After boring readers with his tedious recounting of how Bruce Wayne learned the skills in his youth to become Batman (he trained with masters of multiAfter boring readers with his tedious recounting of how Bruce Wayne learned the skills in his youth to become Batman (he trained with masters of multiple disciplines around the world - whodathunkit!?) in The Knight, Chip Zdarsky does a truncated version of that same, needless story with The Joker. Yup, unfortunately Zdarsky’s Batman run still isn’t improving in this third volume, The Joker Year One.
The first half of this book sees the Batmen of Zur-En-Arrh and Failsafe make a return and, considering they were in the first couple books which were terrible, I expected a rehash to be just as bad but… this was the one part of the book where I wasn’t totally comatose with what Zdarsky was doing.
Joker wants to meet Zur-En-Arrh, who is happy to oblige, and the encounter is intriguing because Zur doesn’t have the same qualms as Bruce about killing Joker. But this interesting angle is short-lived as Failsafe quickly takes centre stage and it’s more Batman vs (essentially) the T-1000 once again. Which means lots of splosions and running - ho hum.
Then we’re into the title story where we learn that one of Bruce’s mentors from The Knight also decided to train the Joker as well for some reason. Meanwhile, Gordon battles corruption within the GCPD (just like in Batman: Year One) and, in the present, Batman deals with an audible virus spread by laughter that’s turned everyone in Gotham into Jokers. None of which was at all interesting and has mostly been done before and better by others, while the mentor thing was, like in The Knight, irrelevant and dull.
The book closes out with the backups from these issues where Vandal Savage returns to Gotham and is hinted that he might become the new commish, and the other story is Failsafe and the Batmen of Zur-En-Arrh doing some pointless posturing.
Jorge Jimenez’s art is as good as it’s ever been - his art in the first half of the book is fantastic. Andrea Sorrentino’s art is ridiculously good - far too good for the crappiness of Zdarsky’s story - and, drawing the Joker Year One pages, Giuseppe Camuncoli cleans up his art a bit to pay tribute to David Mazzucchelli’s art style on Batman: Year One.
As solid and consistent as the art on this series has been, it’s not reason enough to be reading Chip Zdarsky’s unremarkable Batman stories in this dreary run. His one idea for his Batman seems to be “constantly reference previous, better stories and provide unnecessary origins” - The Joker Year One matches that vision to a T. Crappy stuff yet again - no wonder Batman’s sales these days are losing out to Transformers. ...more
Batman’s had more than his share of crossovers over the years and at this point DC are scraping the bottom of the barrel with this latest one. That’s Batman’s had more than his share of crossovers over the years and at this point DC are scraping the bottom of the barrel with this latest one. That’s right, it’s the crossover nobody asked for, featuring a character most English comics readers will be thinking “...who?”: Dylan Dog.
I’m not gonna pretend I’m all that familiar with the character. Dark Horse put out a Dylan Dog omnibus some time ago, largely because I think Mike Mignola’s a fan of this Italian comic (Hellboy’s basically a better version of Dylan Dog), which I read a few pages of and put down pretty quickly (corn-ee). And I feel like most Batman readers didn’t even do that so this will all be new to them - a first and likely last experience with this blah character.
So Dylan Dog is a “nightmare investigator” which means he’s a PI whose cases involve the undead, whom he shoots, and that’s that. Rinse and repeat for however many years he’s been doing this. Fascinating. In this crossover, Catwoman is kidnapped by Professor Xabaras, one of Dylan Dog’s rogues and who apparently had something to do with Joker’s physical appearance post-Red Hood, and Batman goes to save her, with Dylan Dog.
Later, another Dylan Dog rogue, Christopher Killex, is back from hell somehow and back doing his thang: cutting people up to see if he can see their souls in their bodies. Batman and Dylan Dog, etc. etc.
The story is often vague, meandering, lacking any real tension or purpose and things seem to happen for no reason or get discarded without a second thought. It just feels like a lot of confused nothing being thrown together to make it seem like an exciting narrative is happening. It isn’t - it’s always a boring, unengaging read.
There is something to the stylish art of Gigi Cavenago and Werther Dell’Edera that I liked - a European flair that you don’t always see in American comics - but Roberto Recchioni’s dull script made Batman/Dylan Dog an utterly pointless crossover. ...more
A dying man and his young son walk a blighted landscape littered with the mass dead, dodging roaming cannibals and surviving on whatever they can findA dying man and his young son walk a blighted landscape littered with the mass dead, dodging roaming cannibals and surviving on whatever they can find, heading south, to the coast. Will they make it there alive - and what is at the end of the road?
Manu Larcenet’s comics adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is everything I was told the novel was but I found wasn’t. I didn’t enjoy McCarthy’s novel at all. I remember awkward, obtuse similes on nearly every page - to a comedic point - and poorly structured dialogue between underdeveloped characters leading to baffling conversations where you didn’t know who was saying what (it didn’t help that McCarthy didn’t use speech marks or character names or “he said” to make it easier either). That’s what I recall of the novel anyway - it’s been many years since I read it and I’m not about to re-read it anytime soon either.
Larcenet’s rendering of McCarthy’s dark tale is much clearer and, in stripping back the weak prose, exposes the simple power of the story. That is, that, for a parent, it’s not the end of the world so long as your child is alive, even in the literal post-apocalypse - only if they die is it the end.
I’m familiar with Larcenet’s comics, which is why the first thing that struck me about this book is how unexpectedly amazing the art is. I’d read his Back to Basics series a while back (written by Jean-Yves Ferri, the current Asterix writer), which is a very gentle, slice-of-life Sunday Funnies-style comic that looks like this:
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And this is what his artwork looks like in this book:
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It’s like another artist drew this book! The depth of his talent is incredible. Every page is intricately detailed. He also takes care to include the grimy perma-ash of this horrific new world in each panel which only adds to the feeling of dread and misery the characters are put through in the story.
And it’s a helluva story. The two struggle ever onward, rarely catching a break, often facing setbacks, utterly saturated in the never-ending paranoia of this terrible new world. Long before the end I felt as weary as the characters do after just a few scenes, and they’re the ones doing it while carrying supplies, sleeping rough, and all on an empty stomach!
The character work is really beautiful. Small moments like the son making sure his dad eats as much as he does, rather than accepting it all - the boy really does have to grow up much sooner than he should. But you catch glimpses of his youth when he sees another child in a city, or when he hears a dog barking, and he lights up at the prospect of a friend his own age or a pet. Other times, he keeps his dad human by making him give an older, broken down man a jar of preserves that they also badly need - ensuring his dad stays a “good guy” and not like the savages hunting them.
And it is a bleak, bleak environment the two travel through. Not just the ruins of civilisation and the general lack of life but the nightmarish things locked in cellars, the things strung up everywhere, and the way this setting changes the characters’ behaviours. Like the casual brutality of the father showing his son how to blow his brains out with their last bullet if the worst comes to worst.
It’s reflected in the art too with the characters sometimes having the same black, empty eyes of a dead fish, as if what they’ve lived through has made them non-human, or the way the characters’ faces sometimes look skeletal and corpse-like as if they’re already dead.
The one criticism I’ll give it is that I’m really tired of dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories. The number of comparisons you could make - the thousands of dystopian movies/shows/games/comics that already exist - show you how played out this genre is, and I find it generally a very unimaginative and one-note concept. Larcenet handles these aspects well but they’re also unavoidably derivative. I think it’s too easy to be pessimistic about the future. Not that new sci-fi should be as hopefully utopian as mid-20th century sci-fi was, but I’d like to see stories that aren’t quite so abjectly negative - some creative nuance would be better.
Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of those rare occasions where the adaptation surpasses the original material, as celebrated as it is. Larcenet doesn’t just tell a solid dystopian/survival story but a meaningful and moving father/son story as well, one with a palpable heart, and with consistently impressive art as well. If you’re thinking of reading The Road, out of the incarnations available - novel, movie, comic - the comic is the best version to experience. ...more
We’re living in a particularly uncreative era for art where a great deal of what’s being produced by the big companies is an endless raft of unwanted We’re living in a particularly uncreative era for art where a great deal of what’s being produced by the big companies is an endless raft of unwanted prequels, sequels, spinoffs and remakes rather than imaginative original stories and challenging ideas. So here’s another useless prequel: Batman: The Knight!
Haunted and forever traumatised by the loss of his parents as a kid, Bruce Wayne vows that his experience never be repeated again by becoming a bat-themed vigilante. But how did he gain the skills - the pieces of his armour - to become the Dark Knight?
Perhaps a better question would be: who cares? Because, with most interesting characters, it’s not how they came to be who they are that makes them compelling but what they’ll do next. Go forward, not back - those are the stories I want to read.
We really don’t need to see him bare knuckle boxing in Gotham, travelling the world, learning martial arts in the Himalayas, detection skills in Paris, shooting in Canada, etc. You could literally just show a panel or two of these things in a larger story and the reader gets it - we can fill in the blanks ourselves. He trained for years to get these skills. Of course. We’re not dullards.
Chip Zdarsky tries to enliven the story occasionally but his efforts fall flat. Bruce and Henri Ducard investigate a serial killer, Bruce and John Zatarra fight a demon, Bruce and Ra’s Al-Ghul sword fight topless for the zillionth time, Bruce and his friend Anton - is he good or evil? None of it was remotely intriguing to me. I kept waiting for there to be a point to this book but it failed to appear. Bruce falls for a cat burglar in France - gasp! That’s why he likes Catwoman! No. Catwoman is hot. Bruce didn’t need to have had a thing for a cat burglar-type in his youth to show us why he fancies her later in life.
I can understand why DC puts out books like this. Year One is a consistent high seller for them and they’re maybe hoping the next Batman origin story will be this generation’s Year One - that’s why there are so many Batman origin stories (not as laughably many as Superman, but close).
And even though origin stories exist, including an entire line of comics exploring the early years of Batman’s career called Legends of the Dark Knight, I can’t point to a book that exactly tells you how Bruce learned the skills (maybe Scott Snyder’s All-Star Batman? I’ve forgotten most of that terrible series at this point). But then Batman: The Knight (such a bland title) proves why a book like that didn’t previously exist: it’s dreary to read and irrelevant.
Batman: The Knight isn’t horribly written or drawn - it’s competent (if charmless and forgettable) on both counts - but I’m giving it the lowest rating because I was never anything but consistently uninterested in what I was reading. Year One remains the best Batman origin story and it made its enduring mark in just four issues - brevity is indeed the soul of wit. The Knight drones on for ten unremarkable issues and leaves no impression behind.
A little mystique goes a long way - you’d think the publisher of The Joker would understand that but I’m probably overestimating DC’s grasp of its own intellectual properties. I’m paraphrasing Chekhov who said “If you want to bore your audience, tell them everything” - I was thoroughly bored as Chip Zdarsky told me everything about how Batman came to be. ...more
Volume 1 is an interesting way of framing a book that starts with issue #301!
Larry Hama has been writing GI Joe comics on and off for over 40 years. Volume 1 is an interesting way of framing a book that starts with issue #301!
Larry Hama has been writing GI Joe comics on and off for over 40 years. His first run started at Marvel in 1982 and ran until 1994. The series went on hiatus and was picked up by IDW in 2010 with Hama writing again and ran until 2022. This third iteration began at Image/Skybound in conjunction with Robert Kirkman’s Energon Universe endeavour in 2023, so, if the pattern holds and Hama lives until he’s 86 (he’s currently in his mid 70s), there’s another 11 years of Hama/GI Joe comics to follow! Gawd help us…
I feel like I read at least one Hama/GI Joe comic at some point over the years - a free issue from Comixology (RIP) or something - but never a full book. So, even though that comic did nothing for me, I was curious to see what a Larry Hama GI Joe book would be like. If it’s been running for this long, with this same writer, it must be ok, right?
… Eh. No. It’s a bit like Todd McFarlane’s Spawn or (I imagine - I’ve never read it) Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon: a writer can write a series indefinitely and that series can start, remain and continue at the lowest quality ever, for some reason. But unlike McFarlane and Larsen, who own their crap characters and the company that publishes them, I don’t understand why Hama has this connection with Hasbro’s property GI Joe.
Nostalgia has to be the only reason, unless those ‘80s comics were so damn good, which I don’t believe. Is there a single Hama/GI Joe book that people point to as a classic, in the same way people point to Dark Knight Returns for Batman? Nope. And that’s probably because, in those 40+ years, Hama didn’t write anything that great.
Obviously I haven’t been reading the preceding comics to #301 so I have no idea whether this storyline continues a previous one, but it’s not like Hama’s reinventing the wheel: it’s still GI Joe vs Cobra in their perpetual war against one another. A GI Joe character dies (I already forget which one), some people are turning into zombies for reasons, and the whole book is basically one long mindless, disconnected, completely uninteresting action sequence.
Honestly, this was the most unimpressive comic I’ve read in quite some time. It’s like a McDonald’s meal - I ate something but I don’t feel like I ate at all; I read a comic but I don’t feel like I read anything at all. Or a Rock movie where you know things went bang on the screen and The Rock stared stupidly at nothing for an hour or so but you can’t recall a single detail about it.
The one thing I did notice was that the scene where Cobra Commander is introduced is similar to the scene that ends Joshua Williamson’s first (standalone?) Cobra Commander book. Does that mean Hama’s GI Joe is part of the Energon Universe or is it entirely separate, existing in its own world? Dunno. Don’t really care either!
Chris Mooneyham’s art is cool and skilful but indistinct - it could be any of a dozen different artists’ work. If I didn’t know the artist’s name and you told me Paco Medina, Valerio Schiti, Kyle Hotz, Ivan Reis, or Mike Hawthorne (to name just a few) drew this book, I’d accept it.
It was recently announced that Joshua Williamson would continue his GI Joe streak at Skybound by writing his own GI Joe series, with Hama’s neverending GI Joe series running concurrently alongside it. And while I also don’t rate Williamson that highly as a writer, his GI Joe is almost certainly going to be head and shoulders above Hama’s.
Much like James Roberts’ unfathomably popular(ish - it went for a great many issues despite nobody talking about it) yet impenetrably dull Transformers series at IDW, Larry Hama brings his brand of bland to Skybound with his GI Joe, a zombie comic that lurches on despite not having a pulse. This book was one of the most pointless things I’ve ever read and I’ve read the New 52!
I don’t know who reads Hama’s GI Joe: A Real American Bore to justify keeping it on life support (possibly just the one that matters: Robert Kirkman) but those are the only readers who’re going to get anything out of this one - I expect everyone else, once they awaken from their stupor, will be as baffled as I am at its longevity. ...more
Born with spina bifida, John Moore overcame his physical obstacles and grew up to become a brilliant inventor. Among his inventions was a powerful armBorn with spina bifida, John Moore overcame his physical obstacles and grew up to become a brilliant inventor. Among his inventions was a powerful armour that turned him into the superhero Caliburn. His childhood friends watched as their friend amazed the world - until today, when Caliburn was found brutally murdered. Whodunit? His old pal Kasia thinks it was someone in their childhood club known as The Tin Can Society…
So basically this is a retelling of Watchmen: dead superhero, investigation by a moody character, the killer is in the victim’s former group. But… it’s not bad. Peter Warren and Francesco Mobili’s first issue has me hooked and I want to see where this 9 issue series goes.
Part of that is because the premise of Watchmen was always really appealing to me. I’m not a fan of the “classic”, mostly because I never jibed with Alan Moore’s convoluted prose and stodgy storytelling, but I always thought Watchmen in the hands of a better writer would actually live up to its rep. So I’m glad Warren is having a shot at the same kind of story - and pleased to see that he seems to be effectively pulling off a sleeker, more involving version of it in this series.
What I will give Moore is how good the Watchmen characters are and how none of the characters in The Tin Can Society come close to the brilliance of the least of them (Hooded Justice). Caliburn is the poor man’s Iron Man while Kasia, the Rorschach proxy, is awful - smoking in a school as an adult, wow what a rebel… She’s just trying too hard to seem cool in every scene, it’s sad.
Still, it’s early days and Warren sets the table efficiently in The Tin Can Society #1. Even if the characters aren’t memorable, the story is intriguing and the premise, if realised well, could make this a decent series - worth a look if subversive superhero stories are your bag. ...more
Mid-20s cynical semi-drunk Megan is obsessed with her co-worker, Jillian, a single mom in her mid-30s, relentlessly upbeat and full of love for the LoMid-20s cynical semi-drunk Megan is obsessed with her co-worker, Jillian, a single mom in her mid-30s, relentlessly upbeat and full of love for the Lord. Obsessed in a negative way because Megan hates Jillian. Megan hates full stop. Except when Jillian’s life starts to go tits up and then Megan l-u-v-s the fallout. But how will Jillian react to unending Ls?
I read Halle Butler’s second novel, The New Me, five years ago and thought it was utter pants. But then I saw the title of her latest book - Banal Nightmare - which stood out to me. Hmm, I bethought, that sounds like someone with my kind of personality. The library didn’t have that but they had this: her debut novel, Jillian. And the premise intrigued me. All this to explain why I revisited an author I one-starred the first time around and gave her a totally opposite rating the second time. And it’s fun to know how people find books, I bethink.
Yeah, Jillian is cracking stuff - really enjoyed it. It’s shocking that Halle Butler started this well and then immediately hit the skids with her follow-up novel but I’m glad I gave her another shot because she’s a helluva writer.
Jillian is a character-driven novel, rather than plot-oriented, but reads very quickly because the two main characters are so engaging. Perhaps it’s because I’m a huge fan of Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg comics but Megan is, coincidentally, almost exactly like Megg. She’s depressed, in a bad relationship, constantly abusing substances, wishing for direction and purpose in her life while doing nothing to change things, and generally hating herself and everyone around her.
Jillian on the other hand is absurdly upbeat, to the point where she’s almost delusional. But it’s entertaining to take someone like that and then pelt them with shit and see how they react. She fixates on getting on a dog for bizarre reasons, which is the unexpected beginning of her bad times - from that point on, things go very downhill for poor Jill.
The novel becomes more compelling to see how she’ll react to circumstances because she’s unpredictable and already kinda unhinged, and only becomes more so as things become more desperate for her. Not that Megan’s life gets any better - she quietly glees in Jillian’s miseries but her life chugs along in a consistently abysmal straight line; what will happen to her? And I was on board for all of it!
The novel is well-written and the characters are enthralling, even supporting characters like snooty bitch Elena and crap friend Amanda, who wonderfully rips Megan a new one during a party. All the main characters are female and nearly all of them are obsessed with one another in a bad sense - except for Jillian, who’s too self-absorbed to really think too much about anyone else. And I think having that enmity makes characters that much more exciting - there’s immediate tension in a scene if you know one character despises another, because you’re wondering what’s about to happen between them.
The only minor criticisms I would level at the novel is that Megan remains one-note throughout: she ends the book pretty much the same person as she was when she started it, and, while Jillian has this descent over the course of the story, Megan doesn’t, which made her scenes less interesting to read. That’s probably the point - true to her character, Megan stubbornly resists doing the cliched literary trope of having an arc - but it still feels repetitive and stale after a spell.
This isn’t the kind of story that builds to a big climax - it just ends - but I still felt it wanting. I suppose that’s the mark of a good story - to leave you wanting more - but just a little bit more on Jillian’s fate would’ve made it more satisfying. The symbolic conversation we get between two male strangers instead is still funny though - this is a whole novel about shitty people doing shitty things to one another and that last chapter is Butler underlining the whole “fuck you” mentality one last time. (The two guys basically say to one another “Hey, we should be nicer to each other and life will be better” and Megan just turns away, disinterested.)
Jillian is a really fun personality-driven drama between two nutjobs - very entertaining, definitely recommended, and I’m looking forward to checking out Banal Nightmare soon. ...more
There suddenly exists a distorted mirror version of Gotham called Gotham Below where everything’s a little bit spookier for no reason. Now it’s affectThere suddenly exists a distorted mirror version of Gotham called Gotham Below where everything’s a little bit spookier for no reason. Now it’s affecting the rogues in the real Gotham and Batman Below (who has tentacles coming out of his mouth for no reason) has kidnapped some kid to be his Robin for some reason. Batman and a Talon from the Court of Owls have to portal over to save the day. Yay…
I’ve noticed that every comic Christian Ward’s the artist on is an absolute stink bomb but I put that down to odd coincidence and the writer’s limitations and/or having that occasional bad book. Well, there’s no excuse this time as Ward is both artist and writer on Batman: City of Madness which is, true to form, an absolute stink bomb of a comic!
Part of it is Ward trying to do too much. Besides the Gotham Below stuff, Two-Face is doing something, Ventriloquist is being weirder than usual, Alfred’s writing sentimental letters to Batman for no reason. Even though these are oversized issues, the story is still only three issues long and might’ve been better if Ward had cut out these irrelevant subplots that add nothing and focus on the Gotham Below stuff instead.
As it is, everything feels underdeveloped and confusing. Why is there a mirror version of Gotham? How did the Court of Owls create it? What’s Batman Below’s deal? How is it affecting Gotham Above? I had no idea - I barely knew what was going on anyway, and didn’t care because it’s such a boring read. Ward’s also just not a very effective writer who isn’t able to make sense of his half-baked ideas, let alone tie them together meaningfully or leave a strong impression on the reader.
I’ve never really been a huge fan of his goopy art style - it’s always looked like the poor man’s Dave McKean (who turns out be a major influence on Ward, as he mentions in his afterword - this is apparently Ward’s ham-fisted semi-homage to Morrison/McKean’s Arkham Asylum) and his design for Batman Below was just Pirates of the Caribbean’s Davy Jones - but Batman!
A poorly executed, pointlessly supernatural take on Batman, City of Madness is instantly forgettable nonsense. ...more
Hunger is literally the story of the starving artist! An unsuccessful writer (yup, that tired trope of a writer making their main character a writer lHunger is literally the story of the starving artist! An unsuccessful writer (yup, that tired trope of a writer making their main character a writer like them), he’s a hungry boy because he’s got no money for food. He writes, he sometimes gets money, and occasionally something mildly interesting happens, but mostly he staggers around hungry.
Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger is a holdover from the time, years ago, when I was enamoured with Charles Bukowski’s work and he said he was a fan of Hamsun’s. I tried reading it then but gave up for some reason and this time I was able to get through it for some reason. I’m glad I finally ticked it off the list but I wouldn’t say Hunger is much good.
It really is very one note. He’s hungry, he writes, he struggles to survive, repeat. There isn’t much insight into the sensation of hunger/starvation. Our nameless narrator (basically old Ka-newt - which is how you pronounce “Knut” if you were wondering) acts whacky when he’s hungry, saying weird stuff to people in a daze as he knocks around the Danish town of Christiana (modern day Oslo). Except he behaves that way even on a full stomach so he’s just a nutbag.
Some scenes are fun. We get to see what 19th century Scandinavian flirting is: you go up to random women and say “You are losing your book, madam!” over and over until they reach their home and then you stand under a street light for the rest of the day, waiting for them to stare at you from the darkness of their unlit room. Saucy!
It’s well-written but very unmemorable as almost nothing happens and what does is quite mundane. I suspect if Hamsun hadn’t won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 and/or written (probably) better books later on, Hunger would be even more obscure than it currently is. As it is, it’s not a good novel and I got very little out of it - the book’s as empty of entertainment as the narrator’s stomach is of food! ...more
Absolutely fascinating and totally distinct main characters Generic Man Hero Character and Generic Woman Hero Character are on the run for alien treasAbsolutely fascinating and totally distinct main characters Generic Man Hero Character and Generic Woman Hero Character are on the run for alien treason. Kylo Ren-wannabe Proximus is dispatched to kill them. Couple of Transformers cameo. Do not read Void Rivals while operating heavy machinery!
Robert Kirkman’s Energon Universe endeavour is so well-received that last month Transformers outsold all of DC’s titles, including Batman - which says a lot about the popularity of this Energon thing and also how unutterably dismal Batman is these days. So it’s ironic that Kirkman himself is writing the least interesting series in the Energon Universe, Void Bowels.
I don’t care the least bit about the characters or their story. I’ve seen characters like Darak and Solila in dozens of other similar comics and their story of running away from danger is so boring. They did it in the first book and they’re still doing it in the second. And the Romeo and Juliet angle is so trite. Kirkman’s also trying to make minor characters like the pig alien a thing and those characters’ subplots are even worse.
Proximus is a crappier version of Kylo Ren with a worse weapon (laser bow and arrows instead of laser sword) and the Thanos-lite character is a snooze. Most of the book is pointless fighting - it’s so dull.
Maybe it’s because I prefer the series or because they seem so much more compelling in comparison to the rest of this title’s drab cast but the Transformers cameos were what saved this book for me. Not so much Hot Rod (though he is one of the few Transformers I recognise from my childhood, so that was nice) but Springer, who plays a bigger role in this book than Jetfire or Hot Rod, and explains more of what Energon is.
Springer looks cooler than the main cast, has some mystique to him, and just feels like a character with more agency and purpose than anyone else. The only times my attention rose above comatose-levels was when he was on the page.
I don’t dislike Lorenzo de Felici’s art but it doesn’t seem that special to me and the comic as a whole is quite boring to look at - it’s basically the same washed-out purple wasteland with a black space background nearly the whole time.
Kirkman and de Felici’s bad Star Wars impression Void Rivals remains the worst title in the Energon Universe. It underlines that fact by continuing to rely on Transformers cameos to have fans of that series pay attention to it, otherwise it’d be the most disposable series in the line! Void Rivals, Volume 2: Bored Across the Wasteland is a comic void of excitement. ...more
In this sixth volume of Boy’s Abyss, we learn the backstory of the cult author Esemori (his younger self is on the cover) and his doomed romance with In this sixth volume of Boy’s Abyss, we learn the backstory of the cult author Esemori (his younger self is on the cover) and his doomed romance with Rei’s mother, Yuko, when they were in high school. Back in the present, Rei’s former friend and sometime bully Gen finds out about his relationship with their teacher Shibasawa while Rei’s morbid death fascination finally leads him to a place he thought he wanted to go - or does he?
The series quality dropped off in the last couple books with not enough happening for my taste and now the opposite has happened and there’s too much drama in this one! It’s a wee bit over-the-top and I feel like the story would be better if it was focused on fewer characters, but Boy’s Abyss, Volume 6 is still a decent entry.
The first half is definitely the best. I wasn’t expecting an extended flashback on two, up to this point, minor characters but it was actually really good learning about them. Esemori moves from Tokyo to this small town and gets bullied immediately - his father left their family, his mother’s depressed, and his grandma’s distant so he’s very sad and lonely.
The one bright spot in his life is his unexpected friendship with Yuko Kurose, Rei’s future mother, who also has a miserable home life: her dad’s an abusive drunk and her mother’s an absent hostess. Together, they find friendship and solace in their shared pain.
Up to this point, that relationship had only been hinted at, and it didn’t need to be explicitly told, but it was well-done and I enjoyed it.
In the present, the characters’ motivations are bizarre and unbelievable in some cases. Like why is Gen, a student, acting the way he is with Shibasawa, a teacher - what on earth does Rei mean to him? And then Rei’s mother, Yuko - after such an empathetic flashback to her youth, how does that person become the deeply messed up person in the present?!
Even Chako’s doing weird stuff with Esemori for seemingly no reason as does Rei (that finale) - is everyone in this town mental?! Looking back at the series from this point, I feel like it would be a stronger story if it was just focused on Esemori and Yuko, Rei and Chako - everybody else’s subplots feel irrelevant and increasingly silly.
Boy’s Abyss is far from a perfect, or even great, series but it’s more often decent than not and surprisingly consistent for a manga. If you thought the last couple books were kinda flat, be prepared for a sudden burst of loud craziness in this sixth volume! The first half makes this book worth reading in itself and, even if the second half is bordering on the absurd, it feels like the series is changing and I’m interested to see what it’ll become. ...more
One day Elsie, Patch and Lord Fluffy Britches were living the good life of pampered, domesticated cats - now they’re locked in cages along with other One day Elsie, Patch and Lord Fluffy Britches were living the good life of pampered, domesticated cats - now they’re locked in cages along with other animals in the back of a truck driving away from their home! What’s going on - and why’re all the humans suddenly afraid of them…?
Tony Fleecs and Trish Forstner, the creative team behind Stray Dogs, reunite for another animal horror comic: Feral. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as good as their breakthrough hit.
Stray Dogs was brilliant because it was a fresh and unique take on the serial killer story: seeing it from the perspective of dogs in the killer’s house was original and exciting for that. Feral is simply your generic zombie story we’ve all seen a hundred times but with cats and other animals instead of humans. Bo-ring.
It’s intriguing at first because there’s the mystery of what’s going on - and then you realise the formula and it gets repetitive fast. The group encounter rabid/zombie animals, then run away from them - rinse and repeat. Some get bit - oh no, now they turn! Ho hum. The usual beats.
I liked the subtle way Fleecs introduced the larger story happening around the world with occasional glimpses of notices and snippets of dialogue from the humans - until he gave up in the second half and just had the TV news come on. I really hate this hackneyed cliche in comics: the news reporter explaining everything to the reader. It’s artless and clunky. And unnecessary - you got it by that point anyway.
I wasn’t taken with any of the characters either. Elsie’s secret regarding Lord was underwhelming at the end while Lord’s not having claws was a weird detail. It was a big problem in one scene and then not again after that - barely an inconvenience!
Trish Forstner’s art is still fantastic. It reminds me of classic animated movies like Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats, and Don Bluth’s pictures - really beautiful linework and expressive imagery.
Apparently this is a first volume in a proposed series for what I’m guessing Image is hoping will be the feline Walking Dead? Ugh. I’m not coming back for more after this one. I wasn’t that into it to begin with and it lost me long before the end - just another dull zombie comic. I wouldn’t say it needs to be put down, like Will Ferrell, but Feral, Volume 1: Indoor Cats is still a disappointingly long way from the heights this creative team reached with Stray Dogs. ...more
In Manhattan 1944, a Columbia student called Lucien Carr stabbed 32 year old David Kammerer and drowned the body. William S. Burroughs and Jack KerouaIn Manhattan 1944, a Columbia student called Lucien Carr stabbed 32 year old David Kammerer and drowned the body. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were friends of Carr’s and both were arrested after the murder as Carr had confessed to them and neither had gone to the police (Kerouac even helped dispose of the murder weapon!).
The story went that Carr was sick of Kammerer’s unwanted advances and things tipped over one night when they were alone. Carr served just two years for manslaughter and went on to become a successful editor at United Press International until his death in 2005.
This murder, that gave “birth to the Beat Generation” (for bringing together the three main writers of this movement - Allen Ginsberg and the two authors of this book), is explored by then-unknown writers Burroughs and Kerouac in their collaborative novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written in 1945, it wasn’t until 2008 that it was published, partly as a favour to Lucien Carr not to publish it while he was still alive.
I was never a huge fan of the Beats (On the Road and Naked Lunch are both overrated trash) but I have enjoyed some of Burroughs and Kerouac’s work, like Junky and The Dharma Bums - and to that I can add Hippos, which wasn’t bad!
The two write alternating chapters (Burroughs’ proxy is Will Dennison and Kerouac’s is Mike Ryko) with Carr portrayed as Phillip Tourian and David Kammerer as Ramsay Allen. Not a lot happens in the book. We get an idea of the bohemian atmosphere Burroughs and Kerouac lived in at the time, and a flavour of what New York life was like in 1944. The chapter on Ryko and Tourian trying to get passage to France as merchant seamen was fun and interesting.
There’s a glimpse of the kind of writers both would become in later books, with Dennison injecting morphine in one chapter and Ryko often freewheeling around town, drinking and travelling. Burroughs signed the manuscript “William Lee”, his alter-ego in many of his books, while Kerouac was still calling himself “John”.
It’s not amazingly written but it’s also very accessible - this was written years before Burroughs got into his awful cut-up style of writing. The age gap is noticeable in the quality of the prose - Burroughs was 30 at the time, and had probably been writing for longer, while Kerouac was 22, and Burroughs’ chapters are more compelling and well put-together while Kerouac’s are just ok for the most part.
Burroughs claimed that the unusual title was a line said during a radio broadcast following a circus fire. He’s likely referencing the disastrous Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1944 where 167 people died and hundreds more were injured (sometimes called “The Day the Clowns Cried”) although there were no hippos involved, so it’s probably Burroughs misremembering/embellishing.
For being inspired by a murder, it’s not a very dramatic read. The murder happens off-page and is dealt with in the last 20 pages of the novel. The lead-up isn’t particularly deep or insightful - just Tourian saying that he wants to escape Al over and over. In James Gauerholz’s afterword, he mentions that Burroughs was also aware of the novel’s shortcomings, that it was just too middle-of-the-road to be published (and only got published because of who the writers ended up becoming).
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks isn’t the most memorable novel but it’s not a bad read and parts of it were intermittently interesting for me to enjoy it well enough. My feelings about the book match Burroughs’ summation of Kerouac’s contributions: “I don’t specifically think of it. I just rather like it, is all.” ...more
A young Pakistani called Changez tells an unnamed American his life story as they leisurely sit at a restaurant in Lahore. How he once lived the AmeriA young Pakistani called Changez tells an unnamed American his life story as they leisurely sit at a restaurant in Lahore. How he once lived the American Dream - until 9/11 changed everything…
I really enjoyed the first quarter of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and then it hits a wall that it never recovers from before attempting a rather silly, melodramatic ending.
It’s a solid 50 or so opening pages. We hear about Changez’s Ivy League scholarship and getting a prestigious, high-paying job at a financial valuation firm right out of graduation - it’s well-written, compelling stuff.
Then the love interest is introduced and the story descends into a dreary romance between Changez and Erica, a woman who’s still in love with her dead ex. The narrative slogs onwards as the two predictably become closer, sapping any energy Hamid generated earlier in his novel.
This predictable, banal nonsense goes on for half the bloody book before anything further develops but the novel had lost me by that point. 9/11 happens and, whaddayaknowit, a brown-skinned Asian with a beard is suddenly persona non grata in America, and Changez becomes disenchanted with the country too with its subsequent actions. Warmongering imperialist hypocrisy is bad, eh? Woah… how totally not obvious an observation.
Despite being written in the second person, my least favourite narrative perspective, I didn’t mind it as much, which speaks to the strength of Hamid’s writing, although the novel’s contrived framing wears out its believability before the end. I just don’t buy that someone would entertain this overlong monologue from a total stranger for this length of time, especially with so much focus on him falling in love with an American girl.
I did kind of guess where it was headed - there had to be a point to why he was saying all this to an American specifically at this particular point in history - but I found what Changez did to position himself as the “fundamentalist” in the title was weak, and the ending, rather than being this dramatic finale, was more silly than anything.
Mohsin Hamid is a fine writer but I wasn’t taken with much of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Rather than being this searing, subversive and insightful polemical/thriller that I’d expected, it turned out to be a dull romance between two forgettable characters instead - disappointing stuff. ...more
Antony Beevor published what may be the definitive book on the Battle of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in 1998 - Christmas at Stalingrad is a shorAntony Beevor published what may be the definitive book on the Battle of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) in 1998 - Christmas at Stalingrad is a short extract from that book, focusing on the bitter winter of 1942-43 when the fate of Hitler’s doomed Sixth Army was sealed.
For context, the Battle of Stalingrad wasn’t just the worst battle of WW2 but it’s considered one of, if not the worst, battles in human history. It’s certainly the worst urban battle of all time. In this book, Beevor picks up the story as the tide is turning and the Soviets have begun pushing the Nazis out of their country for good.
Part of the reason for this was the infamous and unstoppable Russian winter but also the logistical nightmares that the Nazis failed to overcome, where the Luftwaffe simply weren’t delivering the requisite supplies, leading to severe food, as well as fuel and ammunition, shortages. By December, the German soldiers not dying in combat were dying up to 20 a day from a combination of exhaustion, hunger and cold.
Beevor writes about how the young German soldiers tried to celebrate Christmas on their pathetic rations and I kinda felt sorry for some of them - they couldn’t all have been true-blue Nazis who believed in the cause. I’m sure some of them were poor bastards who got drafted, who hated Hitler, and, through no fault of their own, this would be their last Christmas, dying in the Russian snow for nothing. That’s strong writing from Beevor - showing the humanity of his subjects rather than the cartoonish villainy with which how the Wehrmacht are often portrayed in popular media.
The book has the same pitfalls I’ve encountered before when reading military history: too many unit/officer/operation names, all coming at you too quickly that makes it hard to follow at times.
Also, this particular edition has some detail missing that I would’ve liked to have seen included. You eventually find out the date but I wanted to know from the start when this was taking place (Dec ‘42 to Jan ‘43), and the final, vital outcome is missing. How soon after the envoys’ attempt to reach Field Marshal Paulus did the Sixth Army fall? What became of Paulus and the remnants of the army? I know now but I had to read about it online, which I feel is a failing of a history book and makes it a less satisfying read. That’s a problem with the short format of this paperback, but still.
I learned more about the final stages of the Battle of Stalingrad and enjoyed reading enough of it. Even in this brief book, it’s not something you can casually read - you definitely have to be paying attention to get anything out of it - but it is also accessible; Beevor is a really good writer as well as historian. Christmas at Stalingrad is definitely worth a look for readers interested in this extremely dark episode of the darkest of wars but aren’t willing to commit to Beevor’s full length work. ...more
You know how the latest footage of next year’s flopbuster Captain America 4: We Keep Changing the Title But It Definitely Has “World” In It got smeareYou know how the latest footage of next year’s flopbuster Captain America 4: We Keep Changing the Title But It Definitely Has “World” In It got smeared like you-know-what across our screens and we got treated to that amazing footage of Harry Ford as Red Hulk, and we collectively didn’t go “gross” and immediately try to forget we saw it, but pre-ordered our tickets (and probably popcorn buckets of Red Hulk’s… hmm, head)? Glad we’re on the same page.
Well, it got me a-pondering. I’ve never read a Red Hulk comic before. You know, that imaginatively-named character that you’ll never guess - oh you have - that it’s Hulk. But. Red. Maybe now’s the time. Maybe it’ll even be… ok? You know, so when I totally see that movie in the theatre and not at home, months later, half-asleep, playing a game on my phone, I can go “Oh yeah - that guy. He’s uh… zzz…”
This book is Red Hulk’s introduction to the Marvel Universe. Red Hulk’s killed Abomination - with a gun, for some reason. The totally-still-relevant “mystery” is: who is… Red Hulk? And we aren’t told in this book, and instead watch as he fights various Marvel characters (including A-Bomb, a different kind of Abomination - and Marvel unironically calls itself the House of Ideas) until the book ends and we presumably find out in another book that Red Hulk is Thunderbolt Ross.
That isn’t a spoiler by the way, this comic is yonks old - it’s back when Jeph Loeb was writing comics and not must-watch TV like Hit-Monkey and MODOK (this might be some people’s first time discovering, yes, there IS a MODOK TV show! And it’s as good as you’d think).
And this “mystery” is a bit of a cheat, in this comic anyhow. I’ve read later Thunderbolts comics where Red Hulk has Ross’ Flanders-tache, which only makes sense - it’s not like Hulk went bald when he transformed from Banner, so why would Red Hulk lose the facial hair when he transformed? But Loeb is such a great writer that he needs to resort to cheating like this to throw readers off the scent that Red Hulk is Ross.
Besides the blood red colouring, Red Hulk (that name) is different from Hulk by being able to talk normally and not like a caveman and he gives off radiation for reasons. Great. Visionary characterisation. Ed McStout’s art is what it usually is: shiny polished beefy meh. (Mebbe he should pick another brand then - Ed McDonald’s?)
Well I’m certainly ready for the character’s appearance in the MCU now. This lousy comic at least sets expectations at rock bottom for what will probably be a lousy movie too.
(view spoiler)[And thanks to Disney we now know what Red Hulk’s sex face is:
It’s an eventful time in MS Harkness’ life: she’s graduating art school, she’s making comics, she’s having an affair with an MMA fighter, she’s doing It’s an eventful time in MS Harkness’ life: she’s graduating art school, she’s making comics, she’s having an affair with an MMA fighter, she’s doing a lil sex work on the side to fund it all, she’s studying to become a personal trainer, and her incarcerated molesting father is trying to make “amends”. Tense indeed.
Despite not being a fan of memoirs from people still quite young, I thought Time Under Tension was pretty good - certainly warranted given Harkness’ very unusual life! It’s also my first Harkness comic and I gather this is her third memoir (in 6 years - very productive!), so maybe I was more impressed because I’m reading about her life afresh rather than for a third time (assuming she doesn’t rehash old material). Either way, she’s a talented cartoonist.
That said, I didn’t totally understand the numerous time jumps in the first part. There’s a scene, then it’s 2 weeks prior; there’s another scene, then it’s 1 week before that; there’s a scene then it’s 2 weeks after that; then it’s 1 month before graduation and then it’s the night before graduating. These jumps didn’t add anything to the narrative or mean anything to me and I wasn’t sure why she just didn’t tell the story chronologically.
I was never bored reading the comic but parts of it are definitely more interesting than others. The artist residency in Pittsburgh and the various scenes with friends were fun, and the scenes involving sex work or mentions of her horrible childhood were jarring but in a way that kept the narrative unpredictable and compelling; the relationship with the MMA fighter and her pursuit of her personal trainer qualification were less so.
Like the best cartoonists, Harkness has her own drawing style and, while the book as a whole is never dull to look at, it does feel quite same-y for the most part. Occasionally though she’ll show off an amazing splash page like when she and her flat-mate were getting trashed and it gets very trippy (even though those pages are a nightmare to read!).
And she’s a good writer too, similarly unexpectedly throwing out a beautifully poignant line out of nowhere like “One day, I’ll remember it into something better than it ever was.” Helluva way to sum up a relationship while also saying so much by not saying any more.
The book just kinda ends - there’s a half-hearted attempt at growth but it doesn’t feel convincing, mostly because the book was just about stuff that happened to her at this point in her life - and I’m guessing the life story continues in the next one. Which is fine but, as the unevenness of this book highlights, navel-gazing has its limits and I’d like to see someone as talented as MS Harkness stretch and try for more focused fiction instead at some point.
As it is, Time Under Tension is a memoir full of dark material but Harkness is a likeable protagonist and the book never descends to self-pity - the opposite in fact. Worth checking out if you’re a fan of slice-of-life comics but don’t expect anything too deep or impressive from it. ...more
The Woman in the Purple Skirt sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. When she doesn’t, she has a daily routine where she sits on a park bench and eats a The Woman in the Purple Skirt sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. When she doesn’t, she has a daily routine where she sits on a park bench and eats a snack. But whether she’s working or not, there’s always someone watching her. And, even though she doesn’t know they exist (yet), that someone really wants to be her friend…
Natsuko Imamura’s novel The Woman in the Purple Skirt is alright. It’s not the most compelling of narratives and I feel like Imamura missed out on more heightened drama on the stalker element. But it did enough to keep me turning the pages and ultimately I did want to know what happened next.
Most of the story takes place in a local hotel where the stalker and The Woman in the Purple Skirt work. And here I’ll just mention a peeve I had with this book: Imamura could’ve picked a less clunky nickname for her. She’s always referred to as The Woman in the Purple Skirt - I would’ve preferred either her shorter real name or something snappier like PS (for Purple Skirt).
The story follows PS’s (see how easy it is?) time at the hotel, which isn’t the most exciting of experiences (learning cleaning processes, gossiping about co-workers) but the fairly mundane story is made more intriguing by the sinister framing, told from the perspective of the stalker. I was kept wondering what the stalker planned to do and how unhinged they were - are they harmless or are they completely nutso, in which case who knows what’ll happen?
That said, what does end up happening is underwhelming and I wanted them to do something a bit more dramatic than what they eventually did. So it’s not the most satisfying of endings but the journey there was fine so I didn’t mind that much.
The novel is an interesting look at the Japanese lower classes, showing the less glamorous lifestyles of ordinary Japanese, which doesn’t often get highlighted in pop culture about this country. It’s not the deepest of reads - Imamura observes the loneliness of adult Japanese, in both characters of PS and the stalker, but disappointingly doesn’t explore it any further.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt tells a moderately entertaining tale of contemporary Japanese society that’s well-written but also isn’t that exciting and feels quite superficial. Imamura touches on relevant social problems (the isolation of some modern adults) but chooses instead to focus on what turns out to be a soap opera-esque storyline. It’s an accessible, breezy read but nothing too inspired or memorable. ...more
A rogue Amazon kills some dudes in an American bar causing Congress to pass a law calling for the expulsion of all Amazons from ‘murica, or something.A rogue Amazon kills some dudes in an American bar causing Congress to pass a law calling for the expulsion of all Amazons from ‘murica, or something. But Wonder Woman doesn’t want to go - which makes her an Outlaw. Idiotic fighting ensues while an absurd villain cackles in the background in this abysmally stupid book.
Tom King’s Supergirl remains the worst comic he’s done but, if it weren’t for Daniel Sampere’s exemplary art, I’d rate this Wonder Woman comic on par with that boring nonsense.
The short preamble in this book is actually ok. It’s the future, Damian and Jon are Batman and Superman and they join Liz Prince, calling herself Trinity perhaps because Diana’s still around to be Wonder Woman, for some good old fashioned mythical Greek trials. The character line-up is interesting and the trials are fun but the purpose of this piece is to introduce the terrible big bad of the book: Sovereign. And to tell us that Wonder Woman defeated him. Not that it would go any other way but always a good start to a story when you tell the ending first!
And that’s it for the future flash-forward because we’re back to the present for the remainder of the story which is unfortunately well below ok. Sovereign is the King of ‘murica. Why? Because Americans like having Brits be the bad guys in their stories - it’s tradition, dating back to the Revolutionary War. So, in lieu of any Brits having power in the US, Tom King makes a British proxy in the form of one of Brit-land’s most famous institutions, the monarchy. Now there’s an unimaginative bad guy for American readers to rail against - boo, we’re against dynasties, that’s why we love the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushs, etc.
So we’re meant to believe that a lone Amazon killing some dudes in a bar is enough to have a law be passed against the Amazons as a whole. That’s astoopid. As is something a lone soldier does to himself later in the story, to again sway public opinion against the Amazons. But then this also feels like King wearing his political views on his sleeve, writing some cringey leftist fantasy where the good and right women are being persecuted by the evil and wrong men of the political, militarist right.
He so wants to do a Handmaid’s Tale homage with Wonder Woman that he’ll take anything, including flimsy motivations, to make it happen. All that follows is Wonder Woman standing up to the Trumpian Sgt Steel who, being the misogynist caricature that he is, condescends and gurns at her while she stands proud and just against an unjust world. Le sigh. This means Wonder Woman, as usual, deflecting bullets with her bracelets and letting her tiara beat up soldiers a la Yondu’s magical whistle-thingy (which I didn’t know it could do but whatevs). It’s so dull to read.
When people talk about “strong female characters”, it’s meant that female characters be strongly, ie. well, written - meaning they’re as realistic, multi-faceted and complex as the best male characters and not just there to serve a role in someone else’s story (eg. fridging). It’s not meant that women be literally strong, like Wonder Woman twirling a tank around her head!
I feel like that’s something an incompetent DC editor insisted upon Tom King because I can’t believe he’d be as dumb as to think that that’s what “strong female character” means. But that’s what we’ve got in this book: a literal strong female character, behaving like a man, as if that’s the best way to be, rather than a woman, which, by implication, isn’t. That’s modern feminism for you.
There’s a corny chapter of forced sentimentalism involving a sick kid that just felt desperate on King’s part, and an utterly pointless chapter where Wonder Woman tells her friends not to join her fight, even though they do. And then there’s more loud garbage as Wonder Woman demolishes the US capitol. Ugh.
Daniel Sampere’s art is much too good for this rubbish script. It’s polished without looking flashy, it goes big when it has to - the splash pages are brilliant - but nails quieter scenes too, communicating emotions skilfully with detailed body language. It’s genuinely a beautifully illustrated book and is the only thing that kept me the least bit engaged while reading.
Even if you took away the off-putting leftist pandering, what remains is still a dreary superhero comic that falls back on the least interesting aspects of the genre: soulless fight scenes and empty posturing. Tom King may have been an excellent writer on Batman but his Wonder Woman is far, far from wonderful. Wonder Woman, Volume 1: Dumb and Dumber is embarrassingly childish tripe. ...more
Joe Matt died last year at the relatively young age of 60. Peepshow #15 is his last comic, published posthumously and completed with the help of his fJoe Matt died last year at the relatively young age of 60. Peepshow #15 is his last comic, published posthumously and completed with the help of his friend and fellow cartoonist Chester Brown, who inked the last four pages.
Like all of his comics, this one is autobiographical and picks up where his last book Spent left off with Joe Matt headed to LA in 2003 to see about getting his comics made into an animated HBO show (which never happened). He also chronicles his tumultuous relationship with a fan, Maggie, as well as his usual poking fun at himself.
I’m a big fan of Joe Matt so I was both shocked to hear of his passing and pleased to hear we were finally getting some new work from him - Spent was published in 2007 and there’s been nothing since. And Peepshow #15 is great - it’s as wonderfully drawn and polished as Matt’s style had become over the years, and his slice-of-life anecdotes and narrative style are effortlessly entertaining to read.
One of the best chapters is Seth’s farewell speech to Joe when he left Toronto in 2003 for, briefly, the east coast, before settling in LA. Partly why I love Joe Matt’s comics is because I’m also a big fan of Seth and Chester Brown’s work, so I always enjoyed seeing their appearances in Joe’s comics and seeing that side of their characters (they had a really fun dynamic). Seth’s speech is funny and touching and inadvertently serves as a wonderful eulogy to Joe too.
The final chapter, on his hero R. Crumb, is both sad and funny, which could be used to describe most of Joe’s comics. He talks about how boring Crumb’s Bible book is (he’s right) and then decries his own lack of productivity, calling himself worthless and talentless. Joe Matt definitely wasn’t the most prolific cartoonist but he was undeniably talented - his comics are excellent and I would rate them higher than Crumb’s.
He might’ve just said those things to set up the punchline at the end, or maybe he really did feel that way and that’s why, 16 years after his last book, Spent, was published, he only created the 30 pages of comics that make up this issue. Or maybe he just lost interest in comics - just because he’s good at something doesn’t mean he has to do it if it doesn’t make him happy - or did other things to make money that took up his time; he mentions on average he made $4k a year off his comics ($6k was the most he ever earned in a year)!
It’s a shame though that this is all we have because this issue feels like a preamble to a more involved, compelling narrative - that we’ll never get to see now. Throughout this issue he tip-toes around the fact that he’s obsessed with young Asian girls and says in his chapter on the ten women he’s been with, that his life was about to be turned upside down with Stephanie, the 18 year old fan he hooks up with on the internet. But that’s it because he died before he could expand further.
It’s unsatisfying and disappointing that he didn’t start telling this story sooner to complete it. As it is, it feels like a shallow look at an obsession that perhaps (you’d hope) he’d explore in more depth had he had the time. That and the lottery tickets story are the only downsides to this otherwise brilliant, final comic.
Fans won’t need any encouragement to pick this one up, and I’d recommend Joe Matt’s comics to anyone interested in indie and slice-of-life comics. Peepshow #15 is sadly the last great instalment from a unique cartoonist who was much better than perhaps he knew. ...more
