Random Thoughts

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.

The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening (271x270mm)

I didn’t buy this book at the time — I assumed that this was just a reprint of the smaller books that had already been printed. But… while doing this blog series, I couldn’t find any web sites that stated this outright, so curiosity (and a mad wish for more Life in Hell strips that I haven’t read) made me buy this book.

First of all, this is a physically bigger book — it’s 20% larger in both directions than the original collections. However, it’s just 170 pages long, and the original books were 48 pages… so this can’t collect all five of the previous books.

Let us see what we shall see…

Right, the indicia mentions the previous five books…

What’s with the lame hand lettering-like font? Life in Hell is such a hand-drawn strip that this looks kinda glaringly off.

*gasp* I don’t think I’ve seen this strip before? I mean, I could be wrong — this blog series is like a death march that just won’t end… but I’ve read all of the Life in Hell books over the last… er… five? months, and I may just be misremembering, but that doesn’t look familiar.

These are definitely new! I mean, to me. Whoho! This book really has strips that haven’t been reprinted before.

And it seems like this book is largely chronological, so it opens with strips from 80, and then proceeds from there.

The strip looked somewhat different early on — it’s fun to see.

The earlier collections had collected pieces from Life in Hell’s history, seemingly at random, but picking mostly from recent years. The first collection was published in 87, by which time the strip had changed somewhat, so I guess Groening didn’t want to include any strips like this? I mean, more straightforward comics — Binky meets a woman, and then has an awkward date with her that lasts for half a dozen strips.

So naughty!

Finally, on page 20, we get the first strip that has been reprinted before. And it’s from 87 — dropped into the middle of the unreprinted 81 strips.

Oh! This is the strip where Binky meets Bongo? Who’s his son. I don’t think I’ve seen this before, either? I mean, you’d think I’d remember.

If that’s the case — how odd for Groening to skip this altogether when doing the original collections?

It’s hard to remember whether I’ve seen this before — Groening’s done a lot of variations over this theme.

*gasp* So political! (That’s a Reagan reference.)

Heh. A previous owner has cut out this page from the book — presumably to hang it on the wall or something? But then put the page back into the book later.

So many variations on this iconic page…

Oh! The back cover explains it all!

So Groening has assembled this book to celebrate the first ten years of Life in Hell? So it’s “vintage strips no one ever before dared to print in book form”, along with greatest hits from the previous five books.

Well, I’m happy I bought this book — it’s fun to read those unreprinted strips. By my guesstimate, there’s about… 40? “new” strips in here.

But I do wish that Groening would just do a complete, sequential reprinting of the series instead of this … selective … approach to reprinting.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Lynda Barry ‘n’ Matt Groening’s Funky World Fun Calendar 1987 by Lynda Barry and Matt Groening (305x306mm)

This is organised in a every-other-spread kind of fashion — on half the spreads, Groening does the cartoon at the top and Barry does the calendar at the bottom…

… and the other half, vice versa.

Most of the strips are reprints from Life in Hell or Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but both artists contribute two new full page images, like the above. If I counted correctly.

I think this is new, for instance?

Anyway, a lot of work has gone into this calendar.

There’s so much stuff — it’s perfect for a calendar. You can read these little bits while waiting for the tea water to boil or something. I think they had fun making this thing.

So dense! And quite amusing.

I got this off of ebay, but unfortunately the previous owner has just scribbled a couple things… “Marge”? Marge!?

And a trip to Fire Island in September. Possibly with their mother(s).

And in just five years, I can hang this calendar on my fridge. I’ll do it, too!

Wow. Those faces do not look like either Barry or Groening, do they? How odd.

Finally, a collage on the back.

This calendar was just what I expected: Something that looks like it was fun to make, and is fun to look at.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Sheep of Fools by Sue Coe and Judith Brody (260x261mm)

This is published by Fantagraphics, but it’s a Blab book. When talking about anthologies from the 80s, Raw and Weirdo are seen as the two opposite poles, and nobody much mentions Blab. Which, OK, it’s a timing issue — Blab didn’t really find its form until the very late 80s/early 90s, and by that time all the excitement was over, but I think you can see Blab as a … er… third pole? Is that how magnetics work? Who even knows?

That is, Blab was very arty, but mostly from a 50s lower middle middle class tradition. I.e., more Robert Williams and less Art Spiegelman. People who can draw hands. “Proper artists.”

But really, a bunch of the people who worked for Raw also published stuff in Blab. Sue Coe, Charles Burns, Bill Griffith, Kaz, Gary Panter, Richard Sala, Chris Ware… they all did stuff for Blab. So it might have made sense to cover Blab in this blog series, too, but I just can’t be bothered. I’ve got them all over there *waves at bookshelf*, but there’s so much … boring stuff in Blab, I can make myself do it.

This one solo book by Sue Coe, though, that I found the other day, between the proper Blab volumes. Let’s read this one.

A song cycle for five voices? Perhaps this is a nice, pleasant book from Sue Coe, for a change?

Well, one can dream.

This book has a lot of historical factoids about sheep rearing.

It’s pretty interesting, and as usual with a Coe book, it makes you want to go vegan.

“Auschwitz tight”? Some comparisons should perhaps be avoided…

Anyway, this book has Coe’s usual gorgeous/horrifying artwork, but it seems a bit aimless. It doesn’t really built up to anything in particular… it just feels so random, like mentioning a couple of ships carrying sheep that’s gone down.

And they get in a swipe against halal/kosher butchery, which is nice.

I guess:

The only thing hindering this book is the writing by Coe and coauthor Brody: the rhyming couplets fade in and out throughout, and the prose is somewhat overblown and precious, as if trying to compete with, rather than complement, the art. Nevertheless, few people will feel like chowing down on a lamb kebob after reading this book.

Hm:

That subject is the Australian phenomenon of live transport—in which live sheep are carried on huge ships to Middle Eastern meat markets. Viewing photographs of the transport practices online, I can see that Coe hit the issue spot-on.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.