Alternative/independent comics thread

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby sevenarts » Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:52 pm

Wombatz wrote:i also took a peak into fanta's new anthology, Now. there's a mission statement which promises to "showcase as diverse a collection of cartoonists and comics as possible, one that provides a full spectrum of what the medium has to offer." i thought it felt sameish and 15 years ago. the one exception is Antoine Cossé, who wins this book by a mile:

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Just read Now #1 as well and pretty much agreed. I didn't dislike it at all, there's some good stuff in here, but positioning it as a cutting edge state of the artform anthology is odd. This basically feels just like Reynolds' last anthology MOME which ended almost a decade ago now. Even a lot of the artists are the same. I liked MOME too but even then it was less cutting edge and more a place for a mix of artists who Reynolds liked to showcase their experiments and short pieces, with a mix of approaches including more literary-minded stuff, autobio people, and at least a few formalists. This feels similar, and doesn't have the same vision that drives anthologies like Kramers or Mirror Mirror.

Still, it has some good stuff. Eleanor Davis does a great short piece in a similar sketchy style to her book from this year. Dash Shaw has an amusing minor piece, which easily could've been a leftover from the kind of stuff he used to do in MOME if not for the timely content. Ward and Sheean do a fun alternate history piece, not nearly as good as Ancestor (god I miss Island) but still it's cool to see them placed into this kind of context. Maybe the saddest thing is that almost all the lesser known names (Karla Graham, Daria Tessler, Conxita Herrera, JC Menu) are pretty slight so there's not the sense of discovery I usually get from a well curated anthology.

And yea nothing comes close to that Cosse story, which is phenomenal and pretty justifies the first issue all on its own. One of the best things I've seen by him.
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Oct 29, 2017 12:20 am

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Demon by Jason Shiga
Just looking at his art I never thought I'd be into Shiga, but damn if this isn't really something. The art has this brutish webcomics simplicity that's usually not my thing at all but beyond the draftsmanship it quickly becomes apparent that Shiga has complete mastery of the other elements of the form: rhythm, pacing, inventive spatial thinking, narrative propulsion. Especially propulsion. This thing moves like no other comic. It's something like 700 pages long and yet it breezes by because the way it moves from panel to panel, page to page, is just effortless. It helps that it's utterly bonkers. It starts with a protagonist who can't seem to kill himself, and the first few issues slowly unfurl what the real narrative is, and once that reveal happens it never relents for hundreds of pages. This is intense and incredibly violent in a way that is both horrifying and hilarious; the best way I could describe it is if one of those old Looney Tunes cartoons kept all the slapstick violence but made the coyote bleed and break limbs when he smashed into walls or fell off cliffs. It's absurdist, at times deeply uncomfortable, often genuinely laugh out loud funny, and exciting too. And it's formally dazzling, which again is not something I'd expect to say about a comic that looks like this. Its surface simplicity helps Shiga focus instead on his mathematically precise use of space - which also frequently ties into the plot mechanics - and his incredible sense of action scene rhythms. One issue is a 60-page fight scene that's just continuously inventive, joyously so, so that even as the gore piles up there's this sense of glee at the absurd twists and turns of this battle.

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Spinning by Tillie Walden
Very different from her other work, this is an autobio memoir about her youth as a figure skater. Fittingly, it's much more grounded and intimate than her other books too. Walden's such a phenomenal cartoonist and artist that I'd look at anything she drew, her command of body language is excellent and it's a pleasure to see her draw at this length, and on a subject that seems to demand close examinations of figures in motion. The story is quite good too, focusing not so much exclusively on figure skating and its dramas as on all the other things going on in her life in those years: coming out as gay, feeling disconnection from friends and family, uncertainty about her future, encounters with bullies and abusers. It's a quietly affecting book, its impact sneaking up on me across its length. Duration is one of its best aspects in fact: at 400 pages, it leaves plenty of room for Walden to stretch out, experiment, frequently varying her art style while remaining true to her overall aesthetic. It's all lovely, from the moody nighttime scenes with their traces of yellow lights in the dark to the skating sequences with graceful forms against white space to the less stylized everyday moments of Tillie at school. There's one scene in particular that sums up its grace and charm to me, when Tillie sneaks into her brother's room at night and they stay up watching TV: that's it, but the way Walden draws the faces, eyes wide, huddled close together, the dark all around them, before they both fall asleep cuddled up, is so touching, so real, that it's a memorable image. The book is full of these little moments, and only hints of the scale of her past work - it shows up, tellingly, in nostalgia for the grand scale of the skating rink she used as a kid, before moving to a new town with a smaller arena. Very nice.
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Postby PROBLEM ATTIC » Sun Oct 29, 2017 12:24 am

Sevenarts I love reading your reviews and I'm going to look for some Tillie Walden now. I had no idea.
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Postby sevenarts » Tue Oct 31, 2017 9:47 am

:D

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Happy by Josh Simmons
One of Simmons' earlier works, a 4-issue series that preceded his better known standalone horror works. Like a lot of early work, this is reaaaaal rough and kind of all over the place. There are interesting flashes of Simmons' later preoccupations in nascent form, most notably a rather caustic satirical sensibility that would later be manifested much more completely and in much more powerful fashion in the brutality and darkness of his horror comics. Here it mostly comes off as nasty/sarcastic, with lots of stories mocking people for being happy or optimistic in absurd worlds where positivity practically seems like insanity. The high point is issue #2, which is dominated by a savage, utterly hilarious takedown of autobiographical comics that masquerades as an autobio comic itself. The low point is nearly everything in issues #3-4, which are mostly dedicated to incomprehensible, rambling stories about a hippie circus troupe, done in cramped, chaotic layouts that only make it even harder to read. Most of this just plain isn't good, and it's hard to believe that shortly after the series ended Simmons would do the much more assured and fully realized graphic novella House.

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Whatsa Paintoonist? by Jerry Moriarity
Really unique and original new work from Moriarity, best known for his RAW work and the classic collection Jack Survives. This is a collection of Moriarity's paintings arranged into simple, silent comics and laid alongside sketchy black-and-white comics where he has an imaginary dialogue with one of the subjects of his paintings. The dialogues deal candidly with themes of nostalgia, gender, and mortality, as Moriarity engages with his boyhood, his relationships with his family, and his own work. The imagery is beautiful and memorably strange; as with all of Moriarity's work, there's a sense of recapturing an older time through the skewed sensibility of memory, flattening old memories into these lush, weird paintings like the one where the old Moriarity - balding and gray with his long straggly hair - peels back the layers of the painting to peek in on his long-dead father in a quiet moment. Good, short book that takes all of a half hour to read but there's a lot of pleasure to be had in leafing through Moriarity's utterly idiosyncratic visions.

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Distance Mover by Patrick Kyle
Every once in a while I hear Kyle brought up as one of the key people to watch in modern art comics, and I've always been kinda baffled by that. This book, a collection of his minicomics, doesn't really change that impression. Very Fort Thunder-influenced work where goofy-looking, blobby, semi-abstract figures meander through a sci-fi narrative in a completely abstracted world. There's some appeal to the drawings, to the way that Kyle sets his narrative against a void filled with odd shapes and geometric designs, but I really don't connect with it on any kind of deeper level. Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman, with their rambling stories of characters exploring weird worlds, are the most obvious reference points but Kyle's more controlled drawing lacks their visceral impact, and his stories seem mannered and distanced. There's a tone to this book like it's supposed to be funny but never actually is. This stuff just rolls right off me and I'm sure I'll forget all about it tomorrow.
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Postby Wombatz » Tue Oct 31, 2017 2:09 pm

sevenarts wrote:Image
Distance Mover by Patrick Kyle
Every once in a while I hear Kyle brought up as one of the key people to watch in modern art comics, and I've always been kinda baffled by that. This book, a collection of his minicomics, doesn't really change that impression. Very Fort Thunder-influenced work where goofy-looking, blobby, semi-abstract figures meander through a sci-fi narrative in a completely abstracted world. There's some appeal to the drawings, to the way that Kyle sets his narrative against a void filled with odd shapes and geometric designs, but I really don't connect with it on any kind of deeper level. Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman, with their rambling stories of characters exploring weird worlds, are the most obvious reference points but Kyle's more controlled drawing lacks their visceral impact, and his stories seem mannered and distanced. There's a tone to this book like it's supposed to be funny but never actually is. This stuff just rolls right off me and I'm sure I'll forget all about it tomorrow.


i very much agree with that. we had a small exhibition of his original art over here some time ago, and it was strange how cut and pasted and awkward that was. i have a hard time even getting over his headshapes. the one much more abstract zine where i like his drawings is in his issue of Structures from Uncivilized books. The writing is very hit and miss, but some pages are really interesting:

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re Josh Simmons, i recently read the 2 existing volumes of Jessica Farm, the one where he draws one page per month, starting in 2000, so probably even before Happy? it's surprisingly tight considering the way it was made, more fun than House (more like fantasy horror) and every bit as good i thought.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Nov 01, 2017 2:16 pm

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Noah Van Sciver - Fante Bukowski Two
Didn't enjoy this any more than the first volume unfortunately. More tired tropes of the unsuccessful, deluded novelist. Probably worth a try if you're a huge Confederacy of Dunces fan.
1/5

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Hitoshi Ashinano - Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko (Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip)
Yesss this is one of the most balm series of all time. It's a manga about a robot girl who works in a cafe. Catastrophic climate change has occurred at some point in the past and the human race is in decline, but everyone is chill about it, and the few remaining people live a very slow, relaxed existence in the countryside, spending their days sitting in deckchairs and looking at the water. Alpha the robot girl gets maybe one or two customers a day if she's lucky, and most of the chapters are self-contained stories that focus on a conversation, or making coffee, or trying to take a nice photograph. It's so relaxing and has such a particular atmosphere. I think Tove Jansson's The Summer Book is the only Western equivalent but you'll probably recognise the tone from a few Ghibli movies as well. What's interesting about this series is how it puts its mysteries front and centre (like where did the robot girl come from? Who is her owner? Why can she not eat animal protein where other robots can?) and then ignores its own questions and dares you to do the same. It's really lovely, check it out.
5/5

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Jody LeHeup, Sebastian Girner & Nil Vendrell - Shirtless Bear-Fighter!
A shirtless man battles to save humanity from evil bears. This is a very reddit comic executed with a mild amount of panache, and should probably not be posted in this thread. Its aims and achievements are modest but there's solid craft in the art and the action scenes, and a few of the jokes land pretty well. If you like Kyle Starks and you can let your guard down a bit, you might find something to enjoy in this.
2/5

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Karl Stevens - The Lodger
Apparently this is a collection of a newspaper strip? Hard to imagine any newspaper choosing to run this. It's a diary comic, similar in format to James Kochalka's American Elf but more interested in quotidian realism. Stevens' art is incredibly detailed and frequently beautiful. Something stops me from fully appreciating it though. It aims for photorealism and I guess that makes it a little stiff or fussy. The pacing seems off as well, alternating between too many words and not enough. Stevens doesn't necessarily come across too well. His attitude towards women doesn't seem that great, and he doesn't seem to have the self-awareness to realise that it isn't cool to be aggrieved that his girlfriend doesn't want to shave for him. This book follows him during a period where he's lodging with an old art teacher, and the whole thing is a bit parasitic. I don't know; I found him unsympathetic, broadly speaking.
2/5

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Kiyohiko Azuma - Yotsuba&!
One of my absolute favourite series of all time. Or just one of my favourite things of all time. It's a manga about a very enthusiastic four year old girl, and in every issue she encounters or does something new e.g. acorns or going camping. It's one of the best and funniest things I've ever read. Try it if you're feeling sad.
5/5

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Yuichi Yokoyama - Iceland
Another masterpiece by Yokoyama. I noticed (and loved) this time how when they go into the bar and it's really noisy, it also becomes much more visually confusing in a way that somehow exactly simulates trying to hear someone speak over loud music. The man's a genius. Aside from the astonishing and unique art I think his prose is also seriously underrated. I love in his notes (and in the afterword, here) when he tries to describe the environment like he's just this passive observer rather than the person who created it. "The variety of trees growing along the road are also probably unnatural for the arctic region." Classic. I feel like there's a secret connection between his notes and the way that he draws, like his persona as a dispassionate floating orb gives him the power to draw things in a way that's truly objective and thus deeply alien.
5/5
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Postby walt whitman » Wed Nov 01, 2017 3:20 pm

yeah love yokoyama. ^

sevenarts great reviews as always.

Re Adrian Tomine, he really is one of the greats of alt/indie comics during that late 90s/early 00s sweet spot, up there with other sadboy virtuousos, dan clowes and chris ware. im surprised how much people itt are down on his style/tone; he is a beautiful portraitist and illustrates alienation and urban anomie like no one else. tomine will always be associated in my mind with the proverbial image of a person who's sightline misses the target of their desire; or an unwanted, momentary connection between two individuals looking at each other:

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he really gets you to notice at how others look - or don't look - within a particular space, it's super cinematic GW Pabst type shit. few other comic artists are capable of creating that depth of attention, no one in the contemporary scene (imo) approaches that. i do think Tomine's been downhill for a few years now - just like Ware and Clowes, whose shtick just doesn't seem to be aging well. but that early Tomine stuff from optic nerve hits uh...nerve for me. and stories like "Bomb Scare" from Summer Blonde are just masterpieces in ambient characterization and melodramatic storytelling - like an unfilmed Todd Solondz screenplay or something.
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:03 pm

Yotsuba&! is pure joy, I love that comic so much. It's so simple but so weirdly beautiful. I think I've only read the first 2 volumes, I should catch up.

Re: Yokoyama I definitely see what you're saying, HFC, about the connection between his prose style and his overall aesthetic. I think he used to say - maybe still does - that his aim was to make narrative comics where psychology was not really a concern, so people just do things and natural or mechanical processes just happen and there's no examination of why. It's a really unique aesthetic, it makes these comics seem kinda anthropological from an alien perspective, watching things that you don't have any context for and so can't really explain. Like you, I love the "noisy" effects in Iceland and the general sense that the book is especially dense and cluttered and maybe more interested than usual in suggesting some plot threads - even weirdly genre-like plots - without really explaining them any more than in past books. Great great stuff.
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Postby landspeedrecord » Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:08 pm

just got my first issue of sarah horrocks' goro in the mail. it's pretty great... very sienkiewicz. the lettering is bonkers good

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the second issue sold out in less than a day, so I gotta wait for the reprint. the third issue comes out in a few weeks

you can cop them here: http://mercurialblonde.storenvy.com/ if you so choose

she also has a dope instagram where she posts influences and work-in-progress: https://www.instagram.com/mercurialblonde/?hl=en
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:40 pm

That looks incredible :shock: Very Sienkiewicz and oddly a little Dave Sim too.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Thu Nov 02, 2017 5:35 am

+1 on the Sarah Horrocks. Never heard of her before but it looks fantastic.

Yotsuba doesn't miss a beat as it develops. There are 13 volumes now I think and they're all a delight.
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Postby sevenarts » Thu Nov 02, 2017 9:43 pm

3 memoir comics by women

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Drinking At the Movies by Julia Wertz
A really shitty reminder of why I don't read all that many autobio comics. Really bland and utterly pointless, with instantly forgettable cartoony art. Wertz is so busy carefully cultivating her persona as a whiskey-slugging, sarcastic, misanthropic-but-adorable quirkster that she forgets to actually tell a story or craft any characters besides herself. Other people show up occasionally but are basically props for Wertz's (only sporadically amusing) one-liners; they barely have names and certainly don't have much to do. The whole thing reads like a summary of the story rather than the story itself: there's big incidents (a drug-addicted brother, her stepfather's cancer, her own money struggles) but they're mostly addressed in only the most superficial ways until the perfunctory coda where she literally dedicates maybe a page to saying "the cancer went away, my brother went to rehab, and I became a successful cartoonist." Quite a slog.

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Virus Tropical by PowerPaola
This on the other hand is quite good, a memoir of youth that opens with an image of the artist's parents having sex, and proceeds to follow her development as a fetus. That bit of whimsical over-literalness regarding the concept of the memoir gives a good early indication of what's in store. Paola documents life with her unconventional family, as over the years they gradually fragment, split off, reunite, and depart again, all of them living somewhat separate lives and combining into different familial arrangements over the years. The art is rich and idiosyncratic, with a thin and jittery line and a tendency to distort faces and bodies along with the emotional tenor of a scene. The result is incredibly energetic and vibrant, communicating the characters' inner lives and personalities with every exaggerated expression. The story isn't heavy on drama, though at times Paola intentionally filters incidents through the melodramatic lens of her teenage perceptions, and she deals candidly along the way with some pretty heavy events and their repercussions without seeming like she's trying to be sensationalist. It's all thoroughly grounded in the day-to-day lives of her, her sisters, and her mother, and the book's storytelling is so effortless that the years just seem to fly by. It covers a long period, watching the artist grow up from birth to the cusp of her twenties, but she frequently swoops in for the passages of rich detail that give the book its specificity. Great stuff. Ines Estrada, who does the intro, is an obvious comparison.

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Turning Japanese by MariNaomi
In terms of style, not too unlike the Wertz book: it's a collection of short anecdotes and short strips about the author's attempts to connect with her mother's Japanese culture, and especially a trip to Japan with her then-boyfriend. Certainly much better than Wertz, though. It's a charming, enjoyable, if kinda minor book: not especially daring or memorable, but it's a good quick read and examines some interesting ideas about culture, language, and family along the way. The art, too, is nice, spare and minimalist with copious use of white space. It's pretty plain but not unappealing.
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Nov 05, 2017 2:20 am

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They Live In Me by Jesse Jacobs
Thanks to Wombatz for pointing this out, I liked it a lot. It makes a nice companion piece to Jacobs' other book from this year, Crawl Space, which like this one is about suburban houses as spaces of bizarre transformation and access to strange other planes. This is kind of the darker, nastier, smaller-in-scale cousin to Crawl Space. A couple takes a tour of a house they're thinking of buying, and as time stretches and compresses, the house's sinister aura works on them in harrowing ways. Occasionally, the house even gets page-long monologues where it can lay its evil intentions bare. This is maybe Jacobs' funniest book yet, it's darkly hilarious in its brutality. As always, Jacobs is really good at using a semi-abstract visual language to explore and deconstruct societal norms, here concerning homes and family, and the ways in which those concepts get warped by the capitalistic framework that gets entangled with them. Not as rich or as deep as Crawl Space, but it packs a lot of memorable images and ideas into its slim package. Well worth a look for fans of Jacobs, and further proof that he's at his peak at the moment.

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Arsene Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen
Finally got around to this and it's incredible, of course. Schrauwen's absurdist mock history of his own grandfather tangles hilariously and outrageously with colonialist obliviousness and sexual confusion. Endlessly inventive, the book hurtles from one bonkers idea to the next but comfortably houses its outrageousness within the deceptively stolid frames of its thick-bordered, retro-looking square panels and faux-objective wry narration. Schrauwen casually switches up his cartoon vocabulary from panel to panel: a round-headed cartoon abstraction is abruptly pulled into focus as a much more clearly defined face when his lover points out how handsome he is; Arsene is frequently drawn as a donkey when he's sexually aroused, and his dick becomes a little bird, cracking out of its egg or ready to fly away. Visual metaphors abound, always deployed with a light, whimsical touch, with multiple shadings of meaning embedded in the joke rather than a single didactic point. It's a book that never quite comes out and says what it means, but its overall portrait of its main character is of a bumbling man-child who's oblivious to the native people he's helping to colonize, who never realizes how he's being used as a figurehead, who stumbles into a love affair with a woman who he barely seems to think of or understand beyond her physical attributes. It's scathingly funny, and utterly unforgettable in its virtuosity.

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RAV by Mickey Zacchilli
Scratchy, sketchy Fort Thunder-esque ramblings that are very engaging and well-done. Zacchilli's art is endearing as hell, mixing her obvious American indie influences with a healthy dose of manga in her wide-eyed character designs and relaxed sense of pacing. The pages are always really dense, sometimes verging into abstraction as Zacchilli furiously scribbles out an encounter with the supernatural or an epic fight scene, but the overall shape of the narrative remains crystal-clear, and the characters shine through it all. Lots of fun. This was (is?) a minicomic series that Youth In Decline has collected into 2 chunky collections, and it's probably better in this form because it's all so propulsive and so rewarding of quick reading that I basically never want to put it down.
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Nov 08, 2017 2:14 am

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House of Women by Sophie Goldstein
An adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus in a sci-fi setting, and it's neat. Goldstein's art is extraordinarily simple, very stark pure black and white linework with a bare minimum of lines used to express each form, often carving out the figures of her cast from plain white or black backdrops. As in the movie (and presumably the novel on which it's based too) the story deals with the psychosexual drama afflicting a religious order in a remote location, tasked with bringing their faith to a native population (here, aliens) that's not that interested. The melodrama is fairly straightforward, so the real appeal is Goldstein's elegant cartooning, which casts each of the four nuns as comic stereotypes, instantly recognizable and memorable, and carves out such beautiful interactions of light and shadow as the story escalates towards its horrific, overheated climax. Not the weightiest book but it's well done.

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Daddy's Girl / Nowhere by Debbie Dreschler
I last read this stuff over a decade ago but was moved to revisit it because Dreschler seems to have become such a forgotten cartoonist. She stopped doing comics AFAIK after just 2 major works in the mid-90s - the collection Daddy's Girl and the series Nowhere, where she serialized her Summer of Love GN - and has focused on illustration ever since. The former is a collection of short pieces united by a focus on incest and abuse, often featuring the same family which is apparently a stand-in for Dreschler's own childhood. This is terrifying, sickening stuff, really intense and unflinching in its examination of trauma and the psychological scars that keep victims like these girls quiet. Dreschler's art, with its quavery perspective and density of shading, almost obsessively filling every inch of space with marks and fine details, is perfectly suited to the intensity and intimacy of her subject. Her drawings look and feel like a warped world seen through the eyes of a hurt child. Her followup series, Nowhere, wasn't quite as intense but is equally great in its examination of teen dramas, early romances, and disappointments. Here Dreschler switches from black and white to this weird red and green duotone that gives the book a sickly, off-kilter look, like out-of-focus 3D, which seems to intentionally bathe the book in more of an autumnal, mournful tone despite its summery settings. Both really excellent, unforgettable works from a cartoonist who shouldn't be ignored just because her impact was limited to these 2 books.

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Meat Cake by Dame Darcy
One of comics' great idiosyncratic weirdos: Caroliner bassist, Blind Date performance artist, mermaid enthusiast, and cartoonist. Her long-running series is basically Darcy spewing her preoccupations across the page, with her memorable wispy, scratchy lines recalling old newspaper editorial cartoons and gothic horror illustrations. Most of the stuff here features Darcy's cast of oddball creations - almost all waif-like freak women with mischievous sensibilities - inflicting cruelties on one another or their hapless latest victims. Darcy's dark sense of humor runs through everything, and the result is bloody, sexy, goofy, sometimes frankly pretty tough to read (handwritten, tiny, cursive text threatens to overwhelm the drawings in some later issues) and generally quite fun. Along the way, Alan Moore stops by to guest-write in issue 9, very much catering to Darcy's sensibility and giving her lots of freaky poetry to mine, but the real joy of this series is just spending time in the kooky host's company.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Nov 08, 2017 6:21 am

Great reviews. That Dreschler book is tough as hell. Meat Cake I could recognise as the product of someone really following her own star, but couldn't get into it at all. Scrolling down this page I almost mistook it for a page from Cursed Pirate Girl, although a lot rougher obviously. I wonder if she's an influence on Bastian?

Also +1 on that Julia Wertz book being bad, just in case anyone was still planning on picking it up
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Nov 08, 2017 11:45 am

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Tillie Walden – A City Inside
A lovely, ethereal little book, in which Walden sets out the story of a young woman growing up in the American south and moving to the city. It feels like a magical realist memoir to me, although I have no knowledge of how much it intersects with Walden’s own life. The story is more slight than The End of Summer: pages are often just one large drawing and a couple of lines. The content doesn’t play to her strengths as much, either, but you can see it come alive with detail when she draws architecture and structures. It’s sweet and quiet.
3/5

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Inio Asano – A Girl on the Shore
I thought Nijigahara Holograph was incredible but I’ve otherwise had a hard time getting into the very stately rhythms of Asano's stuff. Although I didn’t love it, this is one of the few where I’ve been compelled to keep going until the end. It’s a drama about two teenagers: the girl is rejected by an abusive crush and the boy is socially isolated, on the verge of becoming a hikikomori. They claim to not like each other, but fall into a casual sex relationship. Asano’s art is beautiful and incredibly rich – obsessive about stillness and incidental details. I think he does a good job playing off the teens’ affected apathy with the barely controllable sexuality. The story seems determined to infuse the (admittedly troubled) male character with some sort of nobility, which he does not deserve. He treats the girl like shit as she comes back again and again to try and fix him. It’s an awful depiction of romance, but I can imagine it’s pretty accurate to a lot of teenage relationships.
2/5

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Gilbert Hernandez – High Soft Lisp
Speaking of dodgy attitudes to women, Hernandez feels like he’s coming close to the line here, but his women are always interesting, complex and active, even while they’re heavily sexualised. This collection nominally revolves around Fritz, but spends most of its time with her motivational speaker ex-husband Mark, as he cycles through his six wives and slowly falls into disrepute. Hernandez is always good but he seems to slightly lose his charm the further away from Palomar he gets, and he’s a long way from Palomar in this book.
3/5

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Simon Hanselmann – One More Year
This is like the opposite of Yotsuba. The cruelty and degradation is extremely strong, often completely nightmarish. The story in the water park where WWJ’s sons glue razor blades to the slide is horrific. It’s still funny but I think this is the first time I’ve come away feeling like Hanselmann drained my life force rather than sustaining me. Maybe that’s a mood thing. Maybe I'm just becoming more of an old man. Also I’d read a bunch of the stories before, but I can't remember where. Vice maybe? It's definitely not all new material, anyway. I like when he cuts loose with the colours and design of the book a bit, as above.
3/5

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Minoru Furuya – Ping Pong Club
Grotesque absurdist gag manga about a ping pong club full of weirdos. Furuya’s art is inherently hilarious as far as I’m concerned, even though this is just the same dozen or so jokes repeated ad nauseum. Ping Pong Club doesn’t have the bizarre emotional depths of his best book Together With Me but it’s worth checking out.
3/5
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Postby landspeedrecord » Wed Nov 08, 2017 1:06 pm

roll call: who's going to Comic Arts Brooklyn (CAB) on Saturday!??

http://comicartsbrooklyn.com/
rather be an idiot than a sheeple
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Nov 08, 2017 2:30 pm

Wish I was going to CAB. :(

Good reviews, HFC. Agreed on the Walden book, her 2 smaller books don't have the impact of End of Summer or, in its very different way, Spinning, but I still love just looking at her images. Really excited to watch where she goes from here since she's starting at such a high level.

I love One More Year as much as anything else he's done but I do think Hanselmann has gone about as far as he can with this vein - this is an apex of horrific stuff, especially everything involving Werewolf Jones. Really hard to read at times. But then I've always loved about his work that the humor is so dark and so infused with ugliness; his books always make me feel kinda icky and bad even as they make me laugh. He's said that he thinks of his 3 Fantagraphics books as a trilogy, that they all take place in the same time period for the characters and precede some big changes, like Owl moving out at the end of Megahex - I think for a while now he's had a plan for a more overtly autobiographical-derived Megg & her family GN that'll be his next big thing, but he wanted to document all this material first. One More Year does collect a bunch of older stuff - Life Zone and/or Worst Behavior are in there, IIRC - and is probably the least of these 3 books but that's a pretty high standard so I still love it all.

Sadly, I think Gilbert was still relatively strong in the material collected in High Soft Lisp compared to where he's at now. His contributions to the latest magazine-sized volume of L&R have been near-unreadable IMO. The further he delves into this parodic soap-opera/porno material the less I enjoy reading him, and that's sad because although I always gravitated more to Jaime, all of Gilbert's work in the first volume of L&R was phenomenal.
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Postby Wombatz » Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:44 am

Poetry Is Useless by Anders Nilsen. i've been struggling with this for some time and am finally officially capitulating. i'd been warned: while i had bought two random single issues of Nilsen's earlier hit Big Questions and loved them, i did not manage to get through the big book ... the single issues appeared oblique and poetic, the big book seemed like every bird conversation the author could possibly think of twice, and after 100 pages or so i wanted to reach for the scattergun. but nilsen sometimes posts pages from his sketchbooks and these look fantastic, so i ordered this:

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the first problem is that on each page of this medium-sized book there's mostly a double spread of the sketchbook, so while you can just about read everything, it's no fun. it's either a cheap move, or some meta distancing act, but these don't look as good as they do on the internet. also i don't know why it took me so long to notice, but Nilsen has no sense of humor. so all these annoying questions and pointers that poetry is useless and nothing means anything are probably true attempts at philosophy. much more miserablist than even chris ware. if you decipher the pages above, this will give you a good impression of what toils to expect.

also i bought this to read to my boys:

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(excuse my german), it's the new Asterix. very disappointing. after a very by-the-numbers first issue, i thought the new team of Ferri and Conrad did quite well in their second book, The Missing Scroll ... not a classic, but they came close to finding their own way of telling these stories. the new one reads as if they'd been whistled back and told to strictly rehash the old formula badly. so it's back to a race through a country and tired anachronistic jokes on what would happen in the traveled region at some point in the future. see above. at least i've learned that both my boys know the mona lisa.

here's one i very much enjoyed:

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Hell on Earth by Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming, after a story by Robert Bloch. this is from 1985, at the beginning of the period when Giffen remodeled his style after Munoz (i love his serious work of that period, the dr fate miniseries, his issues of justice, hex etc., often badly written but the art completely transforms them). here the pages are lighter in color (though on a very dense 16-panel grid). probably many of the words are from the original story, since even the text-heavy pages read very well. the story is how they catch the devil for scientific purposes, and he will escape by possessing folks one by one ...
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Postby sevenarts » Fri Nov 10, 2017 12:07 am

I like Dogs & Water and Big Questions and his older books a lot but Nilsen seems to have lost his way a bit in recent years. Rage of Poseidon was a turd with a gimmicky format that seemed to add nothing to its lame narrative or ideas. I've had that Poetry Is Useless book for a while and it looks cool leafing through it but actually reading it looks like a chore so it always stays in the pile. And I certainly wasn't buying his coloring book. Coincidentally, I just recently ordered the first issue of his new series Tongues so I'm excited to see if he's back on form.

The thing I always respect about him even when a particular work doesn't connect with me is how restless he seems, he's had quite a range of work. His 2 Monologues books certainly do nothing to refute charges of pretension and faux-profundity but they do display quite a weird sense of humor. The End and Don't Go Where I Can't Follow are among the most potent and thoughtful and painfully sincere books on dealing with the loss of a loved one that I've read. I remember even back to his MOME days which was I think some of his earliest published comics work he experimented a lot and maybe 20% of it landed at all, at best, but there was something there that intrigued me anyway, this real sense of curiosity and roaming creativity that he's always seemed to keep.
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Postby Wombatz » Fri Nov 10, 2017 2:32 am

sevenarts wrote:Coincidentally, I just recently ordered the first issue of his new series Tongues so I'm excited to see if he's back on form.

oh yes, pages from that again looked great, do report! ... (on the other hand, wolverine sits on the sentinel like the birds sat on the plane wreck, now the new cover has somebody sitting on an upturned car ...)
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Nov 12, 2017 12:24 pm

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Tongues #1 by Anders Nilsen
Funny we just talked about him and he happens to be starting his new graphic novel project, serializing it in lavish self-published editions. This is a gorgeous comic, similar to the old Fantagraphics Ignatz line, really well printed, oversized, ostentatious. In style, it most resembles Nilsen's first GN Dogs & Water or his mythological short stories that appeared in a couple of Kramers issues. The colors, with a distinctive muted palette, really pop, and visually this is some of Nilsen's most impressive work ever, particularly the way he plays with the layouts in the first of the three segments here, building diagrammatic pages with so much detail and nuance to take in. I don't think this is likely to win over those turned off by Nilsen's pop-philosophical writing but I quite enjoyed it, and I appreciated that as in Dogs & Water there's a bit of a genre story to hold onto; this very much feels like a traditional first issue, introducing the cast and hinting at some of the intrigues and mysteries driving the story. Like in a lot of his work, the tone here is apocalyptic, with a sense of war and violence lurking around the edges, taking place in a wasteland that might be any number of war-torn countries around the world. Good start to his new series, it's great to see him tackling something really ambitious again after seeming like he was dithering around after collecting Big Questions.

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Placeholders by Michael DeForge
A short but very large-format new comic from DeForge, a parodic nightmare about corporatization that escalates swiftly from a small city grovelling before a start-up company to the increasingly horrific fallout of this company's takeover of the city. DeForge's typical deadpan grotesqueries fit the story very well, and it's subtly, sharply funny throughout. Very good, very modern horror comic.

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Voices In the Dark by Marcel Beyer & Ulli Lust
Ulli Lust adapts Beyer's novel about a sound engineer who works with the Nazis and swiftly transitions from rather abstract thinking about the voice and hearing to assisting with a series of horrific experiments. His story runs in parallel with the story of Joseph Goebbels' 6 children, with whom the engineer occasionally crosses paths and seems to hold some fondness for them. The story is harrowing and loaded with dread, and Lust does a stellar job of translating it's eerie menace into muddy, grim, grotesque imagery. As the book goes on and the war drags towards its final days, the atmosphere becomes more and more oppressive, and Lust's drawing becomes increasingly unhinged, loading pages with dense scribbles or covering everything with a fog of darkness, obscuring images with noisy explosions as bombs drop around the filthy, cramped underground bunkers where the characters are hiding. Because the perspective is always locked in on the Nazis', there's continually a sense of unsettling atrocities being committed just off-panel, left unspoken by the amoral, untrustworthy main character or unseen by the children, among whom only the oldest daughter is starting to understand that her parents lie to them and that her seemingly idyllic childhood is not what it seems. It's a really provocative and interesting examination of the seeming normality of this grandiose evil when it's seen up close, through the family and loved ones of those who committed the worst evils. Its real wonder though is Lust's virtuoso performance, shifting effortlessly from bright, story book aesthetics when writing from the children's POV early on, to savage caricature, to the furious, slashing linework and visual confusion as the book truly descends into horror and dread in its second half. So different in every way from Lust's previous memoir book, but really great in its own right.
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Nov 15, 2017 7:27 am

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Pretending Is Lying by Dominique Goblet
New York Review Comics is killing it in the few years they've been doing comics. Just impeccable taste and they've been doing valuable work in putting out stuff that's either obscure/overlooked or not translated into English previously. What a slate: Peplum, Agony, Voices in the Dark which I also just recently read, Soft City which I haven't gotten to yet but looks fantastic, and next year they're doing a much-needed collection of the great UK cartoonist Chris Reynolds' Mauretania strips. And this book, a very distinctive memoir from an important Belgian cartoonist who hadn't been in English before at all. Goblet worked on this over the course of 12 years, and incorporated the drastic stylistic changes that happen over time into the structure of the narrative, reworking the early pages with thick oil paints and using the natural yellowing of the paper as an aesthetic element. This is an episodic series of encounters that dwell on Goblet's ambivalent relationships with her parents and her long-time partner, who for much of their early relationship was still embroiled with another woman as well. Goblet's restless style incorporates bold caricatures and abstract sections, and switches from hyper-detailed, lush un-inked pencils to the density and extreme stylization of the early sections where she piled textural paint onto the pages. The other fascinating thing is how much Goblet pushes herself to the side in her own story. This is very much a story where people close to her frequently treat her in shockingly shitty ways, and yet she's often presenting things from their points of view, subtly engaging in acts of imaginative empathy as she "watches" scenes she couldn't possibly have seen, trying to understand these people who both love her and hurt her. A really inventive and probing take on the memoir genre that sidesteps autobiographical cliches in favor of visual experimentation.

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Lapsos by Ines Estrada
Very cool psychedelic sci-fi book from one of my favorite young cartoonists. Estrada's distinctive punky figures and rough-hewn urban landscapes are married to a sense of the outrageous, as 2 Mexico City youths go on an interdimensional adventure, and a one-eyed depresssive slacker from another dimension visits their world. I always love the way Estrada's eye for mundane domesticity and the drudgery of going to work/daily life interacts with her psychedelic sensibility. Here, it's especially gorgeous as she just totally cuts loose with amazing imagery, drawing most of the book in blue ink with spot color shading but occasionally switching to full paint/crayon color for striking effects. The story's basically nothing, just an excuse for Estrada to draw alien landscapes and put her characters through wild bodily transformations.

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Goro #1 by Sarah Horrocks
Thanks to landspeed for pointing this one out. Hadn't read much Horrocks before, this is very cool. Incredibly detailed art that makes really good use of tone/shadings. It's hard to tell where the narrative is going yet, if anywhere, but this first issue is really interesting, introducing characters within a very melodramatic genre context and basically not caring if everything's clear yet. That aesthetic, working through some obvious Sienkiewicz influences and experimenting with filling the pages with rich textures and marks, can carry this very far all on its own. Looking forward to #2 once it gets reprinted.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Thu Nov 16, 2017 8:45 am

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Thi Bui - The Best We Could Do
This is not the sort of book that would normally catch my eye, but I'm glad it did. Thi Bui tells the story of her own childhood in California as a child of immigrants, and then delves back into family history, watching the very different ways her parents grew up in Vietnam and started having babies as the war reached its crescendo and they were forced to flee for Malaysia. The story is told straightforwardly, and doesn't get into the politics beyond how they affect things on the ground level, which makes sense as her family were in some senses on the losing side. The art also is simple, done with spare, shaky brushstrokes and a monochrome colour palette. It's just a fascinating, unusual story, told with great empathy, which really brings to light the subtle effects of trauma and dislocation.
4/5

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Etienne Davodeau - The Cross-Eyed Mutt
Part of "The Louvre Collection", a weird initiative that asks comics creators to produce work based on the museum. They've had some proper big dogs on this: Jiro Taniguchi, Enki Bilal, Nicolas de Crecy, and David Prudhomme, whose Cruising the Louvre I reviewed upthread. Davodeau's book is the story of a Louvre security guard who meets his new girlfriend's somewhat oafish family for the first time. On hearing that he works in the Louvre, they task him with finding a space in the museum for a family heirloom: the great-great-grandfather's painting of a cross-eyed dog. This is a very pleasant French drama, low key and low stakes, similar to Davodeau's previous book The Initiates. Halfway through it takes a weird turn into secret societies, which is a confusing development, but remains a sweet and relaxing book to spend time with and, I have to admit, it's pretty interesting to see these artists work with the Louvre as a setting. They really pay attention to individual pieces, and it lends each book an interesting subtext about how art interacts with modernity.
3/5

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James Tynion IV & Jeremy Rock - The Eighth Seal
One of the random bits of flotsam from the 0-day threads. The President's wife keeps hallucinating that she's turning into a demon, and it turns out she's probably right, and also that the President's Chief of Staff is the head of an ancient doomsday cult that's somehow controlling her. As usual from Tynion, it all feels distinctly cheap and shoddy, even though that's usually a quality I'd associate with art rather than writing. Jeremy Rock does well with the monster bits (the page above is probably the best page in the book), and seems to have a Gene Ha/Jacen Burrows influence. At other times, the oval office looks like a windowless cell, and the figurework seems amateurish. Also, it just ends with a cliffhanger right as things are kicking off, despite giving all appearances of being a complete story. Real hack work.
1/5
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Postby HotFingersClub » Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:10 am

Aw I'm glad that Ulli Lust book is good. Today is the Last Day was a masterpiece. I'll keep an eye out for that, and the new DeForge.

Already excited about year end lists
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Nov 19, 2017 11:12 am

Tynion is so lame. I doubt he'd be getting anywhere if he wasn't a Scott Snyder coattail-rider. That Thi Bui book seems to be getting lots of hype, I'll have to dl that soon.

The Ulli Lust book isn't as good as Last Day but her art might be even better in it. This was very cool but I do hope she returns to writing her own stuff next book because Last Day really was a masterpiece.
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Nov 19, 2017 4:58 pm

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I'm Not Here by GG
Quiet, minimalist, subtly surreal little book by a cartoonist who has mostly published her work online previously. Very designy and digital-looking, mostly evincing linework in favor of solid areas of white, black, and gray. The story concerns an aimless young woman who, dissatisfied with her life and especially with her family, slips into another woman's apartment and, thus, into her identity. The dialogue is minimal, and confined to brisk captions placed under the images, and the overall effect is contemplative and melancholy. Not bad, but definitely the kind of book that's mainly affecting in the moment but seems to slip away ephemerally pretty quick.

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Expansion by Matt Sheean & Malachi Ward
Collecting Sheean and Ward's first collaborative series, which they self-published back in 2010-2012. Pretty rough in all respects, and as they note themselves in the intro, you can see them getting comfortable with their collaborative drawing process over the course of the book. Like most of their work, both together and individually, it's high-concept sci-fi, here about civilizations with very different values sparring over access to a primitive tribe on which they can impress their ideas and their religion. There's not much to it, the characters are generic, and the plot leans heavily on the savagery of its tribal caricatures, who are the least developed figures in a cast of undeveloped types. It's an early work and I get why it was collected now in the wake of the well-deserved acclaim they got for Ancestor, but wow this does not hold up well at all.

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I Am Not Okay With This by Charles Forsman
Great new book from one of indie comics' best chroniclers of teenage rage and confusion. Here, a gangly Olive Oyl type struggles with the death of her dad, her still-nascent sexual identity, and the darkness festering inside of her, manifested as a psychic ability to inflict pain on others. Forsman's drawing is at its most cartoony, with a rubbery good humor that creates some sublime tension between his awkward, long-limbed main character and the uncomfortably intense teenage emotions threatening to overwhelm her. Reminds me at times of Tom Neely's The Blot in the way it uses cartoon iconography to such potent emotional and psychological effect. This is often quietly funny but the overall effect is this steady ratcheting-up of horror and sadness, all welling up from within, until the gut-punch of the final act. Fantastic stuff.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Nov 20, 2017 10:07 am

Oh nice. Did not know to expect new Forsman. I'm glad he's moving away from Revenger. That project seemed like a real dead end.

I don't really follow the comics press or anything but I'm a little surprised The Best We Could Do is getting hype. I liked it a lot, but it has a kind of drab/square quality - perhaps just because the art is very simple and it strikes this earnest tone... I don't see the stylistic verve of similar works like Persepolis
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Postby Wombatz » Mon Nov 20, 2017 1:38 pm

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Old Ground by Noel Freibert. it's really good. there's two dead kids on an old graveyard talking from under their stones, in a kind of waiting for godot situation, trying to remember stuff while getting pissed on by ghost dogs etc. then there's a two-man wrecking crew wanting to plow the whole graveyard under ... they have some really clunky lines regarding their capitalist motivations, though, which is the worst part of the story ... but it soon picks up again ... Freibert's art can go from seriously deskilled to wild and evocative from one panel to the next, depending on if the heavy black dots he uses organize themselves into shadows, action, or useless ballast. it also goes from almost abstract to very cartoony, so it's great fun trying to make sense out of some of the pages ... i'd be really happy with this except

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i already had the self-published zine of the first part, and this looked so much better. first because the blacks were much blacker (no surprise there ... though the bland paper of the book doesn't help (you can't see any of this on my sorry snapshots, i'm afraid)). but also the aspect ratio of the pages was changed for the book, so now they have a really slim and uncomfortable side margin and too much space at the top and bottom. while the zine was perfect. Koyoma Press have such high production values e.g. for the Jacobs titles that this is really disappointing.

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Exhaustion Hook #1 by Rob Churm. he's from glasgow, probably not so well known, though he once had a zine out by the boutique publisher Nieves. usually he does more drawings than comics, so this is an interesting development, a bit like a pretend anthology, with different stories, though they can break off at any panel, and sometimes i just gave up on trying to decipher lots of spidery handwriting, which merely speaks punk surrealism anyway ... so the chief reason to get this is the drawings. again these go from intentionally deskilled to pretty as a picture, to both at the same time. here's another spread i love:

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Postby Conetoaster » Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:47 am

Rob Churm does a lot of the experimental music gig posters up in glasgow and I love seeing his work about town. Will have to try and grab a copy of that from good press. He also plays in the gummy stumps and was in park attack, both no-wave fall-esque punk.

Have you read any of Malcy Duffs comics:

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Great weirdo scottish surrealism.
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