From In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman, Pantheon, 2004.
This is the last Three Books post.
I had fun doing this every Sunday but a year seems like long enough. I do, however, like to do a themed post of some kind on Sundays, so I’ll do something with comics each Sunday for a year. Not just cover scans—panels, strips, etc. But this Sunday, three covers/three books:
The New Mutants Vol. 1, #22, December 1984. Marvel Comics. Issue by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz. Cover painting by Sienkiewicz.
I got rid of most of my Marvel Comics collection when I was 13 but could never bear to part with Sienkiewicz’s run on The New Mutants, my favorite comic book. (I wish I had kept more of Claremont’s 1980s run on The Uncanny X-Men).
Cerebus #164, November 1992. Aardvark-Vanaheim. Issue (and cover) by Dave Sim and Gerhard. This is the second issue of Cerebus that I bought (issue #163’s cover is not nearly so good, so…not featured today). I had no idea what was going on but loved it. I caught up fairly quickly through Sim’s so-called “phonebooks” of the earlier books. I eventually quit reading Cerebus monthly, but still picked up the big collections, albeit more and more intermittently, until I almost forgot about it altogether. A few years ago I realized that Sim must’ve finished the damn thing (he’d always said it would be 300 issues long and conclude with Cerebus’s death), and I got the final volumes and read them. Let’s just say the first half of Cerebus is much, much better than the second half.
Ronin Vol. 1, #2, September 1983. DC Comics. Issue and cover by Frank Miller (colors by Lynne Varley).
Before Frank Miller became a cranky old fascist hack, he made some pretty good comic books. I’m pretty sure The Dark Knight Returns was the last really good thing he did, and that was thirty years ago, but my favorite Miller will likely always be Ronin.
The kind people at Nobrow sent along three gorgeous Hilda graphic novels by Luke Pearson ten days ago, and we’ve (my family, I mean) read each of them repeatedly since then—we’ve read them independently and to each other (my daughter started her own Hilda comic). I’ll have a proper essay-review thing up down the line, but for now, the short review: These are excellent, gorgeous books—funny, richly-detailed, sweet, and just a little scary (when they need to be).
From P. Craig Russell’s “La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep: A Fragment of a Dream.” Published in Night Music #2 (Eclipse Comics). Via Comics A-Go-Go!, where you can find full scans of the story.
Flannery O’Connor’s “Now Comes Spring Fever” was originally published on April 25, 1941 in The Peabody Palladium, O’Connor’s high school student newspaper. O’Connor served as the paper’s art director starting in 1940. O’Connor was 16 when she published this comic. Her comics are reprinted in Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, Fantagraphics, 2012.
Biblioklept 