I’ve said this before – multiple times – but a reading life goes through various odd turns and stages. Creators that you think of as being current favorites can have multiple books that you expect to get to “later,” are for different audiences, or that you just never see.

And suddenly you realize it’s been a decade since you read a James Kochalka graphic novel.

When my kids were younger, I read a bunch of his books for kids – with and to them, or passed on to them after – but that petered out when they were in their mid-teens; Kochalka’s books for younger readers tended (at least then; we’ve just established I’m thoroughly outdated on his current career) to the younger end. And I read his American Elf diary comics, until those ended. (In fact, the last Kochalka book I covered here was the collection of the earliest American Elf strips.)

So when I saw a Kochalka book in my library app – one for teens, mostly, rather than little kids – I decided a decade was already too long to go without Kochalka.

Mechaboys  is tonally closer to Superf*ckers than to the kid books, though even his work for little kids gets a bit snotty and rude – Kochalka, I think, is an old-school punk, and his characters are brash and pushy and in-your-face no matter what the story. It’s the story of two high school seniors, Zachery (who wants to be called Zeus) and Jamie (who wants to be called James). They just built a mech suit in their garage – Zachery is living with Jamie and his widowed mom for not-entirely-specified problems-with-his-family reasons – out of what seems to mostly be an old lawnmower.

Because this is a Kochalka comic, the mech suit basically works – it makes the wearer bigger and stronger and tougher, though it does need to be started with a pullstring, because former lawnmower.

Our heroes are bullied in school – well, some jock-types pick on them for being weird and different, but it’s fairly low-key for bullying in a graphic novel for teens. The jocks are jerks rather than assholes, basically: just about as thoughtless and impulsive and destructive as our heroes, only in different ways. Still, it’s a huge pain for the guys, and they want to get even or win out or whatever – all those outsider “we’ll show them” ideas.

The mech suit has multiple outings: crashing into a car, visiting a keg party at Booger’s Hollow, and eventually disrupting the prom. But things don’t go quite the ways either Zachery – the more alienated and angry and violent of the two – or Jamie – who thinks a girl in their class might like him, and wants to figure that out – expect. There are fights, including a huge mostly joyful free-for-all at the prom at the end. 

This is a quick, fun story that takes unexpected twists all the time, in Kochalka’s mature cartooning style, all rubber-hose characters with rounded organic black lines. It reminded me how much fun Kochalka’s work is, and how I really shouldn’t have gone without it for so long.

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

This third collection of the Macanudo daily strip – by the Argentinian cartoonist known as Liniers – is in the same style and closely follows the first two books, Welcome to Elsewhere and Optimism Is For the Brave . So, normally, I would struggle to say something different here, when the underlying work is the same kind of thing – more penguins, elves, Olga and her boy, Henrietta and her cat, two witches, Mysterious Man in Black, and so forth.

But I read this book two weeks ago, before a major vacation (my first getaway vacation in about five years), so I would already struggle to remember or think of things to write about it. And having a built-in excuse that comes with links to two long posts about basically exactly the material in this book gives me the warm and fuzzies, this morning when a major snowstorm threatens to drop six or more inches later in the day.

All that is to say: this post about Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin  will be short and vague. Jump into those links above for a lot more about Liniers, his thoughtful comic strip Macanudo, and all of the various (mostly separate) casts that appear in it.

Way of the Penguin was published in mid-December; I read it at the end of January. It’s still essentially brand-new, as you read this. Macanudo is – not quite paradoxically, but something in that territory – both one of the most positive and one of the most intellectual strips out there. Linier’s characters read serious books and think serious thoughts…though often in silly ways. They engage with the physical and the intellectual world without excuse or minimizing. And they’re also almost always happy and energetic, no matter what they’re doing or what odd landscape they’re traipsing through. (Even the witches, who are most likely to encounter townspeople with torches and those Frankenstein rakes, are at worst bemused by it.)

Again: this strip was fully-formed and mature before it even appeared in the English language in the US in 2018; Liniers had been doing it in Spanish for an Argentinian audience since 2002. His art is soft and organic – it looks like watercolors, or maybe colored pencils over ink, to my eye (though, knowing the little I do about the coloring of newspaper strips, I don’t know if that can actually be the case). This is often billed as an modern version of Calvin and Hobbes, since it also has a couple of imaginative children in prominent roles, but Macanudo is more centrally about major (I don’t want to say “adult”) ideas and thoughts. It has plenty of whimsy, but not the same kind of whimsy – there’s an underlying regard for knowledge and truth and understanding here.

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