I'll chime in with V for Vendetta, which I usually re-read once a year and always enjoy very, very much.

I think GY is basically right.

I think we've already reached the point where comics and graphic novels are accepted by a large segment of "indy" and hipster types, but as with everything its easier for small presses to reach those people because they usually "work harder" to find cool new stuff.


But there's still a distribution bottleneck. Comic shops, while fun to hang out in, aren't that plentiful and people who aren't arleady into comics aren't likely to go there. They tend to focus on the superhero, horror, fantasy and sci-fi comics because they dovetail well with their other product offerings - Magic: The Gathering, collectible toys, MacFarlane toys, games, etc and don't devote a lot of room to the artsy or obscure black and white stuff.

Book chains, like Barnes & Noble, tend to shove all their graphic novels into the same section as the Dungeon Master's guides and, as far as I can tell, usually only carry the best selling DC/Marvel/Dark Horse stuff.

Libraries are beginning to carry more stuff. Hopefully that will only continue to expand.

Meanwhile, I'm told the book chains sell a lot of manga, especially to 14-year-old girls. Unfortunately, that audience doesn't seem to cross over.

Most of the non-superhero comics getting anything approaching widespread distribution are in what I guess you could call "adjacent genres" - crime, cloak & dagger, sci-fi, horror, fantasy adventure, etc. I guess its because there's an established group of customers at comic shops who all like superheros, or at least did as kids, and will therefore be good targets for those genres.

DC and Marvel superhero books were among the only things to survive the comics code upheaval of the late 1950s, but then they came to totally dominate the medium because nothing else could get wide distribution. Its really remarkable. No other medium I can think of is so totally dominated by one sub-genre. It's like if all of a sudden 95% of movies were about gangsters or every tv show were about people stuck on an island.

It's a bit like why the cheaper pilsners were the only beer in America for a long time. There used to be other beers, but those were the most popular and therefore the only companies big enough to survive prohibition.

Unfortunately, now that means that most people have no idea there is any kind of comic but superhero comics.

As with the beer, it's going to continue to take time for non superhero stuff to find a way to get to readers.


I usually order things from Marsimport.com or amazon.

QUOTE:
Book chains, like Barnes & Noble, tend to shove all their graphic novels into the same section as the Dungeon Master's guides and, as far as I can tell, usually only carry the best selling DC/Marvel/Dark Horse stuff.

...

Meanwhile, I'm told the book chains sell a lot of manga, especially to 14-year-old girls. Unfortunately, that audience doesn't seem to cross over.

This is one of the areas where I think there's a big divide between the UK and the US. In London at least (any comics fans outside of London, please let me know if it's different elsewhere) the book chains carry as much almost as much of the "high brow" stuff as they do the Marvel/DC collections. Every chain bookstore that has a comics section, and it's most of them in London, will have Sandman, Preacher, Transmet, Hellblazer, several Alan Moores, a few Clowes and Sacco books, and so on. They're not so good at carrying new books, it's true, but they certainly don't just concentrate on superheroes. And while they carry manga, it tends to be a smaller selection than in the US. I read somewhere that Naruto alone is responsible for something like half of all manga sales in the US, whereas it has no real cultural relevance here.

Superheros are mostly an American obsession. They never really caught on big in Europe.

Also, a lot of the books and authors you mention there happen to be British, so there might be a natural domestic content guideline influencing B&N's decisions on what to push in their stores.

Superhero comics have influenced a lot of anime and manga, and vice-versa, but American superheroes as we know them here are not big in Japan, as far as I know.

Our stores usually carry Sandman, Hellblazer, Transmet and stuff like that too, but those are all published by DC or DC/Vertigo and fall into genre's "adjacent" to superheroes.

Do you get the Queen & Country over there? It's among my favorite series. It's about British secret agents, but it's written by an American.

"Our stores usually carry Sandman, Hellblazer, Transmet and stuff like that too, but those are all published by DC or DC/Vertigo and fall into genre's "adjacent" to superheroes."

Sure, but they were just examples I'm familiar with - I'm a big fan of Vertigo in that era. Spiegelman, Sacco and Clowes don't seem to fall into that category.

Queen & Country is available over here, but I've never read it or heard anyone talk about it.

"Spiegelman, Sacco and Clowes don't seem to fall into that category."

No, and I don't know if every B&N in the US would have those, although they'd probably have Clowes' Ghost World because it was made into a film and possibly Spiegelman's Maus because it got so many positive reviews in the mainstream press.

Queen & Country is fun stuff. I highly recommend it. Rucka has also done two Q&C novels that fit into the ongoing storyline. Both are good page turning yarns.

Rucka says he blatantly ripped off a lot of the ideas for Q&C from a British tv show called The Sandbaggers, which ran for three years in the late 1970s. If you've seen it (I have not) then perhaps you can get an idea of what it's like. It's also a bit like the American show Alias, except better.

I've now read Oldboy and the Israeli Exit Wounds. Oldboy didn't grab me at all. That's probably because I've seen the film but the only thing I liked about the book was reading it Japanese style, i.e. from back cover to front cover, right to left. The content didn't interest me.

Exit Wounds was good but I was slightly disappointed with it - it started very well but tailed off towards the end. Perhaps I was spoiled by the fact the first two stories I read were so good.

Of course, the advantage of the medium is that it only takes about an hour to read a book such as those two.

I've heard nothing but praise for Exit Wounds. It was voted best comic of 2007 by the commenters over at Comics Should Be Good.

It's disappointing how few French comics have been translated into English. As Reed remarked, English language comics are dominated by Superheroes, the French ones are so much more diverse. It's only recently that quality writers like Clowes & Spiegelmann have appeared.

Walk into any half decent bookshop in France or Belgium and you will find racks of stuff - and their artwork is much more diverse as well.

Very true - it's only the kids' stuff that gets translated. All the French adult comics I've read have been in the original.

Not many French comics are translated - nothing like the number of Japanese comics. I have Persepolis, however.

Superheroes aren't dominant in the total number of titles, but they are easier to find. At all of the comics shops I've been too lately, 50%-70% of the rack space will be DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and Image stuff meaning that all the other stuff is underrepresented and not every title that you could conceivably want will be there.

But with the internet, all is possible. Like I said, www.marsimport.com is great. As you may know, the comics retail business in the US (and maybe everywhere) is served almost exclusively by one distributor, Diamond (www.diamondcomics.com), but I think Mars Import gets stuff through other channels because they have stuff from publishers I haven't heard of anywhere else.

I've yet to read Persepolis. Worth picking up?

I've only read the first one. I enjoyed it a lot.

Most of the french-language stuff came out of Belgium, the largest two sources being two periodicals, Tintin and Spirou, which were weeklies directed towards the youth, that featured many serial stories, the flagships of editors Dupuis and Casterman.

Dupuis had Spirou, Johan et Pirlouit (of which the Smurfs were an offshoot), Gaston and dozens of others. Gaston is a remarkable character, a hugely popular strip that featured one-page stories of a goofy office gopher, he is as popular a figure as Asterix in France, Belgium or Holland (where he is known as "Guust"). The strip is a sort of antithesis to Dilbert, featuring a creative, lazy, espadrille and turtleneck-wearing goof-off office hand who livens things up. http://www.gastonlagaffe.com/sitefr/gag.php http://echbd.free.fr/ECHBD/images/GASTON_01_100.jpg.

Tintin magazine had Herge's namesake character as well as other characters like Lucky Luke, Alix/Lefranc, Quick et Flupke, Tanguy et Laverdure. All of the comics mentioned above would be worthy of long posts, many of those aren't much far behind Tintin or Asterix in terms of quality and style. There are several excellent "smaller" charcters/series that appeared in those magazines, like the outstanding Docteur Poche, a whimsical and sweet character.

A couple of decades ago, the aforementioned two weeklies became less central, as the genre fragmented and became much more adult-oriented, with most coming out from France as opposed to Belgium. One good example along those lines is the duo of Dupuy and Berberian, whose most famous series is Monsieur Jean, stories of a Parisian writer in his thirties:
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/imagesPreview/a443580561dd85.pdf

the english version is published by Drawn and Quarterly (a terrific name for a terrific publisher based in Montreal.)

Dupuy&Berberian have published a lot of books, including non-graphic novels, books with some illustration. One of their most terrific work is "Bistronomiques", a great book of recipes from their favorite Parisian bistros, which includes lots of drawing and other impressions of the 21st century traditional bistro scene. Highly recommended.



http://www.duber.net/images/exposition/bistronomiques/bistros5gf.jpg http://www.duber.net/images/exposition/bistronomiques/bistros1gf.jpg

They also did a book that came with its own soundtrack CD, "Francoise"


http://www.duber.net/index1.htm

Two good American comic artists, who both happened to live just down the street from my place in Berkeley, CA a while back, are Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) and Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Art School Confiential). They're somewhat similar in that their stories usually focus on young characters in urban settings dealing with every day life and relationships. Like the somewhat autobiographical character in Art School Confidential, Clowes is a bit on the nerdy side.
http://lambiek.net/artists/t/tomine_a.htm

Preview of a Tomine story: http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/imagesPreview/a462fba9cc8e66.pdf

Tomine is published by Drawn and Quarterly, a great Montreal-based graphic novels editor, which has a great lineup of artists. that lineup itself is nicely produced in a series of small self-portraits on their featured artists page:
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/artHome.php

You can't have a thread on modern comics without mentioning Robert Crumb, an eccentric artist who was a big part of the late 60s counterculture and was very influential in "blowing up" the genre. http://www.rcrumb.net/

This famous poster of his, titled Short History of America, was presented frame-by-frame in a recent major conference on sustainable urbanism, it was a huge hit and really underscored some of the basic ills of modern land developement: