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Comics!

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #55

Adrian Tomine's new "Optic Nerve 12" might be about making comics and feeling bummed. It's a fun time.

Hello Friends,

First let me give you some comic news.

Alex Schubert's

Blobby Boys were made into inanimate little toys. Buy them for $15 and they'll rob your other toys. Also Alex did some illustrations for VICE last month. He is one of my favorite new-ish guys in the comix/illustration world, so I am very proud of that.

While googling around I discovered that Oingo Boingo's first single from the late 70s was a song about Patty Hearst and had this great cover with Patty Hearst paper dolls. They put a good and a bad Patty on either side of the cover so that you could flip them around depending on whether you prefer a good or bad Patty. I love Patty Hearst.

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There's a new Jack Chick comic in which he draws a family adoringly watching Family Guy and also openly showing acceptance of homos. Jack Chick is totally not at all OK with this. Jack Chick's comics about homosexuality might be some of his best and weirdest. In Jack Chick's mind homosexuals are a bunch of leather daddies and child molesters who are loved and protected by a blind society, except of course for a small and noble Christian minority. The Christians who oppose homosexuality are beaten by cops in some of his work. Jack Chick's comic rants against the gays are solid but his absolute best work will always be the out-of-print Angels tract. Angels tells the story of a Christian rock band who sell their souls to the devil. I could try to summarize it or pick out specific pieces of dialogue, but it's better that you just read it. Although Angels is out of print, the entire thing is viewable on Jack Chick's website, and below:

Optic Nerve 12
Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly Adrian Tomine came up in the comics scene back when you established yourself by xeroxing and stapling mini-comics that you sold or gave away with the hope that you'd attract a publisher, who would then publish issues of your comic book. If people liked your single issues then at some point they'd be collected into trade paperbacks that smooched together the contents of between three and ten issues. Maybe your book would get mentioned in a mainstream magazine and then attract better sales. The path of alternative comics success has changed a lot in the past ten years. Around the early 2000s you'd walk around SPX or MoCCA and everyone would have mini comics and zines. Even successful artists would make them because they were immediate and easy. There is no standard path to comics success these days (which is not really success as most people would define it) but the mini-comic is pretty much obliterated and comics that are the shape and size of a standard comic book are disappearing too.

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Now there are a lot more people who just put their comics on the internet. If they are popular they start selling t-shirts and shit on their website. Then a publisher gives them a book deal and they make some big book and never deal with minis or comic book pamphlets, which is all awesome. I don't see it as technology killing off great stuff. Instead, it creates more paths for people and it saves a few trees from being cut down for shitty, terrible mini-comics. According to Johan Kugelberg, the core of punk is having an impulse to make a thing and then immediately making it. It's typically something you do by yourself and you don't have to be professional. Kate Beaton uploads these throw-away diary comics to her Twitter feed that are better than most comics anyone else will ever make. So the freedoms of technology are great, but the limitations of a standard comic book format are great too.

I don't adore everything Adrian does. Sometimes I think his characters lack the depth of his peers like Gilbert Hernandez or Clowes. I always think he's a good storyteller and I always like reading his comics. Optic Nerve #12 is about forty pages of comics. There are two longer stories, then a letters page, then a short auto-bio in which Adrian addresses why he still does Optic Nerve as a series of single issue comics. He's referred to jokingly as "The Last Pamphleteer." He's really not though. Michael Deforge is also making beautiful work within the comic book pamphlet confines. The first story is about a depressed landscaper who reads an article about sculpture theory one day and decides to make big ugly plaster sculptures with plants growing out of them. Everybody hates his work, even though he's good at spewing art theory bullshit at them. Making the sculptures ruins his life for a few years until he finally gives up.

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I'm guessing that this is a comic about making comics. Typically when someone makes a comic about someone pursuing a goofy art form that everyone hates, it's usually about making comics. People love to comment on their medium within their work. The monolith in 2001 is supposed to look like a dark movie screen. Watchmen has those Black Freighter comics in the back of each issue. This comic might be about feeling bummed out about doing comics or being bummed over the lack of respect that comic book pamphlets get and feeling like a clown. It's a fun time. The next comic is a full-color story called "Amber Sweet" that was originally published in Kramers Ergot. It's the story of a college student who is the spitting image of a porn actress and the problems this creates for her. Like a lot of Adrian Tomine's comics there are evil "bros" with backwards hats who are vulgar and hurt the sensitive people we like. People yell at her on the street and beat up her date and eventually she gets into an OK relationship only to find out that the guy is obsessed with the porn star. I'm not sure if this comic is supposed to be more about the internet and how suddenly having your life be so public can fragment your personality. Or it might be about the daily shit that women have to put up with from aggressive males. It seems like a third of the women I know have looked up on the subway and seen that a dude across from them is jerking off and trying to meet their gaze. Maybe it's a personal story about Adrian having to deal with jerks like me scrutinizing him.

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The letters column is a nice and funny time. Adrian has chosen to print the best of his fan mail. People getting worked up over hating his characters, legal threats, adoration, so many facets of human nature are wrapped up in this letters column. Finally, there's the black-and-white autobio comic in which Adrian makes fun of how everyone he knows thinks it's dumb that he still wastes his time making single issues of comics. It's over-the-top and set in a world of jerks where only Adrian appreciates the beauty of comics.

The depth and value of the characters and stories contained within this comic are up for you to judge. It's entertaining, it will give you something to think about it, and it's only $6—there's no reason not to pick it up. Here's my Moebius image of the week. It's one of the concept sketches Moebius did when Disney asked him to redesign Tomorrow Land in 1986. It never got past the concept stage though. See you next time,
Nicholas Gazin

Previously - #54

@NicholasGazin