#html flowers

Hi, this is 'Werewolf Jones & Sons' issue two from Simon Hanselmann and Html Flowers.  I'm gonna repeat a lot of what I've said in previous reviews of these guys' stuff but I think some of the finer points I always stress on apply even more when these two team up on a mini so fuck you I'm gonna repeat myself anyway.  I'm not gonna go gushing here so much on their prowess as authors or artists insomuch to get a free drawing sent in the mail or a like on an instagram post so much as I want to convey to you, the reader, as I always have tried to convey, how much I believe these two are serious god damn old school joke and gag writers of a tradition going back to the days of Steve Allen.  And where, individually and in their own projects, Hanselmann has been evolving his characters through a longer form mise´en scene of the culture of hanging out, the late 90s/early aughts, and the early days of social media wars and broken families in such a beautiful and mellow evolution of the tragicomedy and HTML Flowers weaves and casts his tales like incantations and spells in true shamanistic form to convey the crippling emotions and futility of chronic disease and the beauty and expanse of nature and emotion; it is so amazing that when the two of them, with their wholly unique and formed tangential visions, get together it feels like two guys in the office of Hanna Barbera working under deadline to crank out gags and make them good.

And thats what happens here, in two stories that perfectly encapsulate two different ways of telling a joke.  In HTML flower's 'Herpes Creme' we get a steady and sharp snare drum like precision delivery of gag after gag in the Mel Brooks or Sid Cesar style as simple as any "guy walks into a doctors office" skit and just as every bit effective.  To make every line a joke, every single line of dialogue a stab at the reader deeper and deeper into the funny bone, while still using it as effective dialogue to propel the story and never fall into exposition is comedy chops of the finest kind and thats what we get in the first little tale.  The perfect skit tells one joke and it tells it over and over again without it ever getting boring or the reader noticing and damn if HTML flowers dont' pull it off here; he should be writing for SNL but theyre wimps over there and don't like comedy so we know that will never happen.  And in the second, Hanselmann delivers on the slow build, as he has done before so gut bustingly right in pieces like his delightfully offensive "Owls Room".  We go down a path that Hanselmann is becoming an expert at of taking us down that starts at mild comedy, paces itself evenly and steadily downward into glimpses of heart wrenchingly accurate portrayals of real tragedy, and then just as its got me questioning if this is gonna be a tale that just leaves me with the ol empathy sads by the finish he finally lands that punch to the face he's spent winding up this whole time, panel after panel without me noticing, and goes and nails the big joke that leaves jaw open and tears in the eyes.  What we call that, friends, is the punchline.  

I don't' think you can get this book, I'm pretty late in covering it as I always am in these reviews, but it seems there are a few charlatans on eBay trying to make a profit on reselling it if you really want to get it in your hands.  Oh, and I should mention that I am quite proud that I did the absolute right thing one should do with a WWJ&S mini comic; I got drunk at the photo shoot and spilled cheap whiskey all over it.  Now the paper is completely warped, wrinkled, and has that stale puke whiskey smell and that is exactly the condition it should be read in.   #werewolfjones #simonhanselmann #htmlflowers #minicomic #comix

go to Hanselmanns bigcartel and look at all the stuff thats sold out that you cant buy:  http://meggandmogg.bigcartel.com/

html flowers is the most important voice in underground comics and he has some minis available on his site so buy multiple copies right now:  http://novisitors.bigcartel.com/

In an effort to make up lost ground on comix that came out awhile ago that I have not yet reviewed here is a threesome all at once from Html Flowers; ‘no visitors’ #2, ‘sonogram’, and ‘dim glow’. Imagine me, before I say this line, as a poofy haired and horn rimmed large sweater wearing sexless documentarian host/hostess; these books are three starkly different and amazing pieces from a genuinely multi faceted artist. Thats what some idiot art critic would say, right? Ok, back to being me now: I basically think that if you don’t read mini comics and zines you’re a moron and if you read mini comics and zines but don’t follow Html  Flowers then you are a double moron. The realm of zinedom is some of the most personal and heartfelt, sometimes opinionated and subversive, art happening in this here modern age. My city has a big art festival every year and the hoity toity art judges gave a sexless lady with horn rimmed glasses, poofy hair, and a giant sweater a $13,000 prize for making a water fountain that spews out tainted water with a sign on it that says ‘colored’ and called the piece ‘Flint’. It didn’t matter to the judges that she’s from Louisiana and had never been to flint, or that the sculpture was directly stolen from Politico’s M. Wuerker cartoon depicting the exact same thing, the judges felt that they were smart and that by picking that piece to win the big money that they’d show the rest of us morons how to feel and what we should think is important. They’re morons, they don’t read mini comics, and I trust html flowers in what art I go to to learn how to feel; for real experience and insight that can actually help me navigate my way through this shit fest called life.

The first piece I came across 4 years or so by flowers was something along the lines of an ill young person stuck in their bathroom feeling ill while the beauty and rawness of purest nature and moonlight came in through their window and was reflected off the water in the sink, I’m definitely paraphrasing but I’m pretty sure that was close. When I saw that image I was blasted, fucking jolted, back to my ten years of age time living in the suburbs of Walker at 2632 Nolan at the dead end of an undeveloped suburb and all the late nights stuck in the crappy house while outside my window to one end were cookie cutter homes and mowed lawns and station wagons and on the other end were snapping turtles and possum and tall grass and the crickets’ chirp. It put me right there, forcibly put me right there, and I have been studying his work like one clumsily follows the words of the wizened master ever since.

html flowers is a shaman, a mystic, a “natural” and that really comes across in the first one, ‘dim glow’, which is a reprint of earlier stuff from 2012; the stuff that grabbed me. There is an intuitiveness, an attunement, to the power and the magic and the mystery of the whole goddamn universe, the kinda “look there is beauty in this splotch of McDonalds ketchup on a grubby linoleum floor” in html flowers work and it gets its start in mega doses in these early works of joy and pain and mystery. I get happy, downright happy, when I read that stuff.

W Wielkiej Brytanii mają Mercury Prize Award a w Kanadzie Polaris Music Prize. Australijczycy nie chcieli być gorsi i od 2005 roku nagradzają najlepsze australijskie albumy. Poznaliśmy właśnie nominowanych do corocznego Australian Music Prize.

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"Fools" by Oscar Key Sung, feat. Ah Mer ah su & HTML Flowers