Random Comics

I’ve gotten so far behind on my comics reading. I gotta find a few days to Daze soon, man. But at least I got some comics read the past couple weeks.

The new book from Tommi Parrish is a collection of bits and bobs from the past couple decades or something.

Some of them have been published before, but most have not, apparently.

And there’s also pictures and snapshots of notebooks and stuff.

And it works — it’s a really appealing book. It flows well, and by putting these pieces in this context, it feels very immediate and honest. It’s put together very well. And of course, the individual pieces are pretty compelling, too.

What the… No, I didn’t go insane and suddenly become a Marvel zombie — but the web interface on g-mart.com is so confusing. I think I tried to order one of these Age of Revelation books — I remember doing so (but not which one, exactly), but instead I somehow ended up ordering an entire month’s worth of them? *sigh*

But I thought that since I had them, I might as well give them a go…

And as expected, some of them are total snore-fests with the most pug-ugly artwork you can imagine. (See above.)

But! I kinda liked most of them? Not enough to buy the two remaining issues in each series (I think these are all three issue mini series? it doesn’t say so anywhere, but that’s the theory on Reddit, according to Google).

But I’ll be buying the rest of the above; Longshots by Hickman/Duggan/Robinson. It shouldn’t work, but it kinda does?

And Omega Kids by Fleecs/Genolet was both original and surprising. I wanna know what happens next.

And The Last Wolverine (which isn’t about Wolverine) by Ahmed/Salazar was kinda sweet, so ditto. So that’s three out of… er… ten? It probably helped that my expectations were so low, but for an Super-Hero Event Comic Thing, these comics are really good.

Oh, and there’s also an anthologyish thing which didn’t really work, but I liked this Scott Hamptonish artwork by Agustin Alessio.

Sophie was originally published in the 70s…

… and it’s Muñoz and Sampaya at their most strident…

… and their most absurd. I’m learning French, but this was just too advanced for me — there’s tons of slang, lots of oblique and bizarre dialogue, and a very 70s, absurd storyline.

But man, look at this thing. It’s awesome.

However, for my next French comic, I’m going to read something that has a more straightforward narrative. Makes my pauvre branes hurt less.

I’ve been a fan of Carol Tyler for yonks — I love her artwork, and I thing her storytelling chops are amazing.

The Ephemerata is about grief, and the first section was unexpectedly… er… abstract. That is, it reads more like an essay than anything else.

But! The main part of the book is fantastic. It’s gripping and moving and the artwork is great.

It’s quite dense, though — it does sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. But on the other hand, what she’s talking about is pretty overwhelming, too, so I guess that’s just fair.

Who would have expected Robert Crumb to drop a new 40 page ($6) comic book in 2025?

I was afraid that the entire book was just going to be like the above — Crumb spouting not-very-interesting conspiracy theories…

… but it’s not. Above he finishes one of the duo strips co-written with Aline Kominsky (before she died), and it’s great. And he sure can draw still.

So this is all a pleasant surprise — it’s a solid (and solidly entertaining) book.

I mistakenly thought that the Barks series from Fantagraphics was over, but there’s two more to go? I mean, one after this one. I think. So that’s another pleasant surprise.

This is from 1961, which isn’t “prime” Carl Barks. Which means that some of these stories haven’t been heavily reprinted over the years. Half of them I couldn’t remember at all, like the above.

And while I can see why — these stories are perhaps too over-stuffed; Barks is seemingly just putting in random things that occur to him (a pink-eyed rhino with monkey bodyguards? ok), but they are still really entertaining.

There are some really familiar ones, though, like this Master Wrecker story, that I’ve read oodles of times before. But they’re still fun to re-read.

Fantagraphics pads out the book with some Woodchucks stories that were finished by Daan Jippes. I’ve only read these in sketch for before, I think? I’ve got the old Gladstone volumes that were printed in the 80s…

And these are much better than I remember them being.

It’s been four months since I read any of the floppies I subscribe to. They were mostly pretty bad, but a couple were OK.

Like the Krypto books (North/Norton), but unfortunately it’s a mini-series. I like the artwork, and the stories were cute.

These Venom books illustrate the problems with trying to read super-hero books these days.

I started reading All-New Venom with #1 because I like Al Ewing’s writing, and it started off pretty well, but it’s cancelled with #10, and then the next issue is #250, and then it’s er Knull #1? I dunno.

But as the series winds down, it disappears into its own orifices — the last two issues are just about the characters standing around being angsty with each other, and recounting Venom lore from the preceding decades towards each other. I’ve never read Venom before All-New Venom #1, so all if this has zero interest for me.

This is typical — a series will start with great enthusiasm, and then get cancelled within a year, and the last half of the series will be Fan Continuity Service. It’s no wonder nobody reads these things any more.

One World Under Doom written by Ryan North also seems to be heading towards a disappointing ending, but it’s OK, I guess.

And that’s it.

Book Club 2025: Doggerland by Agnes Ravatn

I’ve always liked Ravatn’s writing (very amusing essays and stuff), but I’ve not been entirely convinced by her novels — but apparently I’m the only one; they’ve all been great commercial successes, and have won awards and gotten very positive reviews and stuff.

So… I approached this book with some trepidation, but cautiously optimistic.

And it’s OK? I liked reading it, for the most part, but it feels awfully overstuffed. It’s a short novel, but there’s so much crammed in here — it’s a family drama; it’s a thriller; it’s a comedy; it’s a think piece on the value of literature; it’s a mystery; it’s all about fambly.

Spoilers below; don’t read if you think you’re going to read this.

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Ravatn’s favourite thing in this book is to leave things slightly unsaid — that is, characters will talk to each other, or the narrator talks to the reader, and certain things aren’t said explicitly, but left for the reader to draw their own conclusions. And every time this happened, I was “aha! here’s a mystery, so the reason she didn’t say it was because that we were supposed to understand X, which means that the truth is Y”. In a kind of mystery-writing way, which really just feels like cheating if you’re doing a “serious” novel.

So while reading this novel, there was a lot of eye rolling on my part, as Ravatn tried to make some Shocking Twists, or just Funny Twists.

(Although there was one twist I didn’t see coming.)

So… it’s fun? But again, it’s not entirely successful. And it’ll probably sell a whole bunch of copies — especially the rah rah bits about literature is bound to make bookish people feel flattered.

Doggerland (2025) by Agnes Ravatn (4.15 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Diamanter og rust by Anne Holt

I’m reading yet another mystery, but this one is brand new.

And it’s fun — it’s really original, and it wasn’t at all clear where anything was even leading until halfway through. But then…

OK, spoiler time. Don’t read anything more if you’re going to read this book.

This book features a character with last name “Hoff” who shares a lot of biographical details with Anne Holt — most notably an event that happened in the 90s, where one of Holt’s book was “nulled”; which means that the committee that buys books for the libraries in Norway found it had no literary qualities, and didn’t buy it. This almost never happens with Norwegian authors, so it was quite a thing.

So while reading, it was irresistible to Google things to refresh my memories of all that drama:

“Did you mean: anne holt mullet”? Good question, but no. Google translate:

“Anne Holt nullet” probably refers to a misunderstanding or misspelling of the phrase “anne holt null-ett”, which may refer to her being Minister of Justice for a period of one year, 1996–1997, according to store norske leksikon and VG. Another possibility is that it is a misspelling of “Anne Holt nuller”, which may be related to her having been awarded zero stars on the dice for a book for a year, but this is not directly confirmed in the search results

Wow, that’s some LLM result.

And I was completely degraded as a writer. A couple of my fellow writers thought I was a complete idiot.

Anne Holt was “zeroed out” for her novel “Mea Culpa”. That is, the book was not purchased for libraries.

– A member of the Arts Council stood at Dagsrevyen with a copy of “Mea Culpa”, in which he had yellowed out sentences that he thought were hopeless.

Anne Holt sat alone in the living room and watched. She felt like her life was falling apart.

Which is indeed exactly what the “Hoff” character went through.

The person who started all of this was an author called Øystein Rottem, who died in 2004. Or as Google says:

Øystein Rottem was a Norwegian literary critic and professor, and
he is best known for his collaboration with the author Anne Holt. Rottem helped to popularize Holt’s writing and published a biography of her in 2014.

Literary critic: Rottem was a central voice in Norwegian literary criticism, with a strong commitment to contemporary literature.

Collaboration with Anne Holt: He wrote several books and articles about Anne Holt, her writing and her position in Norwegian literature.

Biography: In 2014, Rottem published the book “Anne Holt. A Biography” which provided an in-depth insight into her life and career.

I thought they’d made the Gemini LLM hallucinate less now? But perhaps not for smaller languages?

But anyway, one of the characters in the book is described as having written that harsh critique that led to Holt’s life almost falling apart is a bald guy who smokes a pipe:

Like Øystein Rottem, so it’s not like she’s being subtle or anything…

Here’s part of what Rottem wrote about Holt, via Google Translate:

These lines are taken from a book that BNB considers one of the best of the year. Read them again. I ask: is it literary politics to point out that this kind of linguistic inaccuracy represents a low standard that qualifies for zeroing? And I can assure readers that I could fill two entire Dagblad pages and more with similar quotes if the editor had given me the green light to do so. The fact that a number of other books are published in which there are just as many inaccuracies does not alter the fact that the decision to zero this piece of weekly magazine prose was entirely appropriate.

Wow, that’s a bad translation…

Well, all of this is fun in a roman à clef way, but the problem is: 1) Anne Holt has done this before. She’s already written a novel where the deranged killer was a version of herself. This time around, the version isn’t deranged at all, but, er… 2) There’s nobody else, at all, who could be the culprit, so it just feels like bad mystery-writing craft. 3) Googling every new details while reading isn’t optimal. And 4) the book ends pretty much as I’d expected otherwise, too, so that’s also a letdown.

But it’s otherwise a very well-done mystery. And I guess if you’d never read anything by Holt before, or known anything about her history, the clef-ey bits would have been less distracting.

Diamanter og rust (2025) by Anne Holt (3.98 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: At Death’s Door by Robert Barnard

Yes, another old mystery.

As is common with Barnard, we get the murder smack dab in the middle of the book, so there’s plenty of time to get to know the suspects (and we get the added mystery of who’s going to be killed). It works well here — there’s a varied bunch of characters, and I couldn’t guess whodunnit at all.

But the actual denouement felt pretty weak — the detective just had a brain storm and AHA! Still, a perfectly pleasant read.

At Death’s Door (1988) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.48 on Goodreads)