Driving Short Distances

This book is a graphic novel by Joff Winterhart - it was a birthday present from my brother, and I've just read the whole thing in a single sitting. It made me profoundly sad, and hopeful, and a tad confused about the relationship between these two feelings.

    What's it about? So there's a 27-year-old called Sam who is failing at life and needs a job. The second cousin of his absent father, a man called Keith, offers him one in his delivery business - the work essentially entails driving about for brief periods of time, getting out of the car, then getting back in and repeating the procedure. Over the course of the several months that Sam works for Keith, the pair make the same several dozen stops several dozen times, eat the same pair of pasties for lunch every day, and allow us as the reader an insight into a dizzyingly well-realisedly mundane community of genuinely believable characters, from a diversity of receptionists to jocular compatriots of Keith's from the local business community to a particularly flirty bakery employee to acquaintances of questionable history.

    Mundanity is the key word in that last paragraph. Almost nothing of import happens in this story - it's essentially a twinned character study between Sam's aspirations and Keith's mystery. And this is exceptionally well-drawn.* One almost feels as if postgraduate dissertations in psychology could well be written about these people, so complex and yet on-the-surface their portrayals are. Ultimately I think it's a story about hope - what we have always wanted to be the possible case of things despite where we start our stories, where we compromise to accepting our place when these plans don't quite work out, and where we desperately long to be when all chance of achieving what we once wished for have long since evaporated - yet how if we're lucky, or simply of a certain mindset, there is always either a get-out clause or the option to just decide to be content with our lot.

    This is a delightfully human book. I love the illustrations and these are at least half the fabric that carries the vibe of the story. The dialogue is so natural it almost feels like reading a comic-ized documentary shooting at times, and it is chock-full of minute profoundly-human observations that resonate deeply with the kinds of things one has always noticed but almost never heard authors mention. It's a brilliant well-told pair of character studies that goes on no longer than it needs to and doesn't try to do anything beyond its own scope. Even if you're not a fan of graphic novels per se, if you're a fan of any kind of pure fiction that's good because of what it says and affirms about humanity rather than because it has Big Exciting Moments, you'll almost certainly like this.

* And I'm not there talking about the art style - though that too is exceptionally well-drawn, with a minimalistic blue-and-brown colour palette that fits the soul of the story perfectly, and a shabby but detailed habit of portrayal that lends every frame a depth of character that makes the goings-on, basic as they may be, viscerally relatable and recognisable.

The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside

This book by Edward Monkton is, similarly as I said of the other, basically a twenty-page greetings card about a woman who discovers the concept of inner beauty. Not poetic really, just a bit flat. Might make a good toilet book if you're the sentimental and non-constipated type.

The Wonderful Man

This book by Edward Monkton is basically a twenty-page greetings card about a nice man. It's nice. It would make a great toilet book, if you have relatively undiscerning taste, and only needed a very brief poo.

the Prehistory of the Far Side

This book by Gary Larson is a highly interesting account of how he came to be one of the most highly-respectly and widely-syndicated comic artists of the late 20th-century (see for proof, the books of respective galleries one, two, three and four - as example).

   The first third of the book is a fairly sketchy but endearing autobiography of how Gary grew up with a fascination for nature, all its oddness and darkness; while also having a fairly odd and dark sense of humour - and naturally these things came together. He includes a few scans of drawings he did as a kid, several of which are fairly horrifyingly graphic - but you can see where the roots of the comic he become famous for came from. It's illuminating to say the least.

   The second third of the book is a dryer and more methodical walkthrough of his efforts to get published, then syndicated, then bigger - and so on. This sheds a great deal of insight into what exactly late-20th-century comic publishers were expecting from their artistic contributors and what they weren't, and it does largely seem that whatever Gary Larson was, they weren't expecting and didn't really want.* It took him a while to find his feet in the industry, and even when he did, the people managing his strips for the syndicates often didn't even understand the comics he was sending them - to the point that, if he sent in a batch of comics for a weeks' worth of newspapers, sometimes they would even mix-match captions between one or the other strip without even noticing, and often with no reader complaints that they "didn't get it" either. Gary Larson's style was simply that weird that people just took it as a given if it made close to zero sense. Though the dryest part of the book, I enjoyed this bit the most. It gives a great light into the inner and outer struggles of a cartoonist trying to get recognised and then successful; and with an honesty and humour throughout, never a bitterness.

   The final third is a compilation of Gary's favourite strips from his tenure, though most of these have already been featured in the galleries linked in the first paragraph. Anyway, if you not only have decided that you like The Far Side as a comic but are interested in the artistic, personal, and economic processes by which one becomes as weird a cartoonist as he, then this is definitely worth a read.

* I'll tell you what they wanted. They wanted Marmaduke: a dog who never made a noise or a mess or a fuss, only a vaguely sardonic thought-bubble in response to a borderline completely normal situation. They wanted Garfield: a cat with a big personality comprising of a whole four jokes under his belt that could be recycled ad nauseum at the expense of his obviously manic-depressive owner Jon Arbuckle... what they DID NOT want was a completely off-the-wall unhinged rumination on anthropology or natural history or fuck-knows-what every week with a completely different joke every time that most days even the editors wouldn't understand. But still, The Far Side remains a classic. How many people do you know that own a collection of Marmaduke strips? Exactly.

the Far Side Gallery 4

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery 3

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery 2

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

Watchmen

This book, written by Alan Moore and turned into the resplendent comic it is by Dave Gibbons, is quite rightly affirmed as numbering among the best graphic novels ever written. And it probably is. If you don't want to fall accidentally prey to the Spoiler Virus, much less the inchoate narrative fury of the anarchist wizard* who wrote this thing, look away now and read the novel before you read this post because I'm going to talk about its plot and characters at length. Content warning first because this shit is set in the 1980's.

   First up - the nature of vigilantism in general. The way Moore portrays the motivational and psychological weights that spur someone into this kind of lifestyle is second to none in my book, with Silk Specter and Nite Owl both agreeably displaying the innate childishness (from the fuller perspective) of such activities. I just think he paints the picture so well of what it would be like growing up as a "superhero" then dealing with the fallout of your own doings - police strikes, riots, etc. It sets the scene from the start as a perfectly subversive story about superheroes failing to be super heroic - even when they succeed.

   Why then would anyone choose such a lifestyle? Well, because of man's inhumanity to man - this building strut supports the strong psychological horror elements throughout, seen with especial vivacity through the eyes of Rorschach (who, in turn, sees it through his blotch-fluid mask/face). The scene where he is cross-examined by the prison shrink is absolute genius, and the sheer brutality of some of the crimes described, not to mention acts of violence committed by this paranoid quasi-detective in pursuit of justice and/or survival - is enough to blow anyone's sense for what is normal superhero par for the course. Which leads me nicely onto...

   The Comedian, who though he dies at the beginning of the story embodies the gritty, brutal reality that these characters inhabit better than any other. He was the man who saw the true face of the twentieth century and, as a "joke", decided to become a grotesque, borderline fascist caricature of it. He works for the American government, so that figures. I will say that I am still uncomfortable with how Moore handled his attempted rape of the previous Silk Specter (i.e. her mum) but this still serves an important thematic role for the plot, it's just an uncomfortable flashback all round. That said the Comedian's hyper-gritty aesthetic makes for a compelling read and really helps ground the story overall.

   The other superhero employed by the USA's top echelon is Dr. Manhattan, who is arguably the only "superhero" in the story but may as well be a god (the quote "God is real and he's an American" tells you all you need to know about the hype around this outrageously over-powered character in-world - although I would cite also here Manhattan's own views, "I don't think god exists, and if he does I'm nothing like him") for all the plot purposes. However - he is as fallible and imperfect as anyone who didn't have to reassemble themselves by hacking the fundamentals of atomic reality. He forgets Laurie needs to breathe when he teleports her to Mars, for Pete's sake. A fascinating character who blurs the line between hero and villain, antagonist or not - so well that the moral complexity of his arc throughout the story will leave you breathless. Not to mention imagining the scenes from Vietnam.

   And finally Ozymandias - and every other empire fell... I won't spoil the ending here, but I should just say the way Moore pulls it off is nothing short of a marvel, and his characterisation of the man behind this particular mask is as real-worldly as I can imagine superheroes being made as. Being super smart is proven to be the greatest power when combined with a bit of luck, sheer willpower and the ability to predict the actions of others. Still a whore in Rorscach's book, though I guess that's a fair critique of someone who literally sells action figures of himself and his ex-compatriots/enemies.

   That's the main characters - I've realised I've given away far fewer spoilers than I thought I would given this post's beginning, but I just wanted to give you a flavour of the characters and feel like the post can sit on its own by now. Strongly recommended reading for any fans of the superhero genre, even if you're generally similar to me in only liking the extreme end of this particular category of story. Even short of graphic novels it has to be one of the best novel-length stories out there, superheroes or no. Get reading it if you haven't - and do so before you watch the Zack Snyder film, however relatively good that may be. Thanks also to my housemate Josh, who lent me his copy of this book for my reading.

* I have nothing to corroborate this with, I just assume that if an author is a powerful enough wizard or whatever they auto-cast some kind of curse type doodah on people who disrespect their written works by feeding upon unnecessary spoilers. Oh shit, that puts me in a very precarious position for being here talking about it... Never mind

Spider-Man: Full Circle

This book is a collaborative work by seven different writers as a celebration of the iconic character's 80th birthday since Spidey's inception by the late great Stan Lee - and to tell you the flat-up truth, I'm really not sure what happens in this comic at all, despite just having read the thing twice. It's a helter-skelter ride of apocalyptic fervour-dream wish-wash madness with werewolves and time travel and a fully circular plot and some kind of magical pixie escape clause or something or maybe Peter Parker's just hallucinating the whole thing while stranded dying in space... I don't know. It was very entertaining though, and there's also a really fun little appendix where the writers and editorial team are chatting about how to make the ending work along with the beginning (oh, should note, when the writers were working on this they knew what had just happened but not where the overall story was going or who'd be passing them, or taking, their plot relay torches at each step); shed some neat lights over the collective process of pulling off a story as crazy in content and methodological form as this one. 8/10 overall, might be higher on a further reading in the future, though also I found myself digging into the Omegaverse lore after being prompted into such a curiosity by this comic - and boy, lemme tell you, that's one rabbit-hole you don't want or need to find the bottom of. You've been warned. By a friendly neighbourhood Spiderman [not me].

Ozma of Oz

This book, adapted from the original Frank L. Baum for Marvel Comics by Eric Shanower and Shottie Young, is a marvellously-illustrated romp through the magical land of Ev, where, to give a taste without giving too much away, Dorothy Young of Kansas inexplicably finds herself once again embroiled in a zany adventure - this time teaming up with clockwork men and a sassy hen called Bill to take on the Nome King and restore order to the topsy-turvy kingdom's inhabitants. I've never read the originals nor even seen the movie "The Wizard of Oz" but I really enjoyed this graphic novel and it's made me excited to explore the rest of the series - this is book three of that, and Marvel have done all three, so I'm on the lookout in Oxfam next time (was where I got this one) for the prior two instalments of these actually magical bizarre adventures.

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is a book* collecting several strips from this webcomic by Dan Walsh, which is in turn an extremely simple ripoff of Jim Davis's gargantuanly-popular** strip - each strip having been subjected to one single edit: Garfield is removed. The comedic effect of this, leaving Jon Arbuckle's horrendously sad life to speak for itself, is consistently far funnier than the original comics they're edited from, coming close to sublime in many of the strips.

* This is an almost totally superfluous aside but this post is short enough that I may as well add, it's my brother's book as I got him it for Christmas or something years ago, and I was delighted to notice he's not only kept it but promoted it to that greatest rank a book can aspire to - small shelf near toilet. I flipped through the whole thing in a single shitting.

** And Really Not That Funny, if you ask me.

Kobane Calling

This book is a graphic recount by Italian artist Zerocalcare and translated into English by "RB" - dealing with events surrounding what is happening in Northern Syria, or Western Kurdistan, at the moment - given the revolution that's going on there. If you don't know much about it then this short comic might be a good introduction, as it does take the whole situation seriously and goes some way toward being of educational value. However if you find yourself wanting to go deeper into knowing more about the Kurds & the things going on in Rojava, may I point you toward my Masters dissertation where you may well find what you're looking for in the bibliography. As a comic though this piece works in its format really well; I love the art style, and the visual atmosphere it maintains gives a real edge to the subject matter - the battle for Kobane itself, where YPG-YPJ forces held the city against Daesh - is dealt with appropriately respectfully and the story told in the pages of this slim volume does end on a hopeful note, as I'd like to think we can say of the story of the Kurds generally some day soon.

Persepolis: the Story of a Return

This book, the second part* of a graphic autobiography by Marjane Satrapi (see first part) was even more gripping, radical and brimming with righteous indignation than its prequel. In part two, we follow her through teenage years struggling to find her identity as an Iranian in Europe, as she explores new experiences and subversive ideas - only then to return home to Tehran in desperation for belonging; but here, she meets obstacles of the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic repressing freedoms (especially for women) that only deepen her sense of struggle. As with part one, it's as educational as it is entertaining, and cannot be read without rowing out across a sea of empathic storytelling in a dinghy made of simplistic and striking illustrations; the dialogue matter-of-fact, sharply succinct, so that developments and relationships that spanned years are neatly condensed to their essence in the wider life story in a few pages, and the visual style and deftness of person and setting characterisation really pulls the reader into Satrapi's world.

* Okay fine I know that link is actually just for a book containing both parts - childhood and return - as I received it for Christmas and didn't see the point in reading the whole first half again just so I'd be able to do a post about the whole book. My blog, I make up the rules as I go. Maybe follow the link to the post about the first part anyway as this post is particularly short because I don't want to have to re-type out all my broad reactions to the general style and thrust of what Persepolis is, and the post about part one deals with those adequately.

Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood

This book, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is one that I will not discuss at length but I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm currently halfway through a several-day essay splurge and am reading pretty much everything about historical processes of democratisation in Turkey and Iran that I could easily find - this book, being as it is a more or less autobiographical account of the author's life from ages six to fourteen in Tehran during the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, the subsequent establishment of the repressive Islamic Republic, and the ruinous war with Iraq, was on the same shelves as many of my required sources and so I borrowed it from the library as a sort of pudding* and have just blasted it in one sitting and I'm hoping to comb through several more academic chapters after this blog post so sorry if you don't like mad run-on sentences. (I love them.)

   Persepolis is gripping, heartwarming, full of as much vivacious humour and character as it is incisive political consciousness - the relatively simple black-and-white illustrations convey a huge amount of emotional context and carry the story really well. Ultimately it's an education in historical empathy: western audiences are rarely exposed to narratives told in the Middle East unless it's a story about war, oil, politics, or all three, in which the main character is a western soldier, businessman, politician, or something, probably fighting cartoonish terrorists. Marjane Satrapi's work in Persepolis (including the sequel which I have not yet read) is the kind of story we need to see, hear, read, whatever, more of - as it helps better show the personal and social realities of what it was like to live in Iran through one of the most turbulent times in its modern history, and bridges the sense of our simply not knowing - though conveyed in the format of a comic, there is a deep and profound humanity in this book, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the Middle East, whether or not you like graphic novels - it is a powerful and well-told story that will make you laugh and be sad and know more about Iranian history and what it's like to be a teenage girl with ambitions of punkdom living under an autocratic religious regime.**

   Anyway, that's the post. I'm going to drop this book in the returns bin in the library.

   Fin

* When you've been reading heavy academic non-fiction all week and you need something lighter, or at the very least more aesthetically pleasing.

** I mean, if that last bit doesn't hook you I don't know what will.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume three

This is the third and final volume of a box-set (this) comprising the whole roughly-a-decade span of newspaper comic Calvin & Hobbes, of which I've already done posts for the first and second volumes. In the post about the first volume, I try to give a general overview of what, superficially the comic is about - in this post, I'm going to go into more depth about some of the recurring themes Bill Watterson explores through the world he's created in this comic, and try to give some shape to why I think it's so timelessly special as well as timefully poignant as an enduring body of artistic work.
   Okay...
   I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
   Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
   This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.



* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume two

This is the second volume of a three-book boxset (this) of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson - introductory comments are given in my post about the first volume (here) and all (well, at least some) my actual reflective thoughts about the series will be given once I've finished reading it in its entirety after the third volume (this). I'm using it as 'comfort reading' while I read loads of dense and depressing stuff for an essay about environmental political economy, and lemme tell you, it's doing the job.

Have a nice day

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume one

This book, the first volume of a three-volume hardback collection (this) of a newspaper comic called Calvin & Hobbes,* by Bill Watterson - I have been nibbling on it over the last month, as something familiar and beautiful for my comfort reading while I commence work on another inevitably-bleak essay on the political economy of the environment.

   Since there are another two volumes to go before I've properly "finished" reading the full collection, I'll save up all my proper thoughts and reflections (of which there will be a lot: this is an utterly fantastic comic strip, possibly the greatest of all time, certainly to my mind, for the quality of writership and pen/brushwork, conceptual depth yet childlike accessibility, sheer adventurous joy - and it's also one that I've known and loved since I first encountered it as a nine-year old, but have never read through the full collection, so I'd like to let my words stew awhile as I ingest the other two volumes) for my post about the third volume. Nevertheless, they are separate books, so warrant separate posts.

   Cool? Cool.

   One thing I will add about this one though is that the first volume comes with a longish introduction from Bill Watterson about the comic as a project - an unexpected success that blossomed with artistic possibility that he took full advantage of in ways no other newspaper comic artist I can name off the top of my head (except Charles Schulz? - no, Bill trumps here) had ever done before and which few have probably tried to do since; his work developed a readership that both deeply touched and connected with the comic, again, not what you'd usually expect from the daily funnies. His telling of how he, having surprised himself at landing such a successful project, tried to make it the best comic he could make, was of immense encouragement and inspiration to me reading it as I am now; the craftsman of one of my oldest cultural loves offering up a straightforward and honest story of struggle and joy and finding fulfilling work in art - which is what, at the end of 2016, I've come to realise I want to do. I've mentioned in previous posts that my excuse** for barely having read anything since a family holiday in early August has been that most of the leisure time I usually direct into reading has gone into writing - and this is still the case, to such an extent that completing this project is now my primary goal for the next few years. I'll be finishing my Masters of Arts (which ironically prepares me very little for an actual career as an artist, those tending to be fairly stereotypically shambolic) over summer 2017, find a non-committal job to pay the bills, and then spend my mid-twenties writing a series of novels**** that I've been planning extensively since around May. Frankly the organicness with which this project has replaced my previous ambitions is deliciously welcome - and so inspiration from masters of the arts, like my much-esteemed Bill Watterson, has been great soul food for me this last fortnight. And I'm sure the next two volumes can only deepen that.

   So, thanks for reading this year, it's been an odd year all round - happy end of 2016.

* If you've never heard of it - it's about a six-year old boy called Calvin with an extremely active imagination and a real-only-to-him best friend in the form of a stuffed tiger called Hobbes; the pair's playfulness drops them into regular trouble, as the immensity and constancy of a child's imagination rubs up against the disappointing mundanity of a child's actual life (leading to many a clash of worlds - with long-suffering mom and dad, the teacher, the sensible girl next-door, the school bully, and the only babysitter in town who has the patience for Calvin's antics). The strips are infused through-and-through with altered realities - earthquakes, dinosaurs, monsters, detectives, fearless space-faring heroes, you name it - as Calvin's imagination runs away with him, Hobbes close behind.

   It was first syndicated in 1985, and by the time Watterson felt his brilliant characters had told all they could and he had achieved his artistic vision as a comic writer/drawer, this uniquely-charming childhood-nostalgia-heavy perfect lovely little strip was going out daily in over 2400 newspapers - until its final strip on January 1st 1996. Lots of them are online for free (see), and while the complete collection is a heavy investment, these books are ones that will stay somewhere on my shelves for the rest of my life. I cannot recommend this comic highly enough. Keep your eyes peeled in charity shops - you can often pick up smaller books collecting C&H strips for a few quid/bucks (in the UK and presumably USA too - dunno how internationally-loved it is). They work extremely well in book form, as unlike most newspaper comic-writers, Watterson frequently embarks on narratives that span several 'weeks' - each individual strip amusing and often surprisingly poignant, the longer stories truly delightful.

** Well, one of them. I also made the mistake of taking on a full-time seven-week research assistance*** position in which I was wayyy out of my depth and that was stressful and huge and certainly not conducive to my quasi-normal quasi-healthy habits of time management. It may have been this that led to my decisiveness in aiming for a break in academia and flying after creative pursuits.

*** Don't ask what it was in.

**** Yup. There's eight of them. They're sort of a series, but each readable as a standalone story, with books varying in tone, topic, and genre, following the same three characters (Amina Nadir, John Ezekiel Smith, and Naomi Moss) over about sixteen years. Lots of things happen to these three. I won't ever put any of my draft material or even outlines of plans up on this blog, but I will give a slightly more in-depth description of the general broad thrust of the project (basically just to fish for volunteers to offer constructive criticism) in my 2016 recap post,***** which you can expect in about a week probably - I'm off to London for NYE and staying for a few days. Without laptop. As true holiday time should be.

***** You know, the thing where I go back and think about some of the best things I've read in a year, or have other thoughts, or make cheesily over-enthusiastic statements about the joy of books. See last year's.

the Jesus Comic

This book by Jason Ramasami (this guy) is a graphic illustrated retelling of the biography of Jesus, based on selected extracts from the four biblical gospels. Ramasami does a stellar job of communicating the life and character of Christ and his contemporaries in engaging and likeable drawings, using a small set of simple recurring symbols to convey grand theological truths in simplified-but-that's-exactly-appropriate-in-a-comic forms. These drawings are striking, often amusing, and once you get the gist of the semantics of his pictures, very easy to follow - lubricated nicely by a small amount of text explaining the theological, historical, or social events depicted in each panel, page, or spread. There are twelve sections to the comic, following a particular chunk of Jesus's life (e.g. his birth, his temptations, one or two healings, angering the Pharisees, his trial, his crucifixion, his resurrection and its implications, etc), by no means comprehensively covering the contents of the gospels - Jason prefaces the comic with a short note explaining that it is not a replacement presentation of the gospel, rather a supplement to aid the flow of understanding for people who engage better with comics than with tomes of systematic theology or YouTube videos. It's extremely readable - I breezed through it while lazily half-watching the tennis after a family picnic (indoors, it rained, #England) earlier this afternoon. Jason Ramasami also does a really good job throughout of showing how the theological truth's he's conveying tied into the story of Jesus have implications for the beliefs of the reader - obviously a comic isn't the place for robust apologetics, but the appeal and cohesiveness of it will no doubt help embellish and give graphic life to readers' understanding of Jesus's story and significance. A pretty great little resource for anyone who's keen to explore scripture and the gospel in a fresh way, and it might even work as an evangelical prompt for visual learners (provided the prompter is willing to discuss the theology and biblical narrative padding behind the graphic system in considerable depth, as despite how accessible this book is, there's still a great deal I'm not sure the average non-Christian reader would grasp).

Beano annual 2015

This book is the annual compendium of special comics from that archaic weekly sort-of-funny children's comic and relic of when your parents were kids, the Beano. I've been at the family home over the week surrounding Christmas, and I found myself stuck in inactivity.* My brothers are elsewhere so games, conversations, or just annoying them with my presence aren't doable; the books I brought with me have tired me somewhat in their length and seriousness; the three inches of snow outside froze over in the night and I'm too cowardly of an Englishman to go for a slippery walk in it; the internet is a bottomless hole of boredom-inducing-boredom-prevention material; TV is obsolete and I don't know entirely how the new remote control works. I found this annual on the coffee table and decided to shoot my nostalgia in the face by reading it.

   The Beano is a weekly children's comic published in the UK since 1938, familiar to any English people who were children during the second half of the 20th century (or in the early noughties, if your parents swamp you as they did me and my siblings with hundreds of back-issues to keep you so occupied in reading them that you neglect to notice and thus ask for such expensive new-fangled contraptions as Playstations or SNES consoles). It features a host of characters that I will not be able to fully list at their present population (some of them have died because of cutbacks or retiring cartoonists, others have been absorbed from complementary "rival" comic the Dandy, others have been newly created to try desperately to find something that will turn the comic into a product that doesn't routinely hemorrhage its printers through children these days simply having far too many better things to do). To give some disappointedly-cynical overviews of examples of characters (most of whom have been around for decades) from the heyday of Beanodom back when I was aged 3-9 and a devoted a reader as there ever was, characters included:

• Dennis the Menace, a boy with spiky black hair who wears a red-and-black striped jumper and deliberately irritates people. Vocations range from systematic bullying of wimpy kids, subversion of all generic authorities,** and causing mess and upset. He has a dog called Gnasher who helps with these endeavours, which also for some reason looks almost identical to his hair given eyes, legs and teeth.
• Minnie the Minx, literally just the girl version of the above but ginger and wearing a beret with an inexplicable pompom.
• Roger the Dodger, a classic anti-authority wise-guy who uses far-fetched pranks and tricks to avoid doing work, get out of trouble, avoid normal healthy social interactions, and so on.
• Ivy the Terrible, a toddler who pretty much just shouts and causes mess and upsets her dad lots.
• The Bash Street Kids; the incorrigible class 2B at an ineptly-run school. One of the favourite classics, probably because it's the only one that was funny more than 40% of the time. It was always my favourite as well, so I'll do it the justice of listing the characters - of whom there are about as many as there are in all the other Beano comics combined. Comprising them are:
• Teacher (the teacher, duh). Like Dennis' dad he also has a Hitler moustache; stoically resigned to a life of misery, he very rarely manages to teach anything.
• Danny, the gang's supposed leader; he proclaims naughtiness more than any of the others and managed to be the favourite of none of the readers. The comic-runners should have picked up on this and had more cartoons about people being funny instead of people just throwing tomatoes at policemen.
• Sidney, generic boisterous child.
• Toots, token female, who is Sidney's twin.
• Smiffy, a boy whose borderline-severe learning difficulties are accommodated for laughingly by his inclusive classmates. Or maybe he is all there and, for want of better-defined personality and friendship, has taken to saying and doing silly things all the time so as to retain a niche as the beloved social joke-butt.
• Wilfrid, a very short kid whose entire gimmick is that he is shaped like R2D2. Turtleneck extends halfway up his face. Says very little but seems well-meaning.
• 'Erbert, shortsighted boy who walks into things when people are looking at him but the rest of the time is perfectly able to join in the mayhem-causing.
• Plug, who always gave me the impression that he was one of the smartest in the group, but will never fully find acceptance because his whole being is centred around his Shrek-like ugliness.
• Spotty. Has a gimmick that his name makes rather predictable. Bald. Also has a very long tie for some reason.
• Fatty. Guess.
• Head (the headteacher); looks identical to Teacher but fat and in a suit. Eats biscuits. Avoids responsibility. My personal favourite, possibly tied with Spotty.
• Janitor (guess what his job is); looks identical to Head but in scruffy clothes. Gets annoyed when the kids make mess, which is like, every week.
• Winston, janitor's long-suffering cat. Can handle a broom. Possibly enslaved.
• Olive, the cook, all of whose concoctions are burblingly hideous.
• Cuthbert, the one good kid in class 2B, who looks like a miniature version of teacher and gets lots of stuff thrown at him for being sensible.
• Billy Whizz, a kid who can run very fast. All his comic strips are basically just not-even-funny explorations of what it would be like to be a really fast kid in a variety of mildly inconvenient situations.
• Calamity James, an unfortunate soul to whom everything bad that would likely be socially ruinous and/or actually fatal happens. Used to have a really visually-witty cartoonist, but in this book there's a new one, very closely imitating the style of the character's inventor with none of the panache.
• Bananaman, a boy called Eric who is really dumb and turns into a superhero whenever he eats a banana. This superhero is great at saving the day but is still really dumb. Imported from the Dandy after it collapsed from shifting demand.
• The Three Bears, literally just a family of three bears who, instead of hunting normally, devote endless outrageous plots to stealing food from the supermarket of a blunderbuss-toting rightly-annoyed man called Hank.
• Lord Snooty, basically Billy Whizz but he's rich instead of fast.
• The Numskulls, five tiny things that live inside a guy called Edd and respectively control his brain, eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Things happen to Edd because of them which are apparently amusing.
• Little Plum, a probably-racist portrayal of a Native American kid whose main task in life is to follow the orders of Big Chief regarding something to be done to buffalo.
• Crazy for Daisy, a girl called Daisy who has to frequently resort to pugilism in repelling the advances of a devoted stalker called Ernest. He is ignorant of being repeatedly spurned in his efforts to woo her.
• Ball Boy, the captain of Beanotown's (yes all the characters live in the same fictional town, calm right down) incompetent football team.

   There are many others who have come and gone over the years, but these are the core bunch that I recall. It definitely used to be funnier; this isn't just a nostalgic projection of my endless childhood afternoons reading these cartoons onto the disappointment that this annual was, nor is it that my age has tripled since my peak enjoyment of them and a more mature sensibility cannot as much find pleasure in them. No. They've actually got worse, and it's no fault of the publishers, whose commitment to still making a product that almost nobody wants I find kind of inspiring. Kids these days just aren't bothered about a cartoon boy throwing flour at his neighbour - why would they be if the alternative source of entertainment for them is throwing grenades at digital soldiers controlled by their friends? I feel like such an old person. Dammit.

* Yes, it's fair to say that December has thrown an odd spanner into the spokes of my reading habits: rather than plodding through a half-dozen pretentious novels and a half-dozen even-more-pretentious non-fiction books at a time and finishing them almost by accident, this month I have read a fair few random easy-go lazy-books. Cat poetry, regional trivia, weird cartoons, this; it's that time of year. Allow it.

** His dad used to have a Hitler-style moustache back in the 1990's. New artist now though. Thought you should know.