From Beam to Buck

A disclaimer is absolutely necessary here: I don’t have kids, may or may not ever have them, and view the process of giving birth as something that happens thousands of times a day (or millions if you want to take all the animals of the world into account), which makes it anything but a miracle. That’s right, I’m an asshole! Surprise! Eh, I have nothing against kids, but I fully expected a book detailing the home birth of Chris’s latest child to have at least a few moments that completely confused/alarmed me. This one starts off with a positive pregnancy test, and strips from there include subjects like Chris wondering if he should tone down his subject matter while his wife was pregnant (her verdict: no), telling his kid that she was going to have a sibling, telling a friend about the pregnancy and his reaction, getting a new place to live, trying to figure out a name (and sadly not going with Volaticus, which I am officially stealing if I ever do have a kid), trying to guess the gender of the baby, working with the midwives, and Chris wondering how to make telling people that he self-publishes sound cool. Then the scene shifts a bit to a story that seemed to meander to me while I was reading it, but it all fits in by the end. Chris was at work and was thinking of tieing one on (“getting drunk” to you whippersnappers (young readers)), but a woman came into the restaurant that made people uncomfortable. He finally told her to leave, so she stood outside the window knitting and generally freaking people out. He finally (and reluctantly) called the cops, but there wasn’t much they could do because she wasn’t doing anything illegal. They finally left and ignored her, but the end result of it was that he barely drank at all. This ended up being a big deal because his wife gave birth the next day, a couple of weeks earlier than her due date, and it might have been a disaster if he was hung over. The birth itself was graphic, in case you’re freaked out by such things (if you are a little growing up might be in order), but overall it seemed to go smoothly, or maybe Chris shortened the labor for the sake of the comic. Anyway, the whole comic is basically a sweet love letter to his wife and kids, with tips for other people who want to try home births. So yeah, I’d recommend this for people who are thinking about giving that a shot. It was also thoroughly entertaining to a childless heathen like myself, but I do have one big question. Is it really normal for the mother to chop up and eat the placenta? Because that sounded gross as all hell to me (again I have to point out that I NO expertise in this matter). Just curious! $5

Piece Goods

Who likes their mini comics violent and random? How about also in color (mostly)? Hey, you’re in luck! This one has a few pieces that are single page illustrations (that’s you’re better off trying to interpret on your own) and a few short stories that mostly just peter out. Those stories include a creepy skeleton dude in red scattering stars (or jacks, or whatever you think they might be), the adventures of a rat trying to calm a baby, how the author would trace rap album covers as a kid and the general reaction he got from his peers, a couple of strips showing the poetic memories of a murderous lunatic, angry driving (or a race) and the inevitable result, letting a crazy person into the house, and the joy of finding out that your house is covered with snow, giving you time to go through boxes of old personal letters and playing out all kinds of fantasies in your head. Most of these stories are open to interpretation and I almost certainly got a few of them wrong, but hey, that’s the fun of reviewing silent comics! It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall, but there’s enough here to make it worth a look.

Champ 2010

It’s about damned time that somebody broke out of the daily diary strip formula. Jed starts off with the usual four panel strip, two panels above and two below, putting one out daily even when he doesn’t have a thing to say. Eventually he starts throwing in sketchbook pages when he’s too busy for a strip, then he moves to three panels, one on top of the other, and finally just whatever format he needs to tell the story he wants to tell from that day. In a genre that’s become tired as hell it was a nice change of pace. This also means that there are more than a few gaps, so any weirdos who demand 365 strips out of a year’s worth of a daily strip are going to be disappointed. As for the rest of us, enjoy the variety! As it says on the cover, this tells the story of Jed’s year without booze, and he regularly professes annoyance at that fact. It was kind of for health reasons but more than anything he seemed to want the challenge of a daily diary strip to fill the hole left by the lack of drinking. I did a review for the first month of this book, so I won’t mention that stuff (the short version is that I liked it), but the subjects of other strips include being miserable at a few different jobs for different reasons, liking the ladies from afar and then from closer up, trying to make time for his comics while still earning a living, wondering if those weird dimples on his thumb nail are cancer, resisting the urge to punch hipsters, and various shenanigans with his friend Chris Monday (whose books will be reviewed here one of these days too). Then things pick up a bit towards the middle of the book when Jed gets a serious girlfriend. That’s also about the time that he started getting complaints about a dip in quality in his work, to which I say: eh, maybe a bit. Misery is almost always a more interesting topic to read about than happiness, so there’s that, but fuck it, the guy was happy! Relationships being what they are, he might very well end up being miserable again some day, which will make his regular readers what, happy? That makes them assholes! I’m veering off track here, but I chatted with Chris and Jed at the hotel bar during the “open draw” thing for SPACE this year, and they both seem like nice enough guys, and as human beings I’d rather they were happy than not. And it’s not like his strips sucked after his relationship started, it’s just that he talked about more things in a relationship frame of mind, which can also seem like a personal attack to some self-centered single people. This is solid pile of strips and, like I said, he plays around with the format a bit, which is always nice to see. Check it out, why don’t you? $9

Tales From the Interstate #1: 20th Anniversary Edition

It’s a shame that so many artists hate their old material, as this is an idea I’d like to see explored more by other artists. I still have never seen King Cat #1, for example, and would love to see it in this format. Pam put her first comic, a redrawn and expanded version of that comic and a “commentary” booklet all together in this package. Her style in the redrawn comic is much improved, obviously, but her commentary makes it clear that the seeds for the characters she’s used all along were here right at the beginning. I’ve been trying to put my mind back in that time period, as I started reading small press comics only a few years after Pam started drawing them, and I’m honestly not sure if this one would have stood out for me at the time. The redrawn edition would have definitely gotten my attention, but the original? Hey, why don’t I tell you about it so you have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. A young couple picks up what appears to be a Buddhist monk hitchhiking. The monk was quiet, either because he was full of wisdom or didn’t speak much English, and he paid for gas a few times, then the comic ends. The Haitian proverb on the back cover might have gotten my attention, but there really isn’t a whole lot to the story. As for the redrawn version, it stays pretty true to the original, then adds eight new pages onto the original six. These new pages show the couple meeting up with the monk again, as he’s now running a used bookstore. These pages tie it into her current Kekionga series more closely, but I’ll leave the contents a mystery for long time fans who want to see what she’s changed. The booklet is also quite informative, as Pam tells the story of how she got started (Matt Feazell has done all kinds of good for comics creators throughout the years) and takes us step by step through the pages and the characters. This may or may not be all that interesting if this is the first thing of Pam’s you’ve seen, but this is indispensable if you’ve been reading her stuff for years. She doesn’t put a lot of personal details in her stories (or if she does she hides it under fiction) but you’ll learn a lot about both Pam and her work if you read this whole set. No price listed, but this has to at least be a few dollars…

Blindspot #2

Let’s all take a moment to mourn the death of the individual comic. Oh, not in the small press world, as mini comics are still all over the place. I mean more any of the established publishers, like Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, those types of folks. Joseph includes a rejection letter from Fantagraphics in this one that is probably the worst kind of rejection letter: they loved his work (with a few suggestions for improvements), but since there is just no market for single issues there’s not a thing they can do to help him. It will be a different story when he gets enough material for a collection, possibly, but for now his only option is to either self publish or let his work pile up until he can put it in a graphic novel. Overall I don’t mind this trend, as I’m happy to wait a couple of years between large books, but it really sucks for books like this which fit perfectly as single issues and might be a bit of a mess as a collected book. Anyway, this comic has a few stories, all new for this issue (the lack of a new Ace Goddard story is explained on the back cover). He starts off with a letters page, and I must confess that I do miss a good letters page. The first story is a delightful romp (I don’t think I’ve ever used that in a review, and if I did it was misapplied like it is here) through the mind a genius in his own head, a young man who gets annoyed with his audiences while playing his guitar at open mic nights and ends up putting six months and a ton of money into his dream project. The ending is a thing of beauty and says a lot about the power of any positive reinforcement. Next up is a date gone horribly wrong, with a social sin that there is just no coming back from. The bulk of the comic is next, and it’s the story of an older man who feels like control of his life is slipping away, as he’s ignored at work and notices that the options of jobs for older men are getting worse all the time. He tries a few desperate ploys, they mostly don’t go well, and I’ll leave the rest of it to the reader. Finally there are two short pieces, about a cheery security guard and Joseph’s sadly brief time working with Harvey Pekar. Joseph ended up drawing the last (?) thing Harvey wrote, a book on Cleveland, and I’m really curious to see it. Anyway yes, this is another solid issue, and you should buy it if you really do support such things. If you don’t or are indifferent, there’s always the inevitable collected edition, or at least there will be if Joseph doesn’t give up hope due to lack of support of his individual issues. Do you really want to risk that? $5

Black Rose #1

It’s not even remotely fair to bring this up during my reviews of the first issues of ongoing series, but at this point I want to see more before I get too sucked in. Don’t get me wrong, this issue did just about everything you need to do to get me interested in a series. There’s the opening, set two weeks before the start of the story that’s told throughout the rest of the book, which already promises a bad end for our hero. We get to see a negotiation between a large army and a terrified smaller town, in which we learn plenty about the motivations of both. There’s a long conversation between members of this army in some quiet time between battles, which is essential to get to know these people and what they’re trying to do. There are also tantalizing hints of the enemy, as well as the fact that we’re still not sure which side is the “bad guys.” And no misspellings that I could see, which shouldn’t be so rare as to warrant praise, but it is what it is. So yeah, every aspect of this makes up a successful and compelling first issue, but I just have to be the cynic who wonders if we’ll ever see the last issue of this six issue series. It’s not fair, it assigns blame to this crew for mistakes that countless other comics creators/publishers have made in the past, and I’m going to stop going on about it right now and will instead just hope that I see a couple more issues of this available by SPACE 2014. If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy series, this is definitely worth a look. It’s made clear in the afterword that this has been planned out for years, and I just looked at their website and saw that the whole series is already available, so forget everything I just said. Sure, I could delete it and start over, but I prefer to be caught in the act of being too cynical for my own damned good. Now that I know the whole thing is already out there I’m really curious to see what happens next… $3