I read some comics over the past couple weeks, weakly.
I’ve decided to step down my Duolingo usage and instead spend that time reading comics in French — I really enjoy doing Duolingo, but I’m definitely feeling like I’m learning less now.
So I thought I’d tackle a classic album by Lauzier — Chroniques de l’Ile Grande.
And the reason I’m putting it that way is because Lauzier certainly piles the dialogue on — but incredibly enough, I found that I could pretty much read all of this. Slowly, though.
This was an album I had in translation as a teenager, and I don’t quite remember what I thought about it? I remember thinking that the Lauzier albums were a bit hit or miss, but I bought them all, so I must have liked them.
This is heavy, heavy satire about exploitation, racism, sexism and etc etc, and it’s also funny. And Lauzier manages to get a proper mood going in these stories. However:
Usually when people go “well, they couldn’t publish that today”, they’re totally wrong… but the story above (in particular) did make me wonder: A twelve year old girl “with the body of a woman” chases the main character (a gringo), who steadfastly spurns her… until she’s kinda-sorta kidnapped by a different guy, and… well, yes, it ends in the most “satirical” way possible.
Which made me wonder whether it’s been reprinted lately in France, and… no? Last edition was in 1978!? Unless bedetheque is wrong, which is certainly possible.
Anyway, I think if you were to publish this in the US today, I think it’d be the scandal of the year.
This is made by somebody called “Alias” who I’ve never heard of before. Which is logical, because Alias is an alias, and this is apparently the only thing that was published under that name?
I wonder whether the alias is a sly comment on “Moebius” — because the art style here is totally cribbed from Moebius.
It’s a collection of short pieces originally published in Metal Hurlant, and while they’re total clichés, they’re both entertaining and look great.
Giardino’s one of my favourite European comics artists, but Shit City is some of his earliest work.
And it’s kinda rough. The stories are totally typical Noir workouts…
… but it reads well and it’s entertaining nonetheless.
The latest issue of Spirou…
… is probably the least entertaining I’ve ever read. The above two pages are the only thing that I really enjoyed in this issue.
But I mean, there’s some stuff that’s not actively bad — but there’s three serials running now that I just absolutely loathe. Kids these days!
I was a total X-Men fan in my early teens, but I’d stopped reading X-Men by the time the material collected here was released.
I think this is probably from a couple years after I stopped reading the series? So I just found this fascinating, because I’ve read later X-Men material over the years, but never these years. So reading it was giving me a lot of “oh right, so that’s what happened?”
It took me a couple weeks to get through this collection — I did enjoy reading it, but a little Chris Claremont goes a long way, so it’s best to take some pauses in between issues.
And it rather works as a collection — the X-Men issues collected here kinda sorta work as a story arc, but then almost a third of the pages are devoted to various specials and annuals, so there’s a lot of “big events” (and some Secret Wars II tie-in issues)… But still, it’s a collection that works.
I’m not sure whether to read more of these, though. Perhaps?
Forming by Jesse Moynihan is something I think I’ve seen around before? But searching my blog, I can’t find any evidence that I’ve read any of this material before, so I may very well just be misremembering. Probably.
This is a doorstop of a book — 450 pages.
And it’s not one of those decompressed books either, so it takes a big chunk of time to read. But! It’s really funny — it’s about how Earth and the Universe were created, and what all those mythical creatures (Mithras, Cronos, Adam, Eve) really were. A lot of the humour is video game related, which isn’t my kind of thing, but it’s not too annoying here.
I really like the artwork, and especially the colours.
However — the pacing seems… unfortunate? I have not done any research before reading the book (because I never do), but my guess is that this is one of those things that have been serialised on Instagram over a long period of time. Perhaps ten years? It has that feel — usually a punch line or two per page, and the page being the unit instead of the spread.
And then! Suddenly! Around page 300 the art style changes substantially. Did Moynihan start drawing on a tablet? Some pages certainly look 100% tablet-ey, but others look like hybrid pages, or look perhaps “fake drawn-on-paper”. Hey, I don’t know — I’m not an artist.
I only know that suddenly the pages aren’t as appealing as before.
And the storytelling shifts dramatically, too. The first ~250 pages were told in a rush, without much of an explanation, and with a cast of dozens — it felt rather like being steamrolled, but in a good way. While what was going on was pretty complex, it was still pretty clear.
But now we get pages and pages of infodumping and explaining that feels pretty unnecessary.
And the humour also changes from being loose and absurd and turns pretty mean. And it feels like a lot of plot strands and characters from the first part were shoved aside in the last third.
OK, now I’m gonna do research! I’m gonna be so embarrassed if it turns out that Moynihan did the entire book over a couple months…
Hah!:
Few comics have taken a path quite like Forming. What began as a webcomic in 2009 has grown into a sprawling, hand-painted epic that stretches from the birth of the universe to the far reaches of time, weaving together Greek mythology, religious traditions, science fiction, philosophy, and absurd comedy into one singular vision. Now, after nearly 17 years, creator Jesse Moynihan has finally completed the work he once thought might never end.
Well, there have been quite a few books that were originally serialised on the intertubes, so…
This page seems to say that it’s all done by hand and not on a tablet — I guess he started using a paintbrush in the last third? Hm…
Looks like I was wrong! Too bad I wrote that thing up there — too late to change it now. If only I had something computerey so that I could edit my mistakes.
Oh well.