nudesreadingminicomics

[nudesreadingminicomics]

Here we have ‘Wont 2 Cant’ by Gavin Owens and Ian Mackay and put out by Cold Cube Press

If you’ve followed me for any significant amount of time on these here social medias, you know I spend the vast majority of the year on the road.  And that, this year, I upgraded to an ambulance for my hashtag tiny home vanlife liveyourdreams road ragin fuckfest that is the instagram amaro filter made real.  Its great, the tiny home van life life and I get all the heroin and I eat all the pussy.  The reason for getting the ambulance was that it had vast storage potential over your class B van or recreational vehicle.   I need something that can fit in a parking spot or haul down a two track so RVs and buses are out but I need bus level storage.  The ambulance has it in spades.  

So, this year, and thanks to the ambulance, I was able to keep a bookshelf of 25 or so graphic novels I would take with me on the road.  ‘Wont 2 Cant’ was one of them.  I believe this book came out quite awhile ago but I had put off reading it, and many others, so I could have access to them while on the road and during the downtime.  So here it is, I finally got to reading it. 

There is no other place that a comic like this can come from other than a place of pure love.  This is unrefined, not cut with baking soda or diet pill, and concentrated love.  This collaboration between the two authors works so well that it feels like this book was made by one person, one uni-mind that is the result of Owens and Mackay spending a lot of time in gelatin and getting all their softer bits, over time, to merge and become one.  This dont read like no ‘written by, drawn by’ collab, this has one singular tone and voice that is expressed wholly by the new unity being that is Owens/Mackay and it makes for great comic and I hope it also saves them on rent and food bills- or at the very least on tax day. 

This is part one of what I hope is a very long exploration and I feel it is because those of us who pre ordered got a ‘the world of wont 2 can’t’ riso print and anyone who is taking the time to do some D&D style world map of their fiction sure as hell intends to take us down some deep cuts into that world.  The place is timeless.  Most of the action takes place inside a monastery (and feels like peak era of 5th to 7th century monastic influence) but the tech elements slowly revealed inside its walls, as well as the more modern world of shops and phones of the outside world, reveal a place that seems to be a mix of all at once.  The glimpses of the outside seem to be structured a little more like a caste or peasant style society, with merchants and taverns were generic ‘locals’ grumble and scoff at the activities of the influential monastery and its fitness obsessed new leader, and it has all the best elements of any fantasy or fairie tale of those mysterious sights and sounds a pilgrim might encounter on an oft traveled road or on a darkened path through the woods.  You know, all the kinda shit we wish we’d see in this shitbox that is modern times.  That shit where we wish with all our heart that the cloaked and bearded crackhead passed out in our doorway is just a wizard in disguise, at the ready to set any kind stranger who finally offers them a glass on a 20 year quest and arm them with a mirrored shield and an acorn that can instantly sprout an infinite ladder when thrown to the ground. 

The absolutely delightful renderings show us an obviously well thought out and diagramed Vatican of a place for our main setting and the orange and grey hues make for a page that I just want to lick, but dont cuz its my only copy.  This is confident graphic illustration with a character design just as well plotted and thought out as the world that is their backdrop.  And that the monastery’s main purpose seems to be the manufacture and distribution of a strange orange orb, which seems to serve as some kind of internet or cloud device of connectivity, it is right along with the theme of our last reviewed book, and many books we are reading these days that all are worriedly, and a little comedically, meditating on a society that is, in one form or another, ‘plugged in’ and on the very numbered ill effects of artificial and electronic connection that far outweigh the benefits.  People dont seem to happy about their orbs, or indifferent to them, but over all the tone at the inn is that they want to get rid of them and stifle the influence of their manufacturers.  Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates; maybe they all made our world a little easier but damn if they didn’t wreck us quite a bit as well.  

So, yeah, this is just a gem of a book and one of a near infinite number of examples of why I tout underground and self published comics as the finest art form of the 21st century.  The internet is cluttered with everyones shitty soundcloud and instagram is an unrelenting tidal wave of hashtaggers desperate for attention and validation, while twitter is a masochistic display of fetishistic self torture and collective suicide and Facebook holds closed the gates and acts like nothing is wrong, but through all that mess we have such wonderful comics being put out by people I will imagine are wonderful; until I find their twitter.  

Go buy this book. Its insta so I cant link to stuff here on this post.  But you can do this, I believe in you.  You get on google and you type in ‘Cold Cube Press’.  Then you go to that “cold cube press” website and you hit on the “store” tab.  Then you select this book, and maybe a couple others, and then you add it to your “cart”.  Then you give them your credit card info, and thereby give them money that you would have otherwise spent on cigarettes or way too much of an upcharge on to get hot wings delivered at 3am on grubhub.  You can do this, I believe in you, and if you have any troubles just call me I am here to help. 

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘Nod Away’ Vols 1 and 2 by Josh Cotter

I felt a lot of feelings reading this one, Josh Cotter’s ‘Nod Away’ Vols 1 and 2.  The book was good, real good, but Ill get into it later.  The feelings were about comics and the industry.  

I bought these two volumes at once.  Vol 1 came out in 2016 and Vol 2 came out this year.  It was a five year wait in between books.  Vol 1 ended on such a cliffhanger, I was pretty happy that I could dive straight into Vol 2 without the 5 year wait.  But Vol 2 didn’t resolve the story.  As far as I can tell, after Vol 1’s 300 or so pages and Vol 2’s 450 or so pages; there could be a lot more story to come.  I have no clue how long I have to wait to read the rest.  I’m a comics fan.  I read comics.  The waiting can suck sometime.  That’s not a criticism.   Not a criticism of the author but maybe its a criticism of the current state of the industry.  No, its a criticism of the audience. 

Right now we seem to want our comics in two ways: as a free webcomic we read daily on some terrible social media platform like this one where we make the author no money but we make the platform a ton of money.  Or we want it in the form of ‘graphic novels’: Big trades that collect 200-500 pages of story in one hefty, and often pricey, volume.  I don’t know what where or when or why we made the shift to not wanting to buy monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly 32-44 pagers in favor of these other two options but I hate it. 

A story of this immensity that Cotter is putting forth here, it’d be so great as a comic book.  Its big, there is a lot in it.  He’s doing it all right.  The characters are well thought out, they have a lot of back story and their humanity and complexity moves the plot in all the right ways.  The drawings are fantastic, his hatching out of nature and cityscapes is a treat for the eyes.  (Though his character work was weak in vol 1, and in his other books such as skyscrapers in the midwest- something people who are so great at nature and building drawings seem to suffer with- he, in Vol 2, is NAILING the character design and has graduated out of ‘illustrator’ into full fledged ‘cartoonist’ with delightful and personality filled renderings of mustachioed midwesterners). And the story is so big, it would be better served to be able to read it in regular and small doses every few months rather than one big dose followed by a 5 year wait. 

Based on what I’ve read so far, which is a great sci fi tale about a new kinda internet that is jacked into our brains that functions only because all of it is filtered through the mind of one gifted child named ‘Eva’ (and which really is the smallest part of the story, more of the story being the utterly messy lives of the scientists tending to her lead and some other sci fi elements like portals and flesh beasts), for all I can tell this thing might go on for another 3000 pages.  That scares me, scares me that I might not get to read to the end.  What will happen to the industry in the next five years?  Right now it seems like more and more people don’t want to pay for their comics, which leads to more webcomics for free which are really just auditions by illustrators and cartoonists to get day jobs in their field, or something they do aside from their day jobs.  We��re just funneling our time and money into instagram (and I’m doing this too with this here blog, because where the hell else am I gonna put it) and not seeming to understand the difference between the platform and the people supplying the content.   There’s less publishers of content there ever was, there are certainly less publishers willing to put out very very very very niche content like that which Cotter supplies. 

Cotter’s comics, through and through, scream out “man I wish it was the 90s and I was doodling in my sketchbook with Anders Nilsen and Jeffery Brown over coffees at Earwax.”  Its delightful.  In Vol 1, a character asks what another is listening to.  He just HAS to have that character listening to Eno’s ‘Discreet Music’.  Yeah, bud, we all liked that album in 1998 as we were forming our musical identity but we fuckin moved on.  Its good, but not worth name dropping.  It didn’t serve the fiction of the comic at all to name drop it, no music needed to be name dropped at all, but he just had to put in that little morsel of a message in a bottle for anyone and everyone reading this that he’s still hoping someone will send him a burned CDR of Michael Nesmiths’ barely heard noise album.  And of course he has to put a bunch of the comic in Logan Square.  Yeah yeah yeah, whatever.  Im just ribbing, its charming.  But those references, the style of storytelling, and the quite good but also very much singular/niche/rough/wholly not mainstream pen and ink renderings firmly put this book in a category that died out around the time of OK Cola.  That time is gone, its never coming back.  Will the industry be in a place five years from now where Fantagraphics, pretty much the only publisher of this kind of stuff left, will be able to put out volumes 3 or 4 or 5?  Will tastes have shifted so much into the toilet that if its not a 4 panel swipe of social relevance and judgement it will be tossed in the can?  Does anyone have an attention span of more than 32 pages?

I don’t.  Not because internet but because I’m old.  This comic would be SOOOOOOOOO good were it released on a regular schedule. This is exactly the kind of story that one loves to dip into once every couple months and get the latest dish on.  A comic we, dying breed that we are, COLLECTORS would buy religiously and talk about and store in long boxes and buy the T Shirt of.  But that time is gone.  Now is the time of the ‘Graphic Novel’ (puke) and as much as I, and many, hate the term, this was still a beast of a time and a beast of a read.  Can’t recommend this book enough.  It took me 150 pages to really start to ‘get it’ and enjoy it but once it got me, it got me good.  Can’t complement Cotter’s renderings enough and how refreshing to read a comic fiction that is not relying on idiosyncrasies (which many comics these days are wholly that and nothing else) and instead is just relying on producing great fiction. 

Go buy the book.  I used to do this as a blog but now I don’t have the blog and so I can’t put up links to the various platforms of the various parties involved here in instagram, like I did on the old blog that allowed hot linking.  Maybe ill change that but I really don’t want to put that kind of work into this.  You’re all on instagram, its hard to get your attention off of it, so here I am pandering to you.  So what you’re going to have to do is: you’re going to have to go on the google search and type in “Josh Cotter Nod Away Fantagraphics” and buy it online or, gasp, go to your local retailer and enquire about it. 

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘Tongues’ issue #1 by Anders Nilsen

Hi everyone, here’s Anders Nilsen’s newest book ‘Tongues’ issue #1.  Like with David Lynch or Philip Glass, when you dig into a Anders Nilsen book you’ve probably got a good idea at the start of what you’re in for (if you’ve read an Anders Nilsen book before).  But also, like David Lynch or Philip Glass, Nilsen’s themes and lines never get boring.  Like those other geniuses, its not that they get better or more detailed or more exploratory of their preferred themes or modes with each successive film or opera they’ve put out its just that they keep those same damn themes and ideas just as exciting as ever before.  Its the mark of a true shoot from the gut style of artist who’s particular neurosis or fetish is matched by equal drafting and production skill.  These style of artists, without any formal training or at least mental faculty or learned work ethic, most often end up in the ‘folk’ category of madmen and madwomen who spend their entire lives meticulously detailing living room furniture with gold leaf, tin foil, or plastic gems.  But, in the case of our aforementioned geniuses, by chance or luck or Satan’s good grace they have coupled their insanity with real intent and observation.  It is the mark of Nilsen (and lynch and glass and every impressionist) that they have the skill to make the reader or listener just as excited about the product as they are.  I’ve got tons of wackos who stand on my street corner rambling on about God all day and night and they dress real neat and talk good but I just can’t listen to them for very long because there’s just no flair, i’m not drawn in.  But Nilsen draws me in.  

This has gotta be his umpteenth book about a dry and grassy minimalist wasteland/wilderness that has a crashed vehicle and human character out of their element who is adjusting to the situation while various talking animals observe and talk amongst each other and then, whoop, theres some stuff about greek mythology and a demigod.  Right?!  I’m totally right, aren’t I?  Well, its that or its a 4,000 page book of two nihilistic scribble people talking to each other, but its usually animals and a stranded person.   But its great, man, its totally great.  

So this one, tongues, is his latest self published endeavor and its a real doozy.  Definitely has the feel that he’s setting up a pretty big and spanning mythology thats gonna fill up a lot of pages.  While most everything he’s done has been in black and white this one is a color book with a rich and creamy and rosy palette of clay and dirt and sand.  We get a crashed vehicle, the military, a stranded person, and some allusion that there is some serious old magic at play here.  But its not like Gaiman at all, man.  This aint sandman or american gods style stuff, even though I do think about Vertigo comics here and there when I read his stuff, he’s approaching this stuff not as a retelling and retconning of old myths and adages for the modern age as Gaiman do he’s more telling real soft and endearing tales of the heart mixed with dirt and a little confusion.  Like, as weird as it may sound when I read a Anders Nilsen comic I always end it feeling like he’s given me a nice hug… and snuck a venomous snake in my pocket.  Go buy this one, folks, cuz as this seems like its gonna be a self published endeavor and it looks like its gonna be a long one there’s probably gonna be a year wait in between issues and if you end up grabbing #2, whenever it comes out, but haven’t read #1 by then it’ll probably be long sold out and hoarded by recluses like myself.  Go buy it, its awesome, buy it now.  #andersnilsen #comix #minicomic #selfpublished

BUY IT NOW FROM HIM HERE: https://www.andersbrekhusnilsen.com/tongues

SERIOUSLY, GO BUY IT NOW. 

and support me on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘Werewolf Jones and Sons’ #2 by Simon Hanselmann and Html Flowers

Hi, this is 'Werewolf Jones & Sons' issue two from Simon Hanselmann and Html Flowers.  I'm gonna repeat a lot of what I've said in previous reviews of these guys' stuff but I think some of the finer points I always stress on apply even more when these two team up on a mini so fuck you I'm gonna repeat myself anyway.  I'm not gonna go gushing here so much on their prowess as authors or artists insomuch to get a free drawing sent in the mail or a like on an instagram post so much as I want to convey to you, the reader, as I always have tried to convey, how much I believe these two are serious god damn old school joke and gag writers of a tradition going back to the days of Steve Allen.  And where, individually and in their own projects, Hanselmann has been evolving his characters through a longer form mise´en scene of the culture of hanging out, the late 90s/early aughts, and the early days of social media wars and broken families in such a beautiful and mellow evolution of the tragicomedy and HTML Flowers weaves and casts his tales like incantations and spells in true shamanistic form to convey the crippling emotions and futility of chronic disease and the beauty and expanse of nature and emotion; it is so amazing that when the two of them, with their wholly unique and formed tangential visions, get together it feels like two guys in the office of Hanna Barbera working under deadline to crank out gags and make them good.

And thats what happens here, in two stories that perfectly encapsulate two different ways of telling a joke.  In HTML flower's 'Herpes Creme' we get a steady and sharp snare drum like precision delivery of gag after gag in the Mel Brooks or Sid Cesar style as simple as any "guy walks into a doctors office" skit and just as every bit effective.  To make every line a joke, every single line of dialogue a stab at the reader deeper and deeper into the funny bone, while still using it as effective dialogue to propel the story and never fall into exposition is comedy chops of the finest kind and thats what we get in the first little tale.  The perfect skit tells one joke and it tells it over and over again without it ever getting boring or the reader noticing and damn if HTML flowers dont' pull it off here; he should be writing for SNL but theyre wimps over there and don't like comedy so we know that will never happen.  And in the second, Hanselmann delivers on the slow build, as he has done before so gut bustingly right in pieces like his delightfully offensive "Owls Room".  We go down a path that Hanselmann is becoming an expert at of taking us down that starts at mild comedy, paces itself evenly and steadily downward into glimpses of heart wrenchingly accurate portrayals of real tragedy, and then just as its got me questioning if this is gonna be a tale that just leaves me with the ol empathy sads by the finish he finally lands that punch to the face he's spent winding up this whole time, panel after panel without me noticing, and goes and nails the big joke that leaves jaw open and tears in the eyes.  What we call that, friends, is the punchline.  

I don't' think you can get this book, I'm pretty late in covering it as I always am in these reviews, but it seems there are a few charlatans on eBay trying to make a profit on reselling it if you really want to get it in your hands.  Oh, and I should mention that I am quite proud that I did the absolute right thing one should do with a WWJ&S mini comic; I got drunk at the photo shoot and spilled cheap whiskey all over it.  Now the paper is completely warped, wrinkled, and has that stale puke whiskey smell and that is exactly the condition it should be read in.   #werewolfjones #simonhanselmann #htmlflowers #minicomic #comix

go to Hanselmanns bigcartel and look at all the stuff thats sold out that you cant buy:  http://meggandmogg.bigcartel.com/

html flowers is the most important voice in underground comics and he has some minis available on his site so buy multiple copies right now:  http://novisitors.bigcartel.com/

and support me on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘the Envelope Manufacturer’ by Chris Oliveros

Well looks here, its 'the Envelope Manufacturer' by Chris Oliveros.  It was something like 15 years ago that I picked up the first issue of this abandoned, redrawn, and re-issued as a graphic novel comic book and was like "holy cow, the guy who runs Drawn and Quarterly made a comic book!" And picked it up and gave it a chance.  At the time, especially as it did have as much of the dream like feels and the drifting camera and sudden scene change elements I was kinda worried that the book was just gonna be some Clyde Fans knock off.  That's mainly because when you pick up this book (or its earlier incarnation) you see the D&Q aesthetic in spades.  

Its really quite admirable, the way this guy nails it and obviously knows exactly what he likes and how to do it.  I imagine running a comic book company doesn't leave much free time for drawing and making comics but by damn it doesn't seem it matters at all because this book has the style, story, and maturity of any of the authors that Oliveros has been publishing regularly these fifteen years.  This book reads as though he was just another artist in the D&Q roster regularly churning out books with the best of 'em.  It is a real treat to see a "first book" come out from someone who is well into middle age.  Though it doesn't seem he went up the usual ladder of self published minis, appearances in low budget anthologies, picked up for a monthly strip in an underground newspaper, regular comic from an indie publisher, and into graphic novel "I'm a real author" superstardom it is obvious that even though one isn't drawing regularly as long as one has both hands lovingly inserted into the industry that still counts as practice because, again, this is an actual really-dealy comic book.

So, yeah, every book D&Q has put out makes a lot of sense in the context of this book because we see the style he likes and the style he's been supporting all those years; that European tiny feet and big hands stuff about the minutiae of the day to day intellectual and subdued graphic novel of the Canadian kind.  And its really cool and satisfying to read this one and really get to know the author and what he digs and right away, in this new incarnation, it is clear it is not just a Clyde Fans knock off.  

A different author might have really took of on the idea and made something twice as many pages long and twice as slow but Oliveros neatly packages this thing together in a perfect tale of a failing business and just all around failing.  Even as the days of the skyscraper seem to be more and more less about the titans of industry and more about polo shirt and khaki wearing business casual bosses running pools of data entry it seems that North America will never lose its "falling man" obsession of the suited and tied businessman hurling himself from the 20th floor of the business building in a final desperate finish to his failed life of chasing success.  And so 'the Envelope Manufactuer's main character is of that type but its put together in such a nice amount Alzheimer's mixed with Hudsucker Proxy and the just right amount of old timey and modernity thrown in that we get a cool 'man's man' tale of a dude at the end of his rope so much that in crisis all he can do is hallucinate and all those around him can do is keep plodding on in the day to day because thats all they know how to do.  

And its drawn so neatly, so keenly, and packaged in a perfectly small size that makes this thing really sing of a lovingly crafted and self published gift from the author to us that I must recommend you buy a copy right away.  #theenvelopemanufacturer #chrisoliveros #drawnandquarterly #comix #graphicnovel

go to drawn and quarterly to find the book: https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/

and join my patreon for all sorts of insanity ranging from uncensored images to short films to live shows to tour diaries to podcasts and more: https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘Entity Reunion’ by Alexander Tucker

ok, here we have Entity Reunion by Alexander Tucker.  

Couple of things: cover says it is a ‘forcefield companion’, meaning its a companion to his other book ‘World in the Forcefield’.  As I haven’t yet read it (but am now gonna buy) it took me a bit of going “is this referencing stuff I need to know from the other book?!?” for a bit until I just chilled and went with the flow.  

Also, I was like “where have i heard that name in comics before?!?”  And because I am a geek, and a hipster, and a nerd; I went to my shelves and started digging and I came up with it!  He’s in the fantastic anthology ‘Sturgeon White Moss’.  Any of you folks remember that one?  That was the first time I saw Tom Gauld’s stuff though I had initially picked it up for the Martin Cendreda and, of course the later issues were all about getting my hands on some Marc Bell.  So, even better, in digging through I’m like “damn, I only have issues 2-6- what else is out there?”  and I do a google search and I find Copacetic Comics is selling a copy of #1!!  So I’m gonna buy world in the forcefield later on because I bought Sturgeon White Moss #1 today.  

Ok, on to the book.  The first of the three pieces contained within is a straight a head monologue with loosely associated imagery.  It kept my attention the least as I kept feeling like, man this just needs to tip the glass and go full on experimental rather than just this flirtation thats going on.  But, upon reaching the fantastic 2nd and 3rd chapters of the book it all came together.  I realized the book was more of a song rather than an abstract and went with the flow.  It took a bit to get my head in a silent space to dig on the hues but the textures of the blues were downright tasty and took me there. The brits are going in a real nice direction in the small and boutique stuff coming out today and there is this thread of narrative, namely in respecting the narrative and making it essential even if oh so minimal or oh so stretched out into some weird corners, that just gives this stuff by Tucker, and many of the stuff from those other cats like Cobb and Kemp and Chandler, feel like its all loosely inhabiting the same universe or has behind it some kinda collective mission going on as a statement of modern comix but what the fuck do I know maybe I’m just making all this shit up in my own head but thats how it feels when i read these books; like some good buddies are making some good stuff. But, aside from the larger swaths of comparison and assumption I’m making, this here book fits nicely into that fold of tasty and well packaged stuff thats making its way over to the states and into the hands of a nerd like myself.  Beautiful, soft, and textured piece of work that obviously did the job right cuz I’m gonna go buy some more; after I get through these Sturgeon White Moss’s that is.

GO BUY ALEXANDER TUCKER’S COMICS HERE:  http://alexandertucker.bigcartel.com/products

also join my patreon for lots of cool stuff constantly: https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

‘Transcontinental’ by Evin Collis

Here’s ‘Transcontinental’ by Evin Collis.  Seems Evin went to art school in Chicago and that would explain how I found this lil one on a recent trip to Quimby’s.  When I handed it over to model Jax Nippleson she exclaimed, “its only 2 pages!” and although it ins’t quite that small, it is a very short little number.  But its nice, its a little slice of life peep into life on a transcontinental train and it nails the mood quite well.  If you haven’t taken a 60 hour train ride, my friends, you haven’t lived.  For those of you in the states ya gotta take the Empire Builder or the Zephyr lines to get a great look at this ol country of ours and for the head space this kinda travel puts you in.  The domed viewing car is a great place to sit and stare and meet people but, sadly, the adventures to be had with the real wackos are no longer since the obliteration of smoking on trains.  I was never a smoker but I always made a point of hanging out in the smoking car because that is where the nut jobs would commiserate, the kind of people that would sneak in hard liquor and weapons.  I remember being cornered by a guy once, him exclaiming to me that “I worship Jesus because when I die I will go to heaven and in heaven the STREETS ARE MADE OF GOLD AND THE LAMPS ARE MADE OF DIAMONDS!!” That wasn’t much of a sell for me, though.  And the time I spent a whole 2 day ride wracked with the worst flu of my life and the blowjobs, oh the countless clandestine blowjobs offered by greasy italian men.  I haven’t really gotten to the comic, have I?  Well, ‘Transcontinental’ is a nice ‘drawn in the folksy style’ little book that does the job right to put you right on a long and musty train ride through the middle of nowhere.  Short don’t matter, its gonna go in a nice place on my shelf.  #evincollis #minicomic #comix #selfpublished #zine

you can buy the book here: https://fatbottombooks.com/author/8233/evin_collins

you can learn more about Collis here: http://www.evincollis.com/

And Jesus Christ join my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

Garden Salad by Tristan Wright

Here’s a comic I came across at random at the local comics shop: ‘Garden Salad’ by Tristan Wright.  This was a refreshing little gem to come across, this book is all about straight up, solid, goddamn good drawing.  Tristan’s style is a mashup of a bit of Woodring with a big heap of Herpich and some Fingerman and Cooper and McKeown and probably some other stuff as well.  This dude obviously spends a lot of time looking at things because this comic is a big heap of lovingly rendered drawings of life and nature and kitchens and dinners; he’s got eyes and is able to pick out the most exquisite details.  The endless leaves and vines and hairs and tattoos all have energy and relationships and everything plays off of each other but nothing gets lost in this miasma of ink that is laid down with exquisite skill on page after page of this thing.  The story is a simple little study of life but has merit in its pace and peacefulness (even though we get some hard core killing it has peacefulness) and it is a charming little scene of optimism that people have homes and gardens and love and all the stuff I’m sure only someone living in California could come up with.  Though the world is overpopulated and the poor are piling up in the cities and the situation becomes all the more dire and hopeless, we still have kids in california showing us that you can have your sleeve tattoo and your hipster clothes and your earth momma girlfriend and your garden and all that great stuff we all dream of having.  Well, I don’t dream of that shit, I dream of having a pool and a fence and being as far away from everything and anyone as humanly possible with amazon prime delivering on a daily basis all the things that cater to my needs like comics and olives and porn.  But, I digress, this here Tristan Wright is a real deal talent and his stuff is really really good.  Probably just a matter of time before he gets picked up by an animation studio and has to spend 70 hours a week rendering Buzz Lightyear’s left arm’s motion blur in post production so buy this stuff up now before he disappears!!  www.tristanwright.com  #tristanwright #comix #comicbook #selfpublished #minicomic

Also, go over to my Patreon where you get uncensored images, music videos, art, and all sorts of fantastic shit from my 20 odd years in performance for real fucking cheap:https://www.patreon.com/shfb

[nudesreadingminicomics]

The Complete ‘Eightball’ by Dan Clowes

Here's 'The Complete Eightball' by Dan Clowes, out from Fantagraphics and its reprintin' issues 1 through 18 of the comic series of the same name.  If you have been living under a rock or are just brand spanking new to comics and don't know what Eightball is, well, Eightball is what inspired just about the whole next generation of cartoonists who followed.  

I used to have every issue of Eightball, I bought them when they came out starting with something like issue 4 or 5, but I gave them away, along with the majority of my comic collection and pretty much all my personal possessions, when I went bonkers and disappeared to South America.  So this new collection is absolutely perfect for a fella like me as it reprints the comics EXACTLY as they came out, on the original paper stock and cover stock and everything.  Its a little hardback book binding together a bunch of old comic books between its covers!!

Anyhoo, if you don't know what Eightball is, its probably the best underground comic of all time.  I was inspired to finally pick this collection up and read it after going through Chris Ware's exquisite 'Monograph'.  Ware's self loathing is abundant, as usual, and as I marveled at page after page of meticulous art and craft accompanied by Wares constant "I'm a horrible artist, I hate comics, I hate drawing, all this shit is so embarrassing," I did start to think to myself, "is Ware indeed all that great?"  And, of course, he is all that great but his self loathing is coming from a good place and it does have a point.  Though I have no idea how much a Ware compares to a Clowes on how much they're drafting a page or researching a subject or sharpening a pencil, the Ware material does definitely come out with every second, every hour, and every day logged on a page very front and clear and it is at times hard to recognize if my awe and wonder at the page is in fact for its merit as "art"  or just for the mere fact that anything one spends over 400 hours working on is gonna result in some crooked necked, mouth agape, stares of awe and amazement.

Clowes' pages sing not only with the inspiring talent, the just fucking hip style, and the draughtman's skill but it does indeedy come off as fucking NATURAL.  I can't do what Clowes does but I can understand it, I know where its coming from and what inspired it, and Ware's stuff just looks like it came from outer space.  Clowes is relatable, I may be a shithead but I still get that warm feeling that if maybe I actually applied myself I could do "good" work like Clowes.  I can't do shit like Ware, nobody can, Ware's stuff is the result of living extended periods on Enceladus mixed with bathing retreats on Titan.

Clowes' Eightball was totally in the right place at the right time.  I cannot explain the excitement of seeing this stuff come out in real time, in the context of those times, and just how much it brought us little hipsters and freaks and losers together.   Going through the collection of course brought a ton of memories back but the material wasn't any less engaging or entertaining, its stood the test of time. He nails our angst, our melancholia, our rants in a timeless fashion and he regurgitates it out sometimes in surreal drama, sometimes in all to real drama, and in exquisite comedy.  

One little piece, one little thing I had totally forgotten about and would never had remembered had they not reprinted everything, was Joe Matt's bullshit letter to Clowes criticizing his humor pieces while reveling in stuff like Ghost World.  What the fuck, is MAD irrevelant??  Is Kurtzman or Wood or Davis irrelevant?  Cuz the humor in Eightball is of the finest degree and, in those early days, Clowes was the direct successor to those dudes and he and Altergott were definitely the only ones carrying the torch.  I used to read those early issues and be like, "HOLY CRAP THIS DUDE IS THE NEXT WALLY WOOD AND JACK DAVIS AND EVERYBODY!!"  I grew up on MAD and EC comics collections and this dude was GETTING IT.  His fantastic crowd scenes of Pogeybait or the Happy Fisherman walking through a city street, surrounded by the mania and the hopelessness of the citizenry manifested in full on mad dog crowd riot style chewing on feet and breaking windows and explosions were THE modern iteration of a MAD page.  This guy knew the city, knew people, and he wasn't aping that shit from Kurtzman or Elder he was just FOLLOWING THEIR EXAMPLE.  It was MAD for me, man!!  It was MAD for the skinny kid sick of watching the dude with the ski cap and the oversized jeans getting all the chicks at the party, man.  Eightball had hipness, "now-ness" and it was a burning fire to go out and suddenly see Clowes on a bottle of OK Soda or hear REM on Letterman singing 'What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"@!  Anyway, so Joe Matt is all criticizing him for his humor pieces and they are fucking TIMELESS, man!  Shit like 'Sensual Santa' is gut bustingly funny and the immediate (and quickly lost) rush of euphoria of good comedy is just as relevant as the paced and developed drama of a Ghost World, dude.

Issue 7 is the pinnacle, is the absolute Nadir of that early era of Eightball.  The main, serialized, story 'Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron' takes on a more serious and labored tone and gives us a hint of where Clowe's fiction will take a turn in future stories and serializations and the pieces 'Art School Confidential' and 'Chicago' are THE most epic rants of all time, peppered with all to real (too painfully fucking real) accounts of just how horrible we humans are amongst its real ball bopping jokes and groan worthy humor.  And you top that issue off with the exquisite 'Needle Dick, the Bug Fucker', who's final panel ends with the finest bit of dialogue in any comic strip ever (and I paraphrase); "hi son what were you doing today?" "FUCKING BUGS."

As Eightball evolved that style of humor was stripped away in favor of much more grueling human observations and dramas.  I didn't grow as fast as eightball did and stories like 'Gynecology' and 'Like a Weed, Joe' didn't strike me very much but the genius and absolute eloquence of 'Ghost World' could be lost on no one.  A fucking modern masterpiece worth every bit of praised heaped upon it and there's not really much more to say here that hasn't already been said.  Again, ya had to be there.  To be a fan of that magazine and watch it rock out Velvet Glove ish after ish and then fucking IMMEDIATELY AFTER, without even a couple issues of toodlin' around and finding his way to the next story, we are given the dose that was Ghost World.  Ahh what times they were!  That was a great time to be a comic fan.  

Ahh, dang it, I didn't want this thing to be one big ol "ya had to be there" trip down memory lane but it turned into one anyway.

Also, go over to my Patreon where you get uncensored images, music videos, art, and all sorts of fantastic shit from my 20 odd years in performance for real fucking cheap:https://www.patreon.com/shfb

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‘sonogram’, ‘dim glow’, and ‘no visitors’ #2 from HTML Flowers

In an effort to make up lost ground on comix that came out awhile ago that I have not yet reviewed here is a threesome all at once from Html Flowers; ‘no visitors’ #2, ‘sonogram’, and ‘dim glow’. Imagine me, before I say this line, as a poofy haired and horn rimmed large sweater wearing sexless documentarian host/hostess; these books are three starkly different and amazing pieces from a genuinely multi faceted artist. Thats what some idiot art critic would say, right? Ok, back to being me now: I basically think that if you don’t read mini comics and zines you’re a moron and if you read mini comics and zines but don’t follow Html  Flowers then you are a double moron. The realm of zinedom is some of the most personal and heartfelt, sometimes opinionated and subversive, art happening in this here modern age. My city has a big art festival every year and the hoity toity art judges gave a sexless lady with horn rimmed glasses, poofy hair, and a giant sweater a $13,000 prize for making a water fountain that spews out tainted water with a sign on it that says ‘colored’ and called the piece ‘Flint’. It didn’t matter to the judges that she’s from Louisiana and had never been to flint, or that the sculpture was directly stolen from Politico’s M. Wuerker cartoon depicting the exact same thing, the judges felt that they were smart and that by picking that piece to win the big money that they’d show the rest of us morons how to feel and what we should think is important. They’re morons, they don’t read mini comics, and I trust html flowers in what art I go to to learn how to feel; for real experience and insight that can actually help me navigate my way through this shit fest called life.

The first piece I came across 4 years or so by flowers was something along the lines of an ill young person stuck in their bathroom feeling ill while the beauty and rawness of purest nature and moonlight came in through their window and was reflected off the water in the sink, I’m definitely paraphrasing but I’m pretty sure that was close. When I saw that image I was blasted, fucking jolted, back to my ten years of age time living in the suburbs of Walker at 2632 Nolan at the dead end of an undeveloped suburb and all the late nights stuck in the crappy house while outside my window to one end were cookie cutter homes and mowed lawns and station wagons and on the other end were snapping turtles and possum and tall grass and the crickets’ chirp. It put me right there, forcibly put me right there, and I have been studying his work like one clumsily follows the words of the wizened master ever since.

html flowers is a shaman, a mystic, a “natural” and that really comes across in the first one, ‘dim glow’, which is a reprint of earlier stuff from 2012; the stuff that grabbed me. There is an intuitiveness, an attunement, to the power and the magic and the mystery of the whole goddamn universe, the kinda “look there is beauty in this splotch of McDonalds ketchup on a grubby linoleum floor” in html flowers work and it gets its start in mega doses in these early works of joy and pain and mystery. I get happy, downright happy, when I read that stuff.

And then, as html flowers matures and manages his struggles in the more recent works of ‘sonogram’ and ‘no visitors’, they contain this kind of hopefulness beautifully bordering against cynicism that is really what makes his work a cut above the rest and his voice the most unique and important voice in comix, nay art, today. A line from ‘Sonogram” sums it up; “I still look up at the frosted glass in my bathroom window, laying in a shallow bath or taking a shit, and feel ecstasy watching the afternoon light bargain for space with the shadows.” Who wrote that? Shelley? Yeates?? No, flowers. He depicts some pretty intense realities in his comix but I always end them feeling so god damn happy (as I said before). And these works, this focus of valid and succinctly informed opinion and sense of mission that flowers seems to get going strong in ‘no visitors’ beautifully comes to a head in what I am sure will be regarded as THE seminal, or semen-al, work of his for years to come; a strip about a rather intense and invasive nasal swabbing that inspires an almost fetishistic response juxtaposed up against the laughable and other consistent element of a love of fast food and cheap eats over hospital plates. I don’t know if I’m meandering here or making any sense, or doing these works justice, but these are THE god damn comics, folks. I haven’t even gotten started on the art, rambling on here about the story, or the collage or the fantasy mixed in with the personal mixed in with the all too personal, so you just gotta check it out. His line, his branches and his melted candles are the bomb. #htmlflowers#novisitors #comix #underground#minicomic

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Hi! First, my usual prefaced apology for the reviews coming few and far between. I'm busy, insanely busy, and I have a years worth of mini comics to get through. Probably from here on out everything I review is long out of print and unavailable, that's how behind I am. But I'm gonna soldier on, all for that sweet satisfaction of getting a random 'like' from Ed Piskor or Nick Gazin. Well, mild satisfaction. Now, Dick Debartolo, getting a 'like' from him will make me jack off for a week! This book is from Ediciones Joc Doc and the artist is Craoman and its called 'Agarrarla'. I don't speak French or Spanish in the slightest so I don't' have much to offer in terms of back story here. The artist is French, the publisher is Spanish. The book is god damn rare golden syrup style GOOD. These comics, from something like 5 years ago, are an insane mix of Marc Bell, Dave Cooper, and Mark Beyer style gooshie-ness. The dude flat out has a very 'Mojo Action Companion Unit' (how many of ya young kids were around to buy that mini?) strip with the author portrayed in Marc Bell style hunch with backpack, skinny jeans, and knit cap 'artist-as-rambler' style shit. I assume the tale is about the artist but am not for sure as it was in Spanish and, as said before, I don't know Spanish. The rest of the book is filled with solid and earnest gross out stuff to the max. But not banal and simple Jonny Ryan style gross out shit, this is lovingly sculpted and studied gross out shit that comes straight from the CORE. Craoman is the drawing master and creates a world of big headed baby boys and teddy bear girls that get together for all sorts of insanity that result in such lines being said as " Oh Lord... but... he's having a shit... he's having a SHIT through his DICK!!" Yeah, that kinda gold. This stuff is the stuff that occupies that place beyond rational explanation or comparison because there is just no point of reference on this green earth for this kinda shit. Its kinda like staring at the suns' corona, I can't properly explain it ya just needed to be there. And the book itself, the packaging, is just phenomenal. Rough paper that has these little sparkly bits of foil like material in it, ink that is all lumpy and sitting on the page, and these beautiful neon colored inserts on cardboard that just must be seen to be believed. This is a real art book, a comic book, a gross out book; this is the awesome book. If you can't read shit like this you're a fucking wimp, put down the social justice zine and read some real art about filling tin cans with corpses' shit and marketing it as seaweed soup to stupid punx (another line pulled from the book). Get this fucker now, do a search for the names and you'll find it. #jocdoc #craoman #screenprint #comix #minicomic

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‘Shit and Piss’ by Tyler Landry

Here we have an excellent submission that was recently sent in, ‘Shit and Piss’ by Tyler Landry.  There is a lot to be said for unfettered imagination.  Not much is said, actually, and a lot more could be said.  In underground comix we tend to celebrate the ‘relatable misanthrope’ quite a bit.  From the 60s till now we’ve been lauding the pantheon of Crumbs/Clowes/Matts/Van Scivers as voices of a generation or a kinda “thats exactly what I’ve been thinking!!” vibe kinda creator guy.  Years upon years of dudes drawing themselves with their shoulders slumped, against a droll cityscape for a backdrop, on a solitary wander as we read panel after panel of thought bubble listing off by rote how much they hate everything and themselves.  Now, I’m using some broad strokes here of course!  All those guys are geniuses and I will happily buy every product but we still need to sit back and acknowledge that to illustrate or to give voice to shit everyone is thinking aint exactly all that; we’re all thinking that same shit!  We celebrate the artist who can in the most literal way give voice to our most common traits, to the artist who can reach many voices through singular voice, but theres also another kinda artist who takes that aforementioned misanthropy, or angst, and instead of drawing themselves hunch backed and grumbling on a city street takes that pure feeling and puts it through a little filter called IMAGINATION.  Being a comix fan for a good 25 years and pretty much devoting those years to the small press and underground, I notice its the Bagges’ who speak to a generation and inspire a swath of imitators for endless years to come but the Woodrings’ don’t so much.  Theres always a big pile of auto bio comics to choose from and tons more about “relationships” but we don’t get much in the way of a silent dog man in a hallucinatory landscape.  Thats cuz that shit aint so easily imitated without clearly cheating and ripping off.  So the imitators are less, or less brave, but we still get a trickle of a few every generation who realize that the secret is just to access ones imagination and let it flow; thats how one best follows in the line of ones heroes.   And methinks we don’t celebrate pure and unfettered imagination so much because even at its first degree of separation from reality; as Landry’s misanthropy is represented in eloquent and skilled representory (as in not full on fucking definition of ABSTRACT) art that instead of showcasing young twenty somethings sitting at a diner talking about girls and combat boots it depicts a shit and piss processing plant and the creatures cursed to live in it, it is quite hard for any of the muggles of the mainstream to understand.  Most folks need cartoons about teens in skinny jeans and california rolled jeans, or at best anthropomorphic monkeys and ponies in skinny jeans and california rolled jeans, to understand anything and anything even slightly beyond that level of reliability.  Any actual use of imagination, is, to that reader, nothing but garble.  In cinema everyone flocks to see Iron Man but even though Hellboy does alright its still not setting the standard, even though that fucker is an action movie with angst about girls its still ABSTRACT by comparison.  It takes only one more degree of separation to get to David Lynch and then beyond that we’re straying into “my kid could do that” territory.  The mainstream hates the abstract and it hates imagination, it just don’t get it.  This is hurt these days even moreso by the fact that we now have smartphones to do our imagining for us, just look at any snapchat filter and you see the death of imagination; your god damn phone puts on your costume for you.  So, by definition, I look at Landry’s ‘Shit and Piss’ as beautiful abstraction of some very basic and understandable emotions and I look at the book as beautiful therapy because, man, we all got the bad feels and what better way to get them out than to come up with a ghastly world that is a giant and ancient shit and piss processing plant full of maligned and cursed creatures destined to fail and yet continue on within its hallows.  Seems way healthier than drawing oneself walking down a Chicago street with ones backpack over ones shoulder with thought bubble after thought bubble of going into in depthy detail of why one hates parties and can’t get along with anybody.  I imagine Landry is quite a well adjusted and happy gentleman thanks to these comics, the therapy of churning out all those bad feels and making the meat man suffer instead of the self.  And I should get to the about the comics!  As before mentioned, ‘Shit and Piss’ is about a shit and piss processing plant that is as old as time.  No one knows who built it, how long its been there, but its got a caretaker and it is our narrator.  And it shows us through through its caves and caravans and of all the horrors within it.  This is classic, old school, METAL.  This is low deep voices grunting about death and blades and blood.  I sat reading this comic, called ‘Shit and Piss’ in a beautiful outdoor park a few blocks from my place.  Sipping on a latte in the bright sun, the leaves rustling around me and the birds at play, with a big grin on my face following along at this parable of the HORRORS of us, the human race.  This comic belongs in an early 90s issue of Heavy Metal, its got it all there. It starts out as interesting and disgusting parables shown by an indifferent and cold narrator who is a hands on/hands off bastard of a god and then you realize the stories start to intertwine and then, just as I needed it, just as I was starting to realize it and want it, I got a SPACESHIP, and I was like, “yep, he managed to fit in a fucking spaceship, I knew it,” and then we get a wonderfully satisfying ending of an origin story.  This comic book perfectly fits that space in between a Fantagraphics book and a Dark Horse book.  I didn’t realize that space was so broad but Retrofit/Big Planet, as well as Koyama, are really filling those spaces well.

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#casserole

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are people really selling BJ and Da Dogs on Ebay for 400 bucks?  Is that stuff really selling for that much?!?!?  Cuz I have three copies, who wants to pony up 400 bones for one?

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Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer

Okee, here we have 'Laid Waste' by Julia Gfrorer.  Gfrorer is a legitimate, real deal, storyteller of the legitimate, real deal, storyteller tradition.  I should get the obvious comparisons out of the way, ones that short sighted mongrel plebeians such as myself come up with in our inability to grasp style or substance beyond the mainstream, so yeah you're gonna pick up this stuff and you're gonna think about Dame Darcy and you're gonna think about Edward Gorey and blabbity blah blah bler blah...  Ok, got the comparisons out of the way.  

On the back of the book is a little blurb from the Seattle Weekly that says something like, and I paraphrase, 'her stories would function even without the supernatural flair' and I say bollocks to that bullshit.  Quotes like that ring the ever present lack of confidence in the people selling comics that comics aren't legitimate as comics and that they've gotta be something else.  I guess the Seattle Weekly is something you need a quote from to sell books to intellectuals who are really getting into Fletcher Hanks right now so I understand if you've gotta put the blurb on there from the Seattle Weekly but in describing Gfrorer's work it sounds so much like the way so many people say, "oh you've gotta read this, its a comic book but its not what you think it is, its not a COMIC BOOOOK” You know, the way people who don't really read many comics talk about comics.  

There is nothing wrong with something like setting, or time period, or THE SUPERNATURAL (ooooh, so spooky just saying the word!!) being the fucking lynchpin of the story because, dude, its a goddamn story.  This here book, Laid Waste, is a tale from plague times; old school medieval England Black Death plague times.  And its about love and its about fragility and powerfulness and all that bullshit but it would not have the fucking WEIGHT that Gfrorer is able to put into it if it was some modern day conversation story about a sick girl and a sick guy falling in love in the hospital waiting room.  A STORY SET IN MEDIEVAL TIMES, IF IT CONTAINS ROMANCE OR THE “HUMAN CONDITION” IS GONNA BE REAL DIFFERENT THAN A STORY ABOUT ROMANCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION THAT IS SET DURING ROMAN TIMES OR EVEN DURING SUPERNATURAL GHOST TIMES BECAUSE WETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, SEATTLE WEEKLY, THOSE SOCIETIES WERE DIFFERENT AND PEOPLES BRAINS WORKED DIFFERENTLY AND THE PRESSURES PUT ON A HUMAN WERE DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT TO A POINT WHERE IT WOULD DRASTICALLY ALTER THE STORY.

What speaks to me, when reading Laid Waste, is that this time existed, these plague times existed; this time period FUCKING HAPPENED.  And its fucking horrible, its so fucking horrible.  And I can't comprehend it and so much of history is forgotten and so much isn't understood or has ever been properly processed and that's where the storyteller comes in.  The storyteller comes in and tells us fucking STORIES.  And, whereas, lets say, when I read an all to real mini comic from HTML Flowers, who is the fucking GENIUS GOD OF COMIX, about being in the hospital and dealing with disease and its making me feel the gamut of emotions and the joy and the futility and the nobility all that stuff, that story is in a completely different category than Gfrorer's heart wrenching and tragic and noble graphic novel about a time period that none of us lived in.  Cuz Gfrorer is an old school, real deal, storyteller.  She's telling us the story even better than historians can.  Where a historian can tell us what happened back then and how the cities were laid out and what the typical day was like for a peasant Gfrorer is able to use fucking fiction to weave all that history around real and fucking heartfelt human experience.   So I say FUCK YOU Seattle Weekly and your bullshit quote because you cant fucking separate "the supernatural" from the human experience because a FUCKING STORYTELLER IS A FUCKING ALCHEMIST AND FUCKING COMBINES THAT SHIT TO THE POINT WHERE IT CANT BE SEPARATED YA DUMB SHIT.  Its an insult to me that the quote is somehow trying to validate the story as "human" even regardless of the "supernatural".  FICTION IS SUPERNATURAL WETHER ITS ABOUT A DRAGON OR A CONVERSATION ON A TRAIN BECAUSE ITS SOMETHING THAT NEVER HAPPENED BUT AFTER YOU READ IT YOU FEEL LIKE IT DID HAPPEN, YOU BELIEVE IT FUCKING HAPPENED BECAUSE IT FUCKING SUCKED YOUR HEARTS DICK AND YOU CAME ON ITS TITS.  And the quote goes on further to use the all too fucking hot button words being over used today, to sell books and movies, about a “powerful female character”.  I didn’t see a powerful female character, I SAW A FUCKING WELL FLESHED OUT FEMALE CHARACTER.  I saw her be powerful when she fucked the man she wanted to fuck, regardless of wether he was married to a dying woman, and I saw her be hopeless and tragic and weak when she collapsed in a ditch full of dead bodies because, oh, I don’t know, THE FUCKING WEIGHT OF LIVING AMONGST THE PLAGUE AND DEATH KINDA GOT TO HER AND KILLED OFF ANY BIT OF POWERFULNESS.  This story is full of fucking humans, grippingly tragic and real and romantic humans. This book is such a goddamn good story and as I read it and weep over the tragedy of its characters I weep just as much for the time period and I weep just as much for how much I don't understand and for how much was lost and for how much work was done.

Also, when you pick up a Gfrorer mini comic there's a good chance you might get 20 straight pages of a detailed, drawn out, and meticulous blowjob or a ghost fucking a dude and making a baby with his jizz mixed with a petrified octopus and that doesn't happen in this book.  Not saying that its a good or bad thing, its just if you're a fan you're well aware that when you open a Gfrorer book you might be confronting some heavy shit like that.  And even though there were no extensive blowjobs, this book was still entirely heavy shit.  And I'm not gonna say, as I imagine the Seattle Weekly would (in an effort to validate the comic) that Gfrorer has "matured" as a storyteller in not putting some graphic supernatural sex in this particular release because, no, Gfrorer was already mature because you gotta be mature to show corpse fucking and make it really an integral part to the story and its simply obvious its not maturity but its that this particular story didn't call for that shit because Gfrorer is a storyteller and knows what the story calls for and I'm sure there's gonna be a comic in the future that she'll release where some cursed and dying sailor has to fingerbang a mermaid to get the key to his dead wife's locket out of its vagina and I look forward to reading that comic and how uncomfortable it will make me feel. #juliagfrorer #laidwaste #fantagraphics #graphicnovel