Comics Semidaze

I read comics all day yesterday, so I had to get some work done today, but now I just wanna read comics again until I plotz… So a shorter daze. Microdaze.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult: Confessions Of A Knife (Remastered)

19:10: Victor Billetdoux – en trilogi by Pierre Wininger (E-voke)

This curiously titled book collects three Wininger albums… but I’ve already read five albums by Wininger, and weren’t they also about Billetdoux? Er… or not? But they were also set in the same time period and with very similar-looking characters, so I almost didn’t buy this.

And… it’s two of the albums I’ve already read, but it includes one new one. I mean, an old one — the very first album. So… yay?

The artwork’s pretty rough-looking… and it’s been newly recoloured, and … not in a very exciting way? I mean, I like that they’ve gone for the general look that Wininger used in the original albums, but it’s just too dull.

The story doesn’t make much sense, but it’s pretty fun anyway. I like the house in the huge cave. I can see why they skipped this story when translating Wininger in the 80s, though: Parts of it read like the work of a very inexperienced cartoonist, which is what it is.

The second album is much more accomplished, and Wininger’s artwork is looking a whole lot more like Tardi. The publishers (in the introduction) say that they think the comparison is unfair, since Wininger’s stories have more in common with Blake & Mortimer… which I guess is pretty accurate. It’s like reading a Black & Mortimer story illustrated by Tardi.

By which I mean that it’s mostly just nonsense, but sure looks pretty.

There’s some scenes here that are pretty riveting, though.

The third album is the strongest one — Wininger’s really got his Tardi mojo going, and it’s got a satisfyingly confusing plot line.

The ending feels a bit… Well, in one way, it’s perfect, but it’s also a let-down.

Coil: …and the Ambulance Died In His Arms

20:40: What Did You Eat Yesterday? 16 by Fumi Yoshinaga (Vertical)

Oh no! They don’t have onions!

Oh no! She made the lunch for herself without using plastic gloves!

I adore how low stakes this series is. And it’s so much fun.

I did have a suspicion that I was an old Japanese woman, though. I’ve booked hotels in cities deliberately far from the train station so that I could take a cab to the hotel without the cabbie getting mad at me.

I hate carrying luggage.

JPEGMAFIA: LP!

21:38: Historier fra det Vilde Vesten 2 by Serpieri (E-voke)

I don’t understand the economics of printing these days, but this was printed in 200 copies? Perhaps it’s some kind of print-on-demand-like thing? But I mean, you have to translate and (computer) letter it…

Anyway, Serpieri’s chops are impeccable: The artwork’s perfect for a western thing. The stories are all written by different people, but are all kind of … elegiac … and definitely on side of the Native Americans. They’re OK.

JPEGMAFIA: LP!

21:58: World War 3 Illustrated #48: Fight Fascism! (AK Press)

This was the first issue after the Trump inauguration, so… I was kinda expecting it to be even better than a normal WW3 issue? (Peter Kuper.)

And there’s indeed good stuff in here, but many of the pieces (not snapped here) just quote Trump a lot, and nobody wants to read that.

So about two thirds of the material made me skim past it, but the rest is good.

So it’s more of a mixed bag than usual.

I know, I know, quibbling about whether people’s anger makes for good reading or not is a bit besides the point.

Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott: Supa Dupa Fly

22:42: Da Atina vandt krigen by Aase Paaskesen Schmidt (Mellemgaard)

This is an odd one. It’s basically the story of WWII in Denmark, with a special focus on the resistance, told through the eyes of a society woman who joins up and participates in the actions.

But half the pages (approx.) are basically factoids about what went on during WWII in Denmark — and these factoids are taken from other history books, most of them illustrated — and the author here has basically drawn those illustrations in this style.

Very odd.

It’s not like I have an interest in WWII — I don’t have a particular dis-interest either, but it’s just not… er… my passion in life, as with many other old geezers. But I found myself oddly fascinated here. I knew very little about what transpired in Denmark in WWII (compared to, say, the UK), and the author has picked interesting stuff to reproduce. And the interwoven story was also interesting. So… I really liked this!? I was ready to hate it, but I don’t?

But is it comics? Perhaps not.

Depeche Mode: Black Celebration

23:40: El Mercenario 9: Los Ascendientes Perdidos by Vincente Segrelles (Arboris)

They were selling (almost) all of The Mercenary series cheaply some months back, so I bought them all and have been slowly making my way through them. They’re kinda fun? But it never feels pressing to read the next one, if you know what I mean.

The series started in 1981, apparently, and this is from 1997. Segrelles is still doing his meticulous painted style — lusher than ever, really.

The figures are less stiff than in the older albums, too. But this album basically has the same problem as most of these: The story is basically that Our Protagonists escape from some mad king/priest or something, so there’s a distinct feeling that nothing has really happened after the album’s over. It’s less the feeling of having read an epic (which I think is what he’s going for) than having seen an episode of some 90s sci-fi TV show.

That’s fine.

Juana Molina: Tres Cosas

00:27: 40 cajones by Santullo/Jok (E-voke)

Well, this isn’t what I had expected… It looks very American? That is, it looks like something from the Mike Mignolaverse? But it’s not, I guess.

It basically retells, once again, that story of Dracula sailing to the UK. You know the one — a ship with coffins in the cargo, where the sailors disappear, one by one? Yeah, that one. Which makes me wonder: Why? Oh lord, why!!!!!

Because this isn’t even a fun variation on the theme: It’s just that story, and nothing more.

Really boring.

Rocket To The Sky: Medea

00:56: Valentin le vagabond – Intégrale tome 1 by Goscinny & Tabary (Zoom)

What’s this then? I’ve never heard of this — and it’s by Goscinny & Tabary!? It cannot be! And it’s the first book of a collected edition series, so there were a lot of these? Perhaps it’s really early work?

Yeah, this looks really early. It has that same look the very first Iznogoud albums had. Hm… so was this before both Iznogoud and Asterix? Oh, both Iznogoud and Valentin were started the same year, 1962. I would have guessed earlier. (Asterix started in 1959.)

Huh. It was published until 1974, but didn’t start getting collected in albums until 1973? Very odd indeed; Iznogoud (by the same creators) had been a major hit in album form since the mid-60s. So… is this going to suck?

No! This is most amusing. The plots are surprising (and satisfying), the gags are funny, and Tabary is a much better cartoonist than I remembered.

This is prime Goscinny. The jokes keep on coming, and the gags are never-ending. But it’s not just that — the characterisation is fantastic, and over the 46 pages of the first long storyline, we really get to know these people, even if the fun never stops for a second.

Amazing.

I’m saving the last two stories for another day, though, because now it’s:

PJ Harvey: Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

02:24: Sleepytime

PX21: Crashpad

Crashpad by Gary Panter (286x363mm)

It’s brand new! Ish! Published earlier this year, and I haven’t read it yet.

This is a huge book (like all of Panter’s books with Fantagraphics)… but this one has a pouch on the inside front cover?

With a comic inside!? What? Let’s leave that for later and read this book…

Groovy. At this point I wondered whether they’d sprayed the book with cannabis juice or something, because I thought I could smell it, but it may have been just synesthesia.

So this book is one long trip? Panter’s doing a more straightforward style than his previous books, which were even more filled with symbols and stuff…

And it kinda looks like a facsimile edition kind of book: We get to see the pencils in the margins and everything, and the pages reproduced are slightly smaller than the book itself, so the pages are off-white, but with stark white borders. Odd, but it looks good.

But then that turned out to be just the intro, and we start on a story about some hippies dropping acid in Texas.

There’s hillbillies and stuff! It’s great fun — I guess it wouldn’t have been out of place in an early-70s underground comic, but not quite: There’s something a bit more unsettling about it all than would have been the norm back then.

But… this is a hugely enjoyable book.

And then a checklist of good hippie stuff.

And then there’s the comic book that was included…

… which turns out to be exactly the same material that was included in the big book. But now reproduced in the normal way, so you can’t see the pencils. So… is what we have here a “comic book” and then a reproduction of the artwork at the size it was originally drawn?

It’s interesting, but I wonder what the idea behind this was. Perhaps Panter really wanted to publish a classic Underground 32-page pamphlet — but that’s almost impossible to do these days (unless you’re willing to lose money), so the large-format book was the only way to get that to happen?

Let’s google.

Ah, the comic book was part of an art installation:

In 2017, Panter created an art installation, Hippie Trip, inspired by his first visit to a head shop in 1968. As part of the exhibition, he created this version of an idealized underground comic, a psychedelic trip through the Hippie scene in Panter’s rough-expressive style. Both a narrative story and an art object itself, Crashpad is presented as a deluxe hardcover reproducing Panter’s original pages at full size as facsimiles (crop marks and all). Plus, the book comes with a newsprint version of the comic tucked into the front. This gives readers the experience of tripping on Panter’s story in the form of an old-school underground comic.

Here’s more:

Comics typically try to hypnotize you, as prose and other forms do, into believing the story for a moment. Experimental comics take those conventions apart and reveal them formally. I do both. Crashpad is a meditation on the optimism of the cultural explosion of the ’60s, in which things were tried out by idealistic kids, and some of the things worked and were worthy of developing, and some of the things were failures or problematic to different degrees. I wanted to do a comic book in the form that comics took in the early ’70s, but people don’t really make comics like that anymore. The market for these art comic books is a fetish market, so making a fancy book with a lowly book inside was a way to address that time period and those topics that got traction in the ’60s and early ’70s.

Heh heh “fetish market”.

Seems like it was received positively:

Besides, the phantasmagoric ride — replete as it is with deliriously imaginative visual wonders rendered with just plain enviable skill — is every bit as important as its endpoint, right? And yes, so often that sentiment, while technically true, is utilized in service of mitigating the effects, both immediate and lingering, of an unsatisfying conclusion. Rest assured, though, that such is hardly the case here.

Sure:

Panter’s painstakingly detailed acid-trip vision offers art comics heads an immersive rabbit-hole experience and sneaky satire on a navel-gazing subculture.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Comics Daze

I need a vacation. But instead here’s another day of reading comics.

Various: Cold Wave Volume 2

15:29: The Fang 2: Weekend at Medusa’s by Marc Palm

I really like the format of this book. It’s so small and cute.

I haven’t read the first volume of this, so some of the goings-on was kinda obscure to me, but it’s pretty fun anyway. The storytelling gets choppy now and then, and the… er… “politics”… are pretty muddled.

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Les Stances a Sophie

15:48: Represented Immobilized by Rick Trembles (Conundrum Press)

There’s only 16 strips in here, so Conundrum cleverly pads out the book by keeping the verso blank. I love it.

Trembles’ strips are quite interesting in that Canadian autobio way…

And then we get some panel-a-day things he did for a month back in 2015.

It’s fine.

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Les Stances a Sophie

16:14: Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 by David Petersen (Villard)

I’ve read a few Mouse Guard bits and bobs here and there, but has never read an actual book of the stuff before.

I found the bits I’d read were pleasantly confusing — and I thought it was because I’d read them without context. But this is apparently the first book, and reading scenes in context is still pretty bewildering, but less pleasant.

“Axe”? The storytelling is just very choppy. On a scene-to-scene, panel-to-panel basis it’s just difficult to say what’s going on. I like that we don’t get infodumps, but this is rough sledding.

And when things become clearer by the end, it turns out that what’s happening isn’t that interesting anyway.

So I guess I won’t be getting more of these.

Various: Kid606 and Friends Vol. 1

16:41: Mr Barelli à Nusa Penida – tome 1 & 2 by Bob de Moor (E-voke)

There’s been a oldee-tymey Frenchey translation renaissance in Denmark the last few years — they’re getting a ton of older French (and Belgian) comics translated and reprinted. I’m assuming this is because it’s really cheap doing that these days?

One of the newer companies is E-voke, which is such an odd name that I had to google it. It turns out that they’d wanted to name the company “Evoke”, but it was taken, so they went with “E-voke”, since… so much of comics publishing happens using computers.

That’s some kind of logic.

Anyway, they specialise in second banana comics (presumably because most of the prime stuff is taken by the established publishers), so I finally get to read stuff like Barelli, which had only been sporadically translated back in the day (and running in various anthologies, seldom as separate albums). So these probably aren’t going to be… like… “good”… but I’m a sucker for this stuff anyway. So: Thank you very much, E-voke. You’re doing great work.

(I’m flabbergasted that there’s a big enough Danish-reading audience to support this endeavour.)

The E-voke books are pretty “no frills” — no contextualisation or anything, which is fine by me. But this one seems pretty sloppy: the colouring changes between the first few pages and the rest?

As you may have guessed from looking at these pages, Bob de Moor worked as Hergés assistant for decades. I think this book was serialised in the Tintin weekly magazine in the 50s? I’m guessing, because, well, there’s no info about such details here.

And man, this is so dense! It’s got the storytelling rhythms of a daily strip — every three panels has a gag of some kind going, and the first panel on the next row seems to set the stage again. There’s a lot of slapstick and action, and virtually no characterisation: Barelli is as much of a non-entity at the end (of this brief 30 page album) as at the start.

But it’s quite amusing.

Laura Jean: Our Swan Song

The second album is even more jam-packed with plot.

Ida: I Know About You

18:03: Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival edited by Diane Noomin (Abrams Comicarts)

Diane Noomin! She’s edited some great anthologies before (Twisted Sisters, and possibly the best underground comic ever, etc), but it’s been a while, I think?

And this is great! (Names of individual cartoonists on the pages. Enclicken to embiggen.)

Huge anthologies like this (especially one that’s themed) usually collapse under their own weights, feeling like random collections of whatever the editor received.

This anthology feels so considered — there’s not a single bad piece in here, and in particular, not a single of those bête noires that riddles themed anthologies: Contributions from famous non-comics people, illustrated by some illustrator.

John Martyn: One World (1)

No, everything here’s top notch, interesting pieces from younger people I haven’t heard of before, as well as more familiar faces that are a thrill to encounter again. Like Ariel Schrag! What’s she doing now? Oh! She had a new book out in 2018. *buy*

OK, not all the pieces are as … weighty … as the rest, but it’s all good.

The mix of approaches is really refreshing. There’s also contributions from all over the world, and there’s short pieces and longer pieces, and it just reads really well.

Noomin’s done it again.

Shirley Collins: The Power Of The True Love Knot

20:09: Jonathan 15: Atsuko by Cosey (Fabel)

I’m so happy Cosey picked up the Jonathan thing again after a long hiatus — it had kinda run its course, but the new iteration is as poetic as the early, classic albums were. (And very pretty.)

Perhaps the plot in this one is tied up a bit too neatly, but you can’t argue with the elegiac melancholy Cosey serves up. It’s kinda perfect.

Electrelane: The Power Out

20:38: Tabte somre by Egesborg/Töws (Fahrenheit)

I thought this was going to be one of those ordinary couldn’t-get-the-movie-produced-so-we-got-an-illustrator-to-do-the-script books.

But it’s so much worse! It’s ostensibly about a Nazi plot til kill Einstein (!), but the entirety of the book is two non-entities sitting in a car discussing whether it’s best to be surprised in life or not. I’m not joking: They drive home these “philosophical” twitterings mainly by discussing whether it’s best to cook French Fries consistently or not.

And now I’ve made the book sound really interesting! Sorry! It’s horrible.

Electrelane: The Power Out

20:55: Flaming Carrot Comics #18-20 by Bob Burden (Dark Horse)

Oh yeah, I bought these comics when doing the Renegade Comics project, but I forgot to read them.

Hey! A Cerebus cameo.

I know that Flaming Carrot has rabid fans, but somehow I just don’t think it’s very funny. There, I said it. Let the pilloring begin. The pile-up of non sequiturs and nonsense feels like it should be hilarious, but it just isn’t. To me. Instead it’s vaguely amusing.

Kitchens of Distinction: Cowboys And Aliens

21:42: Roparen by Jakob Nilsson (Kartago)

A Swedish comic!

Wow! This isn’t what I expected at all — it looks like a pastiche of French 70s comics.

Something about these pages make me think of Tardi, but not the line. The pacing and angles and figures? Or perhaps Wininger… but with a cleaner line. It’s really attractive, especially with that muted earthy colour palette, with only her red coat as a clear hue. The only problem is that many of the characters (and there’s a lot of them) look really similar.

Anyway, this is a proper mystery. It’s got a proper mood going, and it’s a pleasure to read. It could perhaps have been shortened a bit? It feels like it’s spinning its wheels a bit at points. But it’s very impressive.

Soft Cell: The Twelve Inch Singles

22:58: Malgré tout by Jordi Lafebre (Fahrenheit)

Ooo. This book starts with chapter 20, and then it works itself, chapter by chapter, back to the start of the story. It’s so much fun — a chapter will mention something that’s happened, and then the next chapter (in the past) will expand on that, and that way we go back through the history of these two people.

It works brilliantly. And it’s the most romantic, sentimental, wistful story I’ve read in quite a while — the French do this sort of thing so well, don’t they? (And it’s funny, too, and the pages are relentlessly gorgeous.)

The final chapter (i.e., chapter 1) is even told backwards on a panel-by-panel basis, and the very final panel is a three hanky one. And it seems to invite the reader to read the book again, but this time in the opposite direction.

Excellent.

Simple Minds: Sister Feelings Call

00:08: Spirou ou l’espoir malgré tout: “Un départ vers la fin” by Émile Bravo (Cobolt)

This is Bravo’s fourth Spirou album, and it’s part of a long sequence dealing with WWII. And I don’t remember the previous albums being this grim: We start on a train that’s carrying Jews to Poland (to go to an extermination camp).

So the question is whether it makes sense to do this story as a Spirou story — is this a trivialisation of the atrocities that were going on? And… I didn’t think so at the start of Bravo’s run, but it’s getting pretty hard to reconcile Fantasio’s antics with the depressing milieu.

Bravo’s also getting a lot denser: It feels like this album is collapsing under its own weight.

Meat Beat Manifesto: Satyricon

01:46: Nighty

I think it’s time to go to bed.

PX08: Jack and the Box

Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman (236x160mm)

I am emphatically not covering all the Toon Books in this blog series, but let’s have a look at just a single one:

Toon Books is an imprint own by RAW Junior, LLC, apparently, and I think it’s really cool that they’re still at the same address in Greene Street as they had when they started Raw.

Toon Books is an imprint for very young readers… that hasn’t stopped me from buying a little stack of these books, because they’re kinda cute, and some of them have great artwork (like Jaime Hernandez’ book). This is (I think) the only book by Art Spiegelman published by the imprint.

It’s a pretty typical Toon Book — it’s very silly.

And quite successful, I think — I mean, it has a very clear little storyline that escalates nicely, and is something that could be read over and over again.

I don’t know how many books Toon Books have published, but it’s quite a few by now, I think?

And who thought we’d see a book by Ivan Brunetti aimed at K-1s? Toon Books is mostly by staunchly kids-aimed authors, but there’s a few coming from Underground/indie comics — mostly making books aimed a children a bit older than this, though.

It’s… it’s been quite a journey from Raw #1: The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides, hasn’t it?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX90: Warts and All

Warts and All by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman (204x190mm)

This is a very nicely designed book by the Raw crew.

It’s probably not visible here, but those yellow warts are embossed — they give the cover a sickeningly tactile feel. It’s really cool, but… does it shift copies? I think the general effect is more eww than yay?

Gotta have an introduction, so here, at random, is Kurt Vonnegut.

Hey! Who’s that hateful, miserable, callous, sinister, scum real estate sleazebag? Yes indeed.

The Friedmans are famous for doing oldee tymey actors and entertainers in this insanely meticulous style, of course, so I was pretty surprised to find that a sizeable part of this book has nothing to do with those actors. Instead the Friedmans go after other targets — like apparently their old teachers here.

Seems accurate. I remember reading something from some comic book type about how disrespectful this page is. Yeah!

The format of this book is perplexing. I mean, the physical format — in dimensions, it’s a bit like a sawed-off album, which means that most of these pieces have been reformatted down into this format. If that’s the case, it’s understandable — because this book is just a bit more than 80 pages, and if they’d done this in the more usual format, it would have been too thin for the bookstore market.

But it means that some of the pages look pretty jarring. Above, the left-hand page has obviously been blown up from a much smaller drawing — you can see the individual dots. And… it looks like it was taken from the first panel on the right-hand page? According to comics.org, this was originally published in the magazine-sized Weirdo, so… how was it formatted there? (I’m to lazy to pull out my Weirdos.)

And this was presumably formatted totally differently originally? Or is it new here?

The thing with Freidman’s artwork is that even if he’s extremely photo-referential, he uses that to his advantage with these mash-ups — making them look as real as anything else.

Eek! Big-head alert!

And then we end with a glossary for those that don’t know who Vampira is (this is meant for the bookstore market, after all).

Strangely enough, four years after Penguin published this book, Fantagraphics published a new edition. You’d think that Penguin would have marked clout to saturate the world with copies, but perhaps they just didn’t really care?

Drew Friedman is interviewed in The Comics Journal #151, page 85:

A FEW WORDS ON WARTS AND ALL

KELLY: Who came up with the idea to do the raised warts
on the cover of Warts and All?
FRIEDMAN: Art Spiegelman.
KELLY: And how were you guys able to convince Penguin
to do that?
FRIEDMAN: I came up with the title, Warts and All, and
the image of disgusting faces with warts. Art saw the art-
uork, and he said, “Boy, it would great to emboss these
warts, and have little hairs popping out of them.” And I
said, “Yeah, it would be great.” And he had enough power,
I guess, with the editors at Penguin to ask for that and
get it.
I was happy with it. I give Art credit for that. The
whole concept of the book, basically; a book that had been
at Doubleday, under a different title — it was going to
be the same format as Persons Living or Dead. Double-
day gave us an advance and everything, and then pulled
out when they were bought out by this German guy who
cancelled 50 to percent of the books they had scheduled
— our book was one of them. So we were fishing around
for a new publisher. I wanted to do it with a major; I didn’t
want to do another book with Fantagraphics at that time.
I wanted to to get it into major I have no regrets
about doing the first book with Fantagraphics — I was
delighted when Gary called and said, “We’d like to do
your book,” because I was ready to do an anthology. But
the second book I really wanted to be iO Waldens and B
Daltons, and Gary couldn’t get the first book in there, for
whatever reasons. So when it was dropped by Double-
day, Art called and said, “I hear you need a publisher.
Let me try to get you into Penguin; I have this deal with
them where I’m developing books.” Penguin was doing
RAW. So I said, “Great.” It was a long process before
Penguin agreed to do it.
Art had this idea of cutting the strips up and making
a square format, and when he first mentioned this I was
horrified. I said, “Wait a minute, how can you do this?”
But when he actually’ showed me what he had done, I really
thought it worked well. I supm»se some grople Mould think
it was cheating a little bit — sort of like stretching a book
out. And it was, but I was delighted with the results. It
gave it a story-book kind of feel rather than a presenta-
tion of comic strips. So I give him a lot of credit for that.
It worked Out well.
KELLY: How did the book do?
FRIEDMAN: As far as I know, it’s still racking up sales.
It’s up to 15000 now, last I checked. Obviously, it’s not
a best-seller like Maus, but not much is. I think it did well;
I don’t keep tabs on that kind of stuff much. I just asked
my editor last Christmas what the sales were, because
Newsweek had plugged it, and I wondered if the plug had
helped. And he said, “Yeah, the plug really did help.”
As far as I know, it did well. So now I’m going to have
enough work for another book, hopefully in a year or so.
That’s the plan. I might even want to go back to a comics
publisher for the next book, because comic book stores
had a hard time getting warts and All. So it’s like it’s one
or the other. You want your book to be in comic book
store, and you also want it to be in major bookstores. But
unless you’re Maus, you don’t really have it both ways.
KELLY: Or Dark Knight or Watchmen.
FRIEDMAN: Right.

Hah! I knew it must have had been cut down to fit that format.

The Comics Journal #151, page 88:

KELLY: ‘ •Comic Shop Clerks of North America..
FRIEDMAN: That pissed off a lot of people. Although it
was turned into a T-shirt and did real well in comic stores.
I heard a lot of comic shop clerks got a big kick out of
it. I also heard that actor John Goodman loved it…
KELLY: So who did it piss or.
FRIEDMAN: Don Thompson types. “How could anyone
make fun of the fine folk who sell comic tx)0ks?” Basically
stuff like that.
KELLY: %ére these faces based on real people?
FRIEDMAN: Some of them are, yeah. I can’t really say
who, but there’s one in there who’s the son of the former
publisher of National lampoon. He actually got a kick
out of it.

Heh heh. Don Thompson types.

Amazing Heroes #188, page 100:

Warts and All by Drew Friedman
and Josh Alan Friedman (Penguin,
$9.95) is the mistitled second collec-
tion by the pointillist caricaturists who
specialize in celebrating the grotesque
side of pop culture. (Actually, Drew
draws, Josh Alan writes.) Some of this
volume’s victims are predictable—
Friedman family standbys Tor Johnson
and Bela Lugosi both show up more
than once, though this time out the
litigious Joe Franklin stays at home
completely. But there’s a couple of
digs at the sad story of Rondo Hatton
(who during the 1940s used his own
facially disfiguring disease, acromega-
ly, to get cast in horror movies), and
Joey Heatherton (whose real life
deterioration as an actress and as a
human being is the subject of the long-
est and most resonant story in the
book). The full-page shot of Ernest
Borgnine and Ethel Merman avoiding
the consummation of their notorious
eight-day marriage isn’t recommend-
ed for anybody who needs absorbent
underwear. Still, I’m right when I say
the book’s mistitled. It should be
called Warts, Especially.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.