Noah Van Sciver's Blammo (#6)

.

First, a disclaimer for my disclaimer. I paid full price for this. (You can too!)

Now my disclaimer. Noah contributed a comic to an anthology I'm working on now and so I've been in contact with him for a few months now. I've decided he's a very cool guy and next time we're both at Comic Con at the same time or APE at the same time or something, I will say loud things near his table about how good he is to try and generate him some traffic.

= = = = =

I'm the Official Indie Snob on this site and yet I'm not a huge fan of what most people think of when the think of indie comics. For instance, I think R. Crumb has only started getting any good in the last five years. In fact, I don't much like most autobiographical comics, with only a few exceptions (most notably Jeffrey Brown, but there are others) (and getting to be more everyday as I get over myself) (but I don't think I'll ever care for Harvey Pekar). And even the ones I like I can get tired of rather easily.

Which is a weird introduction to this comic, because only a small fraction of it is autobiographical (and some of that was written by Noah's brother Ethan). But aesthetically, he comes straight out of that tradition. He's got the wiggly lines etc etc. But I suspect I'll like him more than most. In fact, based on my small sampling, I'm hard pressed to think of any other indie self-ziner of his type that I like more. And not just because his subject matter is more broad than simple navel-gazing.

His primary strength, I think, is that he is both of his tradition and grown out of his tradition. He clearly loves the comics he is related too, but he also has enough distance to examine them with a critical-slash-ironical-slash-postmoderninagoodway eye.

Which is not to say this book is perfect. The punks-v-lizards thing (you heard me) went on too long for instance and even when serving a story, one can only take so much ICP running in the background.

But these are minor quibbles. Check out more of his art here then don't let his future child starve to death.

Me, I need to find another reason to work with him.