Author: Andrew Wheeler

Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian’s 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It’s more than that, too, but that’s the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake “connectivity” and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I’ll leave as an argument the reader can have; I’m a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman – twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well – among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She’s the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother’s flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she’s so much taller and stronger that she’s the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system – evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I’ll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people – who look mostly like their dreamers – focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach “shadows” to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas – usually a few times – before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years – before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners’ innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it’s not an industry: it’s amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn’t bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It’s been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened – Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow – this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are “somehow” – she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word “news” reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative – HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing – and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it’s all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women’s breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it’s willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true – they’re just generated randomly – but they seem true because they’re negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement – which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans’ minds than you would expect – and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters – mostly ones I haven’t mentioned – are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped – that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely – its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe “lovely” isn’t quite the right word – and it’s full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that’s not the book’s fault.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This is the one where things become both more and less complicated. On balance, probably less overall, by the end, which is unusual for the mid-point of a series.

For any Gen Z readers coming to Scott Pilgrim for the first time (or, I guess, older people who managed to miss it): this is a six-book graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, in a manga-inspired format and video game-inspired world, about a twenty-something slacker from Toronto and his friends, mostly about how he meets a new girlfriend and has to defeat her seven evil exes, but also partly about his band and some related stuff. The six books all came out in the back half of the Aughts, so I guess they’re core Millennial culture, if you want to generation-type them, but Scott himself is such a stereotypical slacker that this Gen X guy found him and his world instantly recognizable.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness  is the third book; the first two were Precious Little Life  and Vs. the World . Current editions have color by Nathan Fairbairn; original publication was in black and white.

This one is the all-exes-all-the-time volume: Scott’s new girlfriend Ramona Flowers (the quirky, cool American with a mysterious past) had a previous boyfriend, Todd Ingram, who is the bassist in the hot new band The Clash at Demonhead. And Scott’s ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams, is the leader of that band. So there’s bad blood all around with TCaD – even more so because Envy’s band is more slick, successful, and success-oriented.

TCaD is in Toronto; they’re playing some shows, and Scott’s band Sex Bob-omb is opening for them. Which is just as awkward – for Scott in particular – as it sounds.

So there’s a lot of scenes here of Scott uncomfortable around Envy – she basically kicked him and Steven Stills out of the band the three of them founded, back in high school, and Scott is not known for being comfortable with conflict and ambition and stress in the first place. And there’s a fair bit of flashback, to show those older relationships – Ramona with Todd, Scott with Envy, and even Envy with Todd, since they’re together now. (Well, relatively together – Todd is a cheater there as well as on a level that will affect his fighting abilities later in the book.)

On the positive side, Scott’s most recent ex, the teenager Knives Chau, is less obsessed with him here and more with Envy. She’s maybe growing up a bit, and, as of this point, seems to be over Scott and settling into a new relationship with Young Neil.

And, of course, there are some fights. Scott is at first utterly incapable of fighting Todd – who has superpowers because he’s a vegan, in one of the best-known and most amusing minor plot points of the series – and there are other small and large battles throughout, including the quick bit where Knives gets the highlights punched out of her hair.

The whole Scott Pilgrim saga has a wonderful control of tone and an infectious joy in its own fictional structures – there’s a lovely sequence early in this book that runs through nearly the whole cast, during the first tense meeting with Envy and her band, with captions to say what everyone wants at that moment. There’s a lot of similar moments, where O’Malley is playing with the comics form and with his video-game references, both to make jokes and to quirkily underline serious moments. (When Scott tries to run to access a “save point,” we can feel his flop sweat and panic.)

In some ways, this book is the core of the whole series – sure, it’s not all resolved here, and you can see O’Malley setting some of the hooks for the back half – but this is where the Scott-Envy-Ramona-Todd broken quadrangle happens, and that’s one of the major foci of the whole story.

But, of course, even after getting past Todd here, Scott knows: there are four evil exes yet to fight.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie

This may be me being cynical, I’m sorry to say. And that’s not anything a nice, brand-new YA graphic novel needs. But I am struck by the way that memoir has so taken over YA comics that everything else bends to that format – even a book like this, which is entirely fictional.

Pearl  is the story of Amy, a Japanese-American girl growing up in Hawaii in 1941. The book doesn’t say exactly how old she is, but I’m going to guess around twelve – old enough to take a long trip by herself, young enough to still be a kid, just the right age for a book like this. And Pearl reads as if Amy was a real person, telling us her story – I was initially surprised when we got a “1941” caption, since I thought it would be a modern-day story about discovering her heritage. (Sometimes not reading the publicity material is a bad idea!)

Amy narrates the book, first telling the story of her great-grandmother, a late 19th century pearl-diver from Okinawa who gives the book its title and provides some parallax to Amy’s story, and then quickly brings her family story up to her time. Now, I read this as an uncorrected proof, and it was obvious in a few places that panels were missing or FPO – some other pages seemed to not have the final color/tone in place. So anything else I write about here might also have changed: what I saw was an early, not-quite-finished version.

So if I say that Amy’s narration is mostly short and factual, evocative rather than digging into her emotions, know that might have changed a bit. Probably not radically – I don’t expect Pearl‘s text doubled or tripled in size – but especially at major moments, it might be a little more personal in the final version than the one I read.

Writer Sherri L. Smith puts us in Amy’s shoes without exactly putting us in her head – we follow her throughout, but see her mostly from outside, as things happen to her. Pearl is largely the story of things that happen to Amy – major, world-historical events – that she has no control over and is just swept along by. I might have been hoping for somewhat more choice on Amy’s part, which isn’t entirely realistic for her age and time and place.

Comics are at least half pictures, though, and artist Christine Norrie’s art is excellent at storytelling, with a particularly good eye for body language and the telling image. (I don’t know how she worked with Smith on this book, so the visual storytelling could easily have been partially or mostly from Smith, if she did thumbnails or a panel-by-panel script.) So we don’t get lots of words about how Amy feels and what she does, but we do see that, and can quickly tell.

I don’t want to get into all the details – it’s a quick read, the kind of comic where the pictures carry a lot of the weight – but Amy goes on what’s supposed to be a few-months trip to visit her family in Japan, in the fall of 1941. And her family lives near Hiroshima. The young audience that Pearl is mostly aimed at won’t necessarily know the significance of “fall of 1941” and “Hiroshima,” but I think anyone reading this post will.

Amy spends the war in Japan. We see it from her point of view – limited, contingent, precise. She’s put to work, goes through travails, learns about what’s happening to her parents back in the USA. Smith and Norrie aren’t quite telling the whole story of the Pacific War here, but they are trying to get through all of the high points that would realistically relate to a Japanese-American girl in Japan.

The art is always evocative, closely focused on Amy and what she sees. There’s a sequence of pages, near the end, with real power and heft, and other stretches of beauty and energy, such as the opening with Amy’s ancestor diving for pearls. It is a lovely book, thoughtful and visually appealing, with a somewhat minimalist text appropriate for the audience. It’s not quite what I thought it would be, but that’s entirely on me not paying enough attention up front.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Eyes of the Cat by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius

I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart  for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic vagueness on top, like a light fog that makes everything unclear.

But I like books that I react strongly to – even if that reaction is not actually positive. The point of art is to make people feel, and revulsion and disdain is a feeling, he said somewhat puckishly. So I keep giving Jodorowsky chances, in large part because other readers – people who I otherwise respect – said consistently for decades that there really was a there there.

Thus The Eyes of the Cat , their 1978 collaboration – I think the first time they worked together, a couple of years before The Incal began. It’s published as a comics album these days, but it’s more experimental than that, and a slimmer, smaller thing – it was originally a giveaway in France, which is oddly appropriate. 

It’s about fifty pages long, alternating full-page illustrations and pages with a single tall minimalist panel – that panel seems not to change for most of the length of the book – and a few words. It’s more like a picture book than a comic: not quite words on one side and image on the other, but almost that.

The words are all in one voice, and we realize eventually it is the boy we see in the tall panels speaking. The boy is speaking to a bird of prey, Meduz, as it stalks – well, you can guess from the title and see from the cover. And the title will tell you what Meduz is looking to take from its prey.

This is a book of mood and atmosphere, one that implies things rather than saying them, creating a tone of horror and creepiness rather than telling a fuller story or describing a world. The boy is deeply creepy: that’s the point. But it takes a little while for the reader to realize it: that is also the point.

The Moebius art is from his prime period, detailed and precise, from the vertiginous ruined cityscape to the intricate crosshatching on Meduz’s feathers. And Jodorowsky’s words are few enough and allusive enough that they work perfectly well – for me at least.

And, before I forget and end this post, the edition I read was the 2013 Humanoids English-language edition, which was translated by Quinn & Katia Donoghue.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare

You know how, when you’re a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock?

Zerocalcare’s graphic novels are set in a world – well, they’re memoirs, officially, so it’s the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it or the way he thinks it’s more entertaining to pretend he sees it – based on that logic. It’s a world full of internal voices – society, peer pressure, desires, the weight of kid opinion – demanding that the main character must do X or Y in this situation, and must never do P or Q, no matter what.

Most of us grow out of that kind of thinking, or at least build different obsessive-compulsive structures in our adulthood. But Michele Rech – the Italian cartoonist who works as Zerocalcare – is not most people.

Tentacles at My Throat  was his second graphic novel, after The Armadillo Prophecy ; it was published in Italy in 2014 and this edition, translated into English by Carla Roncalli di Montorio, came out in 2022. I’ve also seen Forget My Name , which I think was his third book. They’re all that sort of thing: mining the mindset of an obsessive, inward-focused childhood and young adulthood, a life intensely examined.

Of course, Zerocalcare constructs each one of these books carefully and deliberately; this isn’t just a rush of “how I really feel.” One major clue to that construction is that the specific internal voices are very different in each book – the internal voice, the superego if you will, of Armadillo was, yes, an armadillo. But here basically the same role is played by “David the Gnome,” the main character of the TV show based on the ’80s illustrated books. And the internal voices are much less central this time – they pop up to stop Zero from doing things, but aren’t the everyday companion the armadillo was.

So this one is a more typical memoir, made more dramatic and serious – in the way that kids do, when telling stories about their own lives – but mostly realistic and grounded. (There is what I think is a burst of fiction at the end, to tie off one loose end that I suppose Zero never learned the real history of, but nothing like the dive into pure fantasy at the end of Forget.)

Tentacles is a three-part story, centered on his school. The main characters are a group of kids, most centrally Zero himself, his friend Slim – who I suspect may be a composite; he’s appeared in every book so far and has been central in all of them – and their friend Sarah. The three sections are of equal length, taking place when Zero is seven, sixteen, and twenty-seven. The first two center on sneaking out of the school to do something – both in that vaguely transgressive and somewhat ritualized way kids have: “prove you’re brave by sneaking under the fence you’re never supposed to cross, and doing this specific thing to prove you did it.” And the third section is the usual reason former students come back to their old school: someone has died.

Of course Zero obsessed about what happened for years afterwards; that’s what he does. The fact that he “betrayed” one of his friends at the age of seven – as always with Zero, his internal dialogue obsessively focuses on that, on how horrible and unreclaimable he is, how everyone would hate him forever if only they knew the truth, and on and on and on.

And, of course, it’s never as bad as he assumes. That’s the point of this spiraling: it can’t possibly be as bad as the person spiraling worries. I do wonder if the “Zerocalcare” of his stories is going to move forward into that realization at any point, or if they’ll stay stuck in that childhood/young adulthood nexus of fear, doubt, and shame. My understanding is that he’s shifted formats over the past few years – moved from telling these stories in graphic novel form into telling them in animated TV-show form, so he can run through them all again and do the same thing over – but, eventually, the character of Zero will have to move out of the conflicted, neurotic twenty-something life, right?

As always with Zerocalcare, I find it’s a bit too overwrought for me. I want to reach into the page, shake Zero, and tell him to just mellow out – nothing is as earth-shaking or as central as he’s sure every last bit of it is.

(Or maybe he’s right, because this is the world he constructed. As far as I can tell, his group of friends have already utterly ruined the lives of two of their schoolmates, and that’s played for laughs. Ha ha! Lifelong trauma because they happened to be there, and aren’t the heroes! It’s funny!)

I guess I’m saying that I appreciate the skill and craft and energy of Zerocalcare’s work, but I hope he’s massively exaggerating a lot of this stuff, because otherwise he and his buddies come across, frankly, as a bunch of horrible little monsters. More than most kids, even.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey

I should have realized they were commercial illustrators – their work has all of the hallmarks. The polish, the construction, the architecture of the comics panels. It all shows a deep insight into design and a deep concern for design, for telling stories precisely and sharply.

I didn’t quite realize that the first few times I read the work of siblings Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey – the full-length graphic novel The Bend of Luck  and the connected themed collection Animal Stories . I said that their work reminded me of other kinds of art – advertising, Flash games, informative pamphlets, and so on – but didn’t quite make the leap to say that’s because they do that other kind of work as well. They live in that world; they think in those terms.

Successful illustrators who make comics are rare, if only because comics are so vastly less remunerative than illustration. There’s a text appreciation in this book, by Monte Beauchamp, who “discovered” the Hoeys for comics as editor of Blab! in the ’90s, pointing that out, and doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much money they could have made with the same number of pictures for commercial clients.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017  collects the first twenty years of their short comics work, in a quirky reverse order. So it starts with Coin-Op magazine itself, which they self-publish . Issue five comes first, then four, and so on. Before that – it’s unclear if it’s all structured in reverse-chronological order, or otherwise structured for a particular reading experience – are the earlier stories from Blab!

(This is no longer the complete Coin-Op. Issue 9 came out last year; they seem to have a new issue about every other year, plus the regular stream of longer works.)

There are a lot of stories here, and I’m not going to try to list them all. Some are straightforward narratives, but many are more dreamlike, or design-driven. There’s a series of illustrated “articles” about jazz musicians – all of them, I think, entirely fictional – and some pieces that seem to be mostly song lyrics (original, I think) turned into visual art. There’s another series about two sad-sack characters, anthropomorphic dogs or dog-headed men, named Saltz and Pepz who get into various scrapes during what seems to be the Great Depression. They also have a few stories in a twelve-panel grid, showing the same wide scene each page, as big events crash or break across multiple panels and characters.

Many of the stories are set in the vague past, what I think of as the ’30s or the ’50s – not during The War, not during anything major or notable – with boxy cars and people in constructed suits and all the furniture of a world that’s familiar and stable and entirely gone.

And even the pieces I call straightforward are very Hoey-esque: designed, often to the point of being schematic, telling stories as much in the ways the panels are laid out on the page as in the things that happen in those panels. None of it is obvious; none of their work is ever obvious, I’m coming to believe.

There’s a lot of depth and interest in Coin-Op: a lot of time and thought when into every panel here. Even the wordless, imagistic stories – which, as a Word Person, I had to admit I didn’t really “get” – are full of wonders and surprises. The Hoeys are as interested in how they tell stories, how they present moments visually , how those visually feel, as they are in the story being told.

They’re illustrators. It’s what they do. And they do it really well.

(I’ve hit the end here, and neglected to note that some pieces here – I think mostly older work, but not necessarily – were co-written by Charles Paul Freund. The song lyrics in particular seem to be mostly from Freund. It’s not really clear how the Hoeys work together – other than they both write and both draw, from opposite ends of the American continent, on what I assume are the same digital pages somewhat simultaneously – so Freund adds another layer of “how does this fit in” to the mix. That’s all unimportant, frankly: the work is the work, however it got made or whoever did what.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Hedra by Jesse Lonergan

My skills as a reviewer don’t line up well with this book’s strengths, so this may be a mess. I apologize up front.

Hedra  is an Eisner Award-winning short wordless graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan from 2020, and I’m mostly a words person. It uses grids in a really interesting way, breaking up pages – especially at the beginning – into escalating arrays of little boxes, and masterfully leading the eye through complex layouts throughout its length. I usually write about what comics mean, but I don’t think I can do that here – I’ll have to instead just say what I see.

We open with a limited nuclear apocalypse – I say “limited” because we immediately see things rebuilding afterward. Some government builds a starship, and picks an astronaut to fly it. That is our main character: I assume her name is Hedra. (The title could mean something else, I suppose: maybe the name of the ship, of the other major character who shows up later, of the planet they investigate, or something even less likely. But let’s assume it’s our main character.)

She explores various worlds, presumably sending data back home. She’s clearly diligent and good at her work. And then she sees a giant robot (this is my assumption – it’s huge and humanoid and made of metal) flying through space, and follows it or coincidentally lands on the same planet next.

We see her exploring this world in more detail, and the giant robot doing the same, somewhere not too far away. We also see the planet’s inhabitants, who are hostile to the giant robot. (I guess we’re supposed to think of them as evil or enemies, but if a giant robot landed and started stomping around my planet, I don’t think my response would be all that happy.) Hedra finds the robot, and helps him escape the locals. Both flee this planet.

Now, here’s something I might have gotten wrong, or misunderstood. I thought the giant robot was roughly the same size as Hedra’s ship – i.e., substantially larger than she is. But when they flee, they’re the same size. Did one or the other of them change size through some skiffy mechanism? Or did I just misunderstand their initial encounter? (Is it just the locals who were tiny?)

Anyway, they fly off together, without Hedra’s ship, off to the robot’s home planet, where Hedra has a minor transformation of her own, and a substantial change in her mission going forward. We end with a very science-fictional iris-out.

Hedra is interesting and eye-catching and full of things to think about, told brilliantly through pure comics. I haven’t seen Lonergan’s comics since the very different (but also very good) All-Star  a decade ago, but I’m glad to see he’s still out there working, making great (and, I should mention, very Moebius-inspired) works like this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Fall Through by Nate Powell

This book is already dancing about architecture. So I worry that anything I might say would compound that – painting a picture of dancing about architecture. But here I am, and here I go.

Fall Through  is Nate Powell’s new graphic novel this year: it has what I think of as his trademark atmospheric, black-background, swirling pages and vaguely creepy, unexplained and deeply embedded fantasy elements. I found myself resisting it more than some of his earlier books: as always, I can only say how I reacted, and note that it’s as likely to have been me as the book.

This is the story of a punk band, Diamond Mine. They formed in 1994, recorded a 7″, did a bunch of touring, had a following. They lived together in a house, all seemingly in their early twenties. They were part of a wider punk scene across the Midwest and South, with clusters of more-or-less angry, more-or-less young people in every mid-sized town or larger, putting on mostly illegal shows in fields or backyards or wherever and running away when the cops came to break it up. None of that paid – if you actually made gas money, you were way ahead.

Punk, you know?

Jody was one of the four members of the band. She played bass and sang, at least some of the time. She wasn’t the leader and songwriter: that was Diana. She wasn’t the flashy guitarist: that was Napoleon. She wasn’t the quiet, solid-as-a-rock drummer: that was Steff. But she’s our viewpoint character.

Fall Through takes place mostly in 1994. But we also see Jody, seeming the same age, or just a few years younger, in 1978, back in what Gen X me thinks of as the actual age of punk. (Punk was a movement. It happened, and ended, like every other movement. Even early ’80s hardcore was something else. Everything later was revivals and different things, just like “rockabilly” now isn’t what it meant in the ’50s.)

How did Jody get from being 18ish in 1978 to being 23ish in 1994? Well, that’s the story here.

Most of the book is about a tour. It’s the summer of 1994, and the four members of Diamond Mine are in a van, going from town to town to play shows with local acts – again, mostly not legally, and the only way they get paid is if they sell some merch.  Like any tour, it seems to be endless, days stretching on and on, each one like the last. Like it never began and will never end, just a single day, over and over again.

And that may be true. Diana wrote a song – “Fall Through” – and when Diamond Mine plays it the right way, at the climax of a show, they seem to change worlds or times or something. The flap copy calls it “transported to alternate worlds in which they’ve never existed but their band’s legend has.” I don’t know about that: it all seems to still be 1994, and they have tour dates day after day, which implies their band exists and is known.

Really, it feels like a reset. Maybe different worlds, but not that different from each other. Certainly not the wild swings in time and space the description implies. All still that same tour, the same van, rambling through mid-America during the summer of 1994. More punk shows: one every night, potentially forever. Like August keeps resetting – this time St. Louis, the next time Louisville.

Diana seems to be doing this on purpose. Once there’s a frightening figure – coming out of a surrounding cornfield, like a horror movie, during their set – that she clearly triggers the song, the spell to get away from. And it’s taken a while, but the rest of the band knows something is wrong.

There are confrontations, but it’s all in vague language – “moving forward,” “sticking together,” that kind of thing. I expect punks to be louder, more demanding – to swear a lot more, for one thing. (I guess these are well-behaved, Southern, second generation punks.)

So the book never explains what’s happening or why. They talk around it a few times, but that’s all. There’s never even a “this band is going to break up” fight or possibility or option: it’s as if they’re all locked into this, no matter what they want or choose.

The situation does get resolved in the end, and we do circle back to 1978…but the ways and hows of it frustrated me. It’s all thematically appropriate, but not dramatically. The plot doesn’t go anywhere, the actions of the characters aren’t really important to the ending. It’s a book about an endless punk tour, about community and scene, rather than being a story about these things that happened to these people.

We never learn why this happened. We never learn how this song works. We never learn who that mysterious figure was, if he was actually chasing them, or anything. In the end, it all doesn’t matter, all those explanations are beside the point Powell wants to make. But I was here to find out all those things, and I don’t have any particular nostalgia for “wasn’t it awesome to be young and in a punk band?”

So I found this book incredibly frustrating: it avoided all of the things I wanted to know and focused entirely on things I found vague and trite. It’s lovely and thoughtful: Powell draws as well as ever and his people are real and precise. They just all waffle on about the least interesting things, and then go on to play another show as if none of that happened, which makes very little sense to me.

Your mileage may vary. If you’ve ever been in a band, particularly. And Powell is one of our best, so I won’t ignore the fact that I might have missed something major. But the Fall Through I read was not the book I was hoping for.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes

It’s not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature by doing basically the same thing, just with more zip and energy.

Olivia Jaimes wasn’t doing the same thing with Nancy in 2018. What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm. But Nancy had been through transitions before: it’s easy to forget that Bushmiller himself took over a strip then called Fritzi Ritz in 1925, added Nancy as a character, and shifted the whole strip based on what he wanted to do and what the audience wanted to see.

Jaimes – even today, her actual identity is a closely guarded secret; all that’s publicly known is that she had a webcomic before Nancy, is female, and is believed to be relatively young – looked backwards to Bushmiller in some things, like her fondness for meta gags and references to “the cartoonist.” She also dragged Nancy entirely into the modern world, something the very backward-looking Gilchrist had no interest in doing.

The syndicate seems to be pitching Nancy these days to actual kids, which is a major change from the last three or four decades. I don’t know how many actual eight-year-olds identify with Nancy – maybe, she’s prickly and demanding and self-centered and sure of her own righteousness like so many real-world kids of that age – but I guess that’s working for them.

This book – just called Nancy  – came out less than a year after Jaimes started the strip, back in 2019. I don’t know if it’s her complete first six months, but it’s something like that: this is how it started, what the big transition looked like from the other side. Compared to the work Jaimes is doing on the strip now – more than five years later – it’s simpler, starker in its drawing and more in-your-face Internet-meme-y in its gags, than the more organic, story-driven work she’s doing now.

I miss some of that anything-can-happen atmosphere of the early Jaimes years: it felt a bit more Bushmillerian then, since he was always a cartoonist who would draw absolutely anything in service of the best gag he had for that day. But this book is a good record of those days: a somewhat blockier Nancy and Sluggo, their eyes bigger and less expressive, their clothes more templated and old-fashioned, their dialogue more aggressively mentioning newer technology.

Even if you didn’t catch “Sluggo Is Lit” the first time around, check this out if you like smart gag cartoons. Nancy was always a great engine for them, and Jaimes tuned that engine back up and got it running beautifully.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”?

This time, it was hair.

On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir, creator M.S. Harkness draws her hair as a giant, swoopy, structural thing – almost a separate, solid object, like a shark’s fin. That said to me “this is a creator who is comfortable with caricature, who gets that cartooning is how to put complicated ideas down on the page. She’s going to be interesting to read on a craft and structure level.”

I don’t want to say “I was right.” Let’s say I accurately noticed some clear strengths in Harkness’s immediate, uncompromising work. Let’s say that she both has the drawing and page-layout chops to tell a difficult story well, and both the material in her own life and the mental strength to turn that into art to work from. Let’s say I was not disappointed.

This is autobiographical: I assume it’s true as much as any memoir is, that some characters may be somewhat fictionalized or events moved in time or dialogue reconstructed to work better on the page. It feels real. Harkness has an immediacy, in her bold lines and her in-your-face storytelling, that tells the reader she is not fucking around here.

We open just before her art-school graduation, in what turns out to be an extended prologue that jumps back and forth in time during that taut moment of almost that is the month before that big day. All of the work is done; the group show is being hung. Harkness knows she will graduate. There’s a moment where a teacher bluntly tells her “I had to keep everyone else from failing. I was never really worried about you. Your art career or whatever…you’ll be fine.”

This section sets up the tensions and issues Harkness will be working through during the bulk of the book, rolling out over most of the next year.

And, no matter what that art professor thought, she is not fine.

She’s organized, focused, driven. She has a plan and multiple goals. She’s working on her first graphic novel and studying to become a personal trainer. She has a sympathetic fellow-artist roommate as a support system, and is plugged into the larger comics world.

She’s also doing random one-off sex-work jobs to plug holes in her budget. The book description says she’s also selling weed for the same purpose, but we really don’t see that in the story. She has a messy relationship with an up-and-coming MMA fighter – she is, or was, his dealer, and a fuck-buddy for this guy who already has a “girlfriend.” She wants to be more to him than he’s willing to give, and he keeps coming back but is at least honest about what’s going on.

Behind all that is a horrible childhood: a sexually abusive father about to get out of prison and reaching out through some kind of reparations program to make an “apology” she wants nothing to do with. A mother who means well but who Harkness sees as weak and doesn’t have much in common with.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze her, especially based on her own presentation. But there’s clearly trauma there that she’s still trying to get away from, and a complex nexus of physicality: working out herself, helping other people’s bodies get strong as a trainer, the random paid sex, the toll on arms and back from hunching over a drawing board. Time Under Tension isn’t really about all of those physical demands on her body, and how they intersect with each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her next book was – or the book after that. 

Harkness seeks out therapists, which doesn’t go well. She knows she’s driven and goal-focused, but feels like she’s not connecting with people: they’re all just roles in this march forward, each one just a piece of one of her projects.

She has to work it out herself, the same way she does everything. More work, more pushing forward, one day at a time.

In the way of comics, it may be telling the story of a few years ago: I see that Harkness is now thirty-one. Time Under Tension was Harkness’s third book; the first two were also comics memoirs. She’s said that she intends to do five books in this “series.” But this one stands alone: it tells a full story brilliantly, with an unblinking eye on her own life and problems.

And her hair is magnificent. Harkness has a stark style with strategically deployed spots of black, and her hair is the most consistent large black element on most of these pages, drawing the eye to its complexity and unruliness. I wonder if we will see that hair settle down in future books, as Harkness moves forward in life and gets her demons more under control. I hope so. I’d love to see it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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