Good morning, friends. Today we present the final installment of Jeremy Sorese's five-day tenure at the helm of our Cartoonist's Diary feature. This one takes place at a relative's 95th birthday party. Thanks, Jeremy!
We also have two review for you. First, Greg Hunter is back to wrestle with the first issue of Citizen Jack, Image's new "political satire" from Sam Humphries and Tommy Patterson:
...By the time Jack announces his nominal campaign, the comic has not shared any real indication of his politics. The closest it gets is Jack’s charge that, “Political elites are killing this country,” one of the few things members of both party bases might agree on. Armando Iannucci (Veep, The Thick of It) has included similar ambiguities in his work, and like the comic’s resemblances to some much-loved earlier antihero stories, this would put Humphries and Patterson in good company. Even so, throughout Citizen Jack, the choice plays not like a bucking of politics-as-usual but like an unwillingness to alienate any reader too soon.
Later, via a bland burlesque of cable news, the first issue introduces Jack’s competition, the presumptive nominees of … the Patriot Party and the Freedom Party. Humphries may well have an extensive rationale for this choice, but it reads like still more fence straddling—another feature of a story that services the impulse to say, “Boo! Politics” while seeking to challenge no one.
We also have another debut reviewer (the third this week!), Monica Johnson, who is here to tell us about Maggie Thrash's Honor Girl, a YA lesbian summer-camp story.
Thrash, a staff writer for Rookie Magazine, is clearly no SVA graduate. But that’s not a dig on her drawing skills. It is just to say that whether she lacks or doesn’t give a crap about slick art-school-style drafting techniques, she’s really a storyteller, and a strong one. Thrash certainly has drawing skills, but they’re her own, and they’re specifically savvy for the story she is telling. Her bare-bones line drawings colored with watercolor pencils seem to be channeled directly from her 15-year-old self. The drawings have the rawness and bright-eyed directness of the teenager depicted in them, who can’t hide behind a catalog of romantic experience and mastery. This is part of the brilliance of the comic medium itself—the way images work in concert with the literal to tell a deeper, much richer story—and Thrash really hits the mark with it. The drawings are so believably vulnerable, which is maybe why her story feels so devastating.
Also, I hope you noticed that Joe McCulloch sneakily returned to his Tuesday Week in Comics! post to add a significant piece on a comic he picked up at CAB, Lilin, an underground Mexican "internet sex" comic from an artist named Mou.
Lilin, notably, is a sex comic in which nobody is ever seen engaging in sex acts with another person; it is very contemporary, then, in its explicit depictions of male and female masturbation, and Lilin, the demon -- because who really believed talk of the Grail would be the only pertinent bit of religious lore? -- is equally modern in spreading sexually-transmitted diseases over the internet. Her squirt videos somersault into ejaculations of living tar, while the boys develop similar fat pustules on their fapping hands. Everybody is giving birth, and it is these transformations that Mou indulges with his most texture-heavy drawing, dominated by shiny contrasts of solid black against blank white. Eventually, these values come to dominate his pages as Lilin zips up a vinyl bondage uniform and takes to the night to summon her legion, her transcended rank, her animal slaves, unleashed for the symbolic destruction of a convenience store and the murder of everybody present.
So go back to that post if you didn't catch it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Reviews & Commentary. Illogical Volume has a very strong piece on Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, and the From Hell Companion over at Mindless Ones. (Coincidentally, Alan Moore is currently in the news for non-comics reasons.)
Kim O'Connor also has a strong piece on John Porcellino's King-Cat 75 at Comics & Cola.
Jon Vinson returns to Suehiro Maruo and his Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, a book that is decidedly not for everyone.
—Video. Finally, via Mike Lynch, enjoy this 1986 profile of Gary Larson:
