That, and would re-reading Daniel Clowes’s “A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron” late at night (Volcano-vaping half my body weight in herb) count, or is that too “graphic novel-ly”? (a term, btw, that Mr. Clowse, himself, for some reason, despises) (the noun version, that is - not my quite brilliantly conceived adjective)
I like the term Graphic Novel. After decades of being looked down on for being less than literature, it’s a reminder that a comic is a short*** novel, with the “graphic” being a bonus. An extra dimension in storytelling.
I’ve heard/overheard many people discussing or buying “Graphic Novels” who wouldn’t sound as enthused about reading “comic books”. Ditto for “Anime” vs “cartoons”.
*I stopped at a coffee joint on the way to work and read an entire book in 20 minutes (JLA #106).
Let’s see you do that, Jane Austen fanboys.
Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I be reading them?
If it’s well written and the artwork does a great job of storytelling then of course I read them.
Drawn storytelling books have no age or age limit.
And as I read through many of the posts I would hope that in this day and age that the term comic book doesn’t automatically mean super heroes. I can read a copy of Spider-Man, then an issue of Love & Rockets and switch to a Carl Barks Scrooge McDuck comic.
Why not? If it’s done well, you can read and enjoy anything.
I still read the occasional graphic novel, I’m in my 30s. I read the monthlies growing up but there is too much stuff to keep up with now-a-days. So If I read about a good story or it’s an author I like I’ll wait till it’s complete and on GN form and then I pick it up and read.
I just finished Sandman: Overture, a prequel to the Sandman comics of the 90s. I bought the comic books with the variant covers as it was being released but I hate starting a story and having to wait a year or more to finish it so when it was done and came out in hard back I bought that too and that’s what I just finished.
Classic Sandman. Gaimans’ imagination and enormity of the character hasn’t waned. Great short story with no filler.
Next up is Clive Barkers’ Next Testament about how the god of the old testament is released from his prison and back to old testament form. The story seems short in the three volumes but the premise is intriguing.
I don’t mind them replacing the character with a different version, for example X-23 has become the new Wolverine now that the original is dead.
The problem is that these things never last or develop and sooner or later they will revert to their original state. It is part of the problem of the constantly shifting timescales in comic books. No one really ages and any character development can be undone by either trying to tie in with the latest movie or editorial whim.
It would be nice to see a situation where characters do stay dead and the replacements are allowed to grow into the role. Sadly I can’t see this happening with the big players.
IIRC Cerebus the Aardvark did have a planned length of run and the characters did change and die as the series progressed. Whether this was commercially successful I don’t know.
I read Howard the Duck (“trapped in a world he never made!”) in my early to mid 20s, up until they changed the artwork in ~1978 to make Howard look less like Donald Duck, apparently in response to a threat of legal action from Disney. (Did anyone outside of Disney’s lawyers think HtD looked enough like Donald for there to be an infringement of copyright or trademark?)
The result was that Howard didn’t look like Howard anymore, so I stopped reading.
And the movie totally sucked too.
I tried. I never really read comics as a child, and tried as an adult. I swear, I tried about 40 different books, different genres, different mediums and styles. But they were all universally boring. I found myself getting irritated by how few words there were on any given page and how short the stories were, and kept paging past the art to read the story - kind of the point of a comic book is the art! It just didn’t grab me.
Never really got into the DC-class material as a young-un, but then we came across a publication called Heavy Metal which was largely a vehicle for French artists. It was darn good stuff (ask John DiFool), basically good art with captions. And, of course, the classic Asterix and … series.
After Heavy Metal seemed to fade away, mostly lost interest. Mom recently gave me a graphic novel thing, Ms. Marvel, about a teenage Muslim girl superhero. The story and artwork are nice and edgy. The mainstream DC-type stuff always seem bland and repetitive to me.
I wasn’t introduced to Asterix until I was 20. The early works were hilarious; those published after Rene Goscinny died, not so much.
Unfortunately, there has been a lot of Bowdlerization of the books in recent years, all in the name of Political Correctness. Yeccch! :mad:
Comic books, or comic strips?
Not that it matters, as I read both, well into my 50s. In fact, except for a few Archie comics in my youth, I didn’t get into comic books until Simpsons comics came out 25 years ago.
He died just as they had started running it as a daily strip in the local paper. Lamentably, the paper had to call the druid “Readymix” because the name “Getafix” from the books violated their Hayes Code.
i started reading comics in college, so depending on how you define “adult”, I may have only read comics as an adult. I liked the artform as a medium, but only a limited amount of the material I could find appealed to me. Then much later I discovered manga (Japanese comics), and especially girls’ and women’s manga, and since then my consumption of Western comics has dropped to nearly zero even as my overall comics consumption has skyrocketed.
Yeah, this can be skipped. Great premise ruined by a mediocre story.
I never understood the name “Getafix” – it’s from the British editions, and it makes the Druid sound like a Drug Pusher.
In the original French he’s Panoramix, which they should have kept for the translations.
By the way, if you like the books (I’ve been a big fan since the 1960s), I highly recommend the film asterix and the Vikings.
There have been several movie adaptations over the years. The early cartoons were very disappointing limited animation. They did a couple of live-action adaptations (with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix!) that were better than you’d think, but the 2006 animated feature asterix and the Vikings is easily the best one, with really good animation, adapted pretty freely from Asterix and the Normans, with some stuff from elsewhere and quite a bit of necessary updating.
That is the joke, isn’t it? He gives out fixes of his magic potion.
So I assumed. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Give me Panoramix any day.
I don’t have the same problem with “Dogmatix”, but they could have kept his original name of “Ideefix”
As a kid, I always read it as him being the guy you go to to get fixed up, since he’s also the village doctor. So it never had bad associations for me, even when I was grown up.
I did nearly drive myself mad trying to figure out what the pun was in Vercingetorix, since none of the other Gaulish names were really subtle. Imagine the surprise when 14yo me reads a potted history of Caesar’s conquests for the first time 
It’s Idéfix, actually.
I think that’s one of the best name-pun translations by a masterful translation team, and I’m OK with it because even though idée fixe is OK English, it’s still the original French and also not as colloquial as “dogmatic” - although I would also have allowed Monomanix as a more accurate pun.
But Panoramix doesn’t seem to be funny at all to me. It’s just a word that doesn’t have particular relevance to a Druid who is primarily known for making a magic potion.
The winner here is the French name for the bard Cacofonix: Assurancetourix, “comprehensive auto insurance.”