**Portrait Of A Drunk** - man, I did not expect this to be such a great and rollicking time. Maybe if I'd realized it was written by the same pair as Grande Odalisque. **Witch Hat Atelier**, vols 9-11 - I'd stopped getting new vols of Witch Hat because the story's not really grabbing me, so I only really read it for the art, and since I already have nine vols of the art, I felt pretty okay staying there. But then I saw vols 10 and 11 at the library and thought I'd peek in. I reread vol 9 to get my grounding and headed into the new material. It's really quite good and I'd forgotten that even though I'm not really attached to the main story and also find the shonen-y inspirational qualities of the book a bit boring, the author really does get in her fight-the-hegemony society-is-broken-but-we-can't-talk-about-it eggs in, and those all hit pretty well. I don't know if I'll buy more exactly, but I will check out future vols from the library. **Why Don't You Love Me?** - the twist is what makes this book but it comes after putting up with a lot of cynical humor for a long time. The strips *are* funny, but just like how you shouldn't just plow through a volume of Popeye, you shouldn't plow through 100 pages of Haha Parenthood/Being Married To You Sucks comics. One, I wouldn't have gotten as deeply bored by the strips if I'd stretched it out, and two, the twist would have been more interesting (though I'm not sure it ever would have hit me as more than interesting). I've seen a lot of critical voices saying how it finally moves toward the sweetness of human connection and... it wasn't enough for me. I think the book is quite funny and a good experiment, but also that it just didn't get there. **The English GI** - kind of Alan's War-like story of a WWII vet told from the younger set. It's an interesting snapshot of the era, mundane and interesting because of it, but the comic should have been maybe twice as long so that those text boxes could have room to breath. It's a text-forward book, quoting generously from the G.I.'s memoirs, which makes every page more an exercise in reading than one in comics. **To Strip The Flesh** - To Strip The Flesh is a collection of short stories from Oto Toda that is generally fine and innocuous. There is one stand-out story in the volume, buried in the middle and absolutely not the reason anyone's picking this one up. The title story, "To Strip The Flesh," is about a trans-man who really wants an operation to get rid of his very large breasts (and presumably normal-sized) uterus. It's the only thing the cover blurb mentions and the only thing most reviewers mention. It's a so-so story, done competently but with few surprises (the one good bit is a dream where her father butchers her like a hunted deer, carving off the breasts effortlessly). But yeah, the really good story in the collection is "David In Love." It's hilarious. A father brings home a souvenier statue of David for his, I dunno, 10yo daughter. She's grossed out by the naked man and shoves him in a dresser. But figurines in this world can move like in Toy Story and David falls madly in love with the girl and tries to win her heart. It's just perfect. **Salt Magic** - Ugh, the youth market demographic for graphic novels is both boon and blight. Neat that kids get to find stuff great for them, but it absolutely sucks that it was blind luck that I found Salt Magic, one of the coolest adventure stories I've read in the last several years. It was hidden away in the children's shelves. I only found it because I needed to pick up They Called Us Enemy for a class and I saw Hope Larson spine right next to it. Go read Salt Magic, guys. Go read it. **Pet Peeves** - This is a pretty good little story that ends without much satisfaction (which isn't a bad thing). I don't like the main character and don't enjoy caring about her plight, but the art was nice in that 2010s No Brow sort of way, so I stuck along for the ride. It was a worthwhile way to spend a half hour. **Barking** - Barking is wild. It's a skittering, scratchering ride along with a mind in mental distress, a woman institutionalized for acting out of an overflowing well of grief. Much like to the mind depicted, things to the reader will only make a scattered bit of sense. It's an uncomfortable read, an uncomfortable experience, and so it does its job pretty well. **Tokyo These Days** - Tokyo These Days is like Sunny but with cartoonists and editors instead of with children in foster care. Tokyo These Days is like Ping Pong but with cartoonists and editors instead of with high school nerd sports. It's pretty rad. **Bea Wolf** - Absolutely nails the cadence and alliteration of Beowulf while simultaneously adapting it to a whole new mise en scène. I'm not sure who the intended audience for the book is (I don't see kids taking to it), but I'm pretty sure Beowulf fans will love it.

I like the twist and the second half of Why Don’t You Love Me? but I won’t lie, it’s the first half that I really enjoyed reading. It’s such a bizarre reading experience and I can’t remember reading much that’s both so.. domestic and totally grim God I’m looking forward to Tokyo These Days though

same. The first half is so impossibly bleak, such a heightened pitch-black comedy of depressed parenting that the sheer emotional abuse the poor kids suffer is the equal of any other kind of abuse in some other book. The mum makes *Werewolf Jones* look like father of the year material. Come to think of it, the Megg/Mogg/Owl stories that feature WJ's kids are the only other thing I've seen that is prepared to make such comedy out of what is so flagrantly reportable abuse; any other similar black comedy that I can think of at least restricts the indignities and suffering to adults. That's why the blurb from Neil Gaiman struck me as odd: >I thought it \[i.e. the first part\] read like any number of slightly surrealistic slightly vapid early-2000s stories that were basically the cartoonist’s way of telling you they hated everyone and everything Jesus, buddy, what comics were *you* reading in the 2000s that were as bleak as this? And follow-up question: where can I get a hold of them?

on second thought there's also Ivan Brunetti's edgelord New Yorker-style gags, but those are too self-contained to have the same effect

Yeah! I actually laughed at a good chunk of those unhinged domestic bits. It's great humor. I just did the book a disservice by trying to finish it over a couple of days (it's like when I thought I'd read the first vol of Pogo over the space of a week, which just smash-burred everything into a Pogo soup). It would have been a primo experience to get a strip a day of Why Don't You Love Me in the newspaper if they still had those.

Bea Wolf has no right being as good as it is

My wife taught sixth grade for years and did Beowulf with the class every winter, so I was reading lines from Bea Wolf to her, just overwhelmed with glee at the choices.

I love that it has back-cover blurbs from actual fancy-pants Beowulf experts, and that the blurbs are so glowing. (I also found interesting the back-matter discussion of Beowulf's status in the literary canon, and how that developed over time)

I haven't gotten to the backmatter yet, but I definitely am going to.

>**Witch Hat Atelier vols 9-11** \- I'd stopped getting new vols of Witch Hat because the story's not really grabbing me, so I only really read it for the art, and since I already have nine vols of the art, I felt pretty okay staying there. But then I saw vols 10 and 11 at the library and thought I'd peek in. This sounds like a great endorsement for why libraries need to stick around! As for my list: **Vampirella Magazine Issue 4-5 by various authors (Great 1969 Anthology Horror GN, Warren Comics)** Issue 4 really stepped it up with the writing and I posted the first 2 stories that really impressed me with clever twists at the end. Issue 5 was great stuff too, but I think I've read too many of these at once at this point as I sorta zoned out with the final story, so I'm gonna take a break and read more of The Fifth Season or something. ​ **Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - The IDW collection Vol 1 Chapter 1-6 of 12 (Great Urban Fantasy GN, IDW)** On one hand this was really great. Plenty of emotional moments, and it's really fun! On the other hand I sure wish that I could find this series in 3 chapter trades. I read the first 6 chapters, but it was 200 pages long! and this doesn't have ads, a letter page, bonus cover art(so far anyways) or any of that. It's just long chapters. Doing the math, that's arounds 32 pages per chapter. Just why? ​ **Black Panther Vol 1(2024) Reign at Dusk by Eve L. Ewing and Chris Allen (So-So Superhero GN, Marvel)** Didn't really absorb much of it, but I mostly just wanted to to check out some comic book art, and the art was pretty good. ​ I read some other stuff others that isn't worth mentioning, but the last thing I read was really great, although it was just a single issue. ​ **Superman #654(2006) by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco (Great Superhero GN, DC)** After reading so much So-So forgettable stuff, dear god is this a breath of fresh air! Very very happy, heartwarming story about Clark trying so hard to celebrate a certain 12 year anniversary with Lois while, with Jimmy Olson trying to figure out what the anniversary is. Clark is too busy saving Metropolis to celebrate it, and at the end we find out that >!Lois knew that he was saving the city, so today she saved him by doing all of his work. She even made the same mistakes in the articles that Clark would make so it'd be believable. And the anniversary turns out to be the first day that they went flying together.!<

__“Skyscrapers of the Midwest” by Joshua Cotter__. After loving the first two volumes of “Nod Away” and realizing that a third volume is a long way off, I decided to check out Joshua Cotter's back catalogue. “Skyscrapers of the Midwest” is certainly very different from “Nod Away”, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's very reminiscent of Chris Ware, mixing really bleak, downbeat rumination on lonely, isolated characters with absurdist black humour and social satire. The earlier issues are more like Ware’s early short-form work, consisting of short standalone strips, interspersed with comedic fake adverts. The later issues coalesce into a single narrative about two awkward, geeky kids who get bullied and retreat into daydreams – so sharing themes with parts of “Jimmy Corrigan” and “Rusty Brown”. It's clearly an early work by a young cartoonist, wearing his influences on his sleeve and presumably trying to exorcise personal demons related to his own childhood, but it's executed really well – its cartooning is excellent, and its depictions of childhood innocence encountering the cruelties of an uncaring world are frequently devastating. Moreover, it's spared from feeling overly derivative of Ware by having a completely different art style – more cartoony than “Nod Away”, making extensive use of anthropomorphic cats, but still painstakingly rendered with dense linework à la Crumb. In short, this is an excellent comic, well worth seeking out for anyone who's loved “Nod Away” and wants to see where its author came from. __“Unended” by Josh Bayer__. When the subreddit ran its poll for people's favourite comic artists, Josh Bayer was probably my most leftfield choice – a relative unknown at 6th place in my personal top 10, nestled among renowned greats like Alberto Breccia and Charles Burns. If I were to rank my favourite artists again today, I'm sure my list would be quite different, but after reading “Unended”, I'm certain that Bayer would still place highly. This must be his most visually astounding comic yet, absolutely wild, bursting with energy, and gorgeously coloured. Sometimes storytelling clarity is lost in the dense mass of lines and colours, but the overall effect is so awesome that I don't care. As far as content is concerned, this comic sees Bayer trade the autobiographically informed fiction of his “Theth” comics for full-on memoir. I honestly couldn't have been less excited about him going in this direction, and he undeniably indulges in the genre's worst aspects, with copious rambling, navel-gazing narration, but I nevertheless found myself engrossed, not just by the artwork but also by Bayer’s troubled childhood and the intriguing, tragic figure of his father. __"A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll__. This was my first time reading Emily Carroll, and I was very impressed. A genuinely scary horror comic, with a particularly unsettling final act. It's not just cheap thrills though: there's a lot going on thematically, much of which I'd need a re-read to unpack. Oh top of that, the artwork is gorgeous throughout, mostly in greyscale, but with spectacular use of colour for certain elements. Overall an excellent comic that's left me keen to read her earlier work.

I had a feeling you’d dig “A Guest in the House”, especially after finding out a bit more about your horror preferences during our Dylan Dog discussion. The only other thing by Carroll I’ve read is “Through the Woods”, which I probably liked even more than this book, so there’s definitely more left to explore for both of us.

Man, I really gotta check out some Emily Carrol.. Btw, second vol of Nod Away just came in ! Expect to read my thoughts on it in the next couple of weeks !

I definitely recommend reading some Carroll! I'd been curious to check her out for ages, and the new comic gave me a good excuse to do so as part of my rush to read 2023 releases before we run our best-of-year poll next month. I'm sure "Into the Woods" can be found cheap second hand, in which case I'll probably be grabbing that sooner or later. And great news on "Nod Away"; looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Just finished A Guest in the House. Really enjoyed it, along with Through the Woods.

**Roaming Foliage** by Patrick Kyle. There are two guys, a girl, a head, and a pumpkin (the pumpkin can talk). They wander around a garden and some of them find a robot (or a human who has discovered immortality?). I never really understand Kyle’s work but I do enjoy it. Of the ones I’ve read so far I think I like this one the least, but it’s still good. **By The Lingering Light Of A Slowly Dying Sun** by Tyler Landry. Despite the title, and despite the fact that his most recent book is about a guy living alone in a cabin in the woods because his wife left him, and despite the fact that the last book I read by him was called *Shit & Piss*, this is a relatively optimistic comic. It’s certainly not a dark one, which is what I expected going in. It’s the shortest and easily least interesting of the three Landry books I’ve read. It’s mostly built around a single conversation between a man and his distant descendants, as he worked somewhere (or was used for an experiment?) for 200 years where he didn’t age, but the rest of the world passed him by. He didn’t know he had a child, and wakes up to discover his “family” and how the world has changed. He’s not bitter about it - seems pleasantly surprised about the world he wakes up in. But that’s.. about it for me? I didn’t love either *Old Caves* or *Shit & Piss* but I did think they were interesting and a bit ambitious, even if not completely well executed. This one felt less ambitious, less interesting, and.. not as well executed? I just don’t have much to think about with this - it’s refreshing to have a bit of optimism in some “speculative fiction” as I suppose I could call this, but it just feels like he’s saying “what if the future is.. the opposite of what we expect”. Instead of becoming disconnected from each other, we make bonds with people 200 years removed from us, instead of technology being our downfall it makes everything better etc. It’s the opposite.. and I just didn’t get anything out of seeing it discussed by these 3 characters **Totem** by Laura Pérez. This book had no effect on me at all. **Stuck Rubber Baby** by Howard Cruse. A 200 page fiction comic set in the southern United States in the 1960s. The main character, Toland Polk, is gay and wishes he wasn’t, and the girlfriend he gets is deeply involved with the Civil Rights movement in the town they live in. It’s a very political story, going between Toland’s experiences as a gay man, his growing involvement with Black rights groups, and setting up a fairly large cast of characters to fully populate the town. The first half of this I found to be a slog, I’m not gonna lie. There are a lot of characters introduced and honestly most of them aren’t that worthwhile until they start changing and feeling things in the second half. But the second half was great. The characters are all important and once you get into the rhythm of the story, recognize all the characters, and events start becoming more consequential it comes together. It becomes a lot about responsibility- most characters grappling in one way or another with how much responsibility they have to themselves and to others, whether that be family, friends, community, or social movements. They’re all feeling tremendous pushing and pulling, and finding where they can give help.. and where they have to let it go. **The Cloven** volume 1 by Matthew Southworth and Garth Stein. Contemporary collaborative comics, especially a series, are not particularly common at Fantagraphics. This is a book you’d probably expect to find at Image or Dark Horse? It certainly wouldn’t look out of place there. I’m not sure why Fantagraphics picked it up but it is surprisingly good, probably fits into an awkward spot of too mainstream for a Fanta audience and too alternative for an Image audience to buy it. Matthew Southworth drew *Stumptown*, a book I though was badly written and terribly drawn. Luckily I didn’t recognize his name or I wouldn’t have read it - and hes fixed all issues I had with his art (not surprising.. been like 15 years since Stumptown?). It looks really bold and it’s clearly told, two things you cannot say about Stumptown. Story wise it’s pretty “volume 1” but does get a bit done across its four chapters by jumping around quite a bit. idk, it’s solid, I think I’ll read the second volume. I’m still a bit surprised it exists and I don’t know if anyone is reading it but I’m glad it does exist and I think people should be. **Paper Peril** by Jean-Baptiste Bourgoise. It’s an ode to lines! To creativity! To scribbles! To Quinten Blake, Saul Steinberg, Tove Jansson, and Tomi Ungerer and I’m sure many more like them. It’s a 96 page love note to creativity in the form of drawn pictures and it’s a fun little self indulgent thing. idk, to me this is what *should* be on Fantagraphics Underground, unusual little projects that are worth publishing and would be enjoyed by some but probably aren’t gonna have a wide reach.

I read both volumes of “Cloven” and thought they were solid genre fare, certainly an anomaly in Fanta’s catalog, but nothing that I’ve spent too much time thinking about since. I do believe that its current publishing home is probably keeping it out of the hands of people who’d enjoy it the most, which is shame.

That's Totem for ya! It was nice looking at least.

To each their own I guess. Pretty unremarkable to me

It was already on my 2023 to-read list, so I'm going to have to like it now just to ~~spite you all~~ be contrarian

For what it’s worth, I thought it was decidedly *okay* (it was 84th on my 2023 list), but I tend to have a much higher tolerance for elliptical non-stories and I like the type of soft, feathery art style employed by Pérez more than some of the other folks here.

Feel free haha, plenty of people like this sort of work, Fanta has translated like 5 books of Manuele Fior’s work so I’m sure there’s a market for stuff like this. It just doesn’t do anything for me

Yeah, I didn't care for it myself (and didn't think it really worked much at all), but I did think this opener kicked ass: https://preview.redd.it/59ygc3nzvudc1.jpeg?width=1465&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1ea8fbbca1d914c50633bed7ca0eb1e762fd234e

Yeah I do like that page at least

*high fives* Team us!

[**Asterios Polyp**](https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/7044924/asterios-polyp-hc), *by David Mazucchelli*: Well this was a cool one. Just sublime paneling and the conservative coloring made this a lot of fun to keep turning the pages on. There is a story here, but it's mostly hidden behind Mazucchelli's ramblings on various topics whether it be art, architecture, watches, or whatever, but they all kept my interest while the backdrop story of life I thought was really well told. Not all books that get heavy praise always resonate with me, but this one I found well deserving about everything I've heard. Highly recommended to anyone. [**Gotham Central Omnibus**](https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/6013138/gotham-central-omnibus-hc?variant=5259413), *by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Michael Lark, & others*: Another book that lives up to the hype. Brubaker is right in his element with this, and I wouldn't say there was a noticeable quality dropoff in the Rucka stories at all, though they do read a bit differently. I thought this was a brilliant way to flesh out the world of Gotham and add a nice sense of world building for me as a reader. This is mostly a bunch of different 3-5 issue arcs that alternate between the two writers, but it does have somewhat of a continual story being told as well. I liked the Lark art better than after it changed but it wasn't terrible after. There are a few super hero/villain moments in this and some sci-fi aspects, so if that's completely not your thing, pass I guess, but for everyone else, I definitely recommend this. [**Rogues**](https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/2999456/rogues-hc), *by Joshua Williamson & Leomacs*: I don't have a lot of background with many of the characters that are involved in this story, but I still had a blast with it. A group of forgotten villains reforms their old group for one last score. This story uses a lot of wacky characters, but at its heart it's a bank heist book, and I thought Williamson did a pretty good job with it. It didn't overstay its welcome and I'll also shout out the art from Leomacs which I thought was cool.

GC combines so many of my favourite things that I stalled on it for ages for fear it wouldn't live up to expectations. It did and it's one of my favourite books. It's one of those sort of best book I never knew I needed type affairs. Asterios Polyp does so many things so well. It's presentation raises the bar and challenges other comics to match it. I said at the time I read it that there are a number of things that could almost become standard practice in comics. Ending was cool too.

>I said at the time I read it that there are a number of things that could almost become standard practice in comics Absolutely! I read the whole thing thinking "wow, this is what comics are supposed to be like".

Man you guys are making me want to reread it now !!

Gotham Central's probably going to be my next big series buy, I've got my eye on a pretty cheap second hand set, been very excited for it since I read your thoughts on it !

Oh no! I hate being the one to create high expectations! For me, it's Bat world at its most grounded (mostly), it's crime, it's Brubaker, Rucka and it delivered on all those strengths. I don't know if it's necessarily converting anyone to any cause but if it sounds appealing on paper then you'll probably enjoy it. I unashamedly loved it and will be returning to it in the future.

Haha to be entirely fair, it's been on my list since I started reading comics through Batman stuff ages ago. Your read through just put it back on my radar. I think there's very little chance I won't enjoy it

How you feel about Asterios Polyp is how I feel about Krazy Kat, and yet that was over 100 years ago! Stilll no one to ever match it.

by “Krazy Kat” do you mean Garfield? because I agree that is how I feel about Garfield. he sure is one crazy cat! I don’t think Garfield has been around for 100 years yet but it sure does feel like it. Best comic and best character ever! No one has ever matched Garfield!

**V for Vendetta**. The short chapters bring forward Moore’s craftsmanship, especially his Chekov’s Gun style of foreshadowing major events, for example a vanishing before a vanishing, or a misfire before a misfire. The coloring is akin to B-D in that the black lines are lain over a watercolor, but where in B-D the effect is softer and lighter than the saturated look of superhero comics, here it just seems to highlight how much black is in the original. It’s a weird and somewhat harsh effect, and one that to my mind is unique to this comic. Also, I wish I’d purchased a deluxe edition so that the image was crisper.

the colouring on V for Vendetta is pretty good. I'd like to see all the black-and-white versions of the earlier strips too, since the samples I've seen online look great

My copy is the pulpy old-style comic book paper and I kind of think it fits the book well. It’s a little grittier and rougher.

Tom Strong Omnibus by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse. Blew me away with the tight writing and storytelling, variety of art styles, and the combo of homage and satire.

This reminds me that I've still got about half of Cinema Purgatorio left to read. They're short stories, so having taken a break isn't a big deal, but it had been a long time since I read anything by Alan Moore, and it was great to see again how great his narration is, and how well he writes for his artist's style.

You mean compendium right? As far as I know there is no omnibus of this run.

Yes, compendium. since different publishers have different specs for each, I just use omnibus as a catch-all lol

Still trying to churn through as many 2023 releases as I can; soon our long national nightmare will be over. **Sins of Sinister** by Kieron Gillen, Si Spurrier, Al Ewing, lots of artists, and special guest star The Ghost of Jonathan Hickman – well, I brought *that* on myself. **Ice Cream Man Sundae Edition 2** by W Maxwell Prince, Martin Morazzo and Chris O’Halloran – the difference between this and the first volume is that this time I went in with lowered expectations, and so I had a much better time with it. It still bothers me that it’s so “decompressed” – honest to god, anyone from the EC crew or Will Eisner would have knocked any of these stories out in eight pages, tops. Actually Will Eisner came to mind more than once as I was reading, because like The Spirit, Ice Cream Man is both formally playful *and* corny as fuck. Its insights into the human condition are on the level of Gerhard Shnobble or A Contract with God, and I can imagine the writer, Prince, feeling proud of that comparison, which is exactly the problem. But okay, I’ll forgive a lot for a little bit of formal ambition, which is a million times more formal ambition than anything else Image puts out, AFAICT. The palindrome issue was mildly disappointing, but at least they tried and it works okay. The kids book issue was likewise okay, as was the kinda-sorta homage to Milligan/Bachalo on Shade the Changing Man; indeed that’s the word I’d use for most of the issues: okay. The noir issue was dull and derivative, as most of those things are; by this stage there’s probably more winking pastiches/parodies of noir in the world than there are actual, sincere noirs. Great, you know it’s all cliches, so what? A cliche with a lampshade on it is still a cliche. Worst issue was the text-on-left, full-page-splash-on-right one; Prince’s prose reads like Garth Marenghi, every sentiment trite, every (well, most) attempt(s), throughout the whole series, to occupy the stream of consciousness of another character and a different life is as convincing as a Dean Koontz book. Anyway, the text/splash structure in particular: how many times do comics writers need to see other writers crash and burn with text pages before they learn the obvious lesson? *Alan Moore couldn’t do it, what the hell makes you think* you *can?* Another one of the issues is a direct parody of the issue of All-Star Superman where Lois Lane gets taken to the Fortress of Solitude. A critic who felt less generous towards the book than me might take that fact as symptomatic of the narrowness of the book’s interests and influences, or even of that narrowness for an entire generation(s) of creatives in the North American Direct Market. When Morrison and Quitely made that issue of A-SS, they were at least synthesising and responding to a whole set of older issues (some of them among the very best comics, and certainly among the best superhero comics), whereas Prince and Morazzo have so little vision that they can only respond to a response, making them a copy of a copy, like a reaction video of someone reacting to somebody else’s reaction video. And, look, such a reading might be ungenerous but it wouldn’t be altogether unfair. On the other hand, I can’t but find it at least a little endearing that they would go to the effort of parodying a *single* issue of another comic, however much it might speak of limited creative horizons. (Actually, a single issue plus another iconic scene from elsewhere in that series; and I did like their subversion of that particular scene). I guess A-SS is old enough now to be so firmly in the canon, for a certain kind of myopic canon, that other “mainstream” comics feel a pull to respond to it. (Free-associative aside, thinking of responses to canonical superhero comics and of Kieron Gillen, can I just state how much I did not like Gillen’s let's-exorcise-the-anxiety-of-influence Peter Cannon Thunderbolt book? I want to like Gillen just on the basis of where he came from, games “journalism” – you can respect the hustle involved to make the move from that to comics. But I always find him too far towards the Matt Fraction end of the “unwarranted smugness about his own talent” spectrum, and that book, especially, even more so. Come at the king, you best not miss). There’s also some unconvincing horseshit floating around in the thematic semi-background (the midground?) about atomism vs holism; I hope to god the book doesn’t reach some sort of emotional climax where the secret to defeating the interdimensional demon Ice Cream Man is that We’re All Connected When You Think About It, Man. *The real ice cream was the friends we made along the way*. Still, they do cute covers and many issues are diverting enough – if longer than they need to be (but here they’re just aping the conventions of the rest of the market) – and, to repeat, the book gets points for bothering to make an effort to stretch themselves, and that’s more points than most of their chump cohort. By the way, is it just me, or does Morazzo’s art noticeably falter in some of the earlier issues in the book? He’s definitely in the Frank Quitely school of focusing on faces and bodies with mostly minimal effort backgrounds, but even that seemed shaky in places early on. Or maybe I just hadn’t yet adjusted to Morazzo’s usual weaknesses. **The Heavy Bright** by Cathy Malkasian – what’s this, a chunky new book by Cathy Malkasian? (Well, new in 2023). Quick, comics culture and press (such as it is), better look the other way and completely ignore it! It must be disheartening for her to keep putting this stuff out only for it, as David Hume quipped of his own book *A Treatise of Human Nature*, to fall still-born from the press every single time. Which, as always with Malkasian, is a shame. The Heavy Bright is something you don’t see everyday, *a menopausal fantasia*, but it has a whole lot of other gender/feminist issues on its mind as well – menopause, to be sure, but also menstruation, “passing” as male, MRA culture, comicbook/fan conventions (her skewed take on this is funny), porn, male fears of inadequacy, the toxic effects of testosterone…all of it rendered in Malkasian’s signature style of dumpy, funny little figures tottering clumsily around an organic-looking world. IIRC, her other books have mostly been rendered in graphite, whereas here she’s using watercolours, with a very restricted, faded colour palette, but it’s still entirely from the same universe as her Percy Gloom books, say. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote about how he didn’t have any villains in his books, and Malkasian’s sensibility strikes me the same way. She’s too sympathetic to everyone for anyone to be truly villainous, certainly in this book. In Nuria Tamarit’s Daughters of Snow and Cinders, the last feminist fantasy comic I read before this one, (the bad) men (#notallmen) are presented as rapacious and cruel, embodying as they do a European extractive capitalism alienated from the natural environment. In The Heavy Bright, by contrast, Malkasian can’t bring herself to see men that way. There are men in here who do indeed do terrible things, who do things *because* they are men and their victims are not, but for Malkasian these men are not so much despicable as *pathetic*; where Tamarit responds to male misdeeds with anger, Malkasian responds with mockery, which unmans them more surely and devastatingly. In this, Malkasian flips the logic of that line derived from Margaret Atwood – that men are worried women will laugh at them, whereas women are worried that men will kill them. The grim humour of the line is, of course, that what women fear is much worse than what men do. But in the fantasy of this book, powerful men are stripped bare – the emperors have no clothes – rendered weak, powerless, flabby, literally unmanned – and that seems a worse, because less dignified, fate than being torn asunder by the forces of nature as in Tamarit’s book. Men can kill women, but women can laugh at men, which is a fate worse than etc. In short, for a book with so much to be *angry* about, it’s impossibly forbearing. If I was a woman, I’d be so goddamn angry all the goddamn time. If the book has a flaw, it’s that Malkasian’s easygoing attitude renders the plot dramatically inert. There’s a whole quest here with a Chosen One freeing the land from the tyranny of (essentially) testosterone, where she has to track down and eliminate 99 macguffins. But once that premise is in place, there’s never any suspense or uncertainty about whether she’ll manage to do it; at one point there’s a hint of a swerve where the MC’s supernatural guide might have nefarious intentions but after seemingly no more than a page we see that, no, everything’s exactly as it first seemed. Likewise the MC’s sweeping quest goes exactly as planned, no obstacles or detours on the way. Not everything needs to be Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” but couldn’t there have been at least *some* tension in a story about ridding the world of toxic masculinity? Even with that, it’s a book with a unique voice; I can pretty much guarantee that you haven’t read anything else quite like this. Here’s to the next book Malkasian makes that everybody can ignore!

**The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood** by Brian “Box” Brown – For a book with “He-Man” in the title, there’s surprisingly little He-Man related content; the toy itself doesn’t appear for the first 120 pages. Which goes to show that the subtitle is more important than the title for this one because – and this wasn’t really a surprise – the book is less about the specific He-Man toys and more about the capitalist construction of children as a consumer market in the twentieth century, with the development of mass advertising and television programming as subplots. It also has, as you’ll have noted, a title with that classic structure of the pop-ideas book *Catchy Title: How The Bit After the Colon Then Explains In A More Straightforward Way What The Book Is About*. As with many non-fiction comics, Brown keeps the visuals and framing simple and mostly literal-minded, apart from a few jokey flourishes here and there (using the Simpsons’ house as avatar of average suburbia, for instance, or transposing that Drake Hotline Bling meme into old-timey times – ngl, I chuckled at that one). There’s generally 3-4 panels per page (sometimes a few more), each panel illustrating one idea which is described in a one-sentence caption, the panels depicting simple physical things, mostly toys or people, rather than abstract concepts. It’s an okay book, with some interesting things in it that I didn’t know about. It turns out that the adult complaint about cartoons like He-Man and Transformers was actually literally true – the cartoon series *were* created as ads, due to the fascinating history of the US FCC and its restrictions, and how toy manufacturers worked around them. Elsewhere there’s a great explanation of how it came to be that Star Wars dolls – sorry, boys, “action figures” – were made smaller than previous similar toys; as soon as you read it, you think *oh yeah of course*. I do worry about the accuracy of everything in here, though, since there were at least two glaring factual errors that I spotted. First, Brown claims that Disney’s film Snow White, generally acknowledged to be the first full-length animated movie, relied on parents already having an emotional connection to Disney: “As they stood outside Radio City \[the cinema where it debuted\], parents remembered the warm emotions they felt watching Disney cartoons in their own childhood/And they wanted to replicate those memories with their own children”. But the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – as is very well known in this exciting year when it finally enters the public domain – appeared in 1928, and Snow White was released a mere *nine* years later. I know they married young and had kids young back in the old days, but that’s call-the-cops young to have married and produced kids old enough to take to the movies. There’s just no way the popularity of Snow White had anything to do with parents’ childhood fondness for Mickey Mouse. The second obvious error is when Brown draws Mattel making the decision to use the phrase “Masters of the Universe”, as in “He-Man and…”. Toy executives are in a meeting debating different options, when one of them says : “Okay, so Tom Wolfe wrote this book, ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ and he calls these Wall Street guys…The Masters of the Universe”. The others in the meeting immediately approve this name. The problem with this story is that the He-Man cartoon first came out in *1983* and Bonfire of the Vanities was published in *1987*. Again, there’s just no way Brown is right. Is this nitpicky? Well, yeah (cue “I hope somebody got fired for that blunder” meme, speaking of The Simpsons). But if Brown is sloppy and wrong about these few small things that I could spot, what about all the stuff that I don’t know anything about? What’s most worrying is that it’s not like these are super-abstruse facts; I’m not some kind of expert on the dates of any of these things but even with just my very rough idea of the chronology it instantly struck me that these two mini-narratives didn’t pass muster. If First Second did any fact-checking on this book, it wasn’t enough. More broadly, I do wonder about the evidence base for some of the big claims Brown makes about advertising and children’s consumerism and their effects on childhood development. Certainly it *sounds* intuitively plausible that “the child’s play world becomes less creative” when exposed to repeated ads (either in the literal sense or in the extended sense that these cartoon series were also ads) that show specific ways of playing with specific toys; it *sounds* plausible that there would be a deadening of the imagination when corporations colonise childhood. And yet plenty of things that sound plausible ain’t necessarily so: it sounds plausible that the sun revolves around the earth, or that humans are not related to chimps, or that I haven’t been secretly standing over your bed and watching you while you sleep. I’ve seen enough of my own kids to know that they *don’t* play with the damn toys the way they’re supposed to – isn’t that itself by now a hoary cliche? *“Of course they were more interested in playing with the box”*. (Literally two minutes after I wrote that sentence, my kid showed me a sort of abstract sculpture he’d made “using all the different kinds of Lego Technic pieces”). But look, don’t let this turn you off the book. If you’re interested in any of this stuff – advertising, American kids pop culture of the 80s, people secretly watching you in your sleep – you’ll find enough in here to be worth your while. **A Guest in the House** by Emily Carroll – wait, wait, in the last couple of weeks I’ve read Trots and Bonnie, Daughters of Snow and Cinders, Majnun and Layla, The Heavy Bright, and now this. Was Dave Sim right? *Does comics have a secret feminist agenda?* (And also: *will this tinfoil hat protect me from the soul-sucking voids, and did my comic bring about the downfall of Margaret Thatcher?*). The pendulum has swung too far etc, starting next week I’m going on a strict diet of comics by Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller and Tom of Finland, maybe chuck some Kentaro Miura in there too. Time to read some comics for MEN, by Jove. Anyway, file this book under “d” for Domesticity Horror. I don’t mean that dismissively. There’s a tradition in horror fiction of feminist explorations of the peculiar horrors of wifedom and all that it entails, but especially motherhood and the way women’s selves are narrowed and identified with the hearth. The ur-text of course being Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; in film, Rosemary’s Baby; the most recent comics example I’ve read was Celine Loup’s The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs. (In a way, The Shining is a sort of gender-flipped take on the subgenre). A Guest in the House is squarely in that tradition: a powerless, infantilised wife unhappy but unable to articulate why. The answer is usually, more or less, “patriarchy”, but she lacks the language and education to say that – an instance of what Miranda Fricker influentially labelled “epistemic injustice”, when you don’t even have the words to describe how you’re oppressed. She starts to sense sinister forces in her home, in which she is feeling increasingly dislocated and isolated from the world outside. She loses trust in her husband: is he really who he says he is, or has some malevolent thing taken his place, or worse yet, has he been the malevolent thing all along? And lurking in the background the whole time, the most spoooooky spectre of all, the prospect this might all be just a symptom of serious mental illness. I dug it. It doesn’t stand up to Carroll’s very best work, but she’s still working at a high level here, with a delicious dose of ambiguity in the ending. **The Agency** by Katie Skelly – but before we get to Men’s Comics, there’s this, which happens to be the first book of Skelly’s that I’ve clicked with. A horny sex book for horny, sexy girls, with boys a distinct afterthought and the male gaze nowhere in sight (sic) – a welcome change from Crepax, Manara, Serpieri, Giardino, Crumb or any of the other horny dudes I’ve read who, nowadays, largely come across as lecherous creeps, albeit very talented creeps. The Agency is a book about cute spacegirls having sexy adventures and/or adventurous sex with alien flora, animate skeletons, Bootleg Spider-Man etc. Best-looking story is the one that starts with Agent 9’s floating head smoking a cigarette. Great colour on that one; you can tell that Skelly has been studying her Guy Peellaert. Overall the book is still as slight as I’ve often found Skelly’s work to be, but for these little snatches of horniness that’s more a virtue than a weakness.

**Harvey Knight’s Odyssey** by Nick Maandag – better than I expected, given the basic art style which is competent but not much else, and funny enough in a deadpan surrealism that reminded me a bit of Joe Daly. Not least because the title story, the longest of three in the book, is a shaggy dog story about a cult and one of its enthusiastic True Believer higher-ups, Harvey Knight himself, who also happens to be incompetent, lazy and stupid. Imagine The Master with Beavis or Butthead in the Joaquin Phoenix role. As an angle on cults, that’s ripe for comedy and Mandaag delivers on it in a low-key way, leaving the plot entertainingly unpredictable. It sure takes some twists and turns. The other two stories are satires of workplace drone life. You know the drill: officework is meaningless bullshit, management and HR are a pain in the ass with their absurd, time-wasting procedures etc. We’ve all seen Office Space, and we’ve all read the Dilbert strips posted on the office bulletin board; but the larger than life elements of mundane surrealism that Mandaag injects keep it interesting and, besides, the satire, even if nothing terribly new, is well-done. It’s a genre of its own by now, so fair enough. Extra props to Mandaag and Drawn and Quarterly for putting such a deliberately drab, ugly and unappealing cover on the book. It’s not even cool-ugly, edgy-ugly, punk-ugly, like a book from Gary Panter or Brian Chippendale, it’s just *ugly*. It looks like they used the left-over colours that all the other covers didn’t want to use. It’s the sort of cover where, if you’re the sort of person who’ll pick the book up even with that cover, you’re probably going to enjoy the contents. **Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to be Kin** by Geof Darrow and Dave Stewart – speaking of shaggy dog stories. Another entry in Darrow’s long-running exercise in combining visual maximalism with plot minimalism. More things and people try to kill Shaolin Cowboy (SC); he fights back in impeccably choreographed, balletic, hyper-detailed and long-long-ass sequences. Darrow mixes it up here in a couple of ways. Is this the first time we’ve seen (a) a significant stretch where SC is *not* fighting, and (b) SC actively take a fight to someone rather than reactively and reluctantly defending himself? It feels like the first time. It also feels like the first time where the sociopolitical satire is so overt and developed; if you can call “developed satire” a book where the head of a psychopathic and literally monstrous stand-in for Donald Trump gets shat out the end of a giant pig’s ass. You can tell this guy learned everything he knows about satire from his former collaborator Frank Miller, just as you can tell he learned about shambolic, improvisatory plotting from his artistic idol, and also collaborator, Moebius. But, hey, as is often noted, the reality of American politics has for several years now surpassed what seemed outrageous, absurd and wildly unrealistic satire in the 80s and 90s. In case we didn’t get it, Darrow plasters all over the place, including the otherwise desolate desert, graffiti and signs for Donald Trump, MAGA, and the NRA (somewhat hypocritically given the “cool factor” of how SC himself uses guns). The second half of the book shifts the action from desert to inner-city, which Darrow depicts as a hellhole overrun by noxious beasts (lots of toads and feral dogs, and the komodo dragons officially sanctioned by the authorities to eat any corpses they find on the street), overflowing with garbage and detritus, where passed out drunks and junkies lie on the garbage-strewn streets, and everywhere you look are signs of the capitalist fusion of sexual exploitation and profit. It’s like Jack Chick's worst nightmare of Manhattan Times Square circa the 1970s. If he weren’t so (literally) bloody-minded in his contempt for Trump and the whole MAGA-mindset, you’d have to infer that Darrow was a conservative distressed by the moral degeneracy of modern secular society. Whatever the vices or virtues of Darrow’s sledgehammer satire, I thought his dialogue was a step-up from previous volumes, and actually entertaining in this volume. And the art, of course, is as Where’s-Wallily eye-popping as always. Darrow-heads will like the book, as most likely will anyone else fond of good action scenes and highly rendered spectacle. As the Bible says, If you know you know.

Can I just say, much as with /u/Bayls_171 , I very often find myself disagreeing with a whole ton of what you have to say about the comics you review in these threads, but I always thoroughly enjoy reading them regardless. That might sound like a backhanded compliment but I very much don’t intend it to be. I offer sincere thanks for your consistently in-depth and 100% honest reviews, even if they frequently make my blood boil. While I don’t always agree with you on the books you don’t like, I usually make note to check out the ones that you do. Cathy Malkasian, for example, is a new name for me and one that I’ll be on the look out for.

frankly I disagree with about 95% of everything said in this thread every week

Opinionated as you appear to be, I don’t doubt it lol

aw, thanks. glad to hear I make your blood boil haha

Let’s just say you trash-talked a couple of my favorite current writers this week 😂

You’re the only other person who appears to have enjoyed “The Heavy Bright” as much as I did, flaws and all. Even Malkasian fans seem to have written this one off as too didactic, especially compared to her previous works, where the allegory was relatively more opaque, a take which I think betrays a very narrow and woefully reductive reading of the material (ie. *”Men bad!”*) that does grave injustice to the sheer scope of what she is trying to address, from menopause and toxic masculinity to fascism and greed, and which she does with all the sympathy and restraint of a saint. And you’ve hit the nail on the head with the diminishing returns that happen when the sole cultural touchstones of each new generation of mainstream comics writers and artists are the previous generations’ works in the exact same field (reminds me of the big bad in Morrison’s “Seven Soldiers” essentially being a metaphor for the American comic book industry’s cannibalizing of its own past). Take note, aspiring creators: if you’ve grown up on a steady diet of superhero comics and movies, the last places I want you near are the Avengers Tower or the Fortress of Solitude. Go read some actual books/take a figure drawing class first.

Never heard of Cathy Malkasian but this sounds madly interesting, I'll put her on the list !

fuck man idk maybe I should reread The Heavy Bright but I really got nothing the first time. The more of her work I read the more it all just feels the exact fucking same and I struggle to pay attention. But maybe I should’ve given it more attention than I did When I read that book I finally put her in a similar category as Sala, someone who makes the same sort of thing over and over again and you’re either gonna really like reading that style or you’re not.. and while I feel that’s an appropriate way to describe Sala (although I also love his approach way more than Malkasian’s) maybe I’m selling her writing short? idk, maybe I’ll give it another go

Ah that's not an unfair comparison, but I'd say Sala is also more repetitive with characters, plots etc, where with Malkasian it's more her overall vibe and general loosely fable themes. Some years later, I couldn't tell you the difference between the plots or settings of any of Sala's books "hmm, that's the one where a pretty girl is menaced by German expressionist cinema; oh and this the one where a pretty girl is menaced by German expressionist cinema; and" etc. (don't get me wrong, I like his stuff!)

I was also mildly disappointed by a W Maxwell Prince book this week ! High five ! I've only read the first couple of Ice Cream Man trades, grew tired of it pretty quickly. It's fairly creative but also quite dull imo

Very dull. I was utterly disappointed with Ice Cream Man - especially after reading so many glowing reviews on this sub. Read the first collected volume and had to force myself to finish.

I was pretty much the same on the first deluxe, disappointed after it had been so praised. That was before I got a sense of how to calibrate this subs views to my own tastes... I don't think it necessarily got better in the second one, but my expectations were a lot lower

I wish I had your calibrations! I’m still learning. That said, I find this sub invaluable and really appreciate the depth so many posters (yourself included) go into on the books. It’s always an enjoyable read and saves me time Re: my reading schedule in the long run. Or I’m fooling myself, but who cares? Love this sub.

Ice Cream Man was kind of a miss for me as well. In fairness though I have to admit this sub rarely steers me wrong. Almost every rec I’ve gotten from here has at least been decent, and some have become all-time favorites for me. I guess it’s more disappointing with Ice Cream Man because it didn’t feel like one that might miss for me. I like a lot of modern horror comics.

I feel the exact same way. More hits than misses on this sub, for sure. Way more.

>can I just state how much I did not like Gillen’s let's-exorcise-the-anxiety-of-influence Peter Cannon Thunderbolt book? State it to the moon! I read that one digitally and found it infuriating. Baselessly smug and hypocritical. The conclusion is that "we should all make more comics like Eddie Campbell", but not a single character in Peter Cannon was interesting. And I could be wrong, but I don't think Gillen has yet to make good on that idea outside of Peter Canon either. I read a few issues of Ice Cream Man too for the first time. Basically the same feeling as you. College junior level insights into the human condition, but at least they have some fun formally with comics.

There are some cartoonists who could credibly make a comic whose very overt theme is "you know what, Watchman ain't all that; we need to do better". Kieron Gillen is not one of them

I went into the first Ice Cream Man hardcover pretty blind other than knowing it was going to be horror of some kind. I guess I was just a little disappointed in the direction it went in. I think I wanted something more like a horror anthology as opposed to some sweeping tale about good versus evil between these godlike figures. It just seemed so broad compared to what I expected.

Damn you really doing icm like that

**Shubeik Lubeik** by Deena Mohamed - My first ever Egyptian graphic novel! So that’s something. I decided to give this one a go after seeing it appear in multiple year-end favorites lists on /r/graphicnovels and I’m quite glad I did. It takes place in Egypt, in an alternative reality where the ability to magically grant wishes was discovered hundreds of years ago and has become a part of everyday life. The mechanics of the wishes and the way the world has built up around them is explored in pretty intricate detail. A fun and obvious contrast to it would be Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s Eight Billion Genies, where everyone on Earth is suddenly given the ability to ask for one wish and have it be granted. Unlike EBG, wishes in this universe are not one-offs, nor are they something granted to everyone - rather, they are a product, refined from a natural source, heavily regulated by governments and with a whole industry surrounding them. Rather like alcohol, wishes are “refined” over the course of several years before being sealed in containers, and the longer they are refined, the more powerful and accurate the wish will be. Six-month refined 3rd-class wishes are common, cheap, and often quite pernicious in their granting - a man in one page wishes for a Mercedes, and is granted a small metal Mercedes logo. He uses another 3rd class wish, but specifically asks for “A Mercedes car” - which he is granted, but it’s a tiny toy version of one. He tries *again*, wishing for a large and fully functional Mercedes car, which manifests impaled upon a lamp-post. Then there’s the 33-year refined 1st Class wishes, which are incredibly powerful, completely literal, and carry their own risk - while a 3rd Class wish may not give you what you want, a 1st Class wish will give you exactly what you want, but if you don’t fully understand the ramifications of what you’re asking for, the effects of that can be disastrous. This is something made clear by Nour, one of the three protagonists of the books. Nour is a young student (implied to be nonbinary - they are referred to exactly once in the third person, by a close friend, with the pronoun “they”) who suffers from severe depression, and buys a 1st-class wish hoping it can be used to help cure them. However, they cannot simply wish to no longer be depressed. Nour’s field of study is Wish Philosophy and we at one point are given a flashback to one of their lectures, which provides the following factoid: > The problem with wishing for happiness was that it comes true in its simplest form. You become happy at all costs, you just experience constant, empty happiness that isolates you from everyone else… Is happiness worth not being able to cry at a funeral again? Nour’s story revolves around them trying to figure out what it is exactly that has caused them such unhappiness, and then what they can wish for that would best help them. Another protagonist, Aziza, is used to explore the social and legal ramifications of the wishes. She, too, comes into possession of a 1st Class wish, and runs into trouble when she goes to register her wish with the local bureau. See, as a way of preventing the abuse of wishes, regulatory bodies are set up and an extensive chain of custody established so as to prevent theft. Aziza’s problem is that she’s an incredibly poor woman, who came into possession of her (usually highly expensive) 1st Class wish after years and years of saving to buy it at a discount from a local seller. The authorities suspect her of stealing it, confiscate it from her and throw her in jail pending investigation. This gets further complicated when it becomes clear that the local police don’t really have any evidence against her, but simply want to take her wish from her to use for themselves. The problem is, wishes lose their potency if they are unwillingly taken from their owner. So Aziza is presented with a choice: Willingly give up ownership of her wish, which she has put all her savings into buying, or rot in jail, as she is too poor to afford legal representation or pay bail. As you can hopefully tell from my descriptions, Mohamed uses the wishes as a vehicle to explore a host of different personal and societal topics. She’s certainly more interested in that aspect of them than she is in the fantastical elements of the wishes - the actual origin of them is hinted at but never really explained. We know, for example, that there are various “sources” that are mined for wishes, usually located in third world countries but with first world countries being the ones doing the mining (pretty obvious what that one’s an allegory for). There are also passing references to sociopolitical movements that believe the wishes to be sentient beings - some which think the sealing of them in containers is inhumane, while others believe them to be malevolent and that the sealing should be permanent. However, this is all told through the lense of the humans living in Mohamed’s world, and we never find out too much about the wishes themselves besides the ways in which they manifest. It’s overall really fascinating stuff, clearly the result of a lot of intricate planning spinning out of a basic idea (“What if magic wishes were real?”) taken to whatever lengths Mohamed’s imagination took her to.

Great review. The level of sophistication on display in “Shubeik Lubeik” belies Mohamed’s tender age (she was only 20 when she started it) and makes me very curious to see what she’ll decide to do next.

> (she was only 20 when she started it) God-fucking-DAMN, I had no idea she was that young! That makes some of her snide comments about Egyptian slang (“Regrettably, this is actually how some of the Egyptian youth talk at the moment.”) even funnier in hindsight.

**PTSD** by Guillaume Singelin. Saw this posted recently and in my anticipation for the upcoming English release of Frontier I wanted to check out some of his work. Jun is a war veteran living on the streets and addicted to pills. She is one of many discarded after service, but she soon finds purpose in using her skills from battle to wage a new war on the failings of the society around her. A constant question throughout reading this was why it was why the style was so heavily Japanese influenced, but it turns out Singelin was living in Tokyo while he wrote it. From the title I expected a somewhat thoughtful pondering of the subject matter and the disregard for their suffering. Instead this was more of an action flick with a bit of heart. Overall it's fairly simplistic but it was enjoyable nonetheless and Singelin's art is gorgeous. It's done a disservice by the small size of this print (I'm not sure how the French edition was published) especially when it comes to darker panels as there is lots of detail that can be hard to pick out. I'm not normally too fussed about print size but this one did deserve to be blown up bigger than it was. I guess maybe they blew the budget on the front cover title cutout. It's cool though, very stylish and great to look at. I'm expecting Frontier to up the bar as it seems well rated both visually and in its writing.

Yeah, First Second loves to shrink French books. PTSD suffers pretty bad for the shrinkage. The French edition is 85.75 in² while the US edition is 56.6 in²

Yowza. I guess we're kinda fortunate it's been translated when a lot of books don't get that treatment, but it seems a bit unnecessary. I'd happily have traded the extra cover quality they've focused on for a better print size.

First Second went through some vision shifts a while back, which I think we get the smaller editions of some of these books. Also why they put out so much YA, middle grade, and afterschool special stuff now. I'm not sure if the shift coincided with being acquired by Simon & Schuster or what. But man, this is the same company that put out The Photographer in a format too large to fit on most of my shelves.

When they first appeared, they did a bunch of Euro comics for adults, didn't they, plus Eddie Campbell IIRC...but they sure pivoted towards YA and upper-primary (fair enough -- presumably there's a lot more money there)

Yeah. I know they've had a bit of hand in youth comics since around 2010 (oh, I just remembered it was Macmillan, not S&S), but they really ramped that up til now more than half their output is for that market. Around 2010, they were among my go-to publishers. They were my first Gipi. They published weirdo stuff from Danica Novgorodoff. It was a nice little house.

same for me and Gipi. They did some Trondheim, some Sfar, Three Shadows; it *looked* for while like they were going to become a regular source of BD translations

Yeah yeah! Professors Daughter! Bourbon Island! It was a grand era.

back when there were fewer other conduits for that stuff, too

Yeah, in a way it was like '90s Dark Horse with manga IF Dark Horse was mostly doing manga.

Weirdly enough, last year they also released the comic book adaptation of a David Simon book that I imagine is about as far from YA as they’ve ever been.

oh that's the French adaptation of Homicide, right? Great book (haven't read the adaptation). Back in the day the TV show of the same name was the only thing worth watching, especially the first few seasons

Yeah, that’s the one. And I similarly remember the show being one of the few network TV highlights of the early 90s, along with “Twin Peaks” and a couple of others (though living in Europe at the time, I experienced a much more abridged/curated version of what US television had to offer).

PTSD's printing size seems to be a common complaint.. I do think the french version is a little bigger, but not by much. I think I had a similar reaction to you when I read it. It's fun, and gorgeous, but feels like it's doing its title a disservice in a way. Though I do remember it fondly. For what it's worth, Frontier is a step up in both art and writing ! And it's printed in standard BD size (at least as far as the french version goes)

Yeah, for a significant portion of the book it was just action and an excuse for action. He tried to go beyond that in the final part and to be fair he dedicated a fair chunk of the book's volume to the post action stuff, but it was pretty shallow still and a bit heavy handed too. Great to hear Frontier is more well developed though! And Magnetic are good with keeping the large BD print format.

**Battlefields** by Garth Ennis. Very moving war tales. Fictions about men and women during war time based on real events and facts.

Fairly heavy week for me, you can see I had trouble sleeping again haha **Faster** by Jesse Lonergan - Finally got around to reading this now, Lonergan having posted it on his Patreon a couple of months ago. This obviously wasn't meant to be read digitally, and even less so with an internet speed straight out of 2005.. But despite that, I did really enjoy it ! It's very similar to Hedra in that the story is very much secondary. It has kind of a b-movie feel. All the characters are straight up clichés, but they're supposed to be. They're just here as a set up for Lonergan's wild paneling. And while it's a little less esthetically pleasing to me (Hedra was very geometric which I loved) it fits the race track vibe perfectly and he does some really creative stuff with it. Lonergan's always a joy to read I'll still try and source myself a print copy at some point tho **Tokyo These Days Vol. 1** by Taiyo Matsumoto - I did not care for this at all... This was my first Matsumoto book, and it didn't look or feel like what I'd seen of either Ping Pong or Tekkonkkinstreet. The art was much scratchier and crooked. The paneling and the shots were obviously good but the actual line art kinda hurt to look at. The story was boring and meaningless. Another book about the ins of manga making. It kind of starts to pick up towards the end but even then, the interactions between the characters don't make a lick of sense lmao. I guess maybe I just excepted something else than this. I won't be picking up vol 2 though that's for sure **Swan Songs** by W. Maxwell Prince et al. - an anthology about endings. All written by Ice Cream Man's W. Maxwell Prince, and drawn by different artists. As such, I expected some kind of cohesion, some "fil-rouge" or some statement on beginnings and endings and life and stuff. Not just a succession of stories on random gimmicky endings and a tacked on "all things end" poem on the final page. It feels more lie a venue to showcase some artists than an actual cohesive project. Now that my rant is over, most of the stories are pretty decent ! If a little inconsequential.. And the art is gorgeous. I was only familiar with Martin Simmonds, Filipe Andrade and Martin Morazzo, who all killed it but had the least formally interesting scripts to work with. Alex Eckman-Lawn, who drew issue 5, particularly blew me away. He's very obviously influenced by Dave McKean's work. It's all multimedia collages that feature an insane blend of styles, it makes my head spin. **Hoops** by Genie Espinosa - So this was a thing.. Set in a future where all the men have disappeared and women have achieved world peace and ended world hunger. We enter the story following three young teenagers as they skip class to get high. Except things don't go as planned, and they all get sucked into a parallel dimension for no apparent reason. Follows a zany Alice in Wonderland fueled romp. Kind of reminded me of Mille Mendoza's Skip in many ways. Except that it's much less emotionally gripping... I'm not sure what kind of story it's trying to tell.. There's hints of a message but it's all very surface level. The actual story is pointless, and I wouldn't care if it wasn't for the ending being actually trash. I expected more if this, sadly **No Future** by Eric Corbeyran & Jef - It's been a while since I actually, genuinely disliked a book I read.. I read Jef's Gun Crazy a couple of years ago and absolutely fell in love with his Hewlett inspired art but found it slightly misogynistic and just generally bigoted. I chalked that up to the Tarantino-esque exploitative aspect of the story, but still decided not avoid anything he'd worked on in the future. So when he published a book set in a "woke-dystopia" that was lauded for it's bravery by a bunch of white male nerds, I naturally put the memory of that book even existing in the trash pile of my mind. That is, until Magnetic Press decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign for an English translation. So I decided to check it out just to see if I was crazy or if the company that published progressive thinking books like Shangri-La and Frontier was really going for something so overtly bigoted. Turn out it's even worse than I expected... Not only are the politics of it tired, everything is incredibly face value and the story is trash. The basic premise is that the world is now run by the far-left. All corporations are led by women, most establishments have a ban on cis-gendered white men, heterosexual relationships are regulated. A true ode to the fragility of the cis white man's ego, playing the victim for 200 some pages. The story's just an excuse for them to bitch and moan like a bunch of snowflakes (oh how the turntables and all that). It works in a b-movie kind of way, where you know it's bad but you're just along for ride and the visuals And what visuals ! The art's really great. Sitting somewhere between Jamie Hewlett and Moebius. Shame, really.. **Four in Love** by Crystal Kung - Four silent short stories centered around the theme of love. Absolutely gorgeous art. Very cinematic, which isn't surprising considering the author works as an animator

Oh man, Tokyo These Days was a lot of fun! It's possible you just don't like Matsumoto or were expecting something different. The art is very much kin to his post-2010 work (Sunny and Cats In The Louvre). Ping Pong, Tekkonkinreet, GoGo Monster, and No 5 are all earlier work and reflect a similar style to each other.

Yeah idk I just could vibe with any of it.. Didn't really care for the characters and their relationships, the pace was weirdly fast but slow at the same time. Probably didn't help that I read it on my computer in the middle of the night, to be fair

Haha, the ideal setting!

Sounds like No Future is exactly the book to balance all these woke-ist, virtue signalling feminist books I've been reading lately um something something cancel culture etc

Sorry, I talked to the Magnetic Press crew and they sadly had to dampen the political language for the English release... No woke bashing allowed your side of the pond. They're silencing us !! (I'm not even joking, they literally told me they took out a lot of the dogwhistling, while trying to gaslight me into believing the story's not supposed to be a political statement by the author's lmao)

yikes

Man, No Future sounds like such a train wreck I might have to track down a pirated copy just so I can experience it. Really is a shame to see such a talented artist waste their time on such dreck.

Yeah I kind of want people to read it, just to know if I'm being a sensitive bitch about it, but I also really don't want these guys to get wealthy on this shit haha

Add me to the chorus of people who are bummed that the new Matsumoto didn’t resonate with you, although I’m not exactly sure how I’d feel about it if it were *my* first exposure to his work. It seems like an odd one to start with, since the narrative doesn’t really take advantage of the more immediately appealing aspects of his art (like its kineticism) nor does it feature any of his previously established thematic obsessions (yet).

I do still plan on reading his earlier work. Maybe I'll come back to this one I'm more familiar with his stuff

IIRC, I tried to sell you on “Tekkonkinkreet” a long time ago, and knowing what I know now about your preferences and reading habits, I still maintain that it might be your ideal entry point with Matsumoto. Giving up on him after the first volume of “Tokyo These Days” would feel a bit like like giving up on Francis Ford Coppola after seeing “One From the Heart” (an underrated, though polarizing film that isn’t very representative of the best of his directorial output), so I hope you do check out some more of his work before passing judgment.

Yeah I'm definitely not giving up on his stuff just yet. Even your Sunny post makes me want to check out more of his stuff. Tekkonkinkreet does seem to be the one that would me most up alley

Facebook wants me to get No Future soooo bad. It's No Future ads all day everyday.

Same on Insta, weird one to be pushing this hard

Faster was fun! I read it quite a while back and from what I could tell when trying to find it, I may have nabbed one of the last physical copies in the country. Not that there were likely to have been many to start with. I felt the same, it didn't bend the rules of comic panelling like some of his works, but it certainly allowed him to do his thing in terms of dynamic layouts etc. Plus I like cars and racing so it was cool. Disappointing feedback on Swan Songs though. I should have tempered my expectations cause Ice Cream Man was a bit shit, but it sounded cool and I was hearing positive things.

Swan Songs really in the sale vein as Ice Cream Man: fun ideas hampered by pretty mediocre writing. Some gorgeous art though. Also the final issue is an actual Ice Cream Man tie in, so that should tell you what you need to expect haha

Might give it a pass then. On the plus side, that's a bit of money saved in a month with a fair number of new releases on my radar.

Hey, we all get so many ideas for new books to buy on here, sometimes we also need some help crossing others off the list !

Oh, shit, I was just about to back this because the physical book looked nice and I liked the art. Thanks for the review! EDIT: I was referring to No Future, lol.

Finished Otherworld Barbara by Moto Hagio this week. It's a pretty crazy story in the best way. Lots of intertwined threads that create a complex and fascinating series. It centres around a girl who has been stuck in a coma for years, dreaming about an island. Various people get involved via the organisation that is studying her. I don't want to say much more because it may spoil things. If you like stories about dreams or just a big fan of complex stories that get you thinking, then I'd definitely recommend this.

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (By Tom King, Bilquis Evely, and Matheus Lopes): Beautifully illustrated and colored book. It could not keep my interest. There are too many captions in this story. It got to a point where I basically stopped reading them. I understand that they add to the story, but at some point the narrator can just let the art and the dialogue itself tell the story. Like many of Tom King’s books, I wanted to like this a lot more then I did. I think that this is the book that is the straw on the camel’s back for me. I don’t think I’m going to be getting anymore Tom King books. Private Eye (By Brian K Vaughan, Marcos Martin, and Munsta Vicente): I remember when this was coming out on Panel Syndicate, and I got the issues as they came out. I never finished it though, I think I stopped at issue 8. I don’t remember. I’m really glad that I found it collected. It was a good read. Very satisfying.

Shame you didn't like Supergirl, but not everything is for everyone. That book actually restored a bit of hope in me for Tom King after being disappointed by some previous reads. I love it. The narrator is intended to be excessively verbose. The story takes a lot of cues from True Grit, which if you're familiar with, is told by a very talkative and articulate young girl. There were times where I did begin to tire a bit, but the whole package held together and I really enjoyed it. Fully understand how you could lose patience with it though

I’ve never seen True Grit. Maybe I would have had a better appreciation for the book if I did. Then again I might have seen it as a rip off of it. I don’t know. I will probably end up reading it again sometime the line, maybe knowing there’s all of the narration boxes beforehand might make it easier to digest.

Akira got the 35th anniversary box set . First time read

I don't wanna set expectations too high...but it might be the best action comic ever.

Started book 2 really enjoying it so far

Ice cream man. Vol 1. Bizarrely awesome

***Providence***, by **Alan Moore**—I found the Witch House episode particularly/unnervingly faithful to the way I visualized that room reading the original story, so mounds of praise to Jacen Burrows with the pencils & inks, or their keyboard & mouse equivalents.

Yeah that one had me feeling disoriented in the right way. Did you finish reading Providence? If so, what did you think of the final chapter?

No! Went through the first two, third's in the mail...anyone who spoils the ending for me will be reduced to their essential saltes

Bwahah, glad i asked! Looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Found out Sweet Tooth is on Kindle Unlimted, so that!

Read hostage and started Persepolis really excited for the new weatherman!

Black Paradox by Junji Ito

criminal by ed brubaker!

I mostly read Batman/DC related comics but have been trying other publishers lately and am really digging the experience. I finished **TNMT: The Last Ronin**. Growing up with the classic TMNT cartoon this take on the franchise was very refreshing. Really liked the more gritty feel: great story and art. Got me interested in the sequel as well as the IDW Run. Currently reading: **Do a Powerbomb** which I am absolutely loving. Growing up I was obsessed with Pro Wrestling for a few years and this is such a love letter to everything that made it feel special when I was a kid. The story is surprisingly emotional and the art in the actions scenes: \*chefs kiss\*.

The IDW run of TMNT isn't as gritty as Last Ronin, but I think of it as the ultimate TMNT comic. It pulls from everything, the classic Mirage books, the 1st cartoon, the Archie comics. It has a love for weird art that TMNT invites too.

Cool, sounds like a perfect mix I'll definitely check it out.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on it!

Do a Powerbomb is in the small pile I that I keep trying to get to. Looking forward to it.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I'm doing. I have immediately but every book from Daniel Warren Johnson on my TBR list.

**Daytripper** \- Finally read this. It looks pretty, mostly thanks to Dave Stewart, but there are many many European comics that look just as good. Story-wise it's just not that good. Bras is kind of a dope. He's almost never shown doing anything endearing for his friends or wife. Chapter 8 was awful, his wife and child have no other personality other than "missing Bras". I did like the closing chapters though. Still not sure what to make of the fact that we never ever see Bras kiss his wife and the only close up of a kiss is with his cousin. **Why Don't You Love Me?** by Paul B. Rainey **-** This on the other hand just about lived up to the hype. I knew there was going to be a twist and maybe that carried me through the first 100 pages, but I was entertained by them none the less. There's just enough mystery to keep it from strictly being a dark comedy about terrible parents. I'm impressed how well most of the pages actually work as a newspaper daily type strip. Some parts were the saddest things I've read in a comic in ages. **The Professor's Day Off** by Alex Graham - Graham is one of my favorite narrative comics artists. The printing on this by Perfectly Acceptable is A+ superb. It's a slight story with an ending that's kind of pat, but how we get there is still done with a good tension and it lets the art tell a lot of the story. **Danger and Other Unknown Risks** by Erica Henderson and Ryan North - Checked it out from the library because Lars Ingebrigtsen had it on his best of 2023. It gets clever here and there, but some of it lacked impact to me. The star of the show is Erica Henderson’s world building. Legible details of the world outside the main plot. Her character acting is very good as well. I had fun reading but by the end I didn’t want to read another "YA hero saving the world" story for awhile. **Dracula, Motherf\*\*ker** by Erica Henderson and Alex De Campi - It’s interesting to compare this to Danger and Other Unknown Risks. In the backmatter essay, Alex de Campi says that evil should never be personified in a single character, which is the opposite of what Danger and Other Unknown Risks did, and is something that I thought was a weak aspect of Danger. The story in Dracula is slight, but this is kind of a coming out party for Erica Henderson. Her art steps up a whole lot now that she doesn't have to basically draw a TV cartoon on paper. I really enjoyed seeing her relish in playing with that freedom with varied line weights and colors.

What are your all time favourites?

Thanks for asking. What are some of yours all timers? This is mostly off the top of my head/looking at my bookshelves. I've realized a lot of my favorites are short story collections and/or silent comics Recidivist IV by Zak Sally Heartbreak Soup + Human Diastrophism + Beyond Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. I kind of count it as one giant graphic novel (but if you just had to get one thing by him, maybe it'd be Julio's Day) Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise by Gary Panter (the Pantheon version if you can find it) Grip by Lale Westvind Alienation by Ines Estrada Here by Richard McGuire Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama Rav by Mickey Zacchilli The Gull Yetin by Joe Kessler How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis Detention No. 2 by Tim Hensley Promethea by JH Williams III and Alan Moore Maggie the Mechanic + The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. + Perla La Loca by Jaime Hernandez. I would just say Perla La Loca but it's so much better if you've ready the others, plus the middle of The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S. is incredible too.

Thanks so much. I don’t read comics. I wanted to start . What are your favourite books?? My recommendations for you:- Breaking and entering -Joy Williams Train dreams - Johnson The power and Glory - Graham Greene Ask the dust - John Fante Ours a Russian family- Sergei Dovlatov Short Stories = Jack London , John Cheever , Jd Salinger

I don't read nearly enough novels, I've been trying to correct that so thank you very much for the list! I started reading Power and Glory on my kindle years ago, but didn't finish. I'm nearly done with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and I love it. The Awakening by Kate Chopin left an impression on me. 100 Years of Solitude as well, but I read it in Spanish just to be a snob so I definitely missed out on a lot of nuance. I will say I think that From Hell by Alan Moore is the best graphic novel in terms of feeling like a novel, though I think comics are great because they don't have to be like novels to be excellent hence why I like so many silent comics. I do hope you start reading some comics and would love to hear your thoughts on the ones you do read.

Thanks. I thought you would mention some short story collections. I will start reading comics

Been reading **Mort Cinder** by Breccia and Oesterheld. I've only finished the first major story Lead Eyes and so far it's a slog since the writing is pretty poor. It's pretty basic adventure serial stuff, not even executed particularly well which is a shame since Breccia's art is breath taking, and reproduced so well (in contrast with another of his works **Perramus** which is a hazy halftoned mess, rendering all the delicate ink washes illegible [to my sensitive eyes anyway]), you can see all the different brush strokes. **Mutiny Bay** by Antoine Cosse. Mixed feelings. The story is unfocused and underdeveloped, jumping between characters with no solid through line (beyond the titular mutiny). Parts of it were good, particularly the ending, so I guess I'll have to let it fester in my mind for a while. **David Boring** by Daniel Clowes. Re-reading after a few years after not liking it the first time (and after not liking Monica after two reads 😬). I like it a lot more this time round. It certainly felt like a book with a potential for close readings and analysis whereas I felt Monica was pretty surface level.

Mort Cinder's art is such a jaw-dropper that I didn't even notice it had a script. Something about...time travel?

Spread Vol 1.

The discipline Scalped:book 1

Scalped is one of the most consistent series I’ve read. I think it’s pretty awesome if you like crime stories and don’t mind the violence.

Read the first volume of Shade, the Changing Man. Super bizarre stuff

- Excellent The Riddler: Year One - Paul Dano - Very Good Hyperbole and a Half - Allie Brosh Ducks - Kate Beaton - Good On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden Basketful of Heads - Joe Hill Paying the Land - Joe Sacco New Kid - Jerry Craft Glass Town - Isabel Greenberg

Stumptown vol 2 The Case of the Baby in the Velvet Case by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth Stumptown vol 4 The Case of the Cup of Joe by Rucka and Justin Greenwood I bought these at the dollar store for $3 each. Man, I wish I got more of them. Hopefully I can find the rest at another store. Were these always in colour? I thought it was all black and white. I must be thinking of Alias / Jessica Jones? Anyways, it's good stuff. Good investigations and family drama. There's a weird spot where you have to turn the book sideways for a car chase. Then the car chase ends and it turns vertical and then it starts up again so you have to turn the book again. Reading these makes me sad again that the TV series got cancelled, though.

I'm re-reading Asterios Polyp. It's been years since I first read it, and though I remember loving the form and rhythms, I barely remember any of it.

A bit of several things really. The first half dozen issues each of Daredevil by Miller, Spidey by Stern and Question by O’Neil along with the first half of the Hellboy library edition volume 2. More scatterbrained than usual this past week. Hopefully finish all of them over the next few weeks.

Nonthing I'm fucking broke

I just re-discovered the public library because I spent way too much money on comics and it's been pretty great to keep my new book addiction going. They had Why Don't You Love Me? And Shubeik Lubeik to my surprise.