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ABOUT
NEIL GAIMAN: |
Neil Gaiman is one of the top writers in modern comics. He is
the creator/writer of the award-winning horror-weird series Sandman,
and the graphic novel's Mr Punch, Violent
Cases and Signal To Noise. He
is also a best-selling novelist with American
Gods and his children's novel Coraline both
enjoying enormous critical success.
More details can be found at Neil
Gaiman.com.
If you know of any other comic-related reading
recommendations made by Neil Gaiman in interviews or articles
we would love to hear from you. Please provide a scan and/or
link if possible.
Email: recommended [at] readyourselfraw [dot] com |
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RECOMMENDED READING: |
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by Kyle Baker
"It's
really very, very funny. And very clever. And very good… Cowboy
Wally is everything
you hate about American TV. He's fat. He's stupid. He drinks
too much beer. He ruins people's lives with aplomb and obliviousness… Kyle
Baker mercilessly excoriates TV and the unctuous, meaningless
people who are famous for something they never quite did a long
time ago."
Review in Escape #16
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by Brian Bolland
"I love Brian Bolland's more personal work - it's the strangely
English mixture of precision and madness, the sweet-and-sour of
funny and sad, like the result of a perverse breeding experiment
between Heath Robinson and Alan Bennett."
From the back-cover blurb |
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by Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson
"Currently, superhero fictions seem
to break into two kinds: there are the workaday, more or less pulp fictions which
are turned out by the yard by people who are trying their hardest,
or not. And then there are the other kind, and there are precious
few of them. There are two obvious current exceptions - Alan
Moore's Supreme, an exercise in rewriting
fifty years of Superman into something that means something.
And then…there is Astro City. Astro
City , in the hands of Kurt Busiek and his collaborators,
is art, and it is good art. It recognizes the strengths of the
four-colour heroes, and it creates something - a place, perhaps,
or a medium, or just a tone of voice - in which good stories
are told. There is room for things to mean more than they literally
mean, and this is certainly true in Astro
City . I look forward to being able to visit it for a
very long time to come."
From the introduction to Astro City : Confessions
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by Eddie Campbell
"[Bacchus]
mixes air hijacks and ancient gods, gangland drama and legends, police procedural
and mythic fantasy, swimming pool cleaners and classics. It shouldn't
work, of course, and it works like a charm… Eddie Campbell
is the unsung King of comic books… The man's a genius,
and that's an end to it. If you're one of the lucky ones who
read this series when it first came out you'll need no further
recommendation or praise from me: you know how good it is. If
you're discovering [Bacchus] for the
first time, I envy you, you have a treat in store."
From the introduction to the Dark Horse
edition of Deadface: Immortality
Isn't Forever.
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by Eric Drooker
"Mr Drooker is a true successor to Lynd Ward and Frans
Masereel: his New York is the New York of nightmare, a wordless
metropolis of ever looming disaster. Flood! Is
a powerful vision, scraped with care on the backs of our eyeballs."
From the back cover blurb
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by Will Eisner
"I had this feeling you could write stuff in comics that was
every bit as intelligent, every bit as powerful, every bit as meaningful
as anything that anyone was doing in any other medium. And there
was Will Eisner's work to demonstrate that maybe this was true.
So I went out at that point and found a copy of Will Eisner's book,
Comics & Sequential Art, and that
was the book that I read when I decided that I wanted to write
comics."
From an article in SF Gate.com |
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by Will Eisner
"The Name Of The Game is
a family saga: moving, brutal, ironic; in which a simple ink line
- an eyebrow, a frown, the set of someone's shoulders, says more
than words ever could. It's a savory stew of love and ambition,
of history and Judaica that is both a pleasure to read and an
education."
From the back cover blurb
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by Phil Elliott
"As soon as it gets into its stride, this collection of strips
from the Maidstone Star becomes one
of the few British newspaper strips in any way comparable to
the best American work (Alan
Moore mentions vintage Gasoline
Alley in his introduction;
I'd refer to my own personal favourite Barnaby).
Gently, whimsically, charmingly funny - and at the same time, in
its description of a young family, very accurate. It's easier to
be pessimistic than optimistic, easier to write about hate than
love. Phil Elliott's work is optimistic and loving and fine; and
damn his eyes, he makes it look so easy."
From a review in Escape #17 |
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by James Robinson & Phil Elliott
"Illegal Alien is a delightful story - gently
funny, understanding, very English. If the Hernandez Brothers had been born in
Croydon, this is the kind of thing they might have done."
From the back cover blurb |
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by Jules Feiffer
"When the history of the graphic novel (or whatever they
wind up calling long stories created in words and picture for
adults, in the time when histories are appropriate) is written,
there will be a whole chapter about Tantrum,
one of the first and still one of the wisest and sharpest things
created in this strange publishing category, and one of the books
that, along with Will Eisner's A Contract
With God, began the movement that bought us such works
as Maus, as Love
And Rockets, as From Hell -
the works that stretch the envelope of what words and pictures
were capable of, and could not have been anything but what they
were, pictures and words adding up to something that could not
have been a film or a novel or a play: that were intrinsically
comics, with all comics strengths."
From the introduction
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by Reneé French
"I bought The Ticking at Page 45
in Nottingham. It was the single most unsettling experience I have
managed to obtain in my life for twelve pounds and ninety nine
pence. It
was beautiful and oddly sweet and yet it sits in the unlit corners
of my head where it makes strange faces and weird chittering
noises to itself. Sometimes it does nasty things with tweezers
and surgical implements. Please buy it and read it, so
perhaps it will crawl out of my head and into yours and then
I will finally be able to sleep peacefully once again."
From the Reneé French web-site
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by Marc Hempel & Mark
Wheatley
"Breathtaker... proves itself
something utterly odd and new. Powerful art, vibrant colouring,
a new, quirky story told in a different way. Strong and surprising
stuff."
From the introduction
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by Marc
Hempel
"Tug & Buster is
a tragic cry for help from the anguished soul of Marc Hempel - a
sad, deranged meditation on what it means to be a male in today's
society: our plight and our nightmare. Luckily, it's also piss-yourself
funny, so that's all right."
From the back cover blurb , Tug & Buster
#1 (Image Edition)
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by Jamie Hernandez & Gilbert
Hernandez
"I am of the opinion that if you two broke fully formed
on the world of comics tomorrow, like had you two never existed
and the first issue of Love & Rockets,
even if it were pretty much the same as the first issue came
out in 1982, came out tomorrow, it would cause a hugh stir in
the world of comics... But I think there's this bizarre level
on which you are now almost taken for granted. You've been displaying
this level of competence and remarkable creativity, but it's
kind of like, Well, you're not new."
From an interview by Neil Gaiman with Los Bros Hernandez,
The Comics Journal #178
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by George Herriman
"Krazy Kat generally is
recognized as a work of genius."
From an interview, The Comics Journal #169
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by
Matt Howarth
"Matt Howarth is the only person consistently doing brain-stretching
honest-to-goodness science-fiction rock and roll blackly funny splatter
comics in today's marketplace."
From the advertising blurb |
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by Winsor McCay
"It is sobering to reflect, in these heady days of celebration
of the New Comics that stretch the bounds
of the medium, that Winsor McCay was creating his Sunday newspaper
pages over eighty years ago. He not only defined what comics were
capable of achieving, but almost single handedly created the form
as we know it today... Like Herriman's
later Krazy
Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland mapped
the potential of the comic strip as an art form. Unfortunately,
like the inimitable Krazy, other creators
proved unable to build on McCay's work. This collection should
be enjoyed not only for what it is, but also as one of the medium's
vitally important the building blocks. Disappointingly, even amongst
todays New
Comics,
there is almost nothing as visually inventive as Little
Nemo, almost
no-one with the breadth of imagination of Winsor McCay."
From a review in Escape #18 |
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by Scott McCloud
"With
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics the
dialogue on and about what comics are and more importantly, what
comics can be has begun. If you read, write, teach or draw comics;
if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer
at work, you must read this book"
From the back cover blurb
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by Scott McCloud
"Scott
McCloud's Reinventing Comics is
a manifesto, and audacious one, irritating as the grain of sand
which may one day produce a pearl. It will provoke a lot of arguments,
it will make a lot of people think, and it may ultimately change
the world a little - which is, after all, what a manifesto is
for."
From the back cover blurb
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Web-comic available at www.ScottMcCloud.com
by Scott McCloud
"
...the best thing Scott's done since the lovely black and
white Zot Earth Stories."
From www.ScottMcCloud.com
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by Frank Miller
"The
comic-book storytelling draws on many influences, including Japanese and European
comics, and Miller's artwork is strong and impressive, occasionally stunning.
Where Miller succeeds is in the romance, in the telling of a high adventure,
in taking superhero comics as far as they can go and still be
superhero comics."
Review from Comics Forum #14
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by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette & John Totleben
"I remember the thrill of discovering Alan Moore's Swamp
Thing.
There I was, twenty-four or twenty-five, and every month I'd go
down to my comic store and get the new Swamp
Thing and it was
wonderful. It was a great feeling to be twenty-five and have somebody
writing a comic for you, something that was as well written as
anything you were going to find in the prose section or the poetry
section or the play section of a bookstore."
From Writers On Comic Scriptwriting |
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by Alan Moore & Eddie
Campbell
"Alan Moore's The Birth Caul was
a stunning piece of poetry, of autobiography, of magic, of invention;
it was lit, as if by flashes of lightening, with moment of recognition,
the news that Eddie Campbell is going to be adapting The
Birth Caul into comics form I find terrifically exciting
on so many levels."
From the advertising blurb, Bacchus #41
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by Alan Moore & Dave
Gibbons
"Moore's writing is remarkable. He catches the rhythms
of speech so naturally, presents his world so seamlessly, that
the whole seems effortless… Gibbon's art has never been
better. Each panel a semiotician's heaven… undoubtedly
the most ambitious work of science fiction since Gene Wolfe's Book
Of The Sun, and the most ambitious and, in my opinion,
most successful graphic novel ever."
Review in Escape #10 |
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by Alan Moore
"The
stories are boxes that contain mysteries - most of which are unresolved, while
all solutions we are given open the door to larger problems and difficulties.
Or to put it another way, Voice Of The Fire is truth,
of a kind, even if its truths are fictional and historical and magical,
and so the explanations one gets are always partial and unsatisfactory,
the stories, as with the stories of our lives, and unexplained
and incomplete… Do not trust the tales, or the town, or
even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the
fire."
From the introduction to the Top Shelf edition
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by Gilbert Shelton
"Freak Brothers comics have
a tendency to vanish just like biros and railway tickets. No,
really, have you checked your collection recently? So it's nice
to see cultural icons coming out in a form which makes their
vanishing more difficult."
From the back cover blurb
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by Dave Sim & Gerhard
"Through
a coincidence (Dave McKean getting rid of most of his comics in moving), I
wound up with most of the early Cerebi, and spent a recent evening rereading
them as comics, Deni's editorials and all. You've come a long way since those
days, but they're still more literate and better told than 99.5% of what's
on the shelves today. (Sad huh?)."
From a letter published in Cerebus #150 |
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by Jeff Smith
"I laughed out load a lot! Beautifully drawn, beautifully
constructed and perfectly paced."
From the back cover blurb
"...the funniest, smartest, most exciting, most surprising
periodical comic of its day and now it's done."
From the advertising blurb |
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by Bryan Talbot
"Ambitious,
dense, exciting, stimulating, Arkwright is
a tightly etched vision of the other side of Now presented by
a master craftsman."
From the back cover blurb to Volume 3
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by Bryan Talbot
"While
Bryan's story of pain and healing uses Beatrix Potter's work as a starting
point and as a recurring motif, the story he tells is a story, not of animals,
but of people. It's a story of strength and pain and survival. You don't need
to know anything about Beatrix Potter's work to appreciate this Tale
Of One Bad Rat. You don't really need to know anything
about Bryan Talbot either. The work - and fine work it is, and
I do not flatter - speaks for itself. It is good, and that should
be obvious."
From the introduction to Book 1
"It would be easy to simply categorise The
Tale Of One Bad Rat as a fine fiction about overcoming
the effects of abuse. And it is that, but it's more than that:
it's a lovingly crafted story about, in the end, the meaning
and value of fiction and art, about what we take from the past,
and what we bring to the future. With it, Bryan Talbot moves
into the front rank of writer/artists."
From the back cover blurb Book 3 |
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by Craig Thompson
"…moving, tender, beautifully drawn, painfully
honest, and probably the most important graphic novel since Jimmy
Corrigan ."
From the back cover blurb |
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by Rick Veitch
"Collectables; merchandising; corporate ownership of characters;
killing the spandex brigade and bringing them out of the closet;
the gullibility of children: all these things should be borne
in mind when reading the following tale… Rick Veitch cares
deeply about superheroes. He thinks they matter. That they're
important. That they tell us things about ourselves. There's
a mixture of love and hatred here that's heady, weird, and unique:
subtle as a gang rape, gentle as a crowbar shattering a skull,
sweet as a dead boy in a bell tower feeding on pigeons."
From the introduction |
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by Jim Woodring
"Frank will
take you to another world, re-arrange your consciousness and reprogram the inside
of your head. It's cheaper than virtual reality, less risky than
recreational pharmaceuticals, and more fun than falling asleep."
From the dust-cover blurb
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