Brandon Graham: Walrus: Brandon Graham's All Bum AlbumBrandon Graham is currently working on Prophet, wrote the excellent and clever story of King City and has now had his off-beat sketches that he posts on his blog online printed into a book. Walrus is a sketchbook of off-beat ideas, pop culture references and a whole lot of love for Brandon's girlfriend Marian. If your not a fan of his work or haven't seen a sketchbook before flipping through it you might say this is boobs and weird stuff and you'd be right.
There's nothing wrong with boobs and weird stuff.
Be ready for puns and plays on words from the get go cover of All Bum Album of Walrus. You are entering the mind of a Mr. Brandon Graham, so all aboard and other references to films where we climb into people's heads.
Man usually thinks with his y'know what and Graham shows that with the many many drawings of ladies. He's done his share of sex comics early on, but now he's more mainstream, so'd you'd have to call anything he did now " artistic". His love for the ladies is every few pages with some shout-outs to The Dirty Pair, one of his favorite duos of being hot and destructive. I see Sexica, one of his creations, a female organ smuggler pop up in a pin-up over the book. Then there's some real love with the multiple drawings and jokes about his gal, Marian. When I say some. I mean a lot. Brandon brings her up a lot, so much so that I could easily see him committing suicide if she died. If she just left him for another guy like James Stokoe, one of his comic friends, maybe some bad times, ending with... However, even though it takes some time for a book to be published, I can tell you from Graham's blog, he and her are doing fine... or at least that's what he thinks. They make beautiful art together and I don't mean sex, I mean she's an artist too, some of her sketches end up on his pages and her ass on his.
Past the boobs there's many sci-fi drawings, jokes with pop-culture (Marvel comics) and unused ideas. Sci-fi ideas may contain boobs or might not, in each case there fun to look over and wonder where the idea came from. One idea has a kettle high-five-ing a cup when it's done boiling, something I rather want, but can now only exist on the space between Graham's ideas and real comic book pages. Clint Eastwood or the X-Men showing up can happen at anytime, it's just an artist's doing whatever he wants on these pages. Then you have unused ideas flowing in and out and not finished.This isn't a comic you can follow, just one talented artists sketchbook with random thoughts, many of which are about boobs or his girl Marian. It's only lacking the long blog posts I like on his real site with breakdowns what inspired him, but the legal nightmare that would have been makes that content online only.
You still have to respect his art style and surprisingly the amount of colored pages for a sketchbook. If you want to wander into Brandon Graham's mind for a while look no further than here.
From a recent blog post, a quotes as to why the sketchbook is called "Walrus"
"and here’s some new stuff from a Sketchbook I’m starting on this trip. I don’t have a name for it yet, maybe something like Tetrahedron or Barnacle. It’s important to name sketchbooks."
Update: Brandon Graham read this review and said it was nice/weird over his Twitter, which I thank him for I'm a huge fan of his work. Also, he married Marian or at least said he did , I guess with a name like Marian it was the thing to do. I managed to irk Emily Carroll, whose online come "His Face All Red" I really enjoyed, with this review, I didn't intend too. She really took the jokes on Marian harshly even breaking down the sentence that appalled her enough to stop reading the review. See how far you can get female readers! To her I simply convey that I was just getting across that Brandon is very much in love with Marian.