bubosquared | (no subject)

Current Mood: ... dammit!

Entry tags:

comics,
recs

(no subject)

OKay. Fine. Fine. I give!

Hey, comic people on my friendslist? Anyone want to give a girl some pointers on how to get into this fandom? You know what kind of thing I like, I'm assuming, and I've sporadically read X-Men in the past, so I at least know who the players are, there. Well, sort of.

ETA: If it helps, from reading scans_daily, I seem to be developing an odd affection for this Bart fellow. Hm.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Accept the fact that you will never know everything about a given character :D. Make good use of sites like http://www.dcuguide.com and http://www.marveldirectory.com (i think those are the addresses. I just have them bookmarked).

BitTorrent, if you can get it to work, is a good idea and saves you a lot of money (Get the CDisplay Comic Book Reader on your computer if you don't already have it) on back issues.

Suggested DCU reading:
Young Justice
Impulse (Bart's solo title)
New Teen Titans v1 & v2
The Titans
Outsiders v2 (current run)
Teen Titans v3 (current run)

Make good use of your LJ and available forums to discover things about certain characters. Stuff like the Justice League titles, Green Lantern and Batman is often entrenched in decades of canon and can be hard to start off in.

Avoid anything by Chuck Austen, Bill Willingham, and Ron Marz like a thing what is avoided.

Read lots of fanfic. suggested is the stuff at http://www.teland.com.

LJ communities worth looking at:

scans_daily,

dc_clocktower,

dcfic_index (i think that's the name, it's in my friends list, it memorifies all LJ-posted DC fic), &

titanstogether

Some of my favourite stuff:

Anything by Judd Winick. He wrote a really good run or so in Green Lantern v3 (#128 or so to somewhere in the #150s), and is currently writing Outsiders and Green Arrow. He's a pretty gay & women friendly comic writer. He tackles social issues.

Anything by Mark Waid. He mostly writes in the Flash continuity, so I don't real a whole lot of his stuff, but aside from some of this early Justice League Task Force stuff, it's all good.

The Ultimate continuity is a good place to start in Marvel because it is made up of re-writes of old storylines. Essentially a decrackified Marvel continuity. Ultimate Fantastic Four is good, and I'm awfully fond of The Ultimates. I hear Ultimate Spiderman is good.

Mark Millar is usually a dependable writer, as is Brian Michael Bendis (though I hear that his run on Avengers is crap) if you're looking for Marvelly stuff.

Anything written before about 1996 is by definition crack. Or at lest ridiculously melodramatic. Some of it is still really good. New Teen Titans is enjoyable in a soap opera sorta way. JLA v2 is occasionally hilarious and touching all at once. And in spite of the awkward dialogue, Green Arrow/Green Lantern issues from the seventies are actually pretty good.

D'oh! I forgot Devin Grayson (who wrote a really good miniseries about Arsenal that I may have to send you), and Gail Simone, my two favourite female comics writers. Currently Grayson's writing Nightwing (which I don't read), and Simone is writing Birds of Prey. Grayson is a bit of a slasher who believes that Robin/Nightwing loves Batman, and it very much shades her writing, even if its not outright. Simone just writes really good stories. Both of them are comics fans first, and you can tell through their writing. (Simone is actually the woman who started the Women in Refrigerators (http://www.the-pantheon.net/wir/) site).

Accept that if you are not a feminist when you start reading comics, you will be in a month.

Thanks! Can I find back issues on BitTorrent, and if so, where should I start reading? I have this thing about starting at the beginning, which I don't think is really an option with these things ...

Starting at the beginning is kind of difficult, as people make their first appearances one place and then show up somewhere else in their own title, and everything's all over the place.

Impulse, since you like Bart, wasn't so hard to pick up from the beginning, but it wasn't all right out there either. I'd say Young Justice is pretty good, because it's primarily a comedy series, and its storylines are mostly internalized. (Mostly.)

Batverse, I'd say start when Dixon was writing everything. I'm not sure when that is in Batman or Detective Comics, but it will be issue 1 for Birds of Prey, Robin, and Nightwing.

Starting from the beginning is generally a bad idea because the sixties stuff? Is terrible and boring.

Yeah, I'm starting to learn that. Amy linked me to the Bruce spanking ewee!Dickie post, and um. Um. MAH BRAIN! I will never be able to read Bruce/Dick. EVER!

*cackle* but Dick wuuuuuubs hiiiim.

EVIL! *rocks back and forth* Can't sleep. Batman will spank me.

Grimly.

You know, The Titans (1998) is a good place to start also, for a lot of these characters. There's a lot of backstory, but you don't need it to understand what's going on.

That might be a good idea. And they're not from too long ago; I might be able to find second hand copies. (I like reading my comics in hardcopy. Especially in the bath.)

If you're going to read in hardcopy, look for trade paperbacks, as they're often arranged in order to be a semi-coherent story.

.. Trade paperbacks? *tilts head*

(I am a n00b!)

:D Trade paperbacks (tpbs or trades for short) are when the comic company recognizes something is a fairly major storyline, and puts the issues of that storyline together into what is essentially a paperback book. Some comics, like the Ultimates universe, and Birds of Prey are released entirely in trade form as well as multi-issue form. Most trades include about 6 issues of the comic and are somewhat cheaper than buying all the issues seperately. However, they come out a few months after the latest issue in the trade, which is why most hardcore comics fans don't buy them solely. However, they're a good jumping off point (and a good way for non-collectors to read back-issues), and are good for more casual comic fans.

American comics confuse meeeee! Shitloads of different writers and artists, storylines all over the place, all this terminology ...

I wish I could remember how I started reading comics. I think I started with the current Teen Titans run and then went back and read New Teen Titans in bittorrent form (It's nearly 200 issues, so I wouldn't suggest buying it if you can help it); after a lot of time confused, things started making sense.

I am fond of American comics in a way for two reasons:
1) It's kind of like fanfic, in a way. A bunch of different writers working with characters they most likely didn't create. It's interesting.
2) While the intertwining plots is a bitch to read because you have to buy so many different issues, it's also fun because the whole universe is so entwined.

Oh, I definitely see the appeal, I just ... I'm not used to it, is all. European comics tend to be much more ... stories in graphic format. Graphic novels proper, so to speak. I'm gonna take some adjusting to get used to this, is all.

Possible "beginnings." Now that I think about it...

DC reset its comics twice in the past few decades. First in the early eighties with Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which all the DC timelines pared down to one main timeline, causing the deaths of not a few characters (most notably Barry Allen, the original Flash, and Bart's grandpa). The second was Zero Hour in the early nineties in which then Green Lantern, Hal Jordan went crazy, became Parallax, became all-powerful, and attempted to end and restart the universe in order to fix all the things that were wrong with the world. Or something. Marz wrote a lot of it, so I haven't read that much of it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only