Random Thoughts

Swords, Spacemen & Superspies (2024) by James Kochalka

I’ve been a fan of Kochalka since the 90s, but I’ve kind of lost track of him? That is, I stumble over his books and buy them and like them, but that’s it. Perhaps it’s because he started doing mostly books for children — I’m usually not very enthused by the books First Second publishes, and I think Kochalka’s been over there a few years?

I remember fondly Kochalka’s valiant crusade against craft in the letters pages of The Comics Journal. For instance, Kochalka writes in The Comics Journal #194, page #7:

Craft is a rope tying us to
mediocrity of expression! We’re all too timid to
untie it! “But we’ve worked so hard to learn
how to draw, how to write. We can’t give that
up. If we untie the rope we’ll just float off into
space, we whine.
I’d rather fucking choke and die in the
vacuum of space than anemically craft a series
Of smarty pants sequential pictures and pat
myself on the back for my skillful accomplish-
ment.
The joy Of comics is their stupidity, their
simplicity. The way they can cut right to your
soul so easily. Just a simple string Of symbols
and pictures, how can they do that? Magic! It’s
magic, pure and simple, not craft. I refuse to
accept that the magic Of comics is crafted. It
comes out of nowhere, I know it.

Now that’s moving.

Anyway, we’re talking about Kochalka’s newest release, from Black Eye — and it’s the last post in this blog series, because we’re now reached 2024.

This is three books in a box — and TSK TSK, bad glue! Bad glue!

But there’s three nice books inside — two of them are squarebound and one is a pamphlet.

Let’s look at Duck Fighter first.

We get a brief framing sequence…

… and then we’re off into a James Bond-ish adventure, only funnier. I love the offhand attitude of Kochalka’s characters. “Pfft.”

Kochalka’s artwork usually looks really organic and free — this looks more, well, streamlined than usual? I’m guessing it was drawn on a tablet or something?

But it’s funny. Kochalka takes an absurd premise and runs with it.

I’m not quite sure what the intended audience is for this — I could totally see kids finding this hilarious…

… but it’s also more intense than you’d expect a book for children to be.

While any given scene in this book seems like it’s been improvised, the book does have a sort of traditional story arc (even if it undermines itself and is, well, absurd). It’s fun.

The second book is Elf Cat Is Famous. The Elfboy character used to be Kochalka’s standin in books, but I’m not sure whether Elf Cat works that way.

The artwork in this book seems to have gotten more attention than in the previous book. It’s really attractive.

And cute. Soooo cute.

Hey! I totally identify with the Elf Dog character!

Elf Cat Is Famous is mostly about poking fun at today’s influencers, I guess, which makes it unusually topical for Kochalka.

(Heh heh, I just noticed that Emacs’ spellchecker doesn’t recognise the word “influencers”. Cool.)

I love those ferns!

Anyway, the second book feels even more improvised than the first book. It’s perhaps not as funny (even though it’s plenty funny), but it has real nerve. It’s got a real mood going on. It really reminds me of classic Kochalka.

The third book is apparently called Book Moon Prototype, and is pretty short. So I wonder whether this is a pitch for a longer book, perhaps?

Because it’s really high concept. It’s all about The Magic Of Reading, but we get this reading-positive narration while we watch some robots on a moon do a kick-ass fight. So you could see this being pitched as something to encourage kids to read… although I have no idea how you’d expand this to a 150 page book.

You can buy this box from Black Eye.

The book was crowdfunded, and as is common with those books, I can’t find anybody doing any actual reviews of the book? It’s a shame — these are solid books that should get more attention.

But that’s it for this blog series! I’m done! So now I’m packing up my super high tech advanced Comics Snapping Studio (i.e., the end of my couch), so no more almost-Brat Summer-coloured posts from me.

Oh, wait, I have to do a summing-up post. Coming up…

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.

Portraits of Queen West: Spadina to Bathurst (2023) by Kevin Steele

Huh, is this book about Mondrian?

Oh, it’s a map of a bit of Toronto.

Steele explains the concept — over a number of years, he’s taken pictures of streets in Toronto, and this book collects images of one part of one particular street. I’m going like “uhm?”

So we move along the street. Some pages have a lot of images…

… and some pages have these stitched-together panorama views.

And on some of the pages, we have the same buildings over a number of years, so that we can see how things change.

The images are mostly straight-on, and all taken during daytime, but there’s a handful that are askew.

And the thing is — while I was sceptical about the project, I was finding myself growing more and more interested while reading the book. This micro attention to things lends itself to playing detective, going “oh, that changed” or “oh, that’s that thing”, and it’s kinda engrossing? It’s weird! I didn’t expect that at all.

There’s very little text in the book, but there’s some.

At the halfway point, things flip around (and we flip the book upside down)…

… and we follow this section of the street back again towards the west (I guess).

I really like this book, I have to say. People who live around here would probably enjoy it even more.

So we continue towards the end…

… which is another cover, of course.

It’s really well done — it follows through its concept completely.

You can buy it from Black Eye.

Heh:

Steele describes his technique: he waits for breaks in the traffic, then darts out to snap an image when storefronts are unobstructed; he edits his images in Lightroom, adjusting the perspective to make the buildings vertical; and, finally, he stitches the photos in Photoshop.

Seems like a dangerous thing to do.

Right:

Steele’s beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn’t just memorialize the world we lost – it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win.

Right:

I’m just setting out to let you hold the whole street in your hands.

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.

Bore (2023) by Jason Bradshaw

This handsome book collects stories done over almost a decade.

It starts off with a showstopper of a story, really — it seems fully realised and speaks clearly (if silently).

It’s done over a long period by a young artist, so there’s, of course, quite a lot of exploration in how to do comics. So a few of the stories look like Kevin Huizenga…

… while other don’t at all. But even if there’s all this variety in the artwork, it feels like a very… edited? book. I’m guessing there were lighter pieces that could have been included, but it’s all depression all the time here.

The first half of the book is more externally oriented — we get traditional autobio anecdote based stories.

But then we seem to withdraw quite a bit, and large stretches of the book are very short pieces that all deal with heavy depression and suicide thoughts. Huh, I didn’t snap any examples of that, really — odd. Too late now!

There’s experimentation throughout, and I loved this one.

The book ends with a couple longer stories that sort of deal with the external world more again, so the book has a structure that’s like descending into hell and then a ambiguously hopeful ending. It’s a strong book, but it’s… it’s a lot.

The book can be bought from Black Eye.

I’m unable to find any reviews of this book, but here’s one of #11:

The 11th issue of Bore is a cleanly drawn, autobiographical comic that succeeds by omission. By that I mean the drawings are spare on detail in such a way that facial features, limbs, and pets contain as little elaboration as possible.

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.