Graphic Novels

[Jon]

[Jon]

Sabrina - Nick Drnaso

I had high hopes for this but was ultimately quite disappointed. I'd read about Drnaso's work previously but in The Guardian, not in the comics press. He's one of those rare cartoonists who have made the jump into more traditional literary circles. Sabrina was published by a comic publisher - Drawn and Quarterly - in the US but it was picked up by Granta in the UK. It was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, the first graphic novel to have ever been nominated. Zadie Smith is a big fan too.

It starts with the murder of the titular character but it's more about the conspiracy theories and fake news that surround the aftermath than of the murder itself. It's clearly striving to say something about modern life, in particular the boundaries between our online and offline worlds. Drnaso really does do a good job in evoking feelings of isolation and paranoia in both his storytelling and in his minimalistic art style. But it's not for me, promising much but in the end not entirely delivering. Reviews online are generally very positive. I think people considered it an important book with important things to say when it came out. I would have liked a little more plot and a better pay off at the end too and I'm not sure if it'll be considered a graphic novel 'for the ages'.

[Levin]

Ian Gibson has died. The link is to a nice piece by 2000ad.

Just an incredible, distinctive artist

[Gangster Octopus]

I loved Robo-Hunter back in the day. It had, like all the best 2000AD stories, a good sense of humour.

[Jon]

Artist on one of the best comics ever written.

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[Jon]

Dr Strange The Oath.

An earlyish Brian K Vaughan comic. He’s not too associated with superhero comics – his independent comics such as Paper Girls, Y the Last Man and Saga are rightly much more feted.
This is the comic that many people recommend as a Dr Strange primer to those who may be wanting to investigate more after watching Benedict Cumberbatch in the MCU. It’s a 5 issue self-contained mini-series. Pretty good and well-plotted as you’d expect with some good Marcos Martin art.
However, the main reason I got the trade was because they also included some 60s Lee/Ditko stories in the back. Being a huge fan of the Lee/Ditko Spider-man era, I’d always wanted to read a few of their contemporaneous Dr Strange stories. The ones in this volume were, were however, from the very early issues, so fairly workaday early 60s fare, before Steve Ditko’s artwork took a seminal mind-bending turn. (See below).

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[Jon]

Besides a lot of 2000AD (see other thread) I've also been reading some Gilbert Hernandez.

I started with Marble Season, a semi-autobiographical graphic novel from about ten years ago.

It's set in 1960s suburban Oxnard, where Los Bros Hernandez grew up. Very much just a memoir of growing up as a kid in the California at that time. Yes, their Latino heritage is touched upon but it's mostly about what most kids growing up in that time in the suburbs would have been like. Friendships, bullies, TV programmes, comics etc. I, and I'm sure many other suburb-dwelling boys of a 60s, 70s and 80s vintage would identify with it.

It very much feels like a comic strip, rather than a comic book, with lots of little stories taking place over a handful of pages. Very reminiscent of Peanuts, which is an absolute favourite of mine. Another similarity to Peanuts (and homage too, I'm sure) is the lack of any adults in any of the stories.

As a fan of of Los Bros Hernandez, I also found it good to glean some autobiographical information through these pages. It also sent me back to the early Heartbreak Soup stories in Love and Rockets, which I haven't read in decades. They are absolutely superb. Just those strips alone appearing in Love and Rockets would have made the comic a tour de force but the fact that he shared each issue with the stories his brother Jaime told, is mind-boggling. As I've said here more than once, for me the best comic ever published.

[Levin]

I really liked this article about the 2000AD series Shako, the Comics Code, EC and the differences between US & UK comics