LITERARY - 9 NEW COMICS THAT ARE GOOD

Our November "No Photos" Issue comes out this weekend, and is filled with tons and tons of drawrers and the different drawrings they draw. To get your peepers ready for this graphic onslaught, here are a bunch of a recent comics we think you should buy.

Acme Novelty Library #19 
by Chris Ware
Pubished by Acme Novelty Library
Like everything else he's ever done, the new Acme Novelty is about depressed chubby people who are lonely. If you've been trying to kill yourself but need a little boost-up I recommend reading this and then taking in an early-evening screening of Synecdoche.

Boys Club #2
by Matt Furie
Buenaventura Press
This guy's been in Vice a bunch lately and for good reason. Some people make comics ABOUT what it's like to get high with your best friends and do nothing. Furie's comics are EXACTLY LIKE getting high and doing nothing. Everything seems funny and you notice weird little tics that your friends have and sometimes you look down and realize you've been eating pretzels very slowly for, like, 20 minutes. It's great.

Souvlaki Circus 
by Amanda Vahamaki and Michelangelo Setola
Buenaventura
A cute little book with pretty and lonely drawings of cars, animals and people turning into stuff in the woods and lonely places. The $14 price tag may seem a bit steep, but come on, you've earned it.







INJURY #2
by Ted May
Buenaventura Press
This is kinda like the old Eightballs where there are short comics on the inside covers and then two big stories and other stuff like a funny letters page. The first part is a true story about middle-school metalheads having their hearts broken in the early 80s. The second one is a post-apocalyptic gang story that features a Slade pinball machine. Number three's supposedly coming soon, but it's been coming soon for a while.

Popeye Volume Three
by E.C. Segar
Published by Fantagraphics
Popeye is great. Some people only know him as a theme song or a shill for the spinach industry, but Popeye was edgy when it came out and it's edgy now. Popeye inhabits a world of greedy opportunistic jerks in which his ability to beat the shit out of anybody is the only justice. He beats up the bad guys and sometimes his friends accidentally. I wish I could punch away my problems. This book is huge and beautiful, and it contains more comics than you'll be able to read for a while. Its subtitle is "Let's You and Him Fight," which would be awesome words to have tattooed on your body, or just to repeat in your head a bunch of times.



Wigger Haircut #3 
by Zach Hazard Vaupen
Infinite Press Head
This thing is 14 pages long, but it has a nice silkscreened cover which makes it seem like some sort of DIY luxury object. It also features a story called "The Diary of Lisa Frank" about a girl who gets visited by a phantom stranger and whose mother is convinced she was raped. I'm convinced that this was either inspired by a dream or that Zach Hazard suffers from schizophrenia. Anyways, Zach is definitely doing an awesome job of ripping off all those Fort Thunder comic guys who never got their shit together. I bet if you bother him enough on his blog he'll send you a copy.





Faesthetic 9
Threadless.com
Faesthetic 8 was pretty awesome and Faesthetic 7 was amazing, but this issue is a little light on visual content. There's a really funny and weird three-pager at the back by Becca Kacanda about aliens who do everything quickly and also some good stuff by Julia Sonmi Heglund and Joshua Agerstrand, but that's about it. Maybe just rifle through a copy and tear out the drawings that you think are good then try to flush the rest down the Borders bathroom toilet.






Typhon Volume One
edited by Danny Hellman
Dirty Danny Press
Danny Hellman is famous in the comics community (i.e. not famous) because Ted Rall ripped on Art Spiegelman and then Danny ripped on Rall and then Rall sued Danny and then Danny got the best cartoonists to get behind him and make two great anthologies called Legal Action Comics Volumes 1 and 2.  He was working on volume three but Rall's lawyer died and he dropped the suit. So instead, Danny put out this awesome new full-color anthology book. Victor Cayro and Derek Ballard did some strong strips but my mom thought my comic, "Party Monster," was the best thing in the whole collection. You might think this is a given, but she studied art at Yale and is rarely impressed by anything I do. Buy this book because I made a good comic in it.  

The Great Outdoor Fight
Chris Onstad
Dark Horse Books
Achewood is the only web comic worth reading. It's basically the new Simpsons. If you haven't seen the comic that even Time motherfucking Magazine is calling the best thing on the internet, this book is a good start. It contains one of the series' most epic storylines and you can still understand most of the jokes without having to wade through four years of (hilarious) character development. "Hey, don't you do cocaine at me you son of a bitch!" I have no idea how Chris Onstad can stay so consistently funny for so many years. There are some comics of his where I laugh at every panel. This guy is important and also the future, present, and recent past of good humor writing.

NICK GAZIN

Comments

Feels good, man.

[Zutroy]

These all look nice, but comics cost way too much money for most people to get into.

[Uland K.]

All of those are $8 to $25. So don't buy two beers tonight and you should be okay.

[Zutroy]

Where are you drinking that beers cost $36-$112.50? Probably some bar with a comic-book store theme for rich only children who aren't popular.

[Barf]

Take your comics hate elsewhere. Comics are a good time, and worth the $5 (Ted May) to $30 (That really nice fantagraphics Popeye collection) they ask for them. Do you have any idea how long it takes to draw all that crap? Comics artists are basically making Bhutanese minimum wage.

[snakepit]

What about Snakepit 2007? that shit is pretty good. You guys used to love Snakepit back in the day.

Somehow I don't think a book that came out back in June qualifies as new.

[...]

Bout time you admitted liking Achewood. New Simpsons is right.

these are some good reviews. nick gazin is a spruce gentleman.

[Dorcas Malorkus]

Yes! Party Monster has been unleashed on the world! Your mom is a lady of excellent taste- I always thought that was one of your best comics as well.

becca kacanda? fucking kack.

[myself]

thanks for this, sinceriously, i need some good new comics and have been out of the loop for so long. problem is spending money on this stuff when it feels like food prices & job availability are about to go into nightmare realms.
i'll still buy one of these though.
again, thank you for the heads up.

[william]

wigger haircut rules

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that Nick Gazin's momma thinks Nick Gazin's comic is the best. And in a review by Nick Gazin himself no less!

[Manos Turbo]

"Maybe just rifle through a copy and tear out the drawings that you think are good then try to flush the rest down the Borders bathroom toilet."

Have you seen that Kim Ki-Duk film "Bad Guy" where this Korean chick rips a page out of an Egon Schiele book at a bookshop and is later forced into prostitution by this mute guy who stabs another guy in the throat with a piece of paper and gets stabbed in the stomach by a huge sharpened piece of glass and then builds a whorehouse out of a lorry and pimps the girl out to fishermen?

[blarg]

Three days, three acres, three THOUSAND men! Only one can win,

THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT

[c brry]

six months from now zach hazard vaupen will be receiving blowjobs from chris onstad daily

[andy]

dear snakepit,
no one likes snakepit

[andy]

everyone loves zach hazard though!!!!!

[Calvin tan]

manos.. ur one fucked up individual

[Manos Turbo]

Calvin tan.. that's a real movie, you shipdit