July 19, 2010
Website
Goblin Hall
I love that cover. You probably have an instant reaction to it, and you’re probably more than a little off in that reaction. This is the story of a Count who comes back to his estate after being gone for five years. He’s a fairly typical Count, just looking to marry off his son to the daughter of a wealthy family and finally getting some time at home after being gone for so long. Well, his son has met someone else while the Count was away and he plans on marrying this woman. This woman is a mystery, as are the whereabouts of his son during the daylight hours, so he follows his son, meets this girl and is impressed. Sadly for him, he had a cup of wine while meeting this woman, didn’t realize she was related to goblins (the fairy tale kind of goblins, not the Tolkien kind), and ends up drugged in a field for a month (although it seemed to him like only a short time had passed), and he misses the wedding. This causes the Count to get enraged and recruit a posse of mercenaries to take care of these goblins, and it’s here that things start to get awesome. So, naturally, this is the point where I stop telling you the story. I will say that from here things go in all sorts of directions you wouldn’t expect, and Rob’s ability to bring out the quiet human elements in a huge battle are impressive. I particularly enjoyed a moment when the Count meets a friend on the battlefield and begs the guy not to fight him, as he saved the Count’s life in the past, and after the Count gets the better of the guy he drags him off the battlefield and out of harm’s way. This is also self-contained, so no worries about wondering whether or not Rob is ever going to put out another issue (although he’s prolific enough that he’s more than earned the benefit of the doubt). Oh, and as for the sample, the rest of the book is s good bit chattier than this page, but I couldn’t resist using the image of the goblin parade. If you hate all this fantastical I guess you could stay away, but this is really more about how humanity deals with the unknown than anything else, and the results aren’t always pretty. $6ish
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Posted by Kevin
July 17, 2010
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Sounds of Your Name
If you’re a fan of Nate Powell, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. It collects all sorts of bits from his old Walkie Talkie series, shorter pieces from a variety of sources, and unpublished pieces. If you’re not a fan of Nate’s work, it’s probably only because you haven’t seen it yet. It’s impossible to lump this book into one blanket statement, but I’m going to make it anyway: this book is the moment when you start the car and leave your hometown forever with only the clothes on your back and the moment you decide to turn off the car and stay where you are. It’s living the dream, waiting for death, fighting off boredom and giving in to it. It’s trying to make sense of it all while knowing deep down that there is no sense to be made. That was my reading of it anyway, but I will get into specifics for you people who hate dealing in the abstract. Hey, I usually do too, but Nate brings it out of me. Longer pieces in this book include Scrubs (involving a couple who are already sick of living life as defined by the alarm clock and how one of the character takes the lyrics from that song “Scrubs” personally), Conditions (dealing with a boy and girl pair of best friends, how they both seem to want more but are afraid to make the first or even the second move, and how they both desperately want to get out of their small town), Frankenbones (showing two house cats, their past history on the streets and how the plot to destroy some unwelcome house guests), Pulling Teeth (showing how a lodged bit of cracker in the gums can ruin a nice kiss and the constant terror that is small town thugs with nothing to do), and Satellite Worlds (spanning across different lives, how they see the world and the thin line between sanity and insanity). There’s also the title story from It Disappears, but I talked about that elsewhere on this site ages ago. Shorter pieces include Company (showing a car wreck and the mild chaos that followed the developmentally disabled man in the car walking away while the driver was knocked out), Invisibilities (in which two guys try to reinstill some magic into the town),and The Defeatist (dealing with cheating at an early age, before even knowing that it is cheating). There are many more, as this book is 300+ pages, but I’m leaving most of the layers of this onion for you to peel. Also, I usually link the graphic novel to Amazon for the pennies they throw my way when people occasionally click on the link, but I saw that Microcosm publishing has this on sale for a measly $12 at the moment, and that’s too good a deal not to link to it. If you’ve never questioned a goddamn thing in your life, this comic will fly right over your head. For the rest of us, you may find a few of your questions about life answered in these pages, but you’ll also find many more questions. In times as shitty as these, it helps to at least take a look around you. As a wise man once said, the unexamined life is not worth living, and this comic sums that up beautifully.
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Posted by Kevin
July 16, 2010
Lydia’s website
Publisher’s website (Killing the Buddha)
The Living Cain
Before I get to the comic, I wanted to relay to you the mission statement of the publisher, Killing the Buddha, because it’s fascinating: “…an online magazine of religion and culture for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God.” As someone who has had a lifetime to work up a healthy distrust of organized religion of all stripes (definitely in the “hostile” camp), I approve, and the site looks like a nice assortment of interesting topics. As for the comic, it’s the simply told story of a woman (Lydia) who, after an awful break-up in college, decided that she wanted to get exactly one kind of dog to fill the hole in her life. The dog would look at her a certain way, go on trips with her, hold her at night, all the things a missing significant other wouldn’t be there to do. This quest of hers didn’t go exactly as planned, as the dog she got was a danger to everyone around her, but she eventually moved to New York and has seemed to make a habit of rescuing all sorts of dogs, considering it a win if she’s able to stave off execution of these animals even for a little while. Actually, the comic says that you can contact Lydia if you want a dog, so if you live in the New York area (or don’t mind a bit of a drive), I’d say she qualifies as being an expert on dogs. The comic itself is a series of one page panels, and when I said earlier that it was a simply told story I didn’t mean that it was simplistic. Granted, backgrounds are sparse, but she captures a lot in facial expressions or the sudden acts of dog violence. There’s also a thoughtful intro to the book called “What is Missing?”, about that vague feeling that so many people have of something being missing in their lives and how much better things would be if they could just find it. It’s worth a look, and this woman is a hero for trying to help such a wide array of dogs. $6
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Posted by Kevin
July 15, 2010
New review for The Former Roommates of Gary Jones by Kelly Froh. I wanted to mention the death of Harvey Pekar a few days ago, even if I don’t have much to add past past the fact that it was a shitty thing. I never met Harvey, but outside of everything else he achieved, how he changed the face of autobiographical comics (some would say he invented them), the wonders of comic literature that he wrote, the thing I liked most about the guy was his willingness to talk to anybody who was trying to get started in comics. Seriously, I never heard of a single disgruntled comic artist who said that Harvey treated him/her badly, and it says a lot for the character of the man that he had the patience to do what he could to help people out who were just starting in comics, up to and including having them in his home. Matt Herzfeld & Nick Mercer did a few comics of their series Flame-Broiled years ago when they were just starting out (and they may have stopped in the meantime; I haven’t seen anything new from them in ages), met Harvey at an event and he really inspired them. It’s a shame that he’s gone, and the world is poorer for it.
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Posted by Kevin
July 15, 2010
Website
The Former Roommates of Gary Jones
Unless you’re that mythical creature who was lucky enough to live with friends and family in perfect harmony before getting married and living happily ever after with another person, chances are you’ve had some problems with roommates over your life. I’ve lost friends because of roommate drama, as have pretty much everybody else I know, and I still think that I able to avoid the worst of the possibilities of roommate drama before deciding years ago that I was going to just live by myself from then on (outside of getting married or moving in with somebody for something other than a financial reason, that is), and it’s suited me just fine. This brief history lesson into my personal life was brought about because of this comic, as Kelly asked an old roommate of hers (who she describes as the perfect roommate for being able to put up with just about anything and still call the offender a friend) to make a list of all his old roommates since moving to Seattle in 1992. What came out of it was a fascinating cast of characters, all briefly described on a single page with their likeness. Maybe this will be worse than your experience with roommates and it might (sadly) be better, but people described in here include a mooch (there always has to be at least one), a man who didn’t care about world news but got constant updates on his phone for sports teams scoring (and his conservative wife), a pot smoking USA basher, a perfectly groomed hipster who never left the house, a nut cracker collector (also a deadbeat), a constant liar, a gay Mormon, a kid who smelled like greasy hamburgers, a horticulturist on steroids, and a confused hooker. He even briefly describes his experience with Kelly, but they’ve stayed friends and the only remotely bad thing he had to say about her was that she “dated an obviously gay man”. There are a couple of other winners in here, but you get the idea, and the fact that there are surprises left means you might recognize an old roommate in the unlisted pile. It’s odd for nostalgia, good for a cautionary tale, and also good to gawk at the many wonders of how human behavior changes when forced to live with strangers. $2
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Posted by Kevin
July 14, 2010
Website
Moral Geometry #1
Wow. You know those reviews where I wander around a bit, rambling about various things before concluding that I don’t know what to say about a comic? There, I’ve just saved you three minutes of your life. I might have a point or two to make, but overall I rarely have any idea what to do with mostly silent comics involving widely interpretive art, or stories that are meant to be visually expressive more than they’re supposed to make any kind of literal sense. There are four pieces in this comic, and I’ll continue making a fool of myself by breaking them down. Note: the vast majority of my observations will be nonsense. Moral Geometry deals with a masked man, his dinner companion, a spoken monster, and death itself. The Birthing Process is the shortest piece in the book, dealing with the title subject and a profoundly creepy mother. Medicine deals with a struggle with a snake-like creature, the loss of a hand, and growing a new hand that is a pill-dispensing, happy monster. Finally there’s Rubber Face, which at least has words to give me a fighting chance, and it deals with a man putting on his rubber face, saying all sorts of things to a woman on the bus, getting shot in the head and having the result cause a bus crash. It’s not even fair to make this complaint, but the comic also literally has a weird smell about it. Like burning plastic maybe, or one of those scratch and sniff things gone bad. Overall, your mileage will vary with this one. I prefer my comics to make a little more sense, but if you prefer more of a challenge or enjoy trying to untangle interpretive pieces, this one may be right up your alley. Some of the individual panels of the comic were stunning, the problem for me was that when you put them together to make a story it had a tendency to splinter apart a bit. That website of his has more samples to give you a clearer idea of what I’m talking about, as I’m very aware that this is mostly going to sound like nonsense. $3.50
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Posted by Kevin
July 13, 2010
Website
Inhabitants
I’ve decided: for certain artists, I’m going to be as hypocritical as possible and decide that spelling errors are OK. I know, I bitch about it all the time for most every person on this site (at least the ones who always screw it up), but Pat gets a pass. Why? Hm. Well, there’s just something hilarious about a story predicated on the notion of a lack of oscillation of a fan where the author can’t even spell “oscillation” correctly. Not that it’s an easy word, but simply typing a variation of the word into the Google will get you the correct answer. He actually started off the story wrong and shifted to the correct spelling towards the end, like somebody told him the correct spelling and he couldn’t be bothered to fix the earlier errors. In a book that is artistically his best book yet, I choose to be be amused instead of shaking my head in despair. Hey, progress! Not that that lets the rest of you off the hook, and this hypocrisy might go away entirely for the next Aulisio book. So anyway, how about this comic? It’s huge, magazine-sized (and yet still considered a mini comic), and there’s even a burst in the middle when we get to see his artwork in glorious color. Jogger (who you might remember from at least one older Aulisio book) is perfectly content to sit in his room with his fan. Suddenly it stops oscillating, and he travels throughout the world to find a way to fix this problem. Along the way he crosses over the outer barrier, wanders silently through some thoroughly bizarre landscape, gets a cube from the King of Cubes (useless to solve his problem, but hey, he did ask the King of Cubes for help), calls a friend and is informed that he was given a very special cube, uses said cube to stop a whirling vortex by transferring this vortex directly into his brain, goes into a negative space, and meets up with the King of Crystals. Can you guess how he tries to help Jogger? There are long stretches of silence in this book, but he’s found a happy medium between silent comics and, um, talkies with this one. Those wide vistas of utter chaos are needed to help rein in the more casual conversation. There’s no price, but a book with color involved that’s this huge has to be at least $5.
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Posted by Kevin
July 12, 2010
Website
Window #3
Dreams seem to be falling out favor as a comic book subject, and that’s a shame. The stories in this comics really show up the unrealistic realism involved in dreams, and while you could say that phrase makes no sense, I contend that it DOES make sense in the context of a dream, so there! Dreams in here include a piece about a spider that slowly turns into a man/monster, breaking a dream tornado by letting his hand pass through it, and Lydia (his wife?) dreaming about a practically eternal hug with Dave’s dad that made perfect and innocent sense in the context of the dream world. Stories that involve “real life” include Dave’s brother passing up “tornado in a tube” because his students were too young to make it work, a quiet day of searching the house and yard for spiders, and Dave’s glimpse into the other world that is the lives of his students and deals with the moment when it is clear to him that he can only help them out a certain amount, and that amount is often not going to be enough. I’m excited to get this rental project off the ground so you guys can start reading Dave’s books for yourselves. The popular culture has a notoriously short memory, and the comic culture sadly isn’t a whole lot better, but these books should be read by the comic readers and makers of today as well. You aspiring artists could learn something… $1
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Posted by Kevin
July 11, 2010
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Mimi’s Doughtnuts #19
I don’t believe it. Not that I want to call Marek a liar or anything, as I’ve enjoyed his comics immensely and he always seemed like a nice enough guy to me, but I don’t see how this was a 24 hour comic. OK, he used stick figures for the stories, and OK, the backgrounds are reasonably sparse, as that’s a requirement with 24 hour comics. Still, the backgrounds aren’t THAT sparse, the layout of the comic doesn’t look possible in a 24 hour time frame, and there are just too many distinct stories in here for me to understand the time frame. He did say in his intro that he had a number of stories ready to go before he started, that he used tales from his childhood, his friends and friends of friends to make these pieces. He also mentions that the restricting spaces of the stories sometimes changed the stories he was told/remembered a little bit, but the basics are the same as real life. Aw, screw it. I’m going to give up my skepticism and just give him credit for putting out an exceptionally thought out mini comic in a very short time span. The theme of the comic, as should be expected from that cover, is health. The characters from past issues of Mimi’s Doughnuts don’t make an appearance, as these are all stories about various health problems and the trouble that everybody has with their health insurance companies. The health problems listed include early allergies (and the awful moment when a young Marek (?) found out that he was allergic to cats), a persistent cough (and hey, that story was missing a resolution), spousal abuse (OK, the kids heard it as a mutual fight, but it didn’t look good to me), acne (with the hilarious ending of finding out years later that the pills prescribed may cause later heart problems), a broken/damaged thumb, a stroke (with his later fight against the symptoms of a deceased relative), a finger (with the obligatory fight with the insurance company for coverage of the problems), a kidney (and the insurance company’s deliberately cheating him out of his needed payment), a heart (with the heartbreaking tale of the young girl who would need a transplant possibly by age 25 and how tough it would be for her to ever get insurance because this was the dreaded “pre-existing condition”), blood (from a heart attack), and face (with a silly facelift and the conversation that went with it). It’s a great pile of stories that wasn’t hurt a bit by the 24 hour time limit. Check it out, anybody who has ever been sick can relate to some of the nonsense in this volume. $3
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Posted by Kevin
July 9, 2010
Website
The Fifty Flip Experiment #13
You can tell it’s going to be a great comic when you’re already laughing at the introduction. Of course, I was laughing more at my own level of cynicism than anything else, as Dan apologized for being three weeks late with this issue. Three weeks! That’s a man who’s dedicated to putting his bi-monthly comic out on a bi-monthly basis. Does anybody remember why Drawn & Quarterly was named Drawn & Quarterly? Hint: it has to do with putting comics of a series out on a quarterly basis. I think they kept to that for maybe the first year or so, or at least tried to, before abandoning all pretense of that being the case. Of course, according to Dan’s website this is the last issue he’s put out (in September 2009), so maybe regularly putting out comics got to him. So how about the comic? It seems… fluffier than usual, like he was trying to burn up page space by dragging stories out for pages that could have ended far sooner. Not that they’re actively bad stories, but I can see why the man maybe took a break after this one. The first half of the comic is a story about an alien coming to earth, something that felt more like a movie of the week than anything else, but he did manage to spice things up a bit, and the fact that schmaltz can be funny helped him out a bit. Other stories include a mildly pointless piece about lounging in space, a shortie about a psychiatrist with a good punchline, Spoons for Handsman eats too many Rolos (hey wait a minute, how did he open all those Rolos with spoons for hands?) and a meandering piece about the national conspiracy to hide any evidence of queefs. Kids, ask your parents. On second thought just use the internet, as asking your parents would be the most uncomfortable conversation of your life. Overall there’s still good to be found here, but if he is taking a break from his grueling schedule (and in the context of small press comics I mean that sincerely), I hope he’s working on tightening his game up a bit. That and deciding that it’s OK not to have at least one page per comic where you can still see the unerased pencil lines… $2
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Posted by Kevin
July 8, 2010
Website
The Honduran Coup: A Graphic History
If you’re not a fan of comics where you might learn something, you had better move on on to something lighter. There are plenty of options to choose from on this site, as very few comic creators bother to write about important political and military happenings around the world. Editorial cartoonists like Tom Tomorrow and Lloyd Dangle, sure, but they’re not telling a lengthy story and they’re restricted to telling things that they can either explain in their weekly strips or are already common knowledge. Dan has managed to tell the story of this coup from start to finish, and if you just see the word “coup” and think it must be ancient history, nope: this covers the period from 6/28/o9 to as close to present day as publishing this comic allowed. Dan also gets in the history of the place, as the U.S. and its various corporations have determined the course of history in that country for a very long time. Manual Zelaya took a few steps to make things better for the common people and was deposed in a military coup for his troubles, and wait’ll you see what happened to the people responsible for the coup. Here’s a hint: jack shit. As always Dan’s work is meticulously sourced, so if you have a moment or two when you have a “wait, did that really happen/did they really say that?” moment, it’s easy as can be to check it out for yourself. In between the mealy-mouthed Democrats who don’t seem to take much of a stand on anything and the lone current crazy Republican sourced, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this was a bipartisan avoidance of responsibility, which is the way of the world here in the U.S. Fun fact: torture never had a majority of Americans support it (according to polls), even through all the Bush years, until very recently. After Obama gave it his tacit endorsement (and that’s what it was when he closed the door on ever prosecuting the war criminals who tortured, a tacit endorsement), suddenly the people who don’t follow the news thought that it must not be that bad if both sides let it go at best and fully approved it at worst. I don’t mention politics on this site often because that’s not the point of the site, but comics like this bring it out of me. Anyway, there’s not much point of me spoiling the story. The end was still a mystery to me, as the media lost interest here after the successful “elections” and I never did hear what happened to all the people who supported the democratically elected guy, not to mention what happened to Zelaya himself. OK, here’s one spoiler alert: the good guys didn’t win this one. Then again, that never seems to happen, does it? I can see why people ignore the news altogether, that’s for sure. Oh, and this is also a flip book, but it’s the same book twice, just one half in English and one half in Spanish. I would think two different versions would have made more sense, but I could see where this would be a handy tool in multicultural classrooms… assuming kids are ever allowed to be taught about this shameful episode. $5
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Posted by Kevin
