Random Thoughts

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

7.4kg!

I knew that Hugo Pratt had done a lot of British war comics, but I had no idea that these have been made available again. Five volumes so far! Each volume has four 64 (!) page stories! Yowza!

These were published in the early 60s, and were printed digest size on shitty paper. And I assume that these books were sourced from printed copies, because they look pretty gnarly in places.

But c’mon. It’s Hugo Pratt! The awesomeness comes through even if the reproduction leaves something to be desired.

I’ve read more than my share of British war comics in my day, and they’re usually pretty bad, so I had very, very low expectations going in. And none of these stories are written by Pratt, so. But — they’re good! They’re good stories! I was flabbergasted.

Many of the writers had themselves experienced WWII, and the stories are original and engrossing. Being digest sized, even if there’s 64 pages, there’s only room for two or three panels a page, so these aren’t huge stories… but they feel like it. They read like European albums in a way — there’s many characters, and they’re well-done, and the stories have a beginning, middle and end — it feels like we’ve experience something akin to a movie.

I was really taken by this book, and I’ve bought the four other volumes in this War Picture Library series.

I’m still reading my way through the World War 3 Illustrated issues…

This one isn’t the strongest I’ve seen.

Mainly because almost half? of the book was taken up by this story, which didn’t really … give WW3I.

This is a massive book of comic strips from the 80s/90s, featuring Arne Anka, a character with a look and a name that’s quite close to Donald Duck (well, the name in Swedish is). He was even sued by Disney, apparently.

This had a substantial fan base at the time, but I never quite got it.

And I didn’t this time, either. The artwork is great, but there’s so much verbiage for so few actually successful jokes that it just becomes a chore to read. I think. So I ditched it after one third.

Yes, I’ve read Bacchus by Eddie Campbell before, of course. I’ve got the Harrier (I think? Eagle?) books, and lots of the Dark Horse ones, and some collections, and 90% of the self-published series… but I’ve never read everything sequentially. So I thought it was about time, and I got these two volumes. It’s about a thousand pages in total.

Bacchus was Campbells attempt at a US-style comic book — like with super-heroes and stuff, but with Greek gods substituting.

And perhaps doing US style inspired him to get other people to draw the book from time to time, but unfortunately that’s not really as much fun as seeing Campbell’s own artwork (which I absolutely love).

After a few years, Campbell settled into a production line that allowed him to publish each story a bunch of times. A lot of this was first published in various Dark Horse anthologies, and then Dark Horse would publish a three or four issue mini series collecting the story, and then Campbell would publish a trade paperback collection, and then run the stories as backups in his Bacchus self-published series, and then collected again here. So I’ve read some of these things a lot of times over the years by buying them at random, but it is indeed a very different thing to read them all at once.

And unfortunately, some of it doesn’t really work that well in the collected package. Some bits are fun experiments, but when reading a lot of them one after another, it gets a bit fatiguing.

Still, when it works, it really works. I’d say the original Harrier series is the best, still, but there’s a lot of fun throughout.

I think towards the end, it overstayed its welcome a bit. I mean, it’s fun watching Campbell make fun of David Sim, right?

And making fun of Neil Gaiman, too — blurbing somebody’s shopping list — but it’s a bit insiderish, innit?

Campbell runs out of Greek myths to talk about, so we get anecdotes about Dom Perignon, who Campbell tells us invented champagne and went blind because the bottles exploded. But it does take some of the enjoyment out of the anecdotes Campbell tells if you were to google them:

The quote attributed to Perignon—”Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!”—is supposedly what he said when tasting the first sparkling champagne. However, the first appearance of that quote appears to have been in a print advertisement in the late 19th century.

[…]

The myths about Pérignon being the first to use corks and being able to name the precise vineyard by tasting a single grape likely originated from Groussard’s account.

Prior to blending he would taste the grapes without knowing the source vineyard to avoid influencing his perceptions. References to his “blind tasting of wine” have led to the common misconception that Dom Pérignon was blind.

Oh, the halcyon days of 1988 when nobody could check your bullshit!

But it’s a good story.

Still, I’d totally recommend getting these two books. They’re unfortunately out of print, but they can still be picked up pretty easily.

(These books don’t collect all the Bacchus material, in case you wondered.)

This is the final Buddy Longway collection — it collects the four albums Derib did after a decade-long hiatus.

The artwork is more beautiful than ever.

These four albums are basically a single history, and we finally see the family being reunited with their teenage son — but it turns out that (spoiler warning for the rest of the article — I’m giving everything away (well, it’s 20 years old by now, so…)) the son, Jeremie, has joined up with one of the last Native American rebels, attacking and killing settlers at random. His parents are not happy… and then Jeremie is killed.

Likewise, their daughter takes up with another band… and all Buddy can do is to stop her from getting killed, too. The daughter then leaves them to go off east.

Buddy and Chinook manage to get back on their feet, and we see them meet up with friends they’ve made throughout their lives…

… and this is how the series ends.

Except for the prologue, where we learn that Buddy and Chinook were indeed killed that day.

The series had a kind of built-in tragedy from the start, because it was always clear that Buddy and Chinook were living at the end of an era, where the Native American genocide was accelerating, and their way of life would soon become impossible. Still, I wasn’t really prepared for such a devastating ending. It’s a nine hanky book.

Snif indeed. And it’s true — the final album condenses everything about this series.

It’s comics readin’ time!

Black Cab: Games of the XXI Olympiad (2024 remasters collection)

13:28: Mini Kuš #123-126

Sara Boiça’s book is low-key, but extremely insense.

Majenye’s book consists of a number of shorter pieces — some of which are hilarious (a typical comic book convention is depicted above).

Mark Antonius Puhkan’s book is gorgeous av very mysterious.

Matti Hagelberg’s book is mysterious, too, in that I didn’t quite, er, get it.

Anyway, that’s a good batch of little books. You can get them from here.

13:43: Men hvem er du? by Martin Ernsten (Gyldendal)

This is a book about a father with Alzheimer who’s dying.

It’s a remarkably unsentimental portrayal.

There’s a lot of anger and frustration here, but also a deep despair. It’s powerful and disquieting.

And it won comic book of the year in Norway.

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince

14:06: Giraffes in My Hair by Bruce Paley and Carol Swain (Fantagraphics)

I have no idea how I missed this book — I love Carol Swain, and this book is from 2009!

Swain’s artwork and storytelling is lovely as usual.

Heh. Swain does Kirby!

The stories are of the anecdote type — the kinds that seem like they’ve been told over and over again. And I’m not blaming Paley — if I had these stories to tell, I’d tell them. But they feel like they’ve been honed down too much over the years, and now they’ve become standard set pieces. You get the story of walking around Manhattan in a snow storm to score heroin, you get the story where they land in jail, you get the story where he’s dodging the draft by playing insane… It’s like they’ve selected scenes based on “yeah, people love reading that anecdote”? It feels weirdly impersonal.

It seems like I’m not the only one who feels that way:

This is a tricky book for me: I love Carol Swain’s work, and will pretty much take anything she offers, but Bruce Paley’s anecdotes are dull, utterly pointless and would probably amount to less than five type-written pages without Swain’s (sadly slapdash-looking) illumination.

Ghost Dubs: Damaged

15:07: Cashiers du cinéma edited by Dan Welch and David Cardoza

This anthology made by people who works/worked in movie theatres…

… and it’s all about how awful people who go to see movies are, of course.

The most fun piece is the one by Josh Bayer.

And there’s a fold-out poster in the middle.

Idles: TANGK

15:43: Jobnik! by Miriam Libicki

This is an autobio comic from when Libicki was 19 and was in the Israeli army.

Nia Archives: Forbidden Feelingz

But as support staff, and bored to death. (I think in most European countries positions like hers would be filled by civilian staff?)

Adult Jazz: Earrings Off!

It’s really intriguing — Libicki is juxtaposing her quotidian experiences with the drama going around politically and military in Israel at the time, but is not drawing any overt conclusions about anything, and is instead presenting the material to the reader and letting them draw their own conclusions.

Joan as Police Woman & Benjamin Lazar Davis: Let It Be You

The artwork also has a sort of meandering, non-insisting flow, so it all works very well.

It’s not a very uh flattering portrait of the IDF, and you can totally see the connection between the oddballs here and the social media posts coming from IDF soldiers in Gaza now.

Anyway, you can get it from here.

OK, I think I have to take a nap now.

Shearwater: Animal Joy

20:50: Blacksad: Alors, tout tombe by Díaz Canales/Guarnido (Egmont)

I’ve bought this two-parter in Danish and Norwegian and in different sizes? Well, that’s OK.

I’d forgotten the odd anthropomorphism in Blacksad — that is, everybody’s kinda human, really, but there’s still some species difference (like in the mole guy opening a can of worms for lunch). I like it — it’s playful and allows the artist to draw a lot of different animal heads.

And the artwork is the main attraction here — it’s so attractive. And the panels flow so well.

The plot? Well, it’s pretty entertaining, too — it’s about a Robert Moses analogue, who’s even more evil than the original architect.

Charli XCX: Brat

This is a film noir pastiche, so there’s so many plot twists that I was starting to get fed up.

But I have to say that I really liked the final plot twist — I didn’t see that coming at all, and I went “heh heh” out loud. Good stuff. And if I understand correctly, this is the end of the Blacksad series?

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion: Rectangles and Circumstance

21:52: Death Spark 1 edited by Thomas Campbell

This is a quite varied anthology — a couple pieces go for gross-out stuff or just an unexpected joke (like Trevor Alixopulos)…

… but the Katie Lane piece is something else altogether. It’s fractured and engrossing and in the end rather unnerving. Fantastic stuff.

Gastr Del Sol: We Have Dozens Of Titles

22:10: Chromatopsie by Quentin Zultion (Éditions Lapin)

I’ve been slacking off my Duolingo the last few months, and I’ve read no French comics at all. So I want to get started again…

Hey! I understand everything on these pages!

Here’s some new words. “Leur chatte”… “Son cul”… *gasp* These are naughty words! Where’s my pearls! I need something to grip!

Anyway, this is a collection of vignettes, mostly about love and sex and stuff. I really like the artwork, and the way the stories flow in a kind of airy way.

There’s heavy drama in many of the stories, but it’s usually pretty symbolic, and the stories end in a pensive way. It’s a really enjoyable read.

23:12: Att misslyckas som människa by Joakim Pirinen (Kartago)

OK, gotta do some Swedish, too, to complete my language matrix.

This is a hefty book of one-page gags.

That is, there’s a drawing, and a pun or a joke underneath.

The attraction here is the totally wild artwork — it sometimes tends towards Gary Panter 1981, which is great.

With this many gags, not all of them can be winners, but there’s quite a few funny ones.

23:44: Š! #51 (Kuš)

The theme of the issue is mindfulness.

And the stories in the first half take the concept seriously…

… and then the last half is more jokey or contrarian. I was getting worried there for a while, but it ends up being a solid issue.

Machinedrum: 3for82

23:58: What Did You Eat Yesterday? 21 by Fumi Yoshinaga (Vertical)

OK, I’m fading, but one more…

I’ve been reading this series for years, and it’s so… calming.

Even though I’m never going to make any of these dishes.

The past few volumes have been developing longer story arches, but it’s glacial. This is in chapter 167 — Kakei meets Kenji’s parents! It’s a really funny episode, though — I laughed out loud.

Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown

01:00: The End

OK, but now I’ve read enough comics for one day.