Reset: written and illustrated by Peter Bagge (2012-2013): Peter Bagge, that great cartoonist of the distorted, grotesque mundane contemporary world (Buddy, Neat Stuff, Hate) turns to a piece of near-science fiction in this sharp, often hilarious graphic novel.
Guy Krause is a washed-up comedian/comic actor who accepts a job testing out a new Virtual Reality set-up. But not all is what it seems. For one, the makers of the VR set-up have exhaustively interviewed even minor, long-ago acquaintances of Krause so that his life from high school onwards can be simulated and manipulated depending on what decisions he makes. For another, this may not be a project meant for entertainment.
Bagge's linework is superb as always, as is his satiric but probing and sensitive writing. Like most of Bagge's protagonists, Krause is both annoying and sympathetic, as are the various supporting characters. Recommended.
Sandman Presents: The Furies: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by John Bolton (2003): Mike Carey and John Bolton bring some closure to the saga of Lyta Hall as seen in Neil Gaiman's Sandman in the 1980's and 1990's. Hall, a second-generation superhero, became a pawn in Desire's plot to kill Dream because Hall herself was a descendant/avatar of the Greek Furies -- the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, tasked by the universe with punishing those guilty of killing blood relatives. To make a long story short, Desire succeeded. Sort of. The then-current Dream did indeed die, but Dream itself cannot die: Lyta's infant son, born in The Dreaming, became the new Dream.
Hall's memories of what happened while she pursued vengeance have become vague and cloudy as The Furies begins. She's still suffering from PTSD three years after the events seen in the concluding issues of The Sandman. An attempt to restart her life by taking a job as an interpreter for an American theatre troupe headed to a Greek drama festival seems like a good idea at the time.
It isn't, of course, because gods and monsters and spirits of vengeance just can't leave Lyta Hall alone. Carey's prose fleshes out Hall's character poignantly -- despite her super-strength, she's an aimless wreck because of what the supernatural has done to her life. She's allowed herself to be acted upon again and again. The Furies sees her attempt to seize Agency in her own life even as the supernatural comes pouring back in looking for her to play the pawn once again in a Game of Gods.
I'm not a fan of artist John Bolton's incorporation of retouched photos in his art since computer technology allowed him to do this sort of thing -- there are points that The Furies feels like the least amusing fumetti ever. There's a point to the mix of photos and fantastic drawings -- a juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane -- that comes through at some points and fails at others. Hermes looks especially ridiculous in quasi-photo-realistic form.
As an admirer of Bolton's earlier comics work, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the art here. Only the fully drawn sections bear comparison with his fine 1980's and 1990's work, some of it for the original Sandman and its older sister John Constantine Hellblazer (the latter in a splendid Annual about the 'original' Constantine, the Emperor, and his ties to our cynical modern-day magician). It's really Carey's fine writing, with its bursts of sympathy and its unnerving moments in which the supernatural breaks through, hideous and inhuman, that does much of the heavy lifting. Recommended.
Topsy Turvy: written and illustrated by Peter Kuper (1997-2000/Collected 2000): Collection of the terrific Kuper's political cartoons from the late 1990's demonstrates that the more things change, yadda yadda yadda: many of the strips lampoon Donald Trump's presidential ambitions while others lament America's love affair with guns and the NRA's love affair with gun-loving Americans. Yes, it's the American Treadmill to Oblivion. All aboard! Recommended.
The Complete Crumb Volume 15 by Robert Crumb (1983-1985; 2001): By the early 1980's, cartoonist and writer Robert Crumb was considered a has-been by a lot of people in the comics business, a relic of the Underground Comix of the 1960's and early 1970's whose time had come and gone. Crumb was well aware of this judgment.
And boy, were those people wrong.
What would instead soon happen would be Crumb's gradual and astounding Renaissance, one that has continued to this day. He'd work out new and commanding art styles, writing subjects, and obsessions. He'd co-edit the uneven but always fascinating and boundary-pushing Weirdo with young Turk Peter Bagge. He'd even release an album with his band of old-time blues aficiandos. And be the subject of a successful documentary. There's never been a second act in an American artist or writer's life to match it.
This volume, comprising material mostly from the years 1983-85, captures the beginnings of Crumb's recrudescence. Along with posters and book illustrations and covers for Weirdo, Volume 15 of the Complete Crumb also reprints the adventures of Mode O'Day, Crumb's take on early 1980's social climbing. Other media satires and commentaries appear, including Crumb's jeremiad against all post-1930 popular music and an unhinged Reagan-era take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
We also get his foray into the history of psychoanalysis, in which Crumb begins to work out the style he would refine and use over the next decades in his historical pieces, fine-lined and rigorously realistic without being photo-realistic, a style that would help make his recent adaptation of the Book of Genesis so compelling.
There's never really been anyone quite like Crumb in American art, comics, or letters. I suppose Mark Twain is the obvious comparison, but by the time he was in his 60's, Twain's best work was behind him. Crumb sometimes seems to be only getting started. He's a global treasure, and if any cartoonist should be the first to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, it's him in all his sweaty, fetishistic, frustrating, curmudeonly, humane, satiric glory. Actually, now I know who he reminds me of -- Neil Young, who also keeps trying to expand and improve while his contemporaries coast on past glories or slowly fade away. Highly recommended.
Buddy Does Jersey: written and illustrated by Peter Bagge and others (1994-98; collected 2007): Peter Bagge has consistently been one of America's greatest cartoonists for nearly thirty years now, from his days on the acidic Neat Stuff in the 1980's to his new series Retro today.
He's written and drawn the adventures of New Jersey's Bradley family for much of that time, first in Neat Stuff and ultimately in the 1990's in Hate, which focused upon slacker son 20-something Buddy's adventures in Seattle and then his return to Jersey. It's one of the ten greatest sustained comics narratives, a bildungsroman about the sarcastic, undermotivated Buddy and all his screwed-up friends and family.
Buddy Does Jersey returns Buddy to his hometown with squirrelly girlfriend Lisa. Stuck living in his parents' basement, Buddy and Lisa squabble within the greater squabblings of Buddy's father, mother, alcoholic younger brother, and angry single-parent sister. People say and do small, terrible things to one another, though there are grace notes scattered throughout. The whole thing seems sarcastically realistic, with Bagge's jagged cartooning portraying the angry inner lives of these characters in various hilarious and startling and sympathetic ways.
By definition, Bagge is a 'Big Foot' cartoonist -- his characters stretch, spindle, and fold for comic and dramatic effect; by inclination, he's a kitchen-sink dramatist. The characters may live lives of desperation in a decaying America, but they're not lives of quiet desperation: everyone sounds off, repeatedly, often while under the influence of various and sundry drugs and alcohol. As funny as much of this can be, it remains fundamentally dramatic: the situations that occur may sometimes stretch credibility, but they never break it.
And throughout, the art shines as both a dramatic and comedic tool: the death of one character is about as horrific as it gets without in the least being realistically graphic; a running visual gag that involves a broken-down Monster Truck Buddy buys to use as personal transportation never stops being visually funny. This is one of the great comic narratives that people are thinking of when they try to recommend comics to people who don't read superhero comics: brilliant, sad, cynical, dementedly funny and pointed as all hell in its depiction of the dynamics among dissatisfied people of all ages. Highest recommendation.
