Random Thoughts

I did it! I read everything Comico The Comic Company ever published!

You can share my pain over there, on the Comico blog, if you haven’t already been doing. Tsk tsk!

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past month.

Dear Historian by Joff Winterhart is really good.

I really enjoyed his artwork — and it’s apparently done by drawing on the other side of the paper, and then the paper picks up ink from the surface it’s lying on? It’s an interesting technique.

The story is about a historian who’s being courted by a TV production company into making one of these documentaries — on the page to the right above, Winterhart totally nails the format, and you can see the pure hatred for these things dripping from the pages. I, too, loathe those kinds of documentaries, so I’m totally the target audience here.

It’s a thoroughly amusing book, and the only bits that I think almost fall flat is when Winterhart tries to illustrate how moronic and boring the TV guy is — and he does this by having him saying moronic and boring things at length. That’s a very difficult thing to pull off and still having an enjoyable read, and Winterhart doesn’t quite pull off that miracle here.

I also really enjoyed the storytelling techniques that are used here — we get an unusual third person close narration going throughout the book, so it’s almost like reading a fairy tale of sorts. But not in a cloying way! It feels very natural, and is almost hypnotic.

Fantastic book.

Three Tif et Tondu books.

Lapiere & Sikorsky’s take on the characters from the 90s continue to be refreshing…

… and engaging.

So when I started reading this, I went eh? eh? Because this album is just One Thing After Another Until We Run Out Of Pages Totally Without Any Storytelling, but then I realised that this is a 70s album by Will & Tillieux. *phew* Those guys really didn’t know how to make a good Tif et Tondu album.

Tillieux obviously put zero effort into writing this stuff — his own albums are a lot better.

I found this in a used bookstore, and I’ve never ever heard of this before. Le scrameustache by Gos & Walt. But it’s a series that has been going forever! The last one was from 2019, and still by Gos & Walt.

If you guessed based on the nonsensical name and the style above that Gos worked as Peyo’s assistant on Les Schtroumpfs, you guessed right.

This is obviously for small children, so it’s perfect for me in that way, since my French is bad. But… it’s also just incredibly boring. I can’t believe that I would have liked this even when I was five years old, really.

A bigger problem for me is just the lettering. It’s so odd! Look at those “r”s, for instance. Google Translate wasn’t able to help me out at all, so I had to understand every unknown word the hard way; i.e., guessing. Fortunately, there were almost no words I didn’t understand…

Still, I’m definitely not getting any more of this series.

I picked this up at the same place. Looks intriguing, right?

And this artwork certainly looks promising…

But it’s pretty amateurish, really.

There’s three stories in this album, and they’re all adaptations of noir short stories, and none of them are, well, er… that intriguing.

I finished off this Rodolphe/Leo/Marchal series.

And the first four “episodes” are good. It’s a mystery set in Écosse, and there’s time travellers and mysterious objects and stuff. Fun!

But the final album is just so disappointing — we get the solution, and it’s just not that interesting.

Marchal’s artwork is attractive, though.

I’ve been falling behind on my Spirous, so I’ve been making an effort to get à jour.

This batch is pretty good — there’s one special issue about the football world cup thing, and special issues are always funnier.

No exception here.

One of the other issues is a double sized summer special, and it’s pretty great.

Especially Les cavaliers de l’apocadispe, which just has me laughing out loud.

Hey! This isn’t French!

No, it’s the latest Total THB volume by Paul Pope. As usual, it keeps schtumm on what it’s reprinting, but I think we first get THB 5 (done in 1995). While I’ve read the first four issues numerous times — they really are quite magical — by the fifth issue you can tell that Pope has lost interest in the series, so we get page after page of info dumping about various character’s backgrounds.

Extremely attractive artwork, though.

Then it’s five years later, and Pope is now trying to make a living doing comics for Japanese companies. So his storytelling style has changed completely, and while his inking is still attractive, his forms have lost a lot of the charm they had. His line just doesn’t sizzle like it used to.

And, of course, we get more tedious lectures about politics — taxation is theft, and democracy is a mug’s game bla bla bla.

And he puts himself into the book as an incredibly talented artist.

Well, why not?

It’s not that the second volume is bad, precisely, but several of the long fight sequences are pretty tedious. It’s fun to re-read these comics that I have zero recollection of having read in the first place. But, man, is it a disappointing volume.

And that’s it.