Count me among the Cerebus fans. I haven’t really looked at comix in ten years or so, but I loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s stuff, especially Stray Toasters, Elektra: Assassin, and a few other titles I’m forgetting at the moment. Also really enjoyed Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer work, and generally found Concrete interesting. Watchmen, of course, was a favorite as well.
A female friend of mine says she used to read romance comics when she was growing up. Apparently, they were a huge genre in their own right.
Tom Strong is a very good series. I wouldn’t call him a superhero, more like a heroic super-scientist.
I don’t collect comics anymore, but when I did, it was mostly superhero stuff. even then, though, I tended to like the darker stuff like Batman and The Demon (Actually, The Demon was pretty damn funny). Graphic novels that I have include Preacher, Dark Knight Returns, Ronin and The Elementals, as well as various Elseworlds titles. I don’t consider these to be traditional superhero stories.
Ronin is one of my favorite stories in any medium. It could be translated to movie or book format easily. It’s an excellent story that still holds up.
Kindom Come: The Elseworlds title that takes the superhero genre to its logical extreme.
Watchmen: Great read.
Give Me Liberty: The story of Martha Washington, and her rise from the ghetto to a decorated officer in the future America’s Pax armed forces.
I also have a decent collection of horror comics.
Groo, too.
your list overlaps with mine so much, quoting saved time.
Foglio=fun.
Add:
Shanda The Panda --Anthropomorphic slice of life. Great characterization, interesting plot, no capes or tights.
Furrlough–also furry, but adventure/military oriented.
Genus–if you like XXXenophile, you’ll love this. Think Usagi crossed with XXXeno. 
All of Sergio Aragones’ stuff—fun, fun, fun! 
But my unswerving allegience is to the Last Son Of Krypton.
(already mentioned) Midnight Nation is so great. It’s written by the creator of Babylon 5, and a bit as if a creepy Harlan Ellison story were extended into a series of sequels, with new aspects appearing in each chapter. Nor would I say it’s only for horror fans, or SF fans.
(already mentioned) I love Kosuke Fujishima’s You’re Under Arrest for the sheer fun of it.
I like Rumiko Takahaski’s short stuff (published in this country as “Rumic World” or “Rumic Theater”). Yes, this is the creator of Ranma 1/2, but this stuff is, I think, better, since it neither relies on continuing characters nor gets bogged down in repetitive plots.
(already mentioned) As for Pulp, I don’t read it anymore, but the feature Heartbroken Angels did make me laugh pretty often. I liked the strips about the father & son in abject poverty.
I managed to buy a couple of Joe Zabel’s detective series The Trespassers, which has got to mark me as a hardcore indy-comix guy. They’re pretty good, but I haven’t seen in any in a couple of years. I guess straight-up mystery comix are ignored by both mystery fans & comix fans.
(already mentioned) Albedo–I encourage you to seek out the first series (aka Volume I) if only to read konny and czu.
In my opinion, the manga of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind blows the movie away.
And yes, I read (already mentioned) Usagi Yojimbo. It’s just good old-fashioned goofy adventure.
The Peter Milligan/Edvin Biukovic Human Target is not too far from a very weird adult superhero comic; you make the call. I mention it largely because the late Edvin Biukovic was a genius.
I also read DAWN. “I will love you like no other for I have died a thousand tiny deaths and every time I died I thought of you.”
The problem, I think, is that people are often not fans of comix generally, but of a particular genre. So there are superhero fans calling themselves comics fans, horror fans who read Vertigo, and people who like Richie Rich–but there isn’t really a single market for all of those. I mean, I read Liberty Meadows and Love & Rockets and DAWN and (superhero book) Nightwing and (superhero book) Fathom and Furrlough, but I don’t think they’re all the same genre, and there’s not a single market for all of them. But the US direct sales market is run by Diamond (really the only distributor for a small publisher now) and if Diamond & the comic shops cater too much to anime fans, Superman devotees, and Jim Lee worshippers, then the Joe Zabels and Chester Browns–who are completely different from those–get obscured behind the hype for that stuff.
foolsguinea–comix fiend
Yes. I was going to say this. I collect old Romance comics. It’s a pretty big market. A mint condition 10 center can go for almost $60. And honest to GOD, you can’t beat them for the most hilarious, corny, unbelievable, bordering on propaganda stories.
Every romance ends with the couple getting married. One of my favorite lines was from a story of a girl completely dropping her dreams of being a “business woman” to marry a lumberjack and she said,
“And really, being Mrs. Thompson is the best job a girl can ever get!”
Classic.
A lot of bitchslaps, ‘crushing kisses’, ‘bodies ablaze with passion’. Flip through 'em sometime.
I also rabidly collect Old Archies, pre 1980s. The Christian Archies (from Spire comics) are FANTASTIC
jarbaby
Also, don’t people read MAD Magazine? If that’s not a comic, then what is?
I do think that DC Comics is missing a bet by not putting something like Swamp Thing or the Warlord back on newsstands. The stupidest thing Marvel & DC (and Malibu Comics, but that’s another story) ever did was make their main lines and default images strictly superhero.
I’ll read anything that’s written well, though I don’t have much of a stomach for “dark” comics (such as Preacher). With that in mind, here are some representative favorites:
Bone
Kingdom Come
Astro City
Supergirl
The Dark Knight Returns
Watchmen
Sam and Max
Batman: Gotham Adventures
Quantum and Woody
Usagi Yojimbo
…and just about anything by Peter David, Kurt Busiek, and/or Mark Waid.
American Flaag. O.K. so Rubin has some strange powers, he was born on Mars. He’s Jewish to boot.
Growing up, it had to be Asterix.
I’m a big fan of Vertigo comics. One series I loved was ** Moonshadow**. Anybody read that? I think it ran for 12 issues.
Another series I followed for a while was The X-Files. I think a lot of people didn’t like it at first because they couldn’t get past the fact that the characters didn’t look like Duchovny and Anderson. Nevertheless, some of the original stories were pretty cool.
Some others mentioned Maus and Sandman. I must agree, both are excellent.
Books of Magic, Arkham Asylum, Darkness Falls were cool too.
Anything done by Dave McKean is a must-have.
On the lighter side, I read The Far Side,Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert and Sherman’s Lagoon.
Since this thread has been resurrected, this seems a good place to mention the rumours of five months ago have resolved themselves into an actually movie. Johnny Depp is in it. I haven’t decided if I should be alarmed about that yet.
Now where is the film version of “V for Vendetta”?
Has no one here ever read Concrete? Haven’t read it in a while, but great read about a self-conscious, low-confident guy who put thru extraordinary circumstances and how it changes him.
Like an earlier post, I will read anything well written, but really get tired of all the hard, dark and angst-ridden stuff. I still love super-hero books if they’re well-written, and some are. Kingdom Come and Earth X were good stories about what happened to everyone, but I felt both were too bloated and pretentious, not to mention that all the characters’ lives were so sad and bleak. I really like DC’s Starman from the past few years.
my faves: Bone, Sandman(anything by Gaiman), Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, I liked Watchmen and respect it, but overall too dark for my taste, same with Sin City, Preacher, Cerebus, ---- the Disposable Assassin, Leaque of Extraordinary(?) Gentlemen, Books of Magic was food for a while
I’m sure there’s others I can’t think of now.
I occasionally pick up comics these days, but they tend to be superhero comics (I love the current retro Fantastic Four mini-series, done in the style of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby).
Growing up, though, there were some reallly good ones. I agree with Asterix. The French had some great titles – Herge’s Tintin, of course. Lucky Luke, the cowboy. Gaston la Gaffe. Even The Smurfs (Belgian, I realize) weren’t as odious in their original Francophone incarnation, where they were called Stroumphs.
In this country, I loved Turok, Son of Stone. The premise was truly bizarre – two American Indians (Turok and his younger sidekick, Andar)circa 1900 ride into a “hidden valley” and can’t get out. Inside the valley are dinosaurs and cave men. Turok and Andar are always trying to get out (It’s a damned BIG valley), fighting off both dinosaurs (who want to eat them) and cavemen (who want the secret of Fire). Fortunately, Turok and Andar know how to make poisoned arrows, which they use on the dinosaurs. A very clever and quirky series. A few years ago the “Turok” title was revived by another comic company (the original was put out under the “Dell” label at first, then “Gold Key”), but it was so completely different that there really didn’t seem any point in using the same name.
DC comics had some interesting Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy comics in the 1960s – Mystery in Space (with Adam Strange, who rode the teleporting “zeta beam” to another planet and had sf adventures with his girlfriend there. Tales of the Unknown, Challengers of the Unknown (drawn by Jack Kirby!). None of these involved superheros.
Don’t forget those wonderful Carl Barks comics in Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck, not to mention efforts by other, underappreciated Disney artists and writers. La Rosa and others are still carrying on the Barks tradition – Uncle Scrooge is still being issued by Gladstone.
Finally, one of my fond memories is of a comic called Treasure Chest (of Fun and Fact). It was a “Catholic” comic published by the George A. Pflaum company (and that’s no typo). But it was not oppressively dogmatic – most of the items were good kid’s fare. A series on science. One-page gags. A Series on Sports. Frank Borth’s series “How to Draw” (Frank Borth had been the artist who drew “Phantom Lady” in the early 1950s – a sort of proto-Elvira or caroon Betty Page. Fredric Wertham fulminated against this comic in Seduction of the Innocent. How Borth went from that to a Catholic comic I do not know – but it was Plaum’s very definite gain. Borth is an underappreciated GENIUS).A History of the Toothbrush – done in a wonderfully cartoony and fun style. A history of the Flea Circus (essentially the same story told recently in The Big Book of Freaks – they must have gone to the same source, but Treasure Chest was there first!)They usually had two serials running simultaneously. They had one involving their hero “Chuck White” that must have run continuously for over twenty years. They then had a second one that ran about ten-twelve issues, often drawn by Borth. Very clever and well-done stories. They could be collected and packaged today and sold in comic stores. Finally, as a concession to their nominal purpose, there would be lives of the saints or some Biblical event. But the religious part never dominated TC. It was a heck of a good comic, entertaining, educating (as the BBC puts it) “by stealth”. And not a superhero in sight.
Hey, I had a few of those! “The Story of Cheese” was weirdly captivating…the Arab riding across the desert with his milk supply in a cow’s stomach…the French shepherd who stuck his lunch in a dank cave and ended up inventing Roquefort…
Speaking of the Big Book series and Catholicism, has anyone tried THE BIG BOOK OF MARTYRS? Paradox Press was hoping to find a market in parochial schools for that particular title, but the sexy Trina drawings for the St. Agnes story(c’mon, Trina! She was THIRTEEN, fer gosh sakes!) probably scotched that idea.
I loved the tale of Phocas, patron saint of gardeners, who fed and entertained the Roman soldiers, then spent the night digging his own grave to save them the trouble.
Hey, Uke – good to see someone else shares my memories. I didn’t see The History of Cheese (a typical TC entry, though), but I have – no joke – fond memories of The History of Bread. They managed to make the Egyptian discovery of Yeast entertaining.
I have TBBOM, but it’s the one Big Book in the series I don’t re-read. Definitely not a winner. Wish I’d bought The Big Book of Death instead.
Another series I loved (and miss) is Classics Illustrated. Heck, I was introduced to books I still think I would not have heard of through these. And despite the dire warnings of educators, they did * not* push me away from reading real books, but rather got me interested in books. They did a lot of Jules Verne, including obscure stuff like Off on a Comet, Tigers and Traitors, Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World, Michael Strogoff. My mom used to borrow my CI copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey to crib from for her evening classes.
But the best issues were their Special Editions and “The World of…” series. I learned history from the issues World War II and The French Revolution – in fact, I learned more from these CI editions than from my high school classes later on. They had two issues about dinosaurs – Prehistoric Animals and Prehistoric World. And they had issues on Spies, Rockets, Pirates, Vikings, Holidays – great stuff. Wonderfully educational. They tried a new line of Classics Illustrated a few years ago, but they fizzled out. They tried reprinting the old ones, but I haven’t seen much of that lately. In the late 1970s Marvel Comics brought out its own line of Classic Comics, but they didn’t have any staying power. The original CI comics were around for about thirty years, and were well worth it.
“2001 Nights”
and “Concrete” (which is, technically, a superhero comic.)
-Ben
I’m a bit of a dilettante - picked up comics along the way, kinda kept to myself and didn’t ask much about what was out there from people who were bigger enthusiasts.
Having said that, I’m surprised to see I’m familiar with a lot of these. Of course, now that I harbor a secret ambition to wield pen and ink as well, I’m using this thread as a list of Things to Look Out For.
Growing up my first real exposure was to a friend’s Asterix and Tintin collections. I didn’t get many of the puns in Asterix until later, but the Tintin adventures rocked.
Bone I’ve read, at least the first collection. Loved the art, the story is indeed original. Gonna have to get the series in book form and delve into it.
JosephFinn - if you’re still around: A personal message. If Katchoo ever heard you call her “Kootchie”, she’d run roughshod over you like she did Wayne the cellblock officer down at the precinct. Now that that’s out of the way, who draws Red Star? I wanna check it out.
I was exposed to Cerebus in high school, and as it turns out my local Borders carries the collected volumes. Pricey, but in my book definitely worth skipping lunch a couple of times a week to throw the money towards that instead.
I read Gaiman’s Sandman about 10 years ago - I think my sister had them. Haven’t picked up the collections for that one either, but will after Bone and Cerebus.
V for Vendetta kicked serious ass. So much so that I wanted to find someone who could sew up a costume like his and use it for numberless Hallowe’ens to come.
I found the collected Sam & Max at Borders as well and nearly had an accident in the aisle. Hilarious stuff. “They beat me and kicked me and tied me up and swatted my nose with a rolled-up newspaper…”
Maus was absolutely fantastic. Both books. Spiegelman is a genius and a hell of a storyteller to boot.
Underworld runs in the City Paper here in DC and is one of my fave weekly comics, aside from The City by Derf. Combine those two with the Straight Dope and Thursday afternoons are a very happy time for me.
Phil and Dixie! Good God, I remember reading that strip in Dragon magazine back in the early 80s. The running gag about doing a feature on sex and D was a hoot, especially with the last strip - last panel, Dixie is hanging off Phil, looking lustily into his eyes… “Now we can finally do that feature!” and someone comes in and cuts them off. Phil Foglio is great!
That’s about it from my end of things. Now I have stuff I can dig up and read in order to start studying techniques. But before I go, I would like to give a tip o’ the pint to Frank Cho, both for his talented genius and for taking the time to personally respond to a message board post of mine and directing me to some excellent technique manuals. He got a fan for life out of that one.
“sex and D” should read “sex and D&D”.
I’m another one who remembers Treasure Chest. There was a lot of good stuff in there, and there was very little Catholic preaching in it. Good stories, educational stuff (I remember one story all about the St. Louis Arch), and other child-oriented material.
And Classics Illustrated. Sure, I read them–but I was also one of those people who actually did read the original after reading the comic. (Remember how they always had the “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated version, read the original version available at your public library” message?)
But as an adult, there have been two comics that have caught my attention:
Jon Sable, Freelance. Jon Sable is not a superhero; rather, he is almost too human. Yes, the series has plenty of action and adventure, but Mike Grell goes to great lengths to show Sable’s human side as well, especially when he is interacting with his literary agent, his illustrator, and others in his daily life. Mike Grell’s research shows, and his illustrations are superb. Unfortunately, the series ended back in the eighties.
The Sandman. What can I say about this that hasn’t been said before, and better? Anyway, I didn’t want it to end, but like everybody else, I knew that it someday would. I’m very much impressed with the way Gaiman brought all the story lines and loose ends together into a conclusion that was oddly moving. Inadequate words, I know, but how can you describe something that is really beyond description?