Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well. This is a collection of paintings done by the named artist and exhibited in New York and perhaps on the road shortly after the turn of the 21st century. A bit of introduction explains who Gussow was and why he was important, which basically justifies the exhibition.

But ultimately, he’s a mid 20th century brush strokes and shapes on canvas sort of painter. It’s hard to find anything represented in his work but for the colors and shapes. The frontspiece is reminiscient of Guernica but without the actual, you know, distinguished shapes. So this work doesn’t rise to the level even of Picasso. Or even, heaven forfend, Matisse.

So why do I bother with monographs and collections of artists I don’t like? Perhaps I hope to crystallize things I like and to be able to explain better what I don’t. But I’m not sure that’s working. To turn Tolstoy’s quote from Anna Karenina on its head: All art that I don’t like are all alike; each piece of art I like is pleasing in its own way. And the reason I don’t like a lot of modern art is that it’s basically self conscious artist doing art that is supposed to be viewed and reviewed as art. That is, you know you’re looking at a painting. It has little content other than Hey, I’m a painting!.

Perhaps I need to review more modern art monographs to improve my explanation. Or put a little more thought or effort into it. But what am I, Driscoll or Lileks?

This book is by one of the artists behind Duel! and the author of a couple of other books I picked up at LibraryCon 2019.

This book deals with Rook City, a place where many people have special abilities, but one fellow does not. A college student who likes mysteries, he helps an elderly vigilante escape a nursing home and witnesses several students who consume Dracula’s reconstituted blood and each receives a single ability of the vampire’s power–and a professor that drinks a vial with a more powerful reconstitution. Oh, and the super hero defender of the city pays an actor to act as his nemesis and always look good.

It has a number of stories with interconnections, and it works. The art is simple and serves the story, which you know is what I like in comics. And it hints at a continuation, so I’ll look for that.

I liked it, so I’ll pick up more of the artist’s narrative work (that is, not the sketchbook kinds of collections that a lot of con comic book participants offer). And I hope that I like Gahr’s fiction as much as I liked these stories.

This book is not a real monograph, nor is it a comprehensive survey of art in America between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. It’s a very, very brief glance.

For painting, we’ve got a couple paragraphs and an image or two for Whisler, Sargent, Cassatt, members of a group called The Ten, Eakins, Remington, a couple photographers, but each really only gets a mention and a plate. Then we’ve got a couple paragraphs on the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Didn’t Cassatt do an impressive mural for it? Yes, yes, she did, I remembered.), some pages on architecture and engineering in the last half of the last century (The Roeblings who built the Brooklyn Bridge suffered for it; the father died and the son had lingering effects from working in the caissons, I remembered).

So it’s a quick skim–the text is really only essay length–with relatively few images for the text (but the text is not dense). It was most valuble for me to remind me of things I already knew, as I have read books on Sargent, Cassatt, and Remington and the story of the Roeblings in Who Built That?.

But not a bad way to pass an hour or so.

This is a fun little collection of, well, two stories essentially: Duel 1 and Duel 2.

The first has the conceit of two kids drawing super-powered characters who take turns stomping the other kid’s most recent character. So we get a bit of one-upmanship with simple comic drawings of different types of characters.

The second actually features two comic artists swapping drawings, so each new creation attacks and defeats the champion from the previous turn.

The book also includes a couple prequel adventures of the characters before they met their ends in the duels, which is a nice treat of more straight forward comic bookery. The end matter of the book includes additional treatments of the characters.

It’s a bit of fun. I might get a copy of it for my boys for Christmas.

I bought this book six years ago because I recognized Doctorow’s name from the Internet. In those six years, I have read a pile of Executioner novels acquired that same day before picking this book up. In the interim, I forgot it was a novel, and I initially placed it in my carry bag last week to read at the martial arts school while my kids were in class (and I was not, as I recovered from the memorial stair climb).

But it is a novel, and to sum up: Nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

The extrapolated world has people constantly jacked into the Internet, extreme body modifications, and sort-of immortality via consciousness backup and restore to a clone. People live not on cash, but a currency based on social media reputation called Whuffies–if you do a lot of things that people on the Internet value, you have a lot of doors open to you, but if you do not, well, you’re on hard times. Down and out, one might say.

The narrator begins by recounting how he met his best friend, and then the main narrative explains that he (the narrator) returns periodically to Disney World after various adventures. His friend returns, out of Whuffies, and talks again about permanently ending his life. The narrator convinces his friend to not go out on the bottom, but to rebuild his reputation and to go out at his peak. So the two work with the narrator’s girl friend to manage part of the park.

The park itself is run by various ad-hocracies, like-minded individuals who come together to do things guided by people on social media who reward them with likes–and Whuffies–for good ideas. Another attraction developer moves into Liberty Square and threatens the status quo with new technologies–and someone murders the narrator, which makes the narrator go a little off in his defense of the status quo.

Spoiler alert: At the end, status quo is maintained. As I mentioned, nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

I’m not sure if the intended message is that nobody can move forward or change in such a society, but that’s what I took from it.

At a little over 200 pages, it’s a pretty quick read, and narratively, it pulls you along. So pleasant, but meaningless.

I got this book at LibraryCon 2019. The author/artist had a couple of regular, staple-stitched comics that I bought as well as this collection which has a flat spine and hence gets counted as a graphic novel and eligible for my annual reading list and an official MfBJN book report.

This book is a collection of stories that take on stuff from the Brothers Grimm (or at least popular representations thereof) and nursery rhymes and given a darker (although not necessarily as dark as the Brothers Grimm) turn, often featuring lycanthropy as the pivot.

An interesting book. The art is black and white and not too busy. The art and story are well balanced–it’s not a story ins service of the art, but the art serves the story. So pretty good.

I liked it better, strangely enough, than his individual comics. One of the series I read, Musical Mishaps of Cat and Fiddle, stretches a story similar in feel (and featuring a form of lycanthrophy as well), into six issues which lends itself to creating more panels for the story which unbalances it a bit.

So perhaps I’m learning a little about the balance I prefer, and this book has it. For what it’s worth.

Still, I’ll watch for more from this guy at future conventions.

So, Brian J., you’re saying. It’s not enough that you count looking at artist monographs as reading a book for your annual total, but now you’re counting comic books? Well, in my defense, gentle reader, this is a collection of the first six comics in a re-imagining of the Scooby Doo universe published by DC comics from 2016-2019 (or so I learned on the Scoobypedia). So it’s not too far off from, say, Potbelly Mammoth or a graphic novel. He said in his defense.

One of my boys borrowed this from the library, and one of my boys (perhaps the same one that checked it out) this weekend said it creeped him out. So I picked it up.

The book reboots the story as post-apocalyptic fiction. Velma works for a secret corporate lab that has a plan to release nanobots that will reprogram humans to be nicer to each other. When she discovers that her superiors also will make humanity docile, she invites an obscure journalist (Daphne) and her cameraman (Fred) to the complex. They and a dog trainer (Shaggy) and an artificially augmented dog (Scooby) are the only ones who are unaffected when the triggered nanobots instead turn people into monsters. They grab a prototype armored vehicle and head out into the wastes in search of… Well, other survivors or other of the complexes.

Not much happens in the first six issues, really. We get some flashbacks about Shaggy and Scooby and Velma, but too many of the pages deal with the bickering between Daphne, who blames Velma for the apocalypse, and Velma, who really did. The actual action of the issues are kinda nil. Reading the above post about the cancellation of the series after 36 issues, I saw the same complaints with the whole run.

Oh, and spoiler alert: Taking a page from the movie, Scrappy Doo is a bad guy–but is arc is just beginning at the end of this volume.

Eh. I didn’t care for the reboot/reimagining. It didn’t creep me out, though.

I liked this collection better than Jon Corbino: An Heroic Vision. They both come from the early part of the 20th century, where painting has been freed from the line, but Peters’ subject matter is more appealing. It depicts landscapes, generally creeks/rivers or docks, but with human figures in those landscapes.

Well, “figures” might be a little giving. Basically, they’re a couple of brush strokes. But the effect is more akin to the original Impressionist influence. Well, maybe it’s more akin to what I take away from my favorite Impressionism–a sense of a remembered scene or setting.

Unfortunately, as the introductory text indicates, Peters liked to do the same scenes over and over again at different times and in different seasons. So although most of the work is pleasing to look at, if you run through a catalog for an extensive show like this one, it’s repetitive.

But, like I said, pleasing to look at. The human figures make them more pleasing than Monet’s sterile, flora-only landscapes anyway.

I wonder if I will remember Peters or Corbino in a year month or two. Unless I see some of their things at the Springfield Art Museum sometime soon, and I can say, “A-ha! I saw a monograph in that artist,” probably not.

Well, this is the first artist’s monograph that I’ve browsed during the 2019-2020 Packers season.

The book is a couple of full-color plates and a lot of black and white images. The art itself is unclean lines with Degas-like Impressionist touches. The subjects tend to be human figures, but the unclean lines combine with the phrasing, so to speak, make it look a little like Soviet peasant art. I didn’t like it much.

As you know, gentle reader, aside from Impressionism, I prefer cleaner lines, and most of the stuff produced after 1870 will not please me. But your mileage may vary.