I've bought a disgusting amount of comics recently. Sorry in advance for the spam.
I forgot to include Michael DeForge's Heaven No Hell, Joe Kessler's The Gull Yettin, Tsutomu Nihei's Wolverine and Brian Blomerth's Mycelium Wassonii in this pic so I'll talk about them first.
I haven't read much of DeForge's stuff. I didn't like how static Leaving Richard's Valley was but I loved the visual inventiveness and wittiness of his collection A Western World. Heaven no Hell follows suite and is my favourite of his I've read so far.
The Gull Yettin was incredible, it had me sobbing the entire read through. Kessler's visual style is the best type of garish, super striking, flexible and emotive. There is a haunting but lifelike sense of vulnerability and helplessness in this book which makes the moments of love and comfort even warmer. A raw and magical portrayal of childhood.
The Nihei adaption of Wolverine was just flat out boring. Not enough action and the colours dampened the ferocity Nihei is able to convey purely with black and white. There was a Comic Journal article written recently which summed up the lameness of this book perfectly.
Mycelium Wassonii was just as good as Blomerth's other book Bicycle Day. The best kind of cute, psychedelic art. Every page is a treat of a vista or creative layout.
I loved the visual fullness and optimism of Ron Rege's Cartoon Utopia and I think his unhinged rambliness only adds to his art. It was nice to see his usual craziness in a pure structured narrative rather than a series of lectures.
Die Laughing was a solid collection of bleak Belgian cartoons. The author's use of silhouette and proportion is stunning. Some strips were definitely better than others though, some were a bit repetitive or didn't have as interesting punchlines as others.
Elle Shivers' comic Cicatrix is one of my favourites. It's graphically strong and is a reflective mediation on guilt and corruption in the Philippines that's really sad. I was excited to read a fictional work of theirs but I felt it missed the mark. A gay diving romance is definitely right up my alley but idk the script felt a bit too light in a tame indie movie kind of way. I also reread Daisuke Igarashi's Children of the Sea recently and comparing the depiction of underwater action in that manga to this created a wide, unfair margin.
Was excited to find Junko Mizuno half price in a store. I'm a huge fan and had been looking for Pelu for a while. Solid, usual Mizuno but I don't think anything will ever top the density of fun and visual splendour of Pure Trance.
Didn't quite understand Strong Eye Contact despite its large amount of praise. I felt the book ended too just I was becoming acclimated to its unique humour and style. I just wish there was more of it.
Chronosis is a collaboration between an abstract artist and two philosophy dudes I think? None of it made sense but this book nails the terrifying, swirling void of space and shifts the scale of narrative focus in interesting ways.
I picked up a 2nd Sergio Toppi book and the guy is a god. Jawdropping textures that look like they're stencilled out of a block of wood and articulate use of negative space and composition. Love Toppi so much.
Mirror Mirror II was as fun and as disgusting romp as I wanted it to be with a super solid lineup of artists. Laura Lannes, Apolo Cacho and Lala Albert's had my favourite contributions.
Eldo Yoshimizu is this mangaka that uses these large, elegant brushtrokes to create things which are so stylish and energetic that it almost feels like calligraphy. However, his work seems to always be bogged down by really unnecessary exposition. Ryuko manages to succeed despite this and Hen Kai Pan is probably his best because the artwork is able to shine. This was my least favourite of his so far as it was the boggiest of them all but the highlight here was how good the architecture looked.
Purple Spider and Rolypoly were 2 great books I'd previously read at the library a while back but haven't revisited them yet for any up-to-date thoughts.
I bought Windowpane immediately after I got floored from The Gull Yettin and was impressed yet again. The first and last stories were probably my favourite.
Anti-gone is one of my favourite comics and Bradley of Him was also fantastic, even though I had to Google Translate a French copy. The amount of angles and illustrations Willumsen is able to squeeze out of a single scene is nothing short of amazing but his minimalism and subtraction is also so precise.
W the Whore was great, really captivating and haunting words and imagery with awesome, smudgy, graphite drawings. I saw some people who were anxious about buying the book because of Austin English's negative tweets and I was also a bit hesitant but I liked it just fine. It was also 75% off on amazon for no good reason so I ended up saving $50 which was a steal.
Girl Juice is everything I wanted it to be, fun as balls. Somehow captures the yassss queen girlboss discourse in a way that isn't annoying and always makes me laugh instead. It always pops with Benji Nate's cute character designs and colours.
The Philippe Druillet boxset has been an absolute treat, definitely one of my favourite cartoonists after reading The Night and Salammbo. Orgasmic overstimulation of the senses. Architecture, character design, ships, Druillet can do it all.
Picnoleptic Inertia has this grubby, misty haze to it that I've been direly craving from Tsutomu Nihei's comics. Fun and strange stuff abound in this book but one I'd like to reread to get all the meaning out of.
The Agency is the first of Skelly's books that has clicked with me hard, it's so fun and gratuitous and the fact that it's a collection of stories means that it never drags, there's always something new and visceral on the page. Pure candy.