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Comics!

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Witch Hunt #9

It seems like a lot of stuff is happening in comics that is really great. Closed Caption Comics consistently put out things that are pretty and good.

 It seems like a lot of stuff is happening in comics that is really great.  Closed Caption Comics consistently put out things that are pretty and good.  C.F. is too good for comics but here he is blessing us with his creative energies anyway.  Wowee Zonk are awesome too.  There are a lot of short works of quality but where are the longer works or series with recurring characters? I don't feel like I've seen anyone measure up to the storytelling ability of Bagge, Clowes, the Hernandez Brothers, Dave Cooper, or Jim Woodring. Craig Thompson can draw well but he writes like a ten-year-old and Dash Shaw's padding his shit with filler and attitude. Who in American comics will produce work like the old masters? Will it be you? My money's on Sammy Harkham doing something long and good at some point.

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Anyways, in case you're new at this, each month I review all the silly books I get in the mail and order them, best to worst. The worst one, I burn. With no further ado, here's the judgering.

Weathercraft
Jim Woodring
Fantagraphics
I never entirely understand what's going on in Jim Woodring's comics but I'm not irritated by the parts that confuse me. When most people try to employ dream logic in their work they fail miserably but Jim is great at it. The closest thing to a peer he might have is David Lynch but even that's a stretch.  Jim Woodring is the only Jim Woodring and no one has done what he does except for him.

Although Weathercraft takes place inside the universe that Frank occupies it's chief star is the hapless and selfish Manhog.  Manhog looks like his namesake: His facial features are a combination of human and porcine, he has human feet and hands but walks on all fours, he is pathetic and spiteful and lives like an animal for the most part, foraging for food and running from predators. He spends a lot of his appearances in Jim Woodring's comics in a state of suffering. Some weird witchy mutants do a thing which--like in the "Gentleman Manhog" story--causes Manhog to seem enlightened for a time. But, like always, he eventually reverts to his lowly, four-legged state.

There's not much point in trying to sum up the story of this comic.  There's no text, the art is beautiful, and you're totally consumed by the world he's created and you exist inside it while you're reading it.

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Wowee Zonk Two
Various Artists
Self Published
This Canadian anthology is banonkers. It's got some of the best guys going including Chris Kuzma, Michael Deforge, Ginette Lapalme, Andrei Georgescu, Chris Simonen, Patrick Kyle, and Ken Craine.  A lot of them have had comics printed in Vice and I love 'em to pieces.  Just plug "site:viceland.com" and their names into Google to see what I'm talking about. This is one of the best anthology comics I ever saw. I will say no more than that.

No wait, I'll keep going. I got my second wind. These guys draw like they grew up without ever having seen comics before but somehow they heard about them and decided they liked the idea. Ginette makes stuff where people tend to have faces that are a combination of cute animals and butts. Ken Craine does minimalist, three-panel strips scattered throughout the book Sergio Aragones-style and he makes them good. He's like a David Shrigley whose work isn't ugly. Patrick Kyle's work is wiggly, wormy, and reminds me of communal play-doh, all dirty from the sweat from all children's hands (double band-name alert!). Michael Deforge combines his love of newspaper comics with his love of blowing my mind up and making everything look like it's dripping in grease. The other guys are fine too. Get this book or get the fuck off the internet.

Culture Corner 
Basil Wolverton
Fantagraphics
You know who is awesome and holds more water than anyone in comics?  Basil Wolverton, that's who.  I might have gone overboard there but Basil Wolverton is so fucking funny that it's no laughing matter.  He's most known for his portraits of freakishly ugly women in early issues of Mad but he did a lot of other stuff before and after Mad that is good and good for you.

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Culture Corner was Wolverton's newspaper strip that spotlighted ridiculous ways to fix everyday problems like "How to boot a fly off your snoot."  The Wolverton way to boot that fly involves insulting your host with the line "Next time I come to this dump, I want to sink my snappers into a gob of good grub!" This will make her sock you in the nose with a tea pot and it'll rid you of the fly on your nose.

This little hardcover is sweet. The left page of each spread contains the pencil sketch of every comic that it's available for and even the sketches for comics that never got finished. It is rad as hell.

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Nate Freibert
ET Press
This book is limited to 133 numbered copies and each page is hand silkscreened. If there's a story in here I don't know what it is and I don't care to find out.  It's just sixteen beautiful pages of crude and masterful ink drawings, strong uses of text and composition and the sentence "I was sprayed with the electric web" over and over again. If you like art and beauty and inky drawings you gotta get this while that's still an option.

Little Lulu: The Big Dipper Club And Other Stories
John Stanley & Irving Tripp
Dark Horse
 Little Lulu is a little girl with a fat friend named Tubby, a poor friend named Annie, and an impish younger neighbor boy named Alvin.  This volume's a real corker.  Tubby's identical but smaller cousin, Chubby, reappears and they cause some freakouts for an escaped prisoner.  Is that prisoner wearing a black-and-white striped jumpsuit?  Yes, a thousand times, yes!  Tubby continues to act as a detective and put on bizarre disguises while trying to solve mysteries.  He ties an alarm clock to the top of his head and puts on a long white beard in order to trick people into thinking he's a grandfather clock. To complete the guise he walks around saying "Tick-tock, grandfather, tick-tock!"  This comic feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket of hysterically hysterical funniness. I never stop loving it and if you don't love it then you must be a deeply awful person.

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Glack Mass 
Patrick Kyle
Self Published
Patrick Kyle is part of a recent trend of awesome artists who are on the internet and avoid standard comic panels.  I'm loving it.  A guy named Turdswallo Blackteeft and his friend Dingball go to the fortune teller but it turns into a psychedelic nightmare.  The Dingball tells Turdswallo about his tragic punk love story. Then some other shit happens. I don't know. Everything kind of melts into the next thing and the dialogue is weird and inventive and organic. I am in love with Patrick Kyle.

King of the Flies
Mezzo and Pirus
Fantagraphics
I remember seeing the first chapter of this comic years ago in a French magazine and wondering what the hell was going on. The inking style may remind you of Charles Burns, but where Burns' work always feels more inviting this comic keeps the reader at an objective distance. At least when the reader is me. Most of the panels present the subject at the same distance and it relies almost entirely on narration boxes. I'm one of those guys who thinks narration boxes are lazy comicking and resent the hell out of them.

Smoke Signal #4
Edited by 
Desert Island Comics
This newsprint foldover anthology has some great shit and some garbage, but it's free so go get a copy no matter what. They got 'em at Desert Island over on Metropolitan. Travis Millard did another comic about his Dave Mustainey looking Street Bros.  Matt Furie did a full-color comic about a crazy slutty cat lady living in a crazy dirty world.  Jesse McManus blew up my brain with his funniness and rubbery drawing style.  Everything else was either pretty good or at least not total dogshit or if it was it was free dogshit.

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Grendel: Behold the Devil
Matt Wagner
Dark Horse
Grendel is a comic that was first published in 1982 by the long dead Comico.  (pronounced Calm-eek-oh, not Comic-oh.)  Originally the series was about a character named Hunter Rose who wrote novels during the day and was a ninja-esque crime boss at night.  He died but other people adopted the identity of Grendel until eventually the idea of Grendel became this huge cultural force and whole societies were built around it.

The idea behind this book is that it's based on a portion of Hunter Rose's diary which he'd torn out.  Hunter Rose, as Grendel, kills a whole bunch of people and runs his criminal empire while occasionally fighting a werewolf and losing his focus when he suspects he is being observed.  Eventually he goes to a very corny and stereotypical black island guy who says "Yah moon," is shirtless with big muscles and dreadlocks,  and practices Santeria.  Muscley Blackman helps Grendel summon a devil and it shows him the future of Grendel comic book mythology which thoroughly makes Hunter Rose trip face.  Then a reporter who's been trying to solve the Grendel mystery figures out who Grendel is and things end badly for him.

Grendel's an interesting comic.  It's got a similar level of sophistication as the other great Darkhorse comics but unlike Madman or Hellboy but I never feel like we get inside the head of Grendel and see what's motivating him. My best guess is boredom. The only relatable characters might be his victims who seem scared and confused about getting pronged by a giant forked spear. I don't know, maybe that's the point. Anyhioux, this is a really fun comic to read and if you like the idea of an evil Batman it's like evil-Batman-Christmas for you.

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Witch Band: My Heart is Saturated Issue I
Greta Kline and Lauren Martin
Self Published 
Lauren and Greta are two sexy, gawky teens who made a four-page zine that isn't folded over, just stapled around the edge.  There's an excellent letter addressed to men, some other story written in marker that I can't read, some weird nonsense letters, a weird comic about depression and mermaids, a good drawing by Lauren, and then some funny horoscopes.  Ho ho ho! I think the cover is drawn by hand? It's possible I have the only issue of Witch Band. If you want to order a copy or submit content then e-mail Rainbowbloodbrothers@gmail.com.

Rough Justice 
Alex Ross and Chip Kidd
Pantheon
Alex Ross is that guy who does watercolor images that look like real life and often works on superhero comics for Marvel and DC.  You look at his comics and you're like, "Holy Jeez, Batman looks real!"  I reviewed this book in my last column but that review was based on a black and white preview copy.  Looking at the actual book in color I am forced to admit, this is a pretty good book. I just wish that more of the rough images incorporated color cause his coloring work with markers is really fun to look at.  Yeah I'm a dork. What of it?

A FOLK
Andy Folk
Self Published
Stinky, handsome, talented, and pudgy, Andy Folk returns to the world of xeroxing stuff and shoving it at me places. The first two issues of his comic Dice and Clay were pretty funny. This is just a straight-forward zine though, with lots of little stories, musings, and poems that will appeal to anarcho-crusty punklings. There's a funny "piece-a" pizza fan-fiction which tells a false tale of the history of the pizza. The big winner is a checklist that rates how much of a scumbag you are.

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Autonoman
Karn Piana
Self Released
This is a comic with soft gray art in which a robot cares for a little boy and an old man before breaking and being replaced by a new robot.  The drawing style reminds me of text books or grooming guides for working at a fast food chain.

Drawings of Vaginas By Teenage Boys
No artist or publisher listed
This is a book of crappishly drawn Shrigley-style vaginas.  Not much else to say.

Lust For Life
James Yen and Andrew Bulger
Self Published
This is an eight-page auto-bio zine that tells the story about James Yen being nervous about playing a show at a bar. A lot of it is about loneliness.  There are only ten copies so I don't know why I'm reviewing it.

Sand & Fury: A Scream Queen Adventure
Ho Che Anderson
Fantagraphics
Ho Che jumps around from drawing style to drawing style in this book, but the one common thread is that they're all shitty.  I couldn't make myself care about this book with a 10-foot caring rod. Other people have said positive things about this guy's work--I just remember angular high-contrast drawings with stiff poses and incorrect anatomy, then my brain forces me to forget.

H.O.P.E.
various artists
H.O.P.E.
This is a Belgian zine of bad drawings and photos of people wearing boring masks.

Milquetoast! Issue One
Various People
Self Published
This is a lackluster skateboard zine from Texas with badly photocopied photos that have unpleasant digital graininess.

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Skateboard Collages
Brian Cha
Self Published
This is a teeny little zine with photos the size of postage stamps taped into it.  What kind of tards are making zines these days?

Dondi J Portfolio Booklet
Dondi J
Self published
This is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen. This guy can't draw and yet he draws a lot of embarassing shit. There's a rave drawing, a pervading afro-centric hip-hop vibe, some communist shit, and some graffiti-artist-as-ninja shit. The whole book feels like it's coated in plastic.  Normally I would burn this book but I threw it somewhere in my house, and for the life of me, I cannot find it. God please don't let some girl I've brought home turn it up and think this is what I'm into. Check out these hideous Jpegs for evidence of the ugliness. Since this awful thing has escaped my fiery wraith I will burn a bunch of the other bad comics and zines I got.  Well, not me, this giant chicken is going to do it.  Also he's going to burn a lot of other stuff.

Breast,
NICHOLAS GAZIN