That Monday Morning Feeling

GRAPHIC NOVELS reviewed...

Circling the Drain
By Evan Dorkin (Slave Labor Graphics)

Prefixed inside as The Collected Dork Vol 2, this collects #7-10 of the occasional SLG series plus other sundry pieces.

Within these strips Dorkin bridges the gap between the biographical my-life-is-miserable confessor approach and that of old fashioned storyteller, that he also meshes the styles together then adds a William Burroughs like cut and paste format surprisingly makes most of it work in both an interesting and highly entertaining manner.

The guy has an obvious big love for his wife/partner Sara Dyer and it shows. He's not a depressive but he can be prone to bouts of great misery, it's what sets him apart from many of the autobiographical comic types; they tend to live in someone like Crumb or Pekar's shadow, Dorkin's using different emotional starting point so his destination ends ups in elsewhere too.

We at turns laugh with and at him, but there's a difficult point to decide where. The more fictional aspects are often recited by a character known as the Devil Puppet and they come across like some old Charlton or ACG comic strip given old testament blood and thunder at times.

It's a thoughtful examination of the creator at work, or at least as he wants us to perceive him, as, after all, he's still self-editing what he wants us to see. It's well produced and despite its psychological bits a generally pretty fun book throughout.

Just A Pilgrim
By Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra (Black Bull Entertainment/Titan)

Pilgrim is Ennis' typical Eastwood wandering cowboy transplanted to a future apocalyptic time where the sun's gone red and the Earth's oceans dried. It's a joke that humanity will live past our imminent global problems, but the surviving humans in this fiction seek more prosperous places to live (in this case a stage wagon) only to be thwarted by mad pirate type and saved by Pilgrim - a character who freely admits he was a Hannibal Lecter like cannibal until he found God!

Better than the second book, reviewed previously at Speech Balloons, but aside from a couple of good ideas just your average filer as an Eerie or old 2000AD strip.

White Flower Day
By Steven Weissma (Fantagraphics)

Li'l Buddy, Pullapart Boy? What kind of names are these? I feel like I came in halfway through an ongoing Addams Family goes Peanuts soap opera comic strips and I'm probably half right.

There's a lot of promise inherent in the idea but frankly, on the one hand the material doesn't go that extra mile towards the truly surreal, while on the other hand they're not rooted in enough coherent plot to make valid statements. It's all a bit like treading water in quicksand. What's the point?

Basically it's about these weird kids doing kid things - is it the play of imagination we're reading rather than reality? I don't know. Some of the dialogue and rebukes ring true but that's it. Okay cartooning, but a very odd indiscriminate use of spot colour confuses as much as the book as a whole. I wanted to like it but it was too bland in its trying to be oddly cute and I felt like gagging. Does that make it scary or stupid? Or is it me who's stupid?

Flash Gordon
By Alex Raymond (Checker Book Publishing Group)

This is an excellently produced hardback collection of the very first Flash Gordon newspaper strips. Truth to tell we're all more familiar with those old Buster Crabbe movie serials than the actual originating strip - though some of the latter ones herein of the mid 30s have been reprinted are familiar to me.

Flash Gordon debuted on Jan 17th 1934 and for a good year it stuck rigidly to a 2-3 panel per tier on a 4 tier grid system, decent enough reading even today but the plot basically revolves around the principle of creating a new fantasy each instalment, and to my mind curiously comes across like a hardboiled version of Little Nemo!

It's only when the Hawkmen debut that Raymond breaks out of his rigid grid format to allow bigger panels and create more drastic and awe-inspiring changes in perspective and emotion that the heat turns up. If nothing else the whole damn comics medium owes Raymond more than it can ever pay for that breakthrough moment.

The plot retreads material frequently but it's all fast paced with brisk enough text for you to forgive it, and nearing the end of the collection Raymond's art does start to become very special indeed. This is the blueprint for all that's come since in the adventure and superhero mould.

This book proves Flash Gordon was more than just a John Carter rip-off. But did everyone really fall in love with Dale Arden as has been claimed over the years? Surely the ever-on-heat smouldering of Princess Aura was what real boys, and men, were interested in.