Adam Prosser reviews an advance copy of GLAMOURPUSS, Dave Sim’s new comic.
In many ways, it’s not really a comic book; Sim even acknowledges as much. His only real goal here, he says, was to refine his art by producing ultra-detailed ink drawings of (for the most part) pretty girls in fashionable clothing, in a variety of styles that attempt to ape various masters of the comic book and comic strip form: Williamson, Caniff, Adams, and Raymond among them. He’s strung it together as a de facto comic by inserting stream-of-consciousness commentary into the speech bubbles, alternating between observations about the great artists he’s imitating, the basics of comics craftsmanship, the shoddy way the syndicates and publishers have treated classic comic art, and his goals for the project, emphasizing his disinterest in producing a traditional comic. And, every so often, he slips into a writing style that parodizes fashion-magazine prose (I couldn’t help thinking of Seinfeld’s take on the J. Peterman catalogue) and that seems to be hinting at an actual story about a spoiled supermodel and her evil twin, before slipping back out to meta-commentary on what he just wrote.
[Via Dirk]
This past week, I saw on old b/w movie in which one of the characters used that term, glamourpuss, so I know Sim is old but I would maybe guess he’s from the generation of that movie time (forgot the name). I wonder if it was in the common vernacular at that time.