Hmmm..... For consistency with the novels entry, I'll try to keep the same time frame (last August to now), but on a couple of points I don't really remember.

Also for the sake of consistency, I'll start the entry with something totally unrelated to the subject at hand:

I was interested to see this discussion about things being compared to high school, what that metaphor is supposed to mean and how the whole thing seems to rely on the assumption that everyone's high school experience was the same. My two cents on this: if I ever refer to something as "being just like high school," what I'll mean is that it involves things like...

....writing poetry, skipping a lot of class, drinking medically dangerous amounts of coffee, being obsessed with T.S. Eliot, eating lots of fragels*, walking a lot of picket lines, briefly attending but washing out of arts school and being deeply involved in the internal squabbles of various tiny revolutionary socialist groups...

...since that's the stuff that *my* high school experience was all about. Which, I suspect, underlines the point about how "just like high school" is sort of relative.




*if you don't know what a fragel is, I pity you

#

Anyway, to the comics:

(1) An indeterminate number of volumes of Sandman, ending with #10: The Wake. I'm not really sure about this, since I've been reading the series on and off since...let me think...thew winter of 2002/2003, I think? Anyway, I was reading like one or two a year for a long time (I would usually ask for them as gifts, but then ocassionally I'd get impatient and buy one myself in between birthdays and holidays), then in the last year I devoured several in a much shorter time frame, but I really don't remember which volume I started with. Anyway, a bunch of them. Loved it, loved them all. Overall, at least from my admittedly limited knowledge of the field, from having devoured comics in general indiscriminately as a kid and from having read a smattering of the more upscale stuff in graphic novel form as an adult, I'd say that Sandman is the second best thing that's ever been done with the medium.

My favorite bit from relatively recent reading comes from "The World's End," in a story where the protag gets trapped in the dream of a city. He later moves out to a remote rural location, and he's asked, is it because you're afraid that you'll be pulled back into the dream of another city? The response, from memory (so I'm probably butchering the prose), was something like, "oh no, sleeping cities are harmless, curled up like cats around their rivers and estuaries...what terrifies me is that someday they might wake up." Which was both lovely on its own terms, and managed to simultaneously and expertly evoke Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos stuff on the one hand and one of the central images in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" on the other. Perfect.

(2) "The Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate Edition, V.1"

OK, well, *mostly* my recent reading has been the more upscale stuff. This...well...I was in an airport bookstore on the way to WisCon, and I thought, "oh, thank god, this should just about take up the time I've got for the flight from Atlanta to Madison." For the record, the dialogue is about a thousand times more fun and cleve than anything in any of the movies.

(3) The first issue of a comic book adaptation of the Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series

...was OK, and captured some of what I liked about the early books there, but, well, meh. I think I gave away my copy, but I don't remember. This is one of a very few ocassions when I've actually bought an individual monthly comic book in many, many years, and that's a sufficiently expensive and socially degraded habit for an adult that the first issue didn't justify me returning for the second.

(4) "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" by Alan Moore, volumes 1 & 2

Really, really excellent. I remember talking to someone who mentioned having read the beginning and put it down, and I can understand that, but it's worth persistence. The humor is perfect, the aesthetic balance of the whole thing is just right and (no spoilers here if you haven't read it) the tweak on "The War of the Worlds" at the end is fantastic. It will remain of the worst and most unforgivable atrocities ever committed with the weapon of cinema that one of the most clever graphic novels ever made was turned into what is quite possible the dumbest movie ever made.

(5) "V for Vendetta" by Alan Moore

...was OK. I actually had kind of mixed feelings about it on the graphic novel vs. movie front. The politics were much better than the film (which edits out the anarchist stuff and puts in a lot of silly not-so-subtly-disguised 9/11 conspiracy-theory crap), but honestly I thought the movie version probably worked better as a story (plus, hey, Natalie Portman.) Whatever else, it certainly displayed a better understanding of what fascism historically is and how it really arises than the movie did. You really got the sense of a country being ruled by street gangs. And I loved the stuff in the introduction about the Thatcher era and how it was being written for the people who don't turn off the TV when the news starts.

(6) "D.C. Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore"

Meh. At least in broad strokes, this revies gets the main lesson here right: just because Alan Moore is one of the leading contenders for the most talented writer in the history of the medium doesn't mean that everything he's ever written is worth reading. Out of the thirteen stories (counting the two-parters as single stories), I was kind of tickled by a couple of them, one was pretty good and one was great. The two Superman stories had enough of the spirit of paying-homage-to-but-subversively-reimagining classics that I liked in "The League..." that I was pretty tickled by them, I liked the one that seemed to be a re-telling of Milton (I don't remember the name, and the final story (a grim, weird and surreal possible-origins story for the joker entitled "the Killing Joke") was fantastic. Actually, I liked the Killing Joke enough that it might justify the existence of the whole anthology, but the big caveat here is that 9 of the 13 stories I had kind of a "meh" reaction to at best, and there were a lot of moments where I found myself thinking, "wow, this is just a completely regular superhero comic with no particular twist or depth or literary reimagining to it. Why am I reading this?"

(7) The first 5 issues of "Buffy: Season 8" by Joss Whedon

Definitely worth the expense and embarassment of actually reading individually sold comic books as they come out. Whedon is an excellent writer. If you liked the TV series, you'll like this.

(8) "The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus," Vol.1

Don't worry, dear reader, I didn't actually spend any money on this. It was a library book. Big ol' lukewarm piles of "meh." But, despite the cover's best attempts to imply otherwise, Whedon didn't write any of it. As far as I can tell, the only part he can be claimed as a sort-of writer on was a part of the book that was a comic book "faithful adaptation" of his original script for the movie. Which, honestly, struck me as no better than and in any case not in any important way different from the movie as actually made. Anyway, the whole thing served as a nice contrast to the Season 8 comics, an illustration of why the new stuff is so much better. Writing matters.

(9) "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" by Frank Miller

Excellent. I'd actually started to read this in January of '06, and I quite liked what I read there, but I picked it back up and finished it this spring. Anyway, I liked it a lot, despite the unmistakable right-wing subtext. Exciting, gritty, nice writing, clever and witty social commentary, never mind how thoroughly I disagree with it.

(10) "Batman: Year One" by Frank Miller

Also pretty good, though much simpler. Also much more Commissioner Gordon's story than Bruce Wayne's. Which was, come to think of it, probably a good artistic choice. Plenty of fun to be had here in a Sin City sort of way.

(11) "The Watchmen" by Alan Moore

Remember what I said about Sandman being the second best thing ever done with comics as a medium? The Watchmen is #1, despite the very end being a really unsatsifying, gimmicky wrap-up. Everything up until that point was so good that I don't care. A really shocking level of psychological realism combined with really fun gonzo speculative elements and lovely alternate history ideas, and a world that just felt incredibly *real* to me, riffing off standard superhero stuff but having about a thousand times more depth and vividness to it. And a comic-within-the comic that, together with the accompanying commentary on it, adds up to a really interesting commentary on the medium itself. (One of the scenes that sums up the whole thing best for me: two of the characters fall into bed together, and the guy is impotent. Later that night, they go out to perform some super-heroics in costume, one thing leads to another again once that's over...and, this time, there's no problem. The costumes did the trick.) And, really, the nasty and often darkly hilarious one-liners would by themselves be worth the price of admission.

I wish I had any confidence whatsoever in the upcoming movie.