ITT, Let's discuss good comics, reviews, recomendations, etc

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Read Holy Terror! A few days ago, just for shits and giggles. Shit was almost astoundingly awful. Pacing was terrible (the first 60 or so pages consist almost entirely of double page spreads, the rest of it has dialogue tightly and awkwardly packed into every panel), art lazy and showcased Miller's hatred of drawing coherent backgrounds, plot was bare-bones and unashamedly pushed Miller's shitty political and racial views, literally every single character is a blatantly obvious expy of a Batman character, the list goes on. Almost had to quit when a bald assassin named David, with a star of David tattooed on his face, was introduced and played entirely straight.

My, the animators really did go for bringing Mignola's style out in the fullest with that Aer.

I'd say it counts a number of times, since elements are simply added out of the blue to serve the current story (ie, the one time they introduced an extra Angel family member for a "weekly villain"). Dredd's family and clone stuff is always a good example, ever since Rico and Fargo died pretty much any mention of them in more than reference would almost without doubt lead to Shocking Revelations (tm of all comic book companies). And of course, killing and crippling important characters happens all the time at DC or Marvel. Dredd's not really that different from the norm in long-running series on any scale.

EDIT:

Yea, Holy Terror! is not first and foremost vile, but unimaginably shitty in every possible way.

You also forgot that the plot basically serves as a masturbatory Batman fantasy of Miller's (particularly hilarious when you remember totally-not-batman is named The Fixer). It's like finding a rubber fist smeared with lube in your grandparents' attic.


Also, I think I should warn Western Civilization Defense Squadron about keeping this in /gd/, and the fact that Miller wrote David, Israel and Mossad as super-ultra-good guys America should emulate. So I think it may not entirely be in your alley.

Thanks for that Aerelian. Shame that cartoon was dropped, I love how they perfectly captured Mignola's style.

And geez, I had no idea Miller went nuts like that. I read something about Moore and others throwing shit at him and calling him a "fascist", but didn't get all the details of that. Since so many of the big names of comics are rabid nihilists/anarchists/socialists I guess it was no surprise that a rabid right-wing zionist would pop out of the woodwork.

I read Dark Knight back in the day and liked it, as some of his Daredevil work but was never a huge fan of his stuff.

To picture the process behind the creation Holy Terror!, you must imagine Miller masturbating furiously as he draws not-Batman torturing a Muslim terrorist to death, after which he masturbates with greater intensity as he draws him picking up machine guns and killing all Muslim terrorists. There's a very disturbing kind of fetishism going on throughout the whole thing.

Miller himself started going cuckoo somewhere around Sin City and 300 period's end, completely losing his shit after 9/11. As for his lately established reputation as a fascist, it was part in due to a blog post he made last year concerning the Occupy Wall Street movement that quickly devolves into delusions about TERRORISTS EVERYWHERE, copied here verbatim but ironically applied to a scene from a comic he once made (Batman: Year One) where Batman condemns Gotham's wealthy and powerful and tells them their judgment is coming:



(Also, Frank Miller himself has never served in the military)

Damn it, now I will have to read it. Sounds like a blast. Kinda of like Ditko's lolbertarian vigilante comics were a blast.

Don't read Holy Terror. Even as a spectacle, it is godawful, and reading it will probably make you a worse person without noticing.

I remember reading some old Punisher comics once. Their gung-ho Republicanism was awesome, lots of sneering at bleeding-heart UNDOMESTICATED SNOWMENS, hippie treehuggers and anyone standing against the cahnsteechooshunal raite to mow down Hispanic commie drug dealers with an M60.

Comics seconded: Judge Dredd, the best stealth anti-hero you could ever encounter. The best story was, IMO, the one featuring Miss Marple. No other story had the same amount of gruesome black humour as that one did, and it portrayed how awful the future is and what a gigantic prick Dredd is perfectly.

Blacksad: Furry crap but enjoyable furry crap with a very good noir feeling. The early ones are the better ones, though.

Hitman: Ennis is a motherfucking awful comic book artist because of his editors letting him do whatever the fuck he wants because he's such a big star. This usually results in tranny bukkake for the lulz. In Hitman, his editors have even prohibited him from swearing, making it the most sober series Ennis has worked on. No "lol dongs" here.

The Boys: Ennis with no constraints, resulting in him going ULTRA MEGA FULL RETARD. Avoid like AIDS.

Garth Ennis' run on Punsher was great, though. Did a good job of making him appear to be every bit the psychotic prick that he really is, although the misogyny and excessive gore gets old after a few arcs.

Criminal: Not too impressed. Lots of whining. Gets tiresome.

You are probably talking about Mike Baron's run on the Punisher. Most people prefer Ennis contemporary run, but the late 80's and early 90's series are where the character was established and there was much coolness. Like: smug jew sidekick Microchip, Frank castle being a seminarian who gave up being a priest because HE COULDN'T FORGIVE, and then deciding to join the army to kill communists, him becoming a pyschotic mass murderer without a conscience due to his vigilante career, his certainty that he will go to hell for what he does and his conformity with it, his lapsed soul and his obsession with raining down violent justice on the world, etc.

You should probably check Mike Baron's "Badger" too. The early stuff. You are right, I never though of it like this but Baron must be some sort of gung-ho kwanzan republican. I mean, some of the stories... like that one where a crazy evangelical marxist leads his followers to a south-american jungle and plans to overthrow the US government. That was really out there

I'm not an Ennis fanboy, but he has his moments of greatness. I.e: "Punisher: Born" and "Punisher: The End"(which is my personal favorite Punisher comic ever). Most of his stuff overdoes the swearing, nihilism and "violence, lol" stuff, though.

I'd say Crossed is Ennis going ULTIMATE MEGA FULL RETARD. At least The Boys didn't have zombie plague being spread by bullets the said zombies jacked off on. At least not the last time I read an album, but a friend of mine who followed the series said the last three albums he read were total shit and made him stop following the series.

EDIT: Also, you're dead wrong about earlier Blacksad's being better. The series has only improved with each new album as Canales improves as a writer. Guarnido obviously doesn't improve in a way a layman would notice, since he's probably THE best comic book artist there is.

Every time one of these threads comes up, I suggest Frank Miller's Ronin. I would say that Miller's career has been a slow decline from this book ever since it was published in the mid 1980s, but he started from such a high point and declined so slowly, no one really noticed that he hasn't done anything this awesome since, unless maybe it's The Dark Knight Returns. Even if you hate Sin City, 300, etc. Ronin is an amazing piece of work that changed American comics forever, it's truly a one-in-a-million book that is remarkable for both it's plot and the amazing artwork. It's got a Lone Wolf homage, it has post-apocalyptic New York City full of Nazis, leather freaks, subway zombies, killer robots, espers, etc. It holds up after many readings, and you won't know for certain WTF is going on until the very end- even then it's left to your imagination. Also it's nice that it actually has an ending; there's no endless reconned retarded shit; it's a fully-contained story. I like that sort of thing... I guess I'm not a real comic books person in the American sense of the term, at least.

Anyway, I think this book is magic; there's not a single page in this book that I recall that isn't Genius with a monocle-wearing capital G. I don't really know of many really good American comics TBH, but everyone should at least give this a glance.







This is one of the very first comic books I recall reading as a kid, and I think it sort of spoiled me for all of the others. I think I took it for granted that there must have been other books as good as this out there, but these were very few and far between. It was this, Watchmen, Sandman, The Dark Knight that I really liked; almost everything else was a fucking disappointment. Cerebus was OK too, I suppose, but it started to get a bit out-there at some point and lost it's attraction.

Also, for more recent books, I keep recommending Brian Wood's DMZ. It's very well researched and written; sometimes the art annoys me but mostly it's pretty damn solid. Very very good plausible SF/slipstream comic book.

Blacksad is good stuff, I really need to get the newer collections...

I remember Ignition City was pretty good.
I recommend some Mask comics (yes, movie was very loosely based, make that VERY LOOSELY, and I do not recommend to read the very early black&white ones with the espionage theme, because they kind of suck, and they kind of rebooted him in the next few years). I'd recommend The Mask; The Mask Returns; The Mask: Hunt for Red October;. Other stuff is kind of hit and miss.

I never was a fan of Mark Millar's independent stuff. His work on Marvel and DC characters are alright, though I don't think Red Son is worthy of quite the amount of praise it's been getting. His stuff like Kick-Ass, Wanted, and Nemesis just paint him in my eyes as a poor man's Garth Ennis who enjoys kicking his fanbase in the teeth and insulting them constantly out of some bizarre form of contempt and spite.

Is there anything Mad Max-esque worth checking out?

Hombre

x1000

Any decent comic torrent sites out there?

My favorite is still Planetary.

I liked that, if I remember right, Microchip turned out to be a zionist Mossad plant or something and essentially became an enemy of Castle. But yeah, thinking back on Punisher, it's surprising what kind of shit they got away with. Haven't read Holy Terror, but Punisher really isn't any different. He at one point assassinates a weapons engineer because he built a supergun for Iraq, who was an obvious allusion to Gerald Bull or whatever his name was. Castle's reasoning? Don't sell shit to American enemies. Storyline was done during Gulf War or something I think, but there was no reflection or anything.

LOLWUT? Ronin was a piece of shit. I read it many years ago, but by then I'd already heard the hype about how fucking awesome it is and puts Miller on the same map as Alan Moore. I forget the plot, but I believe it was roughly, computer goes HAL, makes assassin with genetics. Assassin has amnesia, bunch of shit. And it wasn't like you couldn't guess the plot midway through either. Throw in Miller's usual samurai masturbation fantasies.

This may seem suspiciously like a one paragraph trollol, but I can't remember most of it except my impression of not being one fucking bit impressed, and I'd have to re-read it which I really don't want to do.

That was actually on the start of Ennis run. Microchip starts working for the government and tries to convince Frank to join and hunt down Osama Bin Laden. Castle kills him in cold blood after it is established that he has been doing shady stuff for Israhell and the Kwanzan terror business

Seems way too outrageous, if that cover is anything to go by.

its outrageous like Conan's outrageous.

hes a loner most of the time
boobs are just there for the usual factors

I'm gonna throw in one of my usual recommendations.

Most people know Garth Ennis' The Boys, and most people also know it's kinda okay-good at the start and degenerates into utter shit. Most people know the concept of "normal people fight superhumans" with comics. The Boys cheats and doesn't live up to that concept at all, since the Boys just guzzle up superpower juice themselves (which kinda makes Ennis' whole starting point moot). But there's one THE comic about the premise of normal people fighting superhumans:

StormWatch: Team Achilles



It was one of the best running series at WildStorm when it appeared, again continuing their tradition of making actually more mature audiences comics. Written by Micah Ian Wright and drawn by Whilce Portacio, the comic was about a recreated United Nations crisis intervention unit StormWatch (which had previously been wiped out by xenomorphs, lol), this time without third party "UN Special Security Council" budget, orbital station, or superheroes. Instead the team is put together largely of military specialists using mostly normal technology (they do operate on a limited resource base, so when a Barrett will do it'll have to do) and tactics to fight superpowered Jihadists, superheroes, and the works. Generally the stories were highly political in nature, being often critical of power politics, hypocrisy in interventionism and geopolitical ambitions, along with being damn good super-type stories with a strong cast of central characters (a standard example is the fan favourite, Jukko Hämäläinen, the team's Finnish close combat specialist and initially only superpowered member, whose superpower is that he can feel the pain of every living thing in a three mile radius).

I've posted the whole series at the Playground, so you can read it there. Otherwise it can be difficult to acquire, since the series was blacklisted after the writer was caught up in a scandal (he'd lied about his military background in his non-comics work criticizing the Iraq War) which led to DC nuking the series (third collected volume never shipped, immediate cancellation of the series, team never mentioned again in years, no reprints of the first two volumes). I've got the first two volumes, which were possible to acquire a few years ago if you knew where to look, but don't ever hope for reprints now that DC discontinued WildStorm as they show no interest in ever reprinting WildStorm's actual material (only about using the characters in the New 52).

Interesting, the cover art looks a bit Japanese-influenced IMO.

Well, WildStorm did debute manga artwork influences to Western style in The Authority, which in turn is one of the best superhero comics ever made (most runs are good, my personal favourite being Robbie Morrison's, and it includes some of the actually good stuff written by Mark Millar). And if not best, at least the most balls-to-the-wall (it started out with Warren Ellis making the concept of widescreen comics, in other words making superhero action as big and impressive as it should be), as The Authority was the superhero comic that took the "why aren't superheroes going after ALL the bastards?" question and went with it: The Authority parked its base of operations, the Carrier above Chechnya (this was during the Second Chechnyan War) and gave Russian forces there command immediately lay down their weapons and withdraw or "we're going to start killing anyone we see wearing a uniform" and left them to inform the Federation president that if there's any reprisals for the troops deserting today they're aiming the Carrier at his big fuzzy cossack hat. After this they gave China even less time to get out of Tibet (I think this notion must tickle your imagination).

You know Vaarna, never once you gave me a good recomendation on comics. Not once. We have argued many times in the past and you know how I think, and yet you always throw around comic titles that have nothing on me and my tastes.

If you do have encyclopedic knowledge on comics, then you must be holding out.

Rather, I figure anyone should be able to let go of their personal political views for a moment to read without political bias (for example, I have tried to read Mein Kampf, it's just that Hitler is an incredibly boring writer).

And I don't think you've read all of them yet. You can list the ones I've mentioned and you have read so far so I can post more.