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LeVine, Jeff – Untitled #2
Untitled #2
Here’s another issue of this sketchbook series from Jeff. One minor complaint: he has a listing at the start of the book indicating where all the drawings are from. That’s fine, but he lists pages for all of that, and then doesn’t put page numbers on the actual pages. A minor thing, as you can figure it out without too much trouble if you can count to 40, but I’m a lazy man and I want it all itemized! Dammit. In here he has drawings of airports, jazz musicians, and basically just all kinds of little things he saw in his travels and daily life. Interesting stuff, but I’m still a bigger fan of the stories. Contact info is up there, $2!
LeVine, Jeff – Untitled #1
Untitled #1
One of the great things about Jeff is that his style is always changing. Sometimes its clear straight lines, sometimes it’s more realistic, and sometimes it grimy (I mean that in the best possible way) like this. It’s a book of pictures, from the looks of it little snapshots of his apartment and all the stuff he has laying around. It’s not my favorite thing he’s ever done, but I like most of his stuff a lot, so take that however you’d like. He has a new website, which I linked to a few times up there, but here you go in case you don’t feel like scrolling. I still think everybody out there should buy all of his comics right away. I guess I was looking for some dialogue in his book (why I was looking for anything is beyond me, but there you go), but this is still a great, quiet look at the orderly chaos that is the average apartment. I’m guessing this is $2, it’s on his website!
LeVine, Jeff – Watching Days Become Years #4
Watching Days Become Years #4 Now Available! $5
More quiet tales of Jeff’s life in issue #4, and he even gets briefly political this time around. I’ve also often wondered how most people in the country are able to so completely disassociate themselves from the violence that is done in our name all the freaking time. Other subjects in here include a lack of time, the value of being awake versus sleeping, a quiet day at home out of the heat, trying to get calmness from trees, the incremental nature of profit sharing at work, and one awesome punchline that I’m not going to ruin here. There’s also his drawings and impressions of places and trying to be content with the little things, and as usual it’s a tossup as to which is his better work. He’s a master of the one page “diary” type strip, but there are also few people out there better able to document the little things about places. The inevitable conclusion, as I’ve been saying from the beginning on this page, is that everyone should still order all his books and give him as much money as humanly possible. I’d love it if I was able to help him, in even a tiny way, get the gift of more time. $5
LeVine, Jeff – Watching Days Become Years #3
Watching Days Become Years #3 Now Available! $5
Again with the long gaps between reading his comics! Full disclosure: I “grew up” reading his stuff, from his Destroy All Comics magazine to No Hope to all the little minis in between. Of course, “growing up” in this racket means that he helped form my high opinion of this medium in my late teens/early 20’s when I was making the transition away from superhero stuff to actual quality work. Not that there’s not SOME quality superhero stuff, kind of… OK, I’ve gone off the rails. This comic, as is the case with most of his work, defies reviewing. Jeff seems to wander around town, finding things to do on his days off (or happily deciding to do nothing at all), and documenting in very specific detail what he’s seeing. What’s often missing in his books are other people, as he’s more than content to document his surroundings, the growing pile of books and DVDs at his apartment, and his personal thoughts. Oddly, although he mentions in this issue that he’s had the same job for 7 years (as of 2006, judging by the dates on the strips), I’m not sure that he’s ever mentioned exactly what he does. It’s just not important enough in the grand scheme of things to warrant mentioning in his comics when there’s so much (or so little) else to talk about. My quest to make this guy rich continues, so buy his stuff, show some love for a genuine artist. $5
LeVine, Jeff – Watching Days Become Years #2
Watching Days Become Years #2 Now Available! $5
It’s been entirely too long between my Jeff Levine fixes, although one look at his website tells me that he’s put out 5 issues worth of strips from his website. Turns out that there’s all kinds of new stuff available, I’m just not looking in the right places. Anyway, on a purely personal note, it’s been fascinating to me to watch how my life parallels his, or at least when it does on those occasional long and pointless nights, when it seems like the whole damned thing is a waste. This is a great book to read the next time it’s three in the morning and you’re thinking all kinds of deep thoughts, because a whole bunch of them are mirrored right here. And I can’t help but notice that in spite of my pleas for everybody to buy all his books and make him rich and famous, that still hasn’t happened. Or maybe everybody who looks at this site already has bought all of his stuff and it made him $10, I don’t know. All I can say is that there are few people I look forward to reading more than this man. Oh, you want to hear about the actual issue? Jeff captures a few quiet moments, take a trip to San Francisco to see a jazz legend, and saves the world from elephants. One of those things is quite possibly not true… $5
LeVine, Jeff – Watching Days Become Years #1
Watching Days Become Years #1 Now Available! $4.50
For anybody who’s not sure about how I feel about Jeff’s work, scroll down and read the other reviews. It was one of the first reviews I did for the page because I wanted to make sure that everybody who hadn’t heard of him would at least see him here. I think a bunch of these have been put up on his website over the last few years, so chances are you’ve seen some of them, if you visit his site on a regular basis. Trust me when I say that the whole is better than its parts. Not that the parts were bad at all, but there are also a few new strips in this. I’m of the opinion that Jeff can do no wrong, so if you’re looking for an unbiased review, you might want to stop reading now. Maybe his work will start sucking when he becomes fat and happy later in life, I don’t know, but for now he’s doing some of the best comics around. They’re all about simple things. Walking down a road, spending a day off of work doing nothing at all, sitting around feeling lonely, just little things. He has an amazing ability to slow everything down in his world and capture it on paper, which helps everybody reading to think about their own life and where it’s going. Turns out that it’s OK if it’s not really going anywhere, as long as you’re still able to stop and enjoy the little things. It’s great to see him getting published again and I think everybody should buy a copy of this. I have selfish reasons, of course, as I really want to see what kinds of comics he would do if he was rich and famous. This is $4.50 and worth every penny. I’ve already mentioned this, but a lot of these comics (and many others) are up on his website.
Levine, Jeff – Snapshot #5
Snapshot #5
Let me start this off by saying that Jeff LeVine remains one of the very few comic heroes of mine. Oh sure, I have a respect for a whole bunch of people, and I like the work of probably hundreds of artists. It’s not the same as somebody being a hero. He is for one reason: Destroy All Comics. The greatest magazine (I guess you could call it a zine, but it deserves a bigger name than that) about comics ever, I looked forward to this thing coming out more than most comics. Interviews with the small press greats, comics, rants, reviews, all done with an unmistakable love of comics. It’s the model that I’m setting up this page to be, and I know I have a long way to go before that’ll ever happen. After he stopped doing D.A.C., I lost track of what he was up to for a while. He also did the incredible No Hope for Slave Labor graphics for a few years, followed by Lust For Life for a few issues. They were both favorites of mine and I couldn’t wait for each issue to come out, but apparently I was in the minority because he either stopped doing it or it was cancelled and he fell off the radar. I should have known that he wouldn’t stop doing comics altogether and I found the latest work of his in the Paper Radio catalog (PO Box 254 Allston, MA 02134, send a couple of stamps and ask for a catalog), called Snapshot.
Snapshot #5 (and all of the issues that I’ve seen) isn’t really a mini comic, at least not strictly speaking. I don’t know what you’d call it though. Zine, maybe? Well, whatever it is, there’s nothing else like it that I know of. It’s part comics, part Jeff writing either about something that had happened to him at the time or earlier in the day, and part photographs. It’s mostly talk about his job, not knowing where he wants to be in the world or what would finally make him happy, and about his emotional distance from most of his family (except his brother). A problem I’ve had in a lot of these reviews is that I don’t want to give too much of anything away. There’s a fine line, I know that, but a lot of the joy that I get out of mini comics is the joy of discovering them. Not necessarily being the first person that I know to hear about them, just the joy of reading them without really knowing what to expect. With Snapshot, I could tell you what he says in every fucking essay in this book and you know what? It would be still be amazing. This is pure poetry and you’re only cheating yourself by not buying it. Shame on you! Here’s a little sample of what you’re missing.
Jeff e-mailed me and told me that all the issues for this series are sold out. He has #1-4 up on his website, so I guess you’ll just have to live with that for now. He also said that he plans to have everything he’s ever done up on his site eventually, so you’ll be able to get as many samples of his work as you should need to convince you to buy his stuff.
