i think pretty much any collection of the big sunday strips, the daily version is great too but that art rangily moving around a big page is the best.
some recent things i read
Internet Crusader - i think people here would like this one, comic about using the internet circa 2004, each page is just a picture of the screen so lots of casual incidental clutter (icon bars, pop-ups) which look even more grotesque in this new static context. some of the expected jokes (lotsa nu-metal) and some good weird ones (the elaborate flash-based website for “COTHL GIRLS”, which is either a porn site or some kind of mysterious religious group). about half the book consists of the viewpoint character playing an imaginary first person shooter. internet themed stuff can sometimes be too cute and imitative, but i like the blobby art here, like a lineart version of mspaint scratches.
Where Demented Wented - collection of Rory Hayes comics, early underground diy horror comic stuff, like an EC comics version of Mark Beyer. i fell in love when i got to the following sequence:
it took me a second to figure out that the last panel was meant to be the top down view of a room, as opposed to a bed just hanging in the void and menaced by shapes. really beautiful moment to moment invention. most of the comics are based around these teddy bear characters who constantly wear expressions of deep misery and disgust.
a weird thing about these is that by dint of the time/context in which they were produced, they sort of got grouped together with the zap comics stuff. and as the collection goes on i think you can see an effort to move closer to the emerging template of what an “underground comic” should look and sound like, i.e. pot humour, doors lyrics, boob mutilation and flying eyeballs, comics that end with “fin” or “why?”, all of which sits very strangely. there’s a sex comic which reads like he didn’t know what sex was and had to guess from reading robert crumb, and which is strange and nightmarelike as a result. seeing that stuff, original weird comics getting lost as they’re pulled into the gravity well of a different and more successful kind of weird comic, is kind of depressing but there’s still a lot of good stuff here as well.
I found out about Tsutomu Nihei’s short manga Abara and read it twice two days in a row. Amazing stuff, I’m surprised it’s not more well-known. It cherry-picks the best elements of 90s apocalyptic sci-fi, without the wordiness.
The oddest thing about the experience of reading this manga it is I almost feel a wistfulness to live in this dirty, doomed world of body horror. And I start to understand the motivation of those characters in the story who choose (?) to become beautiful world-devouring cancers
I got a recommendation for Parasyte as a result of reading Tsutomu Nihei stuff and it’s one of the few times Amazon recommendations send me to something I actually like. Parasyte is a light buddy comedy that casually dips into chilling existential horror when you least expect it. Somehow, this formula works
I also checked out the anime in case it’s even better, but then in the first 10 minutes they introduced a scene where the hand spontaneously saves a child from getting hit by a car. Talk about missing the point. Does this hand sound like it would lift its little finger to save some random child
He has done the cover art for a few novels by this one author I like Michael Brodsky. Have wanted to read his stuff for a long time now. Where Demented Wented looks really cool too, but I can’t find it through my college library tho
but also I am having the most haunting recollection of an image done in his style that made me feel like actually nauseous. some kind of body horror discomfort. i can’t remember the image, what was going on in it, or even how old I was when I saw it, but I explicitly remember the feeling. i’m really wanting to track it down, probably despite my best interest. (oh no. i found it.)
there was this comic by (I think) a Brazilian person that is basically like, joker and batman die together, and i think joker says that he’s batman’s wife?? i found it very compelling but cant find it - anyone know what i;m talking about?
I’d been curious about Satania for a while despite a lot of negative reviews. I went ahead and picked it up because it was (and still is) surprisingly inexpensive for a big, full-color, hardback book.
The negative reviews complain about the story being weird and confusing. Comments of that nature often indicate something that will appeal to me, and that was the case here.
But I don’t demand too much from the story in a comic with good art about exploring a strange world.
This is by the same writer and illustrator as Beautiful Darkness. That book seems to have more positive reviews and while I liked it as well, I liked Satania better.
I also got that hardcover edition of Abara based on Broco’s and Dracko’s discussion above. I started it last night and it’s great.
I noticed a new Jim Woodring artbook is out this year. It’s always a bit of a shock to see Woodring’s prose style the rare times he doesn’t go 100% silent storytelling, it never takes the tone I expect, and he seems to be deliberately undermining the impact of the images
Can anyone help me sort out where I’m supposed to start with Alan Moore’s work on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? There are a lot of volumes, and maybe some separate series? Kind of feels like a Hellboy/BPRD situation where the titles and chronology are kind of all over the place, so I don’t know what the first book to read is.
Also I read Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Years by Al Columbia this week, and thought it to be really interesting. Never encountered Columbia before this. I know now that it is a collection of fragments and scraps, but I didn’t know that while reading it. It was interesting to go through while trying to imagine a coherent fiction and sense of space as everything was falling apart, being crossed out, double-printed and abandoning the frame. This incoherency seemed to me to be part of the danger threatening Pim and Francie, like on an existential and ontological level. The looming horror on any page or panel was the dissolution of significance that turning the next page would bring.
The Sean Connery movie because I don’t want to be the only person in the world to like that one and getting someone from sb to watch it is my only chance. The whole rest of the world has already made up their mind and conspired against it/me
haha, that would be a fun way to start things off. 2000s era comic movies give me such a case of the creeps even to think of watching that movie makes me nervous. But maybe I will? In memory of Sean Connery…
It was his last movie appearance if I remember correctly! I don’t know if it was the horrendous reception of it or his own distaste for the movie that made him say fuck it, I’m going home. I think that’s a cool footnote. He made Zardoz and walked it off! This one though, this one made him quit. If that doesn’t make you want to watch it I don’t know what will
i think that movie is like the 80s swamp thing movies: a terrible adaptation, but pretty entertaining if taken as its own thing
apparently connery would get mad and leave if anyone asked him about zardoz. which is dumb as it’s probably his best (or at least most interesting) movie.
