Random Comics

I read some comics over the past fortnight. Or rather… attempted to.

Let’s do the ones I actually read first:

Riviere has done a lot of comics, but Goffin is unknown to me — and so is this series. I picked this up at random at a used book store.

And we’re talking classic, classic French(ey)-style adventure comics for children.

Look at the that hairdo! Just look at it!

I guess this series didn’t really take off, and there’s probably good reasons for that — the only original thing about it is that it’s set in Africa. Still, I really enjoyed reading it. The nostalgic-looking artwork is part of the charm for sure.

This is something I read in translation as a teenager, I think. Or at least something else from the Jessica Blandy series…

… because I could remember exactly zilch of the plot here, so perhaps I hadn’t read this before after all.

Here we’re talking about another French comics staple: Noirish hard boiled crime, set in the US. And again, not very original, but again, I enjoyed reading it and I’m going to see if there’s further albums of this in the used book store (which is where I picked this up).

I think I’ve read some of the previous “seasons” of this Rodolphe/Leo series about a super-natural(ish) investigator before, but I’m not sure whether they were also drawn by Marchal?

Marchal is no Leo, but it’s totally fine. He has a tendency to exaggerate the heads of the characters slightly, which is eeeh, but you’ve got nice interiors and good scenery and all of that stuff, so it’s very pleasant looking.

The story’s fine, too — lots of mystery and intrigue set in Écosse.

However, when we get to the supernatural/alien stuff, instead of giving you a sense of mystery and wonder (which is what Leo usually manages to pull off), here it just sits kinda flat.

But… it’s fine — I’m definitely reading the rest of the series.

And then we come to the other comics I attempted to read over these weeks, and I failed — and not because my French is risibly bad, because these books aren’t even in French:

I guess I shouldn’t even have picked up this Fantagraphics book, because…

… this art style is just so 2025, and it’s a clear signal that I’m not the target audience. That nose.

It’s drawn in a couple of styles…

… and it’s reminiscent of fairy tales, which is another thing that I just don’t enjoy reading. And… the storytelling is very choppy, what with the mixture of partaking of her thoughts and then suddenly an omniscient narrator — it’s just very “huh?”

I gave up after about fifty pages.

This is presented as being the hundredth issue of this thing, which I assume isn’t true…

… because it’s… I mean, I guess it’s a pastiche or send up of these kinds of things.

It’s got absolutely all the clichés. But I just didn’t find it funny, and if that’s how it was meant to be, then I didn’t find it exciting either.

I ditched this after about fifty pages.

Here’s another book I probably wouldn’t have bought if I’d seen it in person first, but I ordered it on line…

Because the artwork is just bizarre. Heavily photo referenced artwork is common, and it can be good or bad, but this time around, it’s like all the photo reference material comes from a phone camera that’s taken the shots five centimetres from people’s faces.

It’s like everybody is giving selfie face in every panel, which gets even more confusing when there’s people in varying distances, and it looks like up-close tick tocks on pause being placed in a 3D model.

It’s so disturbing that I couldn’t really concentrate on actually reading the book — but I did make an effort, and it seems like the worst pile of clichés that have ever been heaped into one book.

But I guess it’s meant for sixteen year olds? So again, I guess I’m not the target audience.

I abandoned this after about forty pages.

However, this one sounds just up my street, in a way.

And look at this artwork! It’s great!

Unfortunately, the storytelling is really choppy.

And the dialogue is so stilted that, and you’re not going to believe this: I gave up after about fifty pages.

It might well be the translation that’s at fault here, but…

And that’s it for these two weeks.

A Review of the Reterminal E1004 13.3″ Full-Color Epaper Display

I’ve had the following thing on my wall since 2020:

It’s fun because it’s an epaper frame that runs on battery — so I can have it conspicuously displayed on a wall without any wires leading to it. Mysterious! Enigmatic! And it just displays the temperature and the currently playing album.

It’s fine, but it’s a bit small (I gotta put on my correct glasses to see what the temperature is)… and the firmware isn’t unproblematic: Out of every twenty times it wakes up and fetches a new image, it goes to “can’t find wifi”, which is just kinda annoying.

But then, last week, I read of a new generation of epaper devices with brilliant colours and neat features.

Wow! Bigger! Better! Gotta have it! And yesterday it arrived.

After flashing it with the ESP32 PhotoFrame firmware (from a web page! I had no idea that you could do USB flashing via web pages, but apparently there’s something called “The Web Serial API” that does that? Chrome only, of course. kids these days), and a session with Claude where it really wanted to download some Node nonsense a lot, I convinced it to just write me a bash script to upload images to the thing. The result is on Microsoft Github — it’s super duper trivial, but the clue is that the device needs to have a paletted PNG, which makes sense.

Tada! It works! I’ve set it to download a new image once every fifteen minutes, which is correctish enough…

But. Look at this.

Or perhaps — don’t look at that, because it seems likely to give you an epileptic fit.

That’s just… that’s just… that’s just ridiculous. How is this even something that’s a product? You can’t have this thing displayed somewhere people can see it and not expect people to fall on their asses, laughing. It’s ridiculous.

It makes sense as something that only updates, say, once a day — in the middle of the night, where nobody can see it. Hide the shame.

So… man… I have to rethink what I’m going to use it for, because I can’t have this hanging on my living room wall.

Man.

And in the promo pic they’re displaying a clock, sort of implying that you’d have this thing update once per minute? When it takes half a minute to do an update?

Dude.

Introducing reTerminal E1004 Spectra 6 Full Color ePaper Display: Frame What Matters to You

Heh, in the promo version they do show the frame updating… but if you look at 67s, they’re editing out bits *and* running it at, like, 10x speed (look at the laptop movements).

C’mon.

How I made a 60fps Eink Monitor, the Modos Flow

Perhaps somebody brilliant will be able to do something neat with this device, though? Partial updates would help a lot, for instance, if you’re displayin a clock or something on a bit of the display. I guess time will tell…

70% Of Drivers Really Are Above Average

You see it all the time — “70% of drivers think they’re above average” used as an example at how stupid people are. Often mixed with some confused Dunning-Krueger references.

But the thing is: Most people observe the other drivers around them and come to the conclusion that they drive better than the drivers around them. That they are better drivers. And they’re right.

The apparent contradiction here is that there is no universal norm for what makes a “good driver”.

We all have this one acquaintance who’s really into cars. She parks the car doing a j-turn, and she knows how to do an ollie, a lazy eight and a double choctaw. But the thing is, she’s constantly involved in collisions with other cars, and it’s always the other guy’s fault. She can prove it! She’s been in so many court cases and has never been found guilty!

And we all have that other acquaintance who’s not into cars, and she’s never hurt anybody. She’s not even had a little fender bender. But the thing is, you’ve been a passenger in her car, and it’s harrowing. She always goes 10km/h under the speed limit, and you can tell that all the other drivers are mad at her. She can’t even do parallel parking!

Both of these people think they drive better than the average driver… and they’re right. But they use completely different metrics for “what’s a good driver”.

If you’re now muttering “both of those drivers are insane! they shouldn’t be allowed on the street! now, on the other hand, I drive really well and I never…”

Then stop that train of thought and be enlightened.