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Vice Blog

NICK GAZIN'S COMIC BOOK LOVE-IN #18

Dear Comic Book Lovers And Likers,

This being the internet I'm sure that none of you remember a review I wrote last month about a comic called Eden. It wasn't terrible but it was cheesy in a self-adoring and naive way like Craig Thompson's Blankets, and also new agey. I didn't totally rip into it but I did tease. It ranked seventh best out of ten comics. Then this hilarious e-mail was sent to Vice by Eden's cartoonist:

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"Mr. Editors,
I am the author of Eden (Drawn and Quarterly)
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I write you in regards of a "review" of my book, Mr. Nick Gazin posted on Vice recently.
I think it is ok to say you didn´t like a book. But it is wrong to be offensive.
That´s what you really want to happen? Destroy another author?
Is that the "American way"?
You don´t know nothing about me. Why do something like that?
Pablo Holmberg"

While I am sorry that this is how Pablo had to learn about the American Way, did I really destroy this guy? Aren't artists supposed to be struggling with the big ideas and great truths or something? Why does it always seem like comics are full of anxious wimps who can't deal with bad reviews? I'm not saying I want artists to be a bunch of jocks and bullies, it just bums me out when people who are supposed to be seeking truth or beauty have less conviction about what they do than people who cut hair or serve drinks.

Well, here are the latest reviews. They're late because I had better things to do. I hope that anyone who feels destroyed by these reviews uses that feeling to either become stronger artists or quit. Send anything you want reviewed to Nick Gazin at Vice Magazine. Things not specifically addressed to me end up in a big pile of stuff that gets picked over by interns.
Love,

Nicholas

#1
The Wrong Place
Brecht Evans
Drawn & Quarterly
This is one of the best comics I've seen in years. Each page is beautifully illustrated with gesturally drawn watercolor people who look like candy. The compositions, colors, poses, lettering--it's all perfect. There's something about the poses, situations, and the location of the "camera" in relation to the people that reminds me of Eddie Campbell, although I find his work dull. This stuff is like if you replaced his scratchy little lines and people with a luscious cornucopia of patterns and color.

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The book's chiefly about two characters: Gary, who's fairly tame, and his old friend Robbie, a party boy who everyone loves and gossips about. The first half of the book shows a party at Gary's apartment in which everyone seems uncomfortable and mostly talk about the absent Robbie. The second half follows the characters to a nightclub where Robbie is worshiped and it seems like anything is possible. Going any farther into the plot would be pointless as there isn't a totally straightforward plot. It's all made up of little instances. There are moments of conversation at Gary's disaster of a party as people inadvertently reveal the kind of people they really are. The camera always keeps an objective distance and we never really get inside any of the characters heads too much but that doesn't seem like a major problem when the art's this pretty. Although we never really identify with any one character too much it does feel exactly like you're witnessing everything as a ghost. I got the sense that Brecht Evans resented all the characters, or at least I resented them all. They all seemed like shallow jerks, maybe they just reminded me of people I know.

It's rare to find a new good long comic these days. I say this a lot as a joke but Brecht Evans really is the guy I am most excited about seeing more new work from. Every page of this book is like tasty, tasty candy.

#2
Prince Valiant Vol. 3:1941 -1942
Hal Foster
Fantagraphics
Hell fuckin' yeah. New Prince Valiant. Fantagraphics really does these reprints right. While they could easily pump out lazy reissues of the same poorly recolored old strips like everyone else did before them, they actually go ahead and find the original colors and it's like nothing you've ever seen before. Unless you were reading Prince Valiant in the newspaper back in the early 40s. What I said in that last review about every page being like candy goes double for Prince Valiant.

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The whole story is sick as hell from beginning to end. Val is made into a slave and his bejeweled sword is stolen from him. He meets his future wife for the first time in a brief scene and obsesses like crazy. He winds up the guest in a kingdom hanging out with fly princesses but flips out when he discovers that one of the new royal friends he made is going to marry the monster who just enslaved him. He helps her escape, attacks his former owner, effs up, and is fed to the best-drawn octopus you ever saw. And that's pretty much the first third of a really long rest of story involving wizards and pirates and vikings and the Knights of the Round Table and Arabs and murderous hordes.

The book ends with Valiant slicing a hand off while it's still holding an axe and it goes flying through the air. What a book! For thirty bucks you get to own some of the prettiest comics that anyone's ever seen printed up like no one's ever done. There's also a great intro by Dan Nadel, who knows a thing or two about how to write a thing.

Prince Valiant is so good. I don't believe that everything was better in the past but some things were. It's nice that everyone's making comics now, but it also feels like we're moving farther away from a world where people could do the things that Hal Foster could do and where people could identify with a character like Prince Valiant. Nowadays people want to read Scott Pilgrim, a comic about a boring loser who has a crush on a girl whose personality consists of being a rude bitch with a hair cut. Prince Valiant, Sherlock Holmes. These are great heroes. These kids today get into Harry Potter and shit where the hero is some loser who just gets something for nothing. Is anyone striving for greatness anymore? It seems like most people are just hoping to get a ribbon for showing up. Fantagraphics aren't pussies. They are raising bars and smashing boundaries with every mammoth step they take. BOOM BOOM BOOM! PRIIIIIIINCE VAAAAAAAAAAALIAAAAAAAAANT MOOOOOTHERFUCKKKKKKKERS!

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#3
Pandora's Eyes
Milo Manara and Vincenzo Cerami
Humanoids
I remember seeing Manara's comics serialized in Heavy Metal, Penthouse, and L'Echo when I was little and thinking they were pretty good and very porny, but nowadays my porn sensitivity is dulled and I just see amazing comics. His fixation on assholes still seems a little weird. Like I'm pretty sure from reading through some of these comics that he considers ladies' love stars their primary sex hole. It's kind of weird when someone's perversions show through too much. Like for a while in the early 90s Bob Guccione got really into piss and there were all these pictorials of women pissing on each other and drinking piss. As a nine-year-old I thought this was kind of strange, but all adult sexuality was strange and also what the fuck was I doing reading Penthouse at nine? Anyways, now as an adult the idea of being obsessed with women pissing seems really strange. I knew a guy who was into women shitting but I don't think he'd found a partner to engage in his shit fetish with him yet. I'd ask him "Would you eat a ziplock bag of Britney Spears' shit?" "Yes, totally." "What about a bag of my shit?" "No that's gross." --Wait, what was I talking about?

Milo Manara. He's an old Italian genius who tells great stories that usually involve sex or a sexy lady getting into an adventure. He made a series called Click about an uptight lady who becomes severely horny whenever a remote control is switched on and she enjoys severe sexual humiliation for four awesome books. Then there are the two Butterscotch books about a guy who develops a butterscotch-smelling paint that makes you invisible. And there's a ton more. They're all pretty great whether you're the kind of person who jags off to drawings or not. Manara is one of those European cartoonists in the same league as Tardi and Moebius who can draw shit with a super-efficient line and tell a horny and fantastic story involving amazing poses, drapery, and hair and stuff. You look at a lot of modern European comics or what's being published in Heavy Metal now and it's all these ugly Photoshop disasters. Manara still has the goods.

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Despite it starring a sexy lady, and despite it being a book by Manara that stars a sexy lady, there is very little sex or basically no nudity in this book. In fact, it was written by Vincenzo Cermi, who wrote Life is Beautiful. Also this is the product of a new LA-based publisher who's doing some fine comics-community-service by printing both Manara and Moebius. Considering how respected and world famous Moebius is his work should be more widely available. I shouldn't have to buy overpriced back issues of Heavy Metal like a common dork just to read Arzakh. They are filling a big gap in the American comics world. Thank you Humanoids. Thank you for filling gaps.

#4
New Character Parade
Johnny Ryan
Pigeon Press
Oh yeah! Hundreds of new page-long funnies by Johnny Ryan! There's a hilarious one about Chris Benoit, the wrestler who murdered his family. There's one about a guy named Stink Saw who jerks women off by letting them ride on his chainsaw and then charges folks money to smell his saw. There's the "100% Anal Rape" comic that Johnny did after Gary Panter's jerk daughter said that that's what all his comics were these days. There's Obi Wan Slobbobi in which a fat Jedi knight refers to a lightsaber as his zim zam stick. There's the one that's just goofy animals quoting all the mean comments about Johnny Ryan that were on the Vice site. Everything after that looks like it was influenced by the movie From Beyond and is full of people mutating into horrible monsters after making contact with weird sexual demons from other dimensions.

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There's also a drawing that looks like me in here so I asked Johnny Ryan if it was me. He countered with, "Does it have your retarded curly moustache?" I said yes it does. "And is it wearing one of those stupid baseball hats?" Yes, again. "And does it have disgusting long, greasy hair?" Yeah. "Yeah, that's supposed to be you." He also mentioned that he drew me into some animated thing that may or may not ever see the light of day. He also mentioned that he's never going to make another issue of Angry Youth Comics, which is a real bummer. I said bye and he mentioned that he was looking forward to reading the glowing review in which New Character Parade was lauded as the greatest comic of our time.

After getting off the phone with Johnny I noticed another comic that might have been about me so I called him again but this time he didn't pick up.

#5
Usagi Yojimbo Volumes 9 and 10
Stan Sakai
Dark Horse
Usagi Yojimbo tells the story of Usagi Miyamoto, a wandering samurai who is also a rabbit. This comic's been going since the black and white boom of the 80s and the character appeared in the Ninja Turtles cartoon show way back when. I've never heard anyone mention being a fan except for Dash Shaw, but it's a lot of fun to read. Stan Sakai makes us feel like we're Usagi's traveling companion, sharing in his adventures of good doing.

The stories are pretty similar from one issue to the next. Usagi wanders into a town and there's some obviously corrupt people and he fights 20 animal samurais at once. Or he meets some child or lady or elderly person who is running from an attacker and then he helps that person. Sometimes a demon or a person who Usagi thinks is his pal will betray him. It's all pretty straightforward. I always like the main character, and it's full of lessons about old-tymey Japanese agriculture and blacksmithing and stuff. If you're going to be on a plane ride or doing something else you find uncomfortable, Usagi Yojimbo will be the comic book blanket that will just wrap you up in fantasy. Every time I read this comic I immediately want to eat Japanese food. And then I usually eat it.

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#6
Dick Briefer's Frankenstein
Edited by Craig Yoe
IDW/Yoe Books
Dick Briefer is an obscure cartoonist who did comics about Frankenstein's Monster in the 1940s. He's also one of the few auteurs of the medium from an era when most comics were churned out by studios assembly-line style. Briefer's Frankenstein comics started off as mediocre horror stories but then the character got his own comic series and it turned into a great humor comic about Frankenstein and his funny monster pals. The poses, linework, ideas, and jokes that Briefer did in the funny Frankenstein comics are some of my absolute favorites in the history of comics. The lines have a supreme slick undulation to them that are sort of like Jack Cole's, Al Capp's, or Boody Rogers (who Craig Yoe also edited a book about). Briefer's Frankenstein also has a nose that is slightly above his eyeline and makes him look little-boyish. Who doesn't love friendly monsters or feel like one? Unfortunately his editors didn't dig the funny monster thing and made him go back to the old mediocre horror style of doing shit where Frankenstein is a misunderstood beast-man.

I first saw one of these funny comics in Art Out Of Time and it blew my mind. Later Gary Panter loaned me one of his original copies of an issue of Frankenstein and sometime after that I managed to score a copy of #4 on Ebay for cheap. I'd had my samplings and was ready for a full on anthology collecting the series. Unfortunately this book fails to deliver what I think we all wanted.

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The first problem is that it's random selections from Briefer's output. As comics enthusiasts we're past that phase. We're in an age of publishing that's post-Criterion DVDs. Fantagraphics is putting out perfect, chronological Ditko volumes. We want to get all the Frankenstein comics that Dick Briefer collected.

There are also some odd design choices. For instance each page number has a bright red blood stain above it that's brighter than any of the colors in the comic art and is visually distracting. Another odd choice was not printing the art from the covers of the individual issues at full size. Those were some beautiful covers. Yet another odd choice was flipping the drawing of Frankenstein's face from Frankenstein #1 for the sake of the cover concept. It's just a weird and disrespectful thing to do to the guy whose work you're trying to celebrate. When you use a mirrored version of an image it changes the way we as viewers respond to it. Manga fanatics will talk your ear off about how much they hate that shit.

This book is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and Craig Yoe's heart might have been in the right place, but my gut reaction is, "Great, so how long am I going to have to wait before I get a book collecting the funny Frankenstein comics?"

#7
Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft
Joe Jill and Gabriel Rodriguez
IDW
I initially thought this looked corny as Hell, especially the use of the name Lovecraft in the title like that's supposed to be some subtle inside reference. The art's also pretty hideous by my standards. Or rather, it's too stylized for its own good. For a story like this it would've been helped if the art was less slicky extremo and more like Steve Dillon did for Preacher.

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Everyone in this comic appears to be the same age because the artist only knows how to draw the things he likes. The architecture, cars and shit like that are pretty good but I just don't get why so many comic artists draw in these ugly styles, inking everything so it appears to have the texture of a super smooth space ship and then coloring them so they appear to be made of shiny plastic. That works if your comic is about slimy fish people or space-age car people but not if it's about humans.

Despite being turned off by the ugliness I actually enjoyed this a bunch. It steals elements from some obvious sources, the two I noticed were Steven King and The Ring, but like a Steven King novel it keeps moving forward and you don't get bored. Some bad kids kill their guidance counselor so the dead guy's family move into this giant and creepy castle mansion that has magic doors and hidden secrets and a weird witch monster who lives in a well. Meanwhile, the guy who killed their dad has escaped from prison and is working his way to their house so he can kill the rest of them or something. Along the way he sucks a trucker's dick. The book climaxes nicely, like a trucker in some murderer nerd's mouth. Some totally awesome stuff happens and then the book ends with some light cliffhangings so that you'll buy the next volume.

If you dig Steven King there's a good chance you'll like this. The art sucks bad and doesn't serve the mood of the story, but I think I am smarter and have better taste than the expected reader for this series. This is a highly entertaining comic and I'm probably just too negative. If you want to read a ripping yard then rip into this thing, like a pilled-up trucker delving into sweet pliant boyflesh. That's my attempt at getting quoted but also my honest feelings.

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#8
Scenes from an Impending Marriage Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly
Adrian Tomine got married and gave out little comics he made about the process of preparing for a wedding to give away as wedding favors. If I got this at a wedding I would be psyched. "Wow, what a rad little book documenting the goofy stress that my friends have been going through in order to show me a good time while celebrating their love." As someone who wasn't at the wedding, however, and truthfully doesn't really like the idea of weddings, I am not super into it. Adrian Tomine's drawings are always nice to look at but I don't know if this really needed to be released to the general public.

Much of the book seems to be Adrian complaining to his irritatingly good-natured wife about how much he hates preparing for this wedding. Every step of the way seems to be an obnoxious chore which highlights a different thing that sucks about giant expensive weddings. I've only been to one peer's wedding which turned out great and not corny. Still, I could never imagine myself turning to someone and saying "let's buy food for a bunch of assholes we don't talk to." Were I ever to get married I'd probably have a party then get married in the middle of it as a surprise to the guests. I like America so maybe at a Fourth of July party. Something with low costs, no stress, fireworks. A real black shorts and socks kind of affair.

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If you're an Adrian Tomine fan, and a lot of you are, or have a friend who likes comics and is getting married this is probably a great gift. I don't see a lot of people buying this for themselves though. Congratulations to Adrian Tomine on getting married.

#9
My Dead Dad Was In ZZ Top
Jon Glaser
Harper Perennial
Jon Glaser is one of best comedians out there. I'm not a top-five-list kind of guy but I would put him in my top five comedians. Johnny Ding Dong is amazing. Drac Search was a huge and important joke. Delocated is also pretty great.

The stand up bit that this book is based upon was great for a lot of reasons and was one of the best things on that Invite Them Up CD set. This book isn't very good though and it pains me to say that because I like Jon Glaser's comedy a lot and if he ever sees this he'll go,"Vice doesn't like my book? Fuck those fools, especially Nick Gazin." Any invisible bond or fantasy friendship I may have had with him while watching my Youtube clips and TV appearances will never, NEVER happen now. But this is how it goes when you write reviews.

The original bit that this book is based on involved Jon coming to the stage, explaining that his dad had recently died and that while going through his father's possessions he found a series of letters that his dad had sent to ZZ Top while being in an early incarnation of the band. It's an amazing bit, partially because it almost seems real up until he gets deep into letters that his dad wrote full of terrible ideas and bizarre conceptions of what the nature of ZZ Top should be. If you haven't heard it you should, it's great even with me having ruined it. Unfortunately there are no such surprises in this book. Or rather, there's one initial surprise, the one I just ruined and then excused myself for ruining. Once you've read one fake letter relating to rock n' roll history you've read them most. What if the Velvet Underground & Nico record had a hoagie instead of a banana? What if a whole lot of musicians known for their integrity had been shameless sell outs and pitched parodic versions of their song lyrics to lots of big companies? It takes the punch out of what's coming and is also bereft of Glaser's amazing voice and timing. I guess those last two failings are more my fault than book's, but it's still disappointing.

If Jon is reading this. Please forgive me, and keep writing books.

#10
The Cardboard Valise
Ben Katchor
Pantheon
I've been informed by teachers and critics that Ben Katchor's a great cartoonist but like Devo said, "teachers and critics all dance the poot." I felt like I was supposed to like it for a long time before I realized that there was nothing redeeming about his work at all. It's so ugly and bland in the way so many overly stylized old illustrators are ugly and bland. I don't get it, I don't like it and I don't know how anyone can. There, I said it.

See you in two weeks!

NICK GAZIN