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Nick Gazin's Comic Book Witch Hunt #6

To make things more mean and competitive I've decided to order my comic reviews from best to worst. In order to encourage some competition I will be destroying the worst comic from now on by burning them like witches, returning them to hell.

To make things more mean and competitive I've decided to order my comic reviews from best to worst. In order to encourage some competition I will be destroying the worst comic from now on by burning them like witches, returning them to hell. The countdown begins: PR3 The Hallowed Seam James Jean Adhouse Books Like Wolverine, James Jean is the best at what he does. Unlike Wolverine, James Jean doesn't kill people with razors that pop out of his hand. You might not know James Jean by name but you've seen his work. his art's all over the place. It's in galleries, on Prada bags, album covers, in magazines and on the covers of DC comics. Tom Herpich and Kenichi Hoshine are simlarly talented and definitely blow minds with their intense talent and vision but James Jean is the king. James' drawings have sophistication, power and delicacy beyond what most drawers can muster. This book is a collection of Jean's best sketchbook pages. James Jean's finished paintings and illustrations are beautiful but his sketchbooks are my favorite part of his creative output. When you look at these drawings, most of them done with ballpoint pen, his thought process is easier to understand than in a finished product. It's fun to stare at this book and wonder how the signals from his brain travel to his hand and make it do what it does. The first Process Recess volume was a revelation that exploded heads and now fetches $350 on the internet. The second one was mostly his commercial stuff and disappointed many of his fans. Volume Three is a return to form and he's once again giving us what we want: page after page of beautiful drawings of women, friends, firetrucks, airports, cars, carousels, the beach, Sasha Grey, animals, houses, film crews, and everything else. Lose #1 Michael Deforge Koyama Press This is an example of a perfect comic. It starts with a bunch of gags about dogs in college, turns into a pity party auto-bio story, the author's guardian angel goes to Comic Book Hell, and it occasionally cuts back to Green Lantern having a creative block that keeps him from being able to use his power ring. Michael never does the same drawing twice, much like John K, the creator of Ren & Stimpy. The character's will be constructed as best serves the emotional state of the characters. He does great black-and-white art. He does great color art. Get this comic. Read the comic he did for Vice to get a taste of the flavor. You Are There Jacques Tardi Fantagraphics Jacques Tardi's a French cartoonist whose appreciated in France where he's from but only a select few of his comics ever were translated into English and published in America. You'd find an occassional beat-up, thin Tardi book next to a stack of unsold Heavy Metals and bad porno comics. Fantagraphics has come to my foreign comic book rescue and published hardcovered English translations of West Coast Blues, which was good, and this new book, which is great. Arthur There is a man whose family estate has been stolen out from under him but he has somehow retained ownership of the walls and gates that divide the land. Arthur lives in a teeny house propped up on a wall and runs around unlocking the gates in exchange for small amounts of money. He gets a crush on the slutty daughter of the rich family that inhabits his stolen home and everything gets higgledy piggledy. Tardi has nice skinny lines and large fields of black. His architecture and cars and landscapes are amazing. Just the idea of Arthur There running up and down the walls and living in this skinny little house are neat ideas. This book talks a lot about what it's like when you spend your life alone and how nuts a slutty crazy girl can make you. Who's dating sane girls? I can't even remember what they look like. Summing up: If you hate everything that isn't old timey and French and love sluts who are nuts then get this book fast. Achewood Volume 2: Worst Song, Played On Ugliest Guitar Chris Onstad Dark Horse If you don't already know that Achewood is the only good web comic then you do now. Reading that last sentence told you, challenge me if you dare. What do you prefer? Diesel Sweeties? PVP? All pure, unadulterated dogshit. Achewood is great literature and is as important as any "real comic". Summing up what Achewood is can be hard, because it defies categorization. It switches from long, drawn-out narratives to epic adventures to one-off laugh inciters to things that are scary visions into hell. It's easy to roll your eyes at this book's release and say,"Oh, THAT. I can see THAT on the internet for free." Yes, all of the comics in this book are still viewable on the Achewood site, BUT this book contains a lot of new material produced just for this volume. Chris Onstad has written annotations for almost every comic in this book which are often as funny or insightful as anything else this masterful man has written. There are also a few chapters explaining how the characters entered his home. (Sometimes the characters seem to be living with Onstad and sometimes not. It's OK. The comic has a soft reality that shifts to serve the story.) The book is also beautifully packaged with sturdy hardcovers and informational endpapers. This is a book you want to cuddle up with if ever there was one. Time magazine said it was the best Graphic Novel of 2008; I said it was the new Simpsons. If you like Achewood then you have to buy this book because you owe it to Chris Onstad for years of free entertainment and you owe it to yourself to own a truly fine object that you will enjoy rereading and sharing with your friends until you die. I Want You #1 Lisa Hanawalt Buenaventura Press Lisa's been all over Vice lately. She did a comic for the Comics Guide, the Sunday Funnies, and we interviewed her too. Right now she is one of the best artists around, comics-related or otherwise. Her drawings are beautiful and revolting as are her comics. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you throw up in a refreshing and new way. After Crumb (A.C.), a lot of cartoonists thought they could make a good comic by doing autobiographical work and being gross, or making comics that showed them in states of vulnerability. Most of those comics are garbage because most people are boring idiots. Lisa Hanawalt's work isn't exactly auto-bio but it's hard not to feel that you know and like the person who makes these comics, like a friend you can have farting contests with. Portable Grindhouse:The Lost Art of the VHS Box Jacques Boyreau Fantagraphics This book presents the most beautiful and lurid VHS boxes ever produced. There are beautiful reproductions of the boxes from movies such as Death Promise, The Toolbox Murders, Slithis, Slashdance, Bowhunting Whitetails: Just For Fun!, Slavegirls From beyond Infinity, and more movies that can't possibly be as good as their titles. Someone was inevitably going to make this book and Jacques Boyreau made something special that a lot of people are going to love owning. The design is beautiful, the art is reproduced perfectly, and the paper stock feels especially good. It even comes packed in a slipcase that looks like a VHS sleeve spattered in blood. A well-designed book showing off these funny and beautiful examples of a dead medium would be enough, but the introductary essay is a revelatory piece on the importance of VHS and the role it played in cinematic history. If there's any complaint to be had, it's that I finished the forward and immediately flipped to the back, looking for an afterward that wasn't there. This book was due and it couldn't have been done better. I'd like to see more of Jacques Boyreau's writing in the inevitable sequel. Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 Fantagraphics Steve Ditko's an interesting guy. He co-created Spiderman and Dr. Strange, as well as a slew of less famous characters. Many of those characters embody the objective philosophy of Ayn Rand. Another thing that's interesting is that he's still alive and refuses to be interviewed or photographed. English comedian Jonathan Ross hosted an hour-long documentary called In Search of Steve Ditko. Although he found Steve, he still refused to be documented. This book is chock-full of intense faces and monsters and colors. Strong blacks, horror comics, mean revenge, strange surgery, and stuff. It's all horror comics from before Frederic Wertham illegalized good-time comic books. The cover is really thick and the hardcover is hard as hell. I've been working on this column for too long. Out of 20 books, this one placed sixth. If you can find it, then at least flip through it. Little Lulu: Miss Feeny's Folly and Other Stories John Stanley & Irving Tripp Dark Horse Part of the enjoyment from the Dark Horse's Little Lulu collections is thinking about my mother reading these comics when she was a little girl. The rest of my enjoyment comes from these being truly funny comics. The past three volumes have reprinted the comics in color, which makes them twice as good as the black-and-white reprints. This volume, collecting issues #100 - 105 of the Dell comic series that ran from 1948 to 1984, has some stories that had Thomas Morton and I laughing our heads off. In this book Tubby introduces Lulu to his worm ranch and informs her that he named them all Lulu, then makes the worms race while he cheers them on. While knocked out with laughing gas, Tubby dreams that he floats out of the dentist's chair and Lulu enters him in a kit contest, winning the prize for "funniest looking kite." Lulu tells many stories about witches to Alvin, the neighborhood pest, in her neverending attempt to get rid of him. This isn't as laugh filled as previous Little Lulu book, The Alamo and Other Stories, but it will definitely usher the chuckles right out of you. The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 9: R. Crumb Versus the Sisterhood R. Crumb Fantagraphics This is a reprinting; otherwise, it would have ranked higher. This series is awesome, perfect, and essential. I'll die with my collection of Crumb Archives on my shelf unless there's a fire or America slips into a Mad Max-style society. This volume which collects R.'s work from the early 1970s is something of an in-between stage in his career. The raw power of the early years is behind him, and his masterful crosshatch rendering style is still a few years ahead. If you don't have the first six or the most recent three or four then I would go for those first. Eventually it's worth owning them all if you can afford it. These should sit on your shelf next to the complete Shakespeare, your Bible, and the complete Sherlock Holmes. This particular volume shows Robert at his peak aggressiveness towards women. There's Patricia Pig, an anthropomorphized pig woman whose thoughts switch back and forth between sex and things she'd like to own. There are a lot of comics in which female characters get their heads cut off and a few that deal with materialism, racism, and nationalism. The book ends with a comic in which Robert is beaten up by a feminist club but eventually he fucks one of them. Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Mike McKone, Shan Davis DC DC sent me this and I immediately was compelled to buy all the Green Lantern comics that Geoff Johns had written. I'd fallen off the superhero wagon due to lack of funds but now I am once again wasting my money on funnybooks. Here's a little history on the character for the non-knowing. The original Green Lantern was named Alan Scott and was invented to capitalize on the lantern craze. When the silver age of comics came around Green Lantern was created as a new and great thing in which test pilot Hal Jordan finds a dying alien who gives him a magic ring. When he puts the ring on he wears an awesome oostume, he can fly and he the ring is able to construct whatever he imagines. For example, he could catch someone with a big see-through green baseball mitt. There are all sorts of other Green Lanterns who are alien races and they serve as an intergalactic police force. During the shitty 90s, Green Lantern comic sales were lagging so they made Hal Jordan go crazy, turn evil and some other stuff and made some new cool 90s guy be GL. Geoff Johns brought things back to awesomeness and has made Green Lantern one of the best superhero books going. The series has been buliding and building for the last few years and has recently climaxed into the epic storyline happening now called Blackest Night. Now there aren't just Green Lanterns, there are about seven other colored lantern types, all representing a major emotion. Fear, rage, avarice, compassion, love, and hope, and there are also black rings that are bringing back dead superheroes as intelligent, evil zombies who want to eat the hearts of their living loved ones while they experience heightened emotions. Shit is dark. It's just so grim. This book on its own is OK but don't pick it up if you aren't ready to get sucked into an amazing comic series that's a little bit like a really good superhero cop drama. The Troublemakers Gilbert Hernandez Fantagraphics Gilbert is making graphic novels that are supposed to be adaptations of the B movies that the character Fritz from Love and Rockets starred. Gilbert's my favorite Hernandez Brother and this is a sweet little book in which a bunch of grifters try to trick each other out of money. It seems to be about love and trust and whether anybody is dependable or if they're all trying to survive. It's pretty great. You know if you'll like this already. The Art of Tony Millionaire Tony Millionaire Dark Horse I let Owen Kline guest review this one. He had this to say: "Millionaire is one of the only modern cartoonists who successfully draws just as well as some of the early print cartoonists and illustrators of the 1900’s, both stylistically and skillfully. This, combined with Millionaire’s off-kilter brand of humor and absurdist sensibility, is the reason why Maakies has remained one of the best strips of the second half of the 20th century. This book, a collection of stories, drawings, comics and photos, perfectly chronicles Millionaire's career from his earliest childhood comics to current personal work. All told through Millionaire's personal commentary." Casper the Friendly Ghost 60th Anniversary Special Dark Horse I got a soft spot/hard on for solid reprints of golden age comics and Dark Horse delivers once more. This $10 hardcover reprints the first issue of Casper from 1949, along with another issue of unknown signficance but equal quality. The issues are reprinted in their entirety with the backup stories and ads and everything. This would be great to give to kids or fucked-up adults who are nostalgic for childhood stuff that was popular before their parents were born. Injury #3 Ted May Buenaventura Press This issue starts off with another awesome story about teenage metalhead juvenile delinquency. There are some other stories but they weren't as good as that one. They're good enough and this issue is worth a good hard read. Boys Club #3 Matt Furie Buenaventura Press In this issue the monstrous roommates that inhabit Boys Club freeze the longest turd in the world and almost smoke it thinking it's a giant joint. Then some other shit happens. This is my least favorite thing Matt's done yet. It's still good, just not as good as the last two Boys Club comics or his Kramer's Ergot comic. There are a few good transformation drawings, and if it was the first thing I'd seen of Furie's work I'd probably think it was fine--but a level of quality has been set and this just isn't as good. Sorry, my dude. Star Wars Legacy Volume Seven: Storms by 12 different people Dark Horse This is pretty entertaining. It stars Luke Skywalker's grandfather, who seems to be a drug dealer, but he gets visions of Luke saying, "Hey, be a Jedi." For some reason a lot of Star Wars comics have characters with ponytails, dreadlocks, and piercings and stuff you never see in the movies. It feels un-Star Warsy. Everyone's looking like models who are supposed to be what some middle-aged stylist's idea of "edgy" is. Luke Skywalker's great grand-nephew has a fuzzy goatee and surfer hair AND a trenchcoat. Basically he is how I thought cool people looked when I was stupid OR they just look like male prostitutes. Best part of this book? There's a Huttese glossary in the back.  In Huttese I would rate this book as "nagoola." The Aviatrix Eric Haven Buenaventura Press I don't like this one. It's kinda like a less funny Tales Designed to Thrizzle. The art and story do nothing for me. Johnny Ryan liked it and said this:" I like the way Haven draws and I liked the 'dream reality' quality of the story. There's funny elements to it, but I wouldn't qualify it as a humor comic." The Complete Jack Survives Jerry Moriarty Buenaventura Press I thought this book was dull. Not much else to say about it. These comics appeared in Raw and I guess I'm supposed to like them but I feel no connection to them. Someone else might but I don't know who. There's nothing in this for me. I also don't get those rock and roll bands who sing like they're bored. The Future of Fantasy Art Aly Fell & Duddlebug Collins Design The future of fantasy art is that it will look the same as it has for the past 40 years, except uglier and with brighter colors. It would be awesome if a big-butted, topless Frazetta girl on an evil looking horse galloped by and chopped off all of these artists' hands with a big battle axe. Office Boredom Art #1,2,3 and Sensor Trip #1,2 Sergio Zuniga self-published Later Sergio sent me some angry e-mails after that saying that I was a hipster, brought up the old "mommy and daddy's money" standby that usually accompanies calling someone a hipster, and also mentioned that everyone hates me. Here's a video of me burning his comics while I yell at them: My roommate just pointed out that burning his comics has done more for his comics career than his comics ever could.