Random Thoughts

Gripping Typos by David Lees, Gary Panter and others (255x356mm)

This is an oddball publication — it seems like it’s basically an ad for Andresen Typographics in Los Angeles — but it doesn’t say so explicitly. It doesn’t say when it was published, either, but Printed Matter says that it’s from 1985, and they’re usually right about things like this.

So we start with some jokey hokey oldee-tymee ads…

… and then launch into a short mystery involving a private dick and a secret ad (placed with Andresen Typographics). So I guess this artwork is by Gary Panter? It does look like it… vaguely… in some of the linework… but he’s certainly adapted his style a lot for this assignment.

This looks more like it. Pretty cool.

Apparently Andresen Typographics was open 24 hours a day? Three shifts. I guess they did typesetting and stuff?

And the reason for those jokey ads on the inside front cover becomes clear — here we get the same, but for Andresen. “Radio dispatched cars.” “Over 5,000 typefaces available”. Impressive.

Designed by Clive Piercy and Rob Dyer. Oh, and they’ve done a typeface based on Panter’s lettering — “Panter Casual”.

So.

Is this something Andresen would hand out to (prospective) customers? I guess it’d make some kind of impression… and this was when computer typesetting was coming in, so they had to do… something…

They designed fonts themselves.

Andresen was a big deal:

If typographers were kings, then the king of kings was Drew Andresen of Andresen Typographics. Mr. Andresen thought outside the box long before the term was coined. In doing so, Mr. Andresen brought his company and an entire industry to national prominence. Mr. Andresen’s combination of savvy business and marketing skills, long left out of the typography industry, carried the industry to new levels that others emulated.

And… it’s now Andresen Digital, and it seems to be basically the same company?

Well, that’s nice. It’s probably all because of… Gripping Typos!

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Pit’s Letter by Sue Coe (184x184mm)

I remember buying this at a bookstore somewhere in the US and somebody said “you like being depressed, eh?”

And it is, indeed, a full on harrowing read.

It quietly moves from one atrocity to the next.

Coe should get extra compensation from the trauma doing artwork like this has to result in.

The story does move into fantasy after a while, though.

To quote an Amazon reviewer:

EVERYONE WHO OWENS OR DOES NOT OWN A DOG SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.
VERY SMALL BOOK FAST READ. IT WILL GET YOUR HEART.
FANTASTIC READ.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Fleener #1-3 by Mary Fleener (169x259mm)

I love Mary Fleener’s work, but I wasn’t going to cover any of it in this blog series, because while it’s wild and sometimes avant garde, I’d say it comes more out of the Underground comics tradition than what I’m talking about here. But this was published by Bongo comic’s imprint Zongo, which only published one single other thing — Jimbo — which is central to this blog series, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at these comics anyway.

I bought these issues at the time, but I haven’t re-read them since and I remember absolutely nothing about them.

Let’s read the first four pages of issue #1:

Well… uh… this isn’t what I expected at all. This first issue is wordless (which isn’t that unusual for Fleener, if I remember correctly), but it’s not done in Fleener’s cubismo™ style. Instead it looks more like Carol Lay? If I didn’t know this was by Fleener, I totally would have guessed Lay.

OK, this is more Fleeneresque…

I like the way she draws the invisible character.

Ooh! Nice t-shirts!

The second issue ties into the first one only vaguely — but it’s very chatty, and has a bunch of new characters like Switch, the switch-blade maître d’. Was Fleener casting about for characters that could easily be turned into a cartoon, perhaps?

That’s almost a Fleeneresque page.

The third issue continues the adventures of the restaurant characters, but moves them into a hillbilly environment…

… and we get some recipes…

The third and final issue ends with “End of part one”. As far as I can tell, this storyline wasn’t continued anywhere, and she hasn’t done a lot of comics since, apparently?

She seems to have gone into illustration and art. Hm… no, she also did a comic strip?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

How To Go To Hell by Matt Groening (226x229mm)

Big changes afoot — Groening has taken the book from Pantheon to HarperPerennial, and this is the first collection without staples. This is also the first collection that doesn’t dip back into deep Life In Hell history — all the strips are from recent years. And finally, there’s no theme at all, so this is more of a straight-up collection of recent strips.

And it’s also the first collection I didn’t buy myself at the time, so I’ve never read this myself before now. I don’t remember why I fell out of the habit of buying these? I mean, the previous collection (Akbar & Jeff’s Guide To Life) was totally spiffy? But I did. Was there a connection to the ubiquitousness of The Simpsons that turned me off? Sounds pretty odd to me, because I really liked The Simpsons (like everybody else).

Was it the lack of staples? Let’s go with that one.

I should vacuum the floors. That’s hairy, dude.

Anyway, this is a lot less dense than previous collections — many of the strips are simple variations on a theme like this one.

It’s still amusing, though.

Groening does put in a lot of work on a fair number of strips, but it’s a less intense reading experience than back in the early 80s.

D’oh!

Another new development is that Groening is dropping in a whole bunch of straight-up autobiography (where Binky plays Groening). They’re all … well, anecdotes, but they’re good anecdotes.

Oh yeah… wasn’t there a big kerfuffle about Fox going after bootleg Simpsons t-shirts in a big way at the time?

That’s a great anecdote. Now I’m really curious to see whether Groening kept developing the strip in this direction in the following years…

The book ends with a bunch of Akbar & Jeff strips like this, about the first Iraq war.

Groening was too optimistic, unfortunately.

Indeed.

The Comics Journal #141, page 15:

Cartoonists Respond to the Gulf War
As the last issue of the Journal was being com-
pleted, the United States went to war against
Iraq. In the six weeks since then, the war came
to affect nearly every aspect of American life,
including comics.

[…]

Matt Groening’s Iåfe in Hell depicted Akbar
and Jeff staring at one another through gas
masks, finally sharing a single flower in the last
panel. “The gas masks seemed like the first
reminder that there are apsects of this war which
can get incredibly ugly and don’t seem to have
been taken into account,” Groening told the Ex-
aminer. A doll of Groening’s most famous crea-
tion, Bart Simpson, was dressed in camouflage
by troops at the Saudi front and presented to
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Groening’s
response: “It’s always sad when a 10-year-old
gets drawn into a war.” Groening told the
Associated Press that he was “very opposed to
the war,” but that the Simpsons probably sup-
ported it: “I’m not the Simpsons. I’m smarter
than they are.”

Gary Groth interviews Groening in The Comics Journal #141, page 89:

GROTH: One of the things that occurred to me about Life
in Hell is that the politics of the strip usually center on
what I call the private realm, that is, personal relation-
ships, the work place, schools. Unlike something like
Doonesbury, you don’t address national politics.
GROENING: The last few weeks of Life in Hell have been
devoted to the Gulf War, but you’re right. When I got the
opportunity to draw my comic, I wanted to do what was
on my mind, the stuff that keeps me worried: love, work,
sex, death — the basics. I was always amazed that so many
cartoons either dealt with political ideas in a very heavy-
handed way, or concentrated on the trivial inconsequen-
tialities of life, while the hellishness of most people’s jobs
and love lives and fear of death remain unexplored.
GROTH: Would That suggest that you ‘re not a highly poli-
ticized or ideological person ?
GROENING: If I could get my political point of view
across and be funny, I’d do it. But when I’ve tried to do
political humor, it’s just not very funny. I’ve done political
strips from time to time — and there are politics implied
in all of my stuff — but part of my stance is to let people
find the message and decide about it themselves rather
then me declare it. In fact, that’s about as far as I’ll go
in talking about my stuff. It’s not for me to say, but if other
people find it there, I’m glad.
GROTH: So you ‘ve fell compelled to address the Gulf war
in your strip.
GROENING: I was just about to begin a long series of car-
toons called “Binky’s Guide to Love,” a sort of rvised
and expanded look at Is Hell. Then the war started,
and I’ve been doing strips with Akbar and Jeff in gas
masks, talking about the war.
GROTH: This may become evident once I dig Out those
strips, but what’s your take on The war?
GROENING: I think it’s a disaster. I think it’s bad for the
world, it’s bad for the United States, and will not achieve
the stated goals used to justify the war. The comic strip
I just finished begins with the question: “l don’t mean
to be impertinent, but how do we know when we’ve won?”
I’m certainly glad the war seems to be as successful as
it is, but we don’t really know what’s happening because
everything’s censored.
GROTH: Is this the first time you ‘ve actually tackled a ma-
jor Current event in a series of strips?
GROENING: I did some stuff knocking Reagan. In fact,
Efe in Hell started in 1980, the time of Reagan, and I swore
that if Bush hadn’t been elected president that I would have
changed the name of the strip to Life Is Swell. It didn’t
happen that way.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Raw Vol 2 #1: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (153x224mm)

I stumbled upon somebody on the intertubes talking about Raw a couple weeks back. Can’t find it now, but they said essentially “Man, Raw was good… I’m talking about the real Raw — not the fake one they had pallets of at the airport.”

This is that fake one they had pallets of at the airport, presumably.

After self-publishing Raw for almost a decade, Mouly and Spiegelman took Raw vol. 2 to Penguin, and shrunk it down into the same size as Maus. Both presumably astute commercial choices, but since it only lasted three issues, I’m assuming that Penguin come to the same conclusion as Pantheon: It’s just really hard to get people to buy any art comic that’s not actually Maus itself.

(Well, at least at the time.)

I don’t remember what my reaction to these smaller Raw books were — I was at the university, and I didn’t pay as much attention to comics as before. I mean, I was still buying comics, and I bought all three of the Raw Penguins as they were published, but I think I’ve never re-read them since? I have absolutely no recollection of anything in them, except… wasn’t there a Mark Beyer piece written by Alan Moore in one of these things?

Hm.

So I’m approaching this book with some trepidation, but also with a fair bit of excitement, because I haven’t even looked at these books in 30 years — they’ve just been in various boxes…

Well, the design aesthetic hasn’t changed… it’s just been shrunk down. (“Futura — and you’re done”, as the saying went in the 80s. It’s true.)

There’s only three longer pieces in this book — Charles Burns, Spiegelman’s Maus chapter, and a thing from Ben Katchor, and they take up less than half the page count.

It still seems kinda lopsided — the sheer number of smaller pieces first feels like a cornucopia, and then starts getting exhausting…

The people appearing here are lean heavily into Raw veterans… but there’s also a surprising number of underground types appearing here, like Justin Green.

I mean, the bits are pretty funny and stuff, but there seems to be a greater disconnect between the pieces than in previous issues. (Newgarden/Friedman and Joost Swarte.)

And I’m not sure they were all originally meant for this smaller format? (Kaz and Mark Beyer.)

Kamagurka/Seele and Tom de Haven.

It’s all so random! And many of these pieces are very slight. (Newgarden and Kim Deitch.)

*gasp* “Here” by Richard McGuire, which was originally meant for Bad News #3, but which was incredibly influential, er, here instead. It’s just mind-blowing — and it’s not just a formal exercise, but manages to be quite moving, too.

I guess that perhaps what the editors were going after was a feeling of richness? It’s like… “here’s an anthology that shows you everything comics can be. Look at it. JUST LOOK AT IT!” And I can’t really fault any of these pieces. (Loustal.)

But there’s no cumulative coherent reading experience here. (I love Krystine Kryttre’s scratchboard artwork. It’s more underground, though, right?)

Pascal Doury’s previous longer piece (in… Raw #… 5? 6?) had all the penises censored, but apparently Penguin had no problems with the penisnessness of it all. (So meticulous.)

Mattotti’s artwork is amazing, but it’s perhaps not the best printing it’s gotten here…

The longest piece here, by far (twice as long as anything else) is the Maus chapter (and this is probably why Penguin wanted to publish Raw at all). Spiegelman helpfully reprints all the pages from the previous chapter (which wasn’t included in the first Maus book), so the assumption here is definitely that people will have bought the Maus book, and then the Penguin Raw.

And this is the first chapter Spiegelman did after Maus was published, so it deals a lot with the repercussions and reactions to the book.

Spiegelman also has his analyst telling him that he’s the real survivor for growing up with an exasperating father.

Most of the story takes place in Auschwitz, and it’s heart-breaking.

Reading this book, I think I was disappointed by the lack of surprise? It’s basically “all the Raw regulars, and some of Spiegelman’s underground friends”. In one way, that’s very sympathetic — I’m guessing it meant that all these people were finally getting paid real Penguin money — but it’s also disappointing, because there’s little that’s fresh here (except the McGuire piece). But you can’t really complain about getting some Mariscal…

Basil Wolverton.

I love Ben Katchor, but I just couldn’t get into this piece. Perhaps I was just exhausted by this point? So. Much. Stuff.

Commix. Spiegelman gives us the hard sell on the back cover.

Kim Thompson writes in The Comics Journal #210, page 84:

After eight self-published tab-
loid-size issues in seven years,
Spi egelman and Mouly re-launched
Raw as a Penguin paperback. Even
though this second “Volume” was
designed in a more mainstream-
friendly format, there were no
creative concessions; in fact, by
making impossible the graphic in-
dulgences Of the tabloid-size
editions, the “new” Raw handily
rendered moot the most frequent
criticism — that its emphasis on
design overshadowed narra-
Unfortunately,
Spiegelman and Mouly called
it quits after three issues. At
that time, Raw had become so
infrequent (those three Pen-
guin editions took six years to
produce) that its disappearance
didn’t carry a sting — more
like a long, slow, creeping dis-
appointment as the ’90s
continued on with no new
releases. But by that time, Raw
had launched so many careers,
defined (and in some cases ex-
hausted) so many trends, and
opened so many possibilities
that its job had arguably been
done.

Michael Dooley writes in The Comics Journal #135, page 60:

Let’s play comics critic butcher and
carve up the new RAW magazine.
After all,’ it’s been garnering high
praise for over a decade. Worse, it’s
now receiving accolades from outside
the comics world. It’s even become
a book-of-the-month club selection.
So, O.K. Let’s start slicing:
First, let’s accuse the once self-
published RAW of going establish-
ment. This latest issue, the 200-page
volume two, number one, now car-
ries the Penguin logo. Wearing
Mickey Mouse ears, no less. And it’s
no longer a “sporadical. ” Rather than
release dates based on Art Spiegel-
man’ s inner compulsion and the avail-
ability of worthy material, a new
volume is scheduled to be delivered
every nine months. And, in a blatant
ploy for respectability , the back cover
pompously categorizes RAW as
‘literature/cartoons. ‘ ‘
And let’s mourn the passing of the
luxurious bomb-shelter coffee table
format, modeled after Wet and other
avant-garde magazines of the late
1970s. RAW has been shrunk down
to Maus size so it fits tidily on shop-
ping mall bookstore shelves and
folding TV trays.
And let’s bemoan the loss of the
angry, abrasive cover illustration, like
Kaz, Mark Beyer, and Charles Burns
used to do. The latest is certainly a
relatively mild concoction, from
“Buy or Die” Gary Panter of all peo-
ple. It’s a goofy grafting of five comic
strip characters into one head, and one
that he did quite a while ago. A Print
Casebook article about the creation of
RAW’s cover for issue three shows it
as a sketch — is there any Other kind
of Panter drawing? — which was re-
jected for being too static and
understated. But that was in 1981,
back before Panter became the Em-
my Award-winning designer for TV’s
Pee- Wee ‘s Playhouse.
And let’s note how the overall
cover design is no more shocking than
its apparent inspiration, the 1954
MAD comic book simulation of life
magazine with Basil Wolverton’s
Lena the Hyena.
And let’s claim that the material in-
side, billed as “Open Wounds from
the Cutting Edge of Commix,” is
simply a collection of the usual gang
of idiosyncrats, suffering from tired
blood. Their work is just Soho-hum,
designed to be easily accessible to the
trendy set.

[…]

If RAW is running the risk of
becoming the darling of yuppie
hipsters it’s certainly not because it
caters to their huge egos. Witness the
inclusion of “The Single-Minded
Pursuit of More,” Georgeanne
Deen’s painting, in violets and
yellows, on the inside back cover,
positioned opposite Catalan’s full-
page ad for RAW-related merchan-
dise. Looking like a record album
cover that was cropped on the side,
it shows a material girl from hell with
a blobby Jag, tiger skin toreador
pants, pointy tailfin breasts, Woody
Woodpecker hairstyle, and eyes lit
with a fierce, determined, insatiable
hunger to have it all. While not ap-
proaching the brutally awesome pow-
er of RA W s past painter-contributor,
Sue Coe, Deen’s vicious portrait
radiates a savage electricity.
But these are just appetizers. Let’s
dig into RAW’s main course, the
eighth chapter Of Maus.
Spiegelman has an amazing talent
for subtly injecting his cerebral humor
into the most personally horrifying
circumstances. The tide of this install-
ment, “Time Flies,” is a complex
pun involving anthropomorphism and
EBticides. He has, however,
the “M” from “Mauschwitz.” It’s
as as if, now that he’s arrived at that
actual point in the story , his vision Of
the place has become too real for him
to continue to indulge in flippant
wordplay.

[…]

More’s the pity that Spiegelman’s
acute characterizations are severely
weakened by his casual sketchbook
renderings. This style, while it has an
appealing spontaneity and vitality, is
too understated, too easy to dismiss.

[…]

Psychosis reaches a strident pitch
with “The Glass Thief,” in which
Mark Beyer, comix’s conductor of
gloomy tunes and mortuary melodies,
reprises his usual notes of discord.
Amy and Jordan get Out of to find
all their pets are dead. Killed by a
green man dressed like a clown who
leaves more corpses all around. “I am
nothing,” the green man cries. He
threatens to kill them, but then he
dies. We’re just getting bopped with
the beat of the same old song Of
alienation, desolation, and despera-
tion, played out like shattered Philip
Glass.

[…]

Given the same number of pages,
Krystine Klyttre’s ‘ ‘Social Butterfly”
also portrays a world careening
hysterically out of control. Yet, she
manages to maintain our interest
throughout.

[…]

Bob Fiore’s comments in Comics
Journal #132 notwithstanding, RAW
is now using much more Of the con-
ventional sequential image method of
storytelling. And, in doing so, it’s ac-
commodating the expectations of new
readers drawn in by word Of Maus.
Despite post-MTV claims Of a new
visual literacy, people are uncom-
fortable with abstract narrative as
racticed by Mouly, Cathy Millet,
Patn•cia Caire, Bruno Richard, and
Joe Schwind. These very talented
contributors, when mentioned at all,
are unjustly dismissed with derisive
accusations of pretentiousness,
obscurantism, and such.
Will RAW continue to dish out
vapid and lukewarm fare from Beyer,
Friedman, Green, and Katchor? Or
will it serve us yet more spicy and
succulent cuisine to surprise Our
palates, such as it has with “Dead
Dick,” “Poop Deck,” “Zephyr,”
‘ ‘Paul,” and “Here”?
Whatever Spiegelman is ccxyking up
for the future, for the here and now,
R4Wis still the best meal in town.Ü

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #132, page 49:

The problems with RAW, such as
they are, have to do with Art Spiegel-
man and Francoise Mouly’s difficul-
ties in adapting to success. I don’t
knmv where you’re going to find a bet-
ter 200 pages of comics in one place,
but just about everyone I’ve heard talk
about it has expressed some disap-
pointment with it, including Spiegel-
man. (RAW’s new term for the medi-
um, incidentally, is “commix.” Spie-
gelman has tied himself to the mast
of this uglyism and is apparently will-
ing to go down with it.) The editors
have said in previous interviews that
one of the original ideas behind RAW
was to do something new with each
issue, and as they’ve gotten to the tenth
issue they’re discovering that there
aren’t that many new things to do.
Spiegelman has complained of a lack
of new talent of RAW caliber, which
suggests that he was counting On new
talent to regenerate the magazine. But
can you really expect that much new
talent every issue? There was a lot of
new talent about in the beginning
until RAWthere was no place
for it to be published. The problem
is not only that this RAW has the same
people, but that it has the same peo-
ple doing the same things. The danger
is that RAW will start coming out
because there has to be something to
wrap around the new Maus chapter.
There is one untried direction for RAW
to progress in, though, and that is nar-
rative. I don’t think this was ever con-
scious policy, but the effect of the way
the editors choose material for RAW
has been that the only one allowed to
use the techniques of conventional
narrative and characterization is Spie-
gelman. Now that everything is the
same size, this begins to 100k more
and more like privilege.

Ah, so there really was a general disappointment with this book at the time. Spiegelman’s complaint about the lack of new, exciting artists totally undermines my guess that they were just including in familiar faces as a favour — and the late 80s was a weird time for art comics. I’m not intimately familiar with the French(ey) comics scene, but looking from outside, after the semi-collapse of many reliable anthologies, it seemed like the only thing coming out of that scene was science fiction, porn, and science fiction porn. (This changed in the … mid 90s? when (for instance) L’association and Le dernier cri (etc) got cracking and made it possible to publish interesting stuff in France(y) again.

And in the US, things were also in the doldrums in the art comics scene. The next generation wouldn’t arrive until a few years later (Julie Doucet, Chris Ware, etc)…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.