Quick Reviews of Books That Demand More

I'll be honest--I'm trying to clean up my office right now. The piles of books to read are large, and the piles of books read that I intended to review are growing as well. So I've got to take some more control of this office, if not my life. And so, some quick reviews, even though it's not an ideal solution.

Spent, by Joe Matt - Painful, brutal self-portrait of a cartoonist in thrall to pornography and masturbation. Extremely funny at times--those times usually the conversations between Matt and cartoonist friends Seth and Chester Brown. It walks a fine line where Matt really does revel in his misery and compulsion and attempts to justify it. I think it's a significant work in comics, though by its very subject, not one a lot of folks will be waving their gooey fists for.

The Lone Ranger Vol. 1 by Matthews, Carillo and White - This is terrific adventure comics, totally involving even as it evokes standard Western tropes. Carillo provides very effective artwork that serves the story well. I also thought Matthews struck just the right note--it's violent but not gratuitously so.

The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschemeier - I was disappointed in this one. It's not that I didn't like it, but it just didn't open up for me. I got out of it that Hornschemeier was filtering his childhood, or fictionalized parts of his childhood, through different comic art styles, and attempting to make sense of it through the modern-day story, which was in his most realistic style, but I just didn't see a lot of "there" there. The art styles and discolored paper became somewhat distracting, and the scenes usually didn't have any real bang to them. I could appreciate the naturalistic dialogue between Paul and his father to an extent, but at the end it's like, "these are some very polite, nice, well-read people who are also not at all fun to hang around with.

King-Cat Classix by John Porcellino - This has sat on my desk for months. I devoured it upon receipt and I love it. I think Porcellino is a rare talent, and while a lot of this early stuff is a far cry from the work he's been doing the past few years, there are still many gems here and the process of his evolution from angry young man to a kind of Thoreau of Comics is fascinating.

Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor Vol. 2 - Finally. Terrific cover. I like Ellison a lot but I think this volume is slightly disappointing. There are a couple moving stories, but many tend to be humorous, and Ellison's humor is often kind of corny. It doesn't help that Ellison called in old-fashioned artists like Mart Nodell and Curt Swan, bizarre ones like Jay Lynch, or conventional contemporary artists like Rags Morales, Bret Blevins and Eduardo Barreto. It's kind of fun to see Neal Adams black-and-white art on "Rock God," but the very style of it says this had to be something Adams adapted in the '70s, and it's not the most coherent story, either. Highlights are the Waid/Templeton/Ha "The Silver Corridor, mainly for Ha's mindblowing artwork, the rich "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Strnad/Chadwick, and the edgy, modern EC type of crime story, "Moonlighting," adapted by Schutz/Ellison/Colan, and featuring uncolored Colan pencils on the opposite pages of the finished product. Kind of distracting, but hey, it's Gene Colan artwork, so no harm done.