What are you reading in Comics/Manga/etc?

Diosamante, Jodorowsky and Gal (1993)

I hadn't enjoyed the work of Jean-Claude Gal as an adult before. I may have seen his incredible stuff in my thorough page turning of Heavy Metal as a youth, but I don't remember it. Suffice it to say that it's worth a look. If the reader has any familiarity with Jodo, the story will ruffle feathers, trigger emotions. A book best-suited for those who enjoy 'Sword and Sorcery'.

I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.

Real Deal Comix (2016)

Gary Groth delivers more extreme, quality product with this compilation of "Urban Terror". Taking inspiration from the likes of MAD and reminding this reader of Fletcher Hanks, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, among others, two happenstance friends from Mid-Town LA made some wildly brutal, self-published comics throughout the 1990s. Not for the squeamish. According to Wikipedia the artist is in talks to bring this to life as an animated series. Should such come to fruition, a new vanguard, or nadir - you pick, will be reached in animated entertainment.

Also, for anyone interested in comic fiends fawning over the comics they love or have recently come to know, the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel is pretty sweet. I found it after my own discovery of Real Deal Comix a few weeks back.

After smashing a large cockroach with Weird Love - You Know You Want It, I returned to my first pick of Hieronymus, Marcel Ruitjers - a mostly fictionalized comic of Bosch's working life. Really ugly-beautiful in its portrayal of 16th century life. I didn't finish the book, but I would want to if I see it in a shop or library again.

Initially, I merely stunned the roach with the hardcover. Swept its soon-to-be carcass to the floor. Stomped it, then promptly obtained a piece of scrap paper to place the pest in the rubbish.

Some weird-ass reboot of Masters Of The Universe (you know, He-Man) where Skeletor took over Castle Greyskull and wiped the memories of all of He-Man's friends and left Adam as a woodcutter and through a series of improbable events he finds Teela (who is a constant dick to him, even though she doesn't remember him) and also Skeletor is Adam's uncle and what the fuck did I just read?

How to Survive in the North, Luke Healy (2016) 

I enjoyed Healy's Americana about 1 year back. I saw this at the library, only faintly remembering that this was an artist-writer I'd read until I flipped through a few pages and remembered his distinctive style within the 9-panel comics' page.

This is Healy's first big book. Americana is his most recent, from 2019. He weaves an interesting work by making it appear as an historical tale of early 20th century Arctic explorations. Then, about 30 pages in: a confusing chapter about early 21st century academic drama. I'll leave it to readers curious about the shift. Suffice to say that Healy does something clever. Definitely worth the 1.2 hours I spent paging through this.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Volume 2 (2012)

It's been about 11 years since I read this republished comic series in its hardback form. I only saw and read a few issues as a kid in the early 1980s. I got the omnibus' volumes 1 and 2 from the library for my 9 year-old. I'm meandering through volume 2. Kirby's still King. The inclusion of Don Rickles from Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson had so many pitch-perfect bits from Rickles. Kirby really studied and enjoyed Rickles's delivery.

Barnaby, volume 1 - Crockett Johnson (2013)


I haven't completely warmed to this yet, after making it through strips starting in 20 April 1942 and reading steadily through to 10 August 1942, but I do heartily enjoy Mr. O'Malley's exhorted catchphrase "Cushlamacree!", an anglicised Gaelic phrase meaning 'beat of my heart'. Folks, if you like seeing where Calvin and Hobbes got some inspiration, if you have children 10 and under who are precocious and good readers, then this is the "back in grandad's day" excavation of literary gold from the past you want to foist upon them to displace their current reading and viewing habits.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Volume 3 

The kids in my house are inquisitive about the Fourth World philosophies and prone to exclaiming "Jack Kirby" at unexpected times. This connected and interwoven series of books are so, so good.

Batman: Death Metal, because the cover looked cool and I thought it would maybe be an Elseworlds story about some sort of weird music thing? But it was not, and the fact that I haven't read mainstream comics in years and DC comics in even longer left me at so much of a loss I felt like Jay at the end of Dogma. Who the fuck is The Batman What Laughs? What the fuck is crisis/anti-crisis energy? Why the fuck is Dr. Manhattan involved? Does Alan Moore know? Since when are Batman and Wonder Woman a thing? Wouldn't she crush his batwang? Why are Superman's arms made of rock? Do people who read DC comics regularly actually understand what any of this means? What is Metal X or Anti-Metal or whatever the fuck, and why do I care?
And the closest we got to any sort of music thing was this cursed image at the end:

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Volume 4 (2012)

And...all good things must come to an end. The end in this case limps to the finish line. The loss of The Forever People and New Gods, leaving only Mister Miracle as the title to wrap up the interwoven stories, really hamstrung the dynamics of multiple books moving in concert to a finish that kind of gets done in The Hunger Dogs graphic novel. It's meh. Volumes 2 and 3 are the peak of the experience, in my estimation.

I don't read a ton of Manga in general, but I've gotten kind of enamored of a few food-related titles recently, probably because there's not really much like them in Western comics, and they're a subject close to my heart. The two I've enjoyed the most are probably Oishinbo (in which a lazy newspaper writer tries to put together the ultimate Japanese menu) and Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu (which follows a Japanese Pub whose back door is in modern Japan and front door is in a Germanic Medieval town). Both are relatively formulaic, but the formula is enjoyable enough that it doesn't really bother me.

Oishinbo generally is about how some dish or category of dishes (or sometimes something like sake) is getting prepared/served wrong due to people either being lazy or careless or showy or cheaping out on ingredients, and how everyone learns that the proper way to prepare most things is to go back to how it was originally prepared. Sometimes it will walk you through the history of a dish, sometimes the science of it, but it usually ends up with either the lead character explaining how someone else is wrong or someone explaining to him how it was wrong. My main gripe with the series is that it ran over 30 years, but only 7 not especially large volumes of it have been translated into English, and those break up the ongoing story parts so badly (they're grouped by subject) that it might as well not exist.

I started reading Otherwordly Izakaya Nobu (OIN) more recently, and I've still got a volume or two left of what's been published over here, but there are at least three more volumes in the pipeline. Where Oishinbo was more concerned with cooking/preparation, OIN is mainly concerned with eating. Generally speaking, a standard episode is some of the Medieval Germanic resident of Eiterach (the fictional city that may or may not be on Earth) comes into the pub, and the food either makes them feel better, helps them resolve a conflict, gives them some perspective, or something along those lines. It's a very gentle series for the most part - there's only one true bad guy I've really come across so far, and he gets run out of town in his first appearance. For the most part, everyone is willing to talk out conflicts over food and the bad in the world is left outside the pub. 

There are a few others I've read as well. Delicious in Dungeon was what got me started on them. The premise is that an adventure party, to make its way through the dungeon, has to cook and eat the monsters it kills as it goes; the "treat monsters as actual animals and figure out how to prepare them" part was fun, but the book seemed to lose interest in it eventually and I kind of drifted away. I may pick it back up at some point, though. Restaurant to Another World is a more recent one with a restaurant in Japan that opens to a fantasy world one day a week, and on that day, serves whatever elves, trolls, goblins and the like that come through. I enjoyed the first volume for the most part, though it had just enough of what I'd call "Weird Japanese inappropriate sexualization" to put me off a bit. I'm hoping that was just a one-off.