Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days

About a year ago, if you’ll remember, I posted a snippet from Al Columbia’s anthology Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days. Over Christmas in New York City, I dropped by the amazing comics shop, Forbidden Planet, and picked it up. I’m very late to the party here, and there have been plenty of reviews of it online, so I’m just going to quickly toss a few thoughts in and add to the chorus.

Because the book is a fragmented mess of half-completed, scrapped comics, maybe the best way to review it is through some sort of super-pretentious gestalt word vomit exercise. Here we go:

horror • disgust • unease • amusement • terror • awe • distortion • innocence • despair • zombies • lust • betrayal • paranoia • beauty • john lithgow • loneliness

Well, doesn’t this book just sound like a blast to read? In truth, the book carries huge emotional heft, even though a nothing resembling a narrative ever threatens to congeal from the mess of scraps. Columbia has an amazing talent for crafting potent images, and telling stories in very small spaces.

It’s all the stuff of nightmares: the death of a loved one, the fear of being lost, the terror of sleep paralysis when you can swear a knife-wielding monster is shuffling closer and closer to your door. The sensation generated is an overwhelming, macabre curiosity. You have to know what will happen on the next page, especially because it’s so uncertain of a particular storyline is going to continue to the next page.

When every artfully placed panel could represent a bleak ending, Columbia realizes that a few breaks are in order. Of course, you won’t find any positive thinking here – the brief reprieves from terror are mostly stocked with bravado, cynicism, lust, and the pure will to love to see another day. It’s not the best side of humanity represented here, by any measure.

So far, you should have picked up on two things:

1. this book is intense
2. you should buy this book on Amazon, because it is cheaper there and I will get some money if you do
3. you should also tell your friends to buy this book on Amazon, because I will make even more money

But there’s more to this review than adulation and greed. Just a little while ago, one of my friends pointed out an interview with Al Columbia that reveals how difficult it was for him to draw these comics and put the book together. Turns out, he’s not immune to the images he creates:

Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head … it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.

via ComicsComics

I’d be lying if I said the result wasn’t fascinating. I talked in a previous blog post about sincerity. This book epitomizes it, in all its schizophrenic struggle. Get ahold of this book somehow—it’s a quick and unforgettable read.

This is just cool

via Arthurmag, via Jordan:

Here we are, about two weeks from the release of Al Columbia’s first book in almost a decade.  Pim & Francie is already receiving advance praise from folks like Spike Jonze…Al’s always working on something new and amazing, whether it’s music, filmmaking, comics, or in this case, painting.  Al showed me a photo of this new painting he was working on and I became immersed in the labyrinth of frayed facade and haunting beauty.

(click for full view)

Paulette Potts and the Mysterious M&M Bone

Why did this have to happen?

An Atlanta woman has a bone to pick with the candy company Mars after she took a bite into her peanut M&M and says she discovered what a local biologist says is a vertebra from a small mammal.

…

“It’s definitely bone, and it came from some type of mammal,” Blumer told FOXNews.com. “This isn’t [a] tail vertebra — it’s something higher up, and the reason I’m certain for that is because it’s hollow. The nerve cord would run through there.”

…

After making her discovery, she said she contacted the company’s customer service department and received a case number from a representative. She was later informed via telephone by another representative that a “‘supervisor told me to tell you that was probably a peanut twig.’”

Now Mars wants the bone. Hmm.. I wonder why.   Instead, we’re going to get its DNA analyzed.  Then we’ll know _for sure_ what creature it came from.  Any guesses?
Edit: The Consumerist has a post about it now! Excellent.  The comments are making everyone in the office – Paulette included – crack up.