Random Thoughts

It’s been over a month since I had a proper comics reading daze. Time flies when you’re busy with other things…

And for music today… er… it’s been too long since I did Talking Heads (The Good Bits) + Related.

Talking Heads: 77 (Sire)

11:46: The Oddball’s Odyssey by Tony Millionaire (Bad Idea)

This book feels odd. It has that print-on-demand hand feel, but I don’t think it can be? The paper isn’t newsprint, but is a very matte, light blue/grey one, and I don’t think that’s something print-on-demand companies offer.

Ah, I’ve missed Tony Millionaire… very appealing artwork.

The story is (as promised by the title) a proper odyssey (and doesn’t feature a public domain Mickey Mouse at all). It’s not a very substantial story, but it’s sweet.

11:57: So Buttons #15 by Jonathan Baylis and others

You can get this from here.

This issue has all these artists.

This is autobio of the “anecdote” sub-genre, and it’s really well done — it’s amiable and the anecdotes are interesting.

Even though the pieces are short, it coheres into a satisfying book. I like it a lot.

Talking Heads: More Songs About Buildings and Food

12:13: Young Shadow & The Watchdogs by Ben Sears (Fantagraphics)

I feel like this book is a bit of a bait and switch. The stark colouring scheme coupled with that interesting stippling technique seems to point to something interesting going on here… but nope: It’s just another cartoon-poisoned comic book. This time around with way too many characters, none of which have any character.

But I have to commend Sears for perfectly emulating the sheer tedium of watching a game of sports (which takes up most of the issue).

12:25: Creased Comics by Brad Neely (New York Review Comics)

This is a collection of single page absurd gags…

… and some of them are extremely funny…

… while the rest, well, aren’t. This sort of thing can work cumulatively, with things getting funnier and funnier, but this one didn’t have enough of the really successful gags for that to work. I laughed out loud a couple of times, though.

12:47: Electric Chair by Adam Falp

This is pretty wild. I like the artwork’s energy.

The gags need a bit of work, though.

Talking Heads: Fear of Music

12:55: Antimatter by Dean Haspiel

I got this from here.

Well, Haspiel’s artwork is as sharp and attractive as ever.

But to me the stories didn’t really work.

Talking Heads: Remain In Light (vinyl)

13:07: Closing Act by Chris W. Kim (Conundrum Press)

It’s not often you see a comic book as unapologetically metaphorical as this one.

It’s about people living in alleyways that get progressively narrower, squeezing the people living in them…

It works quite well. The mood is consistent throughout the book, and I was worried that things were suddenly going to take a “spiritual” turn, but nope. It’s pretty good.

David Byrne and Brian Eno: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

13:56: Birth Story by Elisabeth Belliveau (Conundrum Press)

What? How is that possible? Do people in Canada live in the black ages or something? I’m pretty sure we were shown a whole hour long TV programme with all the grisly details in school… And without even trying I’ve seen/read way to many things about childbirth…

Anyway, this is yet another one of those.

It’s a difficult birth, though, so it’s even more horrific than usual. Makes for a good horror book.

The artwork is great, and her honesty is on point.

14:24: Chi’s Sweet France by Konami Kanata/Catherine Bouvier (Kodansha)

I really liked the original Chi’s Sweet Home — yes, it was cutesy, but it had something special going on.

This is just annoying and saccharine. It’s like a random collection of scenes that go nowhere — no funny gags, no nothing — and the artwork is so standard.

14:32: Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati (New York Review Comics)

This is from the 60s…

Oh! I’ve read this before! But the previous edition was from New York Review Books, and this is from Comics! So they fooled me into buying this twice! Dastardly!

OK, I’m not going to re-read this, because I vaguely remember it being a bit on the naff side. Or at least me not being very interested in it.

14:40: The Rabagoo Race by Garresh (Living the Line Books)

Speaking of things I’ve read before… has this previously been serialised? It looks so familiar…

Wow, this is gorgeous. It’s like… it’s like… William Kaluta/P. Craig Russell via… Michel Fiffe? Or something? Anyway, very impressive.

The story seems like it’s meant to be one of those propulsive rushes… but… it gets sidetracked? And then kinda fizzles. This is Garresh’s first book, though, and it seems like it took a while to get done, so that’s not surprising. Obviously massive talent, and I’m looking forward to the next book.

Tom Tom Club: Tom Tom Club

14:58: Iceman Omega by Luciano Vecchio (Marvel)

I wondered whether this was some kind of funny funny-book or something, but no…

Because the storytelling is so choppy that I thought perhaps Iceman was trapped in a fantasy world or something. But the explanation is more mundane: This is a collection of stuff that’s been published in various anthologies, so there isn’t much of a story here, even though it seems like it kinda flows from one thing to the next.

It’s OK, I guess.

15:14: Tenner by Xueting Yang (Jippi forlag)

This is fantastic.

It’s a collection of mostly dream-like vignettes, and they’re deeply unnerving and gripping.

It’s a wonderful book.

Jerry Harrison: The Red And The Black

15:31: Une réponse à la mort by Kkrist Mirror

I picked this up in Paris last year… It’s huge.

It collects a bunch of illustrations…

… and a bunch of short comics.

It’s neat.

David Byrne: The Catherine Wheel

15:48: Pøbel by John Sigvart Jamtli (Strand forlag)

Oops — I didn’t realise that this was a musician’s biography when I bought it — it’s about a rapper from the north of Norway.

It’s pretty funny…

… but it’s quite one note: We get stories that I guess have been told over many a beer many a night over the years, so it’s all very digested. I guess if you’re a fan of the artist the book would work better? I just found most of it kinda annoying.

Tom Tom Club: Close To The Bone

16:21: Bury Me Already by Julia Wertz (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)

Hey! Another book about pregnancy. What are the odds.

I’ve been a fan of Wertz ever since Fart Party. Those were some comics.

Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues

This is more serious, of course, but there’s still a lot of gags:

Sometimes so many that it almost feels like it’s an outline for a TV dramedy TV series.

I have to say that I liked reading this book for the most part — Wertz has the comedic timing down pan, and her artwork is easy on the eyes — but it’s just weird that whenever something really dramatic happens, she stops doing comics and drops in some pages of text instead.

I can sympathise with the impulse — drawing this (which would have taken, say, 30 pages in her normal style) would probably have been hard on Wertz (as well as hard on the reader to read) — but it just makes the book lopsided.

David Byrne: Music for The Knee Plays

The other thing is that the book goes on for too long and covers too much ground. It’s just unfocused, and we not only get the kids story until he’s three, but we also get the medical issues of other family members. I think you could easily have chopped this book in two and had two compelling books, but as it is, I was getting rather impatient with the book for the last third, and it feels like Wertz was too, because you get more and more pages like the above. Sure, the stick-ish figures are still cute, but the sloppy lettering is just annoying.

I hate to say it, but I started wondering whether she had a contract for 300 pages, decided she didn’t want to illustrate the really harrowing bits, but padded out the book with less relevant stuff.

Heh, that reminds me of a tweet I saw yesterday:

Anyway, I liked the book. The funny bits are funny. But…

Tom Tom Club: Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom

19:06: Svanger by Knut Nærum/Karstein Volle (Cappelen Damm)

What’s this? Is this a book not about pregnancy, you ask? No! It is! The title means “Pregnant”.

What are the odds!

Wow, that’s some obscure artwork…

Anyway, this book is about a man that’s impregnated by an alien. I’m not spoiling anything — that’s what the press material for the book says, and what the back cover blurb says. So it’s really strange that they spend a third of the book with the protagonist wondering why his belly is growing bigger. Even if they hadn’t already said so, it’s such an old plot that everybody would have guessed anyway, so it’s just… annoying?

(The funniest iteration of the plot I’ve read is a novel by Sheri Tepper where super intelligent and benevolent wasp-like aliens take over Earth (and solves all our problems; a real utopia). But to breed, they have to lay their eggs into intelligent host bodies (eggs that develop into larva that chew their way out of their hosts, painfully), so naturally these wasp creatures choose American anti-abortion ministers as the hosts, since these are the humans with a most principled stance against abortion. (And then keep them trapped until gestation.) Tee hee! It’s one of those feel-good novels.)

But after the first third is over, the book definitely picks up and becomes pretty entertaining. The artwork is sometimes a bit on the confusing side, but if you stare at the panels a bit more, you can totally tell what’s going on. Most of the time.

I liked it — it’s not very original, but it’s told in an interesting way.

19:42: The End

OK, I think that’s enough comics for a day. I’m exhausted! It’s been good finally having a comics reading daze again… I must do this more often.

Wow, it’s been a month since the last comics post. Yeah, I haven’t been reading much comics, and I have to fix that. But I read the above, at least.

I’ve read this in a Danish translation as a teenager, but I found it in French at a used bookstore, so I snapped it up.

And it’s great — I really love this art style; kinda ligne claire but not as mannered. Real furniture and real interiors…

And I remember being kinda put off by the plot, but I was totally into it this time around — it’s one of those miasmatic plots where things spiral out of control and things get more and more mysterious before… just ending without a “rational” explanation. I loved reading it; such an exciting read.

I have not read the subsequent albums in this series, but I’m going to search them out.

I got this collection because of this. I never read these comics back in the 80s, and I do like Byrne’s artwork, so I gave it a go.

And… it’s indeed “back to basics” — it’s very typical Marvel super-hero storytelling; overwritten and kinda awkward. But … kinda entertaining?

I read the entire thing. But… slowly.

Another used bookstore find.

I’ve never heard of this series, and for good reason — despite the pretty attractive art, it’s totally naff.

I guess much of the dialogue is lifted from the novel this is based on, but especially in comics form, lines like the above (and basically every dialogue is like this) are totally risible. Stop torturing those metaphors!

I gave it up after reading half the album. Very boring.

I got caught up with this mini.

I really like it — these issues depict things happening in 2020-2022, so we get a rerun of the Corona thing, which is interesting to read at this remove.

It’s good stuff.

I don’t quite know why I bought this… I guess I was just curious to see if I’d missed something, as this Walt Simonson run is something that gets mentioned often.

And indeed, I finally learn what Beta Ray Bill is.

Simonson’s artwork is appealing, but… I know that this is Thor, and some ponderousness comes with the territory, but I just found that I lost interest as the issues progressed. I think I dropped it after reading a third of the collection — it’s not that it’s bad, but I found that that was a sufficient number of pages of this stuff for me.

Yet another random used bookstore find involving creators I’ve never heard about.

The artwork is, again, very appealing.

And the story is OK, I guess? It’s about mysterious creatures living on a foggy island. Unfortunately it’s the first album in a two part series… and it’s not so good that I’m going to go looking for the concluding album. But it’s pretty good.

Two special Spirou issues in a row.

The first is a Gaston Lagaffe special, and it’s very funny indeed.

But there’s other things here, too.

The second (double sized) special is about spring, and it has all kinds of weird and amusing pieces.

I’ve read most of her comics and enjoyed them hugely.

She writes for children, so I’m not the target audience, but I think this is her weakest book by far.

It just seems to insist on going down some very well-worn tracks — if you’re over twenty years old, you will have read exactly this comic book forty times. But I guess if you’re eleven and this is the first time you read this plot, it might be kinda spiffy?

I dunno.

I like the artwork, anyway.

And that’s it for comics this month…