more... comics...

I started a new job over a month ago (it's not great) and its gotten me back into using the public library as it's within one. 

Scratch that. I'm feeling real haunted today. Therapy was ok, and probably better than I usually am, but I feel amiss. Disconnected and doubtful. And knowing that versus just feeling empty is not too different but enough so that I miss the other things so dearly.

Here's a multiple day-written series of descriptions of comics I read. (I started making/reading the books on this list a month ago.)

1. Sports is Hell - Ben Passmore

After reading Bttm Fdrs I wanted to see what Daniels and Passmore's work was like outside of the sort of horror cyberpunk genre. This is definitely my favorite of the two because all of its comical bits to Bttm Fdrs alongside its obvious political knowhow shine in the more incredulous setting of violence. Think Sorry to Bother You meets Do the Right Thing meets Watchmen (because holy shit I would have watched/read a whole series of this extended out of the one night Crow fest).

The basic plot is white people are evil monsters of violence and in the middle of a power outage following a riot based on the superbowl, this sort of post-apocalyptic hyper-violence between factions (fascions) happens. That's a silly and simplification of the plot but it's one part good political jokes and another part shitposting and other part just really really fucking good because oh my god I laughed so hard when the white lib talks about MLK on the grassy knoll.

2. Upgrade Soul - Ezra Clayton Daniels

This is more a traditional comic. Which is to say...it kind of reads as a Sandman vibe. Maybe. In any sense it's sad to say this is my least favorite against Passmore's because neither are in the genre of my typicality but both shine with their own thing. Here, we kind of see a gritty science-fiction morality tale broken up between sociological lenses and disability/racialization? The racialization of disability and medicalization of racialization? Anyway, I think my main critique is only that I would have loved this as a heavy ink black and white comic because it almost by being colored - which is not to insult any of the colorist's work - blends it into the new mass-production comic scene in the same way the ben day dot does. Sometimes I think hyper detail in linework - which is like the only type of art I like beyond Toulouse-lautrec btw - is just a good way to remind myself that we all have stories and can tell them. I appreciate it as a callback too, to zine culture. In any sense, the book is good and I think better than Bttm Fdrs. I don't like how I've evaluated these though, and am dialing back to say this also gives strong Alan Moore vibes, but in an entirely different way and to not take the Gaiman comparison too strongly, Daniels' art probably just reminds me of some of McKean's ink stuff.

3. Blue by Kiriko Nananan

I've been reading Boy's Abyss as the chapters come out because I'm still a fucking dork into edgy manga nonsense. In short, this is not like that but is like that. A manga coming of age story. It's not exactly the most unique shoujou-ai I've read but it didn't have to be. The art is good and the comic pacing is good. So yeah, the story is maybe the only lacking element, because it's about a romance between two girls - one of which is demonized for an abortion she had by others. It kind of ends in the nonsense that Boy's Abyss pulls every week (and Himegoto Juukyuusai no Seifuku before it) where indecision carries the plot more than meaning and motion. So I guess what I desire is more apt reason and more outward gay nonsense. Nananan is someone I'm going to try to find other stuff by so I can compare it to the translation and whether or just see how other themes of youthful transference enact their space.

4. Palestine: Joe Sacco

I found a pretty gross wakeup call come across most people in the wake of the Sheik-Jarrah focus of this year. Palestine and Israel, an ongoing colonialism, was news of a radical attention span. That they had forgotten - apart a few - that this instigation of British mandate had been set forth years ongoing, and was met with demands towards some moral set that must have been ignoring itself as immoral to momentarily react in the neglect of the loss of children.

I saw droves of people reaching out to state what was obvious - a settlement, a violence, an irredeemable notion - for the first time. It was trendy to know more about Israel and Palestine for a moment, but then the moment passed. People quoted June Jordan and not her poetry. People shouted Free Palestine and painted flags on their bodies. And the bodies still fell. And the rockets went off. And the tear gas let the mosque sensationalized and horrific to our non-Palestinian, non-Jewish world.

When the west - and I mostly mean America - comes to grasp our involvement we would no longer turn to Jewish children and tell them to hold notions of what is a larger group of guilt. I think a lot of what Mal Blum said in an Instagram post as a sad reality in which this conflict, infantilized in its formation because to be informed on it would be and there is more debate about what to term it outside of the discourse of its own affected persons, is not important until there are great specific evils that do not include us. It would make more sense to accuse America and the colonizers of Britain and our shared histories than specify the brainwashing. Or, what sort of discourse is it when you academicize a people who you refuse to interact with as human and constant. So, similar to antiblackness of course. But everything is.

Anyway, if you're familiar with this comic maybe you know that this is what it is grappling with. Almost Crumb-like at moments, it shows at times a great and horrible fallacy of the spectacle of violence that ignores the need for decolonization worldwide. So, if you've forgotten, the people of Gaza still have their lives bulldozed when news points its head or not. The children grow into it.

5. The Secret to Superhuman Strength - Alison Bechdel

A little earlier this year my roommate asked us if we would be okay with them buying a pull-up bar and if it would make them be a jock. I didn't understand why it wouldn't be okay but I did tell them it did make them a jock because well... They've kind of created a whole home gym setup for their COVID life which has been somewhat offset with time at the gym proper, swimming at the pool or going roller skating with their friends.

I however feel no inclinations for the sporty in sense of bodily health. I find it interesting to connect here to Bechdel's exploration of the white world entering a relationship with exercise as it refers to a natural exploration, but when I hike, I'm on a mission. My COVID life was finding mushrooms and pretending things were okay and safe out in the woods as they no longer feel that way when I walk down the streets of the city. I fear retaliation mostly and disturbingly am set to be a homebody even more than I once was in this new sense of self in need of other's comfort. But I am a fat one and shall always be and apparently the thicc-ness is getting down with others.

I don't think there's anything particularly ground-breaking about Bechdel's memoir here - much the same Are You My Mother? it combines an examination of literature's relationship to one's self-development - but it still reigns the usual narrative that Bechdel does good with and has hit the peak of crafting.

I joked the other day about how the Fun Home musical was bad but I don't actually think I believe that. I think maybe we all find different ways to come to things and in that these interactions we have with our world and our bodies serves some form.

6. Picture This - Lynda Barry

Like What It Is, this is a kind of hybrid autobiographical, comic art project and guide meets a collage and I don't know. Nothing needs to be set for making Lynda Barry any more wonderful than she'll always be. I'm moving through a few of her other works right now but am finally gonna post this because it's been a month of some of these having been finished and I'd like to get them off my chest. Lynda Barry is someone who when I read I feel the impossible blend of tackling the trauma of childhood and existing as a human being matched with the knowledge of ourselves.

There's someone who is not doing very well right now that I want to recommend this book to and can't or won't. Maybe I'll secretly deliver them a copy? That's probably a bad idea. 

Read Lynda Barry. She has been extremely helpful through hard times of the last few years and I'm indebted to that.