Stephen4Louise
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After a couple of months of reading fairly hefty books, I decided to take a break from the norm and try out a few graphic novels. So with this in mind I asked Louise for a few for Christmas and she didn't disapoint.

I got four books and have read two of them so far...

First up was 300, by far the shortest of the bunch, but with a great story and great art. For those not in the know, this is the story of a Persian invasion of Greece in 481BC and the attempts of 300 Spartans to hold back 1000's of invaders. This is based on a true story. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys films like Braveheart or Gladiator. Hopefully the film due out later this year will live up to the book.


The next book was a much bigger read. Watchmen tells the story of a team of masked crimefighters and what seems to be a plot to dispose of them. It took me a good deal longer to get through this one (I finished 300 on Christmas day, and this one took me a week reading a chapter or two each night). The story is great, but quite complicated in places, you definately need to be wide awake and paying attention all the way through. Again I struck lucky and picked another gem. This comes highly recommended.

I am currently reading "Batman : Dark Knight Returns" and have "Marvels" in standby. I will post thoughts on both when they are done.

If anyone has any other graphic novels they would recommend I would love to hear about them, or if you want to know more about the one I have mentioned, feel free to ask.

Happy reading,
Steve.

tokyokid
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Graphic Novels are like manga, so I know some Manga titles you might want to check out, like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I'll post some more if more come to mind. It is translated from Japanese.

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[Last edited by tokyokid at 01-02-2007 04:53 PM]

Briareos
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tokyokid wrote:
Graphic Novels are like manga, so I know some Manga titles you might want to check out, like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I'll post some more if more come to mind. It is translated from Japanese.

Well, given that TFAW.com, Dark Horse's online shop, lists mangas under Graphic Novels I guess it's fair game...

If you like action, I'd really give "Battle Angel Alita" (and it's continuation, "Battle Angel Alita: Last Order") a go. Of course, that's currently 17 volumes and counting, so it might be a bit much - though the first 9 volumes made up a complete story, until Kishiro nixed the latter half of the last volume 5 years later and continued from there.

Another great action manga is "Gunslinger Girl" (don't mind the rather cheesy name, though).

And if you don't mind vampires (with a twist), I'd give the "Hellsing" manga a try.

I would have also recommended "3x3 Eyes", but I'm not sure if all 40 volumes will ever be released in the US - it's a wonder they managed to release all volumes in German...

"Planetes" is be a great story about the exploration of our solar system 70 or so years from now, without the whizbang technology so often used in SF stories - and it's only 4 volumes. Dunno if it has been released in the US, though...

For fun, I'd recommend "Hyper Police", or "Mahoromatic".

And I second that "Nausicaä" recommendation.

(Ummm... I see that you're in the UK, but I think most US mangas are published in the UK as well - then again, ordering them through Amazon.uk (or Amazon.de, in my case) is working fine...)

np: F.S. Blumm - Koffer Dill (Summer Kling)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 01-02-2007 06:54 PM]

silver
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JMS's "Rising Stars" is an amusing "alternate take" on superheroes (it also makes NBC's "Heroes" harder to watch because of the obvious rip-offs. at least one of which is rather specific and hard to justify as "generic comic book stuff" )

if you're a fan of DC superheroes (i.e. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman) and especially if you know any trivia about the "other guys" in the DC universe then "Kingdom Come" is awesome. It might be good, anyway, but it's hard for me to tell how much of my appreciation came from knowing too much about backstories and how much could be gleaned in a state of ignorance.


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tokyokid
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Some more older titles that I once got from my Library:

Ranama 1/2
Mansion Ikkou
Lum & The Return of Lum.

Syntax
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Stephen4Louise wrote:
After a couple of months of reading fairly hefty books, I decided to take a break from the norm and try out a few graphic novels. So with this in mind I asked Louise for a few for Christmas and she didn't disapoint.

You lie! There is no Louise member on the forums...

Oh! erm... right... sorry

(and there might even be, haven't checked)

Oneiromancer
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Well, I am legally required to recommend the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. His...level of completeness was very heavily inspired by Alan Moore, although his stories are quite different. The Sandman series is about the incarnation of Dreams, and over the 75-issue run (collected in 10 graphic novels) completes an excellent story about, well, stories. That doesn't really do it justice but I don't want to write several pages about it. The setting is modern-day fantastic.

Cerebus by Dave Sim is also complete, but it isn't very good near the end. The first 7-8 "phone books" are very good and funny though. It's fantasy, with a healthy dose of political, religious, and popular media satire. But then it devolves into misogyny and proselytizing. The first half is excellent though, I reread it quite often.

Bone by Jeff Smith just finished recently as well, and you can buy the complete graphic novel for pretty cheap, for the size. It's another fantasy series with a good story and good humor.

Besides those, I used to love Elfquest (by Wendy and Richard Pini) when I was younger. The original series is still the best, basically graphic novels 1 through 4. It's not as mature (story-wise) as the later collections in the series but it is a much better read. These guys were pioneers in independent comics as well, if you're in to that sort of thing. Fantasy yet again (sense a theme?).

Game on,

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Stephen4Louise
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You've all given me some good ideas. I think Rising Stars will be my next purchase though. I loved Babylon 5, but had no idea JMS wrote comics too.

After that, maybe Sandman, or V for Vendetta. No-one has mentioned it here, but I've read some good reviews elsewhere(never seen the film).

As for the Manga, I have Akira and Trigun (is that manga?) on DVD at home and enjoyed both of them, so I might take a better look there in the future.

Steve.

Briareos
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Stephen4Louise wrote:
Akira and Trigun (is that manga?) on DVD at home and enjoyed both of them, so I might take a better look there in the future.

Well, if you have them on DVD they're anime, but since both are manga adaptions that'd be "yes"...

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Beef Row
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Stephen4Louise wrote:
You've all given me some good ideas. I think Rising Stars will be my next purchase though. I loved Babylon 5, but had no idea JMS wrote comics too.

As far as comics, he's also been writing Amazing Spider-Man since 2001. And Fantastic Four since May 2005. Among other things. Actually, just look here
Guide to JMS' various projects

I haven't read any of his Marvel work, so I can't say anything for or against it, but I definitely recommend Rising Stars.

If you liked Akira as an anime you may like that as a manga as well, its about six volumes, and the story diverges hugely, so it won't seem redundant.

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malkav11
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JMS is also doing Supreme Power for Marvel, which has certain similarities in theme to Rising Stars (i.e., a more realistic look at how the world might react to super-powered individuals and what their lives might be like) but has a much smaller pool of supers and certainly *appears* to be going in a substantially different direction.

It would be unwise for me to specifically recommend many graphic novels. The list would be too long. However, I can throw out some names of comics writers whose work is always at least worth investigating and usually excellent.

Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Carey, Garth Ennis, Mark Waid, Brian K. Vaughan, J. Michael Straczynski, Joss Whedon, Bill Willingham.

I'm sure I'm missing people. The first four are all Brits and all incredibly talented. I don't even hesitate to read anything they've done (though Alan Moore gets kind of esoteric sometimes, so I'm not a fan of everything he's written....he's SO good when he's good, though, that it quite outweighs those other times...and I'm not necessarily in the majority on the few projects of his I dislike.). Everybody else is a bit more mainstream, but still either consistently quality or brilliant and not that great in equal admixture (*coughGarthEnniscough*).

Mangawise: Katsuhiro Otomo (Even if you've seen Akira, you MUST read the manga.), Kentaro Miura (Berserk.), Junji Ito (some of the most creative and disturbing horror comics I've read.), Masamune Shirow (high concept cyberpunk stuff mixed with silly humor and blowing up of things), Hayao Miyazaki. Otherwise not a huge manga fan. Well, okay, Blade of the Immortal is great too. Most everything else I've tended to find silly or worked better as anime.

BeefontheBone
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I'll have to pitch in with the Sandman recommendation - Gaiman's fanastic (you have to give the fisrt two collections a bit of leeway - there's a couple of cameos from DC characters which are fairly unnecessary, but it really takes off after that). His fiction is consistently interesting too - if you like Terry Pratchett, their collaboration on Good Omens is not to be missed. I also hugely enjoyed the Sandman spinoff Lucifer (the last volume of which was recently published) - great characterisation and more mythology. Preacher (by the aforementioned Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon) is mostly great.

I just (like 5 minutes ago) finished reading the first volume of The Invisibles (also from Vertigo), which was enjoyable if a little weird. I suspect it'll improve as it goes along.

If you're after something a little more independent, I enjoyed Bad Ideas Collected!!! by Wayne Chinsang, Erik Rose and Marla Campbell for Image Comics, and there's some beautiful stuff from Top Shelf Productions - David Yurkovich's Less Than Heroes is great. If, like me, you like things which send up the genre, you can do a lot worse. Oh, and I love Too Much Coffee Man - more comic strips than storytelling, but he was a fantastic character.

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Briareos
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BeefontheBone wrote:
[...]if you like Terry Pratchett, their collaboration on Good Omens is not to be missed.

Yep - it's not a graphic novel, but it's a great book.

np: Kaito - Nobody Could Be Alone (Hundred Million Love Years)

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Stephen4Louise
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BeefontheBone wrote:
if you like Terry Pratchett, their collaboration on Good Omens is not to be missed.

Funny enough, I think that is one of the few Terry Pratchett books I don't own! I actually do have two Discworld graphic novels that I had forgotten about, both of which are a good read.

Steve.

MartianInvader
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Stephen4Louise wrote:

After that, maybe Sandman, or V for Vendetta. No-one has mentioned it here, but I've read some good reviews elsewhere(never seen the film).

Steve.

I'd say V for Vendetta reads very, very, similarly to Watchmen. My friend likes V better and I like Watchmen better. In the end, we decided to agree that Watchmen has a better plot, while V has better character development (though Watchmen's characters and V's plot are both awesome). So yeah, if you like one you'll almost certainly like the other. And, as with most stories, read it before you see the film.

And yes, anyone who reads any comics at all should give Sandman a go. I think it's probably my all-time favorite for comics series, and I've read a lot.

If you know much about Marvel characters, I'd also recommend Neil Gaiman's 1612, which has all the same Marvel heros, but takes place 400 years ago.

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[Last edited by MartianInvader at 01-09-2007 07:02 PM]

malkav11
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I'd actually recommend reading most things (V for Vendetta certainly one of them) after seeing the film, if you intend to. Especially with landmark works like V for Vendetta, the film is essentially never as good, sometimes way worse. So if you watch it first, you don't have a little voice in your head going "Why'd they cut that? Geez, how bad can you botch this character? No no no, that's not what that guy's like at all!" etc. And then you read the real thing and get even more blown away by how good it is.

That's me, anyway.

NiroZ
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malkav11 wrote:
I'd actually recommend reading most things (V for Vendetta certainly one of them) after seeing the film, if you intend to. Especially with landmark works like V for Vendetta, the film is essentially never as good, sometimes way worse. So if you watch it first, you don't have a little voice in your head going "Why'd they cut that? Geez, how bad can you botch this character? No no no, that's not what that guy's like at all!" etc. And then you read the real thing and get even more blown away by how good it is.

That's me, anyway.

I generally work the other way when something has been produced on several different mediums. I would choose the medium that has been considered the best, and just stick to that. Otherwise I already know what happens, then I nit-pick on the decisions made in the other medium.

There are exceptions to this of course. I read To Kill a Mocking Bird several years ago, and I couldn't quite understand some of the visual Imagery, something that was much better explained in the film.

Oneiromancer
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Personally, I thought V for Vendetta was a good movie, and this is after reading the graphic novel first. There are some things that just don't translate well to the screen, and in my opinion, they got most of the spirit of the graphic novel in there and in my opinion the most important thematic parts (such as Evy getting captured and the story of the prisoner in the cell next to her). I'm also a big fan of The Lord of the Rings and I also appreciated almost everything they removed from the movie to make it more watchable...except for the scouring of the Shire, I thought that was very important thematically and they should have kept it in even though your average viewer would feel let down by it. In my opinion of course.

Game on,

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BeefontheBone
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Personally I was most disappointed by the lack of stupid singing in the theatrical release. Wait, no I wadn't

I got the first volume of Girls by the Luna Brothers (on Image) today - it's strange but quite neat. Very cinematic style, slightly generic characters (including some hicks straight out of Preacher) but perfectly readable.

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malkav11
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Oh, see, I agree that the V for Vendetta movie was fairly well done, on the whole (the incredibly stupid V related monologue that V does when he first shows up aside). But as someone who'd read the comic I kept seeing things I wish they'd done better or kept in. Like the whole eyes-ears-nose-etc setup of the government's control mechanisms.
The Lord of the Rings movies strike me as the best adaptations yet (the extended versions, that is). Sure, things were left out and things were changed, but not much of importance was left out and I didn't really notice or mind the changes (though I haven't read the books in several years, so that'd be part of it.). Mostly I just want Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights in the first movie.

And I think it's always interesting to at least see a film adaptation - it may not be any good...in fact, it's probably not going to be as good even if it's a good movie..but the director will have their own take on things that can be very interesting. E.G. Blade Runner vs. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The book's probably better, but Blade Runner is still a classic movie (and distinctly different.)

Just to keep on topic: I'd also recommend Hellblazer. Been written by a bunch of different people at this point including Warren Ellis, Mike Carey and Garth Ennis. Lots of weird stuff happening, lots of Constantine managing to con and magic his way through peril. If you saw the movie, you have my sympathies, but the comic is so incredibly much better.

Oneiromancer
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See, I was actually happy they left Tom Bombadil out...after reading Bored of the Rings, I could never get the hippie parallel out of my head and so I couldn't take him seriously again. (Even though I had a bunch of the old I.C.E. MERP sourcebooks and knew he was actually a demigod and other cool stuff.)

And back to V for Vendetta, I could have sworn that there was a V-laden monologue in the graphic novel, but I can't find it on a quick perusal so I suppose you're right.

Game on,

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malkav11
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I don't so much miss Tom Bombadil himself as the barrow-wights, and I don't see how you could have them without him. Admittedly, apparently the reason that sequence wasn't included was because it had nothing to do with the main plot of the War of the Ring. Which is true, but it would have been neat, and that's more important.

I'm pretty sure they inserted the V-monologue into the movie, perhaps in compensation for the fact that they couldn't chop the movie up into 20+ bite sized chapters all named something starting with a V.

Citrus
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Well, I just bought the Bone: One Volume Edition for the plane ride down to Florida, I couldn't help but take a peek though, and it looks great! Thanks Oneiromancer!

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Oneiromancer
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Cool, hope you like it.

Game on,

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"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

bflatjeff
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Bone is great, and not only because it's created by my namesake (or am I his?). Plus, great new catchphrase: "Stupid, stupid rat-creatures!"

For graphic novels/comics series no one has mentioned yet, I'll recommend Fables and Astro City. Two excellent series that take familiar characters or types and do new things with them. Since you've started with the action/superhero things, Stephen4Louise, you'd probably like to explore these.

But there's more to graphic novels than superheroes! Authors tell stories about real life. I'm reading Joe Sacco's Notes from a Defeatist, which collects various things, but lots about war and politics. He also did a book called Palestine about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his experiences of it. I recently read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, an autobiographical story that deals with her father's suicide and her own adolesence and coming out as a lesbian. She writes the ongoing Dykes to Watch Out For. One of the best known true-life graphic novels is Craig Thompson's Blankets, which is heart-wrenching and stunning.

If there are kids around, Andy Runton's Owly is a sure winner, even for pre-readers. Bone is of course great for kids, too.

Back to adventure, but outside the DC/Marvel/etc. mainstream, check out the three volumes of Flight anthologies. Diverse styles, some more focused on art and some on storytelling.

Lastly, I'll mention Clive Barker's not-yet-complete Abarat. These books are practically graphic novels, since they feature Barker's own wildly colorful, sometimes grotesque, always surprising paintings.

Read on,
Jeff

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Mattcrampy
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There is also Maus, the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. It's about the Holocaust and how it's affected one Jewish family, 50 years on.

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Citrus
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Man, Bone was great! Read it now, everyone who hasn't!

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malkav11
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I'm not very fond of the Flight volumes. It's a neat concept and some good people have worked on it, but my experience was that in practice the content was a bunch of tiny fragments of things that would maybe have worked had they been a full comic, but they weren't.