Today at TCJ, we've got that review action that rumors say you crave. This Tuesday, it's our first piece from young firebrand Helen Chazan, who is here to take on Die Laughing, a collection of André Franquin's comics recently published by Fantagraphics. Here's Chazan's opener, the "Chazaner", if you will:
A haggard, silhouetted man stumbles across a snowy landscape. The terrain is vastly black, a blank white curve of snow accentuated by black night sky only a solid layer of ink can provide. The stumbling man casts a more energetic figure as he crests the seemingly endless snowbank. The lively and frantic mark-making that composes his form wobbles with a will to live, yet these fragile splotches also droop and fray with exhaustion like broken twigs or maybe frozen snot dribbling out of the cartoon guy’s big schnozz. Our unnamed hero curses of his inevitable death in the ice hell that is his life, when in the distance, bright lights appear that suggest an end. Our man rejoices – could this be civilization? No. The lights are a pack of hungry wolves, whose jet black bodies replace the dark of night in a brutally minimal panel, our small man cowering in the corner of the frame. Horrible death cannot be avoided, and dreaming otherwise will only worsen the punishment –a charming gag. It’s meant to be funny, which you can tell because these are cartoon characters, appearing in a funny book.
Meanwhile, on the free comics front, we've got Day Two of Colleen Frakes' Alaskan Adventure. (We asked her to officially call it that, but received no response). In today's installment, we find out that science behind Frakes desire to take a plane (almost) all the way to where Santa lives.
Elsewhere, I liked this Venom review because it's a stone cold assessment of the moving target nature of making an appealing super-hero comic when the publisher keeps restarting the book for "new readers", while picking up twenty year old character threads to appeal to the people who might watch an upcoming movie that's based on said twenty year old threads, while also trying to acknowledge what happened in the last seven years because people seemed to dig it even though it will make zero sense to the imagined hordes that Marvel thinks Tom Hardy will be roping in, while also slapping a second number on the book to appeal to middle aged readers who have stuck it out for an even longer period of time and might be aware how many times a new number one has been pasted on the title.
Over at That Groovy site where I keep spending all my time, you'll find a list of covers that never got used in glorious black and white: it's a treat, and I recommend do it.
Here's the cover to the first magazine sized issue of The Comics Journal, which featured photos of the Superman movie, "First Photos" at that. Rest in peace, Margot Kidder: you never took it easy, but you sure seemed to have it figured out by the end.
