’s treatment of the subject matter is intelligent and meticulously-researched.
Moore also wrote a superhero story called Watchmen, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, which I don’t think has aged very well, but which is still far better crafted than 99% of the superhero fare you’ll find out there. His League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn’t bad either.
All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Another writer-artist team, this time a couple of Scots. Morrison’s another of the brightest guys in comics right now, and his Superman stories have a real sense of innocent fun about them which I think you might enjoy. Quitely’s art is exquisite, and the two collections of this title are self-contained enough to require no prior knowledge of Superman’s continuity. I’d say this is the best superhero book published in the past ten years or more.
Sandman, by Neil Gaiman and many different artists. Gaiman brings his deep knowledge of the world’s mythologies to this title, often using the stories to muse on the nature of story itself. There’s a lot of Sandman collections to choose from, but I’d start with Dream Country, which contains two of my favourite stand-alone stories: Caliope and The Dream of A Thousand Cats. There are elements of horror in Sandman, but nothing a Saw fan can’t handle. This series builds into comics’ closest equivalent to the Arabian Nights, which is why I mention it here.
Talking of The Arabian Nights, there’s an artist called P. Craig Russell, who has a highly rococo drawing style you might like. They’re hard to find, but he’s done a few opera adaptations, which show this off to especially good effect.
Marvel does indeed have a book about Thor, and it’s sometimes been very good. The two key creators to look for are Jack Kirby, a phenomenally powerful artist who created the character with Stan Lee back in the 1960s, and Walt Simonson, who both wrote are drew the book in - I think - the 1980s. Thor collections from both these eras are readily available, but some are reprinted only in black and white. The Lee/Kirby stuff is particularly good, and sometimes included a back-up feature called Tales of Asgard which used the other Norse gods as characters.
Just in case you change your mind about Batman, the two books to go for would be Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke. These books set the style for Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but carry it off rather more successfully. Marvel’s closest equivalent to Batman is Daredevil, and a writer called Brian Michael Bendis wrote a long string of dark, gritty urban crime stories for this character recently. They’ve all been collected too.
Moving away from the mainstream to more “indie band” territory:
Locas, by Jamie Hernandez. Tales of young Hispanic street-life in the barrios of Los Angles. Hernandez is a hugely talented cartoonist, who draws in the old “Archie” style, but his stories are hip, credible, charming and (sometimes) heartbreaking. He not only draws the most lovable women in comics, but makes them utterly real as characters too.
Beg The Question by Bob Fingerman. Sleazy, low-life tales of life in minumum-wage New York, as Fingerman’s alter-ego in the book tries to scrape a living cartooning for Screw magazine. Not for everyone, and sometimes quite sexually explicit, but it definitely has its merits.
The Treasury of Victorian Murder, by Rick Geary. Geary writes and draws each of these carefully-researched volumes telling the story of a prominent murder from the 1800s. He’s made this period something of a speciality, and depicts it with huge charm. The Lizzie Borden volume is a favourite of mine, but they’re all very good. As with From Hell, these might appeal to the Dickens fan in you.
Palestine, by Joe Sacco. This guy - who both writes and draws the book - has single-handedly invented the new form of comics journalism. He’s visited several of the world’s trouble spots, lived among the people there, and uses his books to describe how they survive the most terrible circumstances. Unlike a TV crew, Sacco can work with nothing more obtrusive than a notebook and a sketchpad. Unlike a print journalist, he can quickly convey the visual details of a scene by drawing it rather than having to rely on long passages of written description. The results are remarkably effective.
There’s loads of other things I could mention - Moore’s Swamp Thing, Morrison’s The Invisbles, Dave Sim’s Cerebus - but that should be enough to get you going. There’s quite a few zombie books around at the moment, too, but I haven’t read any of them, so I can’t be much help there.
Be a bit careful with more recent mainstream superhero fare, as this often requires such a deep knowledge of the characters’ back stories that it will make no sense to a new reader. The current trend is for what one critic calls “superhero decadence”, which leads to a silly and rather unpleasant habit of degrading the company’s most fondly-remembered characters at every opportunity. Women are gratuitously raped, men dismembered in drooling close-up and every other manner of squalor routinely deployed.
Once you discover a writer or an artist you like, check out some of their other work, and you might well find something to enjoy in that too. This is a far more reliable guide than trying to follow a particular character from one creative team’s run to another, as each set of creators may have a drastically different approach.
I hope that’s some help. Please let me know how you get on.
Check out Love & Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. It’s essentially a long series of stories set around a common group of characters.
A few other good non-superhero series: Concrete by Paul Chadwick, 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, and Queen & Country by Greg Rucka.
I wouldn’t recommend two often-named classics: Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Both were essentially written to readers who were familiar to the comic book genre. A reader who hasn’t spend severl years reading comic books (preferably prior to 1985) won’t catch a lot of the themes of the books.
And here I thought comic books were all about superheros saving the world. 
I’ll have to go pick a few of those up.
For non superhero works my favorite of all time has to be Strangers in Paradise. I never miss an opportunity to recommend this to someone. 
It’s a complex emotional drama concerning the lives of three very different people. It’s touching, heartwarming (and heartbreaking), engaging, very funny and completely brilliant.
Yeah, I have to agree with Little Nemo on this. Whenever I see one these threads pop up someone always recommends Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, and I can never figure out why. They’re definitely seminal works and deserve their spot in history but there also both deconstructions of superhero tropes and cliches. Without that prior knowledge much of their resonance isn’t going to matter.
Miyazaki’s manga of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind is much longer than the movie & pretty impressive.
Also try Shaun Tan’s stuff.
Yeah, it’d make more sense to read Miller’s Ronin. Or even Chaykin’s Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (which is being reissued I think).
Yes. I assume that this is the Gaiman Sandman, which I absolutely love. I started reading Gaiman when he and Pratchett wrote Good Omens.
I thought that I wouldn’t like Y: The Last Man, but it turned out I did. I thought that it would be a series of porn stories about how the last man on earth is constantly sought after. Well, he is, but before the Big Oops, he was about to propose to his girlfriend, and she’s the only woman for him.
Fables is a series that postulates that most of the old fairytale stories were true, and that their characters are mostly alive and well and have emigrated to this world. Of course, they have to keep themselves hidden. There’s a spinoff series called Jack of the Tales which is also worth reading.
That sounds interesting as well.
The art in the early Sandman books is not so good. They change artists around later, but I’m not sure I’d start comic-dom there.
Based on your interests, you may not be a superhero comic kind of person, so I would add Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. It’s an outstanding medieval samurai comic, which just happens to have animals as the protagonists. Sounds dumb, and lame, but it is actually quite remarkable. Kind of like the bedtime tales you can imagine Toshiro Mifune telling.
I wish I’d thought to mention Preacher, because that’s another excellent book. Imagine a version of the Da Vinci Code directed by Tarantino, and you’ll have the general flavour of it. Preacher also has a vampire character called Cassidy, who’d be very much at home in True Blood’s world.
Also, how could I forget Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg, a science fiction/future cop story that’s just been reprinted in two chunky volumes. Chaykin is one of the most highly-polished artists in the industry, and this is his masterpiece. It’s as stylish as Blade Runner, as darkly witty as Robocop and as sexy as The Last Seduction.
I’ll stop now.
Yes to Preacher
Yes to Fables
Yes to Usagi Yojimbo
Yes to absolutely anything by Alan Moore (though I probably wouldn’t start with From Hell - I think my friend with a masters degree in English lit described it perfectly when she said, “it asks a lot of the reader.”)
Yes to Concrete
Hard to say Yes or No to Sandman since each book is so different. Some are amazing. Some drag.
No to Y: The Last Man. It starts out great and fun but after 6 or 7 books it just starts grinding along getting less great and less fun at an alarming pace.
And I’ll add one of my personal favorites that no one has mentioned:
Bone by Jeff Smith
Look for the One-Volume Edition, because it’s all one big story and you’re going to want to read it all. I suggest you avoid the color editions. The color was added later and doesn’t work IMO.
A note: Check your public library for comics (which they’ll call “graphic novels” even though ~90% of them are going to be anthologies :rolleyes:.) If I actually bought every comic I ever read . . . god, I shudder to think. I wouldn’t be able to afford to eat.