Comics Daze

Man, it’s snowmageddoning tonight…

Best to bundle up in a blanket with some comics and chocolate. And music from 1994.

Arthur Russell: Another Thought

00:58: A Cosplayers Christmas by Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics)

I got this in the mystery mail this month. I’m not sure whether I’ve already got this? It’s very topical, though. I mean, Xmas.

This is from 2016.

And it’s great — kinda absurd, kinda wistful, kinda funny.

And I got a little bird in the Kinder egg!

01:10: Julehistorier by Mittéï (E-Voke)

Might as well continue with the Xmas theme…

This is a collection of short Xmas stories from the Tintin magazine in the 60s.

Cute lil crocodile.

In addition to the stories, there’s a bunch of illustrations.

It’s pretty nice! Very sentimental stories, as they should be, and charmingly drawn.

Joni Mitchell: Turbulent Indigo

01:41: Les romans noir et blanc 1987-2006 by Comès (Casterman)

For some reason or other, that Mittéï book made me want to read some Comès, so I think I’ll read the first album collected in this thick omnibus.

And the first album here is something that I’ve read before (first time as a teenager, in a Danish translation) — L’arbre-coeur, The Heart Tree.

The artwork is so gorgeous.

It’s a heartbreaking (but angry) story of fantasy and abuse.

It’s even better than I remember from my last re-read, which was probably a decade ago. I’m tempted to keep on reading the entire omnibus, but I can feel my mind shutting down from having to work too hard to parse French.

DJ Deeon: Funk City

02:51: Processing by Tara Booth (Drawn & Quarterly)

Hey, it’s getting windier out there… brr.

Fortunately this lion cub arrived to keep me warm.

This is a collection of shorter pieces that cohere into a larger thing.

Some of the pieces are really funny.

Lots of good tips!

The Breeders: Head To Toe

Such wonderful artwork. Is it gouache? The colours really pop.

It’s great! If I’d gotten it earlier, it would definitely have gone on my Best of 2024 list.

Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft: Nightsong

03:31: Mythologies and Apocrypha no Two by Tim Lane (Fantagraphics)

This is absolutely amazing. It’s flabbergastingly awesome.

And I’m someone who hates talking heads-type documentaries, but Tim Lane subverts the genre, and brings in autobio (I think) and sudden swerves and it’s just *jaw drops*.

And all just in 32 pages. It’s a perfect comic book.

Stina Nordenstam: And She Closed Her Eyes

03:55: Heroical by David Plunkert

I bought a bunch of older comics from Wow Cool, and this is one of them.

This is a very large book.

There’s a plethora of styles going on here, but all the stories are very brief. It’s entertaining.

04:01: Genesis by Nathan Edmonson, Alison Sampson, Jason Wordie (Image Comics)

Alison Sampson’s artwork is really impressive — the way it makes all these surreal shifts work well on the page.

The story, however, is (to use a technical term) piffle.

04:15: Mondo by Ted McKeever (Image Comics)

Ah, this is just the first issue of a series…

It’s quite McKeeverish, but also a lot more straightforward?

04:26: That Salty Air by Tim Sievert (Top Shelf)

Hm, have I read this before? That’s the problem I have when shopping older comics — I can never quite remember whether I’ve read something before until I hold the book in my hands.

It’s a very… Top Shelf book? I know, I know, but Top Shelf used to have a kinda distinct aesthetic…

… and this book is very much in that mode.

It’s fine, though.

Golden Palominos: Pure

04:47: Beef With Tomato by Dean Haspiel (Alternative Comics)

I really like Haspiel’s super sharp artwork.

This book collects a large number of quite short autobio stories — of the anecdote kind. They are all good, they’re all interesting and/or funny, but unfortunately it doesn’t really build up into something more? So reading these stories, one after another, starts becoming a chore, unfortunately.

I guess these are ideally read a couple at a time over a week or so. They’re good stories and memorable anecdotes.

The text pieces in the last third of the book didn’t really do much for me.

OK, time to read something else than the Wow Cool shipment…

Dead Can Dance: Toward The Within

05:47: Take This Book Apart by George Henad Olsen (Desert Island)

This is a bunch of flyers.

It’s cool.

05:57: Demons: Rise & Grind by Hyena Hell (Silver Sprocket)

Hm… is this a collection of previously-published material? This seems familiar…

But this doesn’t, so I guess it’s new.

Uhm, uhm… This is quite different from previous volumes. It’s mostly a satire (i.e., not actually funny) about working in a bureaucracy. It’s the weakest Demons thing I’ve read by far.

Bob Hund: Bob Hund

06:52: Bad Breath Comics #5 by Josh Juresko

This is the strangest thing I’ve read in quite a while (complimentary).

I love it! Few of these stories go anywhere you’d expect, but instead they’re like “wha?” Really good.

07:08: All-New Venom #1 by Ewing/Gómez/D’Armata (Marvel Comics)

I’ve been looking for a monthly super-hero comic to read for months, and I’ve mostly struck out, so far. I’ve got no interest in the Venom character, but Al Ewing has done some fun super-hero comics before, so here we are.

Huh, I kinda like this artwork…

And this is indeed pretty entertaining. I think I’ve found a monthly super-hero comical book! Whoho!

07:19: Hungry Summer by Asher Z. Craw (Sparkplug Books)

This is very odd.

But compellingly so.

07:24: Ce/Ze by Suzette Smith (Sparkplug Books)

This has an unnerving story logic.

It’s a kind of horror story? But not really. I like it.

07:31: Daz by Kai Nødland (Blokk Forlag)

This is about a vampire with a pet.

I like it, too.

Team Dresch: Personal Best

07:35: The End

But I’m fading, so I think it’s time to call it a night. Or a morning, since, er, it’s morning. A long night’s journey into morning.

Let’s see what the snow sitch it before we go.

It’s stopped! But it’s allegedly supposed to start again in 15 minutes.

Anyway! Good morning!

Book Club 2025: In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

I bought this book in 1998, at the tail end of my Auster obsession. In the 90s, I read everything he published — the novels, of course, but also the essay collections, the plays, the juvenalia… and watched all movies he’d been involved with. But I grew increasingly… er… overly familiar with his storytelling ticks? There wasn’t ever any of the works that I disliked, but I just fell out of love with his work?

So this one was probably the last one I bought, and I never got around to reading it. Until now!

It’s odd that I never got around to reading this, because it was the first thing he wrote after the New York Trilogy, which is (of course) everybody’s favourite (me too! although I haven’t read it again since I was nineteen; I should fix that).

Anyway, I wonder whether this was written earlier? It’s a dystopian thing set in a large city, which at the start seems like a metaphor for New York in the 70s. As the book progresses, it grows less metaphorical, I think, and the New York semblance fades — but it’s a kinda formless book. The first quarter is all a description of this society without any “action”, and then the rest is one-thing-that-happens-after-another-to-the-protagonist. It’s not altogether successful?

Which is another reason why I’m wondering whether this was written earlier, because it reminds me of what Auster was writing about in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, which has as an “appendix” an entire early novel that he couldn’t get anybody to publish.

Googling the book doesn’t tell me anything… this is not one of the more celebrated books in Auster’s oeuvre.

In the Country of Last Things (1987) by Paul Auster (Buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)

A Simple Archive.Org RSS Feed Creator

I’ve been trolling archive.org for magazines about comics sorta regularly (sorting by date added). Yesterday, for instance, I found that somebody had uploaded a bunch of issues of Wizard Magazine that were missing from kwakk.org, the search engine for magazines about comics:

But… manual processes are so tedious, so I wondered whether there was an RSS feed for these things, so that I could just put it on Gwene.

But nope? So I wrote one and put it on Microsoft Github. It uses Emacs, of course.

The results can be read in the gwene.org.gnus.archive.comics newsgroup on the news.gmane.io NNTP server:

So there you go.

[Edit five minutes later:]

There is a built-in way to get an RSS feed:

So never mind!

Book Club 2025: Doctor Sally by P. G. Wodehouse

I’m reading Wodehouse sorta chronologically, and I’ve now reached 1931. This is a short novel based on one of Wodehouse’s plays.

And it is, of course, very witty, but like all of the books that Wodehouse wrote that were based on his plays, it’s just not as good as his other novels. It retains the shape of a play extremely clearly — most everything taking place in two rooms, and a lot of people entering and exiting doors to those two rooms.

So it’s fine, but it’s definitely one of his lesser books.

Doctor Sally (1931) by P. G. Wodehouse (Buy used, 3.69 on Goodreads)

A&R2015: Cerebus Archive

Cerebus Archive (1977) #1-10 by Dave Sim

Back when I was doing the mop-ups for my Aardvark Vanaheim/Renegade Press blog series, I just couldn’t find my copies of Cerebus Archive — not the original Cerebus Archive series, but the series of portfolios that followed afterwards. I looked everywhere I could think of — these things are pretty big, almost tabloid size, so they should be easy to find, after all — but I had obviously stashed them Somewhere Special™, so they were lost for all eternity.

But last week, I got a shipment from Mile High Comics… and in that shipment was Cerebus Archive Number Ten! What the fuck! But but but

And then I realised what must have happened: I had a subscription to the original Cerebus Archive series, and that must somehow have “carried over”, and they’d ordered my a copy of the most recent portfolio.

*sigh*

But since I finally got my hands on one of these, I thought I might do one final A&R blog post… and now that I had a copy in my hands again, I was reminded of how they looked like, and what do you know:

I found the two issues I already had! They were half a meter from where I was sitting! Pffft!

OK, enough with the comicsplaining… let’s have a look at the three issues I have, which is #2, #3 and #10.

They come in very sturdy envelopes, but not sturdy flaps, and I seem to have a habit of tearing the left flap when opening them.

This is the second portfolio, but they all follow the same format: There’s ten large reproductions (I think they’re done in actual size drawn? I may be mistaken) of the first pages that Sim still has in his possession from whatever volume we’re looking at. So here we get ten pages from High Society.

But what pages are in Sim’s possession? Sim would sell off his original artwork, so the most popular pages are gone, of course. Left are the, er, how to put it: Less iconic pages. Ahem. There are many text heavy pages, and many pages that are plot dense.

They’re printed in colour, so you get to see the bluelines that Sim hasn’t erased.

And also paste ups and stuff. The reproduction is pretty nice, but the less-than-thrilling selection of pages makes these very niche items.

There’s nothing on the back of the ten pages.

But! Then there are notes!

So many notes. We get three of these oversized sheets with text on both sides, so we’re getting a lot of text.

And Sim goes through the ten pages and gives an in-depth talk about each one, explaining what he’s doing and what he thinks about what he did and stuff. If you’re into reading Cerebus liner notes, these are really good.

But what about the tenth portfolio, the one that I got the other week? I think the first handful of portfolios were released over a few years (starting in 2015, using Kickstarter, I believe), but then they petered out. I don’t know how big a pause there’s been before this one, but:

Somebody’s scribbled on my portfolio!

And *gasp* I got copy 100 out of 150. I bet this one is worth all the money.

I’m more surprised that they’re selling this many copies, really…

The pages are now in a plastic zip-lock-bag inside the cardboard envelope.

The format is the same as before, but Sim has apparently kept more “key” pages, or people had stopped buying his artwork by this time. Because there’s more striking pages here.

On the other hand, there’s some that perhaps people won’t be framing and putting on their walls.

And instead of three sheets densely filled with information about the pages, we get one sheet that is, er, less densely filled.

There’s some talk of what we’re seeing in these pages, but it’s trending towards gibberish if you don’t already know what Sim is talking about.

And much of the text is about Sim’s religious beliefs, which have something to do with particle physics and the bible, apparently.

So… it’s not very interesting, is it? Nope. At least the first portfolios had some pretty interesting texts…

And now dawn is approaching, and I really should send an email to Mile High Comics so that this subscription is cancelled once and for all. (How many copies were sold by mistake, I wonder… probably, er, not all of them.)

Ah, this one was done via Kickstarter, too.

This blog post is part of the Renegades and Aardvarks series.