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THE HUNGOVER GOURMET #7
"The Journal of Food, Drink, Travel, & Fun"

(36pp digest, $3.00 US/$4.00 elsewhere ppd from Dan Taylor / PO Box 5531 / Lutherville, MD / 21094-5531 USA. Web: www.hungovergourmet.com)

Review by Christine Douville

Editor Dan Taylor sees food as entertainment, and The Hungover Gourmet will provide you with quite a few pieces of diverting reading: restaurant and bar reviews (in DC, NC, OK, MD, PA and TX), articles (my favourites were Mick Sols' article on menu translation, and Holger Haase's article on actor Oliver Reed), zine and DVD reviews, etc. Quite Epicurean!

The Hungover Gourmet, published irregularly since 1997, welcomes your submissions, but please contact the editor about your idea first. Contributors for this issue include zinedom celebrities Davida Gypsy Breier and Stephanie Scarborough. For more information, please visit The Hungover Gourmet's website.

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48 HOURS OF PURE ENTERTAINMENT
by Suzanne Baumann

($2.00 donation – split between Friends of Lulu and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund – from Suzanne Baumann / PO Box 12096 / Hamtramck, MI / 48212 USA. Web: www.fridge-mag.net)

Review by Carol Pond

No, it doesn't take 48 hours to read this comic, but it took Suzanne 48 hours to create it. She participated in two different 24-hour comics events and has collected the results into one fun comic. The first story, drawn September 13-14, 2003 and entitled "Dwayne du Kane and His Dried-out Brain" is about a guy, an out-of-control message board, and a disembodied brain. The second story, drawn at Sean Bieri's home on February 1-2, 2004, is called "A Quest for Quiet Cat Toys" and features Rococo and Gocco, the two-headed cat. Suzanne has a free, light-spirited style; you can tell she really had fun writing and drawing these comics, and that makes them fun to read. As a special bonus, the comic has a wrap-around cover drawing of a really cool clock.

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STRIPBURGER #36
Various

(Stripburger c/o Stripcore / Forum Ljubljana / Metelkova 6/I / SI - 1000 Ljubljana / SLOVENIA. Web: www.ljudmila.org/stripcore/com.htm. Distributed through Top Shelf in the US and others elsewhere)

Review by Mark Campos

After compiling last year's massive Warburger anthology, the editors of Stripburger pronounced themselves "dehydrated and poor", yet have returned with another mindbending collection. This one leads off with the third installment of "Bosnian Flat Dog" by Lars Sjunnsson and Max Andersson, which ranges across a bizarre postwar Bosnian landscape cluttered with the eponymous dogs, Marshall Tito's genetic code, ice cream missles, and the Eurovision Song Contest. There's an interview with M.S. Bastien (which is helpfully translated in an English language enclosure/catalog); also a Bastien story wherein his trademark inky people brandish handguns and McDonald's drink cups: a nightmare vision of New York City.

And, speaking of NYC, Helge Neumann's nod to Gary Panter places a Jimbo-like guy in a speeding bus which crashes into a double tower, mobilizing its prayer and rifle obsessed occupants to war. It's a surprisingly effective allegory.

There is non-political fun from Xavier Robel, Mahler, Malin Biller, and others. Add a fine silkscreen cover by Nadia Raviscioni, and whimsical endpapers by Thomas Ott (one's even a variant on the "angry housewife with rolling pin" gag!), and you're set.

Not only will your purchase of the latest Stripburger nab you a satisfying wedge of the latest art from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, you'll help the editors enrich themselves, or at the very least rehydrate.

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TRUE PORN
edited by Kelli Nelson and Robyn Chapman

($14.95, http://www.trueporncomic.com)

Review by Robert Young

Highlights and lowlights of the latest comics sexthology.

“What She Said While I was Giving Head” by Sean Bieri: Over just nine panels (all of which Bieri spends off-panel, his head buried twixt a pair of thighs) Bieri shows his lover during the same act going from quizzical, to giddy, to demanding, distracted, ecstatic, whiny, complimentary, sarcastic, and finally frustrated. It’s a fine comics page, and on a personal level Bieri gets kudos for his persistence in the face (or lap) of his cunnilingual dealings with this bipolar (melo)drama queen.

Hans Rickheit turns in a well-conceived one-pager on the joys of self-fellating that might make Joe Matt blush; even as it makes Jeff Beck proud. I’ll only say that my back hurts too, Hans. Only for different reasons.

“Deposit” by Vanessa Davis: In a book chock full of brutally frank, often embarrassing revelations, “Deposit” runs neck and neck with Hans Rickheit (never a mean feat) and comes complete with a wonderfully dry and funny punch line.

“Perfect” by Laurenn McCubbin: I got little or nothing from highly-touted McCubbin’s story which was simultaneously pretentious and vapid. The art, seemingly owing a debt to former fashion artist Patrick Nagel (Duran Duran’s Rio cover art), would have looked cold and dated by the late '80s.

Josh Simmons does a star-turn in perhaps the book’s strongest piece, “God Bless Mississippi!”. It stands as the best work yet seen from Simmons who steps away from his usual dizzyingly crosshatched style for something with a lot more clarity and charm. It’s also surely the sweetest story ever to end in a facial. What’s most impressive here is how easily Simmons utilizes a variety of techniques to tell his five-page story. For a sex scene in the back of a pickup with a camper shell, Simmons gives the reader an x-ray view from overhead in which to see the action taking place inside. For a digression on the nasty Cadbury Cream candies Simmons admits to loving (Simmons’ partner makes the sickeningly sweet confections considerably more appealing when she offers that they be eaten out of her pussy), he shifts from cartoon realism to a wildly raw underground style that perfectly illustrates the anecdote. And finally for another dalliance in the truck he delicately outlines his figures with white lines on an all-black background showing impressive facility in the process. Really the only minor drawback of Simmons' story is that it wasn’t scanned very well resulting in a slight muddiness and a lack of true black.

Finally FC Brandt delivers the most unintentionally funny story of the anthology with “The Bush of Two Birds in My Hand”. I actually had the pleasure of overhearing a very boisterous and amusing reading of Brandt’s piece in the hotel lobby at SPX 2003, as performed by frequent Brandt collaborator Jesse Reklaw (Brandt was sitting on the arm of Reklaw’s chair as his friend playfully mocked him). In True Porn, I’m not certain whether Brandt’s intention was to show himself as the world’s most gentle and enlightened lover, or if, unsure about the content of the rest of the book’s stories, he didn’t want to risk possibly offending the sensibilities of the two female editors. Either way, for a supposed autobio sex tale, the dialogue Brandt gives himself and his two female cohorts is hilariously innocuous, and seemingly unironic. One of the women says to Brandt “You must really like women, Chris. Something in your touch and how you behave. You seem really sensitive to our needs” (sounds like Brandt’s angling for more threesomes with potential readers of True Porn). And later Brandt’s character says “Careful Rachel. There’s semen there. Let me get a towel.” I half expected an uppercrust butler to appear and exclaim indignantly “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” Or at the very least for Brandt to ask “May I kindly insert my naughty bit into your inviting place, milady?” None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy Brandt’s story. Certainly he gets points for making sex (threesomes even) look positively healthy and wholesome. Kind of like Leave It To Beaver...with a moneyshot.

With True Porn, editors Robyn Chapman and Kelli Nelson not only deliver very entertaining forewords, but also one of 2003’s most enjoyable anthologies. So what if the subject matter alone gave them a big leg up on the competition.

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DRAWN & QUARTERLY SHOWCASE Book 1
by Kevin Huizenga and Nicolas Robel

($14.95, Drawn & Quarterly)

Review by Sean McGurr

To highlight up-and-coming cartoonists, cool indy-publisher Drawn & Quarterly has started a new annual series that features lengthy stories presented in a sharp package. The not so originally titled Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Book 1 features work by Kevin Huizenga and Nicolas Robel and is definitely worth picking up.

Based solely on a single reading of Huizenga's "Glenn Ganges," he has become a new favorite indy cartoonist. Known for his work in mini-comics, Huizenga's work shines on the large pages of this collection. His art is clean and confident. There is a definite influence of European artists, particularly Hergé (Tintin), apparent in his characters and their expressions. His layouts and the detail work in some panels is outstanding.

Unlike some great artists, Huizenga's writing is just as good. This piece is actually three related stories featuring Glenn Ganges, an average married man living in Michigan. In the first story, Ganges comments on the "Have You Seen Us?" cards featuring missing children that he receives in the mail each week. This results in a wonderfully-illustrated scene in which Huizenga shows the square pictures from the flyer on top of bodies that he has drawn in everyday scenes. Ganges relates these missing children with the Lost Boys, Sudanese refugees who have sought asylum in his town. It is made more poignant by the fact that Ganges and his wife, Wendy, are unable to have children.

Huizenga's next piece employs magic realism as Ganges embarks on a quest through the strip malls and shopping centers of his suburban town to find a feathered ogre that may have a way for he and Wendy to get pregnant. Although Ganges' journey is humorous, the underlying emotions behind it make for a great story. Once the monster is defeated and is turned into a flock of birds, Glenn and Wendy are able to have a child. The birds that the monster has released curse Glenn though and is the basis for the final story. In it, Huizenga deftly mixes an ornithological history of the starling with the raising of a newborn. All in all, the work is superb.

After Huizenga's brilliant piece, it only makes sense that Robel's "87 blvd des Capucines" didn't strike me with the same excitement. The French-Canadian Robel (the work is translated into English) tells a story of a young couple looking for an apartment. There are hints early on that the relationship isn't perfect and that the man isn't thoughtful of the woman's feelings. The first apartment they look at is a mammoth space on the fifth floor of a building that sends the woman into a reverie about her childhood.

There are a number of strange dream-like sequences that don't always click and at times I thought the story was unnecessarily obtuse. Robel's art has a distinct quality that will be unusual to mainstream American readers. The inclusions of subtle green, reds and pinks into the story gives it some anxiety as the colors shift and the apartment seems more than just empty. Although it doesn't quite succeed like Huizenga's work, Robel's story has some nice moments.

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BOP!
by Alex Robinson

($9.95, Top Shelf Productions, Alex Robinson)

Review by Rick Bradford

BOP! is a compilation of Box Office Poison strips that weren't in the huge collection published a couple years previous. In which case, there's not going to be much of a review here. I'd say if you haven't read Box Office Poison and are the least bit curious (reviews are easy to find online) then you should go buy it. However, if you've already read and enjoyed it then you're probably going to enjoy BOP!.

I'd read several of the strips in their original appearances but I'm pleased to have them collected in one place. Two of my favorite stories in here are ones I hadn't seen before and both star Caprice, who is apparently one of the characters in the author's forthcoming Tricked graphic novel. Clearly Robinson's cartooning abilities are continuing to improve. I'm pretty impressed by "Flat Earth" (one of the Caprice stories) and it was done as a 24-hour comic, for goodness' sake.

So, to recap: If you haven't read Box Office Poison go do so. Then pick up a copy of BOP!, a nice bonus to the larger collection.

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