Random Thoughts

I’ve been dipping into this book now and then over the past month or so.

It’s is a book about a Swedish 80s comics publisher. The publisher was called Epix, and published a bewildering array of anthologies with names like Pox, Maxx and Tung Metall. They mostly reprinted stuff from 70s and 80s French/Italian/Spanish anthologies, and also American indie/underground stuff.

So kinda like if… somebody like Fantagraphics published mostly anthologies like Weirdo and Heavy Metal? But a lot of them. Something like that.

They were controversial at the time, and were finally taken to court for publishing too many sexually violent things. Among the evidence was a strip by Dori Seda. So… normal 80s stuff.

But here’s the twist: They were acquitted, but still went under, because the distribution monopoly at the time did one of those wonderful late-yuppie post-deregulation things: It split into two separate companies, where one would distribute all indie things, and the other company would distribute all major publisher things (and the latter company would also be owned by those companies).

So what do you think happened? Yes, of course — the small press distributor went bankrupt, and the other distributor didn’t have anything to do with them, so Epix (among many other smaller magazine publishers) had to stop publishing anyway.

That’s a very creative solution to getting rid of competition. If the former distributor monopoly had said “no, we’re dropping all these smaller companies”, that would have been an outrage. Instead, by using these corporate actions, they could do exactly that, and nobody could object. Much. (Although Epix tried to sue them.)

Shades of what would later happen in the US with Diamond/Heroes World.

Anyway, this book consists mostly of interview snippets edited together. I think they call these things “oral histories”? I’m not fond of the genre, but it works quite well here. The main problem with this approach is usually that a person will say something interesting, but then there’s no followup because they have nobody else talking about the same thing.

This book does not have that problem: Even if it’s formatted as an oral history, and there’s no trace of the interviewer(s) here, whenever somebody says something interesting, they ask other people about what’s been said and get a response.

So it makes for an entertaining read, especially since the owner and boss of Epix got into fights with absolutely everybody. It sounds like every day at the crowded office was a shouting match.

Other things happened — his ex-wife took (he says “kidnapped”, which may be formally correct) their son off to Trinidad, and he used the cover of an issue to announce a reward for information about his whereabouts, for instance.

They were also prosecuted for distributing violent porn (Dori Seda and… Neil Gaiman! (a retelling of a Bible story)), and while acquitted, this led to a 30% reduction in sales.

And Gary Groth claimed that Epix never paid Fantagraphics for using their material. Epix claims that Kim Thompson found out that Groth had just put the money into an account he’d forgotten about, but the situation led to threats from Mary Fleener, anyway. Peter Bagge comments laconically that it wouldn’t be the first time that Fantagraphics put foreign royalties into some “wrong” bank account.

I’m not Swedish, so I’ve barely read any of what Epix published, but I’ve been trying to buy issues of Pox and Epix, but it’s not easy.

Looking over what I have managed to find, these seem like really good magazines. It looks like they basically have everything that’s good from 70s and 80s European and American underground/indie/art/etc comics. Their magazines were monthly, and usually around 100 pages each, so they just published a lot of stuff.

And the reproduction seems nice, and the hand lettering is fantastic.

I guess I should just start reading these comics, even if I don’t have a complete set. I’m kinda raring to go after reading this book about Epix. Hm!

Serier för vuxna – Epix och den svenska serierevolutionen (2024) by Robert Aman (4.16 on Goodreads)

I bought this around 2008, but then never read it. (No particular reason — I buy, like, er, 10% more books than I have time to read, so some inevitably have to remain on the shelves.)

It’s pretty good? I like the formless quality it has — so many books I read are very plot heavy, and have a strict focus on getting somewhere, but this one feels more like a steady state object. It’s relaxing. I guess that’s not unusual for comedic books — more interested in character than structure…

But I think it’s a bit too long. If it had been 200 pages, it would have been a cute little book, but instead it’s 280 and it’s not. And while at no point in actually reading a page of this I said to myself “bored now”, it just felt like slightly too much. I can totally understand why McCauley would keep typing at this — he’d set up some characters you want to spend time with, but c’mon.

Hm… I see that the book has a low Goodreads score — only 3.41, which is way lower than I would have guessed.

Harsh! But nothing really stands out, except:

Few people really loved it — most thought it was pretty middling.

Alternatives to Sex (2006) by Stephen McCauley (buy new, buy used, 3.41 on Goodreads)

Hey, another mystery. Yes, it’s been that kind of week.

This book is almost a parody of these kinds of books. It’s a mystery where the two protagonists both have deep trauma backgrounds, and the murders are over-the-top gruesome. But worst of all is that apparently Holt must have read How To Write A Damn Good Novel before writing this, because she follows the main tenet of that how-to manual faithfully: Every scene has to have both a primary and a secondary conflict.

So a typical scene is that the profiler wakes up at night and pokes her detective husband and tries to say something Earth-shatteringly insightful, and he’ll bellow at her I”M TRYING TO SLEEP HERE, before trying to take a sip from a glass of water and then tipping it into the bed and then roaring out of the room.

Almost. Every. Damn. Scene.

So since everything is interrupted all the time, the book goes on for an unnecessary 440 pages.

On the plus side, the book is about Holt killing everybody she finds annoying, so we get a TV show host killed, a right-wing politician, a book critic who dares to dislike mysteries, and finally a sports person. It’s fun to read somebody who’s obviously enjoying their work.

It’s OK, I guess?

Det som aldri skjer (2004) by Anne Holt (buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)

I’ve been reading this book on my phone while waiting for things over the past month or so. So not very concentrated reading but…

… this book really isn’t very good, is it? It’s a collection of three short stories, and while I haven’t read many books by Rex Stout, the condensed form seems to bring out all of Stout’s most annoying tics? By the end of the third story, I found myself skipping past the unfunny hard boiled repartee.

I think I’ll give Stout one more go, but with a novel instead. From the 40s, perhaps?

Three at Wolfe’s Door (1960) by Rex Stout (buy used, 4.1 on Goodreads)

I wanted to read something easy on the branes; something light and fluffy, so surely a mystery with a cat on the cover would be the thing.

But no — this is a pretty joyless trudge. It’s not really a mystery — it’s more of a thriller. It’s partly told from the point of view of the dErAnGeD psychotic killer, and while it’s very silly, it’s not actually fun.

It’s just kinda annoying overall as a read — even though it’s a short novel, it was a slog to get through.

(The ending was fun, but that was only like ten pages.)

To Catch a Cat (2000) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.79 on Goodreads)