Random Thoughts

Mabel Normand and Her Funny Friends, Fatty Arbuckle and His Funny Friends edited by Marilyn Slater.

These two magazine sized comics collects pieces of a British publication from 1921, now in the public domain.

Each issue includes a brief biography of the movie star in question.

But the meat of each issue is the reprinting of the Kinema Comic contents, and they’re… rather primitive. The level of redundancy between text and image is on a level I don’t think I’ve experienced before, and I’ve… experienced some. You can basically just ignore either the text or the comics. Reading both is tedious.

There’s some fun period britishisms, I assume: “Keep a watchful optic”.

It’s apparently planned as a ten issue series. I don’t know what the editor means by “26 panels”. Is it just a typo for “pages”?

The second issue has a different look. While the first issue was thresholded to completely black and white, most pages here are muddy greys. Hm… “Threw the glad optic”?!? That’s a weird coinkidink…

It’s sometimes rather inventive. The text sounds quite a bit like one of those vaudeville comedians yammering on endlessly.

No further issues were published.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

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.