Random Thoughts

Alex #1-6 by Mark Kalesniko.

This is a quite unusual Fantagraphics floppy series: 1) It’s not a single-author anthology, but a proper story that 2) seems to be designed to last for six issues and 3) wasn’t cancelled before it was completed and 4) was published on a strict bi-monthly schedule (which may be a first (and last) for Fantagraphics) and 6) isn’t very good.

There are good things about it. Kalesniko draws beautiful ugly factories.

All the exteriors are great. They look organic and real and have personality. More personality than the characters. The protagonist is a funny animal, while all the other characters are human, and not all that convincingly rendered.

But the problem here isn’t the drawing, which varies between fine and great, but the histrionic storyline, which is about a alcoholic cartoonist (with a similar name to Kalesniko) who’s not very inspired (except by one new painting he’s made) and is alienating all his friends and drinking himself to death.

OK, perhaps that sounded kinda interesting, but the pages are filled with references we’re supposed to get (and if we don’t, are really boring).

But here’s the main problem here. We see the artist losing his brush…

And then the natural result: He flips completely out, trashes the apartment and then throws the brush from the balcony. And then goes to looks for it, which is the fun part. This is repeated with… uhm… three more objects? I forget. So it’s meant to be funny, and the repetitions are meant to provide structure (and further amusement), but after seeing him trash his apartment for the ninth time, it all starts feeling very silly.  And not good silly.

Kalesniko includes some of the reference material on the back pages, which probably means that there are autobiographical elements to the story, I would guess. Hm, yes, I just duckduckwent a bit, and his biographical details seem to be the same as the Alex character.

This is a pet peeve of mine: Over-emphasising. Why is “teacher” in bold oblique? “Talk”? Really, why is bold oblique used here at all? Sometimes when I’m extra cranky I feel that it would be better not to model prosody and emphasis at all when lettering, especially here where it’s an internal monologue. (In speech bubbles it’s really common to go bold oblique in comics, and that’s usually fine.) If he’s really THINKING that WAY all the TIME then the inside of his head has to BE REALLY annoying.

Besides, trying to dictate reading to that extent is a sure sign of KOOKERY.

(And I won’t mention this is an example of pretty early computer lettering (1994), because I”M NOT A nerd.)

Every other scene is like this.

One bit I liked here was the way he used the cats as harbingers of death (or something). They ghost the guy who’s next to die (or something).

With all the subtlety of a knife to the eye.

Kalesniko has continued to publish sporadically via Fantagraphics. His latest work was Freeway from 2011, I think.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

The Nimrod #1-7 by Lewis Trondheim.

This series is a collection of various of the more “indie” Trondheim works: Autobio, a McConey story, and several shorter pieces, so I can see why it looked like it might make sense to publish this stuff in English in pamphlet format. It’s like US indie comics, so publishing it floppily would be popular?

The autobio work usually has an internal monologue running through it where Trondheim thinks a lot about whether he’s an asshole or not. Or comes off like an asshole. It’s fun.

And since he draws comics, a significant part of the stories deals with, well, drawing comics. Here he recounts the changes the editors at Kodansha (I think) wants to have made to the Japanese version of “The Fly”. And I think this speaks volumes as to why mainstream Japanese comics are so dreadfully boring. Editorial micro-managing seems to be the order of the day there, and that seldom leads to anything resembling art.

OK, it’s a pretty simple joke, but I just absolutely adore (and laughed out loud) to the middle tier there.

In issue two, editor Kim Thompson (in his usual frank way) announces that The Nimrod is cancelled due to awful sales. So the “indie comic” publishing strategy failed for this material.

But then a third issue appears a year later. Thompson explains that he just had to publish it, even if it loses money because it was nominated for awards, and he just had to.

The two McConey albums (in colour, and hardback, I seem to recall) didn’t sell either, apparently. Thompson’s doesn’t whine about it or issue a call to arms, but seems pretty much resigned to publishing Trondheim at a loss. Which is admirable, although it would perhaps be preferable to find a different public to sell this stuff to…

But back to the work itself. The other major mode (other than the autobio) in this series are these pages. They all have pretty much the same arrangement: Square panels with very cartooney characters, and captions above the panels. Some of them are funny (like this one), but others drag a bit. I don’t feel that this form is particularly gripping, I guess…

After teasing the meaning of the title “The Nimrod” for a couple of issues, Thompson finally spills the beans in issue four. I didn’t guess that that was what it meant… or… non-meant…

The issue has a longer McConey story, which is the usual four-guys-bickering while nothing much happens. And it’s great. There’s something so completely real about the way they talk to each other, and while it doesn’t seem to have an overt artificial structure, it all comes together to form a whole anyway. Trondheim is just so good at this type of thing.

Here they meet a farmer. “Short pants.” Heh heh.

But, in my opinion, not this type of thing. These strips feel like he’s improvising some kind of philosophy while at the drafting table, and they’re frequently a bit on the hokey side. I find that it helps if I read the captions with a French accent.

One thing I don’t think I’ve mentioned in this FF series is the way Fantagraphics does internal ads. In the early days, there was usually a couple of pages pushing stuff that might be of general vague interest to the reader of the comic book, but for books like this, they’re targeted particularly well. We get all the solo Trondheim books, but also appearances in the Measles and Zero Zero anthologies, as well as issues of The Comics Journal that have interviews with Trondheim.

Oh, and a t-shirt.

I wonder how successful these ads are… They lend a certain air of slapdash cheapness to the comic books.

The final issue is published in 2003, 18 months after the penultimate issue. There’s no editorial in the issue, and it doesn’t mention that it’s going to be the last issue, but perhaps Thompson didn’t know. But perhaps this is the reason:

Apparently NBM found a way to sell Trondheim to an American audience that had eluded Fantagraphics, so Thompson just wished them luck and stopped losing money on The Nimrod.

NBMs Trondheim program seems to be quite successful. Or at least sustainable: They’ve published more than a dozen Trondheim albums and books, and they’re all pretty much great. Oh, I see that one of the series mentioned in the ad there is something called “Oddballz”, which looks like a pamphlet series. So NBM also experimented with that format before going all perfect bound? And I don’t seem to have that series, so I’ll have to fix that…

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Collier’s #1-4 by David Collier.

This series was published in a variety of sizes (two standard comic book, one standard magazine, and one in the middle somewhere) at a glacial pace between 1992 and 1998. I think I remember seeing work from David Collier popping up in various anthologies around that time, but I would guess that he’s just really slow, because the books just have that feel about them… that old-timey slow feel…

So, Collier used to be in the Canadian army or something, and now he draws comics. For his first solo comic, he’s using the somewhat peculiar “draw a gazillion diagonal lines” method of shading, which looks very labour intensive…

… but has as is main problem than things tend to have the same level of greyness when you look at a page, so things aren’t always immediately readable. But I just love it. It just looks so obsessive and organic.

The first story, about setting up for a rock show, is a bit on the confusing side. I found myself flipping back and forth and back and forth to try to work out who these characters are and how it all fits together, and I think it just doesn’t. This guy, for instance, never gets a name and we’re never given any explanation for why his abode is that salvo box…

And see that guy on top of those speakers there? He went up to put a little tweeter on top, but then the other people left him, so he couldn’t climb back. So what happened to him?

*flip* *flip*

Oh, there’s the tweeter being handed down after the concert? So he was up there the whole time?

But I don’t mind. The confusion just lends it more character.

And it’s funny.

Then a short story about going to New York. I guess Trump was a thing back in 1992, too… He didn’t, though.

Even though the first two stories in this issue are pretty spiffy, the last one is just wonderful in its scattered mundanity. It’s set in army barracks, and it’s about… er… stuff… I guess… And it’s very funny and oddly touching, even though nothing much happens.

Oops. Colin Upton has almost the same critique that I have about that first story…

The second issue starts off with two stories in the same vein as the first issue, and they’re also drawn in much the same We Love Diagonal Lines style. The third one, however, is a story about a Saskatoon woman who ended up going to compete in the Olympics in 1928. It’s told from the point of view of her first trainer, and it’s great.

I have no interest in sports or anything, but it’s oddly riveting. It doesn’t have that much drama or intrigue, and it’s told in a slightly repetitive way (the narrator mentions that she was called “The Saskatoon Lily” three times, at least), but it lends it verisimilitude. It feels like this guy is really telling you a story, and for some reason you’re interested.

The artwork also changes quite a bit. Instead of all the diagonal lines, Collier switches to a variety of ways to shade, like traditional cross-hatching above…

And… er… I’m sure that has a technical name…

The third issue is all one story, sort of. It starts off with Collier wanting to ski up to Grey Owl’s old lodge:

The artwork has taken a definite Crumbian turn, but after showing that harrowing trip, the rest of the issue retells the story of Grey Owl, who was an English guy who went to Canada, passed himself off as native, and then published a series of books on conservation and stuff.

This was back in the 1920s, when things like that were even less popular than now.

I have not checked whether Collier just made all this up or not. Hang on for a second while I duckduckgo… Yup, Wikipedia seems to think it’s true.

Anyway, it really works. The framing sequence makes the retelling personal: As something only Collier could do, and the story of Grey Owl itself is humanising and touching, but still quite funny. It’s great.

You snooze, you etc.

The fourth and final Fantagraphics issue is about Collier’s grandfather, and as good as the other issues are, it’s even better.

It’s told very non-linearly. It’s more like a very vague and somewhat scattered clip book where we’re told things about Richard, the aforementioned grandfather, in seemingly random order. But not in an artsy random order: It almost feels like Collier is just drawing things in the order they occur to him.

It’s a very odd technique, but it works. By avoiding giving this life an “storytelling arc”, as most people would have done, the book feels like a life. Random and without much meaning, but still meaningful.

One thing that did drive me slightly batty while reading it, though, was the total lack of signalling between captions that were Richard talking in first person, and Collier talking about Richard in third person. Typical example up there. I tried to see whether there was any significance to the captions being in boxes or not…

Hm… the first person panel has rounded borders? Is that a clue?

*reaches for issue*

Yes! Whenever the panel has rounded borders, it’s first person! Gad. I didn’t catch that.

Well then, I withdraw my objection. Unfortunately my delete key is missing, so I can’t delete all that, and I have to live with the shame of being inattentive.

Anyway! It’s wonderful. As it got towards the end, I found myself wishing that it was much longer than it is, and perhaps Collier thought that, too, since the story continues onto the outside back cover.

+1 will read again.

After this issue, the series moved to Drawn & Quarterly. Collier has published a (small) number of graphic novels after this, one of which I see that I haven’t read yet, so I’ve just ordered it.

Hm… doesn’t seem to have published anything after 2012? That’s too bad.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.