No One Else by R. Kikuo Johnson

 No One Else, by R. Kikuo Johnson, Fantagraphics, 2021

No One Else Review Link

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 95: Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

2009

A little Michael Kupperman goes a long way.

I can't say I'm a life-long Kupperman fan. I watched the Robert Smigel's TV Playhouse when it was on, where Kupperman did animation. I first knew of his name though, when Tumblr was at its peak six or seven years ago. His work was perfect for a site like that: small doses of crazy, inventive humor. I was into it and got Volume Two of Thrizzle when it came out, and just recently decided I wanted some more and picked up the first volume.  

The sex hole v. sex blimp debate never ends

Kupperman makes short comedy pieces of the sort the Internet is sorely lacking. Humor strips these days tend to be four panel comics that are crudely drawn, with punchlines in the final panel, and not very inventive concepts of comedy. A quick pass through "comics" on Reddit this morning shows three dominant jokes: 1) a scary intimidating character does something cute in the final panel, 2) a cute character does something evil in the final panel, and 3) someone says something dumb and/or shocking while other characters stare in disbelief. That's 85% of the humor strips in my feed. Kupperman has themes he goes through, but I'd argue there is no formula, and jokes are laced throughout the strips, as opposed to a strip that builds to a single punchline. His art is retro, calling to mind work from the 30s to the 50s.

Meanwhile, the comics as literature debate has been settled

At times, it's barely a joke, simply a ridiculous concept that Kupperman has taken a great amount of effort to create. He also builds on his own strips, making callbacks to earlier strips and ideas. What might be a comic on one page becomes an fake advertisement on another. What is an advertisement on one page might face a rival advertisement on another. Like a lot of great comedians, he mines themes to get the humor out of them, and lets jokes evolve.

It's terrible when your Lyndon Johnson biography suffers because of having to perform foreplay

Kupperman was born in the 60's, and takes a lot of references from 70's culture, like buddy cop TV shows and the actors of the day, but he also works in a lot of Americana from old presidents to 1930's pulp stories. Most of the work in the book is familiar in some way, like it's been culled from the collective unconsciousness of America. He definitely is making more references than I can name check. This is dense work.

Remembering the Thirties

When he's on top of his game, it's absolutely delightful. It's novel in a way that humor comics rarely are. With the way the Internet has become, with endless scrolls asking for our attention, somehow it's rarely surprising. Kupperman manages to surprise over and over. Was I asking for for Einstein and Mark Twain as two beat cops solving crimes? No, and I wasn't asking their police chief to dress like Tarzan either.

If there's one issue I had with the book it's that it's that I couldn't just sit down and read it. This book collects four issues, and I had to read it about half an issue at a time. With books that collect a lot of short, unconnected pieces, there are some where I'm ready to burn through it, like Dakota McFadzean's excellent To Know You're Alive, but with this one, I found it hard to stay focused on it. I read it for fifteen minutes before or after reading something else.

From a piece on the pornographic coloring books of the 1970's

That's not really a criticism of the work, just recognizing that the form of one to four page strips without narratives don't lend themselves to concentrated readings.  I was delighted, then I was tired, then I was delighted again. It's good work.

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. 

I Really Should Read This 27: Human Diastrophism, by Gilbert Hernandez

Human Diastrophism, by Gilbert Hernandez

1985-1995

That's two collections down, and another five to go.

This book is from the omnibus style collections, and contains the graphic novel Human Diastrophism, plus another 150 pages of comics. All are set in or in relation to Hernandez's fictional town of Palomar, and the intertwined lives of dozens of its residents. 

Things are back to normal!

Right up front, I really wish I'd read this twenty years ago. It is a phenomenal piece of work. I sampled some Love and Rockets issues in the late 1990's, and I found them hard to latch onto. By that point, the characters in both Gilbert and Jaime's stories had hundreds of pages of stories behind them, their writing was building off history that I simply hadn't read and I was lost. I probably had about eight issues that I half-heartedly read, and gave up on them until buying my first of these omnibuses about four years back. I loved the The Girl From HOPPERS and soon voraciously read all I could of Jaime's work, but had a hard time with the first Palomar collection and put it back on my shelf for a year or two unread.

There is storytelling at work here

Thanks to COVID-19 upending everything, I dramatically increased my reading time and made a commitment to finally get through that first collection around New Years... and I loved it. I had the enthusiasm that you get when you just can't enjoy something other people love but then something finally clicks and it works, and you wonder what the problem ever was.

Silhouettes are used liberally

With the Palomar stories, I know some of the things that kept made it a hard book for me to get into. For one, the cast of characters is huge, and following a story can be confusing. He has a character guide for each book, and I made use of it a few times. The second is that I still find something off about his inking. It's tight, and his drawing is great, but I still don't love the overall aesthetic. A third thing was his focal character Luba. She is a massive-chested woman, and as a reader, much like all the male characters in the books, that is all you notice at first. I had an issue or two of Luba, and I just didn't get it. After reading the first Palomar stories, which include Luba's introduction to the town, I saw her as a well-rounded and complicated character in a way I just didn't see at all in my first exposure to her.

A wordless sequence about crossing a trench becomes a statement of Luba's frustration and impotence regarding her new lover

At this point, I get what the fuss is about. Hernandez' art still isn't something I drool over like I do with his brother, but he has other points that I find incredible. His storytelling techniques are so potent, walking a fine line between camp, dreams and pathos. So much of what he does here would be told as talking heads by other artists. Hernandez uses old school panel design to amp up the drama of his story. And he fleshes out all his characters, even if it's just to give them a single motivation. Almost all the characters portrayed in his town are flawed and weak. Most are decent, but they are not perfect and usually do things they regret. It's very humanistic storytelling.  

Hernandez builds a real history in Palomar, the people don't forget their past

So what's this collection all about? It is sprawling, covering the lives of the people of the small Latin American town of Palomar across twenty years. There's a 100-page graphic novel tucked inside the larger 250-page collection that tells the story of a serial killer in the town, while the second half of the collection has a number of stories focusing on Luba's half-sisters in America. Much like Jaime's work with Maggie and Hopey, though there are mini-arcs, there isn't a larger arc other than these people living their lives. There is a difference here though, in that with Jaime's stuff, time is occurring roughly along with the real world. Gilbert's Palomar shifts and jumps. That's part of what makes following the story require a character reference page. A character who's ten years old in one story might be 23 in the next and takes some adjustment from the reader to follow. 

Probably his best creation, the one-armed Casimira

Some stories are 30 pages, some are five, some are single pages. The book was done over a ten year period, and you see Hernandez shifting his storytelling style and his focus of characters as he goes. I'm sure a lot of it was simply to keep the making of comics a fresh activity for himself. As a reader, it goes a long way to keeping the book novel. One of the treats of the book is seeing a character like Guadalupe, one of Luba's daughters, go from a little kid hanging out in the corners of a story to being a central character with a kid of her own. I've heard of Palomar being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and at the level of them both being about rural Spanish speaking towns, it's not a useful comparison, but in terms of them both showing generations of development, it's apt.

Hernandez takes a stylistic departure to give a dense character sketch of Pipo

Palomar has it's own specific weirdness as well. For the most part, I wouldn't call the book surreal, but there are peculiarities. Tontazin selling her slugs. Her sister Diana who overdevelops whichever muscle she trains. Luba's handsome lover Khamo who becomes a burn victim, at which point they settle down together. Casimira, who was shot out of a tree as a toddler, runs around the town wielding her artificial arm. It's weird stuff, generally in the realm of "truth is stranger than fiction" weird rather than feeling explicitly like a writer's touch. And that's so important in a work like this to keep it from feeling cutesy or twee.

Young Fritz at home with her sister is a sad portrayal of neglect

Hernandez's Latino heritage gives him an ability to comfortably navigate both American and Latin American culture without any awkwardness. Later chapters taking place in California don't have the lived in quality of Palomar, but that's city life, where there are way more people you don't know then people you know. 

Maria's back story captures some 1950's goofiness. Fantastic use of negative space in those first two panels

As for the art, it's unfair to compare him to his brother Jaime, the tightest comic artist alive. Gilbert has great art as well, particularly in the layout. His characters occupy just the right amount of panel, the story progresses at a solid clip, and he's not afraid to reposition everything for the sake of a solid panel. Contemporary artists often try to do something more natural, as if the panel was a camera, and that's not Gilbert's school of work. As much as a camera-style perspective can be effective, it can also be boring, and the panel composition here is never boring. His pages have a lot of punch.

The book is not exactly magical realism, but there is room for poetry in the it

So, I'm into it. I'm going to get the rest of the Gilbert Hernandez Love & Rockets omnibuses, slowly over the next few years. This stuff is good, and is the kind of comic that resonates long after reading.