I Love Led Zeppelin - Panty-Dropping Comics by Ellen Forney

I was keen to look into comics written by women, and this one was worth the search. As I went to pick up two other comics I had interlibrary loaned, I was recommended I Love Led Zeppelin by the reference librarian. I have had great luck with recommendations lately; Perhaps I should learn to trust strangers opinions more!

Anyhow, the book is lovely. The title of this collection of Forney's short works refers to the author's death fantasy of someone finding her tragically young and beautiful mangled corpse next to a wrecked car blasting Led Zeppelin. And shes right, if one is going to daydream about thier own demise, it might as well have a soundtrack that doesn't mortify her.

The collection starts with a series of how-to's including "How to Fuck a Woman with Your Hands" and "How D'ya Survive the Coming Chaos?" I snickered knowingly at the "How to Smoke Pot and Stay Out of Jail" comic's suggestion to hide your joint in a hollowed-out sharpie. Particularly interesting are Forney's illustrations of the stories told by her colorful, friends: on topics from Dan Savage's sex life to Grandma Florence's poetry about Scrabble. The five episode comic "What the Drugs Taught Me" is hilarious. Basically, for a light read, you cant beat Forney's style (which is just as hilarious today as it was in the early 90's). And I can't deny, I like a little sex and drugs in my comics, and maybe even a little Led Zeppelin.

Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson

I'm choosing to write first about this 600 page epic because it's fresh on my mind. Box Office Poison was compelling enough for me to read in one day, but still, I couldn't really relate.
I didn't realize until I was nearly finished that the characters were precisely my age. I supposed correctly that Box Office Poison was written in the mid-nineties because of the Gen-X slacker vibe of the book, its references to Grunge and to Park Slope, Brooklyn as up and coming and cheap…the author has an AOL webpage to this day, and if that’s not a 90’s giveaway, I’m not sure what is. I was almost cringing in expectation of an appearance of Jay and Silent Bob. The whole thing does have a feel as though it was made for cinema not print: fast-paced dialogues, q&a interludes with the characters and daydream sequences galore.

I knew that the book was largely self-referential, and I can recognize now that the author was creating a kind of memoir of those surely nostalgic and aimless days of post-college life (the days that I am living out right now). The main character Sherman is begrudgingly working at a bookstore, as the author once did. He spends about a quarter of the book moaning about this, and to Robinson's credit, he mocks both Sherman and himself for writing stories that are perhaps mostly funny to those who share these experiences (eg: comic book conventions, horrible bookshop customers, rejection from publishers). He even throws in a plot about the little comic artist getting screwed by the giant corporation for good measure (see Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay), and who can argue with that?

But like I said, I read this book straight through so something must have touched me beyond my own need for completing what I set into doing. I can't resist a little bit of human entanglement, and this book offers plenty both emotional and physical. There's both celibate self-loathing and sex scenes set in the interplanetary void. I appreciated the fairly honest depiction of the characters as flawed and physically plain, no ultra-busty heroines in leotards, of course. I cringed honestly at the inevitable awkward encounters and I related to the pointless fights between lovers. I must say that the character that most mirrors the authors life does have quite a storybook ending...but then again, he did go on to be a renowned comic author after all.