{"id":75266,"date":"2026-10-26T00:01:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=75266"},"modified":"2026-10-26T00:14:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:14:00","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-80-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2026\/10\/26\/i-arrogantly-recommend-80-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… #80 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“i arrogantly recommend…” is a review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for such things.” Links in the reviews are to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Read more arrogant recommendations online at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a> Support the Revolution! Buy local!<\/article>\n
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How do we make sense of things when our way of making sense of things no longer makes sense? On how we construct understanding from incomplete, unreliable, or unfamiliar information<\/h1>\n

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A Captain from Portugal<\/a><\/h2>\n

Guy de Cointet<\/strong>
\nPrimary Information<\/p>\n

Originally self-published in 1972, A Captain from Portugal<\/em> is an asemic story\u2014can something without meaning also be considered \u201cnonfiction\u201d?\u2014that appears more interested in how information or a story is relayed than in what it relays. Captain<\/em> gestures toward the conventions of nonfiction with its inclusion of captioned illustrations\u2014unless it\u2019s channeling W. G. Sebald. Whatever is going on here is expressed in a script devised by de Cointet consisting of arc segments alone and in combination with other segments, oriented up, down, sideways, backwards, and forward.<\/p>\n

Perhaps de Cointet encoded his text with semantic content. I may lack the skills to decode its message, but I can appreciate the look of the text across the page. In its straightforward presentation of an imaginary topic, Captain<\/em> reminds me of David Wilson\u2019s Museum of Jurassic Technology, its displays and ephemera largely a parody of museum practices and the conventions by which museums present objects to the public (cf. Lawrence Weschler\u2019s Mr. Wilson\u2019s Cabinet of Wonder<\/em> <\/a>(1995)).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a musical fragment whose notation doesn\u2019t match current practices, a sequence of runes(?), a square black and white illustration that looks composed by a hyperactive Piet Mondrian, a double-sided rasp (?) with odd serrations, and there\u2019s\u2014the one thing I do recognize\u2014the famous K\u00f6nigsberg map of two islands connected by seven bridges that prompted Leonhard Euler to determine whether a walking path could cross every bridge exactly once. (It proved mathematically impossible.)<\/p>\n

Who knows what\u2019s going on? It\u2019s a mysterious artifact, something encountered at the outset of discovery and meaning.<\/p>\n

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Guy de Cointet: Espahor ledet ko uluner! (1973) \u2014 A 5-minute video on de Cointet’s invented language and its performance<\/a><\/p>\n

Guy de Cointet’s archive, covering his graphic works, notebooks, invented alphabets, performances, and preparatory materials (in French)<\/a><\/p>\n

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Chin Music<\/h2>\n

R.T. Short<\/strong>
\nBreakdown Press<\/a><\/p>\n

Richard Short\u2019s Chin Music<\/em> is a wordless depiction of a cricket game, its players, fans, close calls, and drama inherent in the game. I know nothing of cricket, although I can identify the equipment used to play it, if the components are assembled in one place. The tensions between the competing teams, the hopes of the fans, the nervousness and aggression of the players are all depicted in a series of positions akin to what Degas may have sketched watching ballerinas practice.<\/p>\n

Although the players and their fans look like balloon sculptures, the body proportions accord with the human body (more or less) and how the body looks torqued into various positions determined by throwing a ball, hitting a ball with a bat, running, catching, leaping, falling. These are etudes on the human body in motion sequenced as a game. Its wordlessness forces sense to be made of the faces, the positions, the players\u2019 reactions, the crowd\u2019s responses.<\/p>\n

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How I Make Comics<\/a><\/h2>\n

Kim Deitch<\/strong>
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

Kim Deitch\u2019s latest book, How I Make Comics<\/em>, promises answers to two questions: Where do his story ideas come from, and how does he turn them into comics? A series of nested stories mixing real and imagined incidents with urban myths answers the first. The second, as it turns out, requires considerably less explanation. Deitch\u2019s implicit message is that almost everybody and everything has a story behind it that can be explored.<\/p>\n

And here almost none of the stories\u2014presented as cartoon ideas paraded before his wife, Pam\u2014have a conclusion. Instead, the ideas are nixed by Pam and the narration segues into the next yarn, some of them referencing previous yarns, giving How I Make Comics<\/em> a meta-narrative twist, including the fact that we get to see what Pam doesn\u2019t want others to see. That is, Pam’s rejection of each story becomes the pretext for its publication: What she doesn’t think deserves an audience is precisely what the audience gets. Ultimately, it\u2019s readers who will judge their merit, with the marketplace becoming the final arbiter of taste (ahem) and entertainment. (That\u2019s the story-idea how. The technical how? You have to practice\u2014but that\u2019s from the last two pages of the book.)<\/p>\n

Deitch’s world\u2014its businesses, offices, and homes, inside and out\u2014looks straight out of film sets from the 1920s through the 1950s, a kind of early-modern suburban drab. His characters look as though their clothes were cut from the same decades. How I Make Comics begins with a recollection from Deitch on the time he appeared as a member of the Peanut Gallery on the Howdy Doody show on the same day as Donald Trump. Only a child then, but Deitch depicts him as already formed into a soulless embodiment of dishonesty, pettiness, and self-absorption. From there we go to more familiar Deitch territory: vaudeville, silent films (animated and live action) and early talkies (animated and live action), midgets and other small folk.<\/p>\n

A story set in 1922 about a midget dressed as a dog who bombs a warehouse morphs into a husband-and-wife musical vaudeville routine featuring the midget in a dog suit and his wife. In the 1930s, an elephant escapes from the circus during a stop in Brooklyn and is only discovered years later\u2014still alive and still in Brooklyn. There\u2019s a visit to Toy Town, where the \u201csouls of dead human bodies\u201d are transferred \u201cinto new miniaturized human bodies,\u201d and an investigation into the story of a 40-year-old cat living in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

How I Make Comics<\/em> also shows how a resourceful old hand can create homes for drafts and dead-ends\u2014good work is there, as fine as ever, but the individual pieces are slight. Or they\u2019re incompletable. Or something else. I don\u2019t know if this is how Deitch\u2019s book came about, but it seems within the range of a solution he might devise, a thread connecting fragments each interesting as far as it goes, one interesting bead after another, with an absurd premise holding them together. And Deitch\u2019s readers, me included, are entertained again.<\/p>\n