OK, so timeliness is not my strong suit. It’s been a while since the Small Press Expo but I still wanted to share what I got there – two books each from two of my fav artists, both working mostly wordlessly – John Martz and Tom Neely. I highly recommend them all.
I had been hearing a lot about Beats of Burden for a while and so picked up the first issue on Free Comic Book Day. It’s really great. Neighborhood pets as paranormal investigators sounds like kiddie fare, but don’t let that or the art style throw you – it’s hardcore.
And Jill Thompson won the National Cartoonists Society’s division award for Best Comic Book just a few weeks ago.
This is one of the 10¢ bargain comics I bought last Saturday during Free Comic Book Day. I got a couple dozen – it’s such a good way to check out things you’re curious about.
Being a child of he 1970s, I grew up during the era of The Executioner paperbacks, the granddad of all men’s action books… and they all start with “the.” The Penetrator. The Butcher. The Destroyer*. And, speaking of comics, The Punisher. And they’re all about men who kill bad guys. Plain and simple
How’s the comic? Surprisingly dull.
* which was the basis for the fun action movie Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins starring Fred Ward and Joel Grey. Check it out.
I picked a couple of issues of the last iteration of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor which was published by Vertigo. I’m a big fan of Pekar’s work, and I hate to speak ill of the dead, but these were very weak, pale reflections of what AS was.
This is a collection of Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve, a mostly self-published mini-comic that he started in high school. This fact was a surprise to his future editor at Drawn & Quarterly, since his work was already mature. (I mean to say, sophisticated, not naughty.)
This is actually a revised collection. Tomine was not thrilled with the slickness of the first collection – it was too unlike the roughness of the original mostly Xeroxed issues. So this is a boxed set of that contains reproductions of the these publications.
Adrian Tomine’s entertaining new book started off as a wedding favor that somehow ended up on ebay. If you’ve been through planning a wedding, this may give you bad flashbacks. If you haven’t, and you read this book and laughingly say, “This will never happen to me” you are, simply, wrong. It will.
This a very interesting French graphic novel that is a noir-ish, innocent-man-in-trouble with an unlikable main character…which calls back to the films of the French New Wave when American genres were being reimagined.
From pal Pat Lewis, a really fun collection of stories of “broads and monsters,” just like it says on the cover. Find it. Buy it. Read it.
If you have seen the movie, it’s very different from the book.
Full disclaimer: I saw the movie before reading the comic. (Heretic!) And what I had read up to this week was just snippets in Barnes and Noble. (Sacrilege!!) And the trade copy I read this week I got for $5 at the Allentown Comic Con and did have the above image on the cover since it was the official movie tie-in edition. (Blasphemy!!!!)
Kovaleski (the blog of a cartoonist named John) 