Jim Broadbent & Dix –
Dull MargaretWell this is a real curio. That’s Jim Broadbent the Oscar-winning actor, teaming up with a political cartoonist from The Guardian for a super grimy Riddley Walker-style graphic novel about a witch with learning disabilities. I think she has learning disabilities anyway – it may be that everyone in this book acts the same way, but we don’t really see anyone speaking except Margaret, who spends most of the time mumbling curses to herself. She lives in a floating shack scavenging detritus from the bottom of a gloopy grey sea and rattles along in a grim state of horrifying loneliness until she’s robbed on a trip to town and starts using magic to extract her revenge.
Apparently it’s partly based off the Bruegel painting “Dulle Griet” but it doesn’t retain much of the phantasmagorical quality. Instead, this book has the visual consistency of a bowl of porridge – absolutely everything is grey, lumpy and soggy, with big simple panels and lines. Dix draws facial features like little scalpel marks in wet clay. It’s odd. I can’t say I really enjoyed it but I’m glad Broadbent is pursuing his passions I guess?
Helge Reumann –
Black MedicineI’ve been very interested in Helge Reumann as a creator since I saw one of his strips in a collection – Kramers Ergot maybe? It looks like he actually has a pretty wide range of styles, but everything I’ve seen from him has involved these large groups of identical, intense-looking men with dark beards and robes, almost always shown in scenes of war, sometimes with each other and sometimes with golems made of hair, crystals or slime. His sequential stuff is usually laid out in rigid, tight grids of small panels, but this (I think) is more of an art book, with each page showing a still tableau. I’d probably prefer more semblance of a narrative, but I really like this book, with its scratchy, densely detailed images of a world in which war is the only thing left. It’s a startling vision and an arresting aesthetic.
Leela Corman –
Queen’s DayThere’s something interesting about these three sparse, deliberately paced stories from Corman, chiefly the mysterious way they interact with each other. For example, the first story, set in olde times, has a young girl rescued from a river by the witch Baba Yaga, who claims she means no harm and offers soup. The scene is left open-ended. Then, in the next story, we’re in modern times, and a woman arrives at her grandma’s house to be offered soup. Ideas or clues or atmospheric components are mirrored from one narrative to another, but seemingly without an attempt at a cohesive theme. Meanwhile, the vividness of Corman’s art and the personal content of her stories is toned down significantly. Leeched of their colour and confessional force, these stories retire rather than grab, and are finished in minutes.
Josh Simmons –
Flayed Corpse and Other StoriesFuuuck some of these stories really fuck me up. This is Simmons’ second collection of shorts, collecting new work with a bunch of zine and compilation stuff, plus some longer stories like “Twilight of the Bat”. It also brings in a lot of collaborators – mostly rising indie stars like Tara Booth, Patrick Keck etc, to take over the writing and drawing duties. It’s stylistically pretty harmonious though: you could be forgiven for assuming it was one guy experimenting with different styles.
A lot of the stories are even stranger and funnier than those in
The Furry Trap, and a lot of them do this nightmarish thing where they seem to end slightly too soon, ignoring any redemption or even a real conclusion, but just ending unexpectedly at the very moment that the (literal or figurative) knife is driven home – the same moment that you’d force yourself to wake in terror. One of my favourite books of 2018 so far.
Igor Hofbauer –
Mister MorgenThis was a great find. Hofbauer is a Croatian artist who I’d never heard of before, but turns out to be exactly my jam. This book is pretty similar to
Flayed Corpse in lots of ways actually – a collection of shorter and longer stories with a tone of dark, Lynchian, witch in the carpark style horror. Hofbauer’s stories are more internally consistent though: they seemingly share characters and settings, as well as Hofabuer’s art style, a deep and spooky etching with a limited palette of red, white and black. Similarities to Charles Burns are obvious, and Hofbauer actually doesn’t suffer much in comparison. As in Burns, many of Hofbauer’s characters are deformed in some way, menial freaks trapped in a sort of radioactive soviet noir. Really worth seeking out.
James Kochalka –
Quit Your Job and Other StoriesKochalka was formative for me in a way. His diary strip
American Elf was probably my first real exposure to indie comics, so I have a lot to thank him for. Since that ended, none of his fiction has connected with me in anything like the same way.
Dragon Puncher,
SuperFuckers,
Johnny Boo – all that stuff has the depth of a puddle. In his earlier books though (
Quit Your Job,
American Elf,
Magic Boy and Girflriend) he gave himself centre stage, and it worked. He’s a fascinating character – gratingly whimsical and suffused with a childlike openness and hyperactivity, but also moody and mercurial and in love with the mundane. Half My Little Pony and half Harvey Pekar.
There are essentially only two stories in this book, both I think from about 1997. The first one is pretty standard from early Kochalka – he finds a magic ring in the snow and decides to quit his job at a Chinese restaurant, and then his cat wins a competition to go into space. The second one, “Paradise Sucks”, is more complex, intertwining a retelling of the Adam & Eve myth with a story about the “world’s last artist” living in Pekar-esque squalor and isolation in an old factory. The chunky, childlike art and the unfashionable sense of magic in the world is probably going to be too much for some people, but I think (early) Kochalka is sometimes unfairly overlooked, and in terms of fiction I think this book is probably the best advertisement for his unusual approach.