Comics I Bought: January 29, 2009

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

Usagi Yojimbo - 117

Savage Dragon - 144

Mr. X: Condemned - 2

Glamourpuss - 5

Criminal - Volume 4 -"Bad Night" (Hey I never got Volume 3!)

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

"Bottomless Belly Button" by Dash Shaw

The publishers notes on Amazon tell me this book is 720 pages. There are no page numbers in the book so I'll have to take their word for it since I'm not going to count them. So this is a big book. But not quite as big as it seems since it uses the alternative comics "one or two panels on a page surrounded by lots of white" style (not on every page but on some) that I've noticed cropping up in the last few years. Usually in these large page count black and white comics.

I wonder if this style would be analogous to a "page turner" in the world of text books? The type of best seller that has short chapters and short paragraphs. You literally have to turn the pages faster in this book during the sections when there is only one or two panels on a page. I'm not sure what this stylistic choice means besides padding the page count. At half it's length it's still a long story anyway.

Anyway this book is about a family consisting of two grandparents, three of their children, one daughter in law, and two grandchildren getting together, for a few days, in the grandparents' house because the grandparents have announced that they are getting divorced. I'd say that the book deals with the family's reaction to this news but most of them have no reaction. One son is really upset and the rest are not very disturbed by it.

This book is along the lines of the "slice of life" indie comic that has popped up recently. Ordinary people with no special insight muddling through. I generally like slice of life stuff but it can also get tedious. Muddling through can be quite dull. This one wasn't too dull though. I generally enjoyed it.

I'd describe the art style as "not searching for perfection but getting the job done" indie style. What I mean by that is that the drawing isn't very pretty but that's not what the artist is going for. He wants to tell a story. And to tell a 700 page independent comic story (for little money I guess) he can't worry about making a pretty drawing. He just has to draw.

So the drawing is no frills but Shaw finds interesting ways to tell the story and keep us into it. He has a novel approach to certain hard to draw things such as wind. When he thinks wind in the background is important to the story he draws dotted lines to represent the wind but also letters the word "wind" right among the dotted lines. Kind of literal sound effects.

Overall I liked this volume. There was no great insight in it but it got me thinking about the nature of family. I think that's what it wanted to do. So if you're into a slice of life story and want to explore the dynamics of a family check this one out.

One Foot Two Foot

I ordered some new shoes this week. I have short, wide, and tall feet that are hard to fit. I used to dread going shoe shopping because out of every ten pairs that were supposed to be my size maybe one pair would fit me. Then, years ago, I found these Northfield Oxford shoes. They fit great and I have been buying them ever since. They are about a hundred dollars a pair plus I have to get insoles for then since they don't have enough padding for me. So cheap they're not.

But this little piece of writing isn't about my shoes. My shoes just got me thinking about shoes in general. One observation, that has been made numerous times, is that women like shoes a lot more than men do. Cue all the shoe shopping references from "Sex and the City".

A second observation is that a bunch of guy I used to work with were concerned with how a woman's feet (and shoes) looked. They were by no means foot fetishists but a woman had to have pretty feet for these guys to be interested in her. This was foreign to me.

I'd also like to point out that these guys were ten to fifteen years younger than me. I mention this because none of my friends, who are my age (40-ish), have ever mentioned anything about a woman's feet in any of our "guys sitting around talking about chicks" discussions. I mean never. And women are a common topic among men.

This brings me too the thought I had about a woman's footwear and its relationship to the world. I think women's feet and shoes have become a form of sexual expression. They always were to some extent but now it's mainstream. It's linked to women in the workplace.

With men and women working together all the time the subject of what is appropriate and what is not always comes up. In our society men are usually the aggressors and women usually are the ones who dress sexy to get a man's attention. But that dynamic doesn't always work in the office. A man can get into trouble for being too forward with a woman and a woman can get in trouble for dressing too sexy. These are the pitfalls of the modern office.

I think that the interest in the sexiness of women's feet and shoes has grown up to compensate for this. If a bunch of guys are overheard talking about a woman's tit's or ass at work then there is a chance that they could get into some real trouble. If they talk about a women's sexy shoes there is almost no chance of a reprimand. It's not a hot button.

Women also have almost no chance of getting in trouble from their shoes. A woman could wear a top that is too low cut or a skirt that is too tight and be told to dress more appropriately but no one will ever mention her shoes. She could come to work in five inch spiked stripper heels and as long as she is wearing a conservative grey suit she won't get into trouble.

So there is my though about shoes for the week. Not that women haven't always used shoes to express their sexuality but because of the rules of the work place shoes and feet have taken on a new life as a safe and mainstream expression of sexuality.

I just never know where my thoughts are going to take me.

Comics I Bought: January 22, 2009

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

Stormwatch Post Human Division - 18

The X-Files -3

"Spider-Man - New Ways To Die"

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

The Immortal Iron Fist - Volume Three "The Book of the Iron Fist" - by Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, and a whole bunch of artists.

I enjoyed the first two volumes of Iron Fist but I was a little skeptical going in to this one. Y'see this volume collects some of the one shot issues and extras that were not really part of the first two volume story arc. A collection like that is usually a mixed bad. And this one was.

It started out strong. As a matter of fact the first half of the book was some of the best stuff to come out of this Iron Fist relaunch. The stories concern Iron Fists of the past. We get three stories set in three different locations and time periods. They are historical adventure tales. Not quite super hero stuff but not so far removed from it either.

The second half of the book was not so interesting. We get a "Day in the Life" type story with Danny Rand (Iron Fist). It's not that it was terrible but it really didn't hold my attention. It didn't seem to have much to say. Someone else might like it better but I found it to be the definition of "filler material".

The book is rounded out with a reprint of the original two issue Iron Fist origin story from the 1970's. They are solid issues that I had read recently in the Essential Iron Fist volume. Not too much to complain about there except the coloring.

Almost all of the current issues of Iron Fist are nicely colored but these old stories have terrible coloring. They were re-colored badly. The original 1970's coloring was better than this crap. All the color is grayed out and murky plus lots of airbrush technique was used on art that was never meant to have it.

Back in the 1970's the inker used to add shadow and shading to the line art not the colorist. So when that type of art is colored with shading it makes a mess of things. And boy does it here. The storytelling is ruined so badly by the coloring that it's impossible to read. I wish they had re-colored it in a 1970's style. It would have suited the story better.

So there you have it. Half of the book is excellent, a quarter is okay, and a quarter is a decent 1970's story ruined by modern coloring. A mixed bag as I expected. You make the call.

Stocked Up

This week I restocked some art supplies that I was running low on and bought some new things to try out. I finally got a new roll of canvas. I'd been out of canvas for a while. I only used small pre-stretched canvases last year and my large roll of canvas was completely gone. I don't think I stretched any of my own canvases all last year. I don't know why. Except it's easier to buy small (8"x11" or 11"x14") canvases than to stretch my own. With bigger canvases it easier (i.e. cheaper) to stretch my own.

I ordered a bunch of stretcher strips too. Those are the four pieces of wood that make up the rectangle that you stretch the canvas over. Since I had some ideas for what I want to paint I bought specific size stretcher strips. Some long and some short. Since I bought all these supplies from a web site I couldn't inspect the stretcher strips and one of the longer ones (38") is useless. It's bowed about half an inch and will not square up. That's the chance you take with pine. It costs less than four dollars so it's not worth returning but now I have to replace it. Luckily it's one of the few things I ordered that I should be able to get at a local store.

The temperature around these parts dropped into the single digits (Fahrenheit) last week and that lead to a strange thing happening with my order. I bought a bottle of ink along with everything else and when I opened my box full of supplies I noticed something was amiss with the ink.

At first the bottle looked like it had a black cork sticking out of it. This looked odd because corks aren't used on ink bottles. And corks aren't black. Then the cork broke off of the top of the bottle. I didn't quite no what was going on and expected the ink to spill all over everything but it didn't. Y'see the cork was the ink.

It took these supplies a few days to get to me and they must not have been kept anyplace heated because the ink was frozen solid. It also expanded as it froze and broke the plastic cap right off of the top of the bottle. The frozen ink "cork" was sticking about an inch above the top of the bottle. The bottle was only about four inches tall so that was some impressive expansion. The bottle was also wrapped in bubble wrap so that made for an even more odd sight.

Things would have been much worse if the ink was liquid when it spilled. All of the paper I had in the order would have been ruined. I'm glad it was just an ink bottle cap that got destroyed.

I bought a few of other things that I haven't used in a long time that were in that box. I got some marker sets. I haven't used magic markers, except for single color drawing (usually black) in a long time. Back in my school days I was pretty adept with markers. I enjoyed using them. I'm looking forward to trying out some of these new archival type markers that they have nowadays. I got a set of 24 brush markers and a set of 12 basic design type markers. We'll see if they do anything for me anymore.

Colored pencils were among the other things in the order. I don't think I've used colored pencils since 1988. I was never a big fan of them either. As a matter of fact I don't know why I ordered them. I'm not sure what I'm going to make with colored pencils. They are some kind of oil based pencil and maybe I just thought the set looked cool in the catalog. I am a sucker for sets of things.

I also found a good container. I mix some of my acrylic paint in these little plastic jars with lids called cubbies. They're airtight and the paint lasts a long time in them. I have a lot of them with various colors of paint inside. I've been keeping the cubbies in cardboard boxes but that is getting cumbersome. I've been looking for a more durable box to put them in. I ordered the ArtBin 900IDS storage container and it is just what I wanted. Now I need four more of them. Who doesn't love storage containers?

My order of art supplies came in four packages spread out over the end of the week. The one with the most fun stuff in it (markers, colored pencils, ink) was the last package delivered. I guess they were building up some suspense. I also got some boring old gesso and workable fixatif at a local store so I'm well supplied for the moment. That always feels good.

Comics I Bought: January 15, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics. Another slow week. I did get a hard cover collection:

"Charley's War" by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

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

Hulk "Heart of the Atom" - By a bunch of people.

This is a collection of Hulk stories that inspired the recent "Planet Hulk" story line. It all started in the early 1970's with a Harlan Ellison story in which the Hulk was shrunken down until he landed on a microscopic world. In that microscopic world he met a queen named Jarella who became the Hulk's girlfriend. By the end of the comic Hulk was back to full size and gone from Jarella's world. And that was just the first issue in this collection. You got a lot of plot in a 1970's comic.

Jarella only appeared in a few stories after that. One of them was from the mid Seventies and was one of the first Hulk stories that I ever read. So there is some nostalgia in this collection for me. The book end with a What If? story where the Hulk goes back to Jarella's world and becomes a king.

I really enjoyed this volume. Though the stories were never meant to make one big story arc they certainly do. Not in today's pre-planned six issue way but in an old fashioned Marvel Universe continuity way. They catch you up on what has gone before and point out what you need to know.

I hadn't realized how much I missed the old "Hulk Smash" version of the Hulk that I knew from childhood. I haven't read many Hulk stories since the late Eighties or so. I didn't read much of the Peter David run but read some of the Bruce Jones run. Whenever I'd read writers talking about the Hulk they'd always mention how hard it was to write the "Hulk Smash" version. They would always mention they found it limiting and were looking to write new takes on the character.

But in rereading these issue for the first time in twenty-some years I really had an appreciation for the good job the writers did. Harlan Ellison, Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Archie Goodwin, and Bill Mantlo all did an excellent job with the Hulk. And I think the "Hulk Smash" version of the Hulk is the most interesting despite his limited intellect and vocabulary. This volume made me reach that conclusion.

I'm glad I picked up this volume. Though the Hulk was one of my favorite comics during my childhood I haven't reread any of them in my adulthood. For some reason I didn't think they would hold up (probably listening to all the people who poo-pooed them for their "lack of sophistication") but they do hold up. I was content with my fond memories of my old Hulk issues but now I'm going to have to go back and reread some of them.

You Gotta Look

I got a bunch of new comic book and strip collections for Christmas. One of them is "Get Lost" by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. It's a collection of the only three issues of that title that were published in 1954. I had never heard of it before I read about this new printing but "Get Lost" was one of the many comics that hoped to ride the wave created by "Mad". It's a humor comic and even looks like the early issues of "Mad".

Last year I got "Mad Archive Volume 1" and when I read it I noticed an awkwardness to it. I couldn't quite quantify or describe it but it was there. Good stuff but I still found it clumsy some how. When I started reading "Get Lost" I noticed the same awkwardness. It was then that I realized what it was. A totally different type of storytelling than I was used to.

Comic book storytelling is basically designed to keep you moving forward. The artists and writers try to control where your eye looks and bring you to the important points in the story as it moves forward. They can alter the pace of the story as suits them but it's a relentless march to the last page. The epitome of this is Japanese comics that move forward so fast that sometimes it seems as if I'm just flipping pages. Like a page turning novel they are all about what happens next.

The gag-a-day comic strip has an even more simple storytelling structure. It's set-up, pause, joke. Three panels are all you need and it's all about getting to the gag in the last panel. I'm tired of that gag a day comic structure which explains why I don't like many comic strips these days. Of course it could also be that there aren't many good strips around. After all, I still love the classics: Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and Doonesbury.

Even Mad Magazine, which I grew up reading in the 1970's, used a combination of these structures."Mad" had a lot of short strips that were of the set-up, pause, joke variety. It also had a lot of movie parodies. These parodies used the set-up, pause, joke structure within the context of a larger "Push you forward" story. The story of the movie it was mocking. Sometimes making fun of the plot of the movie was most important and sometimes the gags. Either way pushing you forward was paramount.

That is what makes the early "Mad" and "Get Lost" storytelling different. They are all about what is happening now. There is a story, or sometimes just general craziness, going on in the word balloons and overall main structure of the art but many panels also contains a lot of unrelated little stories i.e. gags. It is more related to single panel gag cartoons than gag-a-day comics or comic strips.

This type of storytelling is not about moving the reader relentlessly forward. It's about the reader pausing in the here and now to try and see all the sub-stories, sight gags, and funny drawings going on in each panel. This makes the overall story less important and awkward to read because it's interrupted so much. But it's also what makes this type of storytelling so different. The point isn't to keep reading until you get to the end. The point is to enjoy the humor of the "here and now" of each and every panel. The end be damned.

In the gag-a-day world of comic strips the first two panels are meaningless without the payoff of the third panel. In the world of "Get Lost" and early "Mad" nearly every panel exists on it's own with it's own jokes and funny drawings. Sometimes the point of a panel is just that it's a funny drawing. It doesn't matter what is going to happen next. What matters is that things are funny right now.

When I realized this as I was reading "Get Lost" I slowed down. I stopped paying so much attention to what was going to happen and paid more attention to what was happening. The next panel didn't mater so much. The awkwardness that I felt before was gone as I got into what the artists were trying to do.

I like it that there are new things to discover in old things.

Comics I Bought: January 8, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics. A slow week:

The Walking Dead - 57

Buffy Season Eight - 21

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

"Runaways" Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

"Runaways" is another book that I checked out a few issues of years ago. I liked them and made a mental note to check out the whole series at a later date. Later is finally here.

The Runaways are a group of teenagers, eleven the youngest and sixteen the oldest, who find out that their parents are super villains. So the kids run away. Of course the kids develop some powers and abilities of their after a little while.

I often find stories about teenagers annoying because of the "Hip young" slang that writers have them speak in. Not that I hang out with a lot of teenagers but I never hear them use the slang that writers have them use. And when I was a teenager I never heard much "Hip young" slang either.

Vaughan keeps the kid slang bearable but every time he uses the slang 'rents for parents it drives me crazy. I've never heard that piece of slang in real life but have heard it in fiction. It has such the ring of teenage slang made up by an adult that it always irritates me. After all teenagers have no conception of rent and the irony of calling their parents that is such grown up writer conceit. But that's just a pet peeve.

The writing is actually pretty good in this book. The script is fairly snappy and the plot interesting. What would someone do if they found out that their parents were super villains? That's what these kids want to know. They've been raised to be good normal kids and are shocked to find out their parents are evil.

And their parents are evil. Not in an over the top way but in a more subtle, "we'll even hurt our kids if they defy us" way. The parents are willing to deal out pain and death to get what they want and they think they're right about things.

The art is that "no line weight" style that I'm not too fond of. The artist (Alphona) can draw pretty well and likes to draw expressions on the kids faces but his lack of any expression in his line hinders what he's trying to accomplish. Every line is thin and reedy and that doesn't help with the variety of facial expressions he's trying for. The overly grey coloring doesn't help either.

It's the writing that is the real star for me in this book. I buy Brian K. Vaughan's "Ex Machina" every month but haven't read a whole lot of his other work. After enjoying this volume of Runaways I'll have to track down some more of his stuff.

Lost in the Wilds

Some people lose things all the time, some people hardly ever lose things, and most are probably somewhere in between. I'm a person who hardly ever loses things. Umbrellas, hats, keys, or whatever I generally keep track of them. I don't know why. It's not like it's a virtue or anything. Just a fact of life. So when I lose something it discombobulates me. I gotta know what went wrong.

Today I lost a pair of my gloves. If I ever lost another pair of gloves I don't remember it. I've had these gloves for about five years. They weren't expensive but I liked them. They were a pair of cloth gloves that I got from Target and I think they were marketed as "Sports Gloves". They had a few concentric ovals of grip material on the palm. There was no insulation in them. They were like sweaters for my hands. Not the warmest gloves ever but they were very pocketable.

My process of losing them began with my eternal question as I was headed into Manhattan to meet up with friends for lunch. "Should I bring a bag or not?" If I were carrying art supplies to sit in the park and draw then of course I'd bring a bag. But even if I don't need art supplies I do need supplies for the bus ride. My iPod and headphones. I like big over the ear headphones too. Plus I need my phone and pocket camera. That's a lot of pockets.

So I was trying something new. I usually just wear my duster in the winter but today I wore my sports coat underneath my duster. Besides extra warmth the sports coat has plenty of pockets. I wouldn't need to carry a bag. The headphones would occupy one of the big outside duster pockets. I had it all worked out. But having so many extra pockets can lead to extra confusion.

The first bit of confusion was as I got onto the bus. Usually when I get on the bus I put my hat and gloves in one outside pocket and my scarf in the other. The I take off my coat if the bus is warm. It was. My headphones were already in an outside pocket so there was no place to put my scarf until I removed them. Easy enough to do but habit is a strange thing and having something in a pocket that usually has nothing in it can lead to problems.

I reversed the process as I got off of the bus putting on my scarf and hat but not my gloves just yet. I had to go to the ticket window to buy some bus tickets. So I did. Here is where I'm not exactly sure what happened. After I got my tickets I moved over to put my change and the tickets into my wallet. As I was doing that my friend, Julio, came up to me to say hello. He was just passing through and saw me. We chatted for a few minutes and then moved on.

As I was walking down 8th Avenue I pulled out my phone and called the person I was going to meet. We picked a street corned to meet on (our original plans got a little skewed) and I hung up. Then I went to put my gloves on. They weren't in my pocket. I suddenly remembered a confusing moment with my gloves as Julio said hello to me.

As I was putting my money back in my wallet I had my gloves in my hand. Since I needed to use that hand I went to put the gloves in my pocket but my big headphones were already filling up than pocket. So I put my gloves down on a little shelf next to the ticket booths in the bus station. It was at this moment that Julio said hello to me and we started talking. As I left I completely forgot that I put my gloves down. Since I normally would never put them down. I'd put them in my pocket.

I immediately checked to see if my wallet was missing. It wasn't but in that confusing moment caused by things being in pockets they weren't usually in I wasn't sure what I put down. I looked in the wallet for my three dollars change and the new bus tickets and they weren't there either. I figured I must have put them down on the counter with the gloves. Annoying.

I then had a nice lunch. Occasionally I was flustered by the fact that I lost my gloves and tickets but glad that I didn't lose any of the more valuable items I had in my pockets. Twenty bucks worth of bus tickets and a ten dollar pair of gloves is not a great financial loss.

The strange ending to this story is as I was buying another set of bus tickets I saw three new dollars in the front of my wallet. They were my three dollars change that I thought I had lost with my gloves. I hadn't seen them in my wallet when I looked earlier and don't know why. I then looked for the bus tickets I thought I had lost and they were there too. My gloves were still nowhere to be found but I hadn't lost anything with them after all.

That is the story of a person who rarely loses things losing something. And then having to analyze how the loss occurred. Now I've got to find a new pair of gloves.

Comics I Bought: January 2, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics. I did get two magazines plus a hard cover collection:

"Back Issue" magazine - 29

"Back Issue" magazine - 31

Hulk: Giant Size

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

"H.P. Lovecraft's Haunt of Horror" by Richard Corben

This is the second in a series of "Haunt of Horror" books by Richard Corben. In the first he adapted some short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. This one does the same thing for Lovecraft.

I have never read any of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. I've read plenty of comics and seen plenty of movies that were inspired by his work but have never tracked down any of his writing. I'm not sure why. Everyone else seems to have read him. This book publishes some of his poems and stories along with Corben's adaptations of them. Interesting stuff.

I found this volume much better than the Edgar Allan Poe volume. The Poe volume seemed a little stiff and more like an exercise. Corben is a master storyteller so that is never a problem. I think Lovecraft's short narrative poems lent themselves better to this type of adaptation than Poe's did. If given the choice pick up the Lovecraft volume.

Corben's sense of mood and monsters is on full display here. The stories are all about scary things that go bump in the night and just flipping through the book is creepy. Lots of drawings of scary things and scared people. No one can draw a person scared for their life like Corben can. And people being pulled in different directions. For some reason in this book I noticed he's real good at that too.

Not much more to say about this one. If you're a Corben fan or just want to read some scary stories pick it up.