Comics Daze

It’s been way too long since I read some new comics! (I mean, I’ve been reading old comics for the Comico blog, but that’s not the same…)

This Mortal Coil: It’ll End In Tears

13:22: 2x by Chris Reynolds (Dark & Golden Books)

I got this from here — it’s a new company (?) that’s reprinting some old books by Chris Reynolds and Carol Swain. I’m wondering whether it’s stuff I’ve read before, though.

Right. But isn’t it called “Adventures From Mauretania”?

Oh, I’ve read this one… I’m not sure these introductions are really necessary? But I mean, it’s OK.

Hm, I can’t remember this one… it’s fantastic! I should read that collection again — I think it was originally a print-on-demand book from Lulu? Yup.

Coil: Scatology

13:38: 2x/Another Way Out by Carol Swain (Dark & Golden Books)

These are from the same place as the Reynolds book. And did you know that you can buy Carol Swain originals now?

Hey! I’ve got that scanner, too. It’s good, but very slow. Unfortunately, Epson stopped making scanners of that size — “A3+” — nowadays their biggest one is strictly A3, which means that it’s not big enough to scan an LP cover. Why can’t we have nice things?

Oh, I’ve read these before, then.

Swain does her own introductions…

The stories are as fantastic as I remember.

And then there’s the other book, which has new stuff! Yay!

It’s super. Love it!

13:57: Ding Dong Circus by Sasaki Maki (Breakdown Press)

This is another instalment in Ryan Holmberg’s apparent project of getting all of Garo reprinted, I guess.

Hey! Pretty nice… looks extremely influenced by French pop art.

A couple of the pieces seem to be somewhat narrative…

… but most of them are apparently just random images. The artwork’s nice, but piece after piece of this stuff is rather tedious. It probably worked brilliantly in the original context in Garo, though, which is a problem this book shares with many of these collections. I’d rather see Garo translated in its entirety, really.

There’s one piece that’s done differently — it’s a comment on the absurdity of the discussions about the Vietnam war.

14:16: Santos Sisters #10 by Greg & Fake (Floating World Comics)

Fantagraphics published a Santos Sisters collection last year, which meant that it finally “broke containment” and ended up on a lot of people’s Best Of lists. Which led to a lot of comments like “well, it’s really fun, but I’m not sure I get it? is it an Archie parody or not? IS IT!!! TELL MEEEE!!! ARE THEY SERIOUS!1! *tilt*” which was fun to read.

This issue is a bit of a departure…

We get a Martin Shkreli parody, for instance. It’s fun.

14:27: Bunworld 2 and Pit Bull Eyes by Maggie Umber

I got this from here.

I love the look of the Bunworld books. It’s unique.

And it’s fun.

Is this screenprinted?

It’s lovely, anyway. Two very handsome books.

Cabaret Voltaire: Micro-Phonies

14:34: Crickets #9, Hayseed #1 & Unwelcome by Sammy Harkham

I got these from here, I think.

Unwelcome is a collection of illustrations…

Hayseed consists of sketchbook drawings, I guess.

Heh heh. Nice.

Harkham finished his big serial in the previous issue of Crickets, so what’s he up to now? The short pieces in this issue are very funny.

And then he starts a new serial, which seems like it might go on for many issues. It’s a solid issue.

15:02: The Adventures of Sgoobidoo by Catohn (Pow Pow Press)

This is very funny.

It’s a riff on Scooby-do, but instead of a scooby gang, it’s a delusional, lonely guy with a dog. It’s both funny and affecting.

15:22: Etiquette For Assclowns by Elliot Fu (Desert Island)

Well, I like peeving as much as the next guy…

… but presented like this, with one peeve after another…

… the effect is the opposite of what’s presumably intended: You start hating the really uptight guy doing all the peeving.

Colourbox: Say You

15:36: Dry Cleaned by Joris Mertens (Jonathan Cape)

I got this because it was on The Guardian’s list of the best comics of 2025…

I like bits of it, but things like the shifting perspectives don’t really add much to the proceedings.

In the end, it’s one of those oh-so-ironic stories, and they gild the lily by making the ending triply ironic — when the final twist showed up, I started laughing. It’s so over the top.

But I mean, it’s not a bad book. Just a bit pointless, really.

The Cure: The Top

15:53: Calamity Before Jane by Noah Van Sciver (Toon Books)

I wonder whether this is meant to be used in class?

It’s very didactic, but the approach is pretty odd — do we learn anything about Calamity Jane’s life or not? I wasn’t interested enough to actually read the postscript.

16:07: Nutt by Dan Heyer

Since this is a family oriented blog, this was the only spread from this book I could snap — it’s a very rude book.

Pretty funny.

16:13: Poppy & Sam by Cathon (Owlkids)

Oh yeah, I bought all the books by Cathon I could find, because I liked her latest book so much…

It’s cute.

Poor Basil.

Kissing the Pink: What Noise?

16:17: Mirror Mirror 4 (2d cloud)

This anthology is full of fucked up stuff. It’s the most full-of-fucked-up-stuff anthology I’ve read ever.

And it’s apparently being published my regularly now? Three times a year? Yay.

There’s also reviews in here, but I didn’t actually read them. Sorry!

And some Japanese comics.

It’s an interesting book (the editorial texts, too), and I’m there for any further issues.

16:34: Roy Kuhlman: Reluctant Modernist by Steven Brower (Fantagraphics)

This has a long introduction (which, again, I didn’t read)…

And then the rest of the book consists of reproductions of covers designed by this guy.

I’m not sure the format here is ideal — printing these covers this large, on the shiniest paper in existence, doesn’t really seem like the intended format. I mean, I really like these designs — but flipping through this book is underwhelming.

Some of the covers have terse commentary, but mostly not very interesting.

A very odd book, even for a design retrospective.

King Crimson: Three of a Perfect Pair

16:43: Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner by Jennifer Hayden (Top Shelf)

This is a really enjoyable read — it’s got a distracted vibe going on. It’s about making food.

There’s recipes, too.

It’s really focused on the subject matter, but it’s got an amiable mood going on, which pairs well with the art style and the colours.

17:39: The End

And reading that has made me famished, so now I have to make dinner myself.

Are LLMs finally becoming actually useful for… stuff?

Yes, of course, LLMs are pretty good at programming now, but I’m talking about being able to ask them stuff in general. My use case is the Emacs book handling package — I want to be able to check whether there’s any books from an author I’ve missed. This is an unexpectedly hard thing to determine (click on the preceding link for details).

People have been nattering on about how awesome the latest Claude is, so I had a look today — and I briefly got very enthusiastic. Because I hit m to search for missing books (i.e., books I don’t have) by Georgette Heyer. She’s a good test case, because she’s written so many books that it’s genuinely a tedious job to try to find out this stuff manually — and I know that I’ve got most of her books.

What I do is ask the LLM “list all books by AUTHOR, but exclude these books: “. Results:

Wow! The Transformation of Philip Jettan!? I don’t have that book! *sounds of shopping* I’m not sure why it’s listing the other three, because I have those, and I told Claude so:

And I don’t understand why it listed four books, but then said it didn’t find anything? But this is almost good! Almost useful! So I started writing this blog post, which was going to go “whoho! LLMs rule now! etc!”.

But then I hit m again, just to check, and:

(And so on and on.)

*sigh* It listed all the books — no filtering. OK, m again:

Now it listed just nine books — eight of which were on that list.

So my momentary enthusiasm here was just another FALSE ALARM!

My impression is that LLM fans only have experience with using LLMs interactively — the LLM says a lot of bullshit, and then you correct it, and then it says “oh, you’re right!”, and then these fans get a warm, fuzzy feeling and are really impressed. It’s a great sleight of hand. Using the API this way (where you only give the LLM one try) really lets you see how unreliable these things are.

While I’m here, I might as well check with other models again… Here’s gemini-2.5-flash:

OK, it lists just one book, and one I have. (But not the one I don’t have; the Jettan thing.)

Perplexity:

It lists The Reluctant Widow four times? Well, it includes Philip Jettan, but all the other ones are on the list.

ChatGPT 5.2:

No Jettan, but it has a whole lot of books from the list.

So… nope.

One thing that’s changed since the last time I checked like this is that there are no hallucinations? These lists used to have some mixed in, but I can’t stop any obvious ones, at least.

[Edit: I spoke too soon:

I asked for missing books by Jasper Fforde, and this showed up — it doesn’t exist; that’s just a character from one of the novels.]

I guess I’ll have to check again in six months to see whether things have improved.