Cheap Segars

Comix, posts interesting only to me
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comics bought today

The result of a day shopping for comics. Quite a lot of E. P. Jacobs’ Blake and Mortimer, several William Vance drawn Bob Morane, a Jeremiah I needed, the first album in the Comanche western series also drawn by Hermann and the two absolute toppers: Comic Arf, a collection of Craig Yoe’s comics obsessions and volume 2 of the Fantagraphics’ E.C. Segar’s Popeye series. Which only cost me ten euros at the English remaindered shop at the top of Kalverstraat. And they got a whole stack of them left, so if you’re in Amsterdam…

More Dutch comics awards

Comix, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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flyer for the Benelux Beeldverhalenprijs

I hadn’t heard of the Benelux Beeldverhalen Prijs, but apparantly it’s a competition sponsored by Dutch newspaper NRC Next, the Dutch Fund voor Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst (FBKVB)) who also sponsor the Marten Toonder Award and comics publisher De Vliegende Hollander (at least, they did so last year; couldn’t see if they were involved this year). The five best entries are published in NRC Next this week, with the top three also winning cash prizes of 1,000, 500 and 250 euros respectively. This year there were some 84 entries, down from the 112 last year. The top fifty entries will be exhibited in Art Gallery 37PK in Haarlem.

I found out about this award through a small newsitem on the FBKVB website, which sadly does not list the winners. It’s strange how little I could find online about this year’s award, when the winners are already being serialised, even at NRC Next‘s own site. A missed opportunity.

First page of Spruitjes, bier en leverworst drawn by Jeroen Funke

Compare this with the Jan Hanloprijs, a biannual literary award founded in 1999 in memory of poet and prolific letter writer Jan Hanlo on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, to honour essay writers. This year the Hanloprijs added a media essay category to its two existing ones (for best original essay and best essay collection) “to promote the idea that the qualities of a good essay are not limited to prose” and chose comics as the inaugural medium, thanks to the support of the FBKVB.

According to Michael Minneboo ( Dutch) fortytwo cartoonists entered a comic essay for the award on the theme of “senses”, based around a Jan Hanloo quote stressing the importance of senses other than sight. An anthology of the ten entries the jury liked the best was published in a print run of 500 copies. Which sadly is not available commercially, a shame, as the list of participating creators is quite strong: Bas Köhler, Gerrie Hondius, Albo Helm, Jeroen de Leijer, Sam Peeters, Wouter Gresnigt & Kasper Peters, Milan Hulsing and Margreet de Heer, with the winner being Jeroen Funke (one part of the Lamelos collective), who got 1500 euros for his troubles. He won with his strip “Spruitjes, Bier, Leverworst”.

While both the Benelux Beeldverhalenprijs and the Jan Hanloprijs handed out awards this week, only the latter had the nous to actually announce who the winners were. Or at least to do so in a way that I could easily find out who they were….

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille — Steven Brust

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of Cowboy Fengs Space Bar and Grill


Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille
Steven Brust
223 pages
published in 1990

Sometimes when I’m depressed I go on a book reading binge — I managed to read every Wheel of Time book up to Lord of Chaos in a week when I was at a low point during my time at college. Pure escapism, fleeing into a story to temporarily ignore the world around me. A few weeks ago I fled back in that habit when my wife was having a very bad night, the day before she had to go back to hospital again. I was sleeping on the couch to try and give her an easier night’s sleep but then couldn’t sleep myself, so I grabbed the nearest book at hand. This turned out to be Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille.

Which perhaps wasn’t the best book to keep the night terrors at bay. Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is a strange book, if only because it’s one of Steven Brust’s rare science fiction novels, but also because it’s a light adventure story about a Strange Bar, set amongst a series of nuclear holocausts. Amongst Brust fans it’s apparently a bit of a controversial book with some hating it, but for me it was the right book at the right time. It may be strange to think of a book that has a succession of nuclear wars at its heart as comforting, but that’s what it was.

It’s comforting because Brust makes it so. The nuclear death is in the background, while in the foreground we get the story of the bar that has the best matzo ball soup in the galaxy, as well as some of the best Irish musicians. Whether or not Billy, the protagonist narrating the story in first person, counts himself amongst them remains unrevealed. This is the picture you get in the first few sentences and the cozy atmosphere it evokes neutralises much of the existential dread the nukes evoke. It reminds me of the urban fantasy people like Emma Bull and other of the Scribblies — a group Brust of course belonged to too — were writing in the eighties.

Read more…

Satoshi Kanazawa is still a massive douche

sciencebollocks, wingnuts
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Having a relatively old blog means you can see certain subjects coming back again and again over the years. One of such is the sheer stupidity and nastiness of Satoshi Kanazawa. In 2006 I posted about his bizarre theory that Asians cannot do science properly, two years later about his masturbatory fantasies of having Ann Coulter in charge of the War on Terror. Today he’s back in the news again for saying that evolution made Black women unattractive, especially to middle aged evolutionary psychologists paid to spout scientificesques excuses for prejudiced bullshit.

Not to long ago the London School of Economics was pilloried for taking money to let one of Khadaffi’s sons study there. Yet I think the LSE should be more ashamed for having Kanazawa on its staff…