The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
Batman is old… with a vengeance.
You Will All Die in Pain. by Derek M. Ballard
This was another impulse buy from December’s BCGF— one more spontaneous and fulfilling purchase than that Tom Gauld thing. I was drawn to this zine by its cover, which reminded me of an old Philip K. Dick book that I thought was A Maze of Death, but isn’t (I never figured out what I was thinking of). You Will All Die in Pain. is the approximate size of my smaller-than-average hand and only a few pages thick, but it packs in a half dozen attractively rendered vignettes. Content-wise, it keeps with the comix tradition of borderline-absurd bizarro sex, sometimes to its detriment— it takes a lot to make me uncomfortable, so, you know, err— eh. Be ready for that. But the pen work is very nice! And hey, I found a link to the publisher’s website, so take a look at that before you go.
The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld
I’m not gonna fib at you: this was an impulse buy, and I regret spending money on it. I bought it from a table at this year’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival for ten dollars because it’s an impressive object. It’s thick, it’s large, and it’s published on weighty tagboard. Tom Gauld is a fabulous artist with a great sense of humor. None of that is present in The Gigantic Robot.
It’s based upon an interesting concept: the right leaf of each spread features what is essentially the same image ten times. The whole book is about a dozen pages long; its bulk owes to the tagboard. It takes four or five minutes to ingest. There’s nothing wrong with what it is, but it could easily have been presented as a stapled and photocopied zine to exactly the same effect, minus the price. Whatever. I’m not even upset at all.
The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes
A note: I wrote this, miraculously, right after I read The Death Ray, which was right after I bought it from the D+Q booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival. So if this flesh-tearing analysis of a two-month old event seems stale, it is. Sorry, blogosphere. I have to publish these things in order for the same reason that I have to eat fruit loops alphabetically, by color. I’ve got a case of the crazies.
Let me explain to you the fallacy of the Brooklyn Book Festival (and of all book festivals, really): the aspect of someone’s personality which makes them really enjoy books is also the reason that they probably aren’t good at talking to strangers. So you set up nearly one hundred booths, stock them with interesting professionally- and self-published works, and nobody talks to anybody else. Those hired to man the booths manage to coerce a little bit out of each visitor, but not much. It’s true that the readings and panels are really great, but I personally don’t have the strength to wait in line for forty minutes just to be told that there aren’t any tickets left for a talk by someone who most likely lives within a fifteen minute walk from my apartment and gives sparely attended readings all the time. The booths have a lot of neat material, but there isn’t much you can do if you don’t feel like spending a shit-ton of money.
I caved. I dished out some of my prettier pennies on this at the D+Q table, and I don’t regret it. For one thing, Kate Beaton was signing her new book beside me, and I got to eavesdrop on a conversation in which a fan was defending Buffalo, New York (which is easily the worst place I have ever been), and Nova Scotia-native Beaton responded with “Yeah, people from Canada don’t really like that place.”
The Death Ray is an enjoyable read, but not nearly Clowes’s best. It falls in line with his post-Ice Haven oeuvre, in which he apes a different graphic style on each page. The story is typical of his LLoyd Llewellyn-archetype (also seen in Wilson, Pussey!, Mr. Wonderful, Ghost World, and almost every other book he’s put together) in which a sad, lonely guy who doesn’t really get it goes around not getting it, and then he ages. But it’s Clowes, and Clowes is good, so it is good.
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
A complete list of things which last forty days:
1. Lent;
2. Two consecutive gestation periods for the Norway (Common) Rat (females can carry a new litter within 18 hours of giving birth);
3. Four preparations for Amish friendship bread;
4. Six and two/thirds reenactments of the Six-Day War;
5. Books Ben Read unintentional hiatus.
Yes, it happened again. And, yes, those of you who are attentive readers (re:) may feel betrayed by the ostentatious claims I made about being more regular with this blog. Well, be betrayed no more! Because I no longer claim to be good, or regular. I don’t accept all the blame for this too-wide gap in time; this book made me do it. I had nothing to say about it; if all the amazing Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Egan and Marquez I read this year is fiber (this is an analogy about keeping “regular,” yes.), then this collection of stories from Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve series is a greasy, racist* Geno’s cheesesteak. I got all backed up.
I enjoy Tomine’s comics. Shortcomings is incredible. The Optic Nerves are beautiful, and expertly crafted, too. But this book, which collects four nearly identical stories about desperately lonely introverts who fawn over their memories of strangers, didn’t hit me. They were “meh,” at best. They are drawn very well; I grant him that. I need to get my blogging groove back, so instead of thoroughly analyzing these comics, I will leave you (footnote excluded, obvs) with the best sentences I’ve ever bootlegged, as lifted from here:
“In the movie Tron, there are men and women in tight clothing who throw discs and drive cars. Their world is not so different than ours. Bless us all.”
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*I’m not implying that Tomine is racist, or that his book is racist. This is purely a judgment upon the Geno’s Steaks restaurant in South Philadelphia, where I do not live and have never eaten. I had a sandwich across the street from there once, though.
Weathercraft by Jim Woodring
Goodness gracious, I am falling behind! Seriously. I read this book a month ago. How could that be? Well, for one, I have been moving. And it’s very difficult to read and move at the same time. And I’ve been working my way through what is perhaps the longest and most brain-straining book I have ever read (no spoilers), and I’m trying not to run out of posts to write before I finish. And I am very lazy. So here I am, trying to recall the contents of a book with almost no text in it that I returned to the library weeks ago.
Weathercraft is a “fable” from the world inhabited by Jim Woodring’s beaver/cat, Frank. It centers around a character called Manpig, and follows his exploits as he suffers through a psychedelic, evolving, intellectual adventure. Like the other Woodring book I wrote about, it’s hard to describe. A fantastic detail of Woodring’s work is his propensity to try to explain the plots of his (mostly wordless) comics in an eerily light-hearted appendix at the end of his books. The story is framed by two gargoyle-like witches who appear to be using magic to torture Manpig. In the appendix, the creator dubs these two characters Betty and Veronica, which is perhaps the funniest joke in the book. The appendix also features an FAQ section. It’s a quaint idea, especially since I’m certain nobody actually ever asked these questions, but without reading it, the story is indecipherable. It’s a neat trick. But Frank books aren’t about having plots explained; they’re about feeling craaazzzzzyyyyy.
The Frank Book by Jim Woodring
I ought to preface what you’re about to read by noting that I often don’t have the strength to fully explicate comic books, especially when explicating them is more an act of art criticism than a literary endeavor. I’ve written a post like this once before, and for some reason it was really popular. So I’m doing it again.
But first, here’s some background information: Jim Woodring published these various psychedelic comics as one-offs in magazines like Heavy Metal and Kerrang! during the 90s and 00s. They were very popular, mainly because they are very good. Note that Francis Ford Coppola, the notorious winemaker, wrote the introduction.
Without further ado, here is my blog post:
Frank is cool. He’s like a cat/beaver/human thing. And he lives in this trippy nonsense world. And everything that happens is like super weird but also like super duper profound. Like there’s this guy who’s the devil, or he looks like the devil, but really he’s more like a crazy metaphor for humanity or something. But the guy who is also part pig is also a crazy metaphor for humanity, because he’s helpless and shit. Then there are all these insane colors and shapes that totally do stuff. Some of the shapes have little faces— like Pushpaw and Pupshaw, who are shapes but also have sick names for pets. It’s sick.
Postscript: Suck it, internet.
Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka
Have you ever seen that movie Roujin-Z? It’s this anime from 1991, and if you haven’t seen it, I could most easily characterize it by saying it’s about Tokyo in the future, and that there’s a haywire supercomputer that ends up turning into a giant robot monster that destroys the city. Standard Japanese cartoon fare, no? Well, the interesting thing about Roujin-Z is that the movie is a highly didactic conversation about the state of modern elder care. Here is the trailer. The giant robot monster is a high-tech bed powered by the desires and fears of the comatose octogenarian plugged into it, and the protagonist of the movie is his former nurse, who worries that he isn’t being given enough individualized attention. It sounds really boring, but I swear to you that it is one of the most gripping animated films about the elderly I have ever seen, after, of course, Up. And it belongs to a celebrated genre of Japanese fiction called the “Medical Thriller.”
Ode to Kirihito is the presumed precursor to the medical thriller, which is way more popular in Japan than it is here, which is why I hadn’t heard of it until now. It’s written by Tezuka, the presumed “Godfather of Manga.” I spent the last ten years being skeptical of Manga, mostly because of the people who read it in my high school. This is different. This is very, very good. It’s more than 800 pages long, and every one of them is gorgeous. It’s political! There are dog-people! A woman gets deep-fried! It’s medical! It’s thrilling! And it was written in 1971, way before manga became the Shonen Jump-merchandising-lowest-common-denominator-shitstorm it resembles today. This book reminds me of Coppola way more than it does Tenchi Muyo.
Louis Riel by Chester Brown
How on Earth could a story about the founding of the province of Manitoba in Canada be even remotely interesting? Seriously— It plays the role of headpiece to Minnesota, America’s most boring state. And it’s in Canada, the Mexico of the North Pole! And yet, this isn’t the first wildly fascinating piece of semi-nonfiction I’ve encountered regarding the region. The first is the Guy Maddin movie My Winnipeg, which falsely but amusingly claims that the eponymous provincial city is the sleepwalking capital of the world, and that buffalo are attracted to the neighboring Red River by powerful underground magnets, as well as a host of other “wish-it-were-really-true”s. It is, by the way, one of my favorite movies. Winnipeg, Manitoba is also the setting of Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, another favorite of mine. But how could non-fiction about anything that happened before 1900—especially if it takes place in Central Canada—not be excruciatingly boring?
One: It has to look like a Tin-Tin comic. Brown explicitly states in his notes that Herge wasn’t an influence on his layout and style for his book. He instead cites Harold Gray, whose work I am infinitely less familiar with.
Two: Brown cites a different historical document for every panel on every page of this book. It sounds excessive, but sometimes it’s reassuring to know the dialogue from a work of historical fiction is pulled directly from a court document or surveying bill or whatever else Brown culled from. The research on this book must have taken years. And this stuff is really interesting! Who knew that Canada’s history was so political?
Three: Brown is very, very good. If I Never Liked You is light salad, then this book is Porterhouse Steak. It took me multiple sittings to finish, it challenged and enlightened me, and I can safely say that it is one of the best comic books I have ever read. Move over, Sandman, Vol. 4: Seasons of Mist! You’ve got company.
I Never Liked You by Chester Brown
There is something that I need to clarify (and by need I mean want, and by clarify I mean proclaim, so that is to say, there is something I want to proclaim). I’ve hit a real lag between book-read time and blog-post time. Almost three weeks, in fact. I read I Never Liked You nearly three weeks ago. In the interim period, I have read two magazines, three books, and, this morning, the back of a box of Wegman’s brand Toasted Oats cereal. And much, much internet stuff. I also graduated from college. And I saw Chester Brown read from and discuss his newest book, Paying For It, a “graphic memoir” about being a john. He’s completely open about his sexual history, which seems unusual for a guy who looks like a toned-down version of Jackie Earl Haley. He also discussed his views on prostitution (he’s for it, although I should note that it’s already decriminalized and regulated in his home state of Canada) and romantic love (he’s against it). The recent release of his book was great timing; I had just managed to discover him through both my school’s library and this article by Ed Park, about Brown’s compulsive note-writing. What I gathered by reading and observing is this: Chester Brown isn’t remotely concerned with how people perceive him. And he doesn’t need to be. He’s too honest to care.
