TBE2024: Swords, Spacemen & Superspies

Swords, Spacemen & Superspies (2024) by James Kochalka

I’ve been a fan of Kochalka since the 90s, but I’ve kind of lost track of him? That is, I stumble over his books and buy them and like them, but that’s it. Perhaps it’s because he started doing mostly books for children — I’m usually not very enthused by the books First Second publishes, and I think Kochalka’s been over there a few years?

I remember fondly Kochalka’s valiant crusade against craft in the letters pages of The Comics Journal. For instance, Kochalka writes in The Comics Journal #194, page #7:

Craft is a rope tying us to
mediocrity of expression! We’re all too timid to
untie it! “But we’ve worked so hard to learn
how to draw, how to write. We can’t give that
up. If we untie the rope we’ll just float off into
space, we whine.
I’d rather fucking choke and die in the
vacuum of space than anemically craft a series
Of smarty pants sequential pictures and pat
myself on the back for my skillful accomplish-
ment.
The joy Of comics is their stupidity, their
simplicity. The way they can cut right to your
soul so easily. Just a simple string Of symbols
and pictures, how can they do that? Magic! It’s
magic, pure and simple, not craft. I refuse to
accept that the magic Of comics is crafted. It
comes out of nowhere, I know it.

Now that’s moving.

Anyway, we’re talking about Kochalka’s newest release, from Black Eye — and it’s the last post in this blog series, because we’re now reached 2024.

This is three books in a box — and TSK TSK, bad glue! Bad glue!

But there’s three nice books inside — two of them are squarebound and one is a pamphlet.

Let’s look at Duck Fighter first.

We get a brief framing sequence…

… and then we’re off into a James Bond-ish adventure, only funnier. I love the offhand attitude of Kochalka’s characters. “Pfft.”

Kochalka’s artwork usually looks really organic and free — this looks more, well, streamlined than usual? I’m guessing it was drawn on a tablet or something?

But it’s funny. Kochalka takes an absurd premise and runs with it.

I’m not quite sure what the intended audience is for this — I could totally see kids finding this hilarious…

… but it’s also more intense than you’d expect a book for children to be.

While any given scene in this book seems like it’s been improvised, the book does have a sort of traditional story arc (even if it undermines itself and is, well, absurd). It’s fun.

The second book is Elf Cat Is Famous. The Elfboy character used to be Kochalka’s standin in books, but I’m not sure whether Elf Cat works that way.

The artwork in this book seems to have gotten more attention than in the previous book. It’s really attractive.

And cute. Soooo cute.

Hey! I totally identify with the Elf Dog character!

Elf Cat Is Famous is mostly about poking fun at today’s influencers, I guess, which makes it unusually topical for Kochalka.

(Heh heh, I just noticed that Emacs’ spellchecker doesn’t recognise the word “influencers”. Cool.)

I love those ferns!

Anyway, the second book feels even more improvised than the first book. It’s perhaps not as funny (even though it’s plenty funny), but it has real nerve. It’s got a real mood going on. It really reminds me of classic Kochalka.

The third book is apparently called Book Moon Prototype, and is pretty short. So I wonder whether this is a pitch for a longer book, perhaps?

Because it’s really high concept. It’s all about The Magic Of Reading, but we get this reading-positive narration while we watch some robots on a moon do a kick-ass fight. So you could see this being pitched as something to encourage kids to read… although I have no idea how you’d expand this to a 150 page book.

You can buy this box from Black Eye.

The book was crowdfunded, and as is common with those books, I can’t find anybody doing any actual reviews of the book? It’s a shame — these are solid books that should get more attention.

But that’s it for this blog series! I’m done! So now I’m packing up my super high tech advanced Comics Snapping Studio (i.e., the end of my couch), so no more almost-Brat Summer-coloured posts from me.

Oh, wait, I have to do a summing-up post. Coming up…

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.