I've enjoyed, immensely, reading the tributes to Kim Thompson that they've been posting at The Comics Journal, enjoying them almost as much as I have the experience of re-reading the pieces he wrote that are currently available on the site. But I think my favorite moment out of this was reading the immediate response that showed up on the Fantagraphics twitter feed during the day when the news of his passing hit. I don't think I've ever disagreed with any of the criticisms I've ever heard leveled against Twitter, but there was one moment that day when I looked around the store I was standing in, surrounded by books that simply never would have been published, translated, or imagined if it hadn't been for the decades of hard work that Kim put in and I felt like somebody had thrown a sandbag into my stomach. And out of the corner of my eye, there was Fantagraphics, reposting the genuine admiration, respect and love that was pouring out from the people's whose lives his work had touched. It was truly inspiring.
I did not have very much interaction with Kim directly, beyond a short conversation at a convention (about Grotesque, a comic I still feel has never really been given its due) and another brief one about Lewis Trondheim. Except for that, I knew him purely as a fan, and while I have had a chance to deal with him on some more professional levels (through my position at Bergen Street), that is how I have and will always think of him. I loved reading his writing in the Journal so much, and when I look around at the life I have built for myself over the last ten years, I cannot imagine how desolate it would be were it not for the books he has helped shepherd to publication, the artists he has sought out, the languages he mastered. I am, first, foremost and forever, someone who loves to read, and Kim's life has enriched that love on a level that will be populated by only a few. And as sorry as I feel for people like Gary, Eric, Jacq, Kristy and all the rest of those closest to him at Fantagraphics, I can't help but think to myself how lucky all of them must feel--they got to see him all the time. I don't believe there's anything better than that.
Like a lot of people who read comic books in my age bracket--the one that no longer attracts the top ad rates on prime-time televison--I took a break for a while. I doubt my reasons were that much different than my fellows--wine, woman and song came a-calling, and money spent on Batman became money better spent on trying to make myself look presentable enough that I might find myself in hay, rolling.
When I returned to comics, bitter and jaded at the realization that love and adulthood were nothing like the film Real Genius, that no one thought it was charming and cute to be a cheeky car thief with a penchant for buggery, I brought my bad attitude with me.
"What's this," I scowled. "Gotham City had an earthquake? Lex Luthor was President? Vibe's still dead? LAME."
At least, that's what I remember it being like. I was also using economy sized bottles of horse shampoo as body wash at the time. (Those early 20's were a dark period!) One thing that had changed, however, was that I really didn't care what I was in the comics shop for anymore. Not that I wasn't there for comics, obviously, I was there for that--I just didn't really care what they were about, or who wrote them, or whether they were about Wolverine eating live babies or some random sketchbooks by Robert Crumb where he depicts every person he sees as if they are about to stab themselves in their eyes. (In a way, those two examples are the exact same thing, but let's stay focused.)
I just felt like reading comics again. I felt it so much that I just went to random stores, none of which were anywhere near where I lived at the time, because I was living in an actual cabin, in the actual woods, just like the Unabomber, except that I spent most of my time watching Michael Mann movies instead of constructing bombs and penning manifestos. One of the comics I randomly picked up at that time, purely on the basis of the cover, was 100 Bullets #8.
The red and white jumped out at me from where it sat on the bottom row with all the other new releases that were no longer technically new but not old enough to be considered back issues. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, and seeing what I've seen, 100 Bullets #8 isn't even in the top twenty of Dave Johnson's excellent covers for the series. (Not that it's a bad cover or anything. I like comics that reference old pulp stuff the way this one does. It's just that Johnson pulled off some really amazing covers later on down the line, and this one lands in the middle.)
By dint of not really caring whether I had a full run of the title, but liking it enough to keep my eyes open, I ended up with a complete "thus far" run of the title after one crazy summer that included an annulment and a drunken adoption that ended up really upsetting the government of Marrakech. I'd been reading the issues I found in fits and starts, not even attempting to figure things out, just enjoying it, the way these two creators just played around with language and violence, the way they toyed with the concept of arcs while stealthily building an epic in the background.
I didn't pay any attention to the comics internet at the time, so I had no idea who writer Brian Azzarello was, I didn't know that Eduardo Risso lived in South America and had scripts mailed to him. I doubt I would have cared much anyway. Now that I have to be on a computer all the time, I have developed a sort of masochistic interest in the backgrounds of the sausage factory, and while it doesn't help me enjoy a bad comic to know that the writer did a lot of research about pointless side nonsense, it does refine my disgust in an entertaining fashion.
It only vaguely helps with a good comic too--artists and writers are usually second only to painters in their inability to discuss their own work without spouting off a bunch of ridiculous garbage, the art crit equivalent of blaming a bad mood at work on a forgotten magnetic bracelet and ley lines. (Which is why I appreciate that interviews with Azzarello occasionally deteriorate into him talking about his favorite sports teams and his most recent grilling experience.) Most of the time, interviews with comics creators end up behaving like the trivia section in wikipedia entries for big budget movies. My feelings for Predator (pure white hot love) don't change in the slightest knowing that some of the Jean Claude Van Damme footage was left in, I just like being able to nod furiously to whomever is in my vicinity whenever those scenes appear. "See! He's the short one!" 100 Bullets shouldn't, in my case, be proclaimed the main reason I started using Google to take a look at comic book websites, but it was a pretty integral part. See, I'd never been much of one for community, but the more I read about Agent Graves and his Minutemen, the more slowly I discovered parcels and pieces of the history of the Trust, the times I stared wide-eyed at the panels of the comic Risso saw fit to brand with his iconographic signature box--I started realizing that this was a comic I really did want to know more about. Not that I wanted to "talk about it"--you can do that on message boards with anything, as long as you don't mind rubbing yourself in the sewer of people who compare Brian Singer's Superman to Nazi war crimes in the cold light of sobriety, without an ounce of self-awareness.
I just wanted to find that somebody I knew was out there, the somebody who was smarter than me, who was opening up all the hidden passages of the narrative that I'd yet to discover. I wanted to find that part of the world where there was a group of people who were just as startled as I was when a character in the series, a character that seemed so important ended up dead. I wanted, honestly, not to do this one on my own anymore.
For better or worse, 100 Bullets was the only comic I felt that way about--in a way, it still kind of is, Grant Morrison be damned. I've read comics during the period I've kept up with Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso that certainly stand as "better", if you're determining that word solely on aesthetic constraints and assignments of intent. But I have to say, there hasn't been one that I've looked forward to as consistently as I have this one. I've read 99 issues of this series so far, and I can tell you for sure: I've yet to finish one without hankering for more.
The series ends today. 100 issues, all by the same writer and artist. It's been a hell of a ride. And, like my mother used to say to me every time I left for school, a wee lad in short pants: I hate to see you go.
Speaking of things, here is a recording of me talking to a cabdriver who was taking me to the airport. He's explaining how semen works. The best part is when he says that it "fights with the egg".
Over in comic book criticism land, two guy took up Ng Suat Tong's challenge and delivered a couple of the smartest critiques I've seen in a while. The first was Alex Deuben, who went after Relish. Then there's these twopieces on the Before Watchmen comics. I've never read any of these comics, so I found those two articles pretty revelatory.
I'm not sure why I've been operating under the opinion that the Monkey See blog at NPR wasn't publishing stuff that interested me, but it turns out I was pretty much wrong. I ended up there courtesy of David Hudson, in search of Linda Holmes and her excellent piece on the dire state of women in (or on) film. As with most articles that deal with subjects like this one, you can not read the comments and save yourself some irritation, or you can read the comments for a while and see the actual cause of the problem described in the article played out for you in living, mouth-breathing, color.
The New Yorker has been a bastion of some of the lousiest cartoons for more than a few years now, but I keep reading them anyway, and I'm glad that I do. Edward Steed is a permanent bright spot on that front--sort of like a Kate Beaton mixed with that guy at Playboy who always did the best men-in-grey-suit jokes--and he's been even better than usual in the last few months. The best way to experience his work is while you're reading the magazine's 900th blisters-and-all takedown of a private school where all the professors are getting busted as the deviant creeps the rest of the world implicitly knows all of academia to be riddled with, but if you have to count your free time on one hand, the next best way is to head over to the Conde Nast website, where they bizarrely (and hilariously) explain every single cartoon with a level of detail only a blind person could possibly appreciate.
I usually read super-hero event comics for the same reason that I read children's comics and annoying 20-something comics: because it makes the workday way more interesting and fun to know what people are buying, reading and having opinions about. I'm less and less capable of separating my retail feelings about super-hero comics from anything approximating emotions, which is why I tend to get hyperbolic when I'm digging on Batman Incorporated or an issue of Daredevil, and that's why I'm so glad that Tim O'Neil wrote what he did about Age of Ultron. I skipped this one out of simple exhaustion, and while Tim makes it clear that I would have hated it, I won't pretend that his article didn't make me yearn for the days when a certain cabal of bloggers would all dogpile on a super-hero comic over the course of a few days. The last--I'd say ten years or so--it's become widely accepted to behave as if writing a corporate super-hero comics is some kind of art form on par with legitimate cartooning and such, and it's completely ludicrous. Alan Moore may have accomplished something with the form at one point, Grant Morrison and a few others aside, but even at their best, in-continuity Big Two super-hero comic book writers have about as much claim to the word "creator" as the guy freeze drying ramen does to the word "chef". Take a page from Ennis: treat it like a job, and shut the fuck up.
I read this a second time recently, and while I've never written about Coetzee or really spoken about his work with anyone (excepting a bookseller, but those people are essentially priests to my mind, what is said to them doesn't "count" in the way what one complains about to one's spouse is so incredibly personal that it takes on an otherworldly, inhuman quality after a long enough period of time), I don't believe I'll start carrying on about Coetzee now. It's absurd to think of him as mine, to hold him as personal, and yet--I still kind of do, he seems like a private secret, even if he is the author I see most often brought up when people are trying to provide an example of terse, deterministic prose. He's so consistently excellent, and this is my favorite of his many excellent books. It's the first book I'd read since I read a collection of real life Siberian gulag stories that features hardcore malnutrition and starvation, and I mention that because I hadn't realized how intense that gulag book had affected me--I actually abandoned it about a third of the way through, it was far, far more difficult to experience than I anticipated, and I just reached a point where I could no longer continue--because while I acutely remember how painful it was to read Coetzee's description of Michael's ongoing nutritional decay, it had little effect on me this time around. I'm happy about that, as the freedom from that uncomfortability allowed me the opportunity to revel in Coetzee's sentences, to get drunk on the dry heat with Michael.
How Proust Can Change Your Life (Not A Novel) By Alain de Botton, 1997
I don't think you could convincingly say that this book invented the internet anymore than you could honestly say that Manny Farber invented blogging, but I will admit that I have thought both of those things and I have thought both of them more than once: but to be clear, I am completely wrong. However, I sincerely doubt that de Botton would have been able to win a book deal and all a book deal's tidings for this particular volume without providing a website to prove that he had already written most of it already, for free. It's not that HPCCYL--don't worry, no one calls it that--reads like something that a ridiculous boy would write after someone explained that Julie & Julia website to him. See, it's Proust! And his life can be used as a self-help model, and when it fails to fit, you can use his crazy long ass book in its place!
The Twelve By Justin Cronin, 2012
While it's as un-put-downable predecessor may have the edge on The Twelve in terms of shocks and startles, there's an emotional urgency this time around the old post-apocalyptic vampire business. Like the first book, there's a few too many Stand comparisons--a mentally handicapped male saving the day, a do-it-in-public ending, even a lady traitor pops in--but I'd rather read a guy steal from The Stand than read...Green Mile, or that one about the plant that was sent around in emails. I should probably admit that I can still remember the ending of The Passage and how excited it made me for The Twelve, and yet as I write this now, at least nine months since I finished the book, I can barely remember anything about The Twelve. It did have an extraordinarily well written car chase, and I use the word "extraordinarily" due to the fact that "ordinarily", nobody writes car chases (they obviously belong to movies), and not only does Cronin deliver one, the one he delivers is note perfect. There's also something that happens in a field. Most of what occurs in this book only made sense because I know from experience that books need lots of sentences, and sometimes, those sentences are rather mundane.
The Baby Owner's Manual By Louis Borgenicht, Joe Borgenicht and Headcase Design, 2003/2012
This is a book by a doctor and a doctor's kid full of a bunch of information about babies, but delivered in a format familiar to anyone who is ever gone to an Apple store or watched the end credits of The Other Guys. It is helpful if you criticize something somebody said and they ask "who the fuck told you THAT" because it is easy to find stuff in it, because the whole thing is set up to be an illustrated index. It's okay.
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves By P.G. Wodehouse, 1962
This one is about Wooster going to hang out at Totleigh Towers to irritate Sir Watkyn Bassett, a former magistrate that despises him. Wooster is there because he's terrified that Bassett's daughter is going to split up with her fiance (and she is) and force Wooster into marraige, even though there's a gigantic freak who is in love with the daughter already, a feeling which she happens to share. The girl is in the process of forcing her fiance to go full vegetarian, which is causing him to spend a lot of time with the cook, who happens to be a young woman Wooster describes as having the face of a dog, a feeling the meat-hungry fiance does not share. The fact that these books are obvious and all sort of the same has so little bearing on the amount of pleasure one derives from reading them that I bet that's how you tell somebody has never read one, by listening to them dismiss them for their predictability. Brilliantly funny writing, some of the best in the language. Every time I read one of these, I quietly condem myself for it having waited so long.
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