One Coin Reads 7: Monsters, by Ken Dahl

Monsters, by Ken Dahl

2009

I've never heard of Ken Dahl, I didn't particularly like the cover, but something in the Amazon listing made me pick it up. It was cheap, and he's Ignatz award winning and Eisner nominated. It's great!

The title and cover reflect the content of the book well, but it didn't reflect the cartooning style inside. I saw this marked down multiple times before making the plunge and buying it, but upon reading, this was right up my alley.

Monsters is an autobiographical comic about Dahl (a pseudonym for Gabby Schultz) and his own experience with herpes. Admittedly, it's not an appealing topic, but that's why it's called Monsters. What I found with it though was that it was as brave and honest an autobio comic as I've ever read. The major theme of the book is the shame and self-destructive emotion the stigma of this very common STD causes. The direct effects of the disease itself isn't what causes Dahl's troubles.

Dahl works in four modes in this book:

-straight autobiographical recapping of herpes' effect on his life and relationships

-reflective self-analysis on his thinking during that time

-more metaphoric autobiographical work, where he illustrates his experiences, but lets himself play as a cartoonist to illustrate his own emotional state

-occasional fact bombs about what herpes is, what its physical effects are, and what the statistics are, but done using cartooning skills

Throughout, he uses a lot of techniques to tell his story. Sometimes it's a very light, loose line, sometimes it's a heavily rendered image. My preference is the zone in between those poles, where he very clearly cartoons, but he has a strong texture to give the cartoons weight. The cartooning quality ranges from good to great.

Dahl shifts his cartooning styles throughout the book, this self-representation is more realistically proportioned despite the not-actual-size herpes virus

This isn't a book for kids. Dahl "goes there", he draws the effects of herpes as he researched on the Internet. The worst case scenarios become his own nightmares, which he fully illustrates even though his own case is mild. That is to say, he sometimes draws scabby genitals. It's not something anyone wants to look at or consider, but it is something a lot of people might confront at some point in their own life even if only the fear of it, so I appreciate Dahl's commitment to honesty and mature presentation.

Some people might have an experience with herpes and just ignore it and pass it along. I don't  think most people are like that. Most would be shell shocked by the news and use it as a starting point for self-reflection, if not the seven stages of grief. That's Dahl, whose social life seems knocked off course for years due to the disease.

Living with shame

Reading this, I was taken back to the indie comics that really excited me when I was 20, when I was trying to figure out just who I was and who I wanted to be. I read the 80's autobio of Robert Crumb, and the work of Chester Brown and Joe Matt. I saw myself in them a lot, and received some relief that my emotions were "normal" but not necessarily excusable or acceptable. It's a challenging territory, which mainstream works don't usually venture into. Dahl's book shares some characteristics with those artists, in its frankness and emotional honesty. It's very personal work, but work that most readers should be able to see themselves in.

Ultimately, Monsters is a book about living with herpes, not becoming a hermit, so it has some resolution, and is not bleak in its final outlook. It's not for everyone, but it's a book, to quote Jeffery Brown on the back cover, "for anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex."

Reading Through 2021 24: Seeds and Stems, by Simon Hanselmann

Seeds and Stems, by Simon Hanselmann

reprinting stories from the 2010s, published 2020

Is Simon Hanselmann the most successful indie creator out there right now? He's prolific, self-promoting, and it seems like his work is all over. If he's not the most successful, he's one of them at least. I've enjoyed his work since his days over on Tumblr and have got each of his books through Fantagraphics, so it was an easy choice to pick up his newest release, Seeds and Stems.

Without the slip cover

Upon getting it, I was a little disappointed. The page count is higher than his other books, but the book is a smaller size. Putting them next to his hardcovers, it's not a huge difference, but it feels like a pocketbook rather than a small book.

I like his work a lot, but I just had some apprehensions with this one. The size, but also it's a collection of odds and ends, leftovers, or seeds and stems as a disappointed stoner might say in the days before legal weed. The book collects work from anthologies and minicomics from the past decade. A lot of it is single color printing on colored paper, not the full color of his other books. One of the earlier appearing strips was originally printed as a poster, and man, my old eyes couldn't read it. Chris Ware makes tiny writing, but it's intentional. This is just shrunk down for economics. 

Actual printed size

But I burned through this book. I really, really enjoyed it. Maybe more than his longer stories in the other books. I don't know what it was. Probably because everything is so short, if you're not enjoying one story, you're quickly onto the next one. The thing this reminded me of most was those fat comic strip collections that were so popular in the 80's. I'd read a Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County collection, and just lose myself in them. With this, it's 350 pages, and I probably read 70 pages at a time. That's a lot for me.

I relate to the choice of drugs, but yeah, drug rut, that's a real thing

There's a sitcom quality to it, but it's also got a newspaper comic strip vibe as well. The characters are constant, the setting is constant, and there are lots of jokes. Probably that's a major part of Hanselmann's success, that these strips are, despite the depression, drug use and fistings, very digestible. These are peak Megg, Mogg, and Owl strips. For the majority of these, he's in the zone. 

Hanselmann is always good with his silent panels and reaction shots

Personally, I relate to a lot of these strips. I spent a few years on the sofa like Megg, Mogg, and Owl. They watch How I Met Your Mother and Young Sheldon, I watched the Simpsons and Everybody Loves Raymond. The type of depressive antics of that lifestyle, you can't even tell what you honestly enjoy and what you ironically enjoy. There's just extreme boredom and a wish to escape it. Hanselmann has made a thousand pages capturing this weird nichey lifestyle and I'm all there for it.

He uses a variety of page colors in the book. It's an interesting production value

I don't know that I recommend this book above any of his other collections. It's good, there's a lot in it, but the others are good too, and lots are in them too. It's like those old newspaper strip collections. Some folks will want to own each and every one, but probably most people will be satisfied with a book or two. This one is as good as any of the others. I laughed.

Reading Through 2021 23: Or Else, by Kevin H(uiznega)

Or Else #1, by Kevin H(uiznega)

2004

I miss Drawn and Quarterly's textured paper covers!

This comic was one of the last indie "issues" I bought. I know Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly occasionally print some at the request of the artist, but those companies have pretty much moved to the graphic novel format. For me, I remember enjoying this issue at the time, but not being blown away by it. After a decade of reading Eightball, Palookaville, Black Hole, Hate, and Peepshow off the stand, this didn't resonate too strongly with me. 

The art stood out though: a simple, classical cartoonist style; and Huizenga has stuck with this character, Glenn Ganges. I saw some of his work on his Tumblr some years back and really was blown away. I read Glenn Ganges in: the River at Night last year and was immediately convinced it was a Great Comic. That's a book that every reader should own.

So I had my eye on revisiting this book. What first stood out is that this wasn't original work; it was a collection from his mini-comics and anthologies around that time. D&Q must have been quite taken with his work to republish it.

There are three longer pieces, and some one pagers here. The first full story, NST '04, is indie fare, trying to find poetry in daily life in a slow town. It works because Huizenga is somewhat formalist in his construction, cutting between scenes from panel to panel, creating a patchwork experience of life. I don't love it, but it's different from what was being produced at the time and manages to stand out.

The final page of NST '04 is quiet and poetic

By its length, Chan Woo Kim is the meat of the comic. It's, again, a formalist comic, overlaying adoption agency notes over Asian ink paintings (I live in Japan, it's called sumi-e here, I'm guessing Huizenga is following a Korean tradition in his piece). The art is refined, and shows that Huizenga has skills outside of simply cartooning. I don't know that it's a great comic, but it's an interesting experiment at the very least. 

I don't think this is a must-own comic that people need to track down, but it definitely shows the seeds of an artist who is interested in exploring beyond the established boundaries of comics. In his later work, he has very good linework, but it is in story construction, abstract concept illustration, and the use of repetition and tropes where I think he shines. This book shows some of the promise of that work yet to come.

Reading Through 2021 12: Our Expanding Universe, by Alex Robinson

Our Expanding Universe, by Alex Robinson

2015

One of my COVID plans was to read less new stuff, and fill up gaps in my comics knowledge. Reading something of Robinson's was on the list. His Box Office Poison was well-received when it came out, but I never read it at that time. Since then, I've listened to his one podcast, Star Wars Minute, for about eight years now.

I liked this book and found it interesting, but there was a little frustration with it too. His style is rooted in the indie books of the 90's, and I think it suffers from not being enough in any one direction. It's not super cartoony, it's not super realistic, it's not super dynamic. It reminds me somewhat of my own comics The first chapter or so, the art took me out of the story a bit, but after I got into the book, I could very much appreciate its consistency and clarity. That sounds like faint praise, but that's one of the biggest faults in comics: comics where I can't tell what's going on. It made it an easy read. And some pages he definitely takes more time on the art than others, and those pages stand out

I like the rendering in the top panel a lot!

The story is about three adults of the same age but different stages. Two guys are married, one single. One of the married guys has kids, the other is hoping to. They're very clearly delineated characters. And though the guys are the main feature, the wives get their own space to tell their story too. Robinson is trying to portray a spectrum of characters. But because it's about 30-somethings just living life, there isn't so much happening; or at least what's happening is done through dialogue more than action. It's really interesting dialogue, but you could see this being done as a stage play as much as a comic.

Netflix has some similarly toned dramas, like Love or Easy, and I'm very happy to see adult stories that deal with what we think and what we do in our lives. So it's a good, solid book. Not mind-blowing, but not every book has to be.

Reading Through 2021 10: J & K, John Pham

J & K, John Pham

2019

I'm reading these books everyday, I read three at a time (one tome, and two more normal sized books), so I finish one a day on average. So I'm not writing about good books, I'm simply collecting my thoughts on what I've just read. Generally, I like the books I read, but not always.

I'd wanted to read this for a long time, and heard a lot of good things John Pham. The positive about this: it's a great looking book. The production is top notch. I don't know how it was made, I think he made a Risograph-style print and replicated that as a traditional full color print. If not, he has an incredible eye for imitation. And the art is very good for what it is, cartoon illustrations in the vein of Adventure Time.

The thing is, there was nothing I enjoyed in the reading of it. The characters are two depressed girls hanging out in a mall, and later a cemetery. There are jokes that I didn't laugh at, and pathos that I didn't feel because the characters are vague. It treads in some of the same territory and tone of Simon Hanselmann's Megg and Mogg, but I regularly laugh out loud at that stuff. This stuff didn't hit me at all.

The book comes with an assortment of stuff tucked into the inside cover: stickers, a magazine referenced in the book, trading cards, and a record that I'll never be able to play but you can listen to online.

I can imagine being a 20 year old stoner and getting this and being blown away. I probably would have loved it 20 years ago. At this point though, I regret spending the money on this hardcover. I would rather have just bought a single issue to sample Pham's work to know it wasn't for me.

Reading Through 2021 8: To Know Your Alive, Dakota McFadzean

To Know Your Alive, Dakota McFadzean

2020

Some Can-Con comics, funded in part by the Canadian government!

McFadzean has been publishing comics for about a decade, and it's absolutely criminal that I have never seen his name mentioned on an American website. I'm sure it has, as he's been printed in some American magazines, but his three collections just don't get properly reviewed it seems.

I first saw his work through his daily comics on Tumblr. He spent a few years making daily strips, and you can see it in his inking and story-telling. He's put in the 10,000 hours already.

This is a collection of short stories from different publications, so there isn't a strong through line in them, except that he goes over a lot of the same themes. If I were to put a finger on his main topics, it would be existential horror and existential banality. I had three favorite stories in this. In one, a new kid at a school is bullied, but the kid is also rotten, so nobody is at fault and everybody is at fault. It's kids. In another, a woman gets a gig as a game tester and wonders what life she has. Another more surreal one has the world's first contact with an alien, and how boring it becomes a few weeks later when the next big news story breaks.

I kind of lean toward the existential banality ones, but he also has lots of stuff about faces melting off. He likes drawing faces coming off.

The art is really good, classical cartooning. In terms of modern artists, I can see Seth, Chester Brown, and Hartley Lin in his work. Clean, easy-to-read work. The only problem with this collection is that the works were originally formatted to different sizes, so the ones that were made to be printed on A3 paper are a little difficult to read compressed to the collection size. All the same, I think this is a phenomenal book, especially if you miss the Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics books of the '90s.

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.