Random Thoughts

The to the finish continues, and as usual, no reviews, just reading.

Marble Cake by Scott Jason Smith (Avery Hills)

This is such a fresh comic. It’s told via an ensemble cast that more or less all interact with one another kinda randomly, but it all builds up and connects. It’s such a well-observed piece: Everything feels true and real, and none of the characters are artists, filmmakers or writers. That’s a rarity these days!

Hey, I’ve wondered that myself. Uncanny.

I guess you can see the lineage to British cinema, but it’s very far from being a drawn movie: It uses the comics medium perfectly, with formal touches like different panel shapes in different sections of the book (of which I’m not showing any, because I don’t want to give anything away).

It’s brilliant: It’s an effortless, gripping read. Best comic of the year for me, I think.

Simon & Louise by Mac de Radiguès (Conundrum)

This book is no great surprise — de Radiguès is in his element here. But it’s just such a sweet, perfect little book, with bright summery colours. There’s so many nice little touches, like the recurring punk guardian angel.

I guess there could be some elements some would find trite… I mean, there’s many scenes here that are kinda cliché. But so sweet. So cute.

Fearless #1 (Marvel)

By all those people above there.

I don’t know why I bought this… Hm… was it because it involves Kelly Thompson? She’s fun.

Unfortunately, she only writes a very short itsy bitsy thing at the end of this anthology.

The other two (longer) bits aren’t bad, though. And Millie the Model is back.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #47 by Ryan North and Derek Charm (Marvel)

That crossover nonsense over with, we’re now back to the usual nonsense (which is a lot better). It’s another very amusing issue, and it looks like they’re gearing up for a grand conclusion to the series in issue fifty.

Errr. ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so that’s one variant she didn’t try. What did she try? UTF-16!? HA HA HA HA.

Fence by those people on the cover up there (Boom Box)

The thing here is to try to emulate a Japanese comic to the max, I guess? It’s not entirely successful — the storytelling is rather choppy.

And there are sections in here that are really, really boring. But it’s not all bad.

Yoko Tsuno vol 20 by Roger Leloup (Carlsen)

Yesterday I carted a case of duplicates to a used bookstore and rooted through their comics and got (among other things) this 90s album in return. Yoko Tsuno is an odd series: It never seemed to become really popular, but it was always kinda there in the 80s, managing to rack up a substantial number of translated albums in the Scandinavian countries. I lost interest, because it’s… Everything is 100% intense all the time; everything is drama. It’s exhausting to read.

The first albums weren’t sci-fi, either, but this one is super sci-fi. It’s so sci that I can’t really make out what the fi is all about; it’s confusing. It’s something about transfers of souls, and transfers of memories, and transfers or self, and those aren’t the same thing, and everything is… confusing.

But it was nice to dip back into this. I like Leloup’s artwork; it’s very classic clear line, but with a certain dynamism. The figures are rather stiff, though, but that’s part of the style.

Hm… it just occurred to me that, unusually enough for a Frenchey adventure comic, this perhaps fails the reverse Bechdel test. That is, there are a couple of male characters in this album, but their scenes are brief and they (I think) never talk to each other. Most of the significant characters are women, and the conversations (and fights) are between them.

Yakari vol 14 by Derib + Job (Carlsen)

This is another find from the used book store. Yakari is a series for small children, charmingly drawn by Derib. I remember reading these as a child… although not this album, which is from long after I stopped reading them.

It’s likeable.

Benoît Brisefer vol 4 by Peyo, Gos and Walthery (Semic)

This was a children’s series I did not read as a child — I think they started translating it in the mid-80s? Which was too late for me.

I don’t know my Peyo history, really, but I think Benoît Brisefer was Peyo’s “other” series, not, er, quite as famous as his Smurf series.

The concept is very simple: the title character is a little boy who’s incredibly strong. Except when he gets a cold, and he loses all his strength. So the plots in the albums I’ve seen invariably involve him foiling some villain through his super strength, then he gets a cold and is kidnapped, and remains so until the cold goes away and he captures the villain for sure, this time. The end.

You can kinda see why this wasn’t as big a deal as, well, a lot of other Frenchey children’s series of the 60s.

But the drawings are classic BD and there’s jokes here and there that aren’t that bad.

Action packed.

Les 7 Vies de l’Épervier vol 4 by P. Cothias and A. Juillard (Carlsen)

This is a series I’m completely unfamiliar with, I think. It’s from the mid-80s, which wasn’t a good period for frenchey comics. If I understand things correctly, it was difficult to get anything published that wasn’t sci-fi, porn or sci-fi porn.

This is slightly on the porny side, but is kinda interesting. It’s about the olden days of witch finders and the power struggle between the church and the king and stuff. It’s got a lot of texture, both in the writing and the artwork. And the colour palette is pretty unique.

I think I’m going to be on the lookout for the other volumes in this series.

Syncopated: An anthology of nonfiction picto-essays edited by Brendan Burford (Villard)

I picked this up from the used bookstore, too, but reading the introduction I was getting bad vibes. I mean, the title of the book is harrowing enough: “picto-essays”? But then “comics” in sneer quotes?

This is gonna suck! Badly!

But then it turns out that at least half of the pieces in here are good. The Nick Bertozzi story about how hay bailing works is fascinating.

The definition of “essay” here is very wide. Tricia van den Bergh does a portfolio of drawings from a park, and very lovely drawings they are.

About one third of the pieces aren’t essays in any way, I’d say, but are just normal (auto-)biographical comics, like this one by Sarah Glidden.

Wow! Paul Karasik!

Anyway, this anthology is a bit hit and miss, but there’s some really good stuff in here. Nice random find.

And now… it’s late. Do you know where your cat is?

OK, I got more comics, but this week I’m going to finish the Window Sill Of Comics for sure for sure and finally bring this blog series to an end.

I HOPE.

As usual, just reading, no reviews, because there’s just no time.

Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley (First Second)

I have rather sworn off First Second because their books suck, but I rather like Lucy Knisley, so I thought I’d give this book a go despite the publisher.

My problem with this book is that Knisley spends so much time on things that even I know. She is, for instance, blindsided by how common miscarriages are, and I thought absolutely everybody knew that pregnancies routinely end spontaneously. Perhaps it’s something that’s kept as a closely guarded secret in the US or something?

And she spends pages and pages on dispelling myths that are completely moronic, which makes for a deathly boring reading experience.

And when she’s not explaining things that you’d hope nobody would have to have explained to them, she resorts to these trite metaphors.

That said, the final part of the book is harrowing and exhausting and had me crying a bit, so Knisley still has it, but I don’t know what she was thinking when she made the first four fifths of this book.

Perhaps it’s just the normal First Second editorial influence.

BTTM FDRS by Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore (Fantagraphics)

I don’t know what I expected this book to be. Passmore has mostly done kinda earnest real life comics before, I think?

This isn’t that: It’s a horror movie in papery form.

There’s scant use of the comics medium here, and I wonder whether the author originally wrote this as a movie script?

In any case, despite my misgivings reading this, it turns out to be chillingly effective; weird colouring and all. As befits a classic horror movie, it’s claustrophobic and intense, and while there’s nothing really new here, it’s one of those very rare comic books that is actually scary.

This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte (Drawn & Quarterly)

I really enjoyed Delporte’s previous book, Everywhere Antennas, and this looks even lovelier.

Full of collages and drawings and paintings; very contemplative. I definitely see what she’s going for with the flowing structure and circling back on the same issues in a spiral, but I don’t think this book was as successful as the previous one.

It’s something about those footnotes that makes the reading kinda choppy?

The ending is heart-stopping, though.

When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll (Koyama)

This is published in a format that’s quite unpopular now: The album-ish one with soft colours. I really wonder why they did that: The lettering is so big and there’s so little per page that I’m wondering whether Carroll made this for a smaller format originally.

But I guess these bloody images have a certain impact on the larger pages.

I found it hard to get into this.

Invaders by Lots of People (Marvel)

Chips Zdarsky’s Marvel career trajectory has been pretty typical: His first few comics were fun and were overflowing with ideas.

And now he’s doing stuff like this.

I think it’s time for me to stop buying his comics.

House/Powers of X #1-2 by A Bunch Of People (Marvel)

Yeah yeah, OK. I was an X-Men fan as a child, and I’ve sorta-kinda dipped into the stream of X-Men effluvia the last few years. I thought they had something interesting going like four (?) years ago, but whenever I’ve tried reading it since then, it’s been “eh? eh? what? does this make sense? why is this so boring?”

So this is the new X-Men start (I think?), and as usual I have no idea whether they’re just dropping us into all new concepts or whether this had all been set up earlier, and I’m just not aware. Apparently all previously dead mutants are now alive again? OK, I can roll with that.

Ooo! So portentous!

These comics are more entertaining than what X-Men comics I’ve read over the last couple of years, but the storytelling is a bit clunky in parts. Like here where we learn that Moira is “reincarnated”, but it turns out that her mutant power is really Groundhog Day. SO CONFUSE!

It’s got sci-fi scale, which is refreshing.

I have no idea whether this is all going to turn out to be an imaginary tale or something. I think we just learned that all previous incoherent X-Men storylines were just MacTaggart’s Groundhog Days, but perhaps that’s also just an imaginary tale. You never know, and I don’t particularly care.

Tongues #2 process zine by Anders Nilsen

Oh, yeah, this was included with the issue of Tongues. It was hidden between some other stuff on the window sill.

It’s pretty cool.

Out of Hollow Water by Anna Bongiovanni (2d cloud)

This is an unnerving little booklet.

Bongiovanni’s smudgy pencils somehow makes sense in this tale that somehow seems to make sense on some deeper level, although I’m not quite sure what it’s about. It’s scary and affecting.

Aand… with that I think this day is over. More comics tomorrow! Only three-ish more days to go?