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Comics!

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #35

What's up with suicide and depression in newspaper comics lately? These cartoonists have elevated self-images if they think their awful comics need to comment on sadness.

Dear Everybody,

Did you see this Beetle Bailey comic and the amended version that seems so obvious?

What about this other one? What’s up with suicide and depression in newspaper comics lately? These cartoonists have elevated self-images if they think their awful comics need to comment on sadness. You’re not Bill Watterson.

And did you see this interview with Johnny Ryan that the former VICE Ed-in-Chief, Jesse Pearson, did over at the Comics Journal website?

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Well, here are some reviews of the books I looked inside of this week.

Nicholas

Odilon Redon
Michael Gibson
Taschen

You can’t fuck with Redon. His black and white work has strong goth appeal with its monstrous images and spider things and stuff. His color work is vibrant and has really strong color combinations. Pretty girls, monsters, heaven and hell, nightmares and dreams—it’s all captured in Redon’s work. If you dig spooky shit like Bacon or Goya and don’t know Redon then you’re not holding any water in the realm of artists that people with dark art sensibilities like.

This isn’t the ultimate Redon collection, but it’s a great 95-page introduction to a great painter, drawer, and print-maker. If you are broke this is a good gift for your weird nephew. He said his work was not to be defined so here are some of the better images in this book.

Demon God Goblin Heaven
Jesse Balmer & Jonny Negron

This substantial mini-comic is a project that Jonny Negron and Jesse Balmer worked on from 2009 – 2011. I’m not sure how creative responsibilities were split up, but looking at it you can tell that this was made right before Negron found his current style and voice. There are some occasional panels—especially towards the end—that look great and show his beautiful sense of composition and ideas, but most of this book looks like typical amateur work. There are some good elements, but many of the panels look cluttered, there’s an inefficiency to a lot of the linework, and many of the drawings look rushed and sloppy in a bad way. Also, the story and characters don’t resonate or make a lot of sense. If you’re really into Negron this is worth a look to see him figuring things out on the page, but it’s not worth much otherwise.

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Negropedia
Patrice Evans
Three Rivers Press
“Negropedia” is a funny word, so I thought this might be a funny book. Unfortunately, instead of being full of laughs and knowledge it’s full of stiff humor and dumb observations that all come off as either obvious or wrong. Too much of this book is devoted to fluff like describing the businesses in poor black neighborhoods without making it interesting or relating to anything. If it were done well it might be worth something, but it wasn’t so it’s not. It’s nowhere near as enjoyable as Egotrip’s Big Book of Racism from 2002. If you want a funny book with observations, theories, and stories concerning race, go get that book. While you’re at the bookstore maybe grab any copies of this book you find and quietly toss them in the garbage or on top of some really high place that no one can reach.

I’m flipping through Negropedia a bit more as I write this and just found a part where Patrice Evans claims that Dave Chappelle may have hurt the black race when he went a little nuts and fucked off to Africa. Real nice, Patrice, way to be a dick to someone who actually affects people and is changing racial concepts in America.

Just went through the book again and noticed that there’s a section pointing out how insulting the term “young, black, and gifted” is and then another in which he talks condescendingly about “blipsters,” which is an equally dehumanizing term. (Blipsters is a term that was (is?) popular on Gawker. It’s shorthand for “black hipster.” I’m don’t understand why people who aren’t openly racist aren’t ashamed to use this word like it’s not a big deal.) The author goes into a whole thing about how blipsters are basically race traitors who are rebelling against being black by not wearing baggy clothes before going into the some cliche hipster-bashing rhetoric.

If I were some asshole who wrote for Gawker I might call Patrice Evans a “blerd.” But I’m not so I’ll just call him a nerd. I will go so far as to say his insights and humor are “blorthless,” though.

Cowboys & Aliens
Rosenberg, Van Lente, Foley, Calera, Lima
IT Books
Unreadable and unlook-at-able.

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #34