Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 3: 1984-1986, Berkeley Breathed (365 Books, Day 133)

I have of course read a chunk of this material before, as Bloom County is one of the great newspaper comic strips of my childhood and we have all the collections, but these new archival editions with notes and commentary and all the strips that Breathed left out of the collections are very nice indeed.

If you don't know Bloom County, well. I don't know what to tell you. It was relentlessly political, but remarkably even-handed, the spiritual successor of Pogo; a funny-animal strip that was tied into pop culture in a way funny-animal strips never were before or since. Breathed jumped the shark eventually, and hasn't jumped back, but his work left an indelible mark on me at a very early age. Both gaudior and I consider "The night is cold. My love is warm. Let me warm you," to be the epitome to which all other pick-up lines vaguely aspire. I quote Bloom County so frequently that I don't even notice doing it anymore. It is without question the thing I conversationally cite most often (followed at a short distance by Singing in the Rain, for whatever that says about me). The entire run of it is comfort reading.

It turns out that the previous publications of Bloom County were not remotely complete. Breathed is something of a perfectionist, I think; about a third of this particular volume had not been released in book form.

... it also turns out that may not have been a problem, mind you. The strips that had been left out tend to fall into one or more of three categories: a) strips that were extremely topical about very ephemeral pop culture; b) strips that closely resembled other strips Breathed likes better; and c) strips that are just plain bad. B) and c) don't add much, and a) benefit enormously from the notes and commentary that they could not have had before this historical retrospective. Bloom County in this more complete version is-- hm. More cynical, a little; racier, definitely (I didn't know you could ever put some of this in the paper, and you couldn't now). More flat-out gonzo newspaper-strips-don't-work-this-way crazy, but also, and this is slightly painful to me, less warm at heart.

The reason to read this edition is definitely Breathed's commentary. There's not a ton of it, but he does go through and say what he likes, what he doesn't, what he was thinking, whether he was high (yes), and what the in-jokes were (his mother and stepfather cameo at one point in the strip, which I had certainly never known about). And he says that he had no idea what newspaper strips were supposed to act like, which I had assumed from context, really, but am glad to have confirmed, and gives updates on the peculiar rivalry/friendship/thingie he had with Garry Trudeau. There are also separate editorial comments going into some of the bits of pop culture which Breathed doesn't mention or claims to have forgotten about. The book does not, however, feel overexplained-- it doesn't gloss things that can be assumed to still be in the popular consciousness, and also doesn't gloss some things that aren't (I will never have any idea what the fuck Breathed's deal was about Jeane Kirkpatrick).

So if you're looking to revisit childhood memories or get the strip for kids, and you could do a lot worse, hunt down the original collections, I think. But if you're curious about all the background and the nooks and crannies and are anything like a completist, these new volumes were designed for you. Let's hope Breathed eventually comes back from wherever he left his brain, although I am not holding my breath given his goddamn terrifying upcoming Disney movie, Mars Needs Moms, news of the existence of which is some of the more depressing film news I have had in quite a while.

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 3: 1984-1986, Berkeley Breathed (365 Books, Day 133)

I have of course read a chunk of this material before, as Bloom County is one of the great newspaper comic strips of my childhood and we have all the collections, but these new archival editions with notes and commentary and all the strips that Breathed left out of the collections are very nice indeed.

If you don't know Bloom County, well. I don't know what to tell you. It was relentlessly political, but remarkably even-handed, the spiritual successor of Pogo; a funny-animal strip that was tied into pop culture in a way funny-animal strips never were before or since. Breathed jumped the shark eventually, and hasn't jumped back, but his work left an indelible mark on me at a very early age. Both gaudior and I consider "The night is cold. My love is warm. Let me warm you," to be the epitome to which all other pick-up lines vaguely aspire. I quote Bloom County so frequently that I don't even notice doing it anymore. It is without question the thing I conversationally cite most often (followed at a short distance by Singing in the Rain, for whatever that says about me). The entire run of it is comfort reading.

It turns out that the previous publications of Bloom County were not remotely complete. Breathed is something of a perfectionist, I think; about a third of this particular volume had not been released in book form.

... it also turns out that may not have been a problem, mind you. The strips that had been left out tend to fall into one or more of three categories: a) strips that were extremely topical about very ephemeral pop culture; b) strips that closely resembled other strips Breathed likes better; and c) strips that are just plain bad. B) and c) don't add much, and a) benefit enormously from the notes and commentary that they could not have had before this historical retrospective. Bloom County in this more complete version is-- hm. More cynical, a little; racier, definitely (I didn't know you could ever put some of this in the paper, and you couldn't now). More flat-out gonzo newspaper-strips-don't-work-this-way crazy, but also, and this is slightly painful to me, less warm at heart.

The reason to read this edition is definitely Breathed's commentary. There's not a ton of it, but he does go through and say what he likes, what he doesn't, what he was thinking, whether he was high (yes), and what the in-jokes were (his mother and stepfather cameo at one point in the strip, which I had certainly never known about). And he says that he had no idea what newspaper strips were supposed to act like, which I had assumed from context, really, but am glad to have confirmed, and gives updates on the peculiar rivalry/friendship/thingie he had with Garry Trudeau. There are also separate editorial comments going into some of the bits of pop culture which Breathed doesn't mention or claims to have forgotten about. The book does not, however, feel overexplained-- it doesn't gloss things that can be assumed to still be in the popular consciousness, and also doesn't gloss some things that aren't (I will never have any idea what the fuck Breathed's deal was about Jeane Kirkpatrick).

So if you're looking to revisit childhood memories or get the strip for kids, and you could do a lot worse, hunt down the original collections, I think. But if you're curious about all the background and the nooks and crannies and are anything like a completist, these new volumes were designed for you. Let's hope Breathed eventually comes back from wherever he left his brain, although I am not holding my breath given his goddamn terrifying upcoming Disney movie, Mars Needs Moms, news of the existence of which is some of the more depressing film news I have had in quite a while.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Modern Mosaic: Inspiration from the 20th Century, Tessa Hunkin (365 Books, Day 134)

Back in high school, I made a stained glass mosaic for a Junior Classical League competition. It is a three foot by three foot copy of an angel design I liked from the ceiling of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, and it took my entire junior year to duplicate in quarter-inch-square hand-cut glass tile. The reaction of everyone in my life at that time, including the high school art teacher, was total bemusement, so I taught myself to cut glass, figured out how to lay out the mosaic on a plexiglass sheet over the cartoon, experimented till I found the right sort of glue, and went through the agony of teaching myself to grout (and it was agony, because it could have blown a year's work if I'd messed it up). It came in fifth in the state, which I was and am very proud of, especially as the winner had duplicated a piece from Pompeii that used one-eighth-inch marble triangles to produce photorealistic flowers. I don't even know how a person manages to get marble-cutting equipment as a high school student.

Nowadays when I look at my angel I can mostly see the things wrong with it, but it came out very well considering I had no idea what I was doing.

This book would have been quite helpful in figuring out what I was doing, as it turns out I did most of it incorrectly. The book has two goals: it is an instruction manual, with suggested projects, on mosaic; and it is a brief history of art emphasizing mosaic and discussing possible directions to take mosaic based on the art movements of the twentieth century. As an instruction manual, it's not that bad, though it does suffer a bit from the issue that some experts have in explaining things, where they don't know how much they have to simplify something and so wind up not actually starting at first principles. Also, there are some diagrams which show tools that the book doesn't discuss, and some tools the book does discuss don't turn up in the diagrams. But mostly this is pretty solid, and makes me feel as though I have a real grasp of how one ought to grout (not how I did it). It also gave me an idea of an entire method of mosaic creation I hadn't even known existed, namely the reverse method, where you glue the tiles fronts-down to a piece of paper and then put their backing on top of them; this gives you a lot more leeway to correct your mistakes.

As an art history, it's sadly and necessarily condensed, but really interesting. Mosaic was very popular from antiquity through the Renaissance, fell out of fashion sometime during the Enlightenment, and came back sporadically via the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco, and other arts movements that have valued handwork and things which cannot be easily mass-produced. Gaudi turns out to have been the first person to do architectural three-dimensional mosaic decoration, which I had not known. There's some fascinating theoretical work here on the ways that abstraction and color theory of various sorts can play into mosaic design and the ways in which mosaic is and is not painting and can and cannot do the same things; I would love to see more fine-art mosaic along these principles. There is, for example, no reason not to apply the ideas of the Futurists to mosaic-- it's just that they mostly didn't. The book also name-checks several famous and important mosaic artists, most of which I had never heard of. I was particularly struck by the work of Niki de Saint Phalle-- I'm not sure I like it, but it is very much a totally different thing to be doing with mosaic. And the book points out that the most innovative thing ongoing in mosaic is not physical at all, and can't be: the photomosaics producible only by software, which have finally unified technology with one of the few arts that obstinately resists mass-production. I don't know what, if anything, that means, but it's interesting.

I would have preferred this to be split into two different books, honestly, the manual and the history, with more time and space and detail given to each. But this book is not a bad start at all. Makes me want to do more glasswork, as I have been threatening to do for years now.

Modern Mosaic: Inspiration from the 20th Century, Tessa Hunkin (365 Books, Day 134)

Back in high school, I made a stained glass mosaic for a Junior Classical League competition. It is a three foot by three foot copy of an angel design I liked from the ceiling of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, and it took my entire junior year to duplicate in quarter-inch-square hand-cut glass tile. The reaction of everyone in my life at that time, including the high school art teacher, was total bemusement, so I taught myself to cut glass, figured out how to lay out the mosaic on a plexiglass sheet over the cartoon, experimented till I found the right sort of glue, and went through the agony of teaching myself to grout (and it was agony, because it could have blown a year's work if I'd messed it up). It came in fifth in the state, which I was and am very proud of, especially as the winner had duplicated a piece from Pompeii that used one-eighth-inch marble triangles to produce photorealistic flowers. I don't even know how a person manages to get marble-cutting equipment as a high school student.

Nowadays when I look at my angel I can mostly see the things wrong with it, but it came out very well considering I had no idea what I was doing.

This book would have been quite helpful in figuring out what I was doing, as it turns out I did most of it incorrectly. The book has two goals: it is an instruction manual, with suggested projects, on mosaic; and it is a brief history of art emphasizing mosaic and discussing possible directions to take mosaic based on the art movements of the twentieth century. As an instruction manual, it's not that bad, though it does suffer a bit from the issue that some experts have in explaining things, where they don't know how much they have to simplify something and so wind up not actually starting at first principles. Also, there are some diagrams which show tools that the book doesn't discuss, and some tools the book does discuss don't turn up in the diagrams. But mostly this is pretty solid, and makes me feel as though I have a real grasp of how one ought to grout (not how I did it). It also gave me an idea of an entire method of mosaic creation I hadn't even known existed, namely the reverse method, where you glue the tiles fronts-down to a piece of paper and then put their backing on top of them; this gives you a lot more leeway to correct your mistakes.

As an art history, it's sadly and necessarily condensed, but really interesting. Mosaic was very popular from antiquity through the Renaissance, fell out of fashion sometime during the Enlightenment, and came back sporadically via the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco, and other arts movements that have valued handwork and things which cannot be easily mass-produced. Gaudi turns out to have been the first person to do architectural three-dimensional mosaic decoration, which I had not known. There's some fascinating theoretical work here on the ways that abstraction and color theory of various sorts can play into mosaic design and the ways in which mosaic is and is not painting and can and cannot do the same things; I would love to see more fine-art mosaic along these principles. There is, for example, no reason not to apply the ideas of the Futurists to mosaic-- it's just that they mostly didn't. The book also name-checks several famous and important mosaic artists, most of which I had never heard of. I was particularly struck by the work of Niki de Saint Phalle-- I'm not sure I like it, but it is very much a totally different thing to be doing with mosaic. And the book points out that the most innovative thing ongoing in mosaic is not physical at all, and can't be: the photomosaics producible only by software, which have finally unified technology with one of the few arts that obstinately resists mass-production. I don't know what, if anything, that means, but it's interesting.

I would have preferred this to be split into two different books, honestly, the manual and the history, with more time and space and detail given to each. But this book is not a bad start at all. Makes me want to do more glasswork, as I have been threatening to do for years now.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.