Tagged: comics

Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get…let me say “fussy”…in his designs – he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I’ve occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals – it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books – they’re books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd’s instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book – much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts  – and that’s the point of the book. It’s a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What’s Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist’s widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the “Wimpy Kid” creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words – or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz’s captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn’t have a formal organizational principle for the book – it’s roughly chronological by phases of Schulz’s career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there’s a lot of ancillary materials – comic books and magazine covers, games and toys – as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn’t take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it’s harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work – otherwise you just read the work. But if you’ve dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

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

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I’m also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I’ll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights  was Guy Colwell’s new graphic novel this year – his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people’s comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He’s in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he’s a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren’t known but aiming to be realistic or plausible – this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it’s most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it’s about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell’s telling, Bosch was a visionary painter – literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell – and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting – more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town – the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That’s what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then – in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead – being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It’s a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting – Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide – that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time – and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn’t overdramatize the conflicts; they’re mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell’s art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern – a major benefit for this work – and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it’s one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it’s about. It’s a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it’s a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

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

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

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Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK – it’s the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that’s the actual title.

I don’t know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks’ 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy . But it’s the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She’s big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she’s been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years – and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn’t focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don’t know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could – wait, I mean should – lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix – how she’s no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing – and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, – and they happened quite a lot – both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it’s all Alix’s fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and “where this violence came from.” Um, one – hockey, and two – sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing…which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg – who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay’s boyfriend, though this plot point doesn’t really become important – through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and ’80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he’s never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn’t have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra’s friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he’s only dated boys in highschool. (He’s actually one of these modern “I don’t want to put labels on it” kind of person who is not “bisexsual” even though he admits he’s attracted to both boys and girls – and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it’s impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to live and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There’s also an undercurrent of “what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?” Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories – Alix’s mom is a “Canadian-famous” sculptor who went strongly against her own parents’ wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix’s birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra’s mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix’s mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn’t see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents’ “it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!” arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother’s boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the “he’d be more than happy to kiss her, too” thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there’s too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there’s not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient – such as Alix’s father’s location and the ease of contacting him – when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was – maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is – Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well – but there’s more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

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

Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, & various artists

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Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram’s horns. I know why, they know why – we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I’m just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1  is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology , a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain’t much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it – here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people – Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski – drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it’s the modern world and we can’t have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I’ll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it’s exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book , for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story – this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together – they’re individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell’s adaptations, it’s very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like “exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram’s horns” as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That’s entirely valid, too.)

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

Why Are You Like This? by Meg Adams

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One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things – single-panels, mostly disconnected from each other – sold them individually to magazines or other outlets, but cartoonists all wanted to come up with a concept they could turn into a strip: a concept that supported a stream of stories, with new entries regularly, probably multi-panel. And some larger organization would back that strip, push it out into the world, gather the money, and keep the whole engine running for decades.

But, these days, even the most successful recent new strips of the 21st century – aside from a very few newspaper launches like Crabgrass – are all webcomics. On the positive side, that means the creator owns it all. On the negative side, the creator has to do it all: build a website, design and source merchandise and reprint books, run fundraisers, set up advertising, and everything else that actually brings in revenue on top of just creating the work.

And it may be a cliché, but cartoonists are not generally known for their organizational skill, entrepreneurial zeal, and eagerness to sell their work to other people. On the other hand, we have been getting a lot of interesting strips from good cartoonists, so the system seems to be working…but I suspect there’s an element of “young cartoonist has enough energy and gumption to set it up and run it for a few years, then gets ground down by the lack of stable cash flow and aforementioned late-stage capitalism.”

Because I want to see cartoonist have long, complex, interesting careers. If they can do that in high-profile ways, so I don’t have to take a lot of time and effort to chase their work down, that would be even better, because I am lazy.

These thoughts are brought to you today by What Are You Like This? , the first collection of the ArtbyMoga online strip by Meg Adams, a talented younger cartoonist from the Pacific Northwest. The book is from Andrews McMeel, the book-publishing arm of one of the surviving major comics syndicators, so she’s somewhat plugged into what used to be the big engine of comics success. But ArtbyMoga strips originally appear on Adams’s social media, cast out for free into the world in hopes that will lead to engagement and clicks and eyeballs and merch sales and Ko-Fi tips and so forth. (There is something inherently Underpants Gnomes-esque about modern webcomics, particularly those that live on Instagram. To editorialize briefly, it’s what happens when you let your economy be dominated by techbros who are really good at making sure most of the potential money in any system comes to them and them alone.)

But I’m supposed to be writing here about Meg Adams comics! She’s got a energetic, expressive cartoony style, with big fat confident lines and great faces. Her work is in the roughly autobio area – I won’t assume how much the “Meg” and “Carson” in her strips really map to her real self and husband; comic exaggeration is a thing that exists – and her strips are pretty domestic, grounded in the lives of this couple and their various animals (I think two dogs and three cats).

I particularly like how Adams draws herself. She has a conventionally pretty version of her face she does some of the time, for quieter, more normal moments. But she also has a more distorted, cartoony self that pops up a lot – see the cover, with that weird thin nose, distorted eyes, and unsettling mouth. I’m always impressed by humorists (in comics or out of it) who are confident enough to throw a Gookie and make themselves the butt of the joke, and Adams does that really well.

So I want you to support Meg Adams, and cartoonists like her. Read their comics, buy and read their books, buy T-shirts if you can, buy sketches or whatever if it strikes your fancy. Click like and subscribe, as they say. You can start with this book: it’s out now, it’s very funny, and it’s pretty cheap, too. Thank me later.

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

Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I’ve always been a fan of complication – especially if it’s complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood…well, that’s the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn’t even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they’re married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives – no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc’s severance from the job he didn’t want and Julia’s recent grant – where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months – maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami  is Cejas’s first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer’s eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have – Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean “meat” or “bread.”)

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of – and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do – and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn’t expect. That’s a life, and the joy in reading about other people’s lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas’s careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer’s eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

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

Bogart Creek, Vol. 1 by Derek Evernden

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Names are not unique: I need to remind myself of that every so often. Today I have a book of comics from a small Canadian publisher called Renegade Arts Entertainment, and, at first I thought, “Renegade? Surely it’s not the same one?”

It’s not. The Renegade I was thinking of – Renegade Press, the mid-80s enterprise from Deni Loubert – shut down more than thirty years ago. This is a newer company, founded in 2008, that publishes comics, graphic novels and audiobooks out of Canmore, Alberta. So it’s mildly amusing there were two comics publishers from Canada with sort-of the same name, but there was a good twenty years between them, and they were from close to opposite ends of that large country.

What I saw from Renegade Arts is the first collection of Derek Evernden’s single-panel comic Bogart Creek  – from looking at the Renegade site, I see there are two more collections.

The book isn’t clear on where these comics originally appear – there is a Bogart Creek site that Evernden runs, but it’s mostly a contact-me and buy-my-books operation; it’s not a home for new comics. My guess is that possibly there’s a newspaper or three where they occasionally appear, and/or that Evernden just posts them on Instagram . In any case: he’s been doing this for a few years now, and has built up a body of work.

It’s pretty consistent: dark humor with more gore than most of us would expect in a single panel, full of dark wordplay and distinctive ideas. I don’t know if I’d say there’s anything obviously Canadian about it, but it does seem like the work of someone likely to get stuck snowbound on a frozen dark prairie more than once in any given year.

I do mean dark humor, though: Evernden’s jokes are about death, in one way or another, a good third of the time. It’s often zippy, amusing moments before the inevitable death that he cartoons about, but, still: death. Lots of it. And plenty of big black splotches where something violent and final just happened.

Bogart Creek is one of the many single panels that follow Far Side – “weird” humor has tended to go that direction for the past two or three decades. It is distinctively its own thing while also sitting solidly in that tradition, if you know what I mean: it might not have existed without Far Side to show that this was a viable medium, but Evernden’s ideas and jokes are very different from Larson’s.

I hesitate to recommend Bogart Creek widely, but it is funny. Evernden has a distinctive point of view and makes good gags. He’s also a working illustrator, and you can see that in his work: his style is mostly consistent, but he mixes up his look a bit to suit particular jokes. If you like dark humor, check out Bogart Creek.

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

Adulthood Is a Gift! by Sarah Andersen

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So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen’s comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth , Fangs , Big Mushy Happy Lump , Herding Cats , Cryptid Club , and Oddball . That’s always fun – discovering a new creator and reading all the way out to the walls – but, unless the person you suddenly love is Wodehouse or Simenon, there’s only going to be so many books, and you’ll find the end.

And then you’re in the same place as all of the older fans – waiting for the next book.

Andersen had a new book this fall, the confusingly-titled Adulthood Is a Gift!  It is not, as I first thought, a gift-book edition of Myth; it’s not a repackaging of Myth at all. It’s two-thirds a brand-new “Sarah’s Scribbles” collection and one-third prose-and-comics retrospective of her career to date. It’s somewhere between a tenth and fifteenth anniversary celebration – the first book was in 2016, her first cartoon published online was in 2011. But why should we have to wait for round numbers?

(Parenthetically, as a Marketing Guy, I would have argued against having a book with a title so similar to an existing book, especially with the “crossed-out” title style. My bet is that sales on this one will be slightly disappointing, just because at least some people will be confused and think they already have this. On the other hand, creators typically hate Marketing Guy, and I do understand why.)

The new stuff is prime mature Andersen: goofy gags, largely about cats and introversion and how your body parts start to betray you much, much earlier in your life than you expect. There’s about a hundred of those, in her precise minimalist style – seeing her older work later in the book really emphasizes how clean and funny her line has gotten over the years. (Down to the little things: her people’s eyes are usually just a little off – too big, absolutely, and also just a hair wall-eyed all the time.)

The older material is presented as “essays and images” – Andersen shows an old comic, and then writes about it. Sometimes it’s about who she was at the time, and what she was trying to do; sometimes it’s about how the outside world caused trouble, as when she was attacked and harassed systematically by a group of online neo-Nazis in 2017.

So this is maybe for Andersen’s fans more than her other books – at least for people who don’t mind reading about process and thinking about how art is made. She’s got impressive chops, and is insightful at writing about how she got to where she is now, too. So, if you like funny cartoons about Millennials, or hope to someday make your own funny online cartoons, Adulthood Is a Gift! could give you enjoyment and/or pointers.

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

Nancy Wins at Friendship by Olivia Jaimes

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Nancy Wins at Friendship  is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy , came out less than a year later – in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things “the kids” buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that “kids these days” are different. So that’s not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk deeper into its own dull mix of sappy sentimentalism and incongruous good-girl art, and there was no serious hope that a legacy strip – especially one so closely identified with its creator, Ernie Bushmiller, and his mania for simple, precise gags – would break out of the straitjacket of the syndicate’s hand and ever do anything interesting.

We were wrong. Unlike so many things this last decade or so, we we actually wrong by being too pessimistic, so Nancy is one small hopeful lesson for the world. Nancy was rejuvenated by a younger, female, pseudonymous creator – we still don’t know who “Olivia Jaimes” really is, though it mostly doesn’t matter; whatever she did before, this Nancy is her best-known and probably most-sustained work – first as a big signpost to say “this is going to be different now.”

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But the “Sluggo Is Lit” era – awesome as it was – settled down. That wasn’t what Jaimes was planning to do, long-term: it was more of a clean break from the Gilchrist years, a way to grab attention and draw a line in the sand, to say her Nancy would be over here from now on.

This book shows what Jaimes wanted to focus Nancy on: still smart gags every day – she’s enough of a fan of Bushmiller that isn’t negotiable – but embedded in a more realistic modern world, with the phones and tech (and, yes, some language from the kids) that the early strips made such a point of. But Jaimes also added a new supporting cast around Nancy in school – friends, teachers supportive and struggling, a rival – to widen out this world.

It’s a more grounded strip, as odd as that might seem from the first few months. More grounded than Gilchrist, more grounded than Bushmiller, frankly: Bushmiller was always a minimalist, paring everything down to a single focused gag in each individual strip, and happy to throw away all continuity and consistency to make that day’s gag better. Jaimes’s aims are slightly different: she still has Nancy as a self-centered, appetite-driven little kid, but the fact that she’s smart and clever and good at working out quirky ideas – all traits core to her since the beginning – are more important, and connect to this mostly normal school life.

So Nancy, improbably, became largely a kids-in-school strip, about lessons and robotics club and rivalries with the other elementary schools. This is the book collecting the strips where that largely happened: this is the middle of that twist. It’s a good strip, still full of fun gags, though Jaimes is much fonder of the ironic verbal reversal than Bushmiller’s more visual eye.

I hope there are more books of Nancy; a lot has happened since the strips collected here. This one is largely a how-do-we-do-school-during-pandemic time-capsule at this point; I wonder why that was the book Andrews McMeel put out in 2023, but I suppose they figured they need to stay in order or the pandemic strips will just be too disjoint to ever use. But there are two Olivia Jaimes collections, which is pretty good: I recommend both of them, in the right order.

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

Moebius Library: The Art of Edena by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

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I don’t want to say “art of” books always come out as line extensions after a creator has died and can’t produce new work, but…it’s pretty darn common.

This book, for example: The Art of Edena , part of the vague “Moebius Library” (which seems to be primarily, if not entirely, posthumous itself). It was assembled in 2018 and credited to Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who had died in 2012. It also lists “Commentary by” Isabelle Giraud (his widow) and Moebius Production, which I suspect is the actual entity that assembled this stuff, signed publishing contracts, checked proofs, and so forth.

It is, as the title implies, an art book related to his graphic novel series The World of Edena  – it has four short comics stories set in that world, plus a bunch of paintings, some rough pages, and more than a little text by someone clearly not Moebius about how awesome he was and how special and wonderful his characters Stel and Atan are in these stories.

Luckily, it’s the kind of art book that is mostly art, and the art is presented clearly and well on large pages. The text is a bit much, particularly for those (like me) who think the Edena stories are goofy and weirdly lumpy, lurching from one Moebius obsession to another as they were created over a few decades, and not actually reaching a solid ending, either. But you have to assume that the marketing entity set up to exploit a dead creator’s work will consider him the best things since spreadable cream cheese, so we just roll with it.

As usually, I find Moebius’s art lovely, detailed, and particular while finding his ideas often second-hand, sophomoric, and faintly embarrassing. The stories here – I don’t want to claim much; they are short and may be the main selling point but are not a majority of the book – are mostly wordless, which is always a big plus for Moebius.

Potentially positive: this book explains the plots of the Edena books in greater clarity than the books themselves did – at least to me, when I read them. So it does function as a solid companion to the series.

So, all in all, this is a nice book, of most interest to big Moebius fans obviously, with a lot of striking art and a fair bit of broad claims that the reader (if anything like me) will not entirely be able to swallow. Again: a posthumous “art of” book; that’s what to expect.

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

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