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O sensitive hipsters, your comic book prayers have been answered by "Or Else," by Kevin Huizenga. If you put your copy of Lost in Translation, your Death Cab for Cutie albums, and your hoodie collection into a comicbookization machine, this would the daydreamy, meandering, doe-eyed result. The book's intermittant story associates itself with Glenn Ganges, a cute but unremarkable 30something with a life that is utterly ordinary, not to mention almost totally free of dialogue.
Glenn's adventures are unremarkable -- throwing a rotten apple out for the squirrels, catching a bug in the basement, watching a pigeon wander through traffic -- but the quiet, meditative patience of the art make the book a cozy read. For example, eight panels -- three pages in all -- are devoted to almost totally identical illustations of a cat toying with a beetle. It's something totally unexciting and unsuspenseful, but you know if you saw that happening in real life, you'd stop to watch. And just like in real life, that calming instinct compells you to stop and watch when you see it in the comic, too, nicely rendered in Huizenga's simple, emotive line drawings. Check plus.
After the jump: romance in the pants, and also evil.
Marvel's not only about their patented perverts in tight underwear: they've got some Special Projects here and there. "Special" is a good way to describe "Marvel Romance Redux," in which a cabal of writers dig into the Marvel archives, find some 50-year-old romance comics (yes, such things really existed, and they were exactly as cheesy as you think) ... and then supply snide new dialogue. It's kind of Space Ghostish, or like what Woody Allen did with What's Up, Tiger Lily, with the only difference being ... uh ... well it's pretty much EXACTLY he did with What's Up, Tiger Lily.
The new dialogue's plenty silly -- our favorite was a tender embrace that was probably originally bracketed with romantic dialogue, but now had the girl mentioning that her cheeks were stuffed with tater tots and the boy demanding, "gimme them taters, baby! Mmmm... still crunchy." But we kept wondering, what audience is this project meant for? Who's going to buy this? Maybe -- maybe -- if it had recurring above-the-meta hosts, like MST3K, this might have more of a hook. As it is, it's a clever idea that gave us a couple of pages of chuckles before we'd had our fill.
Finally, this week, we've got Alan Moore in what must've been a very different mood from the one he was in when he wrote V for Vendetta. Comprised of strips riginally published in the mid-80s, The Complete D.R. and Quinch chronicles the foibles of two icky low-life aliens, intent on pursuing a life of destructive, cruel, careless, ugly hedonism. The blow stuff up, and get innocent people blamed, and in general make a nuisance of themselves, we yawned our way through the whole, thing, since there's isn't a lot of texture to the book's tone; D.R. and Quinch are unequivocably bad beings, and they do bad stuff, and that's pretty much all there is to be said for them.
And hey: have you been following along with Isotope's blog? They're offering downloads (legal!) of a bunch of awesome books all this week. Go get 'em.
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