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ALISON by Lizzy Stewart graphic novel review

Alison. By Lizzy Stewart. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 168pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This quite wonderful comic is a match for Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carringon (also published this year, by SelfMadeHero). Both books are by British artists/scriptwriters. They belong together for at least one intriguing reason: the young women artists in question find their fate, at least in the first phase of creative effort, by hooking up with famous middle-aged fellows who take them as lovers/mistresses but also urge them to practice their developing craft.  In the end, the women need to make their own way.

Armed With Madness is a real-life story, with rich-girl Leonora Carrington both aided and exploited by the famous surrealist painter Max Ernst, during the 1930s.  Carrington leaves England for Spain, suffers multiple breakdowns as the Spanish Civil War explodes around her, and ends up in Mexico, an elderly lady re-discovered by new generations. Alison offers us a fictional version two or three generations later. A young woman growing up in Devon takes and then abandons a husband, at the invitation of a visiting, also romantic and famous, middle-aged painter. She goes on, with his sponsorship, to her artist’s life in London.

Lizzy Stewart, a professional illustrator of children’s books, would not have been considered a comic artist a few decades ago. Walls have broken down since then, obviously, and the use of sequential panels to convey a story easily makes the grade as comic art. Actually, the result here looks more than a little like the drawings of Jules Feiffer in various recent works by the veteran artist. But I digress.

The story is drawn and told quite wonderfully, with the occasional, stunning color page or pages set off from the grey wash of most of the book. It is easy to be convinced that this young woman is flattered to be asked to sit for a portrait, first clothed, then other portraits unclothed, as a relationship develops. It is equally easy to be convinced that she is one of a considerable line of young women falling into the waiting arms of an academic painter at the peak of his BBC-level respectability. He had promised to guide her development as an artist, and for all his drawbacks, he remains determined to do so. He also pays her rent.

Throughout, and this is certainly the feminist angle, Alison is seeking—fumbling and stumbling along the way—to realize herself in every sense. That she had been a hopelessly bored (and childless) housewife in Devon, became a frustrated if developing artist in Bloomsbury and a woman making her own way step by step, is all wonderfully conveyed. Born in 1959 and gone to London in the early 1980s, she finds herself in the midst of radical politics, anti-war, anti-nuke and anti-racist movements, not long before Margaret Thatcher comes to power, ruthlessly crushing all opposition. Worse, Thatcher so successfully converts the political system that even future, corrupted Labour Party leaders accept “privatization” and the practical eclipse of the caring social state as a finality. What can art mean here?

The brevity of the young artist’s wider, militant political commitment may offer insight into the artist-in-progress. Or perhaps we see Lizzy Stewart’s own observation of changing radical politics at a certain moment of time. Serious commitments to art, including the teaching of art to younger generations, merge into the critical concerns in the era of AIDS. She watches as disease and death march through her new milieu. A desperate politics of caring emerges as a considerable portion of the London art world literally finds community through the  struggle for life.

It should not give away too much about Alison to reveal that she finds her own companion in a same-sex relationship that is also interracial and global in its connections. Perhaps our protagonist was going in that direction all the time, without realizing her own path. All this is conveyed by Lizzy Stewart with such painstaking care that we find ourselves flowing along, discovering and rediscovering the narrative as the artist discovers her talent and herself. Near the end, she is the learner who has become the renowned teacher.

Alison’s return in something like middle age to her own Dorset is wonderfully visualized and narrated here. Temperamentally a million miles from London, she experiences a return to the natural beauty that she now appreciates afresh, within her own sense of art in the world and in her world.

There is a great deal more to be said here about the young artist’s path. We learn at one point that her older lover, for instance, had the upper-class background to have his talent recognized in childhood, to be trained in formal terms all the way along. By contrast, Alison must undertake a crash course and find another path to realize her talents. Perhaps this detail offers us the secret of Lizzy Stewart herself, a children’s book illustrator, using comics for story telling. Like others today, she is struggling to create something fresh through a merger of forms that become recognizable through the work of the new generations of artists and comics.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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BUILDINGS ARE BARKING: Diane Noomin Remembered in Comics Tribute by Bill Griffith

The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin, in Memoriam. By Bill Griffith.

Seattle: F.U. Press, Fantagraphics,  2023. 23pp, $7.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

We are nearly a year now since the passing of Diane Newman, who took on the comics moniker “Diane Noomin” as she began to publish her work in the Bay Area-centered world of Underground Comix in the 1970s. This is, then, a tribute booklet, but singular, in the way no one except her husband Bill Griffith could conceive and draw. As far as I can recall, no homage from a comics spouse has ever achieved this conceptual depth or intensity. It is a remarkable miniature, with a surprising depth that will please but fail to surprise the regular readers of Griffith, a master of the self-reflection that is also mass-culture-reflection.

The Buildings Are Barking might be compared, if comparisons are possible, to the many pages of Robert Crumb’s Biblical-adaptation Genesis in which Aline Kominsky Crumb’s physical self appears and reappears as the women of ancient Hebrew lore. Real-life Aline had a couple of decades ahead.

Within the last year or so, the artists of Underground Comix lore have been disappearing in haste: Justin Green, Jay Lynch, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, to name only the most widely known. Spain Rodriguez and Harvey Pekar (not artist but writer/editor and self-publisher) passed a decade earlier, signalling how easily even the memories of a unique and vital development in comic art might slip away.

Griffith has seized the moment,  rather taken his time to seize the moment, perhaps as a yohrtseit (symbolic Jewish commemoration on an anniversary) to Diane and her ambiguously and also unambiguously Jewish identity. Urged on by Ko-Ko the Clown—Max Fleischer’s magical animated creation of the 1920s—Griffith gets around within a few pages to telling us about Diane Newman’s alter-ego, Didi Glitz, the soul of her comix or comics work. A teenage inhabitant of Canarsie of the 1950s, Didi had all the appealing/repellent qualities of adolescence seizing onto popular culture as a means of identity. Bouffant hairdos, garish clothes, garish crushes on boys (sometimes goys), clique-obsessions among girlfriends, above all a need for expression, no matter how embarrassing to the objective viewer.

Griffith (let’s call him Griffy here, as Diane did) enjoys his rumination on life in San Francisco of the 1970s-80s, perhaps not really the “idyllic city…before the Dotcom boom,” but idyllic for them and for many artists. Always badly overpriced, losing its architectural beauty decade by decade, their San Francisco was still arguably (with New Orleans) the most beautiful of American urbanscapes. Here, at any rate, Griffith and Newman moved past earlier long-term relationships to grasp each other, marrying in 1980. From there on, and no doubt connected to their mutual grasp of the varied icons of popular culture seen as “history” (her poodle pin collection, his vintage diner photos), they sunk or rose into each other.

Bill Griffith has famously been producing the near-daily strip Zippy the Pinhead since the middle of those San Francisco days, while Diane became part of a subset of women comics artists who ruthlessly delved into their lives and psyches. She aspired to draw a comic about her parents’ secret (and very Jewish) connections with the Communist Party in the McCarthy Era, but she didn’t live long enough. Griffith has found his own way to produce real history-based comic works as Zippy stumbles through time and space. In other words, and laughs aside, they were both serious artists.

The Buildings Are Barking is deeply personal in ways that this reviewer cannot describe adequately, and to which the reader is advised to proceed intuitively, that is, following Griffith’s own shifting moods of consciousness. At the end, we are with  Ko-Ko the Clown again. Ko-Ko always expressed a grimness behind the jaunty exterior: there is a bit of a Grim Reaper about him.

What any serious artist (or writer) leaves behind is the effort at expression, brilliant or less than brilliant but a striving with purpose. Griffith has captured Diane Noomin aka Newman, and thereby captured himself as well.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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Maskerade #7 (Kevin Smith) comics review

Fans of Kevin Smith, and fans of the offbeat and unusual, have been keeping tabs on the Kevin Smith-led Secret Stash Press imprint at Dark Horse Comics. So far, it has offered fans a couple of titles: Quick Stops, an anthology series set in the world of Kevin Smith movies;  and Maskerade, a crime noir about a cut-throat vigilante. The latest issue, number 7 (of 8), comes out August 9th and here’s a taste of this wild and woolly thriller.

Writers Kevin Smith and Andy McElfresh came out of the gate with this title like two bats out of hell. This is grim stuff mashed up with dark humor, smashed with even darker stuff. Ah, but if that’s what your horror radar has been looking for, then it must be pinging like crazy. This is high-octane horror more than anything else. There’s humor but it’s not there to lighten the horror load as much as it’s there to set up the next jolt. As long as you, my dear mature reader, know that going in, you should be good to go.

Our main character, Felicia, is a female version of every character that Liam Neeson portrays in movies now, a character bent on revenge and willing to do anything, literally anything, to exact vigilante justice. So, if you haven’t already, be prepared for blood to spurt out all over the place and, well, prepare for blood to flood any nook and cranny. You will see red over and over again. The artwork by Giulia Gualazzi is on point, and compliments all the action and horror, and blood. Colorist Giulia Brusco is quite adept at providing vasts quantities of the color red, which is, as I suggest, the prominent color in this comic book. You like red, well, you’ll see lots of it here.

No vigilante story is complete without the villain, or villains, getting ample amounts of comeuppance. You thought you could get away with that, Mr. Evil? Think again! Here’s a poker through your hand; and how about we saw off your . . . yeah, that should do it! In this issue, one of the Mister Evils in this story somehow escapes the cage he was placed in and, against all odds, has somehow managed to turn the tables on Felicia. There’s a good bit of high tech shape-shifting going on in this comic and it looks like one Mr. Evil managed to outwit Felicia with her own shape-shifting powers. That makes for a very interesting issue leading up to the grand finale. So, if you’re a big fan of Kevin Smith, this is the mother lode. And, if you’re new to Kevin Smith, especially his weird brand of comic books, you’ve been warned. Who knows, you might love it!

One last word, I sincerely do have to tip my hat to everyone involved with this comic. Horror comics have a long history and tradition. It’s not easy to maintain the pace once the scenario is in place and the key players have been set loose. No doubt, our main player, Felicia, is quite a force of nature. And all the baddies have what’s coming to them. This is a well-oiled comic, that really works, and that’s saying a lot.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Maskerade is published by Dark Horse Comics, available as of 9 August 2023.

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Nudism Comes to Connecticut comics review

Unashamed Comic Nudes!

Nudism Comes to Connecticut. By Susan Chade and Jon Buller. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 175pp, $30.

Nudism (many prefer “naturism”) is more familiar than most Americans can now imagine. The omnipresent rural skinny-dipping probably did not draw much upon a rich and varied European (or other) nudist traditions among the respectable classes as well as others. Communitarian groups in the US developed a nudist ideology of sorts, as far back as the 1890s, but memories of Walt Whitman and even Benjamin Franklin “air bathing” had likely been forgotten by the time the Greenwich Village fashionable set disrobed in Cape Cod summers of the 1910s.

Nudism Comes to Connecticut, written and drawn by a veteran children’s book team, offers a convincing historical experience of free thinking Yankees during the 1930s. They make creative use of a real text, Frances and Mason Merrill’s Nudism Come to America (1932), a volume itself no doubt reflecting the free-spirited, short-skirted 1920s Flapper Era.

Somewhere around Lyme, Connecticut, not far from Manhattan by train,  a Hungarian immigrant hatches a plan for rural land use. A few years earlier,  an American diplomat unhappy at his job in Budapest shared with a friend some of the current German magazines extolling nudism’s many healthful benefits. Back home in the US in 1915, the American and his wife, a native Estonian, take over a defunct hotel in a pleasant landscape, near an underused lake.

Here, somewhat embroidered fiction really does more or less coincide with fact. The idea of “cooperative colonies,” guests and residents doing most of the maintenance and in turn owning shares in the property, was very much alive in the European middle classes of the pre-fascism days, and even philanthropically extended, for periods of the summer, to groups of urban slum dwellers. Before Stalin’s rise to power, a nudist culture of Russian “Proletcult” also seemed to take hold: it was considered especially good for workers to get naked in the countryside, when possible. By the later 1920s, these experiences even gained a pedigree of American scholarly interest.

No surprise, then, that out in the Connecticut woods, not far from a lake, a “cabin colony” sprung up, built on loans and the wishful thinking that it might pay for itself. Takers seem to enjoy themselves thoroughly, even with husbands and wives understandably nervous about their own mates in the buff. As in real life nudism, nude  versions of barely competitive games like volleyball seem to be the mandatory accompaniment to swimming. The comic portrayals of nudes here are tasteful and charming, if not quite realistic to sagging flesh.

The community thrives for a while, never quite overcoming the resentment and hostility of some neighbors, and then runs into the economic collapse of the economy in the Depression. The quasi-utopian adventure ends. As the author/artist team concludes, “most of this actually happened.” (p.173).

It is a footnote, perhaps not so far from this realistic comic, that by the 1960s, bohemian-minded American readers of Bertold Brecht, Georg Luckacs and Wilhelm Reich would draw the conclusion that nudism had to be, was indeed inevitably, political. The bohemian-radical tradition had already been revived after the Second World War in other parts of the world including both Germanies. Although this detail has been largely forgotten, the East Germans, the most proportionally nudist population in the world, actually resisted Russian edicts and took pleasure where they could under a repressive regime. Just as amazing, the bureaucratic class joined them.

Spending their summers on the Cape, American veterans of antiracist and antiwar activism staged dramatic nude-ins at the National Seashore during the middle 1970s. This political action would lead to decades of lobbying politicians for more “free beaches,” an idea that has come, gone and perhaps come again in parts of the US. Today’s nudists should enjoy the innocence of Nudism Comes to Connecticut, so deftly defying the hostility of religious conservatives and  lawmakers right up to the present. “Naturism” seems to have escaped comic art otherwise, save for a few brief, wry commentaries in underground comix. Perhaps the subject has only been waiting for its comic art re-creation.

Paul Buhle

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MY BODY, OUR RIGHTS, World War 3 illustrated #53 review

WW3 Strikes Again!

MY BODY, OUR RIGHTS, World War 3 illustrated #53. Edited by Paula Hewitt Amram, Sabrina Jones and Rebecca Migdal, assistant editor Seth Tobocman.  AK Press, 212pp. $15.

This is, for starters, an incredible bargain of a comic or any illustrated book these days. The two-hundred-plus pages are packed with work from what seems like hundreds of artists but in reality comes down to 35. Its appearance, almost but not quite needless to say, is prompted by the draconian attack upon abortion and women’s control of their bodies by the Supreme Court and the legislatures plus courts of dozens of states. To say that even the limited advances made in the last fifty years are now threatened is a vast understatement. This book offers a struggle against a species of sexual fascism, and like the antifascist struggles of old, holds our attention with its urgency.

Two fresh themes especially attract the reviewer’s attention. In the true tradition of WW3, the rising crop of talent is harvested. This time around as well, more gender fluidity is apparent: another development in radical comic art showing itself in narrative and drawing styles adapted and created anew.

Cover art by Sabrina Jones

The reviewer will inevitably pick favorites and “Post Procedure” by Sabrina Jones, the opening story after a two-page table of contents that also serves up an anatomical lesson,  shocks with its candor. This could be the artist’s own story—and, indeed, does happen to be her story— or the normal saga of trauma (with some occasional exuberance) in a young woman’s life. A sexually active single feminist gets pregnant by accident, and now what? Having a baby appeals greatly, being stuck as a parent and a single parent has much less appeal. There’s a bitter-sweetness here that says more than the reviewer’s words can express.

There are ample other looks backward, for the historically-minded, like this reviewer, to earlier times. Back then, especially before 1949, birth control information let alone legal abortion would be practically unknown among wide classes of Americans. Several gripping pieces here including Tom Keough’s “What My Catholic Religion Taught Me about Abortion,”“A Choice of Life,” by Sam Migliore and “You Could Be a Broom!” by Emily Waters, together lay out what we expect from the Religious Right but what young people are not prepared to deconstruct. Others, notably “Lifeblood Driving” by Lee Marrs, carefully recollect a history of abortion struggles including “bad new days” and…the courageous Resistance. Sue Simensky Bietala’s  “Thank You Nurses,” means a lot to this reviewer, the son of a nurse and social worker who offered illegal advice to married and unmarried women in Manhattan of the 1930s.

The sagas of irresponsible males, dangerous abortions and long-time struggles for sanity remarkably bring forth some great humor. “Late,” by Joyce Farmer, recalls a time not so far away, back in the middle 1950s, with a young woman already engaged but not at all happy to be “late” month after month, then pregnant and married to an unsympathetic husband, and then onward in life. If this sounds grim, Farmer makes every panel weirdly humorous and weirdly very realistic, in the comic-art sense.

Other high points surely include a fantasy high point, “The Doll’s Picnic” by Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, and sometimes grim as well as brave adventures in the world of gender-identity as in “I Survived the Horror of Puberty” by Liz Keough, and “Trans+binary Reproductive Health Care,” by Jessica Raynor Sturdivant. Not to mention the direct frontal attack on the current Supreme Court by the Guerilla Girls and by Sue Coe, herself the best known of the artists here.

For me, these strips and others in the book, so widely varied in styles but so keyed in on the issues, collectively bring us back to that old question, “What is comic art anyway?” Apparently, the answer could be “whatever a sequential drawn narrative can do.” To make such an observation is at once too vague and too little appreciative of what is going on in these pages.

Paul Buhle

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Amazon Review: ‘Get Off the Couch and Go on George’s Run!!’

Happy reader with Vulcan salute!

It’s moments like this that can really make your day. I was just noodling around catching up on stuff and I stumbled upon this wonderful review on Amazon of my new graphic novel, George’s Run. It is published by Rutgers University Press and available at various platforms including Amazon.

Of course, the customer review photo of a Vulcan salute is utterly priceless! Maybe it will inspire you to do the same. So, yes, please do consider getting a copy and maybe even writing your very own Amazon review.

The review speaks for itself so I’ll just run it here:

Amazon Customer

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2023

I was gifted the unique graphic novel GEORGE’S RUN for my birthday, and am so happy I got to read it!
I wasn’t really ready for what I was in store for, but, being very into all things retro and 60’s and 70’s and cool, this graphic novel was a delightful surprise from start to finish.
First of all, let’s address the fact that, although usually you should not judge a book by its cover~ it’s actually totally okay to do so in this circumstance; because the contents are just as intriguing as the beguiling face of the book!I was stunned and impressed by the overall presentation ~in the same way I was drawn to the deeply felt drawings and stories within.Although I am close enough to Henry’s generation to appreciate and remember the country’s love of all things Twilight Zone and Star Trek, I must admit~ I was unaware of George Clayton Johnson and his important role as a writer during this time. I certainly was completely unaware of his eclectic group of writing friends that influenced many aspects of pop culture~especially science fiction culture~at the time…
and I LOVE Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling!!There’s just so much coming at you these days, sometimes it’s difficult to follow even the threads of your heroes and potential creative literary longings.It was really interesting to learn (especially from such an unusual and non-linear format) about this particular outlier writer’s journey through Hollywood and the sort of rebel gang of writers he became a part of~in a way it was akin to the clan in the Ocean’s Eleven story he conjured up…except instead of a rat pack of swanky burglars, he was part of a bunch of literary iconoclasts who didn’t fit into any one particular category!

I loved the colors and the whimsical illustrations and the unexpected dream-like quality with which the book told its tales.

And most of the information included within was completely unbeknownst to me~ and that was surprising; because I love all things Sci-Fi!! What a lovely hardbound book surprise.

This book has a really good energy to it. You can feel the author’s love for his subject matter and for the stories he tells just jumping off every page.

And even though you never know where the tales are going to go, you can be sure that you too have gotten a taste of the Touch of Strange these writers were after on their mission to spread their weird around the world….
…..just by picking up a copy and taking a look for yourself!

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THE TALK by Darrin Bell graphic novel review

The Talk by Darrin Bell

The Talk. Darrin Bell. Henry Holt & Co. 352 pp. $29.99 hardcover.

Darrin Bell does a remarkable job with his new book, in fact, his debut graphic novel. Bell is best known for short-form work: editorial cartoons (won the Pulitzer Prize) and comic strips (check out Candorville). The graphic novel format opens things up in ways that Bell takes to with grace and artistry. The goal here is not only to sum up his life but to go backwards and forwards generations. This graphic novel revolves around “the talk” that Black families have with their children to prepare them to navigate a world of prejudice and racism.

So, why doesn’t it look like a real gun?

Bell begins his book by sharing what “the talk” ended being like for him as a 6-year-old. His parents had recently divorced and so Bell received two separate, and very different, responses from his white mother and his Black father. Bell’s mother was prompted into it after having to explain her choice in fulfilling his request for a toy gun. She chose a bright green plastic water gun. She explained it had to be very obvious it was a toy in order for Darrin not to be mistaken for carrying a real gun by police who were predisposed to assuming he was a criminal with a weapon. What happens next is pivotal. Darrin runs out to play with his new toy and ends up being harassed by a police officer who uses the toy gun as a pretext to still give him a hard time.

We’ve got you surrounded.

Later, Darrin faces another challenge when a white schoolyard bully taunts him about his appearance, calling him, “big lips.” Darrin asks his father what he should do about it and this sets up the father’s turn with talking about race. Bell returns to this moment throughout the book to say that his father had let him down by turning inward, distant, and just staring out into space. However, that’s not exactly what happens. His father may not explicitly respond with a road map on how to deal with bigots but he certainly talks about his experience. It leads to one of the most compelling moments in the book with Darrin’s parents as a carefree mixed race young couple who are abruptly forced to deal with the fact that the local folk are not amused about mixed race couples. That said, Bell lets the reader decide if his father perhaps did the best he could with his more guarded response.

Remember the 2000 election vote count problem?

Overall, I think Bell appreciated the chance to spread out and follow various threads of thought over the span of many pages. I know it’s a balancing act in terms of expressing feeling and citing facts. Every time you present a specific, as opposed to a generality, you make your case that much stronger. Buried deep in the book is one such fact I know still gives many pause: the manipulation of the vote count in Florida that handed the presidency to George W. Bush in the 2000 race. As Bells states: “The Bush campaign’s Florida chairwoman (who also happened to be Florida’s secretary of state, in charge of the election) purged tens of thousands of Black voters from the voter rolls. Reportedly, she used a ‘felon list’ to disqualify them, even though it turned out they didn’t belong on that list.”

Lost in the aether.

Bell speaks of “the aether,” what some believe to be the foundation of our very existence. Bell uses this as a metaphor to describe those in power, the dominant culture, the white culture, inextricably linked to money, power and authority. Bell runs with it in one of the most inspired passages in the book that follows a college workshop of elite white students with Bell, the only Black student, discussing slavery. The white students push the narrative that people simply didn’t know any better when it came to owning slaves leaving Bell to argue that actually, at least 10 million people did know better: the slaves! Later on, Bell is called in by a professor who is threatening to fail him because he must have plagiarized his paper. How could he, an undergrad, possibly write so eloquently about “the aether” and such things when her own graduate students aren’t as articulate?

Why don’t some people have empathy?

I know that there will always be a certain number of readers unfamiliar with the world of graphic novels who are ready to complain that a long-form work of comics could be pared down to just a few pages but that’s not the kind of world I’d want to live in. A graphic novel inhabits its own world where it will expand in order to process and contract in order to highlight ideas in concise ways. I’m sure any experienced reader wholeheartedly agrees. This book is an opportunity to explore issues of race, how Americans have gotten it wrong for so long, what’s at stake, and how do we move closer to a better place. Bell has honed his skills of cultural observation over many years as a social commentator in comic strips and editorial cartoons. He’s refined his skills up to the breaking point and back. This graphic novel is a testament to his efforts.

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B. is Dying (#5) by Tom Hart comics review

B. is Dying (#5). by Tom Hart. Sequential Artists Workshop. 2023. 24 pp. $8.

Tom Hart’s new comics series is about a man dying in a ditch. Well, ostensibly so. Yeah, there’s a lot more to it than that. Tom Hart’s work looks incredibly alive as if it is being created as he’s thinking it. But the end result, the actual content, has been refined in a million different ways. So, come take a look at one of the most alive comics about dying, or any subject.

Tom Hart speaks to the utter disconnection we all must confront as human beings. It’s an existential crisis on a personal and global level, even a cosmic one. The focus here is on the planet and how we interact with it. As a cartoonist, Hart gives it his all to express his dismay and heart-felt desire to find some answers. The reader is led on a journey atop the crust of Mother Earth. What does that mean? It’s a perfect metaphor for how we usually interact with nature, all superficial, never digging deeper.

With a gentle nudge, Hart gets me to thinking about how we routinely take our environment for granted: we exploit it, endanger it and rape it. We are more prone to tear it apart than we are to try to understand what we call home. How can we ever ignore our own home? And yet we do. This comic expresses the collective nightmare we are all having, whether we choose to accept it or deny it. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re all afraid. Hart leans into that fear with his comics: direct and simple, but not so simple, more elegant-simple. Ah, yes, Tom Hart, the master of the elegant-simple.

I appreciate these comics on many levels, not the least of which is on an entertainment level. I’m thinking of how I cherish any time I spend viewing the work of Buster Keaton or, say, Peter Sellers at their soulful best. I can only imagine what Peter or Buster would have done if they appeared in a Tom Hart comic.

There’s the main character to Tom’s story, a lanky Everyman with hair sticking straight up. He is self-aware enough to know that he’s merely walking on the crust of the Earth. If only all of us could reach that point! It troubles him. It frightens him. It gives him nightmares. He dreams that he’s a helpless/hapless parakeet somehow let loose from the home he’s known as a pet and sprung free into the wild. He is out of his element. He is clueless. He has no real notion of how to interact with nature, just like–you guessed it–the average human being.

Tom Hart’s Everyman is just self-aware enough to know that something’s wrong. He thinks he may have come from a great place but has lost his way. It’s all too easy to lose one’s way, especially if you’re on such an uncertain path. This is not new. This has been going on for a very long time, for as long as there have been humans. Tom Hart has been at his comics-making craft for a long time too, for decades. Tom even makes a reference in the introduction to this issue to a recurring theme in his comics of a lone man in a vague landscape in an existential crisis.  Tom’s experiments have led to masterful award-winning work year after year. And one thing is clear: Tom Hart has not lost his way. In fact, Tom has many followers who wish to create comics every bit as good as his comics. Learn more about Tom and his Sequential Artists Workshop where you too can learn the fine, subtle and rewarding art of making comics.

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The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl Comix #5) review and interview

The Compleat Moscow Calling

A young American journalist had the time of his life chronicling the Yeltsin years in Russia. A heady, disruptive and chaotic time to say the least. There was Jose Alaniz, the first to plant his cartoonist flag: Moscow Calling, was the first daily English-language comic strip to be published in Russia. It ran in the Moscow Tribune for nine months beginning in the fall of 1993. Over the years, Alaniz kept adding to the initial story and that has led to this collection published by Amatl Comix, an imprint of San Diego State University Press.

If you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s 1990 cult classic film, Slacker, then this could be for you. Imagine Austin, or Seattle, back in the grungy free-wheeling early ’90s and then drop that absurd hype and mayhem into the cauldron of dysfunction that was post-Soviet Russia under the less than steady leadership of Boris Yeltsin. Yes, anything goes until it all goes up in smoke.

Moscow Calling comic strip excerpts (1993)

That is the scene that a young Alaniz was privy to and navigated within as a newly-minted college graduate overstaying his last semester abroad in Moscow by a few years, with a spirit for adventure and a burning desire to avoid a daily grind back in the States. The comic strip that held these misadventures together is dutifully archived in this collection, given a deluxe treatment with added material and even an excerpt from a novella. Essentially, it’s a treasure trove of material to enhance the experience of reading the comic strip in question. All lots of fun for the academically inclined as well as the free spirit with a hopeless case of wanderlust.

Yeltsin gives way to Putin.

As Jose points out during our interview, the main character of Pepe serves as a bit of an alter ego, at least in the sense that his story loosely follows Jose’s own progress: going from an expat hanging out with other expats to making new friends among the natives. Of course, Pepe’s progress is spiked with larger-than-life mishaps most befitting the comic strip world. But there is that nagging feeling that both Pepe and Jose are privileged, finding ways to be plucked out of harm and discomfort. In the end, it is Jose’s insight and humility that adds another layer of charm to this engaging and inventive comic strip.

The Compleat Moscow Calling

Jose Alaniz is in a wonderful position to continue what he’s begun with Moscow Calling–and he has every intention of doing so. I know, for a fact, that the comics medium attracts all kinds of people for a multitude of reasons. The ones who stick around, I mean a lifetime of working at this craft, of genuinely exploring and growing, are people attracted to the uncanny power of words and pictures. The strongest connection tends to create auteur-cartoonists. I’m one of them. Jose is one of them. It’s not a boast. Some may say it’s a curse!

If you are a writer-cartoonist, then you will find yourself forever being tugged by the demands of prose and visual mastery. That said, I know it’s a gift too. It doesn’t come easily, all tied in a bow at your front door one crisp and bright morning–although many may think that will magically happen. No, it’s a balancing act and a juggling act. Ultimately, you need to figure it out on your own, work at it alone, but that’s how it needs to be. I know that Jose has the ability and the passion to pursue his comics narrative adventures. This collection is an exciting portal into one person’s creative journey byway of accepting the challenge of being a stranger in a strange land.

I hope you enjoy my interview with Jose Alaniz. I ask that you consider dropping by and leaving a Like and Comment. Likes and Comments are the lifeblood of any YouTube Channel and are always very much appreciated. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel too and I’ll be most grateful. Be sure to order your copy of The Compleat Moscow Calling by visiting Amatl Comix.

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Maximus Blade (#1) comic book review

Cover art by Franco Bevilacqua

Maximus Blade #1. w. Chris Warren a. Ken Lavin Chris Warren Media. $4.99

The first issue of a comic book, especially from an independent publisher, can be a very exciting thing and Maximus Blade does not disappoint. The writing is crisp and crackling with urgency and humor. The art is spot on, transporting the reader through time and space with a cast of engaging unlikely heroes up against a truly motley crew of villainous baddies.

Maximus Blade, a sentinel on a mission.

Our story takes places way into the future, 2480, enough to make my head spin. But that’s part of the fun, of course. Time enough for all sorts of mayhem to have happened leaving good ole planet Earth a mere shell of its former self. Time enough for the upper class to have gone even higher, all the way to an outpost on Earth’s moon. Everyone else stays behind back on Earth which has devolved into a Mad Max wasteland.

“When” the hell am I?

Despite all the dystopia, there is hope, or at least it seems that way. There’s no shortage of possibilities to this comic. Meet Steve, a guy from our own present who had it all, only to be swept up by a time portal. Meet Penelope, a member of the super elite who lives on the moon but not anymore. And meet Maximus Blade, the result of some heavy genetic mutations and not much for words. Between the three of them, you’ve got everything you need to keep the adventures rolling along quite nicely.

Maximus Blade and Steve.

My favorite scene in this issue is probably the first scene between Maximus Blade and Steve, who is no slouch back where he comes from but is totally out of his depth in the distant future he’s been teleported into. Maximus, in the few words he grunts, makes it pretty clear he needs a tech guy and fast. Steve hesitates, but not for long. Just as Maximus is walking away for good, abandoning the “stupid kid” to certain death, Steve chimes in to say he’s actually the best tech guy ever. It’s a funny moment and pivotal to what happens next. I’m not sure why Maximus was so easily convinced but maybe we’ll find out in the next issue. For now, Max, Steve and Penelope are up to their eyeballs in death-defying adventure. This comic does a fine job with balancing action and humor leaving the reader wanting more. Not bad at all for a first issue.

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