Currently Reading Wednesdays 10: Finally On Time!

[healyg]

Currently I'm reading 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Paul Gravett. It's got a good sense of the breadth of the field (superhero comics, indies, manga, and French graphic albums and more are all represented), but, at least from what I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into the availability of the selections (I swear to God some of these have never been collected and never been translated). I think some of the entries are a bit dodgily written, too. Overall I'd say it's probably worth a look if you're interested in comics, but don't actually expect to read all of them before you die.

But wait! Since this is a pretty short review, I'd like to take the chance to do a little viewer experiment: the comics are all covered from about page 24 to 938 (note that my copy is missing pages 931-34, boo). What I want is for you guys to pick a page number in the comments, and I'll tell you the entries listed therein and what I think of them. We'll see if this works out.

Comments

[xyzzysqrl]

Give me page 312.

[healyg.livejournal.com]

Page 312 offers us both Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito and the Belgian comic series Yoko Tsuno. Ode to Kirihito I have not read, but I have heard that it is a classic from so many anime and manga dudes that I probably should check it out already. Yoko Tsuno, though, runs a little bit into the issue of availabilty I mentioned, kinda. I checked its Wikpedia page, and of the two English language translations it lists, one went out of business in the late 1980s, and the other is a British-based publishing company, CineBooks. Now that's not too bad! You can still get the Yoko Tsuno on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_lbr_books_series_browse-bin%3AYoko+Tsuno), and at a time when most people do all their buying online, maybe that's all that counts. But it is harder to find in American brick-and-mortar stores and local libraries, and this is a concept that really needs the help of a good local library if the central conceit's gonna hold up. So, not bad, but not exactly good, either.

[xyzzysqrl]

Huh. That's a really good pair. And yeah, actually -reading- the "must read" lists is always a problem because of availability. It seems to be that way a lot.