Random Thoughts

It’s another lovely day, so it’s time to read some comics. Accompanied by music from… let’s say 1974.

David Bowie: Diamond Dogs

11:29: Ambiguous Blu by Noah Schiatti (Fieldmouse Press)

I got this from here.

I really like the artwork here…

And the storytelling is original and compelling. It’s great! But too short!

11:38: Kutikuti: Roiju (Living the Line)

Ah, this is that Finnish anthology…

This anthology has a very unified tone…

And there’s a couple compelling pieces.

(Like the above.) But it’s mostly just kinda vague? It’s strange.

Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

11:53: Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business by Arvind Ethan Davis, Ilias Kyriazis, Chris Peter (Pantheon Books)

I’d normally not buy something that’s called “Raymond Chandler’s “. I mean, not because I have anything against Chandler in particular; it’s just that comics adaptations of hard-boiled crime stuff usually sucks. (Except when Tardi does it.) But this is published by Pantheon, and they sometimes manage to publish good stuff.

Oh dea. The artwork is unattractive, and it seems like this is one of those adaptations where they’re afraid to cut too much of the deathless prose.

And it’s just bad! I mean, storytelling wise. How is the eye even supposed to move across these pages? I think I see what the artist is going for, but it’s not successful.

OK, I’m ditching this after 12 pages.

Various: This Is Reggae Music

12:06: Murderburg by Carol Lay (Fantagraphics)

Yay! Carol Lay!

Oh, I guess she’s drawing on a tablet (or something) now… it gives the artwork a certain stark quality.

This book is a collection of shorter pieces — 30 to 60 pages — and they’re kinda oddly structured. That is, there doesn’t really seem to be much structure?

The pacing is choppy and strange, and I don’t think the jokes are all that funny? The first story seemed like it was on an Addams Family tip (I think; I’ve never actually watched that), and then I wondered whether it was going to be more Murder Family (i.e., Evan Dorkin), but not really. It seems like a mishmash of all things (including The Sopranos, I guess), and it doesn’t really land.

I stopped reading after 110 pages.

Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1)

12:45: Cuba 42 by Ottavio de Angelis/Anna Brandoli (Vertige graphic)

I love Brandoli’s artwork. It’s so European — somewhere halfway between Tardi and Hugo Pratt.

I’m not familiar with the writer de Angelis — but this is a really entertaining and classic story of spies, paranoia and love in Cuba. It’s very noir and extremely cynical, and it makes relentless fun of a Hemingway-like dumb-ass writer character. Lots of fun, and quite exciting.

Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (2)

13:48: The Ardent by Carl Antonowicz (Fieldmouse Press)

This is a strange one. It’s about a monk that goes on a trip…

… and he meets three people that tell him their stories.

Which is, I guess, pretty classic, but it doesn’t really cohere in any way. Perhaps is makes more sense if you’re into religion or anti-religion or something.

14:17: Gaza In My Phone by Mazen Kerbaj (O/R Books)

Well, this is a tough read.

But very effective.

And heartbreaking.

Kraftwerk: Autobahn

14:32: Beat It, Rufus by Noah van Sciver (Fantagraphics)

As a stark change from Van Sciver’s previous hit comic Fante Bukowski, which was about a loser asshole poet, this one is about a loser asshole musician.

Fante Bukowski seemed pretty well-observed — it felt like Van Sciver had used himself for a lot of the stuff he was making fun of — this one feels way more generic. You know — rock musician on a trip, so there’s all the usual stuff.

But there’s some pretty good jokes in here. I mean, I didn’t actually laugh, but the right-hand page made me go “yes, that’s a joke you could have used by a stand-up comic”. (Sorry for using hate speech here.)

15:13: Crucial Times and Thought as a Crime by Kevin Barry (Desert Island)

I like this artwork.

Very acid-ey. And it’s fun, too.

Richard and Linda Thompson: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight

15:25: World Heist by Linnea Sterte (Peow2)

As usual with Peow(2), the physical book is very handsome (detached spine and all of that jazz).

Sterte’s artwork is to gorgeous. It’s like… er… an updated version of Moebius? With Japanese touches? And, like, Brandon Grahamesque stuff with the backgrounds? Whatever the influences are, it’s stunning.

I mean, just look at it!

The story is pretty slight, but it’s pretty great anyway.

15:38: Santos Sisters by Greg & Fake (American Nature Comics Group)

This is very amusing, as usual. And the artwork is kinda magical.

The stories are perhaps… less mysterious than they used to be? Still, very entertaining.

Bobbi Humphrey: Blacks and Blues

15:51: Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards by Jim Ottoviani & Big Time Attic (GT Labs)

The artwork by Zander & Kevin Cannon & Shad Petosky is handsome — and they do their best to give each character distinctive whiskers so you can tell them apart.

It’s mostly men, so the whiskers really help! But oh man, there’s so many characters here that it’s just hard to keep them all straight.

This book is the (true) story of two early palaeontologists who where bitter rivals, and it’s told in a way that absolutely no major publisher would have gone for. There’s virtually no captions, and there’s no characters infodumping at each other like “as you know, Robert, we’ve found a lot of fossilised dinosaur skeleton bits here, and those two guys over there are mad at each other” — instead it’s all told en passant. I.e., it’s a very “modern” (i.e. late 80s) comic book where you have to pay attention.

Which means that there’s little chance of a breakthrough to a mainstream audience, because most of them wouldn’t be able to follow what’s going on at all.

But… is it a good comic? Hm. Well, I liked it, but I have to admit that I found parts of it less than thrilling. I guess I’m just not that interested, really? But it’s well made, certainly. I’m curious what others made of it…

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Betty Davis: They Say I’m Different

17:10: Hanging On By A Thread by Noémie (Black Panel Press)

This looks very nice… Drawn with coloured pencils, perhaps?

Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom

So, this is about living in Lebanon and getting cancer. But mostly about getting cancer.

It’s quite interesting, but it feels quite unbalanced. More than half of the book is about the aftermath (after the chemo had cured her), and those bits feel disjointed and mostly directionless. I mean, it all looks good, and it’s not bad or anything, but it’s like the book doesn’t know how to finish, so it just continues and continues…

18:05: The End

But I know when to stop! That’s enough comics for today, because now I have to make dinner.

Hey! I’ve gotta read some comics. And for music today: 1979.

Talking Heads: Fear Of Music

12:39: Night Drive by Richard Sala (Fantagraphics)

This is a book I’ve wanted to read for years, but it’s been out of print, and:

And that’s kinda a lot of money, isn’t it? ISN”T IT?!

But finally Fantagraphics had reprinted it — and this is an expanded edition, I think, because the original one was apparently 28 pages long:

I must say that I find it really strange that works like this — from a popular artist like Sala — remains unobtainable for decades on end…

Oh, is that what he looked like? I imagined… with a hat, or something.

There’s an abundance of text pieces, and it seems like Sala wasn’t proud of this period. Which might explain why it was never reprinted before. But man… it’s just awesome.

The artwork is so shockingly good that it almost gets in the way of actually reading these pages, but on the other hand, the stories are so vague that it kind of all compounds into an even more gripping reading experience.

If I had this book when I was a teenager, it would have been my favourite comic book. It’s amazing.

13:06: Neutre by Yuichi Yokoyama (Éditions matière)

I bought this from 50 Watts Books…

Hey, nice.

It’s a collection of paintings and drawings.

Some seem to hint at a narrative, but if there is one, it’s pretty vague.

But we do get a couple of more comicsey pieces — and silent ones! Which is unusual for Yokoyama — his books are usually very, very loud.

It’s a very nice book.

David Bowie: Lodger

13:14: Š! #55 (Kuš)

I got this from here.

This is not a typical issue of this great anthology — it’s for a Comics Sans Frontières conference, and I guess about a third of the pages are text pages. (Which I didn’t read! Sorry!)

There’s a few good comics in here…

… but most of them are just kinda painfully mainstream. (There’s guest editors.)

And a few do the usual embarrassing special pleading for why comics are awesome that you see in these things.

With computer lettering! *gasp* *choke*

Yes, I do indeed know that about gravitational fields. I’ve been to high school, even though it’s been a while.

Japan: Quiet Life

13:31: Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books)

This starts off in a pretty confusing way. At first it seems like a straight-up autobio…

But then it seems more like a satire based on reactions to Bechdel’s Fun Home. I had to google whether it actually had been adapted into a TV series:

Nope, but there’s a movie in production.

The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys (1)

Instead the book turns out to be a continuation of Dykes To Watch Out For, with Bechdel herself standing in for the Mo character (who was a standin for Bechdel in the first place). Confusing? Yes!

But I really enjoyed this book. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and while the parts that make fun of Hollywood aren’t the most original bits in the world, they’re amusing enough.

It’s funny and it’s touching, and it’s fun getting to spend more time with these characters that I’ve been reading since the mid 80s. And Bechdel’s artwork and storytelling chops are better than ever.

Joni Mitchell: Mingus

15:42: Ex Cop edited by Leo Quievreux (Le dernier cri)

This is a huge screenprinted book I picked up in Paris last week.

And there’s smaller pages between the larger pages.

Pretty neat, eh?

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures

15:55: D’Artagnan’s Horse by Tomohiro Tsugawa (Glacier Bay Books)

This is a collection of dream-based comics…

… but they aren’t very convincing as dreams go. Except in that it’s seldom entertaining to be told other people’s dreams.

I bailed after reading half the book.

16:10: Couverture Carnet

I don’t know who this little book is by…

Can it be Bruno Richard?

I mean, it looks absolutely awesome.

Fantastic.

Marianne Faithfull: Broken English

16:14: Preparing to Bite by Keiler Roberts (Drawn & Quarterly)

This book was apparently done over a long time period.

As usual with Roberts, it’s one-page vignettes or situations — but I think she used to drop in some longer things before? Here it’s just that.

It’s good stuff. I like it. I hope there won’t be that many years before the next book.

16:52: Les aventures de la fin de l’épisode by Lewis Trondheim & Frank Le Gall (L’association)

This is a fun little booklet…

It’s amusing throughout, and the gag on the final page (no spoilers here!) made me lol out loud.

17:02: Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean by Filippi/Camboni (Fantagraphics)

Er… I don’t know why, but immediately when looking at these pages, I find them pretty offputting. It’s just something about the panel placement or something?

This is a steampunk Mickey Mouse story, and why not? But I just found this intensely uninteresting, and I ditched it after a dozen pages.

Joe Jackson: I’m The Man

17:10: Checked Out by Katie Fricas (Drawn & Quarterly)

This immediately looks very attractive to me. The free-flowing line…

… but also the feeling for colour. The pages are very inviting.

But I think the storytelling is a bit choppy? It sometimes flows very well, but then it sort of stumbles before picking up again. It’s a bit frustrating to read.

Supertramp: Breakfast in America

But I mean, I like it. It’s funny and interesting.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Rust Never Sleeps

18:08: Soften the Blow by Bread Tarleton (Fieldmouse Press)

The artwork looks very tablet-ey…

The storytelling is really interesting — there’s a lot of original stuff going on on the pages.

But the book feels oddly weightless (despite being really heavy). It’s like the protagonist doesn’t really do anything other than have psychodrama? Like, no interests or anything?

18:46: The End

OK, I think I’m calling it a day, even thought it’s early. I should get some stuff done…

The magazines are still trickling into the search engine for magazines about comics, but I guess it’s mostly done now. I mean, it’s by no means complete — it has about 10% of the Comics Buyer’s Guide issues, for instance — but I guess all of the most important magazines are basically there.

The search engine has only magazines about comics, and not comics magazines themselves. But there are some magazines that are 90% comics, but then has some text features that might be interesting in the context. The one that comes immediately to mind is Heavy Metal, since it was running for so long, so there’s just a lot of issues. (And besides, I’d already downloaded it from the torrents.)

But I don’t want to have actual comics on the site, because that’d be way too copyright violationey (that’s a word) for little gain.

So I pondered using an LLM to categorise pages into comics pages/non comics pages, and then went “eh, nope”. But a pretty solid rule of thumb is that text pages have, like, more text than comics pages, so what about just filtering out all pages that have less text than, say, 2K?

The results are here — I guess it’s about 8 pages per issue that made the cut?

It works!

See?

I mean, it’s a fairly crude way to segment — I’m sure there’s some Byron Preiss-packaged comics pages that were included (heh heh), and some pages that had a huge illustration with a text box under saying “this art sucks” that were excluded, but whatchagonnado?

Hm… are there any other long-running magazines like this? I mean, that are mostly comics, but also have some interviews/reviews/etc?

I was in Paris last week, so I went comics shopping again. I mean, there’s a lot of nice comics shops in Paris, of course, but I was looking for shops that had a selection outside the normal Delcourt/Dargaud/etc mainstream stuff.

So I visited Un regard moderne, and it’s very nice indeed.

I guess the selection is, like, one quarter comics and the rest are books (with a lot of art books).

It’s cool! Highly recommended.

So what did I get?

Lots of stuff!

Some very small-press stuff…

Some very elaborate (and screen-printed stuff).

More alternative things…

Joost Swarte!

A screen-printed huge magazine from Le dernier cri.

With four different booklets stapled inside.

Fab!

And just a lot of interesting-looking stuff I’m looking forward to reading.

I went back to Aaapoum Bapoum, which is a huge store, and yet again I only jogged through quickly, because there was so much stuff I wanted to buy, but I’m limited to what I’m able to carry up the stairs here…

See?

Lots and lots.

Like this book by Muñoz and Sampayo — Sophie — that I didn’t know existed.

Look! It’s awesome!

And this one, drawn by Anna Brandoli.

It looks fantastic! And both of these were ten euros or less! *gasp* *swoon* *faint*

Actually, this trip to Aaapoum Bapoum reminded me of a recurring dream I’ve had since I was a teenager: I discover a new comics shop, and I go in and I find new books by Hergé, Pratt or Tardi, and I’m like frantic; I’ve got to read them all! Muñoz/Sampaya or Brandoli is kinda like that — mais je rêve!

This edition collects all the Blotch stuff — I’ve read the first half of this before, but not in French, so there.

And this looks fun…

And gotta buy Gipi.

Anyway, good shop.

I was in the neighbourhood, so I stopped in at the extremely confusing Album BD shop. I mean, it’s confusing since it appears to say “MomieBD” on the front (and does that mean “mummy”?) and not AlbumBD.

And if you look up the locations on the web site, you see that it’s… er… OK! The locations are where the puffins are? Sure, that makes sense for AlbumBD/MomieBD… a puffin… Anyway, three locations near each other.

And the shops are perfectly nice, but the selection is very, very mainstream, from what I could see.

Finally, I went to Bulles-en-vrac (which I guess means “bubbles whole sale” or “self picking” (like with candy) (“bubbles” as in “speech bubbles”), and it was also nice.

Mostly mainstream things, but they had this shelf of more oddball things.

I got a little stack.

I haven’t seen one by Yuichi Yokoyama before.

Looks cool.

And the storytelling in this looks very interesting…

But most importantly: Fuck ze tourists.

Looks like some kind of masterpiece!

Anyway, that’s Paris for you.

I’m still on the lookout for shops that have more oddball comics — these things are really hard to google. Anybody know of a shop in Paris with a big selection of Le dernier cri, for instance? And Bries? And so on.