I finished reading Alan Moores Watchmen last night and I enjoyed it a great deal. I've never really been someone that was into comics much, when I was small I read thing like The Dandy and The Beano but when I got to my teens I stopped reading comics since most of the ones I had any contact with were for small kids.
I have always liked reading and I guess I switch to more books for my dose of storytelling rather than comics.
I didn't read any comics again till I started at Uni and one of my house mates was into things like witch blade, the darkness, Hitman, and Preacher. He dumped a stack of Preacher comics and assorted other which was about knee high in my room and me and my room mate worked our way through them when we should have been working.
It was an interesting thing because it did break some of the associations of comics being just for kids but it didn't make me rush down to the friar's street bookshop (which used to be a books shop specialising in scifi and comics in reading tho last time I looked it was now just another bookshop) and start buying up armfuls of other comics to look at.
More recently I've picked up a few things by association to read like one of Moores other works V for Vendetta which I picked up after reading about the film and found the graphic novel is vastly superior to the film even if the film isn't that bad. And some of the more interesting works by Warren Ellis like Global Frequency, Desolation Jones, and Fell. Which lead me to some of Ben Templesmith stuff like 30 days of Night (comic good film baaaaaaaaaaad), the macabre and funny wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, and Singularity 7.
I also got more into webcomics and it seems like some of the traditional print media is switching to try this newish distribution method, Warren Ellis is currently doing a series called Freak Angels, and there are things like the wonderful steam punk yarn Girl Genius which started as a print comic and switched to web.
All in all I probably still more sampling the fringes of the comic world than a comic geek I guess more of upbringing and still some lingering association of them as something for kids. Though it's hard to imagine things like Watchmen and V for Vendetta as a kids title.
Comments
I got about 20 pages into the Watchmen and gave up. It was well written and interesting enough but just not my cup of tea. Supers stories always leave me feeling a bit empty afterwards.
Having said that, I've never been a big reader. I'm forcing my way through The Reality Dysfunction before I sleep each night. It's normally quite late after I've finished doing Icar/Chom Isis stuff.
I'm similar to Rob...I've tried graphic novels, however I've always found them to be too short for my liking.
I suspect a lot of this is being used to immersing myself in long novels (such as the Reality Dysfunction, which Rob is focing his way through at the moment).
I've always hated short stories, I just don't like the format there is not enough to get my teeth into, they are not really stories they are a clever idea wrapped around a few lines of prose.
Some of the shorter graphic novels or collections have some of that feel to them but never quite that bad. Maybe the addition of some nice art to look at adds something that makes it better than just a load of pointless short stories though. A few of the bigger collections like Watchmen or V for Vendetta have a nice contiguous story that runs through the book to keep you interested.
I've never seen a comic that had the kind of depth that Peter F Hamilton's nights dawn trilogy (the set of books Reality Dysfunction comes from) has but then that is unusual for books as well. PFH's follow up series Pandora Star and Judas Unchained though weighty lacked some of the finesse of the nights dawn come off as clumsy and contrived although I've always felt the deus ex machina that PFH uses to conclude things is all a bit convenient. Still a damn good trilogy though, he's just started a new series Dreaming the Void I should get round to reading that at somepoint.
They seem to be doing a movie fo the watchmen by the director of the 300
here's the trailer
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/
the guy has said he will keep the rather dark ending to it, which would be interesting.
Still the trailer looks pretty good the style of it matches a lot of the art