Tagged: Reviews

Thinking About Thinking by Grant Snider

thinking20about20thinking-9701532

I didn’t think Grant Snider made comics quickly enough to put out a book every year – he’s a working orthodontist, as I always find a way to fit in when I write about his work, since it’s such a highly-skilled, well-paid, and useful career and yet anti-glamorous and low profile at the same time – but this one came less than a year after the last one. So he may be more productive even than I give him credit for.

If I call Snider a cartoonist of introspection and hard-fought positivity, that might sound like spinach, or like the kind of thing you’d find in the New Age store next to the singing bowls and horrible incense. But he is, and his work is much better, more grounded, than that description might imply. Maybe because he’s from Kansas City: there’s an inherently Midwestern sensibleness and focus on real, everyday life in his work. Snider never feels like he’s intellectualizing, even as he does entire books about poetry (last year’s Poetry Comics ) or creativity (The Shape of Ideas ) or even the potentially-pretentiously titled The Art of Living . All his work is personal – often because he has his self-insert character at the middle of his comics, but even his other characters walk that difficult line between Everypeople and particular.

Thinking About Thinking , like several of Snider’s books, is “organized” by a single exemplary comic up front, which provides chapter titles into which everything else slots. In this case, it’s a single page headed “I think, therefore…” with nine panels of different endings to that sentence, from “I overthink” to “I am.” Each one of those panels turns into a half-title for a section of the book, with thematically related comics afterward.

It’s all thematically related, of course: the overall theme is, like so much of Snider’s work, those intertwined desires: to be happy, to do meaningful things in our lives, to be better, to be present, to be authentically ourselves, to just be without twisting ourselves into knots along the way with all of those desires. This time out, the focus is on thinking, mostly overthinking, given those themes and modern life in general.

Snider’s little figures, especially that author-insert and the others drawn to that scale, always remind me of R.O. Blechman – Snider has the same energy and looseness, his people equally able to go anywhere and do anything within their little boxes. He uses color well, usually just a few within a single strip, and his palette shifts by his subject matter – I’ve mostly seen him use flat, comic-style colors, but he also does watercolor-looking strips and some newer pieces with color gradients in the backgrounds.

You have to be willing to be positive to read Snider’s comics, to be willing to want to be better and to want to connect with other people and the world. That may be a big ask these days, especially for the kind of people who are defined by their own anger and hatred. I would like to think Snider’s work can help put people into the right mood and mindset, but I know the world is far too full of people who are never introspective, never thinking about the consequences of their actions, never concerned with other people at all. But that’s just yet another way that this world, and living in it, is difficult and painful…and, nevertheless, worth it. That’s what Snider’s work is all about, in the end: how to live in the world well, even with all the obstacles the world and ourselves throw up. That’s heroic in its way, and deeply necessary, and entirely admirable. Thinking About Thinking is another fine collection of work in that project.

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

version-1-0-0-19

Naked City by Eric Drooker

version-1-0-0-18

Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it’s often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book – the ones that make me think, “wait, well if she can do X, then Y can’t be true.”

So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker’s 2024 graphic novel Naked City  trying to square one very minor circle in my head, and failing. You see, the main character is Isabel, a young wannabe singer-songwriter who moves to New York to chase her art. Her mother was Mexican, and was deported when she was young; her father an American who has recently died. One thread of the book is Isabel’s worry that she’s undocumented – the book never makes it quite clear, but she apparently doesn’t have any paperwork of any kind.

Leave aside the fact that she went to school, where the usual  functionaries would have demanded and received all kinds of proof of her existence and residence and medical history and whatnot. But Drooker has Isabel take a quick European tour right in the middle of the worry about her potentially-undocumented status. And I kept asking myself: does Drooker think, or want his audience to think, that anyone can fly off to another continent, and work there for an extended period of time, without a passport? That plot element – which is totally extraneous, by the way; Drooker could have made it a West Coast thing with no change to the narrative at all – proves that she must have documentation, or it couldn’t have happened.

This is not important to the book at all. It didn’t need to be that way. But it’s the kind of element that makes me question every strength of the book, every moody blue panel and every allusive line of dialogue, wondering if they’re as randomly rickety in their own ways.

Naked City is somewhat fabulistic, which could be the answer to that question – and the one of why Isabel never even tried to look for that lost mother, or know her mother’s name. Fables are focused on telling their specific story, in a particular story-teller way, and details only come up as they support that work.

So Isabel goes to New York, looking to make music and share it with people. She gets a lousy McJob (literally) and busks on the corner, but needs to also do something more remunerative. So she answers an ad to work as an artist’s model, for an unnamed painter who is another of our main characters – the fable here is about making art, and he’s the other side of that equation.

Normally, in a fable, there would be a strong distinction between the two – one is lazy but successful, the other driven but a failure, that kind of thing. Drooker, though, isn’t constructing this explicitly as a fable with a specific moral: both of our central artists are positive, and both become notably successful in their art as the book goes on…though both have to deal with one Business Person, the gatekeeper to success, who isn’t as positive and artsy as they are. (Isabel’s Business Person, as is typical for the music industry, is vastly worse: predatory and demanding and actively molding her into something she doesn’t want to be.)

There are two other main characters. First is Alex, a flighty dancer who “dates” Isabel for a while and dips in and out of the narrative, mostly there (I think) to be the avatar of a certain type of young hedonic artist, living for sensation and totally in the moment. Turning up later in the book is another unnamed man, older, maimed, a former window-washer and probably currently homeless – he’s the unexpectedly philosophical voice of experience, stoic and accepting. He’s not an artist of any kind, but he used to be a craftsman of a sort, taking pride in doing his work well, and now is almost a nihilist, insisting that life is only about the pursuit of money but (maybe paradoxically) refusing to actually do that himself.

Naked City is the kind of book where characters suddenly launch into detailed explanations of their own motivations and desires; it’s about Art and Life and features people who think in those capital-letter terms at great length. Isabel mostly pours it out in her songs, which makes her the most naturalistic character – and that’s good, because she’s central and gets the most page-time. The Painter engages in the most obvious why-art conversations, with just about every other character; I don’t know if Drooker specifically thought of him as an author stand-in, but he tends in that direction. Alex, and the band of similar folks that follow along with him for a few scenes  – because it’s no fun being a hedonist alone – are more shallow, entirely about the moment and sensation above all.

It’s a fairly long book, over three hundred pages, but mostly leisurely – Isabel and The Painter rise in their respective creative worlds, in their different ways, and then things change, for both of them, and they make other artistic choices. It ends better for one of them than the other: I don’t know if Drooker had a moral in mind, but if he did, it doesn’t entirely become clear. To be fair, Drooker’s comics have typically been more imagistic, and he ends this book in his old silent mode, with a forty-page wordless sequence largely framed by snow.

I tend to think Naked City gets too specific too much for its own good – the talky bits are more specific, and less successful, than the pure-image sections. Isabel’s past and parents are a distraction: Drooker wants to show she launched from a specific place, but where she launched from isn’t central to this story. The Painter is more iconic, because we know less about him: he’s there, he’s been painting for years. We know what he wants and cares about and loves: what’s important.

But this is the kind of book that will be most loved and clutched to heart by other wanna-be artists, who will see themselves in all of the arguments about art and commerce, selling out and rising up, who will passionately agree with specific speeches – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some panels or lines from Naked City turned into tattoos before too long; it’s that kind of book. If you’re in that bucket, you should take a look at it: it is deep and capacious, and will give you language to talk about things you care about and examples to frame your thinking.

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

Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 by Greg and Fake

santos20sisters201-2536648

The single-name thing seems to have leapt from Eurocomics and landed on North American shores – well, we’ve always had it in other fields, like music (Cher! Madonna!), but comics-makers are embracing it as well. I may be concerned that our Strategic Name Reserve is in danger of being depleted – there aren’t that many regular forenames, though if we allow variants and standard nouns, we’re in much better shape – but I am still not, despite all my demands, the High Lord of All English Usage, so all I can do is Canute it up here.

I don’t know what arbitration mechanism is available if there’s, say, a Belgian who goes by “Greg” and a North American who does the same – it seems like the kind of thing that could easily happen – but, again, I have not been granted the awesome power I keep asking for, so I guess it’s not my problem.

In any case, Belgians, the name Greg has officially been claimed (by a guy from Chicago, as I understand it), so you snoozed and I suppose you lost. The name Fake has also been claimed (by a guy from Manzanillo, Mexico), but that’s probably less in-demand. And they have teamed up, like Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom, over the past few years to make a comic called Santos Sisters.

The first collection of that comic was published a couple of months ago, under the fairly obvious title Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 . From online descriptions – not the book itself – I learn that Fake is the writer and Greg is the artist. The book collects the first five issues of the series, plus a few odds and ends, though not the covers of those five issues, which seems like an odd and unusual choice. The back cover also gives, for what might be the first time: their fabulous superhero origin. (They found medallions on the beach that granted them superpowers from a goddess, Madame Sosostris.)

Santos Sisters is basically a mash-up of vaguely ’90s superhero elements – more early-Image than anything else, big bulky guns and all – with Archie-style storytelling, all in a mildly mocking tone that regularly spells things incorrectly in dialogue, I think deliberately. Alana and Ambar are sisters – we can call their last name Santos, but that’s probably not right – who are probably in their early 20s, since they seem to live in an apartment, but they get up to Archie-ish teen hijinks with boyfriends and dates.

Alana is the serious one, Betty-coded, with lighter skin, smaller breasts and the blue outfit. Ambar is the party girl in red, Veronica-coded and always ready for action of whatever type. They fight crime in the Southern California city of Las Brisas, the kind of place that has a vibrant downtown and a beach and is close enough to ski slopes for a day trip – a location designed for comics stories.

Their stories are short, in that Archie style. Sometimes about battling some supervillain threatening Las Brisas, but as often watching “Boozy Bees” on TV, or squabbling about dating two guys at once, or going camping in the mountains, or aiding Don Quixote (?!) who has randomly arrived in town (??!?). The word “random” is appropos much of the time, as are “quirky” and “slightly silly.” Again, it’s all starting from the premise “what if these Archie-style girls were Image-esque superheroines?”

Their powers are not deeply defined: they have costumes, of course, which manifest when they call on the goddess. They’re probably resistant to harm, since that’s pretty standard, and they do seem to glow when in costume. They definitely fly, and manifest big guns (most of the time) or big swords (once in a while, I suppose for a change of pace) with which to battle their enemies. But it’s not like Alana channels the power of ice and Ambar fire, or one of them turns into an armadillo and the other an ocelot, or their necklaces generate pulsing colorful forcefields in the shape of household objects, or anything like that. They just chase bad guys, squabble among themselves, and shoot their guns to mow down the henchmen. (Major villains get fisticuffs, or talked down, or some other less-lethal activity, so they can return in later stories.)

It’s a fun premise, and hasn’t worn out its welcome yet. It probably will, since it’s not a hugely durable or extensible premise, but a hundred and fifty pages doesn’t get us there. Greg draws it all in that Archie look, and is good at both the heavy-lidded women and the dim-bulb men. Fake’s stories are varied and goofy in interesting ways – there are twenty-two different stories here, and none of them are repetitive or rely on the same ideas. Again, I’m sure that will come: the premise isn’t that deep. But I’d expect probably another book this size of similar stories, then maybe one big all-the-villains-team-up epic, before it hits the wall of ennui.

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

Just Act Normal by John McNamee

just20act20normal-4943241

Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee’s Pie Comics – it’s called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears ; it’s funny; you should read it – I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip’s three collections were available in my library’s app.

Well, sometime over those three years, a second Pie Comics collection popped up there – yclept Just Act Normal  – and I just noticed and read it. In possibly even better news, McNamee has started posting to Tumblr again, with a half-dozen new cartoons this year after a six-year silence.

So the TL;DR for those of you with short attention spans: McNamee is quirky and funny, he’s got a great semi-stick-figure style – a little in the Tom Gauld vein, which is high praise – and there’s the promise of more stuff from him, too. This book is good; the first book is good. (I can’t figure out what the third book’s title is, and suspect it may be a mirage – on the other hand, the book I read, which clearly has Just Act Normal on its pages, has Book Learnin’ as a header/title in the Hoopla app, so maybe that‘s the title of his third book?)

McNamee has the kind of art that’s instantly readable and is much harder to do than it looks. (The fewer the lines, the tougher it is.) And his jokes are wry, sarcastic, modern, and true – he got his start at The Onion, which gives you a sense of the comic sensibility and tradition he mostly works in.

There are no continuing characters; it’s mostly four-panel bits, different every time. You can jump in anywhere. So you might as well.

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

Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary

version-1-0-0-16

Daisy Ashford was real. She was born in 1881, and wrote a cluster of stories in her youth: weird, oddball things with eccentric spelling and an often-shaky grasp on how people actually lived and talked to each other, all bathed in the sunny happiness of a coddled girl of the Victorian age. After she grew up, she rediscovered those stories, and some of them were published around 1919 with the help of J.M. Barrie. There have been periodic revivals and rediscoveries since then; a movie of her most famous “novel,” The Young Visiters, was made by the BBC about twenty years ago. (I know I saw it, but it must have been before the life of this blog.)

Daisy Goes to the Moon  is about Daisy, but not by Daisy. Matthew Klickstein wrote a short novel in Daisy’s style – which seems to me to be the opposite of the point of juvenilia, frankly – and it was published in 2009, full of 1950s imagery and ideas. And now Rick Geary, master of both whimsy and Victoriana, has turned Klickstein’s story into a short graphic novel, full of authentically Daisy-esque spelling and moderately appropriate Daisy-esque situations and comments.

(Daisy herself died in 1972 at the age of 90, so she’s no more going to complain about what people have done to her memory than Shakespeare is.)

This begins with Daisy about the age of nine, when she wrote her most famous works, and dressed up in the usual Victorian-girl look, down to the big bow in her hair. She’s sitting under a tree, Alice-like, when a “rokit” lands nearby. It’s piloted by Mr. Zogolbythm (Mr. Z), a tall, skinny man all in black who comes from the moon, to which he proceeds to whisk Daisy for an adventure.

The story continues somewhat episodically, somewhat along the lines of the usual tour-of-the-future style for utopian works. Daisy experiences the high-tech of the moon – including a “so-you-can-hear-and-read-too” device implanted in her brain to allow her to understand moon language – flees Moon Monsters and creatures from other planets, shops for shoes and goes to an automat, and so on.

Soon, though, another character pops up: Mr. Blahdel (Mr. B) an American time-traveler from the 1950s, lugging a TV that’s missing an important part. B and Z have some mostly minor disagreements, which lead to further adventures when they dispute over the navigation of a spaceship. We also descend into metafiction when Daisy finds a book written by her sister Angie, which retells the first half of the story badly – the bratty Angie has followed Daisy (somehow; this isn’t clear) to the Moon.

And, of course, in the end Daisy gets back home safe and sound, and declares that to the best place to be.

Geary’s art is as detailed and energetic as always; quirkiness and whimsy typically brings out some of his best work, and that’s the case here. I might think that was an odd project, but it’s done as authentically and honestly as it could be, and this is a fun, amusing story.

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

William of Newbury by Michael Avon Oeming

william20of20newbury-1398313

The publisher calls this book “Hellboy meets Redwall,” which hits the major touchpoints, as far as that goes. Yes, fighting supernatural monsters. Yes, medieval times. Yes, anthropomorphic characters. But it’s much more authentically medieval than a reader would expect, in quirky and unusual ways, much more inspired and growing out of actual research than it is a story stuck into that world for vague coolness reasons.

First and most important is that William of Newburgh – “Newbury” is a variation creator Michael Avon Oeming decided to use here – is an actual 12th century monk, and this collection of ghost-fighting stories about a raccoon and his rabbit brother is actually based on the writings of the real person.

Now, Oeming clearly fictionalized some things to turn the historical record The History of English Affairs – an actual book written by the real William covering the period known as The Anarchy when King Stephen and Empress Matilda battled for control of the country (and Normandy) after the unexpected death of Henry I and his heir – into William of Newbury , the collection of the first four comic-book issues of the anthropomorphic William’s adventures. But the bones of the story seem to be much closer to the original than I would have expected.

(For one change, I’m pretty sure the historical human William didn’t have a semi-reformed thief sidekick, Winnie, whom he was teaching to read.)

The four issues tell a continuous story, but each issue is basically one event – each works as an individual issue or story. There’s an encounter with the supernatural each time, plus complications and larger issues.

The supernatural elements are explicitly based in the medieval worldview. The dead do rise, because they are tormented by devils of Satan. The land of faerie exists, and is made up of fiends who want to torment and tempt Christians. 

William, despite the Hellboy comparison and Oeming’s moody Mignola-esque art, is not going to punch any of these creatures. He is going to talk at them, to call on the angels and saints, to use the power of God to force the devils and faeries to leave and the dead to lie still. He has a staff with a cross on it, which he brandishes at the arisen dead – who are nasty and violent and murderous and tossing hellfire at times, too – but what will stop them is not anything violent, but the power of God, possibly channeled or empowered by William’s faith.

(It does work consistently, as we see. Punching would not. This is not a world in which punching evil has any effect.)

The other major theological point, which is an important undertone throughout and becomes central in the fourth issue, is that William and his brother Edward were almost kidnapped by the faeries as children, and that means their souls were stolen and they are doomed to oblivion after death. (Not even hell, as they understand it: their souls are gone, so they will just die.) There’s a hint at the end that this may not be entirely true, and it may be theologically suspect as well – can an immortal soul be stolen? do these pagan spirits have the power to destroy something made by God? – but that, as they say, is probably for the next volume of William of Newbury stories.

William himself is a fascinating, quirky character: devout, scholarly but muscular in his faith, devoted to doing good as he sees it and using his abilities to help those around him. But also scattered and often cheated in everyday things, not necessarily that good at the rough-and-tumble of life – which is understandable for a monk. I think there will be more of these stories, and I hope so: I don’t know how much more of William’s writings Oeming still has to work from, but there’s enough material here for at least another couple of stories of this length.

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

embarrassment20of20wit5ches-2704502

An Embarrassment of Witches by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

embarrassment20of20wit5ches-2329460

This is not a sequel to Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell . It is, though, the only other project I know of by the team behind that webcomic, and it’s set in a world very similar to Darwin Carmichael‘s. It may even be the same world, though not necessarily so.

Darwin Carmichael ran from 2009 through 2013 and then was collected into a book. Sophie Goldstein drew about 90% of it and co-wrote it all, as far as I can tell, and Jenn Jordan drew a few bits and did the other half of the writing.

An Embarrassment of Witches  was a 2020 original graphic novel. This time out, it looks like Goldstein (the professional comics-maker and teacher) did all of the art, but the book is still vague about their roles, so I continue to assume they write it together, in whatever way. (Probably not Marvel Method. My guess would be some variety of co-plotting, with Goldstein maybe doing page breakdowns and then coming back together for dialogue.)

Darwin was set in a modern NYC where everything in myth was true – there were minotaurs on the subway and stoner angels were important to the plot. In Witches, we only see humans, but it’s a world with industrialized, systematized magic – our milieu is the academic world around magic, focused on two young women and their post-graduate lives.

As required in a story about two people, they’re quite different: Rory is impulsive, unsure, flitting from one idea to the next. Angela is driven, focused, serious. And the story is thus mostly about Rory, since she’s more interesting and active.

They’ve both just graduated. Angela is about to start an internship with Rory’s Type A mother, Dr. Audrey Rosenberg. Rory is heading off to work at a dragon sanctuary in Australia with her boyfriend Holden…who, just before getting on the plane, tells her that he wants to open up their relationship to other people. (We get the sense that this sort of thing happens to Rory all the time – she misreads signals, dives into everything headfirst, and gets hurt all the time by everything before bouncing off into something totally different after a big emotional scene.)

So Rory impulsively doesn’t go to Australia, begs Angela to let her stay in the walk-in closet of their apartment – they’ve sublet her room to a guy named Guy for the summer – sells off most of her stuff, and then falls for Guy and decides to follow him into his new Interdisciplinary Magick program. (Every time Rory does something, you can assume the word “impulsively” is there. The narrative doesn’t say she always does this about a boy, but the two cases we see here both fit that pattern.)

Meanwhile, Angela, in a somewhat more low-key manner, is one of six interns working for Dr. Rosenberg (Rory’s mother, again), who is demanding and exacting and apparently has not one iota of human feeling for her employees or family.

They both crash, of course. Angela because she’s been doing the boiling-frog thing, with pressure building up bit by bit probably since she was five, and she just cracks. Rory because that’s what she always does: throws herself into something but only half-asses it, misunderstands other people and doesn’t say what she wants or needs, and then collapses into an emotional wreck when it inevitably breaks apart. 

They yell at each other, they break their friendship…but only briefly, because it’s that kind of story. They also have familiars – I think everyone in this world does, but the familiars are pretty independent and seem to wander off for weeks at a time – who kibitz on their relationship, squabble with each other, and help to mend everything in the end.

It’s a story I’ve seen many times before – you probably have, too. One part quarter-life crisis, one part best friends assuming too much of their relationship. Goldstein and Jordan tell it well, and their quirky, specific world adds a lot of depth and intertest to what could otherwise be a pretty general and bland story. Rory would be deeply annoying in most stories; she’s the kind of person who goes out of her way to step on every damn rake on the ground, over and over again.

In the end, they both move on to things that we think are good for them – at least, we hope so, and it is the end, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s a solid ending, open and forward-looking. I don’t know if we’ll get another story by Goldstein and Jordan set in a world of industrialized magic, but…if we got two, surely there’s no reason there couldn’t be three?

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

version-1-0-0-15

Fortune & Glory: The Musical by Brian Michael Bendis & Bill Walko

version-1-0-0-14

Brian Michael Bendis’s Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory  was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it’s clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical was published at the end of January – I don’t think it was serialized first, which is a little unusual for a book written by a guy like Bendis and published by an outfit like Dark Horse – and it tells a different story of a younger Bendis getting pulled into writing stuff for other creative media. While the first F&G centered on trying to turn his creator-owned early noir GNs into movies – Spoiler alert! it didn’t quite happen, though Bendis got contacts and contracts and some income for a few years and other things eventually did get made – this second one is about one project that we readers might not have known Bendis was ever part of.

The famously…um, troubled Broadway musical of the early Teens, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark [1], had a book attributed to director Julie Taymor, playwright Glenn Berger, and (after a hasty rewrite during previews) playwright and comics scripter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. But it was no secret that other writers, including several comics writers, had been part of the project earlier. And Bendis was one of them, having been pulled in by Marvel head Avi Arad in 2004 to meet with Taymor and, everyone hoped, write the book of this musical.

(The music and lyrics were always going to be by Bono and The Edge of U2, and they were.)

The Musical is written by Bendis and features him as the main character, with roughly the same character design as the Bendis-drawn original F&G. But this time the art is by Bill Walko, with colors by Wes Dzioba and letters by Joshua Reed. It is the story of his involvement with Turn Off the Dark – which is actually pretty short and minor – as well as loosely-related material about his youth and the usual how-I-got-into-comics stuff.

Bluntly, Bendis took a couple of meetings with Taymor (one by phone, one after being flown down to LA), where he was impressed by her energy and passion but reacted really badly to two major pieces of her vision. First, that the musical should end, like a comic book, with a big “To Be Continued!” message – but he thought he could finesse that. Second, and more seriously, that she wanted to change Spider-Man’s origin from the standard radioactive spider-bite, so that instead Peter Parker got his powers by praying to the Greek goddess Arachne.

(That stayed in the final work, more or less, so it clearly was a deal-breaker for Taymor. I’m more surprised that Marvel allowed it; they could have fired her instead and gone with another director. But I suppose this was post-bankruptcy, pre-Iron Man Marvel, a company more willing to take a crazy chance on someone who was well-known and successful in her area of expertise.)

So Bendis wrote up a treatment, and had another meeting to pitch it. He did not include the Arachne origin, and got only about that far into the pitch before Taymor blew up, and Bendis’s involvement in the project quietly ended. (Bendis thought the project ended, and was surprised when the musical popped back up a few years later.)

That, as I hinted above, is only one small thread in The Musical – maybe 15% of the pages at most. It’s not a long story, and not a lot happens. Most of the book is flashbacks to Young Bendis, dewy-eyed and obsessed with comics, bugging people like Walt Simonson and making crappy comics as a teenager and, eventually, forging an indy self-published crime-comics career in his twenties.

I don’t know if anyone will come to The Musical for that story, but, if you’re a Bendis fan, you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s the standard story of a lot of fans-turned-pro, and Bendis tells it with a lot of self-awareness and humor. Walko brings a slightly cartoony, caricatured line that adds energy and big facial expressions to pages with lots of captions and dialogue.

The Musical does not provide much background on Turn Off the Dark; Bendis was only involved briefly and inconclusively several years before it actually happened. But it’s an amusing “creative people are obsessive weirdoes with quick tempers” story, and the rest of the material in the book is at least loosely and vaguely connected to that story.

[1] I actually saw Turn Off the Dark on Broadway with my two kids. Sadly, I saw it after the retool, when it was just kooky and not full-on insane. I  didn’t write about it at the time, and that was fifteen years ago, so all I have are vague memories. It was very technically impressive and full of excellent on-stage talent doing impressive things, but the story was…well, I don’t want to say “a confused mess,” since that would be insulting, but it wasn’t the most clear and understandable thing I’ve ever seen.

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

Sharky Malarkey: A Sketchshark Collection by Megan Nicole Dong

sharky20malarkey-8359676

As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the “Sketchshark” comic – more than that, it’s creator Megan Nicole Dong’s only book to date, and “Sketchshark” was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr , which now uses the book’s title.

On the other hand, she’s got a day-job in animation as a director and storyboard artist (including what looks like three shows this decade, one upcoming for 2027), which probably takes most of her artistic energy and drawing time the last bunch of years.

Sharky Malarkey  feels like one of those “throw in everything to fill up a book” collections, divided into chapters with somewhat different kinds of cartoons. There’s a twenty-page introduction, which I think was new for the book, in which the creator is picked up for a rideshare by her shark character (Bruce), incorporating what may have been a few separate individual strips about Dong’s life and cat. That’s the only major autobio material; Dong doesn’t seem to be the kind of creator who wants to talk about herself.

The first chapter, Malarky, has a bunch of general cartoons  – people on phones, anxiety issues, other life issues and relatable content, and a bunch of comics about butts. (Millennial cartoonists cartoon as much about butts as Boomer-era cartoonists did about tits – though the millennials are more gender-balanced, both the cartoonists and the butts they draw.)

Then we get the Bruce-centric chapter, There’s a Shark in Los Angeles. Bruce is shallow, self-obsessed, and a minor celebrity (at least in his own head). The fact that he is in Los Angeles is definitely not random, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dong started doing this character when she began looking for work in Hollywood. (The book includes some pieces – older, I assume – in which the main character is still in art school, too.)

Next up is Ladythings, which somewhat heads back to the general humor of the first chapter – but focused on physical or cultural issues that are female-coded. (Often in weird ways, because Dong is a cartoonist and they have goofy ideas; there’s a short sequence about prehensile boobs, for example.)

Then comes The Animal + Plants Channel, which is pretty random. For most cartoonists, a chapter about animals would imply pets – dogs and/or cats, depending – but Dong’s work is wilder than that, with a lot of squirrels and horses, plus whales and a few returns of Bruce. And, yes, there are strips about plants as well.

Fifth is A Toad Makes New Friends in the Forest, which starts out as a picture-book-style story and morphs over into more traditional comics as it goes. It’s also an unsubtle racial allegory, and runs into the final section, Some Sort of End, in which Bruce returns for one last time to lead the big kids-movie all-singing, all-dancing ending. (Dong spent most of the first decade of her career making animation for kids – I’m not sure she’s entirely moved beyond that now – and is deeply familiar with the story beats and particular bits of laziness of that genre.)

Dong has an organic, appealing style, with bright colors enclosed by confident black lines all basically the same weight. And her humor is quirky and specific – the jokes and ideas and setups in Sharky Malarkey aren’t derivative, or ever obvious. It would be nice if she had time and energy and enthusiasm to make more comics like this, since her work is so distinctive, but it looks like animation has been taking her creative energy since the book came out – and probably paying much better. But time is long and Hollywood is fickle; who knows what will happen next? Maybe she’ll make more cartoons and be a massive success at something unexpected. 

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

Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings by J.L. Westover

mr-20lovenstein20presents20feelings-8596618

I like to link to webcomics when I can, though these days, it’s weirdly difficult. A lot of creators seem to just post on their normal social media, since that’s where all of the algorithm-driven traffic goes anyway, and running an ad-supported site is basically a hellscape mostly left to the hardy souls who have been doing it for twenty years and have built up calluses in the right places.

So I’m going to talk about Mr. Lovenstein , and that Tapas link seems to be reasonably relevant. But I have no idea if that’s the real home of the strip currently, or if you should just follow the creator, J.L. Westover, on Instagram or somewhere.

The good news is that the Mr. Lovenstein strip is being collected into books, which are slightly easier to point to. (Still: digital or print? Local store or chain or Internet behemoth? As usual, I pick the link that’s most convenient to me.) And one of them is what I just read: Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings , published last fall by the Skybound arm of the mighty Image comics empire. (There was a time when I could remember which Image studio was connected with which original creator, but that was over twenty years ago. I dunno what else Skybound does these days, but, from the indicia, it seems to be the Robert Kirkman shop.)

This is another one of those roughly-ubiquitous strips: you’ve seen Westover’s brightly-colored lumpy figures (and the occasional animal) on the Internet here and there, shared by random contacts and friends, even if you’ve never made an effort to read the strip itself. (I never did, until this book.)

Westover is a generation or so younger than me, so I don’t know if he meant his characters to visually rhyme with the old Mr. Men and Little Miss books for kids. (And other readers might disagree that there’s that much visual similarity, but it seems pretty obvious to me.)  They are cartoony, with fat rounded lines and simplified features – the kind of precise cartooning that looks simple but is unforgiving, where every line needs to be just right. And his comics are all individual gags, with some recurring styles of characters but no obvious continuing characters. These were Internet comics, so they all have “bonus panels” – have to get people to click through to the actual home of the strip – one or two additional, black and white, beats after the main (usually color) three or four-panel comic. Bonus panel comics have an odd rhythm, like a newspaper strip that always has its main punchline in panel 3 and a muted follow-up at the end, but adding jokes to a book of jokes is generally a good thing, so I won’t complain about it more.

This particular collection focuses, as the title says, on feelings – and, in the Mr. Lovenstein context (and just a general funny-comics context) that means big feelings: crying, being upset by the world or by specific things, the desire to be loved and appreciated, some actual love or affection but not much, and a tiny little bit of actual happiness. Westover’s characters are tormented and unhappy, most of the time, but in funny ways, and ways I think are relatable, especially to people closer to his age than mine.

I find the concept of doing themed collections of a webcomic a little gimmicky – the previous Mr. Lovenstein collection was Failure, and it looks like they’ll continue in that vein – but I also remember legions of Garfield Eats Lasagna and Peanuts Baseball Gags and Jeffy Wanders Aimlessly Through the Neighborhood books, so it’s not a new thing, or an unreasonable thing, or a surprising thing. It’s just a little gimmicky, and sometimes you need a gimmick to stand out.

Mr. Lovenstein is, from the comics collected here, more emotionally honest than many gag strips – in that these-young-people-are-always-talking-about-their-mental-health way some people my age like to complain about incessantly – and it’s also pretty funny a lot of the time. And Westover is a fine cartoonist.

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

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks