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Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes
You could say Glove is about a man named Clay looking for his wife — but only in the same way you could say that nightmares are about monsters living in your TV. It was the first time that I realized that comics could be as surreal and psychologically unsettling as mixing scotch with David Lynch. I rarely see my copy of Glove anymore. It's always getting handed off to the next friend I hear saying they don't like comics because superheroes are dumb. — JC
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Fortune and Glory by Brian Michael Bendis
We've all had fantasies about fame. My personal delusions of grandeur were effectively extinguished by Brian Michael Bendis' memoir. Bendis started out writing and illustrating gritty noir comics; eventually, one of his works got optioned by a Hollywood studio. Glory follows his perilous journey through Hollywood, with its constant train of bullshit: the agents, the studio execs, the endless series of pointless meetings with pointless people in suits. It reads like a conversation between old friends, but also manages to make you squeamish, and it was so plainly earnest and funny that I walked away feeling more idealistic about art and love than I was before reading it. — JC
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Kabuki by David Mack
David Mack's series about a masked government assassin began as a black-and-white homage to Japanese storytelling. However, as the story's focus shifted to the heroine's interior life, the art began to take on a life of its own. Now every labor-intensive issue of Kabuki is a combination of painting, drawings, photographs and ephemera, all collaged in Mack's distinctive style. And the series has metamorphosed along with the art; it's no longer about government espionage, but about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality, and the struggle to find one's identity in a world full of masks. If you've ever looked back at your life and felt like you've been a dozen different people, you're bound to relate. — GW |
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Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez
This soap-operatic Fantagraphics series was the darkest, most passionate of alternative comics. It ushered in a whole new kind of sex symbol, a busty-but-not-like-Wonder-Woman girl mechanic-turned-apartment manager with mixed romantic luck. L&R has been said to embody Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and I think that's fair. But the comics were also just so mysteriously, dangerously sexy that they always seemed like they should come in a brown wrapper. — AC |
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Sandman by Neil Gaiman, et. al.
When I was fifteen, Sandman made me torture men for sport. Read how and why here. — AC |
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