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!