Kaktus Valley #1 edited by John Carlin and Gary Panter.
This is another one of those one-off magazines Fantagraphics used to publish that seemed to arrive without any context. Reading it, it seems like the idea is to gather a lot of people from the more punkey end of the Raw generation together and have them do stories for kids.
So here’s Gary Panter and Ric Heitzman’s main strip about anthropomorphic cacti:
Conflict! Adventure!
Lots of kid friendly characters like “Old Mr Turtle”.
Mark Beyer does his best to be kid friendly…
Mark Newgarden does a sort of parody on kid friendliness…
And then we get a paper play set.
So, er, uhm… I mean, it’s a fun, odd book, but … why? Fortunately, somebody invented search engines, and fortunately, there are people out there that knows these things. Apparently, Kaktus Valley was a proposal for an animated series that never went anywhere. So then he got some friends in to fill out the rest of the pages and then Fantagraphics published it? I have no idea.
But if so, I’m glad they did. More oddball comics, please. And it great that the direct market used to be a place where you could publish stuff like this, and somehow it ended up in readers’ hands.
This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.