Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991

Quite a lot of wear on the book. Isn't in pristine new state .

Zot! has a certain reputation amongst comic readers of an age. It came from the same stable as Alan Moore's Miracleman of Eclipse comics in the 1980s and approaches a similar idea, of superheroes intruding on the real world, but from an entirely different direction.Zot is from a parallel Earth that is much more advanced technologically than our own. He has met a girl from our world called Jenny and visits her often. Jenny hates our world and longs for the day when Zot will take her to live in his world, where everything is brighter and good always conquers evil. Zot, optimistic and enthusiastic, faces some surprises in our world, where things are not so clear cut and people are indifferent, but continues to show Jenny that there is much to love about her world. And them both being teenagers, their feelings for each other grow and blossom.Scott McCloud, the writer and artist on this book, also produced some important texts on the way comics are written, such as Reinventing comics. Zot! was where he learnt his lessons, experimented with comic narratives and wrote some heartfelt stories that deal with growing up. There is enough super hero stuff to keep the book flowing, but it is the emotional stuff that impresses.The book is, as per the title, completely in black and white. It misses the first ten issues of the series which were in colour but were also a more straightforward super hero story that would misrepresent what Zot! became.If you like fantasy and romance mixed in with your superheroes, and are happy to chuck out the ultra-violence and posturing, Zot!'s utterly charming storylines are probably what you're looking for. People who like Ultimate Spider-man and Jeff Smith's Bone will probably love this.

At last we have, if not the complete Zot, the complete black and white Zot which McCloud considers effectively a reboot of his original 10-issue colour series. And who am I to argue? Me, I'm just glad to have to have my Zot collection complete at last.Zot is a number of things. Partly a joyous celebration of the innocent days of superhero comics -Zot comes from the golden future of 1965; partly a bitter-sweet celebration of adolescence; partly about the clash between fantasy and reality -Jenny, his friend, comes from our world. It's also one of the first American comics to show the influence of manga, the humorous side as opposed to the violent energy of material like Lone Wolf & Cub which was making its initial mark around the same time, but the emphasis is on 'influence' rather than imitation.This is an early work by McCloud but it hasn't dated,it's just as much fun as it was twenty years ago, indeed it's enhanced by the author's frequent comments on chapters and story arcs.McCloud features notably in two recent books  500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide (500 Essential...)  and  The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels (Rough Guide Specials)  (they complement each other well and are recommended equally) largely because of his graphic novel trilogy about reading and creating comics. I'm sure that this book will appear in any future editions.Get it. 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide (500 Essential...)The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels (Rough Guide Specials)

I don't have much to add to what the first two reviewers have written here. Except to say that as someone who splashed out on the now-deleted Kitchen Sink collections only to see the final collection (Book 4) fail to appear due to the publisher running out of money, it is a joy to see these comics in print again at long last.That goes double for the "Earth Stories", which featured in issues 28 to 36 of the original series (issue 36 being the last issue to date). Not only because it was ridiculous that such finely wrought tales should have been so long out of circulation when McCloud was enjoying mainstream success as the author of Understanding Comics and its various sequels (though it was). But because those eight issues represented something rarer than diamonds, not only in comics but in literature and the arts as a whole - in that they came from somewhere unmistakably real in the author's life, were autobiographical in the best sense of the word without surrendering any of their fictional magic, and as such had a power to speak into people's lives, including my own, that I have yet to see matched by any other comic in 20-plus years of collecting.It was as if, having relaunched the title in black and white with issue 11, McCloud again stepped up a gear with issue 28, taking Zot! and its readers into entirely new emotional territory. As a reader of the original comics, I was relatively late to the party. The first issue I picked up while it was still on the stands rather than in the back issue racks was issue 35. That was on the back of a series of feverish recommendations in the letters pages of other titles. Fortunately, with a bit of persistence and doing the rounds of comics fairs, I was able to dig back and buy up most of the issues I had missed.And I'm glad I did. No graphic novel collection to my knowledge has ever included readers' letters as part of the package. Understandably so in many cases. Yet to read the letters in titles like Zot!, Sandman and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is to see at first hand (near as dammit) the impact that comics can have on people's lives.Looking back, it's almost impossible to overstate how much the Earth Stories meant to myself and other readers. As a relatively callow youth at the time, reading stories such as "Normal" opened my eyes to - among other things - issues such as gay rights and homophobia. It made them real, and in doing so transformed a key aspect of my view of the world (portentous and pretentious as I know that must sound).Reading this collection now, it is fascinating to have McCloud's retrospective take on his work. Of course, the creator can by definition never really share the reader's perspective; he is always going to see the flaws and/or where he fell short of his original vision. For me, there are places where McCloud's achievements go beyond words. Transcendent moments that occur both in the artwork (certain panels of the story "Autumn"), and the dialogue ("Normal"), and in the ineffable combination of the two (the opening of "Autumn" and the ending of "Invincible", but take your pick).After writing some of the most penetrating and pioneering analysis of the comics medium in print, McCloud now looks set to return to actually creating comics once again. I for one cannot wait.

Good read

Seguro conocerás a Scott por sus libros sobre cómics (Making comics, understanding comics, etc)Estos son excelentes, pero uno se pregunta:"¿Que autoridad tiene para darme consejos?"Aquí es donde entra Zot.Y vaya que si sabe de que habla (escribe, pero ustedes entienden)Vez todos los consejos que el da en acción.Personajes increíbles, excelente diseño de escenarios y personajes, seguimiento de la historia sublime y esta es increíble, de lo mejor que he leído en cómic alguno.Sin duda, un punto clave en los cómics de superhéroes, de los mejores jamás hechos.El único problema es la impresión, que es algo barata (como un manga pero muy abultado)Así que si pueden, compren la edición de pasta dura.Fuera de eso, Zot es un cómic que debe pertenecer en la estantería de cualquier aficionado a los cómics...HASTA EL CUARTO NUMEROLos primeros numeros de Zod son una obra maestra, pero despues el comic se vuelve melodrama adolescete barato (los primeros numeros tambien lo son, pero ES BUENO)El dibujo sigue siendo muy bueno en terminos de estructuras y fondos, porque los personajes son asquerosamente dibujados.Evitelo a menos que se encuentren una versión con solo los primeros tomos.