On Indie Comics

hey everybody. first post, glad i can contribute to this fine feathered blog.

after a good five years of not reading comics at all, i was drawn in by Marvel's superior marketing department. in short, they put the first 13 or so issues of Ultimate Spider-man on the internet for free, then teased me with spoilers that Mary-Jane might die, and before i knew it, i was buying Ultimate Spider-man, Ultimate X-men, and the Ultimates. after starting with these mainstream titles, i determined that i wanted to begin my serious comic book education. i read all the norms, your V for Vendetta, your Watchmen, your DKR, and they were all great. as time went on, i began to "know stuff" about the medium.
however, it was not until this year that i tried to apply myself to the next level of comic book knowledge: the indie comic. while books like Watchmen, are, regrettably, not known to the general populace, they are extremely well known in the comic book world. Alan Moore is almost universally seen as a genius. A reason his books are so well known, and so well received, both by the comic book masses and the American populace (Watchmen isn't known, yet, but Moore wrote V, the League of Extraoridnary Gentlemen, and From Hell, much better than the movie screenwriters at that), is that his best known tales are conventional super-hero stories. Watchmen has very clear archtypical characters, the superman, the perfectly evolved man, the vigilante, and so on. V has the classic outlaw anti-hero. The League is essentially the JLA of Victorian-era fiction. I loved this styles of stories, but I figured that if I was truly going to have a broad knowledge of comic books, I would have to start reading the indie books, the ones that no one outside of comics knows about, the ones that are very often about "normal" life.
i took recommendations from the guys at the local comic book shoppe, and they pointed me towards Daniel Clowes' David Boring. the entire point of the book is supposed to be extraordinary stuffed framed in the normal (his last name is BORING!). i've read it, but still don't understand it, so i'm not going to review it. this post is my last recording before my adventure into snooty indie comics. i'll inevitably read stuff that will be compared to david lynch movies, or post-modern otymological theory. David Boring itself is described as being Beckett-esque on the back. so i'm off to read indie comics. here's to hope it's still fun. i'll come back every now and then, undoubtedly with a new pair of horn-rimmed glasses or argyle socks, and let you know how it is.

toodles, - drox.

(toodles isn't going to be my sign-off, but it will be it until i can think of a permanent one)