Category: Reviews

One good joke can you pretty far. Ask anyone who’s ever headlined a sitcom or had a popular stand-up act. [1]

Or a big comic strip, more to the point.

The early days of newspaper strips are a treasure trove of great examples: the same artists would have dedicated space in their paper, but not always be producing the same strip. So if a guy had a funny-kid joke that day, it might be one strip, and if he had a two-Irish-guys joke, it might be a different strip.

(I can’t see modern audiences standing for that, but modern audiences have been spoiled horribly.)

Frederick Burr Opper’s most famous strip was Happy Hooligan , but that was mostly just his hook to hang “jokes where someone tries to help, and it turns out badly.” He had plenty of other strips to be hooks for other jokes, too — but this is the one his audience loved best, so he tried to tell it as much as he could.

I should admit that I didn’t actually know most of that: Allan Holtz’s informative introduction to this recent selection of Happy strips (edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt, containing about ninety strips from the high years of 1902-1913) gave me the background, along with a quick sketch of Opper’s life and career.

Happy is the kind of old-timey that’s still funny quite a lot of the time, but the cartooning expectations are different enough — a frozen “camera,” lots of wordy explanatory dialogue, drawing that looks a bit stiff to modern eyes — that the reader needs to settle into it and get used to it before it starts to be funny.

Well, there’s one other thing: you have to find that joke funny. That is the problem with a one-joke strip, whether it’s Happy Hooligan or Cathy or Garfield.

In Happy‘s case, the joke generally involved Happy getting pummeled by someone — usually a policeman — after trying to do something nice and inadvertently causing havoc by his clumsiness. Many fewer people in 2018 think violence is funny than did in 1902, so Happy has not aged as well as it might have. (On the other hand, a lot of strips of the same vintage are horribly racist, and Happy sidesteps that by mostly makes fun of British people, at least in the strips reprinted here.)

Happy Hooligan is an important milestone in the development of the American comic strip — Holtz’s introduction is good at making those connections, tracing the developing single-panel in Punch (where Opper worked before starting Happy). Now, “important” is not always the same thing as “still entertaining to read,” but Happy still largely works, if you’re willing to meet it half way and get used to its older rhythms and expectations. And that’s pretty impressive for something that appeared in a disposable newspaper more than a hundred years ago.

[1] You might be a redneck if. What’s the deal with. Watermelon. Seven words. Yo mamma.

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

This book looks very much like it’s going to be a parody of The Family Circus. There’s a male cartoonist, his beautiful and pearl-wearing wife, their four chibi children, and the round single-panel that encompasses all of them.

But creator Benjamin Frisch apparently wasn’t interested in a re-run of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, and so The Fun Family  is a more free-floating parody — maybe of self-actualization and the search for meaning in life, maybe of just life itself.

Robert Fun’s family mimics the Family Circus closely: wife Marsha, sons Mikey and Robby, daughter Molly, baby J.T. Robby even takes over the comic strip, as metafictionally the Keane kids have the Family Circus and in real life Jeff Keane has actually done. [1] It even begins with a famous Family Circus trope: Robert Fun’s mother, “Grandma Virginia Fun,” has just died, and almost immediately appears as an angel.

But there’s no grandpa alongside her, and this dead grandma is a lot more demanding and specifically religious than in Family Circus. In fact, everyone here is spikier and quirkier than in the soft-focus Family Circus. Dad has a strange collection that he’s obsessive about, Mom abandons her husband and falls under the spell of a succession of gurus as she tries to find happiness, and both of them seem to ignore the fact that these kids seem to be no older than six or seven, leaving them to fend for themselves most of the time.

(But this is not a particularly realistic world to begin with: Frisch lampshades the children’s ages by pointedly noting that they do not age over the year or so that this graphic novel covers.)

Things spiral out of control after Grandma’s death, in several directions. I’ve mentioned the two parents’ obsessions, but the kids are nearly as crazy, building religious monuments or burying themselves in comics-making. The kids just want their parents back together, but instead they all just go further apart.

Eventually, there’s a break, and a confrontation. But it doesn’t go the expected way. Fun Family has a “happy” ending — everyone has things they want, everyone is successful, and so on — but it’s not at all the happy ending we expected, or the ending we would get from Family Circus. (Where, of course, nothing ever changes to begin with — nothing like this story could ever happen there.)

I’m not entirely sure if Frisch had a point in Fun Family: it feels like it’s trying to say something about family and work and happiness and self-understanding, but he’s throwing blows in all directions, which obscures anything positive he might be trying to say. Maybe there is nothing positive; maybe this is exactly what Frisch meant: happiness is based on delusions and monomania, so find the things that can make you ignore the outside world (which will only give you grief).

Fun Family looks a lot like the book I thought it would be — cute, rounded, with a great eye for classic cartooning and lots of dot eyes. But it reads like something darker and more savage, underneath all of the happy talk. It implies a deeply nihilistic view of life, for its its gospel of wealth and angelic dead grandmas. Perhaps it’s best Bil Keane was safely dead before Frisch took up his pen.

[1] I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your career be drawing cartoons about your own fictionalized fifty-years-ago childhood, following in the footsteps of your dead father. But “Jeffy” lives that.

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

I don’t know why the story reprinted in I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League  so obviously positioned itself as a one-time one-off. As a former editor and current marketer, I’m strongly against interrupting customers while they’re buying your stuff, but I’m not DC Comics.

And this book does make it clear, in little ways all the way along, that this will be just as much of this silliness as we’re going to get, so you’d better enjoy it now while you have it. (“Now” being 2005, in this case: and it’s true, we haven’t gotten any more, in the more than a decade since then.)

Maybe that was because writers Keith Giffen and J.M DeMatteis realized the high bwah-ha-ha style was harder and more demanding than they remembered, and wanted to get back to simpler punch-fests. Maybe this was all the time for penciller Kevin Maguire that they would ever get again, and they wouldn’t dream of doing it without him. (I think inker Joe Rubinstein was game for more of this, but maybe not?)

But, still: generally, during a story, you don’t look askance at your readers and mutter things like “are you actually reading that?” under your breath. Unless you’re DC Comics, obviously.

If that kind of thing annoys you, you probably don’t want to read I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League. Other things might trigger that reaction: superheroes who crack jokes, running gags, repeated extreme facial expressions, sitcom-level character comedy, naivety and assholishness equally played for laughs, and lots of dialogue. (You can’t have character-based comedy without letting your characters talk.)

(I looked at the prior retro JLI story a few weeks ago.)

This follows immediately on the heels of the prior story: the Super Buddies still haven’t had a first case, but are caught up in dram with their new neighbor, a bar being run by a former (very minor) supervillain…and his partner, who turns out to be everyone’s least favorite Green Lantern, Guy Gardner. (I think at this point he had some other kind of power ring, but the story doesn’t explain — he has a ring, he can do stuff, that’s good enough.) He and Power Girl — the superhero with the famous “boob window” — are our new characters here, replacing Captain Atom, who is quietly recuperating from the events of the prior story and will not return.

The plot, such as it is, sees the Super Buddies first go to hell, and then to the usual alternate world populated by evil versions of themselves. (Is that Earth-3? I can never remember. This is probably pre-Flashpoint, so I don’t think there even was an Earth-3 in those days.)

They run around, complain, yell at each other, make jokes, and occasionally do something heroic when they’ve exhausted all other options. It’s gloriously fun and silly in an over-the-top way, in the way that superhero comics are rarely allowed to be. (The silly comics of this decade tend to be much smaller scale, for whatever reason.) Maguire is still one of the very best artists at depicting facial expressions, and he has a lot of scope here — these folks are making all kinds of faces all the way through. He has a funny script to work with, of course, which definitely helps: these are broad characters, pushed to be silly, and Giffen/DeMatteis have long experience making them funny.

You might prefer your big superheroes to be serious: it happens. If so, this is not a comic for you. You can pick, oh I don’t know, literally anything else featuring any of these characters.

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

You know, I think Gabby Schulz may just be a tad bit dramatic.

It’s a feeling I have — partially based on my readings of his earlier books Monsters  and Welcome to the Dahl House , partially because he can’t seem to decide if he is “Ken Dahl” or “Gabby Schulz,” and partly because Sick  is possibly the most self-dramatizing book I’ve ever seen in my life.

Admittedly, it’s the record of a time Schulz thought he might be dying, which does tend to concentrate the mind. (But, then again, says the contrarian part of my mind — didn’t he recover from this fever without any medical intervention? Isn’t it possible that he’s just really, really whiny when he’s sick?)

And, of course, it’s a book: the only record we have of Schulz’s sickness is what he tells us himself, on large comics pages soaked in bile and misery, full of jaundice yellow and starless black. It could all be fiction. Just because it’s by someone named Gabby Schulz and about someone named Gabby Schulz doesn’t mean it’s meant to be taken literally.

But I think it is. I think Schulz means every word, every pen-stroke of this book, and that’s the way he works in comics: heart on the sleeve at all times, everything out there and exposed, all raw nerves and naked emotion and pure pleading about what he thinks are the most important things at every moment. It would be an exhausting way to live; it can be overwhelming even in a short graphic novel like this one — particularly one so oversized and focused on the negative as Sick.

Gabby Schulz is negative. Everything I’ve seen of his work, under either name, is all about the things he loathes and can’t stand — himself always first and foremost among them. Schulz is the kind of left-winger who is both contorted into knots by his unearned privilege as a white American man and sent into a frenzy by the horrible treatment he continuously endures as an unskilled worker in that clearly hellish American society. His getting sick seems to mostly be of interest as a way to ramp up the self-loathing to ever greater heights — to show how much he can really hate things when he gets going.

Sick is a book in which there is nothing good. There can be nothing good. To be Gabby Schulz is to be cursed: the most horrible human that ever lived, worthless and pitiful and also complicit in the worst society in the history of the world, a pyramid of horrors piled on top of each other without end.

Schulz realizes this, in a way: the book is in large part his own arguments to himself that life — his life, specifically — is worthless and horrible and better ended, and his feeble occasional moments of fighting against that sense.

It’s not a book to read if you are in any way depressed, or suicidal, or unhappy about life. Only the sunniest of Pollyannas could read Sick without flinching, or worse.

All this is presented in vibrant, eye-catching, torn-from-his-heart art — glorious in its hideousness and spleen. And his words are precise if not measured: always pushing further and always obsessively circling that same central conceit: that to be Gabby Schulz is a horrible, terrible, worthless thing, even more so when he has a fever.

I can’t exactly recommend this book. It’s so far over the top there’s cloud cover obscuring its lower reaches. It is absurdly strident about its every last thought. But it is hugely impressive, and uniquely powerful, and utterly itself. It is Sick. Take that word in whatever sense you like.

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

Once again, I’ve gotten to a book several years too late, and that’s confusing me. I read the first Labor Days book (written by Phillip Gelatt and drawn by Rick Lacy, neither of whom I know from anything else) back in 2009 and reviewed it for ComicMix then. And then I got a spiffy digital copy of the sequel later that same year…

…and it sat quietly on my device for nearly a decade.

Lesson: I am not dependable in reading anything, but I’m particularly prone to forgetting things that I have in purely-electrons form. If it’s not on a shelf where I can see it, I’m afraid it drops out of mind very swiftly.

Anyway, I had a week where I was specifically reading digital things on that device, because I was traveling, and so I finally realized I had Labor Days 2: Just Another Damn Day  and actually read it.

And it’s been long enough that I don’t trust my memories of the first book. I don’t think it read like a weird mash-up of a Mark Millar story and a parody of a Mark Millar story, but this one definitely does. (At least to me, this many years later.) The main character is still an Everyman, subcategory Dull Ordinary Bloke, and there’s still a big conspiracy that runs the world or something, but this time it all seems to be more specific and moving forward. (My memory of the first book was that it threw that hero, one Benton “Bags” Bagswell right into the deep end and just had complications run around him for about two hundred pages until the book hit something like an ending.)

So there’s a guy called “the Face of History” — literal, actual guy, also the personification of history — and Bags is having prophetic dreams in which he’s told to find and kill that guy to take his place, driven by some female supernatural entity that I don’t think is ever named here but whose job seems to be lining up losers to kill the Face of History about every sixty years or so.

The Face has massive secret societies devoted to him around the world — well, secretly devoted to him, since most of the devotees don’t actually know that. And there are what seems to be an equally large group of equally crazy, equally secret societies headed by people who know the Face exists and want to depose and/or kill and/or replace and/or subvert him.

So Bags and his hot redheaded bespectacled super-competent girlfriend Victoria have been wandering around, trying to join looney groups in hopes that will get them close to The Face. It hasn’t been working particularly well, but Bags has gotten to drink a lot of beer, so it’s not all lost. But the sequence of events that starts at the beginning of this book sends them through some new organizations, and finally to The Face. Also, Bags’s secret dream-fairy finally realizes how stupid he is and tells him explicitly what she wants him to do.

Again, this all seems like either a rejected Mark Millar story, circa 2007, or someone’s idea of a parody of a Mark Millar story, only it would need to be, y’know, actually parodic at some point. Instead, it’s adventurous in a manner that’s serious about half the time and absolutely unable to be taken seriously the rest of the time.

Look, this clearly isn’t a deathless classic of comics: I knew that going in. But I didn’t expect to be this confused at the end….

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

Everyone gets older, in any world that tries to be real. Most comic-book worlds don’t try — how old is Peter Parker now? And how old was he in 1966?

Jaime Hernandez’s comics world is real — or as real as it wants to be, with only minor occasional eruptions of superheroes and prosolar mechanics. And that world tends to move in forward in time in fits and starts: there will be a clump of stories with his characters at one point in their life, coming out over two or five or six years but covering maybe a month or two of their lives, and then the next clump will begin after that, with another few years passed almost without noticing.

That’s how we live in our own lives — at least how I do. Everything seems to be basically the same for a while, with years that are all pretty much the same rhythms, and then you look up and everything is suddenly different.

Esperanza  collects comics from the second Love and Rockets series, from roughly 2000 through 2007. I could say that this book sees the focus snap back to Maggie and Hopey — which is semi-true, since there’s a long story sequence for each of them here — after the stories in Penny Century, which spread further out into the cast. But Ray D. is just as prominent here as he was in Penny Century: there, he was mooning over Penny; here’s he’s in a complicated relationship with “the Frogmouth,” a stripped named Vivian who also seems to have an unrealized crush on Maggie. Penny herself doesn’t show up as often this time out, true: she drops in and out of the Locas world regularly over the years, as if only visiting it from her own, more glamorous and exciting universe.

And there’s two major new characters here, both younger than the aging Locas: Vivian “the Frogmouth” and Angel Rivera, whose name we’re not actually told directly at any point. So Maggie is still the center of this world — Vivian has something like a crush on her; Ray D. is still semi-obsessed with her; Angel lives in the apartment complex she manages; and we all know about Hopey — but it’s a large world, full of people with cross-connections.

Esperanza starts off with the ten-part story “Maggie,” only briefly interrupted by a Ray D. appearance. That’s more reductive than the book really is, though: all of the stories in Esperanza are telling the same overall story. Some are Maggie stories, some are Hopey stories, some are Ray D. stories, and some even more exotic, but these are all people in the same circle and the stories are all placed in time. It’s all one piece in the end: it all comes together.

Maggie is still managing that broken-down apartment complex in LA, blonde and chubby in what’s probably her early forties. She’s still sabotaging herself, still helping Izzy manage with her minor-author fame, still circling Hopey, who is tending bar nearby and working in some kind of office. (If there was ever any explanation of what Hopey did for close to ten years in that office with Guy Goforth, I missed it.)

Vivian — a bombshell of a woman of twenty-five or so who generates trouble just by being in the vicinity — is the motivating force for most of what happens in Esperanza. She dates Ray D.; she almost has an affair with Maggie; she’s caught up in various low-life gangsters and ex-boyfriends who don’t realize they’re ex. And she can spark a fight just by standing there.

The rest of the plot is set in motion by Hopey’s old enemy Julie Wree, whose mean-girl circle is still intact, still more successful than our heroines, and running a popular public-access TV show, where Izzy appears once and Vivian is the “ring girl,” coming through boxing-style in a bathing suit holding large cards.

Well, there’s a lot of incidents here that aren’t set in motion by anything in particular. Hernandez’s characters are restless and unsatisfied and rarely happy with themselves — and that drives them to do a lot of what they do, in this book and in all of his other work.

The back half of Esperanza semi-alternates stories about Vivian and Ray D.’s messy relationship with the “Day By Day With Hopey” series. Hopey is studying to be a teacher’s assistant — we don’t see her do much studying, but we see her leave the old office job and start the new job — and it looks like she’s finally growing up, finally leaving behind the reflexive shit-stirring that was so central to her early punk personality. (You can see Vivian as the same kind of person, only more so: Hopey fomented chaos deliberately, Vivian is an endless source of chaos in herself.) But she’s also having a slow break-up with her live-in girlfriend Rosie while flirting with saying “I love you” to Maggie, chasing the cute girl fitting her for glasses and having a friends-with-benefits thing going on with yet another woman, Grace.

This is a world: these people all know each other. Some of them like each other, some of them love each other, some of them want to fuck each other, some of them want to kill each other. Actually, “some” in the previous sentence might be understating it: the thing about Hernandez’s cast is that they all feel like that to all of the rest of them, more or less, at different times. (Except Julie Wree: everyone hates that bitch.) Epseranza has stories from the time when some of them are starting to think that they might be getting a little to old to be this crazy all the time.

Maybe they’re right. But I also notice that Hernandez has been bringing in newer, younger women all of the time — Gina and Danita previously, Vivian and Angel most prominently here — so that, if his old cast ever does grow up too much, he has more Locas to keep it all going.

I wouldn’t worry about that: nobody ever really grows up. We just get old, faster than we expected. And we’re all still crazy: that’s why we read Jaime Hernandez, to show us the ways we are, so we can laugh and recognize our own craziness.

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