|
Post by bluebed on Jan 31, 2024 22:58:23 GMT
Seth's cosplay is pretty self-aware, though. He's just a homebody with a very clear aesthetic vision, who decided to commit to the bit and turned himself and his house into a museum. I don't relate to it at all, personally, but it makes sense for Seth, and he's probably amassed a respectable collection of folk arts and various olden things--there's more value in that than in all the dudes who collect Funko Pops.
|
|
|
Post by dominocorp on Feb 1, 2024 1:33:16 GMT
i reread a bunch of those gasoline alley books this week, they are really perfect strip collections, great size for the art to breath, etc. Beautiful comics.
|
|
|
Post by pentimento on Feb 2, 2024 1:06:57 GMT
i reread a bunch of those gasoline alley books this week, they are really perfect strip collections, great size for the art to breath, etc. Beautiful comics. The series seems dead, unfortunately. Of course I hope to be wrong. I really, REALLY, hate Jeet Heer, but those massive intros he writes, combined with all the domestic pics from King's family, are some of the most moving experiences to be found in comics scholarship, especially joined to the wonderful, gentle comics.
|
|
nate
New Member
Posts: 20
|
Post by nate on Feb 2, 2024 4:14:22 GMT
I wish Heer would write more about comics and spend less time chasing clout with middle aged very online lefties, and I’m a very online middle aged leftie.
|
|
|
Post by dominocorp on Feb 2, 2024 4:16:55 GMT
Jeet Heer's writing about comics is basically: 'Charles Dickens often wrote about orphans. Little Orphan Annie is an orphan. As you can see, there is a clear Dickesian tone to Harold Gray!'
|
|
nate
New Member
Posts: 20
|
Post by nate on Feb 3, 2024 4:22:48 GMT
I don’t think that’s totally fair. He can definitely work in that vein, but when he’s t actually putting in the work (e.g. writing on Gray’s politics and the New Deal and the fact that he’s actually capable of discussing how a given work fits in the context of the medium’s history) he’s pretty good. I don’t rate it highly in a vacuum, but compared to the word salad of 90% of comics criticism it’s solid.
|
|
|
Post by arecomicsevengood on Feb 3, 2024 22:30:03 GMT
I have also felt the urge to buy my own copies of Chester Brown's Underwater and reread them (after reading a friend's issues a decade or so ago) so I might as well talk about that here even though it's also coming up in the thread of what people are looking for. My understanding is that, even though sales were not as good as Yummy Fur, the thing that sunk the book was Brown realizing that the pacing he was using was going to take forever. Although maybe he knew that going in and that's why he launched it as his own series rather than just continuing the Yummy Fur serialization. Anyway I think this stuff is so much more interesting than Louis Riel and what came after, although it's quite possible those minis you get when you subscribe to his Patreon are bangers. Reading it, understanding increases from issue to issue, but I am still not sure where exactly he was going with the thing, how far along in Kupifam's life we were meant to go. Age 6? Adolescence? An examination of a relationship with a mute sibling? The surrealism, the lightly inexplicable, the things being constantly "off" to some degree or another... Meanwhile, the gospel of Matthew is being adapted in the back, which is more straight-forward except to the extent that the motivations for doing it at all must've been confusing to a large chunk of the audience. And then the one other story besides these threads is "My Mother Is A Schizophrenic" which, despite the title, is not autobiographical at all, but is a sort of tract where the title just outlines the personal stakes.
Anyway in some of the later issues, as more language becomes decipherable, we also get more indications of certain words encrypted meanings. I might make a little glossary and give it a reread and see if somehow certain narrative threads become more tangible but I like that it isn't about that at all. It's not about decipherability so much as it's about balancing this tendency towards craft and clear storytelling with this incomprehensible abstraction to make something hypnotic and powerful.
|
|
|
Post by pentimento on Feb 4, 2024 2:00:33 GMT
I wish Heer would write more about comics and spend less time chasing clout with middle aged very online lefties, and I’m a very online middle aged leftie. I stopped taking him seriously the day I happened onto his twitter account (this was like five-ten years ago even) and saw he had made in the neighborhood of 500,000 tweets. C'mon, dude.
|
|
|
Post by jporcellino on Feb 5, 2024 0:07:51 GMT
i reread a bunch of those gasoline alley books this week, they are really perfect strip collections, great size for the art to breath, etc. Beautiful comics. Treasures.
|
|
|
Post by arecomicsevengood on Feb 7, 2024 0:36:16 GMT
View AttachmentI just don't get this opinion at all, I don't get people that are like 'i read it too quick!' i dunno, read it again or something? go slower this time? appreciate it? I hate to speak ill of Spurgeon, but this is one of many times where he comes of as arbitrary to me, real minor preferences obscuring a much bigger truth. If you're reading the first three issues of Underwater in 90 seconds, you're 100% reading it wrong, that should be self evident to anyone picking it up. Quoting this from the "in search of/want to buy" thread where Austin was posting about Underwater, and IDK, I don't think I agree with him in this specific case because clearly the pacing in that comic is extremely incremental. (I also dislike Brown's "tons of negative space on a page where the panels hang like pictures on a wall" approach, although this gets worse in the later issues, as more of the language becomes discernable and wouldn't apply to the earliest issues Spurgeon is reviewing.) You can read the comic a few times and it's still going to be more about the reading experience than any narrative reward. Again, that's my understanding of why Brown cut the project short: it wouldn't have gone anywhere, at the pace it was moving, for fifty issues. But I was also sort of thinking about comics and the experience of reading them and appreciating them for their own sake vs. having of a point or conclusion and I was thinking that is especially pronounced with unfinished works, or it ties into how few comics have particularly strong endings anyway. It is kind of a "no afterlife" feeling, you really gotta lean into and embrace that "maybe you'll get hit by a bus tomorrow" vibe. Underwater is unfinished, inconclusive. In retrospect you can say "read it again" because that's what you have to do, but in the context of a serial I think it makes sense to say "that's it?" after 1, 3, 9, or 11 installments.
|
|
|
Post by bluebed on Feb 7, 2024 3:50:04 GMT
I think the pacing in Underwater makes sense, and I assumed it would exponentially accelerate as the character grows older, with increasing time skips. I wish the existing issues were published as a book, for me it would've been his best work, even in unfinished form. I think the thing I appreciate the most about Brown is this very peculiar, sort of hollow atmosphere--everything feels like it's a vacuum, the way he draws pitch black skies for instance. And in Underwater this stylistic weirdness matched the story better than anywhere else.
|
|
|
Post by daisyjaberi on Feb 7, 2024 6:10:46 GMT
Seth is one of my favorite cartoonists if not #1 favorite of all time. He has had a huge influence on me and my work. His style is so clean and pleasing.
|
|
|
Post by fatherspukashells on Feb 16, 2024 20:28:23 GMT
Hijacking the thread to plug a zine I printed last year intended as a follow-up to the Toronto boys' pseudonymously published "You're Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown". It's called PEANUS. Is it ethical to rip off a ripoff? I don't know. For some reason at the time I put this together I just needed to expunge my brain of a lot of cum jokes.
|
|