It's not quite true that school's out for summer, but to revel in that marvelously relaxed and irresponsible feeling that summer weather evokes in me, I'm reading comics I picked up yesterday at Criminal Records for Free Comic Book Day. I spent more money than I should have, but I was lucky to carry home a copy of Drawn and Quarterly's 25th anniversary collection, which I had been longing for.
Drawn and Quarterly is the publisher that puts out some of my favorite comics: feminist artist Julie Doucet's diaries, Adrian Tomine's stories about race, identity, and relationships, and Jason Lutes' Berlin series, an imaginative historical fiction of the Weimar period and the rise of Fascism through the eyes of a cast of artists, radicals and intellectuals.
The biggest surprise of the day for me was finding a somewhat new DC comic, The Movement in two omnibus collections "Class Warfare"and "Fighting for the Future." It tells you something about the renaissance going on in comics today that DC has a comic about class warfare! I haven't finished it yet, but it starts with a promising critique of the police, showing the heroes going after two cops who wrongfully search and intimidate a young couple in an alley, sexually harassing the girl. One of the movement heroes, a masked Black woman named Virtue, has this classic line "Don't be too proud of your prisons.."
I also found discounted 3rd and final volume of Phonogram, a comic all about phonomancers who do magic with music and time, written by someone who may be a little too obsessed with Brit-Pop. That's clearly a must for a "Reading and Listening" post. Also music related, is the fantastic Hip-Hop Family Tree which I didn't buy at Comic Book day, and am still only halfway through.
For music, my all-time favorite references for comics music are Love and Rockets which is a legendary comic of my own generation. For a playlist related to the comic, see this blog .... and the also legendary Dan Clowes' Eight-Ball, later made into the movie Ghost World, whose characters hang out in record stores and pine away over some really eccentric sounding music. In the movie, they recreate this little scene from the comic. Enid Coleslaw had said that if she couldn't find this record she'd be "lachrymose,' but it seems like that happened anyway. That is some poignant shit, man.
NSFW, the song linked on youtube below is not mentioned specifically in the comic, but it should be. So in my own soundtrack for my favorite current comic, Sex Criminals, here's the Buzzcocks:
I didn't get any new Sex Criminals because I'm up to date on that one, but I did pick up a collection of another Matt Fraction comic, Cassanova, along with a missing issue of Papergirls while I was there. Papergirls is new. It seems at first like it's going to be a straightforward girls vs. boys story about riding bikes around the neighborhood, but then it has outer-space monsters and zombies. Whoa!
and with that, I've gotta get back to reading before the sun goes down.
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