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 75: Bezimena, by Nina Bunjevac

 Bezimena, by Nina Bunjevac

2019

Last month, I read Bujevac's Fatherland, and it was very good, if a heavy read. And that's okay. The world of comics needs heavy reads. Bezimena? Heavier!

This cover will either draw people in or push them away. It obviously "sexy", but not a very sexy kind of sexy 

Up front, I'll just say this book was doing and saying some things I didn't quite understand. And it was the kind of lack of understanding where I'm not sure if others would clearly get it and I was simply thick, or if it was poetic imagery which isn't supposed to be concretely interpreted. It doesn't hurt my appreciation of the book, but I'm sure some people are taking things from this book that I didn't on first read. That's the level of book this is. The story is not a simple problem to solve.

There is a layer of myth over the book

The main story I understood just fine: Benny, an upper middle class boy in the 1930's or so, has sexual issues. As a boy, he can't stop touching himself, and as a man, he is barely employed because he's not okay.

From an early age, Benny can't keep his hands off of himself, regardless of the consequences

This is the story of a sexual predator, told from the point of view of the predator, and a somewhat sympathetic one. Bunjevac is in no way approving of the behavior, but portrays Benny as someone not in control of their faculties. He's not malicious in his behavior.

This is what Benny sees

Most of the book is this, Benny's story. It's explicit and uncomfortable, and much of it I can't post pictures of without making this blog more adult than I would like it to be. But this is a book that goes to places most comics cannot.  Sometimes the sexual images are beautiful: Benny is compelled by lust, and obviously on some level he is tempted by beauty and pleasure. But the images are also grotesque and cruel. Benny is hurting women. 

The ugly is rendered equal to the beautiful

Bunjevac draws all images equally dispassionately. That's probably what's most notable about this book: the simple, the complex, the beautiful and the ugly are are rendered with the same intricate, mechanical distance. Bunjevac is putting her heart in all of this, but never changes her tone. 

A typical two page spread

The book is almost entirely built on a single rhythm, a black left side page with a text balloon or two, and a full page image on the right side.

A close up of that last page. An unbelievable amount of time has been spent on each page

In some ways, this book is only borderline a comic, as it used almost no panels, and no word balloons in the pictures. It could be considered an illustrated book. Still, it breaks that convention in places, and is telling a story through word balloons, so it's comic enough. I could understand if someone wanted to classify it as "not a comic" though.

One of the few examples of "comic" work in the book

The book uses framing of am ancient priestess showing a woman Benny's life, and in the story Benny has dreams of himself as a stag, and these parts I couldn't quite wrap my head around. The book cover describes allusions to the myth of Artemis, and I'll trust it. I read it once, and I think this is a book to read twice or more to get its full meaning. It's a large book, but at one image per two page spread, it's a fairly brisk read. Only the distressing content keeps me from going back to it soon.

A hauntingly beautiful image

Bunjevac writes an afterword piece about a near-rape experience she had as a teen which informed the book. That was an experience which altered the way she saw the world. She's not using rape as a plot device or source of pain as has been seen in comics, she's grappling with how men who don't want to think of themselves as bad could still do such a horrible thing. It's a hard idea to confront.

Reading Through 2021 31: Nineteen, by Ancco

Nineteen, by Ancco

2000s, published in English in 2020 

I used to love Drawn and Quarterly. In the 1990s, I bought pretty much everything they published. Some time in the 2000s I started getting tired of some of their books. They branched out into more artsy fare that I didn't enjoy reading. I still think they are a publisher worth checking out though. Their 2020 release, Ancco's Nineteen, is everything I ever loved about the publisher's output.

The cover was what made me pull the trigger and buy it

This is a collection of mostly autobiographical stories, loosely drawn. No rulers, possibly no pencils. Ancco is one of those artists that just has a strong personal style. I've seen work graphically similar before, but it's not overly common in comics. It's very readable. You are quickly pulled into what's happening in each story.

The stories were done over a number of years, and her style evolves over time. They portray her life being a high school student to an independent 20-something.

I always appreciate comics where they suck the fun out of drinking

This is dark, personal comic work. It's really sad too. She very frankly portrays vignettes of her life without melodrama or self-pity. She shows alcohol use within a family without labeling it alcoholism per se, but shows how it affects family dynamics. She shows physical abuse in the family, without making explicit criticism of it. One story, she gets beaten up by her father, in another she's eating at the table with him. That's how family has tended to work for most of history: a family can have serious problems, and you just take it as the status quo. The concept of breaking things off with "toxic" family members is a relatively new Western idea (not that people didn't do it, but that you would receive widespread encouragement and support for doing so).  I think she as a writer knows the alcohol and abuse is not healthy, but that's not necessarily how people think while in the midst of their family life.

Reading this was very cathartic to me. It just tapped into a lot of emotions I don't touch on much, in my life or in other reading. If I had 50 books that were on the topic of coping with a depressing life, I wouldn't be as moved, but it's not that common, and especially not with this tone. This is not a survivor's tale, of how she escaped, it's her just showing her life. In multiple places she shows herself to be a difficult person to the people around her, and it complicates things. If you have guilt or self-loathing, it's easy to place blame on yourself despite being a victim of abuse. 

Absolutely my favorite sequence in the book

This is not a didactic book. It's simply straightforward storytelling which probably reads differently to each reader, depending on your emotional background.  

Family

I found it to be in that sweet spot of indie books: graphically interesting, very readable, and memorable. I can't recommend it enough.

Reading through 2021 6: Pittsburgh by Frank Santoro

Pittsburgh by Frank Santoro

2018

This is an incredible book, a piece of art in comic form. Santoro reflects on the relationships between him, his parents, and his grandparents, and also how his understanding of their relationships has evolved and gotten more complicated as he got older. He bases it around his family house, which has been in his family since his grandparents bought it.

It uses mixed media to put it together: pencil crayons, markers, tracing paper and tape. I've never seen cheap markers look so good.

And here's the thing, it's an easy read. I love Chris Ware and Dan Clowes or any other titan of comics, but their work can be hard to dig into. They can be intimidating. I think a lot of non-comic readers (with some taste in art) could intuitively read and enjoy this. It's a book you could leave out on a coffee table, and I mean that as a complement. I read his last book (Pompeii) and liked it, but I wasn't prepared for this.

I Really Should Read This 3: the biologic show by Al Columbia

 the biologic show by Al Columbia 

2020, reprinting work from the early 90s

This is a book. It’s hard to describe it. It was printed by an Italian company, and I pre-ordered it before Colombia made death threats to the publisher over liner notes (or something similarly minor) and the publisher severed all ties to Columbia. That was last fall or so? So Columbia is still a ‘difficult’ artist.

But the book is interesting. Real horrific stuff. Nightmares, abuse, body horror drawn like 1930’s animation. It’s so skin-crawling but so good too. I wanna read a bit more.