Random Thoughts

Oops! I found more stuff in the attic!

Poster for a German exhibition of work by Mark Beyer.

And there’s stuff on the back.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (280x225mm)

Like most Pantheon books, this is a handsome object. There’s nothing extraneous here — no introductions by famous authors or anything icky like that.

As much as I love Katchor, there’s precious little development between the previous collection of Julius Knipl strips and this one: It’s still a hypnotic pile-up of weird fancies, page after page.

Katchor’s main technique in these strips is using the captions as continuous narration, while the things that happen in the panels (and the things they say) go in and out of sync with that narration. It’s a storytelling tick that demands that the reader really pay attention: A momentary lapse of attention results in the reader having to re-read the strip to get what happened.

Hey! I’d like to have a bus like that.

As with previous Katchor collections, it took me all day to read this 100 page book. It’s just so… slippery. I mean, I totally adore it, but it’s exhausting to read. I have to take frequent pauses.

The collection ends with a twenty page story. Well, a sort-of story — there’s a lot of characters and stuff going on, and the narrative wafts and weaves in strange ways.

It was nominated for two Eisner awards.

Uhm:

This more contemporary setting for the dreamlike metropolis also features more a lot more women than previously seen in Katchor’s work, but as they’re all wives or girlfriends there’s still no chance of any Bechdellian exchanges.

Indeed:

And therein may lie these comics’ genius: In shading his absurdly imagined present with a fondly recalled past, Katchor gives his eccentric Gotham an unexpected substance, a taste of humanity that lingers long after that last panel and makes the Beauty Supply District a place to visit again and again.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe by Matt Groening (230x229mm)

This is the final collection of Life in Hell strips, and I think I’ve covered them all? The Big Book of Hell and The Huge Book of Hell are collections of the other, er, collections, aren’t they? It’s impossible to google these things, because the publishers never mention tiny details like that…

In any case, this was published a decade after the previous collection, which… is pretty puzzling? According to wikipedia, the strip was published weekly until 2012, but nobody wanted to publish a collection of the stuff? It’s so weird to me: Matt Groening is still a huge name, so you’d think the collections would sell anyway… but… I guess the publishers know what they’re doing?

This collection is a return to the normal format — Binky’s Guide to Love was a bigger hardcover, but this is more modest. It’s just 80 pages, and it’s apparently just strips that are about Will and Abe (Simpsons two sons)?

This time around, we get a written introduction by Groening that explains what we’re about to read, which is pretty unusual for one of these collections.

The book starts off with a bunch of strips that were already reprinted in previous collections.

But then the rest is new… to me, at least. Hm. Perhaps I should buy those two Big/Huge collections… I won’t be able to get any sleep until I know whether there’s any strips in those books I haven’t read before.

Will asks the real questions.

We get a series of stories told by Will (helped by Abe), illustrated by Groening, and it starts off pretty well…

However, there’s too many pages that just go on and on like this. I mean, I appreciate the verisimilitude — reading these pages is just like listening to an eight-year-old tell a story. I think they’d read a whole lot better in the original context — one of these pages in the middle of some Akbar & Jeff hi-jinx is very different from reading page after page of this stuff.

Fun is the worst!

Heh heh.

And there’s an extensive index, of course.

And… that’s it. This includes strips drawn in 2003, and the book was published in 2007. Groening continued the strip until 2012, but there’s been no collections published.

So weird.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.