Random Thoughts

I’ve read some comics over the past… three weeks?

These are early-2000s issues of a long-running Norwegian anthology — I never picked up any Norwegian comics at the time, and I don’t quite remember why…

Because it’s really good.

There’s a great variety to the pieces, but I guess you could sum them up with “early 20s comics” — they’re either humour, or they’re very serious indeed. You know. “Profound.” And I like both, so I spend a very comfortable evening reading these books.

It’s published by the people who published all of Jason’s earliest work, and these are from around the time when he was breaking through globally, which is fun.

But there’s just a lot of really original (and entertaining) comics in here. I should see if the used comics store have more of these (I picked them up there).

I got some more periodical comics, but not a lot.

The best of the bunch is, I guess, Black Cat. It’s fun.

Al Ewing’s Venom is also good, but unfortunately they started a crossover series which interrupts what was happening in the series. *sigh* That’s the unfortunate experience of reading a super-hero series — it’ll roll along nicely, and then is taken for a Mega Crossover Detour, and the books often don’t recover afterwards.

But I’m crossing my fingers for this one.

I’ve read these before, but new copies arrived in the mail, so I read them again.

Get Out Your Hankies is from 2016, so it must be among the earliest of the diary books? And I didn’t remember much of the material here, so it was thrilling to read.

I did remember everything that happened in My Dog Jojo, but I was still totally into it. It’s just so good! It’s just a perfect little book — it sneaks up on you and then moves in unexpected ways.

If you want to read new comics by Gabrielle Bell, you should join the Patreon. Lots of great stuff.

This is a book about being gay in Barcelona in 1935.

And while it’s got its heart in the right place, it pretty bad. First of all, the art style, which looks like somebody made a plugin for Cintiq to use Seth’s line, is just kinda not my thing at all.

Second of all, it’s so boring. The book tries to show what pressures the protagonist is under by having people repeatedly ask him “do you have a girlfriend?” and the like, and it just doesn’t work: It ends up annoying the reader instead of just showing the character being annoyed. I know — it’s hard to depict tedious stuff without ending up with a boring book, and the writer here isn’t able to. I had to ditch the book halfway through.

It’s a special issue of Spirou —

the poisson d’avril issue is about AI, or as they say: “l’IA”. So almost all the strips are about AI, and there’s one story where they’ve tried to imagine how an AI-created strip would be like (above to the left), and how much it’d suck. Unfortunately, it’s really not that much worse than many of the other strips they run — full of clichés, illogical sequences and general tedium.

There’s also a kind of round-table on the use of AI and whether the artists use a tablet for drawing or not… I like these themed Spirou issues.

But the non-themed issue is good, too, because Les cavaliers de l’apocadispe are in the countryside visiting grand-parents, and the grand-parents don’t make sensible things like spaghetti for dinner, but have prepared “des champignons á l’eau aux oignons” (mushrooms in water with onions).

Heh heh heh. Les cavaliers is just so precisely observed — that’s like a perfect invention for the most horrible thing a child could imagine eating.

This collection has an X-Men era I’m totally unfamiliar with. I read the X-Men religiously until I was, like, 16, and then I dropped almost all super-hero books (it had something to do with the Kirby boycott or something?). I have a twenty year X-Men knowledge gap. This book collects Adjective-Less X-Men #4 and up, and the Uncanny X-Men from around the same time.

Which seems like an odd thing to collect, but Chris Claremont was booted off the book, and these are the first non-Claremont X-Men comics in a decade and a half, so it makes sense. (There was apparently disagreement between Claremont and superstar artist Jim Lee where the book should be going, and Marvel sided with the superstar artist and booted Claremont.)

And… I can see why. These books (written and pencilled by Jim Lee with dialogue by others) have a certain thing going. Lots of shouting, lot of intense drama, fighting all the time. Claremont was going for more of a soap opera thing, aimed at fourteen-year-olds, while Lee is going more for twelve-year-olds who can look at the pictures and go MAN THAT”S COOL, and they kids are right, of course.

As a writer, Lee makes a good artist.

Lee’s X-Men is a paragon of restraint compared with Whilce Portacio’s Uncanny X-Men issues. They’re totally unhinged, and therefore even more exciting.

Portacio likes drawing figures and nothing else, so each page is just a bunch of random panels with screaming heads, random body parts, and then some radiating lines to fill in whatever background’s left. It’s so cool, man.

And then P. Craig Russell shows up for some pages, which makes a change.

So… these aren’t “good” comics, but I can see why they led to Image Comics being a phenomenon for a few years.

The revived Heavy Metal continues to be very Heavy Metal.

There’s a certain sameness to the approach to the art in many of the pieces, but…

… some people mix it up.

The reprints make a change, though.

But there’s new stuff that’s interesting, too.

At 230 pages per issue, there are, of course, some absolute clunkers included, but I think it still works as a magazine. And it’s much, much better than it was pre-cancellation.