Reviews: VG Cheats, Spera, Brief History of Time, and You & a Bike & a Road

[roadrunnertwice]

Geez, these are starting to pile up. I've been reading a bunch of comics lately.

KC Green — VG Cheats & Beatums (comics)

June 1

Heck of.

A collection of one-off comics about video games, usually inappropriate and surreal. If you liked Green's long-running comic Gunshow, this has a real similar sensibility, but it's less general-interest; much funnier if you're at least familiar with the games Green is riffing on.

These are still readable online at US Gamer, but I re-read the paperback, which has these extra facing pages done up as inappropriate and surreal re-interpretations of '90s and '00s video game magazine design. (And given how surreal the originals were, they kind of make my head hurt. He got the tone spot-on.)

Josh Tierney, Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei, Emily Carroll, Oliver Pichard, et al. — Spera (comics)

June 4

A comic about two princesses and a fire spirit who run away from a war (started by one of the princesses's mother*).

And then they... don't really do anything in particular, or run into much in the way of daunting resistance. There's really not very much story here, and what little there is is somewhat janky.

What is there aside from story? Some solid character design, and some EXCELLENT art and cartooning. And a few scenes with a certain wonderful quietly tense elegance to them. I get the impression that maybe Tierney just wanted to do a comic about these two girls and a dog setting up camp for the night. And that's kind of all it ends up being.

After the main comic, there are a bunch of shorts by various artists about the girls' later careers as treasure hunters. These are mostly kind of slight, and they don't give a very good sense of what it's like to inhabit this world as a treasure-hunting ex-princess. But I quite liked Luke Pearson's short.

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* Is that even how that plural possessive and count agreement is supposed to work, or did I totally whiff it??? NEVER MIND, MOVING ON.

Stephen Hawking — A Brief History of Time

June 2

I got a bit lost around 60% in when he started talking about the imaginary time dimension, and never wholly managed to pick the trail back up, but even when I was struggling a bit there was still some interesting stuff in the back half.

This is a classic for a reason, and the writing is excellent, but I feel like How to Explain Relativity to Your Dog did a better job of really drilling into me how relativity works. I'm thinking particularly of the diagrams of light clocks, and the emphasis that time deforms along with space because space is the only implement we can use to measure time. Hawking kind of glosses over some of that, which I think is why it's easy to lose the path as a layperson. Still, it's an impressive effort, and it's also WAY more ambitious than Relativity because it goes equally deeply into quantum mechanics and the history and current state of attempts to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.

I liked Hawking's digressions about his hobby of gambling with other physicists about whether various theories would pan out. Something about that really got across how much he loved his work.

Eleanor Davis — You & a Bike & a Road (comics)

May 31

Diary comics (not memoir, per recent digressions about kinds of autobiography) about Davis' attempt to bike from Arizona to Georgia.

"What made you decide to do this trip?"

people ask. I say,

"My husband & I want a baby, so I figure I either do this now or wait 20 years"

or

"My dad built me this bike and I hate boxing & shipping bikes so I decided to just ride it home!"

I don't say:

"I was having trouble with wanting to not be alive. But I feel good when I'm bicycling"

But that is also true.

She runs into some knee trouble. She's also biking along the US border, which by her account is pretty dystopian. There's dodgy campsites. There's also actually kind of a lot of moments of grace and beauty, and a lot of interesting people and places. It's kind of a lot of Mixed Stuff.

turn your head

horizon

horizon

your sovereign body

God's thrilling indifference.

As ever, Davis' art is alone in its class, totally unlike anything else I've read. These are diary comics drawn in situ, and her line is often stripped down to the bare minimum of what can survive on page. She draws herself as this sort of big bluff rectangular giant, and I can't even handle it, it's great.