Jim Woodring's Frank, Fran, Congress of the Animals, Weathercraft and The Lute String

Earlier this year, on one of my now infrequent trips up to London (as in, central London; I still get up to south London fairly regularly to see my family... not that that has any bearing on proceedings), I picked up a hardback (first edition, naturally) of Jim Woodring's graphic novel Fran, published by Fantagraphics in 2013. As both a sequel and a prequel to Woodring's 2011 graphic novel Congress of the Animals – how it can be both things defies explanation, like much of Woodring's work – and the third such full-length graphic novel Woodring has published in the last five years – the other being 2010's Weathercraft – it made for a nice addition to my bijou Woodring collection, which I subsequently retrieved from the loft – see also this post – and which basically comprises those three hardback books plus a 1998 L'Association anthology of Frank stories – titled simply Frank – and The Lute String, a slim but splendid Japanese graphic novel starring Frank, Pupshaw and Pushpaw and published by Presspop Gallery Publications in 2005.

I've no idea where I got The Lute String, but it's pretty scarce; I can only see one copy online at present, offered by an American seller for about thirty quid. I do know where I got the L'Association Frank though – in Super Heros in Paris, sometime in the early 2000s. It's a first printing, dated September 1998, but more importantly it has a numbered bookplate affixed to the title page, signed by Woodring:

Which brings me back to Fran, my copy of which also sports a signed – initials only – and numbered bookplate – unaffixed in this instance – courtesy of Gosh!, which is where I bought the book:

With its circular illogic – best appreciated in conjunction with Congress of the Animals (although that book seems to be out of print at the moment) – and the queasy, unsettling hold it exerts, Fran is typical of Jim Woodring's Frank comics – a remarkable and remarkably consistent body of work. Indeed, one could compare Fran with the stories collected in Frank, most of which are around twenty years old, and discern no real difference in either quality or style, although I suppose that shouldn't really come as a surprise given the hermetically sealed nature of the universe in which Frank exists. Even so, I think I would still point the Woodring/Frank neophyte to the story "Gentleman Manhog" – or "Gentilhomme porc" as the L'Association edition of Frank has it – as being the Frank story par excellence: a savagely ironic tale of degradation and enlightenment, one which evidently inspired Woodring enough that he reprised and expanded on it for Weathercraft.

The Day After

Further Thoughts on Election Day 2015

Offered on Election Day 2015

Ed Miliband's idea of a holiday.

That is all.

(Almost.)

Beautiful Darkness and Beauty: Graphic Novels by Kerascoët, Vehlmann and Hubert (Drawn & Quarterly / NBM, 2014)

Continuing the intermittent posts on graphic novels – both old and new(ish) – that I've read recently(ish), here's a pair of remarkable books from last year, both of which boast extraordinary artwork by cartooning duo Kerascoët, alias Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset:

Beautiful Darkness, written by Fabien Vehlmann and published in hardback by Drawn & Quarterly in February 2014 (the copy seen here is a first impression; the book has since reprinted), and Beauty, written – and coloured – by Hubert and published by NBM in October 2014 (both books translated from French editions).

Of the two, Beautiful Darkness is probably the more celebrated. J. Caleb Mozzocco, in his roundup of the best comics and graphic novels of 2014 (a post which proved extremely useful in my hunt for graphic novels I'd overlooked last year), noted, "I don't think I know anyone that read this that didn't feel powerfully affected by it, whether they liked it or not", while more recently, in the letters pages of Saga #27, Brian K. Vaughan had this to say:

Wait, is Beautiful Darkness my new favorite graphic novel of all time?... I finished reading Drawn & Quarterly's edition of this glorious French comic from watercolor painter Kerascoët and writer Fabien Vehlmann a few weeks back, but not a day has gone by since then that I haven't thought about the book. I guess you could call the story a kind of fairy tale about human nature, but it's WAY more harrowing than that, as evidenced by an early image that's probably the most powerful and affecting splash page in the history of the medium. Truly, I dare you to pick it up and disagree with me.

There's not much I can add to that, except to suggest that good as Beautiful Darkness is, I actually think Beauty is the richer, more rewarding read. Beauty also features in Mozzocco's 'best of', but at number 12 (of 13) in the list, as opposed to Beautiful Darkness, which nabbed the number 2 spot; whereas for me it's right up there with the graphic novel which topped Mozzocco's chart, Michael DeForge's Ant Colony. I found Beauty just as arresting as Beautiful Darkness, but in a less showy way – perhaps a consequence of the simpler lines, flatter colours and densely panelled pages. But there's also, I think, more depth to the thing, and not merely because of the greater extent (150 pages as opposed to Beautiful Darkness's 100). The story of a peasant girl who gets more than she bargained for when she's granted exceptional beauty, and set against a backdrop of grandeur, squalor and the changing seasons, the narrative shows how man's basest desires cause wars to be fought and kingdoms to fall. So it goes.

The Conduct of Major Maxim by Gavin Lyall (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982): Book Review

NB: Included in this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

From 1961–1975, British writer Gavin Lyall published seven first-person thrillers. Those that I've read – The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961), The Most Dangerous Game (1963), Blame the Dead (1972) – are stylishly written, gripping affairs, and I like them a lot. Even better though, for my money, are the four third-person spy thrillers Lyall published in the 1980s: the Harry Maxim series. I took a look at the first of those, The Secret Servant (Hodder, 1980), all the way back in 2010; five years on, I think it's long past time I turned to the second one.

Published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1982 – under a dust jacket designed by Melvyn Gill, based on an original concept by Gavin Lyall himself (who had form with the design of the wrappers of his novels: he painted the jacket artwork for his debut, the aforementioned The Wrong Side of the Sky) – The Conduct of Major Maxim was originally titled A Slightly Private War, something I revealed last week in this post on my collection of uncorrected proofs of the Harry Maxim novels. It's an apt alternative title, as the plot sees Maxim, 10 Downing Street's ex-SAS troubleshooter, going ever-so-slightly rogue in order to help out a younger SAS man, one Corporal Blagg, who's on the run following a fatal balls-up during a mission in Germany.

As in The Secret Servant, Maxim is once again alternately aided and frustrated by the Prime Minister's private secretary, George Harbinger, and by Agnes Algar of MI5; and also as in The Secret Servant, Lyall laces the narrative of The Conduct of Major Maxim with plausible-seeming snippets of 'info' about the workings of British state security – for instance that military personnel do SAS tours rather than being on permanent secondment to the service; that the nickname for the SAS is "Sass"; and that MI5 and MI6 derive their names from their original location: "Long ago, the legend said, the security (or spy-catching) service and the espionage (or spy-hiring) service had been born next door to each other in rooms 5 and 6 of the corridor where Military Intelligence first nested in Whitehall."

All this is delivered in Lyall's elegantly unfussy and quietly ironic prose – which isn't to say the narrative lacks thrills, either of the violent kind – notably a climactic gun battle in the port of Goole – or of the internecine political variety, as the long-suffering Harbinger, hobbled by an ailing PM, tries to keep the peace between his errant troubleshooter and the warring factions of MI5 and 6.