Category Archives: Buzzed Books

Buzzed Books #88: Olivia Laing’s Crudo

26 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Buzzed Books #88 by Drew Barth

Olivia Laing’s Crudo

Identity is nebulous. Namely in how we perceive ourselves in terms of the work we create and how it is visible to others. In terms of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, her work with identity ties directly into the work and life of another author: Kathy Acker. We can see this done straight from the beginning with “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York. It was 19:45 on 13 May 2017.” And anyone familiar with Kathy Acker knows she died in the 1997. So from line one Laing is blending both her own narrative and that of Kathy Acker into her novel. This brings up the question of where identity in the scope of the novel begins and ends. When is it Laing or Acker or neither?

Crudo

What Laing specializes in more than anything is the constant imaginative sensory output of her prose: “When she was anorexic in the aughts like everyone she was conducting an assault on gravity, she was the apple that would go upwards, that simple. How nice to astonish the philosophers, to go off like a firecracker in all their faces.” But it isn’t just sensory overload as a means of simply overwhelming readers. Laing is working with a more contemporary rhythm. From her/Acker’s  Twitter dependency, to checking airline and hotel websites constantly, to the perpetual movement of herself all over the world, she creates this wonderful voice that captures the moment of mid-2017 in all its horrendous Trump and hate-filled splendor. Even in those moments of time screeching past like a freight train we have this slow building and composing of emotional peaks that hit perfectly every time.  The novel is visceral, yet wonderfully composed.

Laing uses the ideas of an oncoming dread or time screaming too quickly past us as a means of conveying how her/Kathy’s life works within emotional peaks and valleys. Never forget that there is a wedding taking place in this novel—accompanied by all the joy and stress that brings—but also the events of 2017. Trump and North Korea, Houston flooding, Charlottesville. All of that coupled with Kathy thinking “She missed Obama. Everyone missed Obama. She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn’t like living in the permanent present of the id.” But Kathy is married during this time, vacations in Italy, moves in with her husband. The volatility of the times are reflected in how the novel structures itself around them: with deft realism. We all remember many of the events of 2017 recounted, but we also remember our lives as well. But then again, it still all felt as though the time was being ripped from our hands as too much happened too often.

All of this to say that Crudo is a novel that feels like an incantation at the end of the world as a means of preserving one’s self. Getting lost in the timeline of our lives is relatively normal, but her working with identity and sensory components ensures that she is creating her own memorable impact on the world around her. For her, the act of writing and creating feels like it could be enough to fight back against a world that moves too fast and works to erase the individual.

Dharma Bums Drew Barth

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. His blog, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, appears on Wednesdays on The Drunken Odyssey.

Buzzed Books #87: The Lonesome Bodybuilder

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Buzzed Books

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Buzzed Books #87 by Drew Barth

Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder

At times, there’s only so much a person can say about a collection of stories that moves them or a collection that so meshes with their own sense of what makes a strong story that it’s hard to not just post one of the stories on here in lieu of a review to show just how good the collection is. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is one of those collections that makes me feel that way. But I can’t just copy-paste a whole story here. There’s a lot to talk about in Motoya’s latest collection in terms of its oddity and its spotlighting of characters that radiate a certain kind of sadness. At times existential, it’s a sadness that blooms from circumstance and the particular loneliness of being both together and separate from one another.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder.png

Although the oddity and sadness of the collection are apparent throughout, the idea of transformation is one that resonates most with her work. At times it is quite literal, in the case of the titular story, and at other times it is much more subtle. Take for example the story “Typhoon,” in which an older man and a boy watch people attempting to grapple with the wind of a typhoon as it destroys umbrellas and disrupts lives. We’ve all seen people running through the wind of a storm as it reduces their umbrellas to shambles. But our understanding of what they’re doing is wrong. It isn’t that they are attempting to get through the rain with their umbrella intact—they are trying to catch the wind on their umbrellas to launch them skyward.

The transformation of understanding of what people do with themselves is a thread that resonates heavily throughout the collection and is one that can read like twists at the ends of stories. But it really isn’t. It helps readers to reconsider things that may be fundamental to how they understand the people around them. It is this fundamental misunderstanding that lies at the heart of the titular story and many others in the collection. But these misunderstandings never come from a place of ignorance or malice—rather they come from a sense of isolation. Motoya crafts these, at times, unbelievable worlds and yet they always feel completely true. These are snapshots of contemporary Japan in which people are unable to talk due to strenuous work schedules, family situations, or simple meekness. And these small things resonate so completely that they feel unique to their location and universal.

To enjoy The Lonesome Bodybuilder is to enjoy reading. It is a collection that surprises constantly. At no point do I feel as though I know what a story will entail or how it will come to an end and I absolutely love that. The unpredictability, the depth of craft, the tangibility of these characters and their world creates a collection that is so completely outré but absolutely familiar all at once. I already want to forget that I’ve ever read it so I can experience these stories again for the first time. If a collection of stories ever felt like the familiar warm blanket draped over the couch for nights in, The Lonesome Bodybuilder fits that completely.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Dharma Bums Drew Barth

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. His blog, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, appears on Wednesdays on The Drunken Odyssey.

Buzzed Books #86: The Kiss

29 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Buzzed Books

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Buzzed Books #86 by Aurora Huiza

The Kiss

The Kiss: Intimacies From Writers is a lovely arrangement of vignettes, short stories, essays, and poems. Each is a quick, satisfying read. They all have to do with the act of kissing. More broadly, they are about intimacy. And if bountiful, rapturous show of affection is possible, then there are also festering wounds and forever scars. The body remembers a kiss just as it remembers trauma and violence. Experiences are lasting and they inform the trajectories of lives. So it is refreshing that some of these stories also explore bad kisses, violation, and loss. Major Jackson’s piece is particularly memorable in this respect. He writes about observing a young couple kissing, and admits that their love reaches a part of him “that needs healing.” Even in adulthood, he can move back into his “childhood of violence” like walking “through a door.”

The Kiss

Many of these pieces are doors. We walk through them and sit for a few pages in somebody else’s waking life. In doing so we remember our first kiss, our first time. Rebecca Makkai offers us a brief but powerful story about what it’s like to be in college and miss your period, something that many might recognize. She later learns “that when Cassiopeia was cast into the sky as a chain of stars, an angry Poseidon ensured she’d spend half the night standing on her head.” A woman’s life, it seems, is turned upside down because of a man. She makes us think of the things that almost happened to us, of how scared we have been for the future we currently live, and of the people we knew briefly but fiercely.

Upon finishing the book, some standouts naturally come to mind. Who you are likely determines which writers you latch on to. There is something for everyone. Terrance Hayes recalls the first time his father kissed him. He prefaces this with a fictional story about a giant named Tall Paul. Tall Paul kisses his father. “The kiss was so near his ear,” Hayes writes, “the giant could have whispered something about sadness to him. They pretended it had not happened.” We ache and we long to share our deepest sorrows, and especially to connect with our parents.

Some writers truly make us hurt. Laure-Anne Bosselaar finds a poem her late lover wrote about her. He had written that there is a kiss for her left inside him. He says “it will be the last of me to die.” Much of this collection is simple but grand in this way. Such is love.

There are plenty of small truths and great lines. The shudder of a train reminds Honor Moore of a man that was once beneath her. The comparison is heavy and jarring.

The book can also be funny. Christopher Paul Wolfe offers us a slice of intimate family life. In bed with his wife, he tells her, “‘I want you more than Hillary wanted Barack’s soul.’”

These writers all bare their souls. This anthology is inclusive and refreshing. Our most sacred memories as readers are lodged in these pages. It is a book best read in parts over time, and it is meant to be mulled over. Otherwise you might find yourself overwhelmed with feeling. You might have to call your mom gushing. It’s something you’ll want to flip through every now and then, especially in your most emotionally vulnerable moments. Brian Turner did an excellent job curating an honest, diverse assortment of work.

___

Aurora Huiza

Aurora Huiza is from Los Angeles, California. She is an undergraduate student at NYU studying English and Creative Writing. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Buzzed Books #85: Permanent Exhibit

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Creative Nonfiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Buzzed Books #85 by Drew Barth

Matthew Vollmer’s Permanent Exhibit

Think of a thought process and all the ways it branches out and around. The thoughts rarely stay in one place or along one singular train of thought for too long. It’s that aspect of his own mind that Matthew Vollmer examines in Permanent Exhibit. In this essay collection, he looks to examine not only what is happening in his mind, but what’s happening around it at all times.

permanent exhibit

The organic nature through which Vollmer shares himself in this collection really helps to reinforce both its structure and how the collection presents its content. We see first in “Status Update” the scene being set: it’s 2016 and this is like going through a Facebook feed. It’s a nonstop barrage of information until it cuts off. The essay is short, sweet, and gives us the founding seed through which the rest of the collection branches and grows. From there a reader is given Vollmer’s life during these essays—little bits of bike riding, the death industry, Grand Theft Auto, ruminations on the professor who changed his life. The essays build like concentric rings in a tree as they grow and crest upward.

It’s hard to talk about Permanent Exhibit without mentioning the collection’s structure. Forty-one essays and not a single paragraph break to be found. I love it. And for a few reasons. This helps to reinforce the idea of the mental process through which our minds go through when thinking—there’s no mental paragraph breaks, the brain simply takes a topic and runs with it. But in contrast, it helps to create this kind of focus throughout the essays. We as readers are engrossed in the words on the page because there’s nowhere for our eyes to wander and break from the flow. The essays are like a slideshow of images: focused and singular until we’re enamored with the next one. But they always stick to us no matter the subject. The structure presents us with a slab of words that makes us want to remember and devour the words before us so we can keep some of the beauty in them for a while longer.

And ultimately everything done with the essays is something that Vollmer does incredibly well throughout this collection—he makes the idea of the personal permanent. While some aspects of an individual change, there’s always this concrete, personal foundation that will subsist forever. And what Vollmer typifies here is what essay collections are: this deeply individual examination of the self and how that self interacts with the world around it.

The mind we’re peering into throughout this collection is one of compassion and principle. To go through this collection is to explore what is essentially Vollmer: the father, the husband, the man who bikes and plays video games. But his mind’s eye, the lens through which we see it all, always casts a light on small moments like enduring terrible pop music after his son’s dental checkup, the circus sideshow acts he saw as a child, or the articles his father emails him. He creates the meaning through observation.

It’s a universal experience, but the idea of this collection, his collection—the exhibit of the self and the personal permanence of the self—creates this fascinating look at Vollmer’s mind.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #84: The Job of the Wasp

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Craft of Fiction Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #84 by Drew Barth

Colin Winnette’s The Job of the Wasp

We’re hard in the holiday Season so that means it’s time for ghosts. Slight horror around the holidays seems like a kind of tradition—from A Christmas Carol to Santa Jaws—so I had to maintain the spirit of spirits. This is where The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette makes its entrance, and although not exactly a holiday novel itself, it still ticks off those Dickensian boxes of ghosts and orphans. The Job of the Wasp is one of those novels that excels at creating the kind of tension necessary in any good ghost story—we don’t believe in ghosts until the story makes us.

The Job of the Wasp

The Job of the Wasp is and isn’t a ghost story at the same time. We’re told that ghosts exist from characters outside our narrator, but that narrator completely rejects the idea at every opportunity. But the ghosts, as they appear, are something more interesting. Ghosts have become, in the orphanage the boys exist in, both tradition and a means of instilling fear. Ghosts offer control and a way of dealing with boys who aren’t necessarily well liked. We can see how Winnette sprinkles the idea of the ghost sparingly throughout the novel: little noises the narrator mentions, seeing faces that aren’t recognizable, a sudden body count. The distinct indecision is what makes the ghosts the most interesting—we can believe the narrator and accept them not being real, or we can get swept up like the rest of the boys.

The air of unreliability is thick throughout The Job of the Waspdue in no small part to our unnamed narrator. His actions, his paranoia, his constant internal monologue that paints pictures of grand schemes and conspiracies is what drives not only the story but the rest of the boys in the orphanage to hate him. And, at times, it’s not hard to see why they hate this unnamed boy.

Over the course of a few months, he fails to learn a single name or face and fails to attempt connections with the people around him. So consumed is the unnamed narrator in his paranoia that he is completely self isolated. And because we are so completely in his head, we get the sense that his unreliability is intentional, that the narrator chooses to see the world in his own way as a means of escaping from it.

Colin Winnette has crafted a deeply fascinating novel that combines some of the best elements of Dickensian character studies and Lord of the Flies-esque peril.

And ghosts.

A story is always great with ghosts. But still. The story is a mystery, a conspiracy, a treatise on never leaving boys to their own devices, and, more than anything, an extraordinary piece of fiction that gives us a slightly altered view of our world.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #83: Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Craft of Fiction Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #83 by Drew Barth

Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown

Ever since reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I get excited when I see a family tree at the beginning of a novel. It’s the possibilities a family tree at the beginning signifies: a multi-generational tale so focused on the minutia of family issues and how those ties break. So I got even happier when I saw two family trees at the beginning of Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown. But then the balancing of these two family dramas could prove difficultly delicate—we as readers watch the perilous tightrope act before us and hope for the best. And the best is what happens here. Frumkin is adept at weaving us between both families across generations while always keeping our attention on the story at hand.

The Comedown

While the story is concerned with the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall families and how one interaction between them would keep the families intertwined for decades, it is the way the story is told that is the most interesting. When I said balance before, I absolutely meant it. This is a novel told in non-chronological order and jumps from character to character, time period to time period, with only two moments of being in one character’s head twice. There’s a few ways here that a reader can end up lost. But Frumkin is a master at this tightrope balancing—each chapter is like its own story with a piece of the larger story’s arc intertwined. The leanness and precision of the prose only helps to reinforce the masterful work on display for we are given crucial story elements precisely when we need them, never a moment too soon or too late. The Comedown builds its tension and drama like Lego: piece by piece until we see every story thread from every character fully realized in an epilogue that could be the start of its own new story.

What makes Frumkin’s structure work so well is how immediately immersed we are once a new chapter begins. We are taken immediately from one character’s head to another and know nearly right away what kind of new character we’re inside. It’s a testament to how well thought out each charter is going into this novel. Even in a third person POV, the voices are always specific to each character. Fifteen characters make up the core cast of this novel, and not a one has a voice that’s quite like any of the others. We can see the precision of thoughts and actions from one character in the 70s to the meandering, profanity-laden thoughts of a different character thirty years later. And at no point do we ever stop and wonder which character we are, so strong are their mannerisms and voices throughout their chapters.

The Comedownis a great many things: family drama, drug-addled revenge, bildungsroman, social critique. But the story always manages to balance every aspect of itself, never once giving us the stomach tightening feeling that we’re about to watch this delicately beautiful house of cards topple over. The Comedown is a novel of trust as well—for the characters and the reader themselves. While the characters battle through their own ability to trust one another, we as readers are asked to trust Frumkin in her prose. We see the perilous heights the story reaches for with bated breath, but we know that through skill Frumkin will dazzle us as the story glides above. Only then at the last page can we exhale and know we’ve seen something marvelous.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #82: Flavor

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Comic Books

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #82 by Drew Barth

Joseph Keatinge and Wook Jin Clark’s Flavor Vol. 1 (Collects Issues 1-6)

“Culinary consultant” may be my favorite thing I’ve seen in a comic credits page in a while. Seeing a culinary consultant, specifically Ali Bouzari, on a credits page in a comic that is about food in all its forms shows the reader from the beginning what kind of series they’re about to begin. Flavor isn’t using food as set dressing or as a background element while the rest of the story goes on—food is the heart and soul of the series from the first page. Keatinge and Clark have struck a balance with Flavor that isn’t often seen in books that are engrossed in a specific hook. Food is indeed at the heart of this series, but this is still the story of Xoo and how food shapes nearly every aspect of who she is as a character.

Flavor

At the center of this whole story is something that Keatinge and Clark do so well and is something that is typically one of the trickiest moves to make in a new series: world building with purpose. I’m constantly astounded by the depth and breadth this team achieves in utilizing character motivations, background detail, and panel-to-panel beats to construct a fully realized world simply within the first issue. Am I jealous? Maybe. But for good reason. Even the name of this walled city, the Bowl, conjures up so much potential just with the imagery of food utilized throughout as well as what a bowl is used for, be it mixing or serving. Because, again going back to the first issue, the story sets up something world-breakingly massive on its final page that goes right back to that idea of a bowl used for serving.

As a comic, Flavor is lean with its story in all the right ways: it gives us just enough to go on to keep us invested at the end of each issue, but still leaves us with a pile of other questions to be answered in the next. And they’re always questions that link back to either the characters or the world of the Bowl. Will Xoo get the truffles she needs? How long can an unlicensed chef like her operate in the city? What the hell was that on the other side of the wall of the Bowl? I don’t know yet, and I love it.Flavor is doing what many of Image’s best series are doing and that’s setting up almost everything right from the start with a first volume. Even if this is a series that continues for fifteen or forty more issues, we have the plot points in front of us already and now we get to see just how they connect in the long run.

Flavor is absolutely a series that wears its influences on its sleeve and wears them well. From the Ghibli-esque world building to the feeling of mystery and adventure of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Flavor takes what has been done before and works a new path in its own way. Through its art and world building, Keatinge and Clark want to show us something we haven’t seen before, something inherently different, but still a bit familiar. Not only do they accomplish what they set out to do, they do it so exceptionally well that Flavoris one of my favorite new series to come out this year. Flavor is a story that wants you to read and enjoy and immerse yourself completely in and it is so easy to lose yourself in its wonder.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #81: Alyson Hagy’s Scribe

27 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #81 by Drew Barth

Alyson Hagy’s Scribe

Let’s talk about magic realism. Magic realism is kind of odd and nebulous in how it behaves, but a reader always knows it when they see it. Magic realism gives off a feeling of being immersed,  being familiar and yet not. These senses all come together with Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, a novel that centers around an unnamed woman renowned for her ability to write letters. She’s asked by a man named Hendricks to write and deliver a letter for him, but this request, throughout the course of the story, is made more difficult by the machinations of horrible people around them. Scribe is a novel centered on wants and needs—of what can be given and taken by individuals before consequences rain down like angry locusts.

Scribe

Hagy does something spectacular when she draws on an Appalachian loneliness to drive Scribe forward. Abandoned homesteads, dried riverbeds, old homes built by hand, and a constant sense of unease that permeates our main character’s soul. The loneliness and unease here are unique to their location. Myths and legends of the area, as well as the two sisters themselves, have already taken root and this informs the sheer believability and depth of Hagy’s world building. This is a world after some kind of civil war. Which one? Don’t worry about it. The war happened and this is the aftereffect. And this is a part of the beauty of the story as well: it’s very much rooted in a specific time, but feels timeless all the same. Hagy completely immerses us in the world she’s created, one that is foreign and absolutely familiar. And this goes back to the Appalachian loneliness, this unique blend of hearth fire smells and disquiet about what’s beyond the trees just out of sight.

This sense of unease that the setting reinforces only bolsters the sense of magic that permeates Hagy’s words. She’s built legends, yes, but legends exist in the past. She likewise mythologizes the present, letting the unnamed woman and Hendricks experience aspects of the world that are unbelievable but accepted. Trumpet horns from nothing, speaking in her dead sister’s voice, the presence of a group known only as the Uninvited. The world is informed by magic and myth; shaped by a chisel of realism. The story lets its magic flow freely, showing us with a lyrical eye the jarring and the beautiful in equal measure. The magic doesn’t save or delight. It is a magic that informs and heralds desolation as it rolls down our main characters.

Scribe is a novel of wonder and desperation. The story gives us a landscape painted in language both beautiful and uncanny while populating it with the kind of people who would murder for their debts. It’s a world that exists in a way only Hagy’s lyricism can show. Every page is a song sung by a blind man with a guitar in an empty train station. The words are raw, coarse in a way that is almost grating, but still billows with a beautiful sense of wonderment throughout.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #80: Jason Heller’s Strange Stars

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #80 by Drew Barth

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars

Stars, man. Also, Starman. We can bring in the 70s music scene with the crippling depression of the Altamont Free Concert, or with a blast of cosmic literature radiation that would seep its way into popular culture throughout the decade. And this explosion of new kinds of music, of course, shouldered by a single musician who would come to embody the blending of science fiction and music more than anyone else: David Bowie. While sci-fi music is at the heart of Jason Heller’s deep cut dive through the 70s, Bowie is the ever shifting soul that towers over all.

Strange Stars

Broken up year by year, Strange Stars takes us on a tour through the decade to witness the evolution of sci-fi music. We go from novelty to subtle references to wearing influences squarely on sleeves. Strange Stars is just as much a story about the music as it is a story about the growing changes in popular tastes and culture at the time. Heller never lets us forget that throughout the book. Changes in taste and accessibility act as a driving force behind popular music. After the novelty songs of the 60s ended, bands like Yes, King Crimson, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, even Neil Young begin this slow incorporation of the science fiction stories they love. But it isn’t just dropping names that makes this a different kind of book. Heller dives through interviews and adds a little touch of personal conjecture to explore. Why do these musicians add touches of sci-fi to their work? Their love of the stories is a driving force, but they do it also as a way to communicate ideas of technology, interstellar travel, and dystopia as they become more relevant throughout the decade.

Strange Stars is a book that’s as well researched as it is written. It’s thorough in terms of the music it includes, the books they reference, and the ways in which science fiction bled itself into the music of the 70s. In the case of Michael Moorcock, we seem him joining with the band Hawkwind to contribute lyrics and put on live sci-fi concerts. The exploration between music and science fiction here is something quite often untapped in terms of historical analysis. It wasn’t just the works of Heinlein, Dick, and Orwell that influenced the majority of these musicians. They move beyond influence. In the case of P-Funk, we’re looking at a group that created the very science fiction they’ve come to emulate. And that’s one of the core aspects of this book that we take away. Imitation and homage are fun, but creating something wholly new in the genre ends up being more rewarding.

Jason Heller brings us a new kind of insight on a decade in music that has been analyzed and examined longer than I’ve been alive. But it’s the twist that he brings to his analysis, the inclusion of science fiction as a driving force, that makes it something special. It is the kind of book that’s filled with insight on how these bands brought up their sci-fi influences as well as histories of bands that came and fell in the course of the decade. Strange Stars is history, it’s literature, it’s musical, it’s trivia (like I still can’t get over the fact that Patti Smith wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult), and it’s showing how everything grows from something else. As the 70s ended, the sci-fi niche these bands established earlier in the decade became the mainstream. Science fiction became the world.

Drew Barth

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.

Buzzed Books #79: Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Buzzed Books, Comic Books

≈ Leave a comment

Buzzed Books #79 by Drew Barth

Rich Tommaso’s Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix (Collects Issues 1-4)

Let’s talk about adventure comics. While DC Comics published their own, titled Adventure Comics in kind with Action and Detective, the realm of adventure comics as a genre is uniquely European. Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, the various works of Jacques Tardi, and Hergé’s Tintin all typified what is considered a European adventure comic. From the high panel count, focus on onomatopoeia, and quick bursts of action that would fall back to let the rest of the story progress, these kinds of adventure comics became their own genre. And this is the pedigree that Rich Tommaso pulls from with Spy Seal. While the comparisons to Tintin are apt, Tommaso finds a niche in his unique blending of European adventure comic styles and American comic book action.

Spy Seal

Spy Seal is exactly what the title implies: a spy who is also a seal. Although this is not completely unique in the anthropomorphized world that Tommaso has created with various birds, rabbits, and Gila monsters roaming on two legs, it does help the audience in honing in on our main character even in the largest of crowd shots. We find our titular Spy Seal, Malcolm, unknowingly dropped into assassinations, intrigue, and art heists by the third page. From there, it’s constant movement around the world to confront the mystery of the Corten-Steel Phoenix. However, this is only a part of a larger mystery, a mystery that we’re not privy to just yet. But this serialization of mystery is something that adventure comics thrive on—while a portion of this case has been solved, there’s a few dozen more questions to be answered much later.

Tommaso is able to create a sense of legitimate dread and intrigue in a world exploding with colors and animals. Much like Tintin, he’s crafted a story and world that is very much appropriate for any age audience while maintaining a maturity in how the story is being told. Between chapters, we as an audience are left to infer what happened to get us from where we were previously to where we are now. This method of compressed storytelling on Tommaso’s part allows us to see what moments in Malcolm’s story are most relevant. We don’t need a training montage or an hours long train ride when we could have the mystery and intrigue immediately. The immediacy in Tommaso’s art brings us along for a ride from moment to moment, scene to scene, panel to panel. Malcolm is swept away in his story, and we’re swept away with him.

Adventure comics today occupy this weird little space in comics due to its classic past, and Spy Seal looks to disrupt that space gloriously. It isn’t completely beholden to European adventure comic traditions, nor is it imitating American comic bombast. Tommaso is one of the most interesting artists creating comic art right now because of how he blends what he’s learned about comics into distilled wonder. Spy Seal is adventure comics following an old path with new boots and you want to see what lies at the end.

Drew Barth

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.