Random Thoughts

Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman (236x160mm)

I am emphatically not covering all the Toon Books in this blog series, but let’s have a look at just a single one:

Toon Books is an imprint own by RAW Junior, LLC, apparently, and I think it’s really cool that they’re still at the same address in Greene Street as they had when they started Raw.

Toon Books is an imprint for very young readers… that hasn’t stopped me from buying a little stack of these books, because they’re kinda cute, and some of them have great artwork (like Jaime Hernandez’ book). This is (I think) the only book by Art Spiegelman published by the imprint.

It’s a pretty typical Toon Book — it’s very silly.

And quite successful, I think — I mean, it has a very clear little storyline that escalates nicely, and is something that could be read over and over again.

I don’t know how many books Toon Books have published, but it’s quite a few by now, I think?

And who thought we’d see a book by Ivan Brunetti aimed at K-1s? Toon Books is mostly by staunchly kids-aimed authors, but there’s a few coming from Underground/indie comics — mostly making books aimed a children a bit older than this, though.

It’s… it’s been quite a journey from Raw #1: The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides, hasn’t it?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Warts and All by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman (204x190mm)

This is a very nicely designed book by the Raw crew.

It’s probably not visible here, but those yellow warts are embossed — they give the cover a sickeningly tactile feel. It’s really cool, but… does it shift copies? I think the general effect is more eww than yay?

Gotta have an introduction, so here, at random, is Kurt Vonnegut.

Hey! Who’s that hateful, miserable, callous, sinister, scum real estate sleazebag? Yes indeed.

The Friedmans are famous for doing oldee tymey actors and entertainers in this insanely meticulous style, of course, so I was pretty surprised to find that a sizeable part of this book has nothing to do with those actors. Instead the Friedmans go after other targets — like apparently their old teachers here.

Seems accurate. I remember reading something from some comic book type about how disrespectful this page is. Yeah!

The format of this book is perplexing. I mean, the physical format — in dimensions, it’s a bit like a sawed-off album, which means that most of these pieces have been reformatted down into this format. If that’s the case, it’s understandable — because this book is just a bit more than 80 pages, and if they’d done this in the more usual format, it would have been too thin for the bookstore market.

But it means that some of the pages look pretty jarring. Above, the left-hand page has obviously been blown up from a much smaller drawing — you can see the individual dots. And… it looks like it was taken from the first panel on the right-hand page? According to comics.org, this was originally published in the magazine-sized Weirdo, so… how was it formatted there? (I’m to lazy to pull out my Weirdos.)

And this was presumably formatted totally differently originally? Or is it new here?

The thing with Freidman’s artwork is that even if he’s extremely photo-referential, he uses that to his advantage with these mash-ups — making them look as real as anything else.

Eek! Big-head alert!

And then we end with a glossary for those that don’t know who Vampira is (this is meant for the bookstore market, after all).

Strangely enough, four years after Penguin published this book, Fantagraphics published a new edition. You’d think that Penguin would have marked clout to saturate the world with copies, but perhaps they just didn’t really care?

Drew Friedman is interviewed in The Comics Journal #151, page 85:

A FEW WORDS ON WARTS AND ALL

KELLY: Who came up with the idea to do the raised warts
on the cover of Warts and All?
FRIEDMAN: Art Spiegelman.
KELLY: And how were you guys able to convince Penguin
to do that?
FRIEDMAN: I came up with the title, Warts and All, and
the image of disgusting faces with warts. Art saw the art-
uork, and he said, “Boy, it would great to emboss these
warts, and have little hairs popping out of them.” And I
said, “Yeah, it would be great.” And he had enough power,
I guess, with the editors at Penguin to ask for that and
get it.
I was happy with it. I give Art credit for that. The
whole concept of the book, basically; a book that had been
at Doubleday, under a different title — it was going to
be the same format as Persons Living or Dead. Double-
day gave us an advance and everything, and then pulled
out when they were bought out by this German guy who
cancelled 50 to percent of the books they had scheduled
— our book was one of them. So we were fishing around
for a new publisher. I wanted to do it with a major; I didn’t
want to do another book with Fantagraphics at that time.
I wanted to to get it into major I have no regrets
about doing the first book with Fantagraphics — I was
delighted when Gary called and said, “We’d like to do
your book,” because I was ready to do an anthology. But
the second book I really wanted to be iO Waldens and B
Daltons, and Gary couldn’t get the first book in there, for
whatever reasons. So when it was dropped by Double-
day, Art called and said, “I hear you need a publisher.
Let me try to get you into Penguin; I have this deal with
them where I’m developing books.” Penguin was doing
RAW. So I said, “Great.” It was a long process before
Penguin agreed to do it.
Art had this idea of cutting the strips up and making
a square format, and when he first mentioned this I was
horrified. I said, “Wait a minute, how can you do this?”
But when he actually’ showed me what he had done, I really
thought it worked well. I supm»se some grople Mould think
it was cheating a little bit — sort of like stretching a book
out. And it was, but I was delighted with the results. It
gave it a story-book kind of feel rather than a presenta-
tion of comic strips. So I give him a lot of credit for that.
It worked Out well.
KELLY: How did the book do?
FRIEDMAN: As far as I know, it’s still racking up sales.
It’s up to 15000 now, last I checked. Obviously, it’s not
a best-seller like Maus, but not much is. I think it did well;
I don’t keep tabs on that kind of stuff much. I just asked
my editor last Christmas what the sales were, because
Newsweek had plugged it, and I wondered if the plug had
helped. And he said, “Yeah, the plug really did help.”
As far as I know, it did well. So now I’m going to have
enough work for another book, hopefully in a year or so.
That’s the plan. I might even want to go back to a comics
publisher for the next book, because comic book stores
had a hard time getting warts and All. So it’s like it’s one
or the other. You want your book to be in comic book
store, and you also want it to be in major bookstores. But
unless you’re Maus, you don’t really have it both ways.
KELLY: Or Dark Knight or Watchmen.
FRIEDMAN: Right.

Hah! I knew it must have had been cut down to fit that format.

The Comics Journal #151, page 88:

KELLY: ‘ •Comic Shop Clerks of North America..
FRIEDMAN: That pissed off a lot of people. Although it
was turned into a T-shirt and did real well in comic stores.
I heard a lot of comic shop clerks got a big kick out of
it. I also heard that actor John Goodman loved it…
KELLY: So who did it piss or.
FRIEDMAN: Don Thompson types. “How could anyone
make fun of the fine folk who sell comic tx)0ks?” Basically
stuff like that.
KELLY: %ére these faces based on real people?
FRIEDMAN: Some of them are, yeah. I can’t really say
who, but there’s one in there who’s the son of the former
publisher of National lampoon. He actually got a kick
out of it.

Heh heh. Don Thompson types.

Amazing Heroes #188, page 100:

Warts and All by Drew Friedman
and Josh Alan Friedman (Penguin,
$9.95) is the mistitled second collec-
tion by the pointillist caricaturists who
specialize in celebrating the grotesque
side of pop culture. (Actually, Drew
draws, Josh Alan writes.) Some of this
volume’s victims are predictable—
Friedman family standbys Tor Johnson
and Bela Lugosi both show up more
than once, though this time out the
litigious Joe Franklin stays at home
completely. But there’s a couple of
digs at the sad story of Rondo Hatton
(who during the 1940s used his own
facially disfiguring disease, acromega-
ly, to get cast in horror movies), and
Joey Heatherton (whose real life
deterioration as an actress and as a
human being is the subject of the long-
est and most resonant story in the
book). The full-page shot of Ernest
Borgnine and Ethel Merman avoiding
the consummation of their notorious
eight-day marriage isn’t recommend-
ed for anybody who needs absorbent
underwear. Still, I’m right when I say
the book’s mistitled. It should be
called Warts, Especially.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Is That All There Is? by Joost Swarte (198x267mm)

I was going to keep this blog series All-American, but let’s digress for one post (ahem) and have a look at this book.

I guess all comics collections have to have an introduction by Chris Ware, and this one isn’t too bad.

This is allegedly a complete collection of all comics Swarte has created — and it’s just 140 pages, which explains the title of this collection.

Swarte is, of course, the most Hergé artist of all artists inspired by Hergé, and that extends beyond his line.

Swarte basically does all of the pieces (they’re mostly fewer than six pages long) using this style, but varying how it’s coloured.

Oh, and there’s this one. Hold your phone upside down.

This book is a bit smaller than normal “album” size… which is an odd choice. I mean, a smaller book looks cuter and thicker, but it means that more than a handful of the strips have to be printed sideways to be legible. Sideways printing is fun in pamphlets, but not so much in books, I think. I’d love to have an oversized version of this book. I mean, the artwork’s so gorgeous…

The stories are mostly pretty straight forward and funny, but here’s a political one, and I guess it shows that the football organisations haven’t changed much (Argentinian dictators then; Qatari slavery now).

And this book is also very edumacational: Here’s how colour separations are done.

The book reads like what it is: A collection of all the comics a person has made, mostly presented chronologically. So there’s not really any… coherence… it’s more like a treasure trove.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Come Over, Come Over/My Perfect Life/It’s So Magic/The Freddie Stories by Lynda Barry (229x153mm)

I’m not sure whether it’s because of the way I’ve read Barry’s collections over the years (I’ve tended to stumble across a copy here and a copy there in bookstores, without knowing that the book existed, and in no particular order), or it’s something innate in the work itself… but Barry’s books about Marlys (and the rest) seem less like fictions created by Barry, and more like a reality that Barry has somehow excavated.

I realise that when I’m thinking about these characters, Marlys, Maybonne, Arnold, Arna and Freddie are real to me, emotionally speaking: When Barry was still doing these books, when I found one of them, my brain would go “Yay! Now I can find out what’s happened to them since last time” in a distinctly different way than with other works I’ve followed for decades (like Jaime Hernandez’ Locas characters), that remain resolutely fictional to me.

If I’m counting correctly, there are nine of these collections, which means that there are about 550 strips collected. But Barry has worked on this weekly strip for about 27 years, so there should be about 1400 strips out there! MY GOD!!! There’s more Ernie Pook that hasn’t been collected than has been?! *image of me having a nervous breakdown*

But let’s have a look at the final four of these collections. I mean, I’ll start reading them now, and I’ll let you have a look at some of the strips, m kay?

The previous collections had focused on Arna and her cousin Marlys, but Maybonne (Marlys’ sister) had been introduced, and was in the margins of the series.

Come Over, Come Over flips that completely — now Maybonne becomes the main character, and Marlys is seen from her point of view (instead of Arna being the viewpoint character). (And Arna, Freddie and Arnold aren’t mentioned at all in this book, I think?)

Another difference is that we get more of a continuity between strips. The previous books had mostly had free-standing strips — moving to more continuity gives a very different reading experience; it’s less choppy, less dense.

And this strip is, I think, the first one to be partially “drawn by Marlys” (I seem to remember that becoming more of a thing in later books).

The strip had also, pretty much, been of the “steady state” school of storytelling. That is, nothing much changed over the course of the strips; you could read the strips in pretty much any order, and it’d make as much sense. Here there’s real, life-changing events: the sisters move to their grandmother, for instance.

Oh! This longer story was originally printed in Raw. It was awesome there, but completely without context. Here it fits neatly into the storyline, so it reads very differently. It’s… it’s even better here? It seems impossible, because it was the best thing in that Raw issue, but it is, indeed, even better in this collection.

Marlys introduces My Perfect Life on the back cover, saying that it depicts one year in the life of Maybonne. And… that’s what it does. This strip is now one long narrative, where we follow Maybonne’s life (which deals a lot with her friends and boyfriend drama).

And in the middle of it, we get another longer story that originally ran in Raw. I didn’t quite clock that it was about Maybonne when I read it there… and it doesn’t totally fit in here (it seems to contradict some other bits in the surrounding strips). But, again, it’s still an awesome story.

In earlier collections, I was impressed by how crotchety Barry kept Marlys, but in Maybonne’s eyes, she’s a much more lovable character. Or perhaps Barry has softened some.

My Perfect Life is pretty perfect. I laughed, I cried, etc.

Then it’s It’s So Magic, the final collection from Harper Collins.

This one starts with a presentation of all the characters.

The previous two collections had been about Maybonne, and Maybonne is still (mostly) the viewpoint character, but we shift back to focusing on Marlys again, and Marlys continues her journey into becoming more lovable.

After the deep turmoil in the Maybonne stories, it’s nice to pull a bit back… but… Marlys’ stories feel a bit like a retread?

It’s also a partial return to Barry’s very dense style from early in her career. I’m not complaining; it’s pretty funny.

However, the many strips that are drawn by Marlys do nothing for me graphically. Yes, they’re really convincing recreations of how children draw, but Barry’s normal drawing style is stunning, so I just get impatient and want to turn the page to see whether there’s anything good on the next page.

These strips are mostly from 91 and 92, and as in the previous two books, it’s one continuous story — but it’s a bit more episodic than the Maybonne epics.

Freddie (the younger brother) returns, and… then they all go back to live with their mother again.

Sounds delicious! Fried baloney, mayo, lettuce, crisps and banana sandwich. I’ve gotta try it. Freddie is a culinary genius!

The previous book was published in 94, and then The Freddie Stories, the next one, is from 99, and is from Sasquatch Books (and I see that Matt Groening is no longer funklord of the USA in the indicia) — definitely not as huge an outfit as Harper Collins. What happened over these five years? It’s So Magic felt a lot less… urgent… than any of the previous books, and all those strips that were drawn in the style of children drawing might not (and I’m just guessing) be very commercially appealing.

Was Barry dropped by Harper Collins? Did she stop doing the strip for five years? So perhaps there’s no collecting gap? I’ve tried to google this, but I can’t find anybody that’s written a historical overview of Ernie Pook’s Comeek and its publishing history. You’d think that would be a thing that would exist on the interwebs, but nope.

This future sucks. No flying cars and no Ernie Pook chronology.

Again, we start with an introduction… and this book is printed on bright white paper with a fair bit of bleed-through. Those Harper Collins books looked and felt just right, while this is just kinda brittle.

Hey! That’s a re-run of the baloney strip (but redrawn). Still sounds good.

These strips aren’t dated (all her previous strips have been), so I’ve no idea whether these were made over a number of years. The art styles Barry uses vary a lot — here she’s doing a kinda smudged, rough style.

There’s always been heart-wrenching things happening in this strip, but for the first time, it just doesn’t feel convincing. In this book, Freddie is involved with a case of arson (that he tried to stop happening), landed in jail, got bonked on the head so that he saw everybody as burning skulls, he’s raped, rapist dies, he gets a fever, becomes semi-autistic and… I’m sure I’m repressing a few of the atrocities.

It’s just a lot. And it’s really harsh, with barely any light let in. It’s like… what happened to sour and curdle Barry’s outlook on life?

The art style continues morphing… now she’s doing Dame Darcy? It’s a very luxurious title.

And then the lettering grows really really big, which I take to mean that the newspapers running the strip reduced the size, so Barry had to up the lettering size.

The Freddie Stories is a depressing book. And not in a good way.

Brian J. Dillard writes in The Comics Journal #215, page 43:

Like Roberta Gregory or Aline
Kominsky-Crumb, Barry’s work is often dismissed
because it’s “sloppy.”

[…]

Debbie Drechsler’s work approaches the verisi-
militude of Barry’s, but its heavy tone sometimes
sinks into maudlin excess. David Kelly has tackled
similar issues of gender and childhood, but his
scenarios lack Barry’s nuance and authority. Not
even Julie Doucet’s dream comics, which are richer
visually, embody such a perfect synthesis of clever
scripting and freaky pictures. Fans ofall these artists
would do well to step outside the comics shop and
into a newsstand, where Barry’s strips will be avail-
able week after week, long after The Freddie Stories
goes out of print.

That was the stupidest review ever. Dismissed as sloppy!? Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but only by the most moronic of morons, presumably, so why mention it?

Darcy Sullivan writes in The Comics Journal #140, page 45:

Lynda Barry’s
Come Over, Come Over

[…]

Why does Barry’s sweetness — Maybonne
says the book is “mainly about how life can
magically turn cruddy then turn .and
then back to cruddy again” — still seem so
fresh? partly because it’s so unique. The cur-
rent “adult age” of comics has misplaced
goodness. Our honest-John super-heroes have
become dark blights, sneaky sadists who bleed
like hemophiliacs. Baker considers his book
“mature” because the characters smoke and
drink and cuss before they heft the rocket
launcher.
Things aren’t a whole lot better in Barry’s
own genre, the family comedy. It’s all the rage
for dads, moms. and siblings to trade savage
wisecracks in series like Roseanne or The Cosby
Show, but any problem can be solved with a hug.
Pundits rave about the reality Of The Simpsons,
a droll but stale brood Of Fred Flint-
stone fathers Dennis the Menace (the women,
inexcusably. are disposable — this is another
bonding-with-dad dream). But even this quar-
relsome family is never more than a commer-
Cial break away from a cure-all embrace; the
treacle here is only mitigated by the fact that
Bart is such a little shit.
Lynda Barry’s sweetness seems much more
bearable, mainly because it’s more than Offset
by abject terror. Hugs won’t keep her Mullen
family from disintegrating. In Come Over, Come
Over Maymnne and Marlys, the tux) sisters who
have held Barry’s “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” since
1988. live with their divorced mom until they’re
Shunted away to grandma’s, where they again
see their alcoholic, estranged father. Tossed like
hot potatoes, they attempt to hide their feelings
and to order their world by constructing some
sharp categorizations, like the “cruddy” and the
“beautiful”.
That dichotomy says a lot about Barry, but
even more about Maybonne, whose letters and
diary entries relate most of this volume’s strips.
Maybonne, 14, is growing up here, groping her
way through puberty and a shattered family. At
times her observations seem too wise, too
philosophical, the straining voice of her author
rather than her soul. But, for the most part,
Maybonne struggles with a really tough part of
maturity: the breakdown of classifications.
Barry has always given us lists, multiple-
choice questions, labels (as has, more famous-
ly, Matt Groening). Sometimes these take the
form of jokes: one strip, “Marlys’ Auto Bingo,”
bullets 23 familiar items to look for on car
drives. More subtly, the characters classify each
other. developing codes to help them understand
their lives.

Well, that’s better.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.