Time for a big catch-up post.
Drawn & Quarterly v1-v2 by various
D&Q's flagship anthology in the 90s, and it encapsulates why to me, though they've often published good stuff, they've perennially been a distant second to Fantagraphics in this sphere. This is all just so forgettable and slight, which is admittedly a problem with anthologies in general but it's rare to find one that's so stacked with seemingly interesting artists but so light on anything genuinely memorable. Lots of Eurocomics folks alongside some of the staples of the 90s indie scene. There's some good stuff here to be sure: Julie Doucet's funny, dreamlike shorts are always a delight, Carol Swain turns in a few typically elliptical, haunting vignettes, David Mazzuchelli has a couple of his all-too-rare short stories that are excellent, and there are some really great slices of Eurocomics reprints that wind up teasing at longer works (Dupuy & Berberian's Monsieur Jean, Jacques Tardi's harrowing WWI comics, Baru's dynamically drawn tale about a French-Algerian boxer). Debbie Dreschler, Mary Fleener, Joe Sacco, Carel Moiseiwitsch (more on her below) and Dennis Eichhorn also make brief but worthy appearances. So much of the rest barely makes an impression for the time it takes to read it. And long stretches of the first volume, especially, are dedicated to Joe Matt's whiny, wordy diary comics that seem even longer than they are due to the tiny panels. Did people only think this guy was any good because he hung out with Seth and Chester Brown? It's so unbearable.
Blue Is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh
Haven't seen the movie but I'm familiar with the reputation, of course. This is the source material, and it's mostly pretty good, though more than a little maudlin and sentimental, and certainly it's easy enough to see why it found its way into movie houses. The book is at its best in the first half, when it's documenting the teen protagonist's gradual coming-to-terms with her own gay desires, and her love affair with the blue-haired older girl who first awakened these feelings in her. This stuff is poignant, capturing the clumsiness, conflicting emotions, and prejudices churning inside of this girl as she struggles to understand why she's feeling things she's not "supposed to" feel. Maroh's straightforward style - very stereotypically "Euro" with a mild anime influence - stays out of the way and lets the characters dominate. The second half kind of loses its momentum though, jumping forward in time and skipping over so much that the characters lose focus - Maroh had done such a good job getting into their heads in the early parts and then suddenly it's years later and their motivations are being spelled out in plain text instead of allowed to come out naturally from the story. It feels rushed, which is an odd thing to find in a non-serialized graphic novel. Ultimately disappointing even though there are plenty of good parts too.
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Really charming webcomic (collected in a GN) about a young shape-changing girl who apprentices herself to a super-villain. It's consistently funny and witty, and yet it also gradually unfurls some darker undercurrents that lead to a pretty intense dramatic climax. Stevenson's art is simple and cartoony but she has a great grasp of body language and gesture and facial expressions, so the minimalism totally works and the characters are always really well defined. She keeps it to a small cast and some very archetypal relationships and just plays with the form for a few hundred pages. A good quick read.
Flash Marks by Carel Moiseiwitsch
A mostly forgotten artist whose whole legacy, more or less, was collected in this 32-page Fantagraphics comic. She seems to have come from more of a fine arts background, did a few stories for D&Q's anthology and lots of 80s anthologies, and then vanished from the scene. Dark, edgy, scratchy, deliberately ugly stuff that's perfectly suited to her generally harrowing portraits of military horrors and political manipulation. The best pieces tend to be the ones that pair Moiseiwitsch's ink-splashed scenes of carnage and rubble with deadpan, journalistic recountings of police brutality, the relocation of Canadian Japanese to work farms during WWII, and in the best, most horrifying story here, an examination of the brutal slog of trench warfare during WWI. And then there's "Fatal Fellatio," a Dennis Eichhorn-penned tale that's probably the darkest, ugliest thing he ever wrote, both because of the story itself and because Moiseiwitsch's wild abstractions and grotesque caricatures drive it towards a feverish, apocalyptic tone.
5,000 km per Second by Manuele Fior
Wow, this thing is gorgeous. The painted colors are unreal, and each location and scene gets its own beautiful palette that lends it an ineffable mood. Even as someone who doesn't usually like this kind of fully painted look in comics, this is amazing-looking, and Fior's facility with body language goes a long way towards softening the stiffness I dislike in so many painted comics. That said, I ultimately fall somewhere between HFC (who raved over it) and Wombatz (who definitely didn't) on this one. It is undeniably classical in its themes and its ideas, it feels like 60s European cinema, heavily indebted to Bertolucci and Antonioni, and there's more than a little familiarity to its story beats that definitely detracts from the mood it's trying to convey. That said, it's just so accomplished on a formal level that it's hard not to be affected even in spite of oneself. When the final long chapter involved the central pair meeting again after many years on a rainy night and having an alternately caustic and flirty night getting drunk together, part of me was rolling my eyes but the rest of me was taking in how lovingly Fior draws the rain, and how good the faces are, and how intensely the emotions are communicated through every delicate brushstroke, every little shadow and squiggle of a mouth. There's something endearing, almost, in how rote what's being communicated is when compared against how forcefully, how passionately, it's communicated.
The Interview by Manuele Fior
I liked this one even better. It still feels like it could be an Antonioni movie but it's edgier, weirder, less certain and settled in its ideas. This one is all in black and white, not painted, but it's just as gorgeous if not maybe even more so - I really love the textures in the night skies, the craggy face of the aging protagonist, the odd hair shapes of his young love interest, the loving detail put into cars and architecture. The fluidity and gracefulness of it all reminds me a lot of Lorenzo Mattotti when he works in b&w. As for the story, while I could maybe do without that coda - it did have some fantastic details though - the rest of it moves with this great dreamlike sense of inevitability where even the weirdest events seem to fit perfectly, and the protagonist often seems to be unclear of what his story even is, what's happening to him or why. The sci-fi hook, which could've easily seemed like just a gimmick, instead feels as hallucinatory and disorienting as it does to the characters themselves, and the effect is very powerful. Towards the end, one of the characters even spells out a metaphor for what the alien communications feel like and instead of feeling too overt and unsubtle, it's well earned, a fitting punctuation to the book's poignancy. Good stuff, I'm excited for Fior's new one this year.