Random Thoughts

Hey, up bright and early today, so let’s read some comics. It may be a short daze, though, as I have to run some errands later… we’ll see… it’s also supposed to be pouring later, so perhaps that’ll put an, er, dampener on the Will To Errands.

Richard Dawson: End of the Middle

06:15: Mini Kuš #135-138

I got these from here.

Yay! Heather Loase! She’s brilliant. And this mini is very funny — it’s a classic procrastination comic (“I don’t know what to write” thing), but it works anyway.

Mao does a thing about octopuses.

Ula Rugeviviute Rugyte (plus a lot of diacritics that are too hard to write) does a piece on refugees.

And Dina Omut does a kind of fairy tale.

Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto: Electric War

06:39: Lost & Found by Mia Wolff (Fantagraphics)

Wow, this is really good. The book mixes autobio…

… with a graphic novel that was apparently unfinished.

And it really works — the shifts between the autobio parts and the graphic novel are magical. It’s a fascinating, gorgeous book.

06:55: Frank Zappa Cartoon by Daniel Østvold (Ford Forlag)

I have no interest in Frank Zappa, but Østvold’s comics are often both intriguing and funny.

But… this is a pretty straightforward recap of Frank Zappa’s career, and I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

Stereolab: Instant Holograms On Metal Film

07:25: The Jungle #1 by Keenan Marshall Keller & Tom Neely (Uncivilized Books)

Uhm… this is apparently the third volume about these anthropomorphic apes?

And this is set in a prison, and over the first few pages, we cover all the clichés you can think of, including the Vietnam vet. I guess you can admire the efficiency, but it’s just not my thing at all, and I ditched it after a dozen pages.

07:35: Coderr 4 by Jason Oooverby

This one has a very nice flow.

And attractive artwork.

07:43: Santos Sisters #9 by Greg & Fake (Floating World Comics)

When Santos Sisters started, it wasn’t quite clear whether it was intended as an Archie parody or sincere homage.

And I still have no idea. But I like it.

07:50: Quiet Crossings by Vivi Partridge (Conundrum Press)

This artwork isn’t my kinda thing… animation-adjacent and tablet-ey…

The story isn’t bad, though. It goes for a Hayao Miyazaki-ish thing — it’s about an inn next to Charon’s river. So it’s about people dying, but in a gentle way.

08:06: The Peacemonger by Juliette Collet

I really like Collet’s artwork.

This is a very pensive book. It works.

08:21: Trek Smut (Desert Island)

This is what it says on the tin — it’s Star Trek smut.

Reprinted from an 80s fanzine. Well, why not.

Snapped Ankles: Dancing In Transit: Live 2025

08:24: La mèmoire du futur by Abitan/Guerrive/Schwartz (Cobolt)

It’s a new Spirou… but it’s not one of those “special edition” Spirous?

Oh, right, this follows on the previous album — where Spirou apparently died. But it was all in VR.

There’s some enjoyable scenes in here, but they mostly rely on “oh, I know that character”. But it’s basically a mess — it’s a mash-up of The Matrix and references to seven different (and better) Spirou albums.

In a way it reminds me of modern super-hero comics: It mostly exists to appeal to old fans by doing fan service iterations on “IP” instead of just telling a fun story.

My Brightest Diamond: This Is My Hand

09:14: Fata Morgana or, The Colombine’s Scarf by Olga Volozova

Huh, those windows look very blue now… I should adjust the colour temperature of the lightbulb in my reading lamp here…

There. Much better. Except that now all the other lamps look extremely yellow.

I think this is like the third book of Volozova’s that I’ve read? I like them — they’re constructed from a unique blend of paper cutouts, statues, printed-out-and-photographed paper strips and stuff.

This one tells the story of a Soviet avant garde theatre director. I’m not sure whether it’s referring to real historical people or not, but it’s interesting anyway.

09:27: A root bound plant needs space to grow by Stacey Zhu (Fieldmouse Press)

This little book collects three pieces.

They’re all quite direct — the author is musing out loud to the reader. I think it works quite well — it has a mood going on.

09:34: Drawings From Elsewhere by Oliver Coria (Desert Island)

These Desert Island books are from the mystery mail subscription.

I guess these are sketchbook drawings?

It’s cool.

Ministry: The Squirrely Years Revisited

09:38: Psychodrama Illustrated #9 by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

This feels like it may be the last issue of this series? It’s an extremely dense issue — it’s about all of Fritz’ doubles and the stimulant that’s resulted in these boobs.

I wonder what Beto’s drawing process is these days. The linework has become more wispy, and the artwork is sometimes almost abstract if you squint a bit — just circles and lines.

Anyway, this series is a singular vision for sure.

10:03: L’aviatrice 1 by Borgers/Walthéry/Di Sano (E-Voke)

Grr! I should read comics faster after buying them, because otherwise I end up buying multiple copies…

Oh, I should make lunch…

Uhm… What is this? I kinda like Walthéry’s comics, but I suspect he’s just a hired hand. This book has the unfortunate whiff of being a Belgian WWII pap pap book — designed to sell to Belgian 70-year-old men (note all the bookmarks).

Or is this meant to be read in class to learn about WWII?

In any case, while the artwork is competent (I’m guessing Walthéry did the layouts, at least?), it’s a chore to read.

10:33: Altcomics #7 (2d cloud)

The previous issues of Altcomics consisted mostly of interviews and articles, but now they’ve pivoted to an anthology format.

It has all these people.

Hey, Jason Overby again. That’s a coinkidink.

I like this anthology a lot — it’s mostly pretty abstract pieces, but they’re very evocative. Unfortunately it doesn’t say anywhere who did what (for some of the pieces)…

But it’s a solid anthology. All the pieces are good.

Sacred Paws: Jump Into Life

10:48: Smoke Signal #45 by Tara Booth (Desert Island)

Wow, an entire Smoke Signal issue by Tara Booth?

This is great.

She uses the huge format extremely well.

It’s gorgeous, it’s funny and it’s moving. Fantastic. Try to grab a copy before they’re gone… Oh no, they’re already sold out? Boo. They should have printed more. Perhaps they still have some copies in-store.

11:00: Plejehjemmet by Marie Høegh (Hunov & Haffgaard)

This is about a group of people living at a nursery home.

It pretty miserable — I mean, it’s totally realistic: Some senile people, some very quarrelsome people, and some are just depressed. There’s no “plot” as such, and while reading this I was thinking “but where is this going?” And it’s not really going anywhere, but it’s moving anyway.

Porridge Radio: Machine Starts To Sing

11:16: The End

And now I have to run some errands.. It hasn’t started raining yet.

Eep. Still have a lot of comics to read… I guess I have to find time for another comics reading day soonish. Or two…

I’ve tinkered around a bit with Goshenite, which I use to pre-order American comics. I like pre-ordering, because then there’s less of a chance of me buying the same thing over and over again — I’ve got the memory retention skills of an easily distracted squirrel.

(This is for mainstreamey comics only — the stuff you find in bookstores and the like. The really good stuff is to be found at Domino Books, of course.)

The reason I wrote Goshenite in the first place is because everything sucked, but now things are so bad that even Paul Gravett’s reliable overview of good upcoming books (that I consult in addition to Goshenite, just in case I missed something) is down to being a shadow of itself. He only lists six (6) books this month! Presumably because he has no idea how to find out what’s coming out these days.

The two major distributors are Penguin Random House (which has DC/Marvel, as well as other, largerish (or bookstore-oriented) publishers), and if you have the patience to look through things there, I applaud you. But it’s actually a pretty nice web site to extract data from (but you have to use Selenium to find the links), so that works fine for me (via Goshenite).

Lunar has most of the publishers that PRH presumably said no to distributing, and that web site is just about unbrowsable. Each individual book doesn’t even have a web page, so you can’t even google stuff reliably. The closest you get is this janky search page.

(And try looking at the book info there — it’s impossible to say who the publisher is?)

For the publishers that are so small that even Lunar won’t carry them, there’s Philbo. And they have basically no web pages at all — just a PDF catalogue, so none of those are scrapable, so I can’t put them on Goshenite at all. *slow clap*

And all the places that actually sell comics have web sites that suck. Midtown is probably the best — they do a good job at carrying everything — but it’s slow and janky:

But worse is the just absolutely horrible way to look at preorders — if you enjoy scrolling through nine hundred variant covers (four at a time) to perhaps find something you’re interested in, well… you’re in luck:

Goshenite displays all variants of an issue on one page:

In short — everything sucks, and after Diamond went belly up, it’s even worse than before, and I didn’t think that would be possible.

But I think Goshenite still pretty much works, even though there’s suspiciously few books listed there. I don’t have total confidence that my scripts are finding everything, but…

Perhaps everybody’s just slowly going bankrupt because nobody is able to buy anything?