2024-05: The Sun Shines Down on the Great Big Beautiful Sea
So, since we last spoke, I took my long-awaited trip to France and England. My life nowadays, if I’m being honest, is just streaks of burnout punctuated by vacation, which is, let’s say, not ideal. But man do these vacations feel good.
I started France with a visit to the Pompidou’s big Comics 1964-2024 exhibition, which was really a sight to behold. I don’t really get to see a whole lot of original comic art other than the things I personally own, so seeing pieces by the likes of Phillippe Druillet (whose pieces feel, I swear to God, almost as tall as I am), Chris Ware (who leaves a surprising amount of detail uninked), and Hino Hideshi (among my favorite mangaka) really did feel exhilarating. I wrote a longer piece about it, with some which you can read on SOLRAD; I also posted a thread of photos from the exhibition on Bluesky, if that’s more your speed.
The next day I got a chance to meet up with Ivana Filipovich—a favorite cartoonist of mine, whom I interviewed for SOLRAD last year and whose work I strongly recommend—which was a tremendous amount of fun.
After a few days of mostly shopping and museums—the Pompidou and L’Orangerie were the highlights—I went to Bordeaux to stay with my friends Jen and Lucas, which was a pleasure — admittedly I vibed with Bordeaux more than Paris, though I think that’s mostly a result of me always feeling weird about traveling alone and being glad to be around people. It was great — good food, wonderful people, and, man, I got to hang out with a cat. I love to hang out with a cat.
From Bordeaux I went to London, for a busy couple of days: first I saw Christian Lee Hutson live, which was a delight — my favorite live performers are the chatty ones, and man does the guy do good crowd work. It helped that the venue was pretty small, so it had something of a living room vibe.
Then the next evening I finally saw Waiting for Godot live, which was another treat; somehow I had remembered this play being shorter than it actually is, but the writing is every bit as great as I recalled, and the performances from Ben Whishaw (whom I already knew and liked) and Lucian Msamati (whom I was unfamiliar with) were wonderful. (Loyal readers will recall my trials and tribulations with Godot, i.e. the times I missed my chance to see it. Well, here’s a bit of added comedy: I’d made plans to see this production with a friend, only for said friend to turn out to have prior obligations; I then bought her ticket off her and made plans to go with another friend… who had to cancel due to circumstances outside of their control. I don’t resent either of them at all, mind — I just think it’s funny as hell at this point. But my Godot curse is lifted, sort of, maybe.)
Between these two shows I went down to Shoreditch. See, I have a terrible memory for restaurants, and rarely make a note of any places to go back to. But there is one exception, and it is an Italian-Korean vegan fusion place that I go to every single time I’m in town; it’s nothing fancy, but it is simply delicious food and, most importantly, the best mochi you will ever have in your goddamn life. This isn’t an ad or something, just an earnest encouragement — if you’re ever in London, the place you want to seek out is called Vegan Yes (single best restaurant name ever, quite possibly).
And then there was Thought Bubble. Honestly, it’s hard to summarize Thought Bubble, a place where if you ask me how I’m doing I’m more likely to answer “Who’s to say” than anything, but I mean this in a good way — I don’t really see comics folks more than once a year, so that once a year becomes overwhelming; I get to see a load of people I love, some of whom I haven’t met in years (ahh, the look on Chip Zdarsky’s face when he realized that the last time he saw me I was not even of legal drinking age), others I hadn’t met at all apart from online. This year was particularly great for the latter group: among others, it was great to meet David Brothers and Emma Ríos, two people I’ve enjoyed online for years, and get chances to chat with both extensively; the same goes for numerous people on the Silver Sprocket crew. The more I’m ‘in’ comics, the more I understand that there’s no one community, that it’s all just clusters intersecting, but ultimately the people are what I’m around for, and Thought Bubble is always a good reminder of that. (Plus, as a little bonus, I got to buy original art from no fewer than four different comics I wrote, which is one hell of a feeling.)
The final leg of the trip was a return to London to see another one of my favorite singers, Julien Baker. The lead-up to this was a bit tense, with a minor luggage crisis luckily solved thanks to my friend and fellow critic Tom Shapira, but the show itself was remarkable. Baker’s stage presence alternates between ‘pent up’ and ‘explosive,’ and it’s wonderful to see how she interacts with a full-band set-up, having started out as a solo musician.
Anyway. It was an energizing trip, and now it’s done. Ain’t that just the way.
WHAT I’M WRITING
Comics
In the week leading up to Thought Bubble I posted a new short poetry comic, with art by the amazing Lily Blakely. I’ve been a fan of Lily for a few years now, since her ShortBox comic Gristle, and every new piece from her is a pleasure to see, so I was thrilled to get a chance to work with her on a three-page poetry comic titled “Roadkill,” which you can read in full on Bluesky or Instagram. It’s rare for me to actively like a poem that I wrote (I fare better with comics, but poetry is not something I take to easily), but I was very fond of this one, and I think Lily’s work here is astonishing. Here’s the first page:
And then, a couple of days later, I posted another, longer comic, titled “A Load Off,” which, well, couldn’t be any more different. It’s drawn by Roger Langridge, another long-time favorite of mine, and it’s… well, it’s an odd one to describe, but it’s about a certain type of guy who makes a certain type of comics that I don’t particularly care for. I got a real kick out of collaborating with Roger on this, and I think the comic itself came out really good. But, hey, don’t take my word for it, here’s Chip Zdarsky with the official pull quote:
Anyway, here’s the first page for this:
You can read the whole thing on Bluesky and on Instagram, and you can buy a .pdf on Gumroad — there’s a standard version, on a pay-what-you-want basis, and a process edition including my script and Roger’s thumbnails and pencils, which is paid-only.
I have another couple of comics on the way that will hopefully be done before the year is out, and a few coming, tentatively at least, in the new year. I don’t want to give too much away—for no reason other than I hate to talk about things before they’re sure to happen, just in case something falls through—but one of these upcoming comics is a Jim Jarmusch-y little number drawn by J. Marshall Smith (whose annual one-man-anthology Solace County is wonderful and strongly recommended), which I am phenomenally stoked about. Here’s a peek:
Comics! They’re Fun™
Criticism
For TCJ I wrote about the fiftieth issue of š!, the comics anthology published by kuš! — to my money, the most consistently-entertaining anthology going at the moment. I also wrote about the works of Charles Burns, a creator that always compels me even though I don’t necessarily enjoy him very much — specifically, I wrote about the recurring theme of ‘retreat into a world that doesn’t exist,’ and how it allows him to escape, on occasion, from emotional human human truth. Finally, if that’s not enough, I wrote about Kit Anderson’s Safer Places, a book that’s got the makings of beauty, but is too hesitant, too emotionally guarded, to make anything of it.
For SOLRAD, other than the Pompidou piece, I wrote about Blurry by Dash Shaw—my first time reading Dash Shaw, as mentioned previously (I have since read four different Shaw books, and have another two in my to-read piles, so I suppose that’s its own endorsement)—as well as Bhanu Pratap’s beguiling shorts collection Cutting Season.
Coming up next are pieces on:
1949 by Dustin Weaver (Image)
Iris: A Novel for Viewers by Lo Hartog van Banda, Thé Tjong-Khing, and Rudy Vrooman (tr. Laura Watkinson)
Distant Ruptures: A Selection of Comics 2000-2010 by CF (edited by Sammy Harkham, New York Review Comics)
Tokyo These Days by Matsumoto Taiyō (tr. Michael Arias, Viz)
Les trembles by Thomas Merceron (Éditions Quintal)
assorted books purchased at Thought Bubble
WHAT I’M READING
COMICS
Yours by Margot Ferrick (2dcloud, 2017)
Man, this is a special one. One of those rare works of art that manage, genuinely, to reinvent their own art-form; a wonderfully cohesive collection that interrogates both the rhythmic and the emotional–rhetorical potentialities of comics, tying form and emotional core together. (2dcloud is a terrible publisher, but this book has been out of print for years so they don’t stand to benefit from it in any way. Go find a second-hand copy, it’s worth it.)
The Pleasure of the Text by Sami Alwani (Conundrum, 2021)
A real firecracker of a book, this one. Alwani presents a stunning range of cartooning (the above page is something of an outlier in aesthetic, for one) while sharply articulating the never-ending struggle between the ‘purely-political’ self and the ‘emotional’ self, at once self-effacing and deeply felt.
Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics, 2024)
Schrauwen is another one of those cartoonists that I’d been meaning to read for a long time, and I absolutely loved this — granular to a confrontational degree but never losing control of its remarkably strong flow. Along with Shaw’s BLURRY, it seems that 2024 is the year of the stream-of-consciousness ‘anti-epic.’
Agony by Mark Beyer (Raw Books, 1987/New York Review Comics, 2016)
I’d been meaning to read this one for a while, and it’s great. Colson Whitehead compares this book to Beckett in his intro, and that’s right on the money — an anti-world collapsing in on itself, with very little to redeem it but momentum.
Boy Island by Leo Fox (Silver Sprocket, 2024)
Leo Fox is one of my absolute favorite cartoonists out there (and, as I was saying to him at Thought Bubble, the first cartoonist I came to really love who is younger than me, which is a trip), so I was extremely excited to read this, and it’s as great as I expected — always overt but never inelegant, and just a genuine charm.
Chrysanthemum Under the Waves by Maggie Umber (self-published, 2024)
So Maggie sent me a digital copy of this, but I like her work enough that I wanted to wait until I could get my hands on a digital copy, and it is beguiling — deftly flitting between modes and media, sometimes overt, sometimes opaque, but always beautiful. I don’t necessarily understand all of it, but the underlying emotion is smothering, and I urge everyone who likes challenging comics to give it a go.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Penda’s Fen
I’d been hearing about this movie for years, and I found it very interesting, mostly because rarely rarely does a movie so clearly show not only its ambitions but how they brush up against external constraints as well — these are heady ideas of breaking out of The System that are clearly held in earnest, but whose edges are inevitably filed off both by the platform (this being a BBC production, it can’t be too radical) and by its practical means (this being a BBC production, it doesn’t have an amazing budget).
Here
Nothing clever to say about this. It’s just not good. I like the original comic by Richard McGuire (the original, the graphic novel, and especially the intermediate version from 2000), but this lacks the ambition and formal charm that actually carry the source. Not a surprise, but certainly a shame.
SILLY LITTLE GUY
I thought long and hard about who I should spotlight here, but a special mention must go to my new friend The Detective, whom I got to hang out with in France. She is perfect and I will kill for her.
CONCLUSION
Longer one than usual this time. Sorry about that. It’s been a confusing time, and confusion shall continue, but I hope you’re doing well. What have you been up to? Let me know in the ‘comments below’ (replies) and don’t forget to ‘like’ (I don’t know) and ‘subscribe’ (I don’t know).
Folks, until next time, peace be with you.