Willie Joe: Back Home brilliantly chronicles the struggles and disillusionments of these early postwar years and, in doing so, tells Bill Mauldin’s own extraordinary story of his journey home to a wife he barely knew and a son he had only seen in pictures. The drawings capture the texture and feel, the warp and woof, of this confusing time: the ubiquitous hats and cigarettes, the domestic rubs, the rising fear of another war, and new conflicts over Civil Rights, civil liberties, and free speech. This second volume of Fantagraphics� series reprinting Mauldin’s greatest work identifies and restores the dozens of cartoons censored by Mauldin’s syndicate for their attacks on racial segregation and McCarthy-style “witch hunts.� Mauldin pleaded with his syndicate to let him out of his contract so that he could return to the simple quiet life so desired by Willie Joe. The syndicate refused, so Mauldin did battle, as always, through pen and ink.]]>
author: Bill Mauldin
name: Mza
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2011/09/04
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
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Nausicaa took Miyazaki 12 years to create, in part because he worked with few or no assistants, doing both the writing and drawing using a meticulously detailed style that critics have compared to the work of the French artist Moebius.]]>
author: Hayao Miyazaki
name: Mza
average rating: 4.51
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2010/10/26
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
review:
Ha-yow! I don't get what's going on yet, really -- a new-age-y love letter to an Earth unspoiled by industrial processes, filtered through a Charlie-Brown-esque admiration for the perfect girl, maybe -- but this dog can draw like, buh-chow! It's a shame the art is reproduced so tiny here; the air battles pop off the page, but if they were bigger, they'd be bigger.
]]>
Volume two takes place almost 60 years after the events of Century 1910, in the psychedelic haze of Swinging London in 1969 - a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars.]]>
author: Alan Moore
name: Mza
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2011/08/15
date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: 2011
review:
... filled to capacity with allusions I got and, I'm sure, ones I didn't ... 1969 seems to have aims similar to those of Mad Men -- demystifying the 1960s and remystifying them w/ a new kind of magick. Unfortunately, Mina Murray's story is only about a tenth as emotional as Don Draper's ...... The ostensible optimism of hippie psych rock is shown to be a stupid colourful mask for the nihilism punk would shove in our face eight years later, but Moore doesn't connect these dots in a way that will make anyone feel much tragedy. There's a devil who keeps switching bodies to stay alive: not scary. Our heroes chase the devil: not dangerous. These drawings refuse to come alive -- it's like your high friend telling you something bad that happened to his friend you never met, and he's laughing, but ...... I guess you had to be there.
]]>
But nothing goes as expected, his “last job� turns out to be a set-up that results in a bloody shoot-out from which Terrier barely escapes with his life, and soon he’s on the run from not only the authorities and his treacherous ex-bosses but also the members of a crime syndicate still seeking revenge for an earlier hit on one of theirs. (We won’t even mention what they do to his cat.)
With Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, Tardi, at the top of his form, once again puts his lushly efficient neo-clear-line style in the service of Manchette’s gleefully brisk prose for a spectacularly dark, violent and fast-paced crime thriller that will delight fans of their previous collaboration, West Coast Blues .
( Manchette’s original 1981 novel, La Position du tireur couché , was released in English under the title The Prone Gunman by City Lights in 2001.) 104 pages of black-and-white comics]]>
author: Jacques Tardi
name: Mza
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/07
date added: 2023/07/19
shelves: 2011
review:
]]>
author: Joann Sfar
name: Mza
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/28
shelves:
review:
]]>
Twice Shy tells the story of two strangers who have shut themselves down emotionally as a way to cope with their lives. Bob is an artist with a creative block who loses himself in an aimless existence; while Casey suffers from deep-seated anxiety and feelings of abandonment. Brought together through an unexpected circumstance, they begin to open up and trust each other, gradually finding that their fears of being hurt are overcome by the simple joys that they now share. As they tentatively try to build a life together, the harsh realities of the outside world begin to intrude on their happiness, but the experience changes them both in fundamental ways.]]>
]]>
author: Joel Orff
name: Mza
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/11/29
date added: 2019/12/18
shelves: 2019, comix
review:
An unassuming taxi driver and part-time cartoonist named Bob Frank receives a soap operatic postcard from an estranged ex-girlfriend -- "My life is an UNHOLY MESS ...... I'M SENDING OUR KID ...... Her name is Casey"; and over the next 120+ pages, Bob and Casey get to know each other in a series of quiet scenes that accrete into a bond that is familiar if not familial. Joel Orff's scratchy, uncertain line embodies both Casey's anxiety and Bob's tentativeness in a way that a cleaner stroke would miss. This moment describing Casey's second night in the apartment cuts to the heart of the cartooning miracle -- that a set of lines can both symbolize "face" ~and~ describe a specific face of a specific person in time, and that that face can, if th elements align so, reveal an ✨interior event�
]]>
One of the most celebrated comic books of the century, collected in full alongside an expansive array of special features! Vision wants to be human, and what's more human than family? So he heads back to the beginning - to the laboratory where Ultron created him as a weapon. The place where he first rebelled against his given destiny and imagined that he could be more - that he could be a man.
There, he builds them. A wife, Virginia. Teenage twins, Viv and Vin. They look like him. They have his powers. They share his grandest ambition - or is that obsession? - the unrelenting need to be ordinary. Behold the Visions! Theirs is a story of togetherness and tragedy - one that will send the Android Avenger into a devastating confrontation with Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
COLLECTING: VISION #1-12]]>
author: Tom King
name: Mza
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/12/01
shelves: comix, 2017
review:
]]>
The iconoclastic and bestselling cartoonist of Paying for It: A comic-strip memoir about being a john and Louis Riel returns and with a polemical interpretation of the Bible that will be one of the most controversial and talked-about graphic novels of 2016. Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is the retelling in comics form of nine biblical stories that present Chester Brown's fascinating and startling thesis about biblical representations of prostitution. Brown weaves a connecting line between Bathsheba, Ruth, Rahab, Tamar, Mary of Bethany, and the Virgin Mother. He reassesses the Christian moral code by examining the cultural implications of the Bible's representations of sex work.
Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus is a fitting follow-up to Brown's sui generis graphic memoir Paying for It, which was reviewed twice in The New York Times and hailed by sex workers for Brown's advocacy for the decriminalization and normalization of prostitution. Brown approaches the Bible as he did the life of Louis Riel, making these stories compellingly readable and utterly pertinent to a modern audience. In classic Chester Brown fashion, he provides extensive handwritten endnotes that delve into the biblical lore that informs Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.]]>
author: Chester Brown
name: Mza
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/12/01
shelves: 2016, comix
review:
]]>
author: Joann Sfar
name: Mza
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2010/11/20
date added: 2019/01/22
shelves: 2010
review:
]]>
author: Peyo
name: Mza
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2011/02/28
date added: 2018/07/24
shelves: 2010
review:
]]>
author: Keith Jones
name: Mza
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/02/04
date added: 2017/03/05
shelves: 2010
review:
Seduced by bright, bright colours, I failed to perceive this book was mighty retarded until it was too late.
]]>
author: Manu Larcenet
name: Mza
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/03/28
shelves:
review:
]]>
"What excites me most here is how this approach can be used to reconnect the graphic novel to its many amazing antecedent narrative forms from around the world and reconfirms comics as a vast, unending human activity."—Paul Gravett, author of Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life
"This YA crossover shows King’s life expressed through Chitrakar’s rich Patua art and Flowers’s poetic text."�Library Journal
I See the Promised Land traverses the milestones of Martin Luther King Jr.'s short life, ministry, and journey. This graphic narrative brings together two diverse yet dramatic traditions of storytelling. Renowned African American writer and griot Arthur Flowers tells a tale—replete with destiny and the human condition to Manu Chitrakar's extraordinarily vivid and eloquent art of the Patua folk style of West Bengal, India.
]]>
It was with an attitude of skepticism that I began to read this book aloud to my wife on a Saturday afternoon. It turns out that Arthur Flowers' ebonized prose works perfectly swell when unmoored from its pictorial accompaniment. Clipped phrasing mixes with journalistic plainness, casual asides, and campfire suspense-building. Knowing how it was all going to end didn't diminish the pain and fear of loss that shadow MLK's story. One thing ended, one thing began, like always. The specialness of the civil rights movement in America became normal. If I'd have told Martin Luther King that having a black president would be normal, and nothing in America would be different because of it, would he have crossed over to the Black Power side? Would I be less proud of MLK if he weren't so proud of Gandhi? More proud, possibly? If I am a racist, and if I don't believe all people are created equal, I don't know where to put my love for King. If I think people ain't no good, it don't matter if you're black or white, I don't know where to put my love for King.
One time I met this guy in New Orleans, a gay black hustler who hypnotized me with clairvoyant appraisals of my family life, who seemed to be able to read the pain my parents have felt, this gay black Jesus lover who seemed to know that crushed hopes are saddest when they are just a little bit alive, who bought me a can of Budweiser and then tricked me into giving him 20 dollars. I didn't care, a good cry is worth at least 20 dollars.
I got that same feeling on page 117 of this book:
"Why is he still doing this. He can't come up with a convincing answer. Except this what he do. Nobody else can do what he do. Look how far we've come, Martin. Now is not the time to get weary, Martin. Look all what still need to be done."
The pictures in this comix book are okay. I sort of like how Chitrakar draws Klansmen, bug-eyed and mummified. But the words -- that broke my whole heart.]]>
author: Arthur Flowers
name: Mza
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2011/07/30
date added: 2014/07/31
shelves: 2010
review:
This collaboration between an English professor at Syracuse University, an Indian scroll painter, and an Italian designer caught my eye at the library for its conceptual and visual oddity. I can count on one hand the number of painterly comix that really work for me -- Brecht Evens' The Wrong Place, Jerry Moriarty's comix, some of Lynda Barry's stuff ... It's not that containing lines with colours added later are comix's one true form, it's just that that form lent itself most easily to the division of labour required by comix's commercial origins. Relatively few people have tried painting comix, and almost no one has succeeded in painting comix that are both beautiful and kinetic (i.e., the way I like them). Anyhow, although Manu Chitrakar does use containing lines in I See the Promised Land -- presumably adhering to the traditional Bengali style he's working in -- his work suffers from the same stiffness that plagues most painterly comix. Compounding the intentional limitations of Chitrakar's art, the book's designer, Guglielmo Rossi, has laid the pages out in a way that creates disharmony between panels, between text and pictures, between small and big fonts, between circles and boxes, and between negative and positive spaces. Some pages look decent, some are in-your-face ugly. Either way, I never lost the sense that -- given the files, the general order they're meant to be in, and PageMaker 4.2 -- anyone could have designed this.
It was with an attitude of skepticism that I began to read this book aloud to my wife on a Saturday afternoon. It turns out that Arthur Flowers' ebonized prose works perfectly swell when unmoored from its pictorial accompaniment. Clipped phrasing mixes with journalistic plainness, casual asides, and campfire suspense-building. Knowing how it was all going to end didn't diminish the pain and fear of loss that shadow MLK's story. One thing ended, one thing began, like always. The specialness of the civil rights movement in America became normal. If I'd have told Martin Luther King that having a black president would be normal, and nothing in America would be different because of it, would he have crossed over to the Black Power side? Would I be less proud of MLK if he weren't so proud of Gandhi? More proud, possibly? If I am a racist, and if I don't believe all people are created equal, I don't know where to put my love for King. If I think people ain't no good, it don't matter if you're black or white, I don't know where to put my love for King.
One time I met this guy in New Orleans, a gay black hustler who hypnotized me with clairvoyant appraisals of my family life, who seemed to be able to read the pain my parents have felt, this gay black Jesus lover who seemed to know that crushed hopes are saddest when they are just a little bit alive, who bought me a can of Budweiser and then tricked me into giving him 20 dollars. I didn't care, a good cry is worth at least 20 dollars.
I got that same feeling on page 117 of this book:
"Why is he still doing this. He can't come up with a convincing answer. Except this what he do. Nobody else can do what he do. Look how far we've come, Martin. Now is not the time to get weary, Martin. Look all what still need to be done."
The pictures in this comix book are okay. I sort of like how Chitrakar draws Klansmen, bug-eyed and mummified. But the words -- that broke my whole heart.
]]>
author: François Schuiten
name: Mza
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2010/04/01
date added: 2014/01/11
shelves:
review:
]]>
Darwyn Cooke’s beautifully stylized artwork perfectly compliments the hard-hitting action as originally written by legendary crime author Richard Stark. Parker is arguably one of the hardest hard-boiled characters in all of crime fiction and the original novels feature stories and prose that are as uncompromising as he is. This graphic novel adaptation perfectly matches the style and tone of Stark’s noir world.
The Hunter is the story of a man who hits New York head-on like a shotgun blast to the chest. Betrayed by the woman he loved and double-crossed by his partner in crime, Parker makes his way cross-country with only one thought burning in his mind � to coldly exact his revenge and reclaim what was taken from him!
Winner of the 2010 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Work.]]>
author: Darwyn Cooke
name: Mza
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2011/04/19
date added: 2014/01/10
shelves:
review:
... worshipful adaptation of the popular crime novel ... worshipful is bad, but I don't worry about that stuff when I'm reading a straight-ahead macho revenge story ...... drawn in the style of Batman: the Animated Series and reads about as quickly as a half-hour cartoon, too ... The dames look like Barbies ... all look same ... and all the non-Parker men are un-handsome villains ...... All of this visual shorthand combined with Stark's tight prose makes it easy to keep the pages flipping. I'm sure it was better and more resonant without pictures, but this is so ... easy ... Cooke's New York doesn't hint at the city's richness ... but I reckon that fits in with the book's overall style ... no richness of psychology, personality, or geography. The short, ugly guy's night of perfect sex with a prostitute is the only thing I'll remember, but that has more to do with the words than the pictures. was more fun, but I don't recall why ......
]]>
Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
Hi there,
Your review of Tom Strong, Book 1 was recently flagged by several Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ members. It appears that this section of your review could be read as racially offensive:
He's got a pretty black wife and a pretty half-breed daughter
We strive to maintain a safe and comfortable environment at Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, and we try to stay away from using potentially hurtful terms. Given this, would you mind rephrasing this part of your review or removing it entirely? If this hasn't been replaced in three business days, we will unfortunately have to remove the review.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: [email protected]
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
has a Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ employee examined my review, or is this an automated message ? Do what you want, it's your site, but it'd be to everyone's advantage to have a human review complaints before deleting user reviews
regards,
MZA
________
From: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
To: mizzahh@.***
Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
Hi MZA,
We carefully examined your review before sending out this message. As a clarification, the review will only be removed in three business days if you do not remove the part that we highlighted in our previous message.
Please let us know if you have any questions about this.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Booboo
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
hello Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ,
I don't have questions. You have been clear, and as I acknowledged before, it's your site, not mine, you do as you please. But since I am talking to a human, you might as well know that what you're asking me to do is change th way I write because someone else didn't like it. What kind of person would submit to such pressure from a web site and "several" sensitive flaggers? That's right, a coward. Think on it: what if th same standards were applied to books on Amazon or books in th library -- as a company that celebrates writing in all of its manifestations -- bad writing, good writing, great writing, uplifting writing, miserable writing, evil writing, confusing writing, divine writing -- you can see th irony in deleting writing that doesn't mimic a political orthodoxy or whose humor might be impenetrable.
It's not that I don't like your site. But if it's true that you prefer to cultivate users of a certain political stripe and exclude th ideological riff-raff, it'd probably be more efficient to delete ALL my reviews. "He's got a pretty black wife and a pretty half-breed daughter" is in th bottom-third percentile of most offensive things I've ever written.
regards
MZA
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
To: mizzahh@.***
Hi MZA,
Thank you for your feedback. While we do appreciate your position, this particular comment violates our Terms of Service. Sorry about that.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Booboo
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
hello Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, well I'm not deleting it and don't plan on altering my style or word choice in any future communications, so this heroic deletion of thoughtcrime's on you
regards
MZA]]>
author: Alan Moore
name: Mza
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2013/07/13
date added: 2013/07/13
shelves:
review:
From: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
Hi there,
Your review of Tom Strong, Book 1 was recently flagged by several Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ members. It appears that this section of your review could be read as racially offensive:
He's got a pretty black wife and a pretty half-breed daughter
We strive to maintain a safe and comfortable environment at Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, and we try to stay away from using potentially hurtful terms. Given this, would you mind rephrasing this part of your review or removing it entirely? If this hasn't been replaced in three business days, we will unfortunately have to remove the review.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: [email protected]
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
has a Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ employee examined my review, or is this an automated message ? Do what you want, it's your site, but it'd be to everyone's advantage to have a human review complaints before deleting user reviews
regards,
MZA
________
From: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
To: mizzahh@.***
Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
Hi MZA,
We carefully examined your review before sending out this message. As a clarification, the review will only be removed in three business days if you do not remove the part that we highlighted in our previous message.
Please let us know if you have any questions about this.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Booboo
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
hello Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ,
I don't have questions. You have been clear, and as I acknowledged before, it's your site, not mine, you do as you please. But since I am talking to a human, you might as well know that what you're asking me to do is change th way I write because someone else didn't like it. What kind of person would submit to such pressure from a web site and "several" sensitive flaggers? That's right, a coward. Think on it: what if th same standards were applied to books on Amazon or books in th library -- as a company that celebrates writing in all of its manifestations -- bad writing, good writing, great writing, uplifting writing, miserable writing, evil writing, confusing writing, divine writing -- you can see th irony in deleting writing that doesn't mimic a political orthodoxy or whose humor might be impenetrable.
It's not that I don't like your site. But if it's true that you prefer to cultivate users of a certain political stripe and exclude th ideological riff-raff, it'd probably be more efficient to delete ALL my reviews. "He's got a pretty black wife and a pretty half-breed daughter" is in th bottom-third percentile of most offensive things I've ever written.
regards
MZA
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
To: mizzahh@.***
Hi MZA,
Thank you for your feedback. While we do appreciate your position, this particular comment violates our Terms of Service. Sorry about that.
Sincerely,
The Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Team
________
Re: [#85956] Flagged Review
From: Booboo
To: Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ
hello Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, well I'm not deleting it and don't plan on altering my style or word choice in any future communications, so this heroic deletion of thoughtcrime's on you
regards
MZA
]]>
author: Julie Doucet
name: Mza
average rating: 3.05
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/03/30
date added: 2013/06/11
shelves: 2010
review:
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MATURE READERS
SC, 8x11, 136pg, b&w]]>
author: Jaime Hernández
name: Mza
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/05/30
shelves:
review:
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When a strange fly bites one of the Smurfs, a full-on epidemic develops in the Smurf Village! After being bit, a Smurf turns purple and his vocabulary is reduced to one single word: “gnap!� The purple Smurf runs around the Smurf Village biting other Smurfs on the tail, causing them to turn purple and act crazy too! Soon enough, there are more purple Smurfs than blue Smurfs in the village. It’s up to Papa Smurf to find a cure and save the Smurf Village before all of the Smurfs lose their minds for good!
]]>
author: Peyo
name: Mza
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2011/03/02
date added: 2013/03/27
shelves: 2010
review:
]]>
author: Gilbert Hernández
name: Mza
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/02/14
shelves:
review:
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author: Eddie Campbell
name: Mza
average rating: 3.65
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/06/21
shelves:
review:
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author: Eddie Campbell
name: Mza
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/06/21
shelves:
review:
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author: Winshluss
name: Mza
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/02
date added: 2012/04/02
shelves: 2011
review:
... merges Deitch's ease in cross-cutting between embedded and overlapping realities with a dirty, seam-bursting cartoon style reminiscent of Tony Millionaire and Milt Gross. Pinocchio won me with its furious page-to-page and panel-to-panel momentum, its perfect comedic timing, and its repeated backpedalling to pick up previous story threads and sew them into one surprising pair of pants. Geppetto is a profit-minded inventor; Pinocchio is a robot with potential military applications and no motive; and Jiminy Cockroach becomes a stand-in for both reader and author as a self-doubting, unemployed, down-on-his-luck would-be novelist who's taken up residence in Pinocchio's hollow skull, rent-free. Pinocchio's and Jiminy's narratives run parallel (and are distinguished by colour and black-and-white pictures, respectively) but intersect at several critical points, leading to Pinocchio's apocalyptic stand-off with the human military. Winshluss assembles bits of the original fairy tale and perverts them to his own aims. He contaminates Disneyesque human values such as romantic love, familial acceptance, home, and following one's dream; and then reaffirms the same values while suggesting that their comforts leave us hungry for some unnamed other. It probably isn't God. It definitely isn't religion, as is made clear in a subplot involving faith-based terrorism. By inserting Disney characters (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appear in a subplot) into a sex-, violence-, and greed-fueled milieu, Winshluss risks slipping into simple political satire; but the despair coursing through his panel gutters nullifies moral advice; and the link between Pinocchio's colourful, power-mad outer world and Jiminy's black-and-white, alcoholic inner world is infused with complex magickal potential -- a prayer for amplification of the individual imagination to world-transforming, giant-robot size. Where one political tyranny is in continual danger of being replaced by another political tyranny, Winshluss makes creative storytelling and black comedy its own kind of tyrant. Pinocchio for dictator-for-life.
]]>
author: Tome
name: Mza
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2011/03/19
date added: 2012/02/01
shelves:
review:
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Collecting: DC: The New Fronteir 4-6]]>
author: Darwyn Cooke
name: Mza
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2011/12/16
date added: 2011/12/16
shelves:
review:
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author: Alan Moore
name: Mza
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2011/12/15
date added: 2011/12/16
shelves:
review:
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author: Grant Morrison
name: Mza
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/12/15
shelves:
review:
]]>
author: Alan Moore
name: Mza
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/14
date added: 2011/12/15
shelves:
review:
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Collecting: Uncanny X-Force 1-4, & material from Wolverine: Road to Hell, All-New Wolverine Saga]]>
author: Rick Remender
name: Mza
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2011/12/09
date added: 2011/12/10
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
name: Mza
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2011/03/19
date added: 2011/11/23
shelves: 2010
review:
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author: Sam Kieth
name: Mza
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/11/18
date added: 2011/11/18
shelves: 2010
review:
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Kyoto, 1966. The young Hamaguchi is working for a textile manufacturer whilst dreaming of becoming an artist, when an incident at the zoo forces his hand. He moves to Tokyo at the invitation of an old school friend who also arranges an "interview" at the studios of the famous mangaka, Shiro Kondo. Here he quickly discovers both the long hours of meeting studio deadlines along with the nightlife and artistic haunts of the capital.
For the first time ever, multi-award winning Taniguchi recalls his beginnings in manga and his youth spent in Tokyo in the 60's. It is a magnificent account of his apprenticeship where all the finesse and elegance of the creator are united to illustrate those first emotions of adulthood.]]>
author: JirĹŤ Taniguchi
name: Mza
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/15
date added: 2011/11/15
shelves: 2011
review:
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In “The Mad Scientist,� the science that brought us revived dinosaurs now results in a pithecanthrope stalking the streets of the City of Light, climaxing in an amazing car chase involving a foe from the previous volume. Will the perpetually inept Inspector Caponi just make things worse? Probably. Then in the second episode, “A Dusting of Mummies,� the mummy glimpsed in Adele’s apartment in previous episodes comes alive! The volume concludes with the sudden startling (and delightful) incursion of some characters familiar to Tardi fans, and a shocking climax that leaves the future of both Adele and this series in doubt as World War I erupts. (It’s the only story in the entire series not to feature an “in our next episode� teaser.)
The Extraordinary Adventure of Adele Blanc-Sec, Volume 2, is the lucky seventh book in Fantagraphics� acclaimed series of Tardi reprints, showcasing the rich variety of graphic novels from one of France’s greatest living cartoonists.]]>
author: Jacques Tardi
name: Mza
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/14
date added: 2011/11/15
shelves: 2011
review:
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Take a walk with the dazed survivors of a mysterious worldwide catastrophe. They are bound for a place, somewhere in the desert, where a terrible truth awaits them.]]>
author: Richard Sala
name: Mza
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/13
date added: 2011/11/13
shelves: 2011
review:
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These two teens are the last line of defence for a nation in ruins. Armed with a fully-operational tank the pair must fight off the zombie hordes while they catfight each other for food, entertainment and maybe even the affection and attention of the opposite sex. They have nothing to lose in this world except their humanity, but then again who are the zombies in this world? Are they the undead or are these two teens who must live among them even still human?]]>
author: Jiro Matsumoto
name: Mza
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/13
date added: 2011/11/13
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/11
date added: 2011/11/11
shelves: 2011
review:
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Collects Hellboy in Mexico; Double Feature of Evil; The Sleeping and the Dead #1�2; The Bride of Hell; The Whittier Legacy; Buster Oakley Gets His Wish.]]>
author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/11
date added: 2011/11/11
shelves: 2011
review:
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Even the lead character’s name, which is only one letter away from “Cannibal Duckface� (hint: “Cannibal� is correct) is unprintable.
Prison Pit is so deranged and twisted that even the author’s plot description,
while admirably reflecting the spirit of the book, has to be edited into a sea of asterisks in order to be bearable to normal human beings: “A mysterious new a**hole has descended into the Prison Pit. He’s looking for Cannibal F***face and he wants revenge. Revenge for what? Probably for some f***ed up evil s***. But before he can get his hands on the CanMan he’s got to battle his way through some pretty vicious motherf***ers. S***’s about to get real.�
Well, yes, exactly.
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author: Johnny Ryan
name: Mza
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/10
date added: 2011/11/10
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Jesse Moynihan
name: Mza
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/10
date added: 2011/11/10
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Sylvain Runberg
name: Mza
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/09
date added: 2011/11/10
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Sylvain Runberg
name: Mza
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/08
date added: 2011/11/10
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Sylvain Runberg
name: Mza
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/08
date added: 2011/11/08
shelves:
review:
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Little does she realize that the Isle comes by its ominous name honestly, as the location of a secret school for executioners and torturers, where apple-cheeked youngsters are taught the finer points of extracting information from prisoners� and then putting an end to their lives in a wide variety of gruesome ways. And they’ve reached the point in their studies where theory should ideally give way to practice, so an influx of uninvited visitors comes as a blessing to the faculty.
And yes, this story is a comedy. Albeit a dark one.
For the first time in his career, Jason has enlisted a writer: Fabien Vehlmann. (Vehlmann has written a number of graphic novels for the French and American markets, including an installment of the legendary Spirou series and the three-volume Green Manor continuity, of which two volumes have been released in English.) Vehlmann has managed to interiorize Jason’s deadpan style and wit perfectly, creating a uniquely smooth and successful collaboration. 56 pages of full-color comics]]>
author: Fabien Vehlmann
name: Mza
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/07
date added: 2011/11/08
shelves: 2011
review:
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The stories included are: “Hair Types,� a hilarious piece that on the surface explores the pseudoscientific classification of personality as a function of hair but becomes something more akin to a fable about self-fulfilling prophecy; “Chromo Congo,� a silent story about two men on safari who meet a corpulent and obnoxious hunter; as well as “The Task,� “The Man Who Grew His Beard,� “The Lock,� “The Cave,� and “The Imaginist.�
Though this is Schrauwen’s first U.S. edition of comics, he has wowed American fans with his appearances in the anthology MOME over the last few years, and one of his MOME stories was one of three comics selected for the 2009 edition of Dave Eggers� influential Best American Nonrequired Reading.]]>
author: Olivier Schrauwen
name: Mza
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/07
date added: 2011/11/07
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Jim Woodring
name: Mza
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/06
date added: 2011/11/07
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Yuichi Yokoyama
name: Mza
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/05
date added: 2011/11/06
shelves: 2011
review:
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"It is not only the best comic strip, but the best satire that's come along in a long time."
—Art Buchwald
Carried today by over 350 North American newspapers, Doonesbury's unique blend of social-political satire, cartoon humor, and comic-strip continuity has won a following both improbably diverse and fanatically devoted. In Washington, where Doonesbury is required reading, requests for original strips have come from White House aides, senators, congressmen, and—remarkably—most of the major Watergate conspirators whose maladventures gave the strip grist for some of its most celebrated moments.
"There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order."
—President Gerald Ford
So loyal has been this following that on occasions when Doonesbury was suddenly notable for its absence from a paper following a satirical thrust that had somehow offended editors' notions of comic-strip propriety, readers have always managed to protest it back onto the page.
The Doonesbury Chronicles marks the first hardcover appearance of Michael J. Doonesbury and cohorts, and is their first collection to include Sunday color pages. In all, 572 strips are presented, as selected by Garry Trudeau and encompassing the full Doonesbury canon, from its cozy campus origins at the frazzled end of the sixties through the stumbling first half of the seventies. Conducting us along the way is a motley though always redeemable cast that includes a student radical turned disc jockey, an immaculately dense but nonetheless charismatic quarterback, a nature freak who has nightmares about Mark Spitz, and a runaway housewife who ends up as a Berkeley law student by way of the Walden Commune Day-Care Center. For those hooked on Trudeau, as well as those still somehow deprived, for giving or hoarding, The Doonesbury Chronicles is a rich and Recession-proof treasure of a book.]]>
That's not necessarily a bad thing in a strip whose conversations are the main event, and Doonesbury's rapid response to current events provides a steady stream of dialogues that are interesting even when they aren't funny. Tom Spurgeon has that Trudeau's big advantage over more traditional one-panel editorial cartoonists is how he can call upon any one of a large cast of fully-developed characters to react to the news in ways that reveal truths about both the character and the news. In this book, we see Trudeau developing that strategy with Joanie Caucus and the rise of feminism; Mark Slackmeyer and Watergate; B.D. and the Vietnam War; and Mike Doonesbury/Zonker Harris/Joanie/Mark and communal living. It's a good demonstration of the virtues of fictional treatment of non-fictional phenomena: when political narratives are poured into human shapes, we are encouraged to suspend judgment and perceive complexity.
There are a few "We've come a long way, baby" moments: Joanie worries that law school will reject her because she's a woman. A Black Panther appears as a guest speaker in a college class where the professor presents him as an exotic show'n'tell. Mike's decision to live on an experimental commune is treated casually, as if it is something normal college graduates do. None of these signs of the times deliver the gleeful shock of Mad Men 's best WTF moments because Doonesbury's gentle, liberal attitudes are now the air that American popular entertainment breathes, and its sarcasm is the language we all speak. For me, the familiarity of Trudeau's approach invites disengagement. I want to know what it's like to live on a commune. I want to know how hard it is. I want to know how hard it was for Joanie to leave her daughters behind, too, when she left her husband. Trudeau goes only halfway in describing his world, relying on context to take care of the rest. He has an opinion, but he smooths it over with jokes that say, in a nutshell, "These people are good, even if they act silly most of the time." The nonchalance of his humour may or may not have been fresh at the time, but it's certainly stale now. If we're lucky, the fact that the past 40 years have not given us another Doonesbury-style strip, one that tackles the political world as it happens but still stays true to its own peculiar narrative, will make a lightbulb turn on for an ambitious young cartoonist who can do it, but do it better.]]>
author: G.B. Trudeau
name: Mza
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1975
rating: 2
read at: 2011/11/04
date added: 2011/11/05
shelves:
review:
This 1975 Doonesbury compilation -- selected from the strip's first years (1970-75) -- took me 16 months to read because I couldn't get excited about it as entertainment or as anthropological time travel. Trudeau's jokes and voice haven't aged well in the same way that I imagine the voices and jokes of the friends on Friends won't age well -- something too cute and self-ritualizing about the way they talk and formulate sarcasm, something monolithic about their back-and-forths that disrupts the illusion that all of these people aren't one person talking to himself. Trudeau's drawings here are less slick than they would later become, as you'd expect, but they suffer from the same timidity and lack of variation that make his current work fit in so well on the modern newspaper comix page. Every now and then in this book, usually in an outdoors scene in a Sunday color strip, he draws something that catches my eye -- a car or a tree -- but for the most part he gives us page after page of people from the waist up, talking, standing still.
That's not necessarily a bad thing in a strip whose conversations are the main event, and Doonesbury's rapid response to current events provides a steady stream of dialogues that are interesting even when they aren't funny. Tom Spurgeon has that Trudeau's big advantage over more traditional one-panel editorial cartoonists is how he can call upon any one of a large cast of fully-developed characters to react to the news in ways that reveal truths about both the character and the news. In this book, we see Trudeau developing that strategy with Joanie Caucus and the rise of feminism; Mark Slackmeyer and Watergate; B.D. and the Vietnam War; and Mike Doonesbury/Zonker Harris/Joanie/Mark and communal living. It's a good demonstration of the virtues of fictional treatment of non-fictional phenomena: when political narratives are poured into human shapes, we are encouraged to suspend judgment and perceive complexity.
There are a few "We've come a long way, baby" moments: Joanie worries that law school will reject her because she's a woman. A Black Panther appears as a guest speaker in a college class where the professor presents him as an exotic show'n'tell. Mike's decision to live on an experimental commune is treated casually, as if it is something normal college graduates do. None of these signs of the times deliver the gleeful shock of Mad Men 's best WTF moments because Doonesbury's gentle, liberal attitudes are now the air that American popular entertainment breathes, and its sarcasm is the language we all speak. For me, the familiarity of Trudeau's approach invites disengagement. I want to know what it's like to live on a commune. I want to know how hard it is. I want to know how hard it was for Joanie to leave her daughters behind, too, when she left her husband. Trudeau goes only halfway in describing his world, relying on context to take care of the rest. He has an opinion, but he smooths it over with jokes that say, in a nutshell, "These people are good, even if they act silly most of the time." The nonchalance of his humour may or may not have been fresh at the time, but it's certainly stale now. If we're lucky, the fact that the past 40 years have not given us another Doonesbury-style strip, one that tackles the political world as it happens but still stays true to its own peculiar narrative, will make a lightbulb turn on for an ambitious young cartoonist who can do it, but do it better.
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author: Nate Powell
name: Mza
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/10/31
date added: 2011/11/02
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
name: Mza
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2011/10/20
date added: 2011/10/20
shelves:
review:
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As it's impossible to care, in the conventional sense, what happens to the heroes, reading (as opposed to looking at) these comix becomes similar to watching sports or playing video games; the pleasure has to come from the authors' manipulation of well-known materials, structures, and strategies.
Lee/Kirby's concern for the emotional problems of the Fantastic Four might still have been novel at the time (1966-67), but their cursory, corny treatment of how people talk about and act on their feelings would be greeted with rolled eyes by today's 12-year-olds. The stories' conceptual oddities -- monsters made out of pure sound, a futuristic African nation, the mute king whose voice contains disastrous potential, the giant dog who can teleport -- have stood up much better, which might explain why Marvel writers have revived and revised these inventions again and again, along with the heroes themselves. It's too bad that the inventions amount to trippy furniture placed inside a conventional, non-trippy house. The stories go where you think they're going to go.
It's likely, though, that most people who pick this book up aren't seeking great writing, not even great children's writing, in the same way people don't listen to Black Sabbath for the lyrics. Here, Jack Kirby's drawings of bodies flying through the air are the ass-rocking music. He has never been surpassed in drawing BIG things: BIG, heavy, retarded, humongous machinery; BIG, dumb, cute, ugly monsters; BIG celestial objects; and BIG muscles. I don't know what to make of all these beefy things. They're not sexual things. They're not necessarily funny -- though, especially in combination with Stan Lee's pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue, they often are. Mostly they seem to be the brain belches of a man who has seen some extremely big things and is trying to tell you about them, and the only language available to him is spacecraft and beefy thighs. The language seems incomplete, but the terror and majesty of what this man has seen somehow come through, anyhow.
Two biggest highlights of this book: 1) the Negative Zone collages (WANTED: a whole book of that), 2) the moment Doctor Doom betrays the Silver Surfer and steals his power cosmic. What a dick!]]>
author: Stan Lee
name: Mza
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2011/10/07
date added: 2011/10/08
shelves:
review:
... v. athletic, action-packed, and histrionic, but also a reminder of why most superhero comix are a tough read for me, even the ones starring the most iconic and comforting heroes. I'm familiar with the Fantastic Four, and even though I'd never read these stories in particular (or the ones preceding them), there wasn't a significant barrier to entry, plot-wise. In defiance of decades of accumulated narrative baggage, superheroes generally don't change. Their curse is an eternal return to a status quo of waiting, flexed and charged, for danger to arrive.
As it's impossible to care, in the conventional sense, what happens to the heroes, reading (as opposed to looking at) these comix becomes similar to watching sports or playing video games; the pleasure has to come from the authors' manipulation of well-known materials, structures, and strategies.
Lee/Kirby's concern for the emotional problems of the Fantastic Four might still have been novel at the time (1966-67), but their cursory, corny treatment of how people talk about and act on their feelings would be greeted with rolled eyes by today's 12-year-olds. The stories' conceptual oddities -- monsters made out of pure sound, a futuristic African nation, the mute king whose voice contains disastrous potential, the giant dog who can teleport -- have stood up much better, which might explain why Marvel writers have revived and revised these inventions again and again, along with the heroes themselves. It's too bad that the inventions amount to trippy furniture placed inside a conventional, non-trippy house. The stories go where you think they're going to go.
It's likely, though, that most people who pick this book up aren't seeking great writing, not even great children's writing, in the same way people don't listen to Black Sabbath for the lyrics. Here, Jack Kirby's drawings of bodies flying through the air are the ass-rocking music. He has never been surpassed in drawing BIG things: BIG, heavy, retarded, humongous machinery; BIG, dumb, cute, ugly monsters; BIG celestial objects; and BIG muscles. I don't know what to make of all these beefy things. They're not sexual things. They're not necessarily funny -- though, especially in combination with Stan Lee's pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue, they often are. Mostly they seem to be the brain belches of a man who has seen some extremely big things and is trying to tell you about them, and the only language available to him is spacecraft and beefy thighs. The language seems incomplete, but the terror and majesty of what this man has seen somehow come through, anyhow.
Two biggest highlights of this book: 1) the Negative Zone collages (WANTED: a whole book of that), 2) the moment Doctor Doom betrays the Silver Surfer and steals his power cosmic. What a dick!
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author: Frank Miller
name: Mza
average rating: 1.98
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2011/09/30
date added: 2011/10/02
shelves: 2011
review:
Listen, this is shitty in exactly the way all the shitty parts of Frank Miller's non-shitty comix (e.g., Elektra: Assassin , Ronin , Batman: Year One ) are shitty -- retarded telegraphic speech, lack of attention to details of human behaviour, video game villains, and a heavy dose of nerd sex that will help impressionable boys dry girls' vaginas for years to come -- but I'm not here to shoot barrel fish. Miller's simpleminded politics and psychology aside, the book's a rip-off -- ultra-thin storytelling for 100 pages in which nearly every page is a minimalist splash page. You get some familiar dynamic silhouetted poses from Batman and Catwoman; some drawings that are sketchy to the point of not knowing quite what you're looking at; limited, specific use of solid red and green (Catwoman's shoes and eyes, respectively); and a lot of textural flourishes such as dripped ink and what looks like streaks of watery white-out. None of these things are bad per se, and I'm actually a fan of Miller's post- Sin City minimalism as a look; but these drawings leave nothing to become attached to. Nothing funny or weird, no faces that suggest a whole history of feeling, not even a reliably ordinary everyman upon which a chaotic world may imprint its confusing messages. There's no real chaos, only page after page of bare-bones figure drawing backlit by explosions. If all of this was intended as anti-terrorist propaganda, it falls unathletically short: nobody wants to jump from roof to roof with these two aerobics instructors.
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author: Yuichi Yokoyama
name: Mza
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2011/08/25
date added: 2011/09/29
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Brian Wood
name: Mza
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2011/09/20
date added: 2011/09/29
shelves:
review:
As dystopian fiction goes, this one's better than the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes ; but not as good as Brave New World , Max Headroom , the original Planet of the Apes , Blade Runner , The Dark Knight Returns , The Dark Knight Strikes Again , Idiocracy , Wall-E , Y: the Last Man , Zardoz , or the James Franco Planet of the Apes .
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author: David Jablow
name: Mza
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/09/21
date added: 2011/09/29
shelves: 2011
review:
Thirty-nine drawings of one lady on all fours with her ass pointed heavenward ... vulgar, crammed with detail, full of life and the promise of infinite sexual variety ... Is this the artist's subliminal comment on marriage? The lady looks pretty wifey to me.
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author: Michael DeForge
name: Mza
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/09/23
date added: 2011/09/29
shelves: 2011
review:
... like a Jim Woodring story in which the characters are, instead of enigmas, normal people who have normal conversations, except they look like defective animals -- tossed into a cruel, toxic, ugly, apocalyptic industrial landscape by the same God who won't give Manhog a break ... If Manhog could speak and had a meaningless paper-pushing job (and were uglier), he might be the dickless divorcé in the main story here. Cartoonists are always writing about ineffectual men who are destroyed flesh-shells at the mercy of indifferent women. Is it because it's HILARIOUS? Michael DeForge is funny with this shtick, anyhow, and his cartooning is rhythmic & relentless & circular like a krautrock jam. Give the band more shrooms, DeForge, keep this song going.
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I was 12 or 13 when I bought a reprint of Love & Rockets #1, and it confused me in the usual comforting way, but also in a way that suggested I was not grown-up enough to talk back to it, lacking the resources to know what blanks needed filling. Here was a #1, a beginning, but it acted not only as if I'd missed the first hundred issues, but also as if I'd been raised in the wrong country, watching the wrong movies, listening to the wrong music, speaking the wrong English. Luba, dressed up in war paint, proud IMMENSE tits swangin', yelling an obscenity up at a HUMONGOUS caterpillar who must have escaped from a Godzilla sequel. Maggie sitting in bed in her panties, possibly nursing a hangover, having a casual conversation with Hopey, her lover (!) -- who's also half-dressed and cool-looking and somehow not acting like she's the coolest girl in the world -- before riding to work on a hovering scooter. These were new things. There was the mystery and magick of sex, of course, but this and other mysteries (punk, time travel, love, technology) were encompassed by an utter normality of presentation that made the whole project seem less like a cultural and aesthetic revolution than a documentary eavesdrop on a universe next door.
Twenty-five years after I met them (thirty after their creation), these characters (and/or ones closely related to them) still star in new stories, and still bedevil me with a distinctive cocktail of the familiar and weird. I grew old, the characters grew old, and familiar/weird grew old and succumbed to a synthesis into the new familiar. Both Gilbert and Jaime ditched the sci-fi and superheroic ornamentation of their early work and concentrated on what detractors have called soap opera -- a regular cast of characters' friendships, love lives, and personal adventures -- and then reintroduced elements of sci-fi, superheroes, and other generic forms in various stories in the last decade. Gilbert of late has abandoned Luba in favour of short narrative experiments that aren't bound by history, character, or the laws of physics. I like but for the most part don't love them. Jaime, on the other hand, has handcuffed himself and us to Maggie, daring anybody to lose interest in a woman whose life sometimes seems barely to progress in any direction.
When I call something soap operatic, I mean no ill. Whoever gives himself to a soap opera is in it for the long haul. He means to follow a character until that character dies, or he dies. Remember when ____ died in The Wire ? Remember when ______ lost his fool mind in Season 4 of Mad Men ? Remember how you talked to your wife about the people in these shows as if they were people in the world, not on a show? That is how it is for me and Maggie and Love & Rockets, except these people have been in my world for a quarter of a century.
For many years, I've wondered if Ray and Maggie would be boyfriend girlfriend for real, or end up husband and wife, and when I think about the two of them, I don't think about how Jaime draws (like a boss) or what (genius) storytelling techniques he uses to get his points across. I think about two people who might be in love in a parallel universe and about what they might have to do to be happy in this world. I think about every couple who have had bad luck and had to go their separate ways or who never got together in the first place, and I think about if love is even real or if it is real mostly in stories, and even then only real on a story's horizon -- next issue, next corner, next panel, not this panel. Why am I caring for imaginary friends feeling imaginary feelings?
You can't write a review of that feeling. You can't write a review of multiple universes branching off from a single deciding point. In one review, I give it one star. In a parallel review, I give it four stars -- that's quite good! In this other parallel review, I give it a paralyzed no stars. What I hope happened to Maggie and Ray in this book and what I think happened to Maggie and Ray in this book are the least important things. The most important thing is admitting that whatever happened, it's not going to end. Not once, not never. No way.]]>
author: Gilbert Hernández
name: Mza
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/09/12
date added: 2011/09/18
shelves: 2011
review:
The great game of reading anything for the first time -- by reading I will also include watching and listening to -- is to pass from disorientation into intimacy, familiarity, or, at least, a condition of not bumping blind into every wall or furnishing. I learned this game first in 1977 from Star Wars , which was the first work of art to drop me off in the middle of the proceedings without explaining itself (I couldn't read the scrolling yellow text.), letting me collect my bearings from a catalogue of unprecedented metal objects and the strange-looking, strangely-dressed humanoids who wielded or rode in them; and I continued to practice the game throughout my childhood with superhero comix, whose tradition of serializing characters' lives monthly over years and decades meant I was never beginning in the beginning, at an age when my lack of independent income and transportation meant I was also missing a lot of endings and middles. Under such barbaric conditions, a child has no choice but to compensate, not only to fill in blanks using good detective work, but also to cultivate the fan-fictional lobes of the brain, to imagine beginnings, middles, and endings as he would wish them to be. Anyone who has experienced being a reader in this way can attest to the mental savagery it engenders -- the hunger like the wolf for more story; the deaf, dumb lust for what lies around the corner of a certain doorframe; the sense of betrayal over a narrative cop-out; the oath of revenge by murder. On a more submerged level, the reader might begin to perceive the pleasure in his own frustrations with the game, and the potential for another game existing within the confines of the first, in which incompleteness is not a condition to solve but its own virtue, a game in which the thing you want more of is the feeling of wanting more. I swear that reading has never gotten more intense than it was when I was 12.
I was 12 or 13 when I bought a reprint of Love & Rockets #1, and it confused me in the usual comforting way, but also in a way that suggested I was not grown-up enough to talk back to it, lacking the resources to know what blanks needed filling. Here was a #1, a beginning, but it acted not only as if I'd missed the first hundred issues, but also as if I'd been raised in the wrong country, watching the wrong movies, listening to the wrong music, speaking the wrong English. Luba, dressed up in war paint, proud IMMENSE tits swangin', yelling an obscenity up at a HUMONGOUS caterpillar who must have escaped from a Godzilla sequel. Maggie sitting in bed in her panties, possibly nursing a hangover, having a casual conversation with Hopey, her lover (!) -- who's also half-dressed and cool-looking and somehow not acting like she's the coolest girl in the world -- before riding to work on a hovering scooter. These were new things. There was the mystery and magick of sex, of course, but this and other mysteries (punk, time travel, love, technology) were encompassed by an utter normality of presentation that made the whole project seem less like a cultural and aesthetic revolution than a documentary eavesdrop on a universe next door.
Twenty-five years after I met them (thirty after their creation), these characters (and/or ones closely related to them) still star in new stories, and still bedevil me with a distinctive cocktail of the familiar and weird. I grew old, the characters grew old, and familiar/weird grew old and succumbed to a synthesis into the new familiar. Both Gilbert and Jaime ditched the sci-fi and superheroic ornamentation of their early work and concentrated on what detractors have called soap opera -- a regular cast of characters' friendships, love lives, and personal adventures -- and then reintroduced elements of sci-fi, superheroes, and other generic forms in various stories in the last decade. Gilbert of late has abandoned Luba in favour of short narrative experiments that aren't bound by history, character, or the laws of physics. I like but for the most part don't love them. Jaime, on the other hand, has handcuffed himself and us to Maggie, daring anybody to lose interest in a woman whose life sometimes seems barely to progress in any direction.
When I call something soap operatic, I mean no ill. Whoever gives himself to a soap opera is in it for the long haul. He means to follow a character until that character dies, or he dies. Remember when ____ died in The Wire ? Remember when ______ lost his fool mind in Season 4 of Mad Men ? Remember how you talked to your wife about the people in these shows as if they were people in the world, not on a show? That is how it is for me and Maggie and Love & Rockets, except these people have been in my world for a quarter of a century.
For many years, I've wondered if Ray and Maggie would be boyfriend girlfriend for real, or end up husband and wife, and when I think about the two of them, I don't think about how Jaime draws (like a boss) or what (genius) storytelling techniques he uses to get his points across. I think about two people who might be in love in a parallel universe and about what they might have to do to be happy in this world. I think about every couple who have had bad luck and had to go their separate ways or who never got together in the first place, and I think about if love is even real or if it is real mostly in stories, and even then only real on a story's horizon -- next issue, next corner, next panel, not this panel. Why am I caring for imaginary friends feeling imaginary feelings?
You can't write a review of that feeling. You can't write a review of multiple universes branching off from a single deciding point. In one review, I give it one star. In a parallel review, I give it four stars -- that's quite good! In this other parallel review, I give it a paralyzed no stars. What I hope happened to Maggie and Ray in this book and what I think happened to Maggie and Ray in this book are the least important things. The most important thing is admitting that whatever happened, it's not going to end. Not once, not never. No way.
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author: Lewis Trondheim
name: Mza
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/08/24
date added: 2011/08/31
shelves: 2011
review:
... probably the easiest comix series going right now -- two to six panels per strip; one strip per page; loose, confident drawings; gentle jokes; and watercolours that pop into the air above the book. Their ease is what makes me take these strips for granted and what made me pick this book first from a high stack of unread comix. Trondheim draws himself as a white parakeet-looking bird who often wears the ungainly brown sandals European tourists favour. There is nothing cool about the way he presents himself, and there are no attempts at poetry in his word balloons and caption boxes (though my comments are limited to the English translation). His self-deprecating manner will be familiar to anyone who has watched a Woody Allen movie, though he is more gentle with himself than any Allen protagonist would be. In these strips, neurotic moments are only a normal part of life, not the building blocks toward an identity, nor the whips with which to flog himself further, nor opportunities to rant on mortality or a greater meaninglessness, nor anything to hide and strategically reveal. When Trondheim has a minor health problem in this book, he filters the situation through his four-panel punchline generator because that's his job as an artist -- to pay attention, to be funny, to record one day and then the next, and to make a beautiful drawing. He sees a doctor, he has surgery, he draws about it. He stays in a hotel, he struggles with an unfamiliar faucet handle, he draws about it. Naming the series Little Nothings frees him not to wring extra meaning from every neurotic episode. The name describes a strategy for reducing the big somethings that constitute human neuroticism.
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author: Mario Hernández
name: Mza
average rating: 2.70
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/08/21
date added: 2011/08/27
shelves: 2011
review:
Ungenerous hypothesis: Mario's text is denser than what Gilbert would have written on his own because Mario can't draw as vividly. His words have further to go to complete the scene. When Mario's writing and Gilbert's drawings team up, as they do here, the text ends up weighing too much. Page 63, on which crime boss Mambo's super eye accidentally melts off half of a business associate's head, stands out -- the characters' speech is clipped, and their acting (faces + gestures) does the heavy lifting. I'm sure the book would have been at least twice as long if it had pursued this method throughout. What we get instead is expository voiceover and expository dialogue on top of Gilbert's signature soap operatic action. Unapologetic B-movie corn and offhand techno-mysticism from Los Bros don't surprise me, but I always expect them to go further than paying homage to their boyhood inspirations. The civil rights subplot here doesn't have much more depth or breadth than what Stan Lee would have come up with in the 1960s; but it could have, if the story had been stretched to a more natural length. The sense of claustrophobia I got from navigating Citizen Rex 's large ensemble cast and the collision of their various political aims will stay with me after I've forgotten what those political aims are.
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author: Rafael Grampá
name: Mza
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2011/08/06
date added: 2011/08/21
shelves:
review:
... cuts through standard desensitization to violence by amplifying both cartooniness & grotesque level of detail -- body hair, pock marks, skin sag, soft membrane, tears, sweat, urine, and of course buckets of blood, gushing like a garden hose -- and by neither sparing nor making a special case of violence against women. There's something wickedly egalitarian in that the women's deaths are no less cartoony & no more sexualized than the men's. The one-twist plot & minimal psychology stay out of the way of the action, leaving nothing behind except a vertiginous, amoral glee.
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Fifteen years ago, Dashiell "Dash" Bad Horse ran away from a life of abject poverty and utter hopelessness on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in hopes of finding something better. Now he's come back home armed with nothing but a set of nunchucks, a hell-bent-for-leather attitude and one dark secret, to find nothing much has changed on "The Rez" -- short of a glimmering new casino, and a once-proud people overcome by drugs and organized crime. Is he here to set things right or just get a piece of the action?
Collects:/b> Scalped #1-5.]]>
author: Jason Aaron
name: Mza
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2011/08/05
date added: 2011/08/08
shelves:
review:
... Frank Miller-esque tough-guy talk, and the art even has some of that Miller/Janson jaggedness ... However, none of the paranoia, heroic fascism, and sexual fear that animate Ronin , 300 , Elektra: Assassin , Dark Knight Returns , Dark Knight Strikes Again ...... or, at least, what's on display here is a photocopy of a photocopy of those feelings ......
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Amy has a job she hates, a creep boyfriend she’s just dumped, and a best friend she can’t reach on the phone. But at least her (often painfully passive-aggressive) mother bought her a pink unicorn sweatshirt for her birthday. Pink. Unicorn. For her twenty-seventh birthday.
Gliding through the daydreams and realities of a young woman searching for definition, Life with Mr. Dangerous showcases acclaimed cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier’s gift for deadpan humor and dead-on insight with a droll aftertaste—an unlikely but welcome marriage of the bleak and the hopeful.]]>
If it's hard to work up any passion for any of this, it's not because everyday life is boring, but because our sympathy for Amy is assumed, not earned. She's moping from Chapter 1, Scene 1, and doesn't quit until love comes a-knockin' in Chapter 10. Not all good stories have sympathetic protagonists, and not all good stories require their tellers to judge their protagonists good or bad, but if I'm to feel uplifted by the ending of this love story, I'm going to have to feel bad about love's absence in the beginning.
In the movies, it is sometimes enough to show a lonely female character on the screen, to win an audience over. Emotional intimacy works differently in the movies -- we see an actor's actual face. Not so in the comix, where the abstraction of the human body causes all sorts of magickal effects. I might project my own consciousness into a drawing of a female body; or the drawing might make me say, "You're my friend, little drawing"; or I might have strong urges to fuck the drawing. Hornschemeier's drawings of Amy are at the exact level of abstraction and cartooniness that repels my usual attempts at psychic identification. I suppose that is an achievement in itself, but I couldn't escape the notion that the author himself -- with all of his sensitive-guy neuroses -- was trapped inside this depressed, lazy, stupid girl.
On the plus side, we do get a strong sense of the architecture of her apartment.]]>
author: Paul Hornschemeier
name: Mza
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2011
rating: 1
read at: 2011/08/03
date added: 2011/08/07
shelves: 2011
review:
Having enjoyed some of Mr Hornschemeier's previous comix, I was unpleasantly surprised by this timid show'n'tell concerning several weeks in the life of a depressed slacker. Amy, 26, lives with her cat in a one-bedroom apartment in an unnamed city (in the Midwest, says the book's back cover); works in a retail clothing shop in a mall; has broken up with a boyfriend who just wasn't that into her; spends Friday nights watching an Adult Swim-esque cartoon called Mr Dangerous; and is inconveniently in love with her long-distance best friend, with whom she communicates via landline. That primitive communication device, alongside Amy's college-rock wardrobe and her TV (not Internet) addiction, suggests a 1990s setting; it's also a physical manifestation of the inconvenience that plagues Amy every day. The people on the bus get on her nerves. The boy she loves, who sends handmade art to her in the mail, lives in San Francisco. The local prospects for romance are uninspiring. One guy she ends up having a one-night-stand with has never even heard of Mr Dangerous. Her mother, who also works retail full time, gives her a crappy birthday gift. Customers at work are assholes. Her cat has been known to hurl on her stuff. Up until near the book's end, Amy reacts to all of these little trials with a consistent passivity. She makes sarcastic comments. She mopes. She dreams allegorical dramas that take place inside the candy-coloured Mr Dangerous universe.
If it's hard to work up any passion for any of this, it's not because everyday life is boring, but because our sympathy for Amy is assumed, not earned. She's moping from Chapter 1, Scene 1, and doesn't quit until love comes a-knockin' in Chapter 10. Not all good stories have sympathetic protagonists, and not all good stories require their tellers to judge their protagonists good or bad, but if I'm to feel uplifted by the ending of this love story, I'm going to have to feel bad about love's absence in the beginning.
In the movies, it is sometimes enough to show a lonely female character on the screen, to win an audience over. Emotional intimacy works differently in the movies -- we see an actor's actual face. Not so in the comix, where the abstraction of the human body causes all sorts of magickal effects. I might project my own consciousness into a drawing of a female body; or the drawing might make me say, "You're my friend, little drawing"; or I might have strong urges to fuck the drawing. Hornschemeier's drawings of Amy are at the exact level of abstraction and cartooniness that repels my usual attempts at psychic identification. I suppose that is an achievement in itself, but I couldn't escape the notion that the author himself -- with all of his sensitive-guy neuroses -- was trapped inside this depressed, lazy, stupid girl.
On the plus side, we do get a strong sense of the architecture of her apartment.
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author: Joann Sfar
name: Mza
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/07/15
date added: 2011/08/03
shelves: 2011
review:
Either I'm a bit burnt out on Dungeon 's cynicism, or Sfar and Trondheim are running low on fresh ways to spin their characters. In terms of humour and emotional range, the two adventure stories contained in this volume still fly miles above most of their counterparts in North American comix -- in America, Hellboy comes closest (but can't touch Dungeon's best) -- but the wonder and surprise of earlier installments are missing here, replaced by horror and magickal dei ex machina. Although Dungeon has always been bloody, violence has generally been subordinated to other themes -- friendship, lust, political chess, etc. In "Night of the Ladykiller" and "Ruckus at the Brewers", violent acts are both the main course and primary means of conflict resolution. Jean-Emmanuel Vermot-Desroches renders the gore in "Ladykiller" with the delicate, finely-hatched lines and earthy tones I've come to think of as the Christophe Blain Style, which fits Dungeon well because it can capture the series' darker moods while still being cartoony. Yoann's stiff, painted work on "Ruckus" fares less well -- his panels are murky, cluttered, and static. (The latter quality especially kills action comix.) (Has anyone done great painted comix?) Ultimately, though, Dungeon floats or sinks with Sfar's and Trondheim's imaginations. I like that their comix are explicitly about something, that a theme inevitably suggests itself through the boom-boom and the ha-ha -- familial disappointment for "Ladykiller", career ambition for "Ruckus" -- but their ideas work better when they're not treated as afterthoughts.
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author: Chester Brown
name: Mza
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/07/25
shelves:
review:
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It's a game Moore is good at, and the structure he chooses -- alternating a framing sequence drawn in a 1990s Rob-Liefeld-esque style with flashback sequences drawn in various period styles -- is as fun as it is jarring. His skills as a storyteller, especially his ease with unexpected conceptual twists, are far beyond those of his Golden and Silver Age models. A theme emerges, too, regarding the power of nostalgia for good or ill, that distinguishes Supreme from ordinary comix for kids.
Here's a potential problem: Moore's adult concerns, camouflaged as they are, bleed from every page of the book. His disdain for the so-called "gritty" copycat comix that came up out of the woodwork after Swamp Thing and Watchmen . His anti-nuke, anti-racist 1960s liberalism. His sadness over the impossibility of simpler heroes. To have all of these feelings bubble up just under the surface of a superconventional superhero story seems masochistic at best, a waste of his time and talent at worst. There's pleasure -- Rick Veitch's period simulations stand out, as does Chris Sprouse's sensitive treatment of the romantic tension between Ethan Crane (Clark Kent) and Diana Dane -- but it's mixed with a desire for more Moore. His gift for natural speech is not well spent on lines such as, "So, were you impressed? Did you get any ideas about how to handle superheroes in Omniman or Warrior Woman ?" It's as if Moore wanted to test himself by shackling Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, and the entire bloated history of DC Comics to each of his limbs, to see if he could still fly. He can, but just barely.]]>
author: Alan Moore
name: Mza
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2002
rating: 2
read at: 2011/07/22
date added: 2011/07/25
shelves:
review:
It's not fair to complain about this clever and lovingly-detailed reconstruction of the Superman myth -- I knew what I was getting into just glancing at the first few pages -- life's not fair. Alan Moore unleashes his nerdiest self here, demonstrating an intimate familiarity with dusty corners of the Superman universe. Naturally, Darius Dax is Lex Luthor, Diana Dane is Lois Lane, and supremium is kryptonite; but Moore's thinly-veiled references are rolling hundreds deep, so numerous that DC Comics' lawyers' mouths must have watered. Moore could've defended himself by claiming parody, but he'd have been lying. His aim with this story (besides collecting a paycheck) can be understood perfectly without irony goggles: to awaken the same wonder children felt in the mid-20th century upon encountering Superman comix for the first time, using the exact same set of symbols.
It's a game Moore is good at, and the structure he chooses -- alternating a framing sequence drawn in a 1990s Rob-Liefeld-esque style with flashback sequences drawn in various period styles -- is as fun as it is jarring. His skills as a storyteller, especially his ease with unexpected conceptual twists, are far beyond those of his Golden and Silver Age models. A theme emerges, too, regarding the power of nostalgia for good or ill, that distinguishes Supreme from ordinary comix for kids.
Here's a potential problem: Moore's adult concerns, camouflaged as they are, bleed from every page of the book. His disdain for the so-called "gritty" copycat comix that came up out of the woodwork after Swamp Thing and Watchmen . His anti-nuke, anti-racist 1960s liberalism. His sadness over the impossibility of simpler heroes. To have all of these feelings bubble up just under the surface of a superconventional superhero story seems masochistic at best, a waste of his time and talent at worst. There's pleasure -- Rick Veitch's period simulations stand out, as does Chris Sprouse's sensitive treatment of the romantic tension between Ethan Crane (Clark Kent) and Diana Dane -- but it's mixed with a desire for more Moore. His gift for natural speech is not well spent on lines such as, "So, were you impressed? Did you get any ideas about how to handle superheroes in Omniman or Warrior Woman ?" It's as if Moore wanted to test himself by shackling Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, and the entire bloated history of DC Comics to each of his limbs, to see if he could still fly. He can, but just barely.
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"Humans run on emotion, assumption, and impulse. We can't function on logic alone. People who can't feel pleasure or preference because of damage to the orbital prefrontal cortex are paralyzed by the simple decisions most of us make effortlessly every day. The blue pen or the black pen? Mary or Sue? Any choice -- whether of a mate or a breakfast cereal -- engulfs them in a quicksand of pros and cons." (128)
Gladstone peppers sharp, provocative quotations throughout, from philosophers, politicians, artists, fellow journalists, etc., all of which are properly cited in the main text or in the book's endnotes. The effect of filtering these voices through Gladstone's narration and Neufeld's cartooning is as if many speakers across history have collaborated on a seamless lecture. In the words of one of those sources, author David Weinberger,
"Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance ... Why should we trust what one person -- with the best of intentions -- insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?" (113)
It's like falling down the most orderly Wikipedia rabbit hole ever, and you don't feel tired and hopeless afterwards.]]>
author: Brooke Gladstone
name: Mza
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/07/09
date added: 2011/07/10
shelves: 2011
review:
As a cool lady and an expert on a topic -- media influence -- that comes up constantly on my feed and inspires waves of heated commentary, Brooke Gladstone seems like a natural candidate for Internet intellectual celebrity, but I never heard of her until this, her first foray into my field of special interest, comix. Following the Scott McCloud model -- in which a shape-shifting narrator speaks directly to the camera, bridging dramatic representations of important concepts -- Gladstone takes us through a history of journalism from the beginnings of written language to a speculative future of nanobots coursing through the human bloodstream. It's a pretty thrilling ride; comfortably paced; organized into 16 chapters, none of which seem superfluous; and thorough, at least from my perspective as a non-journalist and an enthusiastic consumer of American media, without crossing the line into nerdiness or pedantry. Josh Neufeld turns in his best work yet, interpreting Gladstone's ideas in a way that gives the pages a satisfying combination of density and readability. He's no R. Crumb -- his caricatures of well-known faces lack the desired instant recognizability -- but he's always moving the narrative forward, amplifying meanings, and finding fun visual twists for Gladstone's metaphors. Some of the book's hardest punches are purely textual, though:
"Humans run on emotion, assumption, and impulse. We can't function on logic alone. People who can't feel pleasure or preference because of damage to the orbital prefrontal cortex are paralyzed by the simple decisions most of us make effortlessly every day. The blue pen or the black pen? Mary or Sue? Any choice -- whether of a mate or a breakfast cereal -- engulfs them in a quicksand of pros and cons." (128)
Gladstone peppers sharp, provocative quotations throughout, from philosophers, politicians, artists, fellow journalists, etc., all of which are properly cited in the main text or in the book's endnotes. The effect of filtering these voices through Gladstone's narration and Neufeld's cartooning is as if many speakers across history have collaborated on a seamless lecture. In the words of one of those sources, author David Weinberger,
"Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance ... Why should we trust what one person -- with the best of intentions -- insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?" (113)
It's like falling down the most orderly Wikipedia rabbit hole ever, and you don't feel tired and hopeless afterwards.
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For every man who always wondered why some guys have all the luck, Mystery, considered by many to be the world's greatest pickup artist, finally reveals his secrets for finding and forming relationships with some of the world's most beautiful women. Mystery gained mainstream attention for his role in Neil Strauss's New York Times bestselling exposé, The Game. Now he has written the definitive handbook on the art of the pickup.
He developed his unique method over years of observing social dynamics and interacting with women in clubs to learn how to overcome the guard shield that many women use to deflect come-ons from "average frustrated chumps."
The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed shares tips such as:
*Give more attention to her less attractive friend at first, so your target will get jealous and try to win your attention.
*Always approach a target within 3 seconds of noticing her. If a woman senses your hesitation, her perception of your value will be lower.
*Don't be picky. Approach as many groups of people in a bar as you can and entertain them with fun conversation. As you move about the room, positive perception of you will grow. Now it's easy to meet anyone you want.
*Smile. Guys who don't get laid, don't smile.]]>
"All right, wife," I said, "The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed is the last trashy book I'm reading."
"But, balli," she said, "trashy books are the greatest."
"Yeah, I know, and this one, despite its grossness and weirdness, contains good insights that aren't available from other, more respectable sources. Still, it's no Nicomachean Ethics."
In fact, the book is bizarrely free of ethics of any sort, save for in this one, lonely passage:
"If you have sex with the woman only once and disappear, when she wants you to stay in her life in some capacity, a protection circuit in her head will punish her, sometimes severely, for compromising her chances of survival and replication. I've been told that it feels to a woman as if something very important has been stolen from her, and it's unethical to subject anyone to such painful and regretful feelings."
Remember, guys, fuck that woman many, many, many, many times.]]>
author: Mystery
name: Mza
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2011/07/06
date added: 2011/07/08
shelves:
review:
While reading this book I tried using the techniques Mystery prescribes to get my wife into bed, but it was too late. She already was in bed.
"All right, wife," I said, "The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed is the last trashy book I'm reading."
"But, balli," she said, "trashy books are the greatest."
"Yeah, I know, and this one, despite its grossness and weirdness, contains good insights that aren't available from other, more respectable sources. Still, it's no Nicomachean Ethics."
In fact, the book is bizarrely free of ethics of any sort, save for in this one, lonely passage:
"If you have sex with the woman only once and disappear, when she wants you to stay in her life in some capacity, a protection circuit in her head will punish her, sometimes severely, for compromising her chances of survival and replication. I've been told that it feels to a woman as if something very important has been stolen from her, and it's unethical to subject anyone to such painful and regretful feelings."
Remember, guys, fuck that woman many, many, many, many times.
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"You had to be a drug dealer, or you had to have gone to jail or had guns. That's what gangsta rap told you. Bounce, you don't have to do that. You can be who you really are when you're at home. When you're at home in the mirror and the music comes on and you want to two-step or dance, bounce allows you to be that person."
Against the music's no-cares attitude, the history of bounce -- as described by a timeline in the book's middle -- includes a sobering amount of murder of its performers. "1993: DJ Irv shot to death in the 7th Ward ... 1996: Everlasting Hitman is murdered on the West Bank ... 1997: UNLV's Albert 'Yella Boy' Thomas is murdered ... 1997: Kilo G is shot and killed in his 7th Ward home, at age 20 ... 1999: On July 31, Warren Mayes is shot to death in his car while leaving a concert at the Treme Center ... 2006: Terence 'Sporty T' Vine is shot to death in his FEMA trailer ..." One photograph shows a metal detector positioned at a club's entrance. In another (from July 2010), 10th Ward Buck lies in a hospital bed after getting shot in the leg during a house party.
Bounce's enormous capacity for joy is inseparable from the difficult social conditions that gave birth to it. That's the feeling pouring from every page in this book, every awkward pose and facial expression, and upward-thrust buttocks. If bounce goes world-scale -- and who knows, maybe Big Freedia's big-time charisma hits the Great Recession with just the right spin -- The Definition of Bounce will be remembered as its Silver Surfer, lean and speedy herald to a planet-rocking, booty-quaking Galactus.]]>
author: 10th Ward Buck
name: Mza
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2011/06/25
date added: 2011/07/06
shelves: 2011
review:
... like a nightmare version of brightestyoungthings/cobrasnake/stupidfuckingwhiteman, in which almost everybody is poor, black, and poor. The ladies are fat, the men are muscular, and the parties are the kind of wild you get only when everybody knows there's not going to be a greater escape than this, and tomorrow's not promised to you, anyhow. Our two narrators, 10th Ward Buck and Lucky Johnson, give us the unromantic view of bounce because they consider themselves more businessmen than musicians. Their story traces a financial escape they fashioned out of the emotional escape their music and their parties supplied. Johnson says,
"You had to be a drug dealer, or you had to have gone to jail or had guns. That's what gangsta rap told you. Bounce, you don't have to do that. You can be who you really are when you're at home. When you're at home in the mirror and the music comes on and you want to two-step or dance, bounce allows you to be that person."
Against the music's no-cares attitude, the history of bounce -- as described by a timeline in the book's middle -- includes a sobering amount of murder of its performers. "1993: DJ Irv shot to death in the 7th Ward ... 1996: Everlasting Hitman is murdered on the West Bank ... 1997: UNLV's Albert 'Yella Boy' Thomas is murdered ... 1997: Kilo G is shot and killed in his 7th Ward home, at age 20 ... 1999: On July 31, Warren Mayes is shot to death in his car while leaving a concert at the Treme Center ... 2006: Terence 'Sporty T' Vine is shot to death in his FEMA trailer ..." One photograph shows a metal detector positioned at a club's entrance. In another (from July 2010), 10th Ward Buck lies in a hospital bed after getting shot in the leg during a house party.
Bounce's enormous capacity for joy is inseparable from the difficult social conditions that gave birth to it. That's the feeling pouring from every page in this book, every awkward pose and facial expression, and upward-thrust buttocks. If bounce goes world-scale -- and who knows, maybe Big Freedia's big-time charisma hits the Great Recession with just the right spin -- The Definition of Bounce will be remembered as its Silver Surfer, lean and speedy herald to a planet-rocking, booty-quaking Galactus.
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author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/18
date added: 2011/06/18
shelves:
review:
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Dark Horse presents new editions of the entire Hellboy line with new covers, beginning with Seed of Destruction, the basis of director Guillermo del Toro's upcoming film. Hellboy is one of the most celebrated comics series in recent years. The ultimate artists' artist and a great storyteller whose work is in turns haunting, hilarious, and spellbinding. Mike Mignola has won numerous awards in the comics industry and beyond. When strangeness threatens to engulf the world, a strange man will come to save it. Sent to investigate a mystery with supernatural overtones, Hellboy discovers the secrets of his own origins, and his link to the Nazi occultists who promised Hitler a final solution in the form of a demonic avatar.]]>
author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at: 2011/06/13
date added: 2011/06/16
shelves:
review:
Not sure why anyone would care if Hellboy defeats the undead Nazis. If this book were a summer movie, it'd have a spectacle of CG machinery, wire acrobatics, and hot girls to displace my lack of caring, but here ...... Mignola's minimalist chiaroscuro is easy to look at, his compositions are solid, but the overall effect here isn't fun. His brand of minimalism is so efficient that it can only accentuate the story's threadbareness. That effect might be appealing in Hellboy's shorter stories, whose chief virtue is a chilled-out atmosphere; in an eight-pager in which only one or two things happen, Mignola's art's spareness increases the sense that we're out here patrolling the wilderness with Hellboy -- it's a lonely job but somebody's got to do it. But when there's an actual plot involved, humankind is threatened with extinction, etc., the art's not going to take us on a side trip if the main trip's not compelling. As a storyteller Mignola's got an even worse case of the disease that afflicted Neil Gaimain in Sandman : inability to sustain epic tragedy. Hellboy's a joker and a tough guy and a melancholy dude inside, and we feel him most when the whole demonic universe isn't breathing down his neck.
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Goodtime Jesus
Neighbors
The Motorcyclists
Five Years Old
Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
First Lesson
The Soup of Venus
Stella Maris
The poems on this list are short, which is the way my lazy taste normally runs, due to a character deficiency, superior breeding, and early exposure to Popeye 'toons. "The Motorcyclists" reminded me of Shannon Burns. Anything longer than a page got me thinking about private languages, such as those spoken between twins, and how I would never presume to learn a language that is spoken only between the genetically identical. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression, Nick Land said, and I kept having a gut feeling that you can't win a big invasion. However, many little invasions?
I like how conversational Tate is, and then drunk conversational, and then back to normal conversational. I like how writing a poem's no big deal, and how if Muhammad Ali'd said some of these things that James Tate said, virtually everybody around the world would have known them by heart. I like being surprised by a particular, personal sequence of things. I like the surprise of density of meaning. Poems do these things better than stories, it's true. I don't like being surprised so many times in a row, I start to think it's my fault. It's not my fault that these total fucking strangers can't stop writing.]]>
author: James Tate
name: Mza
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2011/06/13
date added: 2011/06/15
shelves:
review:
Racing through this one in a couple days probably didn't do myself or the author a favour, but it's a library book, I had to. Tate's a favourite poet of some of my favourite poets -- it was fun to hear bits of their voices in his voice and, as an inexperienced reader of poetry, to speculate more generally about the lineage of poetic influence that has led to what I think of as the modern sound of poetry in the Internet Age. In my make-believe lineage, James Tate's an important giant. Whatever the actual conditions were for the production of these poems, they all sound easy, they all look like a medium-size cardboard box full of packing peanuts that, it turns out, are bullets painted to look like packing peanuts. Now visualize moving a couple hundred of those boxes in a row. That's exactly what the Internet's like nowadays, and that's what reading this book in two days was like. I don't recommend my approach, no matter how many brilliant poems I probably read in a relatively short time, the names of some of which I wrote down for future (Internet) reference:
Goodtime Jesus
Neighbors
The Motorcyclists
Five Years Old
Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
First Lesson
The Soup of Venus
Stella Maris
The poems on this list are short, which is the way my lazy taste normally runs, due to a character deficiency, superior breeding, and early exposure to Popeye 'toons. "The Motorcyclists" reminded me of Shannon Burns. Anything longer than a page got me thinking about private languages, such as those spoken between twins, and how I would never presume to learn a language that is spoken only between the genetically identical. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression, Nick Land said, and I kept having a gut feeling that you can't win a big invasion. However, many little invasions?
I like how conversational Tate is, and then drunk conversational, and then back to normal conversational. I like how writing a poem's no big deal, and how if Muhammad Ali'd said some of these things that James Tate said, virtually everybody around the world would have known them by heart. I like being surprised by a particular, personal sequence of things. I like the surprise of density of meaning. Poems do these things better than stories, it's true. I don't like being surprised so many times in a row, I start to think it's my fault. It's not my fault that these total fucking strangers can't stop writing.
]]>
Here, though, Paley's accounts of scoring drugs, hitching rides, sexing chicks, getting busted, and finding places to sleep provide dirty counterweight to Swain's ambient flying saucer ride. It's a peaceful, easy read -- chapters average five or six pages and have punchlines -- but I wonder about everything that the skeletal story structures omit -- what did Bruce and his wife fight about? How did he convince the girl in the bar to go home with him? How did he save up enough money to move to London and open a comix shop? When he quit drugs, what did he do with all that surplus time/energy? But they'll keep me wanting. In a rock'n'roll life, it's important to keep the stage banter short and funny, and jump straight into the next song.]]>
author: Carol Swain
name: Mza
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2011/06/12
date added: 2011/06/12
shelves:
review:
Got its moments. Bruce Paley's spare narrations of nomadic hedonism ranging from his teen years to his early 30s are totally precedented, but as filtered through Carol Swain's distinctive stubbly pencil textures, nine-panel grid, and supernatural quietude, the stories threaten to loose themselves from gravity and witness America from a satellite's eye. Her grid's steady beat and the collision of rough and soft pencil marks have the same hypnotic effect as holding your hand out a moving car's window as it alternates hail and snow. In her own personal comix, which tend to more pastoral narratives, this hypnotism often overwhelms anything that happens in the stories. Her universe's cast of punk rockers, all of whom seem to share the same face, are ultimately subservient to the rolling hills and empty roads that swallow them.
Here, though, Paley's accounts of scoring drugs, hitching rides, sexing chicks, getting busted, and finding places to sleep provide dirty counterweight to Swain's ambient flying saucer ride. It's a peaceful, easy read -- chapters average five or six pages and have punchlines -- but I wonder about everything that the skeletal story structures omit -- what did Bruce and his wife fight about? How did he convince the girl in the bar to go home with him? How did he save up enough money to move to London and open a comix shop? When he quit drugs, what did he do with all that surplus time/energy? But they'll keep me wanting. In a rock'n'roll life, it's important to keep the stage banter short and funny, and jump straight into the next song.
]]>
Joe Daly brings a refreshingly original—and utterly hilarious—voice to the comics medium, a dry, deadpan wit anchored in everyday reality combined with unnervingly deranged plots, rendered with a hyper-detailed, half-realistic and half-cartoony Tintin-style crispness.]]>
author: Joe Daly
name: Mza
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/11
date added: 2011/06/11
shelves:
review:
... my first time reading a South African cartoonist, I think. His nationality is relevant to the stories in this book in that they take place in Cape Town, whose geography/landscape figure prominently in the art. The beautiful way Daly draws this city, as the two main characters, Dave & Paul, drive a vintage automobile around in it, turns out to be Red Monkey 's main attraction, much more so than the wordy stoner dialogue and the self-consciously twisted stoner plotlines. Daly's effortful writing voice might irritate at first, but it's harmless and I grew to think of it as a friend who's well-meaning but not that funny but who makes you laugh once every ten jokes. There are two stories here, and the first one, "The Leaking Cello Case", is shitty, but it introduces the cast and the location. The second, "John Wesley Harding", must have been done much later -- Daly has streamlined his art a lot and abandoned the ugly contoured colouring he used in the first story; the change is jarring and welcome. His storytelling has added depth, too -- Dave & Paul's friendship starts to make sense, and a conservationist plot angle betrays a possible motivation for Daly's loving depictions of roadside scenery. This is the kind of comix whose sophisticated cartooning and relatively clumsy writing make me jealous in a way I'm not sure I can completely account for.
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"The best horror comic in a generation. This Mignola guy is a wizard"- Frank Miller
Collects Hellboy: Conqueror Worm #1�4.]]>
It could be that Mignola's longer stories are less satisfying than his eight-page riffs on small chunks of folklore. We'll see. Reading the books out of order seems to be working out all right, but we'll see.]]>
author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2002
rating: 2
read at: 2011/06/10
date added: 2011/06/10
shelves:
review:
... too high a ratio of BOOM BOOM (explosions, guys pummelling one another) to boom boom (surprises, cool ideas, sensual pleasures, emotional hooks) ... Makes me want to take a break from Hellboy for a bit, but I probably won't because he's still a rare embodiment of my longstanding wish for a chill superdude who loses his cool only long enough to prevent humankind's extinction, etc. The world's saved, but was it ever in danger? Can't tell from reading HB's posture.
It could be that Mignola's longer stories are less satisfying than his eight-page riffs on small chunks of folklore. We'll see. Reading the books out of order seems to be working out all right, but we'll see.
]]>
Katsumata began publishing comic strips in the legendary avantgarde magazine Garo (which also published his contemporaries Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Yoshiharu Tsuge) in 1965 while enrolled in the Faculty of Science in Tokyo. He abandoned his studies in 1971 to become a professional comics artist, alternating the short humorous strips upon which he built his reputation with stories of a more personal nature in which he tenderly depicted the lives of peasants and farmers from his native region. In 2006, Katsumata won the 35th Japanese Cartoonists Association Award Grand Prize for Red Snow.]]>
The interview and other contextualizing material at the end of the book were helpful to understanding Katsumata's worldview -- he lost his mother at a young age and never knew his father, and it seems his number one wish in life was to have a blood relative. Reading Red Snow as an inevitable form of ongoing therapy for the author is a good way of letting some light in the room.]]>
author: Susumu Katsumata
name: Mza
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/07
date added: 2011/06/09
shelves:
review:
... dark little book ... lots of adultery and loneliness ... My main reference point for this style of manga (gekiga) is Yoshihiro Tatsumi -- Katsumata's comix contain a weird sexual mood similar to Tatsumi's, a combination of desperation and resignation that leads to odd pairings. The big difference here is setting: Katsumata features the rural poor, who are more alien to my experience than Tatsumi's urban misfits. In a rural, prewar Japan that is further defamiliarized by the existence of anthropomorphic amphibians whose lives overlap the human sphere, Katsumata finds and sustains a melancholy note that translates clearly across time, geography, and culture. His farmers, brewers, street vendors, and prostitutes suffer harsh weather, slow business, mischief of supernatural origin, and domestic violence, and there's a sense that if something bad's not happening, just wait another minute or two. Katsumata's humour, when it surfaces -- a village of abandoned women sharing the sexual services of a monk they keep tied up in a sack? -- comes attached to a wave of brutality. He's not hilarious or demented like Tatsumi. The shyness of his writing and his delicate drawings prevent the stories from escaping their own melancholic gravity. The way that poor people can't escape being poor, Katsumata's stories begin with sadness and disconnection and always return to them.
The interview and other contextualizing material at the end of the book were helpful to understanding Katsumata's worldview -- he lost his mother at a young age and never knew his father, and it seems his number one wish in life was to have a blood relative. Reading Red Snow as an inevitable form of ongoing therapy for the author is a good way of letting some light in the room.
]]>
author: Nabiel Kanan
name: Mza
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2011/06/06
date added: 2011/06/08
shelves:
review:
Naive politics, sloppy-fitting magical realism, unearned sentimentality, poorly-drawn men's hair -- it's hard to say which of these was The Birthday Riots' most irritating weakness. Perhaps the straight-outta-porn setup to an attempt at adultery trumps all of these. I've enjoyed Kanan's cartooning in the past. Even here, his sketchy, low-contrast (very white) pages have a primitive immediacy that satisfies my need for speed. The sketchiness of the story itself -- especially its threadbare moralizing -- is the dealbreaker. The same type of naive material was handled with a lot more punk charm by Morrison and Grist in St Swithin's Day . I'm going to go excavate that and Kanan's Exit and see if they hold up under my withering middle-aged scrutiny.
]]>
author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/05
date added: 2011/06/06
shelves:
review:
... still figuring out Mignola's rhythm ... reminds me of the quiet/loud/quiet/loud thing in rock'n'roll except with the beat from "When Will They Shoot" mixed in ... reckon when your protagonist is a 50/50 cross between Ben Grimm and Fox Mulder, a reader might be inclined to read IT'S CLOBBERIN TIME into the quiet moments, and deadpan calm into the actual clobbering moments. I'm reading the books out of order, so Hellboy's origin and nature are mysteries to me -- I hope knowing that stuff won't suck the illusion of complexity out of the character, who has the potential to be a real interesting and damaged individual. The way people might wonder about a great comedian or somebody who performs dangerous stunts for a living, I wonder about Hellboy ...... Richard Corben brings grit, flesh, and grotesquerie to his figures and the natural/supernatural world they inhabit; his interpretation contrasts Mignola's own more abstract drawings. That both approaches seem a natural fit testifies to the peculiar Hellboy yin and yang.
]]>
Collects The Penanggalan (from Hellboy Premiere Edition); The Hydra and The Lion (from The Dark Horse Book of Monsters); The Troll Witch (from The Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft); Dr. Carps Experiment (from The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings); The Ghoul (from The Dark Horse Book of The Dead); The Vampire of Prague; Makoma #1�2.]]>
author: Mike Mignola
name: Mza
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/02
date added: 2011/06/03
shelves:
review:
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author: Nabiel Kanan
name: Mza
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2011/06/02
date added: 2011/06/03
shelves:
review:
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"The objects most likely to do major damage are asteroids of one hundred meters or greater in diameter. The odds of an object this size hitting the earth over the next one hundred years are about 5 to 1."]]>
author: Gregory Baer
name: Mza
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/30
date added: 2011/05/31
shelves:
review:
Lessons: Always sit in the back of the train. If you want it to sell, don't name your book Canada, Friendly Giant to the North. Eat enough fiber. In Las Vegas, choose blackjack over any other game. Certainly, never play keno. If you are thinking about starting a small business, keep in mind that only 40 percent of bookstores operate with net income. Compare this to businesses engaging in "Water transport -- contract pilots", 98% of which are profitable. If you murder somebody, don't just hang out at or near the scene of the crime.
"The objects most likely to do major damage are asteroids of one hundred meters or greater in diameter. The odds of an object this size hitting the earth over the next one hundred years are about 5 to 1."
]]>
Kirby's poses are as dynamic as ever, but many of his drawings seem hurried in the bad way -- lots of talking heads against blank one-color backgrounds -- and his protagonist is a dull jock who never faces any danger that takes more than a couple pages of brute force to surmount. Weird for sure, but not trippy enough
Ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved before the series got cancelled]]>
author: Jack Kirby
name: Mza
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2010/05/12
date added: 2011/05/31
shelves:
review:
100% tension-free story told in odd childlike voice ... featuring hilarious science
Kirby's poses are as dynamic as ever, but many of his drawings seem hurried in the bad way -- lots of talking heads against blank one-color backgrounds -- and his protagonist is a dull jock who never faces any danger that takes more than a couple pages of brute force to surmount. Weird for sure, but not trippy enough
Ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved before the series got cancelled
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... never woulda bought it just by looking at it, because ...
... how unfinished it looks at first, and slightly retarded-looking ...
... but this is sweetly romantic and as far away from in your face as comix can get ...
I grew to love how Orff draws the girl ...
... wearing glasses ...
... playing badminton ...
It was cool reading this back to back with Chester Brown's anti-romantic Paying for It , because Waterwise couldn't be more dissimilar in tone, and yet it doesn't refute Brown's assertion that romantic love is one of Western culture's greatest villains. Waterwise doesn't refute anything or really argue anything. Whereas Paying for It is a very focused presentation that keeps circling its thesis from slightly different angles, Waterwise meanders through a scratchy waterscape surrounded by trees, as its two characters, a woman and a man who have known each other since childhood, successfully evade talking about anything too serious or directly emotional. Is there anything more beautiful in the West than unconsummated love? Orff might tell you. One of my favourite endings in all of comix, I won't tell you anything.]]>
author: Joel Orff
name: Mza
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2011/05/22
date added: 2011/05/23
shelves:
review:
... my favourite library find yet, because ...
... never woulda bought it just by looking at it, because ...
... how unfinished it looks at first, and slightly retarded-looking ...
... but this is sweetly romantic and as far away from in your face as comix can get ...
I grew to love how Orff draws the girl ...
... wearing glasses ...
... playing badminton ...
It was cool reading this back to back with Chester Brown's anti-romantic Paying for It , because Waterwise couldn't be more dissimilar in tone, and yet it doesn't refute Brown's assertion that romantic love is one of Western culture's greatest villains. Waterwise doesn't refute anything or really argue anything. Whereas Paying for It is a very focused presentation that keeps circling its thesis from slightly different angles, Waterwise meanders through a scratchy waterscape surrounded by trees, as its two characters, a woman and a man who have known each other since childhood, successfully evade talking about anything too serious or directly emotional. Is there anything more beautiful in the West than unconsummated love? Orff might tell you. One of my favourite endings in all of comix, I won't tell you anything.
]]>
First serialized in The New York Times Magazine “Funny Pages�
The celebrated cartoonist and New Yorker illustrator Seth weaves the fictional tale of George Sprott, the host of a long-running television program. The events forming the patchwork of George’s life are pieced together from the tenuous memories of several informants, who often have contradictory impressions. His estranged daughter describes the man as an unforgivable lout, whereas his niece remembers him fondly. His former assistant recalls a trip to the Arctic during which George abandoned him for two months, while George himself remembers that trip as the time he began writing letters to a former love, from whom he never received replies.
I'm suspicious of/unsympathetic to the nostalgia driving his cartooning ...... though here it's not as oppressive as it was in It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken or Clyde Fans, maybe because there are a lot of different characters' viewpoints letting some air into the story, not just one old man's sadness over a distant past he can't recreate or revise.
The book's partially omniscient narrator's self-deprecatory asides never amused me, but Seth's painstaking attention to architecture and local flavour did. Would visit this town again.]]>
author: Seth
name: Mza
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2011/05/17
date added: 2011/05/23
shelves:
review:
... favourite thing by Seth ...
I'm suspicious of/unsympathetic to the nostalgia driving his cartooning ...... though here it's not as oppressive as it was in It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken or Clyde Fans, maybe because there are a lot of different characters' viewpoints letting some air into the story, not just one old man's sadness over a distant past he can't recreate or revise.
The book's partially omniscient narrator's self-deprecatory asides never amused me, but Seth's painstaking attention to architecture and local flavour did. Would visit this town again.
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This version of Jane Foster is an archaeologist who works in a museum and dresses in earth tones. She's pretty much a flawless execution of a nerd's idea of a desirable long-term girlfriend. If the series hadn't been cancelled suddenly she might have had a chance to become interesting.
Chris Samnee is a pleasant cross between Mike Mignola and Jeff Smith -- uncluttered, kinetic, chiaroscuro, cute ......]]>
author: Roger Langridge
name: Mza
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/16
date added: 2011/05/23
shelves: 2011
review:
... a tall and fairly effeminate Thor, written in a lighthearted Whedonesque style (minus Whedon's sexual politics) ...
This version of Jane Foster is an archaeologist who works in a museum and dresses in earth tones. She's pretty much a flawless execution of a nerd's idea of a desirable long-term girlfriend. If the series hadn't been cancelled suddenly she might have had a chance to become interesting.
Chris Samnee is a pleasant cross between Mike Mignola and Jeff Smith -- uncluttered, kinetic, chiaroscuro, cute ......
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Chester Brown has never shied away from tackling controversial subjects in his work. In his 1992 book, The Playboy, he explored his personal history with pornography. His bestselling 2003 graphic novel, Louis Riel, was a biographical examination of an extreme political figure. The book won wide acclaim and cemented Brown's reputation as a true innovator.
Paying for It is a natural progression for Brown as it combines the personal and sexual aspects of his autobiographical work with the polemical drive of Louis Riel. Brown calmly lays out the facts of how he became not only a willing participant in but a vocal proponent of one of the world's most hot-button topics—prostitution. While this may appear overly sensational and just plain implausible to some, Brown's story stands for itself. Paying for It offers an entirely contemporary exploration of sex work—from the timid john who rides his bike to his escorts, wonders how to tip so as not to offend, and reads Dan Savage for advice, to the modern-day transactions complete with online reviews, seemingly willing participants, and clean apartments devoid of clichéd street corners, drugs, or pimps.
Complete with a surprise ending, Paying for It provides endless debate and conversation about sex work and will be the most talkedabout graphic novel of 2011.]]>
Paying for It ends up more like a moral argument than a personal bedroom history, as Chester, in a blank-faced manner, aims his knives at the dream of romantic commitment. According to him, marriage and long-term relationships are corrupt institutions that we accept at the cost of integrity, honesty, and happiness. "It's impossible for one person to meet all of our emotional and sexual needs," he says with Canadian equanimity, politely, with that eerie blank face.
All of this transparent polemicizing ought to be surprising coming from a cartoonist who's best known for anything-can-happen supernaturalism ( Ed the Happy Clown ), innocent (yet vaguely creepy) sex stuff ( The Playboy , I Never Liked You ), and unadorned (yet vaguely creepy) recreations of historical oddballs ( Louis Riel , the Gospel adaptations); but it turns out that Chester's political side suits him just as well as everything else he's tried. It's not an ostentatious put-on, or a knee-jerk reaction to a life that has treated him unkindly and which he now thinks owes him big time ...... Chester Brown's anti-love stance seems like a considered and thorough response, developed -- whoremongering notwithstanding -- in isolation.
I'm left with a few questions, fortunately, as this is a short book on an infinite topic. For all of his ranting against Western culture's unexamined assumptions, Chester's got a few unexamined ones of his own. He says, "I don't have the social skills necessary to pick up women for casual sex." Well, what if he did? Would love be possible then? How reliable a narrator is Chester Brown? Aren't the highs of love worth the lows? Isn't that why most men won't pay for it? What if ...... all love is a zero-sum game? We're all paying for it, one way or another. Some men tell lies. Some men pay in niceness dollars and get loved, and then get stomped, and then find them some religion. Some men love to fuck fat women. A few men are famous. And then there are those elusive social skills, which allow some men much access to fine women at a low cost to themselves. Who's paying then? You see where this can go in a million different directions, none of which are directly treated in Paying for It, but which are nevertheless sitting there, swimming vigorously under the dome of Chester Brown's reservoir tip.
]]>
author: Chester Brown
name: Mza
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/19
date added: 2011/05/20
shelves: 2011
review:
... haven't read the endnotes yet ...... Now here is something: a book that questions our most common assumptions about romantic love, but from a perspective neither of bitter longing nor of self-back-patting-and-ultimately-self-deluding contrarianism. Chester Brown maps his feelings the way a good anthropologist might compile an ethnography of a heretofore mysterious culture ... calmly ... factoring in his own biases and weaknesses ... and patiently recording even his most minute reactions ... until a clear picture emerges for both him and his audience of friends and readers. Yes, it is a compulsively readable document of one john's experiences with 23 different prostitutes (24 if you twice count one woman who uses two different aliases) over 5 years, but its most striking developments are gentle shifts in Chester's mind, not adventures of the body ... There'll be no epic quest ... nor sense of dread ... nor conquest ... just Chester's narrow white ass as he thrusts into a black-haired woman whose face is obscured by a word balloon, or by distance, or by the position of her body in relation to his, or by the panel's edge ... their two bodies haloed by an explosion of white light against solid black ink ... embedded in an invariable eight-panel grid ...... and juxtaposed with Chester's thought balloon full of candid running commentary: "She's licking and sucking my balls -- I wish she wouldn't do that. It seems unsafe." Or: "She's more beautiful than any of the prostitutes I've been with so far." And over the course of 227 pages of banging interspersed with coffee shop conversations with his closest friends and down time alone in his room, Chester Brown's estimation of the virtues of romantic love plummets from not that high to near zero.
Paying for It ends up more like a moral argument than a personal bedroom history, as Chester, in a blank-faced manner, aims his knives at the dream of romantic commitment. According to him, marriage and long-term relationships are corrupt institutions that we accept at the cost of integrity, honesty, and happiness. "It's impossible for one person to meet all of our emotional and sexual needs," he says with Canadian equanimity, politely, with that eerie blank face.
All of this transparent polemicizing ought to be surprising coming from a cartoonist who's best known for anything-can-happen supernaturalism ( Ed the Happy Clown ), innocent (yet vaguely creepy) sex stuff ( The Playboy , I Never Liked You ), and unadorned (yet vaguely creepy) recreations of historical oddballs ( Louis Riel , the Gospel adaptations); but it turns out that Chester's political side suits him just as well as everything else he's tried. It's not an ostentatious put-on, or a knee-jerk reaction to a life that has treated him unkindly and which he now thinks owes him big time ...... Chester Brown's anti-love stance seems like a considered and thorough response, developed -- whoremongering notwithstanding -- in isolation.
I'm left with a few questions, fortunately, as this is a short book on an infinite topic. For all of his ranting against Western culture's unexamined assumptions, Chester's got a few unexamined ones of his own. He says, "I don't have the social skills necessary to pick up women for casual sex." Well, what if he did? Would love be possible then? How reliable a narrator is Chester Brown? Aren't the highs of love worth the lows? Isn't that why most men won't pay for it? What if ...... all love is a zero-sum game? We're all paying for it, one way or another. Some men tell lies. Some men pay in niceness dollars and get loved, and then get stomped, and then find them some religion. Some men love to fuck fat women. A few men are famous. And then there are those elusive social skills, which allow some men much access to fine women at a low cost to themselves. Who's paying then? You see where this can go in a million different directions, none of which are directly treated in Paying for It, but which are nevertheless sitting there, swimming vigorously under the dome of Chester Brown's reservoir tip.
]]>
author: Chelsey Minnis
name: Mza
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/19
date added: 2011/05/20
shelves:
review:
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author: Mark Leidner
name: Mza
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/15
date added: 2011/05/15
shelves: 2011
review:
would recommend to: Mark Leidner, because he's into things that are awesome
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author: Rick Geary
name: Mza
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/12
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
review:
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Whether John Blacksad is falling for dangerous women or getting beaten to within an inch of his life, his stories are, simply put, unforgettable.
* Dark Horse is very proud to present the first three Blacksad stories in a beautiful hardcover collection, completely relettered to the artist's specifications and with the latest album, Red Soul , in English for the very first time.
* This internationally acclaimed series has won nearly a dozen prestigious awards � including the Angoulême Comics Festival prizes for Best Series and Best Artwork-and is a three-time Eisner Award nominee.]]>
author: Juan DĂaz Canales
name: Mza
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/12
date added: 2011/05/13
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MATURE READERS
SC, 7x9, 128pg, PC]]>
author: Wilfred Santiago
name: Mza
average rating: 2.63
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2011/05/10
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
review:
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As they journey through a tide of human suffering, Dabny wants to help, and Emmit sees only the money. But a rogue commander of the ruthless security force "Dark Rain" has his sights set on taking down the same bank. If Emmit and Dabny don't outrace him, their last hope for a second chance could be washed away in the floodwaters � along with their lives.]]>
author: Mat Johnson
name: Mza
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/09
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
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A beautiful waitress (Fritz, of course) and her hospital nurse brother (also Fritz) visit their estranged father, a once successful but now retired writer (amazingly enough, also Fritz), in order to find out the true reason why their mother committed suicide. When dad’s health fails, the siblings are then more concerned with the money he might leave them.
The story weaves in and out of reality and hallucination and possibly back in forth in time, and to complicate things further, the sister is sexually obsessed with a mysterious man throughout the tale � or is it her brother (at one point posing as his sister so that he might gain his and her inheritance) that is so hot and bothered by this mystery stud? And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s also a venture into ghost territory, with frauds bilking the gullible and Fritz’s character(s) right in the middle.
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author: Gilbert Hernández
name: Mza
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/08
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves: 2011
review:
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author: Jay Cantor
name: Mza
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/06
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves: 2011
review:
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COLLECTING
Thor the Mighty Avenger #1-4, Journey Into Mystery #83-84]]>
author: Roger Langridge
name: Mza
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/05/06
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
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Meet Marshall. Sitting alone in the local coffee place. He’s been set up by his friend Tim on a blind date with someone named Natalie, and now he’s just feeling set up. She’s nine minutes late and counting. Who was he kidding anyway? Divorced, middle-aged, newly unemÂployed, with next to no prospects, Marshall isn’t exÂactly what you’d call a catch. Twenty minutes pass.
A half hour. Marshall orders a scotch. (He wasn’t going to drink!) Forty minutes.
Then, after nearly an hour, when he’s long since given up hope, Natalie appears â€� breathless, apologizÂing profusely that she went to the wrong place. She takes a seat, to Marshall’s utter amazement.
She’s too good to be true: attractive, young, intelÂligent, and she seems to be seriously engaged with what Marshall has to say. There has to be a catch.
And, of course, there is.
During the extremely long night that follows, Marshall and Natalie are emotionally tested in ways that two people who just met really should not be. Not, at least, if they want the prospect of a second date.
A captivating, bittersweet, and hilarious look at the potential for human connection in an increasingly hopeless world, Mister Wonderful more than lives up to its name.
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author: Daniel Clowes
name: Mza
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/03
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves: 2011
review:
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Featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and on NPR, Y: THE LAST MAN is the gripping saga of Yorick Brown, an unemployed and unmotivated slacker who discovers he is the only male left in the world after a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey, Ampersand, and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his long-lost girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on earth.
Yorick Brown's long journey through an Earth populated only by women comes to a dramatic, unexpected conclusion in this final volume. Collects issues #55-60 of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's award-winning Vertigo series.
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author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Mza
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2011/05/02
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
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author: Steven T. Seagle
name: Mza
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2004
rating: 1
read at: 2011/05/02
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
review:
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author: Jason Shiga
name: Mza
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2011/05/06
date added: 2011/05/06
shelves:
review:
... nerdy, corny, ingenious in a Christopher Nolan sort of way ... mathematical but not in a story-killing way ... but also innocent and sweet and, because of its sweetness, chilling ...... bug-eyed, fat-bodied drawings with production seams showing -- grey washes making stray splash marks and splotchy texture, paste-up shadows ... Shiga misspells it "explaination", but in the end I liek it more for its handmade flaws and handmade care. The entire thing takes place inside a phone booth -- 44 pages, 6 panels per page inside a phone booth -- and doesn't get repetitive -- it uses repetition in the good hypnotic way ...... Shiga cheats on perspective so that the phone booth's interior is roomier than it actually would be. Fleep performs a similar trick on psychic space -- it echoes deeper and longer than its modest suspense/thriller container would suggest.
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World War II is over. The Cold War has begun. The Age of the Superhero is in decline. But where are the heroes of tomorrow? DC: The New Frontier recounts the dawning of the DCU's Silver Age from the perspective of those brave individuals who made it happen. Encounter "keepers of the flame" including Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, who survived the anti-hero sentiment of the Cold War, as well as eager newcomers like test pilot Hal Jordan and scientist Barry Allen, poised to become the next generation of crimefighters.
Cooke, a master storyteller, writes and illustrates this landmark tale, a must-have for fans of the DCU and all lovers of powerful tales of heroism!
Collecting: DC: The New Frontier 1-3 & the three extra pages originally seen only in Wizard Magazine]]>
author: Darwyn Cooke
name: Mza
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2011/04/30
date added: 2011/04/30
shelves:
review:
... indulges Silver Age nostalgia ... packed with visual and verbal shout-outs to comix I have not read but am aware of through cultural immersion. Darwyn Cooke's homages aren't Quentin Tarantinoesque game-playing -- The New Frontier occurs during Eisenhower's second term -- Silver Age iconography and style offer us instant psychic time travel. Kirbyesque squared-off fingers for men and tapered long-nailed ones for women bespeak a simpler and less cynical time for heroes and for American social life, but Cooke doesn't nurture sadness for lost innocence and elegance, as Seth or R. Crumb might. Neither does he seem interested in dismantling political naïveté, heroic violence, or nostalgia itself, the way Moore did in Watchmen . Haven't read the second volume yet, but it seems Cooke's project here is to rehabilitate old-school heroism (read: old-school masculinity) by introducing it to greater political and psychosocial complexities than were possible in Silver Age comix, and allowing heroism to adapt and thrive without losing its essential goodness. Three female characters in positions of power (Lois Lane, Carol Ferris, and Wonder Woman) may prove to be interesting, especially Wonder Woman, whose sojourn in Vietnam has awakened her political consciousness. "Take a good look around," she tells Superman. "There are no rules here. Just suffering and madness." Next episode, we find out if she gets Jane Fonda'd ......
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Jimmy's cross-country bus trip to Manhattan is as hapless and funny as Jimmy himself. When he arrives in the city he's thought of as "a festering hellhole," he's surprised by how exciting he finds New York, and how heartbreaking—he discovers Sara has a boyfriend!
Jason Shiga's bold visual storytelling, sly pokes at popular culture, and subtle text work together seamlessly in Empire State, creating a quirky graphic novel comedy about the vagaries of love and friendship.
Praise for Empire
"He [Shiga] displays a wicked sense of comic timing."
- Publishers Weekly
" Empire A Love Story (Or Not) is funny, sweet, geeky and affecting, and definitely worth a read."
-Wired.com
"Shiga's illustrations . . . are unique and endearing, and his images of NYC are instantly recognizable."
- am New York
"If Woody Allen grew up in Oakland rather than Manhattan, he'd most likely see the world, and especially New York City, as Jason Shiga does in Empire State ." -Big Think.com]]>
author: Jason Shiga
name: Mza
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2011/04/28
date added: 2011/04/28
shelves: 2011
review:
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A gorgeously drawn, strikingly original graphic-novel murder mystery
Private detective Fernández Britten is an old hand at confirming the dark suspicions of jealous lovers and exposing ugly truths of all varieties. Battered by years of bearing ill tidings, he clings to the hope of revealing, just once, a truth that will do some good in the world. It is a redemption that has long eluded him.
Then Britten and his unconventional partner, Brülightly, take on the mysterious death of Berni Kudos. The official verdict is suicide, but Berni’s fiancée is convinced that the reality is something more sinister. Blackmail, revenge, murder: each new revelation stirs up the muddy waters of painful family secrets, and each fresh twist takes the partners further from Britten’s longed-for salvation. Doing good in the world, he discovers, may have more to do with silence than truth.
A haunting story of love and grief, sharply written and luminously drawn, Britten and BrĂĽlightly is sure to establish Hannah Berry in the front rank of graphic novelists.
author: Hannah Berry
name: Mza
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2011/04/26
date added: 2011/04/26
shelves:
review:
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