"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - September 2o26

 [freshly-plagued by biting flies edition.  welcome to the heat dome...]

StormWatch #44 (1996) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tom Raney

Fell #1-9 (2oo5-o8) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Ben Templesmith

A Body Beneath: collecting issues 2-5 of the Comic Book Series, 'Lose' (2oo9-'13) - written & illustrated by Michael DeForge

Correspondence from the End of the Universe vol. 3 (2o2o) - written & illustrated by Menota 

The Ticking (2oo5) - written & penciled by Renee French

Anti-Gone (2o17) - written & illustrated by Connor Willumsen

Patience (2o16) - written, illustrated & coloured by Daniel Clowes

Days of Hate (2018) - written by Ales Kot, illustrated by Danijel Zezelj, & coloured by Jordie Bellaire

2025 was a very good year (for comics)

That's it.  That's the post.

Nah, rilly.  Like, I've enjoyed the hell out of some.  Went on a thorough dive of John Smith's work, majorly got my Neal Adams on, had a coffee & chat with Blaise Larmee, caught up with ev-er-y-thing the south's public library system denied me, and added new Al Columbia to my collection for the first time in years...!  And then there's the li'l free libraries of Chicago, gifting me Raymond Briggs' 'When The Wind Blows' and 'The Sky Is Blue With A Single Cloud' by Kuniko Tsurita.  What else?

I finally got to read the concluding issues of some Unfinished Symphonies that've been hanging fire in my mind for the greater part of thirty to forty years.  Like, I have every issue of 'night life' by Derek McCulloch & Simon Tristam now.  Read all of 'Exquisite Corpse' by the Pander Brothers.  Completed reading 'The Puma Blues' by Stephen Murphy & Michael Zulli.

There's a lot of stuff rolling into my In stack.  A lot of Corben coming.  Some new manga, some ancient.  Doing a few best-of-the-year books from various lists--  Lee Lai's 'Cannon' is SHARP stuff.

Gave away quite a few, too.  All of 'Kaijumax' by Zander Cannon went to a co-worker.  'Tis the season!  Passed my singles of 'Rare Flavours' along to a fellow comicker I'd like to jam with, one day.  And I've plain lost track of everything I donated to l'il free libraries, but there were goodly comix scattered & sown in the fertile plains of Chi, O my bruddahs.  This is a Pulp Towne.

Did I accomplish any of my personal goals?  Not as such.  I'm hackin' at comix.  Got some projects ready for the next stage.  Got some brewing.  Planning & penciling, planning & penciling.  You know how it is.

mirroring the internet

As usual I'm awake at 4am.

Can't sleep, so over to the comix shelf--  even though the main research book checked out is due in 3 days.  I can't do research first thing in my day.  I pluck 'Mirror Mirror' vol. 1; mainly to browse the Connor Willumsen strips toward the end of the volume.  They're really fascinating works of comix.  Maybe the best works of comix to incorporate / contemplate the internet-in-relation-to-self I can think of, next to '2oo1'.  The internet's not a thing I want in my comix, generally.  I'd be happy if the 'net weren't in film, but fat fucking chance of separating the two at this juncture.  I'm not a fan of the internet.  I had my own contretemps with separating my sense of self from blogging, a decade ago.  I don't want fame, and I don't want the majority of people to have access to me.  So these strips by Willumsen, 11 in all, speak to what I feel like the-space-that-isn't is about.

Because that's what the internet it, what cyberspace is:  it's a space that defines itself, in (absent) relation to the sphere of the individual.  The 11 strips by Willumsen cover all the probable permutations of self Connor could conceive of; where the Self touches the Screen, and where it evades & elides contact.

At least that's how I define these strips.  They're very spare, meditative pieces, drawn as iconographically as possible; there aren't even any full-on Faces in the strip, strictly ikons representing eye & ear & mouth.  Each page in the series bears a central window, a digital notepad file, printed onto tracing paper & superimposed atop the 9-panel comic window Willumsen uses to explore / manifest the written / poetic content.  The strips begin with a meditation on The Body (point of origin & departure for The Self) and run through a series of explorations of where 'net & self contact one another, concluding with a meditation on Time, as in time spent, the current of time, the currency of time-as-capital, the Waste of time.

Inasmuch as any of it's Waste(d).  It's only waste if it's not capitalized on, right?  Material conditions and all that.  If the material conditions of the Self are the body, what is the body, when you're talking about the internet?  You're talking representation.  Connor represents the Self as rituals of self-embodiment, self-improvement, self-care, self-awareness.  His self is rendered into abstractions, filtered thru comix, using technical tricks to express emotion & intellect.

These comix aren't just meditations by the artist:  they're for audiences to meditate ON, and so they're superbly suited to the format of Mirror Mirror, which (for Connor's contributions, particularly) mimics-or-mirrors gallery space.  Gallery space is one of those wild theoretical states of being that belongs up there with Hilbert Space.  Fuck, gallery space might as well BE Hilbert Space.  Mirror Mirror #1 is a theoretical interior space for the appreciation of where comix & art collide, collaborate, cohabitate.  Connor's strips are presented one at a time, on the right, faced by a blank-- the comix face out, facing us, when the book is open, and are closed against Nothing, blanks where (perhaps) biographical data relating to the art / artist might be placed, spaces where information could be placed, blanks for the studious to annotate within, gaps for vandals to scrawl across.

Connor doesn't come to any "solid" conclusions in these 11 strips.  The artist contemplates their body, then the Space they've chosen to put their mind into, the Screens we filter thru, the Representational Reality we are ruled by / against (photographs, for instance), the representational geometrical abstractions produced by the coding & overcoding of Self & Internet-image, the conceptual Fog it all emerges out of & recedes into, et al.  The materials Willumsen uses to express it all waver between representational (a Scan of a Transparency of a Printout of a Window) and manifest (the tracing paper wavers, is wrinkled, becomes occluded by excess of imagery, overlaid) and the resulting Waveform never collapses into Fact or Fallacy, in spite of, perhaps in triumph over, the artist's misgivings about the medium.

Blah, blah, blah.  These 11 strips--  the only Connor Willumsen in my comix library, point of fact  --are another one of those works of Art that keeps pulling me back in.  Like '2oo1', it's a comic about the internet, kinda:  it's about how comix end up on the internet, and WHY they end up tatted across that vast numinous & honestly kinda gross bathroom wall we all stare for minutes? hours? every day.

I try not to insert the internet in my comix.  Only one of the five books I've been working on even admit the existence of this-thing-you-are-using-to-read-now.  I've resisted the internet most of my life.  It started with Bulletin Board Systems back in the dial-up days of '93; since then I've crashed out and committed e-suicide several times: nuked one blog after another, yanked my art from the server racks of friends, bailed on lifetime accounts with Flickr & Librarything, and essayed virtual leagues outta my general way to avoid social media tar-pits like Myspace, Facebook & Xitter.  I've only had the internet in my pocket for, like, maybe seven years total, and only ever on a flip-phone because fuck the illusion of Access, man.  My current flip-phone doesn't even have a functional browser.  It's bliss!

I still pay my phone bill in person.

Anyway, here we are, at 6:38am--  did it really take all that time to pile all those thoughts there, like a bunch of mismatched socks?  --having learned very little about Connor Willumsen or Connor's art, much less me, because by some perverse twist you (of all people!) are reading a text-heavy blog, authored by an oldfag with organic brain damage & cognitive issues.  Mirror Mirror #1 sits on the kitchen table, to my left, shut, Connor's comix closed on themselves.  To my right, a stack of sketchbooks & pencils & erasers, topped with some pithy post-its about projects forthcoming & in process.  Nothing legible.

It looks a little like this:

It looks very little like life.

eddie campbell (or, "the mission and the meaning of the mission (is comix)")

Has always been an influence on me, before I even knew who he was.  I knew Bacchus, first, as a teenage reader of Dark Horse Presents, and only cottoned onto the artist behind that mad saga much, much later, on the far side of a chasm where my teen years are housed, half-recalled & water damaged...  and even further, realize that I had seen Eddie's LINE in cognito, in collaboration, endlessly, with other artists hither & yon, from when he was doing the 80s indy scene.  I still pick up scraps from those years today.  I'm probably the only Eddie Campbell reader in Chicago with a copy of the Ace Rock'N'Roll Club.

Chi's a pretty cool town.  A few months ago my husband, who's only read what Eddie Campbell I've shown him*

* Single page strips that endlessly amuse me from his Alec archive of self-reflection, mainly to do with home life, anecdotes & Real Life stuff, which is about as far from Bacchus as it gets.  I was into Eddie first for his fantasy, but in the long view the only Bacchus I have these days is the colour special he did with Teddy Kristensen painting the whole thing, and it's SIGNED by Eddie, which wasn't even a thing I sought; I got it by accident, off an ebay purchase 10 years ago that I only permitted myself--

(the control on my addiction to comix, y'see, was only letting myself buy comix i found In The Wild, in stores or in random nooks in bookshops, little free libraries, library book sales, yard sales, etc--  NO INTERNET PURCHASES, was the hard line up until covid came knocking.  now i control my addiction with an ingrained sense of poverty & the fragility of life & the Transience of All Things, since i have rebuilt my entire comix collection Three Separate Times in my life and have had three near-death experiences.  this, the third collection, is the last one.  the final cut, if you like, the hard edit on what i think the best & most influential comix of my life.  this is the library that survived, and i will pass on, as an inheritance, to someone whom i hope shall not squander the precious knowledge entombed therein.  if you can grok these books you have everything you will ever need to put lines to paper for yourself, guaranteed)

--an ebay purchase which I only permitted myself because my last copy of the Bacchus Colour Special, aka 'The Bottle' got lost, somehow, in my move to the 405 4th studio, where I undertook teaching myself how to make comix all over again as I sweated it out night after night in a dirt bar that also happened to have the best damn pool tables in Atlanta.

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell, and comix, and how Eddie's comix have guided me as a person about as much as Grant Morrison influenced my pop cultural adoration of metafiction & the intellectual, literary gameplay comix could result in, etc, insert endless name-dropping cocklobbering daisy chain of hero worship here [goatse.cx]

Short version is, Eddie influenced me as an Ahhhrtist as much as on the human, literary, level as any scots bastard ever.  Eddie is a player in the comix marketplace on the level of the heavies, has been his whole life (even when he thinks / thought otherwise) and his sense of line & his bravery as a scribbler are second to bloody none.  I love him for his abstraction, his carefully chaotic swings at using two values to represent kalaidoscopes of colour; for being a Colour Artist & fine painter who learned how to do every bit of that in Black & White, in minute abstracted & rigorously swiftly & beautifully resolved experiments in what an artist can do with tiny boxes, lines on paper, & the interaction of word / image.  

He's the real goddamned goods, and better at Talkin' Art than Scott bloody McCloud & Eisner & who else is there, really, when you're talking heavies, because Eddie Campbell is also old as fuck and I express this as someone freshly old as fuck, and at least as experienced with the ups & downs of bar life, hanging with total poolroom genius wasters...  Minus, perhaps, the extra 30,000 miles of wear on SOMEbody's liver.  Who were we talking about again?

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell.  But then I'd have to apologize for biting his style, above.  And I do like that picture, despite all the terribly critical biting things I might could venture--  the fact that I can't mimic Eddie's lettering b/c it's mostly done w/ crowquill nib & i am not lettering with anything other than a felt tip, fuck ya'll very much, i DID my time cleaning nibs & lettering with them and eff all that fine motor control, son, because i possess it no longer  --I do think it's a good likeness, Eddie Campbell to the life, and I was barely trying.

The zip-a-tone really makes it.  Letraset, little black sticky dotty things, whatever you gotta call it.  My favoured brand was Letraset.  They went outta business in the states; I think they merged with a Japanese backer & in some form persist there today, largely kept afloat by the manga industry.  But enough anecdotal, shoppy meanders.  The zip-a-tone is what makes it. 

 

The zip-a-tone is mainly why I thought to post this, today.  This zip-a-tone was given to me by my mother, and may date to her stock from pasting up newspaper adverts for the [Dogwater] Star, her hometown newspaper.

This stuff aged like finest vinegar, as you can see-- it's brittle & doesn't want to stay adhesed to anything other than other acetate; it's gotten that lovely yellow you get from decayed spirit gum that's had exposure to a surface easily affected by humidity (such as xerox paper).  It's fascinating stuff.  You can get lovely moire patterns from it by layering, as demonstrated here.  You can scratchboard it with an exacto to create nifty photorealist gradiants...  Zip-a-tone is the BOMB.  Eddie was, to me, the expert with this shit; at a certain point in an artist's life you collect these obscure scraps & they become precious.  I think Eddie ran out a few years ago; like, within the last administration.  He had that much!

I gave my collection of my mother's letratone... 

--gathered over the decades & only slightly supplied by me, as when I first ran away from home I bought up all the stock there was to be had in Auburn, and their people didn't even know they HAD it:  tucked away on shelves only accessibly by footstool.  I recognized the logo and had to ask someone to get it down.  They sold me the entire batch for two twenties.

Girl at the counter didn't even know what it was.  She asked why I would spend so much money.

Most of that letratone got used by me & my art partner, Josiah, over the late 90s & early 2000s as we both tried & flailed to get noticed / published / do it ourselves, a la Sim, in fucking Auburn, Alabama, then Richmond, Virginia.  We probably picked the wrong time to do any of this, because clearly we caused 9/11.

Anyway, after all the carcinogens died down and nobody knew who or what we were bombing or who we were putting bags over the heads of, the art partnership came to a mutually conciliatory divorce and I was on my own, in Atlanta, and after 4am I would finish cleaning up the daily spills and leave my coworkers to the afterparty, go home & practice making comix.

"...instead of bitching" (#41) was a simple exercise in grinding out a windowpane.  I figured, three panels, three art styles as near as can be imitated, using only felt-tip & ink & a blunt / rough brush.  No laming out with markers on the shading like I had been, where the graytones had almost become a crutch & my linework was suffering.  I think that was the motivation, as near as I can recall.  Eddie's not the panel I'm most proud of-- that would be the Brandon Graham pastiche, where I got his line DOWN; the Carla Speed McNeil imitation is half-rate & too busy, and I don't care for my bald spot in panel 1 at all; it's a terrible composition & unless you knew from previous strips you'd have no idea that there was a bare lightbulb on a weird articulated arm of entwined plastic lei flowers on my desk, nor that that was what that was meant to be.  

Anyway, yeah:  for a while my desk just had a fucking light bulb directly over my head.  Which would be ironic because during this phase of my life I was not particularly creative nor bright.  I knew why I & Josiah had failed, and it wasn't because of Jo.  It was probably because of the unresolved homosexual attraction, unrecognized on my part, happily, because if I'd known I'd had a thing for him we wouldn't have partnered up to make comix in the first place.  We weren't very good at it, generally, we were enthusiastic amateurs.

I mean, my enthusiasm had to be pretty boundless, in those days, because I ran away from home to Make Comix, the way some idiots run away from home to become Rock Stars, or Join Circuses, or Go L.A.-- I mean, there's me, Al Columbia & Brandon Graham, there's gotta be other malformed idiots who started this way.  There I was--  holy shit, there I still am, in my memory palace: the comic shop I used to brazenly steal from back in 97, the one that got burned out for the insurance money; there I am, idly nudging the char from a roof support with my duct-taped jump boot  --rifling through quarter bins back when there .25 bins were a thing, bruh, and there was Eddie Campbell, this fuckin' internationally recognized comix artist whose rep I mainly knew anecdotally, through copies of Amazing Heroes or 'From Hell' hitting Taboo, or... 

Wait, this Campbell cat, didn't he do Bacchus, in Dark Horse Presents?  Did I already say that?

Hey, I think I forgot to finish a sentence, back there.  I gave my mother's collection of letratone, to which I'd also contributed, to my husband.  Kind-of not-really as an engagement present.  It's an heirloom.  Y'know.

Since this endlessly nested reverie has (at last!) reached the weed-fogged borders of Old Beardy's Ideaspace, I suppose it's appropriate to re-visit this cameo by Moore, whom I dreamt dropped into my first "apartment".  (really just a single room, converted motor hotel space that flooded annually; an apartment I inherited from the only other terminal nerd I knew in Auburn, a total loser named Shakin' Blake who creeped on teen girls & eventually got kicked out for not being able to pay rent on that shithole because he'd lost his job at KFC, so him & his Billy Idol cds and his reeking mildewed collection of longboxes--  Shakin' Blake, James, in case you're still reading, is who I blame for my knowledge of 90s GL  --got chucked into the street, so I inherited: a fridge that did a cool imitation of a block of ice; an air conditioner which drooled, loudly; a disgusting sink; and an oven that never worked)  First "apartment" i ever paid rent on, the first lease to ever bear my name.  Bulldozed immediately after I moved out, December 31st of 1999.

That was the first studio I made comix in, and that's where Josiah made his first comix.  You can see it in the first panel:

Not terribly well-drawn, but the compositions work.  It's early in the Greetings from Crooked Corner run of autobio comix that I shan't bore you further with, as they are crap.  But yeah.  Eddie fuckin' Cambell figured heavily in my appreciation of the form, as much as this beardy ol' fucker with his lugubrious Northampton drawl.  I first experienced their work together in that apartment.  It's in some annex of the memory palace, maybe a hallway over from the Big Wreck that rattled my chronology.  Pretty sure I must have been listening to Moore's spoken word performances around the time I had this dream.  The Birth Caul is my favourite thing either Campbell or Moore have done, collaboratively, after From Hell.  It's a magnificent bit of work, especially as a Single Issue of Comix, which is most definitely not what it began as.

Eddie MADE that thing, two-handedly wrestling Moore's marijuana free-associative flight into such robost, sculptural shape.  It's a massive bit of comix-as-art and it's philosophically chewy in a way I find only Eddie Campbell really delivers, for me, at the end of the day.  He gets how people think, and talk, and how it all sort-of ties together.  "Memory is a big ol' plate of soup," as Campbell once endearingly put it.

I'm starting to get what he means.

So it was a pretty wild thing when my husband--  hey, did you remember where originally I left off?  half of fuckin' Anna Karenina ago?  blitherin' in my infuriatingly dissociated way about showing Siegfried some of Campbell's Alec comix?  --my husband attended CAKE, two months ago (the altcomix expo here in Chi, apologies for all the stumbly parantheticals, it's just my style, which is why I don't make autobio comix, it's the sorta thing only works in standup or blogging) because he's scouting for next year & our table there.  Did I mention we're doing that?  We're doing that.  And who does he stumble into?

Siegfried comes home & asks, "Eddie Campbell makes comics."  And I'm like "That's not a question."

Sig says, "Yeah.  He was just walking around, chilling."  And I'm like "Apropos of being fucking cool."

Anyway.  Eddie.  Man.  Don't get me started.

We could have a conversation.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - July 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome BACK to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade!

That's right:  MONTH TWO.  Buckle the fuck in. ]

Armor & The Silver Streak #1-8 (1984-1990) - "written" & "illustrated" by Neal Adams; dialogue by the son-in-law, Peter Stone; inks & professional polish by Rudy Nebres; guest-starring Bart Sears, Trevor Von Eeden, Brian Apthorp, and even Kelley Jones

This one is legendary.  It was supposed to be four issues.  "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak", that is.  But, as it hit the stands, something kept... happening.  We'll address that in a moment.  Maybe; I might need more than a couple.

What's longer than a moment?  An interval?  That sounds nebulous enough for Continuity.

We'll address "The Secret Origin" in an interval.

What *I* want to address, up top, is how fuckin' goofy this sad sack of space opera is.  The alien designs are straight-up 70s, post Star Wars, full-on Barlowe's Field Guide To Extraterrestrials design wank.  There's nothing you could call 80s about any of it, unless you're talking about the character of Armor himself, kitted out head-to-toe with martial arts weapons that're almost entirely japanese in origin.  Whatever Neal's original intentions were when he debuted his "The New Heroes" portfolio, by the time he's paying a printer's bill, Armor's own series has become a full-fledged Sci-Fi cashgrab.

Cynical?  You say that like you've never read a Neal Adams comic.

There's nothing in "The New Heroes" portfolio to suggest The Silver Streak & Armor are brothers.  Apart from their shared name.  They became brothers, by the time they featured in Revengers #2, which (one assumes) was in production alongside Armor & the Silver Streak #1.  But it's hard to say?  Because a hallmark of Continuity is a tendency to burden a single title--  such as 'The Revengers'  --with the necessity of launching one flotilla after another of supporting titles.

Example: from Ms. Mystic we got Shadowhands, which would be reverse-engineered into Samuree, and Urth 4, sensibly re-trademarked as Earth 4.  Well, maybe that's a terrible example.  Almost sounds like Neal didn't quite have his shit finessed.  Whatever.  It was Pacific Comics.  Do over!

From Continuity Studios for real:  with the launch of the Zero Patrol, we got Megalith and Shaman.  Five page, self-contained backups.  Of the two, only Megalith's could be considered a legit push, since I don't for one damned second believe Neal saw commercial potential in Shaman; he spent the entirety of Continuity Comics' span as a publishing entity scrambling to discover a single practical use for the horsehair-mohawk-that-walks-like-a-man.  Shaman's not that dissimilar to Dr. Strange in that he isn't a compelling character, he's a hairstyle with a handwave function for unwieldy plot.

Typical.  In attempting to make a point, I'm drifting away from my actual point.  Okay.  Here:

From The Revengers flows Megalith, Armor & the Silver Streak, as well as the goddamned Hybrids; from Hybrids you get Valeria the She-Bat and (am I the only one fist-pumping?) Knighthawk.

Continuity's deck of characters is like an STD that never stops suppurating.  That's the point.

It's rude--  downright unfair, really  --for me to assume that I have any insight into what Neal's master plan was.  I do simply because there's little evidence to the contrary.  Armor & Silver Streak are brothers, we are told via omniscient narrator caption, and their parents are either abducted or dead...  Yet abducted-or-dead was also the fate of Jacqueline, a.k.a. Scarlet, a.k.a. the Scarlet Streak, so named because her hair has one.  Jacqueline did not exist in 'The New Heroes' portfolio, and feels like a very post-post-hoc addition to the team dynamics of The Revengers.  A stylin', hard-rocking, blade-wielding chick to leaven the all-dick energy of a makeshift team of make-do heroes.

(No, I have not forgotten about the honorary Revenger, Samuree.  But it would be easy to.)

Jacqueline a.k.a. Scarlet might even-- and it pains me to admit this, because it's giving undue credit to Peter Stone --be an invention of someone other than Neal.  As in, "Neal, did you forget about the sister in issue #1?" and Neal being like, "Whose sister?"  And then Peter pushed a character sheet bearing Kevin Nowlan's signature across the desk.

Pure supposition.  Flim-flam.  I don't have the foggiest, and neither do you.  That's the magic of these books.  The reader looks at them and has to inquire why?  Why is there a banner atop every Continuity title strictly to recycle the logo of the character(s) featured in any given ish?  Why does Armor #1 have that little i.p. push at the very top for ARMOR & THE SILVER STREAK, directly atop Armor's chunk-as-fuck logo?  Why did The Silver Streak cease to receive that redundant li'l push on the very title that contains his Secret Origin, with issue #5?  Why was his name stripped from the covers, despite the fact that every issue of "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak" maintains a splash-page appearance of his dopey-ass, Ice Capades-looking logo?

The answer would seem to be popularity.  Nobody ever wanted The Silver Streak, nobody thought he'd make a keen toy, nobody cared about his confusing (& dubious) family relationship(s), nobody even cared to ask why he's a straight-haired Cali blonde while his brother's all brunette & curly.  All anyone knows is Neal insisted.  If you do Armor, the Silver Streak must ride along.

So we all rode bitch, on a Secret Origin of initially four parts that spiraled off into...  what, ten installments?

This could have been understandable, if Jacques Keaton (a.k.a. Silver Streak) had equal time in his own Secret Origin.  That's two whole characters who need explaining!  But Jacques was fated never to be a main character.  The main character is Jack Keaton (Armor).  If Jack loses a hand like Luke Skywalker, Jacques will be there to demonstrate how both his mitts detach.  If Jack loses an eye and has it replaced by a ruby thoughtfully donated by a space computer, Jacques will be there to gawk, awkwardly, and the words To Be Continued will be appended to the base of the page, and then we won't find out any more about The Secret Origin of Armor & That Lesser Character for at least three years, while Neal hustles together some fill-in issues, all the while making big loud promises to draw the epic conclusion.

Hey, let me be fair.  Maybe Neal did.  I haven't gotten to issues 11-13 yet.

You want me to talk about something else now, don't you?

Tough.

Armor #9-13 (1991-1992) written by blabbadyblurfenhurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr1r1r1NO CARRIER

[ ed. note:  we may be experiencing difficulties.  not technical ones.  technically not difficulties at all.  just, coping.  these comics are a lot to cope with!  holy nutsweat, batdog ] 

I SAID, written by Peter Stone, pencilled by Frank Springer & Brian Apthorp; inked by Rudy Nebres and STAN DRAKE, also, Ken Bruznenak, what're you doin' here?  i thought you were at DC...  coloured by John Floyd, Eva Grindberg, & David Marcus, you a baller

Let's get the compliments out of the way.  The covers stop sucking once Nowlan walks on.  The cover design is finally, rationally, refined & the fonts modernized, somewhat.  The books start to look GOOD, with an obvious debt to Giffen, McGuire & Hughes' JLA / with maybe a side helping of Love & Rockets.  Like I'm saying these are actual contenders for GOOD COVERS, something this series has seriously been lacking.  And I'm not even getting to sucking the dicks I want to suck because I have to complain about the covers, and the content, of issues #9-10.  The covers are terrible because Neal made these the covers:  the covers are terrible because there are gratuitous clowns.  Now mind you the clowns are all being violently dispatched by young Jack Keaton, Armor, a Ten among galactic gladiators, a teenager with an alien, artificial hand, and an alien internet uplinked crystal in his right eye socket:  these clowns don't have a chance.  In theory this cover is great, perhaps even one of the greatest covers Neal Adams has ever had a hand in: it's certainly dynamic as a dervish dance, and all the central figurework is done by My Man, Kevin Nowlan, so we're talking carnage.  Clowns cowering in fear for their lives.  Clowns strung up and left to discharge their bowels one last dark time.  It's not a pretty scene.  So in theory this cover should be great!

But then Neal follows it up with some weird hacked-out last minute shit where Armor is being clockwork oranged by Kracky The Klown, who is all up in the comic reader's grill with his greasepainted melon skull leering out, shouting--  Neal Adam's abominable hand-lettered yakking crammed unpleasantly into every square inch of negative space to either side of our central figures of Armor, who's literally having his eyeballs forcibly exposed, & Kracky, shouting  --WELCOME TO KRACKY'S KRACK HOUSE!  It's All It's Kracked Up To Be!

This has the reverse effect intended, of making me want to read it.  In fact it makes me hate the previous cover, for having ever allowed clowns into my life.  I am sad and alone and it was Neal Adams who made me this way.  I want to repent of my sins.  I can't live with my conscience like a dog pillow saturated with piss.  This comic is clown scabies, and it has retroactively infected the previous cover with clown scabies.  I bought these, god damn my soul.  I LET CLOWNS INVEIGLE MY LIBRARY'S PROSTATE

Ahem.

What I am saying there are a couple of things we regret, before the covers actually show up to throw down on the newsstands alongside Kevin McGuire & Adam Hughes, or Los Bros.

The comic goes for it, in the final stretch.  We just had to get past a story starring way the fuck too much Silver Streak, learning he has the superpower of eavesdropping through a fucking window, getting his ass kicked by clowns.  Fuckin' clowns clowned the fuck all over Silver Streak and Armor, then engaged in wacky heavy-handed messaging hijinx about the hyporcisy of the Reagan era's War On Drugs, all the while krackin' wise about how the people selling the drugs are also running the rehab clinics, mannn.  And I'm pretty sure Kracky gives a cop a tugjob, on teevee, in the final three pages of the book.  I mean these issues really haul back and kick my will to live square in the nuts.

But the last three are really good looking books.  Damned good art, great colouring, solid package.  It's like the comic it was always meant to be...  for the last three issues, before the series got eaten by Neal Adams' Event Crisis Overdose.

Yeah.  But first:

[ next up: MEGALITH'S GROIN! ]

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - May 2o25

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

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - April 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ 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.

The Incredible Hulk: The Troyjan War + Future Imperfect (1993-'94) - written by Peter David, illustrated by Gary Frank & Cam Smith, an overworked George Perez, & some Alan Davis clones

Hunh.  I didn't realize Gary Frank was the guy during this time period.  He's got the Alan Davis anatomy & shading, but the dynamism & action chops?  Totes lacking.  The action's kind of hobbled by the crap-ass cast, which during this time consists of The Pantheon, who're less interesting than the goddamned Hulkbusters.  There's a lot of putting big guns in the big green guy's hands because it's the 90s.  Basically the best thing here is Banner referring to himself as the Big Zucchini.

 [ 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