Tagged: comics

The hardest thing, for me, is to write on a book about normal people’s normal lives — without the genre trappings of excitement and violence, without the framework of some standard plot, without being able to do the Hollywood high concept thing of matching a new work with X and Y from the past. When that book is in comics form, and a lot of the heavy lifting of emotion and connection and scene-setting and time passing is done through art, it’s even harder: I’m not artistically trained, and I don’t have a strong vocabulary to talk about those elements.

So, um, Equinoxes is a big, stunning book, sprawling across a whole year and a large chunk of France, with a large cast, not all of whose names we learn. It comes from Cyril Pedrosa, who in that European-comics style is usually credited with just his last name, and whose work I haven’t seen since the heartbreakingly wonderful Three Shadows in 2008.

Pedrosa organizes his book around the four seasons, starting in autumn — and, yes, he is eliding solstices into equinoxes to make the structure work, but let’s not be too much astronomical sticklers right now, OK? Each section begins with a wordless series of small panels about a Mowgli-like hunter-gatherer, somewhere at some time. (We will get other hints about him later.) Then the main action begins, set in France in what I think is the present day. (But everyone has flip phones, so maybe it’s supposed to be about ten years ago, sometime in the mid-aughts.)

There are two main clusters of characters, one centered on the middle-aged divorced orthodontist Vincent and his teenage daughter Pauline and the other on the aged ex-radical Louis. There’s also a photographer, not connected to either of those groups, who wanders through the action, another young woman, a little older than Pauline, trying to find her place in the world and work that will give her meaning. There are two kinds of text interruptions to the flow of comics — one is directly the thoughts of the photographer as she grapples with her life, and the other, I think, is her flow-of-consciousness impression of the person she’s just photographed. She adds another level of art to Equnoxes, which already is about, at heart, the big questions: what gives meaning to life, how should we live, how do we relate to each other, what brings people together and pulls them apart.

This is not a book of plot. It is a book of connections and daily life, of moments that feel small at the moment but maybe aren’t, of what to do with today and tomorrow and tomorrow, of the things that break into your life and shake it all up.

If I were French, I think I’d know where this takes place: it’s somewhere specific, I think, a small city on or near the coast. The places in it are real and solid, and we see a few of them repeatedly from different angles and in different seasons.

The people are equally real: Vincent is a bit of an asshole, but he knows it and fights against it. Louis is worn out from his life and detached from the things others think he should engage in. Pauline is quiet except when she explodes, hiding behind earbuds like so many other teenagers. And there are many more — some of whose names we figure out easily, some who appear once in one context and then loop back doing something else, some who only wander through once.

The cover is appropriate both thematically — two people, in a moment of conversation but entirely separate and not looking at each other — and as an important moment of the story. But I’m afraid it will look cold and distant, and this is not a chilly book. Equinoxes does require time and a willingness to let events flow, like an independent film, but it is lovely and true and has a deep wellspring of humanity in it.

I thought Three Shadows was a masterpiece; Equinoxes is as much of one — big and expansive and gorgeous. (Pedrosa is also doing a lot of things with his art — colors for the season and places and people — that I can point to but not explain in any depth.) I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who cares about people and their lives…which I hope is all of us.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

We all love a good story. And a behind-the-scenes story can be even better than the story told in the book itself. “Heroic editor spends years of his life trying to assemble a massive, global collection with contributions by the best in the field, but the book never sees the light of day” is a great story. That’s the story Bob Levin told in a 2009 issue of The Comics Journal, about Michel Choquette and his massive book The Someday Funnies, which was almost published in the 1970s, and how all of the pages of completed art were still in storage, never seen but ready to go at a moment’s notice.

That was a wonderful story, and it led to the actual publication of The Someday Funnies in 2011, with those hundred-and-fifty pages of 1970s comics displayed on oversized pages and introduced with commentary by comics historian and critics Robert Greenfield and Jeet Heer plus Choquette’s own account of the path to creating Someday, and closed out with the usual author bios and behind-the-scenes details and an index.

Unfortunately, the actual comics don’t live up to the hype. They’re often jokes, almost all time-bound — because the stated theme of the anthology was to be a look back at the just-ended ’60s — and only a page or two apiece. Yes, the list of contributors is impressive — from Russ Heath and Jack Kirby to art spiegelman and Vaughn Bode, from Frank Zappa and William S. Burroughs to Rene Goscinny and Jean-Claude Forest, from R.O. Blechman and Ed Subitzky to Harlan Ellison and Federico Fellini — but what they contributed is much less impressive. There’s nothing here that I’d expect to see again outside of this context, other than spiegelman’s strip “Day at the Circuits,” which he reworked from the ’72 Someday original into a ’75 version for his comic anthology Arcade. Some of it is OK, some of it is incomprehensible without notes or specialized knowledge (I remembered who Vaughn Meader was, but how many people will?), and some of it rises to the level of pretty good. And some just looks like self-indulgence, of the kind that the ’60s has been inspiring at the time and ever since.

Now, it’s true that thirty-nine years is a long time for expectations to build up, and Someday Funnies grew out of a planned comics supplement for Rolling Stone magazine in 1972. But it kept growing, until the Rolling Stone piece would be just a teaser for the upcoming book, and then RS pulled out, and then a series of actual or potential book-publishing deals also fell through, leaving Choquette with a Montreal self-storage unit full of comics and correspondence and no use for them in 1979. It’s not Choquette’s fault that it didn’t happen…well, maybe it was. He could have delivered that original RS supplement and then moved on to a larger project. He could have closed out the book at some point, and kept the scope limited and specific. Frankly, at this distance, it looks like the usual story of a deal-maker high on his own deal-making, wanting to keep going with the fun part of the job (signing up artists, finding new talent, flying around the world) and avoid the vital anthology work of making choices and finalizing the package. (I think he did do the latter, eventually — but probably too late, and maybe not strongly enough to make a publication date in the 1970s.)

Someday Funnies is an interesting artifact, a comics time-capsule of both comics-makers in the early ’70s and the cultural impact of the ’60s when it was still fresh; as far as I can tell, all of these strips were done between 1970 and 1974. (For all of the details of Choquette’s travels and work here, there’s no explanation of which strips were delivered and finalized when; no timeline of the actual work assembled here.) One of Choquette’s less inspired requirements of the original project, that every piece include a blank space that would be used for some unifying element to be decided on later, was eventually filled by new 2011 art by Michael Fog, depicting Choquete’s travels in the ’70s. Again, the background story is the more interesting, vital one — the way this book came to be is more exciting than the actual thirty-five-year-old strips it contains.

One last consumer note: Someday Funnies is a physically big book, the size of a tabloid newspaper. So it can be cumbersome to hold and read as well, and some people may find it difficult to store. (I don’t intend to keep my copy permanently, so I don’t have that problem.)

I’m glad Someday Funnies was eventually published, and all of the contributors — well, those who hadn’t died in between — got to finally get paid and see their work in print. That also was the perfect end to the real story of interest here, of Choquette and his travails. But you don’t need to read or care about the book to know and appreciate that story, and it may be easier to care if you haven’t read it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Yeah, it did take me until now to finally read Herbie. It is so much exactly the kind of thing that I would like that the delay seems weird, but it’s a big world, and you can only do one thing at a time. I finally got to this particular thing, and can finally talk about it.

But wait! You say. Did I come in the middle of something? What on earth are you going on about?

All right, all right. Herbie Popnecker was the “hero” of a series of stories from the American Comics Group, for about a decade from 1958 through 1967 — first as one-off stories in anthologies, then as the star of twenty-three issues of his own comic in 64-67. He’s a short, fat, torpid, laconic kid with heavy-lidded eyes, a bowl haircut, and a lollipop always in his mouth, whose father is constantly complaining about him and calling him a “little fat nothing.” He doesn’t like sports or schoolwork or playing with other kids; at home he tends to sit in a straightback chair and doze, and we don’t see him at school or interacting with his peers.

So far, so promising for a humor title, right? Sounds just like the thing in the ’50s-’60s burst of teen-interest comics, with Archie and Binky and Scooter!

Well, Herbie was more than just a little fat nothing, luckily. He was also world-famous, almost omnipotent, and oddly resourceful. His lollipops gave him superpowers — this is slightly inconsistent, since sometimes he seems to have power merely because he is Herbie — and his aid is regularly sought by US Presidents and UN Secretary-Generals. Gorgeous women swoon at his approach. Vicious animals flee when they realize who he is. He travels in time, via lollipop and a flying boat-like grandfather clock, and can walk under the oceans and across empty space to reach distant planets.

And, if threatened, all he needs to do is ask “You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?” Herbie’s bop is a force that can frighten the greatest forces in the universe — in just this book, we see suns, dragons, and Satan himself cowed by it.

That is one weird mix of elements, and it doesn’t seem like it should work. But ACG editor Richard E. Hughes (writing as “Shane O’Shea”) kept a deadpan tone around Herbie, making it all strangely plausible. And Ogden Whitney drew all of the stories in a solid, straightforward style — both of them as if to drain any possible insinuation of imagination out of the stories, as if to prove Herbie’s adventures must be plausible if they are this normal-seeming.

It worked. It still works, now: some elements are a little outdated (the supernatural creatures are somewhat comic-booky and of their time), but most of Herbie is unique and sui generis. And many individual panels are still laugh-out-loud funny after fifty-plus years.

The first third of the Herbie stories were collected in 2008 as Herbie Archives, Volume One , which is what I finally read. There are two more volumes, collecting the rest of the Herbie stories, which I now need to dig up and read. If you like weird comics, you probably already know about Herbie. If you’ve never read him, you’ll probably want to move him up in the queue — this is still really good stuff, nutty and crazy in all the best midcentury ways.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Oh, look — another comics series I’m still poking my way through, a year or so after it ended! There are ten volumes of the collected Chew, so I’m three or four years behind at this point. I don’t see any particular reason to be concerned about this — not reading a book right when it comes out doesn’t harm anything, or cause a single problem — but I do seem to be doing a lot of it lately.

Anyway: Chew, Vol. 6: Space Cakes . Right smack-dab in the middle of the weird alternate-world detective story by John Layman (words) and Rob Guillory (pictures). See my reviews of volumes one and two and three-through-five (during one of my periodic reviewing bankruptcies) if you care; don’t if you don’t.

This is a comic-book world, coming out regularly in pamphlet form from a major publisher. And that means that, even if this isn’t officially a superhero comic, it will tend to bend in that direction, as a tree growing in a continuous wind will be bent. So this world is, by this point, chock-full of people with weird powers, all of which (this is Chew‘s particular shtick) are food-related. We started with Tony Chu, who can read the history of something by eating it, and this book focuses on his twin sister Toni, who can see the future of the things she eats.

She works for NASA, another one of the super-powerful government agencies (along with the FDA and USDA) in this alternate world. And she’s bubbly and goofy, as befits this goofy series. So, while Tony is in a coma (more or less) Toni takes over for a few issues of culinary mayhem and derring-do. The usual supporting cast runs around doing their thing — including an included one-shot of the murderous rooster Poyo — but this is Toni’s story.

It’s not exactly a good story for her, in the end, but saying more would get into spoiler territory. And the last few pages imply the book will go back to being about Tony, as we’d expect. So this is a big chunk of middle, though it’s chewy, flavorful middle, in a banquet where we know exactly when the dessert and brandy will be coming.

Sidebar: Hey, I haven’t complained about anyone’s ONIX feed for a while! This book was published in January of 2013, and the publisher, Image, still hasn’t managed to upload (to the major online stores) a version of the cover with words on it yet. This is appalling, and if I rated books on some kind of a scale, they’d definitely lose points for that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Note: I didn’t plan to read this book and have the review land on Halloween — that was purely random. But it’s nice when things work out so appropriately, isn’t it? 

There are books where you wonder why anyone ever thought they were a good idea — how they could possibly have come into existence. A fully-painted series of comic books in which a sweaty-looking Superman and Batman trade dreams as part of the schemes of an undead Scottish laird to beat a random female demon would fall into that category for a whole lot of people.

But, once you realize that comics not uncommonly come into existence because the then-hot artist had a list of things he really wanted to draw, it starts to make more sense. Legends of the World’s Finest , the book in question, has introductions from both writer Walt Simonson and painter Daniel Brereton in which both of them pretend this was a good or at least plausible idea to begin with. (In their defense, it was 1993, when the spandex-dudes industry was teetering on an unsustainable peak of grimacing, variant covers, belt pouches, bad art, and speculator hype. A lot of things looked like good ideas at the time from inside the industry. And Brereton, unlike some artists of that era, was hot because he paints creepy, gorgeous art, so the demon-plot at least was driven by his obvious strengths.)

This Legends is also from long enough ago that it feels more like the wordy comics of the ’70s and ’80s than the more stripped-down style of the last twenty years — everyone here yammers on a lot, and the narrative voice gets into the action, too, telling us things we can clearly see in the panels repeatedly. I’m too lazy to look up whether the “real” Superman was officially dead or alive when Legends was published — it was right in the middle of that foofaraw, when first he was dead, then he was four other people, and then he suddenly wasn’t dead and wasn’t any of them, either — but it’s from that era of comics, when the Big Two companies were throwing everything they could think of at the wall, with the Image founders doing the same with even less likely things, and nearly everything was sticking.

For a while, at least. The wall wised up before too long, and a hell of a lot of things suddenly stopped sticking very soon after this. And a lot of projects that worked well enough in the inflationary era look silly and ridiculous afterwards.

Again, which brings us back to Legends. It is silly. I won’t say that it’s actually ridiculous, but it and ridiculous are close enough neighbors to share a snow-blower this winter. It has Batman and Superman act wildly out of character on purpose, but doesn’t manage to wring any humor, or much drama, out of that. It manages to feel much longer than its hundred-and-fifty-ish pages. For a presumably out-of-continuity Prestige Format series, it’s remarkably mired in the dull continuity of the era. (Superman thinks about his last encounter with Blaze, the female demon! It features the character sensation of never, the who-ever-cared-about-her Silver Banshee!)

There are a lot of big elements here that just don’t come off as big. The world is nearly destroyed, yet again, but it’s ho-hum. There’s way too much talking, none of it in words that are surprising or interesting. And it teaches the great superhero lesson that evil people can never change, so you should never ever help anyone who asks.

Everyone has probably forgotten this even existed. They were pretty much right to do so. But the Brereton art is still quite impressive, especially if you want to see a sweaty, bodybuilder-esque Superman lurching around. That’s the most positive thing I can say about it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This is not a limited series. I know: I was surprised, too. But Peter Bagge’s afterword, which explains the history of Sweatshop , makes it clear that it was intended to be ongoing, and that he would have been happy to keep it running for a much longer time.

That didn’t happen: Sweatshop got a six-issue run from DC in 2003, when that company was in one its periodic throes of trying to broaden its range, which was followed by the inevitable and equally periodic pullback to its core competency of grimacing people in spandex punching each other repeatedly.

Sweatshop is not about spandex, or punching. It does have its share of grimacing, and other extreme facial expressions, because we are talking about Peter Bagge here. But, otherwise, it doesn’t look much like a good fit for DC. Our central character is Mel Bowling, a comics creator on the far side of middle age. He’s the credited creator of the syndicated strip Freddy Ferret — though it’s really put together by his oddball crew of young, underpaid assistants — and a lazy, narcissistic golf-playing blowhard.

(The set-up is not unlike some manga about manga-making — Bagge doesn’t mention any inspirations, or Japanese comics at all, in his afterword, but it’s at the very least a striking case of parallel development.)

Reading the first issue, I thought it would feature Bagge’s art on stories about the whole team and his fellow artists (Stephen Destefano, Bill Wray, Stephanie Gladden, Jim Blanchard, and Johnny Ryan also contribute art to these stories) each picking up from the POV of one of the assistants. That would have been neat, and more formally interesting, but it’s not the way the series ended up going: the feint in that direction was apparently a scene-setting one-off for that first issue. Instead, there’s mostly a lead story for each issue drawn by Bagge, and then additional stories drawn by one or more of the others, in the style of old humor comics.

The stories are all about that crew in Bowling’s studio — worrying about the “Hammie” awards, planning and going to the big Comic-Con, dealing with a new writer joining the team, and various career and personal issues for all of them. It’s not quite as zany and slapstick as Bagge got in the ’80s and ’90s, but these are broad characters who do crazy things: it’s a lot like a sitcom on the page.

Sweatshop is funny, and probably even funnier the more you know about strip comics: I suspect Bagge buried jokes and references I didn’t get among the ones I did see and laugh at. Some readers may find the changing art styles distracting, though they all are in the same tradition — Bagge’s rubber-hose arms and googly eyes are probably the most extreme, cartoony style here, with the others giving a (sometimes only very slightly) more restrained version of the same look. What can I say? It’s a funny collection of stories about comics and comics people, and a decade has only dated it slightly. (A contemporary version would definitely have at least one issue full of webcomic jokes.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The great thing about history is that it never stops being history. It might technically get older, but, realistically, a hundred years is the same as a hundred and twenty. Old is old, dead is dead.

So I can read the tenth anniversary edition of a book four years later without feeling any guilt, because the guy it’s about has been dead since 1885 anyway. He’s not doing anything new in the meantime.

I am, of course talking about Chester Brown’s historical graphical comic-book thing Louis Riel , one of the works that most deforms the common usage of the term “graphic novel.” (So I’m avoiding using it directly.) Brown himself is one of those quirky Canadian oddballs that comics seems to throw off regularly — not quite as monomaniacal and misogynistic as Dave Sim, definitely further down the spectrum than seems-to-mostly-just-be-eccentric Seth, and probably about equal with world-class work-avoider Joe Matt — with his own very defined passions and crankish ideas that mostly stay out of this primarily fact-based book. (Riel did claim to have direct knowledge of the divine, which could easily have been one of the things that attracted Brown to his story — but that’s material that was already there waiting for him. And women are almost entirely absent from this story of 19th century politics and war, whether because of Brown’s views or because any contributions they made were quiet at the time and ignored thereafter.)

I can’t speak from any personal knowledge of Riel’s story, or any previous scholarship. My sense is that Brown followed the generally accepted scholarly consensus at the time, and that his telling is as “true” as any book of history: it’s what most experts think happened, in broad outlines, even if some of them probably argue violently with each other about individual details. And that is the old sad story of distant elites of one ethnicity scheming to disenfranchise (or worse) a minority they don’t like within a burgeoning territory they control.

In this case, it’s the English-descended government of Canada, mostly in the person of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, planning how best to cut up and use a vast section of the mid-continent prairies and deliberately alienating, damaging, and snubbing the locals, particularly the population of mixed French-native background called Metis. (That area eventually became the province of Manitoba, if that helps place it in space and time.)

The Metis people were not happy with this, of course. “No taxation without representation” is only one specific expression of an age-old problem: those people over there, with all the power and most of the guns, are telling us to do things we don’t think they should have any say in. The Metis fought back, and Louis Riel is the man who became their leader — it seems, from Brown’s telling, that was because he was right there when the first clash happened on Metis land, and because he spoke English well enough to be a go-between. And he was strong-willed and charismatic to stay in that role. Brown presents him as the leader of his people, and doesn’t get into any power struggles that might have happened within the Metis community, even as we suspect they must have happened.

Riel eventually led two different rebellions against the government of Canada. As Brown tells it, he was goaded and guided into doing so by Macdonald and others, who knew they would win militarily and preferred the simplicity of bullets to the messiness of actually doing their political jobs of compromising and allowing all voices to be heard. It’s a sad, sordid story, basically a tragedy: Riel was unstable and mentally ill (that supposed direct connection with the divine), which possibly kept him from finding a better solution for his people. Or maybe they were doomed from the beginning, since the other side had the government, the railroad, most of the guns, more money, and their own racism to convince themselves they were firmly in the right.

Brown tells the story well, focusing on Riel’s life and actions and using a clean six-panel grid — he gets out of the way of his story almost entirely. This looks like a Chester Brown story, since his art is distinctive, but it reads like compelling reality, without the surrealistic breaks and self-obsessions of his earlier works. There’s a reason this has become a Canadian classic; it tells an important story well. This edition includes an extensive collection of sources and notes, plus a section at the back with sketches, original comics covers and other related stuff. To maximize the scholarly heft, there’s an essay by an academic to close the whole thing out. But most readers won’t bother with that anyway. The book itself is enough: it tells a story we’ve seen many times before, but need to be reminded of regularly.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.