Random Thoughts

I was in London last weekend and got a small stack of comics from Gosh Comics. And since today’s yet another rainy day, I’ve had to postpone cleaning the windows yet again (darn), so it’s comics readin’ time. And today’s music has to be from 1982, just because.

Zazou, Bikaye & Cy1: Noir et Blanc (vinyl)

12:15: Eric’s Sister by Kaitlin Chan

This is from Hong Kong…

I wonder whether those words that are translated below some panels are meant to express — are these people talking English with some random Chinese words mixed in? I assumed they’d be talking Chinese, but er… I’m not sure?

The storytelling is really choppy. It doesn’t help that many of the characters are drawn very similarly, but it’s often just hard to tell what’s actually going on. “You should head out first”? Head out where? Is he just telling her that he wants her to go home so that he can drink alone? That’s a weird thing to do?

The rest of the book is about the main character being sad, but her sadness is 100% understandable, and what’s not understandable is why the other characters don’t give her time and space? I think something got lost in translation somewhere.

New Order: Power, Corruption & Lies

12:50: The Magic Necklace by Claire Napier

Wow, this is quite something — this constantly teeters on the edge of incomprehensibility, but has so great flow that everything remains clear anyway. It’s fascinating.

And it’s a fun story, too — very horny and very dense. Great stuff.

13:11: Crimes of Passion by Karla Paloma

This is a fun little book about sex and murder. It’s printed in a peculiar way — with these yellow insert sheets that kind of function as “censorship strips”…

… but then flips over and has text. It’s a great idea.

See? Fun.

Kissing the Pink: Naked

13:20: The Armadillo Prophecy by Zerocolcare (Ablaze)

Not just Gosh-bought comics today…

Zerocalcare’s enormously successful, and it’s easy to see why — he’s got that Gotlib-like patter down, and draws like a more cartoony version of 90s American alternative comics.

And this is an interesting book, in a way — it’s autobio, as usual, and it’s about the death of a friend, but told in an extremely digressive way — which works well; we kinda circle the subject, but avoids it, too, and that feels really appropriate.

And it’s funny. But I dunno — as usual with his comics, I go “yes, I guess this is good”, but then I don’t really connect with it.

Depeche Mode: Construction Time Again

14:19: Hospital Drama Show by Scott Travis (The Mansion Press)

Love the colours here.

This starts off as a very normal comic…

… but that was just a fake-out. This is a somewhat odd horror/sex/comedy book centred around a hospital — so it’s kinda like a parody of ER or Gray’s Anatomy or something (which I haven’t seen).

And I think it’s just filled with references I don’t really relate to, because I’m oldes. I think it may be riffing on Adventure Time (which I’ve never seen)? And there’s certainly a lot of video game references, including a boss fight towards the end.

I like the artwork, though (which is influenced by Simon Hanselmann, I think — I was idly wondering just the other month when we’d see a generation grown up on Hanselmann appear, and I guess the time is now), and there were some really amusing sequences, but it’s like this book’s interests are 100% perpendicular to mine. I suspect that people who are into what Travis is into would enjoy this enormously, though — Travis is clearly really talented.

Eurythmics: Touch

15:13: Cowlick #7 edited by Floyd Tangeman (Deadcrow)

This issue is squarebound and everything.

As usual, it’s a mixture of non-narrative pieces…

… kinda abstractey concrete things…

… and more traditional comics. It’s great! It’s quite unified in its distracted qualities, and seems to build up until…

… we get to Floyd Tangeman’s piece at the end, which caps things off very nicely.

The Cure: Japanese Whispers

15:52: Young Men In Love edited by Joe Glass & Matt Miner

This starts off well with the above…

… but then everything quickly becomes very samey. Everything looks really professional; really slick, and obviously drawn digitally. (Well, almost all of them.)

All the stories are between four and eight pages long, and with a couple of exceptions, they’re pretty dull.

I’m wondering where all these people came from. It’s all so samey — are their day jobs in animation or something? And it’s also striking that the vast majority of the stories are by writer/artists teams, which is pretty unusual for anthologies with stories as short as this.

Very odd. And almost all really bad.

Tom Tom Club: Close To The Bone

16:21: Relatives by Antoine Orand

Finally, some real comics.

This is narrative in that we follow a ball rolling around a house, and possibly into a separate universe, from different viewpoints. It’s fun!

Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues

16:27: Galago #165 edited by Anders Annikas (Galago)

The thicker format Galago adopted this year is nice. Give more space for the pieces to breathe.

As usual, it’s very varied even though there is, as usual, a theme:

Collecting things.

It’s a strong issue.

17:01: Torse by Paul Jon Milne

Very expressive artwork.

It’s not immediately clear what’s going on in this book, and I like that a lot. It slowly descends into pure horror. Very good.

Colourbox: Colourbox (PolyGram)

17:12: In Limbo by Deb JJ Lee (First Second)

*squints* I don’t think I’ve seen a comic with as little contrast as this has. It looks good, I think, but it’s a bit like reading through haze.

The artwork is solid, but the photo references often shine through a bit too much — sometimes it feels like looking at a photo that’s been through a photoshop process.

And while the storytelling is usually smooth, there’s sometimes just some “eh?” moments… like here, she says she doesn’t care what toothbrush she gets, but then the dentist gets shirty when she doesn’t want whatever other thing there…

Writing text in <spoken in a different language like this> is a well established comics convention. Here she does something I haven’t seen before, and took me a while to figure out: When the main character doesn’t understand the Korean “<being spoken 이와 같이, right>”, the bits she doesn’t understand aren’t translated. Which would traditionally “<being spoken> 이와 같이, <rightn>”?

(It’s also a bit weird that there’s so much her mother says in Korean that she just doesn’t understand. Yes, this is autobio.)

“Double eyelid surgery”!? Is that what it’s called? How weird. I mean, it’s weird that I’ve never happened onto that expression before, considering how many meters of Korean comics I’ve read…

Anyway, from the amount of kvetching I’m doing here, you may surmise that I wasn’t really into this book. You’d be right.

Howard Jones: Human’s Lib

18:54: Whatever Where And Why Vol. 1 by Alex Gamsu Jenkins (The Mansion Press)

Yes, yes, Joan Cornellà. It’s Joan Cornellà’s schtick, except with artwork that’s less intriguing.

Many of these one-pagers just don’t work (left), or mistake disgusting for absurd.

Pink Industry: Who Told You, You Were Naked?

And so many of these are just trite. No! An old woman who’s satanic!

No! People are shallow! It cannot be!

I mean, Joan Cornellà misses a lot, too, but when he’s on form, he’s amazing.

While this is just… “yes, but that’s why people wash their hands before eating”.

OK, perhaps I’m just being to annoyed at some of the less than stellar books and I should call it a night. Too early. And I still have so many comics to read…

Blaine L. Reininger: Playin’ Your Game

19:21: The End

Yeah, OK, another day. And perhaps tomorrow it’ll rain again, so yet again (darn) I won’t be able to clean the windows? *crosses fingers*