GRAPHOMANIA

Sex! Violence! Money! These are all the things I promise to write about, here and elsewhere. At some point.

As I’m sure you’ve seen, I can’t keep up the regular comics reviews on here. Paying work comes first and I hate half-assing things. I’ve also been a little down about the prospect of continuing to work independently. I can’t go back to full-time newsroom work because I need to take care of our kid. I always come back here with the intention of making things happen more regularly; maybe I’ll be able to do that now. I have irons in the fire, finally, after years of trying, and while it’s not clear that anything will actually come of them, it’s nice to be moving forward. Sorry to be vague and depressing. I’m going to try out Amazon Affiliate links starting with this post. First some art, then some news items I’ve found interesting:

• Thought folks might be interested in a factoid that led me to some really cool art recently: Chris Cunningham, who did indelible videos for Scottish techno act Aphex Twin in the 1990s and ‘aughts, also worked for comics magazine 2000AD under the pseudonym “Chris Halls.” It’s mostly covers and pinups but he did the interiors on a chapter of Garth Ennis’s big apocalyptic story “Judgment Day” and they’re great. If you’re trying to track down the rest of the story, there are several reprints under the name of the serial and it’s in volume 17 of the Complete Judge Dredd Case Files.

• One thing that doesn’t seem to penetrate for far too many smart people is that while all politics is local, politics that get big enough are always international. Movements that are predominately American are not necessarily fundamentally American, something you’d do well to remember if you’re reading stories about book bans and anti-queer militants. To wit: Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, one of the most important documents of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is now the subject of schoolroom book bans in Japan, ostensibly because of a scene depicting badly behaved children. Thanks to Megan Peters at Comicbook.com for catching the Japanese-language story and writing a good rundown. (Barefoot Gen is ten volumes long, fwiw, and the lettering in the Last Gasp translation is appalling, though the translation itself is pretty good and the book is seminal. He also wrote I Saw It! for Shonen Jump in 1972, about experiencing Hiroshima as a six-year-old, if you want a shorter version of the story.) Nakazawa, who died in 2012, led a fascinating life—read Matt Thorn’s terrific obit for him at TCJ.
• I’m amped for an upcoming Batman miniseries, something that is probably a little embarrassing to admit but what the hell. I like Batman. I love Rafael Grampá, a Brazilian artist whose Batman book with Frank Miller, The Golden Child, is probably the best thing Miller has done since Martha Washington concluded in 2007. Grampá is working solo now, something I’m always happy to see, especially on Batman. It’s just really hard to screw up a Batman story and there are some artists, notably Grampá’s fellow Brazilian Lee Bermejo, who are better on their own than with their closest collaborators. Grampá has been posting promo images on his Instagram and they’re all gorgeous.
• Speaking of Instagram my pal Mona Chalabi won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times cartoon article about wealth and Jeff Bezos. I say “speaking of Instagram” because Mona’s Instagram is consistently the best journalism I regularly read. She’s also just a lovely and interesting person and I miss working with her.
• READING RECS: I’ve been reading a lot recently—Emily Carroll’s fantastic A Guest in the House is one of my favorite upcoming books of the fall, alongside Daniel Clowes’ Monica. Monica is really a top ten for me—I love Clowes but it’s a cut above even for him. I also really dig Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy although it may not be to all tastes. The art is incredible. Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Hernandez Walta just finished the first arc of their new series Phantom Road; it’s very much up my alley—a sort of puzzle-box story with a lot of action and of course Walta is one of those artists who improved immeasurably with generous deadlines, and I already liked his work a lot. I continue to enjoy W. Maxwell Prince and Martín Morrazzo’s horror anthology series Ice Cream Man. I keep waiting for it to reveal some big tiresome meta-framework that will bind all the interesting short stories together but Prince keeps outflanking me, which is a pleasant feeling.

That’s all for now! Comment if there’s something you’d like me to write about!