Comics Daze

It’s an unexpectedly grey day, so I think I’ll read some comics. And only listen to albums from 1978.

Kate Bush: The Kick Inside

12:40: Face Meat by Bonten Taro (Living the Line Books)

Uh-oh. Japanese comics from the 60s. Seems to be very influenced by American horror comics?

I know! I know!

Like the other Japanese comics in Living the Line’s Smudge line, this is pretty bad. I think it’s beyond time for me to give up on this stuff.

(I ditched the book after 50 pages.)

Kate Bush: Lionheart

13:01: Six Treasures of the Spiral by Matt Madden (Uncivilized Books)

Wow, this book is really good. It’s a collection of short pieces (sometimes only a page long, but there’s some longer stories here, too) done over the last three decades.

It’s varied in form, but quite consistent in tone.

Madden play a lot with comics formats and expectations, and the results are sometimes mind-bogglingly interesting. Many of these pieces are wouldn’t have been out of place in an issue of Raw Magazine in the 80s.

It’s an amazing book is what I’m saying.

13:47: The Anxiety Club by Fanget/Meyer/Aubry (Selfmadehero)

Err… what the…

Oh, this is a self help book? Fuck that shit.

Talking Heads: More Songs About Buildings and Food

13:50: Young Men in Love edited by Joe Glass and Matt Miner (A Wave Blue World)

Oops! This is a kickstartererd anthology? Those usually aren’t very good…

Especially when it’s all quite short stories by mostly writer/artist teams.

This one was good, though — it’s like a proper little short story, and the artwork is lively.

And I liked the art on this one.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel 2

14:25: Passi, Messa ! by Joost Swarte (Futuropolis)

I love Swarte’s artwork.

And it’s very funny, too. My French isn’t strong enough to get all the gags, even with the help from Google Translate, but I get most of it. Heh heh.

15:04: Jeg vil ikke være her by Dorte Walstad (Aschehoug)

This is a story about two kids who go to visit their father for a weekend after a divorce.

It’s not a complicated story — I guess this is for children? — but it packs an emotional wallop. It’s really good.

It seems to be set in the 80s, I think? Which is an odd choice, isn’t it? Is it autobiographical?

Genesis: And Then There Were Three

15:21: Totality by Jeff Lok (Fieldmouse Press)

This has a proper mood going on.

It’s got an irresistable rhythm. It’s compelling.

15:49: Amadeo & Maladeo by R. O. Blechman (Fantagraphics)

Hm… have I read this before? It looks familiar. Oh, it’s from 2016! Hm. Then I probably have.

This is pretty good…

It’s not quite my kinda thing, but it works.

Kraftwerk: The Man Machine

16:01: Cartoon Clouds by Joseph Remnant (Fantagraphics)

Hm. This is from 2017? Oh, right, Fantagraphics had a sale, and I guess these books are from that sale.

It seems like half of the people who come out of art schools make this comic — it’s all about how all the teachers at school are assholes who don’t bow down in awe to people who can draw a realistic hand, like they should. But they usually keep it short!

This goes on and on and it feels like Remnant has a list of grievances to settle, and he spends a couple pages on each — like how much he hates atheists, people with money, people who dress interestingly I mean pretentiously, people who play video games — just anything. It’s really tiresome, especially when the dialogue is so lame and unrealistic as it is (the spread above is unfortunately typical).

(And yes, Joseph’s stand in is called “Seth”, and yes, all the characters have terminal resting bitch face.)

Oh, so ironic! He talks about eating well, and then he does a line of coke! Don’t you think!?

It’s a tiresome book, and I assumed that it had been done by a 22 year old, but “Joseph Remnant” had been publishing for almost a decade before this, so that just makes it even sadder.

Joe Jackson: Look Sharp!

17:19: Too Late for a DNA Test by Richard O. Smith & Daniel Østvold (Ford Forlag)

Østvold’s artwork is stark, but it gets the job done. He’s got really good comedic timing in his storytelling…

Yes: Tormato

… which is essential here, as this book is about a guy that takes care of his 98 year old father (who’s a bit of a twat, as Smith says).

This is a quite original work — it avoids all sentimentality, but it’s not one of those books where the author is settling scores, either. Instead it feels very honest and straightforward, and that’s (as everybody knows) the hardest pose to achieve.

It’s good — I laughed out loud several times.

OK, I should consider making some food or something. I forgot to eat lunch, and now it’s dinner time.

[time passes]

I fried up some pollock. Mm, fish.

Tom Robinson Band: Power In The Darkness

19:07: Souvenir by Sara L. Jewell (Fieldmouse Press)

This is graphically very strong.

And I like the mood it’s got going on.

19:25: Diabolik (Desert Island)

Oh, so this book reproduces the back covers of the long-running Diabolik series? That’s very… curatorial.

And it looks just like Warhol’s portraits?

Well… er… I dunno.

These are very nice drawings, but I don’t really see how they resemble Warhol in the least. The look like everyday Italian comics to me.

Which, of course, is pretty spiffy, but…

(This is from the Mystery Mail.)

Prince: For You

19:31: Alive Outside edited by Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell (Neoglyphic Media)

I got this from here, and it’s a very elaborate package.

It comes with all these booklets and bands stickers and stuff.

And also two large riso prints.

Class! I love an elaborately printed book.

This has all these people:

Impressive, eh?

The anthology is a mix of illustrations and more narrative pieces, but they share a mind of similar approach. That is, it’s quite chaotic.

And I have no idea who did what.

It would be nice if they put the names on the actual pieces themselves, because I’m not gonna flip back and forth and then try to count how many pieces I’m in and stuff.

But that’s Marc Bell for sure.

Heh heh. “People loved it.” “New Yorker readers!” “They are still people.” “Barely!”

Anyway, I particularly liked the above piece, and I have no idea who made it.

Yes, and there’s all these booklets — I think there’s five stapled into the book, and then at least three more that aren’t.

Excessive! Just the way we like it.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this anthology.

Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians

20:25: Forresten 33 (Jippi forlag)

This is a long-running Norwegian anthology.

And it’s good (Martin Ernstsen above).

Hey! Berliac!

Wow, I love this piece by Anders Nilssen. Nobody does animals like he does.

Most of the pieces are straightforwardly narrative, but then you have Wenkai Xu. Nice.

I’ve somehow only got a handful of issues of this anthology, and I should fix that. I see them around at used bookstores, so they’re probably easy to pick up.

Grace Jones: Fame

20:51: Skolen for livet by Simon Petersen (Eudor)

This Danish book seems like an autobio at the start (the protagonist has the same name as the author and looks pretty much like him), but then as it proceeds its gets clearer and clearer that it’s fiction.

It’s pretty good? That is, in part it feels well-observed, and it’s both amusing and interesting.

I think the relationship stuff is a bit… uhm… how to put it. OK: It seems perhaps more real than the rest, but he describes his (I mean his protagonist’s) (soon to be ex-)girlfriend so relentlessly as a controlling stick-in-the-mud that it starts to feel abusive after a while. You start to feel sorry for her for being in this book (even if she’s fictional, which she might not be), which is not the intended effect, I think.

But it’s a pretty good book.

Various: No New York

21:52: Rataplan et le prince de Jitomir by Duval/Berck (E-Voke)

This is a series from the 60s, and there’s a reason it hasn’t been translated earlier.

It looks good, but it’s just kinda lame. I know, I know, it’s for children, but even so, it’s just not all that well written.

Good artwork, though.

22:09: Causeway #30-32 by C.F.

I got this from here, and it’s really cool. And the three issues this time around are more narrative than usual.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Thousand Knives Of Ryuichi Sakamoto

22:12: Galago #167 (Galago)

Well, gotta do a Swedish thing too, I guess?

This is a long-running Swedish anthology.

And… it’s pretty good? There’s a nice mix of longer and shorter pieces, and serious and jokey things. It’s well put together. The only disappointing thing is that two of the things are extracts from longer works that’ll be published later this year, and those are seldom very exciting to read in a context like this.

22:44: The End

OK, I think that’s enough comics for today.

Book Club 2025: Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

There’s something a bit… decadent about these books. They’re about an editor who edits mystery books, so we get an entire other mystery inserted into the book, and then she’s also (of course) involved with a mystery of her own that ties into (and has clues from) the “inner” book. It’s for people who have read so many mysteries that they’re blaze and want to read several mysteries at the same time. Or as the kids say: Dawg, I heard you like mysteries, so I put a mystery in your mystery so that you can read a mystery while you’re reading another mystery. (What is that you say? That thing is 21 years old? NEVER MIND)

It’s well written, and it’s fun, but it’s not as good as the first one. For one, the mystery in the book-within-the-book only had one possible solution, and it was really obvious from the start. Which made it really annoying to read the editor trying to puzzle out what the solution could be, because it just made her seem kinda stupid. And speaking of which — this also didn’t really have much of a motivation for her to get involved in her own mystery this time around. It’s like she was just kinda bored, so why not start interrogating people? It didn’t really hang together…

But it’s pretty entertaining. Since it’s two mystery novels in one, it manages to defend its almost six hundred pages, but only barely.

Horowitz seems to indicate that this will be the final book of the series, and he only wrote it because the actor who plays the editor in the TV adaptation said that she really wanted to have a third season. Which is a good motivation as any to write a mystery, I guess? But hearing that, I went “ah, that explains it” — it just feels ever so slightly strained and artificial.

But it’s fine. It’s plenty diverting.

Marble Hall Murders (2025) by Anthony Horowitz (buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)

Concerts in Oslo Updated A Bit

I’ve gone through the list of venues and added new ones that have appeared in Oslo over the last year, so the Concerts in Oslo web site (and apps for iOS and Android) should now be more updated.

The site works by scraping the web pages of counts on fingers 84 venues and tries to make sense of the concert listings. Of course, these days many venues outsource the listings to Facebook, which is a blessing and a curse: It means that I don’t have to write scraping software for so many different sites, but it’s also just kinda difficult to actually scrape Facebook:

Because the HTML is (I guess purposefully?) obfuscated to make it difficult to do what I’m doing. Gotta keep the users on the site!

But so far, so good, I guess — I mean, they change the HTML frequently, and since it’s so obfuscated, the software basically has to guess at what the concert listing is, so sometimes there’s a gazillion bogus entries that I have to clear out manually and then stare at the code for a couple of hours.

(It’s fun when they change the dates from “THURSDAY 24th” to “NEXT THURSDAY” to “THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW” to “C’MON YOU KNOW WHEN” or whatever the next thing is going to be.)

Oh, well.

Anyway, if there’s any venues in Oslo that I’ve missed that you think should be listed, drop me a note.