Books! More books! Somebody stop me! I keep buying books!
I’ve picked up some fun ones too. Here’s what I’ve been looking at lately.
Dwellings
I was a really big fan Stephens’ comics back in the 90s. Atomic City Tales, Land of Nod, Jet Cat — I bought them all.
And then he disappeared. For over a decade.
So I was really excited when he made his turned to comics a few years ago with an all-new series, Dwellings, which has now finally been collected in hardcover.
In his return to comics, Stephens has really refined his art style. It reminds me a lot of old Harvey comics — Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy, etc. I assumed from looking at the art that the stories in Dwellings would contain some amount of levity. And perhaps a tongue-in-cheek “kid lit” approach to the writing — kinda like his old Jet Cat stuff or Land of Nod.
Boy, was I wrong.
Dwellings is a straight-up horror anthology. The tone is sophisticated, serious, and the characters talk as they would in a modern tv drama. These are “real” horror stories — the kinds of stories Stephen King writes. Grown up stories. But with an art style that makes the book look like it’s for kids? Or like it’s going to spoof kids comics?
But it doesn’t do that at all.
Look, it’s a little weird reading stories that look like kids comics but with captions and dialog that sound like they were written by Ed Brubaker or Greg Rucka. But the stories are really compelling. And the art, while feeling a little bit at odds with the writing, is amazing. I couldn’t put the book down — I read the whole thing, which is rare for me these days. I highly recommend it.
20th Century Boys
I like to think that I read manga, but truthfully my knowledge of manga begins with Otomo (Akira, Domu, Memories, etc.) and ends with Miyazaki (Nausicaä). I’ve also read a little bit of Appleseed, some Lone Wolf & Cub, and a bit of Naruto — but that’s about it.
A reference to 20th Century Boys recently popped up in one of my social media feeds and I decided to check it out. I’m up to volume 15 or 16 at this point — nearing the end. Like Dwellings, it’s another page turner.
I love Naoki Urasawa’s art style — and I really love the way he constructs his pages. The “camera shots” he picks for each panel are very cinematic. I’ve been screenshotting a lot of pages from the book to study later.
The writing itself is also very strong. There is a mystery at the heart of the story and in each issue Urasawa manages to add another little twist to that mystery that always seems to result in me wanting to keep reading for just a little bit longer when I should probably be heading for bed.
If you haven’t read it, here are a couple of the pages I saved to give you a sense of the art style:
Uncle Scrooge: His Life & Times
I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Carl Barks recently, so when I had the opportunity to pick up this mid-80s collection of his Uncle Scrooge comics for cheap, I bought it. It’s a nice big oversized collection — 9.5″ x 13″!
If you haven’t heard of Carl Barks, he spent most of his career working on Disney comics in complete anonymity. A whole generation of kids grew up reading his stories but had no idea who he was — his name wasn’t printed in the books. So he was known to fans only as, “The Good Duck Artist.” More importantly, Barks had no idea his comics were popular — the comics company didn’t forward any of his fan mail to him. It took over 15 years before a couple fans finally tracked him down and he learned of his fame. Crazy.
Haven’t had a chance to read much of this yet — it’s in the queue. I’m excited to see what all the fuss is about.
MAD’s Original Idiots
I think I already have a lot of these stories in other collections, but I couldn’t pass these up.
The art is insanely good. Every panel is jam packed with visual gags and every little detail is beautifully rendered. I honestly don’t know how they managed to pack this much into these pages working under the tight scheduling deadlines they must have faced. It’s awe inspiring. Jack Davis and Will Elder are two of the all-time greats and it’s really fun to study their line work.
Memories of Frank Patterson
Okay, this was a bit of an odd one. I didn’t know anything about Frank Patterson when I picked up this book. It turns out that he was an early-20th century English illustrator who drew mostly for cycling magazines? 🤷♂️
Imagine a time when illustration was so popular that you could build an entire career out of drawing pictures for cycling magazines!
Really beautiful line work. I really love Patterson’s approach to buildings and environments and I’m hoping to pick up a few tricks that might help me with Tiny Dracula.
