Random Thoughts

Yes, it’s another beautiful day here, so I’m just gonna finish up reading the comics I’ve got on the sill over there…

The Names: In Mutation

13:36: Aya: Love in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly)

I read the first half of this the other day, so I’ll read the last half now…

The copy I have is the fourth printing (from 2021), so I guess this is a really popular book? For all the right reasons: It’s so pretty, and it goes down so easily… it’s a joy to read.

Blaine L. Reininger: Commissions 2

The book ties up all the major storylines, but doesn’t feel overly forced — not everything is resolved, and continuing the series seems like a real possibility. But it was adapted into an animated movie, and no further comics have been published after that… But they started a new series in 2010, Akissi, which is about one of the kids featured in Aya? Hm! I don’t think I’ve read those? *shopping happens*

Thick Pigeon: Miranda Dali

15:25: American Blood by Benjamin Marra (Fantagraphics)

Ah, yes, 2016-ish… It was a different age — the age of the post-dumbs, with books like All-Time Comics from Josh Bayer and Fukitor by Jason Karns. The aesthetic is basically “what would comics made by that weirdo that mubles all the time at the back of the class at junior high look like?”

Marra’s not very good at drawing human figures or, well, anything, but when he slathers a lot of rendering on top of his inept linework, there’s at least something interesting going on. It gets an emulated outsider artist vibe? When Marra can’t be bothered to do the rendering, it’s just tedious to read.

It’s a varied book — he tries to do a Johnny Ryan thing here, and it’s a whole lot more cohesive than Ryan, but it’s not actually funny.

Reading this book requires slightly more patience than I have, so I started skipping towards the end. It’s a book that has glimmers of interest here and there, but it’s mostly just not that good.

2016, eh? It was a weird time.

Blaine L. Reininger: The Blue Sleep

16:41: Tinfoil 2021 edited by Floyd Tangeman (Domino/Deadcrow)

If I understand correctly, all the pieces in this issue are collaborations? And… it’s the best issue of Tinfoil ever? I didn’t expect that.

Every piece is some sort of unexpected delight.

It’s a fantastic anthology! It’s got a great flow. *slow clap*

Section 25: Deus Ex Machina

16:58: Vacuum Decay #4 by Harry Nordlinger

This is a very cohesive anthology: All the stories are about torture, maiming and extreme sexual violence.

So I was thinking: This is some next level Mike Diana shit. And then Diana shows up himself in one of the final stories.

This book is probably illegal to own in most jurisdictions in the world. I’m thinking about the story by… Mavado Charon? Which I’m not showing anything of here.

Dude. C’mon.

17:10: Reptile House #8

Hey! A 3D book! It’s been… weeks since I read one last. (I’m reading old Kitchen Sink books for a blogging project.)

I applaud people trying to have fun with the format, but this production just has one basic problem: The glasses don’t actually match the colours very well. With the blue glass you see the “wrong” set of lines fine, so things don’t 3D-ise as easily as it should, meaning that reading this is more of a chore than it would normally be.

But there’s some interesting work in here…

17:21: Tops by Charles Biro (Fantagraphics)

What on Earth… I bought this book because it says “Michael T. Gilbert” on the cover, and I wondered what he was up to these days. But instead this huge book reprints Tops, a late-40s comic that only had two issues before it was cancelled?

Is this some kind of elaborate joke? Has Gilbert created an entire fake magazine? I mean, Charles Biro existed, right? Lemme check… comics.org seems to confirm that it existed.

I’ve read a few collections of Biro comics, and I’m not really a fan.

Hm… interesting artwork…

Hey! Happy ending! (Miscarriage.)

Pole: Fading

Actually… this book isn’t that bad? I’ve skipped most of the text parts, but some of the comics are pretty good? This one is about a woman being stalked and beat up by a guy, and the courts don’t believe her. (But then a copper catches him red handed, so… happy ending?) (Both the assailant and his lawyer seem to be coded as Japanese-ish.)

The best piece is this one, illustrated by Virginia Hubbell.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Hidari Ude No Yume (1)

19:16: Donald Duck: “Under the Polar Ice” by Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)

This is a collection of Donald Duck ten-pagers from 1959… Hm, OK, these seem so familiar. I mean, I’ve read everything Barks has done before, and most of the classic Barks material from a decade earlier a gazillion times as a child, but this seems eerily familiar.

Oh! I read this one last year! I’ve accidentally bought it again.

Oops.

OK, onto the next book; I don’t need to re-read …

Juana Molina: ANRMAL

20:09: Boy Maximortal vols. 1-3 by Rick Veitch (King Hell/Sun Comics)

I can’t claim to be a major fan of Veitch’s super-hero deconstruction comics. I guess I’m not invested enough in super-heroes to want to see them deconstructed? But I’ve probably read all of his previous King Hell books anyway, and I’ve saw somebody mentioning this book, so I got a copy. From *ick* Amazon, because this is a print-on-demand book from Amazon.

Of all things.

Oh, it’s in black and white… I think the previous books were in colour? I may be misremembering.

Very nice artwork — better than ever, I’d say?

But then after the initial few pages, it starts looking more… er… stark? It’s kinda stark-looking. But good. It looks good.

Have we had enough books of weakly coded comics history, though? This must be the dozenth time I’ve read about Jack Kirby at Marvel, only using different names. This seems to be more fictionalised than usual, though.

(I found the recent Howard Chaykin series especially annoying — why not just use their real names instead of asking us to use our decoder rings?)

Damn straight.

These three books are a hundred pages each… but there’s only fifty pages or story in each book, and the rest is filler. I mean, carefully collected sketches and stuff.

Cabaret Voltaire: Shadow Of Fear

The Boy Maximortal storyline is… it’s fine? But Veitch drops in so many of the things you’d expect — it’s all there, from Hoover in drag, to Kennedy getting killed (in volume 4, presumably), to MK-ULTRA, to Kubrick — that it feels like Veitch basically had an 80 page storyline, but then added 120 pages of STANDARD 60S CONSPIRACY NONSENSE to pad things out.

And speaking of the padding — in the third volume, the 50 bonus pages are mostly comics, some of them not published before, so that’s nice. (Veitch mentions that Amazon charges as much for printing a 50 page book as for a 100 page book, which explains the length of these books.)

I guess I’ll be getting the fourth and final book when it’s published, but I’m not as interested now as when I’d just read the first chapter.

Black Uhuru: The Dub Factor

21:52: King-Cat #81 by John Porcellino

It’s lovely as usual.

Various: Ni d’eve, ni d’adam

22:06: World War 3 Illustrated #13 & #32 & #35

Hm… this looks very familiar… oh! I read issue #13 some months back. I guess I’ve gotten two copies of this, too…

I should get organizised so that stops happening so often. So onto issue 32:

This is the eleventh of September 2001 issue, and it’s a really strong one. (James Romberger above.)

There’s a wide variety of approaches taken. (Becky Minnich)

And Spain shows up!

It’s not all 9/11, though: A very effective Romberger thing that may or may not work as a simile.

And this is by somebody that call themselves Nico… and… uhm… So the stories about some people cheering isn’t a myth?

Anyway, great issue.

#35 is very, very different. Spain illustrates an apparently continued strip by Steve Brodner, and that’s not the only strange thing about this issue: It’s “distributed” by Top Shelf, and it’s not on newsprint, and it’s only 64 pages long (a bit more than half the size of most WW3 issues). It’s more like a normal comics anthology — no room for a twenty page piece from somebody who’s never done comics before.

Instead we just get faces familiar from alternative comics, like Joe Sacco.

Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman and Sabrina Jones are still present, but it’s… it’s not a real WW3 issue?

Fortunately, AK Press would take over publication a few years later, and WW3 contents returned to normal (although the format became a posher, squarebound one).

Muslimgauze: Mort Aux Vaches

23:27: You Don’t Get There From Here #57 by Carrie McNinch

OK, time to read one little comic more before going to bed… I’m exhausted…

But this is lovely as ever. I love the daily rhythm of the strip…

Oh! This one has more Japanese adventures. I love those things even more. You should join her Patreon and get yourself some good comics.

Ryuichi Sakamoto & The Kakutougi Session: Summer Nerves

23:54: Sleepytime

And now it’s time for bed.

That was a very… mixed batch of comics, eh? Yes it was.

It’s such a lovely day today…

But I’ve got chocolates, so let’s read comics.

Yukihiro Takahashi: Blue Moon Blue

13:58: Beta Testing The Ongoing Apocalypse by Tom Kaczynski (Fantagraphics)

I assumed that this was new work from Kaczynski, but instead it’s a collection of things I’ve already read — mostly things from Mome.

And some of these things I’ve read a number of times before.

So that’s disappointing, but it’s a really good book anyway. The stories mostly have the same sort of mood, so it feels much more cohesive than collections like this usually are. It reads really well — each individual story is great, of course, but they have a cumulative effect when printed like this.

Fantastic book.

Zazou Bikaye: Mr. Manager

15:04: Life of Che by Oesterheld/Breccia/Breccia (Fantagraphics)

I’ve sworn never to buy another comics biography… But this is Alberto Breccia, and I need to read everything he’s done.

And this is, indeed, very good. It’s a bit vague here and there as to the particulars of Che Guevara’s biography, which suits me fine.

But it’s quite wordy in places. I think the mixture works really well — this is definitely not a Wikipedia Infodump Biography (and not just because Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1969), but it’s also not just a poetical hand-wavey thing. It’s just the right sort of mix.

The artwork is a bit more photo-referenced than I’d expected with Breccia, but there’s several really lovely pages.

Rocketnumbernine: Meyouweyou

15:55: Otherworld Barbara 2 by Moto Hagio (Fantagraphics)

Amazingly enough, I remember who all these dozens of characters are from when I read the first book a couple weeks ago.

16:24: Nap Time

I’m so tired.

Kapotte Muziek: Mort Aux Vaches

18:52: I’m awake! I’m awake!

That was too much napping.

I had to go down and move my car, so I got pizza at the same time… and… I don’t know what I expected, exactly (never bought pizza from that place before), but this wasn’t it.

And it tasted like it looks.

Felix Da Housecat: Kittenz and The Glitz

Otherworld Barbara is engrossing — there’s so much drama on every page, and we piece together what’s been happening slowly, over hundreds of pages. It’s fun! But then she goes and does this massive infodump section where the (nominally sorta) bad guy explains everything we’ve already understood from beyond the grave. It feels like a betrayal? We’ve spent all this energy trying to understand everything, and then she just goes ahead and tells us anyway?

Meh.

But it’s still pretty good. All the play with identity — shared identities, doubled and tripled identities, etc etc.

And I had no idea how she was going to pull off a good ending to this thing, but she totally did.

Various: Fabric Presents: Octo Octa & Eris Drew

21:39: Alanzo Sneak by Nate Garcia

This is totally insane and hugely enjoyable. Love it. It’s got real heart.

Various: Fabric Presents: Octo Octa & Eris Drew

21:48: Swan Song 1 & 2 by Babouche/Dorison/Herzet (Cinebook)

Hm… another French comic from the Great War… I kinda like the colours.

But the storytelling… oy vey… it’s like they’ve read that book — “How to write a damn good novel” — and applied it directly: Every scene has to have a primary and a secondary conflict, etc, and the result is that it’s all So Much Drama.

I was bored out of my gourd by page 20, so I ditched it.

But I had a peek at the end of the second volume, and it looks like it’s just as awful.

22:01: World War 3 Illustrated #14

I’ve now managed to score (and read) a sizeable number of the issues of WW3… perhaps two thirds of them? It’s like mining a secret seam of comics… These books are rarely mentioned in comics circles, but there’s so much good and original material in these books. It’s like over five thousand pages in total?

This is a really strong issue. It’s got all the regulars, like Peter Kuper…

James Romberger…

Eric Drooker…

… and Sabrina Jones.

And ads from Stanley Cohen, of course.

But also plenty of pieces from less familiar names, like Scott Cunningham, who does a really odd and intriguing thing.

Boris with Merzbow: 2R0I2P0

22:34: The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens (Drawn & Quarterly)

Hm… this is from last year? Odd that I missed it. I feel that I sometimes order comics and then I never get them? On the other hand, my memory is pretty bad in general, so perhaps not.

Oh! I checked my mail:

I forget that I’m not as forgetful as I think.

Evens’ colours are so gorgeous.

This is more chatty than Evans’ earlier books, I think? And hefty.

We follow three different groups of people on a night at the town, and it’s just fascinating. Well, OK, at the start I felt like I was reading a comics adaptation of Jersey Shore, but then things grew weirder and deeper and more interesting.

It’s a gorgeous book, and has such a great flow. There’s a lot of conversations, but they’re done so inventively and feel so real, and with all this gorgeous artwork… it feels like such a complete work? It’s really satisfying.

So I figured it had to land on everybody’s Best Comics of 2021 lists, but nope — it’s only on six of them.

Various: Scarred For Life 2

00:31: Department of Art & Habitat #2 by Dunja Jankovik (Sparkplug)

Yes yes art.

These are really cool. They’re kinda-sorta narrative, and with interesting artwork. Nice.

Various: Scarred For Life 2

00:39: Aya: Love in Yop Cito by Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly)

This is the second Aya omnibus. I read the first one a couple of weeks ago, and it collected the Aya albums I’ve read a long time ago. But this one collects three further albums which I haven’t read?

I probably shouldn’t be starting this now, because it’s getting late, but then again, I had that really long nap, so let’s see how that goes…

The storylines continue directly from the first omnibus (even if that had a kind of resolution to many of the plots). But one of the storylines is about Innocent going to Paris, so that takes us away from the warm earth colours a bit.

But most of it’s still set on the Ivory Coast, and it’s still a comfortable read. I mean, it’s a soap opera, and has soap opera dynamics, but it’s so charming and … nice.

Various: Planet Mu 25

02:09: Sleep

I couldn’t finish it tonight; I’ve gotta get some sleep.

But that was a good batch of comics? Some great stuff, and the only bad comics were those Swan Song thingies.