Dejects: Life Is Hard and Damned Unfair (2019) by Jay Stephens
All of a sudden this blog series is in 2019! The previous post was about a book published in 1998, so we skipped ahead 21 years.
Black Eye is totally unique (I think) in rising from the dead like this — and certainly after such a long hiatus. After being one of the most well-respected comics publishers of the 90s (when people would list publishers with good books back then, the list would go “Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Black Eye…” despite Black Eye being a much smaller publisher than the other two. But they did publish books that turned out to be pretty significant, like Jason Lutes’ Berlin and Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville.
Back in the 90s, there were magazines about comics, so there’s still a record about what happened… but finding stuff like this is just painful. Let’s see…
Uhm… Oh, 2019.
Yes, but what’s the story behind it?
In 2019, Vrana relaunched Black Eye Books to publish the previously cancelled 11th issue of Pickle, by Dylan Horrocks. This was followed by the publication of Dejects, by Jay Stephens, the first full-colour publication from Black Eye. From 2010-2024, Black Eye Books published Jay Stephens’ horror series Dwellings.
I could never leave comics behind though! So in 2019, I revived my indie comic press Black Eye Books to keep nurturing my dedication to the art of visual storytelling.
Ah:
Then Michel Vrana, my old pal from Black Eye…I don’t remember the first convo about it, but I think he was having a bit of a midlife crisis moment, where I think he’d been going through old digital files to back them up, he was going through all the old Black Eye files. He reached out and said, “Can you imagine making comics today? All those things we only could dream of. Full color, no money down, you can crowdfund this stuff so it’s just pre orders. You know how many to print, we’re not warehousing this stuff.” He was pitching it as this kind of paradise moment for indie comics, the things you could do now. And he asked me if I had anything that I’d like to experiment with, just for fun.
Well, that makes sense — using crowdfunding would make things a lot less stressful for sure: You get the money to do the project up front, and you can then print a few more to sell afterwards, but you don’t need to do a whole warehouse. The bad thing about crowdfunding stuff is that the books usually sink without a trace afterwards: Many bookstores avoid carrying them, because they figure that everybody that’s interested will already have bought a copy, and there’s no budget for publicity, anyway.
Anyway: Let’s read the second thing (I think?) that the revived Black Eye would publish. I think the eleventh issue of Pickle might be the first thing they did? Oh, that reminds me; I happened upon the following yesterday while researching something else. Gary Groth writes in The Comics Journal #207, page #5:
BEFORE DEGENERATING into a blanket
condemnation of “small publishers,”
Bart Beaty’s “Opening Shots” raises
some good questions about the market-
ing Obstacles facing alternative comics.
He suggests that the failure ofa number
ofindependent comics may be more the
consequence of the “publishing strate-
gies of the small presses themselves”
than the usual gang of suspects that are
routinely flogged (especially in these
pages), mainly the philistinism and op-
portunism of the majority of retailers,
distributor(s), and fans (i.e., everyone
but the artist and publisher). What Beat)’
calls the Cerebus Effect is certainly a
valid observation (and though it’s old
news to those Ofus inside the profession,
I’m pleased to see it aired publicly); to
what extent this has decreased sales of
alternative comics series no one knows,
but I ‘d venture to say it’s had an appre-
ciable impact — which it was bound to
once eventual book publication ofcom-
ics series became institutionalized and
readers Came to expect it.[…]
Ninety-nine percent ofthe kind of
grievances Beaty enumerates have noth-
ing whatsoever to do with pubhshers
(or artists) treating the reader unfairly or
disrespectfully or exploitively. It has to
do With one party (the publisher) not
being able to spend money he doesn’t
have. Period. It comes down to brute
economics, or, put another way, factors
beyond his control. Beaty’s own ex-
amples are illuminating:
l) Black Eye cancelled Dylan Horrock ‘s
Pickle after publishing issue and
intends to include the unpublished I
issue in theforthcoming collected volume
Hicksville. Beat! cries foul. But each
issue ofPickle probably lost Black Eye
money. My best guess is that each issue
IOS! an Of Clams —
S4000 over the life Of the ten-issue
series. My further guess is that Black’
Eye literally ‘t afford to publish
the issue
— or, rather, had to
decide tellether to publish the I lth issue
or put out a handsome trade collection
collecting them all. If you love books and
admire Pickle, the decision to put out
the trade book is an honorable one.
Instead of criticizing Black Eyeforfail•
ing to publish the last issue, it seems to
me a more civilized response would be to
get on knees and thank Black Eye
for standing behind it as long as it did.
Indeed!
Anyway! Dejects! That’s supposed to be the subject of this blog post, after all..
As usual with Black Eye, the design of the book is very nice. But the general feel is quite different from back in the 90s, when they had to be careful with using colour printing and using a cheap paper stock. And the book looks very… digital? That is, it sort of screams “Designed On The Computer”.
Stephens explains the book (in Futura and… is that Bodoni?) — it’s a collection of odds and ends.
But recoloured. The page to the left was published in Sin Comics, I think, but in black and white. It looks like it’s been touched up and coloured on the computer — the line looks a bit smoother than I remember it.
The strips are not presented in chronological order… or any specific order much?
The book consists almost completely of single-page gag strips, and that can get old pretty quick in a collection like this… but here it works. Perhaps because of the mixture of approaches and the way it’s sequenced?
Stephens does an impressive number of styles, but I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to anybody that he’s mostly been working as an animator the last few decades.
Most of the material is from the 90s, I think, like this thing, which I think must have originated as a monthly magazine strip? (There are no notes in the book to say where anything originally appeared.)
That is impressively dumb! It’s s funny book.
The one long piece here is this sequence — it’s 24 pages long, and was previously published (in black and white) as an issue of The Land of Nod.
The book is an enjoyable read — the only thing I could have done about is this super duper compressed Nod strip, which feels like it’s going full out for chaos and mayhem, but doesn’t quite get there.
Stephens was interviews by The Comics Journal:
It’s a really dark book, to be honest.
[Laughs] Yeah. And as I was going through it, revisiting that stuff more intimately, and coloring it for this collection, because we had the opportunity to do so. That was really deep looking at how obvious my chemical imbalance was from the beginning of my career. [Laughs] Signs that I should have certainly been seeing.
Well, I mean, there’s Irwin, which is, “He try to have fun but he can’t.” [Laughs] Every strip is him trying to do something and can’t.
[Laughs]
Is Twerp the most autobiographical one of those? That’s the guy and his wife, where he’s just sad all the time.
I’d say so, yeah. Notes on a divorce.
[Laughs] But yeah, it’s a very dark book.
Thank you.
It looks like Dejects is sold out, but you can get an e-book.
It didn’t get very positive reviews on Goodread:
If, however, you’re a fan of 90s cartooning, this might be a love letter to you. I do like the visual style, but the jokes don’t land for me, so it wasn’t a fun read.
Oh, they reprinted Land of Nod #3:
A surprise addition to the book table was Land of Nod #3. Initially published in 1997, this reprint fixes some issues of the original run and is a testament to Michel and Jay’s enduring friendship.
But fixed some printing issues. That’s cool.
This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.