"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - June 2o26

June?  We've survived into June...?  How about that.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy & David Hine

How many times have I read this, at this point?  Six times?  More?  Sad fact is, I don't know enough about the history of orchids to say whether their symbolic use in this comic works.  But most everything else does.  Future histories are tricky business.  This one holds up, even if its fashions don't.

Tyranny Rex (1998) - written by John Smith & illustrated by (deep breath) Steve Dillon, Will Simpson, Mark Buckingham, Paul Marshall, and whatever other flying monkeys were indentured at 2000ad on a given week

Tyranny Rex starts funny and ends by never fucking ending.  The first arc, with Steve Dillon, is full-on comedy.  It's got some great sight gags.  Then it's au revoir Steve, and hello muddy inks from everybody's least fave, grottiest Hellblazer artist, Will Simpson.  Whom I frequently confuse with Mike McKone, of 'Sex Warrior' infamy.  But yeah.  From Will Simpson onward, I have no clear idea what Smith intended to accomplish with these comix.  Comedy?  I guess Tyranny was meant to be a female counterweight to Devlin Waugh, but wotta bellyflop.  Like the kind that causes a body to lose consciousness.

Fires & Murmur (1988 & 1991) - written & illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti

These are Vibe Comix.  Like, on an intellectual level, the plot of Fires is easy enough to piece out.  But it's never quite about the business it declares-- there's a shiftiness to these books, both on the artistic & narrative levels, such that you're never quite certain what you're reading.  The easiest dismissal would be to call them dream comix, or art comix, but even if they are those things, they're not.  Because the pages, the pages always tell you something different.  Panel to panel, chapter to chapter, they're not interested in lining up so much as communicating the vibe.  These books vibrate with captured energy.  Murmur is the slipperier of the two books.  One is a horror comic, the other is a metaphysical wrangle with self.  But which is which, and why does it matter?  Just lay back with 'em and let the vibes wash your kinks out.

Exquisite Corpse (199o) - written by Jerry Prosser & illustrated by The Pander Bros.

Speaking of kinks.  This was a weird one.  Have I talked about this before?

So I was seventeen, and a virgin, and didn't know a single thing about sex, really, despite being raised by degenerate hippy scum, when this comic showed up in a quarter bin.  I was always convincing my aunt to take me to the one comic shop Dogwater had to offer, and she was always reluctant.  Like, waits in the car reluctant.  She wouldn't go into a record shop, even.  That could be because the one CD store we had in town hoisted a flag-sized poster for Ritual de lo Habitual over the register...  It could also be because my aunt Edwina was a classic repressed churchgoing lesbian.  Anyhow.  She thought filth was everywhere--  and was she wrong?  Because in that dingy quarter bin I found one issue of Exquisite Corpse.  A book that seemed quite unhappy about sex, gray and antagonistic and menacing.

What I could not know, then, is that I'd found the least explicit & disquieting of the three (unnumbered) issues.  I'd seen a couple house ads in issues of Dark Horse, promoting it, and I knew the Pander Brothers from reading Grendal, but as to what the comic -was-, its narrative intent, I couldn't decipher.  It seemed like a dying dream, or fantasy.  I knew it was one of those books it would be a bad idea to get caught with.  By that point I'd already been suspended for "trafficking pornography" at school--  i.e. bringing an issue of Heavy Metal to use for reference for a painting.  So I knew what smut was, even as I didn't have the slightest idea what sex was for, or about.

Because let's be up front here:  my school did not have a sex ed course.  It disguised its sex ed course as Home Economics, and squirreled away the realities of sexuality in an elective.  So I got what passed for sex ed, because I wanted to take a course on sewing and balancing a chequebook.  What I knew about sex, you could've inscribed on an oyster cracker.  I was a hick.  But I knew enough to realize that Home Ec was not actually teaching us anything other than some murky biological realities; Home Ec was on the curriculum so the school could argue that it was not teaching anything godless.

Point being, even dumb as I was, Exquisite Corpse felt dangerous.  It wasn't trying to sell a hollywood notion of fucking, and it wasn't pushing a heteronormative, judeo-xtian agenda.  It also wasn't interested in talking down to the reader.  If I'd been able to get the other two issues, when I was seventeen, and if I'd been caught with them...?  Those books would have been burned.  By my parents.  Who grew up rebelling against book burnings, public pyres of Beatles records and being told that masturbation would result in disease & insanity.  They grew up knowing what repression really was, and they tried to avoid me experiencing it, but by god they would have disapproved of these comix.

Because they're grimy, and unpleasant, and grim.  But they're also really well built, artsy little things.  Three issues, which may be read in any order.  And you should.  Do what I did, find 'em on the 'bays.  They're cheap.  They're beautifully packaged, with photo covers, and fun design elements--  each issue, in lieu of a # number, is represented by a type of knot.  And they're quite elegant little knots, dedicated to a knotted subject: abuse.

That's me putting a trigger guard in there.  It's just not a nice book.

I don't know how successful this little project was.  Honestly I'm amazed Dark Horse was able to publish it at all.  In most places, as I understand, these books were relegated to the Adults Only bin.  With reason.  But yeah.  Solid book.  And the least sexy thing you're guaranteed to read this year.

Dick Tracy:  the Ballad of Crewy Lou (1951) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould & Dick Locher

You've never heard of Crewy Lou!?!?  Well, it's not like she didn't try.

The bodycount on this one is something.  Crewy's no The Brow, but she herself straight up threw a bedridden mobster over her shoulder and stuffed him into a medical sterilizer like he was a load of wash.  She was primed to crank the steam when she was stopped.  Nothing is beyond her villainy.  Look at that hair!!!  Ruthless.  Cracked Tess Trueheart in the head with a rock and kidnapped Bonny Braids!  As icy & craven as they come.  Doesn't even hesitate when it comes to offing Brainard, her big brother, neither.  Hell, the number of cars she goes thru...  Crewy Lou's harder on wheels than Furiosa!!

Yessir, mmm-mm!!  Good comix.

Devlin Waugh:  Chasing Herod (1999) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Steve Yeowell w/ colouring by D'Israeli a.k.a. Matt Brooker

Let us return to joy.  There is no higher joy, for sheer pulp thrill, than Devlin Waugh.  He's a queen, he's a brawler, he's a bastard, and yes, he's even a prissy sniveling coward.  Goddamn, do Yeowell & Brooker make him vogue thru it all.  Forget Sean Phillips, forget Colin MacNeill (I really would like to), the buzzing semicoherent spy-fi turbulence of this arc is why I picked up Devlin Waugh: Swimming In Blood in the first place.

But I didn't get to read this arc, back in the 00s & 10s--  if I had, I would have toppled my graven idols and taken a blowtorch to all my effigies, because this, my lovelies, is the True Shit.  You don't need Grant Morrison.  You don't need Peter Milligan.  You don't even really need Alan Moore, except for the fact that Moore does hew to constructing & following rules-- "Logic" being something John Smith doesn't feel all that beholden to.  Yes, this not-so-little arc is Smith wilding the hell out and threatening to take the Dredd cosmos down with it.

And here it comes, the shit talk deluxe, the MOAB of absolute trash:  this bitty book is better than anything with Judge Dredd or even Judge Anderson attached to it.  Judge Dredd became an ikonic character so that we might have, for this briefest of windows, a reason to wake up in the morning and smile.  I love these comix.  Chasing Herod is the mustache ride to end worlds.

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.

the lit bit - may 2o26

Man that brain damage don't fade quick.  Wrote last month up as April, just like the comix list.

The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Master of Fear (2007) - by Jerry White

Not terribly scintillating stuff.  A decent read if you want a clear-eyed view of the early filmography.  The plot recaps are the snooziest part, honestly.  Not much in the way of interpretation.  Baseline competent.  I am seriously overdue to watch 'Cloud' and 'Loft'.

Chicago: City on the Make (1951 / 1961) - by Nelson Algren

Annual re-read.  Nope, not one word about Chester Gould, nor a single allusion to Dick Tracy.  But pertinent nonetheless.  One of the best poems I've ever read.  You could do worse than try to mimic Algren's voice.  The coda, written in '61, has as much snark, sting and stentorian wrath as you might desire, standing directly on the steeltoed tips of the Cuban missile crisis, freshly simmering.  I'll probably be clipping & pasting pertinent bits into forthcoming Tracing Gould entries over the next few weeks.

One For Sorrow (2007) - by Christopher Barzak

There's a movie, which I haven't seen.  Thought I'd taste the book first.  Not quite in love with the language.  Has a flat, wallpapery affect.  I should finish this before 'Outline Of My Lover'.  But I didn't.  The writing is soporific.  The only thing more flat was the cover art, which looked to be AI generated, cropped weirdly and printed cheaply.  A swing and a whiff.

Outline Of My Lover  (2000) - by Douglas A. Martin

Michael Stipe's legendarily longest LTR wrote a book about dating Michael Stipe.  Figured I'd give it a read.  Quite imbibable style.  There's an immediacy to the emotional content created by unconventional phrasing.  There's more scuttlebutt to be inferred from this than I'd like--  speculating about whether Stipe was ever intimate with Kurt Cobain isn't something I should be thinking  --but there's also a very clear moral lesson throughout about fame and its perks.  Much as I loved R.E.M.'s music, in my teens, I find the arc of Stipe's career tediously American in a way that doesn't gel with why I loved their sound.  He became a rich drunk and drifted into film finance.  That doesn't speak to the lonesome love for life that I found resonant, as a young man.

It's a lovely little heartbroken book, and a clear warning against idol worship.  And, hunh!  I have a Douglas Martin-edited book of interviews with Kathy Acker on my shelf.  I didn't know one of Martin's books was in my library.  Going to re-read that after 'Cruising' week ends...

Cruising: An Intimate Study of a Radical Pastime (2019) - by Alex Espinoza

Research.  It's true!  [Reading now.  Will update afterward.]

Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker

The copy the library sent me was a first edition hardback, added to the Chi library system in November of 1970.  Shortly after publication.  Now I'm sure--  I am certain  --that William Friedkin had a copy all his own.  I know he didn't need to check this out of a library...  He got a studio to pay rights to adapt it, for fucksake, it's not like he would've been hurting to pay for a copy.  Yet I can't help but wonder if he read this book I'm holding, because I'm living in a city where Honorary William Friedkin Way is only a few blocks from my house.  These are the tendencies of this broken brain, forever bending reality to in some way reflect on my lived experiences.

But, like I say, research!

Rilly looking forward to cracking this.  I've been a fan of Friedkin's film for decades.  It will be revealing to see what the source material looked like, after fielding years of critical disdain & speculative scuttlebutt--  which even Alex Espinoza's book indulges in, going straight for the story about Paul Bateson working on The Exorcist, and Blatty feeling so weird about that... he made a movie about a gay serial killer?  I've never quite bought that story.  So we'll see if it's the book that provoked the film, or if Friedkin's film was a provocation aimed at the public.

After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause

Found in a l'il free library, just next door.  Sometimes a book is waiting for you to read it.  You specifically.  Because of course I'm an Ackerhead in addition to all the other nonsense my brain has sponged up in fifty years of being a mutant born to this tortured century & continent.  Because of course, me specifically, I'm the person who is supposed to hold this.

I identified with Destiny of the Endless, back when I was a Gaimanfag in high school.  Have I ever mentioned this deeply mortifying thing?  It's better than when I was censured by every peer on the playground in elementary for pretending to be Diana Rigg doing a Wonder Woman transformation pirouette.  Yep, I read Sandman comix, and I really liked Destiny.  How she spoke, her punk thing...  What I didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was.  What I also didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was in relation to Neil, nor why he'd stuntcasted her in his big weird comic confessional of being a serial adulterer and shitty lover who feared the day he'd be called to account for his fuckery.

Can't say that I've quite figured that out yet, either.  But this book could go a ways towards unpicking that snarl, maybe.

Anyhoo.  Kathy kind of had a hugely belated impact on me, in my thirties, when I finally started killing some of those ubiquitous, unsellable tomes Grove Press ground out throughout the 90s--  My Mother: Demonology remains a favourite, as does Florida  --and some of her lit theory stuff, and by then it was too late, the Black Tarantula had her vagina dentata in me, deep.

It's the dada thing, the Burroughs thing, the Rimbaud thing, the aging punk thing.  Probably why I'm into Delany at this late stage, when I was too stupid to read him a decade ago.  All this is white aging male intellectualism anyhoo, who gives a rat's ass.  These are the games we play, amusing ourselves with Figuring Out References and building arcane yarnboards to garrote ourselves with, in the least autoerotic way possible.

Kathy made me look at art different.  For real.  I did make an aborted attempt at reading her, once, right after I ran away and was too brainfucked to comprehend anything more complicated than a comic book.  I think it was 'Portrait Of An Eye'.  But she didn't hit for me until around 2011.  I stumbled across 'Hannibal Lecter, My Father' in Atlanta's famous, now-forgotten dragon's hoard, a little store known only as BOOKS (r.i.p.), and the little book with the red cover made me think, "It's used, and Semiotext(e)'s always good for a chuckle."  And that was it.

She formally introduced me to the concept of antinominalism.  Consequently I found her many & varied ways of theorizing about art so beneficial I crawled up my own ass and pulled my legs in after me, in zen tribute:  Kathy Acker is how I became a blog.

True story.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - May 2o26

Last month managed to go a full month w/ my April stack titled 'March'.  Bloody brain damage.

King Tiger - Comics' Greatest World: wk. 3 (1994) - written by Mike Richardson & Randy Stradley, and illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Here we go:  action comix, wuxia style, by P.C.  A thing I had forgotten exists!  Brief, but a lovely little fight comic.  I coulda gone for a full-length run of this.  Didn't know there was a two-issue follow-up in '96...   At any rate.  If there's a single drawback in this ish, it's how Chadwick never clearly renders the tats on K.T.'s wrists.  Not that it matters.  Just curious.  The binding magic circle King Tiger draws in this ish is fab.  Grant Morrison browsed these, I feel like.  What my parents' generation useta call eyeball kicks...  A wild li'l 16-pager.

The World Below (1998) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Never read, this is yet another entry in the scintillating saga of ebay orders which turfed out because the seller misplaced the item.  Seems to be happening with Chadwick, lately.  Still haven't gotten my DHP #18.  At any rate teething to read these.  This is a placeholder.

The Autumn Kingdom, vol. 1 (2o25) - written by Cullen Bunn & illustrated by Christopher Mitten

Freshly arrived at the shelves of the Edgewater branch of Chi's library system.  Random selection on the strength of the title / cover design.  Should have browsed it first.  Not enchanted by the narrative choices:  fantasy author father's kids discover the occult "truth" about themselves & how they relate to their father's fiction.  Namely, they relate to it with big silly swords and friction-free battles with Mignolaesque monsters.  (Apparently Christopher Mitten was a BPRD artist?)  I didn't properly read so I sha'n't be cruel.  This book was not for me.  Returned.

Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (2o25) - written & illustrated by Mike Mignola (& coloured by Dave Stewart!)

Not done here, but completed the titular tale.  'Bowling With Corpses' is the first Mignola comic I've enjoyed w/out reservation since 'The Screw-On Head'.  Absolute joy.  Thanks for un-retiring, Mike!

I suppose it bears saying, but I tapped out of Hellboy & BPRD when the big art changes began.  I didn't want to read anybody else doing the main Hellboy tales.  Obviously I've gone back since & done the Corben stuff--  a major oversight, on my part  --and I've read the first half of 'Hellboy In Hell'.  Hard to see such lovely art and admit I aged out of the character, but I suppose it was inevitable.  Hellboy began printing when I was in high school, for chrissakes.  BPRD became an ongoing when I first landed in Atlanta!  Some stories age like dandelion wine:  certain ongoing comix do not.

All of which to explain:  the commercial success of HB was what killed the comic, for me.  Mignola felt unable to provide interior art on a schedule commensurate with the franchise expansion, so he stepped away and gave the book to Fegrado for a bit.  Which was bad enough, as the existence of the book, its very foundations, were in Mignola's ability to enjoy the medium.  He became super OCD about his own polish, after the movie-linked sales surges.  And, to be honest?  I didn't want to see Fegrado aping Mignola--  I need Fegrado to be Fegrado.  As for BPRD, the title ran off Guy Davis--  speaking of artists I've been following since high school.  A franchise can't frustrate its primary visual creators and stay gold, in my experience.  So I dipped on everything.

But selah to all that.  Bowling With Corpses is a fresh start, for me & Mignola's thing, that magic he's been pulling off since the Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser adaptations with Chaykin.  For me, that's when Mignola's aesthetic clicked.  Man's had me hooked ever since.  This new thing is the purest distillation of the creative ecstasy Mike expresses via his deeply atmospheric pacing.  Nobody draws skulls, clocks and mounds of dusty manuscripts like ya boy!

Buff Soul (2o22) - written & illustrated by Moa Romanova

A library pick purely based on aesthetics.  Decadent!!!  The story is a charmer.  A lovely portrait of friendship & party-lifers, and recognizing priorities.  I'll check out more Moa, for sure.

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt - Watch (2o2o) - written by Kieron Gillen & illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard

At some point it became a project to read as many Watchriffs as I could get my hands on.  This riff had eluded me, until now.  I like that this is a Big Gay Comic about capeshit.  It amuses me that the artist is doing an Eddie Campbell impression.  It's in the mail & on the way.  It should be a kick.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy, David Hine, & Shaky Kane (uncredited)

Refreshing my reading.  This time it's the business.  Finally, at last, I'm familiar enough with the story to be impressed with the plotting & pacing.  Unlike other John Smith jams, this one is structurally a stone cabin:  every piece has its place, and all together they form a structure that refuses to tumble.  If there's a drawback it's needing to keep notes, because the cast is bloody massive.

Since the last time I read thru, those horsechoker editions of 'The Boys' came across my desk.  I'm finding it a little hard to not think about that stupid, stupid comic, and the stupid, stupid, stupid teevee version.  Because everyone talks about how Watchmen was grownup, serious, etcetera-- but what always stuck with me, from my earliest exposure, was how British and bloody-eyed the tale is.  There's some grotesque violence spilling off the page in that book-- but Watchmen, for all its cred as an adult tale of sex and violence, contains strikingly little of either eyeball kick.  If you wanted that (and every teenage boy did, even us gayboys) then you had to march on over to Marshall Law.

But Marshall Law is a revolting-looking book.  No disrespect to Kevin O'Neill, who's a titan, but ugh.  The bodies and the blood are both repellant.  So if it's eyeball kicks and gratuitous, perverse chuckles you wanted, well-- we all kind of had to wait for Ennis and The Boys to happen.  Didn't we?

Turns out we didn't.  Because there was 'The New Statesman'.  A book with nothing nice to say about superheroes, or american politics, that idiotic national pasttime which has somehow come to engulf all of culture, art, and sport.  A book which begins its action proper with a hate crime, and the hateful reaction engendered by it.  A book that does not like power fantasies because of the power imbalances baked in.  You have to be disenfranchised and marginalized and Know It to enjoy american politics and pretend the commentators believe their own chirpy commentary.

This is a book about lies of all sizes.  Theirs, and ours, and the world's.

Here we have a power fantasy comic by a gay writer, about being gay, angry & depressed by the status quo.  'The Boys' couldn't manage that, not least because Ennis can't stop laughing about how embarrassing queer sex must be for the queers.  This is not to say 'The New Statesmen' is humourless; merely that the laughs are grim'n'gritty laughs, for an audience who feels none-too-secretly bruised by the ceaseless politicization of their sexuality.  Here we have a book all the colours of bruising.

The first, foremost moment of fantasy in 'The New Statesmen' is of a queer american victim-- who will never admit he has been victimized --taking out a swath of white christian fundamentalists, in full view of the world.  It's the second fantasy, in truth, second string to the actual first fantasy, that of a closeted, queer brit who once did something publicly terrible he can't quite remember.  He wants to be Out, to Love, but he's too secretly crazy and filled with rage to have that happiness, and so he accepts his lot, as a bought-and-sold instrument of Empire.

If there's an allegory in there, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the writer's personal position on these matters.  Or his position in the culture, working with patient fury (as he once did) to gain entree into American comix, staffed directly behind Morrison & Millar, all of them with eyes further up the line, observing Ennis cutting in somewhere after Mills, all of them at the gate, jealous eyes on Gaiman catching up with Moore as Wagner helps sort the baggage claims at customs.

In this reading, if I find a fault with any of this, it's that there aren't enough women being permitted to make a point about all the bullshit and hypocrisy.  The sexism in this book is no less than the sexism of Watchmen--  sexism is a very apt Point, in both Watchmen & The New Statesmen  --but it's not one that's made particularly compellingly, with real heart.  The sexism is more reportorial than rage-based, more passing observation than rejoinder.  The women in these stories are Used, are Useful, but they are not the subject, and their gender is secondary to their sexual utility in the dramatic webs woven.

But who wants a perfect book?  It's in its imperfections that 'The New Statesmen' is superior to Watchmen, because it's not pretending to perfection; this fantasy about power is as imperfect as the world it chronicles, and it is with no great satisfaction that I observe that the world in these pages is thuddingly closer to our present than the alternate history provided by Moore & Gibbons.  John Smith was lobbing bricks, and their gravity landed in the zone of Truthiness we Americans, regretfully, inhabit.  A stark, grubby shithouse of a comic, this.

I need to read it again.

Rice Boy (2oo6-o8) - written & illustrated by Evan Dahm

On my husband's suggestion.  What a delightfully expressive style Dahm has.  The line I liked on Doug TenNapel--  whom, I was not aware until this morning, is an outspoken homophobe; I had wondered why TenNapel had all but vanished from the popular comix landscape  --has a better home here.  This is a book drawn & inked by hand, carefully & lovingly with brush.  You'll not find better cartooned dropshadows anywhere.  I'm still reading, right now, about a third of the way through, so I can't speak to the story beyond being charmed as hell by the whole thing.  It's a nice fantasy landscape Dahm has hewn out, and the colours are rich & vibrant & earthy.  Quite a lovely change from the grimness of 'New Statesmen'.  Looking forward to finishing this, on such a gorgeous and calm day off.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - April 2o26

Concrete, vols. 4-7 (1994-2004) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Den: Neverwhere, Muvovum, & Children of Fire (1978, 1983, & 1989, respectively) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

Why even have notes, if I'm not gonna make notes on these?

Den's a weird comic.  It first began life as a short film, which I've never seen, before today, but have felt indicated via the text.  Repeatedly.  Which is the first weird thing about Den:  it's nodding to its own origins, outside comix.  The second weird thing is it keeps asking:  what the fuck IS this comic, really?

It's only a weird query, inasmuch as there's No Answer.  The closest we can get is, "Den is Den."  Whether you're talking the series proper, or its own satirical post-script, 'Denz', the series is Corben's instincts, at work & play. 

And here's the weird-er, weird-est part--  Den's a queer text.  It's a queer text by a hetero:  a heterodox doc, if ya like...  And me gusta, certainly.  When the Corben library was announced, and I found out Jose Villarubia was in charge of the restoration, I was dubious.  Because Villarubia, lovely as his work can be, is not the original colourist.  I was suspicious.  But Villarubia's not just maintained the faith, he's improved upon the original printings by presenting the cleanest, least censorious version of the work I've seen.

Sure, the colours.  Everybody talks about Corben's colours.  But I'm here for the full-frontal dudity.  Den, the character, isn't attractive.  Most of Corben's faces & bodies aren't sexually appealing-- to me.  But in terms of actually presenting the body in motion, in action, under the influence of momentum & gravity?  Unless it's Muybridge, you're not liable to see this degree of accuracy on paper.  From tumescence to free-floating flaccidity, the constriction of cremaster muscles are observed, testicles descend & retreat, cocks roll lazily, and buttocks tense.

Hey, kids: comix.  

And most of that doesn't happen during sex scenes.  The sex scenes are relatively chaste, really.  The only actual penetration committed to paper, in the majority of instances, is with either blade or claw.  The biggest cock in the second volume, Muvovum, isn't Den's, it's his arch-enemy, Tarn.  As in his enemy morphs into a giant purple people-eating cock.  Spoilers!

If that scans as less-than-queer to you, then you're definitely not the audience for the third volume, 'Children of Fire', when Den basically disappears from the narrative and all the focus turns back onto The Red Queen, the power-mad & physically intimidating villainess of volume 1--  who had a HELL of a fight scene, in v2, where she breaks all the limbs of an old man, bites off one of his fingers, and kicks him out a window.  Volume 3, which dials the Den Saga back to the year dot, doesn't really go out of its way to cater to the original fans.  Den is a desiccated husk of an old man, and The Queen is re-cast as his caretaker & guardian, a spacefarer going by the name Kil.  'Children of Fire' tracks Kil's evolution into the Queen and suggests something deeply genderbent about everything we've seen heretofore.

None of this is explained elegantly.  This is Corben, after all, and nobody can convincingly argue to me that he's a Writer.  He's an ascended fanboy.  He's one of the o.g. fanboys of my parents' generation, point of fact.  His fan fixations aren't mine--  Corben read all of Robert E. Howard, attempted adaptations of almost every Poe or Lovecraft story you care to name, and he loved the John-Carter-of-Mars series.  Madly.  Corben was chasing his own fixations when he got hired on to colour the Warren reprints of The Spirit, and he rode that pack of fixations like baying hounds--  the same fixations which led him to film 'Neverwhere', over time, led him to be obsessed with the pop androgyny of the 80s, same as all were:  Annie Lennox's buzzcut + Kathy Acker's bodybuilding were as culturally ubiquitous as Patrick Nagel prints.

Which is where I'm at, presently, in my reading:  1989.  Year of the Twin Peaks pilot.  Scene of the crime, as 'twere, for my generation to figure out what the crimes against women exactly were.

And there's still two volumes to go.  Den has only begun to warp.  The Big Story will fold-- like origami produced by some blind seer --into itself, in suggestive shapes, inchoate.  Corben kept returning to Neverwhere and asking, "Well, what was that about?" only to produce another, stranger, more gnomic variant on the initial work.  Not because he was huffing Borges & reading french po-mo homos.  Because the entire time he was handcrafting this art, Corben was bluffing his way to market, making & selling these books through his vanity press imprint, Fantagor.

I cannot underline enough:  these are some strange-ass books.  Especially to emerge from '89.  Because 'Children of Fire' was when Corben was serializing Den as a newsstand comic.  Den!?!  A title most famous for being unafraid to depict the male form, re-formatted with a female (but never effeminate) protagonist who wears clothes, like some beachgoing normie!  Of course it's Corben, so the dimensions & proportions of the fantasy are, as ever, fantastical, and consequently threats of sexualized violence are never far away-- but the threats are never given a chance to land, because Kil, not yet the Queen, is definitely more violent & dangerous than Den had ever been.  

O, my trash friends & friends of trash, there are fight scenes.  These are fight scenes to buy a graphic novel by Richard Corben for.  Action like you like it!

Is Kil likeable?  Not as such.  Den's hardly likeable himself.  He's literally a Masculine Fantasy.  But this revised Queen is interesting, in all the ways Den is not.  She's in tune with, in ownership & in control of her body, her sexuality, & her identity-- in all the ways David Ellis Norman is not.  (Have I mentioned how often our acronymic, titular character is sexually assaulted?  Have I mentioned how many times he's been raped?  Nobody ever seems to.  Perhaps I should.  At least the end of v1, which ends with our novice, blundering hero being both raped- and rescued -by women; v2 gives Den close to the full hentai treatment, whereas the worst thing to happen to a female character--  Muuta, disney princess of v2  --is being swallowed whole by a massive parasitic cock.  (Pause for emphasis.  Throat-clearing sfx.)  I wonder why more peeps don't get into the weeds about this stuff...)  Corben, never the most subtle of creators, works harder than most Accredited, Acclaimed, Award-brandishing Writers of Comix to show us, not tell us, who the Queen is.  What's revealed is Kil: a survivor, a striver, an otherworldly--  chthonic, even  --figure of myth.  Corben doesn't tell us much of any of that with dialogue.  Yes, he typesets a lot of text.  His best characterization is, inevitably, illustrative.

A woman arising from the ocean, powerful and athletic, cradling a body so wizened it's virtually a cadaver.  

That's the cover:  that's the story.

You can quibble with my Big Queer Reading.  Because obviously there's a lot of eggy symbolism, and squicky talk about "genetics" from an implicitly matriarchal, eugenicist, spaceclone race, etc.  Which Kil defies, throughout-- matriarchy isn't her destiny.

Now, conquest, maybe...

Den doesn't exist in 'Children of Fire'.  In his stead there's Mal, a frighteningly skeletal figure who eventually cakes up enough--  courtesy of "radiation" and a Neverwhere diet  --to become Den's ringer, in this sci-fi ancestor to a fantasy t&a, beans'n'frank comic that's essentially inexplicable & scripted by the creator's id.  The plotting is on some Dave Sim shit, in terms of a career arc where a creator is tethered to an Ikonic Comic Character: retroactive justification heaped upon retroactive justification, all for making a Carter of Mars fan film in his youth...  Resulting in some very un-Sim self-examination, perhaps.

It's obvious to me that as time did its work on Corben, and Corben did work on himself--  along the way he became a bodybuilder, his own model for Den  --he discovered the Queen to be more compelling & capable than his naive boy-in-barbarian-drag, and so re-configured the Entire Work to focus on her, and her role in redefining Den.  The books all still have Den's name on them, but taken as a whole, it's not about him.  It's about Neverwhere, and why Neverwhere was never quite where he left it, before he returned.

Because, like his Queen, like Den, Corben always returned.  Always in different skin.

Marvel Super Special #33: Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - scripted / adapted by Bill Mantlo, illustrated by Mark Texeria & Armando Gil

Den: Dreams & Alarums (1992) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

Den: The Price of Memories (1994-97) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - March 2o26

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

These left an imprint.

The cover copy for volume 1 of this 7-volume library, repackaged & published in the early 2000s, sez "Classics and little-seen stories from the legendary series".  Which is a little funny, because by the time these books were published, the Dark Horse imprint Legend was exactly one decade in the rearview.

Yesterday I found out Mike Richardson has been pushed entirely out of Dark Horse, and the publisher has been eaten by another of the ever-circling bigger fish.  Some leviathan or other will munch them all, eventually.  To me, it won't matter much, because the big money can't buy my love.  And I quite loved--  still quite love  --Concrete.

Last month the annotations were sweetly silent for ya'll, so if you'll pardon the digression, I'ma go down a rabbithole into the world below: memory.

Concrete was one of a holy trinity, no, quartet...  Maybe quintet?  of comic books that I cared enough about to discover for myself.  I was already a little hooked on Cerebus, in the late 80s, early 90s--  I was a high schooler, what d'you want? --and I was definitely addicted to Eastman & Laird's Turtles--  even though it was something of a chore to find the Real Turtles, and not the TV Turtles, on account of living in Dogwater Alabama, where all the commercial world could be found if only you ventured a county or so over to the nearest Wal-Mart, where Spawn & Youngblood were being packaged up in heat-sealed plastic bundles; god help your degenerate bones if you wanted an actual comic book SHOPPE --and some dumb how I'd even wound up addicted to Bob Burden's The Flaming Carrot-- of all the damn books --but the easiest "indie" comic in the world to find and stumble into, at that precise moment in my narrative, was Concrete.

What would the fifth wheel have been?  The Tick, prob'ly.

(Sometimes I call my narrative My Troubles With Comics, in homage to R. Crumb.)

((My Troubles With Comics was a sub-serial of autobio comix within a webcomic I used to do, titled 'Welcome To Crooked Corner'.  It chronicled the first and only time I was suspended from school, for "trafficking pornography", which meant I'd loaned the H.P. Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal to a friend in art class and his mom found it and narc'd me out to the school.  The comic contained t&a, you see, to say nothing of Alberto Breccia and other adult horrors...  But none of this had happened yet.  And we are still figuring out how many b&w comic books I was hooked on in 199_, so selah.))

Concrete used to be one of the more popular, and marketable, black & white comics of my adolescence.  That sounds weird to say today, but back when advertising was more complex and difficult AND expensive to create, Concrete had risen to the top of a developing boom in publishing.  It was a black & white book created by one guy (give or take the letterer) and had survived the indie glut of the late 80s by dint of being pretty much the mascot of DH's premier anthology, Dark Horse Presents.  Which was reason #1 for Con's popularity, in a nutshell: its fungibility.

Concrete was a full-length comic, an ongoing series, but Concrete was also a VAST, seemingly bottomless well of short stories & whimsical riffs-- within Concrete's own series there was a sub-serial called 'A Sea of Heads' that showed up as much as the 'crete stuff  --and the character was iconic enough to be a toyetic mascot for its main publisher, acting as much as a pitchman for Dark Horse's stable of properties as for DHP.  And Concrete was everywhere.  You could find Paul Chadwick's bouncing baby at any major comics convention; Concrete was in Wizard, and The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter, and Comics Insider...

But why did I like it?  Pop prevalence notwithstanding.  It's all very well to be addicted to pop culture trash.  I grew up hooked on the Beatles, for chrissakes, listening to tales of record pyres; you can get hooked on a thing purely for its cultural cachet and not GET it, y'know.  Like, everyone was "into" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...  But how many people actually *read* the o.g. Turtles, and Grokked It?  Significantly less than you'd think.  Comix people read Thee Turtles, whereas TMNT were everywhere for the casuals.  The Turtles made a certain kind of pop sense because it emerged from a stew of influence whose top notes were martial arts and anthropomorphic funny animals.

Concrete, in contrast, was a book about...  a disembodied political speechwriter with an affinity for environmentalism.  A comic containing only one Fantastic element, an alien abduction, which never recurs.  Concrete was a book about figuring out how to be human, in a culture that didn't value humanity.  And it was--  to me, at least  --an art comic.  It was a comic you read for the art.

It was a comic I read for the art.  Concrete was an Art Comic.  The black and white was my life's blood.  There were a LOT of b&w books to be found, in my youth, veritable oceans of content left over from the boom & implosion of the marketplace in the wake of the Turtles finding a foothold.  But there weren't that many books that looked as Sharp, or as Pop-Influenced, in their black & white rigor.

I'm pouring out a 40 in pure verbiage here because you wouldn't think it to look around, now, but Paul Chadwick did a little to change the indie comix landscape in North America--  as much as Barry Windsor-Smith, or Dave Sim, or Los Bros Hernandez, or those terrible turtle boys.

Let's pause here for an admission.  A confession, truly:  I wanted so bad to rip it off.

I probably spent as much time trying to imitate Paul Chadwick's clarity of line & control of feathering as I did practicing my Frank Miller dropshadows.  Saturdays were spent at my aunt's house, poring over comics bellydown on the hardwood floor and tracing off my fucked-up pencils onto typing paper for inking.  It was Saturdays when I could convince my aunt to drive me to one of two comic shops, where doubtless satan was waiting to sell me magazines designed for single-handed enjoyment, and god smile on her bitter christian soul, she did, with little reluctance.  I guess if the options were godless rock'n'roll and heathen lit, well, at least the comix shops didn't have Perry Farrel's obscene poster of Ritual de lo Habitual hanging over the cash register.

If I had to pin down the exact moment I fell in Love with 'Crete enough to want to steal its main conceit, it was probably when my aunt was having her hair done.  There was a hobby shop at the entrance to the shopping plaza where her stylists worked, so whenever I got bored of leafing through Details magazine and trying to piece together the Wild Palms comic, I'd wander up.  The hobby shop had only a handful of comics, all trade paperback collections--  The One, by Rick Veitch (who?) and Snarfquest by Larry Elmore, and (maybe?) a Sandman like 'The Doll's House'.  But then there were these two issues of 'Concrete', singles, totally out of place amidst the lead figurines and Dragonlance novels.  'Concrete: Eclectica'.  I didn't know what they were, besides issues of my favourite book.

See, what they were?  Was colour.

Concrete, as I said, was a b&w book.  Black & white was why I lived & breathed.  I'd gotten 100% hooked on 'Crete the same way I got hooked on Cerebus--  I bought an issue in the middle of everything with no context for any of it.  My first Cerebus was a Flaming Carrot crossover, at the ass-end of Church & State book II.  My first Concrete was issue #9, the one where he grows horns.  It's a weird as fuck book, if you don't know the characters.  It spends almost the entire issue indoors, with the titular character bound to a chair, starving himself & tripping out.  If you're entering it context free, it's a bizarre In to a world of near-infinite potential, and reward.  So that's what hooked me.  It looked goddamned amazing, and it didn't do what comix had taught me to expect.  The story is very static, containing barely any action worth mentioning.  It's almost entirely an intellectual exercise, as a story.

The 'Eclectica' pieces?  I'm going to be honest, I don't remember them, today.  The essentials have evaporated.  All I remember is the shock of seeing Concrete in full colour for the first time--  if one disregards the cover art for everything Chadwick had drawn, or all the DH house ads, or the luxuriantly gardened painted posters of Concrete that had started to show up in shops.  It wasn't just 'Crete in colour, it was Concrete in computer colour, then still an innovation.  The stories were oddments, stuff Chadwick had dashed off for one project or another that didn't fit in, precisely chronologically, with the greater series which was--  then  --only beginning to be collected.

I do remember there was something luminous and uncanny about seeing 'Crete in colour, and that led me to scribbling my own ideas for a rip-off series.  Something I wouldn't attempt for years, and when I did attempt it, saw as only grotesque & misconceived.  But it got me started on Making, and not just Consuming, comix.  Chadwick, like Byrne, Sim, BWS, Moebius and all the others, got me started.

The aborted rip-off comic?  'A Lunar Body'.  Like, even the title is a bit of a stylistic lift from Chadwick--  he liked to title the individual issues subdued stuff like "A Remarkable Life" or "A Stone Among Stones".  My thing was going to be kind of a Carter of Mars riff where a dude goes to sleep and wakes up in a weird new body, in outer space, and has to re-orient himself in order to survive.  Not spectacularly well-conceieved, my concept guttered out after a few pages of TOO MANY narrative captions.  There was no-where to go with it because my core character was, of course, me.

Anyroad.  Concrete:  it's what my foundations were set in.

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1945-47, vol. 10 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1947-48, vol. 11 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Concrete Colour Special (1989) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Concrete: Eclectica (1993) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Dark Horse Presents #16 & 18 (1986) - featuring 'A Sky of Heads' by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - February 2o26

And so we return and begin again.

Maybe less annotations & notes this month?

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 49-52 (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Beast of Chicago (2oo3) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Black Dahlia (2o18) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 57-60 (1957) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Total THB vol. 1 (1994-95) - written & illustrated by Paul Pope

Evita (2oo2) - written by Héctor Osterheld, illustrated by Alberto & Enrique Breccia 

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 96-99 (1963) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder compendium I: containing 'The Lindbergh Child', 'The Terrible Ax-Man of New Orleans', & 'The Madison Square Tragedy' (2oo8 / '1o / '13) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield (1999) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1931-33, vol. 1 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Children of the Voyager #s 1-4 (1993) - written by Nick Abdzis & illustrated by Paul Johnson

Strange Days #s 1-3 (1984) - written & drawn by a murderer's row of punker Brits, including but not limited to Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, and whoever else was passing that godlike bomber 'round.  these are not comix for sober people

Paradax: Remix (1987) - written by Peter Milligan & illustrated / re-painted by Brendan McCarthy

The Lives of Sacco & Vincente (2011) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Mystery of Mary Rogers (2001) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Annihilator: Rainbow of Death vol. 1 (2026) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons

Dream of the Bat (2007-26) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons & Patrick Keck

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

"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!