N-Philes

Comics That Don't Suck

Posted August 21st 2009 by Adam Glasgow.

I love comics, but I'm the first to admit that most of them suck pretty hard. Lucky for you, then, that I've taken it on myself to read as many as I can -- the new, the old, the sad, the funny, the mainstream, and the indie -- so I can share with you, dear reader, what you should be picking up on your next trip to the comic shop, library or book store. I'm about to tell you all about comics that don't suck.

Blankets

Blankets is an autobiographical comic by Craig Thompson, who grew up in rural Wisconsin in a fundamentalist Christian family. The book starts in his childhood and focuses on his adolescence. Thompson has said that the book has a simple goal -- to describe what it feels like to sleep next to someone for the first time. The whole thing is so intensely human that it's almost scary to read at times. It's a coming of age story that explores family, love, finding and losing religion, and sexuality. The book is deeply personal but masterfully avoids the pitfalls of stories of this type, namely being overly sappy, sad, or seeming pathetic and/or desperate. It's real, beautiful and moving, which is admittedly a very sappy way to describe it. But hey, I'm no Craig Thompson.

Blankets didn't break any sales records, but its release didn't go unnoticed either. It won several awards (including an Eisner, which is often called the Oscars of comics), and helped Thompson to receive the praise of everyone from Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) to Time magazine, who put it on their list of All-TIME 10 Graphic Novels. As an added bonus this is an easy one to convince your girlfriend to read, despite the fact that it's a comic and it's almost 600 pages long. Don't let the size run you off though, the pages fly by and chances are good you'll be going back to pick up his first book – Goodbye, Chunky Rice (which is also fantastic).

The monster of a book, for buying purposes.

Northlanders

Vikings are cool. If you don't agree with this, skip this section, and kindly never talk to me again. If you do agree with this, please continue. Brian Wood is a writer and an artist, famous for his comics Demo and DMZ. He also worked for Rockstar as a designer, putting his hands all over a number of their games (including the Grand Theft Auto series) before quitting to do comics full time. Wood writes Northlanders, but steps aside and brings in different artists for each story in the series – allowing different characters from different places to be presented in various styles. It's brutal, epic, extremely well paced, and nicely drawn.

The first volume follows Sven, a royal-blooded runaway viking serving as a Royal Guard in Constantinople. When he hears that his jerk uncle is trying to steal his birthright, he decides to head home to collect his inheritance. Having no interest in ruling anyone, he plans to take his cash moneys back to Greece. Of course things don't go exactly as planned. If vikings sound remotely interesting to you, pick this up. If they don't, read it anyway.

Northlanders is an ongoing series and new issues continue to be published regularly. There are two collections published so far - each telling the story of a different character. After you finish the collections you can head to your local comic shop, start up a subscription, and read new issues as they come out. You will probably want to do this.

Volume 1: Sven The Returned

Volume 2: The Cross + The Hammer

Criminal

Ed Brubaker is, to me, one of the modern heroes of comics. Attach his name to almost anything and watch me get interested. He's been writing since the early '90s and has had his hands in everything from Captain America to Batman, and has been very successful doing so. Reading Criminal, though, gives you the feeling that this is what he's wanted to be doing all along – write damn fine pulp fiction crime stories.

Describing Criminal is hard to do without making it sound cliché, probably because it seems to make it a goal to cover as many pulp crime story clichés as possible. The drugs, the revenge, the murder, the seedy pasts -- it's all here, walking the line between feeling like an old-timey hard boiled flick and a modern slum drama.

Each collection can stand alone as separate stories (I started with the last one), but reading them all connects a lot of underlying strings and gives you more of a big picture plot. People, places and histories all overlap, so the more you read the more satisfying it is.

There are four collections of Criminal out so far, with a new story arc set to start up this fall. Catch up before the new stuff starts, you'll thank me for it. Criminal not only resuscitates the crime genre, it reinvents it. And I'm not just talking about in comics, either.

Volume 1: Coward

Volume 2: Lawless

Volume 3: The Dead and the Dying

Voume 4: Bad Night

Well that's about it for now, but I'll be back soon with more recommendations. If you try one of these out be sure to let me know what you think. Until then, make sure you keep reading all those comics that don't suck.

Tags: criminal, northlanders, blankets, Comics That Don't Suck

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