O Woe!

By Bill Volk

This comic begins with a giant, space-faring, "stegosaurussed", god sperm flying through outer space. An auspicious beginning for sure! The story then becomes about the evolution and societal progression of a race of "wee scummy men".

The society that Volk creates is pretty neat, and I especially liked the incredibly decadent concept of "doubling" that was done by the incredibly rich people in this comic. Doubling is when someone, in order to prove their wealth, has exact duplicates of everything they own created, and then never uses them. The society goes to pretty insane extremes in their pursuit of showing off how rich they are, and how other factions of society respond.

While I liked this idea a lot, I wish more time had been spent on it and maybe the personal experiences of some of the people in this world. Also the ending is a total cop-out. Lame!

Stranger Knights #3

 By Bill Volk, Casey Bohn, Mary Soper, and Bryan Stone
www.billvolk.com
bohnhelm.blogspot.com
www.bryan-stone.com

Good job Matthew, failing to scan the cover entirely...

Anyway! This is an anthology of sci-fi, fantasy, and super hero comics, and all of them are pretty good! Kind of surprising given I generally don't care for about half of any anthology I read.

In The Capsule's Promise by Volk, the world is invaded by a murderous alien who wants to kill everyone. Two of the Stranger Knights, presumably some sort of super hero team, are nearby and go to find out what's going on. There's Ninurta Frankenstein who is some sort of weird monster thing made of stitched together body parts (and what looks like half a giant baseball attached to his stomach) who appears to be at least partially based on a Sumerian god of war. However he's much more interested in welcoming the creature to earth and sharing culture with it, and isn't too impressed when they end up in a fight. There's also Little Headphones, the unpaid intern of the Stranger Knights who...shoots people? I think that's his only power. Anyway, I enjoy a healthy dose of philosophy in my fight comics, so I liked this.

The Orb of Shalla by Stone is a fantasy piece and probably my favourite story in the whole book. It features a robot and a cat girl who ride weird dinosaur/lizard creatures, acquire a treasure map, and head off to lands unknown in an attempt to loot abandoned ruins

I enjoy robots in fantasy settings, even if it doesn't make any sense or maybe because it doesn't make any sense. Stone's art in this story is attractive and uses good use of cross hatching and similar techniques to help create depth and contrast. Several pages of the comic are entirely silent, and yet they're easy to understand and follow. Plus there's a weird horned pig thing.

The other two pieces are another Stranger Knights story and a science fiction one, both of which are somewhat superhero-ish. While I enjoyed the stories in both of these, the artwork didn't appeal to me in the same way. But overall I enjoyed this, much as I did the first issue.

Stranger Knights

By Bill Volk, Casey Bohn, and Mary Soper
billvolk.com
bohnhelm.blogspot.com
mandk.deviantart.com

The introductory page of this anthology says that it's a collection of comics about "brave men, women, gods, and radiation beasts who venture into an unjust world and punch those things that need to be punched", so you can probably already guess that I'm going to give this comic a good review.

Despite reading lots of zines and minicomics for this site, I still read a surprising amount of superhero comics (I'm currently rereading Ed Brubaker's Captain America run, hurray libraries!), and I still _like_ superhero comics, even though most of the stuff from mainstream publishers is pretty awful. One thing I do enjoy are indie comics creators versions of superheroes. I've dug the Strange Tales collections that Marvel has put out, James Kochalka's SuperFuckers, and similar books.

Of the three stories in here, the first (pictured below) is written and drawn by Bill Volk and features the god on earth Shamash as he fights infinity robots (yes, that many), teams up with other superheroes, and travels to other dimensions. It really combines a lot of my favourite things about comics, mostly that it is full of bizarre creations, humour, and fighting. This story reminds me of superhero comics I enjoy like Incredible Hercules, Atomic Robo, SuperFuckers, and Invincible (I cannot believe that Robert Kirkman hasn't created a character called Jillhammer yet).

The art is mostly good, and while one of the gods that appears is kind of weird looking, it didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story.

The second story in this anthology is also written by Volk, but is drawn by Mary Soper. This one is a sort of space-fantasy hybrid whose interstellar princess hero reminded me of some of the magical girl anime and manga I've read. The comic features the princess fighting both dinosaur-men and sexism, and has her using her powers in a pretty cool way to avoid a major battle. My only real problem with it is that I'm kind of sick of rich and idle superheroes and/or royalty being the focus of stories. Screw them! Even if they are fictional. Also the story ends on a cliffhanger, and I don't know how to find out what happens next.

The third story is about a guitar player who's probably into transcendental meditation and stuff like that as he says that "The echoes from that planet are all wrong." The art style in certain panels was interesting to look at, but the overall piece didn't really come together.

But still! Two out of three stories is pretty good for an anthology, and I'd be interested in reading future issues.

Domesday

By Bill Volk
billvolk.com

A while ago my friend (and comicker) Jen Vaughn sent me a huge box of minicomics. This would be why you've seen a lot more American comics on the site recently.

However, this is one that I don't think she should have sent me, as inside there's a stamp that says "Property of CCS", which is where my friend works. Jen! You have been stealing from the office (library). Bad girl! : )

This comic opens with several full-page images drawn in a stark black and white style. They tell how England was invaded by the Normans in 1066, and that several years later the king sent out people to talk to every landowner and discover exactly what they owned for taxation purposes (you can read more about it here).

Instead of illustrating the entire Domesday book (or the story of it) in that style, Volk then switches to a considerably more cartoony way of drawing characters, and tells a tale of one young man who is sent off to count the animals.

Interestingly the main character doesn't speak English (though to be honest, I can't understand the "English" spoken by some of the characters either), and doesn't even consider himself English (he's a French speaking Norman). As readers we're thrust into considering the English as the "other" who we cannot understand, and don't even really want to as they are strange and dangerous. An interesting inversion of usual English-language work.

Volk's comic take the route of only showing us two posible interactions between the census taker and the landowners: the best posible, and if not the worst posible, than one rather close to it. From these we can make assumptions about what the job was like overall, and how shitty and horrible it generally must have been to do it. Yeah, you might get bribes, but you might also end up dead.

Volk's cartoony style makes the whole thing seem considerably more light hearted than the actual history was. People died because of this thing! And yet, I can't really think that anything bad would happen to the main character even when the comic ends and we have no idea what will happen to him next.



(I sorta feel there should be more to this review... Oh well.)

The Dewey Decimal System is Decadent and Depraved

By Bill Volk

I worked in a library when I was in university, the medical school's library. It was filled with books of disgusting photos of medical things and didn't use the Dewey Decimal System. It was a pretty boring job, and I spent most of my time either reading books (Foucault's Pendulum in two days) or helping completely clueless medical students find books and magazines (always depressing when they couldn't understand alphabetical order or page numbers).

Volk apparently worked in a library that had books considerably more interesting than "Renal Failure". Specifically it had comic books! Not many sure, but it had some, and he had lots of free time during which he could read them.

However, one day while reshelving books Volk discovered that there were comics shelved in other sections of the library. Maus was in the history section and Volk wanted to know why it wasn't with the other graphic novels. He asked his coworkers and other librarians but nobody seemed to know (or care), and so Volk had to ask the one person who was sure to know: the undead spirit of Melvil Dewey himself.

Volk transforms his very essence and journeys through the spirit world, meeting Dewey, Art Spiegelman, and Fortuna in his quest to discover why certain books are misfiled. Alright, so it's not exactly the most realistic comic out there, but it's pretty good.

As for the art I think the most complimentary thing I can say about it is that I didn't realize this was a 24 hour comic until I sat down to write this review. Looking at it again with this knowledge I can see that later pages get a bit scrawly, and that there's a general lack of backgrounds, but none of that detracted from my enjoyment of this comic. I liked Volk's interpretations of Dewey and Spiegelman, while his own spirit forms are pretty cute too.

I have my own library related mystery that perhaps you can answer. How did we end up with books that claimed they weren't going to be published until the next year? If a book's copyright date is in the future is it protected under law?

The Tortoise Enters Tough Races

By Bill Volk

I was worried I was going to run out of things to review on this blog, and then on a day trip to Malmo I discovered the awesome library there and all the zines (well, mostly minicomics) that they had. The site was saved! Hopefully

(Note, I actually have images for this and a bunch of the following ones, but have no way of getting them online yet. Hopefully soon!)

Anyway, you know what I totally love in zines? Fold outs! And this one totally delivers.

But first there's the comic, which is a retelling of the fable about the Tortoise and the Hare. You already know the story, and you can probably guess that there's going to be a twist of some sort, and there is. However I thought it was a good twist, and I enjoyed the mean spiritedness of it all, especially coming from the really cute animals that Volk has drawn here.

And then there's the fold out, which is really awesome if whoever has read the comic before you has refolded it correctly (less awesome if you have to refold it properly yourself first). Each unfolding (is that a word?) reveals a larger space for an image and dialogue to show up on. Hurray! The only problem with it is that it reminded me of those immortal jellyfish things, which in turn reminded me of one of my greatest fears: flying jellyfish. They (thankfully) don't exist, but eeeek they are horrifying, with their tendrils floating through the air and stinging things that get to close to them. I shudder just to think about them.