Comics/Manga Discussion Thread

[Mustang]

All of that sounds pretty good. I will probably stick with the stand alones for the time being and will see how I feel after looking into your suggestions.

Thanks a bunch.

[Markness]

Anyone have any opinions on the current X-books?

Yeah, the ones I've read have been pretty good. Marauders has a really fun dynamic between Kitty and Emma, and making a pirate branch of the X-Men's an inspired take. Read a little of Hellions, and I liked it even though it read like X-Men Suicide Squad at first. And the mainline title's great. It managed to give Apocalypse some much needed character depth.

I pretty much agree with you. Marauders along with Excalibur also have the best art of the X-books. It was good to see Apocalypse get more development and be reunited with his wife. He says Professor X and Magneto will see him again. It probably won't be under pleasant terms considering his history with the X-Men but we'll just have to see.

I also like S.W.O.R.D. and I like how the first issue featured Blink and Gateway; I just hope they will appear again since they weren't in the second issue.

[Markness]

I am going to get back into Fire Force and I also got the first volume of Shinobu Ohtaka's follow up to Magi called Orient. Her art style still looks the same but that's fine since she has an appealing one. I think the manga's only real problem is that it moves way too fast. A whole lot of characters are already present but they aren't properly introduced and there is already a god level enemy. I hope Ohtaka will slow the pace down as it goes.

[Markness]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marvel.com/amp/articles/comics/mutantkind-soars-to-the-top-in-the-new-x-corp-series

I am glad that the X-Corp title is finally coming this May. It will focus on Angel and Monet St. Croix/Penance.

[Daikun]

So, I've been checking out New World Reviews lately. He's pretty great.
Much in the style of Totally Not Mark, he has been doing blind reads of manga lately.

He has fully caught up to Black Clover recently, and now he's catching up on Jujutsu Kaisen.

Black Clover playlist
Jujutau Kaisen playlist

[Dr. Insomniac]

I watched this video about how modern culture's ruined Watchmen, and it fails to grasp not only Watchmen but superheroes in general. The guy acts like what makes Watchmen work is just because it's political and he thinks it makes superheroes look like assholes, which both simplifies what the book's appeal is and also confuses what it's trying to do with the superhero genre. This shit's rich is because he spends time berating fans for worshiping Rorschach while acting as if Rorschach's an evil character despite neither of those are correct. And then the video accuses modern comic culture of failing to understand Watchmen while only bringing up a couple of examples like Snyder films and Doomsday Clock, while ignoring plenty of other responses to Watchmen like Multiversity, Marvels, Kingdom Come, The Twelve, and countless other comics. Or even the HBO show. Heaps of this video are just poorly-researched tracts while acting like Watchmen's a sacred cow that few people understand or appreciate, when it's really one of the most accessible of Moore's books.

[Daikun]

R.I.P. Kentaro Miura

[Markness]

Man, this is such a shock to hear. Berserk will never be completed. 

[Avaitor]

Oh my god. No.

RIP

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

That's devastating to hear. I am far from caught up on Berserk, but even the chapters that I have read show the immense artistic and story-telling skill of Miura as an artist and writer. It's no wonder he was such a huge influence to so many creators. May he sincerely rest in piece.

[Dr. Insomniac]

RIP Miura.

[Daikun]

[Daikun]

Monster author Naoki Urasawa has started his own YouTube channel!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkIFOAoFm47XOAlJwTa6Ieg/videos

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Gotta love how Urasawa jokingly mentions how disheartened he is by people asking him about his next work when it's already being published. I myself have love the first two volumes of Asadora! and have the third volume pre-ordered. It kind of astounds me that Urasawa can still be such a compelling writer even this late into his career.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I did pick One Piece back up for my re-read. A few years back I re-read the East Blue and Baroque Works sagas, but then for whatever reason stopped reading again. However, I had a re-surge in interest in the series again and since then have re-read through the Skypiea and Water Seven sagas, and have just started on Thriller Bark. It's almost absurd how much the earlier content holds up and even improves on a re-read given knowledge of later events. Whether he had them planned out or not, Oda does such an incredible job of inter-weaving various story threads throughout hundreds of chapters that you can't help but notice several clues seeded far earlier in the series that you know will pay off in big ways later given hindsight. What's more is that it actually has caused me to completely re-interpret several scenes as I re-read them. It really is a shame that nobody on this board could ever really find any appeal in One Piece (though, I completely understand it, as it's unique style isn't to everyone's liking), because it's one of the few series that has gone on for as long as it has and arguably gotten even better over time. To be more specific, it's not simply that it's story gets better as it goes along (in a general sense it does, though my personal favorite arcs are still some of the earlier ones), but rather that the longer it goes on and the more mysteries are uncovered, the more the overall story improves, including older arcs as well as Oda's ability to tell the story in later arcs with a more sophisticated and complicated story structure. At the same time, it still never completely forgets it's routes, which I like to describer as a Shonen mashed with Lord of the Rings and Looney Tunes. It's not a perfect series, but there genuinely isn't anything quite like it out there, IMO. It will leave a huge void in Shonen Jump's lineup whenever it inevitably ends (which, while still several years away, will definitely happen within this decade at it's current rate and given Oda's comments in recent interviews).

I've also been back to reading Fantastic Four again, and I'm now in the 160's where writers are still cycled around (though mostly it seems to go to Roy Thomas after Gerry Conway had a string of several issues), and it does at least feel like some stability has been restored to the title at this point. The original team is back together, Johnny Storm is back to the traditional blue costume, and the story arcs have more of a sense of cohesion to them rather than feeling like the writers are throwing a billion ideas at the wall and trying to see if any of them stick only to fumble their way into something barely resembling a conclusion and then recycling the entire process ad nauseum. Still, even with the improvement it does feel more like the title is now just trying to go back to replicate the Lee/Kirby-era magic but without the same level of creativity that they brought to the table as a duo. It's passable for the time, but pretty cookie-cutter stuff overall.

For the record, I don't plan to do this with any other superhero comic, but it is a personal experiment that I wanted to see through, so at least as far as FF Vol. 1 goes, I will remain committed to reading it in chronological order in terms of the main series publication. Again, though, I'm skipping most spin-off material and crossovers unless it's absolutely essential to the main run (like, I did skip The Human Torch solo series from the 60's, even though some of that material does get used in the main series, namely The Fifth Dimension). Really, though, at this point I'm just kind of slogging through the series to finally get to John Byrne's run, which is what I've really wanted to read for a while now given how much acclaim it has gotten.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've just started reading Peter Tomasi's Superman run and I'm already hooked. I was originally going to wait until after I had read John Byrne's Superman run, but I managed to snag the new omnibus at a really good price and started with that. I'm already pretty hooked. I love the tone and style of this story, and it's immediately refreshing to read a story that treats Superman with respect after all of the evil Superman-type characters that have been thrown at us in recent media. While I enjoy some of that stuff, Superman himself is actually a pretty compelling character when written by someone who clearly actually likes that character.

I've also been reading Uzumaki by Junji Ito, which is pretty refreshing since I haven't read much in the way of horror manga before. This has a unique style and sensibility that could only work as a manga specifically which is a core part of it's appeal. It's pretty great if you're the type to appreciate the psychological and surreal aspects of horror as opposed to more intricate stories with a bit more logic applied to them. This one is planted firmly in the real of the weird and mysterious, which is pretty much what I wanted out of this title.

I'm also still in the middle of my One Piece re-read, about half-way through Thriller Bark, and I still love this arc. I never understood why it is commonly thought of as one of the lesser arcs by a majority of the fan-base. I think people tend to prefer the more "epic" story arcs with more plot progression for the core story-line of the series, but the whole theme and point of the series is about the adventure to get to the destination. I'd argue that these seemingly more "isolated" arcs (and I use that term loosely since even these still connect to the main story in big ways much later on) are all the more in the spirit of One Piece as an overall series. As for Thriller Bark, I just love the Tim Burton-esque style of the monsters, and how this is basically one big loving tribute to cheesy horror clichés. It's a really fun arc that really shows how creative Oda can be with the concepts that he takes from other forms of fiction and applies to his work with a unique twist of his own.