4 comics

I had an upswing which was a zenlike disinterest in anything but satisfaction/peace moment and then was depressed and hardly present. Which may still be now but I tend to be forgetful to an extreme degree that I don't think anyone understands how horrible it makes me feel. So it's an anxiety thing, yeah, but I would like to know why or what or when or how to feel. I would like to be comfortable. I'm so sad about being uncomfortable and feeling hurt.

So.

I read some comics?

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1. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist - Adrian Tomine

This collection of vignetts of embarrassment and shame of Tomine's has an Alan Moore appraisal on the back. I can't think of anything to write to extend this.

2. Moms - Yeong-shin Ma

My grandma took me on a ride to all the old gravestones in Woonsocket the other day. It extended into a fully guided tour and story hour: the old barn of my great grandparent, an eerily cursed day in February that runs in the family, a weed shop that confused her friend - she never liked it, by the way - across the border that is named like a flower shop, her hatred of the homeless people who collect cans. I also last month did my episode about Gabriela Mistral and thought of Grandma as I did it. Grandma B is her name and we're not close. She's the B lineage then, our other tract towards white middle-class liberalism in the face of their more historic coming aparts from petty bourgeosie to trade workers, alcoholics, nurses, adoptees. My sister and I also represent a different hierarchical structure - we're the college goers, smart, responsible, never in trouble. Anyway, the point is my grandmother, who I had not seen in two years until my great-grandparents' passing is not conventional. We don't have a conventional relationship. She reminds me of these moms.

At times the narrative is a bit clunky, or maybe underdeveloped but I think it might be because it's calling to a disjointed experience and isn't actually written by a Korean mom, it is still giving a loving glance to them.

3. BTTM FDRS - Ezra Claytan Daniels (author) and Ben Passmore (artist)

I'd been wanting to read this - not actually knowing anything about the plot - since before it came out and am glad I did. I think maybe it doesn't actually hit its messages on gentrification because it's too wrapped up in knowing that's what it's talking about, but I do think it's worth a read. I wish maybe it was a bit longer if anything because the lore all comes out in description at the end. I just watched the Color Out of Space the other day - great watch - and feel that vibe of the haunted house/stalker movie mashup is kind of what Bttm Fdrs is like. That with a false cybperpunk future (really it's the color schemes that do this) where RISD's dominating gentrification of Olneyville (although it's set in Chicago) was made into a sculpture then thrown away then freegans pulled it out thinking they could make a cheap buck and repeating the process.

4. Shadow Life - Hiromi Goto (author) and Ann Xu (artist)

This (even though Kumiko is drawn fat and naked and beautiful in many panels) and Bttm Fdrs (even though it's got a decent amount of gore) feel younger than I'd typically read in comics. It might be that I see a lot of relationship to those wordless panels in Moms to giving a unique pacing and in these other two lore-telling (Tomine's is dissimilar functionally). It's something I noticed with Are You Listening?  and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me a while back. I'm not sure exactly what it is that signals to me a younger direction, but maybe it's the futuristic smooth and directness that I find less puzzling. I like the puzzles that make me feel understood.

Anyway the point of that is to not really have a point beyond thinking about, say, the way Clowes' brutality is discussed in Tomine but Tomine himself being different than these new younger comics folks who have extended even past his new kid on the block Mad-Magazine/Post-Crumbness. It's something I'd like to keep thinking about because I miss weirdo comics for weirdo people that Love and Rockets or even further back Watchman once signified for me. And I think it's maybe a good direction as it seems to have more hope and less need for irony.

That is to say this was my favorite out of the bunch and yet not something I think I would read. I hesitated at the cover, as it is in line with a trend in YA cover design and glad I moved past it. I can be snobbishly elitist in comics because no one knows it's basically all I did for years in my isolation of being a fat gay punk depressive. I want to see more comics and feel good when reading them or poetry (which you know I've been doing) so when I do a big comic spread of here of new people and like 'em, it makes me think about the future having something more to it. That things change.

I've been stuck in an end-of-life cycle of sorts or deterministic death-spent mindset where I cannot imagine much. I'm want to imagine more.

I forgot to describe Shadow Life. Independent bisexual octogenarian woman vaccums up a fake death and tries to convince her overbearingly "fat loud girl trope" (I identify real hard with her) daughter she can live alone as she fights off grief to keep going.