PX89: Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life

Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life by Matt Groening (229x229mm)

All the previous Life in Hell collections had been themed (Work/Love/School/Childhood), and I guess this one is, too — but it focuses on these characters (“brothers or lovers or both?”, as the saying went in the early days of Life in Hell) instead of, er, a topic.

I feel the humour in the Akbar & Jeff strips is subtly different from the Binky/Bongo strips — the latter are often very personal, with Groening talking about his own life (and especially his childhood) a lot (although somewhat coded). With Akbar & Jeff, Groening is free to be sillier (and funnier, in my opinion).

Hey! Is Bongo a unicorn!?

(I love that glade.)

The main reoccurring gag with Akbar & Jeff is their many, many business ventures. They’re so good at combining ventures: “Yes we sell cooking lard!!!”. It’s no wonder the Washington Post made this comparison:

Heh heh.

Along with the lower personal identification, I guess, comes the freedom to kill off Akbar & Jeff sometimes, which can seem pretty callous in context…

Interestingly, Lynda Barry wrote a version that’s less nihilistic and more touching. But still…

Groening didn’t kill them off a lot, though — are these strips the only ones?

Yeah!

Groening doesn’t do topical political stuff a lot, but weirdly enough, they print a strip from 1984 that comments on the then-recently revealed CIA manual.

I may not have re-read this book since the 80s — I totally forgot that Akbar & Jeff got three nephews (or one nephew and his two friends).

Groening does a comment on AIDS.

Anyway, this is a wonderful book, and (if I remember correctly) the last of the “classic” Life in Hell books… but I guess I’ll find out when I read the next one in a couple of weeks.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX12: Daltokyo

Daltokyo by Gary Panter (410x158mm)

Hey! We’re back! I had another two week break from this blog series… which… er… happens in two weeks, according to how many are still in the scheduling queue…

Confusing. But do I remember how to do these blogs now? Did I ever?

If there’s one thing Fantagraphics isn’t known for, it’s making impressive, special physical books: They’re more about content than artefacts. Which makes this book quite special: Not only is it almost a meter wide when opened, but it also starts with four “vellum” (i.e., plastic) overlay pages.

See? Semi-transparent…

… leading to this pencilled map of Mars. It’s cool.

Max Watson does the introduction, and talks about Panter growing up in East Texas.

And then the strip. My god. It’s so well-reproduced and gorgeous. I was so taken by this that when I was teaching myself how to screen-print, that first panel was the first one I made a screen of:

OK, my printing skillz suck, but still pretty awesome, eh? EH!?

The book is physically overwhelming — it’s so wide, heavy and short that you have to use all of your body just to read it.

Oh, yeah, one of the characters here is Okupant X… and Jimbo played Okupant X in a play in that book… very post modern I’m sure.

I just love this artwork. It’s so messy and clean at the same time.

Anyway, this is a heavily narrative strip — it’s got at least half a dozen characters that interact with each other in various ways, and there’s a mystery about some explosions, and there’s an accident and a doctor and… There’s a lot going on, and while perhaps it’s made up as Panter was going along, it really does feel like it’s going somewhere. It’s exciting; it feels vital.

Oh, yeah, that’s the second design I tried doing:

See? I learned.

The plot was getting progressively more confusing, so then Panter did a recap:

Very helpful! I’m sure!

But then… the plot… mostly just stopped?

It’s as if after doing the recap, Panter just lost all interest in continuing, but he did for a few strips…

… and then it’s twelve years later. The first half of this book was done over a year (or so) in 83-84, and then Panter dropped the strip. He picked it back up again in 1996, after Zongo reprinted Daltokyo as part of the Jimbo series.

Perhaps that reminded Panter that Daltokyo existed, so he started it up again? But with a very different art style — the “ratty line” is gone, and it looks more like… er… Kaz now? And Panter doesn’t really attempt to continue any of the various plots, but does carry over a few of the characters.

But it’s mostly just random things, almost all done in four panels. It gets a rhythm going, but it’s pretty nonsensical.

This “new” half of the book was done over a decade (96-07), and the art styles vary a bit. Here Jimbo meets Okupant X.

But this is a more typical strip.

And in the middle of this…

It does get a kinda nonsense rhythm to it? But it feels very gnomic indeed — more private than personal.

So what can I say? The physical book is great. The first half of the strips are gorgeous and effervescent. The second half of the strips… not so much.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX92: Nozone #4: Utopia/Dystopia

Nozone #4: Utopia/Dystopia (202x202mm)

I’ve vaguely seen Nozone around, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually read an issue before? But it seems pertinent to my interests, so I got this issue, and we can have a look at it together…

This is a pretty nice little object… it feels well-thought-out and designed. And the die cut in the cover is nice — each page is only printed with one colour, but you get this illusion…

So here’s the editorial by “Staff”, which is possibly Steve Wacksman and Mike Gorman (the credits are pretty vague).

Peter Kuper does a thing…

There’s this long text piece by Fiamifera.

And Mark Marek shows up for this two-pager, too. His style has changed quite a lot from his mid-80s work.

It’s an odd book. Many of the pieces are pretty insubstantial — a straight-up joke like the above, and then there’s portentous pieces about utopias: It doesn’t really cohere as a reading experience.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX79: Slash volume two number six

Slash volume two number six (295x383mm)

Hey, no, don’t worry — I did one previous issue of Slash, and I’m doing this one, and then I’m not doing any more. And the reason I’m doing this one is that I had forgotten that I had bought the other issue, so I then had two.

So let’s just have a quick flip through this magazine.

The readers have chimed in with their top ten singles and… Bob Marley won!? OK, and then The Misfits and D.O.A., that’s more what I expected… and Scritti Politti? It’s an eclectic list.

The local shit is pretty amusing…

Heh heh. Eraserhead midnight movie.

Oh, wow — an interview with Robin Crutchfield from DNA (after he’d broken up the band he started with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori)… and he’s saying that New York is over now; it’s just masturbatory art rock now.

But unlike most of the people involved with No New York, he’s not down on Brian Eno.

And then we get a short story? With illustrations by Gary Panter.

A really fun interview with the Controllers… OK, I was just going to have a quick peek here, but I’m ending up reading most of the articles. Man, this was a good music magazine.

Er is that… I think it is? As a colour centrefold? Wow.

Heh. Panter reviews Eskimo by The Residents.

And then there’s a page of Jimbo.

What can I say? Is this the greatest music mag ever or is it the greatest music mag ever?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX85: Raw #7: The Torn-Again Graphix Mag

Raw #7: The Torn-Again Graphix Mag edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman (265x360mm)

This is the infamous “torn” edition of Raw: Every cover is hand-torn… although this edition seems to be more torn than others. (I don’t think they’re usually torn in the left-hand bottom corner, too?)

*gasp* This copy is incomplete! The torn-off bit is supposed to be sticky-taped above the “Save what you destroy!” text — which it was in the copy I had as a teenager, but hangs framed on a wall now. I was fascinated at the time to note that the bit that was taped to the page wasn’t the bit that had been torn off of my copy. So I guess they had a bit of mix’n’match action going on when they were assembling the issue.

Just one page of these stylish ads this issue. I think Danceteria were the most consistent advertisers? I think they’re in all the issues (as well as many other comics magazine from New York around this time).

Perhaps the most surprising inclusion in this issue is a Blues thing from R. Crumb. And… it reads like any Crumb story from this era, so he didn’t really adapt the artwork to the larger format.

Sue Coe and Lloyd deMause do a long thing about nuclear war and stuff…

… Charles Burns does a pretty amusing Dog Boy thing…

There’s the required Maus insert, of course, and here we have (again) Spiegelman’s dad and step-mother complimenting him on how good his comics are.

In his father’s story, they’re still hiding from the Nazis, but they’re eventually caught and sent to Auschwitz, so this is perhaps a natural place to take a pause. Which is what Spiegelman did, sort of: Pantheon would publish a collection of the chapters completed so far next year as Maus I, and that changed everything, of course.

But Auschwitz isn’t how the volume ends: It ends with Spiegelman discovering that his father has burned his mother’s diaries… and this is really the emotional clencher.

And I mean, it is: It’s a horrible thing to have done. But this leaves Art Spiegelman as the primary victim here, and that’s pretty eh?

I’m sure I’m not saying anything original here.

Charles Burns, Ever Meulen and Spiegelman collaborate on the centre spread… which has been loosened from this copy, so I guess the previous owner had it on his wall or something?

This is an unusually chatty issue of Raw. While the previous issues had kept the editorial voices to a minimum, here they’re spilling out all over the place. Here they explain that they had all these drawings by Scott Gillis around, and then they got Greil Marcus to write a text to fill out all the blank bits on the pages.

The thing about the plastic straw had me scratching my head as a sixteen-year-old.

And then! A bunch of pages of Japanese comics. Terry Yumura starts the party off…

And then we get a lot more chatter from the editors about Japan, and they explain everything about Japanese culture, like how racist it is etc.

And there’s a Gary Panter Square in Nagoya?

And there’s another booklet! This time by Yoshiharu Tsuge.

And even that doesn’t stop the splainin! Do we really need to have the editors splain at us that that girl is a bit aggressive in her sales technique? It seems pretty obvious…

This issue of Raw doesn’t seem as meticulously put together as the previous issues. For one, it’s got sixteen text-dominated pages, and that seems pretty lopsided. The Crumb strip doesn’t seem to communicate with anything else here, and then there’s the Japanese stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.

Individually, all the pieces in the issue are good, and it’s the most extravagant production (ripped cover with taped in detritus, two booklets, different paper stocks and colour pages), but it seems less like a cohesive magazine than “let’s just put all the stuff we have in here”.

They were apparently publishing 20K copies of Raw at this point — growing each month. It must be starting to become pretty exhausting…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.