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Vice Blog

NICK GAZIN'S COMIC BOOK LOVE-IN #20

Hi Everybody,

For many a year, comics have been a favorite pastime of loners, sad-sacks and creeps. Eric Reynolds recently mentioned that the comics industry was built on the backs of sad-sacks. It's true. Comics are the chosen medium of introverted folks the world over. Who doesn't love placing a comic between themselves and the rest of the world and whittling their life away? Well-adjusted people who don't find social interaction uncomfortable, that's who. But those people don't matter too much to me.

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We all die alone and we all read comics alone. A lot of comics are written from the perspective of socially awkward introverts. People like that for some reason. Some of these comics are great and try to get to the bottom of things. Many of them are gross and seem even farther entrenched in fantasy than anything the X-Men ever did.

Spiderman empowers the reader with a story about a harried nerdo whose life sucks as bad as you can imagine but guess what? He's actually Spiderman and you would feel so stupid if you knew the guy you were being a jerk to could rescue and/or murder you. The world of auto-bio comics and comics that are loosely auto-bio isn't so different from any other power fantasy. In these comics, the main character/author has ultimate control and can make themselves really smart, handsome, morally superior, funny or just generally better than they are in real life. They can reduce the people they deal with to mere clods. You know that you're reading a bad sad-sack comic when wearing goatees or backwards hats and the tendency to say "like" or "bro" is used to portray people as stupid. Crumb, Clowes, and Bagge can all get away with drawing cool clods that way but, for everyone else, it's getting old.

Some people are great at making auto-bio comics, but at some point in the late 90s people started ruining the form by making comics about how cute they were. Jeffrey Brown, Craig Thompson, and James Kochalka all idealize the fuck out of themselves. Sometimes Chris Ware does it too. These people all make comics that give me the creeps. R. Crumb and Pete Bagge often star in their own comics, but they are confronting personal failings as much as the failings of the world around them. They never try to show how suave and cool they are. They're fucking misanthropic outsiders with points of view and they know how to tell a story. Making a comic isn't as simple as saying, "Girls won't think I'm cool if I draw myself in a Spiderman costume. I know! I'll draw myself being nice to girls and having my heart broken by the type of bitch that I hope will come and meet me at the next alternative comix con!" FUCK! TRY HARDER, ASSHOLES! CHALLENGE YOURSELVES! I AM SCREAMING SOME GIBBERISH AS I TYPE THIS! COMICS IS NOT THE SPECIAL OLYMPICS SO STOP BEING RETARDS!

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See you soon,
Nicholas

From 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.

#1
Melvin Monster Volume 3
John Stanley
Drawn & Quarterly

Melvin 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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This hardcover book was designed beautifully by Seth and is riddled with one funny comic after the next that has my adult friends guffawing but would still easily tickle the funny bones of most children.
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.

#2
Paying For It
Chester Brown
Drawn & Quarterly

Chester 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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His book, the Playboy, tells us about his relationship to Playboy Magazine and how it affected him. Another book of his, I Never Liked You, tells of his mother's schizophrenia and his teenage problems with girls. Throughout both books, Chester presents himself as emotionless: like a robot going through the motions of his own life. Then he did a comic about Louis Riel which dealt with schizophrenia and other stuff that was probably more important to Canadians. Now Chet is back, doing comics about himself, the way we like. In case you were worrying about whether or not he'd formed emotions, you can put those fears down: he's more of a robot man than ever!

After getting dumped by his VJ/actress/musician girlfriend, Chester realizes that he wants to have sex but doesn't want a girlfriend and doesn't have the social skills for a one night stand. He decides to start patronizing local prostitutes and he documents all of his experiences in this great little book. Paying For It explores Chester Brown's detachment from societal norms. It is definitely one of the best comics of the year, of recent memory, and on the subject of prostitution.

For most of the comic, Chester draws himself looking something like a less emotive C-3PO. His mouth is a horizontal slit and his eyes are obscured by round glasses. His pals Seth and Joe Matt make appearances, discussing the rightness and wrongness of what he's doing. They also show faces that are void of emotion. In the first chapter we see the three friends walking together and whenever the "camera" pulls out to show the three of them walking together they're in the same position each time, all with their right foot forward, Seth's cigarette hand held up. I'm not sure what the significance of this is. Is Chet saying that we're a bunch of robots who need sex? Is it just a neat looking rhythmic image that provides some subliminal story beat? I have no idea. I'm assuming it was intentional.

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So Chester goes around boning prostitutes while his friends all tell him that he shouldn't and he argues with them. He documents his experiences with each woman and it's pretty great stuff. The comics portion of the book ends on a surprising note that leaves me curious but not dissatisfied. Then there's a fifty page appendix in which Chester discusses his feelings on why it's important that prostitution be decriminalized. After that there's a photo of Chester and then the book is over.

This book is going to be a big hit and is pretty much perfect. I had almost no problems with it so here they are.

1. I thought the dust jacket is kind of ugly, especially when compared to the bare hardcover book.

See what I mean? No problem, easy fix. Just toss away dust jacket.

2. In the appendix, Chester brings up a hypothetical story set in the year 2080. "A young woman works in a hat shop -- let's call her Mary. A young man who also works there decides to ask Mary out on a date. They've known each other several months and she likes him, so she says yes, adding that, if he wants to have sex with her, it'll cost an amount of money that she specifies. He does'nt find this shocking --it's a common request in a situation like this." The story continues with them having paid sex, and paid sex being a common and casual act that most people engage in.

This story just seemed ridiculous to me. If a girl likes you, is gainfully employed, and wants to bone you, then I'm confused as to why the issue of paying for sex would arise. In my experience, if a girl likes you and wants to bone then all you have to do is just let it happen and avoid saying the wrong thing, like "Can I pay you for some sex?" That is usually a bad thing to say and I'm guessing it will probably remain bad to say in seventy years. Some girls are really into dudes who buy them dinner and gifts as some show of power/consideration but most girls I've known don't really give a fuck about that shit. It seems like if you're paying for sex that you're fucking for your own pleasure, not a shared one. If two people are having a good time then why would one pay the other unless it was some kinky role-play thing?

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I agree with Chester that prostitution--as well as gambling and narcotics--should be decriminalized, but I don't think it will ever be socially accepted in the way he wants it to be. I also don't see the way he portrays going to prostitutes as sexy or fun. For me, one of the most important parts of having sex is the acceptance of another person and the feeling of being wanted. If the whole point is just to have an orgasm then I can do that by myself for free without having to deal with some other person who I don't know very well.

Paying For It is a great book and you'll most likely walk away wanting to write some dumb essay on it like I did. Good job, Chester. Way to knock it out of the park, you creepy genius!

#3
Reunion
Pascal Girard
Drawn & Quarterly

Reunion 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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Dealing with old schoolmates or family members can be rattling and draining. You don't deal with these people on a daily basis, and they can become menacing reminders of the way you were. Maybe emotionally mature people are able to have a more objective and distanced relationship with their past selves but not me. I sucked real bad in the same way that Pascal did/does.

This book showed up the day after I'd been invited to my high school reunion. Up until recently, I also had a giant thumb wart that I was ignoring. In fact you can see it in the photos of my hand holding the books in past comic reviews. You get these treated band-aids and they eat your wart off. No one noticed my wart, but if it was freaking out people in restaurants like Pascal's was I probably would have taken care of it earlier.

Even after Pascal loses weight in this comic he still appears to be fairly round headed with no differentiation between his head and neck. I was surprised to find out upon meeting the real Pascal who made this book that he actually had a very nicely defined jaw line. "Where's the roly-poly man from the comic who I fell in love with? Who's this French Canadian Adonis who lies with drawings?" Not only is he not a potato shaped man, he told me that the comic wasn't based in reality and that he'd made up almost every thing that occurs in it. I thought that was neat.

Pascal Girard draws beautiful forms with his shaky, skinny line that's always pleasing to look at. Mmm-mmm, these drawings, my oh my. Reunion is a great comic about a guy who sucks and exploring the different ways in which he sucks. If you're in your late twenties and are concerned that perhaps you are ruled by inadequacies that only you are aware of then I would give this a read. I keep thinking about it and the handsome man who made it.

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#4
Peanuts Volume 15: 1979 - 1980
Charles Schulz
Fantagraphics

Even 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.

This book suddenly made me want to go back in time very, very hard. I want to live in Peanuts so bad. Fuck my life. Someone help get me out of this life.

#5
Uptight #4
Jordan Crane
Fantagraphics

Uptight 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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If I say too much it'll ruin the comic since it's only thirty-six pages. Jordan Crane has a sweet skinny line and can draw like no one else. He can draw complicated scenes and it's clear that he never uses a ruler. There's something very friendly and reassuring about his drawing style. Jordan Crane is without a doubt one of the best guys in the alt comix game right now and my only criticism of him is that I wish he turned out more work. Jordan's making the comics that everyone else is trying to make but unlike them, he's succeeding at it.

#6
Freeway
Mark Kalesniko
Fantagraphics

Freeway 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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As an artist Mark Kalesniko does an okay job. His backgrounds and cars are all top notch but his people look kind of crummy. The main character in the comic is doing background art for cartoons and it seems like that Mark did the same job. Background guys often seem to be great at rendering technical things but fall a little flat when doing humans for some reason.

Alex dreams of coming to LA and becoming an animator, then he does and is deeply disappointed and retreats into fantasy. We don't seem to learn much about his character beyond what I just mentioned. I'm guessing that he's given the dog face and a limited personality so that we identify more heavily with him, like we do with Mickey Mouse. I've been to LA and can relate to the problems of frustration in traffic, compromising your integrity on creative projects, the problems that can arise when dating outside your culture. I still don't relate to Alex.

Overall I found Freeway dissatisfying but other people will probably dig it. I offered to give it to a friend who'd liked Mail Order Bride, Kalesniko's previous comic and he asked what it was about. "It's about a guy who goes to Los Angeles to work in animation and becomes deeply unhappy and possibly kills himself.", I said. "That sounds awful.", he responded. That's pretty much it.

#7
Empire State
Jason Shiga
Abrams

This 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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What's eerie is how similar this is to something that actually happened to me. Last summer I was hanging out with a girl who was staying in New York for the summer when one day some Asian nerdy guy came showed up on her doorstep unannounced. I guess that was his attempt to seduce her or at least get a free place to stay but I don't think either happened.

I assume that a lot of people reading this have had crushes on people who had no romantic interest in them. This can lead to a lot of confusion, embarrassment and long patronizing conversations but at some point after being heart broken and disappointed a few times you learn some things about reading other people's emotions. The main character isn't a sweet nerd, he comes off as someone in a state of permanent adolescence and it's not cute or endearing. It's gross and unsettling. All of the characters are drawn in a crude, big headed style where they appear to be children. This is a common trend in auto-bio comics and as I've mentioned before, I find it dishonest. When adult men draw themselves as children they are usually doing it because it makes it easier for the reader to excuse their shitty or immature conduct. Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka do it. Chris Ware kinda does it. I admire people like Crumb and Bagge who uglify themselves in their comics. Don't hide behind some cute baby-face when you're trying to show us your true self.

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So despite it being a story that is told from the point of view of a grossly immature adult there are some cool things in it structurally. The scenes go back and forth being colored in predominantly red or blue and at one point his mother mentions not to wear either red or blue clothes out of fear of gang violence. So I am guessing that is symbolic of something. I'm guessing that the scenes with both red and blue represent him in roles of maturation. Or maybe not? I can't tell if this book merits any more consideration than I've already given it.

There's another scene where Jimmy asks the object of his desire if she's seen the Empire Strikes Back (an allusion to the title!) and then explains the first two Star Wars movies like this,"The basic premise is that in the future, this civilization called the empire has built this weapon that can destroy whole planets." It's weird to hear someone refer to the Star Wars movies as being set in the future since it's pretty well established that they take place "long, long ago" but what's most revealing is that he came away from Star Wars thinking that the movies are about the Death Star. Yes, he's not totally wrong but your average human being would say that the movies about Luke Skywalker, not the big inanimate weapon.

It's not clear to me from reading this book if the author is aware of how fucked up/possibly autistic his main character acts. I was a fucked up and especially out of touch person but I feel like I passed the phase that the main character is in mentally at least by the time I was eighteen.

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Empire State is like a boring Forest Gump except the retard doesn't get laid at the end.

#8
Nine Gallons #2
Susie Cagle
Microcosm

Nine 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.

Susie wrote a comic in which she comes off as a self absorbed and frivolous person who complains about non-issues instead of focusing on helping people. She seems to still be existing in what some would call "the high school of the mind" and cares more about cliquey ways of relating to people than anything else. In this comic about helping poor people we never see her interact with poor people which is pretty telling. Her sense of superiority towards everyone she deals with makes her a completely unlikeable character and her obnoxiousness is so intense I'm still unsure if she was intentionally trying to show us an icky, embarrassing side of herself or not.

I am really baffled as to whether she is aware of how she's portraying herself. In Reunion Pascal Girard intentionally highlights his flaws. I can't say for certain if Susie was trying to show us her soul or not. We see her in one scene try to take on victim status by mentioning that she relies on the food that she helps prepare with FNB but then we see that her laptop is an Apple and her apartment appears to be full of stuff.

#9
Mid-Life
Joe Ollman
Drawn & Quarterly

As 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!