PX83: Hoo-Be-Boo

Hoo-Be-Boo edited by Will Amato (168×260 cmmm)

I finally managed to score a copy of this 1983 anthology, so let’s have a look at it.

The book doesn’t say who the editor or publishers are, and a quick googling doesn’t reveal anything, either. But the address is in Torrance, California.

Hm… This ebay page claims that Will Amato is the editor, so let’s go with that.

The book starts off with four pages of Big Daddy Roth-esque creatures in space, courtesy of Rick Potts and Gary Panter.

The aesthetics in this book seem to lie somewhere between punk comics expressionism and mini-comix lack of ambition. (Christopher Lissner above.)

Most of the contributors are totally unknown to me, like B. Ehringer. But that’s certainly a quite attractive art style… And googling the name give me nothing.

The most mainstream-ey thing here is this from Vincent-Michael Edwards. I’m not able to google him, either, and I’m wondering whether this anthology has some connection to an art school or something? Most of these pieces don’t really go anywhere, but many look graphically interesting.

Wow. That’s like a better version of what Benjamin Marra is doing three decades later.

That’s odd. (By Kent Moorman.)

Anyway, here’s the reason I wanted to read this book: A five page strip by The Fuk Boys, aka. Gary Panter and Matt Groening. It’s possibly the most straightforward narrative in the book — it’s about picking up a hitchhiker with a hook for a hand.

It looks great!

So there you go.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

18×10%

Well, that was fast — less than a month.

But of course, each one of these er sprints are shorter than the previous one. This time we started at 2140 open bugs, and we’re now down to 2022 open bugs, which is a reduction of… Oh, that’s too much math for me.

So the next stretch is just 202 bugs, and will hopefully finally tip us over into below 2K territory. Magical numbers are still magical.

Hopefully there won’t be a B2K problem.

So what’s been going on this time?

Emacs has an old, inefficient garbage collector, and over the years there’s been a number of discussions about swapping it out with something modern. Hopefully that will happen at some point, but meanwhile discussion on emacs-devel recently touched on tuning what we have. Our garbage limits haven’t really been determined by anything but intuition, so we started tinkering a bit — first of all in a batch oriented setting. So why not use the Emacs build itself as the test?

We compile the .el files into .elc files by starting up an Emacs for each .el file, letting it compile the .elc file, and then exit. That’s not super efficient, but it makes the compilation more repeatable, since we don’t have to worry about ordering that much. This also means that the garbage collection isn’t that important: The processes don’t grow that big, and it’s all released anyway when the Emacs process exits.

On my build machine, a complete fresh build takes 1m29s. Simply by upping the gc limits, that’s slashed to 1m4s. Emacs does a lot of other stuff during the build, so byte compilation is really 2x as fast as with the old settings.

On my laptop, a build typically takes around 4 minutes, and upping the gc brings that down to 2m40s.

That’s a pretty massive win for virtually no work (except for Stefan Monnier who has been running a bunch of build processes with different settings to find an optimal one).

I thought it might be nice to have some charts, so I’ve been running Emacs builds continuously for a week on a server out there in the world somewhere. Behold!

Gregory Heytings have gone through the discontinuities in the chart and identified the major leaps (which have all been for good reasons, it turns out). (Probably.)

To zoom in on the gc tweaks:

So on this server, the gc tweaks brought down compilation time from about 125s to about 90s, which is nice. Looking at the CPU usage chart, it’s even better:

From about 1000 CPU seconds to about 650 CPU seconds. Think of all the electricity we’ll be saving, all over the world, from machines sweating less when building Emacs.

It might be as much as half an NFT! Globally! Over several lifetimes!

Finally, to zoom out again on the CPU chart:

We’re basically back to 2018 levels. “Yay.”

Anyway, other than that, I don’t think there’s any particularly noteworthy features this cycle — just a whole lot of bug fixin’ and tiny tweaks. Let’s have a look at the NEWS diff…

Oh, there’s a new command, C-x C-M-+ to adjust the font size in all windows. I think that’s going to be useful… Oh, and Eli added max-redisplay-ticks — it’s an experimental feature to do estimates for “how much work” we’ve been doing in redisplay, and giving up if it seems like redisplay is hanging Emacs (for some values of “hanging”). That’s going to be really helpful, but needs more tweaking.

But I forgot the three major, major, major new features:

Emacs has had commands to rotate images for a long time:

But now you can also flip the images, courtesy of Timo Taipalus:

I know!

And Tetris now has a new (optional) randomisation algorithm — it’s so annoying getting a lot of the same shapes in a row, so if tetris-allow-repetitions is customised to nil, it’ll use a “bag with no putback” algo (courtesy of Timothee Denizou).

But most important of all:

You can now zoom in on emojis (and, well, any other character) and see what they’re meant to depict. (Which can be somewhat difficult with some of the more complicated emojis.)

Fortunately, not all the new features are as momentous as these.

Hm… I should take a vacation soon.

June Music

Music I’ve bought in June.

I got most of these just a couple of days ago, so nothing’s really gelled as being fantastic in my mind. The Moby album of remixes of his Reprise orchestral rewords (which was really bad) is good. But that’s because the remixers disregarded that album and went back to the originals…

Oh! The Joan as Police Woman is really nice:

Joan As Police Woman x Tony Allen x Dave Okumu - Geometry Of You

See?

And there’s a new Mice Parade album:

Mice Parade Eisa Dancers

But I’ve barely listened to that, either, so I don’t know whether it’s fabulous or not.

It’s all so confusing these days.

Oh yeah, I got a new vinyl of Talking Heads’ 77 album, because I just got too annoyed with the CD version I had (it’s really tinny). I’m not an audiophile (PHEW) or anything, but I just want the version of the album I listened to as a teenager, right? The LP version I got sounded great… but it was a “remaster”. My ass! It was a total 2020 remix with the bass and drums turned way up.

I have just have one thing to say to record companies: Stahp it. The original album was perfectly mixed. They spent weeks slaving over that mix. You get some hot shot “remastering” it now in a day? That’s just annoying.

So I’ve finally re-bought the original vinyl, and it’ll be here in next month’s recap. Hopefully.

Eclipse 1938: The Drum

OK, I’m on a new laptop… let’s hope this blogging/screenshot thing works from this thing, too.

Oh, yeah — this is that box set about that actor.

The Colonial superiors.

Those beards look really real!

Oooo!

Are they carrying on up that pass?

Man, the enlisted men look younger every year.

This looks oddly like a TV movie — I mean, it’s from 1938, so it’s really really not, but whatever colour technology they were using at this time, it has a kind of NTSC vibe?

Is that The Drum?

This is not a good movie. I’m 15 minutes in, and they’ve established a couple of characters, but not really a plot at all.

It’s Sabu!

Finally the star of the movie.

OK, now the boy scouts makes sense.

In the first movie, Sabu didn’t know English, so he learned his lines phonetically. He basically sounds the same here, so the question is: Wouldn’t it be easier just to learn English?

But you could make the same argument here: Wouldn’t it be cheaper to hire actors that have beards instead of gluing beards onto beardless faces?

These colours are insane.

According to the liner notes on the DVD, there were some riots in India after this movie was shown there — because the movie is so unabashedly pre-British (i.e., pro-colonial).

But… I’m kinda surprised that anybody would care, because this movie is a snooze.

Sabu is pretty good, of course, but it’s like they forgot to write a plot while typing the script.

Right:

The appeal is to the shallower herd instinct, the instinct which prefers, with double instinctiveness, to mistake melodrama for tragedy, and is too willingly moved to tears by a regiment marching—though it knows not whither or why.

I don’t know what that means, except that they didn’t like it. And it’s not a good movie — I was kinda on board at the start, but it just gets more tedious by the minute.

I really like the way Roger Livesey talks — it’s very stiff upper lip above the lower trembling one — but that’s not enough to make this movie actually watchable.

Perhaps people in India rioted because this movie was kinda boring?

The Drum. Zoltan Korda. 1938.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Comics Daze

Man, it’s a wet day today. But… I can read comics! Yeah!

Joni Mitchell: Night Ride Home

12:58: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: The Idiots Abroad by Gilbert Shelton & Paul Mavrides (Fantagraphics)

Hm… the reproduction here is kinda odd? The linework looks kinda washed out (reproduced from a printed book, perhaps?) and the colouring only adds to the general messed-up look. That is, it’s all just a bit hard to read?

*groan*

Later parts look a lot sharper, and here the colouring makes more sense, too.

Anyway, I think I’ve read parts of this before? But possibly not all of it? I was originally published between 1984 and 1989, and while I applaud their ambitions — not just repeating the same old gags, but sending the Freak Brothers off on a Major Epic — they got a bit lost in the weeds. Large parts of the book are pretty gag-less, and is just pretty drawings of things from Barcelona etc.

I mean — I really enjoyed reading this, but, like…

Thee Oh Sees: Help

14:10: Bar Ques by Vincent Fortemps (Fremok)

Besides being a great place to shop comics, Domino Comics is also great for just reminding you that there’s exciting publishers around Europe, too. So I bought a bunch of stuff from Fremok.

This is a very handsome little book.

I’m not quite sure what it’s about, but it seems to have something to do with a boat and a storm at sea or something?

Nice.

Thee Oh Sees: Help

14:16: I’m The Eye by Paskalito/Boleyder (Le Dernier Cri (possibly))

This is a very handsome large book.

This is basically a series of illustrations based on er imaginary magazine covers or something? But we get two variations of each.

And then we get more?

It’s fun.

Merzbow & Lawrence English: Eternal Stalker

14:47: Jonas Fink by Vittorio Giardino (Fahrenheit)

Ah! I remember why this sounded so familiar… the first two albums (collected in the first volume here) were published in the 90s, while the second volume here wasn’t published until 20 years later. I feel there’s been quite a lot of series with a publication history like that lately? That is, a series that had been pretty much abandoned, but then the artist decided to finish it at last. Changing market circumstances?

I love Giardino’s artwork. It’s ideal, in a way. That is, in its genre (European comics realism), I don’t think you can find anybody doing better work — the people look like real people, with proper anatomy and convincing postures and correct clothing, and the backgrounds are all there: That house really looks like one of those houses, and that kitchen has all the little things that makes it look like a real kitchen.

That is, these drawing evoke a specific milieu impeccably.

And the line is just very pleasant to look at, too.

See? Very pleasant to read.

Hercules & Love Affair: Omnion: The Album

Towards the end of the “original” albums, I think I see a reason why Giardino might have semi-abandoned the series: It’s puttering along nicely, but without any urgency. It’s about living in Czechoslovakia in the 50s; hounded by the secret police and doing secret translations of Arthur Koestler etc. It seems like it should be super exciting! But it isn’t, because most of the pages are really about a love affair between two characters that don’t really have that much character, and it’s… just kinda cookie cutter? It felt like watching a few of the mid-season episodes of a drama TV show: A lot of padding.

But, OK, on to the new book:

Yikes! What happened to Giardino’s masterful command of the human body? Suddenly everybody’s gone bobble-headed, and that poor woman has been reduced to a couple of lines denoting features that seem to swim around at random in a sea of face…

The colours are nice, though.

Massimo: invalidObject Series (var)

*pause while I read this article about that abhorrent piece of crap* Pretty good article.

OK, back to the book…

After getting used to the new art style, it’s actually not that bad? I mean, except for the bobble heads, it’s still very fluid.

The storyline in this volume is a lot stronger than in the first one. Giardino covers the Soviets rolling into Prague in 1968, which is more relevant these days than you’d hope it would be. The characters become more interesting, and there’s passages that are quite moving.

So: Three thumbs up.

Exek: Check it Out!!

18:14: La Maitre chocolatier 2: La concurrence by Chetville / Corbeyran / Gourdon (Zoom)

This is another one of those French(ey) series they churn out on specific subjects: Food, wine, chocolate… This one is about chocolate.

And luuurve.

As usual, it’s pretty entertaining? There’s lots of intrigue, and now and then we get a lecture about chocolate.

It’s easy on the brain.

We even get some recipes.

19:01: You Don’t Own The Road by Stephane de Groef (Fremok)

OK, back to the Fremok shipment…

This is a very handsome little book… I think the dust jacket is made from textured wallpaper? Nice.

So first I thought this was just a book of drawings of oldee tymey American motel signs, but then I started reading the signs.

It’s quite amusing, and I love the colours.

Wouldn’t you want to hang out at the Lilithium Club?

Exek: Check it Out!!

19:10: Ostende by Dominique Goblet (Fremok)

This is a very handsome mid-sized book.

This is very pretty. It’s sort of loosely narrative, but it’s kinda vague what the narrative is.

Gorgeous.

Møster!: When You Cut Into The Present

19:23: I paladsets skygge by Gabriet Tiedt Lange (Fahrenheit)

I like the artwork.

And I like the story, too. It’s a very 70s plot — think Jodorowsky, Moebius, the second Planet of the Apes… It’s a mish-mash of influences, but works well.

Exec: Advertise Here

19:52: Barelli et le bouddha boudant by Bob de Moor (E-Voke)

Time for some classic second banana old children’s comics.

These Barelli stories are very compressed — just 30 pages and it’s over. Bob de Moor squeezes in at least a couple of gags per page, and lots and lots of action. I think E-Voke has made a wise decision to publish the eight Barelli stories one album at a time — I think most publishers would have published them all in one or two volumes, and that would have felt exhausting to contemplate. But one at a time, it’s a completely different proposition.

Oh oh oh! I’ve read this one before in my childhood. I remember that scene with the elephant vividly.

It’s still fun.

Exec: Advertise Here

20:21: Par les sillons by Vincent Fortemps (Fremok)

The is a very handetc.

I thought this was going to be like the other, much smaller Fortemps book, but this is a pretty clear narrative.

And gorgeous. It’s about war and stuff and is kinda moving.

50 Foot Wave: Power + Light

20:34: El exstraño juicio a Roy Ely by Balacarce / Giménez (E-Voke)

This is a collection of short stories (some are only a couple pages long) from the early 80s, I think? Possibly originally printed in Heavy Metal? I don’t know.

Almost all the stories have twist endings, and while none of the stories are hugely original or anything, there’s an undeniable charm to the stories. It’s unassuming sci fi/horror twisty stories, and they’re fun.

Sophie: Nothing More To Say

21:05: Rhonda 1: Help Me Rhonda by Van O (E-Voke)

Very standard French(ey) 2022 action/adventure artwork…

And it’s all kinda boring, innit? The first album only has the first third of the story, and it somehow doesn’t feel like anything happened, even though she escaped death a dozen times over these pages. Perhaps because nobody has any character here?

I don’t think I’ll be reading more of these.

µ-Ziq: Goodbye

21:34: Complete Fuff Comix Collection by Jeffrey Lewis

OK, I’m not going to read all of these tonight, because I’m growing kinda sleepy, for some reason or other.

But perhaps a couple?

Heh heh.

Aksak Maboul: Redrawn Figures 2

The #0 book has a couple of fortune cookies glued to the pages, which I appreciate.

These books are mostly autobio, and it’s in that 90s vibe — “I went on a trip and here’s what happened”. And it’s a genre I quite like, especially when the trips are as interesting as this.

The other stuff, like this infodump on the Guggenheim family… I mean, it’s interesting, but it’s not thrilling.

But I mean, I like the book and everything, only some things more than others…

The Meters: Gettin’ Funkier All The Time (4): Mardi Gras Mambo

23:20: Sleep

Hey! I’ve been reading Fuff for a couple hours! I totally only meant to read for 30 minutes or something. There is something kinda gripping about the series — I want to know how that trip ends! I’m up to issue #4, and it’s still going strong. And each chapter ends on a cliffhanger of sorts.

But it’s sleepytime, I think.