Comic Book Overview

We are nearing the end of this small journey of exploration, and the first thing I am finding out is that I am not really done, so there will be future reading. I don’t know that it will be an annual event, like Black History Month or Native American Heritage month, but at some point I will take another crack at it.

I have mentioned various works in different posts, but here is the work in the order in which I read it. Generally speaking, if there was a different author and illustrator, the author is listed first, but sometimes the lines blur, and with the Hernandez brothers I think they both do both.

Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (Art Spiegelman)
Maus II: And Here My Troubles Begin (Art Spiegelman)
Rapunzel’s Revenge (Shannon Hale/Nathan Hale)
The Umbrella Academy 1: Apocalypse Suite (Gerard Way/Gabriel Bà)
The Umbrella Academy 2: Dallas (Gerard Way/Gabriel Bà)
Love & Rockets (Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez)
Persepolis The Story of a Childhood (Marjane Satrapi)
Amulet, Volume 1: The Stonekeeper (Kazu Kibuishi)
Ghost World (Daniel Clowes)
Elfquest 1: Wolfrider (Richard Pini/Wendy Pini)
Wolverine (Chris Claremont/Frank Miller)
Mystery Men (David Liss/Patrick Zircher)
Complete Frank Miller Spider-Man (Frank Miller as the illustrator, different authors)
American Splendor (Harvey Pekar/various, including Robert Crumb, though I think Gregory Budgett was my favorite)
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Marjane Satrapi)
300 (Frank Miller)
Flaming Carrot’s Greatest Hits (Bob Burden)
Watchment (Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons)
Absolute Sandman, Volume 1 (Neil Gaiman/multiple)
Batman and Catwoman: Trail of the Gun (Ann Nocenti/Ethan Van Scriver)
JLA World Without a Justice League: Infinite Crisis Crossover (Bob Harris/Tom Derenick and Dan Green)
Wonder Woman: From the Flames (J Torres/Julian Lopez)
Batman: Shadow of the Bat (Alan Grant/Mark Buckingham and Robert Campanella)

First off, I need to point out that my initial premise was off. My thought had been that sometimes when I am on a run of socially conscious reading, I start to tire of humanity, and I thought if I would just put a comic book in between other books, that would give me a little break. I was wrong in two different ways.

One is that I was not really picking light reading. I started off with the two Maus books, and, well, using animals to represent the different races may alleviate some of the horror in some ways, but it’s still Holocaust literature. I’m not saying that there was no light reading, as some of them were, but some of them were quite heavy, dealing with topics like alienation, oppression, and the elusive nature of the American dream.

Also, yes, a comic book will often be shorter than a regular book, having both a page and word count. That being said, they do have a higher image count, and that takes some processing too. It’s working a different part of your brain, but it’s still working it. So when I referred to people who hypothetically just hate looking at pictures when they read, that could totally make sense, just as there are people who get tired easily reading text.

Also, don’t assume the material should be easy. One friend pointed out how the comics tend to have a fairly advanced vocabulary, which is true, but you will also often have fairly layered plots and a large cast of characters.

I’m not saying that comics can’t be escapism, but they may make you work for it.

Tomorrow I will cover some of the highlights and lowlights, and then I am going to go into an area that will lead to a broader discussion, and then, yes, the plan is to get into what I am working on. I wish I was sure I would be finished by then.