Leslie Stein -
Bright-Eyed at MidnightAnother comics memoir/journal about nothing much, but a good one, much better than her fiction series
Eye of the Majestic Creature.
Bright-Eyed is just a daily chronicle of making art, working in a bar and trying to sleep as a chronic insomniac. Her art is impressionistic, colourful and minimal, a bit like Kochalka's
American Elf but more refined. The lack of panel boarders can actually take a little getting used to, especially in the earlier strips which are much more fluid about how your eye is meant to travel down the page, but it really works as an evocation of memory: you don't necessarily see the scene with particular clarity, but the feeling of the experience washes over you. I think my favourite parts were when she lapses into splashes of colour and collage. It's a really pretty book.
3/5
Glenn Head -
ChicagoThis one started off as a real eye-roller but actually brought me round by the time I was done. Head was apparently on the fringes of comix in the early days, running into Robert Crumb and all that. It starts of pretty annoying - possibly intentionally. Head gets his parents to pay for a fancy art school, but never goes to class, and then travels to Chicago with nothing but a sketchbook and spends a few months panhandling and unsuccessfully trying to get in with Playboy until his parents turn up and save him from starvation, at which point we find out that he never told them he had dropped out, so they've been paying for his school meals the entire time. It's an interesting snapshot of a dumb kid trying to find himself in the 70s, nothing too extraordinary, but the extended coda adds an interesting layer of reflection and poignancy. It's not clear to me how much Head has actually learned from his life though.
3/5
Virgil Partch -
Cork High and Bottle DeepA collection of old single-panel cartoons from the 40s and 50s, all about men in hats getting drunk. The cartooning is lithe, misshapen and beautiful, but some of the jokes wouldn't seem out of place for Rick London. Fantagraphics has also made a really strange decision in apparently grouping the cartoons by category of joke, so you'll often see the same joke repeated two or three times in a row with a slightly different formation.
1/5
Noah Van Sciver -
DisquietWent into this trepidatiously after pretty much hating the
Fante Bukowski books and deciding I probably just didn't get on with Van Sciver, but this is much much better. It's a collection of the best of his short strips, spanning realist drama, fairytales, historical recreation and tongue-in-cheek sci fi pulp. The variety was a big draw for me - every story arrives completely unpredictably and functions with an interior logic that reminded me of Josh Simmons or Jillian Tamaki. The art has an expressive, dirty quality to it that adapts really well to each mode he finds himself in. Really good stuff.
4/5
Junji Ito -
The Dissolving ClassroomAnother extremely freaky collection of linked stories, this one following two siblings - a boy who worships the devil and his little sister who maybe has no soul or something? Or is just non-specifically creepy. I detected a more overt subtext this time than usual, apparently critiquing a Japanese society which revolves around manners. The boy kills people by apologising to them until their brains melt and grotesquely deforms women by incessantly praising their beauty. His sister seems much less directly harmful, but is feared much more, essentially just because she's confident. Ito's mainline to completely nightmarish images is undiminished.
4/5
Mathieu Burniat -
Dodin-Bouffant: Gourmet ExtraordinaireAnd finally something a little more gentle. This is an adaptation of an old French novel which itself was based on the life of Brillat-Savarin, one of the originators of serious food writing. Dodin-Bouffant's chef dies, so he has to find a new one, with whom he eventually falls in love. It's a little weird - but probably appropriate - to see this character being idolised and feted because of all the delicious food he eats, while the woman who actually does the cooking gets comparatively little recognition, and the book sort of addresses that but not completely. The cooking sections are numerous and very beautiful but I think would be a lot more appetising if I weren't vegetarian. The art in general, actually, is really lovely. It has that same liquid quality as Kerascoet's work on
Beauty.
3/5