Random Thoughts

Raw One-Shot #1: Jimbo by Gary Panter (278x368mm)

Let’s do a Jimbo mini-series in this blog series: The rest of the week we’ll be looking at various Jimbo permutations.

The cover here is corrugated cardboard with a coloured inlay glued to it. And I guessed by looking at it on the intertubes that it was two pieces of cardboard with gaffa tape as the binding…

But nope. It’s one solid piece of cardboard that’s been bent into shape.

Shocker!

Anyway.

These pages originally ran in Slash magazine, and I’ve tried scoring some copies off of ebay, but has had no luck so far. So I’m guessing punk music nostalgia is a huge thing still? Or perhaps no copies survived? In any case, Greil Marcus, the noted music critic, provides the introduction — and is even namechecked on the front cover, so I guess that was a major selling point?

The first few Jimbo pages are all about Jimbo being a klutz and hurting himself…

… but it’s not all ratty slapstick.

Panter’s rendering techniques shift wildly. And… *gasp* He’s dissing Nancy! That’s controversial: Nancy was becoming a cause celebre in those days.

And indeed, the next strip walks the Nancy diss back.

I love the artwork on all these pages, but there’s something just kinda mind-bogglingly amazing about this panel.

That’s the image that was used on that Rozz Tox manifesto, isn’t it? It sure is.

The story here is pretty er slight: Jimbo’s girlfriend is kidnapped, and then Jimbo is brain warshed (sort of), and then a nuclear bomb is set off. Oops spoilers. But it’s a really entertaining read — it’s funny — but it also has a surprising emotional depth.

I’m guessing the last few pages didn’t appear in Slash.

Panter signs off by talking about how punks these days aren’t real punks, but that hippies still suck.

And I love that Danceteria ad.

As an object, this book is such a thrill: Everything about it is totally perfect. Holding it makes my entire brain and body go “wheee”.

Bill Mason writes in The Comics Journal #93, page 32:

Increasing the dosage has served to
remove my reservations about Gary
Panter’s work, as well. “Subtlety has •no
place In, this world!” complains Jimbo ae
the end of the collection Of Panter pages
(Jimbo, Raw One-Shot recently issued
by Raw Books, and it amazes me noQv that I
mistook the first two pieces by Panter •L sgw
CTimb0 is ‘Running Sore”‘ in Raw 3 and
“Freaks’ Amour” in Young Lust as
amples of wilful) ugliness and adolescent
whining masquerading as expressionism:
Panter’s formidable draftsmanship and
design qualities remained invisible to
until I had familiarized myself with the.
range of lettering, breakdown, and inking
techniques (Often used in •combination
with halftone washes, collage elements,
crayon drawing, and zipatone overlays)
displayed to full advantage in khe Jimbo
one-shot, just as Jimbo remained inscru-
table to me as Running Sore until I had
gotten to know him as Jimbo.
This seems an appropriate place to men-
tion that the Jimbo one-shot is th*ltimate.
gift item for the bibliophile on ur list
who also happens to be a connoisseur of
Punkgraphismus: bound in two-ply corru-
gated cardboard and black electric tape,
the large-format (IOV2 X 14″) newsprint.
guts do ample justice to Panter’s linear and
tonal subtleties and are a stunning ex-
ample—a hackneyed phrase, but no other
will do—of Francoise Mouly’s mastery Of
the printer’s art. As for the contents: while
Jimbo thinks aloud and incurs frequent
•personal injury in the course of experiences
with safety razors, kitchen appliances,
girlfriends, mutants, cultists, giant
cockroaches, and thermonuclear devices,
Panter cheerfully plunders the world Of art
for stylistic analogs. Everything from
Picasso’s crinkled-tinfoil draperies and syri-
thesized monsterpeople to Sharaku’s bug.
eyed Japanese actors to Jasper Johns’s
obsessive pattern-making and crosshatch-
ing to who’s got a gag for me
today?”) Bushmiller’s equally obsessive
rendering of Nancy’s hair, is grafted onto
Panter’s own funky and abrasive drawing.
style. The resulting hybrid is a plant that
many people will hesitate to talk to, but it
lives.
Greil MarcuS’S description of Panter’s
hero in his” witty introduction to Jimbo
contains a surprising blundeq. The Writer
who began his admirable Mystery Train
with an account of what haÖpened wheri
Little Richard appeared as a guest on the
Dick Cavett show along with John Simon
and Erich Segal surely knows that there is,
by definition, no such creature as a Ypunk
Everyman.” punk Zippy the Pinhead?
would have been ah, the point.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Painting on acrylic by Mark Beyer.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Coloring Book by Lynda Barry (278x355mm)

I hope Steve liked the book.

Is that an official designation?

Anyway, I don’t think the “coloring book” thing is meant to be taken seriously, but this is a huge black-and-white book with drawings of naked ladies and Barry writing about her childhood and her relationship with naked ladies (in Playboy, for instance).

Good chant.

Some of these naked ladies are more abstract than others.

I think that’s basically accurate.

Barry packs a punch.

I wonder what the impetus for this book was — whether she had planned on drawing these 56 women as an exercise, and then morphed the artwork into these playing cards and added the text, or whether it was all planned this way from the start. Because the thing is — it really works. The apparent incongruity makes this a thrilling reading experience.

And Barry has coloured the ladies for us, and you can cut out the centrefold and make your own playing cards.

Barry is interviewed in The Comics Journal #132, page 67:

POWERS: And 1 read that —
BARRY: Kiss me! 1 dare ya’!
POWERS: — when the Naked Ladies exhibition open-
ed, there nus some sort of controversy..
BARRY: There was no controversy! I swear on a stack
— I will lay on Bibles buck naked and swear before God
that there was no controversy. But people expected there
to be, so people just made it up. You want to know how
little controversy there was? Naked Ladies got a positive
review in Ms. and Screw. I thought there would be a con-
troversy; I didn’t know who was going to get me, the real
conservative people Or the separatist lesbians. But nobody
said a word. I was sort of sad, myself. In interviews they
always say, “I’ve heard it was quite controversial.” The
only people who gave me trouble was the artist-run
bmkstore — the hip, artist-run bookstore in .%attle refused
to carry it because they said it was sexist.
POWERS: I think it Hus in a Boston Globe article that
that wus When you had your division With the fine arts
community.
BARRY: Yeah. One of the things I noticed whenever I
went to a bookstore was I was looking more and more
at graphics, photography, and comics, and less and less
at the fine arts section. In fact, when I looked at any kind
of books of new art, modern art, my contemporaries, I
had no idea of what they were do’ . I
like the
ernlxror’s new clothes. It still is: I don’
doing. I feel kind of bad about it. So I guess I just turned
into a cartoonist by accident. I was furious at the fine arts
community and at the artists who run that bookstore for
saying that the work was sexist. I mean, Jesus God! Read
it! They were the only people who gave me trouble —
the hippest people in the town.
POWERS: How did that project come about?
BARRY: I bought this deck of those nudie playing cards
for my little brother, and it said “52 different girls,” and
my brother looked at it and said, “Is it 52 different girls,
or is it five girls with 52 wigs?” There was something
about that statement that let me know that it could be five
girls with 52 wigs: the body types are always the same.
I thought it would be fun to do a deck of cards — because
I love naked women — with every type of body. It would
be fun to just draw it; that’s what I thought. I have this
buddy, Keister, one of the guys who got me printed; I
thought it would be fun to do for him. It was originally
a project to make one of my friends happy. It turned into
this thing — it turned into a show; it turned into some
paintings; it turned into this coloring book. And then I
wrote this narrative that went with it.
POWERS: Whs the narrative you speaking?
BARRY: No. It’s a character. It’s not autobiographical.
There are some things: the opening sequence about the
first time I ever saw a boner, that’s true. A lot Of it’s just
made up. Old fiction.
POWERS: The character Ann talks about how she likes
naked ladies…
BARRY: I think that if you talk to any girl, you’ll hear
that. It’s universal. Any kid does, because it’s the
mysterious and it’s the hidden. It’s actually hidden, like
hidden somewhere in the house. A girl I met yesterday
told me that her dad hid the “naked lady” books with
the cookbooks for some reason, thinking that the kids
would never look through the which of course
they beeline to immediately as soon as they found out.
In the narrative, Ann makes a distinction between when
she looks at it as a kid and when later on she’ll never look
at it. She can’t look at it with boys When she becomes
an adolescent; it’s embarrassing for her. So that’s what
that’s about.

R. Fiore writes in The Comics Journal #101, page 39:

Lyrida Barry prosecutes her side of the
sexual wars with a razor wit and a sly in-
telligence that can only be compared with
middle-period Rolling Stones, but with
reserves Of compassion and empathy that
they couldn’t dream of. Naked Ladies is
parc parody of the pornography of Barry’s
childhood (including the National Geo-
graphic), part examination of what the
pamphleteers used to call women’s body
image, and mostly a celebration Of in-
dividuality. The best part is the memoir
that runs under the pictures, in the manner
of some coloring books: Our Home Ec
teacher wou7d terrify us with information
like how the dentist could tell when you
were on your period, and by taking Our
bust measurements and writing ‘it down.
She told us she was exactly like we were
when she was our age and that made some
of us feel sort of like crying.”

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Panter Versus Beyer by Gary Panter and Mark Beyer (322x465mm)

I guess you could call this a portfolio? It’s got four folded sheets of paper in a slightly larger cover/folder.

Each sheet of paper is printed on both sides — usually with two separate images on the “outer” side…

… and one larger image on the “inner” side of the sheet.

Half of the sheets are by Mark Beyer…

… and half are by Gary Panter.

I thought that perhaps these were screenprinted, but fondling the pages more closely, it doesn’t really feel that way. So … just conventionally offset printed? It doesn’t really look like that way, either.

This says it’s silkscreen:

printed entirely in col. silkscreen in 100 numb. copies

But it’s a limited edition of 100 copies?

The thing is, I have no recollection of how I came to buy this er portfolio.

And even more confusing:

I seem to have a whole bunch of these images on the wall in my office — but they are not from this portfolio, obviously. I mean, they can’t be on the wall and the same time be here in this portfolio. But they also seem to be printed on a different kind of paper, and they have not been folded.

But they are in exactly the same size and configuration as the portfolio, so… CBO Editions published them as both a limited edition portfolio, and also (unfolded) as posters? And I bought them both?

I’m all confused.

Anyway, looks awesome.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Mark Marek’s New Wave Comics by Mark Marek (208x270mm)

Mark Marek explains how this book came to be published.

It’s striking how few of the books I’m covering in this blog series are published by… well… publishers. The alternative comic book market wasn’t huge at the time, but publishers like Fantagraphics did exist, and book publishers had departments for art books… but instead most of these books are self-published, or published by art schools, or, as here… by a design studio.

This is published by Manhattan Design, which (contrary to the official-sounding name) was a tiny studio… but they had designed the MTV logo, as well as a bunch of other things for MTV and various “hip” musicians, so they were presumably flush with money and could publish this book.

I’ve never seen a copy of this book for sale that wasn’t signed, so I’m guessing Marek signed the entire print run:

(And an aside here — I’m sure glad I bought so many of these books at the time (or just a few years after), because they’re really all kinda expensive now. I guess I’m not the only one that obsesses about these comics…)

We get not one introduction, but three — from R O Blechman, Gary Panter and Frank Olinsky (from Manhattan Design).

I’m not sure whether this book reprints strips that had run in National Lampoon? I’ve been googling, but apparently only the Hercules strip ran there?

Those of us who read National Lampoon and High Times in c. 1985 will remember coming across Marek’s “New Wave” (scratchy, demented) Hercules comic — “the strangest, bravest comic on earth” — there.

These comics seem to have been created from 1979-1983, but whether it’s a reprint or not is unclear. But these are mostly gag strip, and the first one is… kinda… hackneyed? The main schtick here has been done to death.

But then things pick up and we get more genuinely oddball humour.

I love the way Marek will have the text circle up the panel when the text gets too long. It’s what every child does when making comics.

In this strip, Marek says “no erasures, no mask-outs” (and then a gag follows), but I wonder whether that’s his general mode? Being spontaneous and not making corrections? Very method.

The book is organised into thematic sections, with a separate page introducing the topic featuring a much enlarged image from one of the following strips. These are to enlarged that you can see every wobble in Marek’s marks.

(Original image in the first panel on this page.)

The artwork has a ratty line, but it’s quite accomplished, really: Look at the drama in the second panel, and the swirling confusion and despair in the third. It’s great!

Huh. Did they have humiliating and painful quiz shows like that in 1981? I thought that was something that started happening a couple decades later. Perhaps Marek was prescient?

Anyway, it’s a fun read, and I remember liking it quite a lot as a teenager.

I was unable to find any contemporaneous reviews of this book. Or any review of it now on the web, for that matter.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.