AEIOU, or ANY EASY INTIMACY by Jeffrey Brown is a little larger than a packet of cigarettes, and is probably as bad for you.

You know those couples whom you see get together and just say, “noooo, that is just going to go horribly, spectacularly wrong”? Two people who are just lugging huge bags of personality damage around, you know? You like them, even though they’re clearly mental, but they’re like Hitler and Mussolini — on the basis of their personalities alone, no-one was eager to see them working together. Jeff and Sophia are one of those couples. She has tramlines down her arm and he’s emotionally about six years old. You know it’s going to end horribly.

But you can’t help but watch, can you? You know there’s going to be floods of tears and guts up the wall and two really fucked-up people tearing themselves and each other to shreds, but you can’t look away because it’s so disgustingly fucking car-crash fascinating.

Distilling that feeling into — no, taking handfuls of your own life and smearing them over — these two-hundred-odd little pages, these aching, bleeding confused-childlike drawings… that’s bloody clever. And what I like best about it is that it takes you in one direction, and then reminds you that reality is random and messy and has no plot structure, and leads you another way before you know what’s happening.

This is the closest thing to a romance novel I’ll be recommending you for a while. And it’s a useful introduction to the wobbly, screwloose charms of Jeffrey Brown.

If you’re in the US, use the link — it takes you to the publisher’s page for AEIOU, and they’ll be glad to meet you. If you’re in Canada and you don’t fancy the cross-border postage, email mail@beguiling.com, ask those fine people at The Beguiling in Toronto how much a copy goes for, and tell them I sent you. If you’re in Britain, email page45@page45.com and do the same.

YOUR LITTLE DOG IS DEAD

Heather Davis thought the dark brown otter was just playing with her dog Mike.

Then the 4-foot-long otter seized Mike’s snout with its teeth and started to drag the fluffy, white dog into the lake.

Heather screamed for help. As the otter pulled the dog under, a family friend grabbed a pole, jumped into a small boat and tried to rescue Mike. But the dog already was limp and floating away. “The otter went under water,” said Rick Wolf, 19. “Then it jumped on the back of the boat and started attacking my foot.”

“The otter had his whole mouth around (Wolf’s) shoe,” said Heather. Wolf, whose shoe was not penetrated by the otter’s teeth, kicked and jabbed it with the stick. The otter swam over to Mike, grabbed the dog and glided off.

The body of the dog, an American Eskimo, was found on the shore of the lake on Wednesday, a day after the attack…

A top National Weather Service expert in Phoenix will investigate a powerful lightning strike that “sounded like dynamite exploding,” damaging 13 homes in central Mesa…

“This is beyond the norm,” meteorologist David Runyan said. “It’s bizarre. It intrigues us. We will seek some means to understand it a little more.”

The lightning bolt drawing all the attention caused extensive damage to a home in the 2000 block of East Seventh Avenue, near Broadway and Gilbert roads, as its charge sped to other structures through underground wiring and wet soil.

Mesa firefighters, who have seen the aftermath of other lightning strikes over the years, said they have never witnessed anything like the effects of the Seventh Avenue strike. They believe the strike, recorded at 4:45 p.m., first hit the home, owned by Al Ogawa and Richard McTevia, and spread its powerful charge underground.

The force’s intense heat exploded underground wires, including television cable, near the home, erupted through the soil and spewed dirt and debris like volcanic ash against homes, trees and parked vehicles. Areas around brass doorknobs and locks were scorched…

A man dressed as a clown who assaulted another man and stole his bicycle at last year’s Burning Man festival has been sentenced after the victim’s friends tracked down the disguised assailant.

Dennis Hinkamp had to have two plates implanted in his arm after the attack at the annual counterculture festival on the Black Rock Desert. Though his attacker disappeared into the crowd of painted and costumed celebrants, Hinkamp’s friends launched an Internet search to find him.

They linked him to a group called Anarchoclowns, and finally to a hospital in Washington, where Johnny Goodman was a nursing student.

“If you’re a nursing student in Seattle and you’re a clown, you’re pretty identifiable,” Hinkamp’s friend, Jim Graham of Felton, Calif., told the Reno Gazette-Journal…

Hinkamp, who works as a Burning Man volunteer, said he was riding his bike away from the crowd gathered for the torching of the tall wooden sculpture that marks the festival when he saw the clown coming toward him. “He pushed me over and the way I caught myself, I broke my arm,” Hinkamp said. As he struggled to stand, the clown punched him in the face and kicked him several times. The clown rode off on the bike…

(Okay, he wasn’t really castrated with bricks. Fucking hippies. I bet they all had a healing hug in the courtroom, too. You’ll all end up with insects filling your arses, you mark my fucking words.)

Kyoto Seika University became the first college in Japan last month to set up a Manga Faculty, but there are already several other universities across Japan that have established manga or anime departments.

Osaka University of Arts has taken on as lecturers top manga-ka Tsuyoshi Nagai and Michiko Satonaka to guide its Character Creation Department, while comic artist Reiji Matsumoto has been made a professor at the Takarazuka University of Art and Design and Monkey Punch, creator of the phenomenally popular “Lupin the Third” series will hold the Manga and Animation Course in the school’s new Media and Arts Department.

Why the universities so caught up in the academic side of manga are all located in the Kansai Region remains something of a mystery, but perhaps a hint can be derived from the area’s traditional penchant for business and the size of Japan’s comic market — about 60 billion yen annually.

Then again, Japan’s manga and comic market has been on a downward slide since 1996.

“What you really want to look at is the manga where sales have plummeted enormously even as the overall market declined in size,” a teacher from Kyoto Seika University’s Manga Faculty says. “Manga like ‘Spirits’ and “Morning,’ which target white-collar workers of the present and future, are the ones to look at. Salarymen are now facing a situation of radically changing values that are unlike any other time in the postwar era. Gone are the ideas of promotion by age and lifetime employment and in their place are wage levels decided by performance and ability.

“White-collar workers are caught up right in the middle of this maelstrom of changing values. These two magazines have been unable to create characters with an outlook that meets the changing value system of the times and consequently their sales figures have dropped out of the bottom of the market…”

Ron Jeremy proved that he’s a big man when it comes to small animals by taking a break from his daily grind to pose for a new PETA ad promoting spaying and neutering. In the tongue-in-cheek ad, the Surreal Life star lies naked on a bed, with the tagline “Too much sex can be a bad thing. Help end overpopulation—spay and neuter your dogs and cats…”

(Please secure eyes before clicking link.)

Email from Molly Crabapple:

One of my friends recently lost near everything she owned when the sprinklers went off at her building. It’s one of those decrepit New York “lofts”. They went off while she was visiting the folks. She comes back, and pow, everything’s lost to mildew. Including lots of art.

Her being a hot burlesque chick, me and a few friends are throwing a burlesque benefit to raise some money for her. There’s a page at http://www.evilkid.com/savelola.html with all the details.

amazon.com * .uk * .ca
PDF preview

Okay, it’s Cinderella. But Cinderella is played by a fetish Powerpuff Girl. And she works at her father’s yakitori restaurant. Until he dies. But then he comes back as a zombie. And he has a new family. And there’s a terrible secret behind the provenance of his special sauce.

No no no, stay there.

You’ve never seen guts drawn so cutely. You’ve never seen a Powerpuff Girl chewing up dead chicks, either. This is everything that Japanese comics were always threatened to be in the scare stories: sexual insanity, flying innards, skewed v-movie plot devices, a distinctly sideways sense of humour.

And, y’know, a Powerpuff Girl in fetish gear. It manages to be funny and vaguely sickening all at once. It makes you feel dirty. And I like that.

(Originally presented on artbomb.net, a compendium of pieces on the graphic novels you should own.)

Yes, I am still ill. Am considering a convalescence in the English countryside next week, if it hasn’t all been swept away by monsoon rains. However, I received the following communication from my friend benjones, proprietor of the fine newculture shop/gallery/lounge Jigsaw in NYC, and I need to pass it along before I go, or die. One of Jigsaw’s staples are the kinds of comics that only the committed, diverse stores really stock and make an effort with. Benjones has been thinking on this lately, and this is what he said to me:

In regards to previous comments I have made about being part of the problem — that people like me should open shops where they are needed, rather than where they are already doing well — I have decided to move Jigsaw to somewhere further south.

The move is eight months away, and the location has yet to be decided.

So. If you have regular readers who often complain that a) they don’t have shops nearby, or b) the only shop around is utter crap, send them my way, I want to hear from them. I am currently holding a discussion on my forum as to where Jigsaw should end up and welcome email from anyone who wishes I would come to their town. Right now, the main criteria are 1) in a red state, 2) east of the Mississippi.

Anything you can do to spread the word would be greatly appreciated.

Moving blind is a rather frightening prospect, so it’d be nice to know I’m going where I’m needed, not just down a blind alley.

-bj

benjones @ jigsawnyc.com

A huge preview of the forthcoming graphic novel by Eric Stephenson and Jamie McKelvie, which I have read and is fucking good. Out next month.

yeah, thanks, hep.

LOCAL, by Brian Wood & Ryan Kelly, begins in November:

Brian’s tagging all LOCAL art material at this link.

The Baby Race will follow 35 single women in their 30s as they try to conceive over the course of a year, while Who Killed the British Sitcom? looks at the sharp drop in UK sitcoms commissioned over the past 20 years, (and) Kiss bassist Gene Simmons will try to teach English teenagers how to be guitar gods in Rock School…

Go and look at pages from PENG, Corey (SHARKNIFE) Lewis’ hyperkinetic new kung-fu kickball graphic novel. Then, unless you live near a really bloody good comics store that always gets the stuff worth having, go and order a copy pre-release.

(Reminder by Brian Wood, cheers)

Spit or Swallow: my friend Maddie Greene writing about wine.

…in the interest of science and international relations I came home with a bottle of Big Ass Shiraz, 2003 vintage. You’ll find this in your local grocery liquor shop for $6.99-$8.99 a bottle. A fluorescent kangaroo’s behemoth backside fills the label. The cork is hot pink plastic. Skeptical? Oh, I was beyond skeptical. I had the phone ready and the phone book open to Poison Control…

People who remember Die Puny Humans will recognise Maddie:

Know nothing about comics & graphic novels and how to read them? Artbomb.net, the graphic-novel recommendation site I co-founded, has had its static archive restored, and so Jessica Abel’s introduction to the graphic novel, which she created for us, is back up. It’s only two pages long, and does what it says on the tin. Go and read.

Photo by Leslie:

Am still sick, this is all you’re getting today:

Laurenn just found this:

Number 175, apparently.