Josue Menjivar « Optical Sloth

Menjivar, Josue – Cicada

April 24, 2010

Everyone, please read my review of Broken Fender before you read this. Trust me, OK? Done? Now you know how much I was looking forward to this one. I’m still going to get the other Broken Fender stuff he’s done, and I’ll still pick up anything else I see from him because I think that he has truly great things in him. The problem is that he didn’t come anywhere near reaching those great things with this one. For one thing, a book that’s over 100 pages should take you longer than 10 minutes to read, unless maybe you’re James Kochalka. I still like his loose drawing style, don’t get me wrong, and I know that the main character was tortured. It was just one of many things that didn’t ring all that true for me and, as always, who the hell am I anyway? What other problems did I have? Most of the major plot points didn’t seem genuine, or they seemed like cliches. I won’t say any more because I don’t want to ruin it for anybody who might like it. All I can do is reiterate that I was really looking forward to this and I was really disappointed. Make up your own minds. And buy Broken Fender, for the love of Christ, and wonder with me why this wasn’t as good as that.

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Posted by Kevin

Menjivar, Josue – Broken Fender #1

April 24, 2010

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Broken Fender #1

Can I just go out on a limb here and say that I like everything that Top Shelf puts out? Seriously, I’m having trouble thinking of anything from them that I didn’t enjoy thoroughly. This one is no exception, It’s an old issue, I know, and another case of me finding out about somebody well after everybody else has already told all their friends about him. Still, for those of you who missed him (and he’s still putting stuff out, I just bought an older issue), you’re in for a treat. You can read this thing pretty quickly if you want to, but I felt like I should take a break a few times while I was going through it. The sheer emotion on the pages was incredible. It wasn’t easy going from short story to short story when I was getting kicked in the teeth after half of them. He experiments a lot with his art too, radically changing his style for some stories. The tales in here are mostly about loneliness and desperation, which can become cliche pretty quick if they aren’t done well. No worries there. He was apparently good friends with Matt Madden, so he had a great teacher (Matt’s page will be up soon, I swear. The problem is that I only have REALLY old minis from him and I’m waiting until I get some stuff that’s actually still in print). Maybe he doesn’t know how to write a happy ending, but he honestly crams more feeling and heartbreak in every page than anybody else I’ve seen, possibly ever. I’m getting the rest of these from Top Shelf when I order more stuff, and I can’t imagine any of the other ones are worse than his first issue, so you can pretty much pick up any of them and hit the ground running. He apparently wants correspondence to go to Top Shelf (remember, this is from ’97, way back when not everybody in the world had an e-mail address and a web page), and you can order stuff there too. A couple of pictures this time, to show you how much I liked it.