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Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #37

Greetings non-believers! There are a lot of books piling up in my room and it's hard for me to get to the bathroom because I've basically barricaded myself in. I've started going to the bathroom in grocery bags.

Greetings non-believers!

There are a lot of books piling up in my room and it's hard for me to get to the bathroom because I've basically barricaded myself in. Actually, I've taken to going to the bathroom in grocery bags, tying them off, then placing them on the fire escape. At some point I am going to have to transport them out of my home and I am not looking forward to that. I may just fling them into the neighbor's yard when it's dark out.

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Sincerely,
Nicholas.

Here's this week's comic book news.
1) This Deadpool gif:

2) The check that DC used to buy Superman from Siegel and Schuster has been floating around the internet. It's hard not to look at it and immediately feel sad. They sold their claim to one of the greatest contributions to the world of mythology for $130, got fired from their own books, and struggled financially for the rest of their lives as DC made many millions on the things they created.

And here are this week's reviews, listed, as always, from first to worst.

#1
Smoke Signal #10
Edited by Gabe Fowler
Desert Island
Ohhhh myyyyy goood. The cover on this issue is so sick. Gabe got John Severin, one of the still-working artists from the legendary EC Comics to do the cover. It's impossible to overstate the importance of the EC artists. I imagine a secret cavern with giant stone statues of them all in a row, like the Shazam origin story.

So the cover is some Indians making smoke signals with a pile of burning Mad magazines while a lady in the foreground happily reads a copy of Cracked. Even though Severin must be getting on in years this cover is up there with his best work. I could go on and on about the cover to this issue alone but the interior pages are all pretty excelsior too.

First up is a comic collaboration by Ben Marra and Matt Thurber! Then some pages by Kaz! Then some Tony Millionaire strips! Then an all new, amazing Michael Deforge comic about the Silver Surfer in which you can see his dick and he murders the Fantastic Four! Then an amazing Noah Van Sciver comic about Limp Bizkit's episode of Behind the Music, which is awfully similar to a comic I did with a friend about Limp Bizkit and never showed anyone! Then more great stuff. There is zero filler in this thing. I wish I'd saved my back issues of this anthology. Gabe knows what a quality comic is and that's rare in this backpatting, honorable-mentioning scene we work in!

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#2
Hark! A Vagrant
Kate Beaton
Drawn & Quarterly

Everyone loves this lady, but you know what? I do too. Her work is a little like Scott C's or Angry Jim Campbell's in terms of the simple, hyper readable drawing style with funny facial expressions and poses. I didn't really know her stuff too much before this book. I'd only seen the "Strong Female Characters" comic and the time she wouldn't respond to me e-mailing her. Man, the comics in this book! Man!

You know a comic is funny when you laugh at just the drawings. People don't "draw funny" as much anymore. People usually try to "draw cool" and then rely on dialogue and timing to make jokes work. Johnny Ryan knows how to draw funny and so do those two guys I mentioned earlier, but especially Kate Beaton.

Also, the comics often come from a place of learnedness. Lots of the strips in here are parodies of historic moments or famous books. There's a series of comics about Robinson Crusoe from Friday's point of view, in which Crusoe is a condescending nuisance. So good. My favorite is without a doubt her comics about 1980s Business Woman. A woman with a high wall of hair and multiple shoulder-paddy outfits who is all about maximum efficiency.

This book is so great. I think it's sold out a few times at a few different places. Get it if you can. This is one of those comics that will appeal to people who normally don't like comics.

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#3
The Hero With a Thousand Excuses
Jim Woodring

I picked up this perfect little mini at SPX this year. Woodring can do no wrong. Nothing else to say. You should know this guy.

#4
The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists
Seth
Drawn & Quarterly

Seth has a clean style, but most of his comics are too boring and nostalgic for me to take seriously. As is often the case with talented but uptight people, when he relaxes he makes really fun and enjoyable work. Like he builds these little model towns to use for drawing reference when he makes a comic. Those models are great! And this book was supposedly drawn in Seth's sketchbook and it's also a lot of fun. If you read his book Wimbledon Green it's pretty similar. The story in Wimbledon Green was a hilarious adventure story about the world's greatest comic-book collector told in a sort of fake documentary style like Woody Allen might do. This one's about a fake Canadian cartoonist society with a whole bunch of outposts all over Canada. It indulges in nostalgia for the good old days when blah blah blah but is also funny and fun to read. Go get it!

#5
Deadpool: Dead Head Redemption
By a bunch of people
Marvel

Man, is Deadpool the only good comic that Marvel makes? That's what I am guessing because they won't send me comics to review and they send out like five PR e-mails a day, which is CRAZY. It's cool/odd that they parodied a video game title for the title of this book. Maybe they ran out of new "clever" titles.

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Deadpool is kinda like the new Wolverine. His comics are fun to read because he can't die and he's crazy so everyone will be freaking out while he stays calm and has a good time. He has two different voices in his head and will occasionally chop off his own body parts because it is funny. He's had his head cut off multiple times and survived.

This book is mostly a bunch of stories by different artists including two of my favorite guys of recent comics memory, Kyle Baker and David Lapham. The main thing here is that it's a fun and funny book that is great for subway rides and the bathroom.

#6
Super Iam8Bit
Edited by Jon M. Gibson, Amanda White, Taylor Harrinton, Nick Ahrens
Iam8bit/Plastic Highway

I love video games and I love a lot of the artists in this book, but there's something really, really corny about this. It's easy to make someone like something that they already like, and a lot of selling art is based on that. People paint dogs or boats or naked ladies and sell them to people who are unable or uninterested in anything beyond the most surface aspects of a piece of art.

There are people who base their entire careers on doing art that's based on congratulating people for recognizing references to hyper-popular things. Some people do it really well; most are Deviant Art tards. This book has some pretty pictures in it, but this sort of shit bums me out. It just seems unambitious and dull. Even the video games people choose to draw are obvious. It's all Mario, Pac Man, Zelda, and Donkey Kong. If these people are such hardcore nerds then why aren't they going obscure and doing shit about how hard it was to kill Jaws at the end of the NES game or land on the aircraft carrier in Top Gun? It's like they felt they needed to dumb down something that was already dumbed down about as far as dumb gets.

#7
Secret Prison #3
Secret Prison
I wrote a bad review of a former issue of this newsprint anthology comic in a past column. This new one's better but I still don't like it very much.

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #36