Friday, December 30, 2011

The Best D&D-able Comic Books According To Me


Slaine
Simon Bisley is to Warhammer what Frank Frazetta is to D&D. Or Warhammer is to D&D as Simon Bisley is to Frank Frazetta. Anyway, when he wasn't drawing insane Doom Patrol covers that bend all minds, Bisley did this totally metal barbarian comic and you should buy it.



Ironwolf
I was surprised to hear Keith Baker hadn't seen this steampunk-before-steampunk tale of sabres, swashbuckling, wooden starships, vampires, werewolves, aristocrats, honor, snottiness, cynicism and intrigue before inventing Eberron. When I showed him his eyes just about rolled back in his head.

Howard Chaykin's self-pencilled 70s original is mainly remarkable for the make-Barbarella-weep astrofabulousness of the female character designs and the later, Mike Mignola pencilled Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution is remarkable because fuck yeah Mike Mignola.


Hellboy
Speaking of Mike Mignola. If you are interested in Hellboy but have never checked out the comics and don't know where to start, I'd start off with The Chained Coffin and Others then, if you're hooked, buy all the others with Mignola art and read them in order. If you're still hooked, the Ryan Sook and Duncan Fegredo ones are an acceptable methadone, though the fact that both artists are both so good when they aren't being hired to draw just like Mike Mignola makes their work there somehow coverbandish in a slightly depressing way.

Some notes here: Mignola's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser adaptation sounds like it can't lose, but the lack of true Leiber prose plus Mignola's inability to overcome the perennial challenge of doing medieval scenes using the traditional comic book coloring process makes this about 25% less sweet than it should be. For things in the same fantastic vein that work out a little better, see the Lovecrafty "Sanctum" story in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and Doctor Strange/Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment.



Blood: A Tale
Kent Williams paints some excellent stream-of-consciousness gobbledegook vampire stuff with swords and snakes and trees and dreams and more unerotic nudty than I have ever seen outside a wrestling ring. 4-issues, easily acquired in one bit.



Elektra Lives Again
Why is this Frank Miller drawn/ Lynn Varley painted modern ninja book listed here?

1-It is criminally under-appreciated and with Frank Miller's reputation sinking every time he opens his mouth, its star will probably only dip lower in years to come, and

2-It has the best medieval-weapon slugfest scene ever in a comic book.


Cerebus
Oh, Cerebus... For those who don't know, Cerebus is 300 black-and-white issues of an Aardvark acting like Conan and a comic book creator going from making fun of Conan to being sublimely inspired to succumbing to a particularly uncharming, pleonastic, and misogynistic brand of insanity. Dave Sim gets very good at drawing shadows and aardvarks, though his people are a little rubbery (though these days a lot of people like that kind of thing, so whatever).

The rundown for the unitiated:
The cheapest preview is a single issue called Cerebus #0. If you like it, buy more:
First book: Cerebus: the "funny-animal" original stories--they read like unusually ambitious Dragonmirth strips but are maybe essential to understanding the more serious stuff that follows.
High society--the first intimations of awesomeness.
Church and State and Jakas Story--What the legend is built on. This is the goods right here. Wintry weird politics, slapstick, isolation, and eccentric worldbuilding.
Melmoth--expendable divagation into an Oscar Wilde obsession.
Flight, Women, Reads, Minds--Good, interesting, maybe great, but the rot is clearly approaching and the misogyny first appears I think in Reads. (
Cerebus is rather like the Star Wars question: everyone agrees Empire is the best and that at some point the franchise became terrible--nobody agrees about what point that is.)
Guys--Not as terrible as it is about to get, but clearly now just an old hippie telling jokes about bars.
From then on: total mind rot in progress. Very sad.




Moebius
For English readers, the best starting place is the Epic/Graphitti collected edition #2--Arzach and Other Fantasy Stories. If you like that trip into his frenchy, pterodactyl-laden greenskinned dreamland then you''ll probably like the sci-fi stories in volume 3 Airtight Garage and volume 4 Long Tomorrow. His style has wandered quite a bit over the course of his career: dreamy greens, lumpy cowboys, unhatched New Age-isms, spirally psychedelic erotica, bog-standard balloon-nose French slapstick, so preview anything before spending too much money on it. This might help.


Little Nemo
The earlier full-color strips are a jaw-dropping mix of Ringling-Bros fire-engine-colored Americana, opiated surrealism and art nouveau elegance. There is so much to admire that ignoring the black character in Sambo-makeup and pointlessly meandering plotlines is pretty easy. Last I knew, a complete edition hidden behind an incredibly ugly and unrepresentative maroon-colored hardcover was still available.



Legion of Super-Heroes Vol 4 #5
Oh, it's a long story. But basically a crazy wizard manages to fuck up history so that magic defeats technology up until even the 30th century. So this single issue is the Medievalized versions of the superheroes trying to get their timeline back. Keith Giffen manages to do what Mike Mignola couldn't and creates the most convincingly Lankhmarish visuals in comics history.

Some people thought Keith Giffen's run on Legion was too dark, too dense, too complex, and too hard to understand. These people are all child molesters. There is nothing like it in the history of comic book storytelling and if we had to lose a few illiterate waterheads off the fanbase in order to see it, then those are the risks of the culture business.

Many more people have never even heard of Giffen's run on Legion of Super-Heroes because nobody fucking reads Legion of Super-Heroes. I envy these people because they can go buy back-issues of the first few years of Legion Volume 4 and be extremely surprised and confused and engrossed and happy for a few days in a way that's otherwise fairly difficult to do without taking off your clothes, leaving the house, getting fat, or paying some creep with weird facial hair for a carefully-titrated helping of something illegal.


Thor #337-#367
Walt Simonson's run on Thor is exactly what level 15+ D&D should look like: Fire demons and usurpers and lone heroes mauling legions and hordes and bad elves and sound effects that take up half a panel and galaxies on fire and visuals like Viking tracery in a pinball machine. It was worth Stan and Jack making a beardless nordic Superman ripoff with a wingy helmet and six dots on his red-caped costume just so Walt could turn it into this. Check it.

Years later, Simonson did Elric, it didn't work.


Sandman #50
Neil Gaiman's stories always work best when the artist inspires the dizzy wonder he wants you to feel and P. Craig Russel's take on Arabian-Knights-era Baghdad is as dazzling as it needs to be. Planescape fans also must read Gaiman's "Season of Mists" storyline. It is pretty much exactly where Planescape came from. Plus Kelley Jones drew it, so even if you disagree, hey, Kelley Jones.

Speaking of Kelley Jones: Batman: Red Rain is Batman + Dracula so kinda maybe you have to read that and Jones' Deadman is full of horrific-pretty-much-even-the-end-table-looks-like-a-zombie KJ visuals.

_________
There are, of course, many other comics that deal with the fantastic. Did I hear about (your favorite one here)? Bone? Red Nails? Prrrrobably. Did I like it? Probably not, otherwise it would be here in this list. But if I haven't, I'd love to check it out. Good comics are hard to come by. Wait, Red Nails is good, it's here.

55 comments:

Avram Grumer said...

Didn't P Craig Russell do an Elric comic at some point?

Adam Dickstein said...

Great list. I would have to say that many if not all of these are inspirations for my current brand of gaming, regardless of genre.

I would add the entire '5-Year Gap' era of Legion is some of the best stuff ever done in the title. I worked in a comic book store back then and it was incredibly popular. It's strange how it is viewed with such scorn by many Legion fans nowadays. What you've had since is better? I think not.

Are you familiar with 'The Mystics'? It was a Canadian comic book that was very inspiring to me with regards to my D&D gaming. How about Mandy? Ever seen it? The stories used to run as back ups in issues of Captain Canuck I think. It's been a while.

I also recommend, and I say this with all honestly, DC's 'Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld'. Seriously, this book was excellent. A heroic, sometimes dark, fairy tale in the vain of a D&D meets classic Disney. Awesome stuff. And it ties into The Legion of Superheroes! Huh?! Yes! Believe it.

Happy New Year Zak, Mandy and the rest of PD&DwPS!

-Adam

Welcome to Dungeon! said...

Zak, what did you think of Kelley Jones's "The Hammer?"

Avram Grumer said...
Didn't P Craig Russell do an Elric comic at some point?


He did quite a few, including full adaptations of Elric of Melnibone and Stormbringer. His Dr. Strange special "What is it that disturbs you, Stephen?" is also awesome.

Unlike Zak, I also liked the Moorcock/Simonson Elric comics a lot. I also hold the Chaykin/Mignola Fafhrd & Mouser comics in higher esteem - I suppose the point about the prose is valid but the visuals and color palette are perfectly fitted to how I imagine Lankhmar.

I also recommend, and I say this with all honestly, DC's 'Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld'. Seriously, this book was excellent. Yes.

Zak Sabbath said...

welcome to dungeon

Romans suck.

Zak Sabbath said...

re:Amethyst

This Amethyst?

http://www.tangognat.com/2008/05/12/amethyst-princess-of-gemworld/

Seriously? Seriously?

Welcome to Dungeon! said...

Zak S said...

Romans suck.


I suppose it also had glistening manflesh, didn't it?

Welcome to Dungeon! said...

Also, is the comics version of "The Luck in the Head" good? Is it the same Ian Miller of Warhammer?

Zak Sabbath said...

luck in the head is very good. i shouldve added it to the list, but Ian Miller gets enough love on this blog already, I suppose. and yeah, same guy

charles mark ferguson said...

Beta ray bill. Wow. My family had just moved to a tiny town in Australia's Deep North and I think I was the only kid there who read comics. But somehow I was able to get this run of Thor, the X-men Sleazoid-Dark Phoenix wrap up, the death of Elektra, plus the Warlord, Savage Sword of Conan and a B&W Lankmar piece (it's own issue/mag? a one-off guest spot in another mag? I don't remember) whose images I still remember today. (Maybe this was a reprint of the O'Neil-Chaykin 1973 Sword of Sorcery story "Reveng of the Skull of Jewels"?)
Great stories. Thanks for the list.

richard said...

I haven't been reading comics with anything like the dedication required to form a list like this. Thanks!

Jez said...

this shoulda come out about a month before christmas. thanks for this.

I love Hellboy, but I wish wish wish Mingola had the gumption to end his story when he was still behind the pen.

oh and you should check out Amazing Screw-On Head.

Peter Fitz said...

For those interested in more of Winsor McKay (Little Nemo) I also recommend Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, available from Dover Books for not much money. There's some opium-eating psychedelic shit right there.

scrap princess said...

nextwave by warren ellis.

"my robot face is beautiful and will not by kicked by the likes of you fleshy ones. And I don't believe in your god. God is for fleshy ones, I am robot.
And your god will throw up when he sees what I have done to you."

I mean I prob lost or win you at Warren Ellis.
Like it's a satire as well as celebration of marvel's heights of batshittedness.
But I feel it should taken completely seriously , and more should be written with this level of action and mayhem.

Nemesis the warlock, abc warriors mentioned before on last post, uneven as all buggery but some solid gold moments.

Weapons Of the Gods, its a shining example of the hong kong school of manga. Utterly ham , unnecessary explanation boxs , "..And GreatOak eats the dirt like a dog eating shit!" . daft weapons, its absurd..like when you read or watch something and you like want absolute knuckledragging nonsense and it trys to have like a romantic subplot and character development and shit and you start hooting and throwing feces because you want something that's completely balls out stupid?
Weapons of the Gods is that stupid.

in regard to Amethyst princess of gemworld;
that was actually directly inspired by my very own formative years as a magical princess from another magical land , except with less petty arson. Now you know.

Full metal Alchemist is pretty good for manga. Like the characters and gender shit is annoying, and the back story is kinda dumb but I keep swiping images from it for screenprint collages so its got that going for it.
I think I have really low expectations for comics...

huth said...

Sandman #50

The Sandman Covers collection is a pretty good random monster generator too.

Doctor Checkmate said...

/facepalm... I love Planescape. I love Season of the Mists... Never before did I draw a connection between the two. Wow. I feel rather silly now. Season of the mists defines the ten years that followed my high school graduation the way Elric, Tolkien, and Type 2 defined high school itself.

Some other recommendations: Warlord (for weird blend of Carter and Howard). Groo (because it is silly). Dreamery (WAY OOP Eclipse Comics title. Miss it terribly).

Coopdevil said...

For a single volume Simon Bisley Sláine, try "The Horned God". Every panel is absolutely fucking beautiful (I appreciate you probably have this one Zak, just leaving a note for any blog followers who don't).

In my self-appointed role as Chief Architect of the Brit OSR (irony gentlemen, irony) I recently discovered that one of the casualties of the winding down of TSR UK was that the Imagine crew (who went on to do the bulk of WFRP) had a manuscript in for a transparently Sláine-based Celtic Britain splatbook for AD&D. Sad waste.

Agree with earlier mention of Nemesis the Warlock. Fucking brilliant and makes the 40K background look as derivative as it is really is.

remial said...

great list. I loved the Giffen era legion. I also grabbed the Maxim with the article on you guys, and I have to ask, do you guys always game naked? or did you do that just for the magazine?

thekelvingreen said...

Good choices, Zak. I agree with almost all of them, except Legion of Superheroes, but only because -- predictably -- I've never read it.

I have the recent Bible-sized Simonson Thor book and it is brilliant to have it all in once place, although it does peter out a bit once the fire demon plot is all done with. I'm also lucky enough to own...

For a single volume Simon Bisley Sláine, try "The Horned God". Every panel is absolutely fucking beautiful (I appreciate you probably have this one Zak, just leaving a note for any blog followers who don't).

Yes, that. I have the oversized hardback one-volume edition from 1998 and it's a wonderful piece of work. The current edition is less impressive as a showing off piece for your coffee table, but still well worth having. Bisley was a bloody genius.

Dave Sim used to send a free random issue of Cerebus out if you wrote to him, so if he still does it, that's one way to get a taste.

nextwave by warren ellis...I mean I prob lost or win you at Warren Ellis.
Like it's a satire as well as celebration of marvel's heights of batshittedness.
But I feel it should taken completely seriously , and more should be written with this level of action and mayhem.


Oh gosh yes. It was characterised as a comedy book -- it was funny, but I don't think it was ever supposed to be only a spoof, because as you say it was also a celebration of how weird and imaginative comics used to be before they got taken over by boring crime writers -- and was ignored because it wasn't part of the atrocious Civil War, but it's the best thing the company have put out in years. It's certainly the best thing Ellis has put out since Planetary, although I hear his Secret Avengers stuff is good.

Agree with earlier mention of Nemesis the Warlock. Fucking brilliant and makes the 40K background look as derivative as it is really is.

Also, yes.

scrap princess said...

oh planetary... that was grand! Warren Ellis actually finished that one in less of a last minute cluster fuck , bam roll credits , than on numerous other stuff he wrote.
I really liked desolation jones as well.
That has some gleanable stuff , in its setting of retired extra-ordinary ex-spook village. There was talk of a constantcon campaign like hellboy crossed with something more marvel, maybe desolation jones would be a tasty hunk of goat flesh to throw in the mix?

With warhammer you gotta give credit where credits due, they took that mutant kaos spikey vibe fascist empire vs weirdo aliens and took it to dizzying heights of gratuity.

jasons said...

P. Craig Russell's adaptation of Ring of the Nibelung is worthy of consideration. I find it beautiful. I also really like his version of Moorcock's Stormbringer. Jack Kirby's Tales of Asgaard also springs to mind. This ran as short back-up features in the 60's Thor comics (reprinted in a single volume in the 80's, super-cheap). Good: all Asgaard, no Earth, cool looking giants, awesome helmets and weapon designs, battle scenes exploding with kinetic power, light on the faux-Shakespearean dialogue.

Adam Dickstein said...

I am quite serious. Within Amethyst is some great stuff for mining D&D ideas and the character of Dark Opal (the main villain) is suitably bad ass no matter how you slice it.

I know. I was just as surprised.

August said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
August said...

It seems to me that most Internet haters are basically Dave Sim without the talent.

Marshall Burns said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jeremy Duncan said...

OK, I thought I throw this one out. I recently picked up a copy of the English version of Barreiro and Alcatena's "Subterra," which seems to be a sequel to their earlier "Moving Fortress." Their stuff has a bizarre, decadent feel, and Alcatena's art shows a broader range of cultural and artistic influences than a lot of fantasy art.

Timothy Paul Schaefer said...

Great list!
Little Nemo is classic.
Hellboy is the only comic I buy on a regular basis anymore.
That's what Ironwolf is? Have to check that out also.

Zak Sabbath said...

-remial

there is a recent entry on this blog all about the Maxim article, if you read it it will answer your question

-subterra

Looks interesting

-Northlanders

not my kinda thing

-Barking Alien

Unless there is some pair of hidden secret decoder sunglasses that makes Amethyst suddenly _not_ look like it was drawn by a robot given instructions reading "DC-House-Style-1985-But-More-Awkward-And-Pink" I can't begin to imagine why anyone would think I'd be the least bit interested in that comic. It is ugly. Ugliness should be destroyed. Dark Opal could be the finest villain since Milton's Satan, he is still a poorly drawn comic book character which means he should not exist.

mordicai said...

Hey wut, wut is this Ironwolf stuff, what, this looks great!

I'm sure you've heard of it, & you might not consider it fantasy-- so I'll mention it just on that off chance-- but I adore Mouse Guard. Like a slightly more anthropomorphic Watership Down? Hell yeah. Then again, you don't like Bone, so it might not be your cup of tea, either.

Zak Sabbath said...

mouse guard (the comic) is much better than bone. though a little twee--to be expected i guess.

Zak Sabbath said...

beautiful drawings. maybe shouldve added it

thekelvingreen said...

Oh! I forgot to mention Dan Hipp's Gyakushu! which is more or less one of those Clint Eastwood quasi-supernatural westerns transferred to a fantasy setting. Tokyopop published two of the three volumes before deciding they didn't do English-language comics any more, but I believe you can get the third as print-on-demand -- in the US -- or in digital form.

Knightsky said...

Some people thought Keith Giffen's run on Legion was too dark, too dense, too complex, and too hard to understand. These people are all child molesters.

It's criminal that, of all the different incarnations of the Legion, the '5 Years Later' run seems to be actively ignored by the currently DC management. Are there any trade paperback collections of the 5YL era?

Walt Simonson's run on Thor is exactly what level 15+ D&D should look like: Fire demons and usurpers and lone heroes mauling legions and hordes and bad elves and sound effects that take up half a panel and galaxies on fire and visuals like Viking tracery in a pinball machine.

Simonson's run on Thor is easily my favorite of everyone who ever worked on the character, including the original Lee/Kirby issues. I wrote on a favorite two-part story (which just happens to also include CRAZY DUNGEON DEATHTRAPS) here: http://knightsky-alienshores.blogspot.com/2011/07/retrospective-mighty-thor-342-343.html

This Amethyst?

Amethyst fell under the 'better than it had any right to be' category. The initial set-up might not thrill everyone (Amethyst was a prime example of the 'magical girl' genre years before anyone in the US had even heard of Sailor Moon), but it had some pretty good Order/Chaos themed fantasy stuff.

migellito said...

If I were to add something emphatically to your list Zak, I'd put down Miyazaki's original manga of Nausicaa.

jasons: "P. Craig Russell's adaptation of Ring of the Nibelung is worthy of consideration"
- very much in agreement with this.

spielmeister said...

Great list. There's a lot of stuff here I was not even aware of. I'll be checking on these...

Simon Tsevelev said...

Little Nemo is a legend. Some name it as a starting point for what would later become fantasy literature.

I feel pretty much the same about Mignola's Fafhrd and Mouser. Pretty nice, but lacks Leiber's text.

Tom said...

Weirdworld by Marvel, for as long as it lasted. Though that's probably colored by Nostalgia. But the cover was sooo like the cover of the old Basic boxed set.

psalmanazar said...

I'm going to suggest Alex Raymond's run on the Flash Gordon Sunday strips back in the thirties: it's archetypal swashbuckling planetary romance done in a visual style that varies between 'Tekumel by way of L. Frank Baum' and a sort of Art Nouveau William Blake.

Or, if you prefer the more batshit gonzo end of the spectrum, how about Fletcher Hanks? His stuff is basically outsider art that managed to pass itself off as golden-age comics. If nothing else, Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle would probably make a decent dungeon just by himself.

migellito said...

-Looks up Alex Raymond and Fletcher Hanks-
ho-lee crap! Thanks for the enlightenment!

Night Wizard said...

Mark Smylie's Artesia, guy spent a lot of time on world building and knows his mythic archetypes lol

John said...

The breakdown of when Dave Sim started to go crazy is very handy. I was afraid to get into Cerebus before, but now that I have a rough idea of where to stop reading I think I'll pick up an early volume.

Chris A. Field said...

Legion of Superheroes! Yes! It's good to see the 5 year later stuff getting some love, and issue 5 was pretty amazing.
Have a good one,
CHRIS

Roger G-S said...

If you don't like Simonson's Elric but like Mignola check out Mignola's Corum.

Welcome to Dungeon! said...

re:Amethyst

This Amethyst?


That's not actually the same Amethyst I was thinking of - the one I remember was by Keith Giffen and Esteban Maroto and (i thought) better drawn, kind of more 70s-psychedelic

http://cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_29311/subcat_64974/Amethyst%20SPecial%201%20Page%2046,%20Story%20Page%207.jpg

http://www.gwthomas.org/Amethyst%20v3%203%20(1988)%2014.jpg

http://pics.livejournal.com/icon_uk/pic/0049h4cc

http://pics.livejournal.com/icon_uk/pic/0049q0t5

Anonymous said...

I have combobulated your examples in my mental comic advisory faculty, and the suggestion it has spat out is: Valérian et Laureline. The first two albums are out in English from Cinebook, but the first one is about the least suitable of the series for this context. The second one is good though, but, just get them in French, the printing is always miles better.

Zak Sabbath said...

-ticktock

that comic looks awful. euroBDawful to be specific. is google image search lying to me?

Aos said...

Kamandi has lots of gamable content. You really have to be in touch with your inner 8 year old to enjoy it, though.

Giffen's legion was my favorite comic during the time it was being released. I still reread the entire run every few years.

For anyone doing supers gaming, Kirby's 70's run on Captain America can essentially be strip mined. Virtually every issue is easily converted into an adventure. Also for middle aged 8 year olds.

I'm not a marvel guy, but everyone should read everything written by Jonathan Hickman. His current run on Fantastic Four is fucking good comics. Reading it makes me high.

Anonymous said...

Zak — if you're referring to the art style, nah, it's not lying. Maybe skimping on the later more realistic style a bit, but basically what you see is what you get in terms of art. I find it much more pleasant than Chaykin's Ironwolf page (and look at that man's tiny hands!), but Bisley it ain't.

What GIS isn't doing is showing off much of the weird visual content, though; the second album alone is full of crazy stuff. Living jewels people stick on their skin; fuzzy telepathic animals that live curled up on your head; a hundred Flash-Gordony spaceships... There's a sequence where the protagonists infiltrate a huge castle via the medium of giant psychedelic clam, and as they explore the passageways they end up in a huge party. That's the kind of thing I judged its D&D-ability on.

Necropraxis said...

My experience with comics is mostly limited to a short window in the 90s, so many of these recommendations are new to me. I was less into Marvel and DC and more into Image and Valiant.

Speaking of Valiant, I'm surprised no one has mentioned some of the Valiant books. Particularly the ones set in the future (e.g. Magnus: Robot Fighter, Rai and the Future Force). I guess it's probably because the art is more workmanlike than impressive. But Valiant has some great settings, characters, writing, and stories. And the lack of flashy art is part of the point, I think: to focus on story.

Take Turok, dinosaur hunter. From Wikipedia:

The isolated valley became The Lost Lands - a land where Demons, Dinosaurs and Aliens flourished and where "Time has no meaning". A cosmic anomaly caused time in The Lost Lands to move in a self-contained loop (which meant that while millions of years passed outside of it, inside it, time barely moved at all).

Valiant was keeping the pulp-gonzo alive when most other media was going in a different, more serious style.

There's some good stuff in The Eternal Warrior and Archer & Armstrong too.

I'm not as familiar with the Dark Horse offerings, but I bet there is some good stuff there.

Zak Sabbath said...

Brendan

"the art was more workmanlike than impressive"

and that was why i didn't list it. If we're going to include things with unimpressive art then there are several thousand more comics to add to this list.

It was, incidentally, very sad to see Barry Windsor Smith doing all that work for Valiant and then have everyone else completely drop the ball. Complete waste of his talent.

migellito said...

Although I haven't had the pleasure of reading any of them, I've seen quite a bit of art from Verotik comics. With the combination of Glenn Danzig and Simon Bisley, I would imagine there is a lot of useful material there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verotik
The link to the (probably nsfw) Verotik homepage is at the bottom there.

migellito said...

Zak - I remember feeling that same way about all the Valiant titles, and about BWS.. except Magnus. Of course, I was so rabidly excited to have ANY Magnus at the time. I'm almost afraid to go back and look at it now.. heh.

Unknown said...

This is an awesome list. I'm going to track down as much of this as I can in 2012. :)

Anonymous said...

From reading his comics and related comments, I think Dave Sim's insanity expresses itself in many ways, but can be boiled down to "Don't bug me." His misogyny is not so much hatred of women, but resentment of the fact that he has to pay attention to them if he's in a relationship. When he found religion, he didn't get the urge to help the poor, or do anything constructive. Like most religious types, he finds what he wants in his religion. And what he found was "Don't distract me from God." or in other words, "Don't bug me." A woman is evil, because she distracts him from his art. Now everyone is evil, because they distract him from God.
In other words, he's a wackjob. He was brilliant in his day.

liza said...

Don't laugh at me, guys, but I think Sfar's and Throndheim's "Dungeon" (Donjon in French) is an awesome source of D&D greatness. Yes, I know what you are thinking: "¿a duck rogue? ¿an armed rabbit? ¿a corporate-managed megadungeon?". But bellow the satirical, comedy surface lies a treasure of bizarre monsters, intriguing plots and colorfull characters. I kid you not. I mine it regularly for my games. And the three temporal lines offers you three different flavours: the "Zenith" segment is classic fantasy (with some twists and a lot of satire); the "Dawn" segment is swashbuckling romance; and "Twilight" is a gritty post-apocaliptic world of dark fantasy.
Really, I can't think another comic more D&D-y at this moment.

Anonymous said...

what about Afro Tanaka?