Is this guy the real-life Man With No Name or what?
Two questions inspired by my last post:
1. What are the best candidates for literary superhero comics?
And to turn the tables on my preferred reading material:
2. Are there any manga with literary merit?
The best he could come up with for manga is Bleach? And manga is his “preferred reading material”? Is this a joke or something?
1. What are the best candidates for literary superhero comics?
Watchman, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. One and Two, any Hellboy, DC’s New Frontier. The Spirit (both Eisner’s and Cooke’s), Batman – The Killing Joke, – I’m sure there are a lot more.
2. Are there any manga with literary merit?
Akira, all the Galaxy Express books.
Is this a joke or something?
Yes. At least his examples are, though i think his question is a serious one.
It’s a Bird… by Steven T. Seagle.
The short story collections of Astro City, by Kurt Busiek. Life in the Big City, and Local Heroes. “The Nearness of You”, collected in Confession, is one of the best comicbook stories ever written. That, and “The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man”, always make me cry.
Morrison’s Animal Man and Doom Patrol. Invisibles (superhero? well, we’ve got V and The Spirit…)
Kraven’s Last Hunt by J.M. DeMatteis
Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald
And then there are the prose novels… From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust, and John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead are two excellent works of fiction. The first is similar to Watchmen, while the latter explores how a mythological figure influences and affects people’s lives.
I’d love for someone to spell out how Bleach connects to Medieval Spain unless that was a joke. I’ve only encountered it in passing but i just don’t see it in the premise.
Define “literary merit.”
I’ve seen lots of manga that qualify as having literary merit. That includes all of Tezuka’s works that have been published by Vertical, all of Jiro Taniguchi’s works published by Fanfare, Fumiyo Kouno’s “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms,” Yuichi Yokoyama’s “New Engineering,” and all of the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi published by Drawn & Quarterly.
I also consider Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki” worthy of liteary analysis.
Jackie E.
Deathnote. Monster. BlackJack, return to Black Jack. Domu, Buddha, Akira, Barefoot Gen…