Reading Through 2021 100: The Interview, by Manuele Fior

 The Interview, by Manuele Fior

2013, English edition 2017

I had originally meant to stop at 100 entries in this blog, and as I prepared my 100th in May, a sprawling look at Uncanny X-Men Omnibus 3, I suffered extreme disillusion. The Internet is extremely disillusioning. I realized that people clicked through on reviews mainly on things they'd already read or had interest in, and mainly commented to express a disagreement. I think the saddest thing was posting some reviews on Reddit, and one time having negative votes. For posting a review. As if what American comics needed was fewer people thinking about, writing about, and caring about comics.  

I've continued to think about and care about comics, but not write about them. I'm sure I've read another 100 books in the last four months. The previous books in this blog feel like a year ago, not months. But I still do want to talk about and share the comics I read, especially the work that hasn't gotten the attention it should. 

In April, I read 5,000 km per second by Italian artist Manuele Fior. It was beautiful, emotional, and really exciting. It wasn't entertaining, or of the zeitgeist, nor did it have Batman in it. It was just a good book. I ordered two more of his books, and months later they arrived. I wasn't prepared for just how good and how different the first one I read would be.

Weird sexuality is a theme of the book

The first thing I noticed about it was that, while graphically in line with 5,000, he really was working a different part of his skillset with this. 5,000 was done in loose watercolors, with shifts in color palette throughout the book to match shifts in time and space. Here, he works in ink, both chunky brush and precise nib work. He uses something to texture the pages. Sometimes it's a gray wash, sometimes it's a pencil-like texture. His illustrations are, at their core, cartoony, but the pages carry a photographic weight in many places.

The book has a unique atmosphere, never exactly realistic, but with very natural structure underlying  the images

Like 5,000, it's a mild sci-fi. The story takes place in 2048, but it's very recognizable as our world. Some youth fashion shows it's in the future, and most of the cars are self-driven (part of an early plot point has the middle-class protagonist driving his own car as a luxurious indulgence), but for the most part, this is our world. In 5,000, the story takes place over a few decades, so it was clear why the later half would go into the future. Here, the future setting isn't so important other than it gives Fior space to play with youth movements and how the older generations have difficulty grasping them.

This was the first real virtuoso page in the book. The movement on display with his hair and broken glass flying conveys the scene perfectly, with even the camera angle seeming to rock from left to right. It feels like being in a car accident

The book has two intertwined plot threads: The protagonist, a psychologist named Raniero, has a car accident late at night after a UFO sighting. This is haunting to him, as he knows it's 'crazy', but he also trusts himself enough to trust his experience. This happens as he's in the midst of separating from his wife.

The second thread involves a young patient named Dora he starts seeing, who has been admitted by her parents. She's a part of The New Convention, a youth movement that is against monogamy and traditional family structure. Immediately there is some connection between them as she doesn't feel she needs psychiatric assistance at all, and is only there because her parents can't understand her point of view. The two of them have their views of the world rubbing up against the conventional understanding of life.

If this were a modern American mainstream book, the artist would have simply copy-pasted the illustrations. Fior animates his characters from panel to panel, breathing life into them.

From there, there is some inevitability that they will sleep together, as dual protagonists in a story, but also that they have established an emotional connection. But that isn't the story. I'd be hard-pressed to say what the story actually is. It's a series of emotional shifts as two people with unstable lives navigate the world, a world that pushes against their own personal realities. 

I haven't watched them in decades, but I greatly enjoyed the 60's New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard when I was in my twenties. There was barely a story, just emotional truths and gorgeous images. This book has a lot of that. In the wrong hands, this book will be extremely boring. This book is much closer to 'art' than to entertainment. I have a lot of entertainment books, not a lot of 'art' books, which is probably why this resonated so strongly with me. I'm hungry for work like this.

While the art has a feeling of cartooned realism like the best of Disney movies, a sex scene is interrupted by a nude panel that is borderline photographic except for Dora's face. It stops you in its tracks, and likely that is the emotion Raniero himself is feeling as his world stops and he takes in the body in front of him. 

I have no idea of the techniques going on here

Fior has violence trickle through the book as well, that casts a shadow over the rest of "normal" life.

Fior's storytelling is fluent, if I had to choose one word

Fior balances down to earth talky scenes with panoramic scenery, and spurts of sex and violence. It's about the glacial shifts of emotion people go through in their lives. People change slowly, but they still decidedly change.

At the end of the book, I was wondering just what I had read. It was not a story in a conventional sense. But I loved it. It had resonance. I thought about it for days after and opened it up again to look at the art a few times. It's a short list of books that come off the shelf so soon after they go up.

Young people, ugh

I was taken by the body language, the facial expressions, the lighting, the architecture. Fior is a comic artist at heart, but he's working in a school of art far outside of what I'm accustomed to. I've been reading alternative comics for decades now, through Raw, Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, L'Association, and so on, and while I've often seen masterclass work through those venues, I don't see so much these days where the artist is staking out new territory like Fior seems to. 

Once you see what you're looking at, this is a pretty incredible two panel sequence

I have one more Fior book on the pile, and I'm just going to have to order the others Fantagraphics have made available. I don't know if they'll all be as exquisite as this, but they have to be worth the read.

Reading Through 2021 98: I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

2012, English edition 2018

It's a great story, and it has great art. Is it a great comic?

The oversized hardcover is perfectly printed

Previously I read the first volume of Tardi's Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder, and I loved it.  It really clicked for me.

I promptly ordered this series to see more personal work from Tardi and it's great. The cover notes promise "an artistic triumph," and it's hyperbole, but maybe accurate. The book is 180 pages of impeccably drawn and researched images of WWII era France and the camps of Germany.

The vast majority of the book is black and white, except a select few pages with accents

For Tardi, the book couldn't be more personal. This is his deceased father Rene Tardi's story of WWII. Tardi had asked his father to record as many memories of the war as he could, and his father obliged with detailed accounts supported by illustrations to make things clearer.

Father Rene's image on the left, and Tardi's own image based on it

Tardi then went and did his own research to create a more fleshed out image of the period, and proceeded to make three books out of it. This first volume covers the start of the war until the fall of the Reich in 1945.

Tardi inserts himself in the narrative as a boy, critiquing or questioning his father's story

The book maintains a consistent three-tiered, three-panel page throughout, and is narrated by the father as it happens. While the father goes about his life as a soldier or later, a prisoner, Tardi himself has dialogues with him about exactly what is happening.

Actually killing a person for the first time leaves the father with something like PTSD

As a story, it's as compelling as any other serious war narrative that takes the time to show the human cost and that there is no easy solution. Rene Tardi was a young man in his early 20s, and five years of his life are wasted fighting and later imprisoned in a neighboring country. France is occupied early on in the war, and the French soldiers are interned deep behind enemy lines where they are often used as slave labor. 

Tardi adds a little humor to his role as the artist of the book

Rene has few illusions about the reality that his life there sucks, but that it's also a lot better off as soldier from a country at peace (through its occupied government) than to be an interned soldier from a warring country like Russia. He is suffering, but realizes he could be suffering a whole lot more.

Tardi cuts no corners with the art. Every picture is drawn with attention to detail

Relative to war stories, it's not overly horrific, or I'm just getting numb to it all in my old age. Rene acknowledges all the other horrors of Nazi Germany, but is lucky to be shielded from the worst of it.

Camp life

This is an amazing story, it's a comic, but comparing it to his noir work, he avoids making this compelling or exciting with comic techniques. It's told in a dry manner. I read Paco Roca's excellent Twists of Fate this year, another book about a personal recollection of WWII. That book attempts to put you in the action, to let you experience what the main character did. In contrast, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB seems more comparable to a Ken Burns documentary. It is full of scenes of the war, but doesn't so much show them as they happened as it does show that they did happen. 

The use of photos is one of the rare instances of comic panel-like images

I can't know why, but I imagine Tardi simply didn't want to "write" what happened to his father. He wanted his father's words to speak for themselves. Rene left ample personal notes on his time, and it seems to be an appropriate choice.

Nationality divides even prisoners in this world

A true story of war is not a happy one, but even acknowledging that, I was disappointed at first with this book. So much of the energy that I loved in Streets of Murder wasn't in here. As I sat down with it, I enjoyed it for what it was, and furthermore, understood that this approach to the book was the appropriate one. 

Tardi has managed to pay tribute to his father, and also give a vivid and personal account of WWII. We're all the richer for him sharing it.

Reading Through 2021 97: Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

2019, English edition 2021

Some creators are just so polished and developed, that their work seems like a force of nature.

Urasawa is a fairly well-known creator in the West from series like 20th Century Boys, Monster, Pluto and others. He's prolific, and started a new series in 2018, Asadora. It's already five volumes in in Japan, and two with the English editions. What's this about? I have no idea, but book one reads like the tip of the iceberg. The book opens in 2020, with a beautiful scene of a kaiju attack. 

I wish there was more full-color manga than just the opening five pages

From there it goes to Showa era post-war Japan to focus on a latchkey young girl named Asa living in, I think, Nagoya. She quickly is given some character hooks: she is one of a dozen siblings and considers herself lost in the shuffle. Her siblings are said to have good names, but hers, Asa, is simply "morning," referring to when she was born. She is naturally a fast runner, and is taken with an English pop song she sometimes hears on the radio.

People confuse her for her siblings. Urasawa has a way of animating every character and keeping them perfectly on model

The last Urasawa book I read was Mujirushi, a story about a precocious young girl who never lets anything stop her, and almost immediately I was frustrated that this character is so similar, but Urasawa does it so damn well that notion falls to the wayside. This is a plot-based book, doused in character, so there is no time to dwell on what similarity one character has to another. 

Asa has a run in with a lowlife robbing a house, and instinctively calls for help. The burglar panics and ties her up, and already, stakes are established. 

The thief has a great character design; you know he's had a rough few years from his weathered face

But these are all people. Throughout the book, there are stock characters filling in minor roles, but any character that appears for more than a few pages becomes well-rounded. Asa has a later scene with the owner of a rice ball shop who similarly starts as a one-note character, but within a few pages begins to show her own nuances. 

The marvel of this book is that it is so successful in the main challenges of popular genre fiction: it has the vivid characters, it has the effective storytelling, and it has the stakes that matter to all characters. The themes are there too, about being who you want to be rather than what life might push you to be.

Halfway through volume one, an event occurs that sets up the second half of the book, organically allowing character development, and also laying the groundwork for the second volume and beyond.

A flashback reveals some of the loser burglar's back story, and an incredible transition of worthless race tickets falling into balloons rising

Urasawa has multiple characters that are distinguishable at a glance, all with animated expressions that can tell a story even without dialogue. What gets me about his art is that it is quite loose. I can see the hand in what he's drawn. These are not mechanical lines. Despite that, things have a consistency comparable to a Miyazaki movie. This is the hand of someone who's drawn countless hours.

The pacing of a scene like this is so perfect, it almost moves: panel one established the traffic jam, two introduces the little car, three shows the car in contrast to the trucks, and four shows it managing to do what the trucks can't

That's not to mention the storytelling itself. This is a comic, it is not a storyboard, but it would be very easy to see this adapted to animation. Scenes flow from panel to panel, and he often uses cuts within scenes to give scenes depth. Like many of the best comic artists, it's difficult not to read his work at a glance, though Western readers need to keep the reversed right to left movement in mind.

The eye of the storm

My reaction to a book like this is something like I might to a Disney movie where the immediate reaction might be, "Oh, another one of these." And given a few minutes with it, that morphs to "Yes, another masterfully produced story."  Urasawa is doing something a lot more idiosyncratic than Disney or the like though. I slowly started to read the book a chapter at a time, but by the fourth chapter, I just burned through the rest and ordered the next volume. It was that good.

It's so frustrating when you try so hard to do something, and someone else does better than you without any effort

And the thing is, the kaiju from the opening page of the story is not a factor in the rest of the book. That's a taste of what's to come. Future volumes are going forward in time, and on the cover of book five, Asa is a student. It's likely going to get to the year 2020 before it's done.

On sale now!

I've never read a manga with the story in progress, I'm excited to read this one. I liked it so much that I've decided to try to read the Japanese version and get ahead of the English editions.

Reading Through 2021 96: Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

Phoenix Resurrection, by Matthew Rosenberg, Lenil Yu, and more

2018

2015 to 2019 were the dark ages of X-Men for me, and this book might just be the eye of the storm.

It burns! It burns!

Let's go back to those dark days of 2018 and think about what was going on. The franchise was headless. The books had been spilt into Blue and Gold books to try to capitalize on aging fan nostalgia, and there was a concurrent Astonishing X-Men book out to capitalize on slightly younger fans nostalgia for that title. Basically, the line had been overextended for years, and the concept of a central "main" title had been lost.

At the same time, in order to "shake things up", the franchise had 

-killed Wolverine, only to immediately replace him with Old Man Logan, a time displaced version of him as an old man.

-killed Cyclops.

-left time displaced versions of the 1960's X-Men in the books rather than having Brian Michael Bendis finish off the storyline he'd begun with them. This was particularly egregious, as nothing those characters did after Bendis stopped writing them was compelling to me, or to most readers. The solo Jean Grey book had its fans, but I only lasted a few issues with it.

-left Jubilee a vampire.

-made Sabertooth a good guy, as opposed to a bad guy on a leash like he was the times he was an X-Man before.

-made X-23 the new Wolverine, despite Old Man Logan immediately filling the role on the team.

We have vampire Jubilee, teenage original X-Men minus Jean, and Wolverine is dead, just the old version of him

Most of this was pretty ugly stuff, though I was fully approving of killing Wolverine off for a few years, and letting X-23 step in. Ultimately, the company went with Old Man Logan, and never really let X-23 become the star she might have.

Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler were in a pretty traditional place.

With this special mini-series, that's the environment it was trying to thrive in, and it's an uphill battle. It's not a great book, it's not an all-time classic, but it has elements in it which place it firmly in the neighborhood of Claremont X-Men (good), as compared to Bob Harass X-Men (very bad).

Why would X-Men still bury bodies? Why wouldn't they at least have alarms and scanners on the corpses at this point?

The book is very continuity heavy, as in, if I weren't already a hardcore X-Men reader, I wouldn't even bother with it. Beyond the fact that a casual reader would have no idea who half the characters are, the versions of the famous characters aren't themselves, and there's no attempt to explain any of it. Why are there two Iceman characters? Figure it out, check Wikipedia. The book assumes you know exactly who everyone is, and why most of the main characters are nothing like they were five years earlier, much less twenty. Every Marvel team book needs a character page at the front or back, this one being a prime example.

Annie (in the glasses) is the key to the story. Annie's death during Jean's childhood triggered Jean's powers originally

The prologue and much of the story is focused on Jean Grey's origin story, which is also not explained in the book. If you're a diehard fan, you'll know that Jean was playing frisbee with her friend Annie when Annie ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Jean's telepathic powers were triggered and she experienced her best friend's dying pain. You've read the black and white Marvel magazine from the 1980's Bizarre Adventures #27, which had the origin of Jean Grey, right? I'm sure it's been retold elsewhere, if only in single panel flashback, but it's just not that well known. Writer Rosenberg's choice to make this a key part of the story is the correct choice in order to make a story with an emotional core that's true to the character. The choice not to retell the story in the book, or even reprint a single page for newer readers in the ancillary material at the back, is... I don't want to say baffling, because Marvel makes comics for 40 year olds these days. I'm too accustomed to it to be baffled by Marvel. But it is symptomatic of a bad publishing strategy.

The art is very understated for a modern X-Men comic, and that is really nice

So far, almost all the problems I've described are things that are the responsibilities of the editor and publisher. Given that the X-offices decided Jean needed to come back, that the "X-Men" were in a sorry state, how did Rosenberg do with these lemons? I think he did fairly well. The plot of this is that dead mutants are appearing and disappearing, and it's the Phoenix Force at it again, the cosmic entity that can't quit Earth.

In terms of double page spreads, I found this one lacking

The dead mutants are merely a distraction from the Force's real plan: bringing back Jean from the dead to be the new avatar for it. The Phoenix has had multiple avatars and they've never been stable, not like it was with Jean. So it's incubating her a new body to bond with. Why the Phoenix creates a town populated with dead mutants and a diner run by a grown up version of her dead childhood friend is vague, but sure, maybe the emotional resonance is soothing. It's a superhero comic. 

It's such a weird concept to make another book about dead X-Men... Necrosha was probably a year ago in Marvel continuity

What I liked about this is that, despite the fights, this is not a fight book. When it's all resolved, it's an emotional resolution. I've been reading pieces of the Claremont run recently, and when that book was at its best, it wasn't because characters were punching each other. It was because the characters talked and expressed themselves. It was a sensitive book. 

I'm not going to make the thesis that that is what an X-book has to be; books and characters evolve with the times. But if you think about what made X-Men stand out on the stands in the 1980's, when it was the number one selling book in America, it was the heart of it. It was the way the characters expressed longing and fear, and supported one another through it all. 

The book has battles, but ultimately it's about personal relationships and philosophies on living

Rosenberg, at least with this book, got that, and made it a story about Jean's heart, not about overcoming a cosmic being. 

He went on to write the short run of Uncanny X-Men before House of X/Powers of X, and I think it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if it was the assignment here that raised his game, or if the assignment of killing time (and a ton of characters) before HOXPOX left him uninspired.

Even if it is only for one book, I like seeing this variation on Phoenix's costume

In the current HiX-Men continuity, death has been removed from the narrative of the X-Men. All characters now can be reanimated in a snap, so I wonder why this book was even editorially mandated to be made. Shortly after, Cyclops also would be mandated to return, using some other comic book logic. Why did they bother to do that when in HOXPOX, they brought back everyone any writer wanted to use? 

It's baffling, and makes me question just what the point of this book even was, when it's unlikely to ever be referenced in continuity ever again. But, if you ignore the convoluted continuity it was based in, and that within a year, all of the continuity in this would be ignored, the book itself is pretty good! It has some of the stuff that good X-Men comics are made of.

Reading Through 2021 93: The House, by Paco Roca

The House, by Paco Roca

2015, English edition 2019

Paco Roca is a sensitive man, and I'm here for it.

The cover is a pretty good summation of the vibe of the book. If you like this, you'll like the book

This is my third Roca book, following Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist. He has at least another two books I haven't read, but it's only a matter of time because I am going to become a completist. He's making a kind of comic which few others are: mature, refined stories without any manufactured melodrama. 

Roca uses strips within strips on many pages, capturing multiple small moments

Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist were both true stories, more or less. Fate was based on one man's account of WWII, while Winter was based on the lives of a number of 1950's Spanish cartoonists. The House isn't explicitly autobiographical, but the degree of detail and the similarity of a central character to Roca in age and job gives the feeling of true experiences.

The use of color is impeccable. The story shifts between the past and the present through an adjustment of the tint. Here it's more pronounced, but he uses many subtle changes as well

The book starts with the death of the elderly father of a family. His three grown children are left to take care of his rural weekend home and prepare it for sale. It begins with the younger brother (who seems to be the Roca analogue), and later introduces the oldest brother and a sister. 

While the other books of his that I've read were done in brush and ink, this seems to be done with something like a Rapidograph. I'm partial to brushwork, but Roca gets a lot of life out of his line, and his coloring manages to capture an organic, brushlike stroke. He manages to create a very clear, structured image, but still maintain a lively feel to the lines.

Color here is used to highlight how different memories are just thrown away 

The book uses a wide, panorama format, on whose pages Roca crams multiple rhythms. A page might have three or four horizontal sequences, or two horizontal sequences and one vertical. The panel layout remains intuitive to read no matter the format.

As a writer, Roca navigates a number of threads as we're introduced to these characters. The first is the relationship of each grown child to their father. The father having passed away, all are confronted with the things unsaid, the promises they never quite kept, and just accepting that a period of their lives has closed.

The three siblings themselves have a relationship dynamic that is slowly revealed through their interactions.  All three are married and show different dynamics within their own new families as well.

Another page with multiple rhythms. An elderly neighbor sheds insight on their father's experiences in his later years

All of these relationships are nuanced without veering into cliché. Perhaps the relationship of the two brothers is the simplest, as the older brother has a bitterness to him over feeling pressure to be the responsible one in the family and having to handle the most of the father's estate. Still, their dynamic manages to have complexity as they deal with their relationship to one another as well as both to their father. Both had very different perspectives on how their family life was.

A particularly nice use of time shifting as a brother remembers the view he once saw when he was a child

I was only a few dozen pages in before I started deeply considering my own life and my family. The situations Roca is portraying are all too real. He pulls out a lot of emotion from the reader by showing realistic dynamics rather than amped up ones, and that is no easy feat. The patriarch of the family is absent in the story, but his presence still weighs on everyone. All of them spent long amounts of time at this second house, but less and less as they got older. Eventually it became their father's house more than the family's house. Simply being in the house makes them recall parts of their lives long past. Not necessarily better days, but different days long gone, impossible to reclaim.

As a reader, it's hard not to reflect similarly on your own life.

Here, the present and past overlap, as a grandson remembers only a few years back

As they look after the house, they see how their own relationships have moved away from each other, and to an extent have to reckon with their own families which might someday suffer a similar fate. 

The book has very cinematic vibes, with the consistent use of space and people in it, allowing the reading of the work to be intuitive  

The book is in no way a sad or depressing, it's got some humor mixed in too. It's simply a reflective, contemplative work, recalling those times in your life when you stop for a while and survey the state of your life. The act of reading this caused me to consider my own. 

Roca writes as well as he draws, creating a space for the characters' emotional lives and for readers' emotional lives too.

Reading Through 2021 91: Fran, by Jim Woodring

Fran, by Jim Woodring

2013

What can you write about Frank? 

I have three Frank books (four with this one) and they all somewhat blend together. They all use simple panels, are wordless, and have remarkable inking. The plots in them are all abstract, so it's not easy to say "Poochytown is the one where Frank does..." Rather, it's another Frank book where stuff happens, with some incredible art.

Woodring throws down the gauntlet with panel one, inking shadow like a 16th century engraver

Fran is anther Frank book with incredible art. More than other Frank books, it has something that resembles a plot or an arc, and that threw me off at first. As is stated on the cover, the book continues and precedes another book, Congress of the Animals, which I unfortunately haven't read (and isn't easy to get ahold of these days).  

Frank can't draw very well

I took a quick look at the synopsis for Congress, and it seems to be different than other Frank books as well, so I guess I need to track down a copy in order to better understand this. I love Woodring's art, but the Frank books are all of a piece together, and it's hard to say one is a must-have over any other, which is one reason I haven't consistently bought them all.

Woodring has such control over his inks that he can make Frank's pupils dilate

Regardless of what the connection between these two books are, Fran is its own book. The character Fran reads as a female Frank, from the name and the ears which recall a woman's hairstyle, but it would be too much to say it's a female. I'm sure I'm putting some heteronormativity on to my classification of them, since Frank isn't necessarily male either. What can be clearly seen in the book is that Frank and Fran have a relationship. They sit in a tree together, they play together, but more troubling, Frank shows some aggressiveness and possissiveness towards Fran.

Frank finds a device that goes into your mind, Fran doesn't care for the device

In past books, Frank has shown all range of emotions, sometimes troubling ones. The cuteness and simplicity of Frank's design makes him a character you instantly empathize with, so any time he does anything remotely problematic, it's so frustrating to watch. It's like watching your toddler behave terribly at the park.

Fran doesn't respect Frank's device

That's some of the magic of reading Frank. You rarely feel like you're reading something that's being written. Rather, it's as if you're watching something happening before you. In this way, it is to traditional comics like a nature documentary is to a traditional movie.

When Frank grabs Fran's arm, it expands with consternation, which terrifies Frank. Fair enough 

Frank alienates Fran, Fran leaves, and Frank, Pupshaw and Pushpaw (Frank's dog-like companions) follow. It's a sort of adventure, but it deteriorates into psychedelic weirdness. Always in Frank, the story occurring before your eyes never makes sense in an explainable way, but it is happening in Frank's world and is understandable on an emotional level. When Fran's arm starts expanding, it's not like that was the logical place for the story to go, but it makes sense in the confines of Frank's world. 

Frank flies a rocket into the underside of his world, a new aspect of Frank's cosmology. That's a beautiful rendering of the impact

Fran definitely is as good as any other Frank story, though it felt slightly less abstract than the Frank stories I've read before. It's still a great deal stranger and more creative than most other books I've read all year, but in terms of Frank books, the focus on a relationship made the book feel relatively down to earth.

Frank can't connect to himself

The book production is impeccable, printed on a heavy, yellow paper with a printed purple hardcover. The ink work is as clear as you could hope for. And the art in the book is absolutely stunning. Every few pages I would pause in awe of how amazing the ink work on display was. It's so good that I take Woodring's art for granted. I've been reading his stuff for 25 years, and have loved it every time, but haven't become a completist because I've pushed new books aside as "another Frank book," while I bought something else that often disappoints. He's a bit like Chris Ware like that for me, in that I'm not usually dying to read a new book, but when I do, I absolutely love it.