Sometimes I go to the library and peruse the new books section. Every so often I try to pick a book I know is coming out or had known was coming but maybe didn’t put any energy into saving or reserving. For new books, more often than not I am looking for the audiobooks coming out on Overdrive or Audio CD and so I don’t generally grab those. Or worse, I do grab them, hold on to them, not even really intending to read to them, and then return them unread, while someone else doesn’t get to read them.
The other thing I do is look at the various graphic novels and comics books that come out and grab those instead, often racing through those sometimes reading carefully and sometimes not, sometimes reviewing them and sometimes not. Same goes for short books and novellas and the like. Short one off mysteries, horror books, etc etc etc. Oh and poetry books too. Here I grabbed a bunch of graphic novels or comic books and one thing I found about my local library is there’s been some kind of concerted push to buy more comics by women, trans writers, and or gender nonconforming and non binary writers and artists. So while, I didn’t necessarily go with that intention, that’s been the result here.
Grease Bats 3/5
This is a webcomics/comics collection two twenty something layabouts, wastrels, whatever you want to call them. They collectively remind me a lot of the Teresa Taylor character from the Richard Linklater character in Slacker. Like good webcomics, there’s a balance here between single entry schemes and mini-stories and a kind of overarching arc. So the entry point is very accessible throughout any part of the series. This is also a beefy collection. It’s not super text heavy but each comic strip is multiple panels or pages long and the stories, small as they are cover a small amount but develop slowly over those pages. These aren’t comics with punchlines and traditional joke structures, but instead are funny situations, sometimes with jokes, but with charming characters who find themselves in the kinds of scrapes. There’s a real trickster quality to these character being both non-conforming in gender and sexuality, but also anti-capital in their basic orientation to the world.
Girl Town – 2/5
This is a collection of short stories that circulate a basic set of themes, ideas, and characters/ character types. The writer is also known for her work on Lumberjanes, but I think the success of that is the collaborative effort. This book is a mixed bag, charming certainly, especially the art, but the quality of the different stories is pretty variable. Ultimately I think it’s an interesting and charming book, but there’s a lack of cohesiveness about the whole collection and it felt wayward in a lot of ways. It might work more as a book that you come and go with, but less so on that you stay with, and worse so to read in one go.
The Lie and How We Told It – 2/5
This is a large format comics story about two individuals meeting up accidentally at the grocery store, one of them working, the other checking out. They clearly know each other from a shared past and in a kind of awkward and almost accidental moment, they agree to meet up after the shift is over and split a bottle of wine. They talk, they get food, and they discuss their connected past. It seems they’ve dated or been together in some sense, and now one of them has seemingly moved on and is on the cusp of getting married to an older woman. This is treated in an offhand way as a kind of transgression against the queer past, but it’s never directly stated. Instead, we get the sense that this decision to get married is a regression to a default state of heteronormativity, and this decision is treated with quiet derision. In the middle of the whole story, one of them finds a zine and read it, and this comics zine folds into the rest of the comic.
I guess thinking back on this one, I think it has more depth and interest to it than when I was reading it. There’s very little conversation and dialogue, and there’s a heavy focus on the art. The art is definitely very interesting. Each character is painted with a large physical body that is lumbering and awash with color, while their individual heads are small and variable. It has the almost effect of Francis Bacon making comics. Not quite, but almost. I wasn’t left with a strong impression of the story itself however.
Pretty Deadly 3/5 Stars
This is comics series by Kelly Sue DeConnick, who I know from the Captain Marvel books from a few years ago. If I were to describe this so far from the first collection (and I think I am done here), it’s a kind of mix of Sandman, Deadwood, The Dark Tower (it has a tower!), and the video game Bloodborne. Over all the art is deeply haunted and haunting, and high quality to be sure. The art absolutely carries this. There’s also that kind of frustrating storytelling that a lot of new comics series find themselves in where the world-building is happening at the same time as the story, so it requires patience. And not being the expert comics reader, this isn’t a kind of storytelling patience that I have a lot of success with.
There’s something that happens in worlds of art like this for me though, and that’s a kind of despair. Sometimes this isolation and aloneness is very attractive and fascinating. I am absolutely terrified of the worlds in games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls, and love those games. But I wouldn’t want to live there. So sometimes reading about worlds like those, like in The Dark Tower series or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. So I think not having control over the world, like I do in the video games, or not painting the world on my own with print books makes this fall too squarely in that despairing category.
Bad Friends – 3/5 Stars
This is an absolutely heartbreaking and gorgeous graphic novel by a Korean artist. I will post a picture to close off this post to give you a sense of it. The art is absolutely haunting, and the art style is a lot like Akira, without the body horror and technology. The story involves a young woman who is kicked out of her house for being queer by an abusive father, and forced to find her way in the emptiness of her city, and like a lot of abandoned youth falls into sex work/trafficking. But it’s not quite that kind of book. She also finds herself without a support structure and leans heavily on her new found friends, and well it turns out that not every story is about a group of supportive people finding themselves. Sometimes reality is harder and more harsh than that.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Grease-Bats-Archie-Bongiovanni/dp/1684154111/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=grease+bats&qid=1572817841&s=books&sr=1-1)