February 21, 2002

 
I had a leftover check from Christmas which I had forgotten about, and went shopping at Forbidden Planet in Union Square on Wednesday. I had quite a little shopping spree...

First and foremost, I bought It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth, and it is likely one of the finest comics that I have ever read.

It has a quiet, graceful quality that I can't quite describe in words - every aspect of its presentation, from the beautiful, understated cartooning to the dialogue to the narrative flow of the story broken down into six chapters reveals Seth to be a true master of the form.

The story is about Seth's decade-long search for the art and history of a painfully obscure cartoonist from the 50s named Kalo. I know that it sounds like awfully dull subject matter to base a full-length work, but it is only the narrative structure upon which Seth ponders his life, his inability to cope with other people, his love of the old and disdain for the new, and his personal relationship to the history of cartooning.

There are several bits of the story, particularly when Seth speaks of his lovelife and his relationships with others when I feel a strong sense of relation to what he is writing, and I can certainly connect with people who are prone to obsessing over obscurities to the point of excluding regular life.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for comics of the highest caliber of quality - It's A Good Life... has already become a deeply personal favorite of mine.

I also got My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable by David Rees which is fucking hilarious - a comic made entirely from clip art, with a story about a horrible company who are having some very...severe problems with filing. The dialogue is overflowing with comically unneccessary swearing... It's well worth $6. I showed it to a few friends of mine, and they loved it too - enough to want to rush over and buy their own copies. High quality stuff, indeed.

In addition to that, I picked up Palestine by Joe Sacco and two mini-comics called Love Eats Brain by Dash Shaw. I haven't read through much of either of them just yet, but Palestine looks especially good, the bits I have read.

Oh yeah, and I also picked up the newest issue of Uncanny X-Men by Joe Casey, because I am a masochist sometimes.