Welcome back, dear reader! Today is the last installment of The Comics That Challenged Me in 2018. I hope you found the list interesting – let’s get right into the last five books.
I’ve got a lot of artists published by Perfectly Acceptable on the list this year, and partially that’s because the press is taking risks, pushing its zines to the limit of what the format can tolerate. Anna Haifisch is one the most talented cartoonists working today, and she has a new 28-page comb-bound zine. This one, The Mouse Glass, follows a similar format to her 2017 comic Drifter – a storybook image captioned at the bottom of the page. In this comic, Haifisch delivers a one-hit K.O. parody of the current state of international politics. Haifisch has a simple, cartoony style, but in this specific comic she uses it to great effect, juxtaposing cute looking animals with their loathesome thoughts and actions.
The Lie and How We Told It – Tommi Parrish
I reviewed this book in the middle of January this year, and it’s a book that’s been on my mind since. Parrish’s painted comics are beautiful, but the formal inventiveness of The Lie And How We Told It was unparalleled this year. Using a metafictional book, “One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand,” as a lynch pin to hold the whole comic together was a fascinating choice, and one that paid clear dividends.
Dognurse – Margot Ferrick
I added this to my list of books I liked in 2018 over at Your Chicken Enemy, but I think it bears revisiting here. In Dognurse, a child named Songy has a strange nose and a disease called mumble-mouth who receives care from a visiting nurse named Dognurse. With Dognurse, Ferrick approaches the topic of parental neglect and the facade of care, but it’s an opaque comic and rewards close reading. Ferrick’s art throughout the book is beautiful with decadent linework and a fullness of figure you won’t see in other comics. This comic was a hard read, both because of its opaqueness, and for the way it affected my emotional state. There’s a deep melancholy in Ferrick’s recent work that is transmitted extremely effectively to me as a critic and reader. Ferrick is a master of building emotion into the flow of each page, and Dognurse was another powerful example of that mastery.
Extract – Walker Tate
I got this 2015 zine by Walker Tate from Domino Books, and got around to reading it this fall. What I found was a formal exercise where the movement and size of panels drives the storytelling and drawing. Tate subdivides his pages in so many ways that panels need to be numbered in order to help the reader move through the comic. The only reason Extract works is Tate’s precise line. This was an impressive, dizzying comic, the cleanest looking cacophony I’ve ever read.
Summer Carnage: a Belair Story – Jake Terrell
The first text in Jake Terrell’s latest comic is the word “meanwhile,” an indication that this book isn’t going to operate like you expect. And that is an assumption that largely held true. Figures speak with speech bubbles that have no text, panels seem to have an order that is largely intuitive but not logical. This isn’t a book you read as much as a book you soak up. There’s a dream logic to Summer Carnage: a Belair Story that feels inescapable. The book is delicate, as Terrell’s cartooning often is, but Summer Carnage: a Belair Story takes the proclivities of his previous book Extended Play, and turns them up to 11.
The finalized list will go up on Friday. We’ll take that day as a break day and get back to regularly scheduled reviews next week. I hope you enjoyed this series, and as always I’m interested in what you think about the books I selected! Let’s talk, either in the comments or over at Twitter.
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So I just discovered something straight out of a fever dream…
Apparently, from 2014 to 2017 a number of artists from all over the world recreated the Manga Akira with characters from The Simpsons and called it “Bartkira”
and this wasn’t just some “ha ha look at this funny thing” oneshot…
they recreated all 6 volumes with 300-400 pages each
Bart is Kaneda, Millhouse is Tetsuo and Akira… well Ralph is Akira…
I wish I was making this up…
Is this the rumored American Akira remake? We’ll never know…
well the original website doesn’t seem to work properly anymore so I uploaded all 6 volumes here for all of you to enjoy… have fun
Emma Stone screaming “I’m sorry” during Sandra Oh’s monologue shows that at any given moment, without a hint of irony, White women will insert themselves into a woman of color’s spotlight. She HAD to say something, despite the years and years of silence on the issue, right then and there as a half laugh for…what? To turn the real issue of white washing into a joke? To reinsert herself into the conversation when her decisions hurt Asian actors like Sandra? It’s all liberal posturing disgusing white fragility because she most definitely felt embarrassed to be indirectly called out for her complicity in white washing.
Why else yell an apology after four years of her just never really addressing it? It’s white guilt taken to a literal extreme to pander to the audience for cheap woke laughs. “Look at her, she’s aware of the issues! And she’s sorry!!! XD total self own!” White women can’t bare to sit in their uncomfortability when they are confronted with their complicity and try to detract from it in any way possible. Sure, it’s just a throw away comment but really think about the ideology that fueled her need to say that in the first place, at the time she said it, and the reaction of her saying it from a most white crowd. By dismissing the comment as a jokey, self depreciating nod, we dismiss how white people can constantly do some self flaggration, usually publically, years after the damage has already been done. We see it over and over again.
Yes I know Sandra and Andy’s joint monologue was to supposed to be light hearted and fun, poking satirical fun at topics etc etc but it’s something to chew on. The whole interaction was brief (Emma’s comment wasn’t planned and she literally injected it into the monologue) but is pretty illuminating.
hey staff why did all the adult artists get banned but I’m still surrounded by pornbots and terrible harem fantasy game ads with crying abused women in them, I know the answer is MONEY I just really wanted to bring it up and acknowledge how fucked that is
Zoe Leonard I Want a President, High Line, New York city, 1992 I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.
i’d hate to be a high schooler in this day and age. i see young ass girls on youtube doing “grwm freshman year” full beat 28 inch wigs and its like……. when i was in high school you’d be lucky if we didnt show up in our pajamas. maybe a lil mascara here n there. idk i just feel bad that there’s so much sexual pressure on these younger girls because of social media
I dont even feel bad because its all a choice tbh
im not gonna jump on you for this response because you’re only 19 but you saying that young girls being forced to conform to societal standards is a “choice” aint it chief. nobody chooses to be negatively impacted by sexism and the male gaze it just kind of happens. it’s insidious. and definitely not by choice
