2024-02: It Leaves a Mark
Well, here we are again. I’ve admittedly been bad about updating this - there are too many distractions out there, and I’m not yet in the habit of newsletters. But anyway. Hi. How are you doing?
WHAT I'M THINKING ABOUT
Well, team, I’ll be honest, it’s been a difficult time. On a personal note, today would have been our family dog Ginny’s birthday, but she passed away early last month after a rough couple of years, health-wise. It’s an odd thing, losing a pet, in ways you don’t quite wrap your head around in the abstract. The disruption of routine is the weirdest thing - especially toward the end, I was used to walking her several times a day, which was also a chance for me to break my hermitage a bit and leave the house for a few minutes, which just… doesn’t happen anymore? It’s odd. I don’t know if anyone reading this shares quite this sort of experience, but solidarity if you do.
On a more global note, I remain horrified by the things my country is doing. I think I said this previously, but I’ve basically been existing in a state of distrust in the past few months, because far too many people I know have been consciously and subconsciously justifying and “well, but what about”-ing… well, genocide. Which is not, generally speaking, something you want to be in favor of.
It’s weird. I talk to very few people around here because of this, but occasionally I’ll be snapped into reality in the worst possible way. Case in point: I went to see a new doctor for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The appointment lasted all of fourteen minutes, and about nine of those he spent talking about how COVID was a ‘normal disease’ blown way out of proportion and Gaza should be flattened beyond recognition (immediately after this he said that he was, in fact, a leftist, but the cognitive dissonance there was too much to unpack). A striking introduction to a medical professional if there ever was one, I might say. (I don’t think I’ll be going to see him a second time.)
But yeah. Things are bad. Things are bad because people want them to continue to be bad, if not worse. This is all a matter of human choice; ‘disaster’ doesn’t quite apply here, not because it’s ‘good’ in any way but because it absolves certain parties of the responsibility of intent. A ‘disaster’ isn’t orchestrated, isn’t perpetuated. This, all of this, is.
WHAT I'M WRITING
Comics
I have a new poetry comic out in the world, with gorgeous art by Danielle Taphanel. I very rarely write poetry, and even more rarely think that it’s good, but this was the sort of occasion where the words seemed to fall in just the right places, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Danielle, a favorite of mine, bring it to life. Here’s the first page of four:
You can read the rest of it on Twitter, or Bluesky, or Tumblr.
God willing, I should have at least a couple more comics to share by the end of the year, each of them different from the last, which is always an exciting notion.
Criticism
Well, there’s a lot of ground to cover here. For TCJ, I’ve recently written about the science fiction works of Sergio Toppi, the ‘curses’ of Kevin Huizenga and George Wylesol, and the hollow non-thrills of Edgar P. Jacobs’ The U Ray (tr. Jerome Saincantain, Cinebook, 2023). I also interviewed the wonderful abstract cartoonist Gareth A Hopkins, which was a pleasure.
For SOLRAD (now newly Eisner-nominated! I choose to take either all or none of the credit for this) I wrote about another book by a favorite of mine, Yokoyama Yūichi’s Baby Boom (tr. Ryan Holmberg, Breakdown Press, 2022), as well as Léa Murawiec’s The Great Beyond (tr. Aleshia Jensen, Drawn and Quarterly, 2023), Liam Cobb’s shorts collection What Awaits Them (Breakdown Press, 2023), and Aidan Koch’s latest, Spiral and Other Stories (New York Review Comics, 2024). That last one is a particular gem - I’m ever in awe of Koch’s work, and this collection is a leap forward in terms of execution of theme.
Coming up next are pieces on Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, a book from Fantagraphics that I liked a great deal but disagreed with the framing of, and Tender by Beth Hetland, a debut that I feel falls short of its ambitions.
WHAT I'M READING
Oh, gosh, where do I start. Let’s see…
Comics
we will no longer have to cover each other's wounds by Siyuan Wen (Fieldmouse Press, 2023)
I’ve loved Siyuan’s work for a while now, and this book is a wonderful entry. Beautifully weaves the gently lyrical and the visceral, as haunted as it is haunting, as lived in as it is ethereal. My favorite Fieldmouse book so far.
Kane by Paul Grist (self-published, 1993-2001, collections from Image)
Now here’s a wonder of a comic. Grist is phenomenal at distilling the genre at hand to its key ciphers in such a note-perfect way that it transcends pulp, with a beautiful balance between lean and stylized—just a pleasure of a read.
Perfect Hair by Tommi Parrish (2dcloud, 2016)
I got this one second-hand, because 2dcloud can eat shit, but Tommi Parrish’s work is a wonder. This is a gorgeous debut, with a a great novel-as-vignettes structure, and Parrish’s use of form to heighten emotion is beautiful. I loved their shorter work (their story “Sleep,” in the Australia volume of kuš!’s anthology, remains one of the best short comics I’ve read), and I’m very excited to read their other graphic novels now.
Big Kids (Drawn and Quarterly, 2016) and Stunt (Koyama Press, 2019) by Michael DeForge
DeForge is at this point my favorite cartoonist, and these are two of his best: he exerts a striking grasp of form coupled with an intoxicatingly raw emotional core, resulting in a standard that is, frankly, impossible to equal.
Honorable mentions, if only because I can keep listing comics all day: Herriman’s Krazy and Ignatz Sundays (1914-1928, 1935-1944) which I’ve been slowly making my way through; Huizenga’s The Wild Kingdom (Drawn and Quarterly, 2010); Patrick Kyle’s Don’t Come in Here (Koyama Press, 2016); Laura Lannes’ John, Dear (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2018).
Prose and plays
Fiction
Father Ianaros/The Fratricides by Nikos Kazantzakis
This was an interesting one. I found Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek an interesting disappointment, in that it was a deeply homoerotic piece of writing seemingly unaware of its own homoeroticism (this sounds like a joke, but I’ve never seen a story so steeped in “he can fix me”). Father Ianaros, meanwhile, is more detached in that regard but more heated in others: clearly Kazantzakis’ coming-to-terms with his own communism and Christianity amidst a war going on between the two factions, it is just overwhelmed by love, and anger, and hope, and disillusionment, and all sorts of feelings that the author just allows himself to drown in. Good stuff!
The Flick by Annie Baker
A play this time! I’ve been trying to read more of those. Baker is a favorite of mine, and her plays are all variations on a similar theme: communality through circumstances, in a place not entirely purgatorial but closed-off enough that the rest of the world can sort of drop out. This one, about a cinema in decline in Massachusetts, has some of her greatest character work. I’m still partial to her later The Antipodes, though.
Nonfiction
Molly by Blake Butler
This one is hard to discuss, in a way. I know very little about poetry, but whenever I see a poem by Molly Brodak it’s pretty much bound to take my breath away. This memoir by Brodak’s husband details their tumultuous relationship up to her suicide, and his discoveries of her infidelity afterwards. It’s an interesting read, from a craft perspective, in that I am deeply moved by the events described while also not thinking Butler is, independent of circumstance, a very good writer, so there’s something of a push-and-pull there. Still, a gutting portrait of personality.
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (tr. Robin Moger)
A surprisingly strong companion to Molly, detailing the author’s attempt to trace the life and suicide of an Egyptian author, framed against the tumult of Egypt in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I enjoyed this one a great deal; I know very little about Egypt, and Mersal does a great job balancing the personal and the broader environment.
WHAT I'M WATCHING
The Zone of Interest (2023, dir. Jonathan Glazer)
I wrote a long Letterboxd review of this, but, shortly speaking, I found it astonishing. It’s difficult to discuss this outside metrics of ‘significance’ and ‘importance,’ but I found it just a gutting application of form to go beyond the well-trodden ‘banality of evil’ argument and into what Werner Herzog termed ‘the bliss of evil.’ Striking stuff.
Perfect Days (2023, dir. Wim Wenders)
Ah, this was gorgeous. I need to watch more Wenders, as all I’ve seen besides this is Paris, Texas, but I loved this; a tender look at the love and fear of human connection, and the proxies we use to enter into connection while still keeping ourselves guarded. A lovely unintentional complement to Jarmusch’s Paterson.
Crumb (1990, dir. Terry Zwigoff)
I’m of two minds on this. It’s a very good documentary on a cartoonist that I care very little for, and can be divided pretty neatly into two: ‘Crumb, the famous cartoonist,’ and ‘the Crumb family, a deeply fucked up group of people who don’t really know what to do with their baggage.’ The latter I found much more compelling than the former: it’s a deeply moving look into raw human life which, though still changed by the presence of the camera, is still palpable in its authenticity. The problem is that Crumb, as a person and a cartoonist, I continue to find deeply distasteful in a way that the movie clearly does not; Zwigoff enters this whole affair as a fan, so naturally he pulls his punches, but the ages-old complex of “I’m a lowly worm, but also I am God Himself” is alive and well in the title figure. A strong bit of insight into a personality I continue to dislike.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
Slaughter Beach, Dog - Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling
Slaughter Beach, Dog was a band that I knew exactly one song by for a while, until I decided I should actually, you know, give them more time than that, and this album is a pleasure. Among other thing I’m struck by how natural the combination of that brand of 2000s indie-rock and post-Townes Van Zandt country feels; it’s not a combination I would really think of, but when you listen to this album you think oh well yes of course. Very strongly recommend this one for a plain old good time.
Al Menne - Freak Accident
I mostly knew Al Menne as ‘person who collaborates with Christian Lee Hutson pretty frequently,’ and this album, while clearly bearing the mark of that connection, is very clearly its own lovely little thing. Whatever Al Menne does next, I’m very excited to see it.
Margo Guryan - Take a Picture
An old one, if you can believe it. Friend Rachel Merrill turned me onto Margo Guryan after I mentioned the Beach Boys for what feels like the billionth time in recent months, and I am delighted by this album. Guryan was a classical pianist who basically pivoted to being a singer-songwriter for a while after listening to Pet Sounds, and the result is a wonder.
(Also, hi, go and listen to the Beach Boys sometime soon, it’ll do you good.)
Jeff Rosenstock & Laura Stevenson - Still Young and Younger Still
I wasn’t really familiar with Neil Young outside of “guy my mother likes,” but these two covers EPs, recommended to me by friend Mark Bouchard, are a real treat. I’ve been listening to them basically on repeat for the past week or so now, and I’m at the I will never tire of this stage, at least until the next fixation comes along.
OTHER THINGS OF NOTE
How about some crowdfunders? Fieldmouse Press is doing a Crowdfundr for comics by John Hankiewicz (who is fantastic) and Jesse Lee Kercheval (whom I don’t know but am very interested in); new publisher Go Press Girl! is doing a campaign for a collected edition of Vivian’s Ghost by Hal Schrieve, a comic I’ve been interested in since Casey Nowak, another fave in this house, recommended it; Bulgilhan is Kickstarting two new comics by new-to-me-creators Huahua Xu and Breeze Hu, which Zach Clemente showed me pages from when we met in London last year that took my breath away; and PEOW is bringing back its excellent Ex.Mag anthology for a fifth theme with the theme of vampires. Go back all of these if you like good comics; if you don’t, what the hell are you doing here?
SILLY LITTLE GUY
Well, on one hand, I’d be remiss not to spotlight my dear Ginny as this installment’s Silly Little Guy:
But on the other hand I don’t want to leave you on a sad note, which means, that’s right, this time you get two silly little guys. The other, of course, is Ciorbă the street cat with whom I’ve been hanging out basically every day for the past two years. We love this dude, we do, we do.
CONCLUSION
That’s it from me, I think; bit of a rambler this time, but it’s been a while and I wanted to talk to you. I’m still slowly trying to figure out what I want this place to be, so feel free to tell me if there’s anything else you want to see from me. I’m headed for London tomorrow, quickly followed by Dublin in a few days’ time, for some much-needed time off. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. Have you read anything good? Have you seen a good cat, dog, or otherwise silly little guy? Give us a shout, as the British say, or give us a normal-volume reach-out if you do not partake in the depraved mindset of the British.
In the meantime: folks, peace be with you.