Comics Daze

My sleeping patterns are all fucked up again, so I’ll be reading comics until morn. And beyond?

Bobbie Gentry: The Girl From Chickasaw County: The Delta Sweete

01:45: Ric Hochet 3: Comment réussir un assasinat by Zidrou & Van Liemt (Zoom)

This is from the Ric Hochet revival: The old series had a certain charm, but was really stodgy. The first revival albums were fun, so I hope they keep it up.

And, yes, it’s a plot every bit as silly as the old Ric Hochet stuff, and charming artwork.

It’s a good pastiche.

02:33: King-Cat Comics and Stories 80 by John Porcellino

It’s lovely.

Various: For Discos Only

02:48: A Whole Bunch Of Mini Kuš! by A Whole Bunch Of People (Grafiskie stasti)

Marc Bell’s mini is about a series of banal complications (tax filings, landlord/lease problems).

Tommi Parrish’s lovely colours.

Aidan Koch. Very mood.

Joana Estrela does a very creepy story about a creep.

Nicolas Mahler adapts Finnegans Wake.

Lucas Weidinger does… this…

Anyway, that’s a nice bunch of minis, but Kuš is always good. (Kuš, I think, sort of pioneered this whole “let’s just publish stuff in English” thing for art comics in Europe, which I am eternally grateful for. Now there’s publishers all over Europe that does this, so the art comics scenes feel a lot less insular than, say, 20 years ago.)

03:20: Les Fourneaux 2-3 by Lupano & Cauuet (Zoom)

This series is my new favourite Frenchey series — but I somehow managed to buy albums 1 and then 4 and 5? So I’m now catching up with the middle bit.

The second album is wonderful: I laughed, I cried.

The third suffers from too-much-plotitis: It’s setting things up for the next album, and it’s tying things up from the first album, as well as bringing us up to speed on the back stories of several characters, so there’s little room for anything to, like, happen.

Cocteau Twins: Treasure Hiding (4): Sessions & Rarities

04:30: Paul at Home by Michel Rabagliati (Drawn & Quarterly)

I have a slightly odd relationship to Rabagliati’s comics. I think I’ve read all of them (that are available in English)? And whenever I’m reading them, I really enjoy them? But five minutes after finishing one, it fades from my consciousness like magic.

I so remember zilch about the other Paul comics. They’re all autobiographical? I think?

Yup.

Oh, this one is about growing old? *gasp* 51! That’s ooold.

Anyway, this is really good. But:

This guy likes Highway Gothic? The worst atrocity in the history of type?

I plotzed, I tells ya.

Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott: Codona

05:36: The Pits Of Hell by Ebusi Yoshikazu (Breakdown Press)

Hey! Very punk. Ratty drawrings rool.

I first thought these were all social satire and stuff, and I didn’t realise until like the third story that these were all dream narratives.

And then it totally clicked for me and I was all in.

For about three stories, and then I was bored, because other people’s dreams are kinda boring.

But this collection has some of the most convincing dream narrative I’ve ever seen — reading this really feels like dreaming, which is almost impossible to do. So that’s some kind of genius.

Reading this one story at a time would probably have been a better reading experience.

The Durutti Column: Without Mercy

06:34: Zorglub 3: Lady Z by Munuera (Zoom)

So, this is that Spirou spin-off series. I think I’ve read the previous two albums? They’re about the morally ambiguous Zorglub character and his daughter, if I recall correctly, and they were kinda fun?

Well… it’s OK. It’s got the feeling of a classic BD from the sixties, but updated with all the ultraviolence kids today like.

Munuera’s cartooning is pretty much on point, but the 3D modelling that’s used for the backgrounds (and the computer-assisted sheen of it all) is a bit off-putting.

Folder: invalidObject Series (else)

06:59: Kent State by Derf Backderf (Abrams)

I’ve read a bunch of Backderf’s comics, and I like them quite a bit. His old-fashioned rubbery underground characters are quite appealing.

Here he goes for a the very popular documentary movie thing: A slow introduction of (real) characters, interspersed with a bunch of infodumps about what’s the sitch is, and then it’s all going to build up to a great crescendo 115 minutes into the movie.

This is a pitch perfect emulation of that genre, but on paper. Unfortunately, it’s a genre that I loathe with every single fibre of my being, and I’m feeling my patience is starting to wear thin already. I mean, with the unconvincingly reconstructed dialogue and the portentous pacing, this is… it’s a lot.

So I started skimming. Backderf sure has put a lot of work into this book — it seems exceedingly well-researched.

Anyway, don’t listen to me — this sort of storytelling is something that most people find gripping, and I think it probably landed on a bunch of “best comics” lists?

Yup:

Released in September during the 50th anniversary year of the 1970 tragedy, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams ComicArts) by veteran comics journalist Derf Backderf garnered the majority of votes in PW’s annual Graphic Novel Critic’s Poll, receiving eight votes from a panel of 14 comics critics.

Various: #savefabric (5)

08:02: Old Man Winter by J. T. Yost (Birdcage Bottom)

Hey! It’s getting light outside.

Yost goes hard for a tear jerking story here, and… doesn’t quite get there?

I find the greys here pretty much incomprehensible. It just makes everything difficult to parse.

08:19: Aquatlantic by Giorgio Carpinteri (Facebook)

I like the artwork… it kinda reminds me very slightly of Mattotti?

Heh. And then we get a drawing by him. So I guess that was on purpose.

Anyway, it’s very pretty, but the narrative was pretty “eh?” even for this kind of thing.

Various: Rogue Pulse: Gravity Collapse (8)

08:48: Bug by Enki Bilal (Cobolt)

Like everybody else my age, I’ve been a huge fan of Bilal’s artwork since I first laid eyes on it. His work with Pierre Christin in the late 70s/early 80s is unbelievably gorgeous.

He’s gotten a lot … messier and sketchier over the years, but it still has something special. And I don’t mind the storylines: They’re all very hippieish 70s, and that’s fine. (I gather that some people are really fed up with him.)

This is just like anything Bilal has made the past few decades — more than a dozen characters in a sprawling post-apocalyptic storyline. It’s all chaos and intrigue, and all the characters look the same.

It’s amusingly boomerish — we get factoids like “30K suicides after the Internet went down, because teenagers can’t live without social media” — but while it’s a really stupid plot, Bilal’s storytelling somehow makes it all seem intriguing.

09:48: Cartoon Dialectics 2 by Tom Kaczynski (Uncivilized)

Hm… Oh, this is Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 2. I thought that name seemed familiar.

Anyway, Kaczynski’s artwork here seems looser than it used to be? Perhaps that’s because he’s got a Jimbo outfit on.

It’s a fun book.

David Allred: The Horizon

10:05: The Quality of Pain by Hyena Hell

So this book is a collection of bits from her sketchbook about her chronic pain… and the way her back got fucked up was that some asshole “playfully” picked her up on the street? That’s horrifying.

Anyway, it’s a strong book.

And it’s got a fold out poster.

Love the artwork.

Coil: Swanyard

10:30: Copra 38 & 39 by Michael Fiffe

Finally back to self-publishing and the better paper stock after a couple (?) of years at Image. But it’s not the same as the old paper stock, is it? Did it use to be this thick and shiny?

As usual, I don’t really know what’s going on (because I’ve been picking up issues at random when visiting comics stores over the year), but I like it.

Actually, the storyline here seems a lot clearer than I’ve ever experienced before, but that’s probably because Fiffe did the character intro twice, which was nice, because I really couldn’t remember who any of these people were.

Very nice fight scene in this issue.

Joan as Police Woman: Joanthology

11:12: La Liste 66: Illinois by Éric Stalner (Zoom)

There’s something very American about these layouts…

No, now I see what this reminds me of — British comics. And kinda… wonky? The scales of these people don’t quite match up?

And the storytelling doesn’t quite work as an album — it’s like reading an issue of a monthly comic book.

Mourning A BLKstar: The Cycle

11:45: The End

And on that note, I think it’s time to go to bed soon.

Nighty.

MCMXXXIX XXIV: Fric-Frac

Fric-Frac. Claude Autant-Lara & Maurice Lehmann. 1939.

Another French movie! What are the odds!

Very stylish title sequence.

Natcherly the French movies we (that is I) see from this era are the indisputable classeec arteest films… but this is an out and out low budged entertaining non-art movie? How exciting!

It’s a comedy about… a heist? Probably?

I’m amused so far.

What! Three of the main actors had “Cher” names? I mean, single word names? Fernandel, Arletty and Andrex? I’m guessing this was a French thing at the time?

Ah, so that’s what they’re talking about:

Javanais is a type of French slang where the extra syllable ⟨av⟩ is infixed inside a word after every consonant that is followed by a vowel, in order to render it incomprehensible. Some common examples are gros ([ɡʁo], “fat”) which becomes gravos ([ɡʁavo]); bonjour ([bɔ̃ʒuʁ], “hello”‘), which becomes bavonjavour ([bavɔ̃ʒavuʁ]); and pénible ([penibl], “annoying”), becomes pavénaviblave ([pavenaviblav]). Paris ([paʁi]) becomes Pavaravis ([pavaʁavi]).

And “bavonjavour” was indeed one of the words he was explaining to the other guy.

This is most amusing. But not actually funny? I’m enjoying myself, though.

It’s such a basic movie. There’s virtually no plot (beyond the heist, which I’m assuming is coming, still), so it’s just solid repartee all the way. That’s cheap — just having these actors trade barbs at each other for fifteen minutes is one scene.

It’s charming. But the jokes could be better.

Movie turnaround was shorter in those days:

Filming took place in March and April 1939 at the Laboratoires et Studios Eclair in Épinay-sur-Seine. The film was released in France on 15 June 1939.

I guess they didn’t have to spend a year CGI-ing out Superman’s moustache.

This 2K restoration is very nice. I imagine it looks just like when it was brand new: I mean, look at that shot — the dress looks like it’s solarised.

This movie is still amusing, but it feels like I’ve been watching this for nine hours now, and there’s still a quarter of the movie left.

What I’m saying is that this could have been tighter. A lot tighter.

They’re finally now kinda approaching what we all assumed was going to happen once he mentioned that he worked for a jeweller, like two minutes into the movie?

This movie’s take on love:

That is, being in love, for a man, is all about slapping a woman around.

This blog post is part of the 1939
series.

MCMXXXIX XXIII: Le jour se lève

Daybreak. Marcel Carné. 1939.

*gasp* The first non-English language movie in this blog series!

I’m not familiar with Marcel Carné’s movies… Wasn’t he the director the brats I mean geniuses from Cahiers du cinéma heaped all kinds of scorn upon?

Indeed:

In the 1950s the belligerent critics of Cahiers du cinéma, soon to be film-makers in the new wave, attempted to destroy the reputation of its director, Marcel Carné, accusing him of heavy-handedness and attributing all that is successful in Le jour se lève to his long-time collaborator, the poet Jacques Prévert.

I’m excited!

Dude!

Dude!

Dude!

This is a gorgeously shot movie. And beautifully restored by StudioCanal, as usual.

I love this movie, but it’s not like perfect. Is it possible to be… partially riveted? Somewhat totally fascinated? Sitting on the comfortable edge of your seat? That where I was: Every scene is great, but cumulatively it doesn’t get better than that.

So: A wonderful movie, but not quite as great as it thinks it is.

This blog post is part of the 1939
series.

MCMXXXIX XXII: Charlie Chan in Reno

Charlie Chan in Reno. Norman Foster. 1939.

I may never have seen a Charlie Chan movie before? I mean, I must have, but I can’t recall doing so. So this comes as something of a surprise: It feels pretty much like a TV episode of a long-running show (which I guess it is, except it’s not on TV), but the production values are higher than I expected. I mean, the basics — the film is crisp, the audio’s good, the actors are fine… and Charlie Chan’s son is played by a guy that looks East Asian.

Sidney Toler’s facial prosthetics are horrible, though.

I’m liking this. The mystery is pretty interesting, and it’s got plenty of charm.

They had more fun matches back then.

This blog post is part of the 1939
series.

MCMXXXIX XXI: The Gorilla

The Gorilla. Allan Dwan. 1939.

I wonder whether this DVD has been sourced from a recording from a broadcast? Hm… probably not? It’s very artefactey, but it doesn’t look like VHS artefacts.

This is a Ritz Brothers movie? I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never heard of them. But:

That’s a lot of movies. They were Marx Brothers knockoffs or something?

Patsy Kelly is fun.

Finally! The Brothers!

Anyway, this is a cheap and cheerful B movie. Sometimes these can be way better than they have any reason to be… but this isn’t one of those. I mean, it’s fine! It’s amusing throughout, and has some good scenes going, and some dramatic cinematography, but it’s not actually funny? The gags keep coming, but they all make you go “yes, that’s a gag” instead of laughing.

It’s almost good.

I love Dwan’s “partial filmography as director”:

Lovely:

The death of the Ritz Brothers’ father caused production of the film in January to be delayed. Fox placed a $150,000 suit against the Ritz brothers for a breach of contract as the film was stated to start production on January 30, but was halted when the Ritz Brothers did not show up.

This blog post is part of the 1939
series.