Today at the Comics Journal, we're questioning our decision to move halfway across the country to a winter hellscape that makes Detroit look positively tropical, and we're doing so while reading all about Subjective Line Weight, the comic project that has consumed Andrea Leigh Shockling as of late.
Subjective Line Weight started as an opportunity for me to talk with other women about their bodies and the realization that we all have really complicated conflicting feelings about ourselves. Even somebody who I might project onto them beauty and confidence and all of the things I aspire to and I wish that I had, deep down inside they are just as fucked up as I am. We’re all struggling with the way that we feel about our bodies and our bodies moving through society. I started having more and more of these conversations with people. I have a closed private group on Facebook of friends and acquaintances talking about this sort of thing. I believe that the more that we normalize these stories about our bodies, the better we feel. It doesn’t solve the problem that is women’s bodies are not our own. We can’t master that problem just by sharing our stories, but it’s cathartic and also very validating to recognize yourself in somebody else’s experience.
Today's review comes to us from J. Caleb Mozzocco, who came away from Paco Roca's Twists of Fate sobered, as you should by harrowing real world memoirs of war.
Miguel isn’t the young, idealistic anarchist warrior, suffering and fighting in the hopes of avenging his country against fascism. Nor is he the old man anxiously awaiting a chronic liver disease to claim his life, walking with a crutch to and from the cemetery every day and griping at his younger neighbor. He’s both of those, and more, and by telling his story, and telling the story of him telling his story, Roca creates a fuller, more accurate portrait, giving Miguel an active role and ownership over the graphic novel, even if he never draws a single line of it.
While I love Graeme and Jeff, I couldn't give two shits about The Fantastic Four (except for all the Akira shit they did in the last movie, [kisses fingers forever])--so I never did give their Baxter Building podcast a chance. But I'm hella ready for their next one, Drokk!, which is a monthly podcast running through Judge Dredd, in order. If humanity is still looking at pop culture seriously in the next generation, there's bound to be a moment when John Wagner's work on Judge Dredd gets recognized--there's simply no better run of storytelling out there, and as real life has now grown closer to his pitch-black take on the future to come, no piece of genre that has better captured the psyche behind American decline. I look forward to hearing what those two have to say about the thing--if it's anything like Douglas Wolk's version of the same, it'll be a hell of good time.
While details are still scarce, there has been social media confirmation regarding the death of cartoonist Ted Stearn online. We will have more coverage and a proper obituary in the next few days.
