BAMF! SNIKT! GLORF! The Comics Thread. - The Bear and Badger

Blue Swirl

Which comic character, famously green, was originally grey?

Spoiler:

From today's One Good Fact email.

Cos

I finished Legend of the Scarlet Blades (Saverio Tenuta) recently which reminded me to jump back in here. It took me a few sittings to get through, it's quite intense at points but also one of the more original things I've read in the last year or so. The artwork is absolutely stunning and whilst the story perhaps doesn't reach the same heights, the second half in particular is excellent.

A few other bits I've read this year:
Descender Vol 2 (Jeff Lemire) - I loved vol 1 but took me so long to get around to the second. It didn't disappoint and really need to get around to ordering the next few books. Lovely style and artwork, and a mix of intriguing/terrifying concepts that really good sci-fi does so well.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (Ram V.) - another solid Tin recommendation. A fascinating story about death but told in a more light hearted and somewhat positive manner that I appreciated, not least because it didn't kick in the old existential dread. Also reading something self contained was its own joy, need to do more of that. I have Daytripper on stand by too.

Battlefields Vol 1 (Garth Ennis) - a bit of shame this as I picked it up half remembering reading some of it on first publication in my younger years but it really didn't hold up. Not the first time I've experienced that with Ennis more recently so must be more selective on what I read. This was quite poor by any standard to be fair, schlocky and wasteful of interesting real life stories.

Blue Swirl

Latest Marvel What if? asks what would happen if Burke lived in Aliens. Bonus: it's co-written by the actor who played the corporate douchebag.

tin_robot

Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey

I'm about to write a bit about this, but really, if you're happy to just take the recommendation blind don't read anything more than the next sentence, and then go get it. This is an absolute masterpiece - but you need to stick with it, trust me.

You need more? Fair enough. There's a lot I could say, although, again, I'd argue the less you know the better it is. If you must, then the blurb on the back by Neil Gaiman is a nigh perfect summary:

"When I began to read Why Don't You Love Me? I thought it read like any number of slightly surrealistic slightly vapid early-2000s stories that were basically the cartoonist's way of telling you they hated everyone and everything. And then it came into focus and it wasn't that thing at all. And then it came into focus again, uplifting and heartbreaking and (a word that I use sparingly) relevant. The kind of story, leading to a last panel that's all pain and joy and delivers the whole thing. What a masterwork. To understand all is to forgive all."

Yeah. That's just about it. What Gaiman said, you don't need me.

You do? OK - have a bit more then... The whole thing's presented as a daily comic strip, about the worst parents in the world, Mark and Claire. Claire is severely depressed, and treats her children with at best apathy, and at worst outright cruelty. Mark tries, but is hopeless with children, and can't even get his son's name right most of the time.

For just over 50% of the book's run time, that's about it. A series of sad exchanges, presented almost as gags, where the punchline seems to be "isn't life shit"? There's a sense of more, but it's not clear what. I read this section slowly, a couple of pages at a time - it was bleak but with a dark humour that leant itself to small bites.

Whilst Mark and Claire are horrific, they are also surprisingly sympathetic, and as a reader I found myself torn. They feel incredibly human whilst simultaneously acting at times so cruelly as to be unfathomable. They are both sympathetic, and monstrous.

Then a thing happens, and you start to view them differently.

To say more risks breaking the thing, so I'll say it again - read it, and stick with it. The grim tedium of the first half has a point to it. The whole, taken together, is one of the most perfectly realised bits of fiction I've come across in any format.

Read it before some idiot ruins it by making it into a TV show that misses the point entirely.

Funkstain

I have now read this, and just wanted to say thank you to Tin.

Thank you Tin

Diluted Dante

Too expensive for me. I'll keep it bookmarked and hopefully will come down at some point.

Gremill

I'll be getting that, sounds amazing. I've got a few to get through before then though - Black Hammer Vol 1 and another Tin inspired purchase, Coda.

acemuzzy

I can't really ask my wife to get that for me as a birthday present cos she'll take the title literally

Diluted Dante

So this was gifted to me by an incredibly generous badger. Thank you very much, because it is absolutely brilliant.

You really can't talk much about it without, as Tin says, breaking it. But I can say that I highly recommend that if you read one comic this year, it should be this.

I've given it straight to my housemate to read.

Blue Swirl

I've added it to my wish list. You've persuaded me.

acemuzzy

tin_robot wrote:

Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey

The whole, taken together, is one of the most perfectly realised bits of fiction I've come across in any format.

I have also now just finished this, but had a rather different conclusion. Or at least, I thought it was fine, but would get nowhere near the hyperbole above.

Spoiler:

acemuzzy

Spoiler:

tin_robot

acemuzzy wrote:

tin_robot wrote:

Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B Rainey

The whole, taken together, is one of the most perfectly realised bits of fiction I've come across in any format.

I have also now just finished this, but had a rather different conclusion. Or at least, I thought it was fine, but would get nowhere near the hyperbole above.

Spoiler:

maybe I don't quite get the point it's trying to make, or but trying to make. With the closing scene, that there's a universe out there that things are perfect in? That the fact life sucks might not be our fault? Is it actually positing that as legit, or pure escapism? I'm fine with it as the latter, but the respect people seem to be giving it suggests they're seeing greater merit, which I kinda don't. Meh, maybe I'm just in a grump, and it would exactly be the first time people have said something's great I've been "really?" Glad Badgers are enjoying it anyway, I guess I did well enough, but yeah.

Sorry you didn't connect with it in the same way that I did. There are some elements that possibly hit me harder purely because of who I am. For what it's worth, here's my very spoilery view on what's happening...

Spoiler:

I suppose for the first half of the book I had a couple of emotions. Firstly I was intrigued. It was clear something more than shitty parenting was going on, but it wasn't clear what. (From the very first page, where Claire says "you mean all this might be real?"). Secondly, and this may be one of the places where "who I am" matters, it felt horribly familiar. I could relate a little too well to the kids in the story (though, luckily for me, my Mum was awesome) - and also my own attempts to understand the "why" of my abusive family members as I've grown up, and become a father myself. I also thought the depictions of the Mum's depression were remarkably spot on (much more so than some more straight forward comics). Finally, I enjoyed the conceit of wrapping it up as a daily comic strip, leaving you instinctively looking for a punchline where there often wasn't one.

Oh, and the scene when the kid finally asks the title question? That hit me very hard indeed, and was far, far too familiar.

The kind of mounting "what's going on?" feeling, heightened by the weird presentation, and then the clear signs that the world is going to shit but they seemingly don't care was enough to get me through that otherwise difficult, deliberately slightly tedious, first half. And then The Thing happens.

That's when I stopped reading a bit every day and consumed whole chunks of it in one go. Partly because I really wanted to understand, and partly because the misery and horror had been replaced by an entirely different kind of energy. The return to normality - the comfort it brings Claire and the confusion it brings Mark - felt like both an opportunity to breathe and a chance to understand them better. I found myself reconsidering the first section, what they had both lost and gained, and how they tried to make sense of that change. It's also the point at which it felt like the book became less a piece about shitty relationships or depression or parenting, and a more general meditation on all of us, as a culture.

In the second half, it felt like both of them were trying to work out how to live, and to understand what actually matters. They look back, they look forward, desperately trying to find their bearings and to fathom what they care about. I guess some of this is familiar. Does your job really matter that much? What should we be spending our lives doing. Gradually it seems to me that they come to understand that they are not defined by their jobs, or who they were, or where they're going, but the connections they have to other people and each other. Claire only understands how much she cared about Sally and Charley once they are no longer there.

What's notable as well is that twice now we've seen the world moving inexorably towards apocalypse, and the way that humanity reacts to it. An initial response of horror, and then a rapid return to the hamster wheels we're all trapped in, carrying on as if nothing's happened, focussing on those tiny petty irrelevancies rather than facing more difficult truths. That seemed... relevant to now I guess.

By the time you get those white boxes again you know exactly what's going on (even if you don't know why). At that point, understanding it all, was the second massive gut punch for me. In the first world really all you know is Mark,Claire and the kids. The painful wrench - particularly and ironically for Claire - is the loss of the children. The second time though, when Mark and Claire have been actually living in the world, and thus we've experienced it with them, to have that swept away felt incredibly painful. It's then that I felt a sense of the loss of a whole world. And that understanding reframes the very start of the book too - the knowledge that it's already happened once before we even joined them.

And yet it's oddly hopeful. That final page, and the knowledge that this time, the kids (whoever they are) will get loved. That Claire and Mark will be able to find at least one person in the world they can connect with. It's still bleak, it seems certain that this world too will end, but if nothing else, it's better.

When I finished I went back and read it again - the first half becomes quite different when you know why Claire's depressed, why Mark is so clueless.

As to what it all means? I don't know either really. I chose to take it literally - they really are just being displaced to other versions of themselves every time the world ends. (And liked to imagine that everyone else was too, albeit to other worlds, each ultimately learning the same lessons that Mark and Sally learn.)

It can certainly be taken as a metaphor for mental health. Specifically I would say depression, rather than schizophrenia. That horrible empty hole into which people descend, where everything becomes pointless and empty - and even more so the confusing sensation of emerging from that hole, finding the world destroyed around you, and having to try and live in it, or retreat back the way you came.

But more, for me, it was a call to re-evaluate the way we all live. The cold isolation we keep from each other, the rigid rhythms of our lives seemingly built to distract us from the reality of what we do to the world - and the importance of peeling away all that bullshit and just noticing the people around us, why they matter, and what makes them who they are - and how much we'll miss every last one of the bastards if they all got erased tomorrow.

acemuzzy

Thank you for all that!

Spoiler:

Howdy, Stranger!

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