Recommendations for modern day hieroglyphs

[Shai Hulud]

I don't much go in for action/superhero comics, so it doesn't leave much at the ol' comic book shop for me.  But every now and then the odd gem turns up, usually in the used comics bin.  One of my personal favorites is a miniseries called Epicurus the Sage by William Messner Loebs.  It's an excellent comic, very funny and with some remarkably historically accurate satire.  You don't see that sort of thing a lot, unfortunately there were only two full issues and one special issue.  The writing is very sharp, the characters are well developed with some interesting spin on well known historical figures, Epicurus is hapless and misunderstood, Socrates is a pompous jackass, Plato is his obsequious fan.  There's a great scene in the second book where Epicurus happens upon a group of Pythagoreans counting holy numbers and he fucks with them by shouting out random numbers out of sequence.  Great stuff.

[Faust]

Yeah, Doktor Sleepless seems to be going out on a very disorganized schedule.  Which is a shame.

I don't know why avatar are being dicks about it... The Doktor sleepless discussion wiki is pretty dead too and it had such steam until around issue ten .

Guy, There are a lot of non superhero/action orientated comics but as you said they are hard to find.

[Cain]

It's gotta be almost a year now since the last issue was released, right?  Well over six months, at least.

And GI, that actually sounds quite hilarious.

[Faust]

There was an issue in august.
The really frustrating thing is that it is still in the build up/establish the scene part of the second arc. The same thing happened with Planetary (fantastic series), it started in 1998, it was 26 issues long... it finished this october.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I recently finished volume 1.5 of Ghost in the Shell. It's not a particularly discordian comic series, but it's awesome all the same -- things are generally terribly technically accurate, and when they aren't, the author writes copious footnotes about how and why. There's a lot of politics and IR in the plot (moreso than the sci-fi elements, to be honest), and the plots are generally reasonably complex as well, despite mostly being one-off stories. Volume 1.5 is terribly difficult to find, and since volume 2 was released in the US first, 1.5 was for a while called "the lost volume". Here's a hint: volume 2 won't make much sense if you don't read 1.5 first, and 1.5 won't make much sense if you don't read 1 first. Read them in order. The comic is *far* more complex and *far* more technically specific than the books, the films, and the television runs; it furthermore has a different continuity (actually, each of those has a different continuity, though there are one or two movie spinoffs of the television show and there's a book set in the film continuity).

Basically, if you want to read a couple hundred pages of beautifully illustrated (and partly coloured) geekout about politics, electronics, biology (particularly insect and arachnid biology in volume 1.5), mechanics (solid and fluid), propulsion, programming, economics, and signals processing, the Ghost in the Shell series is probably where you want to look.