Random Thoughts

Dead Meat by Sue Coe with Alexander Cockburn (203x256mm)

OK, this is it, for sure this time: This is the final post in this blog series — before the MetaMaus post which is supposed to be the real final post (and was written months ago), and then the extremely final post that sums up the entire thing (also written), and then some index posts.

IT”S THE FINAL ONE I”M WRITING!!!1!

I mean it.

This time.

So the concept of this book is that Coe went around er the country and visited a bunch of slaughterhouses and feed lots…

(I’ve had this book for decades, but I’ve never actually made myself read it before.)

We start with an introduction that’s more than thirty pages long (by Cockburn) about the history of meat eating, with an emphasis on Christian values and stuff. Which seems pretty absurd, because… what… I mean, it’s not that it’s a totally bad essay or anything, but it just seems so out of place. Perhaps it’s my general disdain and disinterest in religion that just made me really impatient with it all, and I started skipping.

Then it’s on to the point of the book: The abattoir visits, but we get another introduction first (it’s the third; there was a short introduction by some other person before that Cockburn introduction), and this time around, I think it’s finally Sue Coe writing? The book doesn’t say, and Coe has usually just done illustrations in her previous books, so I was a bit confused and started flipping back and forth to see whether there was any explanation…

Anyway, in the introduction, she talks about growing up near St. Georges Hill, “possibly the richest place per capita on earth”… and I’ve never heard of the place, so I googled:

Uhm:

Jump to navigation
Jump to search
“St. George’s Hill” redirects here. For the hamlet in Canada, see St. George’s Hill, Saskatchewan.

Coordinates: 51.352°N 0.445°W St George’s Hill is a 964-acre (3.9 km2) private gated community in Weybridge, Surrey, United Kingdom.

So it’s in the UK? I guess?

I’m just belabouring the point here, because the book is really vague about itsy bitsy details like this, as, like, what country she’s talking about.

Hersham sounds like a fun place.

Coe wasn’t allowed to take any pictures in the slaughterhouses, but she did sketches, and then we get the resulting paintings reproduced in the book.

It’s pretty nauseating.

I mean, not pretty.

The main section of the book is basically paintings and drawings paired with a very matter-of-fact text where Coe describes her meeting people working at these places, and how the animals were treated.

Cor is pretty sympathetic towards the people working in these places.

Haunted by the meat you’re eaten.

Did I mention that the text is pretty tough to read?

And the artwork’s no picnic either.

*sigh*

And then the book is rounded out with reproductions of Coe’s sketches.

I don’t think I’ll be eating anything today.

Or ever again.

Oh, was the introduction insightful?

Cockburn’s introductory essay traces the history of the meat industry with his customary shrewd sociopolitical insight, but without falling into polemics. Dead Meat will appeal not just to those interested in animal rights, but to anyone who cares about how society functions.

Reviews seem to split basically on political lines:

I recommend Dead Meat as required reading and viewing for vegetarians and meat eaters alike, because it attempts to address very complicated issues.

So there’s a few reviews from morons who are all “oh, but she’s exaggerating”.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

The Huge Book of Hell by Matt Groening (267x266mm)

This is in the same format at The Big Book of Hell. That book was published in 90, and was a ten year retrospective featuring many strips not published before, along with a “best of” from the published collections.

This one is published just six years later, so it’s not another decade-long retrospective… so… what is it, then?

So the indicia says that there’s bits here from the previous two Life in Hell collections, and bits from calendars.

The Big Book was (almost) completely sequential, but this one is arranged by subject, apparently.

The strips don’t really cohere per theme, though, so it mostly seems like some intern that had picked stuff at random. The two strips above are from the “Dreamland” section.

I’m guessing the page to the left is from a calendar… and I can’t recall seeing that page to the right before? (By Groening with Gary Panter.)

I can’t recall seeing this page before, either? (It’s even funnier in retrospect, because Groening seems to be saying that he’s somewhat in a rut, and in 87 he created The Simpsons.)

The oldest strips here are from 83, but the majority are from the 90s. And I think I’ve read about two thirds of the strips before, but it’s fun discovering these new strips (well, new to me) hiding between the familiar hits.

Some of the sections seem to work better, like the one about how awful Republicans are.

I don’t mean to imply that this is a bad book or anything: It’s a lovely collection of lovely Life in Hell strips — but I just don’t know why they’re collecting it in this haphazard way. Why not just do a complete, chronological reprinting of Life in Hell already? I’d love to read that.

Well, perhaps I do know why this book is like this: It’s just not a book geared towards nerds. And it’s a scrumptious book as it is. But it’s frustrating.

One of Groening’s rare strips about his childhood. Hippies are the best.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Songy of Paradise by Gary Panter (294x378mm)

I had totally forgotten about this book. I mean, both that I had it and what it’s about.

Oh, right — after doing Dante, Panter is now doing Milton.

Swanky.

Anyway, this is a very large, thin hardback book with metallic inks on the cover — so it’s basically like all of Fantagraphics’ Panter books. (They have somewhat different sizes, though.) I wonder why they hit on this format… it seems so incongruous with Panter’s artwork. Perhaps that’s why? Panter described them as “fetish objects” in an interview…

Jimbo in Purgatory was very, very dense. This is much lighter reading… and it’s funnier.

It’s so short, though. It feels very slight.

Yes:

I enjoyed Songy of Paradise from an adaptation perspective, and I love the detail it has for being such a quick read. I think you will enjoy it more if you have some experience with Milton or Panter’s earlier works, but it is a fun book on its own.

It’s apparently very deep:

Which is a huge part of their appeal, of course. At 35 bucks, a book this slender (if gorgeous) had damn well better give you plenty to mull over, and there’s no doubt that this does : I’ve read it four times since buying it just over two days ago, and new elements — as well as new ways of interpreting previously-noted elements — reveal themselves each time, and easy answers are not just in short supply, they’re downright non-existent. Is Songy’s dipshit dialogue and general obliviousness a sign of his pure-hearted innocence, or of contemptible ignorance? Is he simply a stand-in for Christ, or for the author himself? Are the subtle changes Panter makes to Milton’s conclusion meant to make his “happy ending” ironic — or anything but?

[…]

Multi-layered without being intimidating, endearing without being cloying, precise without being clinical, Songy Of Paradise is as close a thing to a working definition of a comics masterpiece as you’re ever likely to find.

I guess it might be more interesting for people who are er “interested” in religious stuff?

There was even a roundtable:

When I first finish Songy of Paradise, I’m struck by the comic’s unparalleled demanding that the reader step back. The book is large — this many by this many inches. These dimensions are by no means an accident, and they don’t seem to be a last minute decision either. Each page at about the size of an art print for one’s wall, the work is independently beautiful, even if removed from the narrative and seen at a glance. Panter’s understanding of composition in putting this book together makes it a pleasure to look at, whether you’re fluent in its references or not.

[…]

I think the complexity of Songy is of a different order… it’s more Little Lulu than anything else.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Hand-Drying in America by Ben Katchor (298x311mm)

This is a collection of strips that appeared in the architectural magazine Metropolis between 98 and 12, which is a marriage made in heaven, you’d think: Katchor had been doing stories about buildings and object design since, like, forever, so…

This is a big, jam-packed book: It’s 160 pages, almost square, and feels hefty. And we start off on the inside front cover with a thing about the environmental impact of printing books in China. (This book is printed in Chine.) It’s fun.

Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer weekly strip mostly adhered to pretty standard layouts, but Katchor’s doing more daring layouts here. He probably had more space to play with?

Oooh! Such gorgeous colours… but… I think I’ve seen that strip before? The first half dozen pages all seem really familiar to me, so perhaps they were printed in some anthology I’ve recently read for this blog series? Hm…

Anyway, after those pages, it’s all stuff I haven’t seen before, and Katchor sticks to his storytelling mode: A sort of nostalgia for things that may or may not be real (or a mixture of the two). Here’s a strip about the pleasures of buying a magazine from a newsstand. “For professional reasons, the man who sits inside must remain oblivious to the contents of his magazines.” Of course.

Katchor designs virtually all of his pages to be read horizontally. But on pages like this, he seems to be taunting people, daring them to find the correct sequence of panels to read. It goes well at first, reading the first three panels on the top, and then skipping the middle for a while, but do you do the panel with the daughter in the next-to-last row or in the final row?

This confusion somehow brings even more pleasure when reading this page; it’s a weird effect.

This page reminds me of my upstairs neighbours.

Katchor’s artwork seems to be subtly changing over time… his linework used to be more cohesive? Here he’s doing many lines that for his figures that don’t always seem to be quite right, so he leaves them all in? Look at the third-to-last panel, for instance, but it’s throughout, really.

I wonder whether he’s stopped pencilling and is just drawing straight in ink.

I feel seen!

It’s taken me the better part of a week to read this book — it’s not that it’s hard to read any individual page, but after reading half a dozen of them, my mind starts wandering, and I’m not able to absorb anything that’s going on, so I have to start re-reading, so instead I take a break… for a day or so…

It’s quite odd. Is it because each page is a whole entire new concept; a new world? It’s just a lot to take in, even if every page is funny?

As the book (and the years) pass by, it sometimes feels like Katchor is running out of concepts. The above feels pretty forced to me, for instance. Or is it genius? I’m not sure.

Then! Suddenly! Katchor’s art style changes completely! Well, OK, not completely — his characters still have that forward motion posture — but the panel borders are gone, the lines are a lot lighter, and the absolutely gorgeous watercolours are gone. Instead this seems like it’s coloured in Photoshop (or on the computer, at least).

It’s so jarring. I’m guessing this is all a labour saving device? Because it’s not an improvement in any way.

(Or did he get assistants?)

So the last quarter of the book isn’t as good a read. The first half is magnificent, and then it slips a bit, and with this style change, I felt myself lose interest for real. Even the lettering is starting to look sloppy.

But I mean… it’s still good… Here he returns to the newsstand motif, and I guess this strip was created during the magazine crash years: When it started (98?) we were probably at peak magazine, but by the end (12?) so many of them had folded.

*sniff*

Anyway — this book has some of Katchor’s best work. It’s a very handsome coffee table book, and I’d recommend keeping it on the table and reading a strip now and then to bring some magic and mystery into your life.

It seems to be well-reviewed, but in somewhat non-specific terms:

Elliptical and mysterious but never abstruse, the picture-poems of Hand-Drying in America celebrate the mundane world around us by revealing it to be anything but. Yet the nature of this celebration is cool and intellectual — Katchor isn’t interested in evoking anything as sentimental as wonder, nor could you accuse him of preciousness. His approach is too rigorous for that, his language too impassive.

Hm:

Strikingly, in the final strip of the book (aside from the meta-commentary Katchor loads into the endpapers and covers), the cartoonist draws together all the strands he has lately been following—the digital, the global, the historical. The page uses the graphics-overload of the cable news broadcast as a starting point from which to discuss the history of television journalism, the media’s blinkered politics, the public’s short-term memory—even the semiotics of the mid-century necktie.

Yes…

Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories is satirical and sardonic, wry and pedantic, observant and obsessive, trafficking in big concepts and hopelessly bogged down in the trivial, sharply focused and yet oblivious, celebrating permanence while exploring change, impressionistic yet precise.

Oh, Kirkus:

Katchor’s wry humor and unique view on the subject are well worth exploring.

See?

If this makes “Hand-Drying in America” sound sad, it isn’t really, although it is certainly bittersweet. Katchor can be funny, and many of his strips have punch lines, although the humor works in subtle ways.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.