Alternative/independent comics thread

[sevenarts]

Pretty surprised by that as well, actually.

Though if you see a scan of Frontier #1 (the Uno Moralez issue) I'd love to get ahold of that - that's the only one I missed out on and have never been able to find a physical copy of.

[HotFingersClub]

I bought the digital subscription from Youth in Decline at the beginning of the year. Had completely forgotten about it until they sent me a PDF of #15 last week, which I then converted into .cbr

Apparently they did it last year too, but I haven't seen any copies in the usual places. The page where I bought it (http://www.youthindecline.com/product/frontier-2018-subscription) says that it's sold out. Don't know why they're limiting the print run for digital, but they're a small publisher, and if you wanted to get on the digital subscription it might be worth emailing them

[Wombatz]

among other things, i read



Flesh and Bone by Julia Gfrörer. it's from 2010 but somehow i did not have this yet. what can i say, it's of course excellent ... (the only solo book of her's i don't at all like is black is the color, which i thought was kind of kitschy and cost me a year of gfrörer appreciation before i tried another) ... she builds such strange little worlds so easily, strange but still possibly closer to the inner worlds of the times she evokes (here ridden by early modern superstitions) than more ponderous efforts.



Poly Chronos 1 by Ralph Niese. Ralph is another of the very few best german comics artists, and is from the city where i live. his aesthetic background is probably not unfamiliar these days, trashy and weened on 90s superhero comics ... a bit more unusually, his version of that is not at all hard-boiled or over the top genre emulation, but on the tender side, both in the love of detail and in that no feelings will have been hurt in the making of this exploitation story. the new series begins like our protagonist will have to learn some tantrism before he can graduate from the school of gifted youngsters as a proper superhero ...

also, while in prague over the easter holidays, i found this hanging on a museum wall:



from 64, but it looked incredibly fresh, with a touch of 80s underground maybe ... it's by Kaja Saudek, the most famous czech comic artist, it seems. there's no translations of his work, maybe for the best, as i have since heard that the words have aged much more badly than the drawings. this here is very enjoyable (link to the whole thing after the image) and i wish i'd seen it in time to buy a copy of the book.



http://antikvariat-artbook.blogspot.de/2000/01/kaja-saudek-muriel-andele-1969.html

[HotFingersClub]

Brendan McCarthy – Dream Gang
I like Brendan McCarthy, even when he’s not working with a writer the calibre of Milligan or Ewing, although is he leaning more on the cheap digital effects in his old age? A lot of these pages look like The Dark Knight Strikes Again. It suits McCarthy better than it would most artists, but he has less texture than I remember. The story is sort of his version of The Sandman (and even seems to have a few explicit references) and is also basically a retread of The Zaucer of Zilk. Must admit it suffers in comparison.


Gerald Jablonski – Farmer Ned’s Comics Barn
I love that quote from Jim Woodring about Jablonski’s work possessing “that alarming glass-hard veneer of isolated intellect that distinguishes the product of a bona fide lunatic.” This is the longest collection of Jablonski’s I’ve seen, and I think it reprints some of the stuff from Empty Skull although honestly who the fuck knows. The bits I’ve read (probably not wise to read it all, and definitely not in one sitting), I enjoyed more than previous Jablonski, I think because I like the farmyard stuff better than the Howdy and Dee Dee material, and there’s more of a balance in this collection. A lot of it I even found genuinely funny: that horse in the comic above, owning up to all his mistakes; the fact that “a friend of Howdy’s nephew” appears in every single panel of those stories without ever contributing to the story in any way. Funny stuff! Also love how earnestly unhelpful he is in the interview at the back (“I like many of the same things that everybody else in the world does.”)


Tatsuro Kiuchi – Frontier 15
Delightful, especially the colour illustrations. I could just live in those scenes, they give me such a sense of peace.


Paolo Bacilieri – Fun / More Fun
Hmm well it’s certainly very accomplished… This seems like exactly my shit in a way. A huge formalist tome connecting multiple interlocking stories with the history of the crossword, incredibly detailed art, metafictional touches etc. The crossword thing really gets into your brain – I think he must have designed the whole book under some sort of hidden system: reading it feels like looking at crosswords within crosswords, both on each page and in how the incidental tales connect with one another. Also though, it’s just a little dry. Difficult to connect with. I do hesitantly recommend it though – seems like there’s a lot to unpack.


Leah Hayes – Funeral of the Heart
In Hayes’ debut from 2008, she tells surrealist fairytales that fall roughly under a kind of “dark twee” banner and are, to be honest, not that great. Also quite hard to read. It’s not really a comic – full pages of handwritten text are interspersed with occasional pages of illustration, and everything is done on scratchboard, so the text is jagged white italics on a black background. Pretty high contrast. The illustrations are more like photo negatives of Eleanor Davis, and are often quite beautiful.

[sevenarts]

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.

[HotFingersClub]

Great reviews I gotta read The Interview. Sevenarts did you read it in print?

Never having seen an Antonioni movie, maybe I'm more susceptible to the charms of 5kkmps. I recognised the themes of love, ageing and the strands of fate, but I guess it seemed classical to me, and deeply felt.

I'd like it if more people itt read The Arab of the Future so we can talk about how weird it is. I'll put it in the Dropbox is anyone wants it

[sevenarts]

Yeah, I have print copies of the Fior books.

I'll have to check out The Arab of the Future. It never looked too appealing to my tastes but we'll see I guess.

[Wombatz]

i'll bow out of the arab of the future but will get those flash marks, that looks like something i should know!

[HotFingersClub]

Ben Catmull's Ghosts and Ruins is a collection of b&w drawings, mostly of haunted houses, sometimes of actual ghosts, interspersed with tiny ghost stories, some of them no more than a few lines long, in what seems like a clear homage to Edward Gorey. I remember really liking the single issue I found of his series Monster Parade, but that was a lot more imaginative than this. It's fine - not the most interesting choice for him creatively


Bruce Paley's memoir Giraffes in My Hair, illustrated by Carol Swain, is also a little overfamiliar, especially after reading very similar stuff in Dennis Eichorn's Real Stuff and Glenn Head's Chicago. Paley's writing doesn't have the spark or depth of either of those two; Swain is a great artist but maybe not right for this material: her tight, monochrome grids sap the anarchism of the story, which is one of the main things it has going for it. Some of Paley's exploits as a hitchhiking junkie are at least anecdotes worth relating, even if he loses marks for style.

[HotFingersClub]

Finally got around to Connor Willumsen’s Anti-Gone which was spectacular – it’s all I want in a comic: totally absorbing, totally sympathetic in its expression of a dreamlike imagined world. Loved it.


Osamu Tezuka – Ambassador Magma
Another old Tezuka adventure serial, very much in the vein of Astro Boy. There’s even a virtually identical boy robot in this who does a lot of the legwork before they call in the titular giant golden living statue who it must be stressed is not a robot despite all appearances to the contrary. Like a lot of Tezuka’s stuff for younger readers, I love the basic setup and the dynamism of the art but I wish it was about 550 pages shorter. Man was a workhorse.


Dave Cooper – Bent
An artbook by Dave Cooper, whose treatment of the female form was never exactly charming or even very interesting but is also seeming more and more grubby as time goes by. Even while it’s subversive in some sense, it still comes across as fetishisation in a way that’s not really any more palatable than the horny work of Bruce Timm and Rian Hughes. I do like his gloopy bubbly textures though. It would be cool if he thought of something else to draw.


Mardon – Body and Soul
This is one of those pleasing constructions where a bunch of semi-related characters play out an interlocking drama, taking them periodically into contact with one another while only you, the lucky reader, gets to appreciate the whole rich tapestry. There’s a bit of an overreliance on cliché here: the ageing beauty obsessed with plastic surgery and ignored by her workaholic husband, the repressed young man who starts exploring violence and masochism. The cartooning is nice and it passes the time okay.

[Melville]

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.

Jeez, you really dislike self-loathing autobio comics. I found The Poor Bastard collection pretty compulsively readable, and the self-deprecating humor and bare-all style mostly worked for me. Even if you dislike the subject matter and/or tone, Matt's pretty clearly good at expressive/rubbery cartooning.

5,000 km per Second by Manuele Fior

On the other hand, I read this a few weeks ago and found it pretty slight and tedious. It did remind me of a certain type of European movie, but in a bad way: flittery life lessons with nothing of the rawness or impact of actual life.

[HotFingersClub]

Jim Campbell – At the Shore
Just found the first issue of this on the torrents and I have no idea if the rest is available but I'm keen to read more. This issue reminded me a lot of Giant Days – a group of teenagers go to the beach and fart around a bit – the cartooning is good and it's actually funny and just feels good-natured. It looks like later issues bring in zombies, which I'm so sick of at this stage that it might even be a dealbreaker, but I'll probably stick around if it stays this funny.


Keisuke Itagaki – Baki the Grappler
A venerable old fight manga from the early 90s. Looks like this will very much satisfy my craving for absurd boss rush comics. Loving the rubbery figurework – reminds me of Wuvable Oaf


Tsukumizu – Girls' Last Tour
A slow, contemplative, melancholy manga about two girls driving through a post-apocalyptic city in a modified tank. It's well-done, filled with moment of low-key beauty, but I'm currently deep in Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko and feel like I might be overserved for stately post-apocalyptic stories where not much happens. Is anyone else reading? I think the anime adaptation is popular on this board.


Sandrine Revel – Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo
An ethereal biography of Glenn Gould, which chops up and collages the events of his life in a way that sometimes obscures cause and effect. Not sure about that. I love the art and the general tone; the precise painting and texture of the panels. Would've been nice to maybe find out a bit more about Gould.

[Mandingo]

personally of the three i find seth to easily be the most obnoxious/hateable of the bunch.

[HotFingersClub]

Basically crying at work today over Raymond Briggs' Ethel & Ernest

[sevenarts]

I've always meant to read some Briggs stuff, he gets namedropped a lot.


The Pervert by Remy Boydell & Michelle Perez
Readers of Island may remember some of these vignettes appearing in a few issues - brief, enigmatic shorts focusing on a trans sex worker, delivered with a deadpan, unflinching narrative style married to furry/funny animal imagery. Here that handful of vignettes is joined by many others as a debut graphic novel, together comprising a fragmentary, elliptical collection of moments, feelings, and experiences, little glimpses into relationships or states of being. Alternately harrowing, quietly sad, and darkly funny, this is a fantastic work, brutally honest and raw without ever seeming sensationalist. Perez's writing is remarkably direct and frank, and she's obviously coming from a place of very personal pain with a lot of the incidents depicted here. Boydell's art, with its muted watercolors and distinctive, expressive animal figures, would initially seem like an odd accompaniment for these potent stories, but the juxtaposition winds up being very powerful in itself. The book has a compelling atmosphere that is uniquely its own - there are a couple of visual tributes to Simon Hanselmann, who's the closest analogue for what Boydell and Perez are up to here, but the understated way this book lays out both its emotional gut-punches and its (much rarer) moments of humor definitely marks this debut as having its own sensibility. Highly recommended, an early pick for one of the best graphic novels of the year.

[sevenarts]

And two more...


Grip Part 1 by Lale Westvind
Fantastic new chunk of GORGEOUS Lale Westvind wackiness. This is an amazing-looking riso-printed book from Perfectly Acceptable Press, who do probably the best justice I've ever seen to Westvind's out-there imagery - the colors in this absolutely pop, and the rubbery figure work and quasi-abstractions seem to leap off the page with perfect clarity. It's beautiful, and worth a look just to see Westvind's most visually stunning work yet, but as usual with her stuff there's more to it than that too. The book is mostly wordless and its narrative is loose, to say the least, but there's a clear thematic throughline here that makes it all hang together. The story concerns Westvind's powerful Rosie the Riveter-esque women working with their hands, and the fantastical imagery provides a series of visual metaphors for the energy and beauty and creativity of women's labor, as well as the collaborative spirit that causes these women to find solidarity with one another in a solid handshake, teaming up to serve diner patrons, fly airplanes, fix engines, and turn household appliances into hallucinatory machines of pure vibrational energy. I get a little of the vibe of Yuichi Yokoyama in the way Westvind makes seemingly ordinary tasks into vehicles for wild visual fancies but this is totally sui generis. Maybe her best book yet.


Inside Vineyland by Lauren Weinstein
Weinstein's first proper comic from 2003, a Xeric-sponsored collection of odds and ends that showcases the freewheeling spirit of her early comics. Rough around the edges as expected but really quite fun. There's basically two strains here. The longest story in the book is a self-contained mini epic about a robot of mysterious origins who goes blankly and silently through life as the adopted "son" of a lonely man, vainly trying to find love and acceptance with rabbits, high school friends, and vacuum cleaners. It's engimatic, bizarrely funny, and infused with this intense feeling of melancholy beneath the absurdity. Quite good. The rest of the book is all random 1-2 page little strips, some goofy and absurdist, some pointedly feminist and political, some just tossed-off, half-assed gags. A very fun quick read and a great showcase for Weinstein's talent especially at this early point in her career.

[Wombatz]

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.

i have that now, and agree with its strengths. in the end, the shortness of the pieces and their somewhat simplistic politics make one yearn for a more sustained effort (which unfortunately doesn't exist). some other stuff i recently enjoyed:



never read ghost in the shell before. it's great fun, and beautifully drawn, even if mostly i have no idea what's going on, but who cares.



another fun one, punx by giffen. i'm a huge fan of his second half of the 80s munoz influenced stuff ... and while by 95 he had changed his style again, here he returns to a balance between the moodishness of that and an update of his video jack humor making vicious fun of 90s superheroics. it falls apart quickly over 3 issues (plus one *manga* edition in which a godzilla clone is sent on a u.s. vacation by its shrink), but some marvelous work on the way ... though i'd wish he had stayed with the more seriously strange vibes of the first issue.



picked up some issues of bacchus by eddie campbell. now i should add i don't enjoy alec at all (some pages of that in here, awfully boring), and (dare i admit it?) i don't even like from hell ... but this is rather splendid in bits and pieces. something like a cross between cerebus and azzarello's wonder woman with a lot of gorgeous heavy inks thrown in. now i could never make it thru the omnibus of this, but i've ordered one of the old trades, let's see how that goes ...



also i've been investigating some mister miracle back story, and while the kirby stuff (as always) is easy to look at but hard to read ... i found that the final three issues are written by steve gerber ... i have nr 23 now, art by michael golden, and it's really excellent, very different but also a story of self-discovery, highly recommended ... EDIT: just read issue 24 and it's totally lame, so never mind.

[HotFingersClub]

Need to get my hands on some Westvind.

I downloaded The Pervert, mistook it for furry erotica and deleted it. Guess I'll dig it out of the recycle bin

[HotFingersClub]

Some quick thoughts:


Tillie Walden – On a Sunbeam
Just started this, and I’m planning to stretch it out for a couple of weeks. So far it’s beautiful, serene, atmospheric, just like The End of Summer. There are so many gorgeous tall windows in Walden’s work – tranquil and cosy scenes with a great cold void on the other side of a pane of glass. I want to read every issue with this song as my backdrop:



Frederik Peeters – Aama: The Invisible Throng
The second volume of Peeters’ sci-fi series, set in the future and following castaways on a distant planet as they investigate strange goings on. The story is deceptively functional and the art initially seems not too flashy, but Peeters is excellent at creating a visually distinct and cohesive world, and it helps the tone that he never goes too big. You can see how Annihilation might have taken a lot from it. It’s satisfying like any good adventure serial.


Roger Langridge – Fred the Clown
It’s cool and impressive how Langridge manages to pay such careful tribute to such a wide range of cartooning history, but the jokes are never actually funny or entertaining. In this book at least, he’s an accomplished mimic but not much beyond that. His later work on his Thor series was more charming.


Kristen Gudsnuk – Henchgirl
This was a collected webcomic about a young woman working as a henchperson for a supervillain. Tonally it’s very familiar, from Nimona and Scott Pilgrim and a hundred other genre deconstructions in a similar style. This doesn’t do too much to stand out in a crowded field but there are some fun ideas in there and some unexpected plot choices that make it more emotionally hefty than I was expecting.


Ivan Brunetti – Ho!
Woah, Ivan Brunetti is seriously awful. You’d have to go a long way to find more obvious, tedious jokes, and the patina of “offensiveness” that he drips over them only makes them more lame. It’s like Family Guy but… X-RATED! (shitty guitar music). It’s a shame this got published.


Joe Daly – Highbone Theater
Aww yeah Joe Daly fuckin rules. I think this is his longest complete story yet and it’s so good. Palmer is kind of an aspirant shaman, a gentle dude getting into conspiracy theories and Tibetan music and realising that all he has in common with his gross friends is that they like getting high. Everyone important in his life has their own lunatic theories about how the world works, and it’s up to Palmer to synthesise them in a way that leaves him with peace and understanding. As he goes deeper, his world becomes increasingly surreal and full of hidden connections.
I love the art, which starts with a Crumb influence and then flowers beautifully during the psychedelic sequences. I love the sense of humour and the dialogue and the way Palmer struggles to create his own weird little identity. For me, Daly is a completely original and under-appreciated creator. His stories about drugs and friendship embrace the mystery where Hanselmann embraces the squalor. Highly recommend you check out this or any of his other books, all of which have been great so far.

[sevenarts]

Don't get me wrong, The Pervert is *also* furry erotica, it's just very good and smart furry erotica.

Great reviews as always. I'm excited to read On a Sunbeam, I think I'll wait for it to come out in print later this year to finally dig in, Walden's art really deserves the sumptuous treatment. Hopefully it's a nice big format.

I haven't read that Brunetti book or checked in with him in a while but damn that cartoon is gross. I remember Schizo 1-4 being pretty interesting way back when, in that the first 3 were really nasty scatalogical obsessive navel gazing with a really abrasive sense of humor, and then issue 4 had a completely different style and a lot of influence from Chris Ware and was pretty sharp even if the themes felt familiar. I feel like those issues established him as at least someone to watch and a known name in indie comics and then he hardly seems to have followed up on that at all.

[sevenarts]

And yea I clearly need to read some Joe Daly, increasingly feels like a major gap.

[Wombatz]

Frederik Peeters – Aama: The Invisible Throng
The second volume of Peeters’ sci-fi series, set in the future and following castaways on a distant planet as they investigate strange goings on. The story is deceptively functional and the art initially seems not too flashy, but Peeters is excellent at creating a visually distinct and cohesive world, and it helps the tone that he never goes too big. You can see how Annihilation might have taken a lot from it. It’s satisfying like any good adventure serial.

i read aama a couple of pages upstream and as i remember found the art quite flashy (and enjoyed that very much), but the whole book rather less than satisfying exactly because it was like any other good adventure serial

once tried dungeon quest and didn't get into it, but then i don't like games. this highbone theater looks appetizing though, will check that also ...

and, because i spoke quite kindly of the first volume: the next tome of trondheim and oiry's maggy garrisson is totally boring and charmless, stay clear of this unless you enjoy 46 pages of pure stalling ...

[HotFingersClub]

Yeah that's pretty much the vibe with Aama. Nice art, slightly pedestrian story.

I love Dungeon Quest but it's a bit of an anomaly in the Daly oeuvre, both because it was never completed, and part of the joke is that it moves incredibly slowly. Some issues are just queues of men marching through a forest iirc, like in Yuichi Yokoyama.

If anyone wants to dive into Scrublands or Highbone Theater I can put them in the dropbox

[HotFingersClub]

Sophie Goldstein – House of Women
Good old-fashioned psychosexual drama about nuns in a jungle in space trying to beat the heat and “educate” the natives while falling prey to the attentions of a lone cad. The art is good but it could use some colour or something I think. It looks so clean, like the work of a typographer – it doesn’t quite communicate the wildness and humidity of the setting, and the setting here is really key. The character work is really effective, both in the writing and the minimalist visual design.


Guy Delisle – Hostage
Hoo boy it was a very intense experience staying up past my bedtime to finish this. I did not sleep for a while last night. Delisle, who’s well-known for his memoirs about living in unusual parts of the world (see Pyongyang, Shenzhen, Jerusalem and Burma Chronicles), here relates the experience of MSF worker Christophe Andre, who was kidnapped by Chechens. Delisle makes quite a bold choice in telling us basically nothing about Andre, just starting the story on the night of the kidnap. Even spending a long time with this character, and left alone with his thoughts, we find out almost nothing about his life other than that his sister’s getting married soon. Instead of dwelling much on his past or his inner life, we’re forced to wait with him while he takes meticulous notice of every tiny change in routine and every muffled sound heard through a wall, wondering what it might mean for his chances of freedom or survival. Unexpectedly, it makes it very easy to self-insert, and the reading experience becomes a real fuckin nail biter, especially since I went in without knowing how long he’d been imprisoned for. It seems to play out almost in real time, and to some extent I felt trapped in the book with him, through panel after panel of necessarily static art, chained to a radiator, not knowing how he’d get out of there or when. It makes the resolution, when it comes, hard to handle, and makes me feel very pleased that I’m not currently being held hostage.

I’ve also been reading Yaketpachi’s Maria which is another old Tezuka manga, this time about a teenage boy who sneezes out a spirit-child that inhabits the body of a sex doll. It’s okay. Sometimes I feel like the antic quality of Tezuka’s work makes it kind of a slog to read, and this action sex comedy is less rewarding than some of the better-known stuff.

[sevenarts]

Agreed that House of Women was nice, but not much more.


Lovers Only #2: Love Triangle by Sophia Foster-Dimino, Mickey Zacchilli & Carta Monir
Nicely unexpected sequel to the Youth In Decline oneshot from a few years back, this is again 3 short stories about frustrated romance and unclear relationships. The first one introduced me to Foster-Dimino, and she's again the standout for me here, with a story where each page follows a trail of gossip and fucking from one character pairing to another. It's really cleverly structured and formally sharp, and packs a lot of emotion into its simple exchanges of dialogue. The other 2 stories are great, too, Zacchilli contributes a scribbly, funny little vignette and Monir does a great job with a story in which frustrated desire and frustrations over body and gender twine together beneath the placid surface of a seemingly casual weekend party. Cool stuff all around, definitely a worthwhile mini.


Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
Drnaso's first book Beverly - recommended by a few people here as I recall - was real good, a fantastic debut from a guy who clearly had roots and influences in some very familiar indie comics but had already found his own unique voice within that general style. His followup is even better, leaps and bounds over Beverly even, and even though his style hasn't really changed much. He's just so masterful at pacing and paneling. His linework and style are simple and minimalist, his characters aren't differentiated much beyond their hair and clothes - their faces are so vague, so bland, that they rarely even betray a recognizable expression. They live in similarly blank, personality-less spaces, and their interactions often skirt along the mere surface of what they're really thinking and feeling. And yet there's such searing emotion and horror and quiet dignity and despair and hope and ugliness and deep, overwhelming SADNESS in his work, and especially in this devastating, remarkable book. I don't think I've yet come across a better work of art that captures what it feels like to be alive in America today, which makes it sound like some "topical" "of the moment" piece of schlock culture and yet it's anything but. Drnaso weaves in so much of what makes the present moment so uniquely awful - everyday violence and mass shootings, people's complete disconnection from the plights of others, the soul-consuming nastiness and inhumanity of the Internet, the deadening drone of the media - but he does so almost as a background, a context for the very personal suffering of his clearly delineated characters. This is a deeply political work that never explicitly mentions politics. Instead, it's all about empathy and the lack thereof, about trying to cut past all the chatter and dehumanization of this culture and actually connect with some other person. And it's gorgeous, and harrowing, and unforgettable. All those simple lines, and the muted color palette Drnaso uses - much darker and moodier than the equally muted but deceptively cheerful pastel vibes of Beverly - accumulate into pages that are just dazzling in their effect. He captures loneliness so well, this feeling of people being completely alone even when someone is right nearby. Amazing book, hope everyone reads it.


By Monday I'll Be Floating In the Hudson With the Other Garbage by Laura Lannes
I love this so much too. This is a collection of diary comics that Lannes originally posted online. They are shockingly intimate and confessional and raw, and also really, really funny and smart and sharp-witted. The common thread I've seen in Lannes' smallish body of work so far is a caustic sense of humor and a complicated mix of shame and abjection, often revolving around sexuality. Something like this should by rights come off as well-trod territory by now, but somehow she skirts around being boorish with her honesty and that wicked sense of humor. Also it helps that they look great. These comics are obviously done relatively quick and aren't meant to be polished but the marker-work is still so nice, and there's a appealing chunky quality to her drawings here, the linework alternating between sharply defined figures and fuzzy, watery forms that get hazy around the edges. Lannes is great, I'm so excited for her Retrofit book later this year.

[sevenarts]

The New World by Chris Reynolds
I don't care what else comes out this year, as far as I'm concerned this is THE reissue of the year. New York Review Comics has been doing a great job in the last few years, their curation has been impeccable, and the fact that they've put together this chunky book of some of Reynolds' best work is more evidence of their taste and knowledge. Reynolds has long been an obscure favorite of mine. In the 80s and early 90s - and sporadically thereafter - he self-published a series called Mauretania Comics, filled with odd, mysterious stories in a vaguely sci-fi vein, all set in a world that was interconnected, frequently overlapping in characters and ideas, but without an ongoing narrative thread pushing it along. For years, most of this work has been available mainly from Reynolds himself, packaged up in print-on-demand collections and sold online, or in the long out-of-print Penguin edition of his graphic novel Mauretania, which at least when I bought it could be found used for a few bucks pretty easily. I think he had a pretty dramatic influence on a lot of indie cartoonists over the years - Seth certainly, who edits this collection - but he otherwise seems to have been pretty forgotten, so this book is much appreciated.

These comics are very hard to define or describe - I'm not sure I've ever read anything else that affects me in quite the way that his comics do. There's a deadpan, stoical quality to his work, which is often driven by plainly written narrative captions rather than dialogue. They are very internal, contemplative stories, concerned not so much with action or progression as they are with memory and feeling. They all take place in a vaguely defined world where aliens have arrived and inexplicable occurrences are the norm, but the exact parameters of this place are never spelled out and the time period being covered seems to change unpredictably from one piece to the next. There's such a mysterious, ineffable quality to this book that I really struggle to put into words. Reynolds' distinctive art sets quite a mood. His lines are thick, his inks dense, and his regularly laid out panels (often a 9-panel grid in the short stories) are surrounded by thick black borders as well. His pages have this black heaviness as a result, shadowy and intense, and even the sunnier scenes - which always have this remarkable control over the light - seem vaguely foreboding. Film noir threads through these stories, with detectives investigating mysteries that never seem to get solved but just lead to ever more metaphysical mysteries instead. Sci-fi trappings abound but are treated in such a matter-of-fact way that they almost become mundane. One recurring character, Monitor, wears a distinctive round helmet and looks like a superhero or a spaceman, but he always seems to be working various odd jobs while waiting for his never-seen spaceship to be repaired.

This book collects some key Reynolds work: the issue-length The Dial, the graphic novel Mauretania, and a judicious selection of his short pieces. In a lot of ways the shorts are some of my favorite stuff here because they best encapsulate the mysterious quality of his work, the way his captions so enticingly sketch out a mood, a scene, a way of looking at the world, and then quietly end without resolution, letting those feelings linger and intensify. His imagery is frequently haunting: there's a sequence early in the GN where a woman wanders through the woods alone as evening transitions into night, mostly without words, and it is absolutely breathtaking, these dark, shadowy images in which her face floats in darkness or her silhouette is framed against a cross-hatched background with dark shapes looming all around her, culminating in the fantastic image of a glowing bus sign appearing as a beacon in the dark as she waits quietly by the side of the road. Reynolds' work is packed with this kind of imagery. His deliberate pacing and enigmatic storytelling creates the sense of a world in which anything might happen, and often does, but part of its appeal is that just as often nothing happens, except perhaps some unspoken momentary feeling, the experience of an evening, even just the sun setting. In one of my favorite short stories here, a ferryman muses, upon narrowly avoiding a catastrophe at sea, that if he had been worse at sailing, "a story might have happened" to him out there. That's a big part of Reynolds' charm, that knack for avoiding stories, undermining narrative impulses to focus instead on the ineffable. I can't imagine I'll get many pleasures out of comics this year better than revisiting this work in this lovingly produced format.

[Wombatz]

oh this looks good, will get it, thanks for the heads up!

in things i did try to read because of this thread i attempted Daly's Highbone Theater on hfc's rec. i can say nothing bad about it, but it's so very american that the experience of 4 weeks as an exchange student in idaho some decades ago did not qualify me to read this thing, much less hold an opinion.

[sevenarts]

I haven't read Daly yet (and HFC I'd definitely love some on the DB) but isn't he from South Africa?

[HotFingersClub]

He is South African yes. I guess I can see where that reading comes from, in that Daly is kind of chronicling the stoner universe of his particular caucasian middle class area of the globe, like Hanselmann's work is presumably set in Tasmania but could pass for America. Scrublands is more explicitly South African.

Anyway I'll pop some in the box later and you can judge for yourself

[HotFingersClub]

The New World sounds sick as hell