Category: Art

Sunday Comics 

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I was a huge fan of Chris Claremont’s 1980’s run on Uncanny X-Men. I’m not sure how well the comics have aged, because I have a hard time looking at them without my nostalgia lenses on. When I sold most of my comic book collection in the early 1990s, I couldn’t bear to part with most of the Claremont issues (although I did sell a few books that were particularly highly-valued—over-valued, really. I bought a Fender guitar with the money, a Bullet. Anyway). I even kept a bunch of Marvel’s concurrent reprint series, Classic X-Men (also stylized as X-Men Classic). I’ve still got a handful of the issues that Mike Mignola did covers for—he was (and is) one of my favorite stylists.

Anyway, the image of Storm above is Mignola’s cover for X-Men Classic #69, March, 1992. The issue reprints Uncanny X-Men #165—script by Claremont, natch, with art by Paul Smith and Bob Wiacek and colors by Lynn Varley. Here’s the page that Mignola took his cover queue from:

And here’s the full cover:

Bulgakov, Bowles, Gass (Books acquired 31 March 2017)

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I like to shuffle around my favorite used bookstore on Fridays if I have a loose hour. This afternoon, I picked up three: A first-ed. U.S. hardback Bulgakov, an Ecco-Press-imitating-Black-Sparrow-Press Paul Bowles, and a stately-but-too-stately-too-prestigish-(as-opposed-to-“prestigious”) copy of William H. Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. 

I read the devastating  “The Pedersen Kid,” the first novella in the In the Heart of the Heart of the Country collection of collected novellas a few years ago when I checked this book out of the library. Some helpful joker inscribed a map in this copy:

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Said joker also appended three ball pen inked cursive notes to the end of the tale:

“Coming-of age

Christ / resurrection

Oedipal”

I think I read the next story (it’s much shorter), “Mrs. Mean,” but I confess I can’t recall it right now. I do remember returning the book to the library though.

The design of the Paul Bowles Ecco Press edition of The Spider’s House kinda sorta matches the design of In the Heart of the Heart of the Heart of the Heart (Nonpareil Books, btw). I recently finished Up Above the World (after reading and being slightly-disappointed in the more-lauded debut The Sheltering Sky). I liked Up Above the World’s sinister slow-burn. My understanding is that The Spider’s House is considered superior, so we’ll see. (2017 is turning into The Year I Finally Read Paul Bowles).

Mikhail Bulgakov’s samizdat Soviet-era novel Master and Margarita has improved in my memory; reviewing my review of it a few years ago, I find that I remember it fondly, and stronger. (I wrote that it “sags at times”; I don’t remember the saggy bits, but I recall its fun effervescent evil bits).

Anyway, I couldn’t pass up on this first-edition U.S. copy (1968 Harcourt, Brace & World) of Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog (English translation by Michael Glenny, with jacket design by Applebaum & Curtis, Inc.).

I also took note of this cover for Edges, a 1980 sci-fi anthology edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd (and featuring authors like Thomas Disch and Gene Wolfe)—but I didn’t pick it up, mostly because I didn’t particularly have any desire to read it, even though a much younger version of me out there would’ve loved to read it. I mean, I was thinking about that younger version of me out there; maybe that version—a different version of course—will find it.

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