So busy busy, but finally I have a day to spend reading comics. (Except I may have to take a nap in the middle.)
And… since it’s a sleepy kind of day, I think I’ll go with music from the late 70s only.
Let’s get readin’.
| Neil Young: Time Fades Away with Where the Buffalo Roam |
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06:59: Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine by Nick Francis Potter (Driftwood Press)
Not many people know that Goethe was a massive Matt Fraction fan.
This is very nice. It’s a bewildering approaches to comics, from the somewhat abstract…
… to the more concrete.
There’s like a new comics language being invented in each piece. It’s really lovely.
07:21: On Vinyl by Lorenz Peter (Conundrum Press)
This starts off as an apparently straight-forward autobio comic about running a second hand record shop.
There’s some exaggerations for comedic effect, but well within the genre. Then it develops into a bigger epic with a quest for a lost record collection, and flights into fancy, and it’s fun and charming.
However, it seems like towards the end, the author just lost interest in the work, and the storylines end with a thud. The problem isn’t that it’s a downer, but that it just feels so… unsatisfying?
But the first four fifths of the book are plenty entertaining.
| Richard and Linda Thompson: Hokey Pokey |
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08:11: Cowlick #1 edited by Floyd Tangeman (Deadcrow)
Another solid anthology from Tangeman… it’s the usual mix of strange and wonderful nouveau underground comics.
It’s cool.
| Don Cherry: Brown Rice |
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08:22: Martin Peters by Patrick Allaby (Conundrum Press)
This is downright bizarre. The book presents itself as being about this guy Peters’ teenage years — and Peters is just some guy Allaby has met at some diabetics’ meetings; not a friend, really. So the question is: Why is Allaby interested in telling us about Peters, and why should we be interested in reading about Peters?
We even get all the back and forth between Peters and Allaby — which reminds me quite a bit of Chester Brown’s Helder/Showing Helder story.
But it is a fascinating book. It has a certain lack of affect that makes it seem like it’s written by some alien entity. It’s good.
And I have no idea whether anything in the book is true, or whether it’s just a very meta work of fiction. I was certainly assuming the latter while reading it, but…
| Julie Tippetts: Sunset Glow |
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09:15: Mister Morgen by Igor Hofbauer (Conundrum Press)
This is graphically interesting, but somewhat derivative? The black/grey/red colour scheme is classic, of course, but it also just feels like a retread of 80s comics design?
Unfortunately, I read the text on the front cover flap — somebody was nattering on about this guy being the Charles Burns of the Balkans. Dude. That’s setting the expectations really high, and this book doesn’t even begin to deliver. Burns’ artwork is inhumanely meticulous while these drawings are mostly just kinda sloppy. But perhaps they meant the stories? The stories read like riffs on Richard Sala stories. Not that that’s bad, but it all feels so familiar.
Very disappointing.
| Steve Hackett: Voyage of the Acolyte |
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10:10: Nap Time
13:52: Mini Kuš #107-110 (Kuš)
Man that was a good nap… I dreamt I had to explain something about file indexing to Kristen Bell, for some reason. And then we guerrilla styled a house we didn’t own. It turns out that it’s hard to paint on wallpaper that’s not actually properly affixed to the wall.
This is also very dreamy.
As usual, the minis from Kuš are great… but this one is awesome. By Joana Mosi. She packs so much emotion into such a little undramatic story. It’s fantastic.
Very dreamy.
Very symbolic.
| Neil Young: Tonight’s the Night |
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14:12: Aniara by Knut Larsson (Kartago Förlag)
I think Aniara is a classic Swedish science fiction novel? I don’t think I’ve read it myself, but if I have, it’s so long ago that I don’t remember anything of the plot. And this adaptation seems to require you knowing what’s happening, because it reads like a series of illustrated highpoints (?) from the novel.
The artwork doesn’t really do much for me, either. All those bobble headed peope…
14:29: Take The Long Way Home by Jon Claytor (Conundrum Press)
I think I’m reaching the end of the pile of Conundrum books I bought the other week…
This is an autobio sketchbook-like road movie I mean comic book. And it’s absolutely riveting. It seems so straightforward and head-on, but subtle at the same time?
| Jeanne Lee: Conspiracy |
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I really enjoy the placid pacing and the different approaches to the artwork — sometimes more painterly, sometimes more scratchy.
Never listen to advice!
Anyway, a solid book and an enjoyable read.
| Supertramp: Crisis? What Crisis? |
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16:07: World War 3 Illustrated #52: Frontlines of Repair (AK Press)
Nice. Brand new issue of WW3.
This issue is mostly about Covid, but there’s also a bunch of other stuff.
And the George Floyd protests…
| Joni Mitchell: Hejira |
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All the familiar faces are here, but also lots and lots of new people, like Susan Simensky Bietila here.
Ooh! Ben Katchor!
Huh. Most of the contents here seem to deal with stuff from 2020, so it has an out-of-time quality (we’re so over Covid and Black Lives Matter now, right? right?), but here’s a thing about Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
Anyway, another solid issue, and incredibly cheap as usual. Get it from AK Press while it’s fresh.
| Alice Coltrane: Eternity |
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17:14: Invisible Parade by Takashi Horiguchi (Glacier Bay Books)
This is a collection of short, wistful pieces.
It’s definitely got the mood down, but it feels like quite a few of these stories don’t really go anywhere interesting? I mean, most of them are pleasantly absurd and take sf twists, it’s just not that gripping?
Might just be me.
I did enjoy flipping the book upside down several times during reading.
17:49: Conundrum Magazine #3 (Conundrum Press)
Hm… Oh, I thought this was a, like, comics anthology.
But it’s just a promo for Conundrum publications with excerpts from their books. OK, fine.
| The Rolling Stones: Black and Blue |
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17:55: A Different Sky by Samuel D. Benson
This looks like it’s going to be totally out there, what with the manic artwork and all.
But instead it’s a really straightforward supernatural adventure story. Like an episode of Buffy, or something. In a good way. It’s fun!
| Joyce: Vision Of Dawn |
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18:21: Hive: The Coronation by Miles MacDairmid
Again, this seems like it’s going to be totally weird and wild, but beyond the truly insane character designs, this is a very conventional story. I’d say the storytelling is assured? But… it’s more familiar than anything else. You could film this with normal actors, and it’d be a standard indie dramedy.
It’s mostly in the Young People Talking To Each Other genre, complete with assholes in bars and everything. And the thing is, it works? It’s a really enjoyable read — it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it does a shift into a totally different genre towards the end of the book — and since this is a “To Be Continued” kind of book, in the movie adaptation I’d say the first two thirds of this book comprise the first act of the movie. (Which is also pretty typical these days, come to think of it.)
MacDairmid includes a bookmark in the book — which is apparently the watercolours used as the basis for the colouring in the book! (Hm… those colours actually look better than what’s in the book — I assumed they were tweaked a lot in Photoshop before being printed.)
*thumbs up*
| Blondie: Blondie |
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19:43: Gruopvækkende fortællinger fra rabarbermørket by Christian Henry (Fahrenheit)
The printing here is very odd — is it supposed to look like this? Everything is super washed out: No actual blacks; it just goes from light grey to white. And the character design, while amusing, makes it difficult to tell what’s actually happening a lot of the time.
That said, this is hilarious. I LOL-ed out loud several times. The references are pretty dated, but so am I, so it all evens out.
There’s an escalating insanity to these stories that’s masterful.
| Various: This Is Reggae Music |
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20:32: Oboy Comics by Shaheen Beardsley (Freak Comics)
This, on the other hand, looks pretty traditional, but the storyline is pretty weird. At least at the start?
Then it sorta turns into a whiny guy book (of a super-hero variety), which isn’t my thing at all. It’s got all the “edgy” jokes you’d expect, and while some of the jokes work, it’s not very interesting.
| Joan Armatrading: Joan Armatrading |
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21:13: Nofret: Tutankhamon by Sussi Bech (Eudor)
I’m fading fast, but one more comic before sleep. This is the thirteenth and final album in the Nofret series, which I’ve been reading since the 80s, so I hope Bech manages to end the series well…
Bech switched from drawing with pen and ink (and paper) to Cintiq a couple years ago, and I think the artwork lost a lot of charm at the same time. Often the faces just look… off… But it’s a pretty handsome book, still.
| Devo: Satisfaction (I Can’t Get Me No) |
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As someone who barely remembers what went on in this series before, it starts off pretty confusing. But Bech squeezes in a lot of Egyptian history in these 70 pages, and we get the denouement to the Aton thing, where Nefertiti and her husband were deposed, the old gods were brought back and Tut was instated as the new figurehead. That doesn’t really leave a lot of space left for Nofret herself, and all she does here is basically running around and getting kidnapped several times.
It’s OK, I guess? And the ending is bitter sweet. It makes me want to go back and read the entire series; I remember the early albums, at least, had a certain jennesequa, and I haven’t read them for decades.
| Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel 1 |
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21:50: Sleep
And now I think I should get some real sleep. I’m totally exhausted after all these comics.