Random Thoughts

Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe by Matt Groening (230x229mm)

This is the final collection of Life in Hell strips, and I think I’ve covered them all? The Big Book of Hell and The Huge Book of Hell are collections of the other, er, collections, aren’t they? It’s impossible to google these things, because the publishers never mention tiny details like that…

In any case, this was published a decade after the previous collection, which… is pretty puzzling? According to wikipedia, the strip was published weekly until 2012, but nobody wanted to publish a collection of the stuff? It’s so weird to me: Matt Groening is still a huge name, so you’d think the collections would sell anyway… but… I guess the publishers know what they’re doing?

This collection is a return to the normal format — Binky’s Guide to Love was a bigger hardcover, but this is more modest. It’s just 80 pages, and it’s apparently just strips that are about Will and Abe (Simpsons two sons)?

This time around, we get a written introduction by Groening that explains what we’re about to read, which is pretty unusual for one of these collections.

The book starts off with a bunch of strips that were already reprinted in previous collections.

But then the rest is new… to me, at least. Hm. Perhaps I should buy those two Big/Huge collections… I won’t be able to get any sleep until I know whether there’s any strips in those books I haven’t read before.

Will asks the real questions.

We get a series of stories told by Will (helped by Abe), illustrated by Groening, and it starts off pretty well…

However, there’s too many pages that just go on and on like this. I mean, I appreciate the verisimilitude — reading these pages is just like listening to an eight-year-old tell a story. I think they’d read a whole lot better in the original context — one of these pages in the middle of some Akbar & Jeff hi-jinx is very different from reading page after page of this stuff.

Fun is the worst!

Heh heh.

And there’s an extensive index, of course.

And… that’s it. This includes strips drawn in 2003, and the book was published in 2007. Groening continued the strip until 2012, but there’s been no collections published.

So weird.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Zomoid Illustories edited by Ray Zone (110x140mm – 140x216mm – 172x260mm)

I was ebaying for “punk comics”, as one does, and a collection of Zomoid Illustories appeared. I had the standard US comics-sized one already (it’s the one with the red cover up there), but I was wondering what the minis were like.

Very varied. Here’s The Pizz, for instance, who’d done a lot of newave/mini comics at the time.

There’s a computer-generated porn comic by “Dr. T”. Must be one of the earliest computer-generated porn comics?

An… inventory sheet? Oh, yeah, some of these may come from Ray Zone’s collection — I saw a bunch of comics from that collection being sold off on ebay.

Weird porn from Lavox Fentation (which may be a pseudonym; I know).

Weird weirdness by Douglas O’Neill.

Er… more by “Dr. T”?

Pee-Dog’s dick Pee-Dick…

More computer-generated stuff by Ken Tao, so perhaps he’s “Dr. T”?

A pretty nice thing by Bob Zoell…

And then finally the book I had, which turns out to be a reprint of various minis (I think? it doesn’t say so explicitly).

It’s less porny. (Jim Shaw.)

Then! Suddenly! Four pages of prime Gary Panter! I knew there had to be a reason I had bought this at the time…

Peter Bagge and J R Williams? It’s a pretty weird story.

And then a reprint of an interview with Ray Zone from The Comics Journal.

So there you go. I’m not really much of a fan of stuff from the newave/mini comics sphere — it’s usually really unambitious work. Which I guess is what many people like about it: The freedom it represents?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! by Lynda Barry (225x260mm)

This was originally released in a smaller edition by Sasquatch Books in 00, but I’ve got the 16 edition from Drawn & Quarterly here. (I got rid of the earlier edition while weeding out duplicates the other year, and now I regret it. Sooo much.)

That edition was, according to Amazon, 224 pages, and this one is 248 pages. So it’s not that much extra.

This is a quite handsome book — it’s pretty understated; no introductions by famous authors or anything…

… just a two-page introduction by Barry herself, explaining how Marlys came to be.

And then we get more than a hundred strips selected from the collections from the late 80s. There was one strip that I wondered whether was new (i.e., not reprinted before), but anyway — we’re getting most (all?) of the old strips that involve Marlys, but none that focus on the rest of her family from those books (in particular, none of the Maybonne strips).

The final Harper Collins (published in 94) had strips (mostly) from 91 and 92… but this collection seems to pick up the reprints right where that book let up. So we get a bunch of strips from 93 and 94, but (confusingly enough) very few of these involve Marlys. Instead most of these are about Arnold (Marlys’ cousin).

I mean, I love finally getting to read these, but… why… stash them in the middle of a book collecting the Marlys strips?

And then it becomes pretty clear — I think it would just be pretty difficult to get a publisher to do a stand-alone book collecting these strips. Barry like experimenting with different approaches, but many of these strips feel pretty dashed off. They’re not graphically attractive (which is very unusual for Barry) and they’re not that gripping (which is even more unusual for Barry).

And then the strangest thing of all — the storyline (with Jim Jimmy Jim, the fire bug/killer) is the same as the one that was later printed as The Freddie Stories! But this first time around, it’s Arnold that’s involved with Jim Jimmy Jim and all that drama.

Was Barry just unsatisfied with the results? The storyline is sometimes repeated word for word, and it’s certainly more interestingly drawn in The Freddie Stories (here she seems do have ditched her brush and is just doing everything with a pen).

The version in The Freddie Stories is a lot harsher, though. Perhaps because Freddie is such a vulnerable character, and Arnold is sturdier, the storyline felt more exploitative in The Freddie Stories. And Arnold isn’t sent into a spiral of atrocities like Freddie is, but bounces back pretty quickly.

The artwork gets very basic indeed in parts.

Then it bounces back a bit, but it seems like Barry avoided using a brush for more than a year.

Then when it returns, it’s such a relief. But the storyline kinda evaporates and the characters start doing odd things.

I’m guessing that Barry did other Ernie Pook strips in between the Marlysverse strips, but perhaps the two types of strips started blending together…

And then we get a bunch of pages done in a different layout — were these made for a different venue than the Pook comics? They seem to have been drawn very small and then blown up… or at least not reduced. The lines are very chunky.

Lots and lots of pages about bugs.

And then! Some plot! They’ve now moved to a trailer park.

And the strips get funnier again.

Yeah, what’s up with people drawing bobble heads? Those caricatures are repulsive! And don’t get me started about Funko Pops. Nauseating things.

Arna returns! We get this slow drip of “real” Marlys strips in between all the pages about bugs…

And then! Starting with strips dated 00, Barry snaps back to the style from the late 80s — fine, detailed brushwork, and a more day-to-day plot thing. It’s such a relief, because these strips are really, really good again.

So I wonder what happened in the 94-00 period…

Anne Elizabeth Moore writes in The Comics Journal #231, page 26:

THE! TOTAL! LIST!
lar, and/or otherwise most notable comic works that came out in the
year 2000. We list them here alphabetically, because at heart we are socialists,
and do not like to promote hierarchy when we can avoid it. Sort of unfortunately,

[…]

Lynda Barr’s flawed and chunky language, and corresponding unsmooth
drawing style have, in the opinions of many reviewers, lifted her right out
of the realm of comics and dropped her square into the lap of literature. Is
it right to grant someone so much approbation that they no longer fit into
a category of peers? Probably not, but her writing is so exquisite, it is dif-
ficult to limit her praise to that characterized by any sin-
field Of art. Barry is a genius, therek no getting
around it, and her dear darling sweetheart character
Marlys is the perfect vehicle for the underlying
The-world-is-so-dang-groovrsometimes-it-
breaks-your-heart message.
Take this example from “The Total Book,”
a four-paneled single page from 1988 describing
cousin Arnol& written masterpiece: “The most
exciting feature of the book, though, is called The
Earth’s Most ompletely Longest List in the
Galaxy and Universe, Of All Time. It turns out
just to be a list of anything, only numbered, so
by the end you can tell how many.” The final
panel has Arnold asking his sister to name things
while he checks if they arc already on the list: “Um,
ping pong balls?”
“Got it already. Something else.”
“Alfred on Batman.”
“Already got it. Something else.”
“A water wiggle.”
“Oh, yeah.”
For her ingenuity alone — forgetting for a
second about the clunky presentation distracting
you from the fact you’re looking at utter beauty —
Barry earns a place on my personal list of right ons.

Right on.

True:

She makes use of a powerful technique throughout the stories: often the visuals focus on a character reacting to a situation that has either already occurred or is now happening, while the characters’ narration tells the rest of the story. This implicates the reader, inviting her to fill in with her imagination, creating a rare level of interaction and play between cartoonist and reader.

Heh:

But lots of artists are poignant, and lots of them “make you pause, cry and think.” Barry’s unique genius lies in her capacity to wiggle under your skin and, once there, to wiggle some more until you’re gasping and twitching, not sure if it’s with laughter or something else. She provokes existential squirminess.

It’s hard to find anybody being even the slightest bit critical:

The! Greatest! of! Marlys! is one of the best books ever written from a child’s perspective; laugh-out-loud funny, wise, silly, touching, awful, tragic yet ultimately so celebratory of how children survive, even in the worst possible circumstances, that Marlys Mullen is a hero as great as any to be found in fiction.

See?

Marlys is a best-of collection from Barry’s long running comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek. The strip follows the adventures of eccentric eight-year-old Marlys Mullen along with her family and friends as they maneuver through the ups and downs of childhood. Each character is spot-on in the bizarre, delightful weirdness of being a kid. Marlys’ enthusiasm for life is endearing, and it’s rare to see such an accurate and nuanced depiction of an eight-year-old.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Crashpad by Gary Panter (286x363mm)

It’s brand new! Ish! Published earlier this year, and I haven’t read it yet.

This is a huge book (like all of Panter’s books with Fantagraphics)… but this one has a pouch on the inside front cover?

With a comic inside!? What? Let’s leave that for later and read this book…

Groovy. At this point I wondered whether they’d sprayed the book with cannabis juice or something, because I thought I could smell it, but it may have been just synesthesia.

So this book is one long trip? Panter’s doing a more straightforward style than his previous books, which were even more filled with symbols and stuff…

And it kinda looks like a facsimile edition kind of book: We get to see the pencils in the margins and everything, and the pages reproduced are slightly smaller than the book itself, so the pages are off-white, but with stark white borders. Odd, but it looks good.

But then that turned out to be just the intro, and we start on a story about some hippies dropping acid in Texas.

There’s hillbillies and stuff! It’s great fun — I guess it wouldn’t have been out of place in an early-70s underground comic, but not quite: There’s something a bit more unsettling about it all than would have been the norm back then.

But… this is a hugely enjoyable book.

And then a checklist of good hippie stuff.

And then there’s the comic book that was included…

… which turns out to be exactly the same material that was included in the big book. But now reproduced in the normal way, so you can’t see the pencils. So… is what we have here a “comic book” and then a reproduction of the artwork at the size it was originally drawn?

It’s interesting, but I wonder what the idea behind this was. Perhaps Panter really wanted to publish a classic Underground 32-page pamphlet — but that’s almost impossible to do these days (unless you’re willing to lose money), so the large-format book was the only way to get that to happen?

Let’s google.

Ah, the comic book was part of an art installation:

In 2017, Panter created an art installation, Hippie Trip, inspired by his first visit to a head shop in 1968. As part of the exhibition, he created this version of an idealized underground comic, a psychedelic trip through the Hippie scene in Panter’s rough-expressive style. Both a narrative story and an art object itself, Crashpad is presented as a deluxe hardcover reproducing Panter’s original pages at full size as facsimiles (crop marks and all). Plus, the book comes with a newsprint version of the comic tucked into the front. This gives readers the experience of tripping on Panter’s story in the form of an old-school underground comic.

Here’s more:

Comics typically try to hypnotize you, as prose and other forms do, into believing the story for a moment. Experimental comics take those conventions apart and reveal them formally. I do both. Crashpad is a meditation on the optimism of the cultural explosion of the ’60s, in which things were tried out by idealistic kids, and some of the things worked and were worthy of developing, and some of the things were failures or problematic to different degrees. I wanted to do a comic book in the form that comics took in the early ’70s, but people don’t really make comics like that anymore. The market for these art comic books is a fetish market, so making a fancy book with a lowly book inside was a way to address that time period and those topics that got traction in the ’60s and early ’70s.

Heh heh “fetish market”.

Seems like it was received positively:

Besides, the phantasmagoric ride — replete as it is with deliriously imaginative visual wonders rendered with just plain enviable skill — is every bit as important as its endpoint, right? And yes, so often that sentiment, while technically true, is utilized in service of mitigating the effects, both immediate and lingering, of an unsatisfying conclusion. Rest assured, though, that such is hardly the case here.

Sure:

Panter’s painstakingly detailed acid-trip vision offers art comics heads an immersive rabbit-hole experience and sneaky satire on a navel-gazing subculture.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.