Random Thoughts

Hey, the world is going to end in six days because Kamala can’t make herself say “this might be controversial, but I’m actually against genocides”, so it’s time to read some comics, I guess.

Lencinho: Belo Lo-Fi

06:29: Š! #53 (Kuš)

This issue is all Czech artists, I think…

It’s a denser issue than normally, but such a lot of excellent stuff in here…

Xiu Xiu: Rise

The standout is perhaps this piece by Barbora Müllernová, which is just kind of magical.

But it’s all good. Another excellent issue of Š!.

Julie Tippetts & Martin Archer: Vestigium

07:02: Gangway! by Emil Friis Ernst

Wow.

This is really kinetic… I wonder whether it’s inspired by Yuichi Yokoyama? It’s got that propulsive thing going.

It’s great, but should have been like 10x longer.

Oh, and there’s a print included… I apparently scored the last copy? 200/200.

07:08: Rompepistas by Rosa Codina/Kiko Amat (Ablaze)

I’ve really started looking a Ablaze’s listings the last year — they publish a lot of things that seem interesting, but then turn out to be kinda half-assed. Like… really atrocious translations or slapdash formats or whatever.

The translation here seems OK, though, but did we really need that “*Carnaval” footnote? And when we do need an explanation — for Rompetistas’s name — we just got a “*Breaker”. Breaker? Like the CB thing? Or a circuit breaker? Or what? How is that a name?

As usual, the physical book is violently indifferent — the aspect ratio isn’t quite right, so we get a too-tall border at the top, and they’ve used a really shiny, thin white paper which is all kinds of wrong for a book like this.

I’m guessing this is the reason this book exists. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking grants.

Oh, the contents of the book… It’s kinda OK? It’s a typical coming-of-age thing, but is thoroughly unconvincing. This is supposed to be a 17-year-old, and his narration is like something regurgitated from four decades of self help books or something.

But it’s OK. It’s got several scenes that work, so it doesn’t get too annoying.

Oren Ambarchi: Quixotism

08:10: Nunavik by Michel Hellman (Pow Pow Press)

I was briefly in Montreal a couple weeks ago, and I stopped by a couple comics shops, of course. At Librarie Planete Bd they had a nice little section with comics from Quebec, and this is one of those books.

And I bought some chocolates from Les Chocolats de Chloé, which is around the corner from that comics shop. I’m having a totes Quebecois moment here.

Heh heh.

This book is basically one of those travel thingies — the author goes to the way north of Quebec and does the story about his er adventures there.

It’s fun! Hellman doesn’t do anything revolutionary with the form or anything, but it’s really entertaining and seems well-observed. You really feel what the trip was like.

And it’s intensively interesting. There’s so many things I didn’t know — I had no idea that the Dorset people existed, for instance.

*nine thumbs up*

(The chocolate is good, too. Not very distinctive flavours in the ganache, though.)

Joan as Police Woman: The Deep Field

09:07: Passe-Temps by Pascal Girard (Pow Pow Press)

So I’m staying in Quebec for the next book…

This is, I guess, strips from Girard’s sketchbook?

It’s extremely slice-of-life, but these bits are pretty funny — like this woman exhorting him to not buy baby formula (a breast-feeding fanatic), and then him telling her that his wife is dead.

Sometimes I wonder whether he exaggerates his foibles, because after a while I’m sort of getting pretty annoyed with Pascal… I mean, his behaviour.

It’s pretty good, though. When was the last time we had a “real” book from him, though? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But he works as a social worker now, so perhaps he just doesn’t have the time…

Oh, his last solo work was in 2013. Oh well.

Charli XCX: Charli

10:40: Disciples of the Soil by B. Mure (Avery Hill)

Oh, I’d almost forgotten how much I love the colours in this series.

It’s a pretty confusing read, though. I’m not sure whether that’s on purpose (I don’t mind being confused) or whether that’s because I’ve totally forgotten what happened in the previous books. It’s about building a tunnel, and there’s a strike, and… there’s something about magic?

And then when things are starting to happen, the book ends and we get “to be continued in the next book”.

I mean, it’s good stuff, and I enjoyed reading it, but it’s a bit frustrating.

11:00: Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap (Fantagraphics)

This is a collection of short, oblique pieces — I don’t think they relate to each other?

The mixture of more abstract grotesques and precisely observed environments is kinda hypnotic.

And it’s also funny.

Great stuff.

Pescado Rabioso: Artaud

11:14: Rust Belt Review Volume 6 edited by Sean Knickerbocker

I got this from here.

This is an oversized anthology, and most of the stories are autobio or autobio adjacent. Many of them seem er oddly sinister? Like the one above; like if disaster is always lurking in the corner…

While the approaches vary, it has a kind of unified tone. And it’s not a typical anthology these days.

Most of the pieces are pretty straightforward, but this Alex Nall thing has an unnerving spiralling thing going on. Gripping.

Oooh Maggie Umber.

In short: A compelling anthology.

12:02: The Second Safest Mountain by Otava Heikkilä (Quindrie Press)

I quite like the artwork and the way the story flows.

However, every page has like a blinking honking huge text saying METAPHOR METAPHOR going, and it’d fucking annoying.

Pile: Hot Air Balloon

12:13: Peepee Poopoo #1 by Caroline Cash (Silver Sprocket)

Did Cash win all the awards for best everything this year? I think so?

It’s the fourth issue (I think), and it’s still going strong — I mean, that’s not a surprise.

It’s fab. More please.

David Bowie: Rock’n’Roll Star (2)

12:25: Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke by Sugiura Shigeru (New York Review Comics)

Very prescient the way he predicted future lyrics.

Anyway, this is extremely not my kind of thing? It’s one non sequitur after another, which is the typical 50s/60s Japanese comics gag way, and I just find it annoying in the extreme.

Perhaps it’s genius! I’ll never know, because I ditched it after 30 pages.

12:47: Kommix by Charles Burns (Fantagraphics)

This is Burns’ book of “fake covers”… and I find myself enjoying this a lot more than I thought I would? Especially the “Tintin”/X’d Out covers which seem to hint at a larger storyline… But of course, that’s the Burns magic: You look at one of his images and they evoke so much.

Many of the covers could be called straightforward gags, though.

But I mean… OK, this is a great book. Fine.

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: The Funeral Pudding

12:55: Ultimate Spider-Man: Married With Children by Hickman/Chechetto/Messina/Wilson (Marvel Comics)

I noticed that this series has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter, so I thought I might as well give it a go.

Gah, Marvel can’t keep the same artist on for a six issue arc, even?

I have read exactly zero (0) of the original “Ultimate” comics, but I believe that the point of that universe was to allow new readers to read fun super-hero stories without all that backstory baggage?

Well, that’s not what this is. The main point of the six issues collected here seems to be to allow readers to go “there’s that character I know, only slightly changed! And there’s that other character I know, only slightly changed!” That is, it’s for Real Fans Only.

But OK, surely they can tell a fun super-hero story in this universe anyway?

Oh my god. It’s so jarring when they drop in a different artist… It just completely ruins whatever thing they had going. And especially this other artist who seems to insist on using copy/paste on his drawing pad at the slightest provocation.

Surely this has to nix out any hope of having the paperback becoming a perpetual seller? But perhaps that’s not something they were going for here at all, because…

… this book isn’t a story at all: It’s a fucking exposition dump and an “introduction” to the set-up. But they didn’t even get through that — I’m betting they’re going to continue infodumping at the readers for the entire run on the book.

They got as far as giving Spider-Man the name Spider-Man, and then the book ended.

The book is so fucking awful. Nothing happens except “oh, here’s a reference”, and one third of the artwork is horrible.

Fontaines DC x Massive Attack x Young Fathers: In benefit of Doctors Without Borders

13:49: The End

OK, that’s enough comics for today. The day started off really well, but what a downer at the end there.

Wow, it’s been a month since I did one of these posts… Oh, right, I was busy with other things for a couple of weeks, and then I went to the US for a week, and the last week I’ve been on the couch, coughing and watching Murder She Wrote while waiting for the rona to pass.

So not much time for reading comics.

Anyway, these are the comics I’ve read the last month, and most of them I read more than three weeks ago, so let’s see whether I remember anything to say about any of them.

These are six minis from Kevin Huizenga that I’ve been slowly reading before bedtime.

These are process zines, mostly for his big collected book a few years ago, and they’re pretty interesting.

But I found the book(s) where he goes into detail about his thoughts about doing that book absolutely fascinating. So many things to think about, and so many things that he thinks are important for (comic) book design that I also think are important. As he notes here, many things that are great in serialised form fall flat in the collected edition. Or at least — aren’t quite as good, for some reason or other.

And the bit about blurbs is amusing: “What if you ask someone and then it turns out that they’re a clown or a monster and your book carries their name forever”. It’s especially amusing since I read this tweet a few days before I read this booklet:

I feel for Mike Kupperman:

Anyway, very nice minis, and it looks like you can still buy some of them from here.

They’ve sure been pumping out a lot of “special” versions of Spirou the last few years. This one adds another twist — it’s a new series of books that sort of pretends to be actual old Spirou books (note “Classique” on the cover) here. From what I’m able to google, it’s going to be a series where Spirou visits actual historical situations, and hilarity is supposed to ensue.

And the cover here is magnificent, isn’t it? It’s a pitch perfect 1959 Franquin design; very striking. And, yes, the name of the book is The Bay of Pigs.

Because Spirou and Fantasio go to Cuba during the missile crises, and are immediately imprisoned by Fidel Castro.

Yes.

And Fantasio somehow leads the rebels that are plotting with the CIA to do the invasion and stuff, and it’s just very odd. There’s few gags that work — above you see a good one, where we see the origin of the iconic Che Guevera t-shirt design.

If this had been filled with excellent gags, the skeeziness of the project wouldn’t have bothered me much, but it’s just… bad? Yeah, it’s bad. (The artwork’s fine, though.)

It’s not well-liked by people:

Une demi-étoile pour le dessin réussi des personnages de Spirou, Fantasio et Seccotine. Mais le dessin seulement. Tout le reste est à fuir : dessins et décors baclés ou inexistants, scénario inconsistant, dialogues nuls, gags affligeants, rien à sauver.

I.e., nice artwork, but everything else is bad. Quel dommage.

And speaking of bad French comics… I’m not a big fan of Tillieux at all — he’s pretty stodgy and… mean? Yeah, mean.

And this is definitely one of his lesser works. At the time he did this, he’d had a semi hit with his Felix series. Then he got an offer to do a new series with a new free newspaper, and he chose to do something pretty bizarre: He redrew a bunch of his Felix stories with “different” characters. And so Agne Signe is basically a rip-off and I wonder why the people who published that paper let him get away with it.

If these were brilliant stories, I could understand it, but they really aren’t. There are some bright spots, but it’s pretty tedious.

I understand why they’ve collected this historical curiosity (Tillieux is a big name), and I also understand why they didn’t spend much money on doing a proper restoration. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered buying this…

I’m learning French, and this had way too much 50s French slang to be optimal for me, but I managed to make it through (with the help of the Google Translate app). (Speaking of French, the main problem isn’t when there’s words I don’t understand at all, but instead constructions that have only familiar words that don’t seem to mean anything in the order they appear in. Like “je ne vous en veux pas trop” which is impossible to guess at what should mean, but means something like “I don’t blame you too much”? When I encounter phrases like that, it feels like I’m having a stroke and just don’t understand anything…)

And, yes, I’ve taken a subscription to the Spirou magazine! So once a week I get homework in the post. I mean a fun magazine.

And it is fun! I’m surprised at how many good series are in here — it’s a great motivating factor to sitting down a reading this.

A great variety of series, too — although most are aimed at ages 13 and down, which is totally my age range.

But they’re also serialising things like Jerome K. Jerome Bloche, which is a bit older. And they’re doing it in a way I didn’t know they were using: The album where this is from was published the same week this issue was on the stands. So the readers could either choose to wait five/six weeks (I think) to get the complete story, or run out and buy the album and read it immediately. I think that sounds like a pretty cool strategy…

It’s not just serialisations — we also get random shorter things, like this five page Spirou story.

And you know how in US fandom these days, they’ll grasp at any “IP” to exploit. Like, if there’s a trash can shown in a three second clip in Star Wars: A New Hope, they’ll be making an eight hour TV series about that trash can’s origin, family and drama. Drain it all! No detail too small!

That’s not really much the case with European comics… except in this case it really is: Back in the 60s, up until a certain point Spirou and Fantasio lived in separate houses. And then suddenly they were living together in the same house, with no explanation given.

This five page story explains that thing that I’m sure has been bothering French nerds for decades! It explains how they came to move in together and how they chose the new house, and it’s… it’s actually a pretty sweet story? It’s fun. Sometimes expanding on fannish minutiae like that can be fun, and this was a successful little exercise.

A decade ago, I bought all the Peanuts collections from Fantagraphics. And I slowly read them in chronological order, but then, about five years ago, I forgot all about it.

Since I’ve got a cold, I dug out this book and had a look…

… and I read it all today. It’s good stuff! It’s a perfect read for when you’re feeling poorly, I guess.

I did have the Peanuts pocketbooks as a teenager, so I’ve probably read most of this before…

… and certain sequences here were super familiar to me. With the older books, I usually have a kind of vague feeling of “yeees? I’ve read this, probably?”, but there were sequences here that were super traumatic, like the one where Marcie goes to obedience school. I remember just feeling so deeply for her back when I was a teenager, and I guess I still do.

Hey, I remembered something to say!

I thought I had a cold, but it turned out to be covid. *sigh* So I thought I might as well use the opportunity to take a feverish last sweep for magazines about comics for kwakk.info…

One of the weirdest things this time around was the Figurines Marvel thing. Were these things included with Marvel figurines or something? Some of these “mags” are pretty long, like:

20 pages about Crystal? Is that really necessary?

Manara gets the same treatment in Figurines Manara, which seems even weirder. In any case, both are marked as “promotional materiel”, so they shouldn’t perturb normal searches.

The Dutch Zone 5300 mag looks interesting, but unfortunately there’s only a smattering of issues to be found.

And the same goes for P@per.

Ciso Stripgids looks like a nice older fanzine.

I had no idea that Bleeding Cool Magazine ever existed, but there you go.

Tebeosfera is a Spanish-language academic publication, I think. Some of the issues are about 1K pages long…

Vécu is another one of those French hybrid mags, so I wasn’t sure whether to include it or not, but it seemed kinda interesting. I’ve limited paging.

Ja, Splitter, Das Comic-Journal is German.

I think La Lettre de Dargaud is probably promotional?

There’s not just one, but two magazines devoted to Les Amis du Hergé.

Ekllipse seems like a very dark fanzine.

Castermag’ surely is promotional.

As is Bandes Annonces?

Anyway, mostly non-essential stuff this time around, so I think I’ve reached the bottom of the search stack here.