Alternative/independent comics thread

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Oct 14, 2020 5:55 am

Cool shit. I think you've tipped me over the edge into buying a copy of the Gfrorer

I was thinking the lazy teddybear is coloured to look exactly like Winnie the Pooh with his red shirt, and wondered if it was a rip-off/homage, but of course Winnie the Pooh didn't have a red shirt back in those days so I guess it's Disney doing the thieving as per usual
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Postby Wombatz » Wed Oct 14, 2020 6:42 am

that lazy teddy wears trousers, so disney still had to apply the donald duck principle of bare buttocks only being more proper than feathers/fur all over to arrive at their winnie. here's an intermediate attempt:

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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Oct 14, 2020 7:06 am

Wish I could see that image - can only assume it's more art from Wombat Man
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Postby sevenarts » Wed Oct 14, 2020 8:06 am

Good stuff as always. Fair point about the Coché being fairly on the intellectual side of things but at least for me it hit on more deeply felt levels as well. It feels a bit like a puzzle that's not really meant to be solved - the intellectual games and references are there but the point seems to be more about just soaking in that amazing imagery.

That bear is completely Winnie the Pooh, what the hell.
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Postby teratoid_heights » Thu Oct 15, 2020 4:25 pm

HotFingersClub wrote:Image
Heather Benjamin - Cavegirl Monologue
This is an art book rather than a comic and there’s not really too much to say about it, but I wanted to namecheck it because it’s my first exposure to Heather Benjamin. It looks like she’s more of a zine creator and a fine artist if anything, since she doesn’t seem to have done much sequential stuff. Her images are meticulously detailed depictions of demonic sex, filled with blood and savagery and usually centred around gaping ravenous vaginas. She holds nothing back, evoking the sexual horror of people like Johnny Ryan and Suehiro Maruo but turned up to eleven. Having said that, in this collection she seems to have mellowed a little – there’s noticeably less of the bloodthirst that I’ve seen in preview images of her earlier stuff, like Sad Sex. You don’t have any of the insane images of women impaling themselves on giant cocks, but Benjamin also hasn’t replaced those images with new enquiries, instead she’s just narrowing down, coming back again and again to an vision of a single woman with wild floating braids and muscular furry calves, huge pussy always on display and leaking beads of blood. Her art is always a marvel to behold, and if there’s less variety than you might hope for from a $35 art book, there is also an intriguing sense of seeing an act of worship being committed on the page, what once was many women now becoming just one woman over and over again, Benjamin’s near exclusive focus on this figure turning her into a devotional song to sex and destruction.

Ah, had this one on my list. I regret not grabbing a copy of Sad Sex when it was in print as this sounds like more of the same. I wish she'd dip a toe into the world of comics, but it seems like the most she's ever done is cover art. I feel like she might be able to write a halfway-decent horror by way of trauma story.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:02 am

You and me both. Would love to see what kind of story she’d write
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Oct 21, 2020 4:20 am

FYI Perfectly Acceptable are running a little sale accessible via their insta. They've got a few cool books on sale including Lale Westvind's Grip

https://www.perfectly-acceptable.com/sale/
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Postby Wombatz » Fri Oct 23, 2020 7:54 am

so, one more from bries and one more from josh bayer

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it's not an ocean by gert ooms and céline hudréaux. this follows the edward gorey mechanics of a book, only more abstract/spacey, so it looked like something likeable, but i wish i had checked the text beforehand. no spoiler warning here because this could save you some time and money: the story is that there's this ceo who has to fire people until he can't take it anymore and then he let's go of his career and moves to the country to find a more fulfilled life within himself. nobody understands him because they think he's crazy. then, in a final twist, it appears he's crazy, so you get all the clichés but from a neoliberal point of view. thank you very much.

i did like this here page:

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but the overall verdict is:

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happily the bayer book, theth: tomorrow forever, is truly a heavy beast:

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that's wendy o williams, theth's fantasy and muse, trying to shout him toward artistic glory from the back of his headphones. first of all, though, he has to navigate the chasm between his bed and the working desk:

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this fight goes on for pages upon pages ... it's also a fight for the reader, i couldn't take this at one go ... there are no dynamics, just the tension theth aims at for his comic ... the need for self-expression vs the crippling insecurity, the outsider's want to glorify any halfway interesting person but not being able to connect, trying to make sense of life and mixing it up with ideas and theories for a comic that would look something like this:

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which of course is always also the comic we read. i identify up to a point (theth has no self-reflection, he's more of a principle than a character), more than i'm comfortable with anyway. we've talked about bayer's recent coloring on this thread before, and indeed it often overwhelms his greatest strength, the linework, but here it makes a perfect sense, a sludge of gaudy hues thick as molasses, and also a reference to a select handful of early 80s comics in theth's/bayer's pantheon.

i think this is a major work (if the first theth was young adult literature, this is the great american novel). bayer's theme is often that wondrous feeling that we all want from reading comics and how it might translate or distill, and this is the most profound version yet, as the struggle to cope with the world, to come to terms with onself, become a kind of sisyphean inner superheroics. not sure if people here will dig it as much, though, the earlier theth was much more communicative, here bayer is riding his bete noirs again.

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while this main wintery part of the book is one big sludge, there is a shorter somewhat summery coda that spoils the symmetry of the book but suggests we do not necessarily have to fight all the way out of the mire, but time will change us and actions become possible.

p.s. on a much lighter note, here's another childhood memory, a soccer novel in verse, written and drawn in 1943 (! ... somewhere in the trenches while fighting for nazi germany) and printed in 1946, with the permission of the military government for bavaria (control license nr us-e-117). i read it over and over a generation later and the perspective on this spread always bothered the hell out of me:

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Postby HotFingersClub » Fri Oct 23, 2020 3:52 pm

Maybe I've had too much wine or pizza or camel blues but those Bayer pages are looking very good to me right now. Where did you order that from Wbatz?
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Postby landspeedrecord » Fri Oct 23, 2020 5:17 pm

I am admittedly not as plugged in as most of this thread, but josh bayer is one my favorite artists of the past few years... dude's linework just shreds, and I love how he inks and colors it

and by all accounts on social media, etc he just seems like an all-around good person. I'm a fan
rather be an idiot than a sheeple
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Postby Wombatz » Sat Oct 24, 2020 2:05 am

HotFingersClub wrote:Where did you order that from Wbatz?

from the artist directly ... you get a watercolor drawing with orders over 40 bucks, so this made up for the overseas postage. and indeed, like landspeed says, it's worth following his insta, where he posts too many amazing (uncolored) pages for them all to end up in books.

meanwhile, i also bought a disheveled copy of a peter saul catalog with mostly 60s paintings ... these are much stronger and much more relevant to a love of indie comics than i would have suspected coming to him from his later work (which follows superhero comics' move into shady 3d coloring in the 90s)

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Postby sevenarts » Sat Oct 24, 2020 9:21 am

That Bayer stuff indeed looks great. I haven’t always loved his writing - although the other Theth stuff was good - but his art is so dense and strange and cool. That Wendy O Williams drawing straight up looks like a Panter panel.
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Oct 25, 2020 10:54 pm

Time to do a big semi-random minicomic round-up....

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On Tour by Moa Romanova
This is a Peow-published tour diary from Romanova's time as merch saleswoman for her friends in the band Shitkid, on tour with the Melvins across Europe. Although obviously not as fully realized and satisfying as her debut Goblin Girl from earlier this year, it's another fun dive into her sensibility, with plenty of goofy, awkward, off-kilter anecdotes and moments. Despite the generally lighter tone and general gag strip format, Romanova still doesn't shy away from the painful emotions that well up from time to time. Still, mostly just a funny little dip back into her unique world.

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Plaguers Int'l by Max Huffman
Huffman has a really bold, cartoony pop art style and great use of color: very 60s psychedlia-inspired but somehow muted, slightly washed-out and subtle. This stuff is real fun to look at, if not so much to read. I find this kind of faux-retro "groovy" patter pretty tough to take if not done super-well, and basically only Tim Hensley can exactly hit the sweet spot there. The story here is an absurdist superhero/spy genre riff, with a squad of oddball heroes in a post-plague apocalyptic future. It indeed feels a bit Hensley-inspired in the way it lets the story skip in and out of utter nonsense, almost making sense for a page or two at a time and then slipping off into the surreal again. Huffman's alternately rubbery and cubist style is so fun that it's almost worth a look anyway, despite the complete lack of a reason to actually read the words.

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Difficult Loves by Molly Colleen O'Connell
An art comic in the Austin English vein, with a distinctive art style married to somewhat besides-the-point texts, so that it never exactly works as a comic so much as an art showcase that happens to have some nods to sequential narrative. O'Connell's style is dense and busy, with watery ink washes often filling in the gaps between multiple contrasting patterns and designs. Her pages are dizzying and overwhelming, and there's lots to admire in the details but at least for me it rarely comes together into a satisfying whole, especially once the words are taken into account. The text hints at a multi-layered story that cuts between mythology and modernity, but too much of that story rests on the words alone, which vacillate between banal chit-chat and expository speeches. The imagery, on the other hand, is packed with interesting elements and flourishes, but it's so busy that the pages are only sporadically as a comprehensive whole.

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From Beneath by Brian Beaver
Truly a comic that seems out of time: if someone told me this was some lost '80s b&w boom relic dredged up in a quarter-bin, I'd totally believe them, but no it is apparently brand-new this year. It's a silent apocalyptic sci-fi thing in which a pair of cyborgs wander around in their slick computerized car, fighting absurd skull-faced monsters and living shadows. The designs are just wild as hell: one monster in particular, lovingly revealed in a full-page pinup, made me absolutely burst out laughing. So good. Beaver's inky, thick-lined scratchings look like they're ripped out of the margins of a brooding high schooler's math notebook, or maybe a sketchbook of ideas for death metal album covers. Ridiculous and badass in the best way.
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Postby sevenarts » Sun Oct 25, 2020 10:59 pm

Minicomics part 2...

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Questions of Molten Motion / Warmer by Sean Christensen
I've come across some Christensen before but these 2 minis are the most abstract work I've seen from him, with basically no nods to narrative or discernable action. Despite that, they're quite nice, reminding me a bit of Jason Murphy. Christensen's pages weave together patterns and abstract forms with hazy outlines of human figures, often naked and with whimsical alien heads, all of it blended together into this busy dance of lines and static and shapes. There's something hieroglyphic-like about the way he arranges the pages - in Warmer he even includes an indecipherable, presumably invented script alongside the images. I can't make much out of either of these in terms of what it's all about but the delight in motion, form, mark-making, and page design come through loud and clear, making these pretty enjoyable examples of comics' more abstract frontiers.

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2016-17 by Mark Beyer
A slim collection of Beyer's sketchbooks, the first time I've revisited his very particular aesthetic in quite a while. Not so surprisingly, these mixed-media drawings find his basic style very much unchanged from what it was in Agony or Amy and Jordan - darkly absurdist images of a horrific, violent, cruel world that repeatedly crushes his lumpy, misshapen, spindly-limbed characters beneath its weight. I'm surprised how much I miss the narrative element - it's easy to undersell Beyer as a writer, but the deadpan quality of the horror in his stories carried as much of the charge as the disturbing images - but this is still a great reminder of what a remarkable visual stylist he is. Each image here is just so weird, so gripping, all these eerie barren environments and twisted monstrous figures, urban and suburban landscapes sliding into hell. Lots of blood and big bulbous heads, and great variety in the visual approaches and especially the use of color throughout. Just eye-popping, the kind of image- and mark-making where I want to luxuriate in every detail even when what's being shown is absolutely gruesome. A great little book for the committed, though those new to Beyer should obviously check out his older classics instead.

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Endman / Procyon II by Karissa Sakumoto
Eerie, hazy, quasi-narrative nightmares done in a grainy, pixelated style that, as HFC pointed out, obviously resembles Uno Moralez, especially since both are presenting modern urban horrors through this aesthetic that deliberately recalls the technologies of the recent past. Neither of these short pieces quite tells a complete story - by design - but both are evocative, mysterious, and vaguely frightening, with a sense of menace drifting throughout, its source never quite totally clear. Of the two, Procyon II is a bit more narratively driven, a series of Lynchian noir chase sequences connected with dream logic and mysterious cuts to black. It's also the bigger and more visually lush book, with washes of blocky texture and shadows densely packed with noisy static; absolutely gorgeous in its lo-fi way, and Sakumoto's sense of composition is so strong that each panel is striking. Endman is smaller and more washed-out, its details washed away like an nth generation photocopy, and appropriately it's also more abstract in how it proceeds from one idea to the next. Although it's not as immediate as Procyon II, I find its unsettling examination of bodily disconnection and unfeeling violence just as compelling. Two very good minis, excited to see more from her for sure.

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Things Go Wrong #1-3 by Jason Bradshaw
An interesting series of minicomics by a new-to-me-artist. A goofy, shambling, big-footed artist, struggling with depression and creatively blocked, lets himself slide into decay and ultimately death. It's grim and unflinching - in the postscript, Bradshaw describes it as a cathartic examination of his own depressive and suicidal tendencies, and it's obviously deeply felt. There's also some interesting tension between the bleak tone of the third person narration and Bradshaw's clean, classical big-foot cartooning, though it's never quite exploited to its full potential. When Bradshaw is reveling in shit and blood and ruination in this simple, pleasant, cartoony style, it's jarring and at times really disquieting. The art does kind of fall apart at times when Bradshaw zooms in for details, which often just renders the pages confusing - his faces and figures aren't defined distinctively enough to translate into fragmentary closeups so well. This is especially true in the rather plodding, juvenile first issue - the second and third issues, which were drawn a couple years later, are a definite step up. Despite its issues, this is a pretty bold and personal vision from an artist who seems worth watching.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:49 am

I always love a minicomic roundup; that's an interesting batch. I'm glad you liked Karissa Sakumoto - really excited to see more stuff from her for sure

I lold when I saw that Brian Beaver comic wasn't from 1993. What is it about that heavy ink n scratches style that looks so inescapably retro. Maybe that comic is the start of some kind of reclamation for the 20s. I for one would not be in favour
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:50 am

That Romanova mini sounds good as well. She's got a real bee in her bonnet about Mumford and Sons
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Postby Wombatz » Mon Oct 26, 2020 6:16 am

HotFingersClub wrote:I lold when I saw that Brian Beaver comic wasn't from 1993. What is it about that heavy ink n scratches style that looks so inescapably retro. Maybe that comic is the start of some kind of reclamation for the 20s. I for one would not be in favour

that beaver looks like something i'd hugely enjoy. i agree there's a retro feel to the page ... but then again i struggle to come up with 90s stuff that's really like that. it's a topic we've almost talked about in passing here. like i don't see that bayer's wendy could come from panter (totally different linework, fractured in panter, splashing in bayer), or i don't see that a gfrörer drawing looks like tony millionaire (e.g. totally different use of hatching, for space and texture in millionaire, for psychology and composition in gfrörer). i'm sure in both cases there will be a direct influence (or is it rather dame darcy in gfrörer's case?), i'm also sure that all these artists stare at old master drawings a lot, but the comics read so different anyway.

just as an intro to the question: what are everybody's favorite 90s comics that are like the beaver?
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:06 pm

Wombatz wrote:
HotFingersClub wrote:I lold when I saw that Brian Beaver comic wasn't from 1993. What is it about that heavy ink n scratches style that looks so inescapably retro. Maybe that comic is the start of some kind of reclamation for the 20s. I for one would not be in favour

that beaver looks like something i'd hugely enjoy. i agree there's a retro feel to the page ... but then again i struggle to come up with 90s stuff that's really like that. it's a topic we've almost talked about in passing here. like i don't see that bayer's wendy could come from panter (totally different linework, fractured in panter, splashing in bayer), or i don't see that a gfrörer drawing looks like tony millionaire (e.g. totally different use of hatching, for space and texture in millionaire, for psychology and composition in gfrörer). i'm sure in both cases there will be a direct influence (or is it rather dame darcy in gfrörer's case?), i'm also sure that all these artists stare at old master drawings a lot, but the comics read so different anyway.

just as an intro to the question: what are everybody's favorite 90s comics that are like the beaver?


I think the stuff I was most interested in was the more mainstream incarnation of the aesthetic like 2000AD and Peter Milligan. Big fan of Shade, Enigma and the lower profile stuff like The Extremist. Peter Kuper's Bleeding Heart gives me that kind of vibe, and Ben Hutchings' stuff even though the tone is (presumably) completely different
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:51 pm

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Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan - An Embarrassment of Witches
This is Goldstein’s follow-up to her 2017 hothouse scifi drama House of Women, going solo on the art again but this time co-writing with Jenn Jordan, who doesn’t seem to have any other credits apart from an old webcomic called Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell, also co-created with Goldstein. I don’t know anything about the division of labour and who brought what to this book, but the most noticeable addition is a strong commercial streak. House of Women wasn’t a masterpiece but it definitely read like some kind of passion project – the product of someone with a distinctive vision. This book is much less interesting in that respect, starting from the premise down, which is yet another stab at moving Harry Potter into a university setting. To be fair, it’s more of a female-led relationship drama than that would imply, but the basic concept of a university for witches is not really getting me too excited. Even within those parameters, Goldstein and Jordan are working hard not to alienate anyone. Our heroine is klutzy and relatable with boy troubles and a demanding mother – the magic tropes are really just window-dressing for a pretty basic comedy-drama. For whatever reason, the book lacks the maturity of House of Women. Brought to a contemporary setting, Goldstein’s writing is much more rote and forgettable, leaning on language that already feels dated and with motivations drawn much more broadly. The cartooning isn’t bad though – I think Goldstein’s art is better suited to the light frothy stuff than the intensity of House of Women, where she looked a little clean and bland for the subject matter.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:52 pm

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Rosemary Valero-O'Connell - Don't Go Without Me
Finally caught up with this Shortbox collection of rising star Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s work, fortunately timed to coincide with the hype around Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, which brought V-O’C to a much wider audience. The main draw for me was the title story, which ended up being quite good, about a woman searching for her one true love in faerie lands while her memory slowly ebbs away. It’s narratively very uncomplicated and doesn’t really develop much beyond its premise, but that’s kind of fine. Primarily it’s an excuse for O’Connell to draw a bunch of lush crowd scenes with creepy magical beings. She has the design sense of a great manga fantasist but also actually gets the time to work on fully-realised worlds. The result is these lush, video-gamey environments that are very pleasing to the eye.

Aside from that, her Shortbox mini What is Left is also included, and is still good, probably still the highlight of this collection. The final story didn’t really grab me – her art is great as usual but the fable that she sets to it is a little purple for my tastes, told in a poetic, mythic key rather than dramatised. In general, aside from an appreciation for the obvious effort, detail and sense of design and composition that she puts into her art, I came away slightly underwhelmed by these stories. They reminded me a little of all that floaty gothic material like Moonshadow that Vertigo used to churn out in the early 90s.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:56 pm

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Liz Suburbia - Egg Cream
I’m a huge proponent of Suburbia’s debut GN Sacred Heart so it’s weird that it’s taken me so long to get to this follow-up. I guess I was waiting for the collected edition but there’s no sign of #2 yet. Egg Cream is a new ongoing which in this issue mixes two main sections: the first half is what looks like the first installment in a sequel to Sacred Heart, while the second half comprises about thirty short illustrated dreams. I don’t think I dig this as much as sevenarts did. The first half uses a documentary format to fill in what happened before, during and after the events of Sacred Heart, assuming a fair bit of knowledge of the original story. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a dealbreaker but trying to remember the relevant context was confusing enough for me, and I’ve actually read Sacred Heart – no idea what a new reader would make of it. More to the point, I feel like the format sacrifices a few of Suburbia’s greatest strengths: namely the interplay of characters and dialogue, and the low-level social repurcussions of a world without grownups. If Sacred Heart had one flaw, it’s that the ending made explicit things which we just didn’t need to know, and Egg Cream really doubles down on that in a way that felt like dissecting the proverbial frog, digging in and providing explanations where none were really needed. She’s such a natural talent and a charming writer that she can still pull it off, but I have to question if it’s the best direction for this story in particular.

The second half where Suburbia illustrates a bunch of her own dreams was actually stronger for me, which is not something I had ever imagined myself saying, but they are genuinely really funny, superbly drawn and genuinely insightful, providing an interesting window into Suburbia’s personal and inner life without trying to explicitly analyse what she depicts. There's a remarkable amount of implicit depth and feeling to these one or two panel entries. Good stuff – I was never in danger of falling off the Suburbia train but those dreams were a great reminder of how much I love being in her company.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:58 pm

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Mary Fleener - Billie the Bee
I didn’t get on too well with Mary Fleener’s new artistic direction, although she’s been away from the scene for so long I feel she might as well be a new artist. Her 90s autobiog comix are such a sassy, energetic prospect; she had the spellbinding voice and life experience of someone like Dennis Eichorn but she could really fucking draw as well, with a pronounced cubist influence that made her stuff completely unmistakeable. Her recent return to comics is very different – kind of an extended children’s fable about a bee exploring the wetlands near her hive. I think it’s the tone that doesn’t work for me – I love that she’s turning her gaze outwards and examining these different, much more sedate and natural aspects of the world, but too much of it comes across like an educational cartoon; it’s not thoughtful enough to be meditative and not entertaining enough to be exciting. She remains a brilliant cartoonist although I think her drawings of bugs and animals are fairly bland and not really harnessing the most interesting aspects of her style. There are a few fantastic spreads where she goes full jazz again and brings in this massive cubist style that really jumps off the page, but it wasn’t a technique that was used in a particularly interesting way. Basically if there’s a scene in which one of the characters freaks out, Fleener gives us a corresponding wacky drawing – the effect is never used subversively or experimentally.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:59 pm

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Sally Madden - Grey is Not a Colour
Just a quick one here: this is a moderately charming little Retrofit mini from 2012, relaying anecdotes from Madden’s teenage years spent working in the Mutter Museum, a collection of medical and anatomical curiosities in The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Madden’s work cataloguing all these weird specimens almost guarantees some entertaining stories, and we do get some of those, featuring conjoined twins, shrunken heads and haunted false legs. She also gives over a little too much space to recounting some standard office lols that are mildly diverting but could have happened anywhere. Her loose sketchy cartooning is functional in the Kate Beaton mold. Still, it’s not bad if you’re interested in diary comix.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 3:02 pm

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Lilli Carre - Heads or Tails
I’d previously read the first two projects from animator and cartoonist Lillie Carre, Tales of Woodsman Pete from 2006 and The Lagoon from 2008, and found them both pleasant enough, but with this 2012 collection she’s definitely captured my attention for the first time. The stories collected here are literary, mysterious shorts reminiscent of Kafka in the literal sense (as opposed to being particularly paranoid or bureaucratic or whatever people mean by Kafkaesque). Some of them have an Eleanor Davis quality to them too, and are not noticeably inferior. In one, a flower show judge loses his ability to make any kind of judgement after a car crash. In another, a community of neighbours debate the meaning of a terrifying sound heard in the middle of the night. One of my favourites was a longer piece about a guy who takes a long drive from his own life and meets a woman and her moth-magnet son at a fairground. Like a lot of the stories in this collection it's an interesting blend of mannered and naturalistic, and slowly generates a unique tension and elegiac quality. There’s something about her pleasant, mild colouring and the wistful air in her cartooning that primes you to expect something twee and/or bland, and her work is not entirely without those qualities, but that impression discounts her sensitive, imaginative storytelling. A lot of this material has already been published in places like Mome and The Believer and Smoke Signal so it might be old news to you that Carre is actually good; I was really appreciating how she stands out from her contemporaries for the first time.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Oct 26, 2020 3:49 pm

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Sarah Horrocks - The Leopard
Finally this week I caught up with Sarah Horrocks’ first longform series, kicked off in 2015 and collected a couple of years ago. What an interesting artist she is. She’s clearly incorporating all kinds of spiky influences – once you’ve seen her describe it as her “transphobia revenge giallo”, those elements definitely become apparent in the series, but her visual and narrative style is so unique that you’d most likely never associate it with giallo unless you’d been told. The story follows a typically awful Horrocks family gathering on an island to hear the reading of their monstrous mother’s will, and the poisonous language quickly escalates into gory serial murders as the riches are revealed to go to the last surviving sibling. Whether you’ll actually divine that much from what you see on the page is touch and go, as Horrocks is absolutely not interested in accessibility. It’s very difficult to tell who anyone is – the few visual signifiers we’re given are often so distorted that it’s hard to distinguish between them; it’s hard to know how many characters there are or what their relationships are to one another. It’s rare that you’ll know who’s speaking, where the action is taking place, what time it is, or when one scene ends and another begins. Even the lettering is not always legible. What comes through is the absolute savagery of these people in every interaction, and the acidic power of Horrocks’ imagery. Every page is kind of nauseatingly beautiful, with panel composition and colour contrasting that you just don’t see anywhere else. The moments of gore are particularly shocking and vibrant, utilising an interest in bisection that comes by way of Shintaro Kago, and glowing tendrils of neon blood. I think there might always be a hard limit on how much I can really get into a Horrocks story when I’m fighting a losing battle to understand what’s going on, but she always gives me enough that I feel I might be able to work it out. In that respect I was reminded again how similar her work feels to Kyoko Okazaki: the visual language and particularly the rhythms of the scenes – both love to drop you into a situation blind and then yank the rug just before you’ve found your bearing.
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Postby sevenarts » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:38 pm

I think I like comics that are nostalgic for that 90s aesthetic - like Fiffe's Bloodstrike - more than the actual original comics. :D

That's a great set of reviews as usual there.

I enjoyed House of Women just fine though it wasn't too exciting - just solid, well crafted basic genre fare. That color page from Goldstein looks hideous to me in comparison - the sense of designy simplicity was what I liked best in House and that page is cluttered and half assed in its layout.

It's a shame about Billie the Bee. Fleener is one of my favorite 90s artists based on Life of the Party, and I really badly wanted to like the new one but kinda struggled with it. I could see what she's going for and it has some charm but I probably tried too hard to like it based on who she is. She's spent the years she's been seemingly absent doing small local strips for California weekly newspapers - I have some collections of those and they're charming, well-observed little strips about issues of very local concern, not really trying to be anything more than workaday functional comics in the old-school newspaper daily strip vein. I feel like there's a bit of that sensibility behind the graphic novel too, it seems like an attempt to translate that kind of very local, small scale focus into a more sustained work and it doesn't quite work. I'd like to see her succeed at it on another try because it's an interesting approach IMO.

Really love your thoughts on The Leopard. She seems to keep topping herself but at least for now that may be Horrocks' most impressive looking book just because of how wild the colors are. I always love how completely she fucks with things we take for granted like (lol) narrative comprehensibility or character identification. Her books always seem to have absolutely solid genre narratives at their core and yet the presentation of those narratives skirts so close to abstraction at times that it might as well be Jackson Pollock. And then things will snap into focus for some searing action/horror set piece and it all briefly makes sense again. Great stuff anyway.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Tue Oct 27, 2020 5:42 am

Yeah there's a real tug of war at the centre of most Horrocks book between the absolute disregard for audience accessibility and a persistent sense that the plot is still important and we should be at least trying to keep up. I think I often feel slightly offended because the combination of beckoning with one hand and pushing back with the other makes me feel stupid as a reader, but the haughty reserve of the storytelling style fits so well with the tone
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Postby teratoid_heights » Tue Oct 27, 2020 10:59 am

Since this seems like the place to post about it, it looks like Al Columbia has ended his relationship with Hollow Press. From my understanding, the reprint of The Biologic Show just got put up for preorder on the Hollow Press site but it looks like his new comic they were planning to release, Cheapy the Guinea Pig has been scrapped. The founder of Hollow Press wrote this on the publisher's Instagram:
Michele Nitri wrote:"It is with great regret that I am forced to give my version of some untrue and defamatory voices that are running on social media concerning the publication of 'The Biologic Show' by Al Columbia. I didn't want to make this bad story public but at this point I'm forced to.

I have been unjustly accused of not respecting the artistic vision of the work. I mean how things unfolded, based on the email exchange - saved and conserved - I had with Al Columbia in recent months. After showing the cover to the author, receiving enthusiastic compliments by him on the work done, we showed a pattern for the inner cover that triggered something, absolutely inexplicable and crazy, in his mind, that led him to flood us with tons of insulting emails. Then, I've of course kept the highest level of professionalism, and above all ignored the violence and aggression against me, and immediately showed my availability in asking how the author preferred the rendering of the same (receiving 'simple solid black' as an answer).

Then I tried to reassure the author that everything was done as he requested, but the author preferred to continue his personal delirium by insulting me going way beyond the point of 'veiled' death threats and harassment against my family.

I would like to confirm that the volume is already in print and will be published, having paid everyone involved in the project and having absolutely met all the contractual terms. I also want to reassure that the comic has not been manipulated in any way and will be absolutely faithful to the original. I sincerely apologize in advance to Hollow Press' readers who will be enjoy this single volume by the author as, due to recent events, Hollow Press has no intention of continuing to collaborate with Al Columbia, who proved to be quite "unstable" from every point of view.

I would like to conclude by reiterating that Al Columbia is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most extraordinary underground cartoonists ever. Unfortunately, an artist, however formidable, is not always respectable (at least as far as I'm concerned) in equal measure as a person. From my side there will be no other reply on the matter, which in case of need, will be resolved in the appropriate civil and criminal offices."


I'm a member of Columbia's Facebook group and it would appear that one of the things Nitri is referring to is a video Columbia posted in which he rants for well over a half an hour about his irritation with the editiorial decisions made with regard to The Biologic Show culminating in him threatening to kill Nitri and burn down his house. The video has since been removed but there are still a number of posts which appear to be from a Columbia sockpuppet account under the name Levi Mizram:

Levi Mizram wrote:"Hey is it just me or is it fucked up michele nitri has be butchering al's classic biologic show imagery by digitally manipulating and drastically re-working much of the book, according to nitri, to improve on al's work because nitiri has determined al's fans are bored with the art after seeing it for 30 years what he called the "shitty" fantagraphics versions. He describes the book and material inside as a "mess" and that he cant sell it otherwise. This book will sell itself to me. Al was very alarmed by all this, coming so late, and told nitri to cease and desist all work on this reprint immediately and call him before he touches it changes al's work again. Nitri has ignored al and posted this cover instead, announcing the book instead, offering al zero reassurance about anything in meantime. Al had wanted to do this collection a long time before michele abducted it and made it his personal private "creative" pleasure. Al doesnt want to back this up if his work is being destroyed and changed by nitri. Having no idea what nitri's true intentions are as of this writing al very much considers this a pirate reprint that he does not and no longer can in any way support or authorize, nitri having broken his trust on so many levels at this point. I know i would rather see al columbia's biologic show, not michele nitri's. Just my opinion."


Levi Mizram wrote:"this is an example of nitri's brillaint and you can see, very necessary improving and re-working of something al columbia (and i'm sure us too) liked the way it was. Nitri also promised Al he was doing this throughout the whole book too. This all was sprung on Al by Nitri very recently too, very much last second."
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(I believe the original image was just a single head)

Have to admit, I'm a bit taken aback that Columbia would make criminal threats against his publisher (not to mention the guy's family) over something as minor as the design of a book but I've also heard from a few people industry-adjacent that have professionally dealings with him that he's pretty difficult to work with.
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Postby sevenarts » Tue Oct 27, 2020 12:21 pm

Wow. Columbia sounds pretty out of hand there but I've already sworn off buying any more Hollow Press books after reading their disastrous latest Shintaro Kago book which was seemingly "translated" by running it through Google's algorithm. They just seem like a really shaky and morally questionable outfit.

I already have the old Biologic Show issues, I just hope the new book Columbia was going to do for them surfaces elsewhere now.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Tue Oct 27, 2020 12:25 pm

Haha that Levi Mizram is such an obvious sock puppet. I don't know much about Columbia outside of enjoying his work but I remember he left Big Numbers under a cloud of controversy. I guess he's just a tricky character
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