Alex Recommends Comics! Seaguy again! And WE3 and Vimanarama!

I am in the process of obtaining certain footage - certain Eurovision footage. This will probably result in a brain melting marathon of both semi's and the grand final, which in turn will lead to a giga-post next week clocking in at somewhere far beyond indulgent.

But some poor sap also mentioned that he wanted me to recommend some single volume graphic novels or comic books here. I do use comic panels to fill space... ahem, as visually arresting blog posts pretty regularly, and I did want to post about this today anyway so here's a good place to start. Seaguy is so freakin' awesome it hurts my teeth. These panels are from the second issue of the second mini-series, which came out last week:




I'm not sure if I should go over it again, since I'm pretty sure I've written about it quite a few times now. It's a demented, surreal, rapid-fire, super-hero subversion where everyone's a hero, but the heroes are no longer needed as a massive Disney-esque corporation works to opiate the world with pink goo and children's cartoons. It's illustrated in a fabulous, classic style by Cameron Stewart and Grant Morrison's writing is like a stream of awesomeness, straight from the subconcious.

I'm kind of cheating to include it here, since that ol' sap wanted one volume stories and Seaguy is going to be three when it's finished. But only the first volume is out at the moment (possibly out of print, since it came out in 2005) and it's so short and fun in itself, and one of my favourite comics of all time, it seemed like a no brainer.

Also it leads onto another two easy recommendations: We3 and Vimanarama . Seaguy, WE3 and Vimanarama were all three issue mini-series that were published at the same time as part of a rough "Crack!Comicks" concept by Grant Morrison. They're all amazing and they're all wonderful as short, stand-alone graphic novels. Vimanarama is a cosmic-Bollywood-apocalypse story set in the North of England and WE3 is Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey except with cyborg tank-pets. It's so good that people talk about turning it into a movie every now and then, which... eh, probably means nothing. What does mean something is that Vimanarama is drawn by Phillip Bond and WE3 by Frank Quitely and they might be two of my favourite artists ever too. I love all of those books.

So there you go, recommendations and amazon links and all's well with the world.