Last Week’s Comics Tonight

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

This is the second biiig collection of Michel Fiffe’s Copra — this one is over 400 pages long.

And this one has a lot of issues I can’t remember reading — distribution of the original self-published Copra was always pretty spotty, so I think I’ve got about half of them?

So it was great finally reading these issues, and also seeing how it ties together with the ones I have read.

I just love Fiffe’s artwork, and his storytelling is incredible — often on the verge of incomprehensibility, but always understandable anyway. He really makes you invest in the reading, and it’s always worth it. So entertaining.

Please please please don’t take years for the next volume, because I’ll have forgotten everything again by then.

I saw people being really excited about this R. Crumb collection (edited by Dan Nadel) on the intertubes, but I never got around to reading it until last week. And it’s certainly an attractive package physically — thick, matte paper and well-printed (for the most part).

And… I have to say that I’m disappointed. I mean, I really like R. Crumb’s comics, and I’ve read everything in this volume before — all the pieces here are solid pieces.

But it’s almost like Nadel is going for “see? Crumb can be respectable? see? see!? Comics aren’t just for kids any more! Biff! Bang! Pow!” or however those magazine articles pleading for comics respectability used to go…

So the collection is full of biographies of blues musicians, the Krafft-Ebing adaptation, autobio, and all of that literary stuff, and very little of the whimsical or nonsensical stuff Crumb does so well. And it’s presented chronologically, which means that you get even less variety.

As a counter example — Carload O’Comics is an old collection of Crumb’s less famous material, and it’s a great read because it’s sequenced so well.

Even the sex fantasy here is one where Crumb moans a lot.

So, I dunno. It’s just not a very good read, which is absurd, considering how great the material in here is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJKCUPuat-U

But it did make me listen to O Death by Charley Patton and Bertha Lee, so it’s not all bad. Man, that’s a great song…

I got caught up with the weekly Spirou shipments again…

… but it’s not a particularly exciting pair of comics. The above was pretty funny…

… and this one is classic, but other than that, I think Spirou is in the doldrums at the moment.

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Savard before — I found this in a used book shop.

But this is exactly my kind of thing — a ligne claire mystery with magnificently drawn interiors and exteriors.

And scenery.

And wildlife! The only thing Savard doesn’t draw well is people.

Quite entertaining, anyway.

I’m not familiar with Roger Brunel either: “Five parts pastiche, one part porn”. I like that they’re saying “porn” and not “erotic comics” or something as wishy-washy as that.

I picked this one up used, too, and it’s really really been read to bits — all the pages have come loose.

This is a collection of one to three page porny parodies of famous French(ey) comics, it’s amazing how well Brunel manages to ape all these different artists.

The porn part isn’t extremely explicit — much of the humour above, for instance, comes from Blake & Mortimer existing in a world without women, which is Trenchant Critique.

I found it to be very funny, although my French just isn’t up to decoding all the single entendres, the double entendres and possibly the triple entendres — most everything is written in a wink wink tone, where things refer to sexual slang all of the time. Which is something Duolingo just hasn’t covered in depth, so I’m er out of my depth here. Google Translate isn’t very helpful with this stuff, either.

So I think I got about one joke in ten, but I still found it to be funny. Tee hee. I should probably read it again when I’m older and see how many jokes I get then… Very advanced humour I’m sure: “Syphiline and Gonophylle”. (Sibylline and Chlorophylle.)

Two new issues of the long-running Swedish Galago comics anthology.

It’s very varied, but this one by Johan Wanloo was very funny — I’ve gotta be on the lookout for more comics from him.

But there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

And not just Swedish stuff — at least I don’t think that Teddy Goldenberg is Swedish?

Lots of good stuff.

Finally, the latest Carl Barks collection from Fantagraphics.

This is from 1963ish. That’s not prime Barks years, but that’s got a positive side, too — it has stories that haven’t been reprinted to death over the years. For instance, I couldn’t remember the above story at all.

But there’s also some extremely familiar ones.

Classics, really — and this edition is good-looking. A very entertaining way to spend some time.

And it’s fun seeing Barks getting all hip and stuff.

And that’s that.