Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the last week.

Saga de Xam is the biggest book here, physically. It’s by Archive Editions, and it’s a really attractive book — textured cover, matte pages, oversized…

And it reprints an old French comic book, and it’s really really pop artey.

Unfortunately, even though the book is large, the lettering is so small that I can’t read it without spraining my eyeballs. I tried using a small tablet to magnify the text, and while that works, it’s not a fun way to read a book. So I gave up, and stared at the pictures instead. (And besides, the text didn’t really seem all that interesting anyway…)

So, a pretty, but pretty disappointing read.

Pif Gadget is for small children, so I guess I shouldn’t complain…

… but it just seems kinda not very exciting.

I’ve been a fan of Attilio Micheluzzi ever since I saw him in various Eclipse Comics books in the 80s. His artwork is very exciting, so I was looking forward to this.

And indeed, the artwork is very exciting. However, the storytelling is… You know how some artists go for confusion as a storytelling device? When it works, it can be incredible as a tool to draw the reader in. Here, however, I think it’s just plain confusing because it’s just confusing.

So I only read half of this book, and then found that I was putting a lot more effort into this than the material warranted. It’s not that the stories are bad, but they’re kinda standard — it’s as if you took, say, Hugo Pratt’s Desert Scorpions series and then removed all the character, the mystique and the charm.

But man, the artwork is amazing.

This is a Pif Gadget special edition with 54 pages of Iznogoud commeninting on current affairs.

There are all one-page gags — you have Iznogoud not making face masks mandatory, because he’s got a too-big nose. And that’s basically the level of the humour. It’s not awful, but it’s not laugh out loud funny, either.

Some of the gags reference things that are probably obvious to everybody in France — here they’re meeting up with a guy that’s like a vampire, and that’s probably some notorious right wing politician, but I have no idea.

One thing I have to say — the artist (who apparently goes by the name of Elric) does an amazing Tabary (the original artist). Or perhaps even better than Tabary — it’s just uncanny.

Fantagraphics continue to their “Los Marvels” series collecting a bunch of things done by Howard Chaykin for Marvel.

It’s an odd project — why give these comics this oversized “prestige” treatment? And did no designers work on this? And… notice something odd about this contents page? Yes, exactly — it doesn’t say who the colourists or the letterers are, and says nothing about the original editors, either. And Fanagraphics was all about creators’ rights, so it’s just a mystifying project all over.

The 70s stuff is reproduced from printed copies, I’m guessing.

The 2009 Dominick Fortune has a very enthusiastic Chaykin gleefully trying to shock a Marvel audience, and it apparently worked? Sold very little. Which is a shame, because while it makes absolutely no sense, and is pretty juvenile, it’s a lot of fun. Especially the way (oops spoilers) Our Hero kills off the fascists who are trying to storm the Capitol, I mean The White House — those are the two most fun pages in the history of Marvel publishing. Ever! (I’m not spoiling those here.)

The longest thing here is a thing about WWI pilots written by Garth Ennis. I’ve read very little Ennis, but this is pretty good.

So… it’s a pretty good book after all? I think it should have been printed in a smaller format, though.

Two more Spirou issues…

The Champignac serial is bizarre. He’s apparently now a spy for the FBI, and trying to find out whether Einstein is a communist? Like wat. He’s also depressed and hallucinating his dead wife? girlfried? all the time.

(And we also find out that Einstein believes in a life after death.)

This seems to have nothing at all to do with the Champignac character from the original Spirou stories, so it reads like somebody pissing on Franquin’s grave.

The humour in the short Spirou strips is kinda nasty, but is that what children like these days? “Look, Tash, here’s a funny little creature that I don’t know what is… It’s sad. He is without his parents.” “Yes, really sad…” “Yup.”

But there’s funny stuff, too. Spirou is very hit or miss.

When I saw this in the bookstore I almost fainted. A new book by Tardi!? And it’s a Nestor Burma book!?! WHERE”S MY SNIFFING SALTS

And it’s indeed a very entertaining book. Tardi finished off his Adele series the other year, and I’m wondering whether he’s doing one final Nestor Burma book, too, to, like say farewell or something. I mean, he’s not that old — “just 79” — and I hope there’s many more books to come, but you know.

But did you notice something weird about the page above?

Yes! Exactly! What the fuck’s up with the colouring! It’s horrible! I’ve never seen a comic book printed this way — it looks like the colour has been shot from a CRT screen — every “pixel” of colour is a circle filled with all the colours in the rainbow, only some are stronger than others, and that what gives you the colouring. I naturally assumed that the Danes had done something bad with the files, but nope:

The original version, according to Bedetheque, is just as bad.

So… what the actual fuck? I mean, Tardi is something of a wise ass who apparently enjoys annoying his readership. Many people were pissed off with that final Adele album. But this just seems inexplicable.

So the pages being this fugly certainly made reading the book a whole lot less fun. And while the plot is good, and there’s some great characters and snappy repartee, Burma spends half the album driving around in the 20th arondissement, which… may be a comment on something, but I’m not sure what.

And what’s up with these random people staring at the readers? Are these caricatures of people Tardi knows? (They don’t affect the plot.)

I agree with CraigNos:

Ce nouvel opus de Tardi nourrit des avis très contrastés, certains détestent, d’autres lui trouvent quelques mérites, je fais partie de cette dernière catégorie car c’est à l’évidence une œuvre du grand Jacques et qu’il n’y a rien d’équivalent sur le marché de la planche. Je ne dis pas que c’est ce qu’il y a de mieux, ni ce qu’il a fait de mieux, je dis que c’est du Tardi et qu’il est unique dans son genre. Donc, quand on apprécie un auteur qui de surcroît produit au compte goutte, on ne boude pas son plaisir !

The nerve of Diddu:

A la lecture de cet album, je me suis demandé si Tardi se foutait de nous, ses lecteurs, ou bien s’il devenait un peu sénile.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and it made me want to reread all of Tardi’s books again.

And that’s it.

Book Club 2025: Ville hester lim på hjertet by Guro Skumsnes Moe

Skumsnes Moe is a bassist, and I’ve seen her play dozens of time in various constellations.

In a addition to regular-sized basses, she also has an octobass (shown above; bassist for scale). She’s very good, and I picked up this book at a show some years ago, but I never got around to reading it.

It consists of short texts printed out on slips of paper which have then been sown onto pages, and then the whole thing has been reproduced. And there’s also paintings glued in.

I like it.

Ville hester lim på hjertet (2015) by Guro Skumsnes Moe

Book Club 2025: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

I bought this book because I’d read the Ahegao story in The Paris Review. It felt fresh — it was totes cringe, but very funny and kinda devastating. It’s also included in this book, which is a collection of (pretty) tightly connected short stories.

Aaaah! Tulathimutte was the guy who was an internet phenomenon back in 2019 — it was published in n+1 and was suddenly The Discourse. I didn’t read it myself back then, but I saw people arguing about it.

And… it’s even more cringe-worthy than Ahegao. It’s funny, but I wasn’t totally convinced by it. I mean — why would people continue to hang out with this creep for decades? He seemed to lack in any quality whatsoever that’d make him bearable — he’s not even funny. So, I dunno…

There’s other stories here that are more successful — this one is hilarious. And if Peter Thiel were ever to read something, I think he’d go “this guy’s got the right idea! Let’s get him a job with Trump!”

That is, I think the broad satire has been overtaken by current events, and reading the end of this story, where (oops spoilers) this guy gets his comeuppance reads like a wonderful fantasy from a gentler age.

The longest story in the book is also the weakest, by far. The first half is (I’m guessing) based mostly on Tulathimutte’s life, and he’s far gentler with his personal stand-in than he is with any of the other protagonists — all the other protagonists seem like people that annoy Tulathimutte a lot and that he wants to get revenge on, while Bee is a Mary Sue. And then the last half is a tedious exegesis on Twitter drama. It’s so boring that it’s hard to believe that it’s written by the same guy who wrote Ahegao. (Which, of course, the text suggests that it isn’t.) It has the unfortunate stench of someone who’s gone viral once and desperately tries to make it happen again.

So… I’m disappointed. I mean, it’s pretty good, but it’s not really all there.

The most-liked review on Goodreads is:

It’s a pretty well-reviewed book, so of course I go to the 1-star reviews and see whether there’s anything amusing there. I love reading 1-star reviews of books I kinda like…

Heh heh heh.

He has a point.

I like this long review. It’s apparently written in realish time, as the book was read, and I like that approach.

Rejection (2024) by Tony Tulathimutte (buy new, buy used, 3.81 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: The Sound of the Machine by Karl Bartos

I’ve been reading this book for more than a year.

It’s a brick of a book, but that’s not the reason it’s taken me this long. I’ve had it planted on the kitchen table, and I’ve been reading a couple pages now and then while waiting for the potatoes to boil and stuff.

The other day, I’d made it halfway through, and I thought it was time to switch it out with some other book, so I read the last half tout de suite.

For a musician autobiography, it’s not a typical book. These are usually (half-)ghostwritten by journalists that are interested in goosing up the stories, and there’s no goosing here. And if not, they’re usually written by a musician that has some sort of agenda — usually complaining about how stupid everybody else in the band was (or something), and those grievances permeate the book, so you get typical sentences like “and that’s the first time I saw Richard, but I didn’t know at that time what a sleazy weasel he’d turn out to be”.

Instead the methodology Bartos seems to have used is to describe everything that happened solely from the point of view of who he was and what he knew at that time. That is, he’s not using the book as a way to collect evidence for some grand show down, but is telling everything in as straight-forward a way as possible.

So we don’t get to any serious grievances about how money was divided in the band before on page 450, when he confronted Ralf and Florian about it.

I’ve never read anything quite like it, but on the other hand — there’s a reason these books are written in the way they’re written — because this methodology is for serious Kraftwerk fans only.

Of which I’m one! My favourite parts of the book was there Bartos goes through the recording process, track by track.

The gruelling five year process to get Electric Cafe made was interesting — every time some other band released something that sounded more modern that what they had, they wanted to tinker further with the album, which meant that it was finally released, it sounded kinda old.

Here’s the dramatic showdown between Bartos and Ralf & Florian. Yes, really. This is how dramatic it gets.

So is the book any good? Well, it worked well reading it the way I did, and there are really interesting bits about recording, but… Now I can read something else while waiting for the potatoes to boil!

It took five years for the English translation to be published.

There are virtually no negative reviews on Goodreads, but then again — the readership is pretty self-selected for something like this.

The Sound of the Machine (2017) by Karl Bartos (buy new, buy used, 4.28 on Goodreads)