Gus 1: Nathalie

Christophe Blain's 80 page album, Gus, collects a handful of humorous episodic stories set in old-west America. The stories are centered around a group of three unusual bandits, Gus, Clem and Gratt. While they do pull off a few robberies, the bulk of the book deals with their obsessions, struggles and victories with the opposite sex. In some ways, it almost reads like a modern day autobiographical comic about three buddies hanging out in bars trying to meet women. The stories are all funny and zippy - but with a mature, occasionally serious side too - that gives the tales just the right amount of depth - after all, in a way, the book is sort of a commentary on the quest for love.

But the real draw of the book, what holds it all together, is Christophe Blain's amazing artwork. His style is extremely fluid, full of motion, beautiful and hilarious at the same time. I really like the way his pages have lots of panels (most often, eight) filled with unusually expressive, small, thin, bendy figures, often shown in full shots (from their head to their toes). He draws some of the most appealing little figures I can recall seeing. But gee - it's one of those crazy books where pretty much every drawing seems perfect and will knock your socks off. Just the right amount of detail, amazing expressions, and despite feeling perfect, it still feels loose - no easy trick. If the book has one very minor negative though, I'd say at times the coloring felt a little over-saturated. A slightly softer pallet might have flattered the artwork even more.

I also wanted to mention the panel to panel transitions, which are often very fast, and add tremendously to the book's humor. Lots of great jump cuts and double takes. The book just has that mysterious something that makes it seem to be of especially high-quality - in a way that's a little hard to write about - just something to enjoy. It was a pure pleasure to read the book's final note, that Gus, Clem and Gratt will return in a second album.

This is the first book of Blain's I've read, but it jumped him right into the top ranks of cartoonists I want to read more of. And I know he has a lot more books in print too (I just wish the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro would get back to being a little kinder on my wallet).

The origin of manga: Storytelling Man

Here's an interesting, extremely well illustrated article on kamishibai-shi or the japanese storytelling man, that I stumbled across this morning.

Klezmer: Book 1

On the back flap of First Second's english language edition of Joann Sfar's Klezmer it states that he has over one hundred books in print(!), which makes me feel a bit weird that this is the first of his I've picked up and read, and I really liked it too. First of all, his artwork is some of the loosest I've ever seen. It's very undisciplined and rushed looking, very very simple line work that approaches awful at times, but it's not just about the line work, but about the way it combines with some beautiful water color tones. That combination saves even the most minimal, sloppy drawing, making it all work in some mysterious and original fashion. And at times the drawing itself is quite delightful - he seems particularly adept at drawing his characters in such a way that when they smile, you can't help but smile too. What really holds the book together though is the story, which is humorous and charming like the Yiddish folk tales it emulates (or celebrates). At it's most basic, the book tells the story of the birth of a band. We get a little back story from each of the five main characters as they slowly move towards each other across Eastern Europe, and to Odessa. Although the tone is humorous, there's a darkness to the story too, that helps to give it some depth (two character's have been kicked out of their yeshiva for stealing, one character survives an attempted hanging by enraged peasants, another sees all his friends murdered before his eyes - barely escaping the same fate himself). There's even a romantic angle - a lot happens in just 110 pages. Which is one of the slightly frustrating things about finishing reading this book - it's really just the beginning of the story, but looking on First Second's website, I can find no hint that they plan to release the later volumes yet, even though at least two more are already available in french. I'm really looking forward to picking those up soon and seeing what happens next.

Didn't read too much...

Didn't read too much this weekend, just a couple more chapters of Ping Pong - and so little happens in each tiny chapter that it's not really worth talking about again until I read another big batch (I've just started into book two), and about half of the first Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese book collection. I've unfortunately been reading these out of order - so it's a little weird to go back now and read the first book - especially since I'm over halfway into it and Corto Maltese hasn't even shown up as a character (he has been mentioned a couple of times). The main characters seem to be Jack London (!) and a defective Russian on a killing rampage. At least some of the Corto Maltese comics were available in English at one point during the 90s, that I remember - so they probably can still be tracked down. I've been picking up the new, bite sized editions put out by Casterman in french. Did Pratt color these, or is the color something new - I'd only seen 'em in black and white before. In any case, these editions are pretty nice, and very affordable (five or six euros depending on the length of the book). The art is great, as always, but I'm definitely (so far) enjoying the story of this first volume less than the others I've read. The huge volume 2, La Ballade de la mer salée, is definitely the book I would recommend the most so far. Volume 15 seems to be the latest re-release.

Official Corto Maltese site

The Fate of the Artist

I’ve long felt musicians should never write songs about writing songs, directors shouldn’t make movies about making movies and authors shouldn’t write books about writing books, well, because history has shown - the results have always almost ended up shit. This is especially true in comics. There have been so many bad comics written about writing comics! For me, it’s a clear warning sign that the artist has gotten so wrapped up in their own artistic struggles that it has become all they can see anymore, and that perhaps they have nothing left to say... But they need to keep talking. “All I have left to say is that I have nothing left to say,” and that shit is generally the most boring thing you could possible spend your time reading. In The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell comes frightfully close to plopping into the middle of this dangerous territory. However, I’m definitely willing to give him a little slack, considering his huge, sprawling body of work - much of which is quite excellent, especially his first decade plus of autobiographical type stuff. The difference with that earlier work, and one thing that makes it much better than your average autobiographical comics, is that he had a tendency to be looking out at the world, instead of in at himself - the other people in the stories were more important (and more interesting), than Eddie/Alec. Over the years, those other characters drifted out of the stories though, and his autobiographical work, somewhat to its detriment, has seemed to become much more just his own navel gazing musings on his own frantic life and interests, and much less interested in the outside world. His other characters have become mostly his close family members and he seems to be more interested in how they relate to him, seeing them in relation to himself, than as their own individual selves - which could make for more interesting, involving reading. In The Fate of the Artist, I believe he takes this to a new extreme, by have large sections of the story told in the voice of his daughter, talking about his “disappearance,” his interests and his life - she only comments on herself in relation to him - which is frankly, a bit creepy.

So, The Fate of the Artist isn’t exactly autobiography as we’ve come to think about it, and it’s also not a graphic novel as we’ve come to think about it. In a way, it seems like the book is at war with itself and its form. Instead of telling its tale in a straight narrative line, the book is broken up into many different short fragments and uses many different approaches, while dancing around a certain feeling - of writer’s block and maybe domestic problems… The constant arguments between Campbell and his wife seem meant to be humorous, but it’s definitely a dark humor (for instance he has to get stitches at the hospital after she clowns him over the head with a glass - funny?). I do like the book best when it’s being drawn in his more traditional loose, small paneled style - most of which is in color, which looks especially nice. His drawing has always been surprisingly expressive, minimal, original and well, charming - without going for the easy cuteness many others want to express themselves with (you can’t make a cute pink t-shirt out of an Eddie Campbell drawing).Unfortunately maybe only one-fourth of the book’s 96 pages are drawn in that great style. Actually the funnier pages in the book, do tend to be the one-off stuff, drawn to look a little bit like an old newspaper strip from the 1920s - although occasionally the jokes in those tend to be so inside, I couldn’t make heads or tales of what he’s going on about. Less interesting is the quarter of the book told in straight, typeset text (traditional novel-ish), usually written in his daughter’s voice, mystery novel style about his own disappearance. Least successful of all is the rather long section written as an interview with his daughter (for The Comics Journal?) about some of his quirks and delusions - that’s all made up of photographs of (presumably) his Joy Division t-shirt clad daughter drinking a beer at an outdoor cafe, with computer printed out text pasted above her head and circled in thin pen, traditional comic book style.

All these approaches don’t quite seem to add up, but we’re left with some kind of weird, disjointed meditation, on, I guess, Campbell’s struggle with creating comics, and being a kind of obsessive weird, uh, cartoonist not sure he wants to be a cartoonist, but who is nonetheless drawing a comic this instant (that we’re reading), who can’t quite pay the bills, but obviously needs to pay the bills. Uh - it’s just a book about a confused middle aged guy - a book maybe also meant to confuse the reader a bit too? While it has its good moments… Eddie Campbell can still write a funny line, can still be charming, and is still obviously one of the smartest persons to have ever written a comic - this one just feels like it went a little too far over the edge into self-involvement and confusion to be a satisfying read for most anybody but Campbell’s most intimate associates. It’s too disjointed, too much of a mess, and too unfocused to leave this reader with any other feeling but a confused shrug of the shoulders.

American Masters, Charles Schulz

This weekend I watched the nearly hour and half long American Masters episode on Charles Schulz. Like most programs on PBS, I did find its tone a bit dull and portentous. They seemed to ignore the fun and funny aspects of the strip in favor of a psychological reading - viewing the strip as a sort of self-portrait of the "troubled" artist's inner life. It's my feeling that this kind of psychological examination of an artist's life and work, by nature, oversimplifies and usually misses the point. They want to be able to make an interesting story, that goes from point a to point b, that can be sold, more than get at the truth. The best parts of the documentary were the archival footage they dug up of old TV show appearances of Schulz at home and the brief comments of Jules Feiffer, the only talking head who managed to convey some of the mystery, magic and joy of the comic strip and of somebody who dedicated the greater part of their life to creating an imaginary world.

Ping Pong Chapter Seven

The seventh chapter of Ping Pong by Taiyou Matsumoto is interesting because it's the first one, over one hundred pages into the story already, where you really get a feel for the two main characters and how they're different from each other. Interesting how the book seems to be balanced between two different approaches to life. Makoto Tsukimoto (Smile) is the more naturally talented ping pong player, but he has come to feel that he doesn't want to make anybody else a loser by beating them. However, his friend, Yutaka Hoshino (Péko), who is less skilled, only dreams of being recognized as the best ping pong player in the world - he says for him it's simple, he doesn't like to lose and doesn't care what happens to other people, "the only thing that counts is that I win." Two opposing ideas about how to move through the world, but still, these characters seem attached - they seem to care about each other, and like hanging out together - discussing their differences.

I feel like I'm moving beyond an interest solely in Matsumoto's drawing - and finally getting into the story - which is a good thing when there remains nearly nine hundred pages left to read.

Publishers - please steal these ideas...

Yesterday I mentioned that the abundance of well produced, thick collections of classic comic strips and books being published these days is a bit overwhelming - as all this amazing work is coming out at a pace somewhat faster than one can easily find the time to keep up with and enjoy... nonetheless, I can think of plenty of reprint projects I haven't heard of any publishers tackling yet, that I'd love to see someday soon. Three that jump to my mind right away would be the Barney Google strips by Billy DeBeck, all the comics by Milt Gross and the complete Sugar & Spike by Sheldon Mayer. I also would love to see more reprints of earlier Japanese comics, say, from the first half of the 20th century.

In the mid-1990s my comic book reading friends and I often lamented the almost complete lack of classic comic strip reprints being released. If you brought it up back then to publishers, the response you'd most likely get would be that reprints just didn't sell - and that they couldn't afford to put out books collecting comics not enough people (to justify production costs) wanted to read. Ten years later, so much has changed. Now we complain that there isn't enough time to read all the great, high quality, classic reprints that have been coming out. Just this last week we heard word of a complete collection of Noel Sickle's Scorchy Smith coming from IDW and Osamu Tezuka's complete Black Jack to finally be printed in English from Vertical (next fall). Here's the covers of some of the reprint books I'm hoping to find time to read, coming out in the next handful of months (also must buy the new Moomin and Walt & Skeezix from D&Q)...

Ping Pong 1

I’ve been reading Taiyou (sometimes translated as Taiyo - I don’t know which is “right”) Matsumoto’s Ping Pong. I first came across his work in the mid-90’s, browsing through the Japanese weeklies - his artwork stood out a lot - in the way it combined and unusual, for manga of the time, western or european influence - while retaining a certain more Japanese style of extreme speed and movement. A few works have appeared in English translations since (Blue Spring, a couple issues of No. 5 and most notably, Black and White - which has since been collected again under the title, Tekkon Kinkreet). Ping Pong and a couple of other works are available in French. I’m not super far into the series yet - just to chapter seven, or page 120 - but not surprisingly, I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far. First, the idea of a 1,000 page comic centered around a high-school ping pong club is intriguingly different from the type of comics I usually come across. Second, I’m fascinated by the bite sized episodes - the way he breaks up the story. So little will happen in each chapter, I wonder how people originally could retain the story when it was published serially… you really just get the vaguest of glimpses of what’s going on in each episode - a few scraps of dialog spread out across twenty pages (or so) - it’s also all very inter-cut and sort of impressionistic - it’s slow and fast at the same time - a most tricky combination. I’ll write more as I get further into the series…

Introduction

This site will focus on the comic books I want to read, am reading or have read. I reserve the right to change my mind about anything I may write here, positive or negative.

Some of my favorite cartoonists are E.C. Segar, Frank King, Charles Schulz, Hergé, Osamu Tezuka, Daniel Clowes and John Porcellino.