COMING SOON!

It's been a long time since a printed version of the Reglar Wiglar was forced upon the world. In 2005, I swore, Never again! A lot has happened since then, and what do you know? I have the urge to produce a physical product. So, I have been slowly and somewhat diligently working on Reglar Wiglar #22. It will be very different from the previous twenty-one issues. It will not, in fact, focus on music very much. It will have comics and it will hopefully be funny and entertaining and maybe some people will buy it. More as this story develops.

Reglar Wiglar #11 Reglar Wiglar #15 Reglar Wiglar #16 Reglar Wiglar #17 Reglar Wiglar #19

Music is fixed in time like our memories. We all have those songs or records and bands that seem to belong—not to a certain time in history, but to a very specific time in our lives. These memories can be especially powerful when they represent a tumultuous or painful part of our lives. They have lasting power over us. They’re hardwired.

Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, Celebrated Summer, is one long memory triggered by music expressed in visual art. It represents an aching feeling of nostalgia for a part of life that sucked to live through the first time but somehow seems like a better place to visit than the present. The transition from adolescence to adulthood, where everything is up in the air, seems innocent in retrospect only because of the complete lack of understanding of what could happen next or even what’s possible. That’s where Celebrated Summer is set. The soundtrack would undoubtedly be Zen Arcade, New Day Rising or any Hüsker Dü or punk rock record of the mid 1980s. The book’s title comes from a song off New Day Rising; the cover features a colored pencil wash in homage to Zen Arcade, a record that many disaffected teens of The Eighties latched onto for comfort or escape or both.

Not much happens over the course of sixty or so pages. The story opens in a bedroom somewhere in rural, or maybe suburban Pennsylvania, possibly New Jersey. The room is littered with the detritus of a teenaged life dedicated to skate boards and punk rock (Hüsker Dü appears again scrawled on the wall above the bed). It's the summer between the end of high school and the beginning of whatever happens next. The two protagonists, Wolf and Mike examine a blotter of acid on the floor in front of them. "I think we should drop two each," Mike decides, and so they do. Then there's a ride to the beach with a stop to get gas and smokes. There's some time spent people watching on the boardwalk and in a video arcade. Wolf tries to call his grandmother at one point but she doesn't pick up the phone. He's worried that she'll worry, but he's not worried enough try again. Wolf is overweight and self-conscious. He looks like a tripped-out Charlie Brown, full of the same anxieties and with nonexistent parents. Mike is thinner, a little more confident.

The imagery is important. Micro scenes of nature and the bits and blips of the video screens at the arcade get intense, drug-assisted focus. Buildings shimmer as Mike's boxy VW Rabbit drives by them. There’s a reoccurring image of a circle, heavy with symbolism in any context, but also happens to be prominently featured on The Germ’s album What We Do Is Secret—an iconic image in punk rock that's hard to miss. Forsman has a clean drawing style. He creates simple lines that don’t weigh down his panels. This works especially well in his panoramic views of both city and open country spaces. If music is the space between the notes, then Forsman's art is the space between the lines.

On the journey home, Mike, still tripping, asks a cop for directions. Later Wolf is passively confronted by his grandmother for staying out too late. Later he goes with his grandmother to buy shoes at the mall and visits Mike who is taking a break from his job at the food court. At the end of this flashback down memory lane, in the present, Wolf admits to lying awake at night, "strangled by nostalgia". He misses those days so "carelessly passed". It's kind of a bitter sweet bummer in the end, but it's definitely worth the trip—Chris Auman

GOD IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU
Written by Mark Russell Cartoons by Shannon Wheeler
[Top Shelf Productions]

I have finally read the bible. Praise, Jesus! My first attempt at reading this book was abandoned pretty early—like midway through Genesis early. I quickly became hopelessly bored after the 200th "begat". A few years ago, thanks to R. Crumb, I did make it through Genesis, but even that was no walk in the garden, so to speak. It is probably not surprising either, that after roughly 15 years of forced church going, I was pretty close to being totally ignorant of just what the heck went on in this book. (Some pretty crazy shit is what the heck.) Now before you get too proud of me, let me just say that I didn't actually read the whole unabridged version of the Bible, but I did read the pithy 200 plus pages of Mark Russell's God is Disappointed and that counts. While this Mark Russell is certainly a satirist, he is not the piano playing political comedian, Mark Russell, you may be thinking of. No, this Mark Russell is actually funny (sorry other Mark Russell).

God is Disappointed in You boils down the essence of each and every book of the Bible, Old and New, into small digestible morsels. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and yes, by the very fact that it exists, it is irreverent, but it's the good kind of irreverence, not the sacrilegious, blasphemous variety. It's more like a gentle, good-natured ribbing to remind us what ridiculousness appears in these allegorical tales. It doesn't read like an atheist's jab at the Christian tenets of faith. The Richard Dawkins version would be very different, and humorless. This is just a lighthearted romp through hundreds of years of blood, gore, enslavement and miscellaneous human suffering. Whether you’re a fan of religion (this one or that one), a skeptical atheist or a wishywashy agnostic, whether you are Pat Robertson or Bill Maher, this is simply a hilarious book that keeps the morality intact. (More so the New Testament, the O.T. is just bananas, quite frankly.) The cartoon illustrations were provided by Shannon Wheeler, whose work you may recognize from the New Yorker and his long running Too Much Coffee Man series—Chris Auman