Bill Randall

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I used to pretend my poor English, French, and Japanese could cover the comics world pretty well.  Then Stripburger arrived from Slovenia, the Germans came on my radar, and Canicola appeared in Italy.  And the Finns.  At least they subtitled their anthology Glomp for those poor readers not invited to the Finno-Ugric party.

Visually, the book’s a treat.  It has been compared to Kramers Ergot, as both share some artists (Anders Nilsen, C.F.) and crazed visuals.  But the tiny leap does Glomp a disservice.  It seems studied next to Kramers‘ audacity.

Many of the comics often seem like conceptual games. Lamelos’ Trondheim-like romp follows an OuBaPian constraint, with the same dialogue on each of three very different pages. Roope Eronen’s bizarre story takes a break for two pages of food photos, a stop-motion film-within-the-comic.  And the book’s third image shows people in cardboard-box dragon costumes.

I’ll be writing about the book all week, focusing on some of the best works. Until then, BoingBeing’s web site has more samples, and English for those of us so inclined.

1. The Comics Journal’s 291st issue appears online & in print this Monday. I have a long essay on Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, which was a pleasure to write, if just for an excuse to re-read an old favorite. Fanta has previews of the issue, and a fine orange soda.

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2. Book-of-the-Year: the disjointed, entrancing Red Colored Elegy hits stores this week. I’m still kind of amazed it has been translated. Way ahead of its time, it will rewrite many people’s understanding of the art form’s history.

Very soon in the Journal, I will have a long essay about the book, touching on the political context, the animation industry in the day, artist Seiichi Hayashi’s role in both, and some of his earlier work. So read the book now, mull it over, and maybe we can talk about it in a month or two.

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3. If I ever finish it, I’ll have an essay about Dousei Jidai, the other great youngsters-living-in-sin manga from the 70s, in a future issue.

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4. This week, I’ll have short snippets about the Finnish anthology Glomp #9 every day Monday-Friday. And sometime soon, a little note about the “1-2-3 Trio,” I suppose.

Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.