after having it on my hard drive for like a year i finally read chapter 1 of sable house and shit i want more
https://teapak.itch.io/sable-house-chapter-1
teapak does wonderful pages
also she really captures what it feels like to be attracted to someone here
there’s a new usagi yojimbo spin off, about kaito usagi, miyamoto usagi’s descendant who is a thief-for-hire in 1980s osaka. all the art is painted, and it’s a lot more “furry culture”-feeling than stan sakai’s art is. it’s hard to say whether how good it’ll be after only one issue of five, but it’s at least good enough for me to continue?
The only time I ever collected individual issues of comic books was for a few months right when Maxx #1 came out. I still have my little collection from that time in the closet.
I might have mentioned this before on SB but I submitted a “classified ad” and it got printed in one of the Maxx issues.
omg what was the ad?
Like most others, it was looking for pen pals. And I ended up with some very good ones through it.
This shop is pretty great and ships to the US.
Sorry I didn’t write down the specific source of this. It is a facsimile of a Mayan codex, possibly the “Dresden” codex.
Two zines:
Chespitito by Poderoso Sensual
A collection of portraits and mock comic covers all riffing on Chespirito.
DE LAS LÁGRIMAS SIEMPRE ELEGIR LAS MÁS HERMOSAS by Miau Ediciones
i read trail of the catwoman, which contains
selina’s big score is a kind of glamourous 60s-style big heist story. trail of the catwoman is a slam bradley story that bridges the gap between the previous story and the ongoing that follows.
the ongoing is the best part of the book, though. it does a good job of establishing catwoman as havig a purpose as a heroic character in gotham: she protects drug addicts and sex workers and other types of people who might be low on batman’s priorities. it ends on a cliffhanger, revealing the villain who’s been pulling the strings through the previous stories, so i hope they put out more volumes of this in the compact format. i don’t think there’s been any volumes so far that specifically continue from a previous one, unfortunately.
lazily i keep reading stuff that gets updates on dynasty-scans
there’s some things i feel i want to mention
after the rain, the sun, the flower shines - fairly short, already ended. uncomfortable situation where a woman keeps hanging out with the older girl she had a childhood crush on despite pretty much being happily married. it feels kind of meaningless and frustrating and in the end she abandons her marriage for somewhat unstable reasons and we only get to briefly glance at how everyone she left behind feels about it and her with her new girlfriend. saw some people complain its not fleshed out enough but i think it manages, or maybe its more that i also kind of recognize this whole situation as something that doesn’t need particular explanation. her crush seems sympathetic to me because she genuinely doesn’t understand how she affects people around her. the husband is also very cute and likeable.
our love is disgusting - ongoing. not sure how i feel, but when it hits it hits. lotta girls dealing with having not exactly normal feelings, shame, disgust at each other, fear, unrequited obsessions. one of the early chapters has one of our protagonists being awkwardly approached by a stranger’s child, who insists on showing her the doll she has, and then seems to try to lift the dolls skirt to show her before getting interrupted by her mom. understandably the whole experience is weird already, but then the mom looks back at her with, what at least to her looks like disgust. hahaha
wicked spot - i feel like i’m promised something that isn’t there yet. enough with the teasing and lets get back to the killing
normality and monsters - reads like that very common juvenile fantasy of “i would just talk to the monster. then it can kill me afterwards!” it has to be common cause otherwise how does this exist when i’ve been thinking that for years and years and years and years and years. i think its cool. i’m cooking something similar-ish but with the added fears of feeling like you can never be an adult and fetishizing older women. the protagonist (in normality and monsters) is relatably useless at being a person.
pale blue-green color saudade - two previous childhood friends get back together to make manga. both of them have been through grimly horrible shit on their own and are now supporting each other. mostly a pleasant thing about hanging out as adults and supporting each other. could be very good.
dear flowers that bloom in the days of yore - doesn’t quite seem like it would be my thing but the relationship between the two in the main couple is pretty amusing, with them basically playing the girls school “sister” experience but ages reversed due to a misunderstanding. it’s cute enough. but then they introduce this older pair who used to do this before them and have the most ridiculously out of place chapter of horrifying knife play because their relationship turned toxic as hell. that chapter was great! what the fuck? it doesn’t really bear any relation to anything? i don’t even think its foreshadowing for the main pair? it’s just… hey wouldn’t it be hot if two girls hateloved each other so bad they mutually scarred each other with a box-cutter? what? can we leave the main plot for this instead hello?
witches and cigarettes - my skewed impression from my bubbles is this is very popular, it’s got a nice mood and good expressions. mostly a weird comedy with magic hijinks. had a look at chapter 1 again while writing to remind myself and oh i forgot its kinda explicit huh. i just immediately forget there’s explicit content huh?
elsewise with yaoi i like following urekko mangaka x utsubyou mangaka when there’s an update
man’s face when the pet manga author he took in calls him a sick and filthy pervert
also
Stan Lee was an asshole but he was right about Rob Liefeld
reading the game boy licensed comic, which had a lot more going on than i would’ve assumed. it starts with this middle aged guy who apparently spends his time playing mario land and dying to the final boss on purpose:
his other hobbies include snubbing homeless veterans, complaining about jaywalkers and liberals, wishing for a hard rain to wipe the streets clean etc. he also shoplifts nintendo products, the ultimate sin. his impure thoughts and improper videogame playing habits allow tatanga the space goblin thing to hypnotically open a door through his mind and invade earth
some extremely 90s children see this and summon super mario in the same method. after some hijinx the middle aged guy whaps super mario with a man and makes an escape. i was sure he was gonna meet some EC comics ironic fate but he’s more like a recurring foil?
the cover to the third issue shows mario saluting a navy fighter jet. the plot to this one involves tatanga attempting to invade china (weirdly unrelated to the whole pastiche china world in mario land thing). mario fights them by meeting the ordinance officer on a us navy warship and getting what are explicitly stated to be 20mm vulcan miniguns, sidewinder missiles, air-to-surface missiles etc that he can attach to the sky pop. so if you saw the well publicised stuff recently about the usa running low on missiles now you know who to blame. another proxy war spinning out of control.
meanwhile the guy who summons tatanga is getting increasingly chummy with the various videogame monsters.
and mario is lending craven support to the military industrial complex
issue #4 involves tatanga trying to blow up the “clam creek nuclear reactor”. mario tries to fix it because “pipes are pipes” but succumbs to radiation poisoning and falls in some heavy water.
one of the scientists finds him, assumes its a doll and decides to put him in a ziploc bag and take him home to give to their kids. again, this is something they just fished out of a puddle of radioactive goo. but radioactivity doesn’t seem to matter very much since mario just wakes up again and continues as usual.
we never see the middle aged tatanga conduit again. issue #2 wasnt in the scans i read, but apparently in that one he tries to highjack a boeing 747, which is why he’s on the run from the fbi most wanted list from #3 on. i wish the series had continued so we could see the continuing progress of this character from kind of a bernie goetz type into an all-purpose catastrophe zelig. maybe it turns out tatanga is behind waco, the oklahoma city bombing, etc. well i guess that’s what fanfiction is for.
Burning Sky Pop fuel can’t melt steel beams
Reading Blame. Its aight. it would make for a pretty good 3rd person shooter. Reminds me of Junkhead (probably inspired Junkhead)
Blame’s sweeping vistas of massive megastructures is pretty breathtaking. I found the characters to be mostly flat and downright identical (sometimes literally). The protagonist has a magic “gun that blows everything up” which is cool but there’s no stakes to it.
My mom has mailed me a…furry graphic novel a friend of the family self published. It is 500 pages long and I cannot wait to read it.
i never really got far into blame but have been enjoying tower dungeon, the fantasy megastructure comic by the same guy. it’s fun, feels like it’s going for an only slightly more serious take on old wizardry game imagery than dungeon meshi, so far the main appeal is when he comes up with extremely visually startling versions of things from the rpg bestiary. seeing the picture below of what a “slime” looked like was what got me to read it. the little armored mouse characters are also very cute. it kind of feels like someone blowing off steam in a way that’s more appealling to me than what i’ve read of his other stuff.
Nihei definitely got better at storytelling since Blame. I read and enjoyed Aposimz end to end, but I couldn’t make it through more than a few volumes of Blame.
What first got me into Nihei was his two-volume short story Abara. It has this disjointed, sordid and often wordless cosmic horror energy that reminded me of End of Evangelion:
I had a nightmare just a couple of weeks ago where I was doing laps in my local swimming pool and the lifeguard turned into one of the “White Gauna” monsters from Abara. I hadn’t even read the manga in several years!
