the lit bit - june 2o26

After Kathy Acker (2o17) - by Chris Krause

I don't do bios very often.  Maybe one to two a year, on average.  No real reason other than mental hygiene.  Fiction's my thing.  I try not to learn too much about my fave creators.  Because scuttlebutt may be part of art but it shouldn't be a primary point of access.

This was finished two days ago.  Normally I wouldn't carry over, and leave this last month, but...  Hell, it's the scuttlebutt aspect.  Kathy Acker knew Neil Gaiman.  Or was it Neil who knew Kathy?  There's an ambivalence in the text to this, in a book replete with tales of Who Fucked Whom.  In the light of Neil's troubles, and the fact that he could afford to throw lawyers at Todd McFarlane (with help from Marvel), it's near impossible not to speculate.

See, Kathy was in the London S&M scene, and she bought & sold 3-4 different flats around London & Brighton.  As Neil puts it, it's the resale of one of these flats that caused their friendship's elision.  He thinks.  Kathy was notoriously flighty with her friendships, and her passions, if they weren't one and the same.  And they rarely stayed stably in any of the three categories:  friendly, fucking, and friends who fuck.  It was pretty well known how she handled her intellectual & amorous affairs, which is why the reluctance around Gaiman's appearances stands out...

There was a specific lover who Kathy called "the German", and he's distinct from Gaiman in terms of having a proper name and different vocation, but there's some overlap in The German's m.o. in how he & Kathy conducted their affair.  The German, like Gaiman, was married.  Like Gaiman--  reputedly  --The German loved power games, headfucky semi-public scenarios, and thrilled to theatrical cruelty.  While it's possible they didn't ball, similarities between The German's amorous m.o. & testimony from Gaiman's accusers about the games he played are remarkable.  Maybe she told Neil about her adventures with The German, and he decided to re-enact those games with later partners.  Perhaps?

The ambivalence in Krause's narrative around the period these two are onstage with Acker is extremely curious; there is a sense of overlap between the characters for several pages, then the affair ends, quite abruptly, and Kathy sells her flat, fleeing London, optimistically, for a return to New York.

Gaiman doesn't show up again until the final two chapters, and that's when their friendship drifts out.  Over a real estate favour, where Gaiman was somehow responsible for selling her then-recently acquired but never-lived-in Brighton digs.  Gaiman himself sounds uncertain about what happened.  "I didn't sell it fast enough, I suppose," he mulls.  There is no further speculation.

And--  here's a thing  --there is not so much as a single mention of Delirium.  Or Kathy's reactions to being depicted in Sandman.  Which would have come up, as Delirium's development in the comic series occurred as she was living, and in those years Kathy was in her multimedia phase, moving from spoken word recordings to live shows with The Mekons and playing at scriptwriting...  Kathy being Kathy, all-about-Kathy, it's positively bizarre that there's no mention of her reacting to having a comix avatar over at DC.  She would have known.  She would have talked about it.  She had seven years to talk about it!!!

Sandman ended the year before she died.

I am not saying I smell lawyers circling the outer research waters of this book.  Because that would be actionable, and Neil has Miracleman on his side.  They were friends.  What more need be said.

See why I don't read biographies?

High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings (1991) - edited by Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg

Bought this two years ago for an essay by William S. Burroughs.   Contains Kathy and Dennis Cooper and all the other belles of the big gay lit ball.  Since I needed a breather between, embarked on a short story by Gary Indiana, who I've never read before.  Gary was friends (frenemies?) with Kathy Acker & David Wojnarowicz.  Which has sweet fuck all to do with his cred as a writer.  This is strikingly well-written, clear-eyed work, with excellent atmosphere.

 

I'll pursue more Indiana soon.

Cruising (197o) - by Gerard Walker

Another carryover from last month.  Siegfried just finished reading it.  From everything he said about the plot, Friedkin worked to incorporate as much as possible into its film adaptation.  So I'm genuinely curious now.  Started first chapter last night.  Apparently the author was a fan of Samuel Fuller...?  Like, he namechecks Hitchcock, Kubrick, and "Sam what's-his-name, the B-movie guy whose mysteries are so big in France."

As I'm reading the sentence I finishing it aloud, and my husband's like "Knew you would fill in the blank.  Nerd."

The Screwball Asses (1973) - by Guy Hocquenghem

A wonderful little utopian essay about double-standards, doublethink, and dumbness in the sexual revolutionary.  If you want to understand what Queerness means, in relation to the world we all have to "earn a living", pay rent, and pay for our own funerals in, well:  read it.

I have a physical copy on my shelf.  Found in the same little free library in Atlanta where someone left a copy of 'My Loose Thread' by Dennis Cooper.  I've said some terrible things about Georgia, and have some downright hostile insights into Atlanta, but that li'l free library was a reminder-- not everyone In The Community is a class traitor or clone-ass scenester bitch.

Good to re-read.  The right words in my ear, at the perfect time, on exactly the correct project.

Kathy Acker: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (2o18) - edited by Amy Scholder & Douglas A. Martin

Re-reading Douglas Martin's letters from the intro.  Which directed me to an essay of Kathy's, 'Some American Cities', from Marxism Today...

Bodies of Work: Essays (1997) - by Kathy Acker

Which I have!!!  Back on that urbanism track.  Thanks, Kathy!

The House of Impossible Beauties  (2018) - by Joseph Cassara

Next up!  For real!!  Unless further distracted by research.

Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany

Distracted!!!  again!!!!!  by research!!!!!!!!

My second reading.  The first was during covid lockdown.

This book is only confusing if one frames it as science fiction.  Which it is barely is, unless one considers this work as a lens:  for viewing 70s urbanism, with its sexual liberation, roving punk gangs, and apocalyptic art, as a science-fictional condition.  If, instead, one reads it as a gay man, the opening unfolds entirely differently, because it starts with the Kid entering the "autumnal" city park to cruise.  Some semi-visible sex with an ostensible stranger ensues, fraught with worries over identity.  The Kid then moves toward the meat packing district--  where the queers hang out, the text underlines  --where he finds a formal guide to the city's people & pleasures, etc.  It's no surprise that it's autobiographical; the book told me as much the first time.  But as an exploration of urban eroticism, uncovering the erotic potential of city life, this is a wild little novel to drop on readers--  particularly if the reader isn't queer.

This was a seriously subversive thing to publish in 1974.

It's also a pleasurable text, wonderful to fall into the poesy & rhythms of.  Revisiting Bellona is a bit like coming home.  Particularly for me, the teen queer runaway who never got a proper chance to adapt to adulthood until my 30s.  I see cities, and the people who live in them, a trifle differently from the standard model american urbanite.  If one presumes the "average" in question is "heteronormative" or "upwardly mobile" or "middle class".  So, I don't know, perhaps Delany's view is easier to map onto my mind; Dhalgren is a prism, chained to the lens of class & status, but it mirrors the reader's experience, inasmuch as they've had any.

My being a year & a half experienced in Chicago's alleys, lakefront trails, and (more recently) secret celebrations of public sex, has garbed me in weird armor with which to wound this deeply autumnal work.  Because autumnal is the word for the america Delany & I perceive.  America is past the middle of its life, as is the author, as am I.  I was twenty-seven when I landed in Atlanta, and forty-eight when I left it.  Forty-six, when I first read Dhalgren.  And here we are, in the second trump admin, with our economy collapsing, our gov't is incapable of building anything, and major metropolitan cities are treated as a threat to democracy...

Conditions which would only be confusing if one framed them as Reality.  Such a state of affairs are de rigueur for dystopian science fiction.  So hey, enough quibbling from me about what is and isn't.  I'm all right in Delany's book, and he's all right in mine.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - January 2o26

Hello there.  New one.  Read along.

I try to keep a list.  One per month, ideally, although during holiday season posting tends to slip.  Anything new, anything old: if it's words + pictures, it gets noted.  (Datestamps) indicate year of creation / serialization / collection, as accurately as possible.  I should track publisher info in these...  But I haven't been, as that's not a principle creative / creator-specific element.  Sometimes I note colourists or letterers, but by & large if I mention those aspects it goes in the body of the "review".  As each month advances, the list gets updated but does not get bumped to the top; if you're tracking these you'll either have to scroll through my boring blah-di-blah to find it, OR bookmark the entry.  I recommend bookmarking, because things slip my mind.

Girls' Last Tour vols. 1-6 (2o14-18) - written & illustrated by Tsukumizu

An excellent series.  Cunningly staged dérive.  Scribblecore sci-fi heartbreaker.

Flex Mentallo (remastered colour) (1996) - written by Grant Morrison & illustrated by Frank Quitely

Didn't get more 1996 than this.  In many ways the perfect GM / FQ project.  All-Star Superman had low points, weak issues.  No dogpaddling bollocks here, just 4 issues of peak performance, superdense, maximum effort from all involved.  Only wish it was in the '96 colours, instead of the 2o12 sadfilter remix, plainly inspired by the insipid Incal job.  What the fuck was up with desaturation being the mark of the twentyteens, hunh? 

Wolf vol. 1 (2015) - written by Ales Kot & illustrated by Ricardo López Ortiz

Library filler, waiting between books.  Not what I come to Kot for.  It's genre bluffing.  The watered down take is it's an exmilitary Constantine in L.A.  It could have maybe been more.  Its biggest sin is it isn't a substitute for Desolation Jones.  Doesn't work too hard to compel me.  Ortiz's backgrounds are beautifully executed digital creations; I only wished I liked how the artist handles faces.  Their Zero issue was pretty cool.  I was less into this.

Hellboy In Mexico (2016) - written by Mike Mignola & illustrated by Richard Corben

Already read these, last December.  Demanded a re-visit.

The Best of The Spirit (194o-5o) - written & illustrated by Will Eisner & paid art assistants

More than a character:  The Spirit is a time & space I return to.  The eternal city, with its logotecture & Eisnershpritz, its bountiful substratum of caper & crime:  it's a space I like to haunt along with Danny Colt.  The way Eisner draws eyes, the way he folded and draped fabric, the easy clarity with which he captured light through a window....  A timeless style and a style out of time: the Spirit of an ageless age.

More Weight: a Salem story (2o25) - written & illustrated by Ben Wickey

Easy to see why this made so many best of lists.  It's been the best of this year.  Began it last night and have been dashing alongside, a little winded by now, but it's one of those days that started off negative one and the windchill has the general temp well below that, so I've all the isolation & reserves of quiet one needs to make this kind of sprint.

This book put me much in mind of my mother as it does the present moment.  I'll bore you with explanations of neither.  Suffice it to say this is a most Applicable book about the american experiment and what the test results look like, from our weird, diminished vantage point here, at the end of this thing.  It's a crushing book.  If you lay down with your chin upon your chest and the book staring you in the eye like one of Fuseli's demons, you'll rise with a righteous dent in your heart.

More Weight is a fucking banger.  A lot of people set out to imitate Alan Moore.  This book does the rarest of tricks:  it exceeds and excels at Moore's game, which was never exclusively Moore's-- it excels at literature.  It's as clever as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Pynchon, with twice the feeling of them both combined.  And let's not neglect the art:  Ben Wickey is one of the Greats, moving between styles and palettes with sublime confidence.  The cartooning is deft and the colours are Alive and between them and the keen intelligence guiding the production it's so self-assured I'd call Wickey's work "olympian", if not for the humility and wry humour radiating throughout.  The author doesn't see himself Above Things, does not attempt to act holier-than-thou or contemptuous of the subject.

A very humane, human work, in addition to being a king hell opening act on the stage of this dread year 2026.

The Giant: Orson Welles, The Artist & The Shadow (2o25) - written & illustrated by Youssef Daoudi

Perfectly serviceable.  Enjoyable if you appreciate Welles.  Maybe not what I wanted out of a bio-comic, having just emerged from 'More Weird'.  It reads... light.  Sincerely wish Welles' adaptation of 'The Trial' got more mention than a bloody reduced reproduction poster.  I would've liked to have seen Youssef Daoudi's version of Anthony Perkins.  Anyroad.  Good caricatures.  Fun linework.  Feels more like a DVD documentary than a graphic novel.  If I say any more I'll just start flaying the corpse.

Dick Tracy (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Blackthorne reprints!  Coming soon!

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" Holy Daze Special, Batwank!!! - October / November / December 2o25

[...putting the continuity comix incoherence crusade aside for a sustained, healthy moment...]

The Summer Hikaru Died vols. 1-5 (2o21-2o25) - The anime version is dogshit, but this, this is great.  Gonna read as long as it runs.

Tom Strong Compendium (1999-2oo6) - Begins with love.  Ends with a lack of imagination.  2/3rds readable, 1/3rd slog.  A semisuccessful exercise in worldbuilding that defaults into genre boredom.  For me one of the most stinging casualties of the Wildstorm buyout by DC.  Lee did Moore dirty and this book died on the vine as a result.

Adventureman vol. 1 (2o2o) - Wtf is this self-aware wannabe ironyboy winky business.  No.  We already have Casanova, if we need hard genre tropes.  You want an Adam Hughes cheesecake book, just buy an Adam Hughes cheesecake book.  Nobody cares what you bust to, fan-worm.  I won't judge you for busting.  Unless you're busting to this.

November vols. 1-4 (2o19) - Rocksolid.  Charretier is the bomb.  I want to read more of her comix.

The Nice House By The Sea vol. 1 (2025) - I liked 9/10s of The Nice House On The Lake, and then the ending was just "We're gonna hit the reset switch like it's a clit" then we're told there's going to be another "season" because comics are done in Seasons, now, and I kind of fucking hate the way the television model has tainted everything.  I'm not even sure this book needs to exist as a comic, considering James Tynion IV clearly WANTS to be in teevee, and make spinoffs...!  This particular comic's initial sexiness is down to how it looks like an HBO show in comic form, which is some disappointing shit.  Because, look, I loved the first season of Westworld.  What ruins Westworld is that it keeps fucking going.  Yeah, I got some sour grapes.  But read and tell me I'm wrong.

Batman vol. 3: Death of the Family (2014) - Snyder is such a tryhard.  I wish I could understand his popularity.  It's a mystery.  It's the only mystery.  There's no goddamned mysteries in these bat-comix, unless it's how Joker + Marilyn Manson was a hot mod NRG back in the twenty-teens.  This edgelord shit is embarrassing.  Also why the fuck is Jock's art so lazy.  He's already using a computer!

Milk Wars (2o18) - This could have been something.  But it wasn't.  Mainly notable for forcing me to explain Danny The Street to my husband.  The art had its moments.  I guess I'll pour a 40 out on the curb for Young Animal.  DC gave it a sincere shot.  Gerard Way is like one of those little stinky fertilizer sticks you push into the soil of the potted plants DC keeps in the lobby of their L.A. office.  He keeps the flora alive, if not exactly well-fed.  It sucks that he gave up working on His Own Comic, Umbrella Academy, so he could make an inferior teevee adaptation of his own work, and do this.  It's no wonder he looks like Neal Young now.  Can you stage an intervention for mutton chops?

Dai Dark vols. 1-2 (2o19-2o2o) - The artist likes H.R. Giger's work, intensely & unironically, beyond Alien & Species, beyond Brain Salad Surgery & the Giger Bar, this is an artist who spent a lot of time reading, like, all the Necronomicon collections and drawing in ballpoint on printer paper.  Sturdy, fun, dumb comic.  This is straightup shonen energy and I like it like I liked o.g. Trigun.  I'll read these as long as they make 'em.  If there's a downside, it's that the art is getting chunkier & scribblier as it goes on.  I've started seeing pencil lines alongside the inks, for everything-- including word bubble placement!  A curious sloppiness.

DanDaDan vols. 1-3 (2o19-2o21) - I am team Turbo Granny.  She is a chaotic force for good and casually diabolical.  I guess yokai stuff is my jam generally.  Plugs into my folk horror tendency.  There's nothing horrific about this book, but the character design is fab and the artist draws the fuck out of everything.  Easy to see how they came from Chainsaw Man.  The ride pays for the price of a ticket, if you're reading these from the library.  Pretty cracky.

Dimwood by Richard Corben (2024) - Exeunt as you came in, I suppose.  There are some of what you might call Corben's classical themes here.  Hypersexualized male physique.  His legendary enthusiasm for busoms.  There's also (let's be kind) some very wonk drawing.  Of Corben's curious mode of wonk, where he is actually using model reference.  He makes his own strangely shaped heads for his strangely shaped characters, so when he does odd perspectives of the mashed-down and exaggerated planes of faces it's deeply...  unsettling.  There's also some really clever page layouts & action setups, all the visual storytelling you expect from the Lege that gave us a bazillion horror comix and some of the more baller Hellboy spin-off stuff...  The story?  It's tropes on tropes, in a way that doesn't make much sense, there's no emotionally satisfactory payoff, and the story repeats its own action twice too many times.  It didn't have to be 120 pages.  It could have been 80.  But hell, it's one last entry from the man hisself, and it's a family affair.  Everyone helped with the colouring and inking and pre-production.  That brings a little tear to the eye, albeit a tear complicated by the amount of heaving busoms there are in this throbbingly horny-yet-repressed comic a-bulge with grotesque subtext.  I'm def. glad to have seen some colours that aren't Villarubia's--  it's nice to see Richard doing his obsessive Thing with line thickness and layered, delicate graytones one final time.  All that said I'm probably never going to re-visit this particular work.  I'll hit Hellboy again, for sure.  Maybe that deeply problematic Hellblazer comic Azzarello did where Constantine gets himself committed to an american prison.  (Checks library.)  Got it on hold now, in fact.  I'll probably try to properly Read the Den saga.  Isn't 'Murky World' part of that...?

re-read: John Constantine, Hellblazer #51 (1992) - An all-timer.  Sean Phillips at his blocky best, and John Smith spot-welding the pre-vertigo DCU mature readers' title together.  There's a bit of incidental dialogue where John reminisces about the time he & Willoughby Kipling took on the Lapsed Martyrs in Bangkok-- Willoughby Kipling being the Richard E. Grant version of Constantine from Morrison's 'Doom Patrol'.  I quite like that panel.  It serves no real dramatic purpose other than to suggest that the D.P. and Constantine aren't that far from one another, on the display racks.  One of my favourite things about this ish is the suggestion that if you're ever possessed or dealing with malevolent spirits, the worst possible move you could make is asking J.C. for help.  Working with Johnny Con-job is as like as not to transmogrify your soul into Satan's own underpants.

The Color Of The End: Mission In The Apocalypse vol. 1 (2023) - I dunno what's with the subtitle trend in manga these last few years, but it's superfluous.  Redundant, even--  he said, making a point for no-one, no-where  --but that's pretty much the sole flaw here.  The art's impressive, the graytones spectacular (when's the last time you saw an artist actually using graytones to Exciting! Visual!! Effect!?!) and the tale itself is an ambient joy.  A couple decades ago, when I was re-reading 'The Time Machine' by Wells, it occurred to me that my favourite form of SF is The Walk:  The narrator discovers the world of the future at the same pace as the reader; they're both on the same amble, matching pace, so the reader makes the same assumptions & errors in judgment as the narrator.  This book does that, more or less.  It's a contemplative thing.  Sadly, like much of contemporary ambient music, The Color Of The End is not treading new ground, and the wistfulness therein makes me less engaged in discovery.  C.o.t.E. is a mood piece, but I'm less in the mood.  It's not the book's fault.  Maybe it's having survived covid, or having lost (estranged) family along the way, that's to blame.  At one volume I'm okay.  Still, I'd like to taste some other SF manga in this mode.  I hear 'Girls Frontline' is a Walk in a similar vein...

Hello, Sunshine (2025) - Keezy Young is a new name to me, but the art & storytelling are straight-up Michael Lark circa Terminal City.  Better, really.  Better because the tale isn't borne from nostalgic futurity, but from the stuff of teen misadventure & themes of personal horror.  The cartooning is sharp as hell, the colours are crisp and flat as your memories of being into the wrong people at the wrong time.  It's provided some legit startles, which, hell-- when's the last time a horror comic was immersive enough to do that to me?  Tidily realized characterization and charming as birdsong.  A keeper.  My husband will love this.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - August 2o25

 Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade, MONTH TRES. ]

CyberRAD #1-7 + vol. 2 #1 + vol. 3 #1-2 (1992-1993) "creation", story & layouts by Neal Adams, w/ dialogue by Peter Stone & Neal Adams; pencils & inks by Terry Shoemaker (issues 1-3) & Richard Bennett (every single issue); colours by Cory Adams; lettering by John Costanza (issues 1-5) & Ken Bruzenak (everything else)

This feels like it was basically invented to be a showcase for Richard Bennett's art.  Like, it has the stink of Neal trying to keep up with the yoots of today-- 'Jason Kriter: Toyboy' only lasted thru the year of 1986, and that was basically it for Continuity's sole "kid's book"  --so what CyberRAD provides is, instead of a richie rich kid trying to foil his millionaire dad's gun-running schemes, you have a punk rocker trying to figure out why he woke up as a T-1000, on the run from his shadowy gov't keepers & their chrome-plated enforcers, eventually assassinating himself in the middle of a live show, in front of his friends & family.

The first eight issues comprise Continuity Comics' second graphic novel, after Bucky O'Hare.  I've never seen a copy of the trade paperback, but the internet insists one exists, so sure.  I'm glad continuity collected SOMETHING besides Bucky.  The third graphic novel was, allegedly, to be a Bernie Wrightson graphic novel, an adaptation of the classic film 'Freak Show', but Continuity advertised 'Freak Show' for a solid decade and never published page one.  I think maybe Continuity had bought the rights from Heavy Metal / Tundra and were just sitting on it, waiting.

Anyway.

I've bitched elsewhere about how CyberRAD was shanghaied from his own series by Shaman, who essentially conscripts our hero in the middle of his own torture & dissection at the hands of his mad scientist father, to go save Megalith's shapely olympian buttocks from 'Deathwatch 2,000'.  It's totally unnecessary & hallucinatory, the way Otto Preminger's Skidoo is hallucinatory.  

By which I mean it's someone who never did drugs (or much armchair research) depicting altered states of consciousness.  Neal had a pathological fixation on allegorical depictions of psychological states-- he liked a dream sequence, he liked a melting Dali clock, he liked a goofy-ass 'toon where Tom & Jerry huff ether & chase one another in shortbus motion.  If Neal Adams hit a dead end on a story, his solution was always an Imaginary Sequence-- but Neal never read 'The Doors of Perception' any more than he listened to The Doors, so the trip cinema he strove to achieve, as often as not, was little more than pastiche-- and never, ever inspired pastiche.  It would just be rip-off.  'Crazyman', in its final series arc, was a "tribute"-- read: shameless cannibalization of  --the infamous finale of 'The Prisoner'.

Anyway!

CyberRAD ended.  Not where it should have ended, not where it could have ended, not where it was "meant" to end.  But it defnitely ended what was one of a handful of short runs of comix that published on a semi-regular schedule.  All seven issues of Jason Kriter: Toyboy were published the same year, 1986, and almost every issue of CyberRAD dropped over the course of 1992-1993.  No mean feat, from the House of Continuing...

And Richard Bennett, age 23, was probably the main engine behind that accomplishment.  There's a lot to recommend about this book, honestly.  The cover & print gimmicks were strong with CyberRAD, but unlike most every other Continuity book, the gimmicks added value to the content.  The gimmicks enhanced the storytelling.  The fold-outs, and glow-in-the-dark covers, and "secret" imagery were all there to add extra visual FX to a dumb, motherfuckin' loud movie.

It's pretty obvious Neal saw Terminator 2 & said "Must cash in."  Unlike other shameless gropes to qualify for pop-cultural cachet--  Samuree, say, or KnightHawk --CyberRAD manages to be louder & bigger than its inspiration.  I mean, let's be honest: The Terminator's been played out ever since the original, and even that movie couldn't be less interested in themes of what it means to be human or robot.  James Cameron did not read R.U.R., and (probably) neither did Neal Adams...  But like our titular Cyber Radical, Adams & Stone & Shoemaker & Bennett stumbled headlong through a construction site under heavy fire from critics and managed to make it all the way to the big blowout final scene.  I'd say they succeeded, because these comics were stocked in every mall bookstore I set foot in over the course of 1992-1993.

So the font choices for the first five issues kinda suck.  So the main character's mullet defies physics. So the fashions are dated as a George Michael video.  Still, not for nothin':  CyberRAd remains easy to find on ebay.  You could do worse than buy in.

[ next up: 1986!!! ]

"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