Total Black Eye Redux

Black Eye is a Canadian comics publisher established by Michel Vrána in the early 90s, and soon became extremely well regarded. The books all had stylish designs and a quite literary sensibility. Two of the series published have become comic shops “staples” — Hicksville (by Dylan Horrocks) and Berlin (by Jason Lutes), which is quite an achievement for a small publisher.

But in this blog series, I started off by covering everything Tragedy Strikes Press published, because Vrána (and friends) started out there.

Once tragedy struck, Vrána quickly established Black Eye, and most of the people who had been published by Tragedy Strikes continued on with Black Eye.

The 90s was a difficult time to survive publishing comics, and like many publishers at the time, Black Eye had to close up shop. But in an unexpected twist, Vrána got back in the publishing game over two decades later and restarted Black Eye. I can’t recall any other publishers returning like this?

And that’s it. This has been a fun blog series to do, because I got to re-read some old favourites, and discovered that I had never actually read Berlin in full before. And I hope that they keep publishing stuff, because they have an impressive taste level — almost every one of these books are pretty spiffy.

TBE2024: Swords, Spacemen & Superspies

Swords, Spacemen & Superspies (2024) by James Kochalka

I’ve been a fan of Kochalka since the 90s, but I’ve kind of lost track of him? That is, I stumble over his books and buy them and like them, but that’s it. Perhaps it’s because he started doing mostly books for children — I’m usually not very enthused by the books First Second publishes, and I think Kochalka’s been over there a few years?

I remember fondly Kochalka’s valiant crusade against craft in the letters pages of The Comics Journal. For instance, Kochalka writes in The Comics Journal #194, page #7:

Craft is a rope tying us to
mediocrity of expression! We’re all too timid to
untie it! “But we’ve worked so hard to learn
how to draw, how to write. We can’t give that
up. If we untie the rope we’ll just float off into
space, we whine.
I’d rather fucking choke and die in the
vacuum of space than anemically craft a series
Of smarty pants sequential pictures and pat
myself on the back for my skillful accomplish-
ment.
The joy Of comics is their stupidity, their
simplicity. The way they can cut right to your
soul so easily. Just a simple string Of symbols
and pictures, how can they do that? Magic! It’s
magic, pure and simple, not craft. I refuse to
accept that the magic Of comics is crafted. It
comes out of nowhere, I know it.

Now that’s moving.

Anyway, we’re talking about Kochalka’s newest release, from Black Eye — and it’s the last post in this blog series, because we’re now reached 2024.

This is three books in a box — and TSK TSK, bad glue! Bad glue!

But there’s three nice books inside — two of them are squarebound and one is a pamphlet.

Let’s look at Duck Fighter first.

We get a brief framing sequence…

… and then we’re off into a James Bond-ish adventure, only funnier. I love the offhand attitude of Kochalka’s characters. “Pfft.”

Kochalka’s artwork usually looks really organic and free — this looks more, well, streamlined than usual? I’m guessing it was drawn on a tablet or something?

But it’s funny. Kochalka takes an absurd premise and runs with it.

I’m not quite sure what the intended audience is for this — I could totally see kids finding this hilarious…

… but it’s also more intense than you’d expect a book for children to be.

While any given scene in this book seems like it’s been improvised, the book does have a sort of traditional story arc (even if it undermines itself and is, well, absurd). It’s fun.

The second book is Elf Cat Is Famous. The Elfboy character used to be Kochalka’s standin in books, but I’m not sure whether Elf Cat works that way.

The artwork in this book seems to have gotten more attention than in the previous book. It’s really attractive.

And cute. Soooo cute.

Hey! I totally identify with the Elf Dog character!

Elf Cat Is Famous is mostly about poking fun at today’s influencers, I guess, which makes it unusually topical for Kochalka.

(Heh heh, I just noticed that Emacs’ spellchecker doesn’t recognise the word “influencers”. Cool.)

I love those ferns!

Anyway, the second book feels even more improvised than the first book. It’s perhaps not as funny (even though it’s plenty funny), but it has real nerve. It’s got a real mood going on. It really reminds me of classic Kochalka.

The third book is apparently called Book Moon Prototype, and is pretty short. So I wonder whether this is a pitch for a longer book, perhaps?

Because it’s really high concept. It’s all about The Magic Of Reading, but we get this reading-positive narration while we watch some robots on a moon do a kick-ass fight. So you could see this being pitched as something to encourage kids to read… although I have no idea how you’d expand this to a 150 page book.

You can buy this box from Black Eye.

The book was crowdfunded, and as is common with those books, I can’t find anybody doing any actual reviews of the book? It’s a shame — these are solid books that should get more attention.

But that’s it for this blog series! I’m done! So now I’m packing up my super high tech advanced Comics Snapping Studio (i.e., the end of my couch), so no more almost-Brat Summer-coloured posts from me.

Oh, wait, I have to do a summing-up post. Coming up…

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.

Extremely Miscellaneous Magazines About Comics

A month and a half ago I was getting into adding non-English language magazines about comics to kwakk.info, the research site about comics. After that, I’ve been lethargically poking at various sources of finding out names of mags/fanzines, like this nice list on the French Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any good lists like that for other languages (that is — that list a significant number, and isn’t just yet another list of comics magazines).

But last week I happened upon the brilliant strategy of just searching for “fanzines” and “fanzine” on Anna’s Archive, Scribd, The Internet Archive etc. That gives an overwhelming number of things, but I’ve been wading through in moments of boredom, and the results are now uploaded.

Most of them landed in the Miscellaneous Fanzines section. Of course, it’d be cleaner to give each title it’s own URL, but it’s not practical interface wise (all the micro titles would swamp the larger, more interesting ones) or technically (giving each title its own search index would make things too slow). So: “Misc”.

Some of the titles ended up in the Miscellaneous Magazines section, and there’s also one for French magazines, and so on.

But now you can include vital fanzines like this in your research.

And this, or course.

I may be moving some of the smaller (i.e., less than ten issues) mags over to the “misc” categories to help with the speed issue — if you include all magazines and all languages, there’s a noticeable delay. Let’s see…

See? It takes 0.7s! TSK TSK!

But we’ll see.

Anyway, this latest spurt has to an increase from this:

To this:

Eh? Eh?

I also went wild at the local used comics shop and bought a bunch of Norwegian and Danish magazines about comics, and spent a few night scanning. And while scanning, I couldn’t help notice that in the late 70s, the entire idea of comics being a serious thing worthy of study seemed to hinge on two people:

Will Eisner, and…

… Hugo Pratt.

It’s understandable, of course, but it’s amusing of how much a thing that was in Scandinavia before the 80s arrived and opened the floodgates (Maus, Love & Rockets, etc).

Anyway. Go ye forth and re/search.