Random Thoughts

Before we get to the comics today, let me digress a bit. There’s a new essay at Solrad about 2dcloud, and I went “where’s my popcorn! finally somebody’s going to make some sense of er it all”, but nope — it’s an even less than informative article about the sitch than you could imagine.

Now, I’m just a guy that reads comics, and I know nothing, but there’s some things that could be mentioned in an article about this 2dcloud debacle slash saga: First of all, the book under discussion is (amusingly enough) called 3 Books, and is by Blaise Larmee. It has three stories, all of which are clearly made up — what kids today call “fiction”. I say “clearly”, but it’s not like the book says “here’s some things I made up for you today”, but everything about the book, from the binding to the obviously fake “photos”, scream “perhaps this isn’t quite real”. It’s like people not quite getting that Tristram Shandy isn’t a real person?

So I was surprised when the book became a Big Deal (but not shocked, because when you make a book that pretends that “it’s real”, and even go to the extremes of making a web site to support it (as Larmee did), you can’t be too surprised if people believe you), and the publisher said they pulped all the copies. So I assumed that there was something else going on, and there were accusations about a different guy with a different pseudonym at 2dcloud being a sex pest, so I thought perhaps… you know.

And now there’s more:

And then there’s this:

And this:

And:

And this:

And apparently sites like Comics Beat have scrubbed the news stories about this saga:

And so have a lot of tweets about the whole thing.

So there definitely seems to be a story here, even if the story is “those 2dcloud people sure like to do performative obscurity (probably while sniggering)”. (Also see this article from the substack which is probably the most coherent bit written about all of this (and it’s not very coherent, but then again it may all be part of some performance or other).)

If only journalism was something that existed in comics, but nope. That Solrad piece definitely isn’t, though.

ANYWAY

Time to read comics, because the weather is miserable. And for music today… how about albums from 1992 only? Because why not. And because I have a tendency to skip past the 90s when listening to music, for some reason or other…

Coil: Stolen and Contaminated Songs

09:25: Barking by Lucy Sullivan (Avery Hill)

Wow, that’s an impressive graphical approach. The book is about mental illness and stuff, so it’s very appropriate.

The mix of computer and hand lettering is rather odd, though…

Anyway, it’s an interesting book, but it feels oddly incomplete. When the book ended, I had to flip back a few pages to see whether I missed anything, but nope.

09:59: Fall Through by Nate Powell (Abrams Comics Arts)

I’ve been reading Powell’s comics since, er, when did he start? Late 90s? And his artwork’s still very attractive.

But… this book… I dunno. It’s got this voiceover I mean narration no I mean voiceover throughout, and it’s the worst elegiac thing ever. It’s the voiceover from a thousand TV writers’ rooms, talking about Something Important From The Protagonist’s Past, and it just does me in.

But the artwork’s nice.

I had to ditch this about one quarter in, because I couldn’t take it any more.

On a more positive note, I bought this print from Michael Kupperman. Aww!

It’s more EEK if you hold it upside down, though.

Suzanne Vega: 99.9 F°

10:28: So Buttons #13 by Jonathan Baylis and others

Fancy spot gloss printing on the cover! I got this from here.

This issue is mostly about movies and film school and stuff, and it’s got an easygoing kind of vibe to it. It’s very amusing.

Oh yeah, Lifeboat is great! One of Hitchcock’s best (but then again, I do like Hitchcock in general).

Speaking of 2dcloud, this month’s Desert Island’s Mystery Box had three (3) 2dcloud books, of which I already had three, which makes for 100%, if my math is correct.

So that’s disappointing, but whatevs. Among the three was 2001 by, yes, Blaise Larmee, so I guess Desert Island isn’t caught up in all the internet drama…

Huggy Bear: Kiss Curl For The Kid’s Lib Guerrillas

10:49: The Dial and Other Stories by Chris Reynolds (Kingly Books)

I managed to score some old Mauritania Comics issues the other month, and in those issues were ads for something called The Dial. Which I hadn’t read before! This is a new (ahem) edition from 2004, though.

The Dial is even more dream-like than Reynolds’ stories usually are.

It’s great!

The last half of the book is “The Golden Age”, which is about a boy and his headmistress. It’s more surreal than dream-like, perhaps… but also fascinating.

Intermix: Intermix

11:09: Nap Time

And now I’m gonna take a nap — I got up way too early this morning.

Orange: Orange

14:21: The Blouse by Bastien Vives (Ablaze)

I’m awake!

This starts off as an extremely well-observed story about a student.

But then it basically turns into Le déclic by Milo Manara — see, she was lent this blouse, and it turns the men wild and transports the woman into Sex World, where every encounter is sexual. (And/or violent.) The storytelling is on point, but the book feels staid.

14:49: Excerpt by Alex Schubert

As the title implies, this is an excerpt from a longer book (that’ll be published in 2025, apparently). It’s really good! I’m looking forward to the book.

Swallow: Blowback

14:53: Einsteins nya fru by Liv Strömquist (Galago)

This is funny/informative/angry, which is always a good mix.

Unrest: Imperial f.f.r.r

Lots of interesting stuff, like about Stalin’s wife and so on. It does tend towards overloading the pages with text, and the pieces where she allows the panels to breathe a bit more are more fun to read.

16:28: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet (Fantagraphics)

This is a really attractive art style — the crisp, yet still organic colours…

There’s some a kind of… slacker “spirituality” going on here, though. But it’s pretty good.

New Fast Automatic Daffodils: Body Exit Mind

16:50: Insurance/Swamp Parade #2/Bee-Man by S. R. Arnold & Michael Kamison

Insurance is a fun, short book about doing comics.

The Bee-Man book is from 2016, and it’s pretty rough.

Swamp Parade has a number of shorter pieces, and is fun.

Like this Eraserhead 15 Year Later strip.

Buffalo Tom: Let Me Come Over

17:22: Gaytheist by Lonnie Mann and Ryan Gatts (Street Noise Books)

I like the colour palette — it reminds me of Japanese comics. Hm… and I guess the artwork does too? Slightly?

That’s some parenting!

I’m not really in the target audience for this group — I just find it endlessly frustrating to read about people trying to come to terms with superstitions being moronic, but I guess a book like this could be helpful for other people in this situation. And it’s refreshing to see somebody write about Orthodox Judaism instead of funnymentalist Christians (when it comes to overcoming religion).

But still, I found the book to be pretty entertaining. It’s a snappy read — it’s well-paced, and you get a real feeling for the various characters. It’s fun.

Psychic TV: Cold Dark Matter

18:29: Hypericum by Manuele Fior (Fantagraphics)

This is a large album.

It’s about a woman (scientist, of course) who meets a magic pixie dream boy (artist, of course), and the scientist’s life is changed forever! So it’s the normal plot, but it’s done quite well. The character design is pretty odd, though.

19:02: In Utero by Chris Gooch (Top Shelf)

Speaking of odd character designs…

This is very much structured like a horror/action movie — one of those that has a long, long ramp-up until we get to know what the Featured Monster is. And it does succeed in establishing a proper mood.

But… it just doesn’t really come together? But it’s OK.

Kitchens of Distinction: The Death of Cool

19:47: Asterios: The Minotaur by Le Tendre/Peynet (Cinebook)

This is yet another revisionist retelling of the Minotaur story…

… but it’s actually not bad? The artwork is very standard, but it’s entertainingly told.

Finitribe: An Unexcepted Groovy Treat

20:19: Jeremiah 40: Celui qui manque by Hermann (Faraos Cigarer)

Kordy is still looking for Jeremiah, and basically all of this album is like this — in a fog, or a daze, and there’s not much of a plot.

The nerds at bedetheque say things like “what did I just read” and “I can’t remember the last good Jeremiah album” and give the album zero stars (out of five). But c’mon. Hermann is 84 years old.

20:39: The End

OK, I think that’s enough for today, because the only remaining unread comics I have left are rather lengthy tomes, and I don’t feel like starting reading any of them.

It’s another lazy Sunday, so how about some comics reading?

The last few times I’ve been going “well, I shouldn’t buy more French comics that I can only read veeeeery slowly; I should definitely wait, like, half a year”, so inevitably:

Yes, I’ve bought more than 1K pages of Pratt/Oesterheld comics.

I’ve read most of Pratt’s comics already, of course (because most of them have been translated into languages I understand), but these ones, written by Oesterheld, haven’t been.

They’re early work, and there’s probably a reason they’ve been skipped, but c’mon. It’s artwork by Hugo Pratt.

Ernie Pike is about a war journalist, and Sgt. Kirk looks like a western… and these are quite handsome editions. And, like I said, about a thousand pages in total! *gasp*

Gotta hurry up and expand my French vocabulary so that I can read these… Duolingo, c’mon! Faster!

Meanwhile, I’ll be reading non-French comics. And for music… only albums that I haven’t listened to for a while.

Róisín Murphy: Ruby Blue

14:16: Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich (Penguin)

Huh, Penguin doesn’t publish a lot of comics these days.

Oh, it’s ten years old… Physically, it’s a pretty special book in that it doesn’t feel like a typical comic book book — it’s printed on normal Penguin paperback stock, and the cover is pretty floppy, too, so it feels like a bigger version of an 70s Penguin paperback. It’s very nice.

This is autobio, I guess, but with changed names? It’s fascinating — it hits exactly that sweet spot where the material doesn’t feel over-digested (you can tell when the author has had too much therapy, or too “helpful” editors) nor just an undigested gulp of… stuff. (Oops. Sorry for imagery.)

Cabaret Voltaire: Groovy, Laidback and Nasty

The Knife: Silent Shout

The pages are can seem a bit er heavy on the text, but the storytelling really works.

Ooops! What’s that I see over here behind me…

*gulp*

Anyway, this book is really good. The story is original, and feels very true? I think the reason I bough the book is because somebody on the intertubes recommended it, and that’s a good thing, because I absolutely hadn’t heard of it before. And it was published in 2014, but the first printing is still available, so I’m guessing it didn’t really sell well. It’s one of the best comics I’ve read this year.

And it reminds me of the Big Drama on Comics Twitter this week:

*gasp* How dare they! People were all upset until somebody said “well, all that major publishers will pay for is YA and memoirs, so that’s what we’re making”, which sounds accurate. (It was amusing for a while after Maus, when nobody in publishing understood why that was a major success — you could see them going “well, Spiegelman is kinda avant garde — perhaps if we publish all his avant garde friends we’ll sell a lot of books?” and that totally failed. It wasn’t until the two-step of Persepolis and Fun Home that all the publishers went “ooh! the trick is memoirs!” and then we got a metric tonne of comics memoirs from the major publishers…)

(Heh. And speaking of Persepolis — I just googled Ulinich, and her prose novel is called Petropolis. Surely a coincidence.)

Juana Molina: Tres Cosas

18:00: Den sjunde vännen by Sara Granér (Galago)

This is a collection of a handful of longer pieces…

… and a lot of one page gags.

The longer pieces aren’t really stories, but are instead ruminations on a theme, in a kind of dissociative way. There’s funny bits in here, but they’re basically serious. It’s nice.

Pet Shop Boys: Fundamental

18:53: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 3 by Hitoshi Ashinano (Seven Seas Entertainment)

This is another thing somebody on the interwebs recommended, but I’ve apparently bought volume 3 of this thing? Oops.

Well, OK, so there’s about 900 pages before this, so I’m not surprised that I don’t understand anything, but the Standard Japanese Art Style here doesn’t really help — it’s hard to tell even how many characters there are supposed to be, since they have about two faces to go between them.

I guess you could call the storytelling style “calm”. Not a lot happens over the 450 pages in this book.

And the things that do happen are like “wha”. But again, I’m new around here…

Oh, she’s a robot? Several of them are robots? Well, OK, that explains… er… nothing.

OK, I’m not a fan of this book after reading this volume. But it’s very… calm.

Eurythmics: Touch Dance

19:38: Mennene by Anne-Kristin Strøm & Daniel Østvold (Ford Forlag)

Like the Lena Finkle book, this is also about dating, illustrated by Østvold in his distinctive style.

It’s an odd book — it’s really heartfelt and very amusing at the same time? I started wondering whether perhaps the author Anne-Kristin Strøm (it’s presented in a way that leads the reader to read this as autobio, I guess) was fictional, but apparently not. It’s good.

Cat Power: Sun

20:21: Blake et Mortimer: L’art de la guerre by Floc’h, Fromental et Bocquet (Cobolt)

Oh, wow — this has a much starker graphical quality than you’d expect in one of these nouveau P. Edgar Jacobs books.

It’s almost more like a 40s American comic book look than a Belgian ligne claire thing? And it looks like it’s been drawn at a smaller scale than it’s been printed at, so it looks like clip art in a way? And also a bit like Mike Kupperman… Drawn on an Ipad, perhaps?

And the colouring looks basically flat, but then you notice that it isn’t — you get an almost homeopathic rouging of their chins, for instance.

I’m just saying that Floc’h’s graphical approach here is really striking.

Here’s a page from a thing Floc’h did in 1991 — it’s much more traditional ligne claire.

(Huh. I should buy that album. Done. OOPS!)

Róisín Murphy: Simulation

Anyway, the story is pretty entertaining, too.

Arthur Russell: World of Echo

21:36: Won’t Back Down by Trina Robbins (Last Gasp)

Wow! A new book from Last Gasp… you don’t see that often these days. (Or new anthologies edited by Trina Robbins, for that sake…)

Ah, right, this is an anti forced birth anthology.

And it’s a very mixed bag. The pieces done by underground veterans are generally pretty solid…

… and the ones done by more mainstream creators veer between wildly offensively moronic and just boring.

But like I said, there are some good bits. And it’s for a good cause — the profits go to Planned Parenthood. I guess you can buy it here? Possibly?

22:17: Old Stuff by Alex Schubert

This is a collection of short pieces from all over…

… but they also seem to form a distracted narrative of sorts. It’s weird, and it’s great.

And there’s a book of sketches.

LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening

22:30: Perry Shitlife/Perry Midlife by S. R. Arnold

Hey, nice sketch!

Perry Midlife is an intense and harrowing book — but also funny? It’s kinda Clowesian, I guess. (And you can order it from here.)

Perry Shitlife is presented as autobio (taking place about ten years ago)…

… but some of the things just seem too unreal. I mean, singing Blue at a karaoke pub?

But it’s funny and it’s quite affecting. I like it.

23:16: The End.

And now I think I’ve read enough for today. It was a pretty good batch, eh?