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#underground comix #tank girl #frank miller #junji ito #charles burns
Anonymous...Hey, thought it would be interesting to know some of your favourite comics.. so if I may ask, what are they? thnx babeh
Sorry I’ve taken a week to get to this, I really am terrible at using Tumblr.
I’ve probably got a fairly atypical taste when it comes to comics, tending to favour writers who steer clear of the usual archetypes and tired ground.
- Adrian Tomine - Think Richard Linklater’s Slacker, only in comic format; short slice-of-life insights into those of Generation X who feel cheated out of what their forefathers promised.
- Junji Ito - Japanese Horror writer extraordinaire. If you’re a fan of the macabre then look no further, expertly crafted tales with unexpectedly convoluted conclusions. Perhaps my favourite story of his is The Enigma of Amigara Fault, I won’t spoil it for you. (For the real comic gore-hounds out there, check out Hideshi Hino for even grislier tales).
- Charles Burns - His art style consists of a starkly contrasted black and white, with no muddling greys in-between. The kind of stories you’d find in a ’70s B-Movie you stumble across channel surfing at 4am.
- Robert Crumb/Harvey Pekar/Art Spiegelman/Gilbert Shelton - Now I could hark on about Underground Comix for hours but I’ll spare you all the wall of text and leave you to seek out the goods yourself. These authors were all absolutely ground breaking in how comics have advanced in the last 40 years, they broke the status quo of how comic books could only be used to entertain children and brought adult ideas and change to the medium.
- Daniel Clowes - Ghost World is ‘okay’, read David Boring or Eightball to get at the meat of Clowes.
- Frank Miller - No one can draw quite like Frank Miller, each panel is a proverbial Where’s Waldo of visual information to take in, he is a master of the minute. Hard Boiled is my favourite but the Shaolin monk wielding two chainsaws attached to a rope in a battle to the death with a crab might peak your interest more: Shaolin Cowboy.
Strangers In Paradise by Terry Moore, Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido, Tank Girl by Jamie Hewlett & Alan Martin and Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez are all massive favourites of mine as well.
Perhaps my all time #1 comic is The Ballad of Halo Jones with it’s primarily female cast, arguably one of the first feminist comics published in a prominent magazine (2000AD) and an underrated classic from the archives of the indomitable Alan Moore.
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#lichtenstein #charlton comics #underground comix
1950’s Charlton comics - examples of which Lichtenstein would later go on to imitate and parody.
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#gilbert shelton #fat freddy's cat #the fabulous furry freak brothers #underground comix #robert crumb
I just found my stash of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers by Gilbert Shelton, these are the original early 1970’s editions but you can now get every issue collected in a 1000+ page omnibus which is ridiculously cheap at like £15 or something.
Definitely worth investing if you want to see how Garfield was ripped off of Fat Freddy’s Cat and just to see a bunch of degenerate hippies getting blitzed on acid and wandering NYC avoiding the feds/work and on the ever constant search for some of that ’60s free lovin’. The finest of the early Underground Comix movement!
