[ Pull list!? I'd rather pull scabs: ]
War of the Worlds / Scarlet Traces (2oo6 / 2oo2) - written by Ian Edginton & illustrated by D'Israeli a.k.a. Matt Brooker
What ruthless comix! Used to own these. Checked out to drool over Matt's colours, mainly. More a browse than a re-read.
The Immortal Hulk, 10 vols. + 1 misc. (2o18-2o21) - written by Al Ewing, illustrated by Joe Bennett & a wide variety of others
Hrrr. Hulk rich vein to mine. Didn't expect liking. Much smash.
What look for? No care review puny hack! Review accurate, plebe: much, MUCH smash.
At The Mountains of Madness (2o11) - written by H.P. Lovecraft; adapted by I.N.J. Culbard
I.N.J. does ol' horsefaced H.P. pretty perfectly. If I had to pick an adaptation that gets the nitty-gritty of Lovecraft's tone, it would be Gou Tanabe's, but for a version that moves & breathes, it's this. The colouring & clean line style give the interminable, dreadful plod of the prose a brushing-off, and I.N.J. has a magnificent sense of scale. Even if I'm not sure about the penguins. Gou Tanabe rilly brought the unheimlich terror of immense, blind, toothy penguins...
Clyde Fans (1998-2o17) - written & illustrated by Seth
Pretty righteous little meditation on consciousness. Quite enjoy the recursion, too: generation upon generation wandering in circles in the same shell, repeating themselves to themselves. Do I like these people? No more than I like myself: which is to say I find 'em fascinating but they're not great at Pretending to be people... So an accurate piece of art, all in all. I don't know that I would've spent twenty-odd years chiseling this particular block of granite into this particular terrifying & grim sculpture but then, what a stupid thing to say. Seth did, ergo Seth may say what he likes, and did! Clyde Fans is one king hell of a book. Reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf, namely, 'To The Lighthouse'. The mundanity: the minutae, the maundering. Marvelous. Will add to studio library.
The One Hand & The Six Fingers (2o24) - written by Ram V. & Dan Watters, illustrated by Sumit Kumar & Laurence Campbell
It's 'Dark City' versus both 'Blade Runner' flix. Not a cage match, though. More tea social.
Perfectly readable. Nothing invented, yet ideally realized. Might buy someday. Just to stare at it. I don't know that there's much value to be had in re-reads. Overcooked mystery, all in all, because what it set out to accomplish, 'Mars Express' got there first. With a better ending.
Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow, Supplement #2 (2o23) - written & illustrated by Al Columbia
This was a curiously emotional experience. It's my first "new" Columbia since... 2oo9!? And I started reading Columbia in 1994. In Deadline magazine. 'Tar Frogs' was my first, and a comick I admired / dreaded so much I decided, the first time I dropped acid, in my bedroom after my parents had gone to sleep, to re-read it. Consequently the image of the addled, delusional Pim peeling back the edge of his cartoon glove to peer at the writhing horror beneath rilly truly STUCK.
Al's lost none of that. The polish on these images is nearly unbearable in its exacting clarity, and the edge on these cartoon fragments of an imagined past nicks & abrades the brain. The recurring image of a birthday party with horrified & anxious kids in Columbia's work sets me on edge, because his own accounts of his unconventional upbringing couldn't be more different than mine, but we both emerged from an era of parents being... foolish, and foolishly inviting the sinister into our lives.
It's probably bad joss to compare oneself with a troubled, self-sabotaging artist who's never quite broken the surface tensions of the comix market, who's never breached popular awareness. But let's be clear, here: Columbia isn't hurting, these days, having turned his esoteric "fame" into dear profit. Anybody who knows his name seems willing to pay whatever it takes to acquire an original-- Columbia's work sells sometimes for thousands of dollars a page. He's turned his determined perversity in the face of success into a Mode. He's probably best known for walking out on Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz at a time when both were making Big Moves, trying to escape the superheavy gravitational prison that is the superhero genre. The story is infamous & largely apocryphal. The results, less so!
Because, to paraphrase Eddie Campbell: if you want Al, you want fuckin' Al. I always do. And always will. Not bad pull for an arteest who can only function in a climate of controlled obscurity. A role model, rilly...
Young Lions (2o1o) - written & illustrated by Blaise Larmee
On the subject of obscurity & modeling a rôle, we have this terrible enfant.
Blaise I mainly know for those heady, conceptual, Kramer's Ergot years of comix internet. [2oo7-2o15, r.i.p.] Larmee was busily celebrated by critics like Sean T. Collins & Matt Seneca, and that's where I met their output, informally: in snippets & clippings, both static & animated.
Blaise Larmee's work didn't really resemble comix, as I encountered it then. I mean sure, I know what "art comics" were, I made 'em myself. But it wasn't often one encountered 'em being as roundly celebrated as Larmee's were. So the work, and their name, stuck with me. For a long time Larmee's style & linework were filed in my mind alongside Tillie Walden's, for the peculiar, floating clarity of their imagery.
Eventually I found exactly ONE physically printed Larmee comic In The Wild-- I had this rule, you see, of not buying comix through the internet because it felt like a big cheat, and besides, credit cards & e-commerce terrified me... so if I couldn't stumble across a print edition, I'd go years or even decades thinking about an artist whose work I'd never held --and it was a weird happenstance, because the little nook where I found Larmee's 'Comets Comets' also re-supplied me with Al Columbia's 'The Biologic Show', which I had lost [ed. note: a lie. I sacrificed my prized Biologic Show #0 & #1 to the vulgar god, Rent] and additionally introduced me to the lovely, lyrical, time-binding art-comix of Aiden Koch.
That fated purchase-place, Paris On Ponce, a lovely dustyhalf-forgotten antiques boutique cum hipster hang & coffee hang, caught fire five months later, ending another discrete era in both Atlanta's life & mine. It was lockdown and I was returning dvds; when I went out, Paris On Ponce was there. When I returned, it was burning and I had never been more grateful to be masked, because there was lead paint in that conflageration dating from before the 40s.
Larmee's 'Comets Comets' found purchase in my collection of strange minis. It's a lengthwise little pamphlet masquerading as an interview, b&w lines overprinted atop colour photography, Blaise re-enacting a scattered & insider-y chat with a pair of art-scenesters, making fun of both Comics Internet and art scenes in general. ['Comets Comets' may be found in 'The Best American Comics 2015', if your local library has it...] Larmee was that big a beast, for a time-- if they weren't doing promotional talk on Inkstuds Radio or having their most conceptual fuckarounds (see: '2001') hyped to be The Future of The Medium, their work was being confiscated at the Canadian border for what can only be described as inferred obscenity.
And then I guess Blaise got Me Too'd, though I didn't know about that until last year. Larmee & their work and all the goodwill word-of-mouth online vanished, man. It seems & sounds like a self-inflicted wound, another one of those egos who couldn't help but narc out their id publicly. Which feels, to me, in keeping with their overall project of fucking around to find out if fuckarounds are fun for everyone.
Was Blaise a creep? I dunno. Probably. 'Young Lions', inasmuch as it may be read as hagiography, suggests he wasn't a saint. He's a poseur. But that doesn't dismiss the skill. Lots of poseurs in the art world who actually did the work, y'know? And this is a skillful, slim thing, full of captured light in strangely slitted eyes. 'Young Lions', like 'Comets Comets', captures a moment in The Scene wherein conceptual darlings dally & party & spin out all in the name of higher education. It's drawn & overdrawn, the reproduction capturing graphite ghosts of erased dialogue, hinting at both a book & a bio given to elision & naive excess.
'Young Lions' is Blaise, ready to pocket some Xeric money & run, only instead of playing grifter-- his mission statement & stated intent! --he actually made himself make a lasting piece of his present. There is regret & no small amount of subdued sorrow in the margins of these panels. Fluxus & Yoko Ono are invoked, and mock-mourned. There's a deep Florida heat to the light on the furrowed pencils, and nothing Really Happens anywhere in this happening. 'Young Lions', like Blaise, plans an accidental success, lives it, and checks out just as quick.
True comix!
Distant Ruptures (2o-2o1o) - written & illustrated by CF, a.k.a. Christopher Forgues
I'm a Forgues / Fort Thunder n00b. Truly. I had 'Powr Mastrs' vol. 1, and I had Brian Chippendale's 'Maggots', but I never had any Kramer's Ergot-- I couldn't afford this stuff, and like I said earlier, my rules of collecting comix meant internet purchases were verboten. I'd lucked into what little Fort Thunder arcana I found-- stuff that Oxford Comics ordered & was never able to move, because Atlanta was more capes than indie shit, you dig? And I really read 'Maggots', end-to-end. I found this stuff fascinating because it reminded me of the 80s b&w boom: players playing their instruments as they preferred, not because it was what moved units, not because it was the fashion, not because market forces demanded it.
But selah. I sold 'Powr Mastrs' & 'Maggots', same as I sold 'Biologic Show' and all my Paul Pope schwag and even my precious Moebius collection, because rents weren't going down, and my job prospects simply weren't improving. Atl is what you call a hardscrabble city, when it comes to being an artfag. I held onto some scraps, like Aiden Koch's 'Impressions', Larmee's 'Comets Comets', but the real money, I hocked.
I kind-of regret shedding all that weight, and yet I don't, because I remember carrying it all the four point seven miles from my studio to the sole bookshop that paid a decent rate. It was summer, and I had a gym bag full beneath each arm and a loaded backpack. Every step was a stone plod. Prob'ly shed one quarter of my total collection that day, and even then I'd have to lose another simply to confine my total hoarde to one set of shelves. Collecting's just that kind of disease.
So it's been about two decades since I read CF or even much thought about Fort Thunder comix. I never knew Christopher Forgues as a musician, and I've never read any of his non-PM work, so 'Distant Ruptures' is all new & delightful, honestly. I can really see the Henry Darger / storybook illo influence on CF-- there's a naive & unabashed earnestness to how he approaches the form, from numbering the panels to the trippy timidity of his linework. Like you sense the artist himself is uncertain how things will roll, one page to the next. Everything shivers with awe & sweats verisimilitude, even as the characters deliver corny jokes from the corners of their fixed grins.
It wasn't until I got to the interview that concludes this collection that I found anything personal out about CF-- the hallucinogens, the synesthetic tendency, the perseverance in the face of poverty. These are smart and strange little shavings of an artist's soul, unpretentious and happy in their lack of profundity. Sometimes there aren't even punchlines, sometimes it's anti-comedy in gag strip drag.
These are capital GEE WHIZ Grrrrreat comix, is what I am saying, and it's all good that I wasn't there for stuff like 'Paper Radio' when Fort Thunder was a going concern, because if CF had been more of an active influence I might've strayed his dadaist way, just playing for self-amusement instead of straining to figure out whether I was good enough. Now, I'm good enough. (Maybe.)
But CF was good enough from the get-go, man. CF was, is, the goods. This time I hold on to him.
2oo1 (2o17) - written & illustrated by Blaise Larmee
Having endured two Inkstuds interviews with Larmee, I've answered the question for myself. Is Blaise a creep? Yes. Does that impact the value of this work? No. Yes. Maybe
There's proper use of the full toolkit of comix here, and its final lines kind of underline what this book IS, what it would not have existed without. It's an internet essay in comix form. It's a little outgrowth of the internet that found a life in print, and it's a weird piece of conceptual art, and it's... great comix, really. The kid has Ditko brain, Sim brain, but whatever. He's a 'chan-tier troll & a reactionary twit, now: but he made art, once, perhaps twice. (My jury's still out on the "merit" of Young Lions. It contains beautiful drawing, sure, but Young Lions isn't 2oo1, kids.)
2oo1.. is on some Lars Von Trier shit. This is Art. Made by a brilliant young mind before he turned full narcissist, crawled up his own asshole and plugged himself shut with weed. It's comix that float and dance and multitrack harder than the Qatsi trilogy. I keep drawing comparisons with film because of the filmic formalism Blaise employs: these pages suspend & alter time in ways that only the comix Form can-- a Form with the internet may employ; the internet, being formless except in informational terms, must borrow form. The internet is Not Comix, but comix exist on the internet in forms which could not otherwise exist. This work, 2oo1, wittily does both, is different FORMS of comix, depending on whether you're reading it on a screen or on paper. (I think part of this is to do with the way the negative spaces are expressed, whether as projected light, emanating from electronic means, or as reflected light, off the page...)
These are fundamental differences in the Forms 2oo1 has taken, and I find myself preferring Print (as Larmee must have, as well, otherwise he wouldn't have taken the trouble) because reading 2oo1 page-to-page is an actual, tactile, sensual experience. Making 2oo1 a physical piece of art fundamentally separates 2oo1 from the internet that birthed it. It weirds the work, alienates it from itself, in emulation of the artist with his multiple personas (online & in fiction) and his self-interviews... 2oo1 is a comix encapsulation, or holograph, of the internet, which I am personally convinced broke Blaise Larmee's brain, same as the internet gave us anti-feminists, and waterbrained MAGAts and TERFs and the whole delusional-ass 'rationalist' movement. One senses Larmee knew what the internet was doing for / to him, even as one senses his medi[c]ated ambivalence to the damage, in making this art.
The initial image in the book, after the Japanese & South Korean flags which adorn the cover, is of a shatterscreened smartphone. It's a photograph (or perhaps a scan?) of a smartphone, facedown on the scanner bed. It towers over the simple font knelt in rows of worship at its perfectly machined base, demanding ignorance.
The final image on the last page is an american 25-cent piece, heads-up, upside down. I'm sure there's textural intent to all the details of the reproductions bookending Larmee's hand-drawn & hand-lettered content. He's that kind of artist. Nothing is accidental.
The final paragraph of 2oo1, on the last page, relates thusly:
"The child, energetic, lying in bed, thinks rapidly in small circuits. I remember in 5th grade, a violent transition into goal orientation and loneliness-- 'I didn't do anything today', I would sob --and the weight of this feeling would compound as the school year continued. Later on, the memory of being in love, feeling pure, timeless, and feeling asexual and monklike a year later --memories of bare floors, ganzfeld walls, the internet."
In prose, that is Blaise dictating the evolution of Dave Bowman into the Starchild after he is forced to murder an A.I. in self-defense: his imagined ascendance into evolving beyond death, as he withers in the cold Kubrickian afterlife of a life lost online.
This weird little book is 2oo1, cover-to-cover-- from the polymorphous perverse, fashionable techno-fetishism finding expression in the b&w art & situationist collage of ad detritus & art photography, creating a zero-g visual atmo analagous to Kube's obsessive, curiously nutless meisterwork... The non-submersible units are all accounted for: The sundered obelisk of the smartphone towering over the writhing of words in their seemingly unrelated prologue. The quarter petrified in midflip about to plummet weathered old Washington to earth. The beginning and the impenetrable end.
Ganzfeld walls & Kubrick's stare, oh yes. Some mise en abyme shit going dowwwn, brothas.
I am not being sarcastic, I am not being an irony boy: I think there truly is something to this literalist reading. These are not weightless comparisons-- Blaise imagining himself as the Starchild, stoned and angry and not quite knowing why: time falling away as he sees himself staring at projections of an inevitible & dismal futurity: a future that is the same as every future except for the individuated experience of getting there. A future only found in breaking our tools to throw ourselves into a fatal vacuum of identity.
Sounds like everything since the year two thousand and one to me, honestly.
Wet Moon, vols. 1-2 (remastered, 2oo4-16) - written & illustrated by Sophie Campbell
Sophie is the best. I love the meandering all-over-the-place drift of the cast & the scene Sophie's chronicling. They're my people. A lot of that comes with annoying quirks & overbearing behavior and the eventual sorting & filing of who's an ally & who's a friend & why there's a difference-- life, as it's called. It's messy and not very structured and it requires patience but if you're into what people actually look & sound like these are the comix.
This pair was in the library & I'd not re-visited the remastered edition. I only knew these characters as they were originally, very eccentrically, drawn. This new edition sews the style shift up nicely. The pacing is the same and the beats aren't tweaked; it's just the pages re-done and the lettering made consistent. It's been supercool seeing Sophie make this thing, over the last twenty years. A real accomplishment. Glad to have been along for the entire ride.
Laid Waste (2o17) - written & illustrated by Julia Gfrörer
God-damn. If anyone could adapt Ottessa Moshfegh's 'Lapvona' it would be Julia.
Damned great. Unadorned, vulnerable, classically expressive. Inspiring.
[ in media res: ]
How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukranian Invasion (2o22) - written & illustrated by Igort
The Japanese Notebooks: A Journey to the Empire of Signs (2o15-2o) - written & illustrated by Igort
The Ukranian & Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule (2o11-22) - written & illustrated by Igort
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