MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
28 October 2005
I'm off to the comic book shop To get some good trades paperbacks. What are your favorites? I thought Top 10 was fantastic
I would recommend Black Hole by Charles Burns. And Epileptic by David B. if you don't have either already. Spiral into Horror by Junji Ito is also excellent. The new Chris Ware collection is either out now, or out soon. I'm not sure what you're really into.
I just got Black Hole (hardcover, not paperback); I look forward to it. I'm right now reading one installment of The Sandman, The Invisibles, and Transmetropolitan each month.
Of course, I never can remember the difference between trade paperbacks and graphic novels. But whatever.
New York Metro: (page offline) At every turn, it does things that only comics can do. It is entirely, obsessively, mesmerizingly the work of a single visual artist, and its narrative is the devastating story of how his vision rose from sickness and despair.
Montreal Mirror: David B.'s graphic autobiography Epileptic is an absurd existentialist masterpiece.
New York Times review by RICK MOODY: ''Epileptic'' constitutes something new: a graphic intellectual history. A design-oriented history of ideas. There are entire dreams illustrated here in a disturbing and rococo illustrative style, with interpretations included, as if David B. were channeling Jung's ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' or Freud's writings on the oneiric. There are allusions to May 1968 and the role of the French intellectual in contemporary Gallic life, and there are ghosts in profusion, ghosts of Europe past. These include the ghost of the author's grandfather, a man of somewhat dubious ideas, depicted so he resembles one of those beaked denizens of hell you find in Hieronymus Bosch.
Blankets, by Craig Thompson, is a pleasant read. And I'm a fan of Aaron McGruder/Reginald Hudlin/Kyle Baker's Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel. I'm sure there are a lot of things I'm forgetting (ooh, Jason! Iron Wagon, Why Are You Doing This?, etc.), but I've got to go teach someone how to use a rather poorly-designed piece of software.
I don't know trades paperbacks from shinola, but I liked the Sgt. Rock graphic novel "Rock and a Hard Place" and also Moon Knight from back in the day. The Unknown Soldier kicks ass, too. And Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman.
He and Burns came through town earlier this week. Ware is so painfully shy and self-deprecating it's adorable (which is probably the last think he wants to hear).
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
