Random Thoughts

The Guardsmen of Infinity Portfolio by Carter Scholz and Jim Wilson.

This is the second publication from what one might call Fantagraphics’ prehistory. Publisher Groth was a teenager at the time, and I’m going to guess that everybody else involved was, too.

You have to love the self confidence displayed in that introduction up there. Better than Star Trek! At its best!

Good lord! *choke*

Scholz would go on to become a writer for The Comics Journal, and I wasn’t aware that he was an artist at all.

Which, er, uhm, I’m still not. I mean, you shouldn’t rag on comics produced by teenagers like fifty years ago, and by “you” I mean “I”. But c’mon.

I’m guessing that this is the introduction to the project that they determined to be not good enough so they abandoned it? It’s just a handful of pages that don’t lead anywhere.

The rest of this 16 page magazine sized (printed on thick unglossy paper) object is filled with character er studies like the ones above. Which explains the “portfolio” in the title.

It’s nicely printed, though.

Yeah, sure. Why not.

Hey! A Fantagraphics logo! Rad.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Always Comes Twilight edited by Dave Dapkewicz.

Concluding our look at Fantagraphics’ prehistory, here’s Always Comes Twilight, a 48 page magazine sized… thing… printed on nice thick paper.

The editor explains what this thing is: It’s a fanzine, and that he’s grown out of comics fandom and will never read a comic again. Which is fair, I guess, but it’s a somewhat strange thing to start off a comics fanzine with.

The bulk of the book is taken up by lightly illustrated short sci-fi stories. I’m guessing everybody involved are teenagers, and I have to admit that I stopped reading every story after a paragraph or two.

Hey, they’re probably better stories than what I wrote when I was a teenager, so who am I to judge.

There’s one long comic in here, and it’s drawn by Karl Kesel, who would later become kinda a big deal.

His talents are not obvious here.

The illustrations aren’t that bad, really. Here’s Steve Leialoha.

Race Hardun. *snicker*

It should be!

I quite like Jan Strnad’s writing, so I had some hopes for this story, but…

Oh, well.

OK, that’s it: The first three things Gary Groth published under the “Fantagraphics” name. At least I think they are.

While Fantagraphics would come to be perhaps the most important publisher of American comics ever, there’s not really much in these three publications that’d make you guess what’s to come, except perhaps display Groth’s tenacity and ability to make publications happen. And an attention to quality printing.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

A Selection of Fictional Narratives by Dennis Fujitake.

A couple of years ago I read all the floppies that Fantagraphics had published. It was a pretty random thing to do, but it turned out to be a fun little project.

I used comics.org to get a list of the comics to read, and at the time, the first three things Fantagraphics had published wasn’t in that database.

But now they are, and I’ve bought those three things, and now I’m going to read them.

The first of these magazine sized comics is by Dennis Fujitake . I really love the style he developed later, which is totally unique. He can draw any kind of outlandish cartoonish alien and make it look totally natural.

Here he’s doing a totally derivative early-70s underground fantasy style with more than a touch of Jeff Jones about it. In this slender 16 page package (very nicely printed and on shiny paper) he does two stories, and they’re both, well, pretty lame. Gary Groth was born in 1954, so after getting my slide rule out, I’ve determined that he must have been, like, 17 when he published this. That explains the taste level, but I’m wondering where he got the money to do so.

The first story is just hard to make out what’s going on: Fujitake would later become a brilliant storyteller with pages that are a joy to read, but he’s not there yet.

The second story reads marginally better. Both stories have the required O. Henry endings, but the second story has a more amusing one.

The back cover has an er stark design? Yeah, let’s go with that. Stark design.

Hm… come to think about it — this publication is kinda prescient. One thing Fantagraphics has done really well over the years is to recognise creators that show promise and stick by them for many years while they progress. And Fujitake is one of these, I guess: They published a lot of spot illos by him in The Comics Journal, and by the time they published Dalgoda, he’d really blossomed.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.