Random Thoughts

Holy Moly by Leah Hayes.

Fantagraphics doesn’t work a lot with the materiality of their books: The vast majority of them are unremarkable as physical objects. This is quite different from some of their smaller peers, where they often have unique sizes, papers or printing methods.

This is one of those rare unique floppies from Fantagraphics: It’s shaped like one of those composition books: Stiff covers, rounded pages and blue horizontal lines.

And unusually for Fantagraphics, it’s non-narrative, but instead is composed of pages like this: It seems like it could have been drawn in class while listening to boring lectures.

So a very unusual book for Fantagraphics all over.

Fantagraphics recently released Leah Hayes’ much-reviewed graphic novel Not Funny Ha Ha that I’m pretty sure I’ve bought? I can’t remember reading it, though, and it doesn’t seem to be in my ever-growing “to be read” piles. Odd. Perhaps I should just buy it again to be on the safe side.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Grenuord #1-3 by Francesca Ghermandi.

I am not a comics publishing genius, but serialising a translation of an Italian graphic novel as a series of $5-6 comic books, in 2005, published with a four-month interval between each issue, does not seem like the plan most likely to succeed.

It’s told in a decompressed style: Big panels and not a lot of text. It’s also sometimes frustratingly oblique.

Wait, what? The second issue has a “recap” of the first issue where we learn that the protagonist is a walking corpse. I don’t think that was even slightly alluded to in the first issue?

There’s a sort of interwoven, but parallel story about some kids in the neighbourhood, and it’s drawn in this simpler, more child-like fashion.

Well, OK… his face is a skull, so perhaps we’re supposed to guess from that that he’s dead?

No continuation has been published in English.

It’s a pleasantly paranoid and vague story, and I think I’d enjoy reading a complete edition, but it felt like we were just setting up the premise by the end of the third issue, really, so I’m guessing that it’s a rather long book, really? I haven’t been able to find much out about the original edition.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Primitive Cretin by Henriette Valium.

This is an oversized collection of Henriette Valium’s work from the early 90s. It’s slightly wider than a magazine, and quite a bit taller.

Kim Thompson hadpublished Valium earlier in Zero Zero, but the smaller size of that anthology meant that most of Valium’s drawings were somewhat difficult to make out.

The result is an imposing object filled with story after story in this vein. Very scatological.

Valium is from Montreal, and these pages were apparently published in French first before being translated (by Valium) into English. I would assume that they were as weird originally as they are in English.

Valium’s sheer inventiveness is quite astounding.

Valium continued to publish comics, but it looks like he’s doing more art than books these days.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.