Random Thoughts

Here’s some comics (and stuff) I’ve read over the past few weeks. Perhaps a month?

Galago (the Swedish comics magazine) is quarterly now, so the issues are thick and nice.

I was especially impressed by this piece by My Palm.

It’s not all comics!

It’s not very political, but there’s a couple things about Gaza in the “insanity”-themed issue.

This story was also impressive. Love the artwork.

The big one this time around: Rusty Brown! But here’s the thing: I’m a rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth Chris Ware fan, and I didn’t know this book existed. And it was published in 2019! The only reason I finally bought it was that it was mentioned in the “sketchbook” thing he published a few months ago, and my heart went BONK! “WHAT?! I MISSED IT!?”

It seems so unlikely… I mean, I was big enough of a fan that I created a web site back in the 90s dedicated to Ware’s work, and here I’m six years late buying one of his major books.

I don’t know what happened. Probably I ordered it from Mile High Comics, and they dropped the order — they do that a lot. But me not being reminded like half a year later — I think that has to mean that the book just didn’t make much of a splash. I mean, the media was talking about Jimmy Corrigan constantly after that was released, but that can’t have happened with this one.

OK, Rusty Brown had a weird publication history. The first Rusty & Chalky strips were published in the 90s (I think), and had those characters as adult. Rusty was the most pathetic nerdy collector type ever, and was a houseguest at Chalky’s house. There were quite a few of these, and they seemed downright sadistic at times, because Rusty was just so horrible.

Then things flipped around, and we got Rusty and Chalky as children, and it was never clear to me whether they were even supposed to be the same characters or whether Ware had just decided to reuse their names. This collection starts with that later material…

… and then we just get the rest of the stuff that was in Acme Novelty Library over the last two and a half decades. All the characters are connected — they’re all students or teachers at the same school. But we’re this is basically a collection of separate novellas (I guess you could call them), and they were really much more successful in the separate editions they were already published in than collected, because they don’t really cohere that well.

Instead they just exhaust the reader, especially the way Ware likes to drop in all these teensy panels with teensy lettering. I’m fine with an artist that makes the reader work a bit at it, but there has to be some kind of reward for doing so, and there really isn’t: This material just isn’t that interesting. Especially the Lint section is just snoozeville.

The only part that I found to be successful was the one that was made explicitly for this book, and new to me. It’s the most intricately plotted book, and skips back and forth in time a lot, sort of letting the reader into “the mystery” more and more in a very satisfying way. Of course, when we get the final reveal, it’s “oh, again?” because Ware kinda did the same thing in Jimmy Corrigan (and there’s even a Jimmy Corrigan crossover! collectors’ item #1 buy em all sure to appreciate in value).

So after reading the book, I think I’m probably right in my supposition that it didn’t make much of a splash. I mean, I think it’s a pretty good, but it’s not very satisfying as a book. Especially since it’s apparently the first in a series? Or something? It ends with a spread saying “INTERMISSION”, so there’s probably at least one more book? The cover doesn’t even hint at that, and perhaps that’s another reason why it may not be Era Defining or whatever.

Let’s see… I want to google and see what people thought of it. Heh:

All of which is to say, it is to Ware’s great misfortune as an artist that his work found such ready success outside the medium’s traditional haunts. Because as good as he is – and he is good – the praise heaped upon his work by the literary establishment only serves to estrange him from his natural constituency.

Mere Reaction: Why Chris Ware’s “Rusty Brown” Fails:

So, what is Chris Ware’s primary shtick in the world of comics? It’s a fairly predictable one, given how things have played out in other mediums: ransacking the excesses of Modernist and Postmodernist works for every creative trick in the book, while ill-applying it to banal ‘realism’ which usually centres on the boring melodramas of lonely losers.

[…]

Only, having slogged through this comic, I can make a few modest recommendations. For those who have no stake in the medium, don’t waste your time on Chris Ware. The faster he’s forgotten, the better. For those budding comic artists, maybe pick up Building Stories or Jimmy Corrigan to use as a whetstone for sharper, icier blades, and start shredding.

Harsh!

Man, these reviews as way harder on the book than even I imagined:

There’s nothing wrong with writing a book about the futility of life—just ask whoever wrote Ecclesiastes—but Ware has gone to this well so many times that the thumb he’s placed on the scale is clearly visible. Rusty Brown has two kinds of stories: Either a character is punished by the world because he deserves it, or he’s punished by the world even though he doesn’t. The book’s 356 pages contain more upskirts of underage girls (two) than complex human characters (maybe one) because actual people would revolt at being treated and depicted in such a fashion. The view of humanity in the book is dime-store Freudianism: Scratch a character and you’ll find their primal wound, which then overdetermines their behavior.

[…]

The pages are at times deliberately difficult to read, filled with tiny panels, scrambled chronologies, cramped handwriting. But the reward for doing that work is always the same: Ware tries to make you feel bad. After too much of this, a kind of armor accretes, until nothing the book does can affect you. More than anything else, it leaves you feeling tired.

This one is partially positive:

While Ware struggles to achieve a cumulative dramatic effect, the variety of texture and perspective contributes to a single emotional tone, which might be characterised as zany pathos

It’s a 4.29 on Goodreads, though. It’s #8 on the combined “best of” lists of 2019, which is shockingly low…

This is a long-running French series, and it’s kinda unique in that it got much, much better once the original artists stopped doing in.

So the Lapiere/Sikorsky one is great!

While the Will/Tillieux one is just horrible.

I didn’t actually read much of Casemate this month either, because reading French is still a lot of work.

But I did like these interviews that show the pages they’re talking about a lot.

It’s edumacational.

And speaking of edumacational, this book “about” Lovelace & Babbage and Sydney Padua is something else.

It’s a kind of fantasy about their lives, but also keeps the chatter about actual history going throughout — about a quarter to one third of each page are “footnotes”.

But then also broken up sometimes in various ways.

I think this book would be perfect for a certain kind of nerdy teenager, but I got kinda bored with it after a while. Sorry! It’s me, not the book.

Just two issues of Spirou?

I really loved this retro Trondheim/Olivier Schwartz short — very sweet.

Unfortunately, much of the material just doesn’t interest me (many of the gag pages) or actively repulse me (like Frnck).

Yay! Always fun to read Carrie McNinch.

We’re four years behind the times, though…

Still fun to read.

I thought this was a comic book.

It’s not, it’s really a Q&A like it says on the cover. I like Tomine’s comics just fine, but I’m not really interested enough to read this. I did read some of the sections — like this one on drawing materials I found interesting.

And the one on process for New Yorker covers.

And it’s got a very good picture on the back cover.

I checked whether there were any further French comics anthologies being published these days, and Pif Gadget is the only other survivor. But just barely — it’s published quarterly.

And of all the classic French/Belgian anthologies (Spirou, Tintin, Pilote, etc) I guess Pif Gadget/Vaillant was the least famous? In any case, this issue, at least, is just horrible. There’s one long Rahan story (I read Rahan as a child; it’s a Tarzan-but-stone-age rip off)…

… and then all the rest are just one-pagers, all of which are gags, and most of them refer to Rahan. So it’s a very themed issue, and probably geared towards… I don’t know… nine year olds? Or seventy nine year olds? It’s hard to tell.

In any case, it’s all kinda naff. Fortunately I just have a one year subscription, so I guess it won’t be too painful.

And that’s it, I guess.