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PICK OF THE MONTH
PALOMAR: THE COMPLETE HEARTBREAK SOUP COLLECTION, by Gilbert Hernandez, from Fantagraphics Books
Hardcover: JUN03 2299, pg. 324, $39.95
It figures: faced with a book distributor that fails, Fantagraphics has no trouble keeping a steady hand on the keel. But give them a book distributor that succeeds, and they fall right to pieces...
The best way you can support Fantagraphics in their hour of need is to order from them directly, but preordering helps some too. And here's the thing to preorder.
What is there left to say about LOVE & ROCKETS, the comic in which these stories originally appeared? Nothing by me, certainly, at least not at this ungodly hour of the morning. So I'll stick to consumer information. Fantagraphics has collected LOVE & ROCKETS in many and various formats over its 20+ year run, but the one they had settled on was the chronological multi-volume collector-completist format, which is just daunting as hell. Happily, the imperatives of the bookstore market require something more self-contained, and so we get PALOMAR, which collects the entirety of the "Heartbreak Soup" stories in one fat 512-page volume.
Meaning what, you ask. Here's what it duplicates from the existing volumes: all the Palomar stories from volume 1-6, BLOOD OF PALOMAR (vol. 8), almost all of LUBA CONQUERS THE WORLD (vol. 14), and a recent short story, 'Toco,' from the newly revived LOVE & ROCKETS series.
PS: Gilbert also has a new issue of LUBA (#7, JUN03 2306, pg. 327, $3.50) out this month.
PUBO, by Leland Purvis
JUN03 0028, pg. 29, $9.95
Hmm. Purvis seems to have treated this as a way to introduce a new audience to the character (first seen in his self-published anthology VOX), with the intention of further installments down the road. Given the dismal sales of this miniseries (which were unfortunately typical of Dark Horse's undernourished Maverick line), I'm not sure that was the wisest approach. But never mind that, it's a fun story, and a nice accessible introduction to Purvis, one of comics' rising young innovators.
USAGI YOJIMBO: DUEL AT KITANOJI, by Stan Sakai
Softcover: JUN03 0030, pg. 30, $16.95
Limited edition signed & numbered hardcover: JUN03 0031, pg. 30, $59.95
The further adventures of Sakai's rabbit ronin. It's not the most profound comic on the stands, but it's one of the most elegant - you can practically hear it ping like fine crystal. This volume has an introduction by Jack Davis, part of the original EC stable and today one of the most prolific and successful freelance illustrators in the country.
FUTURE WORLD VOL. 1, by Osamu Tezuka
JUN03 0034, pg. 32, $13.95
"Part of Tezuka's cycle of science fiction graphic novels, including LOST WORLD and METROPOLIS," says Dark Horse, and apparently also a "wry satire of the Cold War."
THE SANDMAN: ENDLESS NIGHTS, by Neil Gaiman and various
Hardcover: JUN03 0253, pg. 106, $24.95
Neil Gaiman returns to his most famous creation, to hosannas and the mighty ringing of cash registers. Despite an all-star roster of artists - P. Craig Russell, Milo Manara, Bill Sienkiewicz, Miguelanxo Prado, Barron Story, Glenn Fabry, and Frank Quitely - I'm afraid I'm Sandmanned out. It's like the old country song says: "How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?" But no doubt there's a ravenous legion of fans for whom this book is an answered prayer.
This is far and away Gaiman's month, by the way. Marvel is counter-programming with 1602, a book it's been hyping to the skies while managing to reveal almost nothing about it. And in the Books Section, on page 398, you can find quite a few of Gaiman's books and spoken word CDs, including a new all-ages graphic novel, done as usual with Dave McKean, called THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS (JUN03 2817, pg. 398, $16.95).
HUMAN TARGET: FINAL CUT, by Peter Milligan & Javier Pulido
JUN03 0248, pg. 105, $19.95
HUMAN TARGET #1, by Peter Milligan & Javier Pulido
JUN03 0247, pg. 105, $2.95
I'd been waiting for HUMAN TARGET: FINAL CUT to come out as a reasonably priced softcover... well, so much for that. Almost $20 for almost 100 pages seems awfully high to me, even considering that it's an original graphic novel, without the benefits of prior serialization or ad revenue. And the fact that they're now turning HUMAN TARGET into an ongoing series might suggest a lack of confidence in the OGN format. Oh well, mustn't grumble - the first HUMAN TARGET book was a superior entertainment, and so should this be.
THE MAXX: BOOK 1, by Sam Kieth
JUN03 0224, pg. 102, $17.95
EPICURUS THE SAGE, by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth
JUN03 0217, pg. 101, $19.95
For fans of Sam Kieth; THE MAXX - you know, his signature book, the one the spawned the MTV animated TV show, the one that managed to be deeply wiggy and popular and critically acclaimed, all at once - is brought back into print after a scandalously long time in limbo. And EPICURUS, the satire on Greek philosophy he drew for William Messner-Loebs is put out in an optimal edition with some new material, at a time when Messner-Loebs could very badly use the money.
SMAX #1 (of 5), by Alan Moore and Zander Cannon
JUN03 0236, pg. 104, $2.95
A spin-off to tide over fans of Moore's superhero/police-station-house drama TOP 10.
PLANETARY #16, by Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
JUN03 0226, pg. 102, $2.50
Resolicited from February, because DC decided they wanted to get the PLANETARY/BATMAN crossover out first, to rekindle interest in the long-dormant series, but they didn't have the wit to decide that beforehand. Grr.
PARADIGM VOL. 1: SEGUE TO AN INTERLUDE, by Matt Cashel & Jeremy Haun
JUN03 1303, pg. 137, $13.95
I've seen a couple online comics columnists admit defeat by this book recently. I was glad to find I wasn't alone. The fact is that PARADIGM is a chore to read. Which is not to say that it's bad- it's good enough to profit by the comparisons it often gets to STRANGEHAVEN and Bendis' crime novels, which is saying no small thing. But it's overdone, and much too cryptic (as is signaled by this volume's cutesy, meaningless title, which sets my teeth right on edge).
Haun, the artist, ought to step back from the photorealism a bit- he's good, but the mass of detail sometimes makes it hard to see what you're looking it. And Cashel, the writer, leans way too heavily on the device of having otherworldly, flamboyantly theatrical wackjobs failing, at great length, to explain much of anything to the bewildered normals. It works for David Lynch, but only because it's not supposed to make any sense - you can let the nonsense wash over you, if you're so inclined. But it's a selling point of PARADIGM that there's a grand master plan behind the whole thing that will be revealed to the patient and attentive reader. I wish them luck, but it turns out they're asking for more patience than I can muster.
ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE, by Larry Young, Charlie Adlard and Matt Smith
Hardcover: JUN03 1969, pg. 242, $19.95
Softcover: JUN03 1970, pg. 242, $16.95
Larry Young collects the entirety of his ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE stories in a single volume (The graphic novels collected here - LIVE FROM THE MOON, SPACE: 1959, and ONE SHOT, ONE BEER - would collectively cost $29 if purchased at list price in softcover.) I'm not the first to say this, but I find the series most likeable when the astronauts aren't in trouble, as in the conversational interlude in LIVE FROM THE MOON and most of the barroom bull sessions of ONE SHOT, ONE BEER. But then, I suppose ASTRONAUTS AT LEISURE would be a much less compelling title...
HUMOR CAN BE FUNNY, SECOND EDITION, by Sam Henderson
JUN03 1975, pg. 242, $11.95
Resolicited from December, and I don't know how I missed it then. You know how they say there's a fine line between clever and stupid? Henderson goes racing over that line, disappears over the horizon, and comes full circle into clever again. He's got an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy clichés and no shame in deploying them, and his stuff managed to be funny and "funny" at the same time. The drawing is crude and as simple as possible, but that's what's called for. Recommended.
ANTIPODES PUBLISHING
KNUCKLES THE MALEVOLENT NUN VOL. 1: NO MORE MRS NICE NUN, by Cornelius Stone & Roger Langridge
JUN03 2052, pg. 252, $19.95
If you've been reading Langridge's FRED THE CLOWN - like I've been telling you to and will continue to tell you to, over and over and over again - you already know he's one of the most versatile and polished humor cartoonists working. With KNUCKLES, he gets to apply all that impeccable skill to something really, truly vile. Knuckles is a vicious, warty little homunculus who lives on filth, curses a blue streak, eats the occasional baby and still finds time to smite the unbelievers. If you thought Peter Bagge was at his best doing MARTINI BATON, this will be right up your street. This book collects the, er, best of past KNUCKLES strips and adds 60 pages of new material.
BRIES
SNAPSHOTS, by Philip Paquet
JUN03 2140, pg. 272, $13.95
Paquet did a fine adaptation of Louis Armstrong's autobiography recently, and continuing the jazz theme, he here offers up "semi-fictional stories" (not sure what the solicitation means by that) "about Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and other musical greats". Very much looking forward to this - Paquet's an easy, stylish cartoonist, with a touch as light as smoke.
MORE FUND COMICS, by various
JUN03 2205, pg. 296, $10
A benefit book for the worthy and perpetually beleaguered CBLDF, featuring lots of the most popular mainstream and quasi-mainstream illustrators in comics: George Perez, Adam Hughes, Mike Oeming, Frank Cho, etc. Features quite a few peeks at their upcoming projects, too.
OPTIC NERVE #9, by Adrian Tomine
JUN03 2244, pg. 304, $3.95
SUMMER BLONDE, by Adrian Tomine Softcover: JUN03 2246, pg. 306, $16.95
I already vented about SUMMER BLONDE, which collects OPTIC NERVE #5-8, back when it came out in hardcover. I'll just say this: Tomine's stories have been getting progressively longer just as his protagonists have been getting progressively less interesting - painfully shy sensitive souls, every one of them, unable to function out there in the great brash vulgar McWorld. So it does not bode well, to me, that OPTIC NERVE #9 launches his longest story yet, a three-issue tale of "a confused, obsessive, Japanese-American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for the perfect girl."
EUREKA PRODUCTIONS
GRAPHIC CLASSICS VOL. 6: AMBROSE BIERCE, by various
JUN03 2293, pg. 323, $9.95
Ooh, good choice! Bierce was one of the most acerbic writers America ever produced - hell, even HL Mencken was awed by his boundless cynicism - best remembered today, though not as well as he ought to be, for his brutal Poe-esque Civil War stories and the irresistibly quotable Devil's Dictionary. (Sample entry: "Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.") This will be the first of the GRAPHIC CLASSICS I buy. The Comics Journal complained of the early volumes that the impressive artist rosters were achieved by recycling a good deal of old material, and that some of the new adaptations were ill-thought-out; I'll soon find out if they had a point.
RIPPLE: A PREDILECTION FOR TINA, by Dave Cooper
JUN03 2300, pg. 326, $14.95
And here's where I again shamefacedly cop to not having read Cooper's work yet. For some reason, it's the glancing similarities to Crumb that keep putting me off (the main character's attraction/repulsion to the coarse, physically gross girl he's using as an artist's model, and the zillions of tiny little hatching marks); I like Crumb, but one of him is enough. This is no doubt a very shallow impression I've gotten, and I expect to be embarrassed when I read the book at long last, because everybody says it's brilliant.
After PALOMAR and RIPPLE, it's a weird month at Fantagraphics. There's THE DEVIL IN DESIGN: THE KRAMPUS POSTCARDS ARTBOOK (JUN03 2301, pg. 326, $18.95), Krampus being, in the European tradition of a hundred years ago, the demonic counterpart of Santa Claus; there's THE CRYSTAL BALLROOM (JUN03 2303, pg. 326, $19.95), a prose memoir of adolescence by comics' dirtiest old man, Frank Thorne; and there's, believe it or not, superheroes. YOUNG GODS & FRIENDS (JUN03 2998, pg. 324, hardcover: $29.95) is the first collection from Barry Windsor-Smith's ill-fated magazine STORYTELLER, including some material from issues that never got published.
THE COMICS JOURNAL #255
JUN03 2304, pg. 326, $6.95
This month: a feature on the marginally intelligible comics collective Fort Thunder, and an interview with Keiji Nakazawa, author of a landmark work in manga, the Hiroshima memoir BAREFOOT GEN.
GIANT THB VOL. 2 #1, by Paul Pope
JUN03 2369, pg. 336, $6.97
Does it matter? Nobody familiar with Pope's track record as a self-publisher can possibly believe this will ship when he says it will...
A TREASURY OF VICTORIAN MURDER VOL. 6: THE BEAST OF CHICAGO, by Rick Geary
JUN03 2427, pg. 345, $15.95
Excellent. Geary is a terrific illustrator and a unique voice in comics, with a matter-of-fact, typically Midwestern tone that is odder than any self-conscious stabs at oddness could be. His approach in the VICTORIAN MURDER series is not to sensationalize at all, which makes a refreshing change. This volume is about HH Holmes, billed as America's first serial killer. You can see preview pages here.
NEW SUIT
NEW THING VOL. 2: SECRETS, by various
JUN03 2449, pg. 348, $9.95
Resolicited from September. This launched with the declaration to become the next RAW. It could well be: it obviously demands a great deal of its contributors, and it's a bit pretentious. But it may help that Phoebe Gloeckner (A CHILD'S LIFE and DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL) is headlining this issue, since, judging from her utterly vicious piece in the first Comics Journal special, she has zero patience for art-comics pretensions.
TINY GIANTS, by Nate Powell
JUN03 2501, pg. 356, $15
This is a pleasant surprise: a collection of Powell's four issues of WALKIE TALKIE, a shoestring book I stumbled across last year and loved, plus some other strips. Powell's sort of a John Porcellino who can draw - he tries to capture those times in adolescence when you feel super-sensitive to everything, when all your emotions are magnified and you're desperate for comradeship with somebody, anybody.
And when I say Powell can draw, I don't mean he's some sort of bloodless technician - quite the contrary, the most appealing thing about his art is his willingness to get scribbly. It's full of verve, not at all constrained by correctness or tidiness, and the storytelling is equally inventive. Here's some kid nobody ever heard of, using the medium to its very fullest, and it's a thrilling thing to see.
VOICE OF THE FIRE, by Alan Moore
Hardcover: JUN03 2566, pg. 366, $26.95
This is Alan Moore's first and so far only novel, being published for the first time in America. Like Moore's performance pieces, it's a 'psycho-geography', describing a particular region of England over the entirety of human history. Each chapter is narrated in a different inhabitant's voice, starting with a caveman and working up through the ages from there. As you might guess, this reportedly makes for some tough sledding, prose-wise, and opinion on this seems a good deal more sharply divided than is usual for a Moore work. Top Shelf has gussied up the book with a Chip Kidd jacket, a Neil Gaiman introduction, and thirteen full-cover chapter heading illustrations by José Villarrubia.
VANGUARD PRODUCTIONS
THE EDGE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, by various
With Dave McKean cover: JUN03 2575, pg. 367, $19.95
With Jim Steranko cover: JUN03 2576, pg. 367, $19.95
Resolicited from September. This anthology, formerly called TALES FROM THE EDGE, hasn't been heard from since the '90s. It was in part a showcase for renowned illustration teacher Barron Storey and his students, who included - and this will give you some idea of what Storey's own work is like - Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz. And as it happens, all three are in this issue, McKean teaming up with old pal Neil Gaiman again on a story called "Mr X", Storey doing a story called "Beyond the Clash", and Sienkiewicz doing something unspecified. Also featured are satirical novelist/travel writer Paul Theroux and comics living legend/prudish old crank Jim Steranko. It may be worth it for Storey alone - he's done some very challenging work that has gone strangely overlooked.
COMIC MAGAZINES
COMIC ART MAGAZINE #4
JUN03 2623, pg. 380, $9
I can't recommend this too highly. This month: "a career overview of amazing Mexican caricaturist and poster artist Ernesto Cabral", as well as an in-studio look at Charles Burns, and articles on early PEANUTS, Carl Barks, and Basil Wolverton's MAD art.
BOOKS SECTION: COMIC THEMES
JULIUS KNIPL, REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHER: THE BEAUTY SUPPLY DISTRICT, by Ben Katchor
JUN03 2767, pg. 394, $16.95
This is the second collection of Katchor's weekly KNIPL strip, finally being released in softcover. Knipl himself barely matters - the main character in these strips is New York, as in most of Katchor's work. The great advantage of New York is that you can find a constituency for anything there, which allows Katchor to present the most outlandish arcana and have it feel, not only plausible, but like bits of unearthed history. A Katchor character can find poetry in obsolete appliance instruction manuals, or music in the infinite vocabulary of gastric noises.
Katchor's New York is a vast ocean of lonely people, all harboring misplaced enthusiasms for weird inventions or plans for utopia, none of which can bear too much reality; people who are forever clustering in fellowships or mens' associations (it's almost always men), searching for someone who can understand. Knowledgeable people, such as Michael Chabon, have called KNIPL one of the best and oddest strips this side of KRAZY KAT.
DOONESBURY: GOT WAR?, by Garry Trudeau
JUN03 2794, pg. 396, $16.95
Somebody, please, get Trudeau to take another of his famous sabbaticals. I hate to say it, since the strip is still ahead of 90% of the pack, just by virtue of having some guts and a basic level of competence. But the rot is spreading. In retrospect, you can see the first hints of the rot around the time of the first Iraq war; you see it in the more frequent breaking of the fourth wall, the floating icons used to represent world leaders, the overexposure of Duke, the clumsy attempts at urban black slang. All these things have only gotten worse, and a new, perhaps fatal flaw has emerged of late; Trudeau can no longer write teenagers who are the least bit credible. That's a shocking thing to have to say about the man who was the voice of his generation on the funnies page, but there it is. Trudeau is in danger of falling permanently out of touch.
(The current DOONESBURY, as I finish writing this on Saturday, contains passing references to Hef's grotto at the Playboy Mansion and 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.' This in a strip about women suicide bombers. I'm starting to think no amount of sabbatical time could help.)
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