New Comics/Old Favorites

I recently visited our local comic shop for the first time in over a year, and rejoining my fellow vaccinated + masked friends was a real treat. As usual a great team of friendly, knowledgeable folks was on hand to help me start catching up, and of course the Kevin the resident comics druid. I say that because I showed him the cover art for one book on my wishlist and he instantly recalled where the last copy was in his store amidst thousands of others. He’s one of those old-school shopkeepers who knows my taste so well I’d buy anything he recommends without question (Sue down at the old Hoitt’s Music was the same way – I’d walk in and she’d have stuff already set aside). But then you watch him turn and give equal treatment to an eight-year-old aficionado with encyclopedic trivia.

I got caught up on some titles that I've been meaning to check out, first and foremost of which was "Monster," Barry Windsor-Smith’s first book in sixteen years. He's an artist who sets the bar for pen + ink, and I showcase examples of his work in every drawing class - it's well-worth studying nomatter what the subject matter… just incredible linework and technique. It's the sort of tome you should read while standing up, at one of those old-fashioned lecterns or a vintage stand, with a tweed jacket + suede elbow patches. Also scored a few anthologies; the recent Comics Journal, The Nib, and unfortunately the final edition of Full Bleed from IDW.

front + back covers of the personally seminal issue #8

Probably one of the more sentimental purchases I've made was this ultimate homage to nostalgia, the amazing one-shot 50th anniversary capstone edition of Slow Death from legendary Last Gasp. I had commented elsewhere on another thread about how the original series got me back into not only reading but creating comics in highschool. At the time I had burnt out on superheroes, but then discovered a whole new world of underground comix by astonishing artists dealing with fun topics like extinction, nuclear contamination, war, and ecological collapse. You know, inspirational stuff.

Another outstanding discovery was the recent graphic novel "Sabrina" by Nick Drnaso. I'll let a handful of other reviewers speak to the subtlety of this work, starting with The New Yorker's D.T. Max, who titled his article "Bleak Brilliance" and described it as "...a comic whose drab tonalities and deliberate slowness challenged a genre that leans toward the overheated.” Similarly Ed Park at the New York Times calls it a “profoundly American nightmare,” and no less a fellow purveyor of similar aesthetics, Chris Ware, writes in a Guardian review that Drnaso has created “…a perspicacious and chilling analysis of the nature of trust and truth and the erosion of both in the age of the internet.”

Drnaso illustrates sequences of “mundane” scenarios, almost equally boring regardless of whatever they respectively depict – and example in getting horrifying news is shown about as intense as getting ready for work in the morning - while “trapped in an atmospheric cloud that makes each quiet moment awkward and suspect” (John Seven at The Comics Beat). Daphne Milner for It’s Nice That notes “It is this visual subtlety that lends the graphic novel its power. Sabrina is, in many ways, a critique on the despondency that develops from hours spent scrolling through social media, a critique that is strengthened by Nick’s deadpan graphics.” Review after review notes how the limited palette, flat areas of sidewalk-chalk spot-color, is used hand-in-glove with a simplistic rendering style that, along with an anesthetized aesthetic of almost anonymous, barely-featured characters, sets up a muddied, emotional pace, a visual trudge. The slowly curdling sense of existential dread is metranomed with a font that reminds one of the fine print on the fold-out warnings inside bottles of medication. Even the uniform weight of his contour lines, in particular the establishing shots of interiors + exteriors, place the story in an empty setting reminiscent of traced architectural drawings from reference shots taken in any suburban dead zone. I'm currently analyzing Seth's penultimate publication "Clyde Fans," (review coming soon) and Drnaso joins the pantheon of introspective masters of the genre with this effort. It only took me two evenings of obsessive reading to consume the book, and like the other forms of popular media it mirrors, even such a relatively brief exposure left something behind that isn't rubbing off anytime soon.

Last but not least, much as I bitch endlessly about corporate blockbusters, crappy popcorn and sharing the same space with rude people, I really, really miss movies. I seriously need an IMAX fix. And hat-tip to Marvel for a touch of class with memorializing Stan Lee "That world may change and evolve - But the one thing that will never change – we’re all part of one big family."