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NicholasFrom the best to the worst, here are some comics about sad-sacks. Send anything you want reviewed to Nick Gazin C/o Vice Magazine's New York office.

Melvin Monster Volume 3
John Stanley
Drawn & QuarterlyMelvin Monster was a funny monster comic published by Dell back in the sixties. It focuses on a sweet monster child and his family. He lives with his ogre-ish father, faceless mummy mother, and pet alligator in a place called Monsterville. which is entirely populated by monsters. Melvin's living in a dangerous and hostile world where his pet alligator is constantly trying to eat him, his dad is constantly pushing him into dangerous situations, Ms. McGargoyle the teacher would rather try to kill him than teach him, and even his guardian demon accidentally gives him advice that leads to injury. He always bounces back and stays a nice kid, though. While the world he lives in is frightening, it's also funny and beautiful.It seems like the sixties were full of funny-horrors like The Addams Family, The Munsters, "The Monster Mash," and all those Harvey comics about supernatural children. It's easy to compare Melvin Monster and Casper except that Melvin Monster's a lot funnier and more slapstick. Melvin just keeps getting abused by everybody he comes in contact with and that's what makes it so great. There are no morals, lessons, apologies, or treacle cutting beats at the end. In one comic, Melvin is having a nice conversation with a creepy looking child and this bothers some old monster woman who responds by bashing their heads together and yelling "Fight! Fight! FIght!"
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There's one in which Cleopatra, the pet alligator, is fantasizing about eating Melvin, but he's too filthy. She lurks outside the bathroom, hoping to chomp him post-shower, but he ends up balling up the shower curtain and tossing it into the hallway as a decoy. She eats that instead and confusedly thinks,"Ag! Who'd ever imagine he'd taste like a shower curtain!" as she lies on her back looking nauseous.For the most part the stories aren't as hilarious as individual drawings and sequences. Here are my favorites.





Paying For It
Chester Brown
Drawn & QuarterlyChester Brown is a Canadian cartoonist whose been working steadily for the past thirty years and is considered by many to be one of the best living cartoonists. He's made comics based on the Bible, the process of growing up, weird little science-fictiony ideas, and Louis Riel. His best loved works are his autobiographical comics. Chester Brown is a talented, handsome, and distant character in his own comics. There's none of the emotional self portraiture and endless rambling you find in a Crumb or Bagge comic. It's all icy calm, keeping the reader at a distance from Chet Brown. Or maybe he is letting us into his world and he's just a very calm guy without a lot of messy feelings inside of him.
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Reunion
Pascal Girard
Drawn & QuarterlyReunion is the tale of a socially awkward chubbo who goes slightly nuts when he gets an invitation to his high school reunion. After receiving an e-mail from a girl he liked when he was in high school, Pascal, the author/main character, immediately flies into a manic panic of misguided self improvement. He focuses solely on losing weight and begins jogging but ignores a revolting wart on his thumb that nauseates and alienates anyone who sees it. It's a pretty good fable about delusion. The main character goes throughout the comic acting kind of like a jerk. Of course his appearance at the high school reunion is a disaster and he ends up having terrible interactions with everyone he talks to.
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Peanuts Volume 15: 1979 - 1980
Charles Schulz
FantagraphicsEven though Peanuts's peak was sometime back in the sixties these books are still coming out and you know what? They're still good. I keep waiting for a sharp decline in quality to hit but I'm still enjoying seeing Snoopy blissfully living out his fantasies, Charlie Brown being unable to ever be happy, Lucy being a jerk, etc. Al Roker wrote an intro for this book about how much he liked Franklin which is pretty funny since Franklin's only memorable characteristic is being black. Remember that great Chris Rock bit about how Franklin has less personality than the dog. They should have got Chris Rock to write the intro to this book and got him to do some "niggers versus black people versus Franklin." I love you Chris Rock, you are much more important to me than Al Roker.



Uptight #4
Jordan Crane
FantagraphicsUptight continues the story of a mechanic whose wife is cheating on him and the ways he tries to deal with it and save his disintegrating relationship. Crane accurately communicates how lonely and awful LA can be. The back up story is much lighter fare and continues the story about the boy and his cat from the Clouds Above, continuing their long adventure through a weird and fantastic world.
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Freeway
Mark Kalesniko
FantagraphicsFreeway is a four hundred page comic about a Canadian man with the head of a cartoon dog who comes to Los Angeles to work in animation and every facet of his life becomes drenched in misery. You'll be drenched in misery too if you read this thing. It's not a bad comic, it's just a giant bummer that presents the world as a place with no goodness.The story cuts between different points in time throughout the story with five or so concurrent stories taking place about the main character, each with different pacing. There's Alex driving to work on the Los Angeles freeway, Alex's first week in Los Angeles, Alex watching television all day as a young man, Alex's fantasizing about himself in the Los Angeles of the thirties, and the main story of Alex at his job at the animation studio.The cartoon character that the main character resembles the most to me is Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life. A lot of people I've met look back at that show fondly but it always upset me a lot. Rocko lived in a revolting, ugly and evil world where he was always the victim. There was nothing about the show that, for me as a depressed kid, was funny. It was just a grim affirmation of what I already suspected the world was like.
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Empire State
Jason Shiga
AbramsThis comic left me feeling embarrassed for the author. It's a loosely auto-biographical book about an Asian nerd who lives with his mother despite being an adult. He has one friend who looks a little like a crudely rendered Enid Coleslaw but she moves to New York to pursue a publishing career. He becomes lonely and takes a bus ride across the country in an attempt to woo her. When he gets there she's seeing some guy and it all goes predictable disappointing for him.
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Nine Gallons #2
Susie Cagle
MicrocosmNine Gallons #2 begins with an explanation of what Food Not Bombs is which is laughable since no one whose unfamiliar with the organization is going to care about this comic. This mini is an auto-bio about/by a pretty and smart girl named Susie who exists in a world of ugly stupids who don't appreciate what a great person she believes she is. She's involved in an unpopular Food Not Bombs chapter in Oakland but her focus is on people asking her dumb questions. She meets a cute bike punk and goes to his Food Not Bombs chapter and seems equally miffed that he's more successful at helping poor people as she is that he doesn't remember meeting her. The comic climaxes with her especially unattractive, selfish cunt of a roommate telling her that she wants to volunteer with Food Not Bombs. When Susie questions the potential new recruit's motives, her bovine flatmate replies "Well like, I thought I'd make a documentary about it - like, my journey in helping people." (Stupid people always say "like" and "bro" in sad-sack comics. It's how you know they are stupid.) Susie yells at her roommate about how Food Not Bombs is about helping the poor, not exploiting them for artist projects. Then her roommate storms off as Susie stares ahead looking troubled. Then she went and made this comic, doing the very thing she yelled at her roommate for doing.


Mid-Life
Joe Ollman
Drawn & QuarterlyAs far as I can tell, Mid-Life is an auto-biographical comic about a man who has a bunch of kids and all the women in his life are mad at him and he's just stressed out and hates all the bullshit he has to deal with. I couldn't read it. I don't know if the stories good or bad but the drawings are so ugly to me that I couldn't look at it. It's like staring at an ugly sun. We don't all have to be Hal Fosters in here but this thing boggles my mind. Like, "How did this get published? Why didn't the writer just find an artist to draw this for him instead of trying to draw it himself?" feel a little bad writing this since I saw this guy around MoCCA a lot recently but I'd feel worse if I didn't honestly discuss other people's failings.Not everyone is a drawing genius. Pete Bagge was rejected from Raw Magazine because he couldn't draw--although, as he pointed out, that they let Kaz in there. Raw's editor, Art Spiegelman is also a guy who openly acknowledges his limited abilities. All three of those guys took an honest look at what they were able to do and somehow cultivated three of the best drawing styles in modern comics based around what they had. Evan Dorkin also started out kinda rough and managed to smooth out what he did into a very slick and appealing style.My advice to Joe Ollman would be to reduce his line work. If you look at the early work of most comics guys versus their later work, you see that they almost always start out using unnecessary shading and crosshatching lines. If you're doing fairly simple cartoons adding extraneous information to the page lowers the impact of your images and makes them take longer to absorb. The Southpark guys weren't trained artists but they worked with basic geometric shapes, colors and textures and made a visual style that worked well. You look at a lot of old Liefeld stuff and it's nothing but meaningless lines meant to distract from the lack of anatomical correctness.I really hate saying all this rude shit but this art would be considered bad at a student level. How it got published by a company like Drawn & Quarterly perplexes me.So long everybody! See you in the overly self indulgent funny pages!
