Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd probably give that a go if it was possible to get the iPad app to actually download anything, or run for more than a minute without crashing...

or $69 for the year, which is what I paid.

What's that? Less than £3.50 a month

Bargain if you ask me.

Malc

The only problem for me with that option, which I have looked at before, is I'd need to give up reading Marvel comics for at least six months while the selection on there caught up. Also it only lets you keep ten issues at a time offline and I do read a lot of comics when I'm out and about with no guaranteed net connection. It's a good deal, don't get me wrong, but there are caveats.

I use Komik for reading on my tablet. It's a free app but pay a £1 or so to remove the ads. It's worked fine for me but I've read that it can have issues with CBR files. I've got a .bat file that extracts and repacks from CBR to CBZ just to be sure that everything works.

I use torrents for my comic needs as I just can't afford to buy them any more. At one point, my monthly pull list was upwards of £70

I read everything on my Tab 3, which is great for size.

Right, comic fans, I would like some recommendations.

I've bought the humble bundle, so i'll work my way through those. I have the Buffy comics so I expect i'll give those a go, but after that what should I be reading? I haven't read any comics since The Beano.
What's a good series to start with? I'm downloading Guardians of the Galaxy at the moment, which seems up my street. I expect i'm more into the superhero stuff, rather than the esoteric angst ridden emo stuff.

Definitely read Saga from the bundle. It's awesome.

I am in need of recommendations too. Am considering buying a story arc of some description from the Marvel Universe, but it annoys me that every single one seems to start the blurb with "Following the shocking events of Blah blah Blah..."

Deadpool, obv.

Hit me up if you'd like to know "a good shop".

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a good place to start as that's where they rebooted it a few years ago.

Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore.

Batman: Year One, Dark Knight Returns, any Vol 1 from the New 52 is a good place to start with for DC.

RMD, SVP

Be careful here, the New 52 is mostly utter, utter shite. There's a couple of series that are decent* and some that much later on became okay** but there's so much jaw-droppingly bad shit in there I honestly don't know what the fuck they're doing.

*The Batman stuff mostly, and Brian Azzarello's weird mythical take on Wonder Woman continues to be very good.
**Jeff Lemire has pretty much quietly rebooted Green Arrow all over again to make it into something that's not completely embarrassing to read and the current Swamp Thing run's not bad.

My recommendation would be not to necessarily look at certain characters/teams because the quality is incredibly variable depending on who's doing the writing at any given time. I think your best bet is to look at the best writers and see what they've done you might fancy. A couple of picks for writers to look for be Warren Ellis and Keiron Gillen; there's very little the two of them have done that isn't well worth reading.

If you're willing to go back a bit, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan series is completely stand alone and is just brilliant stuff from start to finish, but most of his own stuff is well worth reading. Super-hero wise he's done acclaimed runs on Iron Man, Thunderbolts (the issue where Norman Osborn finally completes his slow backslide from hero-of-the-hour to violent psychopath is honestly one of the funniest things I've ever read), and his original run on The Authority is top stuff.

Keiron Gillen started out with his own series Phonogram, a very British melding of magic and music that's well worth checking out. Since then he's done very good stuff with S.W.O.R.D., X-Men, Iron Man and Young Avengers. The best thing though is definitely his long run on Journey Into Mystery, which is a sort of Thor spin-off that he used to rehabilitate the character of Loki. It's funny and touching and just excellent all round.

I read the two Saga volumes from the bundle last night, they were great More like that please!

Thanks Bamba. The only problem I have is the same as Curio, the whole dropping into the middle of an established series, which I imagine will only be worse if I cherry pick particular writers unless I look at their standalone stuff?

Marvel's Civil War works as a standalone title, even though it references earlier stuff.

I've only read Detective Comics and the Batman ones so far, and I thought they were pretty good. I've got the first Justice League to get through as well.

They really are, aren't they? There's a third volume out as well, at full price. After that we're caught up and have to wait for the glacial pace of comic publishing. Boo!

I'm a seasoned shopper, but send it over

My current list of "shit to read"

y : the last man
preacher
batman : year one
100 bullets
superman : red son
Marvel : 1602
Fables
x-men - days of future past
Astonishing X-men
Planetary
Powers
Invincible
Deadpool
Spiderman : Brand New Day
Transmetropolitan

Emphatic cosign. Greg Rucka and Gail Simone are pretty much the only other writers whose stuff I'll pick up as a matter of course.

In the vein of cool fun superhero-y stuff: Atomic Robo. Funny, great action, great art. Everyone should be reading Atomic Robo. Comixology has all its "Free Comic Book Day" issues to download for (duh) free which are self-contained stories so you can dip your toe in to see if it's for you (spoiler: it will be for you).

Any of the Marvel NOW! #1s are decent jumping-on points. Other than the stuff already mentioned I'd single out Mark Waid's run on Daredevil and the Matt Fraction/David Aja Hawkeye, which are both all sorts of awesome.

When it comes to the super-hero stuff then yeah, you're going to have that problem of dropping in. The thing is though there's no way round that unless you want to go and read like twenty years worth of comics; it's just the nature of the beast. The better writers though will at least do a better job of making things coherent; plus the start of a new run by a new writer on a given character/team at least gives you a jumping off point in terms of the particular story they're telling.

Obviously DC have tried to address this with the New 52 stuff, and Marvel did similar a few years before that with the Ultimate line, but no matter when you do your reboot you instantly begin setting up stuff that'll be built on later and potentially bamboozle new-comers so at best it's a very temporary solution. And with the New 52 I don't even think they've done a very good job of that because there's still assumed knowledge or unexplained shit in some of the series'.

So, I dunno, I think if it's the mainstream super-hero stuff you're after you just need to deal with dropping in part-way through the soap-opera of it all. Googling references or characters as they come up will get you most of the way there and you can always drop questions to Beex folks here if you're totally stuck. The alternative as you say is to pick up more stand-alone creator owned stuff which is what I did for a long time, muchpreferring to read Vertigo series' rather than anything with capes and tights in it.

I loved the Civil War event, I thought it was a genuinely interesting discussion of the whole idea of super-heroes conducted in-universe and allowed for some brilliant character level stuff as well. I hesitated to recommend it because I read all the tie-ins and stuff (which would cost about a billion pounds) so wasn't sure how well it worked if you were only reading the main series. If it's coherent enough read like that then yeah, totally pick it up.



Indeed, both are awesome and don't really require much prior knowledge of the characters either.

I would liek a good shop too, as I should start reading comics again

Demonoid was my go to before it got shut down and these days I just go to Pirate Bay as they've got a whole section specifically for comics. Every Wednesday/Thursday all the individual new issues get uploaded and you can just pick up what you want. People do also upload packs and older series so you can browse through it if there's something specific you're after.

Home taping is killing music!

I read Atomic Robo years ago - it was indeed pretty good.

There are some good webcomics too, but that's probably something for another thread.

Something like this maybe?

That would have been better if I'd said about Concerned in it.

I'd like to know this too although I already use one private tracker.

I have every single issue, bar two from 1947, of Captain America should anyone want them. The early issues are a fucking struggle to read, mind you.

Those of you that read Civil War, how did you go about what issues to include? I followed the reading order in this link and wondered if there are any other issues I need to include before I start reading.

I was reading it as it came out so just read whatever was published that week I think. That page you've linked to is apparently the official Marvel reading order so I can't imagine it'll steer you wrong.

Also, I've got a fuck-ton of stuff lying around and am happy to make any of it available for anyone who wants it. I've got an exhaustive list at home (on a spreadsheet of course), what's the best way to make that list available?

Publically shared google doc?

Yeah, that might work, if the original multi-tabbed XLS imports okay into Docs. I'll give it a shot tonight.

I seem to have found the full civil war series, with all the tie ins and in the right order, on my hard drive, if anyone wants a copy...

That would be lovely

PM me and i'll give you the link, it's 1.5gb though so it won't actually be uploaded to my dropbox until tomorrow I expect!

yes please

And me, please.

Hello, TK-[0-9]{3}. Are you coming to the BBQuattro? GOD DAMNIT IT SAYS YOUR CORRECT NAME RIGHT THERE AT THE TOP OF THIS BOX

Here's my available list:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_P3-M ... sp=sharing

If you open it in Google Sheets it displays pretty much like the original spreadsheet with it's 40 tabs, whereas if you open it directly in Google Drive it's pretty horrible to view. The newest stuff tends towards the highest number tabs. Note that I'd only archive when a series ended (or when I'd accumulated a shitload of issues if it was long running) so even if something started in like 2007 it'll be in a more recent tab if it ran for a few years.

ETA: Actually I see there's a download option when you click on that link so just do that.

Looking at it I realise though that I eventually realised I wasn't ever likely to go back and read this stuff again so I deleted a load of stuff I'd usually have archived so by 'most recent' I really mean 2012 some time.

Does not open for me, but if I can 'review' any Judge Dread that you have

I tried it in a different browser that I'm not signed into with my Google account and although IE gave me some bullshit error about frames I still get the Google Drive menu bar and can select Download from the File menu. What do you get at your end?

in both ie10 and chrome I get "spread sheet is too large download or edit in google sheets".

It does neither.

Than after page 9, judge dread child 5, it just lists stripxxx, the xxx being a number.

Don't click the Download link in that actual message, use the Download option in the Google Doc "File" menu that's at the top-right and that works fine.



That's because the Judge Child Quest set I've got there is only five issues long. The stripxxx stuff you see is the next set which is a dump of an old webcomic called Life of Riley.

Another comic bundle at Humble.com

https://www.humblebundle.com/thewalkingdead

Pay $1 for
The Walking Dead, Vol. 1 Issues 1-6
Invincible, Vol. 1 Issues 1-4
Witch Doctor, Vol. 1 Issues 1-5
Ghosted, Vol. 1 Issues 1-5

Pay over the average ($10 or so) to add
The Walking Dead, Vol. 2 & 3 Issues 7-18
Thief of Thieves, Vol. 1 Issues 1-7
Super Dinosaur, Vol. 1 Issues 1-6
Plus some other titles (which will be added in a week)

Pay over $15 to add
The Walking Dead, Vol. 4 & 5 Issues 19-30

Hmmm. Might pick that up.

I have The Walking Dead massive thing made of paper, so wouldn't be getting it for that (plus, quite disappointed with it). Also, Invincible is a bit 'meh' and was the weakest of the previous bundle I've read.

There's actually another two tiers on top of that:

Pay $40 or more to unlock:
The Walking Dead T-Shirt
The Walking Dead, Vol. 20

Pay $65 or more to unlock:
Limited edition Negan action figure

That penultimate one there is odd; why go from volume 5 right up to 20?

There's also an offer below that on the page to just get the first three issues of The Walking Dead for free (in exchange for your email address) so anyone wanting a taster of The Walking Dead and electronic comics in general could do worse than that.

I haven't read Ghosted but did enjoy Witch Doctor and it's certainly worth $1.

Why read a comic on a tablet when you can read the real thing...here's one that up for sale. Price is a bit steep though.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/311050328393?afsrc=1

Latest humble comic bundle is all Star Trek stuff

https://www.humblebundle.com/books

pay 1p for
Star Trek: Gold Key Archives, Vol. 1
6 Issues
Star Trek: Best of Klingons
10 Issues
Star Trek Classics, Vol. 1
4 Issues
Star Trek Classics, Vol. 2
3 Issues

Beat the average (currently $9.71) to add

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Hive
4 Issues
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
4 Issues
Star Trek: Burden of Knowledge
4 Issues
Star Trek: Mirror Images
5 Issues
(plus more to come next week)

Pay $15 or above to add

Star Trek: Countdown
4 Issues
Star Trek: Movie Adaptation
6 Issues
Star Trek: Nero
4 Issues
Star Trek: Spock Reflections
4 Issues
Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness
4 Issues
Star Trek, Vol. 1
4 Issues

Oh well.

Bought! 100% charity again. Sticking it to the man since 1982.