Random Thoughts

Here’s some comics I’ve read the past couple weeks…

Not too heavy this time around — just 13 pounds.

I bought these two issues of Raw Vision, an outsider art magazine — because they have articles about Mark Beyer.

They’re pretty interesting magazines all over — lots of non-mainstream artwork.

But the main attraction here are the two Beyer articles, which are unfortunately very short. But at least you get nice art.

The first article is a recap of publicly known things about Beyer (who isn’t very keen on giving interviews at all).

The second is much more interesting (at least to me) — we get reproductions of Beyer’s never, more messier work, and Beyer actually provides comments and what he’s doing!

I think that may be the first time ever? So worth seeking out just for that, even if his comments aren’t really… er… revealing.

This is the final hefty Jodorowsky collection I bought — and it’s the worst of the bunch.

The main thing here is The Final Incal with good artwork by Ladronn, but I found the story to be without many redeeming qualities.

The only this that attracted me to this book was that we get Moebius’ take on the material, too — so we basically get the first album of the Final Incal sequence twice.

Unfortunately, it’s been coloured by Fred Beltran, so it looks like complete dog shit.

The last half of the book is various Metabaron stuff, and much of it repeats the same material as was in the Metabarons Cycle collection, which made it even more boring. But there’s some impressive art.

And with that, I never ever have to read anything by Jodorowsky ever again.

I was most impressed with the first of these collections of Hugo Pratt for British war mags things.

The first collection was 250 pages long, but this is just 64 pages.

But like the first collection, this is a surprisingly entertaining story… and the reproduction here is mostly pretty good, even?

I’ve gotten three more of these collections, so I’ll be reading them soonish, I think.

Yeah yeah, everybody’s read Bone. I have, too! I think I started subscribing to the original series with like issue 7, and I only got around to getting a collection of the first bit years later, so I’ve never read it in sequence.

And besides, it was published over a decade, so re-reading it now was a completely different experience.

And… it’s good? It’s really good? I laughed out loud, with noises coming out of my mouth and everything, several times over these 1300 pages. Smith manages to establish different characters that play off each other extremely well: This allows him to make jokes and skits that feel organic and arise out of those characters, instead of, like, faking it, which so many writers do.

It’s also really epic. There’s this huge, huge story, and Everything Is At Stake, but it works; it really does. However, I have to say that I sometimes found the story a bit stagnant — several times it seemed like we were on the cusp of breaking out of a pattern, but then we returned (more or less) to the status quo. When we finally got to the Epic epic parts, I had started growing a bit impatient?

I’m just nitpicking, though; this thing has sold millions of copies (I think?), and understandably so: I can totally see this book being an Event for lots of kids, and for them, the longer the better, right?

But speaking of millions in sales and nitpicking — I found it really odd that they hadn’t bothered to edit out the remnants of the individual issues. The left-hand page here is the last page of an issue, and there was probably a blurb at the bottom there, and that has been removed, but they haven’t extended the panel to fill the page. And on the right-hand page, we have the first page of an issue, but they haven’t edited out the logo.

But more importantly, those two splash panels side by side feel redundant, as if the record is skipping back.

And we also have remnants from the individual collections, where Smith have the characters do a recap — which is valuable in the smaller collections, but it’s repetetive in this huge book.

I’m nitpicking, but I think this book is so good that it’s just weird that it hasn’t gotten that final polish — this is going to be a book that people are reading, like, forever, so why not make it… perfect?

Oh, and speaking of oddball things (but not something you can “fix” in an edit) — the gender sitch in Bone is just really strikingly odd. Yes, you have these two incredibly super-powered female characters in Gran’ma Ben, Thorn and Briar, but I don’t think there’s any other female characters at all? Which is so odd, because there’s at least three dozen (named) male characters. There’s seldom any women in the backgrounds of the panels either.

Hm… Oh I forgot the possum children’s mother — she has a talking part at the start of the book. But otherwise there’s nobody? It’s just an odd tick, but I guess if you’re modelling your book after Lord of the Rings, that’s where you end up…

Yes, it’s yet another book for children, but this time from the 50s.

Bob De Moor was an Hergé assistant, and he does this style perfectly here.

It’s fun. It’s even got a pretty neat little plot, but the attraction is really the artwork…

And that’s mostly why I bought this omnibus collection, too — I really like Annie Goetzinger’s artwork, but I was also into reading more from Pierre Christin (who has a very long career as a writer in France, but not everything is… awesome).

The artwork here is, as expected, really attractive.

I mean, just look at this. This kind of slightly stiff French comics artwork is my thing. All these interiors and exteriors that look so on point.

This is in French, which I’m still learning, but it’s slightly more complicated than I quite comprehend, so I had to use Google Translate a lot. So it was sometimes slow going, reading this, but it was entertaining and interesting. I think I’m going to hold off on reading more Christin a few months, and read something slightly simpler instead.

But I did really enjoy these three albums collected here, even if I was a bit confused while reading them.

OK, that’s it.