Great read @tomchick
Picked up an edit for you as well:
I read volumes of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County and I devoured whatever comic strips I could fine in newspapers…
I just bought a lovely omnibus edition of Uzumaki two days ago!
UGH, I freakin’ LOVED that book. I read it on my study abroad trip in Sydney. Might have to give it a re-read!
To be honest, I can’t say I ever figured it out, and I’ll certainly talk more about how I’ve wrestled with it. But as with many things about comics I don’t know, I’m guessing @Andy_Bates has the right of it:
One thing that I’ve kind of been disappointed to discover – although it makes sense – is that you can pretty quickly tell when there’s nothing to see in a panel or series of panels. And sometimes that’s because I run into stretches that feel, for lack of a better word, very “low effort”. They feel like I have the artist’s permission to just focus on the words, or even just charge ahead to a denser bit. Sometimes the art even seems apologetic. “I know, I know,” it admits, “but we couldn’t just leave this space blank.”
It’s still weird for me and I can’t read comic books the way I read a real book. I can sit for an hour plus reading a real book easily, and not even notice the time, because it’s always been a familiar process and rhythm for me. I can lose myself in it. But I have no consistent attention span for a comic book. Sometimes I can go just a few pages and I’ve had enough. Other times I can easily read one whole issue and be ready to keep going. But overall, I can’t process comics as quickly or as readily as written stories.
Cheers and nicely spotted! If you want one of these Marvel bananas, I’ll save it for you. You can even have the Hulk one.
Just remember, back to front! :)
Don’t throw out the over-ripe bananas - freeze them in a zippered plastic bag, then you can defrost them at your leisure in the microwave when you’re ready to make banana bread (bonus - you get better banana bread this way too, as defrosted bananas have a better consistency for baking!).
Did you sit and watch them for an extra ten minutes?? Maybe there’s an after-credits sticker.
Are we allowed to write the name… Elektra Assassin. Loved that, and the artwork was amazing. Came out the year I graduated high school, when a lot of cool comic stuff was published.
Also Big Trouble in Little China that summer before college.
It was a formative year.
This has always been my problem too. I didn’t grow up reading them and, in fact, started eschewing anything with illustrations around the age of 10 (a mixture of finding them patronizing and wanting to visualize things my way). Subsequently I’ve read a few comics (Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and in each case while I’ve enjoyed the story I’ve struggled with exactly the problem you describe - I just kind of want them to be all text rather than having all that distracting art. It’s a me problem, not a problem with the medium itself, but I’m not sure how to get past it and it really does make reading them a task, instead of a relaxing joy like a good book.
I’m really happy to see Tom and you talking about this, actually, because I really had thought I was the only one with this issue.
I’m not really as familiar with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but the other two are very much…less accessible, maybe? I mean, they’re great comics, but they really play with a lot of genre tropes in a way that’s more difficult to process. I wouldn’t show Memento to someone who hasn’t watched a lot of movies, and Watchmen isn’t great for someone who hasn’t read a lot of comics.
All that to say: You started with some of the heavier comics.
I may not read the medium but I’m very familiar with the stories as manifest in TV and movies, certainly enough to understand what e.g. Watchmen is doing with comic book tropes. As I said, I enjoyed it quite a bit for the story, despite not having much regard for the art.
Not to put too fine a point on it but for me the “heavy” ones were the only ones telling interesting enough stories to be worth dealing with the format.
From the topic title I thought this was a Woody Allen thread.
I just mean that Alan Moore spends a lot of time deconstructing superhero comics (and specifically Silver Age comics) in a way that would be difficult to appreciate without already being familiar with those comics. And I would say that deconstructed comics aren’t the only ones worth reading.
Re: how to read comics, I highly recommend this book:
It’s not literally a tutorial on reading comics, but it’s an amazing discussion of how comics work, formally and artistically.
Also, what’s McCarthy’s problem with green bananas?
It’s worth exploring stuff that isn’t Marvel or DC. Image (and Boom! and IDW and etc) has a ton of creator-owned books that do not deal with superheroes and explore all sorts of strange conceits. And you can go further afield with indie, international and web comics and get some really interesting stuff. If you can get your hands on them, check out the Love and Rockets books from the Hernandez brothers. Some of their work, particularly the Palomar books, approaches the literary artistry of Garcia Marquez.
Yeah, an important phrase is missing from what I posted last night, that should say “were the only ones of which I was aware…” This was over a decade back and, at the time, I had absolutely no idea that the wider range of comics existed at all. I have more sense of that now, just from the range of adaptations, hanging around here, and talking to more plugged in people elsewhere too (one advantage of teaching, students tell me about stuff I’d never have heard of otherwise).
Anyway, I appreciate the suggestions and will try to follow up on them when I have the time to read more (got a new fall prep dumped in my lap a few weeks before the semester starts so right now it’s all work all the time, though at least it’s astronomy so it’s fun work).
That definitely sounds like a worthwhile read for me. Thanks for the suggestion!
So, all the people who never got comics, you haven’t read classic European stuff like Asterix, Lucky Luke, etc? Or all the sci-fi BD from the seventies?
Or Disney stuff when you were younger? I remember being a kid and reading these humungous Disney collections, somehow I gravitated to the sci-fi stories (usually with Scrooge McDuck), or Darkwing Duck stories.
I mean, it occurs to me that I read some B5 comics that wrapped up certain plotlines after the show ended. I think those would have been my first “long form” comics. I certainly enjoyed comic strips in the newspaper when I was a kid (Bloom County forever!) but until you just mentioned them I didn’t even know there were Disney comic books (I was never a Disney kid so those probably would have passed me by anyway), and I’ve never heard of the European stuff you mentioned there.
Honestly, I’m looking at all of this and starting to wonder how the hell I’m going to find time to dig into any of it. There’s still an infinite well of novels to read, games to play, and stuff to watch, adding a whole additional medium is intimidating! As problems go, though, it’s a good one to have.
I realized as I was reading your comment that this was exactly me as a kid! And I think it partly had to do with Dungeons & Dragons, which might have the odd illustration here and there, but overall, it conditions you to rely on your imagination for all things fantastical.
Quick sidebar! If you’re of a certain age and you ever played D&D, I cannot recommend this egregiously coffee table book enough:
But I think you’ve definitely hit on something, @vinraith. When I’m reading prose, my brain can handle the visuals, thankyouverymuch. In fact, that’s my VFX studio of preference! It’s fast, efficient, and freakin’ gorgeous. I’ve spent over half a century fine-tuning it to appeal to my own specific tastes, preferences, predilections, etc. Nine times out of ten, it’s going to provide me with a far more impressive scene than whatever someone can draw on a page.
And I think this was my own personal hitch when I tried to read comics. I didn’t want to let go of the natural tendency to handle the visuals myself. Furthermore, I didn’t know how to.
Very nicely put, Bates!
Gah, I probably should have provided more context. McCarthy just turned 89. He’s probably not going to be with us much longer. : ( The implication is that an 89-year-old who buys green bananas is close enough to death’s door he might not be alive long enough for the bananas to ripen.