Here is a new work of art by Hurricane Nancy. We all have our thoughts on current events these days. It can be a lot to process and sometimes art can help lead the way. In this latest piece, it looks like someone is being torn in two directions without any clear path ahead. Well, time will tell.
Be sure to visit Hurricane Nancy and check out her art for sale.
Filed under Comics
Eric Drooker is that consummate artist, the ideal artist that young people generally aspire to be. Take a look at the short film below to gain some perspective on Mr. Drooker. This is a short film he did in New York in 1981, a tumultuous time with undeniable relevance to today; a timeless film. We will always need to remind ourselves we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I had the honor of putting together this studio visit with the artist. We discuss his latest graphic novel, Naked City, published by Dark Horse Comics. In it, we find a set of characters, representative of all humanity, who are basically reminding themselves that they have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Born and raised on Manhattan Island, Eric Drooker began to paste his art on the streets at night as a teenager. Since then, his drawings and posters have become a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on covers of the New Yorker.
Eric Drooker in his studio.
His first book, Flood, won the American Book Award, followed by Blood Song (soon to be a feature film). Naked City is the third volume in Drooker’s City Trilogy. His graphic novels have been translated into numerous languages in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. After designing the animation for the film Howl, he was hired for a project at DreamWorks Animation.
The City Trilogy: Flood (1992), Blood Song (2002), Naked City (2024).
Drooker’s art is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Library of Congress. He is available for speaking engagements and frequently gives slide lectures at colleges and universities. Mr. Drooker’s art is available for sale at his website.
At heart, Eric Drooker is a street artist with all the energy that comes with it: everything from his zest for creating work to his zeal for talking about his art. Just give the floor over to him and he’ll work his magic, maybe even play the harmonica if necessary.
The New Yorker, October 28, 2024, The Money Issue. “Crushing Wealth” by Eric Drooker.
“Troubadour” by Eric Drooker.
The New Yorker, March 6, 1995, “Under Bridges” by Eric Drooker.
“Tomorrow” by Eric Drooker.
While I was in his studio, he picked up a copy of The New Yorker magazine, with his art gracing the cover, an issue published just the prior week, and launched into a talk about how the magazine cover functions as a form of street art. While the magazine has a healthy readership, it also reaches a vast number of people who regularly consume just the art on the cover as they come across the magazine on display in various locales whether in a bookstore or in the dentist’s office.
The New Yorker, November 9, 2009, “Autumn in Central Park” by Eric Drooker.
The New Yorker, August 6, 2007, oil on canvas, 20″x16″, “Urban Jungle” by Eric Drooker.
Naked City got on my radar earlier this year and I’m so grateful that I got an advance copy. My friend, and colleague in the comics world, Paul Buhle, wrote the review for us here at Comics Grinder. Without a doubt, Naked City is a significant graphic novel with the added distinction of being part of a trilogy, part of a great artistic process. We, as artists, can and must do some planning ahead on projects while, at the same time, allow the art process to do its thing. Such is the case with Naked City. It is as much a graphic novel about being an artist as it is simply about being human and being true to yourself.
“The Argument” by Eric Drooker.
Filed under Comics, Eric Drooker, Interviews
Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America. William Elliott Hazelgrove. Rowman & Littlefield. 2024. 280pp. $32.
For six seconds, Orson Welles held his audience in suspense with utter silence during the infamous 1938 Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds. This is the linchpin moment vital to this book’s argument that Orson Welles had a malevolent intention behind this most talked about radio scare. Was it a playful prank, an attempt at art, that got out of control? Most will argue that to be the case. William Elliott Hazelgrove, the author of this book, prefers to paint a much darker picture. Whatever the case, you can add this to the mountain of books on Welles and make a note of its intriguing details.
Orson Welles rehearsing War of the Worlds broadcast, 1938.
Orson Welles, given such a vast and complex career, continues to inspire great love and hate. Hazelgrove comes out of the gate exhibiting his scorn like a badge of honor with a bombastic description of what it must have been like for Orson Welles, someone wielding so much power as a star of the dazzling new medium of radio. No doubt, numerous casual listeners to a radio play of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, adapted to sound like a realistic news broadcast, were innocently caught unawares in 1938 and this resulted in a panic. Hazelgrove turns the screws with his suggestion that Welles should have known better and that a touch of evil must have been at play that night. Now, whether there is more or less truth to this analysis, Hazelgrove sounds very certain. However, keep in mind, that is just Hazelgrove’s suggestion. Smithsonian Magazine presents a case of Welles and his Mercury Players team scrambling to turn their adaptation into something palatable: “The elements of the show that a fraction of its audience found so convincing crept in almost accidentally, as the Mercury desperately tried to avoid being laughed off the air.”
Orson on Mars, sketch by Orson Welles, 1938.
Given that Hazelgrove clearly falls within the anti-Welles contingent, it becomes all the more interesting to continue to read onward as he paints as unfavorable a picture of Welles as he can muster. His next target is the Welles masterpiece, Citizen Kane, which Hazelgrove quickly dismisses as a “famous flop.” In Hazelgrove’s opinion, and this is only his opinion being quoted here: “Undoubtedly, people in 1941 left the theater scratching their heads. Some caught it. Most didn’t.” The popular belief is that Citizen Kane was misunderstood in its own time but that is, in fact, not the case. There are so many facts to work with that can be spun in so many directions. William Randolph Hearst got in the way of Citizen Kane succeeding at the box office but, without a doubt, Citizen Kane, in its own time, was a critical success. So, herein lies the frustration, and fun, in discussing Welles and his work. There is more than enough room to spin the facts and tilt your argument in one direction or another. All in all, Hazelgrove offers up an engaging and highly readable addition to Welles scholarship. I don’t have to completely believe him or agree with him and you don’t have to either but, like Orson Welles himself, Hazelgrove offers something lively and highly relevant for further discussion.
Filed under Book Reviews, Orson Welles
Carol Lay has set the bar high for time travel novels and, no doubt, time travel graphic novels. I would not be surprised to find out that this book ends up joining the ranks of time travel movies. As we move further along in an ever-expanding tech-laden and crisis-prone world, we seem to have an insatiable desire for time travel stories. Well, then grab this book! And, if you should need a little more convincing, please stop by the Comics Grinder YouTube channel and check out my interview with Carol Lay.
MY TIME MACHINE, published by Fantagraphics Books, is one of the best contemporary time travel stories I’ve ever read, whatever the medium used to tell it.
We keep the chat light and easygoing and, given the subject matter, we find ourselves naturally covering a lot of ground. If you are new to H.G.Wells, or a diehard fan of time travel and science fiction, we’ve got you covered. This is one of my most fun interviews with one of the best cartoonists in the business. As an added bonus for those readers familiar with the original novel, and the 1960 movie for that matter, you can consider Lay’s book, as she states, “a sort of sequel to the original in that my book treats those events as if they had really happened and my story is a continuation.” Lay goes on to say that climate change plays a pivotal role in her story. “H.G. Wells was very interested in science. He carefully studied Darwin. He basically wanted to go into the future to see how humans evolved. In my story, I wanted to go into the future to see how the planet evolved.”
Like I suggest in my review of this book, it’s really nice when you have an auteur cartoonist like Lay (in full command of both writing and artwork) who knows just how to dive into the good stuff. Creating a work of comics at this level is a lot of work but it can also be a lot fun. That’s the whole point to all this: it’s gotta be fun! At some crucial level, the story is moving along at an undeniable and highly compelling pace. You do not have to be a fan of science fiction to get into this book. If you love a good story that is as much character-driven as it is quirky and confronting big issues, then this will appeal to you.
Filed under Comics, Interviews
My Time Machine. Carol Lay. Fantagraphics. 168pp. $24.99.
I be time travelin’. Carol Lay‘s debut graphic novel makes the case for jumpin’ on board that time travel machine if you should get the chance. While seemingly downright casual about the whole thing, Lay’s adventure comes fully loaded with serious considerations on theory, sober insights and plenty of What If? scenarios. This is time travelin’ after all! And who better to suit up with than such a stellar cartoonist as Carol Lay? Best known for her comic strips (find current work at GoComics), this book lets Lay shine in the full-fledged graphic novel format.
Yep, you need someone who is really into the whole concept of time travel in order to have a truly awesome time travel story. Lay delivers right from the opening pages that depict her in the far, far distant future, just her inside her time machine on some desolate landscape. What now? When now? Instantly, we get a sly nod to the familiar: whatever she’s doing, it’s running on an app from her phone. Moving right along, she runs commands from her iPad. Lay has her alter ego kept at bay with enough comforting high tech to keep her in a chill and relatively matter-of-fact mindset. Time traveling can be seen as just one big, albeit massive, status check.
It turns out sly humor can do wonders and it definitely fuels much of what goes on here as you might expect. But it’s not jokey humor. It’s more of a point of view, like the world-weary wisecracks from a co-worker you’ve grown to love. When you think about the best time travel stories, they’re often far more understated than the genre would seem to suggest. As much as Lay’s alter ego is excited about the possibility of killing Hitler, once the time travel option is in play, she’s really more preoccupied with her own lot in life. It seems rather short-sighted, right? But it proves rather impossible to avoid, all the same. Rob, her ex-husband and closest friend, would agree.
The story’s time machine is a result of Rob’s handiwork. He, fairly nonchalantly, rigs it up in his spare time. Not a big deal, really, when you know what you’re doing. And that very wry and dry humor, I must say, is the most fantastical aspect to this graphic novel and gives it a special charm. You could say this is science fiction with the mature adult in mind who has seen it all, needs to skip over all the dancing around, and is ready to get right to it. This is truly sci-fi for grown-ups! The two main characters are of a certain age, spry enough to still think of themselves as middle-aged yet humbled to know better. For them, time has become more precious. Sure, time can’t help but get wasted but, at least, they’re wise enough to know better, which is a big part of this time travel tale. I welcome more of these kind of stories from writers and cartoonists, especially those of a certain vintage and viewpoint.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews, Sci-Fi
NAKED CITY: A Graphic Novel. Eric Drooker. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2024. 329pp. $29.99.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
For many an aged connoisseur of film and television history, the title of Eric Drooker’s new comic conjures up fond, familiar images. A 1948 film offered the nearest Hollywood approach to Italian “New Realism,” and was directed by Jules Dassin,a left-wing film director about to flee the US and the blacklist for a legendary role in Greece (think Never On Sunday). On the surface a mere “policier,” it captured the grit of Manhattan as a manufacturing city, including a police chase on foot through crowds of working class types, never seen in quite this way before or perhaps after. “Naked City” made a titular reappearance for good reasons, one of the finest “New York Era” television efforts (1958-63) which began each episode with a vivid view of Manhattan, and plots that often featured police as social workers dealing sympathetically with broken lives.
Drooker himself actually fled New York for Berkeley, decades ago. But he co-founded the annual, hard-hitting anthology World War III Illustrated before departing, and has returned spectacularly—in his dreams, that is.
We are in the world of existential experience. Artists and musicians trying to make a living and make their way and also find some kind of companionship, where possible. Street scenes, park scenes, people who aren’t nearly as dangerous or unfriendly as they look, and cops who are a lot more casually brutal than the press would have us believe. Drooker, as in an earlier Manhattan GN, Flood, does not need much dialogue and some pages have hardly any at all.
Let’s try another analogy. One of the most useful observations of European art historians generations ago captured a crucial turn away from narrow religious art. For a thousand years, more or less, painters had drawn human beings at close quarters, engaged in one or another religious expression. And then, not necessarily for non-religious purposes, the landscape began to appear as something in itself, something to be seen, reflected upon, captured in art.
It was a giant step forward, anticipating the following steps in which humans would reappear but in a new light. Bruegel was already there, in a sense, but by the nineteenth century, a flood of art, more and more secular, placed ordinary people in ordinary lives. Or exotic people in their ordinary lives somewhere far from the Euro-centered world. Only one step remained, in the lowly comic pages of the yellow press, to allow ordinary as well as extraordinary people to talk, make jokes, swear, and generally carry on.
Thus comic art, long unrecognized as any kind of art. Drooker brings us back to landscapes, but as cityscapes. Interiors and exteriors alike, not to mention the subway caverns, not to mention music venues. Not to mention balmy days, and snowstorm days, tenement to public park.
The plot is fairly thin and the characters not developed with notable complexity because Drooker wishes to direct the reader’s attention elsewhere. Our protagonist, a young woman coming from a rough background, has aspirations as a singer. She naturally can’t pay even a meager rent without finding some kind of work when nearly every kind is obnoxious as well as unrewarding. By accident, she becomes an artist’s model and we enter the world of the artist himself.
Here, any comic art volume will poke around a little, raising inevitable analogies to the comic artist’s own artistic vision, work and troubles. This guy is more than a generation older than our protagonist, has no apparent sexual designs upon her but also no sense of a career more successful than following his agent or exhibitor’s advice. He may not come to a happy ending because hardly anyone does here. The City is rough on the ordinary aspirant to artistic fame or even relative stability. The lonely streets are too dangerous, just for starters.
She is lucky enough to escape the worst dangers except the sense of being alone in a world of skyscrapers, tenements and offices. She is lucky enough to be recognized as a singer with talent. But something is definitely missing.
Drooker is a socialist and environmentalist as his art has always explained to readers. He does not thump any key here, no political causes are highlighted, if the plight of the working stiff is always on display. He is pointing in another direction. She is undocumented and in that way always endangered, her memories of her family’s political persecution in Mexico stand for themselves, part of a past that she has left behind except in wistful moments.
She is, finally, one more stranger in the metropolis. Like millions of others facing the same dangers, including deportation. And with similar hopes. She is not allowed her own special songs to them. But she endures.
Actually, it is the Yiddish language short stories and novels about Manhattan from the 1890s to the 1940s that seem the closest to Drooker. Strangers in a language that will remain forever alien West of the Hudson. Inclined toward visionary social solutions based on culture as much as politics, the artist, even the ordinary lover of art, group-music singer or musician to film-maker and even cartoonist, those curious Jews left a mighty legacy that Drooker follows.
Then again, Drooker could also be seen in Tompkins Square Park, where Allen Ginsberg discovered his art on anti-gentrification posters, introduced himself to the artist and began a process that culminated in a Drooker/Ginsberg collaboration of poetry and comics. Quite something to remember. And again, quite the city saga.
Ginsberg discovered Drooker as Drooker had discovered Ginsberg. Together—which is to say a new collection of Ginsberg’s poetry illustrated by Drooker, published in 2006—they created a unique comic. We can appreciate the partnership best with Ginsberg’s words, from Drooker’s website:
Essay by Allen Ginsberg
Drooker’s Illuminations
I first glimpsed Eric Drooker’s odd name on posters pasted on fire-alarm sides, construction walls checkered with advertisements, & lamppost junction boxes in the vortex of Lower East Side Avenues leading to Tompkins Square Park, where radical social dislocation mixed homeless plastic tents with Wigstock transvestite dress-up anniversaries, Rastas sitting on benches sharing spliff, kids with purple Mohawks, rings in their noses ears eyebrows and bellybuttons, adorable or nasty skinheads, wives with dogs & husbands with children strolling past jobless outcasts, garbage, and a bandshell used weekly for folk-grunge concerts, anti-war rallies, squatters’ rights protests, shelter for blanket-wrapped junkies & winos and political thunder music by Missing Foundation, commune-rockers whose logo, an overturned champagne glass with slogan “The Party’s Over,” was spray-painted on sidewalks, apartments, brownstone and brick walled streets.
Eric Drooker’s numerous block-print-like posters announced much local action, especially squatters’ struggles and various mayoral-police attempts to destroy the bandshell & close the Park at night, driving the homeless into notoriously violence-corrupted city shelters. Tompkins Park had a long history of political protest going back before Civil War anti-draft mob violence, memorialized as “. . . a mixed surf of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot,” in Herman Melville’s The Housetop: A Night Piece (July 1863).
Filed under Dark Horse Comics, Eric Drooker
The Apprentice: An American Horror Story. Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring Sebastian Stan. Jeremy Strong. Maria Bakalova. 2024.
Even the most loyal fan of Donald Trump will likely find something to appreciate from the Trump biopic, The Apprentice: An American Horror Story, which, by no small measure, is like what Citizen Kane was for William Randolph Hearst. The Trump film is not attempting anything as grandiose as redefining filmmaking but, while Trump’s lawyers would argue otherwise, it can hardly be dismissed as a “hit job.” No, this film is significant. As a story of one person’s descent into the abyss, it is impossible to resist the pull of this film. While it may seem, at first, to be merely framed within the confines of a biopic, it has a certain grace and gravitas all its own, with a distinctive degree of horror. I’ll demonstrate with a series of storyboards I created on the fly while viewing and later refined a bit.
And, one day, this will be Trump Tower!
The opening shots set the tone for an ambitious film with a young Donald Trump, circa 1974, the big player center stage. He is gallivanting through the decay and despair of economically throttled New York City. His eye is on the eyesore of the once opulent Commodore Hotel, the long dead crown jewel of a bygone Grand Central Terminal super-block. The young Don sees a way back to the glory days but that story is yet to unfold, a quintessential example of graft in the extreme.
Hi, I’m Donald Trump.
Steadily, we reach the core theme with the first meeting of young Don and the infamous take-no-prisoners super lawyer Roy Cohn. Early on, Cohn is impressed that Donald has managed to schmooze his way into membership to the same elite club he belongs to. He sees potential in the handsome bumbler.
Rules of the Game.
As his mentor, Cohn teaches the Donald the rules of the game, if you want to win at any cost: Rule 1: Attack, Attack Attack; Rule 2: Admit Nothing, Deny Everything; and Rule 3: Claim Victory, Never Admit Defeat.
Dinner with the Trumps.
So much of the raw content that makes up this film is bits of facts we’ve heard before but the film manages to look at them from a different angle as during a family dinner scene. There’s the patriarch, Fred Trump, openly belittling the eldest son, Fred Jr., for never having amounted to anything important. Fred Trump does not come across as an over-the-top villain, just a miserable person. There’s a deadening acceptance by everyone at the table that Freddy is a failure, not up to Trump standards. It is one of the most sorrowful Trump family facts that is a recurring motif.
It was love that didn’t stand a chance.
Why can’t Fred Jr. find his place in the world or why is it that the Trump family can’t seem to find a way to make him feel welcome? The answer is that Freddy doesn’t have the killer instinct. But Donald does–and that makes all the difference in the world.
No love to spare.
Again, at its core, this is a film about Donald and Roy Cohn. It turns out that the sorcerer’s apprentice has learned his lessons all too well. The tone of the characters drops from dark to darker and even pitch black at times. We see Don out to win at all costs. There’s a good amount of time spent depicting Donald stalking Ivana before he made her his bride, only to later assault her and discard her. Given enough time, Don will even discard his beloved mentor, Roy Cohn.
Young Donald Trump.
Of course, the film is self-conscious of its subject, its relevance and its undeniable connection to Citizen Kane. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment with the young Don in his bachelor pad viewing Nixon on TV while in the background there’s a big movie poster of Citizen Kane.
Trump’s Rosebud.
The final frames of the film zoom in on Trump, now a full-fledged killer in the game of life. And, just like a fanciful scene from Citizen Kane, the camera closes in on his eyeball, an American flag waving from within. While not a perfect match, the Citizen Kane/The Apprentice comparison is definitely worth discussion. It’s interesting for me to discover, having lately been reading up on Orson Welles, that there was a growing consensus by critics, when Citizen Kane was released in 1941, that somehow that film failed to capture something. When you tallied it all up, Charles Foster Kane remained an enigma and perhaps not someone even worthy of so much attention. Well, from today’s point of view, that uncanny hollowness makes the film all the more alluring. Also, from today’s point of view, it should give us all quite a shudder.
Filed under Comics
World War 3 Now?, #54, 2024. World War 3 Illustrated. 250pp, $25.00. Distributed by AK Press.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
The very launch of World War 3 Illustrated in 1979 offered a grim view of the future. Sadly, not much has altered for the better since then. We are now in a most perilous situation, and the annual comics anthology offers a way to look at things and, just possibly, also offers some potential ways out.
Many of the contributors to WW3 remain from its long-ago origins, most evidently Seth Tobocman and Sabrina Jones. One might risk calling them the darker and lighter spirits of the team, respectively. How WW3 has evolved through the decades is mostly through globalizing. Once mostly if never entirely North American in its artists and subjects, it has become a truly global anthology. Lots from the Middle East, not surprisingly. More from Latin America.
One of the most striking pieces, by Nico Donatti, treats the Bolsonaro years in Brazil. The Trump-inspired rightwing politician and his movement looked to wipe out as much of the Amazon rainforest as profitable, deal the last final blow to the surviving tribes, and blame the social unrest on “Communists.” Happily, Bolsanaro went down in defeat. Yet the regional peril remains, as we see in the pages of Carlo Quispe and Nadia Rondon, two Peruvian artist/activists. They depict the continuing role of colonization launched by Spain centuries ago and very much alive in the violent repression of protesters. As of the present, new changes in the laws give the judicial branch the ability to blunt environmental laws in the name of profit and international investments.
It gets worse, if possible. Certainly around color pages on the climate protests in New York City and the violent assaults upon Palestinian civilians. Like the treatment of the war in the Ukraine, these are studies of people under attack. With good reason, many depictions of fear appear in these pages, but none worse than the fear and terror experienced by an Israeli woman who sees nothing good in the narrative of revenge and hope. Only a change of mood that will bring the hostages home can offer hope. Maisara Baroud and Mohammed Sabannet offer visual treatments of Gaza, and readers may shudder as they turn the pages.
I am drawn (as always) to Sabrina Jones’s work, because of her unique comic art style but also because her intense humanism finds a basis for redemption. Here, a deteriorating old building in the Lower East Side is repeatedly revived by artists and musicians until…it was snatched up by a random billionaire. And yet the struggle of 9th Street continues, as it has since the labor uprising of Tompkins Square Park in 1873.
There’s more here, almost incomprehensibly more. Another familiar contributor, Susan Simensky Bietela, offers a hard look at her adopted Milwaukee, how the Republican convention brought out the worst in a city proudly governed by socialists, only a century ago. Near the end of the book, Kevin Pyle shows us a “wasteland” in New Jersey, close to Manhattan, somehow remarkably become a haven for birds and other species who can live in the marshes untouched by suburban life. “Nobonzo,” a non-gendered artist, closes the book by renewing the “beautiful idea”of anarchism reborn for the near End Times. Two children learn about the ideas of Kropotkin among others, with this pregnant thought:
“Rather than looking at history backwards, starting with the conclusion, when everything we love will have ceased to exist, let’s begin from the present moment; Let’s become capable of action in the context we’re in….The real content of utopia is the concrete actions it enables you to take.” Along with the very final one: “There will always be something beautiful.” We need to hold that thought.
Filed under Comics, Comics Reviews, Paul Buhle
Honestly, this is the only graphic novel that matters right now.
Final Cut. Charles Burns. Pantheon. 2024. 224pp. $34.00.
Honestly, Final Cut is the only graphic novel that matters right now. And we’re about to take a look at it. Everything about it, from the title on down, is true to the artist’s vision. Charles Burns had to invent his place in comics. As he has said himself, the underground comics of the 1960s had receded into the twilight around the time he came of age. There was no alt-comics scene when it was Charles Burns up to bat. He had to create a whole new thing. Yes, there were other cartoonists of his generation in the same boat but Burns brought in such a distinctive and original vision that only a few others could stand alongside. In recent years, perhaps Burns wondered if he could still pull a rabbit out of his hat. Well, that is not asking the right question. It’s more just a matter of when and now we have a new book. Burns’s comics are typically set in the atmospheric woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, circa 1970, and this one is no different. No need to change a winning format.
Boy Meets Girl. Boy Obsesses Over Girl.
It’s a new book following in a well established Burns tradition of alienation nation, just what the doctor ordered if what ails you is a need for the extraordinary. This is the story of one young man’s need for the transcendent, and his inability to rise to the occasion when he comes face to face with it. What’s wrong with him? Maybe it has to do with him being a teenager, a little too young for his own good. When he met the girl, he flinched. He didn’t win her over. Instead, he did quite the opposite: he obsessed over her.
At the movies!
As much as this book is about horror movies, from classics to B-movies, this is also about fan culture and the fans who have a need greater than they can fully express to other people. There is no way that Brian is going to connect on a deep level with Laurie. Maybe when he’s older but not now while he’s in high school and that’s all he’s got. At this point in his life, he is driven to tears by the disturbing ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He took Laurie, on a just-friends-date, to see it at the local movie theater but, no such luck, she didn’t really get it. So, for now, his love of horror movies is all he’s got. And that’s not too bad. He’s a budding filmmaker after all.
My last reading of Charles Burns goes back to the trilogy (X’ed Out, The Hive, Sugar Skull) he did about a decade or so ago. Before that, I read Black Hole when it came out in singles. By comparison, this new full length graphic novel feels as grounded as Black Hole and more accessible, even personal. Brian feels a bit more like an alter ego. The reader is supposed to be sympathetic to Brian. He seems a little off but, at the same time, he seems to be figuring out things at his own pace. For now, he has an unstable mother to attend to and he’s got the afternoon horror movie on local TV to help him cope.
Filed under Charles Burns, Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews
MrBallen Presents: Strange, Dark & Mysterious, The Graphic Stories. MrBallen. Art by Andrea Mutti. Ten Speed Graphic. 2024. $24.99.
I have known a few Navy Seals and they’re all charismatic and full of energy which is what John B. Allen, aka MrBallen, is all about. MrBallen is very likable and enthusiastic and he’s got that Wow factor so very few podcasters truly have, leaving them in the dust. What I always tell my creative friends interested in pursuing a blog, or more, is to be themselves. That is so true of MrBallen. The dude is one hundred percent authentic. Watch an episode of MrBallen and see for yourself, if you have not already. The moment I started to check out one of his videos, I got that high energy vibe. MrBallen can’t sit still and is hyper-focused on whatever subject he’s tackling on his mega-popular YouTube channel, MrBallen: gripping stories most likely having to do with an adventure, perhaps some ghosts and probably a bloody aftermath. A new book is out collecting some of his best stories in a comic book format. So, as a comics expert, if I do say so myself, I wanted to see just how well a comics adaptation would hold up. Well, it takes me back to some of the best comics from my childhood and beyond. Some stuff you just can’t get enough of.
Sometimes you just want a very scary story to give you a chill. You’ve come to the right place. With each passing year, it seems harder to achieve this unsettling feeling within mass entertainment. In this case, the trick is to keep to the facts, and remain hyper-focused, just like MrBallen. Let the story do the work. People don’t have time for much else when it comes to a spooky story, especially one that is based on actual events. So, that’s what you get from MrBallen’s show and that is what you get from this graphic adaptation, with crisp to-the-point artwork with just the right amount of atmosphere and artistry. Yes, this might be a guilty pleasure but it needs to be delivered with style. Artist Andrea Mutti does just that. So, pick your poison from the glorious past, from Tales from the Crypt to Weird Science to True Crime. The best of the best find a way to just roll with it and so it is with MrBallen’s collection of creepy tales.
In fact, maybe more to the point, think of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Yeah, MrBallen is presenting a new and improved version of believe-it-or-not content for the 21st century and it sure looks like it’s working. Interesting enough how a lot of these stories date back to the turn of the last century. I’m sure MrBallen would have done great as an editor or host on a true crime type of show on the radio or in pulp fiction. Lucky for us, we’ve got him in the here and now to present such stories as “The Valley of Headless Men.” This first story in the book features a Bermuda Triangle kind of spot where generations of greedy gold prospectors go to untimely deaths. Tucked away deep within Canada’s Northwest Territories is a heavily wooded area surrounded by mountains in a very secluded area near a river. It is picturesque as hell but very difficult to leave once you’ve forced your way in. The ultimate reward awaiting anyone who makes it that far is dying a gruesome death. Yep, it’s the sort of story that will satisfy an itch to be spooked.
As I suggest, MrBallen is playing with a proven method of storytelling going back, in our modern era, to pulp fiction but going even further back to ancient folklore. Yes, there’s definitely something for anyone looking for a good scare. This is a great book to enjoy on its own or as a companion to MrBallen’s phenomenally popular show or just to kick back with during the Halloween season.
But let’s end on a high note, shall we? How about the story, “Thorns,” set deep, deep within a scary German forest? Like many of MrBallen’s scary tales, they may have roots going back hundreds of years but can also have taken place fairly recently. Such is the case with Elsa, a young woman who simply wanted to enjoy being a camp counselor. Her story is very simple but also very unsettling. Basically, we get to know her a bit and follow her in an attempt at getting a good night’s sleep out in the woods. That is not to be the case. The whole time, Elsa is fighting off a nightmare about being forced to wear a crown of thorns cutting deep into her head. It’s brutal and it seems to have no end. That is until she wakes up and finds out what is actually going on. Well, you’ll want to read further for yourself. All in all, a fine little Halloween tale as is the case with the rest of this super scary book. Just like its host and creator, MrBallen, this book is the real deal.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews
