{"id":31423,"date":"2025-01-26T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T09:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=31423"},"modified":"2025-01-24T17:16:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T17:16:23","slug":"abandoned-cars-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2025\/01\/26\/abandoned-cars-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Abandoned Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\" \"\"
\nBy Tim Lane<\/strong> (Fantagraphics Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-60699-341-5 (HB) 978-1-60699-3415 (TPB\/Digital edition)<\/p>\n

This book includes Discriminatory Content<\/strong> included for dramatic effect. <\/em><\/p>\n

Do you remember America? It\u2019s clearly not the place it used to be. Maybe it never was.<\/p>\n

Tim Lane is a post-war American. His inner landscape is populated with B-Movies, Rock & Roll, junk-memorabilia, big cars with fins, old TV shows, Jack Kerouac, the seven ages of Marlon Brando, pulp fictions, young Elvis, distilled Depression-era experiences (all of them from \u201cThe Great\u201d to the latest), black & white images on TV, loss of faith in old values, Mad Avenue propaganda, compromised ideals, frustrated dreams and waking nightmares. Lane calls that oh-so-plunderable societal gestalt and psychic landscape \u201cThe Great American Mythological Drama\u201d, and for this first compilation of his stark, intriguing comic strips dipped deep to concoct his own striking contributions to the Great Double Martini of Life…<\/p>\n

Many contemporaries used that shared popular culture to create new paintings and sculptures (see any of the many \u201clowbrow\u201d or \u201cpop surrealist\u201d\u00a0 tomes by Schorr, Ryden, Ledbetter et al<\/em> that we\u2019ve previously reviewed) but Lane eschewed the gallery art arena for his explorations, opting instead for the only true American medium of expression, the story, and toils bombastically in its ugly bastard offspring: Comics.
\n\"\"
\nHe draws in stunning monochrome: hard-edged, uncompromising and enticingly moody, and these short stories, vignettes, observations and sequential investigations are far from the usual stock of funnies. The compelling contents are culled from varied sources like Legal Action Comics<\/strong>, Hotwire<\/strong>, Typhon<\/strong>, Riverfront Times<\/strong> and Lane\u2019s self-published magazine Happy Hour in America<\/strong> from 2003 to 2008, ranging from tales of dark, eccentric whimsy (\u2018American Cut-Out Collectibles\u2019<\/em>, \u2018The Manic-Depressive from Another Planet\u2019<\/em> and \u2018The Aries Cow\u2019<\/em>) to philosophically charged musings (\u2018Ghost Road\u2019<\/em>, \u2018To Be Happy\u2019 <\/em>and \u2018The Drive Home\u2019<\/em>). There are Pop cultural pastiches (\u2018Outing\u2019<\/em> and \u2018Doo-Wop and Planet Earth\u2019<\/em>), fascinating autobiography and reportage (\u2018Spirit\u2019<\/em> parts 1-3, \u2018In My Dream\u2019<\/em> and \u2018You Are Here: the Story of Stagger Lee\u2019<\/em>) to just plain old-fashioned noir-tinted thrillers like \u2018Cleveland\u2019<\/em> and \u2018Sanctuary\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Also included are numerous untitled, enigmatic and addictive short pieces, and for my money the most evocative and powerful piece herein is an all-but-wordless, 2-page rumination on age and loss: \u2018Those Were Good Years\u2019<\/em>. You\u2019d have to be made of stone to be unmoved…<\/p>\n

Crafting comics is clearly not a job or hobby for Lane. Serious artists have always struggled to discover greater truths through their creative response to the world, and he has obviously found his instrument in black line on white and his muse in the shabby, avuncular, boisterous, scary detritus of our everyday, blue-collar communal past. The result is stunning and highly intoxicating.
\n\"\"
\nQuesting, introspective, insightful, melancholic and as desperately inquiring as the young Bob Dylan, with as many questions, even fewer answers and just as much lasting, life-altering entertainment to be derived…<\/p>\n

Why haven\u2019t you got this book yet?… And once you\u2019ve sorted that, why not try his 2014 graphic novel The Lonesome Go<\/strong> or 2020\u2019s Toybox Americana: Characters Met Along the Way<\/strong>?
\n\u00a9 2003-2008, 2010 Tim Lane. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Lane (Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-60699-341-5 (HB) 978-1-60699-3415 (TPB\/Digital edition) This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect. Do you remember America? It\u2019s clearly not the place it used to be. Maybe it never was. Tim Lane is a post-war American. His inner landscape is populated with B-Movies, Rock & Roll, junk-memorabilia, big … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Abandoned Cars”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[75,239,104,122,66,328,127,343],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-comics","category-drama","category-graphic-autobiography","category-historical","category-horror-stories","category-music","category-nostalgia","category-reportage"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-8aP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31431,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31423\/revisions\/31431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}