Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #108 by Drew Barth

A One-Shot Look

I’ve written about my appreciation for shorter comics. I appreciate how a two page story by Junji Ito contain more horror than most full-length films. Another master of the short story art, Hirohiko Araki, had his series of shorts, Thus Spoke Kishibie Rohan, animated last year and they will be released on Netflix this month. But there’s a slight problem here: these short manga have never been released in English officially. So, what to do? Luckily, Araki’s output is massive and he does have one short story out to enjoy while waiting for the others to be released: Rohan at the Louvre.

Even with Araki’s penchant for the bizarre, Rohan at the Louvre is one of his oddest works. The manga artist, Kishibie Rohan, travels to the Louvre to view a painting mentioned by a woman while living with his grandmother as a teenager. The woman had found the painting when she was just a young girl, but remembers the horror of it clearly. Painted with the blackest ink from a 1000 year-old tree, the painter was executed for cutting down the tree and it is believed the rage of his undue death is still imbued within the painting. As such, the painting was obtained by the Louvre and has been sitting in an abandoned vault deep beneath the museum for decades. So of course when people look at it for the first time ghosts erupt from the vault that had been holding it and the museum workers that had been accompanying Rohan meet a variety of grim fates. It’s that Araki brand of fun, you know?

What makes Rohan at the Louvreeven more interesting is that it is the first in a series of manga and comics commissioned by the Louvre itself to showcase the museum. Creators like Enki Bilal, Jirō Taniguchi, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and others crafted stories centered in and around the Louvre and its collection. But Araki’s story really elevated what you could do with a story about a museum. The ways in which he utilizes color to imply time and motion are almost unseen in many of his other works, but here he was able to experiment like he had in his Thus Spoke Kishibie Rohan shorts. Araki manages to create a museum story that barely spends any time in the museum proper and instead focuses on the passage of time through the museum’s catacombs and the character of Rohan.

While it will be fun to see some more of Araki’s work animated, it’s also nice to appreciate just how good he is at creating short bursts of manga. It’s works like Rohan at the Louvrethat only excite me for the potential release of of more short works in the future with the success of the animated adaptations. From there, I can only hope for more short works from Araki as his latest series, Jojolion, begins to wind down.

Get excited. Get Bizarre.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

The Curator of Schlock #334 by Jeff Shuster

Suspiria

The greatest horror movie of all time? I won’t argue. 

I made one request of Jervis. While I am busy scribbling away on the My-Dinner-With-Andre-but-with-vampires script, I thought a nice, cool glass of egg nog might hit the spot. I asked that the next time Jervis stop by the grocers that he pickle me up some. What does he buy me? Horizon Organic Low Fat Egg Nog. Are you kidding me? I can’t get the real stuff. I’m going to figure out a way to deal with Wally, Celestial, and Jervis. I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!

Speaking of hell, this week’s movie is 1977’s Suspiria from director Dario Argento. Jessica Harper plays Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student who travels to Freiburg, Germany to attend a famous dance academy. Unfortunately, there are sinister happenings going on at this dance school and by sinister happenings, I mean witchcraft. Nasty, nasty witchcraft.

Suspiria is the ultimate horror movie about witchcraft.

I believe it was the last movie in Europe shot with a technicolor camera. Accompanying the gorgeous visuals is a jolting score by the Italian prog-rock band Goblin.

So I’m struggling a bit to give my thoughts on Suspiria in that it’s as close to a perfect horror movie as I’ve ever seen. More often than not, horror seems to be about regular people running into evil. Sometimes that evil comes from the natural world, but sometimes it’s preternatural. And sometimes that regular person is destroyed by that evil. When you go into a horror movie, you don’t know if the main character is going to survive.

Take Suzy Bannion for example, an ordinary American woman visiting Germany. She comes European ancestry, might even be part German, but that country is as foreign to her as any other. When she arrives at the school, she notices another student running from the academy into the stormy night. Said student is murdered in a painful and terrifying fashion by some kind of spell. These spells attack other faculty and students at the school, anyone who gets too close to figuring out secret of the academy, that members are involved in the occult.

I remember when I first watched Suspiria, I kept trying to figure out who the witch was. Was it Madame Blanc, the aging headmistress of the academy as played by Joan Bennett? How about Miss Tanner (Alida Valli), an angry woman with a thick German accent that would probably feel right at home in the Third Reich? We’ve got Pavlos, a creepy Romanian dude with false teeth, and Albert who resembles Little Lord Fauntleroy. Which one of them is the witch? They all are.

The above mentioned belong to a coven running the academy. At the head of this coven is Helena Markos, a witch know as the “Black Queen,” thought to have died in a fire many years earlier. The coven kills anyone that gets wise to them. And they have set their sites on Suzy Bannon which they refer to as a “bitch of an American girl.” Well the coven shouldn’t underestimate the American girl. Sometimes it’s the American girl that will succeed where others failed. Sometimes it’s the American girl that will whoop your ass.

In Memoriam

Daria Nicolodi

June 19, 1950 to November 26, 2020

There would be no Suspiria without Daria Nicolodi. She cowrote the screenplay, inspired by tales she’d heard about a ballet academy run by practitioners of the occult, Daria Nicolodi starred in several Italian movies, but she was a writer as well as a performer. I’ve covered movies of her on the blog before and will cover more. May she rest in peace.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443 and episode 444) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #97 by Drew Barth

Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Robots?

From Gundam to Pacific Rim to Big O, I’m likely to be all in if there’s a robot bigger than most buildings stomping around somewhere. The newest series from Vault Comics, Alex Paknadel and John Lê’s Giga, gives me robots as big as buildings because they have become actual buildings. From cathedrals to apartments, the giant robots of old have opened themselves up to become the habitats for the people left behind after their war had devastated the planet.

Giga, however, isn’t the story of the giant robots and their fights—it’s the story of the people left behind inside the giant robots and their fights. As a result of the battles the Giga had commenced years prior, they have been deified. These giant robots have been opened up, studied, and turned into grand cathedrals to their power as well as buildings for everyday use. Baba Yaga is somewhere furious her house only has chicken legs instead of pneumatic skyscrapers. And it’s in these grand cathedrals and buildings that we meet our main character, Evan Calhoun. Evan is a person who uses a wheelchair and used to be a part of these cathedrals until being cast out for unknown reasons. When his story begins, he’s struggling. Barely able to scrape together enough scrap for rations, him and his robot, Laurel, enter a Giga beyond their city limits and directly into peril.

Vault Comics excels at first issues. Giga continues that trend. A first issue is one of the hardest things to write in comics—the balance of world-building, introducing characters and tone, and establishing a story in roughly twenty something pages is a feat. Paknadel and Lê manage this balancing act due in part to their method of storytelling in this issue. We learn a small amount of Evan’s past and his connection to the religion around the Giga, but an explosion occurs and we hard cut to thirteen years later where he’s struggling to survive. We’re given our world in just a couple pages—from the attitude of the world to the Giga to the general struggle of living in a world that exists in the shadow of giant robots.

Giga satiates my need for giant robot stories by giving me a giant robot story I’ve never seen before: one where the giant robots haven’t even moved. I’ve seen robots fight, I’ve seen them brood, I’ve seen them choke slam the living embodiment of entropy, but I’ve never seen one stop and become a part of the setting. What Gigadoes so well throughout its first issue is it makes you think of these behemoth machines as immovable—they’re just as much a part of the background as a skyscraper in Metropolis—and focus in on the people who have to live around them. It feels like the kind of thing Paknadel and Lê can set up just long enough before one of the Giga begins to move.

Get excited. Get huge.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.