Personally, I absolutely cannot stand Preacher.

"See, it's funny, because the Messiah is inbred! And the priest is morbidly obese, and he falls on him!" Yes, yes, Ennis, you sure are edgy. Now please go away.

I did like his run on Hellraiser, and The Demon and Hitman are ... OK. Not great, but OK. But I will never understand the regard people hold him in.

I wonder what kind of "mature" comics did you try? Did you ever read anything by e.g. Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, David Mazzucchelli, Joann Sfar, Daniel Clowes, Jiro Taniguchi, Charles Burns? (The work of the latter does have some explicit content bordering on the grotesque, so you might not like him, but he's the exception to the rule.)

Depending on your preferences you could also give these ones a shot (they don't pile up violence, in any case, at least not in an explicit and exploitative way ;) ): Lewis Trondheim, Manu Larcenet, blutch, Killoffer, Gipi, Igort, Guy Delisle, David B., Adrian Tomine, Jessica Abel, Derk Kirk Kim, James Sturm, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Aaron Renier, Keiji Nakazawa, Reinhard Kleist, Isabelle Kreitz, Mawil, flix, Arne Bellstorf, Ulli Lust etc. etc.

(Note that most of them tell stories that are either related to real life experiences and aspects, some fictional, some biographical, or philosophical, grotesque, absurd, or humorous. They rarely are fantasy, sci-fi, action comics or similar, if that's what you're looking for.)

EDIT: The Kozure Ôkami (Lone Wolf and Cub) mangas by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima are violent but pretty good story-telling, if you don't mind that. These short stories about a dishonored samurai who works as a contract killer try to depict a realistic image of the Tokugawa era in Japan, and they often have surprising twists.

Which is mentioned in like five issues of the whole run.

While many of the extremely violent comics certainly aren't for everyone, but often enough the violence is a meta level of storytelling. Very much like in games, which also clearly shows which games are good with violence (Spec Ops) and which are just violent and stupid (Postal).

Eg. the "Strange Kisses" series by Warren Ellis is excellent because of the way it uses violence. It simply wouldn't have the same impact otherwise.

Especially US comics often have used extreme violence to set them apart from the "normal" comics in the past. This trend, last I checked, is actually reversing, as your "average" comics have increased greatly in quality.
The series is a great modern western with many good development elements. By dismissing it because of the more grotesque elements your missing out on the greater issues. The most important, spanning to several, is (as usual) responsibility.

The biggest issue I have with Ennis is that after reading Preacher you have pretty much seen every character he can write.

No one mentioned Inspector Canardo? It was fan translated to English by the guys at DCP. Go find it and read it NOW! Seriously, it's really great comic and definitely worth reading.

It was at least 15 years ago, and my memory of the details is sketchy. ;) I think Frank Miller was among the things I looked at (Sin City), and several "Druuna" books that my friends were extremely fond of.

Thanks for the long list, bookmarked. :)

Incidentally, this thread got me thinking why exactly I stopped reading comics, I did like them as a kid. I remember begging my mom to buy me an issue of "Perry Rhodan" in the supermarket (because I liked the cover), then being disappointed that it wasn't a comic, and letting it lie around for a year. But when I finally read it, it seemed to offer me a world that was far bigger, more interesting, and more engaging than any comic book I knew. From then on, I read _everything_ I could find on my parents' bookshelf, from Hemingway to Pearl S. Buck, from Henry Rider Haggard to Vladimir Nabokov, and comics began to feel very boring very fast. It's possible that I never found the right ones, of course. ;) But in general, the writing was better in the books, and the images in the comics were less interesting than the images that the books evoked in my mind, so I never felt much inclination to go back.

Well, that explains it then. :D The world of comics has quite evolved during the last 15 years, especially over here in Germany, where comics always had a rather bad stand. You coulod try searching for "Graphic Novels" in bookstores or libraries, that's the term they've come to use for marketing "mature" comics to people who think comics are immature and for kids. ;) (Check out this site about graphic novel publications in Germany, it's a combined PR effort of alternative German comic publishers).

Comics are often compared to novels and then deemed inferior, but I think you have to judge each medium on its own. There aren't that many people anymore who'd compare books and movies in that way, saying that they have no interest in movies because they prefer the experience of reading a book. Or that they deem music superior to visual arts etc. The problem is that for a long time comics were not accepted as an art in its own right or not taken seriously as a medium (at least not over here). To me comics are not alternatives to books, but complementary, and they tell stories in their own unique way, which is fundamentally different from novels or movies (or games).

I'm wondering why so many people complain about the term "graphic novel" as if it was an attempt to advertize supposed kids stuff to adults. The way I get it it's a somewhat different format and was "invented" by ambitious artists, not people who had trouble selling comics.

You definitely have a point. Actually, I'm wondering now if I might be treating comic books the same way that I _don't_ want others to treat games.

And while I'm still very sure that I don't like the works that were presented to me in the 90s as "good mature comics", I indeed did completely miss any development that may have taken place since then.

It's both, and even more than that, a word with several connotations and different interpretations, just like "indie games" is. And there are both advantages and disadvantages to its use. It also depends on the country you live in (e.g. I believe the French and Belgians don't really have a need for this word, in the US it's used for all kinds of comics as long as they come in bookform, and here it mostly refers to specific kinds of comics that 'even' intellectuals could read without a guilty conscience. ;) I don't complain about it, since e.g. in Germany it seems to be necessary to make the distinction in order to get more people to get over their prejudices towards the medium in general, and it seems to be working, so that's a good thing.

I just question the idea that comics have to be more like "novels" or named after them to prove that they are just as artistic as literature. IMO that betrays a sort of inferiority complex. Comics are comics, not a different kind of novels, regardless of their quality and themes.

Chninkel
http://manga.animea.net/chninkel-chapter-1-page-1.html

Now bear in mind that I bailed out after maybe the first three volumes*, and that was years ago. That being said ...

My problem with Preacher (or what I read of it) isn't that it had grotesque elements; I enjoy stuff like Hellraiser, which can be pretty grotesque. But Preacher read to me like Ennis had gone to the Something Awful forums, read through the "funny comic book panels" thread and the "badass comic book panels thread" and decided, people like this, so I'll make a comic book that's nothing but this. So there's page after page on Ennis' standard gross-out humor, and page after page of Jesse or the Saint of Killers fucking people up in appropriately impressive ways, but virtually nothing that gives it any emotional weight.

* Because I can only spend so much time and money giving a chance to things I don't like.

Well actually, the term "graphic novel" is exactly that, a term coined to sell kidas comics to adults. Even if accept it into the vernacular, it can only apply to self-contained single volumes like Watchmen, Maus, Etc, as opposed too Metropolitan, Walking Dead, or any other set of collected works.

I agree with you 99%. That 1% of me likes the images as it homogenises everyone's imaginations. That way I won't be super disappointed when the film/book adaptation comes out!