R. Crumb's: Bible of Filth (Humor)

 

by Robert Crumb

Publisher : David Zwirner Books (December 12, 2017)

Softcover, 336 pages

AmazonListing

This is technically a reprint - or reedition - of a 1990s French collection of Robert Crumb’s work. A “worst of” collection, showing his most shocking, sexual, or brutal material. This reedition adds about a hundred pages of further Crumb material. I was amazed that they managed to weed it down to only 325 pages, as there was so much to choose from. The presentation of the book is a work of art in itself. Leather bound, printed in gold-edged onion-skinned Bible paper, and attached red bookmark. Takes me back to the type of Bible my grandmother would tote around everywhere, except it’s filled with material I actually want to read.

To me it was such a breath of fresh air and reminded me why I became a fan of Crumb in the first place. It is unadulterated pornographic material created without restraint or consideration of outraging the puritan mob. Of course, when much of this material was first created the puritans tended to be conservative Christian republicans, now the pendulum has swung and all the censorious wailing is stemming from the Left. Many of the activist types would have heart attacks at the material here, crying every kind of “ism”, or they might let it go since he’s ostensibly “one of them”, but they often don’t shy away from eating their own. Let that stand as the trigger warning - If you read this book and become offended, then it’s your own fault.

The only recurring characters are Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, and Devil Girl - who have about three stories together. In them Crumb diagnosis the standard dilemma many men find themselves in today. That of the alpha, beta orbiter (or incell), and female passive antagonist. Well before terms like red pill and cuck were common, we see Crumb basically using those ideas in his art. Mr Natural has the Devil Girl in his pocket, but Foont lusts after her. Upset that this nasty woman openly despises him, Font pretends to be disgusted by all of the horrible sexual things Natural does to her, but is really just upset that he isn’t in the driving chair. A perpetual weakling, who wants to be taken care of, but lusts after women who aren’t willing to do that.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst

A Man Named Ove (Humor)

 

by Fredrik Backman

Publisher: Washington Square Press; Reprint Edition (May 5, 2015)

Softcover, 337 pages

Amazon Listing

“It was a time of change in the country. People moved and found new jobs and bought televisions, and the newspapers started talking about a ‘middle class’. Ove didn’t quite know what this was, but he was well aware that he was not a part of it. The middle classes moved into new housing developments with straight laws and carefully trimmed laws, and it soon grew clear to Ove that his parental home stood in the way of progress. And if there was anything the middle class was not enamored of, it was whatever stood in the way of progress.”

The tale of a neighborhood and changing times, focusing on that cranky old man down at the end of the street. The one who terrorizes the neighborhood children, screams, “keep off the grass”, and seemingly takes no joy in life except in denouncing others for minor infractions. This is our protagonist - someone which I’m sure nearly every man has run across at least once in their life. This is our protagonist. This is the lens through which we see his world: A once rural, now suburban, area in Norway.

From the Film Version

He’s an old man whose values and sense of rigid proportion never stepped in line with the rest of the world, or at least he was unwilling to mute them to fit in with others. As the book opens, he is a man near the end of his life - at least the life he cared about. His wife is dead. They had no children. And all that is left to him is the bitterness from looking at the world outside. He attempts suicide several times, but is always interrupted.

Slowly, little by little from interacting with the new people around him, this curmudgeon begins to discover a new reason for living. If only to confound those people from the social services department. He is the perceived villain become hero. Still, I understand why many of the people who gave it low stars also admit to not finishing the book. He is not a likeable character -at first- and I’m sure spending close to 350 pages with this man, might seem to be more of a chore than joy. Also this is not a concise novel governed by Chekov’s Gun, you gain a full perspective of Ove and his troubles, some useful to the plot, some useful to understanding the character, some simply part of ordinary life.

Author Fredrik Backman

This is a good read. Easy to get through without much reflection or difficulty. I’m not sure what these people who complained about the book are talking about. If anything it seems a bit dumbed down in its use of vocabulary, but that might be due to the translation. A Man Called Ove is not a difficult read, just a slightly long one - leading to a satisfying conclusion.

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.

The Exquisite Corpse of August Nordenskiold (Experimental Fiction) (Psychology)

 

by Goldin+Senneby (Editor), Kim Einarsson (Contributor)

Publisher : Sternberg Press (April 1, 2016)

Hardcover, 154 pages

Amazon Listing

 

“Nordenskiold was an alchemist. He was obsessed by a self-appointed task: to make gold from inferior metals in quantities so large that gold itself would become worthless, eventually leading to the end of the, ‘tyranny of money.’ putting an end to the evils of his time, He led a double life in pursuit of this task, making him seem like a character from the pages of an Almqvist novel. His challenge was to find the time and resources extensives laboratory resources; monetary worries are a constant theme throughout the story of the attempted eradication of the tyranny of money.”

August Nordenskiold was an 18th century Swedish alchemist obsessed with creating the philosopher's stone, lapis philosophorus, and thus free mankind from the obsession of currency. Thus demonstrating himself to be in possession of two of the greatest clichés in academia, the learned man - for he was that. He could almost be described as a polymath - who is a fool, and the logical journey ruined by a false analogy. If gold saturated the world, all that would be accomplished was that mankind base its currency on something else.

August Nordenskiold

However, strange as it may seem, this book is not about August Nordenskiold, 18th century Sweden, or alchemy.  It is a series of essays, each one commenting and morphing a belief system from the essay previous to it. Thus we go from the biography of an Enlightenment era alchemist; to the “alchemic” properties inherent in modern finance; to the inherent flaws in modern which insists on waiting for the apocalypse; to aspects of sleight-of-hand illusionary magic, to a postmodern retake of Edward Kelley the appointed medium to Dr. Dee of Elizabethan fame; to a review of William Burroughs’s 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night where the character of Kelley is reborn among a group of time traveling pirates attempting to create an equal utopia under the guidelines of Captain James Mission - similar to what Nordenskiold tried to achieve in Sierra Leone; to a feminist review of the previous review with all the standard whining about inclusion while ignoring what the actual text states. This is followed by several pages of interesting poetry.

The layout of the book is odd. Every other page is blank, except when a new essay begins. Thus one train of thought melds into the other, where the next essay is presented on the opposite page from the one it's commenting on. Thus one train of thought, one system of belief, morphing into another like lead into gold. The overall flow is fascinating and a very different look at the anthology. All of the essays, except the final one, had something interesting to say and ponder. Well worth a look.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.

Stinz: Wartime and Wedding Bells (Fantasy)

 

by Donna Barr (Author)

Publisher : Brave New Words (January 1, 1992)

Softcover, 144 pages

Amazon Listing 

All of Donna Barr’s books are unique, not only in topic but in execution. She has a style all her own in character interaction. Each of her characters has a natural warmth and a caring attitude, which they might be forced to suppress. Eventually that decent attitude comes through, allowing even antagonists to interact without the plot running into stereotypes or clichés. Each story is characteristic of the author, and I think I can honestly say that no one could write this story in exactly the same way as she does. 

The protagonist is Steinheld Löwhard, or "Stinz"---a centaur - who lives in an isolated Centaur community in pre-WWI Germany.. The Gieselthal centaurs call themselves halbpferd ("halfhorses") and look down on the nomadic "gypsy centaurs" who come through their valley at intervals. While relations between centaurs and "two-leggers" are usually cordial, there is normally some distance---centaurs see "two-leggers" as weak ad generally avoid them.

While the whole of the story takes Stinz from his early youth, up to near-death. This particular chapter covers the centaur's draft into the German military. On the eve of his announcing his engagement, the recruiters turn up to take Stinz away. What follows is a fish-out-of-water story in the military and his superiors attempting to figure out how exactly to train him, as most of the physical training for humans are either inefficient or impossible for training a half-horse.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.

Die: Fantasy Heartbreaker (Fantasy)

 

by Kieron Gillen  (Author), Stephanie Hans (Artist)

Publisher : Image Comics; Illustrated Edition (June 11, 2019)

Softcover, 184 pages

Amazon Listing

In the 1980s there was a cartoon called Dungeons & Dragons where a group of kids from our dimension were sucked via a magic carnival ride (damn carnies) into a fantasy world  where they are assigned classes (thief, barbarian, cavalier) to fight the orc forces of Venger and occasionally Tiamat would show up to scare the Hell out of everyone. It lasted three seasons and left off with the characters still stuck in their otherworld. In 1985 Arrow comics (soon to become Caliber) created a series called The Realm and later Legendlore, where four ordinary teenagers were sucked into a fantasy realm and forced to fight their way back to their homeworld. They never made it out.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. In Die, six ordinary English teenagers are sucked into a fantasy realm blah, blah, blah. But then the action jumps two years. Only five of them have returned. Jump ahead again twenty five years, the five find themselves forced to return to the land, called die, where their former friend is now the Grandmaster and runs - sort of- the world. While the others have matured, he still wants to play. Thus they are forced into a strange world, fun to children, nightmarish to adults, where they must battle their way out of.

The world here is deep and actually shaped like a 20 sided die. Obviously the author has gone into a lot of detail in creating the characters and this world. From the notes included in the graphic novel, he even created a role playing game surrounding it.The heroes’ journey isn’t all just sword and sorcery though, it also has a deeply personal element stretching through it. Their trip though this world of fantasy brings back many shameful and troubling elements from the group’s past, developing a theme that addresses nostalgia and the trials of growing up. Added to this the art sets the mood perfectly. It is an absolutely gorgeous and just looking at the book was worth the price I paid for the volume. 

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.

Flesh Wounds (Erotica)

 

By Franz Henkel & Myke Maldonado

Publisher: Heavy Metal Magazine (November 1, 1997)

Hard Cover, 70 pages

Heavy Metal website. 

Another gem I pulled down from the Heavy Metal website at a fraction of what the second-hand rip-off merchants are trying to peddle it for. $50? Ridiculous. Get it for less than ten. Not only is that possible, but it’s really all the story is worth. I’m not saying it’s a bad story, there's simply not much to it. The eroticism of the content, which would’ve set me ablaze as a youngster, now it all seems a lot sillier in my old age.

Essentially this story is 50 Shades of Grey before the book even existed. In this tale we have Amanda, a pathetic shell of a person who is being dominated sexually by her lover, Karl, who can’t ejaculate unless he has his lover trussed up in a BDSM harness. Amanda becomes interested in tattoos and then genital piercings, joining the late 90s subculture - which I assume still exists. Karl’s sister shows up, whom Karl had raped in the past, and seems sexually twisted towards Amanda. Who knows what’s really going on there. Sex and violence ensues - as if you couldn’t tell.

I have a bad habit of treating characters in stories like this as one would a normal tale, rather than pornographic one, so I kept looking for motivation and all I saw was a pathetic creature, trying to please the biggest jerk in the world. But then sexuality is the purpose of the volume, so it achieves its end. It is beautifully drawn and well executed. If you want the equivalent of 50 Shades in graphic novel form, then grab this volume.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.

Neekibo (Action)

 

by Dieter Plessix (Author)

Publisher : Kitchen Sink Pr; illustrated edition (September 1, 1993)

Hardcover, 44 pages

Heavy Metal Magazine Listing

Another great little find from plundering the back issues of Heavy Metal magazine website. Neekibo is labeled as volume one here, and indeed there is a second volume, however the story told in this book is self-contained. You don’t need another to complete the story. This is originally published in French with four volumes in the series. Unfortunately only two have been published in English.

In order to get away from his domineering mother, a young man suffering from arrested development goes to Africa in order to help a tribe move to another location. He quickly becomes married to one of the tribeswomen, gets involved in an international incident, and tries to help everyone get out of a sticky situation.

A difficulty with this book is that it tries to tell a much grander tale than the space provides. It needed double the amount of pages to adequately fit in all the characters, the needed pathos, and the plot points. As such, the plot moves at a rapid jerky pace, tossing in characters left and right, with an overarching hurriedness towards a very depressing ending. Too many characters, not enough space, and a love story which might have been poignant had it not been so cramped.

However, the illustrations are excellent with people exaggerated to varying degrees, occupying richly detailed and realistic backgrounds - reminding me of Milt Caniff’s style.  The quality is all the more remarkable for being only his second graphic novel, although he was thirty on publication.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.