Author Archives: vommarlowe

Loveless Ink

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This is an exploration of how Kouga’s inks and composition show character and mood in the first volume of Loveless.  The art style shifts with point of view and interactions, building into a powerful visual language.

I have mixed feelings about Loveless. It’s a hot mess in a lot of ways. The story contains horrible child abuse of various kinds, including some that is institutionalized and some that is family, various reprehensible relationships, some seriously broken people, a couple of sociopaths, BDSM themes (both consensual and not), dubious portayals of motives of people who ought to be villains but might not be, amnesia, innapropriate information about sexuality, and some of the most heartbreaking and beautiful characters I’ve ever read.

All this in a cat boy story about preteens.  Oh, manga.
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There’s zombies in my yarn

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Intro

A couple of years ago, I was in a van full of librarians, being whisked in air conditioned splendor to the convention hall at ALA. I got to talking to my seatmate, a public librarian, and she told me that the most interesting thing she’d heard so far was that zombies were going to be the next vampires.

(Proving yet again that librarians know everything.)

I frowned at her and said something like ‘No way’, and she said something like ‘I know, hard to believe but it’s coming’, and we went our separate ways, each armed with logoed bags to pick up enough sample books in the hall to weigh down a small truck. (ALA has so many sample books for free that they set up special mailing-home stations so people don’t have to keep hauling the books around; unfortunately, I didn’t notice these until later, so I only got two boxes worth of books.)

A small incident in a professional context, two years ago, but I was thinking of it recently as I was discussing some comics.

I’ve never been a big fan of scary horror. I enjoy the occasional foray into serious horror, as a genre, but mostly I prefer comedic horror. I only saw the Shining by accident. A roommate told me it was funny and talked me into going to see it on the big screen for a dollar. By the end, I was huddled under a coat, levitating with panic, jumping at noises and peering through my fingers. Funny my ass. (Bitter? Me? Never!)

But I loved Evil Dead, and I’ve seen not only Blacula, but Blacula 2 (bka Scream Blacula Scream), and all of the movies with the plucky German Shepherds who turn into vampire dogs (hey, it’s a mini genre, and they have cute ears, don’t judge me OK). I also enjoyed the early Anita Blake books, which were rather comedic in their zippy, plotty way, and I even sat through Howling: New Moon Rising, although I demanded that my hosts supply me with spirituous liquors if they were going to continue to subject me to it.

So I should be an ideal candidate to jump on the zombie train.

Except….

I’m burned out already.
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Beauty and form: the human figure and portraiture, some resources for study

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As y’all know by now, I love to draw the human figure. This has been a life-long passion of mine.

One of my frustrations as a student of anatomy and human portraiture is that so many of the resources available have been single-dimensional in terms of beauty or form. After a couple of hours with the Atlas of Foreshortening, I start to think that everybody has a shaved head and washboard abs.
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The cycle of criticism

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There has been a recent discussion of the nature of manga criticism and where it can be found (and if it can be found).  I have maintained that, yes, it does exist and can be found, whereas others have other views.  As part of that discussion, I want to explain part of the issues as I see them, in finding the criticism and where it happens and how, and decided that instead of cramming it into a comment (not doable), I would take the time and do as full an explanation as I can.
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God of Cake: VM on yet another wacky webcomic

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As y’all know, my taste is a teensy bit bizarre eccentric, and I’m an utter snob extremely picky about art, but I have this fondness for art that expresses emotion well, even if it does so in ways that are technically unsophisticated, because I am strange like that.

Yes, yes, I’m aware that I made terrible fun of a harmless comic about pants not that long ago, to the horror of many and to accusations of intellectual dishonesty, but what can I say?

I am helpless in the face of this comic, because it makes me laugh like a hyena on nitrous oxide.
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Bayou Vol 1, Jeremy Love

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This is a beautiful and haunting comic. It’s kind of what I had hoped and expected to feel after reading Swamp Thing, to be honest. Not the parts about racism, but the parts about the feeling of the swamp as a powerful life force that cannot be controlled and that contains far more life in far stranger ways than we can admit to ourselves. A life that can tell us odd stories and take us on strange journeys.

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Still not a comic, Blackout by Connie Willis

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It’s been a long time since Connie Willis, author of To Say Nothing of the Dog, has come out with a book.  She’s been working on a book about World War II for years, and it is finally finally out.  It was so large that it had to be divided into two volumes, in fact.  Blackout was released in spring and the conclusion, All Clear was released this week.

Today I’ll be talking about Blackout.  This review contains some spoilers for Blackout, but (because the mysteries are fairly crucial ones), I have tried hard not to include any spoilers that go through to All Clear.  All spoilers (which are general and I hope minor) for Blackout are beneath the jump cut.  If you want to know whether you might enjoy Blackout and haven’t yet bought it, or if you bought it but kind of gave up because you became confused, bored, or puzzled, here’s what I loved:

Blackout is about war.  Not war in the trenches, which is ably covered elsewhere and which I hope (fervently) that I will never see, but a war at home.  It is about the civilian side of war, where everyone, in a sense, becomes a soldier.  It covers the Blitz in London and it covers the Evacuation of the children to the country, and it covers that most amazing of events the evacuation at Dunkirk, where the British Expeditionary Force was rescued by a lot of Sunday sailors and fishermen.  (If you don’t know about this, go find out.  It always makes me cry.)

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