Rolling comic books 2021

Okay, some new library reads:

GIFT FOR A GHOST by Borja Gonzalez (Abrams) - This is a beautiful nocturnal story by a Mexican artist that weaves between a contemporary girl indie band and a late 1800s debutante world, which may or may not be real. Not a lot of plot, but there is an interesting dream logic layered throughout the book and a lot of negative space and emptiness. The art is really immaculate: sort of like Mike Mignola (blacks and reds, ornate backgrounds) and Nick Drnaso (no one has facial features!).

ART OF CHARLIE CHAN HOCK CHYE by Sonny Liew (Pantheon) - A big book I meant to read when it came out. This is a super ambitious book that presents itself as a coffee table art book, a retrospective of a Singaporean comic artist (Charlie Chan Hock Chye), but this is a framing device. Chan is an invented protagonist and the book uses this form as a way to tell the story of his life and the history of 20th century Singapore/Malaya via his comic books, which are done in this amazing pastiche of global comics styles (Dan Dare, Pogo, Astro Boy, Harvey Kurtzman war, Ditko, Mad magazine, even Dark Knight Returns). This makes the book initially a bit staccato and hard to get into, but it comes together in the end and the framing device allows Liew to constantly translate out of the Singapore context to create a story that feels both personal and a history of the 20th century anti-colonial left. Here's an essay about it w/ some images: https://aaww.org/rewriting-singapore-story/

Oooh that last one sounds up my alley, thanks!

I just learned about the Warren Ellis metoo situation from last year (https://www.somanyofus.com/ if you somehow missed this like I did). The story resurfaced because Image is publishing a new comic from him. I'm not an enormous fan of his; just was a big fan of transmet back in the early 2000s. But the plethora of stories that these women put forward have me aghast. Why are people shit?

I had forgotten about the Warren Ellis story--terrible!

I really want to check out Barry Windsor Smith's MONSTERS. I remember loving his Archer & Armstrong run...

The art for The Lie and How We Told It by Tommi Parrish looks cool. I'll try to check it out.

Here are some more library reads:

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE: A CHILDHOOD IN THE MIDDLE EAST (1978-1984) by Riad Sattouf -- This is a graphic novel I've seen on the bookshelves of a lot of non-comics readers and it also has the combination of being by both an Arab artist and a Charlie Hebdo guy, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The comic has a weird combination of objectivity and puerility, retelling the author's childhood experiences in Libya, France, and Syria with extensive detail but then (being from a boy's POV) often swerving a bit to focus on something juvenile (e.g., torturing animals, seeing a nude woman in the window). Almost every Arab character and especially every Arab man is depicted as a grotesque. There is a lot here that would delight a French Islamophobe in the depiction of Syria and Libya as (impoverished) dictatorships, though life in either country is surely worse now after Western intervention than it was in the early '80s. Other than that, the book is well-constructed, entertaining, humorous, etc., particularly scenes where the main character's dad negotiates humiliation or the main character imagines god as the french pop singer George Brassens. The art is "cartoony," but there is a strong sense of perspective, volume, and one-tone color, so the world feels real.

I REMEMBER BEIRUT by Zeina Abirached - A very abbreviated recollection of Lebanon's civil war (really a proxy war by other countries). Not really a comic or even a diary, but some memories with very graphic design-style images, seemingly influenced by David B and Marjane Satrapi. Her other book was supposed to be better, will check that out.

THE CONTRADICTIONS by Sophie Yanow - I'd heard about Yanow from the mailing list of Copacetic Comics, which seems to stock great art comics. This comic is about a queer American college student studying abroad in France and her adventures hitchhiking and crushing on a surly/depressed anarchist. (Possibly a spoiler: but lefty anarchism is revealed at the end as adolescent selfishness and the narrator returns to her previous bourgeois lifestyle!) The story is more developed and scene-based than most first person comics, but the ligne claire-style of the drawing makes the art feel like a summary of itself, so the comic feels less memorable.

RUNAWAY PRINCESS Johan Troïanowski - This is actually a comic I borrowed for my kid, but it was really fun. Not necessarily mind-blowingly original and definitely a kid's comic, ((translted from French and published by Random House 'ss raphic novel series for kids) bbut reminded me of Pippi Longstocking, Nausicaa, Valerian, etc., in its sense of playfulness and adventure! I

Almost every Arab character and especially every Arab man is depicted as a grotesque.

God Brassens aside (this is a consensus in France, I guess - Joann Sfar wrote illustrations for an exhibition on the man, in which he said "the Japanese have Totoro, we have Georges Brassens", surely on a level with comparing him to God), are there non-Arab characters and if so are they portrayed non-grotesquely?

I read Abandon The Old In Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The stuff I read by him before was very typical angry Japanese post-war stuff about those left behind as economic recovery took hold, but I don't remember it being as much about the grotesque as these are. He draws this one face that's sort of a blank friendly dumb guy, keeps showing up in different roles in different stories; Tatsumi says it represents himself. I dug it, tho predictably it's not great on women. Might have gotten my interest up to finally tackle his autobiography comic, which always looked like a chore to me.

Now I'm reading the Drawn & Quarterly anniversary book. I know that when I got into indie comics in the 00's I was always struck by how much talent was coming out of Canada specifically, but don't think I'd ever realised how much this was down to one specific publisher.

Oliveros' dedication is massively admirable, but before then you had Vortex, Aardvark-Vanaheim and Renegade, Tragedy Strikes and Black Eye, Strawberry Jam, even Matrix and Aircel, setting the stage for Canadian indie publishers. Plus people like Bernie Mireault and Dave Cooper who quickly hopped to US publishers soon after their earliest work, or never notably published in Canada, like Collier, Cherkas, Ho Che Anderson... Bryan Lee O'Malley, by the time you're reading.


(of D&Q's core 4 artists, only Julie was essentially an Oliveros discovery: Vortex had been publishing Chet and Seth for years, and Joe was on Kitchen Sink before moving to Canada. Rabagliati is probably 5th in the ranking, and aiui his audience in translation on D&Q was negligible compared to his Québécois readership?)

Advance solicitations corner: Wolk's Marvel book is finally dropping in October, and reprints of the Dungeon collections are coming(!) in anticipation of new Dungeon material(!!)

Fuck! That's major news for me on both points.

The new Trondheim with Bonhomme "Omnivisibilis" is great btw
https://www.europecomics.com/album/omni-visibilis/

Having suscribed to 2000AD for enough months now, I gotta say: I lack the historical knowledge to know whether the phase it's currently in is good or bad by the mag's standards, but I am falling in love w/ the weekly comics anthology format. I love the variety and the certainty that if something's not up to snuff, well, something else will come along in a couple of pages, and the thing itself will be replaced by something else in a month or two.

BWS's Monsters was pretty intense. Weird structure, but I dug it. Reminded me a little of Powell's Two Dead that I also read recently, as a black-and-white historical fiction/spooky epic mystery.

https://www.instagram.com/alfredcolumbia/

Apropos of completely nothing, I found these sketches in my parents loft during a clearup, and thought I’d share:

https://i.imgur.com/YF6pSXF.jpg

the holy trinity

who's the one on the left?

Nice!

Yea, those are awesome.

Where's Tuomas to say he doesn't recognise any of these?

https://www.jmkeworld.com/
https://www.instagram.com/j.m.k.e/

Watched a bit of the Cartoonist Kayfabe on DC: The New Frontier and they kept referring to Cooke in the present tense. Had a moment of "wait, am I wrong that he's passed?", googled, and got bummed out all over again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/arts/france-culture-pass.html

Really hate the framing of that title - France officially made 2020 "the year of the comic" and included comics in that discount for a reason. Don't project your cultural biases onto it, NYT.

Agreed

such a dick move, NYT editors.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sloanesloane/death-in-the-mouth-original-horror-by-people-of-color

Kids reading books, society will crumble

Oh wait it did

they ended up changing the headline and more aggressively changing it in print, but it's stupidly clickbaity and willfully ignorant

But rather than discovering highbrow arts, many are choosing mass media they already love.

"highbrow" derives from phrenology, right?

sighted on tabs: confused guy buys a pile of manga, mistaken believes it is worth the price shown on ebay when it is actually worth more or less what he paid for it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdZd6z9BmL4

context: https://onposting.substack.com/p/me-and-gary-vee-down-by-the-schoolyard

can't believe i watched all of that. weirdly compelling because I know a few guys like this, classic east coast affable/sleazy hustler/grifter, though this guy seems even heavier on the sleazy side than normal

(of course, I'm a little jealous that he did get all those books. i would've happily paid that to read and collect them! where does it say he didn't turn a profit, though?)

though fuck this guy for the bootstraps-positivity / "people spend their money from the govt on nikes" comment and that he is performing this clown show with a personal net worth of $200 MILLION, jesus fuck what is wrong with this world

I’m just opining that there is no fucking way he made even a thousand bucks on that haul on eBay, no one is buying manga at those prices and I speak from experience

He got 1,001 books! Supposedly sold at $6,396.12 (let's say $7K before fees) It's slightly possible he could get $7 a book over enough time, especially if many of those were runs were OOP as it looked...and he had some luck. I paused the video and the sell dates listed are in May and June of this year. Think he definitely made a profit - one worth traveling to 32 garage sales (if that's even true)... well, I don't know.

Saying as someone who unfortunately recently returned to collecting manga again, it is often bad. (Do you know much a full run of Goodnight PunPun costs now? oof..)

But yeah, it could be an exaggeration or lie. Still, buying that big a haul for only $270 is unbelievable or heinous. Like did the owner believe these books were worth only 27 cents each? Maybe bitter revenge from an empty nest?

He's making money on chumps like us keep streaming the video and arguing over how much of a chump this dude seems to be too.

Some days I just look at the world and say, bring on the sun going nova and wipe this grease stain of a planet out of the heavens.

http://cdn.quotesgram.com/small/47/54/1466503358-tumblr_me2piotOhX1rur0aro1_1280.jpg

Ha! Exactly. I have definitely thought in the last few years that I would love to be a super-villain.

Still the underwritten message of all the good comics where the bad guy finally wins is in the end, it all still kinda sucks.

https://gizmodo.com/batman-writer-james-tynion-iv-is-moving-from-dc-to-subs-1847449770

Surprised by this. He seemed to have strong support from DC the past couple of years, they put him on Batman after Tom King's run. Question is, is he popular enough to make money on... Substack? Or maybe Substack gave him some kind of incredible deal.

I think he's an average DC house writer (his Batman/Detective work was decent), but he's churning out so much stuff, possible I just haven't read his best material

Substack is just giving massive deals to (esp right-wing) comics writers (in line with them giving good-to-massive deals to rightish-or-openly-transphobic essay writers)

writer/artists or artists get jack doodley

https://aiptcomics.com/2021/08/12/chip-zdarsky-substack/

none of the comics writers I'm seeing in the list are particularly right wing, unless we're doing the Nick Spencer political dissection thing again

Yeah, pls flesh out your thoughts on this one a lil, sic. I want to understand.

I may have just logged that opinion when Spencer was announced as being in charge of the whole thing, and not bothered to follow up tbh - I thought there was at least one more but dnrc who

At the very least, a cursory glance suggests that this may be a deal of the 'too good to be true'/'...with the devil' variety, particularly given the unsavory right-wing associations.

i think it's just a decision made upstairs to break off a mill or two and corner the market for comic nerds

Hiring Spencer to head it at the same time as yr paying (and otherwise platforming) a solid grip of anti-trans ranters might be a total coincidence but it says SOMEthing about the decision-making process

maybe they're trying to cover more bases, like a "neutral" book publisher would

I did hear similar rumblings to sic's initial post amongst some comics ppl but can't find the tweets anymore

maybe they're trying to cover more bases, like a "neutral" book publisher would

“we hired middle-aged male superhero writers from DC and Marvel!”

They're giving Molly Ostertag money, an unequivocal good imo

yeah, forever happy to see her succeed