I saw Richy Vegas at SPX and had a similar experience trying to pay more!
I first just casually flipped through and said “this is so paranoid,” meaning that it was doing a good job depicting paranoia. Then he told me about how he was having experiences where he thought everything was connected, like a song playing on a PA would be relevant to his life and he felt like somebody knew what was happening to him.
yep I was just emailing back and forth with him and we both keep remarking on how amazing it is thst two people who have never met can bond over their brains breaking in extremely similar ways
Just finished Jaka’s Story (first time since I was a teen; I usually just re-read the first four volumes but I’m on a quest to do a full re-read rn) and good lord the lettering on this one specific character is god-tier stuff. You can hear this voice in your head, crystal clear.
i love how i can imagine that characters face (its the one with the closed eyes and buck teeth right? boy howdy am i gonna look silly if im wrong) reading the words. so good
watching his lettering evolve is twice as fun as watching him figure out where ears go on the head over time
Yup! The Cirinist interrogator.
blurring for wanton gore lol
have i posted about eric svetof’s Spa in here yet, i adored Spa. tasty little nightmare.
a quality i really specifically like about the comic form compared to others is that comics intuitively create little spaces and atmospheres by creating a striking image and then allowing time to pass inside of it and svetoft is brilliant at leveraging that effect to drag you across morbid and bleakly comical little scenarios
here is a sequence i like to describe as Hog Madness. spoilered for Hog Madness
These Lone Sloane books just keep getting better. I don’t know why reviewers say the narrative is confusing or hard to follow. I’m not finding it to be that way at all. Reminds me at times of Jack Vance stories.
Whoa… I’m very interested in where I might be able to read these!
I’ve been reading comics every morning and I should really write about them more often.
I’m in the middle of Arsène Schrauwen. I love it so completely. It keeps asking me politely to wait before reading more, so it’s off to the side right now. The compositions and writing are astounding.
I’m taking a long time to read witzend because I mostly don’t like it. Mr. A was a highlight, which really says something. Wally Wood is a great cartoonist, but these plots are weird. They’re trying to be antimisogynist by way of ironic misogyny. I’m enjoying the issue of Weirdo I got much more. Crumb does an adaptation Boswell’s private journals which kind of rules.
I read the first two collections of Love and Rockets, Gilbert and Jaime’s first stories from the early 80s. It’s crazy to see all these techniques employed to create big, real worlds. They must have read comics religiously, Toth, Kurtzman, Eisner and on forever. It’s also crazy how they overlap with the waning light of underground comix. But they have none of the qualities that date those works. They can actually write women! What a concept!
There’s a nice hardcover version of the Druillet books on sale on Amazon right now.
Thrift books is matching as well.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/lone-sloane-boxed-set/35161244/item/52294633/
love this school of character writing
it’s funny to me that the 70s kirby stuff somehow feels more “postwar” than the romance, crime, superhero comics more immediately done on the tail of the war’s end, like even in the early fantastic four comics there’s the sense of a closed and sedate world in which real catastrophe is impossible. when adolf hitler himself returns it’s as a one-note gimmick villain who’s killed off with a shrug after an abortive coup in half-assed south american locale. positive changes seem to happen solely in the realm of new gadgets invented and protected by austere pipe-smoking scientits and kept far out of ordinary life.
and then in the 70s there’s suddenly a new rush of both optimism and fear, it’s like the period returns in transfigured and intensified form. raceless, genderless secret agents of the new united nations do battle with villains wearing crazed mash-ups of napoleonic, cossack, nazi regalia. weirdly intimate and caring personal sci-fi machines turn people into stronger versions of themselves to tear apart tanks while yelling there’ll be no more hitlers. the imperturbable coastal cities of before always now seem on the cusp of being shaken apart, by death-drive fanatics in masks and uniforms, while bikers found secret utopian communes in the trees. part of this is his own weird effort to gibe with youth culture and surely part of it is feeling his oats after getting to break from marvel. but i’m entranced by how these comics express those feelings by returnning to and restaging recent history in ways that would’ve been inpermissable by the conventions of the form at the time
kirby was famously inspired by hippies and disgusted by nixon, which is also probably part of it too
Currently reading Ishitsuyo Natsuko’s Lunashii, about an acupuncture clinic/religious cult/multi-level-marketing scheme
In the first volume, the clinic’s adopted heir Luna uses her spiritual techniques to “help” fellow high schoolers with their awkward romantic attempts and their faltering creative pursuits — in exchange for appropriate compensation, of course.
Later on, the story gradually turns into a sort of eroticized business drama, as Luna and her spurned former crush strive to outdo one another in the art of the affinity scam
Jack Cole had such a cool style. I love how totally flat Plastic Man is compared to the man he is beating up. Even better, that guy is wearing such loose-fitting clothes you can even see the socks cinch up!
Finished Cerebus. The long dissection of the Torah in Latter Days and the Bible stuff at the start of Last Day were almost unreadable. I know he means his bigotry sincerely, but the “infants getting tattoos, toddlers giving blowjobs” stuff in Last Day is so over the top it makes me laugh anyway, like this is what the stupidest people believe lol.
Anyway moving on to a regular book (The Black Company) for my next read, with Witchblade on deck for comics
What era of Witchblade? The 90s run or the brand new one?
Finally got around to reading the second half of the Parker series last week. I really liked The Score. Slayground was also fun but more simplistic.
If you end up liking this, you might also like Malazan Book of the Fallen. It’s kind of along the same lines but with more depth. (But if you ever try that series I recommend starting with book 2, not book 1.)
I absolutely love Malazan Books of the Fallen although I will say the first book is a good starting point because it’s a decent standalone story.
There’s definitely some parts which I think are a little problematic, these crop up more in the later books though.
