Michael Kupperman - 'All the Answers'

I really enjoyed Michael Kupperman's new book 'All the Answers' which has just come out. I have always liked his work, especially 'Tales Designed to Thrizzle'.

This book is a biography / autobiography about his father who was called Joel Kupperman and was a very famous child star on a weird radio and then very early tv show called 'Quiz Kids'. His dad met all the famous people of the time like Orson Welles, Harpo Marx and Abbott and Costello. Being on the show really messed his dad up and the family never spoke of it during Michael's childhood. Michael tries to work out what happened and how it affected his own childhood and his relationship with his father.

Here's a good review of the book from Rob Clough. I really enjoyed the book and so it's highly recommended.The surreal-ness of his father meeting all the famous people in odd situations (and often not caring, as he doesn't know who they are) makes it seem a lot like Kupperman's other books at times. It also has a lot of emotions in it as Kupperman tries to work out why his dad was like he was.

Emil Ferris - 'My Favourite Thing is Monsters'

I bought myself this book for my birthday as it had been top of loads of peoples 'Best Comics of 2017' lists. It's massive, 386 colour pages, and it's only the first part of the story. It's set in 1960's inner city Chicago and has ten years old Karen trying to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbour, the mysterious Anka Silverberg. She is the beautiful woman on the front cover. Karen loves monsters and nearly always draws herself as a werewolf. While she is detectoring she puts on a trench coat and hat, as a werewolf detective. The chapters in the book are separated with copies of pulp horror magazines, most of them seem to correspond indirectly with the story. The whole book is made to look like a spiral notebook that Karen is drawing in, there are holes for the binding, and the whole thing is on lined paper.

There is such a lot going on in the story. Karen finds tapes made by a reporter who met Anka where she tells the story of her horrible life. She was Jewish and born in Berlin in the 1920's. Her mother worked in a brothel where Anka lived too, and later sells her into child prostitution just before the Nazi's rise to power. The book also tells what Karen finds out about the people around her, her mother, her brother Deeze, the other people who live in their apartment block and her few friends . It's very grim at times, there is a huge amount of bad stuff going on and I feel it could all end up very badly for the characters. The Chicago Art Institute is also very important to the story, as it is Karen's favourite place. There are lovely drawings of the paintings, and Karen can crawl right into them and find things out.

The drawing is very very beautiful. There are lovely really lifelike portraits and drawings of all the characters on some pages. The drawings of Karen's mother are especially great. On others it gets much more scribbly and loose with little panels, whatever is best for the story.  Some of the crosshatching is amazing, all done with coloured biros and pens.

I really enjoyed this book and would tell anyone to buy it. It's a lot of money but it's a massive book and well worth it. I reckon I will be able to read it a lot of times and notice a lot more stuff each time. I'm going to get part two once it comes out, though I am worried for the characters.

Derf Backderf - Trashed

I really liked the other Derf book I have read, 'My Friend Dahmer' so I bought this one a couple of weeks ago. It's a fictionalised version of his time as a binman in the small American town where he grew up. It's really good. Even though he has fictionalised the stories they still feel very real, and he must have used a lot of real events. There's stories about picking up foul bags of rotten stuff, filled with maggots, working in the freezing winter, and his strange co-workers. They are cool and interesting. I wonder if they have wheelie bins now in America, I guess not in the small places.

There's also a bunch of stuff about where rubbish goes and landfill sites. I would have liked more of the stories instead of the factual stuff, but thats because it's all about rubbish in America and you can just think 'I bet it's not as bad here in the UK' and not have to think about it.
Here's Derf's blog, they are making a film of 'My Friend Dahmer' so he talks about that.

Michael Kupperman - Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume 2

Here's the second hardback volume of Michael Kupperman's 'Tales Designed to Thrizzle'. I really like these. They might seem very quick to read at first, but you can flip through them again and again, laughing at different bits each time. This volume has the long story 'Quinception' in it, which might well be his best work yet, and makes the book worth buying all on its own. I also really laughed at some of his fake comics covers, especially 'The Turducken Fuckers'. Highly recommended.

Mardou - Sky in Stereo 2

I really liked the first part of Mardou's 'Sky in Stereo' and the second part is even better. I think it's Mardou's best comic. It's for sale here, from Yam Books.The postage from America was expensive, but it was well worth it. Here's a proper review of the book, from Rob Clough's High-Low blog.

I find this book really true to life. Iris gets a microdot from Glen (who she has a massive crush on) and takes it on a boring Monday night. She ends up going back home and staring out of her window all night, while watching the sky dance around and melt. For the rest of the book she wanders around trying to make sense of the trip, and not being able to sleep, until she gets back home and has an encounter with her mother. It's a really great book, one of my favourites of the year so far. It's very beautifully drawn, and feels really honest. Very highly recommended.

Evening PS- just got some of the postage back, its gone cheaper now on the website

Derf Backderf - My Friend Dahmer

This is Derf Backderf's book length comic about going to school with Jeff Dahmer, the serial killer. He wasn't really friends with him, as Dahmer was a really strange messed up kid, but Derf and his friends treat him as a kind of mascot. They find him really funny in his weird ways. The book is sympathetic to Dahmer until he finally gives in to his horrible urges and kills someone. There's a lot about growing up in Derf's small town and the way everyone passes the time, and there are some very funny scenes too, as well as a lot of very sinister ones.

This is a really good book. The drawing is great, the people are really strange looking and drawn in Derf's own style, but totally believable. Before this I'd only seen some of Derf's stories about being a binman in his home town online, but I'd definately want to check out his other books now.

Here's a review from the Comics Journal and here's Derf's Blog about how he drew and researched the book.

Julia Wertz - Drinking at the Movies

This was a very good book. Its very funny and I have read it four times since I got it about Christmas time so it must be good. It's an autobiographical tale of Julia Wertz moving from San Francisco to New York. There's loads of pages on her website so go have a look. The website used to be called 'Fart Party' but now it's called 'The Museum of Mistakes'.

Vanessa Davis - Make Me a Woman

This was a very nice collection of autobiographical comics by Vanessa Davis. I'd read most of the fancy colour ones on-line as there were lots of links to them as they came out, from the Comics Reporter. They are well worth reading again. The book also has lots of lovely pencil drawing pages from her sketchbooks. I am always a big fan of good pencil drawings and these are great. It's nice to read some autobiography that's more finished for a change and pretty to look at, after all the diary style, done in a hurry, autobiography I've been reading lately. Not that there's anything wrong with that stuff, it's just nice to have a change. It's a very good looking oversized book, very well printed.

Johnny Ryan - Prison Pit 2

Yay! I'd been looking forward to this and I wasn't disapointed. It's got fancy silver shiny covers too. More brutal violence and scatological goings on in the prison world. It's more of the same from book one but I'm not bored of it yet, at all, if anything it's got funnier. It has a great opening sequence too which I won't spoil by telling what it is in case people haven't seen it yet. If you liked the first one I highly recommend it.

Benjamin Marra - Night Business 3

Another excellent issue of 'Night Business'. Buy it from Benjamin Marra here...
There's loads of action in this issue as 'The Rider' starts patrolling the night, looking for justice, and Johnny is captured by Donny the Pimp and taken to the generic dockside warehouse. Donny's dozens of goons are waiting for him in the warehouse to get their revenge. Some great dialogue, and awesome fight scenes. Top class, very highly recommended, and once again a great author bio and picture.

Mat Brinkman - Multiforce

I got the great big 'Multiforce' book this week from Good Grief. It's a brilliant book! Here's a very interesting review of it by Frank Santoro that talks about it a lot better than I could. Well worth going and getting it. It's the first time in a long while I've especially gone to a comics shop to buy a comic they have just got in, before they are all gone. Must be five or six years...

Josh Cotter - Driven By Lemons

Wow, this might well have been on my books of the year list except I got it on New Years Eve and have only just read it. I'll definately be reading it over and over again in little bits. It's a copy of Josh Cotter's sketchbook I guess, or it's made to look like that anyhow. A moleskin type sketchbook with rounded corners and inside covers and that. There's several pages of dense tiny text that doesn't make much sense but it's lovely words and makes a kind of poem, and as you read the book it seems to fit with it and make some sense of what's going on.

The main character is a rabbit and he keeps appearing and then disintegrating into beautiful abstract scribbly things. This sort of stuff is really hard to do well, but this book pulls it off and you never think he's just making marks for the sake of it, there is some sort of story and purpose to the whole thing though I'm not sure what it is... it's very satisfying. Maybe it's about the rabbits mental health problems, but nothing too obvious and simple. Very highly recommended.

Johnny Ryan – Prison Pit Volume 1

Yay! I was looking forward to this and it didn’t disappoint me at all. Its very cool, go and buy it, all the good reviews of it are true. A brutal maniac is dumped on a prison planet and proceeds to meet and fight the inhabitants in various long and disgusting battles. Awesome. Each baddy has there own special moves, involving snot, jizz, growing extra arms and heads. It’s very manga-esque in it’s long and elaborate fight sequences and also in the pacing. I am well looking forward to issue 2. It is my favourite Johnny Ryan thing I’ve seen though I like a lot of the Blecky Yuckerella strips and fondly remember his ‘Every Autobio Comic Ever Written’.

Benjamin Marra - Night Business - Issues 1 & 2

Waaaaaaaaaaahhhh these are awesome. They may well be my favourite comic of the year. The drawing is so fascinating, everyone is super shiny looking with tiny hands and strange poses. Grrrrr they are angry. (As you can see the best way of describing it is by writing funny noises)

The story is set in ‘the city’ at night in 1983. Johnny and Steve are running an agency ‘Glitz Glam’ which looks after exotic dancers. A crazy masked murderer has killed one of their girls in a frenzied knife attack and now they are after him. Johnny gets one of the girls to act as bait to draw out the murderer. The city is very sleazy, full of pimps and strip clubs. Benjamin Marra is a very funny man, the authors descriptions on the back pages of the comics made me laugh out loud. Highly recommended, go and order it from his website.

Carol Tyler - You'll Never Know - Part One

I didn’t buy this for a while but then I saw that Rob Clough had mentioned it as his favourite book of the year so far so I ordered myself a copy.

I’m very glad I did. It’s mainly the wartime biography of Carol Tyler’s father Chuck Tyler. I can’t help comparing it to ‘Alan’s War’ by Guilbert but they are very different books though both about average American soldiers in World War 2. ‘Alan’s War’ is purely the memoir of Alan Cope with very little emotional input from Guilbert, he wants to just write down Alan’s memories without adding his own thoughts and feelings. Carol’s book adds loads of her own thoughts about everything, how she found out her dad’s experiences, what was going on with her and her family at the time, what it all means to her. She kind of starts the book by accident to try and take her mind off her break up with her husband, the cartoonist Justin Green, and to make a nice photo album for her dad too. This is just the first part with her dad going through training, meeting her mother at the training camp, falling in love and getting married, and then being shipped out to North Africa. Something horrible happened to him in Italy but it hasn’t reached that yet, and it’s not certain whether he will want to talk about it at all as there are lots of memories he doesn’t want to think about.

The drawing is brilliant, with watercolour washes. Carol puts the panels in the middle of the pages and does a lot of using the spaces around the panels and the edges of the pages to add a lot of extra feeling to the pages. She also does some lovely full page drawings.

I really liked it and I will definitely get the next part of the story, I hope it comes out soon. Oh yeah, if you are looking for it to buy on amazon its only under C Tyler as the authors name, not Carol Tyler, took me a while to find it…

Peter Bagge - Everyone is Stupid Except for Me

It turns out that Peter Bagge is one of those Libertarians, so he’s all about the US Constitution in this book. They are into having a very small government aren’t they, that doesn’t get involved in people’s affairs, I’m not an expert as I don’t think we have them here. I don’t agree with some of his politics (the right to bear arms and that) but the drawing is very nice. Very clean, very cartoony. I like the characters rubbery long arms. And a lot of the stories are very funny too. I’ve never read much Peter Bagge as I never got into ‘Hate’, I wonder if I should read some. I’ve only ever read his stuff in Weirdo.

Darwyn Cooke - Richard Stark's 'Parker - The Hunter'

I bought this book as I'd seen a lot of recommendations on The Comics Reporter and it sounded very cool. The dust jacket covers not the best picture from the book, I much prefer the hard back cover underneath, thats a cool image.
The story's quite familiar (I've seen it in that film 'Point Blank') but the drawing is amazing with all it's blue shading and very cool 50's look which is perfectly done. I'd never read any Darwyn Cooke before but I'll get the sequels to this when they come out too.

Josh Blair, Pete Borrebach & Nick Marino, Noah Van Sciver - Apartment 307

This is a nice little anthology with three stories all by cartoonists who noticed that they all live in apartment's numbered 307 (not the same apartment or even the same city). They all wrote very different stories about their homes. There's a review of it by Rob Clough here. Noah Van Sciver I've seen with his 'Cartoonist Interviews' in the Comics Journal and his art here looks very similar. He draws himself very ugly but I like his drawing, nice and cartoony. Josh Blair uses a lot of diagrams and pictograms to show how climbing the 42 stairs to his third floor apartment are the main source of exercise for him. He says how it's a good thing he doesn't live on the fourth floor... here's a link to the Candy or Medicine blog where you can buy it.

Joey Alison Sayers - Just So You Know #1

This is Joey Alison Sayers autobiographical comic about being transgendered and starting living as a woman. It's drawn in the style of the cover above with big round heads. It's a very happy way of drawing which makes the comic much lighter and happier, even when it deals with painful things, like her telling her mum and dad she's decided to become a woman. It's full of funny little stories such as a series of pages called 'Am I A Bitch Now?'. Have a look at her website as she does a series called 'Thingpart' which is often very funny.

David Mazzucchelli - Asterios Polyp

There has been a lot of hype and excitement about this book so I ordered it nice and early and hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed. I haven’t read anything else by Mazzucchelli so didn’t know what to expect. It’s very good I am pleased to say. The drawing is wonderful and the story is exceedingly well crafted, full of circular references. Everything has meanings and comes back later in the story. It’s surprisingly sweet too and a really nice read, it’s funny too. Highly recommended.