Comic Shop Musing 12/17/2005

As the wheels continue to turn at the publishing houses of all those monthly titles I have recommended, I thought I would turn my attention elsewhere for just a little while. (By the way, how's everyone enjoying all those comics I sent you out to buy. They are good stuff aren't they. Well except for the fact that it's been forever since a new issue of Planetary came out, but you can't do much about that. Oh, who am I kidding? I know no one who visits this blog would think enough of me to spend money on comic books just because I say so. I suppose I'll just have to live with the fact that I seem to be the only blog on the entire inter-web not yet featured on CNN. Anyways . . .) I thought what with it being the season of crass commericalism and gift exchanges, that maybe I could do my part to send some of those dollars the way of the comic vendor. Now obvioulsy unless you're involved in a three-dollar limit Secret Santa, then you probably don't have much reason to buy anyone an issue of a monthly title as a gift. And take it from a guy who's in the process of hunting down some issues of Sea of Red he missed, finding several issues of a particular title and buying them in a group can be hard to do , and it doesn't always work out all that well. Thankfully you have other options. The publishers of the various comicbooks go to the courtesy of collecting their tittles into convenient trade paperback form, whenever they complete a major storyline or just when they find they have a large number of issues that could be bulked together for some good reading. I have always enjoyed trade paperbacks and I own a sizeable collection of them. Still I, and all the other comic book fans on your gift list, would always enjoy having some more. So I have decided to share with you a review of some trades I recently acquired, as well as suggestions for a whole slew of poosible gift ideas. Most of these trad can be had for $25 or less, so they'll fit in your budget. Plus, the recipient of any of these gifts is likely to start reading them as soon as he opens the package, so that means they'll be out of your way as you put the finishing touches on the roast beast.

The Cap'n Recommends:

Walking Dead Vol.1 Days Gone Bye- The basic premise of this series is the same as every zombie movie you've ever seen. Some mysterious condition arrises which first kills people then turns their corpses into animated, flesh eating scavengers. Meanwhile an intrepid band of dissimilar humans finds themselves having to cooperate to survive. The story appeared so cookie-cuttter common that I passed it over when it first came out. It wasn't until I had heard the glowing and repeated praise of the series by my local comic vendor that I decided to buy a trade and give it a try. Walking Dead stands apart from other tales of the undead, because it recasts the story in two important ways.
First writer Robert Kirkman, an avid zombie fan himself, has made an open decleration of his intent to make this an ongoing story for as long as possible. That means that that unlike so many movies, real time and attention is devoted to the characters and their problems. We begin to see the possibilities of living in a zombie filled world for the complex and intriguing possibility it is. The horror of this series doens't come from gruesome scenes of mayhem and gore, although artist Tony Moore is an expert and that very thing. The terror comes from watching the slow but steady erosion of the world we know and love. Now we are left with a world of pure necessity where people have to do all they can just to get by.
The other key feature is the degree to which this is a story about the characters more than the world they live in. For the most part, zombies stories have been more intersted in the dead than the living. Kirkman and Moore reverse that by giving us a family as the central characters. They are so identifiable and so likeable that we come to care about them deeply and personally. Just as the horror comes from waching the slow and agonizing death of our modern world, the drama comes from watching the slow corrosion of the morals and values of these characters. We watch as their plight becomes more desperate and their behavior becomes more ativistic. I have only just begun to follow the story, but I am sure we will witness a point where it becomes hard to tell the foul, loathsome scavengers who savage our concept of humanity, and the zombies apart.
I gladly recommend this volume, which I already own, and any of the subsequent volumes I plan to purchase soon.

The Goon: Fancy Pants Edition- This tale also features plenty of zombie fighting but this is of a different variety. The Goon is a creation of pure pulp joy. He's the archtypal 1930's roughneck, who splits time between secretely running a criminal empire and using his sizable brawn to protect his city from the mechinations of the evil Zombie Priest. The series' talented writer/artist/creator Eric Powell easily leaps between genres combining elements of horror comedy, western, and crime into his stories. It's a real fun romp to read his stories.
This particular volume is a hardcover collection of stories from various parts of the series two incarnations as both an independent publication and from Dark Horse publishing. They put the stories into a chronological order though they weren't originally released that. That makes this particular tome a great buy for someone interested in a fun and original story, but not interested in piecing a story together one month at a time.

The Cap'n Suggest:
While I have read some of these stories I currently own none of them (something I hope to correct in the near future). I believe they all provide qualiy entertainment, and any or all of them would be a fine gift.

• Bill Waterson's The Complete Calvin and Hobbes- We all loved this strip back when it came out in daily form. Waterson achieved some of the highest levels of achievement in the comic art form ever seen in a newspaper since Will Eisner's immortal work on The Spirit. The three volume hardcover collection comes with a steep $150 pricetag. So you ma want to reserve this for someone extra-special or maybe a gift to a family of comic lovers (is there such a thing?).
• Any of Alan Moore's classics from Watchmen to From Hell to V for Vendetta . Moore is a grand master of comics storytelling and any comic fan you know would love to own any of these works.
• The entire Crossgen library can be found pretty cheap these days. The publisher was forced to close its doors too soon do to poor management, but the creators who worked their created some very memorable tales. Thankfully, the company was very efficient at collecting their series into trade paperback form. Another bonus, is that the Crossgen covered just about everything genre except superheroes, so they are good for non-traditional comic fans too.
• Brian K. Vaughan's Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days explores the potential convergance of super-heroes an politics through stories that reflect the world we live in through a very different lens.
• Charles Burns' Black Hole is a series that defies description, but it's been widely praised in the mainstream media as well. If the person on your list ever loved the dark underbelly of anything, then Black Hole is for them.

What's that? You want to know, what are these graphic novels you keep hearing about? That is a whole different blog entry people, and there's only so much time in the day.