Random Thoughts

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

You don’t see Chinese comics much, so I got this book by Yi Yang…

And I have to say that I quite like the line — it’s kinda scratchy in an 80s US indie way (but then also very Japanese-like at the same time).

And I can see what they’re going for here, with all the chaos and stuff in the storytelling, but I just found reading it to be exhausting. So I ditched it after reading about a third of the book.

I’ve been buying these DC Finest books over the last year and quite enjoying them — but also thinking, halfway through, “ok, that’s enough of that”. 600 pages of 50s/60s/70s DC can be a lot.

But this one — I just really liked it all the way through. Of course, much of that is because of intense nostalgia: I originally read many of these stories when I was like… eight? Ten? And because one didn’t have all that many comics as a child, I re-read these books over and over. But then I haven’t read them at all again since I was, like, twelve?

So it’s just so weird seeing these stories again. Every ninth page there’s a page that makes my brain go *ping* — images and sequences that look so spookily familiar.

So that’s probably most of the attraction here, but these are also just really well made comics for children: There’s an enormous inventiveness reminiscent of super-hero comics from the 50s, but these stories are also personality driven in a way super-hero comics hadn’t been before the 70s. (Sometimes risibly so — Green Arrow is always grumbling about something, whether it makes sense or not, for instance.) This just really hits some kind of local optimum for super-hero comics, I think.

And of course the artwork — Dick Dillin with Dick Giordano on inking, making everything look very Neal Adamish. Very attractive and fun to read.

The writers also plop themselves into several of these stories — here they even have one being the main villain. It’s fun. So I read the entire thing, a couple issues a day, over a month.

I haven’t read many of the XIII albums by Vance & Van Hamme.

The artwork’s very attractive.

But if this is what the XIII albums are in general, I don’t understand the popularity. It’s page after page after page of old guys infodumping.

I mean, it’s good for training my French, but it’s pure tedium.

“The Sincerest Form of Parody” is a sampling of humour stuff from the 50s that’s not Mad Magazine: After Mad became so popular, imitators popped up and churned out similar stuff… but most of it was pure dreck, of course.

But I thought a collection like this would be better than it is. I mean, if you have an expert picking out gems from hundreds and hundreds of issues of humour comics, you’d have to end up with a pretty good book anyway, right?

But nope. There are a couple of funny stories in here, but most of them just lean into trying to emulate Kurtzman’s Mad story style without having his sense of humour.

If these really are the funniest stories from that era, then it was worse than I imagined.

Another thing I read as a child — Benoît Brisefer is targeted at young children, but even as an eight-year-old I found these albums to be repetitive and dull.

But.. I rather liked this one now. It does not follow the standard plot line, but does something funny and almost meta with the concept.

And it’s just silly, stupid fun. And the French language level is perfect for me, of course.

Speaking of French… I read the latest two Spirou issues.

Unfortunately, I hate all the major serials they are running now, so it’s just a bad patch for me and Spirou. There are, of course, good bits, too — curiously enough, both of them are Lewis Trondheim (with artists) taking his turn at doing Franquin strips. So the above is pretty entertaining.

And here he’s doing Gaston Lagaffe pretty successfully, too.

I’m looking forward to the other serials ending soon, though.

I’m pretty sure I read Yeong-Shin Ma’s previous book, but I don’t remember what I thought of it.

Hodo, though, is pretty dismal. One takeaway from this book is that South Korea is a horrible, horrible place. But then again, isn’t that what so many of these “indie” comics from Korea tell us? It’s starting to look like a campaign from the South Korea Tourist Board to discourage people from coming there, like that Danish (or was it Swedish) campaign they ran in Africa that said that everybody in Denmark is gay, and that women have All The Rights, and if you beat your kids they’ll be taken away from you — to discourage people from emigrating to Denmark.

Anyway, this has All The Traumas.

It’s structured kinda oddly — you can start reading from either end of the book, and the right-to-left bit is about her grown-up life, and the left-to-right part is about her childhood.

They’re both horrible.

The Outsider by Joe d’Esposito is something as odd as a biography of Bernie Krigstein.

I quite like d’Esposito’s artwork and storytelling in general. The most disturbing thing is using that font for computer lettering — the artwork is so freeflowing and organic that the lettering stands out like a sore thumb.

D’Esposito also does that offputting thing where you draw the thing that’s going to appear in the subject’s most famous piece of artwork.

But I did like reading this book. If you’re into comics, you probably know most of the stuff in this story, but it’s well made, and flows well.

It’s also relentlessly old fashioned in its approach — I found myself wondering all the time “but how did d’Esposito know that this is what happened?” What’s his source for all of this? We know what the protagonists are thinking, and we’re privy to scenes that nobody but Krigstein could have recounted… but then again, the dialogue in many of these scenes is so generic that it’s clear that it’s based on a “well, that’s the kind of thing people might have said if this had happened” methodology.

I’m guessing.

So it’s not altogether successful, but still — pretty good.

And I read some of Mah Stories.

I really like Ryan North’s super-hero stories, but it’s becoming clear that he has basically just one mode: “Let’s take the super-hero powers to their maximum and see what happens”. He’s done this with Fantastic Four (Sue Storm can probably move the Earth around with her force shield now), and now he’s doing it with The Flash and that moronic “Speed Force” thing: If he can use that to the max, then he can effectively be everywhere and stop absolutely all bad things from happening.

That’s a fun concept, but… it’s also… *sigh*.

G. Willow Wilson has a much more reasonable approach — keep things pretty grounded, and you can do amusing book after amusing book: You don’t have to blow up the Earth every issue, and have The Most Stakes Ever Ever EVER. Super-hero comics are more fun when it’s Black Cat and Punisher being mad at each other because Black Cat accidentally ran over Punisher’s dog.

(Don’t worry, the dog is fine.)

And… that’s it? Yeah, that’s it.