After insisting recommendation from my french friends I ended picking up the first volume of Last Man. The premise is a mix of a tournament arc (with fighting game like rules) mixed with “person from modern world goes to fantasy world.” With the twist that the “stranger” is not the protagonist of the story and he seems to know why (and how) he is there. Liked it enough to continue.
Really strange beast of a comic, but one of my favorite reads of 2015. Reframing of the politics and structures of power of the region of Murcia (the place I am from) as conflict between demonic cults. I like how it start showing how behind very mundane politic conflicts there are supernatural things, that in turn are used as a mean for even more mundane goals.
Also, the scene of the propaganda video of the terrorist group that aims for the independence of Murcia and the ban of christianism is a riot.
I’m not big on Preacher now (though I was as a teen, and maybe I’d dig it on a re-read) but I think I might be big on Steve Dillon. He was a supremely readable cartoonist, which is probably the most important yet underrated thing a cartoonist can be. When it comes to modern dudes doing big publisher genre work I wouldn’t put him at that JR JR tier, but he was maybe a notch below. You always knew what the fuck was going on in a Steve Dillon comic. This sounds like it shouldn’t be high praise, but it is, because drawing a comic is a fucking nightmare and almost no one is good at it. Steve Dillon was incredibly good at it, and I…I dunno, you spend long enough reading comics/following cartoonists/being a cartoonist and you just hope if someone died young it was natural causes and not a super talented dude pulling a Wally Wood. He was real good and did some really good work. I hope he was happy.
Steve liked a drink or two, and if the truth be told that’s how most of us knew him. Or it might be more accurate to say that Steve liked the pub, because that’s where you go to meet up with people, and Steve loved people. He found them endlessly interesting, he was happy to talk to anyone.
He changed my life in a couple of ways. The first was with a phone call, somewhere towards the end of ’91: “All right, mate, I’m thinking of heading over to New York in the new year, maybe for a long weekend. Fancy it?” The second was with two decades plus of brilliant artistic collaboration, where he took whatever lunacy I threw at him and made it work flawlessly, every single time.
We met in London in the summer of ’89, but it was about a year later in Dublin that something audibly clicked. After everyone else had passed out, we sat up ‘til dawn and killed off a bottle of Jameson, talking about what we wanted to do in comics- what we thought could be done with them, what the medium was for. I can recall a sort of mutual “Oh yes, you. You’re the one. You get it.” This was to pay off handsomely in the years to come.
The last time I saw Steve was late last Saturday night in New York, walking down fifth avenue to his hotel after saying goodnight outside Foley’s. It could have been the end of any one of a thousand nights. It’s not a bad last memory to have. Steve was best man at my wedding and my good and dear friend. I think he probably taught me more about what that word means than anyone else.
I drank with Steve Dillon from Dublin to Belfast, from London to Glasgow, from San Francisco to New York City. I have not one single complaint. Cheers, mate.
Second volume of Shimanami Tasogare was scanslated over the past two weeks. Somebody espousing the qualities of that series much better than I ever could:
Of course, the second volume ends on a cliffhanger that will take scanslations another ten months to address…
In the same spirit of crystalized queer agony, The Private Report on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness has soldiered on in its frank depiction of life breakdowns and depression, with even the premise’s glimmer of hope managed brutally and inevitably. One regular chapter and one bonus chapter left to scanslate (edit: oh, it was officially picked up) and it’ll probably stick to the dour notes.
The new Josie and the Pussycats may seriously be the most unpredictable comic I’ve ever read.
The first issue seems to be in tune with the newer Archie Comics, in that it takes the basic concept and just takes it into less stilted territory. It’s structured like a pilot, as it has the various key characters meet and decide to start a band. It suggests, essentially, Josie and the Pussycats as a CW show–a relatively grounded comedy–and it pretty much works on those terms. It’s a solid companion to IDW’s Jem and the Holograms.
Issue #2, meanwhile, is nothing like that. It leans on the fourth wall heavily, with an extended riff on A-plots vs. B-plots and cherubs actually displaying a banner with the issues’ “moral”. The amount of gags increases exponentially, and their tone is drastically different and far more absurdist, feeling less like a TV show and more like Archie’s take on Giant Days; the issue hinges on a bunch of punks conning the Pussycats into signing an exclusive contract playing for a dive bar, which they do so by asking for autographs and then notarizing them on the spot (one of the punks is a CPA). It feels way more adult–the first issue starts up in a bar and has a Tinder analogue, which are already notable but aren’t necessarily kid-unfriendly, but then issue two goes a step beyond that and features a (very funny) gag about Meth addiction and a scene where somebody punches somebody’s tooth out, which wouldn’t be out of place, except that the tooth is completely covered in blood.
Both versions of the book largely work, so it’s not like it’s a full-blown identity crisis, but still, they’re essentially two different books, and that Archie published them as is makes Josie the most interesting book I’m currently reading, which was not something I expected a week ago.
There’s going to be a spanish edition of Fred’s “Philemon” (a comic barely translated to other languages and with not a lot of editions) and holy fucking shit I’ve waiting for this to happen for like fifteen years.
With that, Perramus finally on print, the Mob Psycho 100 manga and the translation of The Private Report on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness I am very very happy comic wise.
Speaking of Perramus, Alberto Breccia is one of the greatest comics artists of all time, sample:
so I hadn’t picked up my comics for a month and I just have this pile i’m pecking at. But… where am i gonna put these things? I have to organise them?
WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?
