My decision to conquer timidly venture into the world of comic books at last was one met with much enthusiasm by my friends... a list of recommendations quickly accumulated; which I'm hoping will grow over time.
In no particular order (well actually, it's the order in which they were recommended...):
V For Vendetta ~ Alan Moore [currently reading]
Watchmen ~ Alan Moore
Fables ~ Bill Willingham
Sandman ~ Neil Gaiman
Y: The Last Man ~ Brian K. Vaughan
Pride of Baghdad ~ Brian K. Vaughan
Mouse Guard ~ David Petersen
Mr. Stuffins ~ Andrew Cosby & Johanna Stokes
Preacher ~ Garth Ennis
The Umbrella Academy ~ Gerard Way
The Buffy comics ~ Various (?)
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac ~ Jhonen Vasquez
Squee ~ Jhonen Vasquez
The Star Wars comics ~ Various
The Guild ~ Felicia Day et al. (aaaand now Do You Wanna Date My Avatar is stuck in my head.. )
Transmetropolitan ~ Warren Ellis
So, Day 1. I borrowed V for Vendetta from a friend at work (I may not have mentioned, but I have wisely chosen a habit that I cannot afford to fuel and so will be obliged to beg borrow and steal all the comics I need to read...) and started reading it on the train home.
Initial thoughts? It took a little while to ease into... I had a lot of trouble integrating the words and images.. I would find myself at the bottom of the page, having skipped 4 or 5 frames and just read the speech bubbles/captions. I have no problem with words or images as separate entities - I live in books, and Shaun Tan's The Arrival may well be one of my favourite things in the universe (it's a wordless graphic novel and if you haven't read it, do so now...) but, stuipd as it is to say, and stupid as it makes me feel - learning to balance the two is probably going to take some perfecting.
I'm really enjoying it so far - although Alan Moore's introduction regarding his disillusionment with Conservative Britain rather made me want to muffle my screams of terror in the nearest pillow. In V for Vendetta, the omnipresent CCTV cameras have "For your protection" signs justifying their presence... Britain now is the most watched country in the world and no one feels the need to justify that. Anyway, I digress; I'll store my thoughts up for when I'm finished and my political terror for whenever the hell Nick Clegg gets his head out of his ass.
On a slightly lighter note, I have a confession to make...
This isn't my first time... I did in fact pop my comic book cherry back in secondary school when a friend of mine (who also introduced me to Placebo... must track her down and thank her someday...) threw Lenore #1 at me during lunch.Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe and not shying away from being generally icky and squelchy - Lenore filled the little zombie girl-shaped hole in my heart that I didn't know was there!
A stack of the first 10 issues was one of my very first eBay purchases! I think I had to convince the seller to accept a postal order (kind of a weird form of cheque)... Dear whoever you were in California - I'm sorry for making you want to shoot me/yourself whenever that was! My country had no concept of debit cards...
Moving from Roman Dirge to Alan Moore is quite the leap, it must be said... more on that as the situation progresses...
Food glory of the day; my fanfic rant made me so late for work that I ate a cupcake in the shower for breakfast... this was remedied later on by a newly opened Mexican restaurant near work giving away free burritos for lunch... I love when the universe restores balance like that... proof of the Force, people!!!
Going to bed to watch Stargate: Universe or The Guild... Sometimes, I am just too rock and roll...
It took me a while to get used to the format of comics too. At first I didn't think I would like them because I couldn't get the flow right, and I would miss word bubbles sometimes, etc. It gets better. :) Unless the comic is poorly laid out that is.
ReplyDeleteYay!