TBE1992: Sin

Sin (1992) #1-5 by Jason Stephens

I have to admit that I wasn’t quite sure whether “Jason Stephens” was the same guy as “Jay Stephens” — I mean, it would have been quite a coinkidink for Tragedy Strikes/Black Eye to publish two people with almost the same name, but Jason’s style seems so different from what I remember Jay’s style being… More scratchy and less streamlined/oldee fashioned animation/comics influenced. And didn’t he do a series that looked kinda like Mike Allred? Do I totally misremember?

But yeah — I guess they’re the same people! *gasp*

Anyway, I think that means that Stephens is the person I’ll be reading the most comics by for this blog series. While he doesn’t have a long-running series, Tragedy Strikes (and later Black Eye) has done a lot of different things by him over the years, and is still publishing him today (after a two decade pause).

(Vrána noted in a comment to a previous post in this blog series that Tragedy Strikes and Black Eye aren’t the same company — but there certainly is a continuity editorially (Vrána was the Tragedy Strikes editor and then started Black Eye), so I thought it made most sense to cover both publishers in one series.)

We get plenty of these pages here — collages of old ads, with pleasantly incongruous texts, and this makes me wonder: How old was Stephens when he did this, anyway? Because I remember I used to do this kind of thing when I was a teenager…

… and the book has that energy: It’s extremely loopy, going from one thing to another, and dropping as many quips as possible along the way. It reads very much like something a teenager would do.

Including the funny sex scenes.

But the artwork is quite accomplished, so hm. OK, I’m going to guess that Stephens was… 19 when he did this book. And I can’t contain my excitement any more and I’m now going to google Stephens! (I never do any research for these blog posts before writing them, and I’m proud!)

Pow:

Jay Stephens (born March 22, 1971) is a Canadian cartoonist and animator currently living in Guelph, Ontario.

OK, I was wrong. But not that wrong! He was 21 when this was published.

He is best known as the creator of Discovery Kids’s animated television series Tutenstein , Cartoon Network’s The Secret Saturdays,[1] and the JetCat animated shorts for Nickelodeon’s anthology series, KaBlam!.

Oh, I had no idea… Well, that explains his style change — cartooning will do that to you.

Stephens asks people to send in their dreams, and he’ll illustrate them.

So how’s that for a first issue? It’s just brimming with restless energy, and it’s a lot of fun to read. Nothing really goes anywhere, but whatevs — it’s funny.

The series continues as it started — lots of non sequiturs and random oddness.

And also some recreated children’s drawings.

Some of the issues feel pretty coherent in a way — every other page, we get a callback to something that happened many pages later, and it’s got this cumulative funny effect going.

Famous people write in.

The second issue has one of those flip-around back covers…

… and a super-hero parody (that sort of continues through all the issues).

Stephens gets married, but kinda surprisingly we don’t really get much autobio stuff — it would have been typical for the time period and for this kind of random one-person anthology thing, but nope.

Heh heh. Now that’s a super-hero.

Hm…. *squints* Very complicated fold in.

The issues do become calmer as we go along.

And we get an extremely brief comment on modern, gritty super-heroes.

And somebody actually wrote in with a dream to be illustrated!

The final issue seems even more scattered than the previous ones…

… and I think Stephens had run out of stuff to do in this mode? I guess we’ll see — I don’t remember what Sin Comics (his next series) was like.

According to comics.org, the comics featured here haven’t been collected anywhere, and I can see why that would be difficult to do. Or were parts of this collected in Land of Nod? I guess I’ll come to that in a couple weeks…

In any case, this series is a good read. But what did the critics think?

Wizard Magazine #37, page #118:

Stephens started off in minicomics and graduated to Sin, a full-sized comic published
by the late Tragedy Strikes Press, Sin featured Stephens’s bizarre creations, including Nod,
Irwin. and Dave, who were simplified, abstracted versions of Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse,
and Donald Duck. Just after picking up steam and gelling five issues Of Sin published,
tragedy struck and Tragedy Strikes disappeared from the face of the planel bringing
Stephens’s comic to an abrupt end. IA sixth issue was completed, but it hos never seen print.}

Huh.

Comics Scene Volume 2 #43, page #059:

“Because Nod was based on a real
experience, he’s more real to me than
the other characters,” Stephens says.
“In the beginning, I didn’t feel capable
of writing Nod well enough to do him
justice. I didn’t want to ruin him, so I
played him down.” In fact, Nod disap-
peared from Sin after #1. In Sin #5, the
other Sinners mounted a search party,
but all they found were a passel of
evil-smelling Yeti.
Nod’s main disciples, Merv and
Dave, similarly recall cartoons Ste-
phens loved as a kid. “They’re kind of
postmodern,” Stephens explains.
“1
took Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck
and stripped them of any recognizable
characteristics.” Well, Merv’s pants are
still a giveaway, but it’s true that you
can’t even tell what animals they’re
supposed to be. According to Ste-
phens, they’re not any specific ani-
mals, neither are Nod (though
Stephens’ printer once called him a
cat) or Captain Rightful (a kind of
snake with legs).
This genus-free menagerie set Sin
apart from the independent comics it
rubbed spines with on the shelves—as
Stephens puts it, “Sin wasn’t exactly
‘cool.’ ” For one thing, the comedy re-
volved around the characters’ love for
particularly cheesy comics. Merv and
Dave once mounted a commando-style
raid against Fascinating Komics Incor-
porated when they thought the Sinister
Horde comic was getting too moody.
Stephens roamed through Sin too,
usually in the guise of the Cranky
Badman, who holed up in the Hall of
Brooding. “I actually have a Badman
costume,” Stephens announces.
“I
made it for Halloween in 1991. It looks
like it does in the comic, except a lot
messier, and I look really stupid in it. ”
Sin ran for five issues from 1992 un-
til 1993, when Stephens left the book’s
floundering publisher, Tragedy Strikes
Press. The wages of Sin had been god-
awful by mainstream standards—
around $20 a page. But due to T SP’s
financial troubles, Stephens wasn’t
paid for the last two issues.
“I almost completed #6,” he says. “I
could have done it, but it would have
been for free.” Too bad—it was a
humdinger. “Almost everyone dies in
it.” This lost issue may someday see
print as part of a Sin collection,
Stephens says.

The Comics Journal #212, page #103:

STEPHENS: I used acrowquill for the Sin stuff. Thatwas
one ofthe big leaps in art between Sin and Sin Comics,
learning to use a brush. Now I use a brush, butl no
longer use a brush and dip ink, except for filling blacks.
When I moved to Prague, I got turned on to this brush
pen that Pentel makes. You have refills you screw on,
you squeeze them. And ifs a brush. les the same nib,
and ink, but ids so much easier. I can get stuffdone
in halfthe time, because I don’t have to dip it, and clean
it, and wash it.
SIALIVAN: So you’re brushing along, andyou run out of
ink, andyou squeeze it —
STEPHENS: Squeezæ it and more ink comes down, yep.
SULLIVAN :And ifyoa squeeze too bard, youget agiant blob
Qfblatk on your —
STENENS: I suppose you could, but Ive mastered it.
[laughs)

The Comics Journal #212, page #090:

Stn.LIVAN: Was Michel your editor and yourguiding light
when you were working on Sin back then?
STEPHENS: Uh…offcially, he was my editor. But I
would say we were friends back then, so as far as
guiding light, I mean, he laughed at my jokes. There
“‘as very little editorial input. Initially, when I was
concocting what I would do for my own book, from the
short pieces I’d done in Reactor Girl, Michel was very
much a part of-helping me decide what kind ofa format
to choose, which of course ended up being no real
format at all. But no, he was great. He corrected my
spelling.

[…]

You publishedfive glorious issues ofSin, and not six,
even though you did a sixth one — what happened?
STENENS: I hadn’t been paid for #5, basically. The
other thing, too, is I got spoiled. Tragedy Strikes
started off as a real honest outfit, in that Shane Kenny,
the publisher, wanted to do it right, and he really
wanted to pay us. It wasn’t a lot of money, but he did
pay us, and I got paid on time, and I got paid a page
rate, which was probably nothing. And then when the
money stopped coming in, I got kind of indignant.
Which is hilarious, because it took meyears to get paid
anything after that. But I basically folded up shop. I
sent Shane a letter telling him that I hadn’t been paid
and I needed the money. From the get-go I made
comics an actual part of my income. I was counting on
the money. So I wrote him a letter — very civil,
registered mail — and said, haverft been paid, and
officially that voids our contract, and what do we want
to do about it?” He was really cool about it. He just
said, “We don’t have the money. You can take books
in trade.” So I said, “Great,” took a stack and left, and
that was it. The sixth issue was almost finished, but it
didn’t see print until the collection.
SULLIVAN: And Ibis is uhen Michel started Black Eye?
STEPHENS: Uh-huh. The continuation ofPi’kle, I think,
was the inaugural comic. Sputnik and the new Sin
Comics debuted almost simultaneously afterwards.
JAY’S MEDIA BLITZ
SULLIVAN: With the new seriesojSin, there was a big,ium/d
inyour art. Haw long a timeperiod was it between the
series and the new series?
STERENS: Oh, it would have been months. And I was
drawing in the meantime, and reeducating myself in
comics. I’d read Lowe andRotkets earlier. In high school
even I was into that, and Yummy Fur, and Flaming
Carrot, but my knowledge Of the modern under-
ground, or the New Wave movement, or modern
comics in general, was prety narrow.
so I was trying much harder now to improve the
arnvork, whereas with the first Sin, I was trying to just
be — I don’t know what I was trying to do. But it
somehow took on a different meaning to me, in
between those projects.
SULLIVAN: In the early Sins, it seemed like you were
thinking, “How quickly can lgetfrom tbispaneltothe next
panel? • In the second series, it a lot slicker.
I think the writing was still important, but
I v,nas trying to do more than just make people laugh.
I started to realize that those gags worked well in short
pieces, but there didn’t necessarily need to be a con-
necting narrative. I started focusing on that kind of
humor in shorter bursts, and simultaneously working
to develop other ideas, like the Atomic City stuff
a pretty awkward stage, actually. I find the Sin
Comics issues hard to look at.
SULLIVAN: Really?
STEPHENS: Yeah, because I can see what I was trying to
do. I’m self-educated, and ids all on public display. I
leamed a lot from working through those 80 pages, so
I’m glad I did it. But it was a pretty awkward growth
spurt.
SULLIVAN: I thought those issues showed a big
couth spurt for you.
STERENS: Don’t get me wrong, I was pretty
proud of them at the time. [laughs]

Rich Kreiner writes in The Comics Journal #161, page #098:

Exploiti ng the available artistic liberty most
fully is Jason Stephens, who, in Sin, delivers a
high self-interested version of what comics
could or ought to be. At once both an unapolo-
getic insurrectionist and ensconced creative
dictator, Stephens dresses the form and content
of funnybooks as his personal court jesters,
staging entertainment most agreeable to him
and most hilarious to the rest of us. Sin is a non-
Stop parade of his whims and wiles delivered
with a reckless obliviousness that borders on
the unconscious.
In its five issues, Sin has toyed with and
subverted comic book conventions. ‘The Land
of Nod,” one of the three recurring features of
the book, mines the funny animal vein. Its
simple yet distinctive characters tap into the
primal acceptance of amicable critters instilled
in many readers during formati ve years Ofcomic
absorption. But motivations, vocabulary, and
grammar are simplified still further by Stephens,
making them even less plausible and more
goofy. Concurrent with this reductio ad absur-
dum, characters of Nod are forced to deal with
Incongruencies, improbable complications, and
mature issues incompatible with a “real” juve-
nile humor comic.
With “Badman,” Stephens puts his signa-
ture spin On autobiographical comics (“I can’t
think of anything to draw! I’m drawing myself
not thinking of anything to draw The top-
ping twist comes as Stephens pictures himself
as a costumed character within the confines of
its dopey and contrived alter ego (“We join
Badman in the Hall of Brooding! ‘I hope I’m
not just nuts!”‘).
The superhero genre gets a shellacking Of
its own with ‘The Sinister Horde,” which in-
cludes such characters as The Clot, Captain
Nasty, and Teen Satan. Here, as with “Nod,”
there is an unmistakable familiarity, a nostalgic
affection, mixed with a contemporary. wide-
eyed awareness ofthe inherent silliness of it all.
Sez Red Maple, “I’m afraid we can’t let you
into Canada. Of course, if you evil bastards
want to stick around for a fight, it would suit uS
just fine.” “Yeah,” chimes in Rocky, the Cana-
dian Shield, ‘We have free medical care! Ha-
ha!”
Plotting proceeds from the seat Of the pants.
A chief delight of Sin is its rollicking unpre-
dictability, a total uncertainty over where the
story will careen and what will be laughable
next. The language is an element of the book’s
alternating personality: from naive and infec-
tiously charming to bombastic to taciturn. The
use of the banal, in both word and picture, is
crucial, acting as a means Of pacing the reader,
as a set-up device, and as its own source of
stoned chuckles.
The art, in keeping with narrative spirit, is
likewise unpredictable, fantastic, spare, dynami-
cally hokey, conspicuously risible, and, above
all, unfussy. There is real skill in the constant
visual refrains of genre attachments and in the
ability to keep the graphic hodge-podge from
hardening like taffy.

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.