Wow, it’s been a month since I did one of these posts… Oh, right, I was busy with other things for a couple of weeks, and then I went to the US for a week, and the last week I’ve been on the couch, coughing and watching Murder She Wrote while waiting for the rona to pass.
So not much time for reading comics.
Anyway, these are the comics I’ve read the last month, and most of them I read more than three weeks ago, so let’s see whether I remember anything to say about any of them.
These are six minis from Kevin Huizenga that I’ve been slowly reading before bedtime.
These are process zines, mostly for his big collected book a few years ago, and they’re pretty interesting.
But I found the book(s) where he goes into detail about his thoughts about doing that book absolutely fascinating. So many things to think about, and so many things that he thinks are important for (comic) book design that I also think are important. As he notes here, many things that are great in serialised form fall flat in the collected edition. Or at least — aren’t quite as good, for some reason or other.
And the bit about blurbs is amusing: “What if you ask someone and then it turns out that they’re a clown or a monster and your book carries their name forever”. It’s especially amusing since I read this tweet a few days before I read this booklet:
I feel for Mike Kupperman:
Anyway, very nice minis, and it looks like you can still buy some of them from here.
They’ve sure been pumping out a lot of “special” versions of Spirou the last few years. This one adds another twist — it’s a new series of books that sort of pretends to be actual old Spirou books (note “Classique” on the cover) here. From what I’m able to google, it’s going to be a series where Spirou visits actual historical situations, and hilarity is supposed to ensue.
And the cover here is magnificent, isn’t it? It’s a pitch perfect 1959 Franquin design; very striking. And, yes, the name of the book is The Bay of Pigs.
Because Spirou and Fantasio go to Cuba during the missile crises, and are immediately imprisoned by Fidel Castro.
Yes.
And Fantasio somehow leads the rebels that are plotting with the CIA to do the invasion and stuff, and it’s just very odd. There’s few gags that work — above you see a good one, where we see the origin of the iconic Che Guevera t-shirt design.
If this had been filled with excellent gags, the skeeziness of the project wouldn’t have bothered me much, but it’s just… bad? Yeah, it’s bad. (The artwork’s fine, though.)
It’s not well-liked by people:
Une demi-étoile pour le dessin réussi des personnages de Spirou, Fantasio et Seccotine. Mais le dessin seulement. Tout le reste est à fuir : dessins et décors baclés ou inexistants, scénario inconsistant, dialogues nuls, gags affligeants, rien à sauver.
I.e., nice artwork, but everything else is bad. Quel dommage.
And speaking of bad French comics… I’m not a big fan of Tillieux at all — he’s pretty stodgy and… mean? Yeah, mean.
And this is definitely one of his lesser works. At the time he did this, he’d had a semi hit with his Felix series. Then he got an offer to do a new series with a new free newspaper, and he chose to do something pretty bizarre: He redrew a bunch of his Felix stories with “different” characters. And so Agne Signe is basically a rip-off and I wonder why the people who published that paper let him get away with it.
If these were brilliant stories, I could understand it, but they really aren’t. There are some bright spots, but it’s pretty tedious.
I understand why they’ve collected this historical curiosity (Tillieux is a big name), and I also understand why they didn’t spend much money on doing a proper restoration. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered buying this…
I’m learning French, and this had way too much 50s French slang to be optimal for me, but I managed to make it through (with the help of the Google Translate app). (Speaking of French, the main problem isn’t when there’s words I don’t understand at all, but instead constructions that have only familiar words that don’t seem to mean anything in the order they appear in. Like “je ne vous en veux pas trop” which is impossible to guess at what should mean, but means something like “I don’t blame you too much”? When I encounter phrases like that, it feels like I’m having a stroke and just don’t understand anything…)
And, yes, I’ve taken a subscription to the Spirou magazine! So once a week I get homework in the post. I mean a fun magazine.
And it is fun! I’m surprised at how many good series are in here — it’s a great motivating factor to sitting down a reading this.
A great variety of series, too — although most are aimed at ages 13 and down, which is totally my age range.
But they’re also serialising things like Jerome K. Jerome Bloche, which is a bit older. And they’re doing it in a way I didn’t know they were using: The album where this is from was published the same week this issue was on the stands. So the readers could either choose to wait five/six weeks (I think) to get the complete story, or run out and buy the album and read it immediately. I think that sounds like a pretty cool strategy…
It’s not just serialisations — we also get random shorter things, like this five page Spirou story.
And you know how in US fandom these days, they’ll grasp at any “IP” to exploit. Like, if there’s a trash can shown in a three second clip in Star Wars: A New Hope, they’ll be making an eight hour TV series about that trash can’s origin, family and drama. Drain it all! No detail too small!
That’s not really much the case with European comics… except in this case it really is: Back in the 60s, up until a certain point Spirou and Fantasio lived in separate houses. And then suddenly they were living together in the same house, with no explanation given.
This five page story explains that thing that I’m sure has been bothering French nerds for decades! It explains how they came to move in together and how they chose the new house, and it’s… it’s actually a pretty sweet story? It’s fun. Sometimes expanding on fannish minutiae like that can be fun, and this was a successful little exercise.
A decade ago, I bought all the Peanuts collections from Fantagraphics. And I slowly read them in chronological order, but then, about five years ago, I forgot all about it.
Since I’ve got a cold, I dug out this book and had a look…
… and I read it all today. It’s good stuff! It’s a perfect read for when you’re feeling poorly, I guess.
I did have the Peanuts pocketbooks as a teenager, so I’ve probably read most of this before…
… and certain sequences here were super familiar to me. With the older books, I usually have a kind of vague feeling of “yeees? I’ve read this, probably?”, but there were sequences here that were super traumatic, like the one where Marcie goes to obedience school. I remember just feeling so deeply for her back when I was a teenager, and I guess I still do.
Hey, I remembered something to say!