Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-in #96

Dear people who love to look at stuff,

My name is Nick Gazin, and I write about comics, art, books, nerd stuff, paper, and anything related to fan communities I find funny or meaningful. Mostly, I review comics.

Here are some reviews.

Biobuddy
Anya Davidson
Self Published

Anya Davidson silkscreened this comic’s cover and pages and designed a unique drawing on each copy’s inside-cover. Although Picturebox sold these for $5 each, I expected their minimum price to be $40. Anya's stuff reminds me of Moscoso, Gary Panter, and Jack Kirby, but not in a way that detracts from her work's individuality. She's an artist to watch.

Exorcise Book
Heather Benjamin
A Bolha

This is a really nice zine collecting Heather Benjamin’s recent drawings. If you don't already know about Heather's work, she draws intense scenes with women who have great hair and earrings, but also have hairy bodies, lots of menstrual blood, and fangs. Her comics include mutilation, bondage, bizarre sexual fantasies, and nightmares. The images are equally deranged and beautiful—she creates each image with delicacy and care. I am fairly certain that Heather will continue her ascent and become a big, big deal.

Buy her book here.

50 Girls 50
Al Williamson
Fantagraphics

This is the kind of thing that makes me really excited and fills me with severe object lust. It's hard for me to fool myself into thinking that object ownership can bring me any real joy, but if something is sublimely beautiful, it can fill a need that’s much deeper than compulsive collecting.

This book collects the work of Al Williamson from Weird Science and Weird Fantasy. Most of the comics are sci-fi stories involving space travel. In the stories, people stare out of rocketship windows at space's inky blackness before they arrive on jungle planets filled with dinosaurs. Although Al wrote these comics, he was occasionally assisted by other artists, most notably Frank Frazetta.

Buy 50 Girls 50 here.

Cowabunga Schnauzer
Marc Bell
Half-World Books

[Marc Bell](http://www.etsy.com/shop/marcbelldeptstore?ref=l2-shopheader-name ) gave me this at the NY Art Book Fair. I’m so happy I live in a wonderful world where one of my favorite artists knows I exist and wants me to have his work.

These images are like a weird version of The Busy World of Richard Scarry, and every page of every Marc Bell comic is chock full of original concepts and strange uses of language. I still love Shrimpy and Paul above all his other work, but I think Shrimpy and Paul is one of the best comics of the past 20 years.

These Two Zines
Heather Benjamim

Someday, I'll tell younger people I had the opportunity to buy Heather Benjamin originals for almost nothing, and they’ll go, “Aw man!” This is simply a one-page fold-over zine, but it’s still beautiful. I have zero bad things to say about Heather's work, because her art is perfect.

Celebrity Facial
Jennifer Kornder

A nice lady in a dress gave me this photocopied zine at the New York Art Book Fair. The zine collects grotesque portraits of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Paula Deen.

Drawn in a loose and experimental style, these portraits show both Jennifer’s humor and her artistic control. She’s a hot talent to watch out for.

You can fine her stuff here.

Dian Hanson's History of Pin-Up Magazines
Dian Hanson
Taschen

It’s funny that teenagers make fun of each other for masturbating. As an adult, it's hard for me to think of anything cooler than jerking it. Look at this book for proof. This three-volume boxed set includes books with covers from jacking-off history. I don’t want to jerk off to these books too much, so I’ll probably give the collection to a dumb slut who’s into cornball burlesque bologna.

The Best American Comics 2013
Edited by Jeff Smith with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I think it's really, really, really cool that Jeff Smith, the brains behind Bone and one of America’s best cartoonists, edited this. I didn’t expect to like this book, but I was jazzed to see work by Alison Bechdel, Brandon Graham, Sam Alden, Michael Deforge, Sammy Harkham, Kate Beaton, Michael Kupperman, Paul Pope, and Gabrielle Bell. The rest of the contributors were average.

Behind Every Curtain
Marcel Dzama
David Zwirner

This is a nice little Archie Digest sized book of Marcel Dzama's new work, which includes drawings, paintings, and stills from his movies. It only costs $20, so I bought a few.

Buy it here.

The Flowers of Evil Volume 1
Shuzo Oshimi
Vertical

The Flowers of Evil is the first in a series of mangas about Takao, your standard nervous high school pervert. He reads high-minded books, including Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, and thinks this makes him special. He has a crush on Nanako, the star pupil of his class, and one day he steals her gym clothes when nobody’s around. Nakamura, the school weirdo, witnesses his crime and uses this information to blackmail and bully our hero. Meanwhile, he actually starts spending time with the object of his affection.

The girls each represent a different way that the main character feels about girls. On the one hand, he's a perv who wants to sniff their clothes, and on the other hand, he has fantasies about some sort of pure love. It seems like a lot of manga and anime have male characters who are weirdly ashamed about their sexual urges. It seems like guilt and fear play a big role in manga.

A lot of manga tends to be the same, but I liked this one. It's not the best I've ever read, but if you're a perv or would like to read about pervs, you will enjoy The Flowers of Evil.

See you next time!

@NicholasGazin