Sirens

Remember how, while we were in the Haight Ashbury ‘hood, I stopped in a way cool comic store? Yeah…well, I found my new total, absolute, complete favorite and it’s not who I’d expected!

It’s Isabella Rotman. Go read her illustrated artist’s statement – it’s brill. Utterly. She’s archly funny, full of frank observations and I’m just wild about her drawings.

She has loads of samples up at her site and, I think, Siren School is there in full. You know me though, I dig paper. I like reading from an ink and parchment set up. So, indeed, I will be investing in MORE Rotman and soonly too.

The Catboy comic by Benji Nate – what sucked me into the shop to begin with – was enjoyable enough (yeah, that’s some damning with faint praise, eh?). I love the concept – beloved pet cat becomes people size and semi human. He can speak, eat people food (pizza!) and just generally, amusingly hangs out. It’s very funny at times (he gets a job as a dog walker!) but the illustrations don’t thrill me as much and the humor's not as incisive as Rotman's. As much as I love that cover drawing, I'm not inclined to shell out for more.

The awesome title and cover of Michael Sweater’s Please Destroy All My Enemies promises, but doesn't deliver, a ripping, snarkathon, drawn in three fingered Simpsonesque beauty. To be fair, there are panels that bring a smile to my face but, mostly, they fall into the realm of What? This is supposed to be amusing? and I don’t get it Land. Without cutting wit and relatable humor, the cartoons are just...meh.

I also bought a NON-comic book, NON-poetry book. No, RILLY!

Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute was, originally, a serialized memoir published in the San Francisco Bulletin. Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus found and edited it along with a selection of the letters written in response.

Was this purchase all about copping salacious intellectual feels? While there is that risqué element, sure, this has more to do with wanting to know what life was like for luckless women from another place and time. History has mostly been written by and about men. If women are featured it’s, most often, either because they’ve uncommonly risen to powerful positions or are hooked up with some dude who gets most of the cred/blame. That's, maybe, starting to change.

I’m always wondering/imagining – who would I have been way back then?

The preface, forward and intro for Alice runs close to 80 pages. I get it, it’s good to have the historical background BUT…to me, it’d make more sense, be much more satisfying to read all about Fremont Older, the original publishing paper's editor, AFTER, not before. He’s not the main story – she is.

Yeah, I’m skipping over it so’s I can dive into Alice’s tale.

“Alice’s own narrative immediately gripped us,” Anderson said by phone. “But the thing that really indicated to us that this was a special and remarkable document was, alongside these daily installments of Alice’s story, there were these letters to the editor that were published, and nearly half of them were written by other prostitutes or working-class women, reflecting on their own experiences in San Francisco and California in this really candid way.” (source)

Between this and the poetry volumes I snagged, reading matter-wise, I'm all set for at least another week.