robertrivasplata's Reviews (631)

Wealth inequality, police (non) accountability, social media culture, & U.S. municipal politics are just some of the issues that collide to make a comic that feels like Judge Dredd meets Anna Dorn's Exalted. I Ideas like the speculative bread bubble, the fame obsessed political class, & the astrology fanatic revolutionaries, make Justice Warriors feel very reflective of our times. Unlike a great many other great comics, there's something about Justice Warriors that feels like it would resist adaptation into a movie. The characterization of Bubble City/the UZ would be difficult for Hollywood to get right. & maybe only Bors & Clarkson are able to make a story featuring a turd & a swamp monster as the main characters compelling. 

Compilation of Passmore's comics. Kind of like a Creepshow movie, if it had some news reporting from anti-racist protests thrown in. A lot of these are pretty out there. I'd say “GoodBye or the State of Nature: a Comik” is the most difficult to get my head around. It's hard to pick a favorite out of all of these stories. A Pantomime Horse I is an incredible combo of a mysterious story, surrealism, weird art, & real emotions. I loved the twist in The 100% True story called Ally I Need is Love. The title story is the most cringey (appropriately). Passmore is great at creating characters that are just barely concealing some feral nature. Many of these stories need to be re-read a couple times. 

Memoir of being a Black punk rocker teenager in Apple Valley, CA sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Seems to cover about a year, during which James had a whole coming of age, forged his identity, etc. Suburban isolation, alienation, & despair are compounded by Southern California's famous neo nazis, & the usual casual racism. Imagine a scene so tiny that the only 2 Black punks in town have to fill out their band with a racist skinhead punk. Ultimately James was just passing through, geographically speaking;& even had he stayed, he had connections to the outside world that none of his Apple Valley friends really did. His leaving his friends behind at the end is sad. Of course, Spooner grew up to became even more of a Punk rocker & lives his ideals so there's a happy ending for him. I like the period pictures at the end of James & friends. Definitely a great memoir. Does a pretty good job of explaining SHARPs. 

Accounts of women-led resistance movements from South America, Vietnam, India, Nepal, Thailand, & the Philippines. Offers a snapshot of intersectional feminism. I need to look at the about the authors again to check out their other work. 

Like the title says, this is a history of the genesis of comic book superhero Wonder Woman, focusing mostly on the life, family, & times of her main creator William Moulton Marston. Marston created Wonder Woman towards the end of his life, & she was his major professional achievement, coming after years of attempts to make a name for himself as an academic, pop psychologist, & lie detection expert. I was almost impressed at Marston's relentless self promotion, & also his wife(s') relentless promotion of him, often in some pretty deceptive ways. I can tell Lepore was at least somewhat amused by Olive Byrne's ongoing bit where she interviews famous psychologist W.M. Marston, while never disclosing that she's known him for years, let alone kinda married to him. Not sure if this is a trick she learned from Marston himself, who was certainly not below having his students to represent a defendant in a murder trial for the purposes of calling him as an expert witness to promote his lie-detector. The Secret History of Wonder Woman ncludes a lot about the history & milieu of the feminist & suffragist movement of the early 20th century, tying Marston's philosophy (for which Wonder Woman was his vehicle) with that of those early feminists, especially Margaret Sanger & her sister Ethel Byrne, who just happened to be the aunt & mother of his mistress/2nd wife, Olive. If it sounds confusing, it's because I was sometimes confused. My main complaint with this book is that it should have included a family tree/dramatis personae chart. Some of the captions in the color plate section do a decent concise job of explaining some of these family relationships, so I was not completely without a paddle. Also includes a fair amount about the state of the field of psychiatry in the United States during the early 20th century. 

The old photos & comics featured as illustrations are amazing. As always, I'm struck by how odd the 1930s-40s comics' style is. It's hard to articulate, but I feel like the look is epitomized in the faces in the courtroom scene on pgs 76-77, & in the way Wonder Woman is running onto the daily comics page on pg 244. 

Not sure I buy the Marston family's claims that the bondage fantasies featured in the early Wonder Woman comics were not enacted in reality by William, Elizabeth, & Olive, or that Elizabeth & Olive didn't have a sexual relationship of their own after William's death. The lengths the family went to cover up the fact of William, Elizabeth, & Olive's throuple (sometimes tetruple) indicates that the kids are probably not reliable narrators in that regard. 

The endnotes are not completely vital to understanding this book, but they do illuminate the kinds of (& how much) research Lepore did. The amount of research that went into just reconstructing Marston's Harvard University career is amazing. & I'm kind of blown away that the Harvard University Archives contain students' class notes going back at to least 1911! The list of abbreviated names at the beginning of the notes is really helpful for keeping the various dramatis personae straight. 

Collection of Alison Bechdel's soap opera comic strips from 1987-2008. Features a large quirky cast of politically engaged Queer characters of diverse backgrounds. As such it's a chronicle of some pretty grim years during which political engagement & activism were seen as foolish & even self-indulgent. This is reflected back into the strip with the depictions of activism decreasing, while at the same time all the characters are being driven insane by the omnipresent news of the world consistently moving in the wrong direction. The tyranny of the news, & the 24 hour news cycle makes DTWOF is kind of like This Modern World, except with multiple interweaving storylines featuring a large cast of Lesbians instead of absurdist 50s kitsch humor. DTWOF also depicts the period during which the dream of making a difference in the world was replaced by the dream of just making a living. So, this collection is a good reminder to me that the 90s really were how I remember. 

In addition to the historical interest, it is interesting to see the evolution of Bechdel's art style over the course of the strip from a fun, cartoony style, to the more realistic style familiar to the fans of Fun Home. I really enjoy all of the humorous titles & headlines & brand names in the backgrounds. 

Pretty sure I first encountered DTWOF in the SF Chronicle sometime in the late 90s, sometime after the horniness content was diluted to levels suitable for late 90s mainstream newspapers. If I'd been able to read it regularly back then, I probably very much would have disapproved of Sydney's introduction. 

I would totally read The Exhaustive Dykes to Watch Out For. 

Collection of Will Self Essays from between 2001-2021. The essays about books (reviews & introductions) are the best ones. The Chernobyl essay & Australia speech are pretty good too. A lot of Why Read interacts with Self's public persona & identity as some sort of public intellectual (?) & shit stirrer, a persona which I am almost entirely unfamiliar with. I liked Book of Dave & Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, but I can't get over how wild it is that this guy is the sort of celebrity in the UK that gets recognized on the street. I hoped that the one titled “Being a Character” would be about Self's public persona, but no such luck (it was more of a humorous look at how & why readers invest real emotion & thus bring life to the characters that they are reading, which was interesting). I have to admit the fact of Self's celebrity makes me somewhat less interested in reading more of his work. The essays about the future & relevance of the written word in this era of the internet (or “bi-directional digital media”) are kind of repetitive, but “bi-directional digital media” is a decent collective name for “the suite of technologies comprising the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the worldwide web, & the internet”. Not sure I buy that it spells the end of long-form literature as we know it, but also not sure that I care. I'll still be reading! Self's complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is on display throughout these essays, speeches, &c. The glimpses into Self's development as a writer, such as how he first read Catch-22 solely to analyze how its narrative & humor work for his own use. I also can't hate on his bragging about being close enough to J.G. Ballard that he inherited his typewriter. I'd brag too! 

Box Brown's darkly loving homage to 80s-90s lowest forms of popular entertainment. Follows the life & career of a character combining aspects of every child star of the era. The details on the various fictitious publications & fake movie posters are great. Like many other Box Brown books, Child Star explores the meeting of celebrity, pop culture, & nostalgia. I look forward to seeing his thoughts on the subject in The He-Man Effect. I feel like Brown wanted us to suspect lil' Owen's parents were trying to make him small from the start, so that they could have a child star. Very reminiscent of Bojack Horseman, but without any promise of a redemptive arc. 

Alien's eye view of Japanese society with a high WTF factor. All of the chuckling endorsements on the book jacket from the likes of Sally Rooney, Elif Batuman, & Ruth Ozeki do not prepare you for what lies in wait inside this book. Earthlings reminds me a lot of the movie Heavenly Creatures, in which two young teens invent a fantastical cult with two members. The house in Akishina & its place in the consciousness & memory of the protagonist reminds me of the village in The Beginning Place. The part where the characters are stranding themselves in the isolated community reminded me a bit of various J.G. Ballard novels & stories on that theme, such as the Drowned World, Memories of the Space Age, High Rise, etc. The doomed attempts to transcend society and even humanity also feel Ballardian, I guess equating Chiba society with Ballard's various dystopias. That element of a family-type unit attempting to collectively escape society, & even humanity also reminds me a bit of Pink Flamingos or Cecil B. Demented. The omnipresent trauma treated matter-of-factly (& mostly repressed by the characters) reminds me of Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy. The cucumber & eggplant with the chopstick legs representing the horse bringing the ancestors to our world, & the cow to take them back is really cool. Also intriguing is the “mobile grocery” that doesn't visit Akishina because it's too small. Can't help but think that these people need to be carried away by the Acid Mothers Temple. This book is surprisingly page-turning, & also rewards re-reading. Really makes me want to read Convenience Store Woman. 

Julia Wertz's memoir of escaping alcoholism & growing the fuck up in general. For once, this is a book featuring a drinking problem that doesn't make the drinks sound incredibly appealing. Usually the depressing depictions of alcoholism that I read make me perversely interested in whatever the characters' (fictional or otherwise) drink of choice is. Impossible People has all the details about Wertz's Brooklyn basement studio with the amazing rent & dubious legality that Wertz hinted at in Tenements, Towers, and Trash. The street & roomscapes have the same detail & style of Tenements, Towers, & Trash, but now the streets of New York are populated with Wertz's quirky cartoon characters. The art kind of reminds me of the newspaper comics page April Fools Day antics where the characters would switch strips or drop in on other strips (e.g. Dick Tracy dropping by Blondie, Rat from Pearls Before Swine popping up in Mark Trail, Dagwood and Ted Forth switching places, etc). The backgrounds seem like they are from one (serious) strip, most of the characters are from another strip (humorous), Julia's cartoon avatar could be from another (humorous) strip, & finally her cat Jack comes from yet another (humorous/cute) strip in the funny pages. Wertz & Jack probably could have once made a bunch of money from a syndicated animal comic strip (& associated greeting cards & merchandise franchises that would eventually be better remembered than the strip, perhaps even entering the archaeological record in the form of plastic artifacts seeded across the worlds oceans via container ship accidents). Speaking of Jack the cat, was he right about “Jeff” the whole time??? The part with the Comics convention in France is a reminder that as much as I make fun of English speakers' mangling of foreign names, the French are still masters of the art. This is definitely the best thing I've read by Wertz. Impossible People kept reminding me of a Melvins song (featuring David Yow) that has a sample of someone saying “well, I have a new friend, his name is sobriety...” Kind of makes me want to read Drinking at the Movies, but I'm mostly looking forward to seeing whatever she comes out with next.