Random Thoughts

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories Vols. 1 & 2 edited by Ivan Brunetti (200x260mm)

I wanted to have a quick look at these due to their sheer heft, both physically and metaphorically. Altogether they weigh 2.6 kgs, collect over seven hundred pages of comics (or “graphic fiction” as the title portentously tries to convince us that this is), and it’s from the Yale University press.

What are they going to focus on? Is it going to be all Stan Lee superheroes, or just 700 pages of Gary Panter, or what?

These books are edited by Ivan Brunetti, and I guess that these are meant to be used in college courses about comics? If that’s the case, there’s a surprising dearth of text about the artists and pieces — there’s just a short introduction by Brunetti, and then it’s onto the comics.

(And, yes, that’s the contents page to the left there. Utterly useless, but… er… fun?)

I’m not re-reading these books now — I read them last year, I think, so I’m just flipping through them for this blog post. I wanted basically to see whether the 80s “punk comics” generation was going to be represented here or not, and in that case, by which pieces. And, indeed, it seems like all the more famous people from Raw are here, and with… er… sometimes obvious (but understandable) choices, like Love’s Savage Fury by Mark Newgarden.

The most annoying thing about these books (especially the first volume) is how many strips are printed sideways. That’s fun in pamphlets, but it’s a chore with these heavy books. But I guess students can handle it and get a work-out at the same time. (Kaz.)

The book has a few sections (not marked as such) dealing with the same subject, like a handful of different cartoonists doing Charles Schulz. (Art Spiegelman.)

Most of the people are represented with less than a handful of pages: A bunch of people only get a single page, and Lynda Barry gets three. It makes for a choppy reading experience, but I guess that’s not really the point of these books?

All the Raw people are here (except Sue Coe). Here’s Mark Beyer…

Can’t do a book like this without Richard McGuire’s Here.

Oddball choice for Gary Panter: A Jimbo in Purgatory (I think) excerpt.

Charles Burns, of course.

Jerry Moriarty.

Ben Katchor and Art Spiegelman again. They’re all here.

The book does have a certain flow. After Maus, we get Jason Lutes’ Berlin — things are arranged according to themes, but pretty loosely.

Or according to other connections — we get all the 90s Drawn & Quarterly people in a row: Seth, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and here Julie Doucet.

The reproduction’s pretty good, too.

And this is how much we get about each contributor.

Pretty odd.

The first volume must have been a success for Yale, because we get a second volume two years later. This one has real contents pages!

And as you can see, it’s basically all of the people from the first volume all over again. But with some new additions. If these books were meant for reading in class, you’d think the next volume would be all-new artists? Brunetti says in the introduction that he’s just gathered people he loves to read, so it’s a singular vision.

Some of the juxtapositions are pretty good, like Mike Kupperman and Drew Friedman.

We also get a few of the Raw people that weren’t included the first time around, like Jayr Pulga.

And yet another strange Gary Panter choice — this is from the first part of the collection Jimbo edition.

Brunetti’s aesthetic is pretty congruent with mine, so there’s only a handful of things in these books that I don’t already have. But… it’s like a small subset of the comics I like: Brunetti leans hard into harsh, stark, shocking comics, and nothing else, basically.

One new development in this development is the inclusion of a few up-and-coming people, like C. F….

… and Anders Nilssen. So it’s not all heavily narrative comics, like the first volume was.

I’ve only included snaps of a handful of people in this blog post — this isn’t an ahem in-depth look at these books. There’s oodles of fantastic stuff in here, and if you don’t already have all these comics, it’s a great way to get several kilos of fabulous comics.

And you can pick them up cheaply. Perhaps students are flogging them after finishing whatever comics course they’re being used in? Or perhaps people just hate the books?

But perhaps it wasn’t made for students?

Aain unlike past anthologies of comics — indeed, unlike many anthologies of most kinds — this one is conceived not as a reference book but as an episodic narrative. “After much deliberation,” Brunetti explains, “I have chosen to arrange the work so that it flows smoothly, unobstructed by strict chronology.” The stories connect, one to another, with threads sewn deep: A tale of quiet despair, by Jerry Moriarty, leads to another of genteel solitude by Ben Katchor; a memoir of childlike sexless love by Chester Brown leads us to one of frantic carnal yearning by Joe Matt. This design works — so well that despite the mad variety of visual styles in the book, one comes away with an appreciation for the commonalty of serious comics today.

Yup:

Brunetti’s second collection of his favorite cartoonists’ work is even better than the first—more far-ranging, more personal and eccentric. Clearly a tour of one person’s singular tastes, it’s arranged in a stream-of-consciousness “oh, and you have to see this one” sort of way

Good point:

There are, however, some less successful moments. Both the overly iconic table of contents and the reductive contributors section are unhelpful, especially to readers not familiar with the material. Equally baffling is the decision to lavish attention exclusively on Charles Schulz, who receives several graphic tributes yet, curiously, is himself represented by a written essay rather than his comics.

And why include an extended excerpt from Daniel Raeburn’s (poorly proofread) article about graphic artist Daniel Clowes and not do the same for other contributors? And what rationale underlies an explanatory caption for Crockett Johnson and introductory notes for Frans Masereel and Henry Darger and no one else?

Awkward and uneven, such formal eccentricities undermine the spirit of the anthology, as does erratic editing that sometimes turns a selection into a banal half-thought.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March and Art Spiegelman (140x224mm)

Note the sizes of the names of the two creators on the cover? Yes, indeed, this was published after the stunning commercial (and critical) success of Maus II.

This is a very handsome object. It’s designed by Spiegelman himself, but it’s obviously gotten lot of attention from the people doing the production work, too (which seems to be R. Sikoryak).

It’s got these nice details, like velvet-like end papers. Very luxurious.

See? Very nice.

Spiegelman does a chatty introduction where he explains how he came to illustrate this narrative poem from the 1920.

That Burroughs is a wise man. Or is that wise guy? I find it interesting that they found it necessary to equivocate about whether it’s good or bad poetry in the original introduction. Surely it can’t be that bad?

OH MY GOD IT”S THAT BAD

It’s basically Vogon poetry. But Spiegelman’s illustrations are really meticulous. He’s doing his kinda-sorta-but-not-really woodcut style, and it looks very stylish here.

March tries to get stuff to rhyme, and he seems to succeed in about one third of the attempts, but it’s all forced rhyme, and there’s like no meter, no rhythm… it’s like he just chopped up some prose into uneven lines and pasted in some words with the vaguely the same endings here and there: It’s like a poem by somebody who’s never actually read one.

The book is printed with two inks: One traditional black ink, and one grey, slightly metallic (or at least somewhat reflective) ink. It looks really pretty.

*gasp* Say it isn’t so!

I wondered whether Spiegelman would mix in some comics here, but this is as close as it gets.

Spiegelman’s approach to doing these illustrations is basically to slavishly draw what the text is already telling us. That’s like the most annoying thing you can do in comics… but when doing illustrations, it’s not so bad?

The poetry’s awful, but the story it tells is pretty entertaining. I can see why they made a movie out of it.

But… it just barely rhymes here and there:

As you read on you wonder why rhymed verse has lost ground with modern poets. You understand why William Burroughs declared that this was the book that made him want to be a writer, quoting lines from memory long after he’d last read the book. You also see how Spiegelman’s fingers must have itched to draw some of the scenes evoked by the poem, and how March’s words plus Spiegelman’s drawings could bring ideas for song and dance numbers popping into a composer’s head.

More to the point:

But the poem works as a bouncy artifact, and the black-and-white illustrations are appropriately, viscerally graphic, summoning up the sense of a knockabout urban spree with debonair zeal and well-appointed crudeness.

Doggerel seems more to the point:

A lot of the poetry is bad, doggerel, maybe kind of fitting the salacious subject matter: drunkenness, casual sex/swapping, an orgy, misogyny, and, spoiler alert, manslaughter:

His mouth and his throat were foul cotton.
God, he felt rotten!

Greil Marcus gets it right:

The Wild Party is “The Cremation of Sam McGee” without rhythm, and what’s doggerel without a beat? “Of course it’s poetry,” Burroughs told Spiegelman, “it rhymes.” The judgment may suggest why Burroughs is not celebrated for his poetry. The very first lines of The Wild Party set the tone, and they rhyme—“Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still / And she danced twice a day in vaudeville”—as long as you don’t mind a trip-stumble-and-fall on the last word to complete the meter: “vau-de-ville.”

Perhaps it’s the weakness of March’s language that keeps Spiegelman from finding his own visual language. He shifts from hard-guy Keystone Cops pies to note-for-note depictions of faces to scenes that seem like unintentional parodies of the action to tight close-ups of mouths to repeating images—as if he most of all wanted to keep up with March’s busyness.

[…]

Spiegelman says that “the twenty-six-year-old March improvised the poem, a few lines a day.” I don’t know how else you write a poem, but if a few lines on the order of “Always in vogue; / Vicious, / Capricious: / A rogue— / But her manner was gay, and delicious” was a day’s work, or play, March must have been too drunk or too bored to stay conscious.

Heh heh heh.

This is not a big deal. The Wild Party is junk and Spiegelman’s drawings are a fan’s tribute. When his own story next appears to him he’ll rise to meet it.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Horror Hospital Unplugged by Dennis Cooper and Keith Mayerson (216x280mm)

This is, once again, slightly off topic for this blog series, but I thought it might be vaguely interesting to have a look at a Re/Search book. In the 80s, Re/Search seemed to exist on the margins of both comics and music culture: They were involved in bringing more attention to industrial culture, as well as body modification, exploitation movies and avant garde comics. So you’d see these books in obscure corners of some comics stores (as well as in music shops).

This is from Juno Books, which happened after Re/Search broke up, I think? And may be the only actual comic from these people.

Dennis Cooper is a writer (and filmmaker) who’s done a lot of er challenging stuff. I haven’t followed him at all, but whenever I’ve bumped into his stuff, I’ve kinda regretted it? His scale goes from “atrocity” to “really horrible atrocity”, and that’s not my thing.

This is apparently based on an early short story, expanded into a ~250 page graphic novel. It’s about an LA punk band.

Mayerson’s artwork changes from page to page — I guess he’s doing most of these pages in a sort of mid-70s underground style?

The variety is entertaining, and Mayerson sure knows how to get those comedic beats in. I don’t get the feeling that he’s really much into the comics per se, but he’s using all these various forms in interesting and clever ways.

For instance, in the romantic bits, he switches totally to a Japanese-inspired romance comic style, and he does it pretty much flawlessly.

And then, bam, this style for a business meeting.

This book is a pretty quick read for such a long book. I guess ten years later you’d call this style “decompressed”, but it’s unusual for a mid-90s book, when it seemed like everybody tried to jam as much storyline into as few pages as possible (possibly for economical reasons).

Anyway… the story’s surprisingly straightforward: It’s about a young band, a recording opportunity, drugs and sex.

This all makes this a pretty convenient counterpoint to draw attention to one thing about “the Raw generation”: These are things they didn’t write much about. I mean, sex and drugs. Think Panter/Barry/Coe/Beyer/Spiegelman etc — extremely little sex and/or drugs going on. That was more of an Underground comix/hippe thing, and the punk generation had moved on to other concerns.

Mayerson’s storytelling is usually very clear, but he goes sort of obscure at points. But then again, there’s a lot of drugs involved, so it’s appropriate.

And, yes, since it’s a Cooper story, we do get around to some atrocities. But this book is 76% atrocity free!

Huh:

Horror Hospital Unplugged is a book that stands apart, as much for its literary and visual qualities as for its treatment of the age-old story of how young people have to find their way in the world of their cynical and scheming elders.

The first 1996 edition of this book is out-of-print but can still be found online. A reprint was published in 2011 by Harper Perennial.

Right:

I am not sure that I could convey how mind-blowingly stunning this book is. It is, however – and the ending made me cry, which does not happen to me often in reaction to something written or illustrated.

Hm:

What’s unexpected is the ways in which Keith Mayerson’s eclectic illustration style bring both Cooper’s sense of humor and human tenderness to the front of the narrative. Scenes that would seem stark and desperate with Cooper’s narration become farce. The characters are masochistic clowns and the action becomes dark slapstick similar to Tony Millionaire’s comic strip (which started slightly later in 1998) Maakies.

[…]

It’s also impossible to ignore how 90s the whole thing feels. As a re-published volume, the work could be a historic relic from 90s zine culture, representative of an ethic and aesthetic in pop culture that has been lost, but retains its relevance through the strength of the narrative. River Phoenix’s overdose, and his subsequent ghost, play a major role in the decision making. Today Phoenix could easily be replaced by Amy Winehouse. The pop culture figures in the story, whether it’s an attention seeking, belligerent Courtney Love or a pervy, power-drunk David Geffen, are signifiers for basic archetypes.

Heh:

While “Introducing Horror Hospital” lacks the violence of much of Cooper’s work, the graphic novel adaptation assaults the reader with Mayerson’s drawings. The execution of this book feels like an act of anger or frustration or pain. Mayerson attacks these pages with his pen. Grotesque nib drawings splay across the page. Characters’ faces twist from panel to panel, morphing into Tex Avery wolves as drawn by André Masson. Other pages suggest Antonin Artaud drawing a MAD Magazine spread of celebrity caricatures. Some pages are dense with gags and notes and maze-like arrangements while other panels feel like they were thrown onto the page. “Did he draw this on uppers?” is a fair question.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything by Lynda Barry (220x283mm)

The Lynda Barry Renaissance over the past few decades has been a delight to behold. Drawn & Quarterly deserve major kudos for this, I guess — they’ve managed to make her books count in a major way: Every book she publishes gets reviewed in All The Magazines. And they’re really good, too (from What It Is to Making Comics), but they’re quite off-topic for this blog series, so I won’t be covering them.

This is a collection of her earliest (un)published works, and is very on topic. And from the name (Everything Volume 1) I assumed that Drawn & Quarterly was going to actually reprint all of the Ernie Pook’s Comeek strips (I think the old HarperCollins collections only did selected strips?)… and a second volume was announced in 2014, and then in 2016, and then in 2017, but it keeps not happening.

But let’s look at the one collection we’ve gotten, then.

It’s in the same physical format as Barry other D&Q books: It’s a thick, almost-album sized book with hardback covers, and the design is very collage-ey and chaotic. I guess keeping the same format makes sense — the other books seem to be very successful (commercially and critically), so you want people to be able to put this book on the same shelf?

(Note that Matt Groening is, once again, Funk Lord of USA — I think it’s the first time since the mid 90s?)

Not for kids!

We start off with a ~10-page introduction. These aren’t drawings Barry did as a kid, but she’s done these now. We don’t really get any… in depth… sense of how the comic strip actually happened, though, which is an odd choice.

Instead we just dive right into reprinting her oldest published (I think? it’s unclear) work.

And Ernie Pook was apparently the lead character in the strip back then.

The strips are fine, but… this format for reprinting them is so awkward. Why this pale blue? And it really brings home that the format of the book itself is just sort of unsuited for the task. The strips just float about on these big pages; it doesn’t complement the work at all, in my opinion.

The humour reminds me quite a bit of Nicole Hollander when Hollander’s having one of her more abstract moods? It’s fun, and it’s funny.

Barry experiments with a lot of different approaches to the artwork, but goes a lot for extreme closeups and oddball framing. It’s really cool, I think. (And I laughed out loud at this strip. So weird!)

Oooh! I wonder if that also works against anti-vaxxers!

So after that, we’re told that the strips had been running in The Seattle Sun, a weekly newspaper…. but we’d not been getting all the strips here in this book, because there’s also been reoccurring characters — Two Sisters — and now we’re getting those strips.

So… whiplash back to Barry’s earliest style. And this… horrible… sickly green colour.

Man, look at that obsessive patterning. Barry’s style keeps getting lusher and prettier over these strips (and we apparently swap out the sisters for a different pair).

Barry reappears to tell us that she ended the Two Sisters thing abruptly… but I’m not quite sure what she’s saying here? Did the sisters become heroin addicts and die or something? She says she ended it in a harsh way… did she leave those harsh strips out of this book? What?

And part of the reason she ended the strip was that she wanted to go in a different direction, both with her artwork and the storylines, and that’s partly because she discovered the comics of Matt Groening…

… and Gary Panter. Her first collected edition appeared a year later, collecting the Girl + Boys strips (I wrote about it here).

This section of the book is kinda-sorta facsimilish (that’s a word), reprinting even the indicia of the first book. But it’s a totally different format, of course.

In this new book, we get one strip per page, while the original book had them in this horizontal format. Note how much of the original design has been replicated — including the floating dots in the margins everywhere. But it’s gained those reproductions of ephemera at the bottom of every page, which is… a design choice.

At least the horrible pale colours are gone.

All the strips from the original book are reprinted, but we also get more than a dozen new ones (that Barry hadn’t included in the first collection).

There’s a lot of funny ones, so it’s unclear to me why they were excluded the first time around. Just space considerations? She didn’t like them? What?

This collection is a bit frustrating. Barry does spend a lot of pages introducing the work, but she’s pretty vague about things. Perhaps she didn’t want to overwhelm the reader or something.

In any case, it’s great being able to finally read this work, but the format just feels off. Reading the original Girls + Boys book was thrilling; a sort of illicit weird little punk book. That’s not the vibe this staid book gives off.

Doesn’t sound like the NYT was that impressed:

The samples of Barry’s long-running strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” collected here are mostly one-off absurdist gags rendered in an arch, brittle new-wave style.

The Portland Mercury were more impressed:

Some of these comics are more than 30 years old, but they still feel as fresh and funny as they must have when they appeared for the first time. Equally as compelling are her new introduction pages, which convey the same insight and generosity of spirit that shone in the Times Magazine piece. If, like me, you haven’t read much of Barry’s work, this is a great place to start; for fans, this reissue of long out-of-print material is a must have.

And it was a starred review in PW:

Barry’s touch as a creator is already established even in this early stage, her talent for creating child characters, penchant for encouraging the reader to engage creatively, and touches of surrealism impelling a creative force that cannot be categorized.

So I’m still wondering why there haven’t been any further volumes of Everything in a decade. It looked like Blabber Blabber Blabber was quite work intensive: The introductions newly drawn and collaged etc. If that’s the problem, what about just … you know … just reprint the actual comic strip? All of those strips? Without so much surrounding them? And how about doing it in a format that’s friendlier to the strips? Perhaps something like the original collections? But more complete?

But perhaps they know what they’re doing:

It might have seemed like Lynda Barry became one of comics’ most prominent thinker/creators all of a sudden with 2008’s What It Is and 2010’s Picture This, a pair of extraordinary—and extraordinarily well-received—works that blended aesthetics, how-to and autobiography.

[…]

Barry provides new collage introduction segments, contextualizing and easing the contents into a format that makes Blabber the next integral installment of Drawn and Quarterly’s growing Lynda Barry library.

Perhaps this is the format they’re able to sell it in?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.