The Cardboard Valise

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Cardboard Valise (Pantheon, 2011).



Oh, I've got a lot of time for Ben Katchor, and it's always very well rewarded. I haven't enjoyed a comic as much as I did his latest work, The Cardboard Valise, in ages.

In his previous books, Katchor has created a sort of skewed version of New York City and its environs. This time out, he really broadens his view in a story - really a series of interconnected strips that can be read in any order - that links three travelers from a big city to the island nation of Outer Canthus.

I found myself eventually reading just a few pages a day and, when finished, I put it back on the bottom of my pile for a reread as soon as it's feasible. It's a book where the odd angles at which Katchor stages the action work in tandem with the strange revelations of the text. Everything is revealed in such a natural way that readers might have to stop and question whether something mentioned in passing is a real occupation or restaurant, or another of Katchor's only-a-little implausible fictions. It's an amazing example of world-building, and the sort of place I could easily lose myself. Highly recommended.

The Beauty Supply District and Essential Avengers vol. 6

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I first told you about the remarkably strange Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer back in February, and told you then that I owed Bizarro Wuxtry a purchase of another Ben Katchor book. Actually, I've bought two now, but this was the first one I finished. It's a collection of another eighty-odd Julius Knipl strips and a new 24-page story, and it's absolutely wonderful, more tales of the city, if the city is sort of like New York and its businesses include Macedonian Coffee Shops and its museums are devoted to the minutiae of unimportant people. It's absolutely captivating, and while it might take you ten or twelve pages to figure out the strip's beat, I'm sure you'll be truly sucked in. Highly recommended.

Ben Katchor was interviewed last month by the New Jersey Jewish News. Click the image below to read!






And then there's this.

To understand my disappointment, I must explain that as a middle schooler in the early 80s who'd only recently discovered Marvel Comics, I kept reading references and footnotes in their stories to certain "classic" epics of the past, yarns like "The Kree-Skrull War," "The Avengers-Defenders War" and "The Celestial Madonna Saga." Since Marvel had no reprint program of note back then, and since I really couldn't afford the back issues, these all went unread until Marvel's Essentials line got around to them.

In short order, these supposedly classic tales were instantly revealed as damp squibs, but I don't know that any comic has had its reputation so unjustly inflated as the unbelievably stupid Celestial Madonna storyline, which weaves in and out of ten of the 27 issues reprinted here, and might just be the most tedious thing I've ever read. It's some grandiose plot involving the arch-villains Kang, Rama-Tut and Immortus, all of whom are different incarnations of the same person, and it involves no fewer than four flashbacks of ungodly length. I mean, the whole book is a disappointment - it's almost painful, watching Steve Englehart insist that the reader care about characters as flat and unlikeable as Mantis, the Swordsman and Libra - but I found myself flipping past giant chunks of this thing. I simply do not care what the mysterious, secret connection between the Vision and the original android Human Torch is, partially because Englehart never gives the readers any reason to. Do we get proper red leather jacketed Wonder Man getting drunk with the Beast in volume 7 at least? Not recommended.

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Mention of Bizarro Wuxtry reminds me: I provide links to Amazon or some other source in these reviews for your convenience, but I strongly encourage everyone to support their local businesses and comic shops. There's a whole pile of comic reviews in this blog that you can read by clicking the "what i just read" tag below which you can try out, and while I love the 40% off coupons at Borders as much as anybody, you'll be doing your neighborhood right by visiting somebody local and picking up some good reading. Credo!

(Originally posted April 14, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



One of my favorite Stanley Kubrick films is The Killing. As Sterling Hayden is assembling his team, he visits his friend, the large, almost unintelligible muscle, who spends his days at a second-floor business in that strange urban center where men pay to play chess all day. I've always thought that was the oddest little business. So imagine my surprise to find Ben Katchor's strange little timelost, dreamlost New York, where that chess establishment would have fit right in.

Devlin at Bizarro Wuxtry, America's finest comic shop and a place too ordinary for Knipl's excursions, recommended this book some time ago, but a couple of pages didn't sell me. I didn't understand it, couldn't find the sort of characters I enjoy or a plot to follow. But a $4 copy at Book Eddy, that remarkable bookstore in Knoxville I simply will not stop talking about, sold me as worth the risk for the price. And it still took me several pages - much of the book is collected from a weekly strip that runs in NYC's The Forward - to figure out this book has nothing to do with character or plot, but setting.

It's a city populated by incredibly strange businesses, newspapers and professions. Citizens suffer umbrella-related eye injuries, or try and avoid sleep at the Stay-Awake-Atorium. They give themselves amnesia by drinking Oblivion, and prove their love to a beautiful woman by shoplifting jars of cherry tomatoes from every deli in town. They go on vacation and visit the Pygmy Penitentiary, they hire licensed expectorators to avenge trivial slights. It's a city of dreams, and I was not entirely surprised to see that the book concludes with a lengthy storyline about a daily newspaper which reports the dreams of citizens as though they were newsworthy, all of these stories told in a casual, there's no other word for it, dreamlike manner. It's a remarkably strange book, but very compelling. I need to see whether Bizarro Wuxtry has more Katchor in stock next time I'm in Athens.

(Originally posted February 01, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)