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Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 11:59 am
by Wombatz
HotFingersClub wrote:He is South African yes.

:oops:

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Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 3:13 pm
by HotFingersClub
Don't worry man no one does.

Scrublands is in the box. Highbone Theatre currently uploading.

I also have Dungeon Quest and The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book if u liek the taste

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:20 pm
by Melville
HotFingersClub wrote:Basically crying at work today over Raymond Briggs' Ethel & Ernest

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I should read this. I love When the Wind Blows.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:50 pm
by Melville
HotFingersClub wrote: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.

I haven't read Ho!, but I think Brunetti's crude humor in Schizo #1-3 is much more self-lacerating than Family Guy. It exudes self-hatred and disgusted disappointment with reality. I was mixed on those issues, but I love much of Schizo #4. It's a lot less crude, abrasive, and cynical. The Kierkegaard strip in it is one of my favorite things.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:52 pm
by Melville
That Chris Reynolds book looks awesome.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 6:50 am
by HotFingersClub
Melville wrote:
HotFingersClub wrote: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.

I haven't read Ho!, but I think Brunetti's crude humor in Schizo #1-3 is much more self-lacerating than Family Guy. It exudes self-hatred and disgusted disappointment with reality. I was mixed on those issues, but I love much of Schizo #4. It's a lot less crude, abrasive, and cynical. The Kierkegaard strip in it is one of my favorite things.


I've never read that issue so I'll take your word for it, but after reading Ho and most of Misery Loves Comedy it would take a lot for me to consider reading any more of his stuff

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 1:09 pm
by sevenarts
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Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein
Great funny, awkward, painfully sincere strips about being a teenage girl, dealing with cliques, inconsistent friends, bullies, alternately yearning for and being disappointed by boys, all that stuff. Just bursting with vitality on every page. It was drawn over a period of many years so Weinstein's style varies quite a bit, but it's always infused with a ton of personality, especially in the way she purposefully warps her own image in accordance with her mood and the way she sees herself in a particular story. The episodic structure works wonderfully, all these little snippets, scenelets, and gag strips gradually accumulating into a patchwork image of the high school years. Definitely a classic.

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Scrublands by Joe Daly
Finally picked up on HFC's suggestion to read some Daly. Well... it's OK. This book is dominated by a lengthy, semi-abstract strip called "Pre-Baby," which is actually quite good - a blobby human-like form drifts passively through landscapes that alternately suggest the inside of the body, the bottom of the sea, alien planets, and sexualized human forms, all on a journey towards a kind of birth. It's pretty cool, and Daly's pseudo-abstract cartooning is a lot of fun. It's surrounded by a whole bunch of shorter gag strips mostly starring a pair of slacker buddies, and those are very much not my kind of thing. In those strips, Daly's debt to American underground cartoonists is very obvious, and maybe a little bit too to 90s indie solo anthology guys like Clowes, Brown, Burns, etc. This work feels pretty derivative, very much already done, and it's kind of blank to me - not especially funny, and it's not at all clear what the point even is. Maybe the humor just goes over my head but I didn't really feel this book at all other than "Pre-Baby."

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Highbone Theater by Joe Daly
This was much more interesting to me, though I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it overall. It took me a bit to get really into it, but gradually its savage mockery of hyper-masculine, macho culture really started to win me over in a way the shorter strips in Scrublands never did. Daly's cartooning, it should be said first off, is at an extremely high level here, this stuff looks amazing. His beefy-bodied, tiny-headed caricatures have this amazing physicality and rubbery way of moving and gesturing that's just really fun to look at above all. And the book is an epic, nearly 600 pages long, but the imagery never really wears thin because Daly mixes it up really well, throwing in color segments and shifting between reality, dreams, hallucinations, movie scenes, and amorphous sequences in between these various levels of reality. Parts of this I find especially funny and satirically sharp. The protagonist, Palmer, is a bit of a loner and weirdo who never fits in with his stereotypical "bro" buddies, and I really got a kick out of all the scenes that parody that kind of dude-dominated party culture. Daly's use of awkward silences, juxtaposed with the goofy, strangely vulnerable-looking faces of his characters, makes a lot of these conversations really hilarious, odd, and even poignant in a way that's hard to precisely put a finger on. Good stuff. But it is a looooong book, and not all of it connects in quite the same way - a lot of the conspiracy chatter loses me, and unfortunately kind of takes over the book towards the end and I'm not at all sure what I'm meant to make of any of that stuff. Some of the portrayals of black people are also pretty :? and I'm not sure if I just feel that way because Daly is a white South African dude but it feels weird that in this book set in Africa, black people pretty much only pop up as figures of nightmare and violence - maybe that's meant to portray the perspective of these (white) characters, but it definitely feels half-baked at best. It's in stuff like that that I see why Wombatz could come away from this thinking it's stereotypically hyper-American, and not in a good way. Still, this is a pretty fascinating book and Daly is undeniably a top-notch cartoonist so even the parts that don't really work are still pretty wild to just look at, and I came away from this all the more intrigued by him overall even if I can't say I love this straight through.

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Frontier #16 by Ako Castuera
I'm probably always going to be the kind of philistine who likes the issues of this series that focus on comics best, but this sculpture showcase is still pretty neat. Castuera's work recalls various kinds of folk art but with lots of weird, subtle twists to it that betray a twisty personal mythology and an odd sense of humor. Her forms meld animals, bits of modern detritus, images of gods and mythological creatures, and painted patterns. The photographs are all really good and capture the details and nuances of her work up close really well. A nice little exhibit.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 6:35 am
by Wombatz
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ha ha ha indeed. after thoroughly enjoying some random issues of Eddie Campbell's Bacchus i ordered the cheapest trade i could find, it's volume 5, earth, water etc. well, this is not the way to read it, the complete story, one page after another, is a tough grind, lots of repeats, overexplanations, general stuffiness andsoforth. i'm too lazy to research the publication history of this, but the floppies mixed a few pages of this and that storyline to brilliant contrast and effect, constantly surprising and engaging. go for those, the trade explains too many jokes.

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somewhere i have a couple of self-released things by Vincent Stall, and as i remember they were real beauties, lovingly designed, fun to touch. Things You Carry came out in 2011 from 2D Cloud, and it's a bit too anonymously half-glossy. i think stall's original drawings for this had white as a third color (like on the cover on this one), and that looked much more memorable, the central character like a ghost separated from the surroundings. i'm stressing this so much because i had a hard time getting into the book/zine for this reason, the constant yellow/brown kind of makes the gaze slip across the pages. it's still pretty good though, splendid art and a nice little parable about the stuff that makes us us vs. the larger scheme of things.

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this is Hot Metal by Gabriel Corbera. very nice, a lone explorer coming to terms with the landscape around him and then the vampire bats come in. it's a bit less like an existential video game with much talk interrupted by fight scenes than his usual stuff (which i don't know too well) ... the art is somewhere between jon chandler and noel freibert and very cool, but he's not as good a writer as those two. still recommended.

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speaking of Jon Chandler, i've finally read the two-volume collection of his earlier zines and stuff, Be Careful What You Read. it's something like 700 pages, but a very quick read. especially the first volume is pretty great, not like a collection of diverse stuff at all, there is no indication what pages are from which zine, but like a developing narrative with recurring themes and characters. the main setting appears to be a somewhat over-familiar medieval retro-postapocalypse through which protagonists often move like through a video game (see corbera) doing battles and cracking wisely, but, contrary to other examples of this genre, the characters are complex, often strange customs underlying their doings, and much is left unexplained. (the comparison makes no sense, but he has a kind of gfrörer-like knack for historically allusive situations.) the second volume is a little more grabbaggish and should be 80 pages shorter, but there's still enough good things in it (all pics here from the second volume).

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Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 7:37 am
by sevenarts
Great reviews as always. I really need to read more Chandler, he looks pretty interesting.

Although:

Wombatz wrote:there is no indication what pages are from which zine, but like a developing narrative with recurring themes and characters.


I get why people do this when collecting old stuff but I kinda hate it. I like getting a sense of history when trawling through old zines and minis, seeing where the seams are rather than trying to hide them. I feel the same way about collections of floppies that try to erase the boundaries between issues too much.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:18 am
by HotFingersClub
Sevenarts! Good job checkin out Joe Daly - loved reading your thoughts and I'm glad you found things to enjoy. It being funny and fun to look at is a big part of its appeal to me. You're right about his treatment of black people. It's the same in all of his books: they barely appear apart from in strange peripheral roles. I don't know much about South Africa, and I wonder if it's less socially integrated than we might expect given the geography. I always find myself wondering if his portrayal is typical for media coming from white SA.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:22 am
by Wombatz
sevenarts wrote:
Wombatz wrote:there is no indication what pages are from which zine, but like a developing narrative with recurring themes and characters.

I get why people do this when collecting old stuff but I kinda hate it. I like getting a sense of history when trawling through old zines and minis, seeing where the seams are rather than trying to hide them. I feel the same way about collections of floppies that try to erase the boundaries between issues too much.

i guess i enjoy not being reminded that i already have a few of the minis :)

talking of chandler, issue 4 of john's worth should be out shortly, but that's probably not his strongest series, very beholden to tough guy road movie genre tropes ... also, here's a link to a recent story from a forthcoming breakdown press anthology https://partisanhotel.co.uk/The-Hitcher-ii

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:00 am
by HotFingersClub
I wrote a long and probably unnecessary evaluation of all of these and then lost it all in a crash, so you will have to make do with the knowledge that Incomplete Works and Jane are not good, Jessica Farm is a'ight and The Season of the Snake is real good and is recommended for fans of Moebius and euro-sci-fi in general

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Dylan Horrocks - Incomplete Works

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Aline Brosh McKenna & Ramon K. Perez - Jane

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Josh Simmons - Jessica Farm

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Serge Lehman & Jean-Marie Michaud - The Season of the Snake

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:52 pm
by sevenarts
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The Artist by Anna Haifisch
A collection of her Vice strips about a pathetic, struggling artist. Kind of one-dimensional and slight but undeniably funny too. The strip basically has one joke - artists are over-sensitive, socially hapless, and disconnected from the world - but the variations on that formula are well done and Haifisch's sense of humor is charming without sacrificing its edge. Her ratty, nervous line is perfectly suited to the themes of the strip, capturing the anxieties and hang-ups of her nameless protagonist. The overall aesthetic, especially the colors, remind me a lot of Michael DeForge though this isn't anywhere near his level of insight and depth. Not bad, anyway.

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Von Spatz by Anna Haifisch
New book from Haifisch and much better than The Artist, although the general aesthetic and the themes with which she's preoccupied remain mostly the same. This one is still concerned with artists and their follies but here she adopts a whimsical structure in which a trio of famous artists - Walt Disney, Saul Steinberg, and Tomi Ungerer - meet up at a psychiatric retreat where over-stressed artists go to recover. Without varying her style much, Haifisch seems to hit on something deeper here, with a series of deadpan anecdotes and uneventful moments gradually adding up to a quietly affecting (and wryly funny) book that deals with the intersections between creativity, capitalism, and mental illness. Where The Artist was straightforward, its jokes and point of view patently obvious on the most superficial readthrough, this book is gently absurdist and surreal, threading its ideas from one oddball image or scenario to another. Its ever-shifting, brightly hued desert landscapes recall Herriman more than DeForge this time, and its mixture of absurd humor and moody introspection makes it surprisingly poignant.

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Prison Pit Book 6 by Johnny Ryan
Long-awaited final volume of Ryan's nutso ultra-violent series. The protagonist Cannibal Fuckface, having previously fought his way through about 1,000 pages of gruesome monsters, piling up endless hills of entrails and body parts along the way, now runs the final gauntlet towards a bonkers confrontation with his ultimate nemesis, while completing his own transformation into an inhuman crystalline creature with no remaining connection to his former fleshy existence. Ryan comes up with some inventive body horror or new disembowelment method on nearly every page, with only the most minimal of dialogue to get in the way. Darkly funny, horrific, and liable to make you say "holy shit" every other page. Just an absolute testament to comics at their dumbest and best.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:41 am
by HotFingersClub
Picked up some cool shit at ELCAF this weekend

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Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 7:59 am
by sevenarts
Hell yea. That's a great haul, can't wait to hear your thoughts about some of those.

I ordered that Emily Carroll book recently too, looking forward to reading that as well.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:37 am
by Hot Piece

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:45 pm
by sevenarts
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A Western World by Michael DeForge
Always faintly disappointing to buy a book thinking it's new and find out it's a collection, mostly of stuff I already have. Still, when the material included is this good revisiting it in a new format is fun anyway. This gathers together a new crop of DeForge short stories from the last 5 or so years, from his 2 comics for Breakdown Press, his oneshot Placeholders from last year, his contributions to Island and Kramer's, etc. All fantastic stuff and despite the range of styles on display, it holds together really cohesively. "The Prime Minister of Canada," from On Topics, is a special highlight, in which the title character quietly mopes and slogs through the routine embarrassments, petty frustrations, and aggravating red tape of his boring job. His Island story, a straightfaced slice of absurdist horror in which Saturn becomes an odd afterlife for Earth's dead, is still astonishing, and "Placeholders" still rules even at a dramatically reduced size. There's some stories I don't recall seeing before too, which may mean I just don't remember but the bits that were new to me were great too, especially the final story, which is especially gorgeously drawn and colored, and is one of the most melancholy, moving pieces here. Another fantastic book from one of the best artists in comics, very much essential for anyone who doesn't have this stuff already, and maybe even for those who do, too.

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Beneath the Dead Oak Tree by Emily Carroll
Very cool newish minicomic from this master of fairy tale-like horror. This is beautiful, one of the prettiest comics I've seen from her, the colors especially are amazing. Formally this is pretty similar to the short stories in her big collection Through the Woods - styled halfway between a comic and a children's book, with many pages foregoing panels in favor of striking full page images with minimal text driving the narrative. Carroll's a gifted short story artist, her sense of pacing is impeccable and the way she uses repetition in the narrative, like in a classical fairy tale, is really elegantly done. Gorgeous, gory, and just a lot of fun to read while also being suffused with darker emotional undercurrents. She packs a lot into a few pages here, this is great.

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What Is Left by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
Another mini from the same UK publisher, Short Box, that did the Carroll comic. This one is a short sci-fi piece that's pretty rich and emotional, focusing more on mood than action. A spaceship fueled by the memories of a volunteer is destroyed, and one crew member survives in the heart of the engine, drifting like a ghost through the fragmented memories of the young woman who'd been powering the ship. It's another gorgeous comic, the fine-lined cartooning is really excellent and the pink and purple hues with which it's shaded overlay a consistent, somewhat melancholy atmosphere over everything. Reminds me quite a bit of Tillie Walden, never a bad thing.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:26 am
by HotFingersClub
You beat me to my own damn reading pile. Looking forward to those Shortbox books

Is there anywhere that has a complete list of what A Western World actually contains? I want new DeForge but I'd prefer not to double up

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:35 am
by HotFingersClub
I haven't seen that Prime Minister of Canada one before but it looks almost too real for my sense of personal responsibility and engagement with the world right now

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:10 am
by HotFingersClub
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Paul Buhle & Noah Van Sciver - Johnny Appleseed: Green Spirit of the Frontier
This is kind of interesting albeit definitely scholarly and a little dry. It's not the easiest read. It's a biography of the real man John Chapman behind the Johnny Appleseed story, but partly for lack of surviving detail, it digresses a lot into the character of frontier society at the time – the social and religious environment that produced Chapman – and posits his legend as being a kind of gentle, life-giving opposing force to more masculine, violent and expansionist American folktales like Paul Bunyan, John Henry and the whole cowboy thing. Van Sciver is working in the same vein as his own book The Hypo, and he's a good fit, but the tone overall is much more documentary or even scholarly dissertation than storytelling per se. I would have liked to have seen Van Sciver's own take on the story, whether he would have given it a more conventional (or engaging) dramatic structure.

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Sophia Foster-Dimino – Sex Fantasy
Really good, thanks Sevenarts. These are spacious, surreal expressions of certain obscure feelings that come about when we try to relate to other people. I loved a lot of them, and enjoyed each one pretty much more than the last, but particularly the one with the little woman getting trapped at a bus stop in a blizzard. It's a thick book but there's only one panel on each page, and it goes not much slower than a flipbook. Really excited to see something more substantial from her.

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Gary Panter – Jimbo in Purgatory
Really just posting this to see if anyone else is a fan, because to me it was impenetrable. Should I go back and try harder?

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Box Brown – Is This Guy for Real?
Box Brown's Andy Kaufman biography is clearly trying to capitalise on the success of his earlier Andre the Giant one, and I think he's chosen his subject well to capture a similar audience and a bit of thematic resonance. I liked it well enough, but it still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. Brown's got a fun thick line and an appealing cartooning style similar to DeForge, but is stylistically quite rigid (at least in his non-fiction), and it sometimes limits the art I think – some of these characters are not really recognisable as their IRL counterparts, although they mostly look distinct enough from each other. He focuses a lot on the wrestling in this book, on the feuds in particular, and it feels like the book suffers for it if I'm honest – the wrestling may have been a bigger part of Kaufman's life and personal interests (genuinely don't know about this – I've only seen Man on the Moon) but his impact seems much greater in the world of standup and character comedy, and it deserves more attention than Brown gives it. As with the Andre book, the insights seem pretty surface-level. Bit disappointing.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:56 am
by Wombatz
yes i'm also finding it difficult to really get into panter (of course he was a huge influence on stuff i really like (though i must admit that i find e.g. chippendale sometimes drags in a very similar way if in a lighter mood))

by coincidence, i tried reading the hypo some weeks ago and the thick texture of lines was quite nice to stare at, but apart from that i didn't see the point and soon gave up (it's like that complaint against some sort of films when they're just filmed theater, wooden to a stillstand, and not real movies ... that genre only in comics)

i enjoyed jessica farm much more than hfc did

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 1:11 pm
by HotFingersClub
I thought Jessica Farm was pretty good. Def not my favourite Simmons. Why did you like it? Have you read Hans Rickheit's books?

You aren't missing much with The Hypo, it's pretty boring. Disquiet is still the only Van Sciver book I've enjoyed

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:11 pm
by sevenarts
HotFingersClub wrote:Is there anywhere that has a complete list of what A Western World actually contains? I want new DeForge but I'd prefer not to double up


I don't know of a complete listing, but it definitely has all 4 stories from the Breakdown Press issues of On Topics #1-2, "Mostly Saturn" from Island, "Computer" from Kramer's Ergot, his large-format oneshot "Placeholders" from last year, and a couple of shorts from Lose. Not sure on the rest and at least a few stories I think are previously unpublished, or at least I didn't recognize them and I grab most everything I can find from him.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:20 pm
by sevenarts
Also, really psyched that you loved Sex Fantasy, too. It's an amazing book and I can't wait to see what she does next. I also highly recommend both issues of Lovers Only from Youth In Decline for more of her in the meantime - the first one has the story that introduced me to her and it's very much of a piece with the material in Sex Fantasy, except in color.

I love Gary Panter personally, he's in my canon for sure and Jimbo In Purgatory in particular is among my favorite comics. Which is not to say it's not impenetrable at times, or tough to get into. What I love about his art is the tension it has between different levels and different aesthetics. His trashy punk sensibility and ragged, scratchy lines suggest punky abandon and yet his comics are elaborately structured and formally very rigid. By the same token, he grabs very formal, classically literary texts and then places them into a context with pop culture detritus, post-apocalyptic imagery, wild abstractions, and goofy cartoony stereotypes. His comics read very differently to me than almost anything else. They're not really narrative works, even though they often recycle narrative structures from the texts they're pillaging. They're more meant to be pored over, explored, taking in the densely detailed pages, the way everything fits together into these amazingly designed full-page patterns and schemes. I can't think of any other artist in comics who so thoroughly deconstructs, interrogates, and outright pokes fun at the relationship between images, text, and design in comics. They're bracingly formalist comics and yet there's a real looseness and vibrancy in so many of the details that keeps it from being just dry academic exercises to me. Also, I'm not sure how you're reading it but Purgatory, like most Panter comics, is a BIG book, in terms of the page dimensions - I can't imagine how much it must lose on a tablet.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Fri Jun 29, 2018 5:25 am
by HotFingersClub
That's a brilliant defence, and you're right, I read it (or tried to read it) on my little notebook screen, and thought the density and crabbedness of it were a stylistic choice closer to what Jablonski does in Cryptic Wit. Maybe I can find a library that stocks the print version.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:50 am
by Wombatz
yes, sevenarts, thanks for that! i will admit that with comics i'm just not willing to put the work in, i want my instant gratification.
sevenarts wrote:They're not really narrative works, even though they often recycle narrative structures ...

that's probably even true for the other stuff! anyway, i have an older raw collection (jimbo: adventures in paradise) and the art is absolutely amazing, it's just that after a few pages i don't know what all the words are for, no proper jokes, no real narrative (except for the standard level of picaresque that automatically comes with moving from panel to panel), happily also no forced surrealisms where the protagonist goes "where am wtf's this", no heavy-handed allegories ... some pages are just great, but accumulatively the words wear me down, even when there are much fewer than in purgatory ...

purgatory i didn't really try, mostly because the source material already does mean something to me ... not to say that i read a lot of dante, but there are so many centuries of amazing pictures out of him, like, here's just a random first google hit ...

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anything from mathematical renaissance diagrams of the circles of hell to doré's nightmares ... that i must admit for once i find panter visually boring. so it does come down to the words, and they're many.

i also have the picturebox twofer, which has lots of great notebook pages but is a bit too posh for its own good. panter so much should be my cup of tea. maybe i'm just resisting that :-)

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:12 am
by Wombatz
HotFingersClub wrote:I thought Jessica Farm was pretty good. Def not my favourite Simmons. Why did you like it? Have you read Hans Rickheit's books?

it is my favorite simmons, but not for intelligent reasons, i just love the tone and (probably because of the way it was supposedly made, one page per month) its openness where the art will change along with the narrative, and that in some (and often different) ways, each page delivers ... hm, i don't see any connection to rickheit (haven't liked what i tried by him at all, too much easy surrealism (see above) and exploitative buttcheeks :oops: ), except maybe for the basic badass girl wandering the woods thing ...

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:30 am
by HotFingersClub
The butts are pretty lame in Rickheit. The first volume of Jessica Farm reminded me a lot of The Squirrel Machine - the grisly tone, the dreamlike shifting of place and the worldly/naive girl protagonist oscillating between childhood and mature sexuality. Particularly the long section where she's wandering through the house in company of those strange characters, each portal leading to another improbable space.

I really like the way Simmons handles interior space in general, especially in House (which is probably my favourite of his work). The way it keeps expanding and refusing to connect gives me a kind of videogame sense of exploring a haunted mansion - I'm always going to be drawn to the mysteries of sprawling houses. Rickheit's books, which are all the same, are almost a distillation of that feeling in that, unlike Simmons' work, they contain nothing else of interest, just the pleasure of trying to imagine how the rooms fit together.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:17 am
by HotFingersClub
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Liam Cobb – Conditioner
I loved this so much. Well, I could probably have done without the third story with the talking fish, but the rest of it was gorgeous, especially the centrepiece story about the demolition of the Heygate Estate, which juxtaposes brutalism with magic in a way which just spoke to me. I’m pretty familiar with this area of London and was tangentially involved with the Heygate demolition, and Cobb’s story does an incredible job in both art and narrative of capturing the desolation and the captivating tension of concrete and plantlife that fills spaces like the Barbican. At the same time, there’s something about it which feels like an early work – a sense that it’s underdeveloped or hasn’t found its own voice. I don’t mind though. I’m excited to start following Cobb’s output.

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Ian Edginton & D’israeli – Kingdom of the Wicked
This felt leaden after the ethereality of Conditioner. I have a soft spot for Edginton because I randomly read his Authority rip-off/spin-off The Establishment when I was getting into comics and really loved how much of it went over my head. This book is one of those stories where the protagonist goes back to his childhood fantasy world to find it’s been TWIZTED by a malevolent force. D’israeli, who is generally brilliant and underrated, does an excellent job of selling the horror, evoking the futurism of Lorenzo Mattotti’s Fires, but Edginton’s contribution still feels pedestrian – probably more so now than it did in 1997.

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Kyle Starks – Kill Them All
It’s another action comedy from the guy who brought you Sexcastle and Rock Candy Mountain, both of which are more enjoyable and sprightly than this one, which lumbers under the weight of its influences. In this one, a hard drinking tough guy cop and a beautiful assassin fight their way to the top of a tower block to kill a ganglord. There are some decent jokes in here but it feels like it was rushed out between the two aforementioned books and there’s a lack of fresh ideas.

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Tom Parkinson-Morgan – Kill Six Billion Demons v2
Yes, yes, fucking sick. First volume was great and this feels like a massive step forward. I still can’t get over how much visual detail and fascinating character designs he can cram onto every page, but now that the whirlwind tour is out of the way I’m actually getting really invested in the lore and the plot (if not quite the characters, it must be said) in a way that doesn’t really happen to me much anymore. The whole sequence in Nadia Om’s palace feels like it finally brings the series into a more comprehensible frame, and it immediately kicks off with massive blockbuster action while never sacrificing the visual fireworks. I’d be amazed if Parkinson-Morgan can sustain this intensity but I am 100% on board for this cool shit smorgasboard.

Re: Alternative/independent comics thread

PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:46 pm
by sevenarts
Nice reviews. Glad you dug that Cobb book, I think he's great though what you said about it feeling like early work resonated too and made me realize I have the same impression without actually forming it enough to put into words. Everything he does is cool and interesting but it definitely feels like he has the potential to go further eventually. He's got a great formalist's sensibility for space and pacing. He has a new book out I ordered the other day, looks to be in his more direct narrative vein which is cool because Slow Drift was nice.