Comic Strip Collections
Apr. 5th, 2024 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI backed a Kickstarter for a bunch of webcomic collections, and also bought ARR a stack of comic strip collections because he’s read everything on the shelves. Then I read them all.
Nancy Wins At Friendship – I loved the original Bushmiller years of Nancy, which I have collected in a series of reprint books. They’re very much a product of their time, but they’re clever and funny. Olivia Jaimes found that voice, making the events modern (smartphones, social media, robotics club) but keeping the character appropriately timeless, and mixing fourth-wall-breaking gags with character-based ones. Also, expanding the cast of Nancy’s peers beyond Sluggo creates more variety in the “kids being silly” gags.
Zits (four volumes) - On one hand, there are only like a half-dozen jokes: Jeremy eats a lot, Jeremy’s feet are big, Jeremy doesn’t listen to his parents/girlfriend, Jeremy can’t communicate with his parents/girlfriend, the van is a shitshow, Pierce is weird. On the other hand, they’ve kept the art high-quality over the years and have come up with a lot of variations on those jokes, often worth a chuckle or two.
Scenes from a Multiverse (books 1 – 5) – Jon Rosenberg is a very good comic creator and a lousy businessman, something I realized when I interviewed him in 2002. Since his continuity-heavy Goats series ran out of steam and he never finished it, he’s been running this gag-a-day strip with moderate continuity, which is much more evident when you read them all in a row. There will be a sequence of events with a single character that take place moments apart, but were published over the course of four months with a half dozen other strips between each one. And every individual strip is funny, but boy it would be easier to keep track of what was going on if they were actually in sequence together...which he generally did NOT do for the books. (He also has a limited collection of jokes, many of them revolving around religion being stupid, but they only get old if you read them all in a row.)
I really should re-read Goats at some point too, as I have the full set in both physical and pdf form. Well, sort of--there are actually two sets of Goats books: There are six “Goats Silver” books that collect the black-and-white, more gag-a-day strips of the earlier years, and then four books of the multiverse-spanning “Infinite Pendergast Cycle”. I’ll get there eventually.
Nancy Wins At Friendship – I loved the original Bushmiller years of Nancy, which I have collected in a series of reprint books. They’re very much a product of their time, but they’re clever and funny. Olivia Jaimes found that voice, making the events modern (smartphones, social media, robotics club) but keeping the character appropriately timeless, and mixing fourth-wall-breaking gags with character-based ones. Also, expanding the cast of Nancy’s peers beyond Sluggo creates more variety in the “kids being silly” gags.
Zits (four volumes) - On one hand, there are only like a half-dozen jokes: Jeremy eats a lot, Jeremy’s feet are big, Jeremy doesn’t listen to his parents/girlfriend, Jeremy can’t communicate with his parents/girlfriend, the van is a shitshow, Pierce is weird. On the other hand, they’ve kept the art high-quality over the years and have come up with a lot of variations on those jokes, often worth a chuckle or two.
Scenes from a Multiverse (books 1 – 5) – Jon Rosenberg is a very good comic creator and a lousy businessman, something I realized when I interviewed him in 2002. Since his continuity-heavy Goats series ran out of steam and he never finished it, he’s been running this gag-a-day strip with moderate continuity, which is much more evident when you read them all in a row. There will be a sequence of events with a single character that take place moments apart, but were published over the course of four months with a half dozen other strips between each one. And every individual strip is funny, but boy it would be easier to keep track of what was going on if they were actually in sequence together...which he generally did NOT do for the books. (He also has a limited collection of jokes, many of them revolving around religion being stupid, but they only get old if you read them all in a row.)
I really should re-read Goats at some point too, as I have the full set in both physical and pdf form. Well, sort of--there are actually two sets of Goats books: There are six “Goats Silver” books that collect the black-and-white, more gag-a-day strips of the earlier years, and then four books of the multiverse-spanning “Infinite Pendergast Cycle”. I’ll get there eventually.
