Matthew Smith, illustrator of Solomon Stone, wants to know what I think of Asterix:
I love Asterix, despite the frequent and regrettable racism that seems to plague mid-20th century Francophone comics. I love Asterix so much I even briefly considered planning my honeymoon to include a trip to Parc Asterix. And, while many people would consider this blasphemous, I actually think that as an adventure/humor comic, it’s even better than Carl Barks’ work on the Disney Duck titles. The cartooning and the plotting in the Asterix books is near perfect, and one of the primary reasons that the only language besides English that I can even speak a little bit of is French is because at one point I was determined to read Asterix in a language where the puns weren’t quite so mood-breakingly awful. (The more recent translations are better about this, and those are the ones featured in the omnibus editions that are currently out.)

Brian asks about sizes of comics:
I’m actually not too picky about comic sizes. I like the slightly larger than comic size that DC seems to be using for their hard-covers lately, as I think it’s a good size, being between the standard American comics size and the European album format. I don’t like the trend towards digest-sized American comics, outside of material specifically intended for children, as I think it does a disservice to the art. By the same token, I don’t like it when European comics are shrunk and edited to fit into American comics sizes. I’m even becoming disillusioned with manga sizes, finding the slightly larger format that Viz is using for their adult-aimed titles like Detroit Metal City and 20th Century Boys far preferable to the standard manga paper-back. I haven’t had a chance to check out anything in the manga omnibus size yet, but it looks like a good size to me as well.
Basically, I just want the art to be readable and in a format that the illustrator approves.

elsie would like to hear more about xxxHolic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles:
One of the things that I really like about these two titles is that CLAMP pulled off the neat trick of making each story stand alone as an independent work, but if you read both of them you can see connections between the two that expand upon the mysteries and characters of the individual titles. The way that the two stories incorporate material from other CLAMP titles, particularly Cardcaptor Sakura, which feels loomingly important to the linked story because of it’s glaring lack of explicit cross-over. The degree of interconnectedness is something that I’ve only seen before, to this extent, in the works of mystery and horror novelists, and of course super-hero comics. In fact, there’s a slight similarity between these two titles and what Grant Morrison played with in Seven Soldiers, in terms of self-contained stories that interconnect in ways that are only obvious when all the titles are read.

Eli would like some recommendations, particularly for contained stories:
This is actually something of a tough one, as one of the things I like about comics is the preponderance of serials. But I’ll give it a shot.
Gilbert Hernandez’s “Palomar” stories from Love & Rockets, a heartfelt drama about life in a South American village, are available in a set of about three or four trades or one massive hard-cover and are worth checking out. I may be in the minority, but I find Gilbert’s stories far richer and more satisfying than Jaime’s “Locas” series.
I’ve been picking up the occasional trade of Jason Aaron’s Scalped, a hard-boiled, noirish mystery series set on an Indian reservation, which is one of the more interesting titles from Vertigo of late.
There’s a bunch of Grant Morrison titles worth looking at: WE3, All Star Superman, Seven Soldiers, Seaguy. Actually, pretty much everyone should read WE3 and All Star Superman anyway.
Rex Mundi is quite good, if you’re curious about what The DaVinci Code might have been like as a good book.

Bob Temuka is curious about my take on non-Dredd related 2000AD titles and The Invisibles:
Well, the only 2000AD title I read at all is Nikolai Dante. In general, I’m not a big fan of most British comics. What I’ve seen tends to be very self-regarding and gratuitous. Nikolai Dante works for me because of the gleefully rogueish nature of the character; the stories can veer between broad farce and intense drama, but inevitably, at some point, Dante will stop taking himself seriously, which keeps the stories from drifting too far into angst. What frustrates me is that the books tend to not be easily available in the US. It seems to be a crap shoot as to whether or not Diamond will get them in, and I’m several volumes behind because I haven’t yet found a reliable alternate source that has the books I’m missing in stock.
As for The Invisibles, I liked it at the time, quite a bit, but it was very much of it’s time (as most of the good Vertigo books seem to be) and it suffers from two slightly less than fatal flaws. The first is that the inconsistent art means the books lacks a cohesive and consistent visual style, and since Morrison tossing around lots of Big Ideas, consistently clear art would have been a great help in communicating those ideas. The second is that Morrison grossly over-estimated the intelligence of his audience. He expects you to do some intellectual work as you read the book, and to have some familiarity with the concepts and names he’s throwing around. What he forgot is that most comic book readers think that Chris Claremont comics are intellectually rigorous. They’re just simply not going to do the work that the book requires on the reader’s end.

Stanley asks for my opinion on The Doom Patrol and The Incredible Hulk:
The only version of the Doom Patrol I really warmed up to was Grant Morrison’s pre-Vertigo version, just for it’s beautiful oddity. I’ve only read the one issue of the most recent relaunch, but I’m slightly skeptical, given the rather pedestrian nature of the last two revamps. I suspect that it’s one of those concepts that, outside of its original context of slightly off-kilter Silver Age heroics, really needs a strong creative vision to make work.
Hulk, sadly, has never really done anything for me. I’ve talked about the character with Mike extensively, sadly, and I think he suffers from a problem not entirely dissimilar to the one that the Doom Patrol has: it takes a really strong creative vision to make the character work. Unfortunately, those creative visions almost always require moving him away from the “Hulk smash!” type of stories…which is really the only thing that people want. The character might work better as a villain making occasional guest appearances in other people’s titles than as a super-hero in his own right.

Dorian wanted my take on recent DC “event” titles, particularly World of New Krypton and Blackest Night:
I’m seemingly in the minority in this, but I’m actually really enjoying the Superman books right now. True, I think Flamebird and Nightwing, and probably Mon-El as well, would probably be better off as back-up features rather than leads. And the “General Lane is a murderous sociopath” subplot is grating because it’s yet another attempt to bring back the “world distrusts Superman” story, which we appear to get every few years. But the characterization and plotting on the books has been exceptional, and the art is quite appealing. Heck, even Supergirl is entertaining, and that hasn’t been true in over twenty years.
Blackest Night I was more excited about before it became apparent that it was just going to be “DC Zombies.” I was enjoying the stories of the various ring corps and wanted to see more development of that cosmic side of the DC universe. As for the title itself…well, with the exception of Blackest Night: Titans, I’m actually liking the cross-overs a little bit more than the main book. Like the Superman books, the plotting has been really enjoyably tight, but it just feels…predictable? Starting with the big bad being Nekron (and the plot being a virtual repeat of his first appearance at that). I don’t think anyone seriously expects all the characters killed in this series to stay dead, for example, and most people seem to expect quite a few resurrections to occur as a result of the series. Heck, the only thing that’s caught me off-guard so far is the seeming importance that the various Doves are looking to have.
And I still say this is going to end up with almost all the DC characters having some kind of power-ring, if only for an issue. I can just see DC hawking the “Star Sapphire Wonder Woman” and “Blue Lantern Superman” action figures.

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