The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1723: Optic Nerve #1, April 1995

I really, really liked this comic. I'm not a huge fan of the confessional/biographical/pseudo-biographical genre - I find that they're generally telling stories about people dealing with the sorts of things I deal with in my everyday life, and not in a pleasant way. Perhaps if I didn't have problems in my life, I wouldn't mind so much reading about those same sorts of problems in other peoples' lives, fictional or no.

But this comic was so good. The stories were perfectly paced, the art was wonderfully evocative, and I recognized the characters, the feelings they were having. Perhaps it's that they were conveyed in a way that I found familiar, described in thoughts that echo my own. That said, the particular events in this comic were not even remotely similar to anything I'm dealing with in my own life, or have dealt with. But the emotions attached to those events are similar enough that the comic spoke to me.

If I haven't made that clear by this point :D.

I've delved into Mr. Tomine's work before, though not on the blog. I have a collection of his mini-comics on my shelf, and maybe an issue or two more of this series. Once everything's unpacked at the new house, I'll have to have a closer look.

"About halfway home, I give up on trying to hold the tears in."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 72 - Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection, September 2015

I remember learning about the New Woman in a Nineteenth Century literature course, and about the importance of bicycling to these ladies. Kate Beaton does them proud, and probably offers one of the most authentic, as far as their attitude goes, portrayals of these very early Feminists.

That's not all she does in this book, of course, but the total badassery of the lady on the cover merits consideration. She reminds me of some amazing women that I know.

What more can I say about Kate Beaton's wonderful comic?  One cool thing I didn't mention in my last review was the diversity of art style in the book. Or perhaps it's a diversity of finishedness. What I mean by this is that there are comics in both collections that really look like they've been painstakingly rendered, sweated over, perhaps, and there are those that look like they were jotted down on a bus. This is certainly not a criticism of any of the comics - the quicker-looking ones are still very funny, and the difference of art style gives a different reading experience. And an artist most definitely has to keep things different in order to stay interested.

So go have a look at her work. And then go read Wikipedia to find out who the people are you've just read about. Educate and delight. Sydney would be proud.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 71 - Hark! A Vagrant, March 2012

I have of course seen the "Hark! A Vagrant" webcomics flying about on the Internet over the last few years. Kate Beaton's is a name you can't help but have heard if you're at all plugged in to the comics world. So when I found both of her collections (the second will be featured in 2 weeks) at a thrift shop, I knew they had to come home with me.

Ms. Beaton's is a very specific kind of humour. Or rather, hers is a very specific audience. She's not telling dick jokes here (well, there are a few) - she's making very funny, very intelligent, commentaries on a variety of historical, and not-so-historical, subjects. There were references and strips in here that I didn't get, because they feature historical figures about whom I have no idea. Thankfully, history nerd that she is, Ms. Beaton fills us in on the salient details in her commentary below each strip.

I'm also quite taken with Ms. Beaton's Wonder Woman. Sick and tired of being treated the way she has been, WW gives no more fucks, and takes no shit. Someone at DC should hand the Amazon Princess over to Ms. Beaton. It might be magical.

Here's the link to the online archive: http://www.harkavagrant.com/

Definitely worth a read. And probably a re-read.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 415: Anna & Froga/Moomin Valley Turns Jungle, May 2012 ("Hey Kids! Comics!" Week, Day 3)

Today's selection was a giveaway for Free Comic Book Day 2012. There was a time in the short history of FCBD that stores would set out tables full of comics, and you could just take what you liked. It's now become a buy one get one sort of situation, which I'm totally against, but having not been a comic shop owner for quite some time now, I've no say in how these things progress.

"Anna & Froga" is an odd little comic. Froga's a bit of a dick, and from the brief couple of stories in this issue, I can't really see why Anna is his friend. Unless she's a dick too, but we haven't seen that in the stories contained herein. There are, as with most good children's writing, some pedagogical moments happening here (i.e., don't eat gumballs from the ground, don't take advantage of the friendship of a tuna - you know, common lessons we all need to learn), and Anouk Ricard's deceptively simple art style gives the stories not only the thematic feeling of childhood, but also the visual feeling.

The B-side (or is it a double A-side) of the comic is a reprint of the Moomin comic strip. I've been aware of these stories for a couple of decades. Back when I was active on the Barbelith discussion forums, someone recommended the Moomin children's books to me. I never did get around to reading them, but every now and again these reprints crop up in a FCBD offering, and I think that perhaps I ought to read them. Which, really, is what FCBD ought to be about. My understanding of it at the beginning, and I had my store for the first FCBD, was that it was designed to bring in readers, and to expose jaded readers to things they hadn't read before. Now, sadly, it's more a marketing tool for big summer crossovers from the Big Two, and an incentive program for comic stores (well, not all of them, but a lot).

FCBD is coming up in less than a month, and I strongly recommend heading out to your local comics store and trying out something new. You might be surprised by what you read. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 119: The Adventures of Paul Free Comic Book Day Edition, 2005

To select today's comic, I opened up my database and looked for things that were not part of a series. I came across something that's not even really a comic. Or rather, it is a comic, but was never actually published as a periodical. Michel Rabagliati's Paul books owe much more to the European tradition of comics than they do North America, even though the artist is Montreal-based. This sample of Paul's adventures was released as part of Free Comic Book Day in 2005, and offers a nice taste of the range of Rabagliati's tales and deceptively simple art style.

Free Comic Book Day is a fairly great day for me, though it's become less and less about the proliferation of comics and more and more about the advertisement of comic shops. Not that I'm necessarily against that idea, but when one or two comics are free and you have to pay for the rest, even though they're ostensibly "free" comics, I think it's defeating the point. I never charged for comics on the first FCBD, and my local comic shop didn't on any of the others. And it's such a great chance to pick up stuff that's completely outside of what one might normally buy. Such as this Drawn & Quarterly sampler. I was enamoured enough with Rabagliati's tales from this comic that I did eventually pick up one of the Paul books when I came across a copy. I was not disappointed. The trouble is, with stores charging for the comics now (and yes, I know it's only 25 or 50 cents, but when I'm spending $60/month on comics anyway, and when four or five "free" comics equals one of the ones I really care about getting, you have to be wary of the cash), I'm loathe to pick up something I'm unfamiliar with. That said, there's still plenty of choice, and it does make me more discriminating about what I'm going to get on FCBD.

Rabagliati's art and writing are very fluid. The stories read as autobiography, and probably partially are, but we of course are not reading a series called The Adventures of Michel. It's impressive that M. Rabagliati can convey that sense of the autobiographical even when we're explicitly aware of the fact that the focal character is a fictional one. It could be the first person narration that generally starts off the tales, or the fact that we're seeing different moments from the life of the same character. Whatever it is, the stories are injected with personality, and person-ness, that is consistent across different stories in different time periods. And it's that that makes the comics read like they are stories from life, rather than fictions. Though they're all stories, really, even the ones from life.

We'll hit up something else from outside the mainstream tomorrow. The "A Miscellaneous" section of my collection has some cool stuff in it. See you tomorrow.

(Edit: I lost numbering here. Was originally published as Day 120.)