I liked it a lot.
Oh, this is bullshit. I think Watchmen is great because I like how it deals with issues of humanity, justice and eschatology, not because it has capes in it. Maus was great, but it didn’t rock my world like Watchmen did. Maybe because I came to it at the end of a binge of Holocaust media that were much more moving to me, personally, or maybe I didn’t like the art style as much, I don’t know.
But to just dismiss everyone who rates Watchmen as a superhero fanboy is prejudice, plain and simple. As is assuming people like it merely becuase Time-Warner push it on us.
Wow! Great review there, Stoney!
Don’t mind me, okay? Got too much time on my hands and I’m practicing curmudgeon…ity?
Anyway, I’m trying to learn how to be old and cranky, and I’m having to cram it in, and y’all are my kids, so there!
We didn’t have curmudgeons when I was a boy!
We had ol’ bastards, an’ we liked it!:mad:
Sorry, Sagebrush!
k, I’m done
Q
Really. I mean, Watchmen has been praised for like two decades now.
Note that grphic novels do not have to be dark and depressing and dark does not = “good”.
Try the Terry Pratchett Discworld Graphic novels.
Agreed. It’s that sort of reasoning that gets people thinking that the detestable “Life is Beautiful” is a great movie. “Maus” is a great comic that happens to have the Holocaust as its subject. It’s not great simply because it’s about the Holocaust. Obviously, subject matter is important - you can’t tell a great story without an interesting subject. But the greatness of “Maus” lies in the way it’s executed, not just its subject.
If the only TV you’d ever seen was the oeurve of Garry Marshall, you’d think Laverne & Shirley was a masterpiece. Watchmen has benefited from a hype & distribution system (including “viral” informal aspects like word-of-mouth & blog mention) geared toward a) superhero work & b) Alan Moore, who already had a name from Swamp Thing, et al.
Works without that level of investment by a highly-connected domestic publisher are not getting the play. How much Japanese stuff have you read? How much French BD?
Now, I can understand preferring Watchmen to Maus. Obviously, my mileage varies. There’s an epigram by Martial to the effect of preferring the true & scabrous to horror stories from the ancient Greek–or in this case from 1980’s British comics–& I’m more on that side.
Oh, good lord, you’re right. David Lloyd’s art is serviceable but uninspiring–not Kevin O’Neill hideous, Alan Davis welcoming, nor Ian Gibson flashy. I also have never got through the first chapter; dry in visuals & text.
I also liked Peter Milligan’s Human Target, which was drawn by the late Edvin Biuković. (Not to be confused with any other Human Target comics; though those can be fun, Milligan’s take is brutal.)
And I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Bryan Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat
And for someone coming from reading Dave Gibbons stuff, those are good choices; clear, realistic art.
It’s a matter of personal preference, to be sure, but I find that Lloyd’s artwork set the perfect tone for the story of V for Vendetta. It’s my favorite Moore work, followed closely by From Hell. (Eddie Campbell’s artwork in From Hell was an acquired taste for me, because it’s so loose, but it’s grown on me).
And since I’m here, I’ll second the previous mentions of Starman and Preacher, and will also throw out recommendations for The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution (written by Grant Morrisson) and Madman: Oddity Odyssey (written and illustrated by Mike Allred).
A question not to read out of context. Bone is fun, but teen fodder at the end of the day.
I’ve never quite understood the love for Maus. Its a good read and very originally put together but seriously flawed in being too personal and introspective.
DKR is very good and rather surprisingly hasn’t really dated (not in the same way as another excellent comic of the time by the same author, Frank Miller’s Elektra: Assassin). I really enjoyed Promethea but don’t think its anywhere near being Moore’s best work. *League of Extraordinary Gentlemen *is in the same boat. I also rather enjoyed the surprisingly romantic Cairo, relatively recently published by Dark Horse Comics.
Gaiman’s monolithic Sandman is in my view the second best graphic novel, in that its extraordinarily multi-layered and contains the ultimate murder mystery, right when you least expect it. The Vertigo imprint spin-off, Lucifer, is also very decent, especially in most of the earlier issues.
Not domestic to me, they’re not.
Very little, I don’t read the language.I’ve watched more anime than I’ve read manga, let’s say.
Quite a bit. All the Tintin and Asterix, of course, as well as some Moebius and Metabarons.
You left out Italian fumetti (Manara, Pratt, Crepax, the delightfully perverse Serpieri) and the homegrown British stuff like various 2000AD titles (Slaine, Dredd, Strontium Dogs) and the sublime Charley’s War
I am not ignorant of world comics.
The essential messages of Watchmen are as true and relevant as those of Maus. You’re conflating the significance of the event depicted with that of the work itself, methinks, in which case real-life events win out every time. But even then, I’d prefer my choice of Tan’s The Arrival over Maus any day, for art alone.
I’m really surprised (and pleased) to see a lot of my favorites already mentioned. I guess I thought from the last few times I dipped my toes into the weekly comic book discussion thread that this was a board full of mainstream DC readers and not much else. I had absolutely no clue, for instance, that there were so many Usagi Yojimbo fans here.
It’s hard for me to rank 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I don’t think I’d put Watchmen at #1 anyway, but it’s fairly high up there. In my opinion, though, it’s not even Alan Moore’s best work - that honor goes to Top 10. So here are several books that I consider to be among the best “graphic novels”, in no particular order:
[ul]
[li]Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha[/li][li]Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix[/li][li]Alan Moore’s Top 10[/li][li]Preacher [/li][li]Watchmen[/li][li]The Dark Knight Returns[/li][li]Usagi Yojimbo[/li][li]Lone Wolf and Cub[/li][li]Maus (and Maus II, obviously)[/li][li]The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck[/li][/ul]
Top 10 is a lot of fun and filled with “easter eggs” (a term I first encountered in commentary of Kingdom Come, referring to the hidden continuity references ordinarily hidden in the art of a comic) which as a long time comic book reader I delight in.
But otherwise its merely a quirky TV cop show masquerading as a superhero comic, and if you haven’t read comics for 20-30 years most of the easter eggs aren’t apparent. Its kind of like Warren Ellis’ excellent Planetary (for which I might start a separate thread) - you need to understand pop culture to properly access and understand it.
The book is hardly self-contained, in the same sense as something like Moore’s other work from the turn of the century, Promethea (and even then Promethea has a big shout-out to Fantastic Four in the presence of the Five).
As a collection or TPB, I’d rank Transmetropolitan as one of my favorites of all time. Plus, everyone I loan the series to tells me that within a few days they start feeling intense surges of righteous indignation every time they watch the news. 
In response to First Among Daves:
Top 10 is about on level with Preacher: really really fun and somewhat deep/artistic. That’s a step below Watchmen (fun and really deep/artistic) and a step or two above Y: The Last Man (fun and not really deep or artistic at all.) On balance, it’s all a matter of taste, but something about Top 10 really struck me to the point that I give it a slight edge over Watchmen. They’re both great books, like most of Moore’s work.
Cisco - how is Top 10 deep? There’s a series of murders. With no real detective work but just the use of one of the characters superpowers the crime is solved, and the culprit is someone we might have suspected fairly quickly. Its pretty close in calibre to Moore’s work on Wildcats, but instead with sometimes dozens of Easter Eggs in some panels (the knock-off of the first issue cover of Crisis of Infinite Earths, with Pariah leading a conga line, as an ad for multi-dimensional vacations, still makes me chuckle every time I read it). Don’t tell me I missed something…
I haven’t read it in 3 or 4 years and I don’t own a copy so I honestly can’t cite specifics, it’s more that I just remember feeling that way at the time. The personal relationships, I think, were much more complex than you’d get out of a mainstream Marvel or DC comic, IIRC, and then there was the whole thing with Smax’s incest with his sister. I seem to recall being touched at how “human” the robot was in volume 2.
I love Top Ten and I agree pretty much word-for-word with First Amongst Daves’s assessment of it.
It’s tons of fun and excellently written, but it’s not really very challenging except in the sense that you have to have read a lot of comics to get all of the references contained within it.
If I were to compare it to a movie, it’d be something like Shaun of the Dead. Fantastic movie and a geeky delight, but I wouldn’t call it particularly deep.
My favorite Moore comics are his issues of Supreme, and the same can largely be said of them.