NEW STUFF ARCHIVES
New for June 2021
The City of Belgium
by Brecht Evens
Brecht Evens, creator of The Wrong Place, The Making Of and Panther (all of which except for Panther, which was, thankfully, just reprinted, are currently – and shockingly – out of print here in North America) has, in The City of Belgium, likely produced his masterpiece. There might not be any other work that compares in the effectiveness of its conveyance of the feeling of being immersed in the overflowing of city life, of the sense of being aware of everything, of being surrounded by so much – too much – that is happening all around at every moment. A riotous explosion of color and details communicate the overwhelming feelings that accompany this awareness of simultaneity. The City of Belgium runs for 334 pages of lushly colored, mind boggling art. And, as for the story: it is a journey, but more than a journey through space and time, it is a journey through the psyche to the seat of the soul. Beginning with a single protagonist, heading out for a last night on the town, the story soon branches out to follow a host of others, all whose evenings out on the town intersect at the outset. Taken together, these characters' lives weave a tapestry that reveals the contours of contemporary Europe for which "the city of Belgium" is – as Brussels is the capital of the European Union – a metonym. Each of the characters has a distinct and unique character, and here, as elsewhere, character is destiny. By the time the sun rises, each will have faced – or at least caught a glimpse of – their respective destinies. We encourage you to dip your toes in with these two previews, but only with the caveat that they barely give you an idea of what's to come. Here is the preview offered up by Brecht Evens's own site (which we have linked to in the middle). And, Here is D & Q's preview, which focuses on a single moment.
retail price - $29.99 copacetic price - $26.75
The Pleasure of the Text
by Sami Alwani
The clear nod to the seminal work by Roland Barthes in the choice of title (taking it as far as to also “quote" its cover color and font; nice touch) will inform knowing readers that this is a work of ambition and that attention will need to be paid in order to experience all it has to offer. Each of the many pieces collected here – representing the bulk of Alwani’s comics output over roughly the last five years – contains multiple layers of signification below the surface. And, while, of course, Alwani plainly wants to confront readers with the reality of a gay sexuality and sex between men, he also obviously doesn’t want readers to stop there. These stories work hard and work well to situate sexuality in culture and society, to relate personal lives to professional lives, to connect individual needs and wants to life events that may have triggered them, and, ultimately, to delineate a relationship between states of mind and the nation state itself. Employing a graphic toolkit that, while informed to varying degrees by that of fellow Torontonians Patrick Kyle and Michael DeForge, is clearly his own, Alwani successfully conveys emotional registers through both line and composition – as well as color, in those instances when it is employed. He does so, in part, by intermingling the inner and outer lives of his stories' protagonists – who are, most often, to varying degrees, stand-ins for himself. These characters’ names' slight difference from his own – Simmie Antlflick, Sunny Balwani, Saehmeh the Dog, Sami/Baby – registering both the awareness that these characters are not, in actuality, him (cannot sufficiently embody him) at the same time as, on the other side of the mirror, revealing that he does not feel entirely comfortable wholly identifying himself with his own name, as printed on the book jacket, recognizing that it is illusory, if not deceptive, to consider that a name can fully represent anyone's actual identity. (This could also be related to the fact that any representation of his given name employing the Latin alphabet remains a transliteration of the original Arabic from which it is ultimately derived.) While the majority of these pieces were previously (mostly self-) published – including his breakthrough work, “The Dead Father,” which went on to be selected for the 2017 volume of Best American Comics, and Copacetic fave, “The Idiot” along with many others – there are several major new pieces here that are among his most substantial, including two which, along with the aforementioned “The Idiot” and the also previously published “Persona”, have been given – intriguingly ironic – referential titles: “American Psycho” and “Atrocity Exhibition”. Perhaps (or, perhaps not) taking a page out of Kathy Acker’s playbook, these titles add yet another layer to the dense signification that is Alwani’s trademark. And, finally, amidst and intermingled with all this challenge and confrontation there is also a humane and empathic display of human wants and needs, along with the emotions that both their denial and fulfillment bring. Sami Alwani’s Pleasure of the Text is a unique, challenging and rewarding volume.
retail price - $19.99 copacetic price - $17.75
Tongues #4retail price - $6.00 copacetic price - $5.75
by Anders Nilsen
FINALLY! Tongues 4 has arrived. Some secrets are revealed, but the mystery only deepens, in this, the most substantial issue yet. Reading Tongues is a mind expanding experience like few others in comics (late Jack Kirby comes to mind). Nilsen has not only a wide ranging and vivid imagination but also a strong understanding of the mechanics of mythology that, taken together with his solid grasp of both current events and their grounding in history, provides him with a fertile ground upon which his imagination can flourish. And, of course, what pulls all these together to produce the work before us in the pages of Tongues, are Nilsen's phenomenal drawing ability and comics making skills.
retail price - $18.00 copacetic price - $15.75
In Your Next Life You Will Be Together With All of Your Friends
by Anders Nilsen
And, what's this? Yes, it's true – this month we have a rare double-dose of Anders Nilsen! In Your Next Life You Will Be Together With All of Your Friends is a highly engaging and æsthetically pleasing miscellany collecting Anders Nilsen's works, created largely over the last five years, but including a few outliers going back as far as twenty years. Most have been previously published (although often in forms to varying degrees different from how they appear here), in a variety of outlets, notably the New York Times. Themes range from the history of the universe to a rafting excursion through the Grand Canyon to the painful conjunction of the pandemic and the death of George Floyd. The nature of the work ranges from sketchy to highly polished, according to theme and purpose and includes a variety of modes including drawing from life, collage, abstract drawing, comics, and, especially, combinations of some or all these together. Oversize (same as Tongues) | Full color | semi-French-flapped (back cover only) | 32 pages | plus a 12-page mini-comic insert and perforated, ready-to-mail postcards printed on heavy coated stock (which wraparound to a two-sided, horizontal-strip self-portrait-of-the-artist). In other words: a treat!
retail price - $20.00 copacetic price - $18.75
Now #10
edited by Eric Reynolds; contributors this issue: M.S. Harkness, Theo Ellsworth, Tim Lane, Julia Gfrörer, Jacob Weinstein, Joakim Drescher, Hartley Lin, Richard Sala, Walt Holcombe, Steven Weissman, Silvia Rocchi, Alex Nall, Noah Van Sciver, Chris Wright, Celia Vårhed, Karl Stevens, Nick Thorburn
It's here, Now! Now #10, that is, featuring a new, heavier, stiffer cover stock, and.... a whole bunch of great comics by many a Copacetic favorite!
retail price - $12.99 copacetic price - $11.75
It's Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980
by Dan Nadel, Charles Johnson & Ronald Wimberlyretail price - $29.99 copacetic price - $26.75
It's Life As I See It makes for an inspiring reading experience, educational and entertaining in equal measure. Even more, it is a revelation. There will be very few readers indeed who willl have previously encountered much of the material presented in this volume. While many, for example, may be familiar with Morrie Turner's Wee Pals, few will have read strips from its earlier incarnation as Dinky Fellas, which appeared exclusively in The Chicago Defender – which also published much of the other material included in this volume. Edited by Dan Nadel, noted scholar and curator of comics, fine art, and – most notably – their intersections, It's Life As I See It is the companion volume to Nadel's 2021 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, but, as its subtitle indicates, the work assembled here dates from 1940 to 1980, and focuses solely on Chicago's black cartoonists. Included along with the aforementioned Morrie Turner, is the work of other renowned black cartoonists, such as Jackie Ormes, Grass Green and Charles Johnson (who is more widely known as a National Book Award-winning novelist), along with lesser known – but equally talented – cartoonists such as Tom Floyd, Seitu Hayden, Yaoundé Olu and Turtel Onli. Here at Copacetic, the biggest revelation of all was Jay Jackson's adventure strip, Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos, which ran weekly in The Chicago Defender, and of which a full nine months of continuity from 1944 are collected here. What we have to say about these strips can be summed up in one word: "Wow!" In addition to all the comics work noted above, there is an essay "My Life as a Cartoonist," by Charles Johnson, an afterword by Ronald Wimberly, an overall introduction along with individual introductions to each cartoonist's work by Dan Nadel, and an amazing cover by Kerry James Marshall. Need we say more?
retail price - $24.95 copacetic price - $21.75
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New for May 2021
Love and Rockets, Volume IV #10
by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
It's here! Gilbert continues his explorations of fame, fortune and fantasy via Fritz & Co. This installment contains many intersections and linkages galore as body issues mix with body doubles, mirroring collides with projection, and (much) more. Also, in this issue Gilbert’s restless experimentation has led him to provide readers with “Rosy’s Re-Cap”, a half-inch (!) tall strip of comics commentary running along the lower edge of ten consecutive pages of continuity. The magic of comics allows you to read this strip separately – on its own – or read it simultaneously – together with the main feature – or mix it up. The choice is yours! And, then, on Jaime’s side of the house, Tonta’s orbit spirals ever closer to that of Maggie, until… yes, the magic moment we’ve all been waiting for arrives! While out in the farthest reaches of space, Anima saves the day once again – but will her memory return? and if it does, what does that portend? The mysteries lengthen and deepen, like shadows at sunset on an alien moon…. Love and Rockets. Where would we be without it?
retail price - $4.99 copacetic price - $4.44
Monsters
by Barry Windsor-Smith
Over half a century after exploding onto the American comics scene with his work on X-Men, Daredevil, The Avengers, and culminating in his legendary run on Conan, the British comics artist Barry Smith (later Barry Windsor-Smith) is still at it, and has now, at last, delivered his magnum opus. Monsters, is a (quite) long-in-the-works (as in over twenty years), 360 page tour de force largely set in the America of 1964. Here in the pages of Monsters, Windsor-Smith revisits some of the themes he explored in Weapon X – with an undeniable nod to his (sadly, now deceased) artistic peer, Berni Wrightson’s own masterwork, Frankenstein – but here with a heightened degree of realism and greater attention to the details of family dynamics. All together this makes for an ambitious work that connects family to politics to history in ways that reveals these connections to be monstrous. And that barely scratches the surface. Anyone interested in learning more about this ambitious work – and willing to risk a possible spoiler or two – is hereby directed to these reviews in The Guardian and The New York Times, among many others.
retail price - $39.99 copacetic price - $34.75
New For April 2021Trots and Bonnie
by Shary Flenniken
Here it is, what is sure to be the definitive Trots and Bonnie collection. Originally appearing in the pages of National Lampoon from, roughly, the early-1970s to the late-1980s, Trots and Bonnie featured Bonnie, a preternaturally naive 13 year-old "everyteen", and her dog, Trots – along with her sidekick, the world-wise Pepsi, and her comic foil, the clueless male, Elrod. It was – and still is – a one-of-a-kind strip. Its creator, Shary Flenniken, employed a strong grasp of the classic strips from back in the earliest days of the Sunday comics page – the line, the pacing, the page layouts, the characterization; all of it – and then drafted it in the service of fearsome fun frank frolicsome feminist forays against the mainstream (here read, masculine) status quo, that took no prisoners and did so in the pages of a magazine that, while also poking holes in the façade of our republic, was otherwise very much a boy’s club. Comics taking similar aim were also to be found in the pages of underground comics like Tits and Clits and Wimmen’s Comix, but, being underground, those comics reached a largely different audience from those picking up National Lampoon at the newsstand. It is, however, in its formal attributes that Trots and Bonnie stood – and still stands – most apart from the crowd. In the strips that fill this collection, readers will encounter pages that incorporated formal attributes of the likes of Clare Briggs’s Real Folks at Home, Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, and other classics and did so in ways that made their ways of seeing newly relevant to her times – and ours – and by doing so connected their respective eras in important ways. This collection was edited and designed by Norman Hathaway and includes an interview with / overview of Flenniken's life and career, along with an introduction by Emily Flake that shares with readers the kind of impact Trots and Bonnie had on its original readers.
retail price - $39.99 copacetic price - $35.75
The Secret to Superhuman Strength
by Alison Bechdel
The Secret to Superhuman Strength is Alison Bechdel's first new book in nearly a decade. As anyone familiar with Bechdel's work will guess,, the "superhuman strength" does not indicate that readers are in for a superhero comic book, but the ironic nod to this staple of the comics form is not without signifigance. This 240 page hardcover book is, as both of her previous works, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, a memoir. It is in a larger format – 8" x 11" – than these, however – and it is hand colored – employing an intriguing, limited palette – by her partner, Holly Rae Taylor. Fans of her previous memoirs will be happy to learn that she once again revisits her roots and that both of her parents are featured. And, she doesn't stop there! In exploring her theme, she goes all the way back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, via Jack Kerouac. Yes, there's more here than the title might lead you to believe. There will be more to say, but for now, we direct you to this excellent review by Parul Sehgal at the NY Times.
retail price - $24.00 copacetic price - $21.75
The Thud
I Feel Love
by Julian Hanshaw, Krent Able, Anya Davidson, Benjamin Marra, Kelsey Wroten, Cat Sims
I Feel Love takes a look at the darkside of love, where things don't go as planned, or don't go at all, or fall apart. It isn't pretty, but what can you do? It's all part of this crazy thing called life. Editors Krent Able & Julian Hanshaw have assembled some mighty talents to tackle this terrible task in the 152 page full color pages of this follow up to their previous anthology, I Feel Machine. Get story details and more in Avery Kaplan's review on The Comics Beat.
retail price - $22.99 copacetic price - $20.00
Slow Death Zero
by Jon B. Cooke, WIlliam Stout, Richard Corben, Peter Bagge, Rick Veitch, Peter Kuper, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Hunt Emerson, Max Clotfelter
What goes around, comes around, and here we are back at square one with the "issue zero" of Slow Death, one of the longest running titles of the original wave of underground comix, premiering in 1970. Here we have a 128 page softcover trade edition filled with all new comics work (and one Crumb reprint), in (mostly) full color and black and white. Featuring a host of Slow Death alumni along with a few fresh faces from the newer generations of cartoonists, the stories here address climate change and impending doom in one way or another, and to varying degrees of ghastliness (although WIlliam Stout's opening contribution starts things off on a relatively optimistic note). This anthology includes what must be one of the very last stories Richard Corben drew, which is fitting given his long association with the title.
retail price - $24.99 copacetic price - $22.75
Crime and Punishment
by Osamu Tezuka, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tezuka boils down Dostoevsky's classic novel to its bare essentials – it runs a mere 144 pages – and adds slapstick comedy, for good measure. This (sometimes very Disneyesque) adaptation was originally published fairly early on in Tezuka's career, in 1953, and he later went on to view it as "a bit of a disaster" – but also stated that, at the time of its publication, this work "received more encouragement and praise from students and adult readers" than he had previously experienced. So, it must have done something right. Regardless, there's some great cartooning here, including the murder sequence, which is an amazing eleven pages divided vertically into twenty-two static panels of the apartment staircase where the murder takes palce, that brings to mind Will Eisner and Frank Miller. Some (many? most?) may find the cartooned depiction of Dostoevsky's weighty themes a bridge too far (as in, "Crime and Punishment as a Disney cartoon? Are you serious?") but others may delight in the combination. And this piece certainly foreshadows Tezuka's tackling of weightier themes in his own, original, mature period manga, later in his career.
retail price - $15.95 copacetic price - $15.25
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A Journal of My Father
by Jiro Taniguchi
Originally published in Japan in 1995, Jiro Taniguchi’s A Journal of My Father, a moving tale of a son’s memories of growing up in Tottori, a small city on the sea of Japan, has at last made it to American shores in English translation (by Kumar Sivasubramanian assisted by Chitoku Teshima). As the title suggests, the story centers on the relationship of the son – Yoichi – with his father, who, we learn at the outset, has just died. The story is divided into twelve chapters which, while there are several especially significant moments that recur, take the reader on a chronological journey from Yoichi's earliest memories up to the present. While many specific details of his family's experiences are atypical, the emotions experienced by the participants are universal, and most readers are sure to find themselves strongly connecting at any number of points as the story unfolds, even if for different reasons. Fans of Ozu will appreciate the refined structure and expert pacing, which are a piece with the levels of emotional reserve that predominate – but which also serve to accentuate the rare emotional outburst when it bursts through. Additionally, A Journal of My Father does double duty by having the experiences of the Yamashita family that make up the novel serve as a synecdoche for post-war Japan as a whole, and in this way provides a small window on the changes of those years while also demonstrating the fixity of Japanese cultural traditions and familial bonds. The richness and nuance of the story are no doubt enabled by Taniguchi’s decision to root the story in his own experiences, as Taniguchi too grew up in Tottori at the same time as his fictional creation, Yoichi. Jiro Taniguchi, who passed away four years ago, in 2017, time and time again managed to create comics that infuse the mundane and quotidian with an enlightening imagination that makes it come alive. It is worth noting that while Taniguchi’s works are also largely formed from a strongly masculine perspective – and this one, with its focus on the father-son relationship, is certainly no exception – it is clear that here, in the pages of A Journal of My Father, he has striven to represent the feminine point of view as well and worked to elucidate the dynamic underlying traditional Japanese gender role formations. In short, another classic.
retail price - $28.00 copacetic price - $24.75
Young Shadow
by Ben Sears
The latest – and longest, at 124 pages – Double + Adventure by Ben Sears has arrived! This time around it is duo-tone (orange and black), and, as always, plenty of fun! Learn more and catch up with Ben by heading over to Brian Nicholson's feature article on TCJ, HERE.
retail price - $16.99 copacetic price - $15.25
Grixly #51 & 52
by Nate McDonough
Issue #51 is devoted entirely to a new ongoing saga*, “Longboxes”, wherein readers are, for the first time in comics history (maybe?) taken deep behind the scenes of the arcane world of comic book dealing. Here, in the pages of Grixly is a comics document that at long last dares not just to go behind the façade of the “wall comics” but to knock them to floor and then rip out the drywall supporting them to reveal the hidden human plumbing that’s been there all along, conveying, cycling and recycling old comic books from one collection to another. In issue #52, “Longboxes” manages to occupy roughly a third of the issue, but can’t keep long term Grixly obsessions from clawing through, including intrusive thoughts, pent-up anger, sarcasm, prophesies, horrific violence – alone and in various combinations.
retail price - $6.00 copacetic price - $5.00
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