Previously, in Wuxtry...
[ They say 'paper chase' means pursuit of vital docs. Try telling a collector that doesn't equal a complete run of Giffen's 'Legion'... ]
No.5 (2ooo-o5) - written & illustrated by Taiyō Matsumoto
Curiously atonal & off-kilter action manga about absurd assassins with some resemblances to 'The New Statesmen'. Viz published two volumes in the early oo's, then cancelled the translation. These are the remastered reprints, and the whole thing; hard to believe I've been hanging fire for a couple decades, waiting for this. The art is why I'm here-- a superslow build to the Real Business of brutal fightscenes, in vol. 3. Easily as intense & punishing as the elevator fight in Ales Kot's 'Zero', and fourfold as visually exciting, Taiyō gets goddamned savage with a brush. Total trashure! The final volume is GLORIOUS, visually, even as the narrative bow that gets tied at the end makes me wish the story had been less decompressed... There are reveals in the final half of the fourth volume that make sense of the infuriatingly inchoate narrative that runs through the first three. But selah. Matsumoto took his time because he needed to take his time-- what right do I have to bitch?
Cats of the Louvre (2o16-17) - written & illustrated by Taiyō Matsumoto
Thought I'd like it, purely for the pleasure of watching Matsumoto do stylized reproductions of classic pieces of art. But it's a strange, airless thing. There's no real feeling to the characters, and the motivations are as basic as could be. It feels like a paycheque gig. An overlong, twee, slightly Murakami-flavoured paycheque gig. Dunno. Award-winning, but not from where I'm sitting.
Wolverine: Enemy of the State (2oo5) - written by Mark Millar & illustrated by John Romita Jr.
Damn. A classic Millar romp through other creators' IPs. It shouldn't be good. But it is. Is it smart? Does it need to be? You want giant purple mecha cop-stomping zombie ninja satanists? Check your brains at the credits page! John Romita Jr. reminds us that he was one of the main guys-- along with Paul Smith --to give us Wolverine-as-cinematic-action-star. Elektra, who's dead to me because she's not dead to Marvel, makes a compelling co-star, as Millar sock-puppets her with a dead-to-rights Miller impression. Oh, and Baron Strucker gets remodeled to resemble the Prof from Weapon X, for reasons I don't quite understand (but may be related to the Prof being BWS's expy for Claremont?) is portrayed as a gormless cipher and a cuckold.
Look, I never said it was art. I said it was a romp.
Arséne Schrauwen (2o14) - written & illustrated by Olivier Schrauwen
Delightfully deadpan joke generator. Also a sublimely pretty printjob. And an all-around delicious book to hold. My first go-round with Schrauwen, but won't be my last. Have 'Sunday' queued with my local library. Can't come quick enough.
2oo1 (2o11-15) - written? & illustrated! by Blaise Larmee
Since I'm having a day where my tinnitus won't let me rest, got up and rinsed my ears with hydrogen peroxide. Does it help? Dunno. It's psychological, maybe, probably, a stress response; I interpret the physical phenomena as the hammer of my eardrum spasming, slipping, striking erratically. The more I focus on it, the worse it becomes. Cleaning & flushing my ears feels like I'm treating the problem, and so it recedes. Sometimes palliative care is a cure.
Of course now I'm awake, and it's three hours until I have to be at work, so there's nothing for it but to read 2oo1, again, seated on the toilet lid, not leaving the bathroom, waiting to be sure that I don't want the reassurance of another cycle of hydrogen peroxide fizzing thru the chambers of my skull. It seems like the right place & time to consider this enigmatic little artwork: this puzzlebox of problem & solution, with its fractured pacing & inscrutable assembly, a little gallery of years of thought & work, yanked from the internet and placed, with parental loving concern, into the physical world.
I know-- knew, still don't know --much about Larmee. Their ethnicity, their sexuality, their identity, their morality, their ethos. These fractions paper the book, and these details are peppered all around the spaces where Larmee used to terrorize the art-comix scene online; everything exists in its original contexts even as the work & the artist persist outside that context, having removed & recontextualized themselves & their work from these spaces. These details are germane: these details are not their interpretation, and their interpretation is not, necessarily, meaning.
The book is filled with junk. There are junk scribbles, castoffs in the process of enfleshing imagery, alongside scraps from the spare and lonesome world Larmee inhabited: there is junk theory, abstracted thought folded origami-like within the landfill of language that is English, expressed haltingly in scrawl & repetition, secreting itself in the folds of the binding and launching itself across double-page spreads: there will be junk preserved, forever, in the scanned & photo-composited scraps of paper and plastic and metal, receipts, account balance slips, notes to self, observed phenomena like the passage of a slug across a rippled and abraded printout of Larmee's most famous & well-regarded comics work, the titular '2oo1', a centerpiece of overheard conversation atop observed movement (perhaps dance); Larmee, observing their existence in its totality, records it, producing this fractured record of anti-narrative perfection.
2oo1 is an album. It's music. In hearing Larmee's mind dancing, I dance alongside. Unmoving but moved. It's not-comix. It's not any One of Larmee's comix-- it's an anthology of All their comix, over a span of years. It's everything about & around & surrounding their comix. It's a little sliver of the internet, bound in time, entombed in ink & pulp, a bit of deathlessness chronicling the struggle & demise of an observed, incomprehensible personality. It's not Blaise. It's David Hockney & Davison Middle & Hall Hassi-- it's all the stage names & rabblerousers they've been, talking with / to us, recording the record they'll be forever known for / within.
I pause over certain pages, looking down into them, wondering at how, from my perspective, Larmee is wholly visible, yet they'll never be able to see out. From Larmee's perspective, they're still there, in the work, inextricable. They've left bits of themselves all over it-- defunct addresses, pieces of costuming, props & jewelry placed atop the scanner bed and imported. These things have nothing to do with the story, but then, if THE STORY IS THE WORK, what may be deemed actually peripheral? Theory? Theory is the throughline, the narrative thread which binds this thing as manifestly as the stitching in the book's spine. Blaise taps an imaginary microphone and dictates their process, ruffling hair, acting/embarrassed to be called upon in such a public way. Does it anyhow.
Blaise explains 2oo1. With calmed ears, I read.
RUNE (1994-95) - written by Chris Ulm(?) & Barry Windsor-Smith; illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith (with additional colours by Keith Conry & Albert Calleros)
Dawg, did I ever under-rate the amount of gay panic Barry Windsor-Smith had going on with this book. This is really... Like, between 'Monsters' & 'Paradoxman' and Rune? Barry had issues.
I'm not saying he hates gay people, just so we're clear. It's just evident that he has a particular perspective on us, and it's a little, well, fraught. As a long admirer of his work, it's not a major mark against it-- the gay nazis in 'Monsters' are well-developed, for villains, and the suggestions of rape in 'Paradoxman' are played well enough, as such things go. These aren't Bad Things: but there's a specific aura of menace to the homosexual tropes at play in this here vampire comic, and while I think Barry loves nothing better than to fuck with tropes, it's-- it's a curious place for it, is all. This book was not designed to be a success, in a line of comix that were super thirsty for any 90s mainstream sales, and Malibu went so far as to make a special cut of Rune #0 so they could give it away with SPIN music mag. I mean, SPIN is a weird place to push your "vampires are abhorrent parasites and also, uh, queer" epic, isn't it?
I found the SPIN giveaway today: it was published in September 1994, when the regular series, as drawn by BWS, had just published its 5th issue, ending Barry's regular contributions. Everything in the SPIN promo had been serialized as part of Ultraverse's flipbook promotional stuntage in 2-3 page increments (except for instalments I & J, truncated here for space purposes, since this promo copy is chock fuckin' full of full-page ads). So Malibu knew Barry was out, and wanted to give the book a boost, because this was maybe the only viable title they had? Barry Windsor-Smith was a huge get, and they knew his name had pull... But this is what they got out of him. A curiously homoerotic tale about the nastiest, ugliest vampire Barry could draw, because Barry was sick of capeshit. "You want capes? I'll give you fuckin' Dracula, bitches."
Barry was the johnny appleseed of graphic novels in the 90s: dude drops Weapon X on Marvel, serializes 2/3rds of his Storm graphic novel, talks a lot about his Hulk and/or Captain America graphic novel (which ultimately becomes 'Monsters'), and dips. Drops Solar: Man of the Atom at Valiant, an entire volume of X-O, and that dopey-ass Archer & Armstrong series: three graphic novel length projects in total; dips. Seeing a pattern?
And then he lands with Malibu and does-- this? Just bizarre. Anti-commercial is underselling it.
I dunno. It's cool to get to read it all again. Nothing was coloured like this: these comix are, ultimately, why Marvel bought the Ultraverse. They coveted the colouring dept, they needed the software & the specialists, and they by god got it. Which means that Marvel owns Rune, which is why there's a Silver Surfer / Rune crossover comic. Technically, Rune is part of the Marvel U, and every once in a while some smartass pencils him in the background of a group shot.
Someday, some waterbrained watcher of trends will propose a Northstar x Rune event and the resulting singularity of taste will collapse the entertainment-industrial complex on itself like a dying sun. And that will be it for OUR universe...
Sunday (2o24) - written & illustrated by Olivier Schrauwen
Clearly I am converted. 'Sunday' is a day for worship.
Swimming In Darkness (2017) - written & illustrated by Lucas Harari
This is one of those graphic novels where the art itself distracts me from reading it. I'm constantly more caught up in browsing the stark & shivering imagery than the text and I keep dropping the narrative thread to lose myself in the labyrinthine & foreboding architectural dream of the bathhouse, wandering its torrid corridors, watching steam rise against the falling snow, shielded by brutalist arms of concrete, laid down to funnel one along the building's body toward its foundations. I always stop shy of actually reading the thing and just get lost in the dreaminess of the imagery. Rilly good shit, this book. Harari's art & colours get you higher than any hash.
Coda: I never finished reading this, because the font choices SUCKED. At the end of it all, the font choices looked so artificial & clangorous it made me wish for hand-lettering. The dialogue shouldn't look pasted in by a computer-- irrespective of how the rest of the b.d. was drawn, the spoken narrative needs to feel like it's attached to the art!!! Otherwise a reader like myself won't hear how the characters Actually Speak: I'll only hear subtitles.
("Hearing subtitles." Honestly. Only a mental patient or an asperger's case talks like this...)
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (2oo6-25) - written Eiji Ōtsuka & drawn by Housui Yamazaki
Perfectly profane. I've been reading these off-again, on-again for years, never quite pasting together a Whole Story-- which is great, because these are little mystery stories, one-off "cases", and the comedic cast of misfits are sitcom gold: they're bad at business, and their business is charity to the dead.
Another total trashure. Eiji's got a goldmine in this serial. It's a real treat to watch Housui Yamazaki grow as an illustrator, too. May it run forever, and Big Mysterious Plot be damned.
Supreme: Blue Rose (2o15) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tula Lotay
[Gonna cut'n'paste feels from my private comic chat thread, because I am not fucking awake enough to be updating my reading list:]
Yesterday visited the largest comix library I've yet encountered-- the seventh floor of the Harold Washington Library has three whole aisles of nothing but GNs. Alongside Brandon Graham's 'Rain Like Hammers' and 'The Gull Yettin' by Joe Keller (who i've been swiping colour palette ideas from lately), I picked up 'Supreme: Blue Rose' for a re-visit.
Back in 2o15 I read this title impatiently, month-to-month. Each month I'd re-read the entire series before devouring each freshly dropped issue. I'd also fuck around with configuring & reconfiguring the covers on my worktable-- of course, stoner that i am --and even read SBR while wearing League Of Extraordinary Gentleman official 3-D glasses so as to savor Lotay's outtathisworld colouring.
I profoundly enjoyed SBR as it was happening, thinking hard about the comic-as-informational hyperlink-ridden essay form. I was really plugged into Ellis' approach to art & comix. This title was like the dead tree incarnation of a webcomic, it blinked & blinged with banner ads & pop ups for products that didn't exist. Add to that Ellis' own particular aesthetic fixations, as a superfan of Enki Blial... If you've ever read 'The Woman Trap' or 'The Beast Trilogy', 'The Black Order Brigade' or 'The Hunting Party', you can immediately see why Ellis selected Tula Lotay to interpret his script. There's this dissociated, mundane psychedelia endemic to Bilal's work, how he draws his not terrifically expressive characters hallucinating like Vogue models: that's what Tula Lotay improves on here, with her curated chaos scribbles.
Per the bling-y nature of this work-for-hire, with the writer taking the stage on a character untouched since Alan Moore was last thirsty for funds, Ellis namedrops in multiple media formats, hyping 'I Am Sitting In A Room' by Alvin Lucier because he needs the audience to hear the speaker of those words to enunciate with degraded overdub resonance. It's a nice touch. The whole book is Nice Touches, swiping bits of David Lynch's symbol kit, for instance. Sets & props from Twin Peaks & Mulholland Drive blip in & out of focus-- cut & pasted here to make a Morrison-style argument for the gratuitous rebooting of looted I.P.s, sure, but also to justify the man fuckin' with some genre-mashups like a master of the turntables.
Ultimately SBR is ellis is playing coolhunter like he's living the art life in a Wm. Gibson novel, scrapbooking all his favourite influences in one place to provide a compelling Aesthetic Argument for why reboots happen: so big cheque stars can drop something that looks like this, a comic that reads like New Wave science fiction-- only it's talking about doughy power fantasy shit "created" by Rob Liefeld and Alan Moore.
As is not uncommon with Ellis the book kind of loses steam after the fourth issue and by the sixth issue i am like shut the fuck UP, but glory be this was a beautiful & weird little piece of work that went nowhere & did nothing new, really.
SBR looked SO good at the time Image was dropping it, man. Ellis was on fire at that moment, with me. I'd always enjoyed his flash fiction schtick. Now I know he was just using Moorcock's basic conceits for how to grind shit out; Ellis was studying what Dennis Cooper & Blake Butler's generation of internet writers were doing; and Ellis was savvy enough to know his tastes were Popular Tastes. People liked Moore's Supreme for the same reason people dug on Twin Peaks, because audiences dig art that's All Potential. Which is why afro-futurism will never die, because it's about pure potential, about improving upon reality. It's about breaking codes (& overcoding) and generally hacking the fuckedness of the mundane.
Sci-fi bullshit about the universe being information is a recurring favourite fixation of Ellis', it's his Ideaspace, really, and as a conceit I shit sure prefer it to this cheap-ass Bleed, which is basically Roddenberry's warp speed for the comix literate. Like it's just a hacky way to explain away a cut. Whatevs. Point being this was solid Ellis, and some evergreen art out of Lotay.
Like, Ellis asked Lotay to draw some booooooollshit, man. Like an assassin with a splintered & collapsing wireframe topography for a face? I mean, Ellis. What a cruel cunt.
The Gull Yettin (2o23) - written & illustrated by Joe Kessler
Wild, kinetic, careful work. Windowpane is a joy of my bookshelf. Adding this too.
Yeah. I got nothin'. There's an interview where Kessler remarked that after his mom read it, she was like, "You're done, right?" And he knew how she meant it, like it wasn't negative, it was just, "This is it." This was the one that does everything. What else is there for a talent with a toolbox like this to do? Windowpane was the exploration of all the possibilities Kessler saw for full colour printing: process determining content & content determining process; it was Kessler's gym, where he sweated it all out. The Gull Yettin is the artist discovering his myth as he made it. It's so lovely & deeply felt & understood: it's all exploration, and it's a very sensory read-- as a silent work it's the LOUDEST and vividly expressed, with such youthful energy!
It's one hell of a work of beauty. Me, I don't think he's done.
Anti-Gone (2o17) - written & illustrated by Connor Williumsen
This, too, was one hell of a thing. Utterly gorgeous. There's nobody better at manipulating the cartoon ikonography of comix than this, is there? Yes, hyperbole. Gilbert Hernandez isn't dead, and Osamu Tezuka's spirit is deathless. I dig all that. But holy shit. This is what I always kind of wanted out of Brandon Graham and never quite got-- that cooler-than-thou in the ruins of the future thing. This is some deep shit, right here, slim & tight & high frequency.
Buying a copy as soon as I find an affordable one.
Rain Like Hammers (2022) - written & illustrated by Brandon Graham
Thought I wanted to read this. There was a period where Brandon Graham really excited & interested me. But I think that's kind of stopped? I wanted that Matt Howarth vibe, where the stories are full of non-terrans, all shapes & varieties of life. But this is just a story about boring hominid body-swapping & general future avarice, shades of 'The Long Tomorrow'. It's fine for browsing, but there's nothing to draw me in. Graham's colouring doesn't even interest me, here. It was exciting, seeing a B.G. book I didn't recognize on the shelves of the Harold Washington library, but holding it back here in the studio at home, I'd rather be reading a cut'n'dried b&w mystery formala like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.
Sorry, B. I know everything I said sounded bitchy & disappointed. I don't mean it like that. Maybe it's a vibes thing. Rain Like Hammers is not my vibe right now.
I've never really mentioned this, but Brandon Graham was why I started using felt-tips. I was obsessed with a certain kind of line you could only get with a crow-quill pen or the very microscopic tip of a calligraphy brush, and there Brandon Graham was with that collection, 'Escalator', which had everything but his porn comix. I liked what he was doing, and I realized he had just taken up what Matt Howarth had been doing for decades: using the pens & markers that were around. Graham used felt-tips for most everything, and when I picked them up again I re-discovered the versatility of an instrument I'd never really appreciated. I'd liked felt-tips for their line more than rollerballs but rollers were dominant usage & utility in my part of the U.S. at the time, and felt-tips were... I dunno. Easier to fuck up? I was hard on my tools in my youth.
Anyway, Brandon Graham's comix & his enthusiasm for comix (akin to Paul Pope's) really fired me up. He had a graffiti / skater rat influence that vibed with me, because that was where I was from, and I liked the fearlessness of some of his art where I could tell he was just making shapes & didn't have solid pencils beneath them, how he was just going straight to pen, like Tezuka, or Howarth... That he could DO that, with a felt-tip, made me re-examine how I approached linework, for a time. I liked the design of Stadler's felt-tip cases, I appreciated the basic size range, and how really three pen sizes could do everything you needed that wasn't brush, because I will ALWAYS be a slut for using a brush. Brush is where I live & breath & rut. It's my favorite implement for art. But felt-tips are a close second, and Brandon Graham was what turned me there, back in 2005.
I followed him everywhere, from the NBM porn years thru the TokyoPop implosion to Image all through the Prophet / Multiple Warheadz era and then I just... dropped off. Like the world ended basically. I lost my studio, I didn't have the internet, I'm stranded in a strange town trying to hold down a new job & there's covid rampant & I'm sleeping in a graveyard & zowie, I have a cracked skull and a fucked hand. When life comes at you you don't have as much time for comix as you used to. But I try. And I have this dumbass blog to help me remember the Good Shit.
Brandon Graham is the Good Shit. Even when I'm not all hyped about a thing. 'Rain Like Hammers' feels surplus to requirements when we've got, like, official Blade Runner sequels and Ghost In The Shell is a franchise that cannot die. I want bizarre robots & peeps which aren't hominid bipeds w/ attendant humanoid fixations-- I want aliens & weird shit, right now, is all, and so I'd be better served going back to Prophet for the Weird Alien Shit, or reading Matt Howarth's Konny & Czu stories. Humans and technology are tres grossing me the fuck out r.n. and I don't wanna be thinking about how we'll all be porting into remote sexbots in the next few years because the Supreme Court will be having an opinion about i,...
Like if that's where my head goes when I pick up a book by one of my bros, then shit is too grim.
It ain't you, B.
Spiral & Other Stories (2004) written & illustrated by Aidan Koch
Beautiful work. Quite elegant comix. Aidan works in broad strokes. I want to read more.
[ nexties: ]
When The Wind Blows (1986) - written & illustrated by Raymond Briggs
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