Cover The End

"I come to bury the comic book cover, not to praise it".

I've written before on what makes a good comic book cover (good design, good art, and the fact that it tells a story) and how there are not as many good comic book covers as there use to be. But this week I came to the realization that the art of the comic book cover is dead. Covers don't matter at all anymore. They've lost their cachet in society and have almost no cachet in the comic book shop.

What made me realize this? The cover to Ex Machina number 39. Ex Machina is a comic I buy regularly. I bought it last week but it sat around for a few days before I picked it up. As I picked it up I realized I had never even looked at the cover. So I did. That is when I came to the conclusion that comic book covers matter in no way shape or form anymore.

I hate to pick on Ex Machina and Tony Harris' artwork because I like the book and the art. But the cover was pointless. Like almost every cover. It was nicely drawn with a nice design. A little symmetrical for my taste but that's not really bad. It was that the cover told no story and was just a guy standing there that made it so pointless. It looks more like an exercise than a cover created to get a customer to pick up a comic and buy it.

That's the problem. When comics were sold on newsstands to the public a cover was the thing that screamed out to people. Now that comics are sold almost exclusively at comic book shops people don't even look at covers much. They buy their regulars. I'm picking up Ex Machina no mater what is on the cover. And I'm not picking up the X-Men no matter what is on the cover. Well maybe I would if they came up with am X-Men cover to intrigue me but I doubt that will happen.

Comics are much more expensive now than the newsstand days too. The days of browsing covers and picking up something that looks interesting are over. Not at three to four bucks a pop and not with all the dull covers.

Plus most regulars to the comic shop know what's coming out that week and what they are going to buy beforehand. It's the age of the internet and instant information. There is no need to look at covers in deciding what to buy. At most it will jog a customer's memory that so and so number eleven was coming out this week and there it is.

Covers have become place holders filled with clip art. A cover has to be there so one needs to be drawn but it will in no way sell the book. Excepting Alex Ross covers. He is the only one left who can give a cover any type of cachet. Every other cover is art meant to be clipped for other uses. Ads, previews, t-shirts, posters, and whatever else anyone can think of to sell. Ninety nine percent of covers are never put to these uses but they can be if needed and that is what is important to comic companies.

What I wonder is did the comic book cover die because it was made into clip art or was is made into clip art because it was dead? I'm not sure but I think it's decline started because of neglect.

I know that for a decade plus no one was in charge of covers at Marvel comics. Editors commissioned them to be made but there was no art director in charge of making sure they were good. Editors who even had a small clue about making a cover look good had bigger fish to fry. Covers all got done in a perfunctory manner. Basically whatever the artist turner in is what got published.

Then the editors started asking the artists for clip art covers so they could use the art elsewhere. "Iconic" covers they were called. This was in the mid Nineties when comics were in a major decline. Could some good covers have garnered interest and slowed the decline? Or were comics going to decline no matter what and the covers already didn't matter?

I have no answers to these questions. People still love the art of comic book covers as they are the most expensive piece of art in the whole comic book. An interior page can run a couple of hundred dollars while the cover will run a couple of thousand. At least for old comic book art.

I love the art of comic book covers and was sad to come to the realization that covers just don't matter anymore. They exist for no reason these days. They tell no story and sell no comics. As long as we have monthly comic books we will still have comic book covers but with so few artists, editors, and companies interested in what makes a good comic book cover they will continue not to matter. Ouch.

Comics I Bought: November 27, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Glamourpuss - 4

Savage Dragon - 141

The Walking Dead - 55

Buffy Season Eight - 19

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"M" by Jon Jay Muth

Back in 1990 I bought the first issue of the four issues mini series that is collected in this 2007 hard cover publication. I don't know why I never bought the rest of the series but many times I've run across that one issue in my collection and wonder what the rest of the story was like. Wonder no more.

"M" is an adaptation of the 1931 movie by director Fritz Lang. Considered a classic and ground breaking movie even Muth, in his afterword, questions what would make him want to take on the task of adapting such an admired movie.

"M" tells the tale of a city terrorized by a serial child murderer. The police are desperately trying to find him as the city panics. An underground criminal organization also sees it as in their best interest to hunt down the child killer. Do criminals and murderers have the right to pass judgement on a child murderer? This is one of the questions that "M" ponders.

I've generally liked Muth's artwork. I don't think he's done much comic book work in years but I used to buy lots of comics that he worked on. He is a painter who works from photo reference and that is what he did here. I find the art a mixed bag. Some times the art and storytelling are stiff, sometimes smooth and exciting, and sometimes Muth can hit you with an image that is just awesome. The bag was was mixed with mostly good stuff.

Muth worked hard on creating atmosphere and he succeeds pretty well at that. The paintings are in black and white with some color thrown in here and there. Mostly for symbolic story telling impact.

The only real complaint I have with this book is the lettering. It was done before the age of computer lettering but it isn't hand lettered. It uses some sort of Times font and the balloons are mechanical looking. Plus there are large blocks of type that should have been broken up into smaller balloons. The level of craftsmanship on the art is an A while the level of craftsmanship on the lettering is a C. I wish it was re-lettered.

Overall I was glad I got to read this book after all these years. Despite it's flaws it's a well done story. They did a nice job with the printing too. I'll have to track down the movie now. Not being a film buff I've never seen it.

Fiending For Drawing

I've been drawing a lot for the last week and I thought I write a little bit about my process. I'm working on a portrait right now which is something I don't do a whole lot of. I am in no way, shape, or form a portrait artist but do enjoy the task every now and then. I love drawing faces but most of the faces I draw are made up. The features aren't always in the right places either. But sometimes I want to work with a real face.

I started with a photograph. Though most times I'm not the kind of artist that uses photo reference sometimes I do. One of the things an artist has to know about using photo reference is how to take a good picture. I've seen plenty of photo referenced art be ruined because a bad photo was used. I could write lots about what things make a bad photo but I'll just stick with if it's a cheesy snap shot don't try to use it as reference.

I tried out my new Wacom Cintiq (12 inch). It's a computer tablet that is also an LCD screen. I can put it on top of my drawing table and use the special pen to draw right on the screen on top of the digital photo. It's not quite like drawing on a piece of paper. It's more like drawing on a piece of paper with an eighth of an inch of glass on top of it.

So after I drew my underdrawing on top of the digital photo I printed out my drawing in non photo blue (a less then 50% blue that won't show up on a bitmapped scan or photocopy) on bristol board. I then drew on top of the blue line with my regular 4B pencil. This will be the finished pencil drawing. But not the finished drawing. I was going to ink this one.

Inking is a traditional comic book/strip way of working. Those mediums were printed on cheap newsprint and therefore a pencil line could not be reproduced consistently. To deal with this fact an artist will draw something in pencil and then grab a brush, pen, and ink and redraw, in ink, right over the top of the pencil line. The ink drawing is the final drawing that can be reproduced consistently. Things aren't always done like that today but it is still a way of working that many employ.

I happen to like an ink line and decided that is the way I wanted to work on this portrait. So I scanned in my pencil drawing, blew it up digitally, and printed it out, once again, on bristol board in blue line. Then I grabbed my Windsor Newton Series 7 number three brush dipped it in ink and got to work.

After I was done with the inking stage I scanned the ink drawing. When using a computer I use both Photoshop and Illustrator to color things. For this one and a lot of my prints I chose Illustrator because I like vector graphics for creating shapes. I do a lot of drawing in shapes when I work in color on the computer. Photoshop is more about dark to light and modeling.

Since I'm using Illustrator which is a resolution independent I like to blow things up. But whatever I'm blowing up has to be made as a vector graphic in Illustrator. The stuff I scan in will blow up just a jagged as a bitmap graphic. Because the things I like to blow up in portraits are eyes and lips I will often draw them larger and separately from the rest of the face.

So that's what I did. After laying down the basic color for the whole face in Illustrator I blew up the eyes and lips and printed them out in blue line. I penciled and inked them again at their new larger size then scanned them in. I then brought them into Illustrator, cleaned them up and colored them. They could now be reunited with the rest of the face plus be ready to use for another project where I use large eyes. Like my painted coat.

I had my basic colors in but I now had to add in darks and lights. This is where I like to draw in shapes. I layer and interlock different shapes of color. There is some dark to light modeling going on but realistic color is not my goal. I'm looking for a an interesting playfulness between the line, shape, and color. And it has to look like someone too. This stuff gets complicated.

My next step was to figure out the background. When working on something that is not a portrait I usually figure the background out as part of the whole scene. Since this one was eighty percent face I never did. I printed out the finished pencil sketch in blue and grabbed my pencil again. I knew I was going to execute the background on the computer but it's still much easier to work out my ideas on paper and then scan them in. That's what I did.

I'm actually taking a break from the background to write this up. I've been working on this one drawing/print for about twenty hours now and I really need to give it a break. Except I've been into it and it's coming along well. Sometimes it's tough to quit when things are going well. I think I'll put it down until morning though.

Comics I Bought: November 20, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics plus a hard cover collection:

The X-Files - 1

StormWatch: Post Human Division - 16

Ex Machina - 39

Jack Kirby's The Demon Omnibus

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Fell" by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith

"Fell" is the name of a detective who just got transfered to a city called "Snowtown". It's across the bridge from a big city and Snowtown is the ass end of the world. It's run down, crime ridden, and nobody seems to care.

Fell isn't there to clean up the place or anything like that. He's been exiled from the big city across the bridge for some unnamed reason and he's just killing time until he can go back. That doesn't mean he won't do his best. He's a man who likes to do a good job in a town that doesn't know the meaning of "Do a good job".

"Fell" reads like an episodic police drama because that's what it is. No big giant story where everyone and everything is interconnected just small time crazies in a small time town that's falling apart. It's as jaded and cynical police drama as I've ever read.

I'm having a hard time criticizing the art because I'm ambivalent towards it. It's not bad but there are a lot of things I don't like about it. I also understand that there is not a lot of money to be made in many of these Image comics and it is a lot of work to draw one. Templesmith is really trying to make things interesting and it shows. Except I didn't find the art very interesting. But maybe that's just my taste. Either way I did appreciate his effort to make the most he could with the time and money involved. Comics are hard work and sometimes I can appreciate the effort even if I don't like the results.

All in all "Fell" is a dark episodic police drama. I found it a little too over the top cynical but it was generally well done. If that's what you are in the mood for then check this book out.

Hair Today

When looking back at old photos, as has been happening a lot lately because of Facebook, I notice that one of the first things people comment on is hair styles. This isn't a new observation as people have been laughing at old hairstyles for decades but it got me to thinking about people and their relationship to their hair.

The first relationship is nearly exclusively the domain of the male. There are always a couple of guys in the pack who have had the same exact hair style all their lives. It is a short and conservative haircut that rarely changes. Maybe the part changes from middle to side and maybe the length varies by an inch or two but nothing drastic. Ever. From age ten 'til age forty the hair is a constant. This is usually a sign of having pretty good hair that holds a men's classic cut well.

Of course there are now those who opt out by shaving their heads. This is mostly a man's domain and is really just an off shot of the people who always have the same cut. The cut is just been replaced by a shave. Once a person starts shaving their head they usually don't stop. Except the few who are going through a period as our second group is.

And that second group is almost the same as the first. Except that in this group a man has a period of long hair. It's usually when he is young. In college or just out and for what ever reason he grows his hair long. But not being a true "long hair guy" he cuts it at some point. Usually when the demands of a career force him to. From then on in it's the same short hair cut for good or ill.

The next type is the person who changes their hair around a bit. Mostly women fall into this category but I was a man who also fit in here. And it's almost always young people in this slot. I grew different parts of my hair long, shaved other parts, and had other lengths in between. Most young women go through all sorts of styles and lengths throughout their teens and twenties.

But then haircut fatigue sets in. It has a lot to do with peer pressure and the demands of a career but at some time in a person's late twenties to early thirties they start getting the same haircut over and over again for the rest of their lives. Unchanging.

A person may have had ten different haircuts over ten years and then the same haircut for the next ten years. When we see picture of the old haircut it will look funny no matter what. We get used to the same boring old haircut. It becomes the way we look and any deviation from it becomes funny looking. We become locked in.

The last relationship with hair is when a woman gets older and then cuts her hair short. This is part of haircut fatigue. "It's so easy to take care of", is always the phrase that goes along with the woman's short hair cut. I don't think most men care for this stage but by that point they know better than to say anything negative about their woman's hair. It's easier to not care but pretend you do.

Not being born with hair that is suited to a classic men's cut I have always a fan of the goofy haircut. I have had many of them in the past and I am not the least bit embarrassed seeing old pictures of myself. I too have had the same haircut (or lack thereof) for the last ten years and envy my younger self who had the energy and stamina for fun hair. It was a part of life that I enjoyed.

So embrace those old pictures and enjoy yourself when you used to have fun with your hair because it all inevitably comes to an end. And when people who have had boring haircuts all of their lives laugh at other's old pictures it makes me feel sorry for them. They just don't get it. Viva the funny haircut!

Comics I Bought: November 13, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Jack Staff - 19

Savage Dragon - 140

The Walking Dead - 54

Mister X - The Archives

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Astro City: The Dark Age 1: Brothers and Other Strangers" by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

"Astro City" as a series is one of the best written super hero comics around. The series is generally about a city, Astro City, in which a lot of super heroes make their homes. The stories are not as much about the heroes as they are about the relationship of the heroes to the regular people of the city and vice versa. It does a good job of capturing, the awe, ambivalence, mistrust, envy, and lots of other emotions that the citizens feel for the super citizens.

This volume specifically takes place in the 1970's. That was a bad era for the people of Astro City as a lot of heavy stuff went down and the world transitioned from its happy go lucky "Silver Age" to its grim and gritty "Dark Age". This is not as cheerful as the other "Astro City" volumes.

The story is about two brothers. One who becomes a cop as the other becomes a small time criminal. Yes that's a cliché that gets annoying at times but it is also used to good effect.

The book really takes off in the second half. That's when the criminal brother becomes a full fledged henchman in a criminal organization. He's has no aspirations to be anything but a small time thief but he just gets dragged along with the tide.

Brent Anderson's artwork is top shelf as usual. He's another one of those artists who when I'm just flipping through a book of his I don't find his art very interesting but when I actually read it the art comes alive. I really need a name for that phenomenon. His story telling is nearly flawless and he does a great job with the variety of super hero and super heroic events he has to portray.

You have to be in the mood for a dark story to read this. Not your normal nihilistic annoying dark super hero story but a story about trying to hang on to something during a time of change. Trying to make a life for yourself as the sands shift beneath your feet. It is really well written it's just not a "pick me up". So if you're not too depressed already give it a read.

For Want of a Font

I'm in search of a font. I thought I had one I liked but I was wrong. It all has to do with the web comic I've been working on for ages. Besides the subject matter of said comic and it's involvement with ideas from my prints, paintings, and photos one more thing I am concerned with is my choice of font to letter the comic in.

I don't want to letter it by hand or go with a traditional all caps comic book font. I want an uppercase/lowercase font but there are not a lot of interesting comic book fonts of that nature. It's a small niche. I moved on to some regular body copy fonts that I thought might work for me but they all seemed too mechanical for my liking. I don't want a stark contrast between hand drawn art and a mechanical font.

My next step was to rough some fonts up. That's when I convert them in Adobe Illustrator to "artwork" and skew and roughen them up a bit using some filters. I'm always coming up with filter "recipes" in Photoshop and Illustrator to apply to images so this is nothing new. It took me a while but I finally found a font and "recipe" that I liked. I though I was done.

Then everything lingered. The comic wasn't turning out to my liking. I worked on a lot of strips but never finished anything. That probably had to do with the fact I had no idea what the finished format was going to be. I didn't have the size totally knocked down.

As a matter of fact I was working at three sizes. Since this comic was supposed to unify my comic book, print, and web work I was trying to figure out the perfect physical size that would satisfy all three. I though I had it but I didn't. Hence me never finishing anything. If you don't know what size the finished building is going to be it's never going to be finished. Or something like that.

Today I found my size and format and actually finished one of the strips. Except for the font that is. Y'see in this new format the font size went up a couple of points. Not much but it was enough to make me not like my old font and roughening recipe. After I printed out a copy of the strip the font didn't look good. It looked shaky. Like it was a mistake. It looked like something went wrong in the process and it wasn't really supposed to look that way. Not a good thing.

So I spent some more time looking through my fonts today. I'm sick of looking through fonts. Especially because I am looking for something specific that probably doesn't exist. I want a body copy font for a comic strip that is a little bit funky but not too funky because it can't fight with the drawing for attention. And it has to be easy to read. Most funky fonts are display fonts and are not easy to read as body copy. I hate to have to struggle to read a comic because of the font. I don't want that for my strip. Call me picky.

I found a font I vaguely like called "Montara Gothic" which I am using straight up but it's not really satisfying me. The font I was using before that which I now don't like at all was a "Frutiger" all messed up and roughened.

Though I've always used and appreciated a wide variety of fonts I've never been a hard core type guy like some of the designers I've known. My knowledge of fonts is fair to middling but clearly not deep enough to satisfy my very particular need in this case. I will have to keep my eyes open.

Comics I Bought: November 6, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Savage Dragon - 139

The Incredible Hercules "Secret Invasion"

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Omega the Unknown" by Jonathan Lethem (with Karl Rusnak) and Farel Dalrymple and Paul Hornschemeier

"Omega the Unknown" was a series that was published in 1976 by Marvel Comics. It ran ten issues before it was cancelled. As a child it was one of my favorite series. I didn't buy it off the stands which means I probably got it from one of the older kids in the neighborhood after he was done with it. I also remember always having all ten issues in a bunch so I knew that's all there ever was going to be of the series. The ten issues probably reached my eleven or twelve year old hands in 1977 or 1978.

I'm guessing that I read all ten issues six to eight times between my receiving them and the end of high school. I haven't read them since despite having purchased them on Ebay a few years ago.

Obviously the series was also a favorite of the writers of this new volume about Omega. This isn't a continuation of the 1970's story but an adaptation of it. It's not a remake by any means (except for maybe the first issue) but they try to capture the oddness and mystery of the original in telling a similar story.

I think they succeed pretty well. The original "Omega the Unknown" was never a typical super hero tale and was loaded with Steve Gerber (the original writer) weirdness. This volume embraces the weirdness but doesn't overdue it as could be the case.

The story is about a really smart but odd teenage boy and the title character "Omega" who is a silent warrior fighting robots who destroyed his world but are now on Earth. The boy has been home schooled all his life but his parents have recently died so he is living in NYC now and trying to blend in with the rest of us.

Who are the lead characters really? What is their relationship to each other? These are the mysteries of "Omega the Unknown". If you are expecting straight forward answers then you better look somewhere else. The original series was canceled before the answers were given and it was never really about the answers anyway. it was about asking the questions. It was about wondering. So is this series though there are some more answers. Just not all of them.

Much like the original "Omega the Unknown" was different than all of the Marvel super hero stories around it at the time this series is also different than the rest of Marvel's offerings. It's about mystery, alienation, and weirdness in a way that's quite relatable. I wasn't sure how I was going to react to an adaptation of an odd and forgotten series that I loved as a kid but the writers loved it too. And they used their love of it's quirky uniqueness to make something interesting of their own. Give it a look.

Halloweenie

Halloween has come and gone for yet another year. Just like every other day. And for another year I've gone down to NYC for a photo journey at the Halloween parade. This is my fifth year in a row going down there and I've never actually seen the parade. Except for a glimpse or two. It's too much of a pain in the ass to actually see the big parade. I look for my own little ones.

I go to the streets around the parade and take pictures of people in their costumes. And people in general. There are plenty of people in costumes willing to stop for a snap. Some aren't but rejection is just another part of life. There are more people in costume then you will ever see any other place at any other time. At least I don't know of a place where there are more. Maybe Rio or New Orleans for their carnivals but it's tough to top a half a million people in costume.

Before this five year run of all the many years I was in NYC for Halloween I only went to the parade once. It was before I started liking to take photos in large public crowds so all I did was watch the parade go by. I was never a fan of watching parades go by so I found it dull and barely remember it. I can't even recall what year it was. In the early to mid 90's I'm guessing.

The parade is quite different now. Even from the mid-90's. First of all every other woman now dresses in a sexy costume for Halloween. And these are the women going to the parade not marching in it. In the mid-90's maybe one in ten women had a sexy Halloween outfit. Now it's seven out of ten. Halloween has become the official holiday of the short skirt and push-up bra. That's my kind of holiday. Three years in a row of warmer than average weather helps too.

The second change is the crowds. Man how they've grown. Just five years ago, when I first went to take photos, I walked the parade route just ahead of the parade. It was crowded but doable. Now it's impossible. The scariest moment I've ever had in all of my NYC experience was in that crowd three years ago.

I was with my two Steve friends, Hughes and Bunche, walking south on Sixth Avenue. We got near Fourteenth Street and it was madness. We were on Sixth Avenue in a river of people and we could only go forward. It was shoulder to shoulder and chest to back. You couldn't even take a step sideways let alone turn around. We wanted to turn down Fourteenth Street and get out of the madness because up ahead there was no end of people in sight. It took twenty yards down Fourteenth Street for the crowd to abate. It was crazy. It must have taken us fifteen minutes to get from the middle of Fifteenth and Fourteenth (on Sixth Ave.) to our exit on Fourteenth street. All that time we were at the mercy of the crowd. I could see how a person could get trampled to death in a large crowd with no where to go.

Now we stay clear of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue all together. Bunche was with me this year and we walked down Seventh Avenue. Plenty of costumes to be seen over there. And a little room. There are so many people out that there are not only barricades (between the street and sidewalk) on the parade route (Sixth Avenue) but there are also sidewalk barricades along Fifth and Seventh Avenues. That's so the spill-off people, like us, stay out of the street.

One tip I can give you if you plan to go down to the parade is meet up with everyone you are going with ahead of time. I've found my cell phone to be completely unreliable at the Halloween parade. For whatever reason it doesn't ring/vibrate. It just goes to voicemail when you call me or I call you. Or it just beeps at me when I try to make a call. And my phone isn't the only one behaving this way. I guess two million extra people for the night on those cell phone towers messes up the system a little. Don't depend on cell phones for meeting up. Plan ahead.

And besides, every cell phone call that I overheard was exactly the same. "Huh? What? Where are you? Huh? What? I'm not sure where I am let me look. Huh? What?" Yes, it's a little hard to hear out on the street amongst thousands of revelers.

That's another reason for meeting up first. Greenwich Village. I've ended up on the same Greenwich Village street three years in a row now. It's a great street to shoot photos because a lot of people congregate there to go to the parade. It's its own parade. And I still have no idea what street it is. Greenwich Village is another of those old Dutch parts of town where the streets run every which way. You have to hang out in the Village for a while to get to know your way around. Hanging out in NYC in general isn't enough. That's why everybody who wanders down there for the parade has no idea which street they're on. Including me. We meet up in Madison Square Park before hand. Much easier. Don't think because you know NYC that you know Greenwich Village. It's different down there.

The actual taking of the photos is tough. You have to talk with strangers and ask for their photo. Most are fine with this but not all. My friend Bunche is much better at this part than I am. He's a big weirdo too but somehow more approachable than I am. Strangers like him better and respond better to him. I notice that when I work and am non-verbal i.e standing in amongst the crowd quietly shooting video or photos people pay me no mind except maybe to smile or nod. But when I talk they are often startled no matter how polite I may be. But I'm used to being a big weirdo.

And it's hard to get really good photos at the parade. Taking pictures in the dark with a flash does not usually make for the best pictures. Shooting in video mode with available light is also a challenge. And there is not much room to back up and frame a shot. I don't think I've made a good photo yet out of all my Halloween shooting. But I hold out hope. It's fun to dress up and got out anyway.

Comics I Bought: October 30, 2008

Hey, I just realized I never posted what comics I bought this week. Halloween had me so distracted. Anyway, here you go.
I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Usagi Yojimbo - 115

Tomb of Dracula Omnibus Volume 1

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel (who I went to college with)

The title of this book "The Alcoholic" pretty much sums up what the book is about. Though a more descriptive title might be "The Alcoholic Author". Being a paid writer frees up an alcoholic's time to really indulge in some self destruction. A person who has to hold a nine to five job can't get into nearly as much trouble. Well, maybe they can but they'll end up losing their job and being out on the street.

"The Alcoholic" may be autobiographical or it may be not. The main character and the author share a first name and a last initial. The book jacket refers to the main character bearing "only a coincidental resemblance" to the author. It also refers to the main character as the author's "alter ego". It really doesn't matter to me if it's autobiographical or not but why are you playing me like that? It's annoying.

The book started out slow for me. I wasn't enjoying it because it started out like every story about an alcoholic. Blacked out, miserable, and at the bottom of the heap. How did he get this way? Let me tell you he got that way like every other alcoholic. He started drinking. And why did he start drinking? Like every other alcoholic because it felt good. Not a lot of insight.

Then somewhere around a third of the way in I started to like it. We get to meet the one person he has a real relationship with, his great aunt, and the girl who breaks his heart. He also has some interesting things happen to him during his clean years and his functioning alcoholic times. It's always about the drinking but sometimes more than that happens.

Dean's art is first rate. I think he really hit a high note in his graphic novel with Harvey Pekar "The Quitter" and he holds that note throughout this book too. His story telling is excellent and I especially like his sense of shapes and how they interact. Dean's art is the reason I bought this book and it didn't let me down.

Overall I have to say I liked "The Alcoholic". It started out a bit clumsy and awkward but picked itself up off the floor. The interesting rest of the book made it for me.