New Comics Day

Another light week for me. Most weeks are, actually, when it comes to periodicals. Graphic novels/trade paperbacks/etc. are taking a larger chunk of my purchasing power, as they seem like a better value overall. More permanent. More story in one big chunk. Easier to store. Pretty much the only monthlies I get are the things I just can't wait for, or don't think will be collected. So that doesn't mean I'm about to give up on buying comic pamphlets, monthlies, floppies, whatever you want to call them; but I do think there's a notable shift, at least in the smaller independent companies, towards original graphic novels, as opposed to serialized stories that are later reprinted. And ultimately, I think that's a positive shift, at least for the way I prefer to read comics.

And so, after that rambling intro: Here's what I actually bought.

Hellboy: The Island #2 of 2 (Dark Horse, $2.99)
This two issue dose of Mike Mignola returning to his signature character is just waaaay too small. He's got such a unique style, full of character and energy, and it's especially apparent this time around. This character and world he's created just don't feel right in anybody else's hands, which makes me a bit skeptical about his plans to pass of the art duty in the next Hellboy miniseries. It seems sort of wrong to have gone 20-some odd issues on the title, keeping all the auxilliary stories by other artists in sideline titles like Weird Tales and B.P.R.D., and then to suddenly hand it over to another artist. Especially after a story that could be a huge tunring point for the title.

Even though this issue is about 75% exposition, it works. It's a great setup for the future direction of the Hellboy story, and gives Mignola plenty of room to stretch out and draw all sorts of strange cosmic entities and monsters, and sets up the stakes from here on out. And it's not as static as most villian-explains-master-plan scenes that it could be compared to. There's some give and take to the scene, and some interspersed action to keep things lively.

So where does this title go from here? Mignola has removed Hellboy from the supporting cast and circumstances that have set the stage for his stories, and pushed him closer to dealing with the role he's avoided through all his encounters. So does the focus shift from Paranormal Research and Fighting Mythical Creatures to a more blatantly apocalyptic storyline? Or now that Hellboy's beat the snot out of yet another critter urging him over to the darkside, does he continue to blithely ignore the impliactions and go back to the B.P.R.D.? I guess we'll see, but I know which one I'm hoping for, even if Mignloa isn't drawing it.

Random Encounter #4 (Viper Comics, $2.99)
It must be fight comics week. Too bad there's no new Sharknife due for a while, or we could really round things out...

This title is sort of a guilty pleasure. The artwork is super clean, with lightweight-yet-solid linework, and excellent dynamic action scenes. It's got a highly manga-influenced visual sensibility, in the character design and heavy use of action lines. The story, like Scott Pilrim and the aforementioned Sharknife, plays around with the narrative conventions and iconography of video games, with power-ups, combos, and special items playing as much a role in the story as dialogue, chatacter development, and plot.

The plot is somewhat flimsy, and unfolds with a video-game like logic, but now that we're four issues in, we're starting to see a little more development to the setting and some refinement to how this particular world works. The first few issues were essentially based on, as the title proclaims, a "random encounter" between teenagers raunning a convenience store and strange robot creatures. It makes for lightweight reading, but as the series progresses, we're getting a little more of a glimpse of a world where this sort of thing is unusal, but not unheard of. If you're looking for some candy in your comics diet, you could do far worse than to check this book out.

Playing catch-up

I got a big fat marsimport.com order in last week which included a lot of older titles, including:

Bipolar #1-5: (Alternative Press, Tomer and Asaf Hanuka)
I know this series has been out a while and I am totally behind on my review here. But I was inclined to mention this series on the merit of the story of the man who killed himself (Pizzeria Kamikaze) and lives his existence in some type of Purgatory where everyone else there has "offed" themselves as well. I found this story to be original and well-written with some pretty pathetic characters. The art is haunting and beautiful and unique.

Urban Hipster #1, 2: (Alternative Press, David Lasky and Greg Stump)
This was an easy, unemotional read. Both issues were mildly amusing, but nothing I would fawn over. The title pretty much gives away the premise of self-involved hipster types living the urban fantasy in Seattle. I don't really care for hipsters (perhaps due to envy) so reading about their hum-drum existence didn't make this a super enthusiastic read. The one highlight was "Babette's Feast" but other than that, there wasn't much else to get me excited.

A Fine Mess #1: (Alternative Press, Matt Madden)
I admit I was drawn to this book because Mr. Madden is the husband of Jessica Abel (Artbabe), one of my favorite artists. And also because I accidentally purchased A Fine Mess #2 a while ago (accidentally because I hate buying books in the middle of a series). I was pretty disappointed because the stories in #1 weren't as interesting to read as #2. Perhaps it was because the stuff in #1 was older, dating back to 1998. But it was hard for me to keep interest in it, whereas with #2 I tore through it. The "Exersizes in Style" were the highlights in both books for me.

Any Easy Intimacy: (Top Shelf, Jeffrey Brown)
I feel apprehensive about writing this, because what praises haven't already been sung in Mr. Brown's honor? Either way, add another voice to the choir. While his art can be described as elementary, there is a really endearing, honest quality about it. And I may be falling into the cliche that every girl loves a love story, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I found myself and people I know in his flawed characters, which was refreshing and amusing. I finished his book feeling like he needed a hug. And maybe a flower. Either way, I definitely plan on adding more of his works to my lil library.

New Comics Day

A slow week for new comics as far as I was concerned. I ended up spending a whopping $4.50, minus my 10% subscriber discount, and plus tax. But it's not like they had to wrench teh money away from me at the shop because the only book worth picking up was:

Love & Rockets Vol. 2, #14 (Fantagraphics, $4.50)
Ah yes, the good ol' reliable Hernandez Bros. This issue is another good slice of human drama with a touch of the bizarre, surreal, comical, and fantastical they're known for. Jaime continues his "Day by Day with Hopey" storyline, giving us Thursday and Friday, while Beto pushes forward with "Dumb Solitaire" and an extra dark installment of "Julio's Day," which is surprising, considering how disturbing this particular storyline usually is. It's like "Palomar" with all the life-affirming deference to love and determination stripped away. If "Palomar" explored the growth of it's characters, for better and worse, "Julio's Day" dwells on the depraved, petty, and outright vicious side of the equation. Luckily, Jaime is there to balance out the book, notably the scene of schoolgirlish excitement between Maggie and Hopey as they spy on Maggie's superheroine neighbor in the middle of the night. It's good to see the spotlight more on Hopey, after the extended "Maggie" storyline of the first 10 issues, although it is odd to have a "Locas" storyline that takes their apartness as a starting point, a status quo. It does give a slightly different perspective on the two as individuals, and opens up some more territory to explore, I suppose...

Comic Blogging Potpourri

A few things to pop into my head recently...

Been reading a little more of Kevin Huizenga's work, and he's consistently impressed me with his inventiveness and his range. In what little I've seen of his work so far (Or Else #1 and #2, and the Drawn & Quarterly Showcase book), he's gone from abstract to pseudo-autobiographical to fantastic magical-realism, to outright educational/instructional, all while keeping a consistent visual aplomb. There's a multi-page sequence in Or Else #2, that peaks with a pair of fold-out pages, that is a remarkably surreal meditation on sunset, with "skipping", repetitive narrative captions and art the slowly dissolves into childlike scribbles and half-tone experiments. It's audacious, boundary-pushing, and also captures this perfect hallucinatory moment that really sticks with you. And in the same book, we get a dryly informative segment on why the moon sometimes appears larger and/or redder when closer to the horizon. This work is seriously just all over the map, and it works! I was glad to see that there's some more material coming later this year, as part of Fantagraphics new Ignatz line. There's an ad for this line in the first few pages of the new Comics Journal, and I just happened to catch the "Ganges" title out of the corner of my eye. So that's yet another upcoming book to loo out for.

On another, unrelated topic: I was thinking more about my impending Cerebus re-read, which I'm planning on starting as soon as Amazon decides to actually ship the copy of Going Home that I ordered over a month ago. (Call me crazy, but I want to have the whole thing in my sweaty little hands before I begin). And for some reason, I remembered this saying that some comics blogger (can't remember who, sorry) mentioned a while back. To paraphrase: Only buy comics you expect to enjoy. The gist of the statement was that if a book doesn't excite you anymore, or falls into a irrecoverable rut, there's no need to keep picking it up. Loyalty won't make it a better book again, and giving your money to shitty comics only encourages the production of shitty comics. Right, simple enough.

So why re-read something like Cerebus?

There's a lot to enjoy in Cerebus. There's also a lot to frustrate, disappoint, and infuriate. There's a pretty obvious downward spiral after the first half, as the work becomes more insular and esoteric, the ideological preoccupations of it's creator become increasingly part of the text. There's a sense of potential squandered, or at least a bar set so high that the book can never live up to it's own myth. Even a sense of willful alienation of the audience.

So, I'm wondering, why subject myself to 6,000 pages of a comic that follows a pretty sharp parabolic trajectory, from passable fantasy/funny animal pastiche, to sharp political and social satire, to some of the most formally ambitious comics work around, to overreaching and sometimes cringeworthy screeds? Why not just read the first half again, and leave it at that?

I'm not really sure. And note, I'm not in any way doubting that I'll go through with the re-read, I'm just not sure what exactly I'm hoping to get out of it. Am I like an English major reading Ulysees just to say I've read it, whether I enjoy it or not? Am I hoping to dig out the redeeming qualities of the work and say to the world "Look! Here's what you overlooked! Here's how and where Cerebus retains it's value through to then end!"? Am I just in it for the sick thrill of watching the decline, like some sordid Rise and Fall expose? Maybe a little bit of all of that. Maybe I just want to enjoy the parts of it that I can (which would mainly be the form, and not as much of the content) as it progresses.

Well, whatever it is, I've got a while to think about it still, seeing how speedy Amazon has been so far.

Speaking of re-reads: After Cerebus, I think Akira will have to be my next re-read project. I found this French overview of Otomo's manga work earlier this evening, and browsing through it made me feel a nostalgia for that series. It was only a couple of years ago that I actually read the entire series front-to-back, after having read only bits and pieces of the old Epic printing, but something about the energy of that work, and the remarkable attention to detail in the artwork makes me want to revisit it again. I have a few untranslated collections of Otomo's other work sitting on my bookshelf as well, but It'll be a while before I can fully enjoy those. I haven't had any luck finding scanlations of those yet, and they probably won't be translated commercially anytime soon. Oh well, I've got plenty of gorgeous Otomos artwork to flip through in the meantime. Maybe I'll put some scans online at some point...

OK, enough of this blogging as procastination routine! Back to work on a birthday present for a certain contributor to this blog!

Upcoming Series

OK, so I discovered the answer to my earlier question about what Paul Pope is currently up to:

Batman: Year 100.

Just announced at San Diego Comic Con apparently, to be released early next year as a four-issue prestige mini-series.

Also interesting: two new series from Brian Wood: the ongoing DMZ (which I've been seeing snippets of on Wood's Livejournal for some time now), and the 12-issue Local, a series of stand-alone stories, similar to Demo, each tied to a different US city.

Ah man, there's finally some good new comics coming out...I've been feeling a sort of rut when it comes to monthly titles lately.

Hot Damn.

This post by Don Simpson is a real tour-de-force summation of issues facing artists (and, tangentially, publishers and audiences and retailers) in the American comic book industry, and the consequences of rotating creative teams, companies perpetuating trademarks at the expense of new ideas, and work-for-hire contracts. A great contrast to Dirk Deppey's "Opening Shot" column in the new Comics Journal. Should be required reading.

But I'm at a little barbeque and beer party, so I'll have to post more coherent thoughts about it later.

New Comics Day

I almost gave New Comics Day a pass this week, for a few reasons. One, I was sort of cranky from working 45 minutes of overtime doing someone else's job. Two, it was hot as all get out outside today in Santa Rosa, and it's Downtown Market night, meaning several blocks adjacent to the local comic shop are shut down right around when I get off work. Third and final reason: the only book I was expecting this week was 100 Bullets #62. I don't follow a whole lot of regular books these days, so it makes it much easier to skip weeks here and there. I know, what kind of fan am I?

But I decided to go anyways, mainly because I needed an excuse to bike somewhere. And I figured I could pick up something extra if there was nothing new and exciting.

So I ended up with my 100 Bullets, the new Shoujo manga issue of the Comics Journal (which I didn't realize was out yet, and which looks gorgeous), and a copy of Or Else #1, by Kevin Huizenga. I was sort of eyeing this book for a little while, after seeing it on the dust-collecting shelf hidden away near floor level next to the back issue bins, but behind you if you're facing the trade paperback shelf. Yeah, my local comics shop could learn a thing or two about merchandising. Ah well.

I'll have some thoughts about 100 Bullets later on, but I wanted to say a thing or two about Or Else while it's fresh in my mind. First off, it was the art that really drew me in. Huizenga has a style that looks like a throwback to the heyday of newspaper strips like Pogo, with some very deft linework, especially in a series of panels depicting passing scenery on a nighttime bike-ride. The figures have an iconic/cartoon-y look to them, reminiscent of TinTin, or Seth's work. The storytelling has sort of an odd rhythm to it that's confusing at first, but makes sense once you get a feel for the flow of the narrative. It was made more difficult by the fact that, though this is issue #1, apparently the main story, "Glenn Ganges," carries over from earlier minicomics and books by other publishers. Thankfully, there's a listing of related works in the Notes on the back over, so new readers aren't completely lost, and gives me another batch of books to add to my constantly growing wishlist.

The main "Glenn Ganges" story covers roughly half of the book, with a short intermission for a very Spy Vs. Spy or Krazy Kat -esque one-page abstract fight comic, and then a beautiful experiment in text/image combination, featuring the text of adoption papers juxtaposed with Hiroshige inspired Japanese landscapes, with lots of interesting implied junctions and breaks of the image between the panels.

Pretty solid score for a day that I didn't expect to bring anything too interesting...

And no, I didn't get All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. But I'll probably pick up All-Star Superman when it comes out. At least the first issue, to give it a try.

Female Characters in Comics

Last week at work during a break I was in the break room reading a book (I believe it was Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware). I was hoarding the one comfy chair and was so completely engrossed in the book that I didn't notice a coworker standing in front of me. He started to chuckle, so I looked up.

He said I was confusing because I come across as this socially aware, liberal, political minded woman and here I was reading comics of all things. I asked him what was so uncool about reading comics and he said it was because of the female characters. He said that the women always have big boobs, raging hormones, and little to no character development. After diving into the conversation a bit deeper, ends up that my co-worker is more a 'superhero' comic book reader. I started to think about how the different divisons of comics represent female characters, and also whether most women like me prefer independent comics to the mainstream comics for this very reason.

There are a couple great resources representing women in comics. I really like Sequential Tart and Friends of Lulu for just existing. But I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and really dive into this inherent divide in the comics world.

So I did a little reasearching online. I ran across an interesting article on how to convert your lady friend to reading comics. The article basically stated women want more character development and emotional attachment than fights and crashes. Duh. I also read an piece that Silver Bullet Comics summarizing why women don't like comics and what to do about it. However, the most interesting read was a more historical dissection of comics and gender differences. It also addressed the different ways independent and small press comics represent women compared to the bigger publishing houses.

There are obviously a lot of articles out there, but the common themes addressing women and comics were how to attract women to comics for better sales and how to convert women to reading comics so you don't have to worry about her getting mad about spending money on release dates. It makes me wonder if the only reason why women are even being considered as a small but growing faction of comic fans is because we have money to spend and companionship to offer. I hope there will be a time when Marvel or DC will have books with characters like Enid from Ghost World or Hopey from Love and Rockets. But for some reason I don't see this happening any time soon. Is there room in the comic world for a female character with a great rack and a brain?

American Elf/Paul Pope

Just a quick post before work, since I got up a bit earlier than usual this morning....

I've been tearing through American Elf, reading a handful of strips every chance I get. The weirdest thing about the book is the mindset it puts you in; once you fall into the rhythm of the strips, you find yourself breaking down your interactions with people into "panels", and trying to determine if things that just happened to you would make a good strip. It really makes you relate to the process behind the art more than almost any other book (or film, or album, for that matter).

I was going to say that it also gives you a great sense of Kochalka's personality, and I suppose it does, but it's also a very selective, distilled sense. Even though you can read what seems like years of his life, it's really only one or two events per day; the exchange of two or three sentences at best. While it certainly gives you a sense of his twisted humor, and his tendency towards crankiness on a somewhat regular basis, there's really not a whole lot more you can get out of four panels per day. Read enough of them and you start to get more of a complete picture, but even that only gives you a limited amount of information. Especially when a large portion of the panels consist of belching, farting, peeing, and teasing the cat.

Got a shipment from Mars Imports yesterday, containgin Paul Pope's P-City Parade and Buzz-Buzz Comics Magazine, and also a copy of Goodbye Chunky Rice, by Craig Thompson, that I already own. Oops. They were out of stock when I placed my order, so I went ahead and picked it up elsewhere....and of course, as soon as I did, they got it back in a Mars Imports and sent it to me. Oh well. I'll figure out something to do with the extra copy...

But with the other two books, I'm a lttle bit closer to my goal of Paul Pope completism...in fact, I should be getting a package from Mile High tonight with a copy of THB #2 in it, bringing me a little closer still. But the main thing I'm excited about is having a copy of the "Smoke Navigator" story, in Buzz-Buzz. This story started out life as a manga project during Pope's years with Kodansha in Japan, eventually became condensed into the version that appears in Buzz-Buzz, and then was expanded and altered in some form to become a portion of 100%. I've heard a lot of praise for this story, and I'm looking forward to reading it myself.

Ont he topic of Paul Pope, what is that fucker up to these days? He's had a couple things out recently (his issue of Solo and a story in Project: Superior are the only ones that leap to mind), and I heard a rumour he's working on some sort of Batman project, or maybe some new THB material, but I haven't heard anything official in ages. It doesn't help that his website hasn't been updated since 2003...If anyone knows, pass along the info.

Judging by Covers

I just discovered that James Jean has excerpts from 5 years worth of sketchbooks online. There are figure drawings, landscapes, fantastic ideas, and bizarre imagery galore, in everything from pencil to pen and ink to paints of various sorts.

Jean is an illustrator whose work always strikes me with it's remarkable design sense and use of color. His compositions are dynamic, even when portraying static or abstract images. Unfortunately, aside from his work in the Project:Superior anthology, he hasn't worked on a lot of books that interest me. He does a lot of superhero covers for DC, which usually doesn't interest me apart from the covers. I've heard some good things about Fables, and might check that out at some point, but at this point I'd have to pick it up in trades, and might not get as much cover art goodnesss in those. I'll flip through one and see next time I'm out shopping.

Also on the topic of incredible illustrators adorning the cover of books that don't necessarily appeal to me: Tara McPherson. She does a lot work on Vertigo genre books, which could be interesting, but I haven't really cheked out. Her work is deceptively simple, with clean lines and usually soft, pastellish colors. I don't know if she's doing any more comic book work int he future, but I hope to see more from her in this medium.

My Life in Comics

Before I really get into the (hopefully) regular rhythm of psoting on this blog, I thought I'd give a basic rundown of my history with the comic book medium: how I got started, how my tastes evolved, important books in my history, etc. This is the "Getting-to-know-you" post that will hopefully give some sense of where I'm coming from, what I'm in to, and what sort of material you might expect to see covered here. It'll also probably end up longer than I want it to, so be forewarned.

I've always had comics of some sort around. Some of my earliest comics related memories don't involve comics themselves, but having superhero-related things around the house. I had casette tapes with narrated Justice League stories, backed by dramatic music and accompanied by a picture book ("...And there was the Joker! Duhn Duhn Duuuuuhn! Now turn the page. So Batman decided..."). I had Superman pajamas, including velcro cape, and had related Halloween costumes at least two or three times.

Some of the earliest comics I remember owning were Transformers comics, in the mid 80s. I would buy random issues at the Hobby Shop in Abbotsford, where I grew up, along with the latest Transformers toys, of course. Most of my other early comics interests were licensed properties based on toys or TV shows or movies I was interested in, like Alf, Star Trek, and, during my D&D phase, Forgotten Realms.

At some point in 5th or 6th grade, after moving to California, I picked up a copy of an Uncanny X-Men comic. I'm not sure exactly what issue it was, but it was somewhere in the late 270 range. It was towards the end of the "Muir Island Saga" storyline. (I also remember having X-Factor #70, with a cover by Mike Mignola, around the same time).

Everything changed around this point. Soon, I was following all the X-titles from month to month, salivating over Jim Lee's artwork, and buying all the alternate covers I could when the new, adjective-less X-Men series launched soon afterward. I was digging through back issue bins at my local store, the Comic Book Box in Petaluma, trying to fill in gaps in Excalibur Storylines, or find the first appearance of Gambit. I started getting interested in Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen's work on various Spiderman titles, but never really got into the character like I did the X-Men.

And then, Image comics came along. Being a huge fanboy to most of the artists involved, I started picking up almost everything Image put out. I had all the early Spawn issues, Wildcats, the Savage Dragon, even some Youngblood. I was reading Wizard and collecting trading cards. And at some point I started picking up the Maxx.

Soon enough, the Maxx took a leftward turn from it's already somewhat skewed take on superheroes, and became far more focused on the interior lives of it's characters. The combination of that and Sam Kieth's adventurous, expressionist art blew my mind, and it quickly became one of my favorite titles.

Around this time (about 7th and 8th grade), my best friend Reed and I decided we were going to start a comic company. And we were thinking big. We didn't just want to write one book...we had ambitious plans for entire universes of superheroes, superteams, crossovers, extended storylines, you name it. We were more interested in the any-idea-is-good planning stages that we were in actually learning about the craft of comics, illustration, writing, and storytelling or honing our skills in these areas. We weren't completely bad, but we certainly had no idea what we were doing. We managed to complete a few dozen pages of several of our titles. Looking back on them, the elaborate back-stories and meticulously detailed character relationships we had in our heads never made it to the actual pages, which were instead filled with incomprehensible action sequences and explosions.

Around the time that the Maxx was getting interesting, Spawn did a series of books with guest writers: Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Dave Sim. These were all names that I'd heard but never actually read, and from reading Wizard's coverage of the crossover, I learned a bit about what they'd done. This led me, ultimately, to a copy of Cerebus #166.

This was a pivotal book in my comics development. I picked it up on chance, because my local comic book store had happened to get a copy in and I knew that it was by that Dave Sim guy, y'know, from Spawn! It was the first self-published book I remember owning. It was one of the few non-Marvel or Image books I'd ever picked up. And it was ultimately a Rosetta Stone to the world of creator-owned, self-publiushed, independent, and art comics.

It was a weird place to start. That issue took place during a very extended storyline, and was a minor climax in the story. I had no idea who any of the characters were, what the setting was, or anything else. And it was written in a very confusing way, since it was meant to evoke the confusion of a city during a crisis. Oh, and the main character was asleep for the entire issue. But something about it intrigued me, and I started picking up Cerebus regularly. Soon it was one a few monthly books, along with the Maxx, that I still followed.

Through the previews in the back of Cerebus, I found out about all sorts of small press and independent comics, like Hepcats, Rare Bit Fiends, and Strangers in Paradise. I never read most of those titles, as most of them were hard to find in my area, and my trips to the comic shop were coming in decreasing intervals. But when I first saw a section of Paul Pope's THB, and Jeff Smith's Bone, I knew I'd found some more worthwhile books to follow.

Sadly, I ended up dropping my comic habit alltogether soon afterwards. I don't remember exactly why. It was a combination of reasons, I think. I didn't have much of an income, as a non-working high school student. There weren't a lot of titles being published regularly that excited me. And I was becoming increasingly interested in music, as a form of entertainment and an artistic outlet. My drawing slowed to a halt at some point, and I just stopped showing up to the comic shop every week. Also, Dave Sim's plunge off the deep end in Cerebus #186 really put me off of his work, although I continued to pick up the title for at least a year afterwards.

Fast forward a few years, to Junior College. I'd picked up a couple of trade paperbacks (like Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns) in recent years, but never really picked the comic habit back up. I was in a screen-printing class and decided to break out one of my old THB comics to use as inspiration for a class project. I ended up hunting down Paul Pope's website and found out that he had new work out soon, the 100% series, from Vertigo, and more THB. That was what finally pulled me back into the comics shop, and got me hooked all over again.

In the process of collecting Paul Pope's stuff, I rediscovered a lot of Vertigo's output, most notably 100 Bullets and the Vertigo Pop series. My girlfriend at the time was a huge manga fan as well as an aspiring artist, and I was constantly surrounded by all sorts of artistic stimulation, and seeking out new comics to read. Soon, I was amassing piles of new comics and trades.

In that period of time, I discovered stores like Comic Relief in Berkeley, and Comix Experience in San Francisco. I started ordering comics online, to fill in gaps in my colelctions of Bone and other titles. I went to APE for the first time, and discovered Love and Rockets by chance in a used bookstore. I visited Japan and picked up some untranslated manga by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame), started reading Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine and on and on and on...I started reading the Filth, which led me to Morrison's work on New X-Men, which led me to Milligan and Allred's X-Statix. And when Cerebus ended last year, I picked up the final issue and decided to start reading the parts that I had missed.

I discovered Dirk Deppey's Journalista! blog on the Comics Journal website, and was soon hooked, and discovering new comics blogs by the day. The multitudes of internet comics sites led me to even more discoveries and got me hooked on books like Demo and Scott Pilgrim, and a trip to the Comics Weblog Updates page has become a part of my daily routine.

And that takes us pretty much to the present, where I'm buying way too many comics and reading way too many comics blogs. I'm waiting for my final Cerebus phone book to arrive so I can start a great big re-reading project. And I've also got a copy of THB #2 on the way, which will complete my collection of the original self-published run of that series. I'm following a handful of current comics, and picking up older titles like mad.

So I figured...why not join in the online comics blog party myself? And hence, this blog.

Phew....how's that for an introduction?

New Comics Day

Just to get the ball rolling here, here's the first installment of what will be a semi-regular feature here on the site. I'll be posting something a little more "introductory" later on, to give this blog a bit more direction and purpose. So just for now, here's some quick comments about what I picked up for New Comics Day this week. Fuller reviews will come later....

Y: the Last Man #35 (DC Comics, $2.99)
I like this series, but the formula is starting to show through in each storyline. There's enough interesting stuff going on here, and writer Brian Vaughn really takes advantage of the serial format to keep you coming back month after month, but I think the book is in need of some freshening up at this point. It could just be a mild slump before things get interesting again, but it could be the beginning of creative stagnation. Hopefully the former.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #192 & 193 (DC Comics, $2.50 each)
I can't remember the last time I bought a Batman comic (probably when you could count my age on 2 hands, with leftover fingers), with the exceptions of Dark Knight Returns and Year One. But I noticed that artist Seth Fisher was working on this arc, and I loved his work on Vertigo Pop: Tokyo. I haven't seen any of his work since, so I figured this was a good opportunity to see more of his work.

Dumped (Oni Press, $5.95)
I'm on a bit of an Andi Watson kick lately, having just finished his excellent mini-serieses (is that a word?) Breakfast After Noon and Slow News Day, and waiting for the Geisha mini-series to arrive from Mile High Comics. I like the simplicity of his art style, which is expressive in a very minmalist way, especially his character's faces. His writing is great also, with strong characterization and a knack for slowly unfolding melodrama. His current work, on last years Love Fights and the current Little Star shows him steadily refining his already excellent style.

American Elf (Top Shelf, $29.95)
This one I've been meaning to pick up for a while, but the price tag was a little daunting. It looked worth it, just for the sheer scale of the book, but it's hard to plunk down that much for a single book sometimes. Anyways, after this week's announcement that there won't be another volume of the Sketchbook Diaries, and the revelation that this book had sold so poorly, I felt like I should do my part to pick it up, even if it was sort of like locking the barn after the horse was gone. Hopefully, at some point it will become feasible to publish more of this series in the near future.