Random Thoughts

I’ve got to read more comics! But perhaps not for as many hours as usual, because I’ve got some errands to run.

Juana Molina: Son

13:19: Land of Mirrors by María Medem (Drawn & Quarterly)

Wow, the artwork is really attractive… and reminds me of a thing I’ve idly wondered about: Right, Sunday by Oliver Schrauwen was originally published in a riso-printed edition in Germany (I’ve got those), but then Fantagraphics published a collected edition in the US, and that was apparently offset printed, but reproduced from those riso-printed books, if I understand correctly? This also kinda looks riso-ish, but too elaborate for real riso, so does Photoshop have a plugin these days called “Make My Colours Look All Riso And Stuff”?

This is an intriguing, quite original book.

And it seems like 100% the sort of book that I love, but, er, I didn’t? It just didn’t grab me.

Arthur Russell: Calling Out of Context

14:15: American Nature #2 (Floating World Comics)

Huh. A Dave Sim pin up?

A gratuitous 2d cloud joke!

But most of the issue is text pieces… Seems fun.

14:33: Robot Tod by Faryl Dalrymple (Floating World Comics)

Hey! If I tip the lamp away and up the ISO, I can use a colour temperature that’s more natural for the entire room… Let’s see if this works or whether it’s just too dark to get good snaps of the pages.

Well… there is enough light, I think…

Anyway, I really like Dalrymple’s artwork, and this seems like it’s going to be a fun story, but it’s just so brief. I’m there for the collected edition, though.

14:41: A Slice of Spy by Matt Howarth (Cosmic Lion)

Tipping the lamp away was too much work — makes each snap take 4x as long as my usual work flow here, and that’s just not on. So I’m back to 3300K (from the more appropriate 4500K room temperature).

Anyway… Wow. I’m a kinda… er… of two minds when it comes to Howarth. I absolutely loved his more zany mystery science fiction comics, like Kief Llama back in the 80s. I found the ultraviolence of the Post Bros offputting. And I thought his incredibly distinctive line was just the best.

This just looks awful. His line is still pretty good, but those pics he’s dropping into the backgrounds is distracting in a really bad way. And those palm threes are just horrible.

And the story’s not much of a story. So this is quite a disappointment — the first new Howarth book I’ve read in decades, and it’s this sloppy. There’s an interview included here, and Howarth says that he drew this book in one week, and I’m not surprised? He also says that he has so much stuff on his shelf that hasn’t been published, so perhaps he’s just gotten used to making things with no thought for publication?

I’m still on board for buying more Howarth stuff, though.

Pet Shop Boys: Electric

14:57: Raised by Ghosts by Briana Loewinsohn (Fantagraphics)

OK, being desaturated is the major way to signal that you’re doing something Serious these days, but c’mon. This is so brown and beige that you can hardly make out what’s in the pictures.

This starts off in the normal “I had such a hard time at school” way…

… but then, fortunately, changes completely: We get the story of a teenage girl who’s totally normal, and has lots of friends, goes to concerts and is pretty cool. Very unusual! But her trauma is that her parents weren’t very present.

It’s a pretty good book. It’s an enjoyable read.

Pet Shop Boys: Please

15:35: Weapon X-Men (Marvel)

I read the other day that Marvel are cancelling most of their X-Men comics again, including this one, which I just got the first issue of. It’s really discouraging — I’m trying to find some monthly, dependably super-hero comic to read, but I guess that’s just not a thing any more.

This is very 2025.

It’s fun! It’s a properly stupid super-hero book, and works perfectly. Too bad it’s already cancelled.

Hood: Cold House

15:50: The Retirement Party by Teddy Goldenberg (Floating World Comics)

Oo, I like this.

It’s funny, it’s unnerving.

It’s got real nerve. I love it! Fantastic!

And now I’m gonna run some errands, I think. See you later.

Circlesquare: Hey You Guys

17:38: Mansect by Koga Shinichi (Living the Line Books)

I’m guessing this was serialised in a magazine for children? It features a lot of boys with nagging mothers for sure.

It’s pretty well done? There are bits that are kinda scary, but the characters have less than zero character, so it’s rather a snoozefest cumulatively.

And extremely derivative — I think he cycles through all possible American rubber movie monsters from the 50s by the end. But of course, since it’s Japanese, we also get weird fetish stuff.

I’ve certainly read worse Japanese comics.

Hercules & Love Affair: Blue Songs

18:12: Rataplan et l’ibis d’or by Duval/Berck (E-Voke)

Huh… That name seems awfully familiar, but this is an old French(ey) comic I’ve never seen before. Oh oh oh — Rantanplan is the name of Lucky Luke’s incredibly stupid dog! Well, that’s weird.

Well, the artwork is certainly competent enough…

But man, the story is excruciating. None of the gags are funny, the characters aren’t particularly compelling, and the story is boring. I know, I know, this is for six year olds, but even as a six year old I would have found this to be embarrassingly bad. It’s no wonder this has never been translated before. But these days it’s so cheap to run off a translated edition like this that you only need a couple hundred old curious suckers like me to cover the costs.

18:30: Kafka’s Manuscript by Jason Novak (Fantagraphics)

I’ve really enjoyed Novak’s previous books, but this one…

There’s one panel every other page.

All silent, and they tell the very brief story of (I’m guessing) somebody bringing a Kafka manuscript to the US or something. I’ve used more time to type these words than it took me to read this book.

Kraftwerk: Autobahn

18:33: Mild White Steed by Michael D. Kennedy (Drawn & Quarterly)

Nice fold-out flaps.

This is a collection of shorter pieces.

Quite varied in style.

It’s an interesting book, and I got really into a couple of the pieces, but some of them feel more willfully obscure than anything else.

Xiu Xiu: Fuck the Police

19:26: Aya: Face The Music by Abouet/Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly)

Lots of D&Q this time around… The Aya books have been published in a kinda strange way? I have no idea which ones I’ve read, because they’ve been in different formats, and now there’s no numbers on them now, which makes it even harder to keep track. So I think I’ve missed some? Quite a few, probably?

But this is new. Possibly.

Uhm… yeah, I must definitely have missed a volume or two, because some of these plots don’t seem familiar to me.

Was this originally published at this size? The linework looks pretty wispy… “Format 175 x 250 mm”. Yeah, looks like this was originally printed at er 10-20% larger size?

Ah, yes. It’s full on super-dramatic soap opera, and the structure is basically one page per scene, and then we go on to the next one. Since there are about two dozen characters here, it makes things both frenetic and also glacial at the same time, if that makes any sense? It’s also difficult to just remember who all these characters are…

But it’s a pretty enjoyable read nevertheless. The artwork is charming, and the characters have character, and several of the plot threads move forward (and come to a kind of climax) at the end of this.

These books work.

Laura Jean: A Fool Who’ll

20:20: Secrets of a Lost Diary by Santiago Cohen (Fantagraphics)

Well… this artwork doesn’t do much for me.

And I was pretty annoyed by this book throughout — until the final dozen pages, when I started liking it a lot. Odd!

Propaganda: Outside World

20:50: The End

I think that’s enough comics for today — I’m beat.

Here’s some comics (and stuff) I’ve read over the past few weeks. Perhaps a month?

Galago (the Swedish comics magazine) is quarterly now, so the issues are thick and nice.

I was especially impressed by this piece by My Palm.

It’s not all comics!

It’s not very political, but there’s a couple things about Gaza in the “insanity”-themed issue.

This story was also impressive. Love the artwork.

The big one this time around: Rusty Brown! But here’s the thing: I’m a rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth Chris Ware fan, and I didn’t know this book existed. And it was published in 2019! The only reason I finally bought it was that it was mentioned in the “sketchbook” thing he published a few months ago, and my heart went BONK! “WHAT?! I MISSED IT!?”

It seems so unlikely… I mean, I was big enough of a fan that I created a web site back in the 90s dedicated to Ware’s work, and here I’m six years late buying one of his major books.

I don’t know what happened. Probably I ordered it from Mile High Comics, and they dropped the order — they do that a lot. But me not being reminded like half a year later — I think that has to mean that the book just didn’t make much of a splash. I mean, the media was talking about Jimmy Corrigan constantly after that was released, but that can’t have happened with this one.

OK, Rusty Brown had a weird publication history. The first Rusty & Chalky strips were published in the 90s (I think), and had those characters as adult. Rusty was the most pathetic nerdy collector type ever, and was a houseguest at Chalky’s house. There were quite a few of these, and they seemed downright sadistic at times, because Rusty was just so horrible.

Then things flipped around, and we got Rusty and Chalky as children, and it was never clear to me whether they were even supposed to be the same characters or whether Ware had just decided to reuse their names. This collection starts with that later material…

… and then we just get the rest of the stuff that was in Acme Novelty Library over the last two and a half decades. All the characters are connected — they’re all students or teachers at the same school. But we’re this is basically a collection of separate novellas (I guess you could call them), and they were really much more successful in the separate editions they were already published in than collected, because they don’t really cohere that well.

Instead they just exhaust the reader, especially the way Ware likes to drop in all these teensy panels with teensy lettering. I’m fine with an artist that makes the reader work a bit at it, but there has to be some kind of reward for doing so, and there really isn’t: This material just isn’t that interesting. Especially the Lint section is just snoozeville.

The only part that I found to be successful was the one that was made explicitly for this book, and new to me. It’s the most intricately plotted book, and skips back and forth in time a lot, sort of letting the reader into “the mystery” more and more in a very satisfying way. Of course, when we get the final reveal, it’s “oh, again?” because Ware kinda did the same thing in Jimmy Corrigan (and there’s even a Jimmy Corrigan crossover! collectors’ item #1 buy em all sure to appreciate in value).

So after reading the book, I think I’m probably right in my supposition that it didn’t make much of a splash. I mean, I think it’s a pretty good, but it’s not very satisfying as a book. Especially since it’s apparently the first in a series? Or something? It ends with a spread saying “INTERMISSION”, so there’s probably at least one more book? The cover doesn’t even hint at that, and perhaps that’s another reason why it may not be Era Defining or whatever.

Let’s see… I want to google and see what people thought of it. Heh:

All of which is to say, it is to Ware’s great misfortune as an artist that his work found such ready success outside the medium’s traditional haunts. Because as good as he is – and he is good – the praise heaped upon his work by the literary establishment only serves to estrange him from his natural constituency.

Mere Reaction: Why Chris Ware’s “Rusty Brown” Fails:

So, what is Chris Ware’s primary shtick in the world of comics? It’s a fairly predictable one, given how things have played out in other mediums: ransacking the excesses of Modernist and Postmodernist works for every creative trick in the book, while ill-applying it to banal ‘realism’ which usually centres on the boring melodramas of lonely losers.

[…]

Only, having slogged through this comic, I can make a few modest recommendations. For those who have no stake in the medium, don’t waste your time on Chris Ware. The faster he’s forgotten, the better. For those budding comic artists, maybe pick up Building Stories or Jimmy Corrigan to use as a whetstone for sharper, icier blades, and start shredding.

Harsh!

Man, these reviews as way harder on the book than even I imagined:

There’s nothing wrong with writing a book about the futility of life—just ask whoever wrote Ecclesiastes—but Ware has gone to this well so many times that the thumb he’s placed on the scale is clearly visible. Rusty Brown has two kinds of stories: Either a character is punished by the world because he deserves it, or he’s punished by the world even though he doesn’t. The book’s 356 pages contain more upskirts of underage girls (two) than complex human characters (maybe one) because actual people would revolt at being treated and depicted in such a fashion. The view of humanity in the book is dime-store Freudianism: Scratch a character and you’ll find their primal wound, which then overdetermines their behavior.

[…]

The pages are at times deliberately difficult to read, filled with tiny panels, scrambled chronologies, cramped handwriting. But the reward for doing that work is always the same: Ware tries to make you feel bad. After too much of this, a kind of armor accretes, until nothing the book does can affect you. More than anything else, it leaves you feeling tired.

This one is partially positive:

While Ware struggles to achieve a cumulative dramatic effect, the variety of texture and perspective contributes to a single emotional tone, which might be characterised as zany pathos

It’s a 4.29 on Goodreads, though. It’s #8 on the combined “best of” lists of 2019, which is shockingly low…

This is a long-running French series, and it’s kinda unique in that it got much, much better once the original artists stopped doing in.

So the Lapiere/Sikorsky one is great!

While the Will/Tillieux one is just horrible.

I didn’t actually read much of Casemate this month either, because reading French is still a lot of work.

But I did like these interviews that show the pages they’re talking about a lot.

It’s edumacational.

And speaking of edumacational, this book “about” Lovelace & Babbage and Sydney Padua is something else.

It’s a kind of fantasy about their lives, but also keeps the chatter about actual history going throughout — about a quarter to one third of each page are “footnotes”.

But then also broken up sometimes in various ways.

I think this book would be perfect for a certain kind of nerdy teenager, but I got kinda bored with it after a while. Sorry! It’s me, not the book.

Just two issues of Spirou?

I really loved this retro Trondheim/Olivier Schwartz short — very sweet.

Unfortunately, much of the material just doesn’t interest me (many of the gag pages) or actively repulse me (like Frnck).

Yay! Always fun to read Carrie McNinch.

We’re four years behind the times, though…

Still fun to read.

I thought this was a comic book.

It’s not, it’s really a Q&A like it says on the cover. I like Tomine’s comics just fine, but I’m not really interested enough to read this. I did read some of the sections — like this one on drawing materials I found interesting.

And the one on process for New Yorker covers.

And it’s got a very good picture on the back cover.

I checked whether there were any further French comics anthologies being published these days, and Pif Gadget is the only other survivor. But just barely — it’s published quarterly.

And of all the classic French/Belgian anthologies (Spirou, Tintin, Pilote, etc) I guess Pif Gadget/Vaillant was the least famous? In any case, this issue, at least, is just horrible. There’s one long Rahan story (I read Rahan as a child; it’s a Tarzan-but-stone-age rip off)…

… and then all the rest are just one-pagers, all of which are gags, and most of them refer to Rahan. So it’s a very themed issue, and probably geared towards… I don’t know… nine year olds? Or seventy nine year olds? It’s hard to tell.

In any case, it’s all kinda naff. Fortunately I just have a one year subscription, so I guess it won’t be too painful.

And that’s it, I guess.