This book was shorter than I expected, so today’s post should be quick.

Last time around with Jim Benton, I read and enjoyed his all-ages graphic novel Attack of the Stuff  but noted that I might be getting to the end of the all-ages bits, leaving only the definitely-for-middle-graders books. (And, don’t get me wrong: middle graders are fine people who deserve awesome books, but I’m not one of them and haven’t been for some time.)

And that seems to be true: from here, Benton’s work is a vast sea of Frannie K. Stein and My Dumb Diary, plus a clutch of board books for even younger people. There are some other things in graphic format that I might be tempted to look at eventually – the Catwad  series, maybe Batman Squad  – but they are very clearly middle-grade-y, and, again, I am at a different point in my life right now.

Quite a Mountain  calls itself “a fable for all ages.” I pretty much knew what that meant going in, and I bet you do, too: short, accessible, with some kind of a message, a book designed to sit by the cash register and sell itself to the random passers-by. It’s hard to tell, since I read it digitally, but I would bet serious money that it’s in a small, gift-y format as well. I read it within maybe fifteen minutes, and I was trying to stretch it out.

I tagged it as “comics,” but it’s an illustrated book – one big drawing to a page, with typeset text to accompany it.

So there’s a bear and his friend, a frog, at the bottom of a mountain. The frog is mildly disgusted at the idea of a mountain at all, but the bear decides to climb it. He does. He comes to various things on the mountain, finds a place to live for a while, but…you know the metaphor, you know the lesson.

To Benton’s benefit, he never leaves the metaphor or says the lesson clearly. He’s telling a story about a bear. Any lessons are up to the reader. And he’s got a lovely stark illustrative line in the drawings and his usual casual quick writing: this is a book that feels light and fun and amusing on every page. It’s not setting itself up seriously in any way.

But this is inherently a “you can do it!” book, to be given to new graduates or bought by people to cheer themselves up. It’s a fine mini-genre, and it will always be with us. I’m not complaining, just defining. Benton has the attitude I share towards the matter and the genre: not entirely believing in it in its purest form, but clear that nothing comes without effort. And clear that “effort” is annoying and not what you want to do most of the time.

So this is a solid fable, with no detectable saccharine – unlike most of its cohort – by a fine creator.

I’ll just end by giving the last word to the frog:

I’m not going to tell you that you can’t do this, because that would be discouraging. But I am thinking it. I am thinking it pretty hard. 

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

I fight with my tags, here on the blog. They tend to proliferate, with a core that I use a lot and a loose penumbra of things that I thought I’d use more often (Circles of Hell! Class War Follies! High Finance! Kids Today! Pedantry!) but just have a few random posts.

And there are areas where I keep thinking my one tag is too big and not entirely useful, but going back to re-tag would be insane. Such as Comics, a tag used on a full quarter of all the posts here. Clearly, that’s not doing its job. Breaking it into Webcomics and Masked Punching and The Smell of Newsprint and who knows what else would be more useful, but I know I will never, ever find the tens of hours that would take.

So, today, I have yet another comic. This one is a webcomic , and, as I seem to be saying a lot lately, I’m not sure if it’s still active. (That site throws the scary “not secure” warning in modern browsers, and the last comic was posted about a year and a half ago.) But there was at least one book, in 2017, which I just read, so it will live for the ages in at least that form.

The book is Lunarbaboon: The Daily Life of Parenthood , and, as is pretty typical for a general strip collected, it’s a somewhat thematic collection of the first two years or so of the strip. Now, I’m pretty sure Lunarbaboon – from what I’ve seen of it, here and there, over the last roughly a decade – was mostly about the main character’s relationship with his kids, but not entirely. This collection, as I think is the standard for a major-company series-launching comics collection (this is an Andrews McMeel book), wants to be easily categorized and grabbable, so it’s pitched as a companion to Fowl Language and Baby Blues and so forth.

Cartoonist Christopher Grady is more webcomicy than that, though: this isn’t a gag-a-day strip, but closer to a work of therapy. I get the sense Grady cartoons to make sense of existence, to understand his life and the world. So he has humor, but it’s not about getting to a joke – his strips are more ruminative, even mildly depressive, about fighting with sadness and feelings of unworthiness.

It can get a bit pop-psych for me sometimes, but it’s always honest, and I get the sense that it’s been useful for Grady – not just professionally, since he did it online for a decade and got a book out of it, but personally, as a way to contextualize the world and find an audience that sympathizes with his concerns and thoughts.

I guess I’m saying that Lunarbaboon is fun, and often humorous, but don’t go into it looking for Big Laffs. Go into it looking for the story of a guy who often feels overwhelmed by life – like so many of us, so much of the time – and how he copes with that, with the help of his family. And, of course, some of the crazy things his kids do, to either kick him out of depression or send him chasing after them to stop that crazy thing before something worse happens.

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

First of all: this volume contains two things, which it does say pretty clearly: the title is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist , after all. There’s one new book – Campbell dislikes the term “graphic novel,” so I’m going to see if I can consistently avoid it here – and one old book, with somewhat convergent concerns.

The old one is The Fate of the Artist, originally published in 2006, in which “Eddie Campbell” disappears, or maybe is replaced by the actor playing him in this comic. I’m shocked to realize that came out more than a decade and a half ago; time refuses to stand still until I can catch up with it.

The new one is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell, and that comes first here.

Well, let me back up: I read this digitally, so the two books were run together, with Second Fake first and Fate second, each with their own covers and titles and other accoutrements. As I understand it, the physical book is in flip-book format, with the two titles bound back-to-back. (Should I drag out a random half-remembered bit of publishing slang and call that a dos-á-dos? Sounds super-pretentious when I do so.)

I read Fate when it came out, but that was so long ago that it was just before the Days of This Blog, so I have no record of my opinions to which to link you. (How did we live in the Before Times, when opinions disappeared like puffs of smoke and we had to try to reconstruct them in memory, instead of keeping them perfectly still and fixed forevermore?)

Fate is mildly mixed-media, with photos standing in for comics panels and pages of type sitting alongside conventional comics pages – and, as you might guess from the title and subject, pretty post-modern and self-referential. This is a book about itself, about being a book by Eddie Campbell about Eddie Campbell in which Eddie Campbell is missing and so, logically, it is not actually by Eddie Campbell after all. It’s also the kind of book that comments on itself – Campbell also includes throughout a pseudo-gag-a-day comic called “The Empty Nesters,” looking like it’s from the early 1900s, which is not exactly about his and his wife’s life, but clearly was at least a jokey version of that life.

One reason I enjoy Fate – and this is pretty idiosyncratic – is that it’s clearly the last of the Campbell autobiographical comics of the Australia period. He’d been telling stories about himself, both as comics and in the text features and interstices of his monthly Bacchus comics throughout the ’90s and the beginning of the Aughts, showcasing his life as a Scottish guy living Down Under, giving glimpses of his three children growing up, and presenting his life as a guy who drank wine and “ran a business (the Bacchus comics) out of the front room.” The kids are nearly grown in Fate, and I don’t think we see them again in Campbell’s work: they moved out, got their own lives. (And, as Second Life mentions in passing, that wife divorced Campbell somewhere in the meantime, so Second Life sees Campbell and his now-wife, the novelist Audrey Niffenegger, living in the USA, which feels like the wrong milieu after so long elsewhere.)

Second Fake is just as post-modern, but slightly less collage-y – it has lots of pieces, but the pieces are all more centrally comics. There’s the autobio narrative, with a be-masked Campbell and Niffenegger navigating the weird world of late lockdown – that odd era when we all thought we couldn’t get haircuts and maybe would never interact with other people ever again. Interspersed are single panels of “Life in Lockdown,” repurposed hundred-year-old gag comics that Campbell is mostly retextualizing rather than reworking. There’s also a private detective, Royler Boom, who is hired by Niffenegger to find the missing Campbell, in a plotline that deliberately fizzes, as the “real” Niffenegger complains that she wouldn’t do any of that.

There are also “strips” titled “Life’s Too Complicated” and “Dreams of the Fiend,” to tease out other themes of the story, and some ideas for books (the supervillain group/heist caper Covid’s Nineteen! the screaming adventures of Karen!) that Campbell abandoned either before or while working on this. Second Fake is partially a record of a time of uncertainty and confusion – both societal and personal, as Campbell started and gave up on multiple ideas before pulling together…well, the book we have now.

Both pieces of this book are kaleidoscopic, both try to center Campbell as a creator and manipulator while (inconsistently) shoving him as a person away from the center of the story. Fate is cleaner and better organized; Second Fake is one of those pandemic creations where just the act of making something new out of chaos was a big win. They work well together, but I’d recommend reading them in chronological order, which isn’t what I did.

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

I admit this is a weird thing I do: I read full books from webcomics that I don’t follow. But I want to argue that it isn’t weird.

First, why would I want to read a book of a comic where I’ve read all of the comics already? Well, OK, yes: if you like a thing, you like it, and often want to do it again. And I used to do this a lot in the years when print comics were powerful and dominant over the land: Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side and plenty of others. All right, maybe that’s not the convincing side of the argument. But, still: you can see not wanting to do the same thing again, right?

So, then: why not read a whole book of something that you think you’ll like? Sure, you could find wherever it lives on-line, navigate back to the beginning of time (assuming you can figure out how to do that) and then one-day forward through it. But isn’t the whole point of a book that it’s just easier?

I always thought so. And that’s why I read the first (and maybe only) collection of Jane Zei’s “The Pigeon Gazette” (which seems to live in multiple places equally: Tumblr , Instagram , and Webtoon ), Success Is 90% Spite .

Now, I do have to complain about the book format, too. At least in my library app, it’s a reflowable “book” (I’m going to guess ePub; the system hides that) rather than a “comic” (in PDF, so each page displays as a page and can be pinched to expand/shrink). So each strip is a specific size, and if I want to view them slightly larger on my tablet, I have to turn the thing sideways, which has the knock-on affect of adding a blank page after each cartoon.

(The part of me that works with UX people is hanging his head, muttering darkly, and cursing the world.)

But enough blather about formatting!

Zei has a funny, cartoony style, which was solid right from the beginning of this strip, and a strong central character in the version of herself that she presents. You’ve probably seen her strips somewhere; they’re the kind of thing that gets shared socially, usually with no attribution. Luckily, most of Zei’s strips feature her avatar centrally, so random readers have a decent chance of realizing all these separate funny things are part of the same big funny thing, and finding it. (That’s more or less how I did it.)

Of course, in the way of all good things, The Pigeon Gazette seems to have quietly ended last summer – like so many webcomics, it seems to have been tooling along at a comfortable pace and then just stopped. We may be at the point where we get a random “sorry it’s been so long! I promise to get back to a regular pace!” strip every three months, or a flurry of things before another final silence, or that all the web presences just quietly disappear one fateful day.

But the book exists, which loops back to my original main point (and I do have one). It was published in 2020, by Andrews McMeel, a big name in the funny book biz, and Success will survive and be findable for a long time, no matter what happens online. And that’s why I prefer books. This one is funny and zippy and – that horrible webcomics word – relatable, and I suspect a lot of you would like it roughly as much as I did.

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