Giving the Gift of Comics

[zuludelta]

Well, another Christmas has gone by, and as per my usual, I gave comics to my young cousins and godchildren (all aged 10 or below).

Here's a list of what I got them

- Invincible TPB Vol.1 (gave it to the 10 year old)
- The Amazing Wolf-Man TPB Vol.1 (gave it to the 8 year old)
- Teen Titans Go! Digest Vol.1 & 2 (gave it to the 7 year old)

With money so tight these days, though, I wasn't able to get anything for myself (sob!) but my older brother managed to score the first 4 issues of Steven Grant's critically-acclaimed Two Guns mini-series on the cheap for me (yay!)... now I only have to look for the 5th and final issue.

So did any of you guys give or receive comics during the holidays?

[bearded]

sort of...i got an ipod with some of the pendant audio books.  i got infinite crisis and 52.  really good.  and i'm downloading the circus 13 audio adventures of batman superman and wonderwoman.

[murs47]

I received the 3rd volumes of Simon Oliver's The Exterminators and Gail Simone's Birds of Prey run. Haven't read them yet.

[Podmark]

I got Batman: Year One, Dark Knight Returns, and The Dark Knight Strikes Back. Rounding my way through the classics.

[JKCarrier]

Not comics per se, but I did get "Kirby - King of Comics" by Mark Evanier, and "Watching the Watchmen" by Dave Gibbons.

[Talavar]

Absolute Sandman vol. III for me - it's the comic book that doubles as home defence!

[Silver Shocker]

I got two Essential Spider-Man volumes. Haven't started reading them yet though.

[The Hitman]

I received the Heroes: The Graphic Novel Vol. 2, but that's about it.

[EDITED to be a complete sentence!]

[The Enigma]

Nothing, although I might use some Christmas monies to start buying the Preacher trades.

[YoungHeros]

Hulk: Volume 1: Red Hulk (Premiere Hardcover) from my brother

And I love it!

[GhostMachine]

I got money for Christmas and used part of it to pick up my comics from the LCS. That's about it as far as comics for Xmas goes, and no one I exchange presents with reads comics or has kids that do, or I would have definitely given out some.

[Uncle Yuan]

I seriously considered getting the Watchmen for my 15 year-old son, but ultimately decided against it.  Still a tad too mature.  Soon, though.

[zuludelta]

I seriously considered getting the Watchmen for my 15 year-old son, but ultimately decided against it.  Still a tad too mature.  Soon, though.

Good call, I think. I read Watchmen in its entirety only when I was around 17 or 18, and while I enjoyed it immensely on a "kewl, I'm getting into stuff people smarter than me think I should read!" level, I didn't really understand its significance until 3 or 4 years later after a semester of art philosophy and self-directed study in the history of Western comics. It's not so much a question of the material being too "mature" for a mid-teen, (really, there's nothing in there in terms of "maturity" that's beyond an average Twilight Zone or X-Files episode when you think about it), but a lot of the nuances of story and technique applied by Gibbons and Moore (the 3 x 3 grid, the juxtaposition of images, the Cold War context, etc.) would probably be just lost on a young and relatively naive reader (through no fault of their own, of course)... sort of like introducing a kid to cool jazz when they're at the age when they're more likely to get into something like popular hip-hop or getting a newly legal drinker to sample a fine 12 year old whiskey when their palate probably wouldn't be able to distinguish Thunderbird from Macallan's... some things just need time and prior experience to be appreciated fully... 

[Uncle Yuan]

   Um . . . suddenly I don't feel qualified to read it.

[The Enigma]

I seriously considered getting the Watchmen for my 15 year-old son, but ultimately decided against it.  Still a tad too mature.  Soon, though.

Good call, I think. I read Watchmen in its entirety only when I was around 17 or 18, and while I enjoyed it immensely on a "kewl, I'm getting into stuff people smarter than me think I should read!" level, I didn't really understand its significance until 3 or 4 years later after a semester of art philosophy and self-directed study in the history of Western comics. It's not so much a question of the material being too "mature" for a mid-teen, (really, there's nothing in there in terms of "maturity" that's beyond an average Twilight Zone or X-Files episode when you think about it), but a lot of the nuances of story and technique applied by Gibbons and Moore (the 3 x 3 grid, the juxtaposition of images, the Cold War context, etc.) would probably be just lost on a young and relatively naive reader (through no fault of their own, of course)... sort of like introducing a kid to cool jazz when they're at the age when they're more likely to get into something like popular hip-hop or getting a newly legal drinker to sample a fine 12 year old whiskey when their palate probably wouldn't be able to distinguish Thunderbird from Macallan's... some things just need time and prior experience to be appreciated fully... 

I also read Watchmen at 18, having discovered it on my own, partly through wanting to know what had happened in comics the year I was born (turns out, some really good stuff!) and I loved it because previously I'd been a huge X-Men fan, especially as a kid and superhero stuff generally was my thing, but the maturity stuff didn't bother me (there's a bit of violence, some nakedness, obviously the Comedian and his actions and some swearing, but nothing that is likely to blow the mind of today's 15 year-old), what did more was seeing Captain Metropolis' dream fall apart and the perfectly beautiful horror of the ending. Anyway, I'm getting a bit off the topic here, I did love Watchmen a lot at 18 and I still love it now; like all the best films, books, songs and so on, you see/hear new things every so often when you re-watch, read, listen etc. but I think I read it differently now. The first time was, as with Zulu, "hey, awesome!" but it was only later that I realised the importance of what Moore had done in deconstructing superhero comics and the cleverness and insight he displayed in so doing. There's nothing quite like the first time, though *happy sigh* so make sure he understands some of the context if you can, even if that's only after he's finished reading it.

[zuludelta]

  Um . . . suddenly I don't feel qualified to read it.

I didn't mean to imply that Watchmen requires serious study to be appreciated, it's just that it's so embedded in the context of the times it was written in, in terms of, well, everything about it from the creative trends informing the art and the main plot points that it might seem impenetrable to a younger reader unfamiliar with the larger circumstances surrounding the book's creation (One could almost say that it's horribly dated. Almost). To be honest, I wasn't really smart or aware enough to get a lot of what Moore and Gibbons were trying to do the first time I read it, and only kept it prominently displayed on my bookshelf for a couple of years sandwiched between some Albert Camus and Noam Chomsky books so that I could impress the Linguistics major I was dating at the time with my alleged progressive and modern taste in casual reading.

The first time was, as with Zulu, "hey, awesome!" but it was only later that I realised the importance of what Moore had done in deconstructing superhero comics and the cleverness and insight he displayed in so doing. There's nothing quite like the first time, though *happy sigh* so make sure he understands some of the context if you can, even if that's only after he's finished reading it.

To add to Enigma's advice, it might be a good idea to fill your kid in on some of the context surrounding Watchmen (without spoilering the ending, of course) before giving it to him. Moore did a great job of recreating the Cold War paranoia of the mid-1980s, but all that political tension almost seems surreal now in retrospect, even to those of us who actually lived through it. The idea of an ultimate weapon like Dr. Manhattan getting out of government control and suddenly tipping the fragile nuclear arms balance between the US and the USSR and pushing the world to the brink of World War III was definitely a "urine your pants" scary imagined scenario at the time, but the significance and impact of that particularly important plot development has been dulled, I think, in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[zuludelta]

Oh, and as a belated additional holiday present, my brother gave me the full run of Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja yesterday. I was practically doing cartwheels (aching back notwithstanding) when I got them... I have fond memories of reading the early issues as a kid (my brother and I would take a trip down to the local American Air Force base and read issues on the newsstand outside the base's restaurant... the old guy who managed the newsstand actually let us read the comics there since nobody really bought anything off of him outside of the occasional Newsweek magazine, much less talk to him).