Last Week’s Comics Tonight

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past couple weeks.

I bought another one of these DC collections of 70s comics for nostalgic reasons — I vaguely remember reading some of these when I was, like, ten.

What I remember most is Jim Aparo’s artwork (who does all the art on all the issues) — it’s not hard to describe it, it’s basically “Neal Adams but with a bit less drama”. It’s super attractive.

These sort of team-up books are difficult to write, I bet — and this is a bi-monthly series with absolutely no continuity. And Bob Haney writes all the characters without any character, so what we get is plot, plot, plot. One issue after another with a brand new hokey plot — like the above where the commissioner Gordon is fired… and then Batman is also fired!? And he just quits?

OK, this may be the hokiest of the stories, but… it’s a lot.

And every issue is divided into three chapters for some reason or other, which makes things seem even more cramped, plot wise. It feels like a throwback to 50s/60s super-hero comics in that way.

(By the way, this reminds me of a joke from a friend when we were talking about the phenomena of “Batman shampoos”, as one does:

“Why on Earth haven’t anybody launched a “Conditioner Gordon” product?!” You’re welcome.)

Anyway, I worked my way through this book for three weeks, reading an issue now and then, and when I got halfway there, I decided that I’d read enough of these, so I ditched the book.)

It’s been some very normal weeks for Spirou.

One thing I had to skip here — the Smurfs. I just smurfin’ couldn’t smurf the smurfin’ meaning of any of the smurfs. I mean words.

But there’s good stuff, too.

This is one of those award bait comics by veteran Norwegian comics artist Flu Hartberg. (Who seems like a good guy — he’s heading up an anti-LLM task force or something. Which is nice.)

But the book is just a collection of the tritest things you can come up with for a “serious” “graphic novel” — it’s a coming of age story, where we follow the protagonist from his small town to the Big City. I mean, look at the artwork — limited palette to make it serious, and the extremely clear artwork and storytelling to appeal to a non-comics-reading audience.

The dialogue is just risibly bad.

Oh, and what does the protagonist do in the Big City? Yes, he goes to art school where the teachers are just into Pointless Awful Conceptual Art and hate comics/illustration.

The book feels extremely unnecessary.

Jesse Lonergan does something very different.

I mean, look at this! Striking, eh?

Unfortunately, despite it looking really cool, I couldn’t get into it. It just feels oddly put together — it starts off almost totally wordless, but then it seems like he loses confidence in the reader, and starts putting in more dialogue that Explains It All, and that’s pretty jarring.

And the entire thing is mostly fight scenes and Spiritual Important Things, and meh.

But the artwork and design sure is great.

Another old French(ey) album…

Jessica Blandy isn’t very present in this one — it’s mostly about these evil, evil, degenerate, evil, insane and evil characters that live in a swamp (and one of them drinks blood) that kidnap Blandy to marry her and stuff.

I did really enjoy the sheer hatred of Americans that shines through.

Unfortunately, I learned something, and that’s never good! I hate learning stuff! But that preacher up there is quoting Proverbes 2.16: “Mais à la fin elle est amère comme l’absinthe, Aiguë comme un glaive à deux tranchants.” And I went… “Bitter like absinthe? Sure, that’s bitter, but did they really have absinthe in the olden days? Isn’t it “bitter as gall” or something? But it turns out that the Hebrew word apparently means “wormwood”, which is the ingredient in absinthe, so the French translation is much closer than the English one…

Don’t you hate learning things, too? So now we’re even.

(I think it works that way.)