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Vice Blog

NICK GAZIN'S COMIC LOVE-IN 16

Hello Comic Book Lovers and the Comic Book Curious,

Every two weeks I come in and tell you, the Vice Reader, with your double-ironic 4 Loko parties and your fixed-gear art bikes and your something about cocaine, all the latest in comics. Comics are the only artistic medium that exists and the perfect way to tell stories in this post-literate world in which we live in.

It's been an OK two weeks for comics. Gabe Fowler did a pretty good job hosting the Brooklyn Comics N' Graphix Festalooza and that's all the comic book news I know about. Gabe's best pal Zach Hazard helped me out on one of these reviews, so thanks to both those dudes!
Love, Nicholas

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#1
Powr Mastrs 3
CF Picturebox
I feel comfortable saying that almost all of the critically respected working cartoonists are making complete and utter shit, but CF is actually good. He actually shows off things he can do that are unique to him and he doesn't rely on some corny sense of "attitude." I have my doubts as to whether or not he knows how to tell a story, but so far I haven't cared. CF's drawings are crude in the ways they should be and sophisticated in the ways they should be. He uses techniques that children are into, using a ruler in obvious ways and subtle pop-cultural references that are almost gettable.

Powr Mastrs is the best thing that Picturebox publishes, maybe the only good thing they've published. It's a fantasy/sci-fi comic that is impossible to follow and every page is beautiful. Trying to figure out what the hell the plot is doesn't really matter though. It's more like a series of beautiful moments and relationships.

The comic starts with a character riding a motor vehicle that's constantly shifting and turning into other things. It's all very Akira-esque, right down to the speedlines. Then there's some POV shots around a bricklined area that feels like that old screensaver. I'm going to stop trying to describe this. Here are my favorite spreads from one of my favorite books by one of my favorite guys. Seriously, this guy. THIS GUY.

#2
Study Group 12 #4
Edited by Zack Soto
Jason Leivian/Zack Soto
Study Group 12 is an anthology comic that Zack Soto's been putting out for at least the past ten years. He was one of the first guys to publish comics by Victor Cayro and all kinds of rad guys early on. I used to walk around in a Study Group 12 T-shirt wishin' I could be in it. Now I am, so that's one thing I can cross off of my childhood dreamslist.

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Here are but some of the great comics and drawings in here. Farel Dalrymple did a good little comic about one of his urban witch girls who talks to vermin. Jon Vermillyea did another light romp with the Breakfast Crew. Vanessa Davis did a funny comic about her and her boyfriend discussing "Don't Fear the Reaper." Jennifer Parks drew a comic that's gauzy and dreamlike. Aidan Koch has great lines and compositions. T Edward Bak is a funny bummer. Michael DeForge is a guy everyone wants for their anthologies and somehow he has time to be in all of them. I don't need to kiss that guy's ass any more than I already have. Angie Wang contributed an amazing drawing with Tomer-esque/Jillian Tamaki-esque linework. Corey Lewis has some nice drawings but I don't know if he has a lot to say. Dan Zettwoch did an amazing one-pager detailing all the things in Pablo Escobar's pet hippo's stomach when it was opened up. My comic is my favorite thing in this anthology and one of my best comics yet. Although it was clearly drawn in a day and is derivative of ideas I took from CF it's still a buttstormer. Good lines, weird ghostly shapes, and a focus on male/female relations.

There are only 500 copies of this thing and they seem to involve a lot of hand-screened art in them. They are all definitely hand-numbered so if you want one get it now if that's still possible.

#3
Unexplored Worlds:The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2
Steve Ditko
Fantagraphics
Steve Ditko's this hermit who co-created Spiderman, is obsessed with Ayn Rand, and made a lot of great comics. Up until Fantagraphics started printing these thick hardcovered archives of his work the only way to get reprints of these comics was in cheapo black and white booklets. Fantagraphics has finally presented the work of one of comics' greatest mystery men in dignity with beautiful color reproduction and informative introductions.

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The last book was full of leering demons and grimacing faces drawn in inky contrast and beautiful peerings into what Hell is like. This book shows off Ditko's work after the Comics Code Authority came onto the scene and turned every lurid story of horror and "the macabre" into some lame morality tale in which everyone has a nice time. Still there's some strong content in this book, unconfounded by the gayness foisted upon Ditko by the Code. There's a story called "The Man Who Stepped Out of a Cloud" which starts with a black cloud floating down to Earth and a man in a blue suit stepping out, befriending a lonely and abused child, and taking him back to his home planet. There's also a comic that has an identical story to one that was in The Horror! The Horror! About men who are forcibly evolved by some unknown force until they become so far beyond human that they merge with infinity and blink out of physical existence. Later we learn that their test monkey had been narrating the comic. Oh yeah, there's also a great one in which a scary surreal painting turns out to be a portal to spooky dimension which turns into a prison for a surreal butler. That one rules.

Is Ditko really that great? He's got beautiful ideas, but as an artist his skills are pretty crude and in several of the comics in here it seems like he's just doing a really crummy Wally Wood impression. The comics in the previous volume were great because Ditko's ability to see and convey the demons inside him were uncanny. When he has to scale back the bleakness, the results are just OK. The first Fantagraphics book in this series? Essential. This new one is nice if you like Ditko but you probably don't need it.

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#4
Bloom County: The Complete Library Volume Three: 1984 – 1986
Berkeley Breathed
IDW
Before print died newspaper comic strips were a thing that existed. A hundred years back they were huge, giant pages and only the best cartoonists got to make them. Comics like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Prince Valiant ruled the shit out of each other and were national crazes. Then TV came and ruined everything with its superior entertainment value and non-reading component. Comics got smaller and smaller until they are whatever they are now. About 30 years ago Bloom County was a pretty good one of those.

Despite the extreme datedness of some of its references (will you never catch a break, Gary Hart?) Bloom County's forever great. The book opens with a bunch of jokes in which the depressed and shlubby Opus the Penguin and his friend, the revolting and nonverbal Bill the Cat run against Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. Michael Jackson comes to town and Opus impersonates him for a while. The human kid characters comment on the new PG-13 movie rating. There's a story involving the Vanessa Williams nudeness. Opus goes on a date with a manhating granola lesbian. Characters die and come back, get amnesia and stay in their familiar rut. An extra added thing that makes this book great is occasional annotations from Berke Breathed himself.

This isn't the complete Calvin and Hobbes and it isn't even close to being the complete Popeye but it's familiar and comforting, full of likable guys and decent vocabulary words. It makes me so happy and if you remember this comic with any fondness it'll probably make you happy too.

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#5
BPRD : King Of Fear
Mignola, Arcudi & Davis
Dark Horse
BPRD is this comic series spun off from Hellboy about a government branch that monitors and tries to control supernatural catastrophes. This is a fun romp full of beautiful drawings, a story full of secrets that are slowly explained, and it all seems to be leading to the end of the world. It's hard to say if the comic will ever climax with this totally insane and world-ending end of the world but Hellboy's been stringing us along for 17 years now, so I kind of doubt it. Either way, though, good comic. Hellboy and BPRD are good comics that are much less stupid than the Hellboy movies and worth your time if you have time and money for comics.

#6
FUC- --U, -SS __LE
Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics
Johnny Ryan is this guy who I write about a lot, usually because someone makes me. At this point I've interviewed him four times and we both just absolutely loathe each other. Johnny's new book is full of the yucky yuks, barfy larfs, and gags-that-make-you-gag that have made this shock comicker the Artie Lange of drawn funnies! FUCUSSLE is Johnny Ryan's final collection of Blecky Yuckerella strips since she dies at the end. For $12 you get 99 comics and a drawing of Blecky flipping off a goose. Do you like comics where dangling nutsacks are mistaken for pinatas and rich people shove DVDs into midgets' butt cleavage which causes them to act out the movies? A comic where summoning a Garfield Satan is possible by using the Lasagnanomicon? A comic where a little girl shoots the homelees in the brain, grinds them up, and feeds them to skunks for Thanksgiving? You don't? Neither does anybody else. Eat my balls, JR.

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#7
Eden
Pablo Holmberg
Drawn & Quarterly
This is some severely new-age bologna. The book collects a series of four-panel comic strips set in a magical forest that I guess could be Eden. It comments on love, sex, death, loneliness, and other. It does about half of that in a way that makes me nauseous. The final strip is a "clever" comic in which we see a guy drawing a tree with bare branches. When he finishes he says, "You can get dressed now." Then the tree is [SNORRRRRRE][SNORRRRRRRE] uhp-what? Where am I?

#8
AX: Alternative Manga Vol. One
Edited By Sean Michael Wilson
Top Shelf
Some of you may remember an amazing anthology of weird manga from 10 years ago called Secret Comics Japan. That book was amazing and showed off a lot of the weirdest and best stuff that was published by the long-gone Pulp magazine. This book isn't as good as that one was. I didn't get this so I'm turning to other people for their opinions since I could be wrong. Here's what celebrated manga enthusiast Zach Hazard thought about this one:

"Although it's obviously not perfect, the best thing about the AX anthology is that it's the most diverse alternative manga anthology I've read, which sort of sets it up for imperfection. There were a lot of comics that I was highly anticipating by mangaka I am already really into (Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Imiri Sakabashira, Kazuichi Hanawa, Nishioka Brosis, Takashi Nemoto, and a few others), and I wasn't let down. All the artists I like had awesome pieces and they were all new to me. As well, I was introduced to a few other really cool artists I didn't know about and whose work I have overlooked, such as Takao Kawasaki and Toranusuke Shimada (whose story "Enrique Kobayashi's Eldorado" was easily the most interesting and engaging of the entire book). There's some obvious shit, like Tomohiro Koizumi's story which looks like it was serialized on Deviantart; and I think they did a pretty disgusting job of placing translated text over the Japanese text in a lot of the stories (they could've at least fixed the levels a bit so it wasn't obvious where they just selected a square area of text and then hit delete). I know Nick doesn't like it because it wasn't as good as Secret Comics Japan (which it definitely isn't), but I felt more like this anthology was focused on introducing westerners to a lot of Japanese artists that haven't had much or any exposure in English-speaking countries, especially ones who weren't already covered by the other alternative manga anthologies printed in the United States. So overall, I think that design-wise the book really isn't that much better than if all the stories were scanlated and posted on mangafox, but since no one did that I'm fine with buying it in book form to read a bunch of great comics by great artists."

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#9
All These Sin City Books
Frank Miller
Dark Horse
In my last reviews column I reviewed the first two Sin City books from Dark Horse's recent reprint series and how that despite severely corny storylines, there is value to them. The excitement comes from Miller showing us drawing techniques which he seems to be discovering for himself as he draws the story. Dark Horse has now sent me the last four volumes in the Sin City series which start off strong and slowly become totally terrible.

The first volume is That Yellow Bastard, probably the strongest Sin City book storywise. It's also one of the stories that made it into the movie. A Clint Eastwoody character saves a little girl from a serial killer with political ties, goes to jail due to the severe corruption of stuff, and then leaves to save the little girl again. The big visual gimmick in this one is that the bad guy is colored yellow while everything else remains black and white.

Family Values is number five and it tells the story of Dwight, who is the type of character you see a lot in mangas and all kinds of Japanese storytelling. He's making his living as a photographer but ALSO he's this ex-Green Beret Rambo guy who can kill everyone. Dwight is helping Sin City's prostitutes get revenge on etc. The visual idea here is that the constantly nip-slipping rollerblading samurai girl never gets shaded in, no matter how much shadow is in the frame.

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The sixth volume is Booze, Broads, & Bullets. It's full of short comics Miller did about Sin City for anthologies. The art's pretty good but the stories don't exist.

The final volume is Hell and Back, which is the biggest, most expensive, and worst book in this series/maybe comics? The art and lacks the deliberation from his older comics and is almost amateurish for a good deal of the book. He incorporates this unnecessary and scratchy linework on top of his usual thick black forms which reminds me of very early Evan Dorkin, before he learned to economize. Miller had a distinct style even when working for Marvel and fitting in with their house style. In this book he goes too far and most of it looks like it was drawn without any advance planning. The proportions are bizarre. Characters' hands all look like giant hockey gloves and their feet are ridiculous too. The big artistic gimmick in this one is one whole chapter being entirely in color which would be boss if this thing wasn't unreadable. The whole book has a strong "Why the fuck did you do this?" vibe to it.

If you like Sin City the first four volumes are pretty good. The last three are less so. If you're not into the art then there's really nothing here for you unless you're really stupid. My dad once described Sin City as "an adolescent nerd's idea of film noir." And he was right as his is about most things not related to who in Hollywood and politics is and isn't gay.

#10
120 Days of Simon
Simon Gardenfors
Top Shelf
A Swedish cartoonist/rapper decided to spend 120 days without returning to his apartment or allowing himself to stay at the same place for more than three days. He fucks some girls, takes some drugs, gets in a fight. There's really nothing to say. This is what boring people consider an adventure I guess. I don't know if all Swedes are talentless pussies with no imaginations or if it's just this one.

See you in two weeks or not if you don't check back! Bye!

NICHOLAS GAZIN