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NICK GAZIN'S COMIC LOVE-IN 15

Hey Comic Bookies,

It's me, Nick Gazin, your old friend or possibly enemy but most likely of all, perfect stranger. I read some comic books and then Vice paid me to say what I thought about them. Fuck you teachers who pulled comics out of my hand as a child. Who's laughing now?
Here's some exciting comic news:
-Alvin Buenaventura Is back in the publishing game

-Dan Clowes' Wilson is being turned into a movie. Also his new book Mr. Wonderful is being published.

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That's all for comic news. Here are the reviews listed, as always, from best to last.

Love, Nicholas

(Send comics, zines, books and anything you'd like reviewed to Nick Gazin C/o this magazine.)

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#1
Four Color Fear
Greg Sadowski
Fantagraphics

and

The Horror The Horror
Jim Trombetta
Abrams Comicarts

What an age we live in. Once upon a time if you wanted to read old obscure horror comics you had to know that they existed and then go haggle with some jerk over a bunch of decaying, crumbling 60-year-old comics and then you might get it home and realize that it was missing a page or something. Now the best of the best are collected into affordable books with good paper, great color, and explanations of how the comics studios worked and who made all those uncredited comics and shit. God bless you, comics. Both Abrams and Fantagraphics released two great books that are about the same size and about the same thing at about the same time. It thus made sense to review them together.

The first similarity that will strike you is how terrible their covers are. Both feature collaged images of drawings by different artists and obnoxious use of type. The Horror! The Horror! shows a decent sense of composition, and the title's legible. I am just not crazy about the overly detailed and computery title font or collaging together two drawings in this fashion. Also, using a famous movie quote from a film written specifically about Vietnam for a book showcasing comics from the 50s is lazy.

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Four Color Fear chose a better title but their cover design is some fucking dogshit. They combined two drawings by different artists, threw in dropshadow, put some glossy Adobe Illustrator-looking blood splatter around that, and then took multiple steps to make the title illegible. The title is in different colors, disappearing around the curve of a cylinder, and shoved into the bottom corner of the cover like it's being punished for doing something bad. There are a couple of title pages with different designs which I assume were covers that didn't make the cut. At some point someone intervened and did this at the last second, possibly under the guidance of the editor or someone else who has no visual background. Normally I wouldn't complain about this, except in this case these people were working with some of the most eye catching imagery of all time. Just take a panel, throw a dignified title in big letters at the top and that's it. Book designers should always ask themselves, "What would Chip Kidd or Helene Silverman do in this situation?" Shitty design aside these books will both blow your fucking head up.

Four Color Fear shows off all kinds of non-EC, non-Steve Ditko horror comics that feature beautiful images and storytelling so bad it's almost dreamlike. The funniest one is about a woman who plants an evil cactus in her yard that murders her husband by throwing an axe squarely into his back and then hugs her to death. There's no explanation made as to why or how the cactus came to life. It just did, OK? There's another comic where a doctor who has created a "flesh bank" in a giant room at his hospital that's just a giant wall of living flesh that tries to absorb a pretty nurse who scorns him for her army fiancee and which reminded me a lot of Videodrome. Basil Wolverton's Nightmare World comic has panels that seemed to predict the world of Super Mario Brothers. Trying to describe what makes many of these comics strange would take too long. Weird characters, odd behavior, no real logic, the list is endless. What makes this shit gold is the art.

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There's this guy Howard Nostrand whose drawings are equally ripping off Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and in one instance, Will Eisner. There's also this artist Harry Lazarus whose sense of black in his compositions and placement of basic shapes is incredible. Frank Frazetta, Plasticman creator Jack Cole, EC genius Basil Wolverton, and comic book college founder Joe Kubert all have work in here too. Flipping through this it's hard not to think to yourself,"How did I not know about this until now? Why didn't anyone tell me?" There's a gallery of glossy cover art In the center that is flat out some of the best art I've ever seen.

The Horror! The Horror! features similar stuff but it dedicates about half its length to a textual history lesson on horror comics. It also features some overlapping content with Four Color Fear and a poorly authored DVD with an old PSA about how comics were poisoning children's minds. I probably shouldn't have ended on that note--doesn't really sell it.

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#2
Achewood: A Home For Scared People
Chris Onstad
Dark Horse
Achewood is the only web comic there is. It's about a bunch of anthropomorphic cats, stuffed animals, a handful of robots, and a squirrel who is like the squirrel equivalent of GG Allin living in a house together. The nature of their reality has changed and shifted throughout the years to best serve whatever storyline or idea is happening. Although it initially seemed that the characters were all creatures that lived in the house of Chris Onstad, the cartoonist who makes Achewood, they have since been shown as living independent of him in a subterranean SoCal dreamworld. There will be a series of one off strips that will be funny, followed by a massive arching storyline that will explore an entirely different world of possibility. The cast allow Onstad to comment on life from different viewpoints and he doesn't treat any of his characters as if they're stupid for being who they are, except for one who seems to be the culmination of every self-righteous asshole you've ever met. Achewood is one of the greatest comics of all time. It's hard for me not to ramble about it at length. It will make you a nerd for it. Casually quoting Achewood has become as natural for me and my friends over the last ten years as referencing the Simpsons has over the course of my life.

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This book is good but it's my least favorite of Dark Horse's Achewood collections so far. The first volume was the epic and hilarious Great Outdoor Fight. The second, Worst Song Played On Ugliest Guitar, featured a lot of variety and yuks, a good portion of which involved Todd the Squirrel, who is never not funny. The shittiest Achewood book is still better than ninety-nine percent of everything else though so it's not a big deal. This volume features the storyline where Roast Beef, the depressed and socially anxious cat who grew up poor, steals his friends rocket ship and runs away to the Moon to be by himself. In another storyline, Ray Smuckles, the foolish and wealthy cat, starts a couple of crummy companies. Billy Idol's ghost travels into the body of a five-year-old otter and teaches him to "exist as a mixture of danger and sexiness. That is all." Roast Beef is accidentally shot for the first of what becomes several times throughout the course of the strip. Beef's habit of buying self deprecating T-shirts is revealed. There's also 30 pages of writing from the different characters' points of view describing the origins of Ray and Beef's friendship. Ray mentions some rude titties he is looking at and when asked to elaborate on how rude they are he replies "The rudest!" This book is far from being the rudest but it's rude enough for you, old man.

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#3
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye and Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
Frank Miller
Dark Horse
My brain tells me that Sin City's corny but all I have to do is pick up any one of the books and I'm instantly sucked in. The stories seem fairly repetitive but move forward and keep me reading. The exciting part is watching Frank Miller's style change and the visual innovations he comes up with. I spread the pages wide and stare into the stark black&white panels. The first volume, which was originally meant to go on for 48 pages ended up organically growing into the 200-plus-page volume it became and serving as the first entry into the world of Sin City.

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Sin City is a world where whores are the smartest, best-organized, and most beautiful people in town. There's something really sick about the whole thing. Besides the neat drawings the thing I am most impressed by is the confused morals. Everything's "badass." Badass shit is the worst. Nothing's cornier than America's love of badassness. Whenever I hear the word badass, my brain ichats my eyes with that gif of Fred Durst doing that face where he's kind of got his lips puckered and his eyes opened real wide like he's dropping science by letting a guy jump over him on a BMX bike.

The first volume tells the story of Marv, who was the one played by Mickey Rourke in the movie. He sleeps with a woman and when he wakes up she's dead and so he goes out hunting for her killer. He gets ridiculously knocked around and there's all kinds of goofy violence. The story starts off in a style similar to what Miller had been doing before for Marvel and DC, using scratchy pen lines. There's heavy silhouette and shadow in the first pages, but the figures are still drawn with scratchy little pen lines and Marv isn't the Hulk with a nose like a Boston Terrier yet. He starts looking like an ugly and in-shape guy on page ten and by page 180 he's got no neck and his torso is so huge. Miller starts relying less on pen and gets more into constructing stuff out of black shapes, describing things by the shadows they cast. In chapter nine Miller gets into this idea of drawing rain as a these stabbing diagonal black lines and the increasingly intense and exagerrated style works well with Marv's mental instability.

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A Dame To Kill For isn't quite as experimental but Miller still shows us new techniques. The main character is Dwight, a guy who used to be good fighter or something but chilled out and works as a private investigator. Then a lady from his past reenters his life and causes the story to happen. Miller's stylistic new things were smoky rooms being expressed as a series of horizontal blobby lines, texture on roofing tiles, and a woman underwater has a seaweed-like texture across her body.

My only problem with these is that Miller drew new cover art for the books that looks like he did it really fast. The Hard Goodbye's cover is a passable profile drawing of Marv but the art for A Dame To Kill For? Yechh. There's a portrait of a woman's face, some smeared ink to represent blood and then are four lines that are supposed to suggest her upper torso. I am going to guess that Dark Horse asked Frank Miller to do new cover art for all six or seven volumes of Sin CIty and he did them all in one day without much forethought of what they would be. I think that merely using a closely cropped image from one of the drawings that was actually in the comic would have worked better and I think they may done that before. Jesus Christ, I can't believe I wrote six paragraphs about this. Bottomline: The movie was kind of corny, the comics are still ripping yarns and watching Frank Miller discover new drawing processes and techniques is my favorite thing about them. I give Sin City a solid B and recommend it to people who liked it when they were young and think they're too smart for it.

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4

These Air Jordans
Adults (I hope, but don't really care)
Nike
I got Vice to get Nike to send me these totally awesome Air Jordans to review. Boy, let me tell you when I was in punktimes, I thoroughly believed that Nike was evil and Converse were totally punk. At some point I realized that all sneakers were made by evil corporations, especially "Nosweats." I remember some big-headed girl bragging about her sneakers being sweatshop-free and then giving my roommate a fucking pamphlet about how much better than him her shoes were. Later we googled them and discovered they were liars.

Nikes are so comfortable. Gary Panter once commented that you never hear men complaining about their barking dogs because their shoes are so comfortable. After switching from Vans, Converse, and Docs to Nike my soles never hurt, even after walking many miles every day. They are like little SUVs that you put on your feet. I put 'em on and think "Today was a good day. Didn't have to use my AK, went on a road trip with my girfriend's kids or something. Traded in my AK for a fishing rod but I still rap about stuff like I'm an angry racist criminal."

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#5
The Acme Novelty Library Number 20
Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly
Chris Ware's overrated as a cartoonist, but he's a good illustrator, a great graphic designer and his sketchbooks are tops. The map-style of visual storytelling that he did was a big contribution to comics. I buy, read and enjoy everything he does, I just don't think that he does characters that measure up to those created by his peers. Bagge, Clowes, Crumb, Dave Cooper, Jim Woodring, and the Hernandez Brothers can all form characters that you can either like or dislike pretty readily. Most of Ware's characters leave me feeling nothing except mild irritation.

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In many ways Acme Novelty Library is just another male power fantasy. When you're little you might discover that you like Superman because he's invulnerable but at a certain age the lack of conflict might make you pick up Spiderman since he's poor and racked with guilt and rage. Maybe the costumes will ultimately turn you off and if you keep reading comics you'll turn to Sandman. At some point reading a comic about magical deities might be too goofy and life will have humbled you but you still need wounded hero fantasies. Sure, Jimmy Corrigan was a chubby loner with social anxiety but his power came from his moral superiority to the characters he came into contact with and his being the center of our attention while we read the book. Instead of fantasizing that you have powers that allow you to beat up your parents Chris Ware's comics appeal to the part of you that wishes to witness your parents at your funeral.

Ware stepped a little bit outside of the empathetic loner with his Rusty Brown comics, Rusty being a stunted adult who collects shit and is always trying to con his only friend out of his collectibles. This book takes some of his biggest storytelling steps yet.

This comic tells the story of Jason Lint, a popular jock who torments Rusty Brown in previous books. After showing us the house of the main character, presumably after his death, the comic shows his face forming from a series of dots and his early childhood memories. The art is crudely symbolic and the dialogue spoken by his parents is unintelligible at first, informing us that everything that happens from now on is in Jason's point of view. Jason goes from birth to finishing college in 24 pages during which time his mother dies, turning him into a jerk, and he accidentally kills his friend while driving high. From then on his life has its ups and downs and eventually he dies.

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There are some boss stylistic things happening in this book. There are a few occasions where the drawing style switches around, most notably when an elderlyJason Lint sees a comic or possibly a visual representation of a prose work about him breaking his son's collarbone, drawn in a variety of styles that refer to at least a few specific current cartoonists. I've spoken to a few people about this book and the consensus is that this is one of the best things Chris Ware's ever done.

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#6
Wowee Zonk 3
Wowee Zonk
Koyama Press
Hey all right, new Wowee Zonk! Wowee Zonk is a comics anthology/collective from Canada with the core members being Patrick Kyle, Ginette Lapalme, and Chris Kuzma. Superstar, Michael Deforge is also in there. This one has a great cover by Patrick Kyle, four amazing Michael Deforge pages, some sketchbook pages by Andrei Georgesxu who is drawing way different than he used to, a comic by Zach Worton about killing his boss, a comic by Ginette Lapalme that ends with dolphins 69ing, a totally amazing comic by Chris Kuzma about duck children detectives who are deformed, and a Patrick Kyle comic about weird wizards. These guys are so good. So good.

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#7
Boys Club 4
Matt Furie
Pigeon Press
These are always a fun time and Matt Furie is always boss, with his wacky stoner roommate monster characters who don't seem to have jobs. All they do is eat gross food, smoke a lot of pot, and do the kind of weird stuff you do when you get too comfortable with the people you're living with. Half the comics in here originally ran on this site. I liked them then and I liked them now. There's one comic in here where a character transforms into a snake and eats a pizza face-first. That whole thing happened because I said to Matt, "Can you do me one with a transformation in it?" I deserve all the credit. My name should be on the cover! THIS IS BULLSHIT!

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#8
The Jerk Practice Presents: The B-Squad Superhero Shorts
Hans Freiwald, Casey Van Heel, Jes Liberty
Every now and again someone will come up with the idea to do a comic about superheroes, but y'know, they're like normal guys. Someone will ask them,"So you're a superhero, what do you do?" And they look into the non-camera and roll their eyes or something like that. This was big in the 90s but it mostly died off. Nick Bertozzi did a comic like it called Incredible Drinking Buddies. The Tick almost falls into this category except that the Tick ruled. Too Much Coffee Man was a pretty successful version of this idea. B-Squad didn't do the idea well or 20 years ago. Also it has flyers and drink tickets for a comedy event in the middle which seems desperate and sleazy.

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#9
The Wednesday Conspiracy
Sergio Bleda
Dark Horse/SAF This comic is about a totally badass lady with an eyepatch who smokes cigars even though squares tell her not to. Oh, and she has a jar full of demons that she opens when she is attacked by other demons and they fight the demons that attack her. Also, she has a group of friends who all think they are crazy at first but they are the only ones who know what's really going on. I think the guy who made it was really into Sandman and Books of Magic but was way less able to come up with okay ideas than Neil Gaiman was.

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#10
Harshmallow
Matt Haveron
It's a bunch of lame gag comics.

That's all for now. See You In Two Weeks!