I re-read a lot of The Sandman last week or so. I skipped a couple parts ('Brief Lives', 'Fables and Nocturnes'), but my favorites are 'The Kindly Ones' and 'The Wake', anyway, so it was fine. I really like how interwoven the characters are - Barbie from 'The Doll's House' reappearing in 'A Game of You', Ken from 'The Doll's House' now in Sandman: Nightmare Country.
I found Sandman: Nightmare Country because I found Sandman Special: Thessaly and needed to know what happened. The ways that DC have tried to lead the reader through these books is very poor. They sent me from Thessaly to Nightmare Country #4 to Dead Boy Detectives, and that is not the reading order at all. The reading order is Nightmare Country, Thessaly, Nightmare Country: The Glass House. Whatever is happening in Dead Boy Detectives I don't know and I don't really want to find out because 1) it's super boring 2) the continuity does not make sense based on the events of the books that actually are telling the story I want to read. One of the things that is terrific about The Sandman is that the writing is great. The story is not always satisfying. It does not always come to an end that is just and wrapped up in a bow and everyone is living happily ever after, but Neil Gaiman tells it in such a way that it doesn't matter. There are a lot of messy stories with messy people, gods, and every kind of being in between, and it's just told so well that it's very real. When I saw that James Tynion IV had written the Thessaly one-shot, I was super excited. I've been reading a lot of his other work and so I knew I was walking into something good. Unfortunately, the art in the Thessaly one-shot is poorly done - the same artist did Nightmare Country #6 and the already sloppy work is even worse in that issue. (Tynion IV also wrote the two Nightmare Country mini-series.) The art for the rest of the two mini-series is mostly well-done, and the cover art is lovely, as seen above. I think it would be difficult for a new reader to fully grasp the storylines in these books, because they're very heavily steeped in the Sandman lore. But for people who know the characters and their origins, it's a terrific tale that is still unfolding - the next installment is coming out in April of 2024. I definitely have a new appreciation for Morpheus' re-made nightmare, Corinthian, and I'm happy to see more of Thessaly and the new incarnation of Dream. I went back and read The Sandman Presents: The Thessaliad as well. I love reading about this clever, calculating witch and how she moves through the world. The thing about bad art is it motivates me to get some work done. So I have been plugging away in the studio, much to the dismay of my sleep schedule. Not sure when I will get the time for the non-Murder of Crows comics I've been thumbnailing in my sketchbook, but we'll get there.
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I love this little joke from Gotham Central #10! I was looking to see if I could get the second installment of Friday (it's out at my brother's library, but not on Hoopla at my library), and when I searched for Ed Brubaker I found this book and read the first eleven issues yesterday. It's really good - Batman sometimes makes a brief appearance, but usually you'll see only his foot or his silhouette as he's making an exit. I really enjoyed the second story arc with the Firebug and the unsolved murder (which also has a great joke): Another thing that I liked about Gotham Central is that it focuses on the Major Crimes Unit (abbreviated as MCU, which my brain always reads now as Marvel Comics Universe, oops), and so when cops from other departments fail to solve a robbery they just say it was Catwoman and then the case gets pushed to the MCU (who knows it wasn't Catwoman). It's a good time, for a police procedural. The art is great, also - when you read a lot of superhero comics, there are a lot of comic book artists who basically draw the same features on everyone and it's up to the colorist for the reader to tell them apart. Michael Lark, however, does a terrific job - different faces, different body types, I really like how he draws Sergeant Davies. Sometimes he's a little heavy with the brush in some panels, though, and the reader loses clarity from expression, but it's better than flipping back and forth wondering which character is which because they all look alike.
Speaking of clarity of expression, I'm still reading Love and Rockets, just bouncing around from issue to issue at the moment because I'm looking at the way Jaime Hernandez draws expressions. As a kid I read a lot of Archie comics and that influence is apparent in the expressions (Archie makes a cameo backstage at a wrestling match in one issue, iirc), so I've been reading a lot of those, too, just to look at the expressions - the older Archie stories are more expressively drawn, but luckily the digests have a range of stories from different time periods. Have a happy Friday! I woke up today on the wrong side of the bed and I'm ready for naptime. Last week I read Love & Rockets Volume 9: Esperanza and it was, for some reason, wildly depressing and I wound up leaving work early. I mean, it's terrific. I had mainly read the earlier Locas comics, so I was looking for this volume because I knew about Vivian 'Frogmouth' Solis but had never read a story with Frogmouth in it. (Volume 9 is her debut.) I love Jaime Hernandez so much and I'm not sure why this collection made me so sad. I guess, like Maggie, I am also getting older. I finished the first arc of Fatale, which is kind of an occult horror/crime story by everyone's favorite crime writer Ed Brubaker. I like it all right, but I'm not sure if I will keep going - I probably will just to find out the secret of Josephine - I'm sure that part of this is purposeful, but I have a really difficult time keeping the Characters That Are Not Josephine straight in my mind. Everyone in this book is expendable, and almost everyone dies in some horrible way, so it's hard for me to keep track of which man it is that's dying in that particular issue and why or if it matters. In the first issue, there is a murder in which the murder victim is posed to look like the tarot card The Hanged Man, and there are some other references to blood magic, but unfortunately the occult aspect of the story is kind of vague by the end of the first arc. Maybe all of that will be explained in the next story arc. After finishing that first arc of Fatale I tried to get into some Phantom Lady as a palate cleanser. A lot of people actually die in Phantom Lady, which I guess is the pre-comics-code world for you. I like that she has a little black light mirror that blinds people. I'm surprised that no one recognizes her, especially her boyfriend, because she has no mask or anything to conceal her identity, she just changes from street clothes into her skimpy costume. I guess they're banking on the idea that debutante and senator's daughter Sandra Knight wouldn't wear something that scandalous. And, of course, her outfit is quite scandalous - one of the covers was featured in Seduction of the Innocent. (This is how I know about Phantom Lady - her famous 'headlights', as Dr. Wertham put it). A very cool design element of Phantom Lady comics is the opening page will be in a monotone, either blue or red: It's very striking and beautiful!
Phantom Lady was illustrated by Matt Baker, who is considered one of the first (if not the first) African-American comic book artists. I don't know a lot about him, but it's something I discovered while looking into the history of Phantom Lady! You can read more about him here and here.
I wish Twitter was on the verge of implosion every day so I could log in to weebly and have my metrics say views are up 400%. (I also had someone follow me on LiveJournal, and the thrill of having someone follow me on LJ in 2022 cannot be overstated.)
I finished a sketchbook!
Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman, passed away November 10th, which is why I have been on the Batman kick I've been on. I really loved Batman: The Animated Series, and have been watching/re-watching those episodes (there are some that I haven't seen yet). Mask of the Phantasm was a fun time; I had never seen that one before, either, which is kind of hard to believe, but it's one of those movies I never got around to.
Catwoman is a pretty solid book all around. Every time I pick it up, it's good or even great. I remembered reading this series as it was coming out, because I liked Darwyn Cooke's art - now, on the re-read, I realize this run was written by Ed Brubaker. It's really terrific, down to the lettering. There's an issue where Selina sends her roommate, Holly, out to collect some information, and Holly is looking at the East End of Gotham through a recovering addict's eyes - her thoughts are presented as captions in what I'm assuming is a handwriting font that really pulls the reader in to her point of view. I don't know if it would have been as successful, honestly, without that handwritten element:
Ed Brubaker is great at telling a crime story and he's currently doing Friday, which is a book I talked about back in this post. This particular arc was a sticky situation for everyone involved, especially Holly, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this run. I think there's on more issue with Brubaker writing it, though. I'll have to see what else he's done; I had never paid too much attention to or followed comic book writers until I started reading The Department of Truth. The art has to be good before I can focus on the storyline.
Hello! It has been a long time since I have updated, mostly because no one really reads this blog except for maybe three people. And I am one of those three people.
I have been reading a lot of comics lately, so let me tell you about what I've been getting into. ♡ My coworker loaned me a hardcover biography of Jack Kirby, which has been very inspirational but also kind of sad in terms of how much Jack Kirby got the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I started reading superhero comics in the '90s, but also bought vintage comic books from the antique store (mostly '70s era Wonder Woman and the third volume of Marvel's Red Sonja), so the Kirby influence was evident in what I was reading - I mean, I was renting the VHS tape of How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from Blockbuster, and Marvel was reprinting the old Kirby comics around the late '90s as well. The art in the biography is terrific so I picked up a secondhand copy to use as a reference and I'm waiting for it to get here. Jack Kirby was wildly prolific and there were several projects that he was involved with in one way or another that I wasn't familiar with - one was a comic called Black Magic (or True Amazing Accounts of Black Magic) and another was The Strange World of Your Dreams. I love comics from the 1950s, and these two titles are okay, but they do not compare to another comic that I was reading pretty recently from the '50s whose title now escapes me. Many of the titles are very similar, so it's hard to remember if it was Strange or Weird or any number of synonyms combined with Tales or Stories or another similar synonym. ♡ Hoopla recommended Batman:Noel, which had very lovely art and opened up beautifully with a snowy Gotham city scene. The art was more realistic for a Batman book, which is something that I don't always care for, but it was very well done and I think that having a realistic style contributes to how horrifying Batman villains can be. Both the artist and the colorist deserve every accolade. It was an interesting take on A Christmas Carol. I liked that Batman was gradually coming down with walking pneumonia because he is, after all, a human being who gets sick. Not enough sick days in superhero comics in my opinion. ♡ After Batman:Noel, I read Catwoman: When In Rome, which was fine. I liked that the artists were inspired by fashion illustrator Rene Gruau when making this book - I really love Rene Gruau's illustrations, and it goes well with the mood of the character of Catwoman and her glamorous lifestyle. The book looks as though it was done either with watercolor or ink wash - there was a little feeling of not quite being comfortable with the drawing style, which is more of a vibe and difficult to explain. Because it's based on this illustrative work of Gruau, things are a little more stylized, but not as stylized as the art of, say, Darwyn Cooke. The storyline was all right, a little mob story, a little weirdness with the Riddler. I read that first and then went on to Batman:Hush. Batman:Hush was terrific. I was trying to piece together who did it and why the whole time and never got it until the end. It really involves all these different villains in amazing ways without feeling too forced (this was how I felt about Wonder Woman & Justice League Dark: The Witching Hour), is just a wonderful detective story, we have some very good spicy moments with Bat & Cat, it's a great story by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's art is fine. Jim Lee is someone I definitely looked up to in the 90s when he was super popular with the run on X-Men and then with his work at Image, but today I'm just like, Oh this is Jim Lee and everyone looks the same. The only way you can distinguish between Jim Lee characters is basically the coloring, everyone has the same body structure and facial features, especially the ladies. They are all babes, but they look exactly the same. Anyway, if you like Batman, this was a really good one. I don't even think you would need a firm grasp of continuity - things are pretty well explained if some of the context is unclear. ♡ Even though I have been reading all these fun Bat & Cat comics, I have also been doing some indie reading. Hoopla had the Madman collection and I started on that because I never had read Madman back in the '90s. I knew of it, but had never actually picked it up. It's very much a fun indie comic of its time, just a zany romp with competing mad scientists and Madman himself, who is a reanimated zombie in a superhero costume who uses weapons like lead-filled yo-yos and a slingshot. It's fun. You can't take it too seriously. ♡ I REALLY LOVED indie comic Hell Phone by Benji Nate. I can't wait for the next installment! I must know what happens. Cute art, engaging storyline, fun friends in adorable grave robbing outfits. It's a must. It had a blurb from Liz Suburbia, and it's in a similar vein to Suburbia's comic Sacred Heart, which I also really liked. I read Hell Phone on hoopla, but it is also available to read on WebToons. I took a little bit of an extended break. Extended vacation. It's good. I have been trying to rest and relax. It has really paid off. For Christmas this year, Santa brought me an electric typewriter! He knows that I'm good for goodness' sake. I have been reading a lot and some of it has been good and some of it has been not so good, so we'll hit the highlights and leave the rest for another day. Wintering was a terrific read. I'd heard about it when everyone was raving about it during our first pandemic winter, and this winter was really the right time for it. It's very difficult to tell ourselves that we need to rest, or even to tell other people that we need to rest - especially now, when we all have pandemic exhaustion and are supposed to continue on with daily life as though it were normal for people to be dying in scores every day from a health crisis that could've been over by now. It's A Lot. I think people are trying to pretend it's Not A Lot, but it is, and that's okay. Take a break. The world will keep turning.
I'm going to segue directly from Wintering into Fierce Love because I think they pair well together. When we nurture ourselves in our times of difficulty, that's the only time we'll be able to nurture others in their difficult times. That is what living in community is about. We can't pour from an empty cup. I think that Fierce Love is my book of 2022; I got it from the library but I'm going to have to buy it. We have to start being more involved in the well-being of others, of our communities. I love this book and it's really been inspiring! Fun fiction: So, I checked out a lot of comic books to read and I happened to pick up this Warren Ellis Moon Knight TPB & what a joy, what a delight! I particularly enjoyed it because I didn't need to know a lot about anything that was happening - the character is well-enough explained for the new reader AND all the stories were standalones! I haven't read any kind of superhero comic for YEARS that has not been part of some larger arc and the individual comics stood alone. YEARS!! I didn't even realize it until I read these, and it was such a breath of fresh air honestly. Just fantastic, fun, witty, a great time. I am also working my way slowly through Krazy And Ignatz 1919-1921: A Kind, Benevolent And Amiable Brick (I snagged the next one, too, for when I finish this one). Krazy Kat is so good and it is a delight to read. I have never read anything like it and I love George Herriman's little puns and alliterations. I usually read a few of the strips before bed and they're like little treats at the end of the day. Hope y'all are staying warm and staying safe! Feliz ano novo! The above is a panel from my sketchbook that's from 2010. When I was a kid, my parents divorced, and my dad compensated by sending me care packages full of comic books from the local store in LA. (It's actually, I found out, the same store whose owner had a comic book themed wedding back in the '90s, when things like that were still pretty unusual. I was so impressed when I found out, because there had been a photo of the happy couple in Wizard magazine.) Some time in middle school I started reading Marvel comics and collecting trading cards. Eventually my single issues were all sold or given away, excepting the single issues I have of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise. It's hard to justify dragging the long, heavy comic book boxes along from state to state. And even though I still read comics and still liked superhero comics, it's the Disney comics I read as a kid that really stuck in my mind. Underground comix artist Victor Moscoso talked about Carl Barks in a long interview he gave to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal: "None of the other artists that did the duck stories came anywhere near him. I didn’t know his name — Crumb told me his name. We were talking about it and he was very knowledgeable in comics, so I asked him, 'Hey, who was the good duck artist?' That’s how he was known: the good one. And he says, 'Carl Barks.' That was the first time I ever heard the name, because they were all signed 'Walt Disney.'" (I had never heard of this particular distinction before I'd read this interview - by the time I was old enough to look back on duck comics, Carl Barks was already a known name - so imagine how surprised I was when I googled, in quotes, "the good duck artist" and google just immediately returned "Carl Barks" as a result.) I was on the hunt for a couple of Christmas themed Donald Duck stories I'd remembered as a kid. This is not one of them, but it is a stellar example of Carl Barks' gorgeous lettering: I absolutely adore his lettering. It is so crisp in this story. I love the little flair on the "n" in "in" on the title card. Even the word balloons themselves are gorgeous. What I was looking for was a story called "Letter to Santa", which was originally published in Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #1 back in 1949. (This story has been republished in the collected Carl Barks hardcovers - it's in Trail of the Unicorn, which is Volume 8.) Michael Sporman uploaded the recolored version onto his blog, in two parts, so you can read this wild story if you want to - part one is here and part two is here. (There's no "next post" navigation on his blog that I could find, so it might be easier to navigate like this.) It's so good, like most of these comics are, and it's perfect for the holiday season. (I was really more of a fan of Donald than Mickey, but Mickey Mouse did have some good detective stories. I really enjoyed the Thirteen Ghosts story and the one about Kali's Nail. I don't think a lot of people understand how often Mickey Mouse has a handgun in the comics - and uses it!) Victor Moscoso is also terrific. I didn't realize how much his work influenced mine until I started re-reading Zap. As a teen, I'd scored some issues from a friend of my stepfather ("Don't tell your mother you have these," he said), so I must have had them somewhere back there in my brain. Here's one of Moscoso's pages from Zap Comix #2: Victor Moscoso is absolutely a professional and if you love art shop talk like I do, that long interview I linked above is just fantastic. I think often about his application of color theory to concert posters and his references to Josef Albers.
By the time R. Crumb had asked Moscoso to do Zap, Victor was the oldest of the underground artists and he already had a family, so it's funny to read his reactions to the other Zap stories: "...I thought the taboos were all illusions, until Crumb did 'Joe Blow.' Then I realized, OK, you can chop off a guy’s penis and eat it. That’s all right. But you can’t fuck your children. There are limits in this civilized society." I would estimate that much of my time in my life has been spent either gazing at or attempting to gaze at a woman's naked form. I'm not sure what my first drawings were - my parents never even told me the story of how they met, much less considered imparting any anecdotes about my life other than my father once tearfully asking whether I remembered when he would take me to the beach and I would eat sand. ("You'd think he would know," remarked my mother with disgust, "that if you were young enough to eat sand, you probably didn't remember it.") Though I could ramble on about this for the rest of time, constantly departing down rabbit holes of anecdotes that may well be false (remind me to tell you about the preacher and the Saran Wrap), I recently was talking to Katie about erotica, pornography, and the male gaze. Many aspects of erotica and porn are different now than when I was growing up - Katie and I are around ten years apart - and I came up in a time where feminine beauty and sexuality was centered around the male gaze. Additionally, the 1980's were a horny decade, the decade of the rock music video babe. There were babes everywhere you turned in the 1980's. And then came the 1990's, when I started reading superhero comics - and then suddenly, the Comics Code was out, self-publishing was in, and so were Bad Girls. (Let me tell you, I was living.) This is all to say that my personal understanding of what was sexually desirable came mainly from what was available to me as a child (Tex Avery cartoons, Jessica Rabbit), a teen (comic book ladies), and then as a young adult (the back room of the video rental place in the next town, the ability to buy Playboy and Penthouse). We didn't have a Gay-Straight Alliance in high school until years after I graduated (and even then, the creation of a GSA was so panic-inducing that it led the county school board to suspend all club activity in schools). There was very little in terms of queer teen companionship, of any kind of queer elder mentoring, of much community. So there was really no one to tell me how to be queer. I just continued in the way that I knew: looking at babes. Who doesn't want to look at babes, I would think, and I probably still do. Today I was reading The Lonely City and was so struck by this passage. It's an excerpt from Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: "This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn't produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don't have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn't immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy." Of course this seems obvious, but it brought with it so many avenues of thought. I have always been so struck by the joy and celebration that I see in the works of gay men, also in gay male porn: the appreciation of the visual, the exaggeration, the fun. Think about Tom of Finland and you'll understand what I'm getting at. Everyone is having a good time, except maybe the occasional woman who shows up in a comic.
One of my favorite stories in Sometimes She Lets Me was about a femme who just wanted anonymous sex, who just wanted to cruise. It was bemoaned that lesbians don't cruise, and I felt that. I also bemoan it, certainly. But it isn't safe. For many reasons. And this passage made me think about what it is to be a sex object, because there's power in that. But it's a fragile power, in a way, because it doesn't mean we can cruise, it doesn't mean we can walk alone at night - it's a different kind of objectification than the objectification of a white male body. Objectification with power, and then the powerless object. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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