Reading Through 2021 88: The Playboy, by Chester Brown

 The Playboy, by Chester Brown

1992, revised edition 2013

When I last read this book, I was a boy; now I am kind of a man.

The cover is a repurposed panel

Sometime around the mid-90s, I got turned on to the output of Drawn & Quarterly, and without a doubt, it changed my life. For one thing, it was the leveling up I needed to see from comics to justify keeping up with them. I love genre, but I couldn't subside on genre alone. I needed something with a deeper motive and a greater ambition to keep me from giving up on them all together. D&Q was that thing. It also helped that they were Canadian and helped me to see Canadian art as different than merely government funded would-be American art (there was a lot of not-so-great CanCon movies, music and TV in the 90s).  This book, along with the work of Seth and Joe Matt, gave me something to aspire to, though the work of those three is a pretty narrow spectrum through the lens of 2021.

The current version is smaller in size, with a lot more pages than the 90's version

So I had this, and all the rest of the D&Q books of the time, but I think I gave my copy of it away around the year 2000. It was long gone, anyway. More than once, I looked on my bookshelf for it and couldn't find it, so I finally just ordered a new copy. First thing I noticed was it's a new edition. The old edition was bigger, more panels on the page, black backgrounds, and if I remember correctly, a comment by Hugh Hefner. The new one has one or two panels per page, it's been re-scripted, and other subtle alterations which I missed.

I like the paper the new one is printed on, simple newsprint like a cheap novel has.

You can't buy pornography at the store near your house, for obvious reasons

The book in a nutshell is this: Brown tells autobiographical anecdotes about buying Playboy from teenage years to adulthood. It involves a lot of shame and being extremely conscious about all of it. Where to buy it, how to talk about it, how to dispose of it, how to carry it so that nobody thinks you're doing anything abnormal.

Hiding stuff in your shirt is a terrible idea. You hide it out in the open

Of course, he has his own personal details as to how he did things, but this hit home to me like few things I'd ever read at the time. Even today, it hits home. Pornography is pretty near universal in male experience, but in most circles, it's not something men want to talk about or acknowledge. It's embarrassing, verging into shameful. It depends on the person and their upbringing how much shame there is, but I was raised pretty non-religious, in a fairly open house, and I was mortified that someone might think I wanted to look at naked women. 

The use of pornography at the very least is universal, and if there is a guy who says he's never, then chances are he was simply using Sears catalogs instead. And it's a part of human experience. I studied the history of art, and one of my favorite quotes was by David Hockney (if I remember correctly), which went along the lines of, "It's only pornography for a hundred years, then it goes into a museum." It's been a constant in human culture. 

That's the kind of stuff I had to remind myself to not just feel like a skeeve.

The rituals of calculatedly disposing of his pornography is painful 

Brown lays it all out in detail the efforts he would go to to destroy evidence of having bought a Playboy, being haunted by not having it, and repurchasing it again, and eventually getting rid of the evidence again. It's painful, because he was doing it to himself. He wasn't being preached at by his parents or a reverend. He had just internalized this idea that wanting, having and using pornography was wrong.

So painful

The biggest takeaway is the honesty Brown shows throughout. Even as an adult writing about it, he isn't comfortable with it. In a Maus-like reflection of people reading his work in progress, he feigns not knowing about Playboy history in conversation with a guy who will likely read his comic a month later and see that he was lying. He's tackling the topic, yet he hasn't come to terms with it. It makes the whole project fascinating, and fairly unique. Autobiography was still a minor genre in comics, and rarely does the artist show themselves to be barely able to acknowledge in life what they're acknowledging on the page. Most autobiography is about topics someone has come to terms with.

Porn in forests and parks will never change. I've seen it in Japan lots too

My thoughts on this book, over twenty years after I last read it: it's much smaller than I remembered. At that time, trade paperbacks were still somewhat new. The original book was maybe 160 pages, which felt pretty substantial at the time, but feels quite short within the world of comics today, especially as Brown doesn't use half of the paper on the page. The landscape of comics has evolved a lot in the past 25 years and if it were released today, I think it would still get a lot of praise, but it feels slight compared to most alternative comics I buy.

How foolish of him to try to dispose of a magazine in the family fireplace

The book feels as personal now as it ever did. I've read a number of autobiographical comics this year, and all are revealing, some more than others. Maybe for me, because this resonates so deeply with my own experiences, it just feels that much harder of a book to have made. At this point, I could tell some of my own stories like this, but having read this book would make it easier, and I'd have to have some ironic distance from the "me" I were talking about.  Brown does have his own ironic distance as well, as he narrates the book in the form of a demon.

I imagine an eighteen year old today would still relate to this, though some of the details would be harder for them to imagine. Do young men buy magazines anymore? Maybe a young man today just amasses files on their hard drive, which they purge and rebuild repeatedly. I don't know, I don't talk to any teenagers. Maybe their porn is in the cloud. 

Can't just throw pornography out with your garbage. Someone might see it

This wasn't a book I was dying to get back, it was languishing in my online wishlist for about two years, but I just decided I should have it back on my shelf. Reading it reminded me how important it was for me, because I saw myself in a comic as much as I ever had. My own life had drama and conflict that I had never recognized.

Reading Through 2021 65: Sick, by Gabby Schulz

Sick, by Gabby Schulz

2016

Just last month, I read Monsters, by Gabby Schulz, aka Ken Dahl, and was quite impressed.  I've subscribed to his Instagram and picked up another of his books, Sick. Now, Monsters was about life with herpes and festering genitals. Sick couldn't possibly be more troubling to read, could it?

The cover and the insides as well are lushly grotesque

Yes, it could. And it is. Sick has two parts to it. The first part is an autobiographical tale of a two week long sickness Schulz persevered through all on his own because he was too poor to afford healthcare, and too cut off from friends and family to get support. I was on board for this experience, as bleak as it was. I wondered if it was a spiritual successor to Glenn Ganges in: The River at Night. Taking a small intimate experience and blowing it up to the length of a book.

Then the second half was about humanity and what a blight on existence we all are. The thing is, it was told from a distinctly American perspective, one wrapped up in race, religion and economic inequalities, and I wasn't on board with that because it just isn't the world I live in, as a Canadian living in Japan for the past twenty years.

There are dozens of pages of shredded flesh

The book looks great. It's an oversized hardcover, loaded with lush watercolor illustrations of sickness. It's beautiful in its grossness. He draws scenes and images over and over again, and gets into rhythms with them which are compelling to look at. He shifts from neutral side views to worms-eye views, and with some sequences in the bathtub, the view from down the drain. It's powerful stuff.

There's a lot of suffering

More and more I hear about Americans who can't go to the hospital for the simplest things because it is just unreasonably expensive. It's tragic, and that's the way the country has chosen to go. I prefer Canada's free hospitals (paid through taxes of course), or even Japan's heavily subsidized insurance system to America's "better be rich or else" one. The notion of spending two weeks in bed, immobile and losing blood every time you use the washroom, yet not being able to go to the hospital is insane. It's not normal in the developed world, it's normal in America. 

He tackles his own difficulties in trying to be a person

Schulz weighs his life, the ups and downs, the value of existence, and tries to find out if it's even worth living. At first, it's personal and compelling. He gets into his "complicity" as a white, able, sane, middle-class, cisgendered male, and despite being in the identical demographic, I started to look at him as opposed to relate to him.

He goes into talk about humanity, but it is so much about America, or at least Euro-centric. What he's writing is interesting, but he describes it in some universal way, when it isn't. Every country has its problems, but, as an outsider looking at America, America has more than average.

History is most definitely a dark thing, with countless stories of societies being horrible to other societies, Europeans often being the most horrible  

So as I read, I saw Schulz writing what he seemed to think was some grand truth. The world has problems, every place has problems, but what he's getting at is really a personal view of the world. Toward the end, he writes, "Maybe there are no words to describe what no one wants to hear." On the back cover, he writes, "Not recommended for the self-satisfied." I felt bad for him, because I've done the soul-searching and analysis of life, and my results weren't the same as his. 

Our history, he states, is "primarily one of destruction, consumption and greed." History is most definitely full of destruction, consumption, and greed, but it's hard to say it's primarily so. I love the art of the world, I love the culture of the world. The negativity is part of it, but it's a miserable practice to focus on the negative and make it the foreground. It's simply part of the animal that is humanity. 

A beautiful page. The one after this is bleak

It's a good work, he's a talented creator taking himself to an honest place. The ideas in this at the very least force readers to confront their opinions on the world, whether in agreement or disagreement. If I had to compare it to another comic creator, the closest one would be Ivan Brunetti and the self-flagellating work he did in Schizo. But in that, Brunetti knew he was being over the top. Here, Schulz seems quite serious. The reality of their point of view could be very different. Perhaps Brunetti was serious, and his humor was a reflexive defense. Maybe Schulz is offering this up as food for thought and not a treatise to be taken so literally. I can't say. But the book portrays human life as a disease. 

It is food for thought though. To read through this is to confront a lot of harsh ideas about humanity. Ultimately, I don't share Schulz's views and by the end, I was interacting with it as I might a book espousing Christianity or Islam or any other view of the world I have already investigated and rejected. I wasn't able to embrace his ideology, and that affected my ability to purely enjoy an ideological work like this.

I Really Should Read This 13: Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac

Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac

2015

I've heard Bunjevac's name come up for the last few years, especially since Bezimena came out. I actually ordered that book around New Years, but am still waiting on it. In the meantime, I found a copy of Fatherland and decided to give it a read.

This is a good book. It's not a fun book, it's a mature, personal, thoughtful book.

The idea behind this book is very strong. It's a history of Bunjevac's family, specifically her father. She lays out her own personal situation in the opening chapters of the book: she was born in Canada in the 70s to two immigrants from then-Yugoslavia, and was soon taken back to Yugoslavia with her mother to be raised with her mother's family. There, her father is either never spoken of or spoken badly of, until his reported death in a bomb-making accident.

From there, the book delves into what made her father who he was. Bunjevac herself doesn't remember him, she only knows him from pictures and stories. In order to understand him, she has to delve into the history of Yugoslavia and the Croatian and Serbian conflicts there. The book does some information dumps here and there, but for the most part keeps things personal, highlighting how the government regime changes and ethnic tensions affected her family, pushing and pulling them, and traumatizing them as well as most of the population.

The key with this is that it is personal. History can be a dry or abstract subject, but the history in this doesn't feel like that. Her father is directly affected by the tide of history and ends up in Canada, but he never lets go of his Serbian upbringing.

The most striking thing about the work is the art. It is very controlled yet manages not to be stiff. There is a photographic quality to it, but it's a byproduct of the rendering style as opposed to everything being rooted in photographs. Bunjevac certainly uses photos in places. The cover is a family photo, and in different places in the book she uses old photos to show snapshots of family memories. It's not an art style that I love, but it's impressive and quite unlike any artist working today. 

Fatherland tells a story that I've never read: the life of a man leading up to him becoming a terrorist and losing his family. He's not a good guy, but he's not a bad guy in the book either. He's a troubled guy.

I go into books like this, true family stories mixed with real history, with trepidation, because they can be so heavy (for another example, Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do). This is heavy too. After reading this, I'm glad I read it, and it left a strong impression. It's really good. I have to go read something more escapist after this though.

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 32: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

2020

What an enormously frustrating book.

AAA production values

I love Tomine's work. I really do. I was buying Optic Nerve in the 90's, I love his New Yorker illustrations, and Killing and Dying is one of my favorite comic collections period. Killing and Dying is incredible. Right from the first preview of this, I was not down with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, a collection of autobio strips about how embarrassing Tomine's life is.

In 2020, it ended up being what seemed like the most reviewed work of the year. Not best-reviewed, but most reviewed. Tomine is a comic artist with fans in a lot of media organizations, so Rolling Stone or EW or the Guardian or the New York Times will weigh in on his work, along with lots of comic sites. And they kept saying it was very good. Everywhere kept saying it was very good! Only a few places, like Solrad, gave mixed to negative reviews of it. The thing is, the positive reviews of it highlighted what I expected would be a negative about it. The Guardian (pulled up as the top pick on an Internet search as an example) said:

 In a series of autobiographical sketches from childhood to the present day, Tomine casts a cynical and unforgiving eye on his fragile ego, the dubious rewards of his successful career and the absurdity of the comic-book industry.

That doesn't sound great to me: a successful artist showing he was unhappy and frustrated in the comic industry. 

"This one time, I was at Dan Clowes studio, and I felt bad."

The majority of the book is a series of vignettes where Tomine is experiencing the dream of indie success and feeling bad about it. He's one of the youngest nominees at the Eisner awards, and he feels bad. He's at a book signing in Tokyo, and he feels bad. He's the subject of a TV documentary program in Angoulême, and he feels bad.

It's honest, and I'm sure he felt that way, but the jokes are only mildly amusing, not really funny, and not so insightful. For most of the book, I was just wondering why I was reading it at all.

"This one time, I was a guest at the world-renowned Angoulême Comics Festival, and I felt bad."

Around the mid-way point, he starts to add some dating themed strips. He hopes that if his girlfriend will see he's a popular cartoonist, it might impress her. This sort of detail was more endearing to me than the cringe stuff, since it was a lot more of a peek into his psychology. It's his own weakness as a person rather than the world not boosting him up enough. But this sort of thing is in a minority of the stories in the book.

The thing is, I knew from reviews and previews before I read the book that this was the main thrust of the book, and I bought it anyway. After reading, I don't think this is what the book is actually about, despite it being the majority of it. The final story is about a near-death panic he has where he reevaluates his life and everything he knows. Tomine is very frank, and direct to the reader in the form of a monologue to his wife about where his head is, that all his perceived slights are nothing compared to the love he has for his family. That final story is that Adrian Tomine magic that I love.

It doesn't change that the first hundred pages of the book are a guy highlighting the negative in every aspect of a long and successful career. He got to where he is through hard work. It wasn't given to him, so I don't want to say that he isn't thankful for it. But I don't enjoy reading a book where he makes success out to be such an emotional burden. 

What he's really trying to say

Other than that, the packaging is gorgeous. It's made up to be a Moleskine notebook, with the elastic band and everything (clout in the industry has some benefits when asking for frills in publishing at least). And the cartooning is incredible. Really incredible. He drew in this style in some of the stories in Killing and Dying. I loved it there, and I love it here too. It's very elegant, very precise, and the level of nuance in the facial expressions is simply amazing. I was regularly comparing panels to see the level of detail, for example, in jaw lines as mouths opened and closed. It's a weird thing to comment on, but it's difficult to draw and he does he perfectly. He's doing very simple images, but the structure behind them is sound. 

He's at the top of his game as a cartoonist. And he's got decades ahead of him to do more great work if he chooses to. 

When I saw him put that text balloon tail in the third panel, I cursed the cartooning for being so elegantly simple and clever

Books can change upon a reread. Maybe knowing that the book uses the first two thirds as a set up of the lonely cartoonist to contrast the family man learning to appreciate his life in the third act will work on a second reading. I read all his stuff twice, so maybe it won't be so frustrating next time. 

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.

One Coin Reads 3: POS by Pierre Paquet and Jesus Alonso

Piece Of Shit, by Pierre Packet and Jesus Alonso

2017

This was not technically one of my ¥500 books, but it was pretty close: ¥683, marked down from ¥2884. How could I not sample an oversized hardcover 250 page French book at that price?

If all the line work in the book was like those figures in red, I would have been a very happy reader

I know lots about American comics, but with French and European comics, I only know the broad strokes, generally the stuff published through Heavy Metal, Fantagraphics, or Drawn & Quarterly. I'm working on learning something about Humanoids.  Probably I should know about Pierre Paquet, publisher of Paquet Editions, but I don't. This is the first time I remember hearing of him. So I went into this cold. The cover is good. It doesn't exactly reflect the insides of the book, but it's a compelling image.

So, this autobiographical book is about Pierre and his falling outs with people over a decade or so of his life, roughly the lifetime of the dog on the cover, who is the one *person* he's able to maintain a healthy relationship with. He is a "piece of shit" in the story, a paquet de merde in the original translation (playing on his name), and the book is advertised as a mea culpa of sorts. But it's not. He burns some people on publishing by not being able to sell their comics, but this book shows he really tried and had things working against him. He is sued by an artist for not being paid, but the real truth was the artist was lying and abusing their relationship. Paquet as the big bad publisher ends up taking the heat. He has a falling out with an old friend and misses seeing them on their deathbed, but it was communication failure, not actually Paquet's fault. The stuff with women (the stuff on the cover), is late in the book, and he is wishy washy in a supposedly good relationship, so in that case, he is a piece of shit, but not really? Like, he lets the relationship trail off, he's not abusive or cheating. He's pretty human in his self-portrayal.

Paquet and Alonso aren't afraid to show a story visually

And so as I was reading, it was interesting to read, and it's well-told, but it's weird to see a book a guy wrote about his own life where he's taking blame in the title and concept of the book, but the book itself is him basically saying it wasn't really his fault, that he was doing his best but everything was working against him. Probably if the title and the description of the book was just about him being a screw up, it would have made more sense on the whole. 

I had a lot to think about and consider after though, which is more than I can say for a lot of books, so that's a positive thing. I'd rather it was interesting but frustrating, than competent but boring.

Alonso adjusts his palettes based on the lighting of the location. It's really subtle work

All of that before I even discuss the art! I didn't love the style overall, Jesus Alonso's art is a little looser than I care for. Especially for the main figures, I prefer tighter lines. I'm okay with impressionistic backgrounds. But it's still really good art. The color in it is near perfect. It has different color schemes on every page that look completely naturalistic, but aren't sampled from photographs. This is the kind of color work from the 50s and 60s in illustration that I marveled at as a kid. It's really a beautiful looking book. It's digitally drawn, and I don't love seeing digital brushstrokes compared to real brushes. I got over that pretty quickly though.

And the storytelling is great, panel to panel, scene to scene. His dog gets sick and has a bloated stomach, and Alonso is able to communicate that in a panel. He does a good job of animating the dog's facial expressions as well, without going into Disney territory. Alonso captures mood and expressions well, and each figure has their own distinct face and way of being drawn. I get this feeling there are hundreds of incredibly hardworking comic artists in Europe like Alonso, super competent in the fundamentals of comics, whose work rarely sees the light of day in English.

So I kind of liked this book? It was interesting, good looking, and easy to read. If it was just a fiction book, and not autobiography, I'd probably would have liked it more, but I can just pretend it's fiction on the re-read in a few years.

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.