Hey, I read some comics this past week. Let’s have a peek…
These are the last three collections of war comics Hugo Pratt did for the Britishers in the early 60s.
The reproduction is variable, and some of the stories are pretty bad, but on the whole, reading these has been a very positive surprise.
I mean, it’s not surprising that the artwork is great, but the stories are pretty unusual as war stories go. These are 64 pages long, so they’re all graphic novels, of course.
The above has an unusual O. Henry twist at the end, too, but most of the stories are very straightforward.
The only total miss here is something called Battler Britton, which was a continuing character, and the adventure he’s sent on here is totally lame. And you can see that Pratt is phoning it in, too.
This tank story didn’t do much for me, either — page after page of tanks shooting and being shot up. Pratt got to draw a lot of military equipment, that’s for sure. And I mean, he does that well, too.
I’ve read five, count em five, issues of Spirou, because I got behind while I was on vacation and then had covid.
The standout series is the above by Les Fabrices — Fabcaro and Fabrice Erre. It’s just hilarious? One gag after another.
The worst is the drek above.
There’s great variety, really, but except things like Jerome K Jerome Bloche there’s too much that’s kinda samey.
Hey, continuing with the anthologies, we have the latest issue of the Swedish anthology Galago. And it’s great!
It’s the best issue of Galago I’ve read — almost all the strips are bangers.
And it’s not just Swedish artists this time around — here’s a Norwegian…
… and here’s a Canadian.
I really enjoy the thicker format Galago switched to a couple issues back — perhaps it allows them to be more audacious because they have more pages to play with? This issue is a really compelling read, anyway.
And, yes, another anthology, and this time Finnish.
It’s good.
Brief, though.
I picked this up used in Paris this summer. Look how cheap! Five euros! I can totally finance another trip to Paris just by going to used comics stores!
(Isn’t that how money works? How dare you.)
I didn’t really have high hopes for this one… Le Tendre has done a lot of stuff over the years, and they’re not all er good.
But this one is! It’s not a complicated story, but it’s really well done.
Yes, I read a bunch of super-hero (and adjacent) comics, too. Haven’t done that in a few months, so it was a nice little stack.
Ryan North has gotten a lot of praise for his stint on Fantastic Four (I’m not sure the artist has), and sure, having whatsisface falling in love with an alien that looks like that is fun.
But… super-hero wise, I’m just kinda frustrated by North’s constant ramping up of everything. Sure, now Sue can cover the entirety of the planet with her force shield, and Reed can stretch to cover blocks, and whatsisface can create dopplegangers made out of fire, and Ben can… OK, Ben hasn’t ramped up.
I mean, it’s fun, but where do you go from here?
Black Cloak is good.
Fantagraphics is now working backwards from 1950 back to Barks’ earliest Duck work, and we’re now back to 1945. Which means that we just have two more volumes to go. *sniffle*
This is a collection of mostly ten and eight page stories, and they’re so dense. So many gags and so many ideas. It’s a bit exhausting to read this collection, but it’s so good.
And it has the only Barks’ only story that follows directly from the preceding story — the nephews get a reward for capturing a crook, and the next story they have the money! It cannot be!
Anyway, that was my week in comics.