Graphic Novels (free from sci-fi and superhero bravado)

My favorite graphic novels right now not involving super heroes is the Criminal series by Ed Brubaker. Actually just about anything by Ed Brubaker is good, but most of his stuff involves super heroes.

100 Bullets (recommended by Brandon Tietz) was also really good.

Also V for Vendetta and From Hell by Alan Moore.

I enjoyed the Sin City books, but I honestly thought that the Criminal series was better.

Maus is polarizing, but I think of it as mandatory reading.

has anyone ever read that Sarajevo book by joe kubert?
I always wanted to get that one, but never did for whatever reason.

I think I've said this somewhere before, but the Transmetropolitan series is pretty awesome. It's not entirely free of sci-fi, but there are some pretty great themes in there. Also, you might enjoy Fables. Also - Blankets.

Hi Hattie

Joe Sacco's a good one for Israel/Palestine conflict type stuff. He has a journalist's eye and sense of a story. Also wrote more Crumb-like self-hating cartoons collected in Notes from a Defeatist.

On a similar note to the Sacco Palestine books is The Photographer. Written in 1986, it follows Medicins Sans Frontieres around Afghanistan, mixing photography, prose and illustration.

Away from the serious war shit...

I think The Preacher series is great fun, if you just go with it and can stomach a little more vampirin'.

A friend bought me Chew for Christmas and so far it's a lot of fun. The type of bizarre story that you only really get in graphic novels. (In this case we follow a cibopath detective - that's a guy that can taste the history and life of an object by tasting it. And he has a boss that likes to force him to chew the evidence.)

Maybe a bit obvious, but I enjoy the weirder worlds of Daniel Clowes - particularly Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and Charicature.

I'll be checking out some of the recommendations on this thread too.

Assuming you've already read Persepolis, Hattie?

Whoa Hattie thinks like me. I was about to open a Graphic Novel thread aswell.

Yesterday at my favourite bookstore they gave me a €30 book voucher for Xmas and I got a copy of Howl The Poem by Allen Ginsberg (Graphic novel version)

I'm also tempted to buy Persopolis, From Hell and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, all graphic novels.

just started in on ennis. reading the crossed currently. ordered the pro and the preacher. probably get into the boys after that.

i loved the watchmen for what it was.

sorry, but i'll always love batman. the rest of them, though, are a little too silly for me.

im probably best asking nate about this: i heard that the transformers graphic novels delve a lot more into the psychology of civil war than the cartoons did. are they worth investing a little cash in ?

ive been wanting to read from hell for years. i'll get to it sooner or later.

cool thread, by the way-

The Preacher ones look good, should I?

Preacher is always a good choice. Stray Bullets is still my favorite though, not a superhero to be found there.

Blueberry (Jean-Michel Charlier, Jean "Moebius" Giraud) is probably one of the best western series ever :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueberry_%28comics%29

Corto Maltese (Hugo Pratt) is an italian series about a sailor-adventurer in the early 20th century :

http://www.suite101.com/content/discover-the-magic-world-of-corto-maltes...

As far as super heroes go though, you can read a lot of the Batman books and not have to feel like you're in a totally fantasy world. Batman feels real, and so do a lot of the villains.

Frank Miller's Year One is awesome, as well as his Dark Knight Returns.

Jeph Loeb's The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and Haunted Knight are all really good.

And all the Batman books I just named have inspired the two recent Batman movies - Batman Begins and Dark Knight.

I'm surprised that Kirk or Brandon haven't jumped in here to recommend The Maxx.

I'll do it for them. It's much deeper than you would think. And it's really hard to describe, so no blurb would do it justice anyway. But it's excellent.

Thanks for this thread. I have been really looking for new things to get into. I don't have anything really to recommend at the moment, but I'll bump this when I do.

i keep forgetting about the maxx. it's a total brainfuck like inception and worth the time just like that too.

Oh, another one that I really liked was Y - The Last Man.

It's about every single man on the planet dying except one - leaving basically a planet of females. I really liked this one a lot.

Its probably my favorite. All of my other favorites have all ready been mentioned, cept Sandman, but I don't know if that is too sci fi.

It's supernatural, so I think it's okay for this thread: One series I've been into lately is called Locke & Key by Joe HIll. Top-notch writing, and the art is just as good. If you're into psychological/supernatural things, you really should check it out.

Criminal is the best "real world" graphic novel being produced right now. Transmetropolitan is great, but in that it's 1000 years ahead of us, it's definitely sci-fi. Preacher is also great, but it has angels, demons, and a vampire.

Check out From Hell. Great work there.

PS - I haven't read Heart of Darkness as a graphic novel, but I imagine that Joseph Conrad would spin in his grave if he knew about it. Then again, he'd spin in his grave at themovies of it too.

I don't know. Its hard to say, but I think he might dig the idea of a graphic novel.

anything's possible, but everything i've read about him (letters, biographical stuff, etc.) leads me to believe that he chose his words so carefully, that they would leave no doubt to his meaning. For him, I believe the thought of replacing those words with a picture would be repugnant.

Unless of course you kept the whole manuscript. It's a short book overall, I suppose it could be done.

PS - I just joined the book club, so: Hi and stuff!

The hunting party (Enki Bilal & Pierre Christin, 1983)
Each of the East-bloc party loyalists gathered for a hunting weekend at an icy mountain retreat has a personal tale involving their mutual host, Vassily Chevchenko, a Communist Party patriarch whose career dates back to Lenin's time. As his guests reminisce, Chevchenko, his leonine countenance long frozen by paralysis, turns his thoughts to Vera Nikolayevna and a separate realm of memory, flesh and mortality unfolds. The sole unseasoned spirit in this worldly company is a young interpreter, both a witness to tales of unsavoury doings of his jaded comrades' past - invasions, purges, tortures, executions - and a duped participant in their present brutal, bloody game- a hunt from which he emerges with his own tawdry tale to tell.

PM me if you're interested in a PdF version in french.

I started reading Preacher due to Melody always bringing it up and I'm really liking it. I'm a little over half way through the series now.

It has a lot of the elements in it that I loved about Y - The Last Man.

The supernatural stuff is kept to a minimum (which is crazy given the storyline). And when it is done, you are already so deep into what's going on that it's totally believable.

I don't read graphic novels that often any more but I think I'll pick up a couple of The Preacher and Criminal books.

Frank Miller's Sin City series was pretty fantastic so to hear that Criminal is even better is exciting.

And this might not count as non-sci-fi but has anyone read the 30 Days of Night books?

And I see that the same guys responsible for The Criminal have also done something called Incognito.

Incognito and Sleeper are actually my favorites by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

Icognito is about an ex super villain ratting his boss out and going into witness protection. They give him a drug to take away his powers and he becomes a file clerk. He's so bored that he starts drinking and smoking weed. The weed counteracts the drug and he gains his powers back. He starts going out and doing good things. But that puts him on the radar. They've written Incognito 2, but it's not out as a graphic novel yet.

Sleeper is about a super villain who is actually an undercover government agent. His contact ends up dead (which is the story of Point Blank the prequel). His contact was the only person that knew about him. He gets so deep in that he starts to question who he really is - bad/good. There are tons of twists in that one. Buy Season 1 and Season 2 (and Point Blank for the prequel). Don't buy the ones labeled volume whatever even though amazon recommends Season 1, 2 and Volume 3 - you'll end up double reading everything.

Criminal is just plane gritty. It's written along the same lines as Sin City - telling the story of one person per volume, they all intertwine and connect throughout. Keep in mind that it's my opinion that it's better than Sin City. I liked it more. So that might not mean you will. I'm sure millions of people will argue with me on that one.

Yeah, Franc Tireur kindly sent me a french copy about seven years ago. I thought it was excellent. I wasn't blown away by the film adaptation, however. Coincidentally, I bought my friend one of Marjane Satrapi's other graphic novels for her birthday last week:

It's a lot shorter than Persepolis, but looks worth a read.

I recently finished Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, which is probably the best graphic novel I have read in years.

Fun Home (subtitled A Family Tragicomic) is a graphic memoir by American writer Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one's family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel's laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.

rural pennsylvania = the heart of cold, puritan values.

You made me really curious about Fun Home, Harriet.

It's really worth a read - the ideas are so well-researched and the plot is gripping.

I think the cover is AWFUL, though. Who gave that the go-ahead??

Riddlegimp wrote:

Hi Hattie

Joe Sacco's a good one for Israel/Palestine conflict type stuff. He has a journalist's eye and sense of a story.

GIMP!

Yah, I have read a few Sacco books - I really liked Safe Area Gorazde. Never read Palestine, I didn't want to buy it because it's the sort of book that a lot of people own (and I could hopefully borrow it for free, instead!)

I've only just begun How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, but I like it. The drawing style and theme is very similar to Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds (also worth a look) - but I'm prefering How To... right now.

Bump Da Bump.

I'm enjoying the first volume of the Preacher. (My first graphic novel)

Nice! Preacher was pretty good. You'll enjoy that series.

Preacher never gets old.

I'm only halfway through teh first volume but I've already called the books store for Part 2.

This is a good thread. I'm not into graphic novels that have sci fi/superheros so much.
Here is a list of the graphic novels I am really into:
Finished Series I have read:

Preacher by Garth Ennis
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn
100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello
Young Liars by David Lapham
Sin City by Frank Miller
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis

Finished Series I am still reading:
Ex Machina by Brian K. Vaughn

One-book graphic novels I enjoyed:
V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Silverfish by David Lapham
Filthy Rich by Brian Azzarello

Ongoing series I am following closesly (collecting the trades):

Scalped by Jason Aaron
Greek Street by Peter Milligan
The Boys by Garth Ennis
The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman

Series I started that never really grew on me:
Swamp Thing by Alan Moore
Air by G. Willow Wilson
Shade: The Changing Man by Peter Milligan
Unwritten by Mike Carey

Personally though, I think everyone in the world should read Preacher, it's by far my favorite.

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is brilliant. It's full of metaphors and I loved it. But hey, that's just my opinion.

I loved Young Liars, just finished that recently. How was Silverfish?

Also 100 Bullets and Y: Last Man are among my favorites.

Also pretty much anything by Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker (as stated a hundred other times by me). They're my favorites.

Preacher will always be the best!

Thanks for the opinions and suggestions. The two you mentioned as your faves are both REALLY good, but I guess you already know that...and same with Young Liars...A lot of people I know didn't like it, but I thought it was great. I have been trying to find Stray Bullets everywhere.

Silverfish was creepy, a quick read, but worth it. It's just one small book, but it packs a punch.

Your best bet is to download Stray Bullets. Otherwise you'll only be able to find a couple volumes on the internet and spare issues here and there. I found some at a place by my house but it was just a few random issues.

I don't think you people understand what the phrase "free from sci-fi and superhero bravado" means?

I am probably included some sci-fi without really thinking about it. I was more thinking along the lines of stereotypical extreme "comic-style" sci-fi and more about superheros. I know a lot of the ones I mentioned could be considered sci-fi and probably even are filed as such, but if I did include Sci-Fi, it was because somehow I had grouped them differently in my brain (for example "Young Liars" was presented as sci-fi, but I saw at as being about mental health issues and violence as well)....Sorry, I will try to be more careful next time if people aren't enjoying what's being posted in the thread, because it is true, I did include some sci-fi and I know others did as well...At the time, I didn't think about it, but upon you pointing it out and thinking about the titles, I am guilty of posting sci-fi.

I was just glad to see the discussion bumped... my threads so often fade into the abyss.

I've read that, it's good!

I think I've decided what I'm going to get with my Waterstones token...

It's about a group of teenagers living in Seattle during the 70s who contract a sexually transmitted disease.

I just checked this out from the library

It's a super quick read. Definitely not worth buying but I enjoyed the storyline and illustrations.

I read this in Waterstones yesterday. It was good but I didn't feel much for the characters. It was an interesting concept and is without a doubt, a graphic novel in every sense. I probably should elaborate. The book has very little dialogue and therefore encourages you to follow each box intently. The pinnacle moment of the story relies on the reader to decipher a rather subtle picture sequence under water and many readers, including myself have not managed to decipher the message. Oh well.

My friend gave me Daytripper for my birthday.

Can't wait to read it!

I need to get on the vertigo band wagon. Can't wait to get A job to waste my money on graphic novels.

Anyone excited about The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn ? (Shame Levi's not here anymore to share my enthusiasm). Hopefully Spielberg hasn't over done it with the SFX...

They seemed to have respected Hergé's visual style. I am just worried about three things : I hope they did not mix up elements from too many different adventures, the difficulty of computer animation, and the voices. The casting choices seem excellent though.