By Jared Gardner

J. T. Yost’s Xeric Award-winning first collection of short stories is a splendid promise of good things to come. The title story is the gem of the short collection and the one new piece in the book, and by itself it is worth the price of admission. It is a quiet, gentle story about the efforts of an old man in his final days to make human contact, to find the much-needed warmth he increasingly finds himself missing since the death of his wife. It is restrained and touching without ever being maudlin or manipulative.

It has been said by better men than I that I am officially the worst interviewer ever. And while I would like to imagine that this is a gross understatement, I did receive weeks’ worth of hate mail after my last interview (Harvey Pekar, on stage on front of what turned out to be hundreds of psychopaths). So, when our dear friend of the gutter, Chris Reilly, invited us to interview him about his new anthology/jam comic, Strange Eggs Jumps the Shark, we decided that rather than let me unleash yet another round of letterbombs and anthrax mail, we would ask Chris to handle both sides of the interview table. The new Strange Eggs volume feature contributions from, well, Chris Reilly, of course--but also from Jhonen Vasquez, Steve Ahlquist, and a range of other contributor whose names, strangely, do not contain unlikely combinations of consonants in close proximity. It is also very, very funny and is being released from SLG this week. But before I go and mess it all up again, let’s turn it over to our guest interview and interviewee, Chris Reilly.

On a related note, in the weeks ahead, we will be running some historical comics features, digging into our attic for some of the odd things that have gathered there over the years, everything from obscure early comic strips to high school art by Frank Miller. If you have stuff in your own virtual attics you would be willing to share with us, send it on!

By Jared Gardner

With summer upon us, it is time for me to catch up with that stack of comics on my desk and see what is worth following into the dog days to come. Today begins the first in a series of reviews of new series, most of them only in their first few issues, with suggestions as to which are worth adding to your pull list and which are worth letting go the way of so many one-hit wonders of summers past.

By Elizabeth Hewitt

A year ago, I decided I would try to entertain both my students and myself and offer a class on true crime literature. It was in searching for exemplary texts on famous nineteenth century cases (my favorite) that I discovered Rick Geary and his masterful Treasury of Victorian Murder series. In these universally acclaimed books, Geary takes his readers through the cases of Mary Rogers, Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes, Lizzie Borden and several others. While Geary always chooses the most sensational of cases, his approach to true crime is methodical and procedural. But his black and white line, which resembles lino prints or wood etchings, conveys both incredible precision and artistic warmth as he leads us through the historical murders.

By David B. Olsen

When I was a freshman in college, I shared a dorm room with a soft-spoken, long-suffering young man whose attitude toward me could be described most generously as tolerant. Within the first two hours, our small room smelled like a poorly ventilated tavern. Within the first two weeks, I had festooned our walls with a motif that was equal parts independent record store, child’s Halloween party, and hobo scrapbook. I was an obsessive student with an ironic aesthetic and an endless catalogue of angry music, but I may not have been the best person with whom to spend a year of collegial confinement. I see that now. The square space of our room may have kept us physically close, but this proximity was little consolation for the fact that we could not have been farther apart as people.

By Alex Boney

Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Goodnight cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon

I’ve been reading Goodnight Moon (written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd) to my 15-month-old son for the last year, much as other parents have been doing for the last 50 years. It’s a quiet book—the platonic definition of a bedtime story. It methodically points to all the bits of clutter in a child’s bedroom—things like a balloon, wall pictures, kittens and mittens, a mouse and a toy house, a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush—and quietly puts all of these objects away for the day. At the end, the lights are turned out and the child is peacefully asleep in the dark, quiet room. Goodnight Moon seems a stark contrast to the dark mythology of Batman, but Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert use the children’s book as the basis for their recently-completed “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” The result is a lyrically elegant, touching story that portrays Batman’s psychological vulnerabilities more clearly and more effectively than anything written in at least two decades.

By Jared Gardner

I am grateful to the good folks at Sparkplug books for producing some of the most consistently innovative, intelligent, and surprising books around. Thanks to Sparkplug we have the ongoing brilliant Reich, and the far-too-infrequent genius of Jason Shiga, to name just two that have become especially dear to me in the last couple of years. I am also grateful to the good folks at Sparkplug for letting me know when I’ve missed a title. Chris Wright’s collection Inkweed (2008) is now officially the best book of 2008 I (and probably you) completely failed to register back in those heady days when the economy was still “strong” and missions were still “accomplished.” It is not a perfect book, by any means: its idiosyncratic style (both the linework and the writing) can alternate (sometimes in the same story) between pretentious and moving; and the stories themselves are not all up to the level of the very best in this collection (“The Urn,” “The Unmerciful Gift”). But as Wright himself says in the introduction, this is a young artist’s collection, from the transient years of new apartments and roommates, to those years when Fellini and Tarkovsky were new, to all that Wright says a poignant “goodbye” to with this collection. For those of us who haven’t moved in years and who can recite (in Italian) extended quotes from La Dulce Vita, one might imagine that such a collection would come across as at the very least puerile. But this is the work of a young man already a mature artist, one ready to take the medium in new directions in the decades ahead. Far from making us feel old, this is the once-every-year-or-so book that makes an old guttergeek feel young again.

By Jared Gardner

That we here at guttergeek are endlessly devoted to all things Julia Wertz would come as no surprise to our long-time readers, in the event we had any. But when I first heard from her that she was working on this project, I must confess, I was dubious. It sounded at once too cutesy and too high-concept for the author of Fart Party. As is so often the case, however, my gut instinct was totally and completely wrong (in the interests of full disclosure it must be said that in the Spring of 2007 I confidently prophesied the imminent failure of the soon-to-be-released iPhone). In I Saw You..., Wertz brings together scores of well-known and relatively unknown cartoonists to work with a shared constraint: writing a short comic inspired by the “Missed Connections” ads in Craigslist or in local freepapers. The results range from humorous and playful to emotionally devastating—and only occasionally a bit cruel. And most surprisingly of all, the results are remarkably rich, consistent and endlessly entertaining, a testament to Wertz’s talents as an editor as well as the range of talent from which she was able to draw for this project.