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.
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."
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.
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.