Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last week. Or rather… that I attempted to read — I bounced on *counts on fingers* four of these seven books, which is, like, a lot for me.

I’ve never heard of these creators before — Pierre Jean Bichose and Zimmermann — but this album apparently won some kind of prize (for the writing)? Anyway, I picked it up dirt cheap in a used bookstore.

And I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The linework is somewhat basic, but the page designs, the colouring and the storytelling really work.

It’s about a gang of terrorists that destroy various artworks in museums (no, it’s not new — late 80s), and it manages to jam a very satisfying story down into the standard 44 pages allotted to French(ey) comics. I mean, it’s not a masterpiece or anything, but it’s a surprisingly good trifle.

I shouldn’t have read it in one sitting, though — my brain starts shutting down after reading French for more than half an hour, so the last third of this book is rather hazy to me…

I read The Tomb of Dracula when I was, like, twelve? And I remember really enjoying it. And I’ve seen some people calling it the best comic book of the 70s.

And I still enjoy Gene Colan’s artwork — it’s really moody and appropriate.

But I was just really bored by the stories. I read 400 pages of this very shiny-papered omnibus and then decided that I’d definitely had enough.

I was really surprised. Perhaps my expectations were too high?

These early Corto Maltese stories come in very convenient format for me.

They’re all 20 pages long, which means that I can read one complete story (takes me about half an hour) before my brain starts sending out distress calls.

I’ve read these stories so many times now (in various translations) over many decades, but I still find them absolutely fascinating.

This one, though, was totally not my thing.

I mean, the artwork’s fine.

It’s just the storytelling style. I didn’t find it enjoyable, and I dropped it after a couple dozen pages.

Ditto with this, but for very different reasons.

The tablet-ey artwork looks offputting to me, and the constant fake drama — you can’t have two people just talking to each other; they have to start shouting (for no reason whatsoever) — *sigh*.

C’mon Avery Hill. What’s going on.

This comes in a box…

… and like Chris Ware’s Building Stories, it’s a collection of pamphlets in various formats.

No comparison otherwise.

But it’s fun! It’s apparently a true story, and it’s about when the author and his brother (both early 20s, I guess) were taken on a Mediterranean cruise by their mother. So you get a lot of scenes of people being bored on a cruise ship, but! The author had also been given a lot of tasks to execute (“it’s an art project”), and it makes for a good read.

I can’t say the same for this.

It’s one of those Comedies In Space, where the schtick is that the human protagonist is an asshole and a moron.

So far, so familiar, but the jokes are just so… lame. Does the writer work in animation, I wonder?

Anyway, it’s been a disappointing Week In Random Comics.

Book Club 2025: The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

I think I bought this because I read a poem by Notley in The Paris Review?

Huh, it’s not often you read a note at the start of a poetry collection giving a user’s manual… Do the poems really need that?

OH MY GOD

I guess they do, sort of, but once you get used to it, it reads much like most other poetry. That is, it seems like Notley uses “quotation marks”

the same way
other poets
use newlines.

(Although it’s difficult not to think of Zagat’s — ‘This “restaurant” has “good” food.’)

So it reads well, really, which perhaps explains why my Penguin edition here is the 19th printing? Or perhaps it just means that this book is assigned reading in All The Colleges.

Which would be understandable — it’s extremely American. That is, it’s all metaphor and spirituality, and … I hate that sort of thing.

I did read the entire book, but I should have ditched it after the amusing novelty wore off.

The Descent of Alette (1996) by Alice Notley (buy new, buy used, 4.31 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Ikkje by Jan Erik Vold and Steffen Kverneland

I think I picked this up at a sale a couple years ago?

This is a very shiny book — not only the cover, but the interior pages as well.

It’s really good, of course. Jan Erik Vold is perhaps the most important Norwegian poet, and the illustrations from Kverneland work well.

Illustrating poetry isn’t easy — you can be too literal (and bore the reader by repeating what’s written) or you can be too abstract (and basically just be wallpaper for the text). Kverneland avoids both problems admirably.

Ikkje (1997) by Jan Erik Vold, Steffen Kverneland

Book Club 2025: The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

I have no idea why I bought this book a couple years ago — I’ve read two books by Muriel Spark before, but they haven’t really inspired me to go all in… Perhaps I read a review of the book somewhere? Or something?

The physical copy here isn’t very inspiring. It feels more like a print on demand book than a print on demand book does. C’mon, New Directions.

This is written in a fascinating fashion — the language is breezy, amusing and digressive, but also oddly slippery. You never know what the next thing is going to be, and it’s frequently slightly unclear just what she’s talking about at the time, although it’s often clarified a few sentences on.

So it’s like a mind dump of the hostel/club she’s describing; all these young women living their intertwined lives, talking over year other.

And then out of the blue, there’s a shocking ending.

It’s a good book, but it was sometimes hard to keep paying attention, because it flows in such a strange way.

The Girls of Slender Means (1963) by Muriel Spark (buy new, buy used, 3.65 on Goodreads)

Even More Catalogues & Zines

kwakk.info has been carrying Previews catalogues for some time now. The usefulness of these things can be discussed (which is why they’re not included in the /all/ search), but having this data can sometimes be useful. (Say you’re doing research of an artist and you see that the last time they’re mentioned is doing an alternate cover for Boom! and you go “ah”, for instance.)

I’ve sourced most of the catalogues from Anna’s Archive, but even they don’t have everything. But then a comment pointed me towards DCBS’s download page (thanks, Jonathan), and they had some stuff, and I incorporated that.

But then I started googling for more, and, tada:

Alternate Worlds (in Australia) had All The Catalogues going back six years!!!

So we went from:

To:

Those Diamond Previews issues are long, man.

It was also interesting to look at the very last issues of Diamond Previews — Diamond was soliciting comics as late as October this year! When surely everybody had to have known that the new owners were stone cold crooks who’d just keep any stock sent to them and not pay anybody anything…. Allegedly! Allegedly! Did the trial(s) end yet?

Here’s a link to this historic artefact.

I guess it’s a fitting end to Diamond, in a way — I mean, the American comics industry was mainly financed by organised crime when it started…

In non-catalogue news, I stumbled upon Ken Meyer, Jr.’s zine page, which has hundreds of zines about comics — many of them chock full of early interviews with interesting comics artists. So I put them into the index.

In other tweaks, I’ve now made language-specific links from the front page to make it more obvious how to get at those — they used to be hidden behind rather obscure menus.

So there you go — kwakk.info is the link.