CCCBC
by T. Hodler
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Discussions can be fun!
Initially, I thought Alan Moore’s new four-issue series, Neonomicon, might be a good fit, both because it just began and because it will be short. (Also, apparently, it is his LAST COMIC EVER, but somehow I feel like I’ve heard that song before.) But maybe Moore is too much old news. Do any of you have any suggestions? Ideally, an anthology title such as Weirdo or Eightball, in which the contents changed dramatically from issue to issue, would be best, but I’m not aware of anything like that existing today. If Kramers Ergot was coming out on a regular basis, it would be perfect, but it’s not. I guess we could cover MOME, starting with the current issue (which is kind of crazy actually), or even backtracking to discuss the issues of it from the beginning. Or heck, I haven’t read Heavy Metal in a thousand years, but Joe keeps plugging it, so there must be something there. Any readily available series would work, probably, though I think something contemporary and/or ongoing would be the most fun.
Anyway, the hive mind probably has many good ideas that I haven’t even considered, and nominations are welcome. Either way, a chosen title will be announced within the week. The resulting series might not make it past a single entry or may become a thousand-post epic. At one post a month that would mean the club would run until 2093–by then comic books (and Comics Comics itself) will be downloaded directly into our brains. An uplifting thought, for sure.
Labels: dumb ideas, feedback requests
Pretend that 1-800-MICE, Slime Freak, & Night Business are one series titled 1-800-Slime-Business. Should be enough issues per year.
personally i want to know why Alan Moore continues to work with avatar anyways. those are some consistently ugly and uninspired comic books, even the stuff he’s done with this is pretty awful. all his criticisms of DC become pretty pale when you see yet another avatar brand waste of paper with Alan Moore’s name somewhere on it.
bvs – My impression of Avatar is that they essentially stepped into the role Caliber Press used to play in producing comics versions of preexisting Moore works, a la ALAN MOORE’S SONGBOOK from the late ’90s, while also bringing older works back into print (or to print for the first time). NEONOMICON’s the first original script he’s done for them. The quality varies wildly, and the best of it doesn’t rank with the best of Moore’s works, no, but I suspect what’s crucial to Moore — or at least in line with his sentiments regarding comics publishing — is that he’s always consulted, asked permission, presumably recompensed to his satisfaction and given some degree of editorial say, should he elect to use it (and I know he did in fact ask Jacen Burrows to redraw the ending to THE COURTYARD, at least).
Obviously you can still take the results as jarring against his statements on comics failing to move forward, but what seems crucial is that he’s given a mostly unregulated authority to act as he pleases, with people who apparently please him — and Moore has been very complimentary of Burrows, and Antony Johnston, who scripts out most of the comics adaptations of his songs and prose and such — even if his specific actions don’t come to much.
Tim – The thing with HEAVY METAL – it can get really horrible if there isn’t a decent feature; I don’t have much faith in their short stories anymore, so when I mention an issue it’s usually on the strength of the central album(s)/album-sized thing(s) that month… plus there’s inevitably a few pieces that don’t flow well in English at all, enough so that you seriously start to doubt the acuity of the basic translation itself as well as the adaptation, but that’s always been a problem.
You’re breaking my heart! Actually, none of that surprises me, but it is too bad. Maybe it would still be worth reviewing a single issue some time, but based on what you say, HM doesn’t sound like a good fit for a whole series of posts. Unless we are feeling masochistic. (And sometimes, I am guessing, that is exactly how the royal we feels.)
Glamourpuss!
but then we’d have to read Glamourpuss!
Seriously, the newest issue felt more like CEREBUS than anything I’ve read since CEREBUS ended… loved that opening page!
I stopped reading after issue three or four. Do you think it would be okay to skip to the current issue, or will I (& everyone else) be totally lost if we don’t start at the beginning?
The thing about Glamourpuss is… about half of each issue, the fashion magazine stuff, is utter crap. But the other half, the photorealist comic strips bio-history-criticism stuff, is great.
Glamourpuss is a really good one, second that. It would be best to start at the beginning, though, I can’t imagine coming into #14 cold.
This might be totally wrong for the kind of thing you’re talking about, but Batman Odyssey is incredibly interesting, divisive, rich material that’s good to read, and I feel like it could even turn out to be historically important if anybody decides they want to be influenced by its particular brand of madness.
Id rather read my own death sentence than that Batman book. Brrr.
Smoke Signal, motherfuckers!
second.
There’s that Kyle Baker Deadpool comic series coming out soon.
written by David Lapham
SECRET PRISON! issue 1 is still available and 2 is coming out this weekend
Thanks to whoever wrote that, but Smoke Signal is a better rag at this point. (We’re closing the gap though!)
Nazi Knife and Good Vs. Evil have the digest size hitting the right buttons, but not so much with the comic serialization aspect. Indeed Smoke Signal (also Kuti and Diamond) would be fantastic in the smaller-book/regular-release fashion, but are already amazing as newspapers of course.